My friend and blogfather George from GM Roper asked me to join him on his radio show tonight. Everyone knows you can’t refuse the blogfather, so of course I said yes. Please tune in and listen a 7pm Pacific time here or call in and say hi at 888/407-1776

Somtimes the MSM tries to pass off its fauxtogrophy for propaganda reasons, and sometimes it’s just being stupid.

NEW YORK - No, Katie Couric didn’t suddenly lose 20 pounds. The incoming “CBS Evening News” anchor appears significantly thinner in a network promotional magazine photo thanks to digital airbrushing.

The touched-up photo of Couric dressed in a striped business suit appears on the inside of the September issue of Watch! which is distributed at CBS stations and on American Airlines flights.

CBS News President Sean McManus said he was “obviously surprised and disappointed when I heard about it.”

Gil Schwartz, executive vice president of communications for CBS Corp., said Wednesday in a phone interview the photo alteration was done by someone in the CBS photo department who “got a little zealous.”

I thought the whole advantage the MSM had over blogs were the “editors” who prevented stuff like this from happening. Guess not.

in USA Today Bruce Kluger has a piece titled Lieberman “Snakes” and the seductive mythology of the blogosphere where he makes some obvious observations, and some very poor conclusions.

If ever America needed a wake-up call about the mythology of blogging, we got it this month.

On Aug. 8, Connecticut businessman Ned Lamont defeated U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary, a triumph widely credited to the rah-rah racket produced by pro-Lamont armies stationed along the Internet.

Indeed, the bloggers had scored big. They had helped vault a local politician to national prominence and cemented the Iraq war as Issue No. 1 in the congressional elections. Not a bad day.

But their victory was short-lived. Even before the primary, Lieberman announced that, should he lose, he’d still run in November as an independent. This electoral chutzpah effectively rope-a-doped the bloggers and recharged the senator’s fabled Joe-mentum. Lieberman’s still the man to beat in the general election.

Very true, but what Kluger fails to mention that many on the right, and many of us in the center were saying all along that Lamont’s primary victory was really a loss for the Democratic party.

There is no way you can take way the victory of the netroots. They won the primary for Lamont there is no denying that. Without Kos and Firedog lake, and many others Joe Lieberman wins that primary going away.

Kluger goes on:

If this wasn’t enough to drain the effervescence from the blogger bubbly, America’s noisy Web wags were dealt an even more sobering blow 10 days later when Snakes on a Plane opened nationwide to a decidedly flat $15.3 million box office.

Before its premiere, Snakes had been the latest blogger darling, as swarms of online film geeks prematurely crowned it the summer’s big sleeper. This hyperventilating fan base even convinced Snakes‘ distributor, New Line Cinema, to up the movie’s rating to R, to ensure a gorier, more venomous snake fest.

But all that clapping and yapping couldn’t put enough fannies in the seats. Ticket sales for Snakes‘ debut barely topped those of Talladega Nights, which was already in its third week.

Although Connecticut and Hollywood are a continent apart, the two events speak volumes about the capriciousness of the blog culture.

The “blogosphere” is not a gigantic megaphone for the ”blogger” collective all speaking unanimously with one voice. It is exactly the opposite. It is a collection of small and large voices each advocating their own ideas and opinions. I had no idea any blogger said Snakes on a Plane was going to be a blockbuster and I read blogs night and day.

If Hollywood executives actually believed that something some blogger or group of bloggers says, can make a stupid movie appealing to the mass market, then that speaks to the idiocy of those particular executives not the effectiveness of the blogosphere.

Lieberman’s boomerang reminds us that voters represent a meager percentage of the total populace — and that bloggers are an even tinier subset of that group. Consequently, what appears to be a coast-to-coast juggernaut on a 17-inch monitor is, in the real world, simply an elaborate PC-to-PC chain letter — enthusiastic, but not necessarily the national mindset. 

I am sure some on the left and the right claim to speak for the entire country. Most bloggers and most people with common sense realize they do not.  So you aren’t telling us anything new here. However I believe it is definitely true that by monitoring blogs on both the left and right you can get a very good sampling of how the public at large feels.

“There isn’t much point in detailing the chest thumping of the various blognut extremists,” wrote Time’s Joe Klein in his analysis of the Lamont victory. “Their reach is minuscule.”

I assume by repeating it Kluger agrees with Klein?

I couldn’t disagree with folks like Daily Kos or Firedog Lake more, and I realize the obvious point made by Kluger above, a minority of Americans actually vote, an even smaller minority vote in primaries, and an even smaller group of them have their own political blog. All that being said discounting the real and powerful effect a group of left wing activist bloggers had on a Democratic Primary election is whistling past the grave yard.

The netroots in effect selected the Democratic Party’s candidate for 1 of the 50 seats in the United States Senate and purged a former Vice Presidential candidate and long time encumbent Senator from the party. That is a huge no matter what side of the aisle you are on.

Is it Woodward and Bernstien bringing down Richard Nixon? no but it’s pretty damn big.

The question of if that was a good or bad thing for the Democratic Party or the country is an entirely separate one, and subject to debate. I don’t think it was the point Mr. Kluger was attempting to make.

Now Kluger makes the next big jump.  

For those who think Klein is underestimating the power of the blog, I have four words: Howard Dean for president.

The blogoshere put Howard Dean on the map. Howard Dean lost the election. Just like Snakes on a Plane no amount of PR, or advertising, or campaigning can “dress up a pig” so to speak. And by the way can you say Howard Dean Chairman of the Democratic Party?

Do you honestly think he would have ever achieved that without the blogosphere?

Time Magazine certainly didn’t get him there.

On the other hand, as August 2006 clearly demonstrates, bloggers can just as easily get it wrong. That’s worth remembering.

Let me answer this with one of our super secret blogger terms….. DUH. Bloggers being as there are between 12 and 50 million of us (depending on which numbers you believe), and the nature of the medium get it wrong about half the time.

The newsflash for Mr. Kluger might be, The New York Times, and CBS get it wrong pretty often themselves while supposedly playing it right down the middle. Anyone seen Dan Rather or Mary Mapes lately?

Kluger concludes the piece with the kind of condescention that continues to result in ever lower circulation numbers to MSM outlets around the world:

The whole thing reminds me of child-rearing. As the parent of any toddler can tell you, the younger the child, the louder the screams for attention — and quite often, the degree of the crisis is in reverse proportion to the decibels of the bellows.

To that end, it’s important to remember that the blogosphere is still in its infancy, and like any kid, it needs to be watched very carefully.

It seems to me the people doing all the kicking and screaming lately are MSM hacks trying to protect their endangered gigs.

As I was working on my last post this just broke in the New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 — Richard L. Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state, has acknowledged that he was the person whose conversation with a columnist in 2003 prompted a long, politically laden criminal investigation in what became known as the C.I.A. leak case, a lawyer involved in the case said on Tuesday.

It will be very interesting to see the reaction from the left who is proven to have been completely wrong about Karl Rove, or Dick Cheney being the leakers of Plames identity. I will update this post as they come in.

Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake:

Richard Armitage gossiped about a member of the CIA to journalists. He violated the first principle of national security clearances — disclose information on a “need to know” basis only. I do not care how valuable his knowledge may be, he should never, ever have a high level security clearance again, because he is not to be trusted.

I wonder if she feels the same way about Sandy Burgler Berger?

Yes I know they are completely unrelated. I’m just asking.

Shakespeares Sister may want to stick to poetry. Apparently no one told her Richard Armitage was against the Iraq war. 

So Armitage was privy to a memo written by the Under-Secretary of State, after Libby (probably at the behest of Cheney, though he claims otherwise) requested a “fact-finding mission” (ahem) on Valerie Plame.
All just a big mistake, eh? That’s quite a convenient goof for a partisan hack who is a former foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush and one of the signers of the Project for a New American Century’s letter to Bill Clinton in 1998, urging the removal of Saddam Hussein. Considering that the whole purpose of outing Valerie Plame was to discredit her husband, Joe Wilson, who was challenging the administration’s case for war in Iraq, I find it spectacularly coincidental that Armitage made such a colossally convenient mistake in telling bigmouth Novak “more than he should have” about an issue that served to undermine a key administration critic on the war.

Very few accuse Armitage of being a big Bush supporter.  
 

 

That’s the title of Hitchen’s latest must read piece.

As most of us have long suspected, the man who told Novak about Valerie Plame was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s deputy at the State Department and, with his boss, an assiduous underminer of the president’s war policy. (His and Powell’s—and George Tenet’s—fingerprints are all over Bob Woodward’s “insider” accounts of post-9/11 policy planning, which helps clear up another nonmystery: Woodward’s revelation several months ago that he had known all along about the Wilson-Plame connection and considered it to be no big deal.) The Isikoff-Corn book, which is amusingly titled Hubris, solves this impossible problem of its authors’ original “theory” by restating it in a passive voice:

The disclosures about Armitage, gleaned from interviews with colleagues, friends and lawyers directly involved in the case, underscore one of the ironies of the Plame investigation: that the initial leak, seized on by administration critics as evidence of how far the White House was willing to go to smear an opponent, came from a man who had no apparent intention of harming anyone.

In the stylistic world where disclosures are gleaned and ironies underscored, the nullity of the prose obscures the fact that any irony here is only at the authors’ expense. It was Corn in particular who asserted—in a July 16, 2003, blog post credited with starting the entire distraction—that:

The Wilson smear was a thuggish act. Bush and his crew abused and misused intelligence to make their case for war. Now there is evidence Bushies used classified information and put the nation’s counter-proliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is a sign that with this gang politics trumps national security.

After you have noted that the Niger uranium connection was in fact based on intelligence that has turned out to be sound, you may also note that this heated moral tone (”thuggish,” “gang”) is now quite absent from the story. It turns out that the person who put Valerie Plame’s identity into circulation was a staunch foe of regime change in Iraq. Oh, that’s all right, then. But you have to laugh at the way Corn now so neutrally describes his own initial delusion as one that was “seized on by administration critics.”
David Corn; meet Christopher Hitchens. Wouldn’t you like to see that introduction at a cocktail party?

When the news broke yesterday that a man had driven his SUV through the streets of San Francisco for over 2 hours intentionally running over pedestrians, Hugh Hewitt started doing what journalists are supposed to do. Asking questions.

Could this possibly be a terrorist attack?

What was the driver’s ethnicity?

What was his motivation for this heinous crime?

Where did the attacks take place?

Was it in a jewish neighborhood?

Within short order he got some answers:

UPDATE:  A caller to the program who stated he had lived in the neighborhood where the attacks occured asserted that this is a heavily Jewish neighborhood.  I have not found that confirmed in the media accounts yet.

UPDATE:  Four callers have confirmed that without doubt this is a Jewish neighborhood, and that one of the victimns was run over in front of the Jewish Community Center in the area.

UPDATE:  From an e-mail:

Look on the web! the JCC located at 3200 California St. Site of one of the attacks: 3250 California ST.

Hugh Also asked the same question everyone else with any common sense was asking:

So where is the MSM?  The attacks began five and half hours ago.

Well it is now more than 16 hours later and still not one mention of motive for the attacks, not one MSM journalist has attempted to connect the dots between an immigrant from Afghanistan running over people in a jewish neighborhood.

The Anchores is livid:

Can you imagine, if someone had (God forbid!) driven a car into 14 gay people, how quickly the press would have managed to cover the story? Can you imagine that Mayor Newsom would call it “road rage” and suggest that there really probably wasn’t a “hate crime” attached to the action?

What the hell is wrong with the press, what the hell is wrong with the leadership? Why are they so incapable of calling anti-semitism what it is, of calling a terrorist action what it is? Newsflash, folks, when someone decides to drive his car into people as they’re crossing the street, it’s the same as tossing a molotov cocktail at them, it’s the same as tossing a grenade. It is destructive, it kills people and terrifies communities, that is called t-e-r-r-o-r-i-s-m! Hey, guess what, fellas, we don’t need no stinking anthrax to kill and terrify…we can use our cars.

I swear, these people are tempting me to some vile language.

Gateway Pundit has a map of the area and has this:

Update: From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Those involved in the investigation — speaking on condition of anonymity — discount any mental illness, saying the 29-year-old Afghanistan native seemed coherent, unrepentant and claimed that he repeatedly drove at pedestrians because he “just wanted to.

Webloggin:

UPDATE V: Apparently Popal “‘made some comments‘ to officers as he was arrested….” I wonder what they were? Were they delusional, along the lines of “I am she and she is me and we are both together and the Devil is behind it all and I saw the brilliant moon explode” or were they delusional along the lines of “I hate Israel, and I needed to kill all the Jews?”

 

Lots of bloggers have done some great work on this story including Little Green Footballs, EU Referendum, Riehl World View, The Strata-Sphere, and Confederate Yankee.

Bernice Lipkin of Think Israel sent me an email about this 2 weeks ago and I just haven’t had the time to read it. Until tonight. Her post may be the most comprehensive examination of the events that occured and MSM coverage of Qana . I highly recomend you read her piece The Bloggers Take on the Qana “Massacre”

Senate Majority leader and presidential hopeful (he can keep hoping because he is never going to be President) posted this afternoon at VOLPAC blog that he supports the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, S. 2590 and wants to bring it to the Senate floor for debate and eventually a vote.

It seems that some mystery Senator has put a super double agent secret hold on the bill. Up until now 89 Senators have publicly stated they are not holding up the bill. Hot Air has it narrowed down to one of three possible scumbags.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that the final three are, alas, all Republicans. For shame.

Captain Ed, eliminates one of the suspects:

I noted three Republicans whose lack of response puzzled me — well, two of them, anyway. Jon Kyl has been a consistent voice for fiscal responsibility, so I took out the cell phone and called his offices in DC. The friendly staffer who answered told me unequivocally that Kyl did not place the hold on S2590, and in fact supported the bill. I asked twice just to be sure he knew this for a fact, and received strong assurances both times.

So for some reason if any Senator approaches his party leader he can ask to have a hold placed on any bill anonymously. Why can’t we ask both Senator Frist, and Senator Reid if anyone in their party asked them to place a hold on the bill?

Why can’t we expect them to answer that question honestly?

Why can’t we expect them to leak the damn name of the scumbag who is holding up this legislation?

[tags]Politics, Congress, Senate, News and Politics[/tags]

I have actually been meaning to post on this all day but am just slammed at work. I will have more later but for now here is an excerpt from The New York Times article titled Details Emerge in British Terror Case.

LONDON, Aug. 27 — On Aug. 9, in a small second-floor apartment in East London, two young Muslim men recorded a video justifying what the police say was their suicide plot to blow up trans-Atlantic planes: revenge against the United States and its “accomplices,” Britain and the Jews.

“As you bomb, you will be bombed; as you kill, you will be killed,” said one of the men on a “martyrdom” videotape, whose contents were described by a senior British official and a person briefed about the case. The young man added that he hoped God would be “pleased with us and accepts our deed.”

The police were apparently tipped off by informers.

Armed with the tips, MI5, Britain’s domestic security services, began an around-the-clock surveillance operation of a dozen young men living in Walthamstow — bugging their apartments, tapping their phones, monitoring their bank transactions, eavesdropping on their Internet traffic and e-mail messages, even watching where they traveled, shopped and took their laundry, according to senior British officials.

The authorities quickly learned the identity of the man believed to have been the leader of the cell, the unemployed man in his mid-20’s, who traveled at least twice within the past year to Pakistan, where his activities are still being investigated.

Last June, a 22-year-old Walthamstow resident, who is among the suspects arrested Aug. 10, paid $260,000 cash for a second-floor apartment in a house on Forest Road, according to official property records. The authorities noticed that six men were regularly visiting the second-floor apartment that came to be known as the “bomb factory,” according to a British official and the person briefed about the case.

Two of the men, who were likely the bomb-makers, were conducting a series of experiments with chemicals, said the person briefed on the case.

MI5 agents secretly installed video and audio recording equipment inside the apartment, two senior British officials said. In a secret search conducted before the Aug. 10 raids, agents had discovered that the inside of batteries had been scooped out, and that it appeared several suspects were doing chemical experiments with a sports drink named Lucozade and syringes, the person with knowledge of the case said. Investigators have said they believe that the suspects intended to bring explosive chemicals aboard planes inside sports drink bottles.

While nothing mentioned in the article provides conclusive proof that these men were involved in a terrorist plot, all of the information together makes a very strong circumstantial case. You can be sure the police are keeping more details to themselves.

I will have more on this later. Two important things I found in the article were two of the alleged terrorists while they didn’t have passports yet had requested expedited approval for their passports (something I mentioned earlier), and the group had recieved a message from their Terrorist sponsor in Pakistan that read “Go Now”.

That certainly sounds like an imminent threat to me.

[tags]terrorism, Current Affairs,News[/tags]

Only this time one cameraman wasn’t playing along. Counterterrorism Blog has the story.

Hezbollah’s staged mini-demonstration in the southern suburb of Beirut has been exposed by unauthorized media footage. During a visit to the Hezbollah former “security square,” destroyed during the war with Israel, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was greeted by a prepared crowd of Hezbollah militants.

The Lebanese Army officers and Hezbollah were seen smiling at each other and coordinating the staged demonstration. A camera linked to an international media agency was broadcasting live from behind the Hezbollah’s security lines. It captured the details of the “show.” A group of women and girls, in traditional Muslim dresses and scarves were gathered by Hezbollah bearded security some 15 minutes before the motorcade arrives. The gathering was at about 30 feet away from where Annan’s car was supposed to stop. This indicates that the motorcade security and the Hezbollah operatives knew ahead of time where the spot would be and had the women standing and waiting. Posters of Hassan Nasrallah were then distributed to the women. The camera showed a group of bearded men standing few meters behind the first line of women as a “second brigade.” Then the camera showed the group of women tightening their positioning while few men with hats and “talkies” positioned themselves behind the women and started shouting orders: “Clap when Annan gets out of the car,” they screamed to the women. The latter complied with “passion,” raising the posters of Nasrallah. “Boo when Seniora appears,” the Hezbollah’s operators shouted. A huge boo was produced, not only by the women, but also by the men standing behind them.

Go to Counterterrorism Blog for the rest of the story as no MSM outlet is likely to air it.