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The Associated Press is at it again. This time engaging in media distortion concerning Benjamin Netanyahu and those supporting him for Prime Minister. Netanyahu is described as "hawkish". And those supporting him as "opposed to peacemaking". That is flat-out media distortion. There is no Israeli leader that does not want peace. By contrast Tzipy Livni and Kadima are described as "centrist" and "moderate". Webster defines moderate as "within reasonable limits." Engaging in appeasement policies with those who seek your destruction is not "reasonable", or "moderate", if that word is prefered. The AP and MSM have it backwards. Netanyahu, Likud, National...

Top nations 'water down' IMF reports, says regulator By Jennifer Hughes in London and Alan Beattie in,Washington Published: February 10 2009 02:00 | Last updated: February 10 2009 02:00 Warnings from the International Monetary Fund about the risks posed by the financial system had often been "watered down", according to the head of the UK's Financial Services Authority. Powerful countries will have to avoid quashing reports they do not like if they are serious about creating a better early warning system for the global economy, said Lord Turner, chairman of the -regulator. "One of the problems the IMF has had...

Its from the Marx Brother’s movie Duck Soup. This is one of the great classic scenes in entertainment history and I believe that it is so memorable because it says something universal and scathing about mirrors, human behavior and illusion. The pas de deux between Groucho and Harpo starts out looking like an earnest attempt by Chico to imitate Groucho’s actions exactly- as if to fool him into thinking that he is really looking into a mirror instead of at a spy who is on a mission against him. Now, this scenario has been imitated by other pairs of actors...

"I think it's important for the American people to understand we're not going to drill our way out of this problem. It's also important to recognize if you start drilling now you won't see a drop of oil for ten years, which means it's not going to have a significant impact on short-term prices." - U.S. Senator Barack Obama, Aug. 8, 2008 If Senator Obama - as well as every other leading Democrat who's uttered some variation of the above - merely wanted to remind the American people that there are no easy answers to the ongoing energy crisis, I'd...

DALLAS - American Airlines says its new $15 fee for a first checked bag will affect fewer than one in four customers this summer and won't lengthen lines at boarding gates. The carrier said Thursday that it's taking steps, from curbside check-in to the aircraft cabins, to avoid disruptions from the new policy. American last month was the first major airline to announce it would charge customers to check a single piece of luggage. The fee takes effect on tickets bought on or after June 15. American said three-quarters of summer travelers had already bought their tickets and wouldn't pay...

They just can't get it right. Yesterday on ABC News' Political Radar, senior political reporter Rick Klein wrote of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards calling conservative author Ann Coulter a "she-devil." Part of the background Klein provided: In June, Coulter went on ABC's "Good Morning America" and said she had learned her lesson after being blasted for suggesting in a joke before the Conservative Political Action Conference that Edwards was a "faggot." "If I'm gonna say anything about John Edwards in the future, I'll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot," Coulter said. As Noel Sheppard...

The newsroom is a sacred, magical place where unhinged partisanship never intrudes into actual reportage. Except when it does. The actual reference occurs on page three of the article: After comparing the current war against extremists with the militarists of Japan and the communists in Korea and Vietnam in Wednesday's speech, he plans to discuss the war in Iraq in the context of its implications for the broader Middle East in a speech next Tuesday at the annual American Legion convention in Reno, Nev.

Major U.S. Newsweekly Offers Sanitized Version of Racist Margaret Sanger Entirely omits racist motivation behind vehement commitment to birth control, abortion, sterilization By Elizabeth O'Brien WASHINGTON, DC, August 7, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The third largest U.S. newsweekly published a highly skewed historical account of Margaret Sanger, entirely omitting the racist motivation behind her vehement commitment to birth control, abortion and sterilization. U.S.News & World Report, a rival of Time magazine and Newsweek, published an article on Sunday entitled, "The Passions Behind the Pill, helping women in poverty is what drove the development of the oral contraceptive." The story makes no hint...

A lot of people are atwitter over this addition to the Thompson advisory team of former Senator Spencer Abraham. But, it is starting to look to me like a story incorrectly reported by the MSM and rolling off track from there. It just seems that there are too many conflicting reports on Abraham's role with the AP reporting that he is a new "campaign manager" but others saying Randy Enwright is. The website IsraelToday, for instance, has posted a story full of alarm over the addition of Spence to the team. Their reaction is similar to many Israel supporters here...

BBC in more trouble over edited pieces By Patrick Phelvin , Sunday Telegraph Last Updated: 5:14pm BST 15/07/2007 The BBC was involved in a fresh row about doctored footage yesterday after it admitted mixing up the chronology of a documentary about Gordon Brown. Just days before Director General Mark Thompson is hauled before the BBC Trust to explain the royal fiasco, it emerged that the sequence of a Newsnight film had also been altered. The Treasury has complained to the corporation that the 12-minute piece, on attempts by documentary-maker Jamie Campbell to secure an interview with Brown during the leadership...

BBC in row over doctored TV footage with Gordon BrownBy SIMON WALTERS - More by this author » Last updated at 23:28pm on 14th July 2007  The BBC was at the centre of a new row over doctored TV footage after it admitted that its flagship Newsnight programme changed the sequence of events in a film highly critical of Gordon Brown. Mr Brown's officials have complained to the Corporation about an 'unfair, unbalanced, unnecessarily personal, and disingenuous' film which they claim was altered in an attempt to make him look like a thug. Newsnight editor Peter Barron has admitted...

The papers this morning were full of the revelation in a BBC documentary that the Queen had had a hissy fit and stormed out of a photo-shoot with the photographer Annie Leibowitz. As the Times reported: The Queen offered a rare, public display of displeasure when she sat for Leibovitz, who is famed for her Vanity Fair photographs of stars such as a pregnant Demi Moore in the nude. A camera crew was invited to film the encounter for a fly-on-the-wall BBC One series, A Year with the Queen, made by the production company behind Wife Swap. The portrait was...

BBC apologises over Queen clips A still from the five-part programme Controller apology The BBC has apologised to the Queen for mistakenly showing footage that wrongly implied she walked out of a portrait session during a documentary. The programme trailer showed the Queen in an exchange with photographer Annie Leibovitz, followed by a clip of her apparently walking off. The footage, revealed to the press on Wednesday, was not intended to be seen and was shown in error, the BBC said. The documentary, A Year With The Queen, will be shown later this year. "The BBC would like to...

In the days following the death of David Halberstam on April 23, praise of his journalism appeared in just about every major newspaper and magazine in America. Adhering to the principle of de mortuis, I did not interrupt the paeans with remarks about Halberstam’s gross misdeeds in Vietnam, which I had exposed in a book last year. But now that the funeral period has ended, the media has made clear that Halberstam’s elevation to the status of national hero is intended to be permanent, so in the interest of national history it has become necessary to point out how much...

After three years of tax-exempt operation, Media Matters’ credibility as a media watchdog is questionable. Its leader, Brock, is a self-proclaimed liar who strong-armed sources that didn’t agree with him. While writing his mea culpa, “Blinded by the Right,” Brock was hospitalized in a mental facility where he spent time in a “quiet room” and “had delusions, he thought people were trying to kill him,” according to the Drudge Report. Media Matters stars, including Brock, Eric Alterman and Ryan Chiachiere, are hypocrites who have used the very sexist, bigoted and racist language for which they crucify others, including Imus. They...

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

George Will's column has taught me several new rhetorical tricks. The first is how to use verbs to distort and impugn. In a column last week about my book Building Red America, Will wrote (emphases mine): "The GOP," Edsall laments, 'has achieved a gradual erosion of the popular consensus behind the major progressive and social-egalitarian movements of the twentieth century." This artful sentence labels me as a mindless, knee-jerk liberal. In fact, I argue that the left has not come to terms with the fact of eroding support for the liberal agenda. That may or may not be lamentable, but...

Parties to Tackle China¡¯s Distortion of History By Lee Jin-woo Floor leaders of the governing and opposition parties yesterday agreed to cooperate to address China's distortion of history. The five parties also decided to fully support a resolution unanimously proposed by a National Assembly panel on Thursday. In the resolution, members of the Unification, Foreign Affairs and Trade Committee denounced China for intentionally distorting ancient Korean history. They said the controversial research results of the state-funded Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) are not purely a scholastic product, but the Chinese government's intention to claim ancient Korean kingdoms originated in...

How to get back at China South Korean protesters tear a Chinese flag in front of the Chinese embassy in Seoul September 7, 2006. China published books and articles recently which claim that Korea's Koguryo Kingdom (37 B.C. - 668 A.D.) and Palhae (698-926), which had occupied today's northern part of the Korean peninsula and the northeastern region of China, were part of China's ancient territory. South Korean Vice Foreign Minister Lee Kyu-hyung said on Wednesday that South Korea would take diplomatic steps to cope with China's attempts to distort Korea's history, local media reported. The flag reads,'Stop distortion of...

The central piece of evidence leading to this conclusion is the fact, mentioned by IDF officials from the very beginning, that the building collapsed a full seven hours after the Israel Air Force bombing. Why, then, would the residents inside not have been evacuated in the meantime? As Brig.-Gen. Amir Eshel of the Israeli Air Force told reporters Sunday night, "It is difficult for me to believe that they waited eight hours to evacuate it." Without additional evidence, Eshel merely left open the possibility that Hizbullah terrorists, or explosives they left behind, caused the explosion. "Indeed," writes Robert Spencer for...