Hot! Hot! Not!

I

t’s one of those cognitive dissonance moments: They tell you this October was the hottest October ever recorded - excuse the pandering Paris photo - and you’re asking yourself, “Yeah, but wasn’t I freezing my fanny off for most of the month?” Yes you were, and you should believe your fanny, not Warmie “scientists,” who live to feed bogus data into the global warming industrial machine.

Fortunately, they don’t get away with this malarkey like they used to. Here’s Christopher Booker from the UK Telegraph, with emphasis added by Okie:

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

As the Okie says,

Innocent error, or intentional manipulation of the data sets because the reality of the situation just doesn’t fit into the Anthropogenic Climate Change catechism? Shoot, I don’t know. But, the Global Warming proponents have been willing to use funny numbers before. At the very least it’s sloppy work that went unnoticed by GISS because the information was exactly what they wanted to see.

Yup. And there’s much, more more. Read the Okie’s post.

T

here is something very chilling and troubling about this video that shows angry gays jostling an elderly woman, identified by Phyllis Burgess, and destroying her property - a cross, a religious symbol - in a demonstration in Palm Springs protesting the passage of Prop 8:

Here’s a longer clip, where you see just how threatening, intimidating and belligerent the gay rights activists are in denying rights to someone who opposes their view.  I believe the loudmouth in white is the same man who in the clip above is seen stomping violently on the symbol of Christ’s passion.

The early part of the clip shows how dangerous the situation was for the lady and the reporter. Fast forward up to 2:28 and you’ll see very clearly the actual event, when Burgess walks in with another supporter of Prop 8, has the cross ripped from her hands and is jostled roughly.  You will see a Prop 8 proponent hold a No on 8 sign in front of the camera to prevent the recording of whatever the protesters were doing and saying to Ms. Burgess.

I just did a search on AP and Brietbart for Phyllis Burgess and found no hits.  Apparently only Fox News and the desert TV stations see this as newsworthy.  Imagine the press coverage we would be subjected to if a lesbian had been surrounded by Mormons, jostled roughly and her … her what? … her sex toy? … had been pulled from her arms and stomped on!

The Mainly Marginalized Media appear to have decided not to cover the incident, preferring not to criticize gays for riotous, rough behavior and the descration of sacred symbols.

T

he media bias never ceases … and never ceases to amaze me. Today, President-elect Obama came to the White House at the invitation of President Bush, and how does the Washington Post headline it on its home page?

Bush Meets with Obama at the White House

I kind of thought it was the other way around. Usually when you accept someone’s invitation and go to their place, you’re meeting with them. WaPo and the rest of the Mainly Marginalized Media just don’t know when to stop. Heck, I don’t think they even know how to stop.

The actual story, BTW, has a more moderate headline: Obamas Make Symbolic Visit to Future Home: White House.

How fitting for a guy whose entire political career has ridden on symbolism.

T

he Washington Post’s Ombudsman, Deborah Howell, will wait until tomorrow’s issue - five days after the election - to deal critically with the Post’s efforts to throw the election to Obama. Here’s what she found in her analysis of WaPo’s coverage:

• OpEd pages: 32 favorable pieces on Obama vs 13 favorable McCain pieces, and 58 negative op/eds on McCain vs just 32 on Obama
• More Obama photos (311) than McCain photos (282), with Obama leading McCain in large pictures ,small pictures and color (can I say that) pictures
• More Obama news stories (946) than McCain news stories (786), which she explains in part by the longer Dem primaries, but admits that after the conventions, Obama got 626 stories and McCain got 584

Howell doesn’t analyze the stories’ content, which is unfortunate, but she admits that they were biased towards Obama:

But Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Post did nothing on Obama’s acknowledged drug use as a teenager.

Howell apparently doesn’t think the entire “spread the wealth” meme and various radical associations are worth even bringing up.

What’s WaPo going to do with this information? Nothing, as far as I can tell. Here’s what WaPo political editor Bill Hamilton had to say to Howell about the coverage, and it doesn’t sound like a man who’s the least bit worried about his role in further damaging the credibility of our free press:

“There are a lot of things I wish we’d been able to do in covering this campaign, but we had to make choices about what we felt we were uniquely able to provide our audiences both in Washington and on the Web. I don’t at all discount the importance of issues, but we had a larger purpose, to convey and explain a campaign that our own David Broder described as the most exciting he has ever covered, a narrative that unfolded until the very end. I think our staff rose to the occasion.”

Yeah, but gee Bill, don’t you think the campaign would have been even more interesting if you and your peers had actually, you know, covered it?

E

veryone knows it:  The mainstream media has gambled a huge stake in this presidential election.

I recently read that 80 percent of newspaper reporters support Obama; I don’t have a cite for that, so here are a few similar stats, with cites:  WaPo-owned Slate revealed that among its staff Obama was ahead 55-1 over McCain.  Pew found there were nearly twice as many negatively toned McCain stories, and about a third less positively toned McCain stories.  I’ve come up with 102 instances of media bias with one hand tied behind my back; if I were a full time blogger, I have every confidence the tally would have easily passed 400.

And most important, three out of four Americans believe most reporters will not try to offer unbiased coverage during this campaign.

The media figure that if Obama wins, this trashing of their reputation as objective news sources will have been worth it and somehow their actions will be forgiven because they were proved right by the Obama victory. Nothing could be further from the truth.  No matter who is victorious tomorrow, the media will not be the victors; they have willfully turned themselves from the MSM to the MMM:  The Mainly Marginalized Media.

If Obama does win, we would be fools to trust the MSM to report accurately on the actions of the administration, which will only lead to further marginalization of formerly significant news sources.  Faced with continuing and growing frustration with a lack of digging into Obama’s policies and problems, more and more Americans will look elsewhere for their news:  the blogosphere, partisan publications that we can evaluate fairly because they make no bones about their editorial stance, talk radio (as long as the Fairness Doctrine isn’t reinstituted), and whatever big media haven’t marginalized themselves.

If McCain wins, it will be worse for the MMM.  The only thing worse than deliberately trying to manipulate an election is deliberately trying to manipulate an election and losing.  Based our experience with how they responded to Bush’s win in 2000, we cannot expect them to learn new behaviors and repent old ones.  Instead, they’re likely to respond viciously since their egos were caught up with Obama, and subject McCain to even greater levels of negative reporting, which will just suck them further down in public perception, circulation and viewership.

I don’t see NBC/MSNBC, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, AP and the rest of the yellow blue journalists seeing the light and actively recruiting for political diversity up to the highest levels of their organizations.  As  Bill O’Reilly said, the only thing more important to the media than money is ideology.

Hollyweird apparently learned its lesson this time around.  Sure, most of ‘em are in the tank for Obama and funded him lavishly, but we didn’t see a repeat of the sort of involvement they displayed in 2004.  My guess:  It hurt their earning power, just as it’s hurt the media’s earning power.  But being more practical sorts, Hollyweird dialed it back and largely stayed under the radar.  Cameron Diaz didn’t cry hysterically about rapes in the street if McCain is elected and Alex Baldwin didn’t threaten to move to Canada.

The media exhibited no such restraint, and as a result, only one in four Americans think they’ve been honest and fair in reporting the election.  Three in four don’t trust them.

Faced with this marginalization, media outlets have three choices.  They can stay the course, shrinking until they reach insignificance.  They can recast themselves as partisan players, in the European model.  Or they can recruit for political diversity from bottom to top, honestly recreating themselves as objective sources of news.

Only the latter will keep the media from becoming further marginalized, giving the traditional outlets hope for a future with significance and even profitability.  But I doubt if there are enough qualified conservatives available who would be willing to risk their futures on a profession as risky as journalism, so this option  probably is already foreclosed.

That leaves being stubborn and becoming ever more marginal, or willfully becoming more marginal by declaring sides.  Quite a predicament they’ve gotten themselves into, and for what?  To get a second-rate Democratic candidate for president elected?

They deserve what they get.

Art (both of ‘em:  Okie on the Lam)

I

n this week’s Sunday Scan, I’ve looked at how the news media, which has had an unusually large role in this election, is handling the last big readership day before the election.  You’ll see what The LA Times, the SF Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post and the New York Times chose to feature - or not feature - at the culmination of their reprehensibly pro-Obama election coverage.

New York Times: Living On The Edge Of One Sided Seats

T

he NYT’s pre-election Sunday feature is The Year of Living on the Edge of Our Seats, a title that implies a nail-biting story line of two conflicting sides. But this nail-biter only has one side: Obama.

In the 39-paragraph story, 19 paragraphs are neutral, either mentioning both candidates or neither of them. Twenty mention Obama.

Math experts: How many paragraphs mentioned McCain? Correct. Zero.

The edge of the seat to the NYT is all about how Obama threaded the needle to defeat his Dem primary opponents and position himself against the candidate they describe as, should he win, “the oldest American ever to win a first term,” vs. Obama who is, of course, “the first black-American” who would be president.

Here’s a typical Obama passage:

Think back. When Mr. Obama took the stage in Iowa after his victory in the state’s caucuses last January, he was not yet the favorite for the Democratic nomination, and he was a long way from becoming the general-election frontrunner.

In videotape from that night, you can see and sense an astonishment and exhilaration — in him, around him — that seem almost quaint just 10 months later.

“They said this day would never come,” he tells a euphoric Iowa crowd, and not just his eyes but the whole of him twinkles, gleams. “They said our sights were set too high.”

While he’s talking specifically about himself and his campaign troops, it’s impossible not to hear in his words a statement about all minorities in America, for whom the week-by-week, month-by-month advance of his candidacy would hold an especially powerful message.

Shall we interject a little race into the campaign? And shall we interject a little GOP-bashing?

How will some younger voters react if Mr. McCain prevails? Or some older ones if Mr. Obama does? In recent weeks, the ire and ugly catcalls of some supporters of the McCain-Palin ticket have suggested a division in this election that goes well beyond tax policy or Iraq strategy.

What of the calls of “Rape Palin!” that broke out at an Obama rally without so much as a “Tsk, tsk” from The One? Or what about Palin hanging in effigy, a bit of misogyny that didn’t merit BHO’s attention?

In short, the article is the perfect exclamation point on a political season that showed the NYT and its MMM brethren (that’s”Mainly Marginalized Media”) to become vile house organs for Obama, content to co-opt any journalistic ethics that are clinging to survival in order to influence the election.

I’ve called AP the All Pro-Obama newswire and the Anti-Palin newswire, but I happily tip my hat to AP today for a little piece it ran called Obama’s Prime Time Ad Skips Over Budget Realities.

The article, by Calvin Woodward, very effectively rebuts these quotes from last night’s 30-minute Obama mis-infomercial:

“That’s why my health care plan includes improving information technology, requires coverage for preventive care and pre-existing conditions and lowers health care costs for the typical family by $2,500 a year.”

“I also believe every American has a right to affordable health care.”

“I’ve offered spending cuts above and beyond their cost.”

“Here’s what I’ll do. Cut taxes for every working family making less than $200,000 a year. Give businesses a tax credit for every new employee that they hire right here in the U.S. over the next two years and eliminate tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas. Help homeowners who are making a good faith effort to pay their mortgages, by freezing foreclosures for 90 days. And just like after 9-11, we’ll provide low-cost loans to help small businesses pay their workers and keep their doors open.”

Unfortunately (or is it “not surprisingly?”) Woodward did not point out the family in question is now making less than $200,000, instead of the old $250,000 threshold.  Who knows what the threshold will be?  We have only the word of a guy who lied about campaign funding to guide us.

A hat-tip to Annie for the link. She asked how such a story would run, given AP’s recent history. I think it may be that the media’s doing a lot of last-minute base-covering because their bias has become too open and too frequently criticized by the only group that counts - their peers.

Zombieland is at it again, this time with a speculative but fascinating reconstruction of Barack Obama’s “mystery days” in New York - a reconstruction that shows it’s likely, or at least possible, that Obama knew Bill Ayres as early as 1981.

He begins with a piece of math we all - MSM included - should have done long ago:

Barack Obama would have you believe that the bombings by the radical domestic terrorists known as The Weather Underground were something that happened “when I was eight years old” and with which he had absolutely no connection. And while it is true that their bombings started when Obama was eight years old, they actually continued until he was twenty years old.

And that means they continued until Obama’s mysterious New York years - and that he was in New York when Ayres & Co. set off one of their last bombs!

And, incredibly, the life of Barack Obama and the terror campaign of the Weather Underground nearly intersected on the evening of September 26, 1981 at an anti-Apartheid protest which turned violent at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York.

I’m tempted to say they may have intersected, rather than just “nearly.” But I don’t know for sure.

What I do know is that Obama had the same political interests as the final remnants of the Weather Underground at the exact same time in the exact same place. That as an adult he was living in the same city where and when they conducted their second-to-last terror attack, which was a protest against the Apartheid polices of South Africa — the very topic to which Obama has said he was devoted at that time. So because of all this, Obama must have known about the Weather Underground and their tactics while he was still in college. So when he met Weather Underground founder William Ayers 13 years later, Obama certainly had to have known exactly who Ayers was and what he had done.

Especially if he (Obama) is as bright as he wants us to believe he is.

Zombieland’s piece is an investigative tour de force, complete with analyses of phone books, various radical student organizations, and what is known of Obama’s life and interests while he was at Occidental, then Columbia.  It also digs into what Ayres and his wife Bernardine Dohrn were up to at the time, and concludes:

They were in the same city as each other, at the same time.
They lived near each other.
The went to school near each other.
They had the same political interests.
Their circles of friends and associates intersected.

By sheer coincidence, a decade later in Chicago, they were in the same city as each other, at the same time; they lived near each other; they had the same political interests; their circles of friends and associates intersected.

Or was it not a coincidence at all?

It’s the sort of work the New York Times should have done, but its analysis of Obama’s NY years was basically a quick shrug and a “Dunno.”  If the NYT had done this research and had hounded Obama like its hounded Palin, we might know for a fact that Obama and Ayres have known each other for 17 years, and that they met as fellow radicals waaaay back when.

But they didn’t, so we don’t.

hat-tip:  Okie on the Lam

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism just completed a comprehensive study of recent campaign coverage which failed to turn up excellence in journalism; rather, it found strongly negative coverage of McCain vs. much more positive coverage of Obama.

Pew researchers analyzed 2,412 campaign stories from 48 news outlets that covered the six weeks from the end of the conventions through the final presidential debate. They focused on 857 stories from 43 outlets that were focused on one of the candidates in order to determine the “tone” of articles.  They found:

In other words, there were nearly twice as many negatively toned McCain stories, and about a third less positively toned McCain stories.  How does this play with the electorate?  I think Pew found the answer in its analysis of the coverage of Sarah Palin, which was triple the amount of coverage Joe Biden received:

As for Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, her coverage had an up and down trajectory, moving from quite positive, to very negative, to more mixed.

Translated:  In the afterglow of the very good speech she gave at the convention, when she was immune from negative media coverage because people had just formed their own opinion of her, she was up.  What could the media do? They had to report on the good speech and the positive reaction of the GOP faithful and others.  They had to report on the boost she gave the ticket.

Then the media focused on the negative: Troopergate, Wasilla whiners and feminist rants, and they fed us a steady drivel of negative stories, as Pew found.  But as she persevered and powered through these negative stories, and her popularity rebounded (among those not suffering from PDS), the tone of the press coverage had nowhere to go but up.

Pew found that in all, 39% of Palin stories carried a negative tone, while 28% were positive and 33% were neutral - which is really unconscionable.  I would love to see a comparison to Geraldine Ferraro’s coverage!

Tone is of course related to the nature of the news item; it’s tough, for example, to put a bubbly tone on a story about the teacher busted for child molesting.  Obama’s lead in the polls and command of fund-raising can be expected to give him a “tone edge” - but not a two-fold or three-fold tone edge.

Pew says it cannot prove bias:

Is there some element in these numbers that reflects a rooting by journalists for Obama and against McCain, unconscious or otherwise? The data do not provide conclusive answers. They do offer a strong suggestion that winning in politics begets winning coverage, thanks in part to the relentless tendency of the press to frame its coverage of national elections as running narratives about the relative position of the candidates in the polls and internal tactical maneuvering to alter those positions.

But here’s the key.  Pew notes that Obama’s positive coverage tracks with polls; down when he was down, up thereafter, in a wholly objective news analysis.  But McCain’s negatives started growing with his reaction to the financial crisis - a subjective news analysis.  It is an easy task, and not a dishonest one, to catergorize McCain’s reaction to the financial crisis as successful, primarily because he was able to work with the House GOP when others couldn’t.  But the press overwhelmingly, and subjectively, saw it as a negative - an anti-McCain bias that drove down his positives.

In short, with a hat-tip to Matt Davies:

hat-tip: The Astute Bloggers

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ood luck finding anyone on the sane side of this campaign who’s happy that the GOP spending $150,000 on Sarah Palin’s wardrobe.  No one is.  But that doesn’t make it a bad decision.

First, McCain/Palin reported the expense and were up-and-up about it.  It’s up to the lawyers and regulators to haggle out its legitimacy, and if there’s any question, a quickly pulled together charity auction of the Palin suits and accessories will certainly raise more than $150,000 for charity.  Done deal.

But that must makes the move legal, not wise.  What makes it wise is this:

The Alaska-shoppin’ Sarah Palin was an utter and complete fashion disaster.  Can you imagine what the media and leftyblogs would have said if Palin had hit the campaign trail in her Wasilla-purchased finest?  The campaign knew that the Palin wardrobe was a political disaster in the making.  They knew what would happen if they rolled out this Sarah Palin:  a laugh fest,  endless parodies, loud mocking, nasty gossipy news coverage.  Well, we’re getting that even with the new wardrobe.  It would have been much, much worse without the helpful intervention of Neiman and Marcus.

So the crazy, vicious Left forced the campaign’s hand, and now that it’s out, they’re howling in outrage.  Why do they always get to butter both sides of their bread?  Why is it so difficult for the McCain camp to portray the Left and the Leftist media for what they are?

And, by the way, the original Politico report was just another Palin Derangement Syndrome hatchet job.  Here’s the pivotal part of the entire report … where is it now … oh, there it is … way down in paragraph 13:

A review of similar records for the campaign of Democrat Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee turned up no similar spending.

A review of similar records.  Reporter Jeanne Cummings (it had to be a woman writing, huh?) was sitting on such a choice, catty story she couldn’t risk screwing it up by finding out that the Obama campaign had in fact purchased clothing but not reported it.  No, folks, there’s no show of reportorial curiosity here; no evidence of actually picking up the phone and calling the Obama campaign with a few directed questions.  Cummings just took their word for it.

She took the word of the man who sat in Rev. Wright’s church for 20 years and never heard anything anti-American, et. seq. ad infinitim.

Update:  Thanks to Bookworm for this info:  According to The Weekly Standard, the over-the-top podium get-up for the Dem National Convention cost $140,000.  Who got the better deal here, the GOP that continues to benefit from Palin’s ongoing and well-dressed appearances, or the DNC, which turned off millions with the whole Greek column thing?

Funny thing, though … I don’t remember the media jumping all over the DNC for its podium expenses.