Protein Wisdom is a great blog http://proteinwisdom.com/ worth some of your time.  This article is all you need to know about Iraq.  The article has tons of source document links to support what Karl is talking about, and will take you years to read completely.  By then Rudy will be running for his second term and there will be no more to write about Iraq.  - ENJOY!  -PF

The Big Picture(s) [Karl]

In the midst of the still-lingering controversy over the truthiness of The New Republic’s “Baghdad Diarist,” more than a few people suggested that war supporters, unable to discredit the real bad news coming from Iraq, targeted the Scott Thomas Beauchamp stories as a weak link.  I cannot speak for everyone who supports the mission in Iraq, but I would submit that Beauchamp’s apparent fables and embellishments are not a “weak link” to be attacked, but simply an egregious example of the establishment media’s flawed coverage of the conflict.   Accordingly, what follows is an over view of the establishment media coverage of the conflict in Iraq.

Though public opinion polls consistently show that Americans consider Iraq to be the most important issue facing the country, establishment media has slashed the resources and time devoted to Iraq.  The number of embedded reporters plunged from somewhere between 570 and 750 when the invasion began in March 2003 to as few as nine by October 2006.  The result was the rise of what journalists themselves call “hotel journalism” and “journalism by remote control.”  Janet Reitman, reporting for Rolling Stone, described the state of the media in early 2004:

When I arrive in Baghdad in April, most American journalists are holed up in their rooms, reporting the war by remote: scanning the wires, working their cell phones, watching broadcasts of Al Jazeera. In many cases, they’ve been reduced to relying on sources available to anyone with an Internet connection…  While Arabic and European media such as The Guardian and Le Monde manage to cover the war on the ground, American reporters seldom interview actual Iraqis. Instead, they talk to U.S. officials who are every bit as isolated as they are, or rely on local stringers and fixers, several of whom have been killed while working for Americans. “We live in a bubble,” grumbles one AP reporter. “If we know one percent of what’s going on in Iraq, we’re lucky.”

There are exceptions of course, though the number of establishment embeds shows they are literally exceptions.  I do not discount the very real danger to Western journos in Iraq, though independent bloggers like Michael Yon, Bill Roggio, Bill Ardolino, and Michael J. Totten seem to have been able to embed outside Baghdad with nothing like the institutional support available to journalists from the establishment media… and that the number of such bloggers is growing.  Moreover, I cannot ignore the consequences of “journalism by remote control.”

Noah D. Oppenheim, who visited Baghdad for MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” noted that “The consequence of this system is that, on television, the story in Iraq is no more than the sum of basic facts, like casualties, crashes, and official pronouncements.”  The data back Oppenheim.  The television airtime devoted to coverage of Iraq has plunged dramatically.  Television networks devoted 4,162 minutes to Iraq in 2003, 3,053 minutes in 2004, 1,534 minutes in 2005 and 1,122 minutes in 2006.  The amount of time and space devoted to Iraq coverage has continued to decline through the first half of 2007.

Bad news stories, especially the daily death tolls, consumed an ever-larger share of this dwindling coverage.  In 2003, it consumed 38% of the networks’ Iraq newshole.  In 2004 and 2005, it consumed 44%.  In 2006, it rose to 56%.  James Q. Wilson observed in the Autumn 2006 City Journal:

When the Center for Media and Public Affairs made a nonpartisan evaluation of network news broadcasts, it found that during the active war against Saddam Hussein, 51 percent of the reports about the conflict were negative. Six months after the land battle ended, 77 percent were negative; in the 2004 general election, 89 percent were negative; by the spring of 2006, 94 percent were negative. This decline in media support was much faster than during Korea or Vietnam.

Nearly two-thirds (.pdf) of Americans still rely on network TV as their primary news source.  Thus, it is not surprising that by mid-2005, the Pew Research Center found that the “steady drip of negative news from Iraq” created a widespread awareness of the rising American death toll that was significantly undermining support for the US military operation.

The establishment media has developed ever more creative ways of reporting US casualties.  For example, in April 2007, the McClatchy newspaper chain reported that “March… marked the first time that the U.S. military suffered four straight months of 80 or more fatalities,” without any suggestion as to why the number 80 had any significance.  Indeed, the four prior months averaged over 80 casualties; they just weren’t as evenly distributed.

The establishment media also has become more willing to show graphic video of US casualties at the hands of the enemy.  CNN aired an insurgent sniper video obtained directly from the enemy.  The NYT posted video of a Marine being shot, reporting his death before his family could be contacted.  ABC News aired video of a Bradley armored vehicle blown up by an improvised explosive device as six American soldiers died inside, then exploited the grief of family members to attack the current “surge” of troops in Iraq.  Similarly, CBS News spiked a story containing video originally posted on an al Qaeda propaganda website, but posted the same video on its own website.  Throughout the conflict, the establishment media has shied away for the truly graphic images of the enemy beheading civilians.

Conversely, there are the stories “journalism by remote control” misses, or chooses not to cover.  As early as September 2003, establishment reporters admitted that “good news” stories were getting short shrift; three years later, nothing had changed.  If anything, by late 2006, the stories missed were getting larger.

Take, for example, the coverage of events in Anbar province.  In September-November 2006, the Washington Post ran a series of articles suggesting that the US military was unable to defeat the bloody insurgency in western Iraq “or counter al-Qaeda’s rising popularity there.”  These stories were echoed in the New York Times/International Herald Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, NBC News, ABC News, CNN, the AP and others, down to local TV.

But this was not the only picture of events in Anbar.  In “Will the Real Anbar Narrative Please Stand Up?”, Bill Ardolino juxtaposed the WaPo stories against analysis by bloggers and embedded reporters like the Times of London’s Martin Fletcher and Michael Fumento for the Weekly Standard.  Bill Roggio’s military and intelligence sources were angry over the media’s characterization of the secret reports cited by the WaPo.  Roggio examined how the claims made in the WaPo coverage were taken out of the larger context of events in Anbar.  Roggio and the Mudville Gazette’s “Greyhawk” charted the formation and rise of the Anbar Salvation Council — the alliance of 25 of the province’s 31 tribes in the fight against al Qaeda.  Roggio and Greyhawk followed up when the Anbar tribes got US air and artillery support — a development ignored by the establishment media.

We now know which narrative was more accurate.  Al Qaeda was not increasingly popular in Anbar.  To the contrary, the local tribes were overwhelmingly opposing and increasingly waging war against al Qaeda, with support from the US military.  Bloggers — carefully following and synthesizing information from their own sources, military information, embedded reporters, Arabic media and isolated stories in the establishment media over the course of a year — proved to be better remote journalists than those at the WaPo, NYT, CSM, AP, CNN, NBC and ABC (and any others I have overlooked).

Incidentally, as early as September 2004, Roggio had predicted the tribes would eventually turn on al-Qaeda.  This type of development is crucial to winning a war against an insurgency.  Popular support is key to the continuation of an insurgency; Mao Zedong famously advised his insurgents to “move through the people like a fish moves through water.”  Thus, the magnitude of the media’s failure to recognize the import of the rise of the Anbar Salvation Council — and its portrayal of Anbar province as lost — cannot be understated.

Even now, generally antiwar media outlets are traveling throughout Iraq and revising their opinions.  The Guardian reports that violence is ebbing and wealth returning to parts of Iraq, Der Spiegel concludes that the “US Military is more successful in Iraq than the world wants to believe,” and even Salon’s correspondent concedes that parts of Iraq actually seem to be getting better.  The establishment media still remains largely confined to quarters in Baghdad.

The other major Iraq story of the period was Pres. Bush’s decision to “surge” US troops in hopes of bringing down escalating sectarian violence.  The establishment media’s coverage was less than subtle.  In December 2006, before the decision was made, NBC News was claiming that it was a “lose-lose” proposition for Pres. Bush.  On January 7, 2007, the WaPo reported on the “growing skepticism inside and outside the administration” over the proposal.  NBC News assembled a panel on the surge composed solely of experts hostile to it.

When Pres. Bush announced the surge, the poll numbers supporting it increased, but the establishment media — especially CBS –focused almost entirely on negative reaction to it.  If civilian casualties went down, it was because death squads decided to lie low, not because so many militia leaders were detained.  Any increase in US casualties — which would be expected from a strategy that put the troops in among the local population and was more aggressive in going after terrorists — would “cast doubt” on the surge, with CNN International launching a similar attack during a report on soldiers being honored for their valor.  A June terror attack on a Baghdad hotel “was a blow struck against the US plan.”  The August terror bombing of the Yazidis came “just as the American military is claiming the troop surge is making real progress,” and ”dealt a serious blow to the Bush administration’s hopes of presenting a positive picture in a progress report on Iraq.”  The NYT claimed the plan was falling short of its goals in July, and so on.

The reality — at least at the moment — is that the new counter-insurgency strategy has turned the trendline of civilian casualties downward for the first time since (semi-)reliable data has been available.

When the “surge” of troops into Iraq was completed in June 2007, MNF-Iraq launched the largest offensive since the first phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom ended in the spring of 2003.  Operation Phantom Thunder included operations not only in Baghdad, but also in the “belts” surrounding the capital, as well as in Diyala, southern Salahadin, northern Babil and eastern Anbar provinces. The fighting was most intense in Baqubah, the provincial capital of Diyala (a/k/a Operation Arrowhead Ripper).

Bill Roggio had reported that the US military was laying the groundwork for the Diyala campaign as far back as April 2007, adding that it would not kick into full gear until the full compliment of US forces were deployed into Iraq in late May or early June.

In contrast, the establishment media was caught flat-footed when this massive operation was launched.  Embedded blogger Michael Yon’s dispatch after the first day of battle noted that he and NYT reporter Michael Gordon seemed to be the only media in Baqubah. Yon’s next dispatch noted that he and Gordon had been joined by the L.A. Times, CNN, AP and Joe Klein from Time magazine.  However, the AP would “stay only a few days”; Klein helicoptered in and out the same day.  By July 5th, the media would consist of Yon and two others; two days later it would be Yon and a photographer.

The Columbia Journalism Review noted that the L.A. Times was the only major paper to put the launch of the operation on page one and that CNN was the only notable television coverage of the battle.  Operation Arrowhead Ripper made events in Iraq the second-biggest Big Media story that week – and the top story on television — yet very few journalists were actually there.

Among the stories from Baqubah almost entirely missed by establishment media was the US military’s discovery of mass graves in a neraby village.  Michael Yon photographed and videotaped Iraqi and US soldiers disinterring the remains of adults and children.  The media generally ignored the story, even after Yon offered map coordinates, names of Iraqi and US Army officials, his photographs and videotape, and ultimately permission to use his reports free of charge.  The AP’s Director of Media Relations first claimed that it was not reporting the story because the Iraqi police and US military had not issued a press release about it — even though the AP had Special Correspondent Robert Reid in Baqubah.  The AP then reported the story out of Baghdad, based on vague details supplied by a local stringer who Yon had interviewed.  Ultimately, the AP gave the story bigger play, using Yon’s material — ten days after the atrocity was discovered.

This last example highlights the risks posed by remote journalism’s reliance on local stringers and fixers.  Western journalists in Iraq are likely to not speak the language or know the culture in depth.  News consumers, however, have no idea how the establishment media vets the locals they entrust to translate or relay the events they ostensibly cover.  The risk of relying on biased stringers and fixers is heightened where (as here) the country in question has long been torn by religious and ethnic strife.  A few more examples show this dynamic has unfolded in Iraq.

On November 15, 2006 the L.A. Times reported the claims of locals that a US airstrike killed at least 30 people in Ramadi (including women and children). A Times correspondent in Ramadi said at least 15 homes were pulverized by aerial bombardment.  By other accounts, those killed were adult males, killed by fire from tanks.  The paper never printed the US military’s denial of an airstrike.  The LAT stringer was accused of having ties to the insurgency by someone purporting to be a US soldier; soldiers stationed in Ramadi claimed the airstrike was a complete fabrication.  Investigating the incident, the blogger Patterico found that people with experience in Iraq noted that al Qaeda either pays off, intimidates, or has sympathizers among many doctors in Iraq and that reports from doctors and “local residents” were highly suspect, as they rarely report males being killed.  The LAT ultimately backed off the claims in its original story, but readers never learned whether the stringer had ties to the insurgency.

In October 2005, there was an airstrike near Ramadi, but the reports from the locals were disputed by the US military.  The story was datelined to Baghdad, but a photograph was taken by Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi stringer working for the AP.  Bilal Hussein grew up in Falluja; in November 2004, an AP reporter interviewed him about his escape from Falluja, which was then under attack from US Marines.  Seemingly staged photos Hussein provided to the AP and Reuters in October 2005 were identified at the Sir Humphrey’s blog.  The National Journal reported that in September 2005, Bilal Hussein provided the AP with images that may have been created for the photographer.  Moreover, the National Journal piece on fauxtography suggests that Santiago Lyon, the AP’s director of photography, is not particularly concerned about staged photos, so long as the photographer does not instigate them (and he apparently asssumes that they do not).

Bilal Hussein — and Lyon — were no strangers to controversy.  In 2004, Bilal Hussein photographed three terrorists in the act of assassinating two Iraqi election workers on Haifa Street. The AP’s Lyon admitted that Hussein was “tipped off” by the terrorists about a “demonstration that was supposed to take place on Haifa Street.” The AP was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for these photos, though former New York Times photographer D. Gorton reviewed the various stories the AP told about the incident and found them “confusing and at times contradictory” and that “there is nothing in the information put forward that would definitively answer critics who believe that the photographer may have been complicit in the event on Haifa St.”  Gorton added:

What is clear is that the photograph, in the editor’s own words, fitted into an editorial view that portrayed Iraq as ungovernable and chaotic. Thus, it tended to confirm that notion, to the AP’s readers, just months before the highly successful election.

In April 2006, Bilal Hussein was detained by the US military as a security threat with “strong ties to known insurgents.”  The AP later reported:

The military said Hussein was captured with two insurgents, including Hamid Hamad Motib, an alleged leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. “He has close relationships with persons known to be responsible for kidnappings, smuggling, improvised explosive device (IED) attacks and other attacks on coalition forces,” according to a May 7 e-mail from U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jack Gardner, who oversees all coalition detainees in Iraq.

Hussein’s case has been reviewed at least three times; he remains in detention.

In April 2005, a CBS stringer was arrested as a suspected insurgent.  CBS revealed the man was referred to the network by a “fixer” in Tikrit — Saddam Hussein’s hometown and an insurgent stronghold — “who has had a trusted relationship with CBS News for two years.”  The stringer was ultimately acquitted, but was detained for a year after an investigative judge decided there was enough evidence to recommend the case be tried.  One would hope that the establishment media would have a higher standard for its employees than “not convicted as an insurgent.”

Similar problems arise even in the context of the establishment media’s police sources.  The best-known example is that of Baghdad Police Capt. “Jamil Hussein” the pseudonymous source for over 60 AP stories, most of which were not corroborated by other press accounts, many of which occurred outside the jurisdictions to which he was assigned, and at least two of which were debunked by bloggers.  The AP, by spinning the case as one of whether the source existed, never acknowledged that he was pseudonymous, in violation of the AP’s own policies.  Nor did the AP directly confront the falsity of his stories of destroyed mosques.

“Jamil Hussein,” however, is not the only police source to have supplied dubious stories to the establishment media. In June 2007, the AP and Reuters ran stories claiming that 20 decapitated bodies had been found in a village southeast of Baghdad.  The stories were based on anonymous police sources in Baghdad (15 miles away) and Kut (75 miles away).  The wire services retracted the stories after they were questioned by blogger Bob Owens.  In August 2007, the wire services in Baghdad reported that 60 people were massacred in Baqubah, but Maj. Rob Parke says that no such bodies were found after days of investigation.

The case of The New Republic’s “Baghdad Diarist” is a variation on this theme.  As Bob Steele, the Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values at The Poynter Institute school for journalists, told USA Today, Scott Beauchamp’s pseudonymity allowed him to make accusations against others with impunity and to sidestep essential accountability that would exist, were he identified.

The risks of remote journalism are amplified by the danger of groupthink.  At its worst, accesss to the same small set of primary (and perhaps dubious) sources can result in the lead story of The New York Times being cobbled together “out of wire reports and late-night recollections from exhausted correspondents.”  Moreover, as Oppenheim observed, “(m)ost journalists did not support this war to begin with, and feel vindicated whenever the effort stumbles.”  Bartle Bull, who has written about Iraq for the New York Times and lived with a family in Sadr City, went so far as to suggest that the errors of hotel journalism were not those of laziness as much as a “weirdly personal” obsession with the notion that Iraq must fail.  I am generally loathe to attribute to malice that which may be explained by incompetence, but it is possibile that both influence the coverage of Iraq.

The establishment media’s attitude toward the invasion manifested itself — until quite recently — in the frequent invocation of Vietnam as an analogy. As ABC News would later concede, questions about a Vietnam-style “quagmire” haunted the president’s Iraq policy since before a single bomb fell on Baghdad. CNN and the L.A. Times were among those doing the questioning, as was CBS News correspondent Bob Simon, who told USA Today that he opposed any invasion of Iraq back in October 2002.

Within the opening days of the invasion, the Baltimore Sun was claiming that “This war in its early stages recalls the pitched battles and bloody skirmishes of the Vietnam War,” while New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd found it “hard not to have a few acid flashbacks to Vietnam at warp speed.” Barely a week into the operation, ABC’s Peter Jennings and CBS’s Lesley Stahl had invoked the Vietnam quagmire, while NBC’s Today Show invited The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh on air a few days later to contend that “it’s never too early” to roll out the Vietnam analogy.  The Scripps-Howard News Service warned that saddam Hussein’s “strategy was to drag America into a Vietnam quagmire.”

After Coalition forces toppled Saddam, the trend only intensified.  John Watson, assistant professor of communications at American University, told the CSM that media skepticism set in more quickly than in Vietnam, beginning with the occupation phase and coinciding with reporters leaving the embedded media program — which is what the aforementioned CMPA study showed as well.  In June, CBS’s Bob Schieffer and others were asking whether the US was involved in a “guerrilla war” in Iraq.  By October 2003, former WaPo reporter David Maraniss was insisting that “the echoes are immense” between Iraq and Vietnam on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews.  On November 14, 2003, Reuters ran a piece headlined, “US War Dead in Iraq Exceeds Early Vietnam Years,” burying deep within the story the fact that the US presence in Vietnam was tiny for the first four years of its involvement, as compared to the force in Iraq.

President Bush was asked directly about the Vietnam “quagmire” analogy by the establishment media again and again and again.  From the outset of the invasion through mid-July 2007, the TV networks each aired hundreds of stories containing the Iraq-Vietnam comparison; CNN, the NYT and the WaPo have done thousands of them apiece.  The AP has compared Pres. Bush’s rhetoric with that of LBJ, the bad intelligence on Iraqi WMDs with the Gulf of Tonkin, and the Haditha killings with My Lai.  Combined with the ever-increasing percentage of stories devoted to the daily death tolls, the message being conveyed by the establishment media was unmistakable.

It might be asked why the establishment media resorted so early and so often to the Vietnam “quagmire” analogy, and so rarely challenged the subjects of their coverage  who invoked it.  The specious Reuters story aside, US casualties in Iraq have been lighter in Iraq than in Vietnam.  At Slate, even after engaging is some very dubious body count inflation — giving terrorists extra credit for each US soldier killed due to improvements in medical treatment and force protection since Vietnam — Phillip Carter and Owen West came up with an imaginary 2,975 comabt deaths in Iraq during 2004, compared to 4,602 real combat deaths during 1966 in Vietnam.

Nor does the analogy hold for civilian casualties.  In Vietnam, the civilian death rate was about 400 per 100,000 per year.  In Iraq, it has been about 150 per 100,000 people per year.  Moreover, only about ten percent of the deaths in Iraq have been caused by US troops. Controlling for population and duration, Iraqi civilian fatalities from direct US action and crossfire through the end of 2006 were 17–30 times lower than those from bombing and shelling in Vietnam.

There have been no comparisons of enemy casualties, largely due to the establishment media’s Vietnam Syndrome.  Indeed, when Pres. Bush mentioned that in October, November and the first week of December 2006, Coalition forces killed or captured nearly 5,900 of the enemy, ABC’s Martha Raddatz grilled White House press secretary Tony Snow about it.  Reuters and the WaPo were quick to remind readers that the practice of giving enemy body counts “was discredited during the Vietnam war.”

To be fair, military commanders will say that enemy body counts are of limited use in measuring success against an insurgency.  However, WaPo national security blogger William Arkin was alarmed over a “return to a Vietnam-mentality body count system” when the DoD put out a request for proposals to develop “a system of metrics to accurately assess US progress in the War on Terrorism and identify critical issues hindering progress.” The request never mentioned enemy body counts, let alone require that they be a metric of success.  Given the ongoing debate over whether US policy is creating more terrorists than it is killing, it is odd that the establishment media would be against taking such measurements.  This complete aversion is at least partially rooted in myths about invincible guerrillas and insurgents — myths that US Naval War College Professor Donald Stoker argues are a direct result of America’s collective misunderstanding of its defeat in South Vietnam.

Moreover, as Prof. Stoker noted in the January 2007 issue of Foreign Policy, history shows that insurgents rarely win, though victory over an insurgency usually requires a decade, on average.  A Dupuy Institute study for the DoD showed that even post-World War II insurgencies lost 60% of the time. Of course, each conflict is unique, and the differences are as important as the similarities.  Yet this only underscores the problem of the establishment media perpetuating the single case of Vietnam to frame its “big picture” of the conflict in Iraq.

It could be argued that the media suffers from Vietnam Syndrome because civilian Americans in general tend to lack an understanding of military matters, or because academia tended to lose interest in military history in a nuclear, post-Vietnam era.  But even an establishment media dominated by the Boomer generation that came of age during Vietnam knows that Vietnam was not the end of history.

In December 2005, the NYT published a chart showing that the casualies from the conflict in Iraq pale in comparison to the Afghan civil war of 1978-2002, the tribal conflict in Rawanda that lasted a mere three months in 1994, the ethnic war in Bosnia from 1992-95, the ongoing mass killing in the Darfur region of Sudan, the Nicaraguan civil war of 1978-90 and — perhaps most telling — the internal sectarian and ethnic violence waged by Saddam Hussein against his fellow Iraqis between 1988-91 (even excluding the Iraq-Iran war).  That the establishment media was content to frame the conflict in Iraq as a replay of Vietnam in the face of this data suggests that the establishment media has been operating with a great deal of groupthink.

Perhaps the most telling expression of the media’s hive mind on Iraq, however, may have come last week, when Pres. Bush gave a major speech on Iraq which included his own Vietnam analogies.  Though Pres. Bush spent more time in his speech comparing aspects of the Iraq conflict to the US experience with postwar Japan and with South Korea, the establishment media has a visceral — and near-unanimously negative — reaction against his references to Vietnam.

The most absurd reaction had to be that of the NYT, which exclamed that Pres. Bush’s “decision to inject Vietnam into the debate over Iraq was bizarre” — this from a paper which has run roughly 3,000 stories with the comparison and which used the word “quagmire” to describe Iraq in the very same sentence.  The paper’s ostensibly straight news coverage sounded the theme common in most of the establishment media, “Historians Question Bush’s Reading of Lessons of Vietnam War for Iraq.”  The major television networks all advanced that theme, soliciting quotes from liberal historians like Douglas Brinkley (the biographer of Bush’s 2004 opponent, Sen. John Kerry), Stanley Karnow (longtime friend of the late North Vietnamese spy Pham Xuan An, who worked for both Time and Reuters) and Robert Dallek (whose Bush Derangement Syndrome was on full display earlier this month in the Washington Post).  The Times of London was able to find historians who agreed with Pres. Bush’s general points; somehow, the establishment media in the US missed them.  Conversely, the media apparently forgot to solicit quotes from the historians now pooh-poohing Vietnam analogies during the years in which the media ran thousands of stories using Vietnam analogies.

The establishment media’s other major theme was to suggest that Pres. Bush was hypocritical for raising a Vietnam analogy after years of rejecting such comparisons.  These media giants were seemingly unaware that Pres. Bush had made similar remarks in October 2005 and April 2007.  Moreover, the suggestion of hypocrisy is an ad hominem attack on Bush, rather than a criticism of the validity of his current argument.

A lesser media theme was the suggestion by historian David C. Hendrickson in the NYT — echoed by David Shuster on MSNBC — that the US was actually to blame for the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia  — as opposed to blaming North Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodian territory from 1965 onwards to launch attacks on US and South Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.

The L.A. Times suggested that the “real lesson of Vietnam is that its civil war was a nationalist struggle that toppled no communist ‘dominoes’ across Asia.”  But Lee Kuan Yew,  prime minister of Singapore in 1975, argued that the domino theory would have held true had the US not intervened in Vietnam.  And while glossing over the horrors of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the L.A. Times also managed to entirely miss the nation of Laos, a/k/a the Lao People’s Democratic Republic.

In short, the establishment media response to Pres. Bush’s Vietnam analogies ignored the ongoing historical debate over the cause of the horrors following the US withdrawal from Vietnam and favored an ad hominem claim of hypocrisy over an examination of the merits of Bush’s claims.  The establishment media’s newfound hostility to Vietnam analogies tends to confirm the claims of reporters like Oppenheim and Bull that most establishment journalists are obsessed with the notion that the US must fail in Iraq and feel vindicated whenever the effort stumbles.

At this juncture, just to anticipate what more unhinged readers may want to read into this essay, I emphasize that I am not alleging some sort of conspiracy is involved in these phenomena.  A conspiracy involves an agreement among those involved.  The flaws in the establishment media’s Iraq coverage do not arise from some secret agreement but from their preexisting prejudices, misconceptions or ignorance of military history and theory, journalistic biases toward bad news, economic constraints, and so on.

Thus, as a supporter of the mission, I feel no need to discredit all of the bad news coming out of Iraq.  I do note that all of the bad news coming out of Iraq is nowhere near the bad news that came out of Vietnam, despite thousands of news stories invoking that conflict.   I also note that all of the bad news coming out of Iraq is nowhere near the bad news that came out of other recent conflicts.  It is particularly worth noting that all of the bad news coming out of Iraq is nowhere near the bad news that could have come out of Saddam-era Iraq, had ex-CNN news chief Eason Jordan not suppressed that news and recycled Saddam’s agitprop.  Eason Jordan later resigned from CNN after he baselessly accused US troops of targeting journalists in Iraq — a claim challenged at the time by US Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), but not by the establishment media.

While on the subject, we could apply Vietnam analogies to the establishment media’s performance on Iraq.  In Vietnam, Time and Reuters hired a North Vietnamese spy to cover the war; in Iraq, the establishment media has hired stringers with alleged ties to insurgents and run dubious stories and staged photographs they provided.  In Vietnam, none of the networks made any effort to train their people to comprehend military matters; there was little incentive to learn the language, with the result that most correspondents were isolated from the Vietnamese, their culture, and their problems.  In Iraq, journalists are isolated from most people outside their hotel accomodations in Baghdad.  In Vietnam, the media consensus was that the Tet offensive was an “unmitigated defeat” for the United States; Walter Cronkite would claim the US was “mired in stalemate.”  Even the NYT now concedes that Tet “was a military defeat for the Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese sponsors.”  Yet in Iraq, the establishment media missed the seeds of the counter-insurgency in Anbar province, the loss of popular support for the jihadis and the biggest battle of the second biggest offensive of the conflict.  Moreover, the establishment media has continued to suggest that this or that individual terror attack “casts doubt” on the current strategy, even as civilian casualties decrease.

Of course, there are differences as well.  The establishment media turned negative on Iraq much faster than it did in Vietnam (or Korea), with much less justification.  In the Vietnam era, Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America, while the phrase “credibility gap” was popularized to describe public skepticism about the Johnson administration’s statements and policies on the Vietnam War.  Today, most Americans believe the establishment media is often inaccurate and more are confident that the US military is providing an accurate picture of Iraq than are confident of the establishment media.

In sum, most Americans do not trust the establishment media coverage of Iraq.  Journalists, including those from establishment media, point out the chronic and systemic problems with their work.  Yet in some circles, for whatever reason, it is criticism of the establishment media’s Iraq coverage which is seen as odd, rather than the coverage itself.

Executive Summary  By: The Media Research Center

As the 2008 presidential campaign season gets underway, wide-open primary races in both the Republican and Democratic parties are competing for the media’s attention. So are the broadcast networks covering both sides equally, or are they tilting the campaign playing field in favor of liberal Democratic candidates?

To find out, Media Research Center analysts reviewed all 517 campaign segments on ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS’s The Early Show and NBC’s Today from January 1 through July 31. Those three broadcast morning shows draw nine times the audience of their cable news competitors, and are geared toward everyday voters, not political junkies. These programs are therefore a prime battleground in each campaign’s quest for positive media attention.

The results are astonishing: Not only are the network morning shows overwhelmingly focused on Democrats, they are actively promoting the Democrats’ liberal agenda.

Among the major findings:

• The networks offered nearly twice as much coverage of the Democrats. More than half of all campaign segments (284, or 55%) focused on the Democratic contest, compared with just 152 (29%) devoted to the Republicans. The remaining stories either offered roughly equal discussion of both parties or did not focus on the major parties.
   
• All three Democratic frontrunners received more attention than any of the top Republican candidates, with New York Senator Hillary Clinton receiving the most coverage of all.
   
• Undeclared liberal candidates such as former Vice President Al Gore and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg received more network TV attention than many of the declared Republican candidates.
   
• The network morning shows doled out nearly three times as much airtime (4 hours, 35 minutes) to interviews with the various Democratic campaigns. In contrast, the Republicans received just 1 hour and 44 minutes of interview airtime.
   
• In their interviews with the candidates, the network hosts emphasized a liberal agenda. Of the substantive questions that could be categorized as reflecting a political agenda, more than two-thirds (69%) of the questions to Democrats reflected a liberal premise, and more than four-fifths (82%) of the questions to Republicans came from the same perspective.
   
• The top Democratic candidates received much more favorable coverage than their GOP counterparts, with Senator Clinton cast as “unbeatable” and Illinois Senator Barack Obama tagged as a “rock star.” The most prominent Republican, Arizona Senator John McCain, was portrayed as a loser because of his support for staying the course in Iraq.
   
• Not once did network reporters describe Senator Clinton and former North Carolina Senator John Edwards as “liberal,” while ABC only once labeled Obama as “liberal.” Yet the networks showed no hesitation in attaching the “liberal” label to Republican frontrunner Rudy Giuliani, who was so branded 12 times.

These early returns suggest that ABC, CBS and NBC are skewing their news in ways that will benefit the Democratic candidates in 2008. The broadcast networks have a responsibility to cover both parties in a fair and even-handed manner — not for the sake of the candidates, but for the voters. That means giving viewers a chance to hear from all of the major candidates in interviews, asking them similar questions, and balancing the day-to-day news coverage to keep both Democratic and Republican primary voters equally well-informed.

————

to download and read the full report by right clicking on the .pdf below and SAVE TARGET AS campaign2008.pdf

or click here for the online version.

On our way to a Cincinnati tennis event in August we stopped in Indiana to visit Bret in his new house. He and his finance are friends of the daughter of a good friend of mine; they are all life long biking circuit enthusiasts. I thought you would enjoy the story even though it’s not about Politics - OR - Football. Truly inspiring. -PF

August 14, 2007

Welcome back, Mr. Neylon

Brownsburg teacher paralyzed in accident returns to classroom, helped by technology

By Josh Duke

August 14, 2007

Students in Bret Neylon’s Brownsburg High School class got more than a U.S. history lesson on their first day back to school.

They also learned a little about life.

Neylon returned to the classroom Monday just 14 months after a devastating bicycle injury left him paralyzed from the neck down.

“Just him being here shows how much he wanted to teach again,” said junior Robby Hechinger, 16. “He could have just given up, but he was willing to work hard for us, which means we need to work twice as hard for him.”

With the help of high-tech equipment and widespread community support, Neylon, 40, is achieving something most people in his situation don’t.

Just three out of 10 people with an injury like Neylon’s go back to work within 10 years after the injury, according to the Maryland-based National Spinal Cord Injury Association. The numbers are much smaller for those, such as Neylon, who are just one year removed from the accident, said Marcie Roth, chief executive officer and executive director of the association.

“The message he is sending to his students is invaluable,” she said. “We want them to know anything is possible.”

Neylon views his return to the classroom as the last step to resuming a normal life.

“When I teach history, the No. 1 goal I have is to teach about tolerance and understanding and appreciating different people,” he said. “There are many things that people with paralysis can accomplish in life.”

Neylon suffered the injury during an all-out sprint to the finish of a June 17, 2006, bicycle race in Wilmington, Ohio. Unable to avoid an accident in front of him, Neylon was catapulted over his handlebars and onto his head. The impact fractured a vertebra in his neck.

While Neylon spent months in a rehabilitation center in Atlanta, the move to help him began immediately back home. Brownsburg residents and area cycling enthusiasts held fund-raisers, prayer vigils and even built a handicap-accessible house that was waiting for Neylon when he arrived in September.

“His return was never a question for us,” said Kathleen Corbin, superintendent of Brownsburg Schools. “Bret Neylon before June 2006 was a wonderful teacher and he is a wonderful teacher now, and you don’t want to lose good people like that.”

Neylon resumed coaching duties with the high school track team last spring and is leading the cross country team this fall.

To aid his return to the classroom, the school district and Indiana Vocational Rehabilitation — a state organization that helps people with disabilities — partnered to pull resources together and hired Easter Seals Crossroads to prepare the classroom. Wade Wingler, director of assistive technology for Easter Seals, estimated the cost at up to $30,000.

“I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and I’ve never had another employer that has embraced a situation like this,” Wingler said. “Disabilities affect everybody differently, but Bret is a shining example of someone who dealt with it, and then considered, ‘What do I have to do to move forward?’ “

A special helper Neylon has depended upon at home became key to his return to the classroom. A voice-activated computer software program called Max allows him to send e-mails, answer and dial the phone, run the overhead projector and even provide a little comic relief on command.

“Max, these are the students I told you about,” Neylon said as the class settled in Monday. Max promptly filled the room with pre-recorded laughter.

But Max can’t do it all, so the school district hired Neylon’s sister, Cathy Stinson, to be his assistant. Stinson was a special education aide in the Mooresville school district before leaving to help take care of Neylon.

“She will be my hands whenever I need it,” Neylon said.

Stinson will help with grading papers, taking attendance, making copies and feeding Neylon at lunch. If the computer system goes down, Stinson would help Neylon teach the class using the chalkboard, he said.

On his first day back, Stinson’s assistance at the chalkboard wasn’t necessary. Max worked flawlessly, and Neylon and his students quickly adjusted, said Donna Petraits, director of communications for Brownsburg Schools.

“I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew it would be different,” said Robby Hechinger, who also had Neylon as a teacher in middle school. “But it really wasn’t any different than in eighth grade. He used the computer system and a microphone, but otherwise it seemed like any other teacher up there.”

After Stinson took attendance, Neylon showed historical clips from the Vietnam War, the sinking of the Titanic and the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center.

Neylon saved the last 10 minutes to talk about his accident and answer any questions students might have, Petraits said.

Junior Erika Hess, 16, came away from Neylon’s class inspired. She said he already changed her outlook on life.

“I’m just so grateful that I have him for a teacher. . . . I’m so excited about this year now,” she said.

 

Technology at work - Bret Neylon’s return to a Brownsburg High School classroom depends on technology. Here are two examples:

A voice-activated computer software system, called Max, lets Neylon accomplish routine tasks on command. Max recognizes Neylon’s voice and does whatever he asks, whether it’s answering the phone, turning on the overhead projector or sending an e-mail.

School officials rewired Neylon’s entire room and added speakers to help amplify his voice. He uses a wireless lapel microphone to project his voice, which was weakened by injuries.

The National Spinal Cord Injury Association

Below, find only a small clip of this week’s cover story of the WEEKLY STANDARD magazine. If you want to understand the Bush Derangement Syndrome read the entire LONG article here. I’ve posted snips below -

……. At the same time that Conason is looking back to a fictional past in America, Naomi Wolf–last heard from in 2000 advising Al Gore to dress in earth tones–is looking back to a real past in Europe, and seeing troubling parallels. In 4,600 overwrought words, she explained to the readers of the Guardian that there are ten steps to “Fascist America” and Bush is taking them all.

Bush has whipped up a menace (the war on terror); created “a prison system outside the rule of law” (Guantánamo, to which public dissidents, including “clergy and journalists” will be sent “soon enough”); developed “a thug caste … groups of scary young men out to terrorize citizens” (young Republican staffers who supposedly “menaced poll workers” during the 2000 recount in Florida); set up an “internal surveillance system” (NSA scanning for phone calls to and from terrorists). An airtight case, this, and leading to just one conclusion: “Beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable … that it can happen here.”

Well, this explains many things. It explains why poor Cindy Sheehan is now sitting in prison; why Bush critics like CIA retiree Valerie Plame have been ostracized by the corporate media and are wasting away in anonymity; why no critic of Bush can get a hearing, why no book complaining about him can ever get published, and why our multiplexes are filled with one pro-Bush propaganda movie after another, glorifying the Iraq war and rallying the nation behind its leader.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, Cindy Sheehan is running for Congress; Valerie Plame is rich and famous; the young Republican “thugs” made all of one appearance seven years ago–chanting “Let us in!” when Miami-Dade County vote counters planned to move to a small inner room with no observers present; and press censorship is now so far-reaching that you can’t even expose a legal, effective, and top-secret plan to trace terrorists without getting a Pulitzer Prize.

“What if the publisher of a major U.S. newspaper were charged with treason or espionage?” Wolf asks breathlessly. “What if he or she got 10 years in jail?” Well, journalists have been harassed, pressed for their sources, and threatened with prison, but not by George W. Bush and his people. Back in the real world, only one prominent journalist has been jailed by the federal government in recent memory, and that was Judith Miller, imprisoned for 80-plus days for contempt by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, the great hero of the anti-Bush forces for having indicted Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff.

Such is life here in Fascist America. Of course, some think that the coup took place some time back, in the form of two, three, even four stolen elections over the span of six years. In 2000, they agree, the election was -stolen by the Supreme Court, after Governor Jeb Bush and other Republicans in Florida had systematically disenfranchised liberal voters through misleading ballots, illegal purges, faulty machines, and long lines.

After 2002, most had moved on to a different fixation: the touch-screen electronic voting machines that they thought had been secretly programmed to tip key elections to conservatives. “There is strong evidence that Kerry won the popular vote [in the 2004 election],” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the Progressive before the 2006 midterms. “There were easily three million votes that were shifted… There were 80,000 Democratic voters in twelve western Ohio rural counties who cast a vote for Kerry and had their votes shifted…  In six other counties there were tens of thousands of Kerry voters who had their votes shifted to Bush.”

……………… Democratic pollster Mark Blumenthal, at his Mystery Pollster blog, unraveled the myth of the exit polls that Kennedy described as “exquisitely accurate.” To the contrary, he reported, they were error-prone, unreliable, and had a record in the past four presidential elections of tipping heavily to the Democrats’ side: in 1988, they exaggerated the Democrats’ vote by 2.2 points; in 1992 by 5.0 points, by 2.2 points again four years later, and in 2000 by 1.8. In 2004, the spread was 6.5 points, barely higher than it was in 1992, the difference being that the candidate projected as being the winner then was the one who in the end won.

Blumenthal noted that “Senior election officials from the Carter Center have repeatedly advised against the use of exit polls in election monitoring in Central American countries, calling them ‘risky,’ ‘unreliable,’ and ‘misleading’” and that an election project funded by the U.N. and the U.S. Agency for International Development had concluded, “The majority of exit polls carried out in European countries over the past years have been failures… One might think there is no reason why voters in stable democracies should conceal or lie about how they have voted … but they do.” Joe Andrews, a chairman of the Democratic National Committee in the late 1990s, has repeatedly noted that touch-screen machines really help Democrats, by making voting easier for their constituent groups, including disabled and elderly voters.

——— really! if you have the time read it all here

or download a pdf of the article below

(right click on link below, then SAVE LINK AS)
bush-derangement-syndrome-explained.pdf

Well we got just a bit more than 24 hours notice that Rudy was going to be back in Iowa on Friday. For me personally, it was the most fun I’ve had at an event to date and I didn’t hear a word he said or even shake his hand! The story I’m most interested in telling is at the very bottom of this post because I spent the last 30 minutes there.

We were talking about taking time off work and driving there, but then got the call that we were needed and gladly accepted the mission.

The event was held at Ross’ Restaurant on the corner of State Street and 14th under the I-74 bridge over the Mississippi. The first people were three people waiting on a mission to see Rudy - pictured below with Ambassador Terpeluk (Luxembourg 2002-2005). He was traveling with Rudy on this 2 day 6 event swing through Idaho, Iowa, Illinois. Tracie, Rudy’s paid staffer for SE Iowa, picked them up at the airport at 3am on Friday Morning z z z z z z 

These three are regulars every Friday at Ross’ and they heard from the couple’s son (the two in the middle) that Rudy was going to be at Ross’ on Friday. Funny thing, their son is in Grenada! All three are leaning Rudy (they like Mitt too) and were very nice to talk to during the down time. The fellow on the right is a friend of theirs who got a scripted autograph in a copy of Rudy’s book “Leadership” during the event. The autographed book is for his wife’s 60’s birthday and Rudy wrote what he asked him to write and more.

I did talk to the Ambassador for a bit. Rudy’s campaign needs a higher internet presence - his website is fine but more needs to be done generally on searches, etc.  joinrudy2008 and a better use of humor, IMO. The Ambassador said the campaign has over 9,000 video clips on file - but that’s not what I really meant. Hmmm…

this is a good picture of the Mayor, and you can see Maggie Tinsman just out of range to the left side of the picture (Maggie is a state co-chair and is running the SE Iowa district volunteer effort for Rudy with Tracie)

I just couldn’t resist posting this picture. A young family had breakfast at Ross’ just to meet Rudy.

The lady in the forefront is the daughter of the owner of the Restaurant. I will try to ID the others later. ( and those below)

To me, this is the most interesting story. During these “meet and greets” Rudy will literally shake everyone’s hand (ok I missed because I was a moving target during the event) and create a photo op or sign an autograph. At some level this is a better event that the “town halls” because of the informality. Iowa is really lucky that we get to meet the next President of the USA at this level of informality.

This picture (below) was taken at the very end of the event. The gent shaking Rudy’s hand was with two older people who, until after Rudy left, I assumed were his parents. As it turns out he was just helping some older acquaintances with water damage and brought them to Ross’ for breakfast. They didn’t know Rudy was going to be here. “Do you think I would have dress like this?” he said. From our conversation he was clearly a Rudy fan. After sitting in the booth for a minute (I was handing out brochures, answering questions about Rudy’s candidacy) the husband and wife with him were unclear on the value of Rudy’s candidacy and (imagine this) we talked.
This is going to be hard; I promised Allan and Joyce (the older couple) a letter with more information since they don’t have internet access. I’m worse with snail mail than I am at returning phone calls.

I sat down and talked to Allan and Joyce for about 20 minutes toward the end of the event because they had some questions and wanted to tell me about the problems they had with Rudy generally. I promised them more information but will outline the conversation here. I never asked them if they were ( R ) or ( D ) it doesn’t much matter - we talked issues. Allan’s two big issues for President is 2nd amendment rights and a relationship to lack of union support that affected him personally in the 1980s during Ronald Reagan’s terms as President.

Rudy is going to have problems with gun advocates. Saying he supports 2nd amendment rights to keep and bare arms will not be good enough in the Midwest. I did think he answered the question as best he could in this video - click here to view it.

What Rudy did previously was based on governing the largest City in the world that was also at that time - the crime capital of the United States. He had to do something and he focused on reducing taxes and removing guns. He’s said in his 12 Commitments that what is right for NYC is not necessarily right for Montana. He believes states should make their own laws on gun control - but he has stated again and again that he supports 2nd amendment rights and would never be in favor of removing guns or the ability to carry licensed guns. I fear this will never be enough for some voters, but those who call Rudy a “gun grabber” are unfair.

However, Rudy frankly admits not everyone holds the same views that he does on every issue - but his “80% friend is not his 20% enemy”. What you won’t see is Rudy changing his mind about issues based on polling data. Voters need to balance how each candidate may govern based on what they say and prior experience.

The second issue Allan wanted to talk about was a bad feeling he had of memories of President Reagan firing the Traffic Controllers in the 1980s when they went on strike - and probably more importantly, losing a union job in the 80s that he associated with Reagan.

I’m not sure people understand or remember that it is illegal for government workers to strike and PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) did just that. If you take this link here, you can read a Q&A session including President Reagan’s opening remarks on the announcement. Basically, Reagan allowed the workers to return to work within 48 hours or face termination. Most lost their jobs, many returned - air travel continued.

You can read here what I think about unions. I’m not anti-union, I’m pro economic growth. You can also search on the Iowa Politics category to view other posts from me about the Fair Share bill unions are trying to cram down the Democrats and Republican throats in the state house this year.

It got so nasty one of the three democrats that did not fall into line with the unions, changed party affiliation after the session ended this spring.

From a purely business perspective, it’s horrible law. Few new businesses will re-locate in Iowa if this bill is made law, some have threatened to leave Iowa. Union leaders aren’t concerned about long term impact on workers families - look at the rust belt; jobs are gone. Unions were started for a good reason, and are responsible for some good things like the 40 hour work week and overtime. But I have a simple statement that you will read over and over in these posts - “you can’t be pro-worker and be anti-business”. Too many union leaders don’t balance the profitability of businesses when representing their unions in negotiations, and union leaders for government workers think there is an unlimited supply of money from your tax dollars.

Rudy understands there needs to be a balance. It’s interesting that the Union Leaders of the Fire Fighters don’t support Rudy, but a significant segment of the rank and file do support Rudy. It’s hard to be a union member and fight the tsunami of the labor organization against republican principles.

LINK

Wrong At The Times

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Media Bias: There they go again. A major media outlet makes a claim about the economy it can’t back up. We’re starting to think maybe this isn’t an accident.

In this case, the culprit is the New York Times. In its Tuesday edition, it makes the claim that Americans “had to make ends meet with less money than at the peak of the last economic expansion.”

As evidence, it cites the data from 2000 to 2005. Sure enough, real household income in 2000 was $55,714, while in 2005 it was $55,238, a decline of 1%.

“The fact that average incomes remained lower in 2005 than five years earlier,” the Times piece intones, “helps explain why so many Americans report feeling economic stress despite overall growth in the economy.”

Case closed? Hardly.

This is a classic example of statistical bait and switch. Our suspicions were raised with the Times’ selection of that first year — 2000. Wasn’t that the peak year in the Internet boom? The year before the 2001 recession, which was already underway the very day that President Bush stepped into office in January 2001?

You pick a record year for income — one that included, by the way, massive amounts of one-time capital gains from the stock market — then compare it with income several years later and, of course, growth will appear to be weak.

That’s only one bit of numbers legerdemain the Times used.

It also chooses “household” income as its gauge. A useful measure, but with caveats.For instance, the average household in 2000 had 2.62 people in it; in 2005, according to Census forecasts, the average household had 2.57 people. That’s a decline of about 2%.

So, all things equal, incomes should be 2% less than they were in 2000, based on the Times report’s use of household data.

Instead, they were down just 1%. Thus, adjusted for household size, incomes using the income measure of the Times actually rose 1%, after inflation.

By the way, there are far better income measures than those used by the Times. They show something quite different.

Let’s take real personal disposable income — a measure of what people actually take home after taxes, which is highly relevant given President Bush’s big tax cuts. Instead of the deceptive household measure, let’s look at per person income.

When you do, you see that, in real terms, disposable personal income rose 7.7% from $25,469 in 2000 to $27,436 in 2005. By the way, move that out to 2006, and real incomes grew 10%.

Lest you think we’re cherry picking here, we’ll take one other standard measure of national income growth: real per-capita GDP, the number economists prefer when making cross-country comparisons.

In this case, per-capita GDP grew 6.6%, from $34,755 in 2000 to $37,052 in 2005. Again, add in 2006 data, and the gain was 8.6% since 2000.

One more telling statistic: During the period the New York Times heralds as one of low growth, personal consumption rose sharply. From 2000 to 2005, per person spending rose a solid 10.1%, fueled by tax cuts, low unemployment, a housing boom and record stock prices. That’s after inflation, mind you. And, yet again, extend it out to 2006 and the real spending gain is a hefty 12.6%. A big gain.

What about the claim Americans are “feeling economic stress”?

Strange, but just last week a new Harris Poll showed that 94% of Americans remain “satisfied” with their lives. Sound like a country stressed out over the economy to you?

Sure, we all have financial worries. That’s part of life. But using data in a deceptive way to portray things as bad when they’re not isn’t just wrong; it’s dishonest.

The Times’ distemper when it comes to anything related to President Bush is well known. Sadly, this is just another in a long line of tendentious economic reporting by a once-great newspaper.

 

Carbon offsetting schemes not so green

By Jasper Copping, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 20/08/2007

As millions of Britons jet off to foreign climes for their holiday this month, the more environmentally minded travellers will have salved their consciences by paying for trees to be planted to compensate for the carbon emissions caused by their flight.

But a ground-breaking study has now called into question the effectiveness of using trees to “offset” emissions, suggesting that their ability to “lock-up” carbon dioxide has been greatly exaggerated.

Forests have long been seen as an effective way of absorbing the greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, which are thought to trap the sun’s heat in the atmosphere, causing global warming.

Celebrities, including the Rolling Stones and Leonardo DiCaprio, the film actor, have signed up to schemes to plant trees to offset their own emissions.

However, the new research found that trees bathed in extra carbon dioxide grew more tissue, but did not necessarily store significant extra quantities of carbon. Instead, the tree’s capacity to absorb the gas depended on water and nutrient levels.

The news will come as a blow to the carbon-offsetting industry, which has expanded rapidly as individuals and companies try to atone for their carbon dioxide emissions by paying companies to plant trees for them.

In 2003, the Rolling Stones held a “carbon neutral” tour, planting one tree for every 60 tickets sold.

Dido, the singer, and even the celebrity drinking club, the -Groucho, are all reported to have paid out for trees to be planted.

In 2002, Coldplay, the band fronted by Chris Martin, the husband of actress Gwyneth Paltrow, announced it would offset the environmental impact caused by the release of its second album, A Rush of Blood to the Head, by planting 10,000 mango trees in southern India. By last year many of the trees had died.

David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader, also says he pays into offsetting schemes for all his flights, road and rail trips, and a growing number of blue chip companies and airlines, as well as Government departments, now sign up to such projects.

According to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Britons spent £60 million on such schemes last year. This is forecast to grow to £250 million annually by 2009.

The latest findings come from an ongoing study - known as the Free Air Carbon Enrichment project - which has been running for 13 years at Duke University, North Carolina, in the US.

Researchers bathed plots of pine trees in extra carbon dioxide every day for 10 years and found that while the trees grew more tissue, only those that received the most water and nutrients stored enough carbon dioxide to offset the effects of global warming.

Ram Oren, the ecologist who led the project, said the research suggested that planting more trees would not be successful in slowing the pace of climate change. “More trees don’t necessarily mean less carbon dioxide,” he said. “Planting trees is not going to do a whole lot to decreasing carbon concentration.

“What we’re finding is that extra carbon very quickly goes back into the atmosphere if there are low nutrients and water available.

“And we are not going to be able to increase the capacity of forests to hold carbon, because we couldn’t fertilise such large areas or provide sufficient water. It would cause such pollution that the consequence would be much worse than carbon dioxide enrichment in the atmosphere.”

But Ru Hartwell, the director of Treeflights, an offsetting company planting trees in Wales and Peru, said: “There are problems with tree planting but it is only one way in which we are going to get on top of the problems of global warming. I have complete faith that tree planting is positive and we should not just chuck away our spades and do nothing.”

Link here to what continues to be one of my favorite blogs - my chuckle for the morning, @ Powerlineblog.com

They Can’t Multiply, Either
August 17, 2007

Lately, the New York Times’s Public Editor has been on a tear about the fact that the paper’s reporters and editors can’t spell, a fact which we noted here. They can’t multiply, either. In today’s Corrections section, the paper corrects a prior mathematical error:

An article on Tuesday about the governing party of Turkey’s presidential nomination of Abdullah Gul, an economist and practicing Muslim, misstated the number of votes he would need to win confirmation in the 500-seat Parliament if he failed in the first two rounds of voting, when a two-thirds majority, or 367 votes, is required. In a third round, he would need 276 votes, not 267.

Oops. Still not right: two-thirds of 500 is 333. It’s hard to imagine how the paper’s reporters and editors–including whoever edits the Corrections section!–could look at this calculation and fail to realize that it’s wrong. (Two-thirds of 500 is the same, obviously, as one-third of 1,000.)

There is an explanation for this numerical fog. The Turkish Parliament has 550 seats, not 500. Further corrections will no doubt be forthcoming; maybe the Times will get it right the third time.

You should keep this kind of thing in mind when you consider that the people who work for the Times, and similar newspapers, think they are qualified to instruct you in political, social and ethical matters because they are smarter than you are.

Fighting the “Real” Fight

Foolish myths about al-Qaida in Mesopotamia.

By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Aug. 13, 2007, at 12:02 PM ET

---

Over the past few months, I have been debating Roman Catholics who differ from their Eastern Orthodox brethren on the nature of the Trinity, Protestants who are willing to quarrel bitterly with one another about election and predestination, with Jews who cannot concur about a covenant with God, and with Muslims who harbor bitter disagreements over the discrepant interpretations of the Quran. Arcane as these disputes may seem, and much as I relish seeing the faithful fight among themselves, the believers are models of lucidity when compared to the hair-splitting secularists who cannot accept that al-Qaida in Mesopotamia is a branch of al-Qaida itself.

Objections to this self-evident fact take one of two forms. It is argued, first, that there was no such organization before the coalition intervention in Iraq. It is argued, second, that the character of the gang itself is somewhat autonomous from, and even independent of, the original group proclaimed by Osama Bin Laden. These objections sometimes, but not always, amount to the suggestion that the “real” fight against al-Qaida is, or should be, not in Iraq but in Afghanistan. (I say “not always,” because many of those who argue the difference are openly hostile to the presence of NATO forces in Afghanistan as well as to the presence of coalition soldiers in Iraq.)

The facts as we have them are not at all friendly to this view of the situation, whether it be the “hard” view that al-Qaida terrorism is a “resistance” to Western imperialism or the “soft” view that we have only created the monster in Iraq by intervening there.

The founder of al-Qaida in Mesopotamia was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who we can now gratefully describe as “the late.” The first thing to notice about him is that he was in Iraq before we were. The second thing to notice is that he fled to Iraq only because he, and many others like him, had been driven out of Afghanistan. Thus, by the logic of those who say that Afghanistan is the “real” war, he would have been better left as he was. Without the overthrow of the Taliban, he and his collaborators would not have moved to take advantage of the next failed/rogue state. I hope you can spot the simple error of reasoning that is involved in this belief. It also involves the defeatist suggestion—which was very salient in the opposition to the intervention in Afghanistan—that it’s pointless to try to crush such people because “others will spring up in their place.” Those who take this view should have the courage to stand by it and not invent a straw-man argument.

As it happens, we also know that Zarqawi—who probably considered himself a rival to Bin Laden as well as an ally—wrote from Iraq to Bin Laden and to his henchman Ayman al-Zawahiri and asked for the local “franchise” to call himself the leader of AQM. This dubious honor he was duly awarded. We further know that he authored a plan for the wrecking of the new Iraq: a simple strategy to incite civil murder between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. The incredible evil of this proposal, which involved the blowing up of holy places and the assassination of pilgrims, was endorsed from whatever filthy cave these deliberations are conducted in. As a matter of fact, we even know that Zawahiri and his boss once or twice counseled Zarqawi to hold it down a bit, especially on the video-butchery and the excessive zeal in the murder of Shiites. Thus, if there is any distinction to be made between the apple and the tree, it would involve saying that AQM is, if anything, even more virulent and sadistic and nihilistic than its parent body.

And this very observation leads to a second one, which has been well-reported and observed by journalists who are highly skeptical about the invasion. In provinces like Anbar, and in areas of Baghdad, even Sunni militants have turned away in disgust and fear from the AQM forces. It’s not difficult to imagine why this is: Try imagining life for a day under the village rule of such depraved and fanatical elements.

To say that the attempt to Talibanize Iraq would not be happening at all if coalition forces were not present is to make two unsafe assumptions and one possibly suicidal one. The first assumption is that the vultures would never have gathered to feast on the decaying cadaver of the Saddamist state, a state that was in a process of implosion well before 2003. All our experience of countries like Somalia and Sudan, and indeed of Afghanistan, argues that such an assumption is idiotic. It is in the absence of international attention that such nightmarish abnormalities flourish. The second assumption is that the harder we fight them, the more such cancers metastasize. This appears to be contradicted by all the experience of Iraq. Fallujah or Baqubah might already have become the centers of an ultra-Taliban ministate, as they at one time threatened to do, whereas now not only have thousands of AQM goons been killed but local opinion appears to have shifted decisively against them and their methods.

The third assumption, deriving from the first two, would be that if coalition forces withdrew, the AQM gangsters would lose their raison d’être and have nothing left to fight for. I think I shall just leave that assumption lying where it belongs: on the damp floor of whatever asylum it is where foolish and wishful opinions find their eventual home.

If I am right about this, an enormous prize is within our reach. We can not only deny the clones of Bin Ladenism a military victory in Iraq, we can also discredit them in the process and in the eyes (and with the help) of a Muslim people who have seen them up close. We can do this, moreover, in a keystone state of the Arab world that guards a chokepoint—the Gulf—in the global economy. As with the case of Afghanistan—where several provinces are currently on a knife-edge between an elected government that at least tries for schools and vaccinations, and the forces of uttermost darkness that seek to negate such things—the struggle will take all our nerve and all our intelligence. But who can argue that it is not the same battle in both cases, and who dares to say that it is not worth fighting?

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2172152/

Toward a Realistic Peace
By Rudolph Giuliani

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2007

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Summary: The next U.S. president will face three key foreign policy challenges: setting a course for victory in the terrorists’ war on global order, strengthening the international system the terrorists seek to destroy, and extending the system’s benefits. With a stronger defense, a determined diplomacy, and greater U.S. economic and cultural influence, the next president can start to build a lasting, realistic peace.Rudolph W. Giuliani, former Mayor of New York City, is a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.We are all members of the 9/11 generation.The defining challenges of the twentieth century ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Full recognition of the first great challenge of the twenty-first century came with the attacks of September 11, 2001, even though Islamist terrorists had begun their assault on world order decades before. Confronted with an act of war on American soil, our old assumptions about conflict between nation-states fell away. Civilization itself, and the international system, had come under attack by a ruthless and radical Islamist enemy.

America and its allies have made progress since that terrible day. We have responded forcefully to the Terrorists’ War on Us, abandoning a decadelong — and counterproductive — strategy of defensive reaction in favor of a vigorous offense. And we have set in motion changes to the international system that promise a safer and better world for generations to come.

But this war will be long, and we are still in its early stages. Much like at the beginning of the Cold War, we are at the dawn of a new era in global affairs, when old ideas have to be rethought and new ideas have to be devised to meet new challenges.

The next U.S. president will face three key foreign policy challenges. First and foremost will be to set a course for victory in the terrorists’ war on global order. The second will be to strengthen the international system that the terrorists seek to destroy. The third will be to extend the benefits of the international system in an ever-widening arc of security and stability across the globe. The most effective means for achieving these goals are building a stronger defense, developing a determined diplomacy, and expanding our economic and cultural influence. Using all three, the next president can build the foundations of a lasting, realistic peace.

if you want to read all 7 pages - go here

My notes (Republican vs Democrats) are already about to drop off the front page - so I will link to them here: Remember, I’m only speaking for myself here; but these threads are important to me.

Part 1 - Politicians and the Press
Part 2 - National Government
Part 3 - National Defense
Part 4 - Paradigm Shift

I have been struggling to write the next segment I have in mind - why social conservative (or liberal) values should not be part of political discussions or legislated at any level of US government. I may instead, summarize some philosophic biases in part 5 to continue to my thoughts toward that previously stated end.

Never having been to the Iowa Straw Poll, I did watch some of the speeches on CSPAN yesterday and noted the voting. Romney won with 31%. Mitt has run a well organized campaign in Iowa; I like him. I just don’t think he will be as strong of a national candidate as Rudy will be. Time will tell.

The Iowa Straw Poll is a fund-raiser for the RPI (Republican Party of Iowa) and gives its party faithful a chance to voice their personal opinion on who they think is the best candidate. Running for President takes an enormous amount of money, time, effort and organization (paid and volunteer).

Huckabee finished 2nd with 18% and Brownback with 14%. Those two are both very similar in policy and stance - with one subtle difference. In my opinion Sam Brownback spent quite a bit of time pandering to the religious right - his group was responsible for some anti-Mormon literature early in the campaign. Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas Governor, Baptist Minister, and born again nutritionist (he had bariatric surgery several years ago and lost 200 pounds) was more subtle - yet their messages were almost identical.  (If only one of them were running would that candidate have won? Yikes!)

The only things I took out of this Iowa Straw Poll, were these:

1) The Fair Tax element continues to be well organized (more on that later)

2) Rudy was right for not entering the “battle” (the investment of millions of dollars would not have reached his audience in the state, he was much later in organizing than others, and the money is better spent elsewhere). He has been in the state every other week for the last 6 weeks and will be at the State Fair next week.

3) The Social Conservatives continue to dominate RPI organizational structure - but it is yet to be seen how well that will translate into caucus voting in 2008.

Stay tuned!

by Jay Ambrose  - Link to article here

August 12, 2007 — NEWSWEEK magazine, which tells us in a recent edition about a “well-funded,” global-warming “denial machine,” is itself something of a trashing machine, a journalistic pretender that mistakes smear for substance.

The stumbling, bumbling exercise in ad hominem McCarthyism takes it as an unchallengeable truth that global warming is a human-induced catastrophe that could be readily prevented, and concludes there is just one way to explain the “naysayers” to this holy writ: They are part of a “well-coordinated,” heavily financed scheme cooked up by self-serving corporate interests to dupe the public and confuse or buy off politicians.

The article not only fails to make so sweeping a case, but skips over a fact that the rawest newsroom rookie should have picked up - namely, that the Chicken Littles have outspent the cited think tanks and other groups in trying to inflict everyone with the willies, scientific exactitude be hanged.

As some of the skeptics have noted in response to Newsweek’s nastiness, the expenditures of the doubters are in fact dwarfed by the multimillions skillfully deployed by environmental groups. Sure, some corporations have sought to persuade lawmakers and the public that the alarmism is itself a danger, and why not? These businesses could be badly damaged by some suggested policies that, in terms of actually achieving anything, might be little more than voodoo dances.

Newsweek thinks they would be jim-dandy. On the basis of what analysis? Nothing precise is offered.

The more you read the Newsweek piece, the more you notice it excludes still other information and argumentation that doesn’t suit its thesis, material that is hugely important in understanding the issue but might get in the way of advocacy. It mentions Al Gore’s apocalyptic movie about warming, for instance, without noting how misleading it was on some questions, and nowhere does it even hint at how so many alarmists have leaped over scientific justification in their near-biblical prophecies of coming calamity.

An article aiming to provide well-rounded, helpful, praiseworthy news reporting might have discussed the Kyoto treaty with some semblance of comprehension. The treaty would accomplish next to nothing in and of itself, as even many of its proponents agree, while it could very well do serious harm to the economies and people of rich and poor nations alike, as a number of economists have argued. Newsweek might even have conceded that some Kyoto signatories in Europe have done far less to limit greenhouse-gas emissions than the dreaded Bush administration.

The most egregious transgression of the article is something else, however. It is the demonizing of “contrarian scientists” and questioning think-tank analysts who are surely as honorable as those who would carelessly abuse their good names.

The article goes out of its way to tell us that one nonapocalyptic scientist, Patrick Michaels, has earned $165,000 from interested industries, as if his scientific conclusions were dictated by this money that constitutes one small portion of his livelihood.

If the magazine thinks that is how the world works, why didn’t it similarly point out that NASA’s James Hansen, a supporter of John Kerry in the last presidential election and one of the most outspoken scientists about the threat of warming, received a $250,000 prize from the Heinz Foundation, administered by Kerry’s wife?

Everyday decency and an understanding of the need for unfettered discussion in a democracy should have informed the Newsweek reporters and their editors that while it’s OK to probe and push and ask tough questions, it is intellectually unsupportable and cruel as well as contrary to the public good to treat those on one side or the other of this kind of complicated, difficult, policy-oriented dispute as conscienceless bad guys, their hired hands or maybe dupes or dolts.

Even now, dissenters to the global-warming orthodoxy are providing us with all sorts of countervailing possibilities that could ultimately save us from irrecoverable policy decisions, and the last thing you want to do is scare them into shutting up. The only people who would do that are those so arrogant as to think they possess the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The Newsweek reporters don’t. Despite their insistence that you are part of a “denial machine” unless you call an unsettled science settled, the science of global warming is unsettled.

Max Ehrmann, Desiderata, Copyright 1952.

Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.

But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself.

Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,