musing minds

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.

Update: My husband thinks they should just “split the difference” and change the time a half hour year round.

Congress is considering extending Daylight-Saving Time an additional two months to save more energy. The theory is, the more daylight, later in the day, the less energy used. They would start daylight-saving time on the first Sunday in March (instead of April, as it is now) and extend daylight-saving time to the last Sunday in November (instead of the current last Sunday in October). But not all parts of the United States switch to daylight-saving time. Arizona, Hawaii, parts of Indiana, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands don’t change.

If they do so, on Halloween it will be lighter, longer. I’ve always thought it should be extended until at least the first Sunday in November to enable that. Even if Halloween is on a Sunday, it’s always darker an hour earlier. With the extension date being set to the last Sunday in November, there’s a little more light for Thanksgiving Dinner, and a little more time to get those Christmas lights hung…

The AP has the story. Apparently Kofi Annan has just realized that the UN Human Rights Commission needs to be replaced with a new, permanent body to prevent suffering around the world. D’oh!

“We have reached a point at which the commission’s declining credibility has cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole and where piecemeal reforms will not be enough,” Annan told delegates.

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.

AARP has a Social Security Blog! What’s next?

AARP’s recent commercial compares tearing down the whole house because the sink is broken with reforming Social Security reform suggesting that reform would destroy Social Security and they also suggest that with a few small changes, Social Security can be guaranteed.

• Social Security is NOT guaranteed, Congress can change it any time, even eliminiate it completely.
• Their few small changes include raising the cap on “contributions” and would entail reducing benefits after 2041.
• The AARP membership consists of people aged 50 and older.
• President Bush has already stated that those 55 and older will not be affected by any changes to Social Security.
• Even if changes are voted in this session (109th Congress), effective dates will be sometime in the future.
• Most probably any current member of AARP will not be affected by changes to Social Security.

Tell me, please, why do they oppose private accounts so vehemently and why should we listen to them?

A Flash from Patrick Ruffini via Blogs for Bush:

This communicates the poll results and the current state of the Social Security Debate: