The booming economy, and today's items

It's The Economy, Stupid MSM

Have the media learned anything? Apparently not. Despite 36 straight months of expansion, an unemployment rate of 4.6%, and inflation at an annual projected rate of 2.4%, the media still can't bring themselves to report on a Republican economy honestly. Business & Media Institute found that TV networks gave twice as much airtime to negative stories as positive ones (62% - 31%). Bad news was twice as likely to get full-length treatment as well. The people interviewed by the network were three times more likely to relate negative anecdotes. To no one's surprise, CBS took the lead in negative coverage, committing 80% of its economic coverage to bad news in the middle of a huge economic expansion.

Politics
'President Pelosi' even scares her
Talkin' 'bout My Generation
Men Without Chests and Women Without Breasts

Media and the war
CNN, Meet Marine 2nd Lt. Joshua Booth, a Sniper Victim
CNN's Anderson Cooper, Embedded Reporter
Reporting on the War and CNN's Betrayal: Briefly Stated

NYT-ea culpa: Times mouthpiece acknowledges error. Some questions for the Public Editor of the NYT, Mr. Calamity. Dan Riehl and Michelle Malkin are among the many posting on the subject.

The Lancet study
Middle East Madness

While we argue over various mathematical formulas to determine how many have died in the Iraq war, note that the passive is the voice of choice—as in "50,000 have been killed", or "100,000 have died."

Culpability is ignored. And so we have the following Orwellian situation: the aggregate number must include everybody who dies violently in Iraq: an "insurgent" in jeans who blows himself up in an IED mishap, a terrorist killed by a Marine, a child murdered in a school by Islamists, Shiites blown up by Sunnis and vice versa -all these are lumped together as collateral civilian deaths.

And how can it be otherwise, when the enemy wears no uniforms, counts on killing civilians to ruin the country, and most journalists will blame all deaths of any sort on the American presence in Iraq?

Stung by the dishonesty of "body counts" in Vietnam, and worried that in postmodern warfare, Westerners are not only not supposed to die, but also should not kill, our own forces release no figures on how many enemy terrorists they have killed. The result is that the narrative of almost all the mayhem coming out of Iraq is bifurcated into either how many Americans were killed, or how many "Iraqis" perished -a sure method to convince the reader that the entire enterprise is a complete disaster in which we are mere sitting ducks, whose presence alone leads to Iraqis dropping dead like flies.

EUrope and Islam
Veiled and Reviled

The ACLU
ACLJ Asks Appeals Court to Uphold NSA Surveillance Program

In a lighter mode
Hillary might want to read this one that my beautiful friend Maria sent: Natural Skin Care Treatments

Forget the plastic surgery and expensive products. Natural skin care experts say the secret to wrinkle-free, supple skin is right in your kitchen.

Of course, Hillary hasn't been to a kitchen since that day she was handing out cookies in the White House.

Today's video


(technorati tags Economy George W Bush Politics Media European Union Iraq Hillary Clinton Larwyn)