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Another search through different avenues has failed to turn up AP’s source for more than 60 reports of atrocities and murders: The AP (non-)responds and another search comes up empty.

When Real World and Reel World Collide BY STEPHEN WHITTYSome films make history. More films make it up. "The Last King of Scotland" gives an African dictator a personal physician who has an affair with one of the dictator's wives and escapes during the Entebbe crisis. "The Black Dahlia" solves a 60-year-old murder by putting two ex-boxers on the case and implicating a rich family of real-estate developers. "Hollywoodland" looks into the mysterious death of a TV star by having a determined gumshoe named Louis Simo start looking under rocks. All of these films opened this year. All of them...

A Democrat won the Ohio governorship for the first time since 1986 as Rep. Ted Strickland easily defeated Republican Ken Blackwell in one of 36 races for states' top elected office. With 10 new governors guaranteed to come out of Tuesday's elections, state governments were in for their biggest shake-up in years _ one that had a chance of being even more tumultuous if Democrats managed to reverse years of Republican dominance. Strickland's win in Ohio was based on a statistical analysis of the vote from voter interviews conducted for The Associated Press by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International....

Just announced -- Fox is dumping exist polls after determining that they are biased towards Dems 6-8+ percent. Will use just raw vote totals for rest of election.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 — A liberal gay rights group said Wednesday that one of its employees, acting anonymously, had created the Web site that first published copies of unusually solicitous e-mail messages to teenagers from former Representative Mark Foley, which led to his resignation. A spokesman for the group, the Human Rights Campaign, said it first learned of its employee’s role this week and immediately fired him for misusing the group’s resources. The scandal surrounding Mr. Foley, a Florida Republican, has been a burdensome distraction for members of his party in the month before the midterm elections, and some Republicans...

Pending Hastert's news conference, Fox is reporting that internal Repub polls indicate that the Foley matter is destroying any chance of the Repubs keeping the House, "and maybe the Senate as well." Breaking as we await the Hastert news congerence. Fox reports that the entire country is riveted by this matter and it has "blown away" all other issues for the upcoming mid-terms. I have a hard time believing this manufactured scandal is having this effect, but Fox seems to be shooting straight on this. Perhaps the dealy in the Hastert new conference is due to furious fighting over whether...

Finally, a Republican scandal that may stick Usually when the Republican chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children instant-messages an underage boy and asks him to get out a ruler to measure his... Well. Ahem. Let's just say: Usually when a congressman is involved in a scandal, he doesn't bring the whole party down with him. This time could be different. The Mark Foley affair is so simple and so human, it's like a Cliffs.Notes version of all the other Republican scandals: Rampant corruption. Leadership? Ha. No one cares till the klieg lights get turned on. THE...

Do scandals involving Rep. Foley and others affect your attitude toward all parties? * 2419 responses Yes. I'm fed up with both Republicans and Democrats. Both parties are equally corrupt. 29% In general, the Republican party is the most corrupt. 54% Generally, Democrats are the most corrupt party. 5.8% There are alternatives to both parties- that's why I vote independent! 3.8% Scandals pass... and it's a shame a few bad politicans give Capitol Hill a bad image. 7.4%

OK, Condi: Stop lying about the plans your administration inherited. Or rather, declassify NSPD-9 so everyone can know whether you're telling the truth. Let me explain. Bill Clinton pounced on Chris Wallace on Sunday for implying that he didn't do enough to take out Al Qaeda. In his response, he singled out plans that then-counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and the CIA drew up at the end of the Clinton administration for attacking the jihadis in Afghanistan. Those plans, which the Bush administration inherited, were never acted upon before 9/11, despite Clarke's and CIA Director George Tenet's sense of urgency. Instead,...

One of Virginia's best-known political analysts said he had never personally heard Sen. George Allen use racial epithets, despite saying on television a day earlier that the senator "did use the n-word." Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, said Tuesday in an e-mail to The Associated Press, "I didn't personally hear GFA (Allen's initials) say the n-word. "My conclusion is based on the very credible testimony I have heard for weeks, mainly from people I personally know and knew in the '70s," Sabato wrote. Sabato, a classmate of Allen's at the University of Virginia...

HOLLYWOOD - Hollywood activist George Clooney has launched a scathing attack on the media, accusing journalists and producers of neglecting their responsibilities to their country. The Ocean's Eleven star is a vocal opponent of President George W. Bush--and he believes the media has betrayed the public by not reporting the truth about the Bush administration. And Clooney, who joined Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel last week to address the United Nations Security Council about the problems in Darfur, blames the American public for focusing on reality TV shows instead of real news.

When he sets his jeweler’s eye upon the so-called Swift-boating of the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, for instance, future candidates for office get point-by-point instruction on how to turn a campaign liability into an asset: in this case how someone with no combat experience can successfully run on national security issues against someone who was actually shot on the battlefield. Mr. Rich asserts that the Bush camp, “so brilliant at creating fictional stories for their own man,” managed to “create a fictional biography for Kerry” that offset the stories of his heroism as captain of a Swift boat...

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...

Yesterday evening, I received a call from my column syndicate, Creators Syndicate. The Associated Press had phoned my editor to inform her that it would be sending a response to my column yesterday about detained AP photographer Bilal Hussein. (Funny how quickly they respond now. Where have they been the past five months? Oh, right: Busy covering up the news about Hussein's April 12 capture by the military at a Ramadi apartment with an alleged al Qaeda leader and a weapons cache.) The AP last night asked my editor to supply its corporate communications office with my newspaper client list...

I called Tim Russert to ask if Dick Cheney had washed his hands after their interview on Sunday. "No-o-o," he replied, sounding confused. Any sort of scrubbing, I wondered? Antiseptic wipe, Purell, quick shower on the way out? No, Tim assured me, the vice president did not stop at the basement shower at NBC, or even drop by the men's room you pass on the right as you head out to the parking lot. According to The New York Times' health section on Tuesday, Lady Macbeth and Pontius Pilate were not alone in wanting that "damned spot" out. "People who...

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...

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...

According to Zogby's latest poll of likely voters, 34 percent tend to vote Republican, 37 percent tend to vote Democrat and 23 percent are "not sure". Considering the 3.1 margin of error, and if some of the "non-sure" voters turn right, the Republicans are in good position of staying in Control of Capital Hill. (If the positive trend in the polls continues, the Republican "will" stay in control of Washington after November).

Here's an email we received yesterday morning at 10:26 am: Hey guys, Even though I'm a big fat liberal, I've been a big fan of your site since it first launched, and I visit it every day. It's a terrific resource.However, I do have a criticism regarding the way you posted yesterday's (9/15) AP Piece "Polls Shows GOP Not Making Its Case". That's the way the AP titled it, at least. You guys decided to title it on your site "GOP Gains Ground In Battle For Congress".I understand that there may have been some data in their polling that made...