Modo and Friedman demoted? Kinda looks that way. Is Dowd low hanging fruit on the tree of accountability or is she just getting tiresome? Probably a bit of both. I’m not holding my breath for the NYT to dramatically change its approach any time soon. Hat tip Lorie at Polipundit

Just caught Fox News Sunday and Sen. Schumer (D) was on looking increasingly desperate on the judicial filibuster issue. He actually said that by allowing a simple up down majority vote it would make the Senate look like a “banana republic.”

A couple of observations. Usually when somebody looks and sounds desperate, that’s because they are desperate. In addition to the above ridiculous comment, he hedged on the question as to whether Republicans have the votes to stop the filibuster, saying that he’s spoken to a number of Republican senators that will vote for it even though they know it is wrong. Translation: the Republicans probably have the votes.

As for the “banana republic” comment, my father emigrated from a totalitarian regime which recently embraced democracy. They danced in the streets in celebration of the fact that they finally were able to have majority rule. Schumer, like so many other Dems these days, appears to have completely lost all perspective. Opposing what is effectively a minority veto over the majority is totalitarianism to the Dems. I think DJ over at PoliPundit is on to something when he writes about the destruction of the Democratic party.

Powerline has a couple of good takes on the Talking Points Memo story here and here. I’m happy to say that they too noticed the “real but inaccurate” irony, which I mentioned awhile ago.

Here’s my last word on the issue: those on the left acting all outraged at us conservative bloggers for speculating that the media used forged memos, is sort of like chastising a woman for accusing her cheating boyfriend of having another affair when this time he “only” had his hand on her butt.

To use the immortal words of Glenn Reynolds……heh.

UPDATE: Captain Ed has a good summary as well.

The Washington Post has an article about the Schiavo Talking Points Memo. This time it’s pretty factual, detailed and balanced. One certainly isn’t left with the impression that a bunch of Senators sat in a conference room and decided to come up with a way to exploit Terri Schiavo. On the contrary, it looks like the political portions of it were disavowed when seen. It also seems that it may have been a working draft (which would explain the errors).

Imagine if this level of detail had been reported from the outset. Sure, there would have been some views like this:

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said he believed that the memo originated with the GOP because it is “totally consistent” with how the Republicans have operated for the past four years.

But that’s just a classic attempt to paint the entire group as having the same views as a single errant member, and we all know it when we see it, especially from the likes of Mr. Biden. That’s a far, far, cry from implying in a story that the entire group was in on it.

To those bloggers that feel we need to eat crow on this, I say no way. When the press makes explosive political charges with so little (or conflicting) facts and takes a “trust us we know” approach, you’re going to get speculation running rampant from both sides of the blogosphere. This was a story that was poorly reported from the outset, and one that clearly erred on the side of branding all Republicans political opportunists. They were more like Joe Biden than trusted purveyors of the news. Don’t blame me for thinking the worst of them. The media lost my trust long ago.

We’ve all heard of “fake but accurate.” Wecome to “real but inaccurate”. It turns out a GOP legal counsel to Mel Martinez wrote the Talking Points Memo. He rightly resigned after ‘fessing up. What a fool.

What is interesting is how much this still jives with the original story, particularily after what we learned from the Washington Times report the day before. One thing is clear – this was not some mainstream Republican effort. Even Martinez didn’t know about it. This was some rogue idiot writing a sloppy memo. The original story, which implies some mass Republican effort on the part of Senators to capitalize on the Schiavo matter, appears to be just as innaccurate as if the memo was fake. And now we have confirmation of this. The memo was real, but the story inaccurate.
Hat tip: Lorie at PoliPundit

Most of you are probably aware that CNN has a regular segment covering what blogs are talking about. Ian at Jackson’s Junction has the latest segment. Out of the dozens of hot topics on the blogosphere, CNN focused exclusively on one – Tom DeLay’s (alleged) corruption. Ok fine, it would be hard to cover more than one topic on such a short segment. But then they proceeded to cover liberal blogs and the supporting NYT and WaPo hit pieces, only briefly mentioning a couple of conservative sites. I timed it for good measure. The “liberal side” got four times the coverage than conservative blogs. Not 40% more, but 400% more. It’s not as if conservative blogs aren’t covering this too.

Is this little hit piece a big deal? Not by itself no. But when the show makes a point of looking at political blogs from the left and right, and then focuses on the left by a 4 to 1 margin, its sort of telling no?

The MSM’s relationship to the Democrats reminds me of that bad kid I hung out with in school who kept egging me on to make the wrong choices: “hey man, everything’s ok, everybody’s doin it, its cool”. Things always felt so good and so right at the time, and hey, my buddy wouldn’t lead me astray. It was usually the next day or so when reality came crashing down on me.

While liberal bias in the media may be frustrating to us conservatives, at least we know it when we see it. Liberals want so bad to believe what they hear in the media that they take it as gospel. Just look where the liberals’ friends in the MSM have taken the Democrats in the last couple of years.

Buoyed by the MSM’s endless cycle of Iraqi quagmire stories and self fulfilling polls the Dems took a cut and run position. Countless success stories abounded in the alternate media as well as legitimate polls which predicted that Iraqis were ready for democracy, but the Dems couldn’t or wouldn’t see reality. Instead they chose the MSM version and ended up on the wrong side of history when Iraqis overwhelmingly embraced democracy.

Before that, the MSM lead the Dems down the garden path of embracing the U.N. as the answer to all of our international problems. Again the blogosphere was abuzz with stories of U.N. corruption long before the Oil For Food scandal became too big to be avoided by the mainstream press. How ridiculous does Kerry’s “international test” look now?

More recently the MSM has spun the Schiavo story as a Republican albatross, but again, the facts were largely ignored, bogus memos were relied on, and the polls were spun to reify the story, not to ascertain true public sentiment. Zogby had the kahunas to conduct a fair poll and, sure enough, most would have favored keeping Terri Schiavo alive.

Finally, take a look at the public sentiment on the issue of same sex marriage referred to by Jayson at PoliPundit. Judging from press accounts in the MSM over the last year or so, one would have thought that Republicans were radical religious freaks based on their position on this issue. Not so at all. But the Dems took it hook, line and sinker.

With friends like the MSM…

Both Ankle Biting Pundits and Powerline have the latest on the memo scandal reported by the Washington Times. Apparently not a single Republican knew anything about the source of the talking points memo. In fact, all of the Senators were interviewed with no results. All but two that is. Democrat Senators Jack Reed and Harry Reid refused to respond. That’s funny, isn’t Harry Reid the one who’s been claiming Republican foul play the loudest.

Just think of all of the facts that have surfaced since the original story was reported. How hard was it to get these facts? Most of them just came from a common sense review of the document itself. Let’s say that review took a couple of hours to digest and think about. Probably less, but lets err on the side of caution. Then there was the exercise that the Times did of interviewing the Senators. Ok that takes a bit more time, probably a couple of days to track everybody down and get ahold of them. Not a lot of effort I’d say.

Now imagine if those facts were (ok hold your hats here, I’m going to suggest something that sounds a little nuts) actually reported. It seems pretty obvious that the story would infer the opposite of what the original story did. But I guess that’s the point isn’t it. Fact checking and journalistic integrity wouldn’t give them the story they wanted to tell. So instead they excitedly rushed out with the baloney memo story.

The Times and blogs report (the others stonewall), you decide.

Holy smokes is my wife looking beautiful. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always thought that she was a knockout, but she’s almost at her fifth month of pregnancy and she’s just radiant. I’m not just talking skin deep beauty either. It’s like her soul is shining more brightly. And it seems to keep getting brighter and brighter by the day.

I guess that’s the beauty of two souls.

Have you ever heard of “Freedom of Transportation”? How about “Freedom of Education”? How about “Freedom of Healthcare”? No? How about “Freedom of the Press”. Ahhh there we go, you’ve heard of that one. It’s a biggie actually – the First Amendment to the Constitution. Transportation and healthcare are important societal institutions, but freedom of the press is particularly special and deserving of constitutional protection. It’s not so much that the press per se is important as is our right to be informed. A functioning democracy requires the populace to be in the know, rather than in the dark. So we bestow upon the press a special status, with special rights.

Constitutionally they are entrusted to inform us. In turn, major news organizations specifically hold themselves out to be purveyors of “news”. Not only is our trust in the media implied, they explicitly ask us to trust them. “News you can trust”, “the most trusted name is news”, “reliable sources” are all phrases we have heard.

So when we see biased reporting that appears more to advocate a political position rather than inform us of important facts, it is more than just annoying or even unfair, it’s a serious breach of trust. It’s also an abuse of power. Under the guise of informing, they’re actually advocating. The practical effect is to undermine democracy by taking the public out of the decision making equation. You can’t make a meaningful decision without all of the facts. Worse, because the bias is not disclosed the public is made to believe it has all of the facts and the citizenry become mere pawns in a political game.

So excuse me and my fellow bloggers for being p***ed off when we see the media doing such things as feeding the public grossly skewed polling results on matters of grave importance as if those polls represent “the truth.”

Funny how doctors and lawyers go to jail for breaches of trust, but the media seems to get a free pass.

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