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The Guardian's Sound of Silence Posted by Marc Landers on October 3, 2006 - 13:13. Remember when the AP ran the bogus story about the Crowd booing when President Bush annonunced that Bill Clinton was ill? There was no booing and the report created a firestorm in the blogsphere. Faced with an onslaught from bloggers, the AP was forced to retract the story. The Guardian's Jonathan Freeland was caught in the reverse when he claimed there was no applause in response to this statement by PM Blair at the Labor Party conference: "So when Blair said that a withdrawal from...

Keith Olbermann ended Monday's Countdown with his latest “Special Comment” rant, complete with video from a man on a rack in the movie 1984 as Olbermann described President's Bush's supposedly awful deeds. In praising how, in his interview aired on Fox News Sunday, “Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done in five years. He has spoken the truth about 9/11, and the current presidential administration,” Olbermann portrayed Chris Wallace, who conducted the interview, as an agent of the White House and delivered the lowest of insults, calling Wallace “a monkey posing as a newscaster.” On Bush, Olbermann...

Classic letter to the Editor below

In Arabic it says: ""The massacre of children in Qana 2, is the gift of Rice. The clever bombs..Stupid," Banner appeard in downtown Beirut. Fifty-two people were killed, many of them sleeping children, when Israeli warplanes blitzed the Lebanese village of Qana, triggering global outrage and warnings of retribution for a "war crime" as a ceasefire appeared more remote than ever.(AFP/Ramzi Haidar)

Three Billionaires Bidding for LA Times Three billionaires, including Hollywood mogul David Geffen, have expressed interest in buying the Los Angeles Times, but have been rebuffed for the time being by its owner, Tribune Co., the paper reported. Geffen, property developer Eli Broad and supermarket investor Ron Burkle each wrote to the board of directors of the Chicago-based firm, which is under pressure from shareholders to boost its flagging share price, the paper said in its Saturday edition. The report, citing unidentified sources, said Tribune's directors considered the three letters at a July 19 board meeting. Tribune Chairman and Chief...

Oh, what a difference a day -- and a recount -- makes. Mexican and international press is reporting that the official recount has put PRD candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador in the lead over opponent Felipe Calderón, who had just a day ago seemed to be the victor in this race, full of all the twists and turns of a telenovela. According to Spain's El País, reporting a little over an hour ago: The recount of the 42.79% of the votes from the Mexican presidential elections of last Sunday yields a 2.62% lead to leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador,...

I'm a big fan of Rumsfeld and Cheney, but I have to tell you if Rumsfeld did ok this it's a serious lapse of judgement. I'm sure he didn't give the NY Times permission to tell everyone where his secret camera(s) are, but still it's not very smart on his part in my opinion.

Jury convicts ex-Bush official in Abramoff probe By PETE YOST Associated Press WASHINGTON — A jury found former Bush administration official David Safavian guilty today of covering up his dealings with Republican influence-peddler Jack Abramoff.

N.Y. Times Publisher Apologizes for Boomers New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. told a college graduating class that he was ”sorry” for his generation’s failure to achieve the goals it had set back when he was a college student. "When I graduated in 1974, my fellow students and I ended the Vietnam War and ousted President Nixon,” he told about 900 graduates of the State University of New York at New Paltz on Sunday. "Okay, that’s not quite true. Maybe there were larger forces at play. "Either way, we entered the real world committed to making it a better,...

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe. You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world. Fools. The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily.

Just a reminder, today is United Nations Day. For those in New York, make sure to go your foreign dignitaries a very special "New York Hello" today to these "people".

For years, airlines controlled what passengers saw on their cabin screens, editing out scenes of graphic violence or sex, and banning movies altogether if they showed airline crashes. But now, with three U.S. airlines offering live television feeds and on-board Internet access expected to be available within a year, passengers can see anything they want -- even news coverage of an event in which they might be taking part. After the drama aboard JetBlue Flight 292 unfolded live on television Wednesday, executives of Denver-based Frontier Airlines, which like JetBlue shows DirectTV on its flights, began to rethink their policy of...

When Rita strikes I expect that the local and state response will be MUCH better than Katrina. I also expect the same for the Feds. My guess is also that if things go rather well, the attacks will be loud as ever that Bush "saved his own state" and that Texas isn't poor like Louisiana, etc. In fact, I would wager the memos have already been typed up and they have simply left the dates off them and the actual cities that are struck until this weekend when they release them to the press. It's sad, but why do we...

I'm just curious. I know they can be impeached, but are they protected by the decisions they make as executives from criminal prosecution for example in negligence, etc? Are there any cases you are aware of?

Fact and Fiction in Hurricane Katrina Blame GameThe Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader have announced a joint bipartisan committee made up of senior members that will be tasked with reviewing, at all levels of government, the immediate preparation and recovery from Hurricane Katrina. One of the problems to be explored is whether local officials failed to utilize every means necessary to evacuate the city of New Orleans as expeditiously as possible, including using hundreds of parked school buses and other mass transit vehicles which could have been used to help evacuate the city. There are two sides to every...

I am a participant in Zogby's interactive polls and have been for over a year. I'm not a Republican, but registered independent. I defintely tilt to the right, but have a mix of libertarian philosophy and conservative philosophy. At any rate, the Zogby poll results that were released today caught me off guard. I get a poll survey from him every couple of weeks and always fill it out. For this, I did not receive any. I emailed him and asked him why I wasn't included and half heartedly joked was it because I voted for Bush. Here was his...

I've been reading some left leaning sites the last few days just to see what is going on. I know some of you here do the same. It's sad, it's pathetic. They actually believe what they are saying. I was on CrooksandLiars this morning and the amount of "tolerance" and hatred spewing forth is unimaginable. We need to get rid of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and start the SLR...the Strategic Litheum Reserve.

Anybody know what the vote was on Mike Brown's confirmation via the Senate? I've been trying to find this out. I think this guy will be the fall guy but that's not really why I'm asking. A lot of my liberal "colleagues" are screaming about cronyism and my guess is that this guy was confirmed by the entire Senate or damn close. Can't seem to find the information, however.

Randy and Ronnell Vorick thought La Habra was about as far away as one could get from terrorism. They were wrong. For the last 2 1/2 weeks, the lives of the couple and their three children have been plunged into an unsettling routine of drivers shouting profanities, stopping to photograph their house and — most recently — spray-painting a slogan on their property. ADVERTISEMENT Their house, a suburban fixer-upper the Voricks bought three years ago, was wrongly identified in a cable news broadcast as the home of a terrorist. "I'm scared to go to work and leave my kids home....

KRUGMAN TRIES TO PULL A FAST ONE [John Podhoretz] Paul krugman tells a whopper today in his column about media recounts in the 2000 election: "Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore." Um--no. Wrong. Bzzzzz. One of those groups was led by USA Today, and here's what they found in a May 15, 2001 USA Today story headlined "Newspapers recount show Bush prevailed": "George W. Bush would have won a hand count of Florida's disputed ballots if the standard advocated by Al Gore had...