Seriously, what is up with the quotes around "propaganda"? Or "surrenders"?

Al-Qaeda propaganda man 'surrenders'

AN al-Qaeda affiliated "propaganda" man in charge of supplying Al Jazeera with videos and online documentation has surrendered, saying he regreted what he had been doing, Algerian daily Liberte said today.

The daily, quoting unnamed security sources, said Abu Abderahmane had used the internet to communicate with the Qatar-based channel, as well as sending it videos, and CDs either directly to Doha or its Morocco branch.

"I felt guilty, and I regret what I was doing," Abu Abderahmane was quoted as saying by unnamed security sources in Algiers.

Abderahmane's Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb group grew out of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) in January after winning approval from Osama bin Laden to rename itself an al-Qaeda affiliate.

Since then the Islamists have launched a wave of deadly attacks targeting Algerian security and Western interests.

Analysts say the use of suicide bombers, more lethal bomb-making technology, fund-raising from criminal rackets and a sophisticated web-based publicity machine have helped the rebels stay active.

Notice there are no sneer-quotes around "rebels." I guess they really are just "rebels," and not, say, terrorists blowing people to hell.

The Deciders.

They're even using punctuation to help Al Qaeda now.

Reuters -- a "news" organization you can "trust."

Posted by: Ace at 02:29 PM | Comments (10)
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As Michelle notes, the media seem to be increasingly desperate to make their own news, given that the actual news, such as on the economy and Iraq, runs directly contrary to their partisan interests.

An emailer wants to know if ABC will likewise send someone with a "I Love W" pin to a Harvard mixer and document the nastiness.

Or, better yet: Park an SUV with a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker in San Fransisco and record all the vandals keying it and smashing windows.

If it's manufactured outrage you want, why does it have to involve setting up people to act with (presumed) Republican-type bias? Are we to believe the left harbors no hatred and intolerance whatsoever?

Posted by: Ace at 01:58 PM | Comments (29)
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Whatta dick:

[An ex] says, "Bill wants someone he can put down in an argument, tell you how ghetto you are, how big your butt is, and that you're an idiot. That's why you never see him with a white girl or an intellectual. I might as well have been a Muslim woman with my head wrapped, walking 10 paces behind my man. [But] I couldn't be 'Bill Maher's girlfriend' any more - not when I'm Karrine Steffans . . . best-selling author."

True, her book was about all the dudes she'd boned in LA, so maybe it wasn't just that she was an author that turned him off to her. Still, I gotta say her diagnosis strikes me as accurate.

Via the Conservative Grapevine, which is sort of like Memorandum, except with 80% more links to Cracked and 99.9% fewer links to Firedog Lake.

Posted by: Ace at 01:46 PM | Comments (36)
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Obvious, yes, but the source is odd.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, R-Calif., said Monday that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., hasn't been treated differently because she's the only woman in the presidential race, but added that her campaign appears to have been trying to exploit that perception in the wake of last week's Democratic debate.

Pelosi, the nation's first female House speaker, told ABCNEWS.com in an interview that she didn't agree with observers who thought Clinton was drawing particular heat because she's a woman.

...

But in distributing a Web video splicing together her opponents' attacks her campaign appears to be exploiting perceptions of Clinton facing down a field of aggressive male challengers, Pelosi said.

"I think the campaign is trying to take advantage of another -- probably people who didn't even watch the debate, to say, 'Oh, they were really rude,' or something like that, and that has some salience," said Pelosi, who has said she does not plan to endorse a candidate in the Democratic primary. "You know, every vote counts." Last Tuesday's debate in Philadelphia has set off a wide debate over the role of gender in the presidential race.

Posted by: Ace at 01:30 PM | Comments (14)
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Doubleplus Undead doesn't like the idea; I'll be happy if they just get Jeff Goldblum to reprise his role as a thug/rapist. (Yes, that was him.)

I don't mind that they're remaking Death Wish. They're remade it six thousand times under a variety of titles, and have recently turned to odd choices for the Crazed Vigilante role such as Kevin Bacon, Jennifer Lopez, and even Jodie F'n' Foster. So asking Stallone to remake Death Wish is a no-brainer; he already did that more or less with Cobra. Give him a chance to get it right.

I wonder if this is due to the writer's strike -- I know during the last one they remade Mission: Impossible as a TV show, just using the old show's scripts with very light changes.

Posted by: Ace at 01:09 PM | Comments (16)
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He claimed that Rudy said that Democrats would invite Osama to the White House for negotiations, then used that as a jumping-off point to brand him a deranged liar.

Of course the tape he played to introduce this claim clearly showed Giulani saying the Democrats would invite Assad to the White House, which in fact Barack Obama has discussed. How clear was the tape? Well MSNBC's own transcript of the show had it as "Assad," immediately, right from Jump Street. And yet Olbermann went on and on with his false claim.

So after pressure from bloggers, Olbermann finally apologized -- sort of. Blaming the error almost entirely on AP, which had gotten the quote wrong in its first print report.

But then, Olbermann had the video, and he played the video, and he assumedly listened to the video. How exactly he can blame the AP for his own gross mistake is beyond me, but that's what he did.

Posted by: Ace at 01:05 PM | Comments (45)
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So delicious. They pay $400 a pound for this sort of quality red meat in Japan.

The First Amendment, as others have noted, serves as the foundation for the enterprise, and supports reporters in their quest for truth .- or at least for serviceable facts that in time might lead them toward some reasonable facsimile of truth.

We also hear that the First Amendment is under siege. I think that´s true. I don´t believe anyone here would disagree with the proposition that the quality of public discourse isn´t what it once was or that it presently achieves levels of excellence and depth that it desperately needs to reach.

Yet, while it may be tempting to blame the usual suspects — the government, interest groups, angry factionalists — those forces frequently have always tried to restrict the free flow of ideas, and they always have failed.

They´re not the culprits here. Instead, there´s a new and unexpected menace on the block:

The media.

...

Political rhetoric has turned nasty, childish, and very personal, especially on Capitol Hill, and Americans are sick of it. Hotheads seem to be enjoying a false spring of fame. And members of the mainstream press are scratching their heads and asking, “What´s going on here?” Why are the nation´s newspapers hemorrhaging readers? Why are the television networks losing viewers? Why has cable news suddenly hit still water? What is going on? Don´t Americans care about the news?

Well, of course they do: The problem is, they don´t think they´re getting news — and they´re right.

[...]

Reporters and editors for three decades have sneered at accusations of bias, as if the claim were novel — it is not — unthinkable — it is not — or false — which it also is not.
...

And what about conventional wisdom? For months, the media avoided asking about progress in Iraq. Despite repeated reports from the field that Iraqis had turned against al Qaeda, the news seldom made it into newspapers, and almost never on front pages. Last week, the military reported that civilian deaths in Iraq had hit their lowest point since 2003. U.S. and Iraqi deaths and casualties similarly had declined. So what led the paper the next morning? Stories about Blackwater. The statistics that put the war in perspective were relegated to the back pages of the Washington Post and in some publications, to oblivion.

A vigorous press must be one in which reporters challenge their own sympathies and assumptions as aggressively as they challenge the sympathies and assumptions of others. Unfortunately, that too seldom happens, with the consequence that opinion-mongering has driven out straight news.

Remember how the media crowed when a survey showed FoxNews had reduced Iraq coverage when the war was going badly for America?

Are they crowing now?

Posted by: Ace at 12:25 PM | Comments (32)
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Human octopus? Or goddess-child? This is from the Daily Mail and appears quite real.

A toddler born with eight limbs and believed by some to be the reincarnation of the multi-limbed Hindu goddess Vishnu, is set to undergo a 40-hour operation to remove half of her limbs.

Lakshmi Tatma was born joined to a 'parasitic twin' and will go under the knife at the hands of 30 surgeons to remove two of her useless arms and legs.

The headless 'twin' is joined to Lakshmi at the pelvis and has its own spinal column and kidney.

Without the operation the little girl would never be able to walk or crawl and would be unlikely to live past her early teens, doctors said.

The extraordinary eight-limbed baby was born in a poverty-stricken region of Bihar, India - on the day devoted to the celebration of the four-armed Hindu deity Vishnu.

More pics at the link, including a diagram of her double skeleton. Frrrreaky.

Thanks to RobG.

Posted by: Ace at 11:50 AM | Comments (41)
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It's long been this way, but the Financial Times has finally realized it. At least they've allowed a wonk from a Heritage Foundation to pen an editorial revealing The Awful Truth.

Alegislative proposal that was once on the fast track is suddenly dead. The Senate will not consider a plan to extract billions in extra taxes from megamillionaire hedge fund managers.

The decision by Senate majority leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat, surprised many Washington insiders, who saw the plan as appealing to the spirit of class warfare that infuses the Democratic party. Liberal disappointment in Mr Reid was palpable at media outlets such as USA Today, where an editorial chastised: "The Democrats, who control Congress and claim to represent the middle and lower classes, ought to be embarrassed."

Far from embarrassing, this episode may reflect a dawning Democratic awareness of whom they really represent. For the demographic reality is that, in America, the Democratic party is the new "party of the rich". More and more Democrats represent areas with a high concentration of wealthy households. Using Internal Revenue Service data, the Heritage Foundation identified two categories of taxpayers - single filers with incomes of more than $100,000 and married filers with incomes of more than $200,000 - and combined them to discern where the wealthiest Americans live and who represents them.

Democrats now control the majority of the nation's wealthiest congressional jurisdictions. More than half of the wealthiest households are concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats control both Senate seats.

This new political demography holds true in the House of Representatives, where the leadership of each party hails from different worlds. Nancy Pelosi, Democratic leader of the House of Representatives, represents one of America's wealthiest regions. Her San Francisco district has more than 43,700 high-end households. Fewer than 7,000 households in the western Ohio district of House Republican leader John Boehner enjoy this level of affluence.

It's nice to be rich enough to not care much about taxes and the economy. But it's not nice for the plutocrats to pull up the ladder of opportunity and thus protect their privileged positions.

Posted by: Ace at 11:32 AM | Comments (14)
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"Stop pining" for the past, he advises, and stop trying to act as "gatekeepers" of which information the public should have and which it shouldn't.

PS: Latest circulation audit shows a bloodbath for the daily papers, with the NYT down 4.5%. The NY Post was also down 5.2%. Only four papers in America posted gains.

Posted by: Ace at 10:58 AM | Comments (12)
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