Wait, I'm confused.

I thought "trends" had be sustained and confirmed over a period of time before becoming newsworthy. And yet I see this headline proclaiming, on the basis of (in the scheme of things) a relatively weak Al Qaeda effort at demonic mass-murder as re-igniting the once and future "trend" of ever-increasing casualties and instability.

A bomb in a parked car struck worshippers heading to a Shiite mosque Sunday in Baghdad, killing at least nine people as Iraqis celebrated a Muslim holiday, while the death toll rose to 18 in a coordinated suicide truck bombing and ambush north of the capital.

Relatives and rescue workers pulled bodies from under piles of concrete bricks and rubble in the Sunni city of Samarra, where a suicide truck bomber detonated his explosives late Saturday. Guards had opened fire before he could reach the targeted police headquarters.

Gunmen drove up and fought with police immediately after the blast, which tore through nearby buildings. At least 18 people were killed and 27 wounded, police said.

Nobody claimed responsibility for the attacks in Baghdad and Samarra, but they bore the hallmarks of al-Qaida in Iraq militants who had promised an offensive during Ramadan to undermine U.S.-Iraqi claims of success in quelling the violence in the capital with an eight-month-old security operation.M

On the other hand -- buried deep -- is this:

While Baghdad and cities to the north have faced a series of deadly attacks throughout Ramadan, the numbers have been relatively low and dropped significantly with the start of Eid al-Fitr, during which Iraqis visit the graves of relatives and pack into parks to celebrate the end of a month of dawn-to-dusk fasting.

The deaths reported in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, raised the number of people killed or found dead on Saturday from a low of four to 22. That number was 16 on Friday, a dramatic drop from the 50 deaths reported a day earlier.

Note what "trend" gets the headline and lead grafs, though.

Posted by: Ace at 02:16 PM | Comments (10)
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If Suitably Flip can find this stuff, why can't the NYT?

He predicted than a no-name actress would be revealed as a straw donor in Hsu's illegal contribution scheme. He seems to be right.

Wouldn't it be nice if the news media were still in the news business?

Posted by: Ace at 01:38 PM | Comments (12)
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I guess it's time.

Republican presidential contender Fred Thompson swipes at GOP rival Rudy Giuliani in a speech he plans to give Monday night on the former New York mayor's home turf.

"Some think the way to beat the Democrats in November is to be more like them. I could not disagree more," the one-time Tennessee senator says in remarks he is to deliver before the Conservative Party of New York.

"I believe that conservatives beat liberals only when we challenge their outdated positions, not embrace them. This is not a time for philosophical flexibility, it is a time to stand up for what we believe in," Thompson adds.

He doesn't mention Giuliani's name in excerpts made available to The Associated Press, but he's clearly trying to draw a contrast with the rival who's leading in national Republican polls.

Giuliani was once a Democrat. Unlike Thompson, the New Yorker backs abortion rights and gay rights. And, the ex-mayor's central argument for Republicans to nominate him is that he gives them the most likely shot to win in the general election.

Ahead of Thompson's speech, Giuliani's campaign arranged for several deputy mayors who served in his administrations to hold a news conference in Times Square later Monday to promote his success in reducing crime, overhauling welfare and cutting taxes.

"Some candidates talk the talk about Republican principles. Others actually have a proven track record of governing according to Republican principles. Rudy Giuliani has that record," Randy Mastro, a deputy mayor in Giuliani's first term told the AP before the news conference.

With voting beginning in under three months, Thompson is trying to win the support of conservatives who are pivotal in GOP primaries.

"With me, what you see is what you get. I was a proud conservative yesterday, I remain one today, and I will be one tomorrow," Thompson says.

Giuliani really opened himself up to this -- and to the grim possibility of 1/4 of the conservative base voting third party or staying home -- by being so damnably stubborn in refusing to tack to the right on the three hot-buttons of gay marriage, abortion, and guns.

Posted by: Ace at 01:14 PM | Comments (99)
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From this good American Spectator defense of Coulter on this point.

Although, of course, it states the obvious. As Allah snarked: "Breaking: Christian Admits To Believing In Christianity."

Favorite quote: "How can you believe that? You're an educated woman."

Education is apparently incompatible with Christianity and vice versa.

Now there's a hateful remark.

Posted by: Ace at 01:02 PM | Comments (32)
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Or at least according to their useless partisan hack ombudsmen. He cannot find any bias at the paper at all, but at least he can rouse himself to criticize "interviewers" who make up questions and distort answers in order to create a false interview "transcript."

WHEN you read Deborah Solomon’s “Questions For” in The New York Times Magazine, it’s like crashing an exclusive book party at Tina Brown’s East Side garden apartment.

There you stand, sipping white wine, as Solomon and a famous author or politician or media personality trade zippy repartee. Her sharp, challenging questions elicit pithy, surprising answers — a disloyal comment about an employer, a confession to a Diet Coke habit, what’s in Jack Black’s iPod.

That is the illusion of Solomon’s column. The reality is something else: the 700 or so words each week are boiled down from interviews that sometimes last more than an hour and run 10,000 words. Though presented in a way that suggests a verbatim transcript, the order of the interview is sometimes altered, and the wording of questions is changed — for clarity or context, editors say. At least three interviews have been conducted by e-mail because the subjects couldn’t speak English or had other speech difficulties. And, Solomon told me, “Very early on, I might have inserted a question retroactively, so the interview would flow better,” a practice she said she no longer uses.

“Questions For” came under fire recently when a reporter for New York Press, a free alternative weekly, interviewed two high-profile journalists — Amy Dickinson, the advice columnist who followed Ann Landers at The Chicago Tribune, and Ira Glass, creator of the public radio program “This American Life” — who said their published interviews with Solomon contained questions she never asked.

While the vast majority of Solomon’s interview subjects have never complained, these are not the first who have. Last year, The Times Magazine published an angry letter from NBC’s Tim Russert, who said that the portrayal of his interview with her was “misleading, callous and hurtful.”

Russert, the author of two books about his father, told me that the interview had been presented as an opportunity to talk about his mom on Mother’s Day. Instead, the interview, headlined, “All About My Father,” featured a seemingly insensitive Russert dodging Solomon’s questions about his mother. “I talked at great length about my mother,” he said, but none of it appeared in the published interview. Russert said that Solomon combined questions and took “an answer and transposed it to another question.”

Gerald Marzorati, the editor of the magazine, said, “We examined his complaint and found it more or less justified.” Russert had talked about his mother, Marzorati said, and Solomon made it appear that he had not. Solomon said, “I made a mistake not putting in what he said about his mother.”

There's more, though it begins to descend into the level of inside baseball. While Solomon seems to *mostly* get the quotes right, she often presents them out of context -- indeed, with false context -- as being answers to questions that she never asked and would most likely never produce the a cutting answer had she asked such questions in the first place.

She's basically playing word-salad with interviews, moving sentences around and inventing questions to create a punchier, livelier, more readable interview... an interview, alas, that never actually took place, except later in her mind and in her edits to the transcript.

Posted by: Ace at 12:55 PM | Comments (30)
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Oh wait, he accuses Romney of "throwing [him] under the bus." My bad.

Yeah, Romney's a bad, mean, calculating cat for cutting loose a dude he barely knows after he pleads guilt to peeping into a stall at someone on the crapper.

So, Larry Craig is going to continue fighting this on appeal. I still stand by my previous prediction -- a bit beaten up, but still operative -- that judges will ultimately err on his side, partly to make trouble for the GOP.

I wish that Minnesota had an official Certificate of Heterosexuality, because that seems to be what Craig really wants.

Okay, Maybe My Prediction Just Sucks: Iceman sends this link noting that the appeals court must find an "abuse of discretion" on the part of the lower court to reverse this sort of ruling.

"What's the likelihood of success? Even less likely of prevailing in the appeal than he had in prevailing before Porter," Steve Simon, a legal defense expert at the University of Minnesota Law School, said earlier this month.

The appeals court must find there's been an "abuse of discretion" by the trial judge before overturning a ruling—in other words, that some aspect of the ruling was decided improperly. Ron Meshbesher, a longtime Minneapolis defense attorney, said earlier this month that the standard for an abuse of discretion is vague but that such a ruling is fairly rare.

"It's not frequent, let's put it that way," Meshbesher said. "It certainly is a steep hill to climb."

Posted by: Ace at 12:06 PM | Comments (13)
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A dubious honor:

Via Newsbusters.

They also note that Al Gore has apparently done more for peace than, say, a woman who rescued 2500 children from the Holocaust. Sounds about right.

And on global warming, CNN takes the official position that the judge who ruled Al Gore's movie was erroneous and biased is all wet, while a crotchety meterologist has had enough of the silliness:

Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.

[...]

"We're brainwashing our children," said Dr Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. "They're going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It's ridiculous."

...

Dr Gray, whose annual forecasts of the number of tropical storms and hurricanes are widely publicised, said a natural cycle of ocean water temperatures - related to the amount of salt in ocean water - was responsible for the global warming that he acknowledges has taken place.

However, he said, that same cycle meant a period of cooling would begin soon and last for several years.

"We'll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realise how foolish it was," Dr Gray said.

There's more at the link. He says a lot scientists know all this crap is nonsense but also know they can't speak out against it, as they'd never get a grant again.

Posted by: Ace at 11:47 AM | Comments (19)
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Trend? Nah. I guess it's only a story for conservative outlets like CNS News. The MSM wants the war officially won before they'll lower themselves to reporting on it at all.

The casualty count from Iraq continues to decline for the first half of October, according to Department of Defense reports.

In the first half of October, 14 casualties were reported, 12 of which were combat related. The most recent reported death was from Oct. 12.

Last year -- during the same period -- there were 44 deaths in Iraq, all but two combat related. That's nearly three times the number of casualties as this year (for the first two weeks of October).

September 2007 marked a 14-month low in reported casualties -- 68 deaths from Iraq, a drop in casualties the military credited to the 30,000 "surge" in troops that began in June. In the September totals, 41 deaths were from combat.

The first half of September had a total of 42 overall deaths, 27 of which were combat related -- more than twice as many as the number reported for the first half of this month.

More: The WaPo editorial board seems upset they even have to acknowledge that hope is unavaoidable, though they've done a terrific job of avoiding it.

And over at Instapundit, Michael Yon confirms -- Al Qaeda's been pwned.

Posted by: Ace at 11:01 AM | Comments (10)
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BizzyBlog corrects a bit and notes that the NYT (accidentally!) put a brief AP blurb about the story on page A22, but I'm going to count that cleanly as "not reporting the story." A22 is where you bury stories. Certainly no NYT journalistic resources were devoted to the story.

Two Sundays ago Howie Kurtz asked representatives of the Washington Post and CNN why the plunge in Iraqi deaths (and US servicemen's death) had gotten almost no play at all in the MSM. They robotically claimed it was because they couldn't be sure the trend would hold. Though they agreed that if deaths rose, that was automatically a story, no need for a "stable trend line" to be newsworthy.

The deficit figures put lie to this claim. Check out BizzyBlog's chart and there is no doubt whatsoever that we have a sustained five-year trend. Five years. Consistent trend. And yet the media will claim they're not reporting on this because... hmm, the likely candidate is that it's such an obvious trend that it doesn't need to be reported at all. It's just "more of the same," which is not newsworthy.

I'm always amused by the contortions the MSM will twist itself into in claiming that some set of neutral apolotical rules justify its plainly politicized coverage. On one hand they'll claim that if it's a "new story," a "change in the narrative," it's newsworthy -- unless that new story is the plummeting death rate in Iraq, in qhich case they need a three or four year trend line before it becomes newsworthy.

Of course, as their deficit non-coverage proves, the moment they have that long-term trend they will claim it's just "more of the same" and hence no longer newsworthy. So when it comes to news that could possibly benefit Bush, support tax cuts and pro-business policies, or improve public support of the war, the rule seems to flip from "we need a trend to report it at all" to "now there's a trend but that means there's no news here" without a second of pause between them.

Posted by: Ace at 10:38 AM | Comments (13)
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Hot on the heals of joining the Twoofeh Movement, Fisk now decides the CIA itself blew up flight 103.

Coming soon: Did the NSA actually capture the American Embassy in Iran disguised as "radical students"?

Thanks to CJ.

By the Way... If you're coming to this party late, you might wonder why people post that picture of Robert Fisk.

Basically, it's because after flacking for the Taliban and Al Qaeda immediately after 9/11, he was savagely beaten by outraged Afghans, and immediately sprang to their defense.

He also cries that he fought back against people trying to bash his head in with stones.

The more I bled, the more the crowd gathered and beat me with their fists. Pebbles and small stones began to bounce off my head and shoulders. How long, I remembered thinking, could this go on? My head was suddenly struck by stones on both sides at the same time – not thrown stones but stones in the palms of men who were using them to try and crack my skull. Then a fist punched me in the face, splintering my glasses on my nose, another hand grabbed at the spare pair of spectacles round my neck and ripped the leather container from the cord.

I guess at this point I should thank Lebanon. For 25 years, I have covered Lebanon's wars and the Lebanese used to teach me, over and over again, how to stay alive: take a decision – any decision – but don't do nothing.

So I wrenched the bag back from the hands of the young man who was holding it. He stepped back. Then I turned on the man on my right, the one holding the bloody stone in his hand and I bashed my fist into his mouth. I couldn't see very much – my eyes were not only short-sighted without my glasses but were misting over with a red haze – but I saw the man sort of cough and a tooth fall from his lip and then he fell back on the road. For a second the crowd stopped. Then I went for the other man, clutching my bag under my arm and banging my fist into his nose. He roared in anger and it suddenly turned all red. I missed another man with a punch, hit one more in the face, and ran.

I was back in the middle of the road but could not see. I brought my hands to my eyes and they were full of blood and with my fingers I tried to scrape the gooey stuff out. It made a kind of sucking sound but I began to see again and realised that I was crying and weeping and that the tears were cleaning my eyes of blood. What had I done, I kept asking myself? I had been punching and attacking Afghan refugees, the very people I had been writing about for so long, the very dispossessed, mutilated people whom my own country –among others – was killing along, with the Taliban, just across the border. God spare me, I thought. I think I actually said it. The men whose families our bombers were killing were now my enemies too.

...

Goddamit, I said and tried to bang my fist on my side until I realised it was bleeding from a big gash on the wrist – the mark of the tooth I had just knocked out of a man's jaw, a man who was truly innocent of any crime except that of being the victim of the world.

I had spent more than two and a half decades reporting the humiliation and misery of the Muslim world and now their anger had embraced me too. Or had it?

...

And – I realised – there were all the Afghan men and boys who had attacked me who should never have done so but whose brutality was entirely the product of others, of us – of we who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the "War for Civilisation" just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them "collateral damage".

So I thought I should write about what happened to us in this fearful, silly, bloody, tiny incident. I feared other versions would produce a different narrative, of how a British journalist was "beaten up by a mob of Afghan refugees".

And of course, that's the point. The people who were assaulted were the Afghans, the scars inflicted by us – by B-52s, not by them. And I'll say it again. If I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdullah, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.

In his credit -- hey, he is consistently a mewling pussy.

Posted by: Ace at 09:50 AM | Comments (31)
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