Propaganda on the news, and today's other items

Propaganda in the news:
Voice of America or voice of Ahmadinejad?

After a Senate subcommittee hearing last summer in which an escaped Iranian dissident testified that the U.S. itself has been beaming anti-American propaganda into Iran, Sen. Tom Coburn began looking into the problem. Today, in a polite but searing letter, addressed to President Bush, Coburn spelled out his concerns that American broadcasts into Iran, via Radio Farda and Voice of America, freighted with content that sounds like the propaganda of Tehran itself, "may actually be harming American interests rather than helping."

Global Warming Smear

political and media activists attempt to stigmatize anyone who doesn't pay homage to their "scientific consensus."
...
Here are the facts as we've been able to collect them. AEI doesn't lobby, didn't offer money to scientists to question global warming, and the money it did pay for climate research didn't come from Exxon.

Speaking of "climate change", The Economist

The other part of the report's job is to make predictions about what will happen to the climate. In this, it illustrates a curious aspect of the science of climate change. Studying the climate reveals new, little-understood, mechanisms: as temperatures warm, they set off feedback effects that may increase, or decrease, warming. So, as understanding grows, predictions may become less, rather than more, certain. Thus the IPCC's range of predictions of the rise in the temperature by 2100 has increased from 1.4-5.8°C in the 2001 report to 1.1-6.4°C in this report.

That the IPCC should end up with a range that vast is not surprising given the climate's complexity. But it does leave plenty of scope for argument about whether it is worth trying to do anything about climate change.

As far as global warming goes, send me some. It's been below 30F for an entire week here and I need to shed the Polartec and the tweeds. ------------------------------------
When You Tax Profits, You Tax People (emphasis added)

The prevailing 35 percent corporate tax rate takes a monster bite from all U.S. businesses. Moreover, our business taxes are far too high in relation to the rest of the world. Believe it or not,the corporate tax rate is lower in France than it is in the United States.

Along with slow-growing Japan, the U.S. has the highest marginal tax rate on corporate profits of any of the developed countries. Think of this: Germany is cutting its corporate tax rate to 15 percent from 25 percent. And if frontrunner Nicolas Sarkozy wins the French presidential election this spring, he plans to slash France's corporate tax burden. Meanwhile, we'll still be taking our best companies behind the barn and shooting them.

The bottom line here is that our economic system is all about free-market capitalism, and at the core of that system is profit. Profit isn't a dirty word. From profits spring the abundance of this great country. Profits are the mother's milk of stocks and the economy. Expanding profits provide businesses the resources to enlarge production operations and hire additional workers. This, in turn, is how incomes are created, wages that are then spent by American families.

Why can't liberals grasp this?

Because it won't fit their script?
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Hillary
Imagining a Triangulator-in-Chief: Hillary Rodham Clinton

P.J. O'Rourke recently said Hillary's "Hugo Chavez in a pants suit." Should Hillary wear skirts? Donatella thinks

They make her look too masculine

In Hillary's mind, "and that is wrong because?"

She'll have to lose a few pounds and wear shorter jackets, to look better in skirts. This is what she looked like in a skirt years ago.
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In a lighter mode,
Affairs to Forget. How Hollywood lost its romantic groove.
Here's my second-favorite movie,

They don't make them as they used to, don't they?