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On Monday President Bush flies into Houston to campaign for a congressional candidate who — at one point — looked like a long shot. But an exclusive poll indicates that Shelley Sekula-Gibbs may pull off a political upset and win her write-in campaign for Congress.

'On the nose" is a Hollywood expression. It refers to a scene or a piece of dialogue that is too obvious or too good to be true. Hollywood would have said the whole Mark Foley sex scandal is on the nose. Let's start with the fact that this confessed gay stalker of teenage congressional pages was co-chairman of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus. All over Hollywood, fingers would go to the tip of the nose: Can't we make it Armed Services? No, we cannot. To change anything at all about the Foley matter would be to trifle with...

It is now a month away from the mid-term elections and we might as well not hold them. I mean the MSM has already declared the Democrats to be the overwhelming winners. Not a doubt about it. The reason is that Mark Foley is gay. That's it. The Democrats will win FOR SURE in November because Mark Foley is gay. See, according the Democrat and MSM hopes, the "fundies" as they are called will stay home and not vote because Mark Foley is gay thus giving the victory to the Democrats. To ensure they stay home, Lawrence O'Donnell and...

In London, sex scandals come along every other week. You name it, British parliamentarians do it: three-in-a-bed, auto-erotic asphyxiation, gay teen flagellation, getting your toes sucked while wearing the soccer kit of Chelsea Football Club. But at least at Westminster, sex scandals require actual sex. That the governing party of the world's only superpower could be felled by one creepy pervert's masturbatory e-mails and IMs is an event historians will marvel at. Granted that the Roman Empire in its death throes got hung up on gay sex, the American hyperpower seems set to be the first to collapse over gay...

CNN: PAGE LAWYER DOES NOT RULE 'IN OR OUT' PRANK CLAIM... DEVELOPING... Former congressional page Jordan Edmund's lawyer Stephen Jones... BLITZER: He will join us live in the next hour. What are you hearing, Brian, about some of these Internet suggestions, some Republicans suggesting this whole thing is a prank, a hoax and there is no there, there. CNN REPORTER: "We asked him about that item in the DRUDGE REPORT. He said very clearly he cannot rule that in, he cannot rule that out. He says he is not saying it was not a prank but later in the interview,...

The watchdog group that first provided the FBI with suspicious e-mails from then-Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) said yesterday that FBI and Justice Department officials are attempting to cover up their inaction in the case by making false claims about the group. Law enforcement officials said the allegations by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) are without merit, and they stood by allegations that the group had refused to provide some information to the FBI. The dispute is the latest controversy this week for CREW, a liberal-leaning group that has come under attack from House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert...

WASHINGTON, Oct 5 (Reuters) - Democrats are poised for U.S. Senate gains in the Nov. 7 election, but face an uphill battle to pick up the six seats they need for control, according to Reuters/Zogby polls released on Thursday. Democrats lead in five of 10 crucial Senate battlegrounds, including three Republican-held seats in Pennsylvania, Montana and Rhode Island and in Democratic-held Maryland and New Jersey. But Republican incumbents lead in Virginia and Missouri, and Senate contests in Republican-held Ohio and Tennessee are deadlocked, the polls showed. Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, running as an independent, has a big lead over Democrat...

A posting of an unredacted instant message sessions between Rep. Mark Foley and a former congressional page has apparently exposed the identity of the now 21 year-old accuser... ABC RELEASED TRANSCRIPT OF ONE CHAT BETWEEN FOLEY AND A MAN WHO WAS 18 AT THE TIME OF THE INSTANT MESSAGE EXCHANGE.... NETWORK STATED THE MESSAGE WAS TO 'UNDER AGE' TEEN... DEVELOPING... ABC ONLINE GLITCH LEADS TO IDENTITY OF FOLEY ACCUSER; FEATURED IM EXCHANGE WAS WITH 18 YEAR OLD

WASHINGTON -- The last time the Dow Jones industrial average closed at a record high, America was living in a giddy economic era when good times and budget surpluses seemed as if they might continue indefinitely. It was Jan. 14, 2000, the start of another year, another century and another millennium. The economy was roaring along. The jobless rate was a low 4 percent. The "new economy" of young entrepreneurs energized markets with new tech companies that didn't turn a profit. Nobody seemed to care, and excesses piled on top of excesses.

When I first saw this article this morning, I asked my daughter to pinch me. But, it was still there. I then asked her to slap me. No change. Finally, smelling salts. Alas, it was still on my computer screen, and from the Washington Post no less: “The Redder They Are, The Harder They Fall; Republicans More Damaged by Scandals.”

On his radio show yesterday (Thursday, September 21, 2006), host Hugh Hewitt interviewed Thomas B. Edsall, who up until recently was a senior political reporter for the Washington Post. He had been with the paper for 25 years. Through precise and direct questioning by Hewitt, Edsall admitted something that is rarely heard from a liberal these days. In a shocking admission, Edsall articulated that the biases of the mainstream media are "overwhelmingly to the left." He also proposed that Democratic reporters outnumber Republicans "in the range of 15-25 to 1"!In the interview, as Hewitt and Edsall discussed the rise of...

...Has Times editor gotten away with murder?Posted: September 22, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern If you blinked you would have missed it. I'm speaking of the news coverage about who really leaked Valerie Plame's identity as a non-covert CIA agent. The leaker, former Colin Powell aide Richard Armitage, was a vocal critic of the war in Iraq. Perhaps the media "overlooked" Armitage and his role in this scandal precisely because he shared their disdain for the war in Iraq. Did you happen to notice that Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby didn't receive that same consideration – even though they...

WASHINGTON - The judge in the CIA leak case ruled Thursday that if Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald feels that admitting certain classified documents at the upcoming trial of I Lewis "Scooter" Libby can jeopardize national security, Fitzgerald can then move to dismiss the perjury charges against Libby. Judge Reggie Walton cannot automatically allow classified materials to be admitted at trial. He first must go through a series of closed hearings under CIPA regulations. CIPA, the Classified Information Procedures Act, protects and restricts the discovery of classified information in a way that does not impair the defendant's right to a fair...

Just About the Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Read smalldeadanimals.com 21 September 2006 In its attempt to sway, manipulate, and form world opinion to fit with editorial boards, the MSM now has a new tool: World Opinion Polls. In case you missed that, I’ll rephrase it. The MSM now conducts WORLD opinion polls so that we can be enlightened by knowing what the world thinks. The concept is so flawed that I won’t insult the intelligence of readers here by even bothering to debunk it, but I will say this. What does it say of news media editorial boards, when...

In recent years, The New Republic, one of the nation's leading magazines of political and cultural commentary, has been embarrassed by scandals involving two of journalism's original sins: fabrication of stories and plagiarism. But the latest scandal, involving the magazine's cultural critic Lee Siegel, has to do with a transgression peculiar to the Internet age: sock puppetry. A sock puppet, in Internet parlance, is a false Internet identity created for deceptive purposes. Siegel, who had been writing a culture blog for The New Republic, had started using the pseudonym "sprezzatura" on the blog's forums to praise himself and savage his...

Remember the "Arab street," that riot-in-the-road featuring flammable Israeli flags, Saddam Hussein posters, clenched fists and chants threatening "Death to America"? The street may have lacked pavement and a fire hydrant, but it had beaucoup television cameras. Flames, clenched fists and death threats -- a heart-pounding collage of sensational imagery and rhetoric. What more could a TV exec need to attract audience eyeballs? Recall the talking heads who told us in 1990, after Saddam invaded Kuwait, that "the Arab street" was going to rise en masse, as an ur-proletariat, which would support Saddam against the West. If you need documentation,...

NEW YORK From the newspaper that brought you the first-ever perfume critic comes what appears to be another first -- "futurist-in-residence." The New York Times, apparently seeking to boost its image as a forward-looking paper, announced Tuesday the appointment of Michael Rogers, a former Washington Post Company executive and Newsweek.com general manager to the newly-created title. In a release, the paper described the new position as a one-year consultant appointment to work with The New York Times Company's research and development unit. Spokeswoman Stacy Green compared the appointment to that of the paper's public editor, in that it would be...

Arrested Pulitzer Prize winning Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein, who took the infamous pictures of a terrorist execution on Haifa Street in Baghdad, and is notorious in the blogosphere for his collusion with jihadis as they tried to kill Americans, is the subject of a very lengthy attempt by the AP to whitewash his acts: U.S. holds AP photographer in Iraq 5 mos. (Hat tip: Michelle Malkin.) The AP spins furiously and buries it in the middle, but here’s some interesting information from the US Army: The military said Hussein was captured with two insurgents, including Hamid Hamad Motib, an...

The Fitzpatrick Plame investigation has spurred the New York Times into examining how their reporters conduct themselves. Apparently, the Gray Lady wants her staff to act more like terrorists and drug dealers. Reporters are being told to delete emails, destroy notes, and use disposable cell phones in order to stymie future investigations.

NEWSWEEK “Isikoffed” the Gonzales Memo Since Christopher Hitchens is correcting old Dowdified quotes, I thought I’d correct one myself. This one, from a 2004 NEWSWEEK article, is a major Dowdification — in my view, every bit as egregious as Dowd’s original. What’s more, it’s still influencing lefties even today. Worse, unlike Dowd’s alteration of a Bush quote, the NEWSWEEK story didn’t even use an ellipsis to indicate what was missing. By altering an Alberto Gonzales quote in this way, NEWSWEEK managed to make Gonzales and the Bush Administration appear unreasonably dismissive of the Geneva Convention. The story was co-authored by...

The percentage of Americans who blame the Bush administration for the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington has risen from almost a third to almost half over the past four years, a CNN poll released Monday found. Asked whether they blame the Bush administration for the attacks, 45 percent said either a "great deal" or a "moderate amount," up from 32 percent in a June 2002 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll. But the Clinton administration did not get off lightly either. The latest poll, conducted by Opinion Research Corporation for CNN, found that 41 percent of respondents blamed his...

We live, as the pundits say, in the United States of Amnesia. Even so, did the makers of "The U.S. vs. John Lennon," an inquiry into our government's bizarre attempt to neutralize the perceived political juice of that famed English singer-songwriter, really need to spend half the movie explaining the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement to viewers? If things are really that bad, then perhaps the filmmakers should explain who John Lennon is. After all, the Beatles date back over 40 years. For those who do remember or are aware of the zeitgeist of the counterculture, this lengthy regurgitation...

With tears welling up in his eyes, Bob Schieffer finally concluded his 18-month tenure as anchor of the CBS Evening News with an emotional in-studio tribute. Incoming anchor Katie Couric joined Schieffer at the end of Thursday night's broadcast in studio for a retrospective of his career, featuring a one-one-one pre-taped interview with the former Today Show host herself (perhaps to give viewers a sneak peek of the Katie to come?). Schieffer's professionalism resuscitated the reputation of the CBS Evening News at a time when the legendary news organization was mired in scandal in the wake of a widely disputed...

New Orleans police chief during Hurricane Katrina, Eddie Compass, says he unnecessarily "heightened people's fears" by repeating unconfirmed reports of out-of-control crime in the city during the aftermath of the storm, adding to the confusion caused by the disaster and potentially hampering rescue efforts. "There were reports of rapes and children being raped. I even got one report … that my daughter was raped," Mr. Compass says in a Spike Lee documentary scheduled to air on HBO tonight. "In hindsight, I guess I heightened people's fears by me being the superintendent of police, reporting these things that were reported to...

With Fox News reporter Steve Centanni and cameraman Olaf Wiig still being held hostage by Palestinian terrorists, the Western media has received a potent reminder that broadcasting certain truths from inside Arab territory can result in devastating consequences. While it is not clear the kidnappers’ motivation—they have yet to state any demands—this is just the latest in a string of abductions, which is in and of itself only part of the arsenal of heavy-handed media intimidation present in the region. Thuggery helps explain the obscenely low volume of negative press coverage of the Palestinian Authority, Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah, and others....

Many of the mainstream media apologists have conceded – and they had little choice but to do so – that many of the photographs of the Israelis’ response to Hez b’Allah’s act of war, were staged. The evidence of staging and Photoshopping is too public. The media allowed itself to be used to defame Israel, stir up sympathy for Lebanon and halt the advance into Lebanon. But the concessions of wrongdoing stop short with digital alterations. Media spokesmen are still in denial about the biggest media fraud of all: the dramatic dead baby display at Qana. EUreferendum has not given...

When Reuters was forced to sever ties with free-lance photographer Adnan Hajj and remove more than 900 of his photos from its database earlier this month, long-whispered questions about the reliability of Arab stringers and freelancers came to the forefront. But while the widespread use of Arab locals in covering the Middle East raises many legitimate concerns, the Palestinian propaganda machine has enjoyed tremendous success over the years hoodwinking supposedly sophisticated Western journalists. And Hezbollah appears to have done the same over the past month. In short, almost nothing that is purported to happen in the Arab world can automatically...

Thanks to some intrepid digging from commenters Lancelot and Harris at EU Referendum, another video of the events at Qana has been found. This is one that I have never seen before and really shows what was going on that day. It is truly a must see for anyone that believes that the photos at Qana were staged. It completely debunks the "our photographers do not set up photos" and "the rescuers were not holding up the children for photos" claims. Believe it or not, it is a link from Wikipedia of all places. Here's the direct link to the...

FIVE weeks have passed since the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers provoked Israel to launch its most unsatisfactory military operation in 58 years. What problem has been solved, or even ameliorated? Hezbollah, often using World War II-vintage rockets, has demonstrated the inadequacy of Israel's policy of unilateral disengagement - from Lebanon, Gaza, much of the West Bank - behind a fence. Hezbollah has willingly suffered (temporary) military diminution in exchange for enormous political enlargement. Hitherto, Hezbollah in Lebanon was a "state within a state." Henceforth, the Lebanese state may be an appendage of Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an army that, having...

Lebanese rescuer 'Green Helmet' injured A civil defense worker who has drawn controversy for holding up the bodies of children killed in Lebanon said Tuesday he was lightly injured fighting a weekend fire sparked by an Israeli bomb. Salam Daher, dubbed the Green Helmet for the color of his civil defense headgear, said he was hit by debris Sunday when a bomb or missile fell on a building while he was helping to battle a fire at a gas station in the port city of Tyre. "I fell over when the bomb hit, and I got some scratches from debris...

Ray Robison has yet another example of staged photojournalism from Lebanon, a car with verses from the Koran strategically placed for propaganda effect: Al-AP at it again with staged photos. Ray comments: Notice this car has a wall-hanging positioned on the door. An Arabic reader tells me this board has verses from the Koran on it. Because Islam does not allow for images of the Prophet Mohammed, Muslims use verses to adorn their homes the same way some Christians use paintings of Jesus. If you want to make the argument that this wall-hanging got where it is by chance, then...

Fox is now showing the German TV video of Qana showing Green Helmet Guy posing a dead child Click here to watch the Fox News video Here is the original FR post Here is the original video on YouTube: Green Helmet the movie director [Germany's NDR busts him in the act]

The recent discovery that a Lebanese freelance photographer, Adnan Hajj, had manipulated pictures he took for Reuters has raised questions about the standards of photojournalism at a time of widespread digital photography. The case also increased pressure on news photo editors, who select and edit thousands of photographs under deadline pressure each day, to detect digital alterations. "The Soviets had to have a whole department to doctor pictures," said David Friend, an editor at Vanity Fair and a former director of photography for Life magazine. "Now all it takes is a swipe of a mouse, and the kid down the...

AP Circles the Wagons Around Green Helmet Guy It’s utterly surreal. The Associated Press does a full court press, supporting the man they now call Salam Daher with a multimedia presentation packed full of distortions and outright lies: A Grueling Task in Lebanon. Watch the AP presentation here: A Grueling Task in Lebanon

Kopel: Were front-page photos staged? Images from Qana raise issue of whether media were manipulated. If you see a news photograph of the war in Lebanon, shot from within Hezbollah territory, can you be confident the picture and caption are accurate? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Earlier this week, Reuters fired photographer Adnan Hajj and withdrew his portfolio of 920 pictures after Little Green Footballs, The Jawa Report, and many other weblogs provided evidence that Hajj had used digital editing and other techniques to fake numerous photos of the Lebanon war. On July 31, the News and Post ran the...

DAY 2 - THIS IS OUR 'TOP' POST UNTIL WE GET A RESPONSE FROM AP Page views since posting: 10,411 - First posted: 7.25 PM 10 August 2006. New post underneath this one. They hunt in packs, they film in packs and they lie in packs. And their bosses, sitting in their air-conditioned offices, thousands of miles from the action, back up their lies. And the liar-in-chief is Kathleen Carroll, senior vice president and executive editor for Associated Press. Unlike Reuters' who have at least admitted their photo-fraud and started their own internal investigation, Carroll's hastily-produced "rebuttal" of the staged...

At first everyone thought they were just blowing smoke, but the debunking of a Reuters photograph by a group of Web sites has launched a fiery online war in which bloggers have taken on the mainstream media. Bloggers, or writers on web logs, were the first to reveal that a Reuters photograph depicting plumes of black smoke rising over Beirut was doctored to enhance smoke above the city. The Web site www.LittleGreenFootballs.com is credited with first revealing the scandal, which has been dubbed Reutersgate, but the affair has spread far wider than the Reuters News Agency and into several of...

ATTENTION EDITORS - CAPTION CORRECTION FOR SJS01 - 05 WHICH WERE TRANSMITTED AT APPROXIMATELY 1725 GMT ON AUGUST 9, 2006. THE CAPTION INCORRECTLY STATES THE CAUSE OF DEATH. CORRECTED VERSIONS IMMEDIATELY FOLLOW THIS ADVISORY. WE ARE SORRY FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE CAUSED. REUTERS. A Palestinian man carries the body of three year-old Raja Abu Shaban, in Gaza August 9, 2006. The three-year-old girl who had been reported killed by an Israeli air strike in Gaza on Wednesday actually died of an accident, Palestinian medical workers said on Thursday. Workers at Gaza's Shifa hospital said on August 10, 2006 that the...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The highest-ranking U.S. soldier charged in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in Iraq has been sentenced to eight years in prison. Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick, a U.S. Army reservist from Virginia, also was sentenced Thursday to a forfeiture of pay, a dishonorable discharge and a reduction in rank to private.

-Snip- As we said about the Reuters incident, media bias is a consensus, not a conspiracy. Consensus is what this apparent rash of unprofessional photography appears to be, which should remind U.S. policy-makers that active public diplomacy is indispensable as long as there are journalists who find war stories too good to check. -Snip-These new instances appear to be shoddy journalism, not propagandizing, and so their bias is inadvertent but nevertheless revealing. -Snip- Once the facts emerge in such cases, the full weight of the government's communications efforts should be made to ensure that the correct information is distributed broadly...

Warning Graphic Content Germany`s NDR presents unpublished video footage from the qana events, demasking "Green Helmet" as a cynical movie director, staging photographs with a liitle boys body. ... (more) Watch the video here Warning: It's graphic.

LGF: “Fauxtography” is born Slublog: Toys in all the right places Extreme Makeover Beirut Edition Allah Pundit * Lebanese pieta * Gway Pundit Ynetnews on AP photos Watch the Video

Reuters, you are not alone. The news agency fired a photographer this weekend after it became clear that he had doctored war photos from Lebanon, but it would seem that Reuters isn't the only respectable news organization with this problem. While not quite so stupid as to get sloppy with Photoshop, Tyler Hicks of the venerable New York Times has some questionable work of his own. In this photo, a man appears to be pulling a remarkably un-dusty, possibly dead man from wreckage in Tyre -- note the victim's shorts and his hat, which is conveniently tucked to his side....

Media Bias: Need a little anti-war, anti-Semitic buck-up? Try some Reuters coverage. The British news outlet will be only too happy to oblige. Over the weekend, a Reuters photographer was caught trying to make one of Israel's defensive attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon look much more devastating than it was. The photo was eventually withdrawn and the photographer ostensibly fired. The photo, an image of the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike in Beirut, had apparently been altered to give the effect that the smoke was thicker and the damage worse than it was. The doctored version, credited to Adnan Hajj,...

The Passion of the Toys In Platoon, Oliver Stone said the first casualty of war is innocence. He was wrong. As the photos here show, the first casualties of war are...the symbols of innocence. And photographers from Reuters and the AP just happened upon many of these perfectly placed symbols of war's horrors. Ben Curtis, AP Sharif Karim, Reuters Sharif Karim, Reuters Sharif Karim, Reuters Issam Kobeisi, Reuters Mohamed Azakir, Reuters This last one is the only one that seems...untouched. Feel the pathos. Mourn for these oh-so-photogenic and suspiciously dust-free trinkets of childhood. Just don't ask any questions about their...

On July 28, 2006, a Muslim entered the building of the Seattle Jewish Federation and shot every Jew he saw, murdering one woman and wounding five others. On the same day, Mel Gibson was arrested on DUI charges and while intoxicated let loose with anti-Semitic invective at the Jewish police officer who arrested him. Question: Which story has most troubled the Left? The answer is known to any American who can hear or read. So, the real question is: Why? Why has the shooting and murder of Jews elicited less angst from the Left than the anti-Semitic statements made by...

Reuters reported that 40 people were killed in a Lebanese village by Israeli air strikes. Less than three hours later, the Associated Press reported that the number of casualties had been dropped to one.

Michelle recaps the Hajj/Reuters affair along with great examples of the doctored and staged photos. A must see. Click here to watch the videoA must watch

The War’s Media Fall-Out From the desk of The Brussels Journal on Mon, 2006-08-07 19:16 A quote from Helen Szamuely on EuReferendum, 7 August 2006 (http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/08/what-we-are-up-against.html) What we are dealing with is not one news agency having a rogue photographer and incompetent editors who then try to cover their backs but a canker that has eaten into almost the entire MSM or, at least, its English language parts. There are various reasons here, I think. One is the bias that is no longer seen as bias. The MSM tends to lean to the left and takes up all left-wing causes...

Monday, August 7, 2006REUTERS PULLS ANOTHER FAST ONE Reuters. Let me think ... isn't that the news agency that has refused to call Islamic terrorists what they are ... Islamic terrorists! Yes, by golly, I think they're the ones! And Reuters has also been accused of staging photos at the site of the Israeli bombing of that building in Qana? But Reuters wouldn't do anything like that, would it? Well ... as a matter of fact, they would. Fresh off the accusations that Reuters was staging terrorist casualty photos at Qana, they've been caught monkeying with wire photos again. You...