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Wenza Ali Mutlaq walked a bit uncertainly up the long street near the main government offices here on June 22, the hot wind stirring her heavy black abaya. She passed the concrete barricades put up to ward off suicide car bombers and made her way alone, almost haphazardly. Suddenly, a police car zoomed in. A policeman got out to talk with her. And then their lives were over — torn apart, along with 14 other people, by the huge blast of fire from her concealed explosive vest. Ms. Mutlaq, who was in her 30s and whose attack was captured on...

Rove’s Third Term By PAUL KRUGMAN Al Gore never claimed that he invented the Internet. Howard Dean didn’t scream. Hillary Clinton didn’t say she was staying in the race because Barack Obama might be assassinated. And Wesley Clark didn’t impugn John McCain’s military service. Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, titled his tell-all memoir “What Happened.” But a true account of modern American politics should be titled “What Didn’t Happen.” Again and again we’ve had media firestorms over supposedly revealing incidents that never actually took place. The latest fake scandal fit the usual pattern as an awkwardly phrased...

From the black conservatives who brought you radio ads two years ago claiming that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican come the new summer blockbusters: ads calling Sen. Barack Obama a racist and an elitist. King, of course, was an independent, not a Republican -- but that didn't stop the National Black Republican Association (NBRA) from airing their claim on urban radio. Now spots entitled "Arrogant Obama" and "Bitter Obama" are coming to radio stations serving black America, where more than 90 percent of voters supported Obama in Democratic primaries. The NBRA ads will begin airing July...

Simple mistake, or wish fulfillment? Appearing on MSNBC this afternoon, a Washington Post reporter claimed the paper's latest poll results showed Barack Obama with a "big lead" over John McCain on the issue of handling Iraq. The only problem: the poll actually shows McCain with a small lead. David Shuster interviewed Ed O'Keefe of WashingtonPost.com at 3:03 PM EDT. DAVID SHUSTER: Ed, when asked who do you trust on the economy Barack Obama is ahead by 16 points. On women's issues he's ahead by 32 points. So where's John McCain making up the difference. ED O'KEEFE: Terrorism. He's ahead of...

CYPRESS -- Things are getting ugly at Southern California gas pumps, and we're not just talking about the record prices. Some drivers are turning to violence. A doctor from La Palma was arrested Monday night after police say he grabbed a tire iron and threatened a driver who cut him off at a Costco gasoline station in Orange County. According to witnesses, Dr. Antonio Reyes, 58, was among a crowd of motorists waiting in line at the pumps at the Costco on Katella Ave. around 5:40 p.m. when another vehicle cut in front of him. Apparently angry about being cut...

... But the second charge, concerning prevention, is harder to excuse. It has been known for years that HIV is hard to pass on during normal heterosexual intercourse. Only one copulation in 500-1,000 with an infected individual will do so. The risk comes with certain behaviour (anal intercourse, which risks tearing the lining of the gut; and injecting drugs using dirty needles), certain professions (prostitutes of both sexes) and certain ways of life (multiple, simultaneous lovers, rather than serial polygamy). Aiming propaganda at heterosexual teenagers is (outside the special case of Africa) a waste of money. It is, however, often...

Does one of every four American teenagers really have a sexually transmitted disease? No, despite headlines given to a recent federal study. On March 11, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease. This eye-opening statistic landed like a dead rat on the doorsteps of America’s 37 million households and 30 million teenagers. The New York Times, among other papers, put the news on the front page. CBS news anchor Katie Couric told her viewers that “at least one in four teenage girls in America has a sexually transmitted...

In my previous column, “Rarely Do I Agree With the Rev. Jeremiah Wright - An Open Letter to the New York Times,” I sought to expose how a New York Times article by Jodi Kantor had used fraud and deception to portray those hesitant about voting for Barack Obama as racists. Unfortunately, I had no idea of just how far and dishonest she and the Times had been, something I found out only upon further investigation. In the midst of her shameful and race baiting piece, Kantor quoted one Rabbi Ruvi New wholly out of context. When I first read...

For weeks now, we've heard a steady drumbeat--from Big Media, from Barack Obama and other Democrats, and now from HBO's "Recount"--that the Supreme Court handed George Bush Florida and the 2000 election, even though subsequent reviews show the recounts Al Gore requested would have increased Bush's margin of victory. Tom Shales, in today's WaPo, has finally put into words the reason behind that: "If the mess in Florida had been resolved with as much skill and savvy as went into the making of the movie, the world might be a different place today -- presumably a better one...." In the...

I called this AP story fishy from the beginning: Iraq’s most influential Shiite cleric has been quietly issuing religious edicts declaring that armed resistance against U.S.-led foreign troops is permissible — a potentially significant shift by a key supporter of the Washington-backed government in Baghdad…~~~ “(Al-Sistani) rejects the American presence,” he told the AP, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment to media. “He believes they (the Americans) will at the end pay a heavy price for the damage they inflicted on Iraq.” For good reason it seems. Gateway Pundit has the scoop: Iraqi-American Haider...

John Hagee, the controversial pastor who has endorsed John McCain, argued in a late 1990s sermon that God sent Hitler to help the Jews get to the promised land (Israel, not Auschwitz). Why did God allow the Holocaust to happen? According to a report in the Huffington Post by Sam Stein, Hagee's answer was: "Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel." The report raises several questions. Did God have to be so rough in his methods? Instead of putting the Jews on trains to Auschwitz,...

By see-dubya • May 9, 2008 01:55 AM For what it’s worth, the New York Times reports that the U.S.’s designated new commander in Pakistan, General James Hood, has not been allowed to take up his new job. He had served as commander of Gitmo, and although he actually did away with some of the roughest forms of interrogation there and won some (grudging) praise from human rights groups, his legacy in the Middle East is tainted by Newsweek’s lie: General Hood, who took command of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay in March 2004, shortly before the Abu Ghraib...

The news media successfully predicted 10 out of the last 3 recessions, so obviously we can trust them about the current one they keep trying to ram down our gullets, right? Well, I suppose if you define a "recession" as being in a generally pessimistic, defeatist mood and really wanting Barack Obama to win the next election, then yes, the news media is in the midst of one of the most pronounced recessions in the whole of human history. The rest of us, though... aren't actually doing so bad. Job losses aren't materializing as predicted, the dollar has begun a...

The problem with CBS and Katie Couric is not that the show isn't working. CBS Evening News is a mother on life support and Katie was just stillborn. She never had a chance. Ever since CBS lied about the Bush National Guard story, it has as much credibility as, well....a major news network that makes up news. Small disconnect in that strategy but overcomeable with time except for the fact that CBS, ABC, and NBC are running out of time. All three of the major networks have been losing evening news viewers for the past 10 years in a major...

THE HAGUE, 07/03/08 - Public broadcaster BNN deliberately misled viewers in a film clip about a woman in a burqa, the all-covering Muslim garment. In a mini-film on 101tv, BNN's digital youth channel, a woman is seen who is helped immediately when she drops her bag of oranges. The same woman in a burqa however gets no help when the same thing happens to her. The journalist said she felt discriminated against when wearing the burqa. But Amsterdam broadcaster AT5 discovered deception. AT5 cameras that recorded the BNN filming show that many passers-by wanted to help the woman in the...

Escondido, Calif. (AP) -- The North County Times fired an editor for altering an Associated Press story to read that a Los Angeles city councilman strangled a kitten at a news conference about his city's new pet sterilization law. The newspaper published a story Wednesday that read, "'We will, sooner rather than later, become a no-kill city, and this is the greatest step in that direction,' Councilman Tony Cardenas, who co-authored the bill, said as he strangled a kitten at a City Hall news conference."

Documents released by the Office of the Chief of Staff, U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base Florida, in relation to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests files for documents relating to the military investigation into the Scott Thomas Beauchamp "Shock Troops" article in The New Republic magazine. The following are the never-before published statements of soldiers interviewed in the course of the investigation. Names are redacted per federal privacy laws.

---------- The recent New York Times' blatantly misleading attack on the American military, where with rigged data they attempted to portray Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans as crazed killers, should serve as a reminder that liberal media treachery against our military is very much alive and as viciously dishonest as ever. As many of us know, this animosity of the Left is certainly nothing new. In their recently published book recounting how a grassroots movement of Vietnam veterans successfully torpedoed John Kerry’s presidential aspirations in the 2004 campaign, To Set the Record Straight, authors Scott Swett and Tim Ziegler describe...

I'VE had a huge response to Tuesday's column about The New York Times' obscene bid to smear veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan as mad killers. Countless readers seem to be wondering: Why did the paper do it? Well, in the Middle Ages, lepers had to carry bells on pain of death to warn the uninfected they were coming. One suspects that the Times would like our military veterans to do the same. The purpose of Sunday's instantly notorious feature "alerting" the American people that our Iraq and Afghanistan vets are all potential murderers when they move in next door was...

January 14, 2008 – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Mary Pearson: (916) 441–6197 or Email: mary@moveamericaforward.org EXCLUSIVE: New York Times ‘Killer Vet’ StoryExposed as Erroneous by Pro-Troop Group SACRAMENTO- Move America Forward (website: www.MoveAmericaForward.org), the nation’s largest grassroots pro-troop organization, today announced that after vetting the numbers cited by The New York Times in their Sunday, January 13, 2008 story, “Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles,” it became clear that the Times had engaged in demonstrably erroneous and false reporting. It took seven New York Times researchers to find 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a...

DES MOINES, Iowa – Several Republican officials close to Fred Thompson’s presidential campaign said they expect the candidate will drop out of the race within days if he finishes poorly in Thursday’s Iowa caucus.

DES MOINES, Iowa – For three decades, the Republican presidential nominating contest has served to unify the national party’s coalition of social, economic and foreign policy conservatives in advance of a general election fight with Democrats. This year, it is ripping that coalition apart. Is the GOP grounded in the social issues embodied by Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee or the foreign policy experience of former POW John McCain? Do Republicans see their futures in a former CEO such as Mitt Romney, who promises to tackle Washington incompetence, or in a leader such as Rudy Giuliani, who talks tough on terrorism...

UTICA, New York - Illinois Sen. Barack Obama would defeat all five of the top Republicans in prospective general election contests, performing better than either of his two top rivals, a new Zogby telephone poll shows. His margins of advantage range from a 4 percent edge over Arizona Sen. John McCain and a 5 percent edge over Arkansas’ Mike Huckabee to an 18 percentage point lead over Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, the survey shows. Against New York’s Rudy Giuliani he leads by 9%, and against Fred Thompson of Tennessee he holds a 16 point edge. The telephone survey included 1,000...

It appears that we have positive identification of the rifle used in the Omaha Mall shooting. The pictures from Fox 42: Omaha show an ordinary SKS rifle with a fixed 10 round magazine. The same rifle that millions of people in the United States own for hunting and plinking. It is an acceptable deer rifle for most of the country. There have been many reports of "assault rifle" used in the MSM, and reports of 30 round magazines. It appears that all of these reports are false, probably intended to stir up anti-gun sentiment before the election.

The story of our Baghdad Diarist. For months, our magazine has been subject to accusations that stories we published by an American soldier then serving in Iraq were fabricated. When these accusations first arose, we promised our readers a full account of our investigation. We spent the last four-and-a-half months re-reporting his stories. These are our findings. When Michael Goldfarb, a blogger for The Weekly Standard, left me a message on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-July, I didn't know him or his byline. And I certainly didn't anticipate that his message would become the starting point for a controversy. A...

How Can CNN Reasonably Deny Anderson Cooper Knew Kerr Is A Gay Crusader Keith Kerr, retired Colonel., U.S. Army; retired Brigadier General, California National Reserve, who submitted a YouTube question about gays in the military, is actually a member of Hillary Clinton's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transexual Americans For Hillary Steering Committee. And Anderson Cooper is listed by "Out" Magazine as the second most powerful homosexual in the US, secondly only to David Geffen. http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2007/04/out_ranks_the_top_50_gays_ande.html Of course, Hillary was not listed.

The angry family of an Iraqi journalist went on local television on Wednesday to blast him for claiming they had been massacred three days ago by Shiite militiamen in Baghdad. "We are still alive. Thank God!" the sister of the journalist said, before bursting into tears. The journalist, Dia al-Kawwaz, had said she was among the 11 family members slaughtered by militamen on Sunday in his home in Baghdad's northern Al-Shaab neighbourhood. Al-Hurrah television paraded the relatives of Kawwaz, clearly alive -- and clearly angry. "No one attacked us ... militias or special forces. Nobody stormed our home. He even...

NBC News White House correspondent David Gregory, accused of being a partisan, made a false statement about the "Scooter" Libby case. In reporting former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s charge that the Bush administration fed false information, Gregory claimed Libby "went to jail for obstructing the leak investigation." Although Libby was sentenced to 30 months of prison, Libby never actually went to jail as Gregory claims. President Bush commuted Libby’s sentence, eliminating the prison term yet still upholding a hefty fine and probation. "Today," however, did not spend a lot of time on the McClellan charge, just a brief...

Rudolph Giuliani may not win New Hampshire, but he has already won the pundit primary. It’s not even close. Quite a few conservative journalists are in Giuliani’s corner. His rivals have no similar support...

U. S. Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, has spent the better part of the last decade running for president. He actively sought the office in 2000 and lost handily to George W. Bush. Since that time, he has done everything he could think of to antagonize the base of his own party. Former Sen. Fred Thompson, R-TN, acts as if the thought of running for president just occurred to him five minutes ago. Some days he acts as though it still hasn't occurred to him. For very different reasons, these two men, with their totally different approaches to politics, have probably...

(Angus Reid Global Monitor) - Rudy Giuliani holds a five-point edge in the national race for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in the United States, according to a poll by Harris Interactive. 31 per cent of respondents would vote for the former New York City mayor in a 2008 primary. Actor and former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson is second with 26 per cent, followed by former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney with 17 per cent, and Arizona senator John McCain with 12 per cent. Support is lower for former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Texas congressman Ron Paul, California congressman Duncan Hunter,

The story of General Petraeus getting accidentally shot in the chest is a case in point. One of his own soldiers had pulled the trigger. Normally, something very bad would have happened to that soldier and his commander. Instead Petraeus sent that soldier to Ranger School, and his Captain (Fred Johnson) was promoted early. In June, I witnessed LTC Fred Johnson helping to restore security and rebuild Baqubah. Fred Johnson is a believer in second chances. Some months ago, a soldier in Baghdad wrote a piece on the way war can degrade the morals and affect the judgment of combat...

October 10, 2007 -- FRED Thompson had a senior moment at an unfortunate moment - during the very first words he spoke as a presidential debater. Only a minute or so into his opening answer of yesterday's Republican debate - Thompson's first debate since formally entering the race in September - he just stopped speaking. Froze. Blinked in confusion. Seemed to have lost his train of thought. It was a discomfiting pause. And if it had come during prime time during a general-election season, it would have spelled the end of Thompson's candidacy and ensured a Democratic landslide.

Fred Thompson may not yet have won the hearts and minds of Republican voters in the United States. But give the GOP presidential candidate this much - he knows who runs the government of Canada. "Harper. Prime Minister Harper," Thompson said, without hesitation Tuesday when asked during a Republican all-candidates presidential debate to name Canada's leader. That Thompson correctly answered the unexpected question saved him some mild embarrassment before an audience of Republican supporters at the CNBC debate in Dearborn, Mich. But it'll likely do little to quell larger doubts about a late-starting presidential campaign that has struggled to meet...

Oct. 9, 2007 - Fred Thompson stood a head taller than his fellow Republicans but he seemed in over his head as the CNBC debate began here. He wore the pained look of a man in need of a powerful digestive pill. But by the time the two-hour marathon ended, the new guy on the trail had gained just barely enough confidence, composure and credibility to make it to the next round of the GOP food fight. “Fred didn’t die today,” said Ron Kaufman, one of Mitt Romney’s top spin doctors. Rudy Giuliani, trained for combat by the toughest press...

We are being fed false and misleading information, in matters big and small. It has come from trusted sources such as established newspapers, experienced journalists, Pulitzer Prize winners and Nobel Peace Prize winners. It has been going on for a long time, sometimes by carelessness and sometimes by deliberate lying. I have compiled a list of 101 such incidents. Did you know that Time magazine and other news organizations had a Vietnamese communist on full-time staff in Vietnam during that war? Do you remember that ABC, CBS and NBC have all rigged cars or trucks with explosives or other devices...

He may be the tallest candidate in the race for president, but Fred Thompson is clearly in over his head! In both his fumbling pre-candidacy period and his hesitant, attenuated post-announcement campaign, he's given the clear impression that that he is ill-informed, inarticulate, badly briefed and downright lazy... ...But beneath his casual, disorganized and ill-informed way of running for president, one suspects an arrogance lingers -- a sense of not needing to prepare and a lethargy in the face of challenges that perhaps indicates a failure to appreciate how daunting a task running for president really is.

A former consultant to ABC's investigative unit admitted yesterday that he put his name on a purported interview with Barack Obama that he never conducted. Alexis Debat, a former French defense official who now works at the Nixon Center, published the interview in the French magazine Politique Internationale. He said he had hired a freelance journalist to conduct the interview, in which the Democratic presidential candidate supposedly said that Iraq was "already a defeat for America" that has "wasted thousands of lives." Debat said he had been unable to locate the intermediary, and the Obama campaign says no such interview...

A spokesman for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign yesterday blamed a faulty background check for the campaign's failure to raise any questions about Norman Hsu, a previously unknown businessman who suddenly became one of its biggest fundraisers. -snip- Hsu twice attended events sponsored by Bill Clinton's global charitable effort, putting up $15,000 each time as an entrance fee. The donations allowed him to mingle with the corporate executives typically attracted by the former president's charitable endeavors. Bill Clinton's aides said they knew little about Hsu's own businesses, save that he was involved somehow in the apparel business. Shortly after...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A liberal advocacy group's print ad attacking Gen. David Petraeus drew a firestorm of criticism from both sides of the aisle on Monday. The ad, running in Monday's edition of the New York Times, shows a picture of Petraeus. Bold letters spell out "General Petraeus or General Betray us?" Moveon.org Political Action, which paid for the ad, accuses Petraeus of "cooking the books for the White House" on progress being made in Iraq and calls him "a military man constantly at war with the facts." White House spokesman Tony Snow called the ad, running the same day...

NEAH BAY, Wash. — A California gray whale that was harpooned and shot with a machine gun off the western tip of Washington state has died, officials said. Coast Guard Petty Officer Kelly Parker said five people believed to be members of the Makah Tribe shot and harpooned the whale Saturday morning. Petty Officer Shawn Eggert said the whale disappeared beneath the surface in the evening, dragging buoys that had been attached to the harpoon, and did not resurface. A biologist working for the Makah Indian tribe declared it dead, Eggert said. Tribe members were being held by the Coast...

NEAH BAY, Wash. (AP) — An injured California gray whale was swimming out to sea Saturday after being shot with a machine gun off the western tip of Washington state, officials said. Coast Guard Petty Officer Kelly Parker said five people believed to be members of the Makah Tribe shot and harpooned the whale Saturday morning. The extent of the whale's injuries were not immediately known. Tribe members were being held by the Coast Guard but had not been charged, said Mark Oswell, a spokesman for the law enforcement arm of the National Marine Fisheries Service. A preliminary report said...

Washington Post columnist, Sarah Stillman, has penned the sort of pretentious column that is blind for its self-indulgence and foolishly extrapolates the author's singular experience as one ubiquitous or as a universal representation of our soldier's lives once back in the states. In this case, Stillman seems to imagine that the Iraq war has made all our returning soldiers drug addicts, drunks, and social outcasts. Worse, she naively seems to imagine that no returning soldiers in history have ever experienced such difficulties returning to "normal life" once back from war's jarring experience, or at the very least today's soldiers have...

West of Delancey: CNN's God's Warriors at war with truth Posted by Rabbi Marvin Hier | Comments: 4 A day prior to the airing of Christiane Amanpour’s six-hour CNN documentary entitled God’s Warriors, I was one of four clergymen to be a guest on Larry King Live to discuss the issue of fundamentalism in today’s world. The interview on Larry King was pre-recorded in mid-July and none of the participants had seen the six-hour documentary because it was still being edited. Now that I have seen it, I sent the following critique to the producers of God’s Warriors.1. MORAL EQUIVALENCY...

PBS, NY Times & Scott Riter promoted false history in Iraq Have you seen this CNS news report posted at Laurie Mylroie's website? If you havent yet its time you should http://www.lauriemylroie.com/ CNSNews Report: Saddam Had WMD, Extensive Terror Ties By Scott Wheeler The senior government official and source of the Iraqi intelligence memos, explained that the reason the documents have not been made public before now is that the government has ‘thousands and thousands of documents waiting to be translated Quote from the article “M14 is a reference to Iraqi intelligence directorate of special operations. The Iraqi documents obtained...

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani are rivals for the 2008 Republican nomination, but you wouldn't know it by asking them. In an interview with ABC News Radio Friday, McCain said he is "flattered" that Giuliani would support his bid for the White House were he not trying to win the job for himself. At a campaign event Aug. 8, 2007, Giuliani told a crowd in Iowa, "I happen to be a very big admirer of Sen. McCain and I can tell you quite honestly that if I weren't running for president I would be...

I was listening to the news out of the corner of my ear when I heard FreeRepublic specifically mentioned as a "hate site" about fifteen minutes ago. Ostensibly the long report was about the Klan using the web to recruit new wackos. Then the focus turned to Casa Maryland, and their director who claimed that calls for his murder had circulated on the internet by anti-immigrant bigots. It was then that the anchor identified FR by name as a hate site.

If anyone ever starts a museum of horrible explanations, the one-liner by Newsweek's Evan Thomas about his magazine's dubious reporting on the Duke non-rape case— "The narrative was right but the facts were wrong" —is destined to become a popular exhibit, right up there with "we had to destroy the village to save it." What Mr. Thomas seems to mean is that the newsroom view of the lacrosse players as privileged, sexist, and arrogant white male jocks was the correct angle on the story. It wasn't. According to Duke's female lacrosse team and other women on campus, the male players...

On Sunday, Reuters reported that the scene of a large massacre had been discovered near Baquba: BAGHDAD, Aug 5 (Reuters) - Iraqi police said on Sunday they had found 60 decomposed bodies dumped in thick grass in Baquba, north of Baghdad. There was no indication of how the 60 people had been killed, police said. Baquba is the capital of volatile Diyala province, where thousands of extra U.S. and Iraqi soldiers have been sent to stem growing violence. Why did the police have such a hard time providing an indication of how the 60 people had been killed? Probably because...

News agency Reuters has been forced to admit that footage it released last week purportedly showing Russian submersibles on the seabed of the North Pole actually came from the movie Titanic. The images were reproduced around the world - including by the Guardian and Guardian Unlimited - alongside the story of Russia planting its flag below the North Pole on Thursday last week. Titanic error: Reuters issued this film still with a story about the Russian flag being planted beneath the North Pole. Photograph: Reuters