Something worth cheering over

The media industry slashed 17,809 jobs last year, a nearly two-fold increase from the 9,453 cuts in 2005. The New York Times Co. and Time Inc., have already laid off 2,000 employees in 2007.

The hate-America first crowd at our media certainly deserve unemployment.

If it's Florida, it's suspect

This news item from the Palm Beach Post is curious.

BRIEFLY
The U.S. Treasury Department rejected the World Trade Center Palm Beach's plan for a humanitarian, educational and information-exchange trip to Cuba in June, The Miami Herald reported. The WTC Palm Beach, a not-for-profit trade group affiliated with 278 similar organizations around the world, unveiled plans to take about 30 South Florida professionals to the island nation last month. The Palm Beach group said it wanted to discuss ideas and technology related to food, water and medicine with nongovernmental agencies and private citizens in Cuba. It said the delegation didn't intend to conduct business or meet with government officials. The group was coordinating the mission with its counterpart, the World Trade Center Havana.

Which lead to this story about the founder of the trade group with the charity-sounding name. He's running for mayor.

The Miami Herald story here.

Call it Justice

McClatchy newspapers looked at 'Rational standard' missing in capital punishment cases. And this is the best they can do.

Was he guilty? Beyond doubt. But his path to the death chamber was cleared by 11 judges who watered down a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings that require lawyers to defend their clients' lives vigorously.

Vinson's attorneys had never looked into the iron-pipe beatings their client took from his mother, or how his drunken grandfather liked to wake him with a flurry of fists, or how his debilitating childhood seizures probably signaled that he had brain damage.

Do you suppose the ex-girlfriend who was killed and sexually mutilated should be denied the same justice as someone else because her killer had a sordid background?

It was a gruesome murder. And the bleeding hearts who want to abolish the death penalty proclaim, "But execution is neither a solution to violence nor a comfort to mourners. It is part of the problem and increases the cycle of violence." They don't know. They dont' speak for the families. They don't speak for the victims. And they are absolutely wrong that capital punishment increases the cycle of violence. It ends it.

For one.

The writer also asks us to have sympathy for a murderer who "wasn't toilet-trained until he was 10" yet was able to strangle and murder a retired school teacher.

The courts are doing their jobs - upholding the law. The left-of-Lenin newspapers would have it otherwise.

Wal-Mart wins big

Remember when Maryland passed a law in 2006 forcing Wal-Mart -- but only Wal-Mart -- to spend more on employee health care? The healthcare socialists cheered and the badly-managed state figured that they could shift some of their medicaid burden to a corporation loathed by Democrats. (Because Wal-Mart isn't unionized.)

Not gonna happen. A second court found that the Maryland’s "fair-share health care rule" violated federal labor laws, the concept that states can compel companies to offer more generous health care is suddenly in doubt, experts said.

By a 2-to-1 ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Baltimore found that the Maryland requirement — which affected only Wal-Mart — violated a 32-year-old federal labor law known by its shorthand, Erisa.

The law, known to regulators as the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, was intended to allow big companies to set up uniform health benefits across the country, rather than navigate state-by-state requirements.

Guess whose brilliant idea it was in the first place??

“State level health care reform is still possible, but it’s not going to be the Maryland model,” said Naomi Walker, the director of state legislative programs at the A.F.L - C.I.O. which lobbied for the Maryland law. “We have to go back to the drawing board.”

No. Just back to following the law.

This is how the union thugs tried to screw Wal-Mart. "Specifically, the Maryland law forced corporations with 10,000 or more workers to spend 8 percent of their payrolls on health insurance, or pay the difference into a state fund. Four companies in the state have more than 10,000 workers, but only Wal-Mart met all the criteria." Soo prize! Soo prize!

There's always something so Soviet style about union tactics, isn't there?

Our Dutch Monitors

VNU is changing its name to Nielsen Company "to capitalize on its largest brand." Better known as our television rating service among others.

According to the New York Times, VNU, based in the Netherlands, was founded more than 40 years ago through the merger of two Dutch publishing companies. It was taken private last year after six private equity firms acquired it in a leveraged buyout for $9.85 billion.
It also owns specialty magazines, including Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter.

They forgot Adweek and Editor & Publisher.

And you wondered why television, movies, and our MSM don't seem to reflect our values so much as the anti-Christian, anti-American, secular values so dear to Europeans.

The sopranos they ain't; they're crooks

Only in south New Jersey. The headline is "Political boss enters prison" and it starts out like this.

Five minutes before noon Tuesday, former Democrat Party power broker John A. Lynch Jr. said goodbye to a friend who drove him to the Federal Correction Institute in Loretto, Pa., and became federal inmate 28068-050.

"You're a nobody. You're just a number. You just went from the limelight to the shadows," said Gerald J. Luongo, a former mayor and South Jersey assemblyman who recalled making that walk himself when he entered a federal prison camp in Florida in 2002.

Lynch was is the former mayor of New Brunswick, president of the New Jersey State Senate and Middlesex County party boss.

Just google -- New Jersey mayor sentenced -- for a few of the Garden State's finest. An overview of 2004 written at the end of the year by the Star-Ledger had this startling fact, "2004 was remarkable for how much time and how many resources were spent chasing dishonest officials.
Assembling this list of corruption-related events - raids, indictments, sentencings, resignations, etc. - reveals an average of one corrupt act playing out on the public stage every three days. "

Biggie of the Day

A biggie you might have missed.

Chris Dodd announced he will run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, saying problems at home and abroad meant it was time for him to "get out of the bleachers and onto the arena floor."

Announced on Imus in the Morning show. I don't know if Imus asked Dodd about his real prospects of actually being elected. If that's the purpose.

His role as chairman of the Banking Committee — which oversees the nation's banking, financial services and insurance industries — creates new fundraising opportunities, a potential boost for a long-shot prospect like Dodd who must prove he can raise the tens of million of dollars needed to stay competitive in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Imus said he planned to vote for Obama, to Dodd's dismay.

"Now wait a minute, wait a minute," Dodd interjected. "I come on the program, I blow everybody else off, I announce here — at least leave the door open a little bit for me here. ... And I'm your pal — 14 years — you can't just walk away from me. You leave that door open a little bit."

Talk about a farce.

Our Peter Pan Press

Headline on an AP story from Editor & Publisher: "Whoops, They Did It Again: 'NYT' Reporter Describes Video of Another Grisly Execution in Iraq"

Whoops??? Like, in we're dancing in the aisles over the grisly execution video leaks? Yes, that's Editor & Publisher, the self-described America's Oldest Journal Covering the Newspaper Industry.

Greg Mitchell actually finding something morally repugnant besides war????!!!! To be fair, he doesn't claim repugnance. He reserves that for President Bush. And morality is something his spell checker makes sure he never uses in case he might be asked to explain his standards. But at least now we know why he's such a screwball. It's that goosing from high school.

Airbus

If you doubt socialism is an economic disaster, you only have to follow the Airbus saga. Today, finally, EADS is ending production of its A320 at a French factory and moving the operations to Hamburg. After how many years?

The only reason part of the A320 was in Toulouse in the first place is because it is the headquarters of the company and as a sop to the French unions.

Disappointed

Tommy Lee Jones would never do that. I'm kinda disappointed that he was hired in the first place.

The Marcellos gave a hint about who their source was when they described "the baby-sitter" of Calabrese as the son of a corrupt Chicago policeman convicted of bribery in a celebrated case. That description only fit Ambrose.

Damn.

Media Race Card

Philadelphia Weekly is playing the race card in reporting the layoffs at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Deepening the wound at a paper already struggling for readers, advertising dollars and some kind of identity, the layoffs represent a major step backward for diversity.

Of those laid off, 16 employees—or 22.5 percent—are black.

“It’s a very unfortunate situation,” says Inquirer reporter Vernon Clark, who’s been at the paper for 20 years, and last week helped many of his colleagues carry boxes to their cars. “It’s devastating to see 16 African-Americans walk out the door when we’ve struggled so hard over the years to increase the number of minorities here. Those efforts have been wiped out in a day.”

It's predictable that when media layoffs occur for journalists to claim it is because of a A) greedy bastard parent company is B) obsessed with profits and C) could care less about quality.

The accusation was most often made against Knight-Ridder before it bombed was sold. This, despite of the fact that Knight-Ridder Foundation invented the diversity index for newsrooms, substituing numbers for quality or even qualifications.

The only minority representation at Knight-Ridder papers was conservative opinion. The newspaper chain was so unprofitable that only one bidder - McClatchy stepped up to buy it. The Philadelphia Inquirer was among 12 newpapers McClatchy sold almost immediately. The new owners are said to be exploring the sale of the 82-year-old landmark that houses The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News.

Playing the race card is hardly likely to elicit the sympathy journalists seem to expect. But, that's all right. They write enought sob stories about themselves to fill Romensko's blog for days on end. And these two papers in particular played that same card for over thirty years which is why the The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News had to be sold in the first place.

And the second time.

It's a game no one is interested in anymore.

Duke, no-case

I wasn't going to write another word about the Duke Rape case, but an article in the Huffington Post grabbed me.

Not for clear-headed thinking but for the laughs. It's got all the elements of a blog piece with none of the originality. When you spell 'academic' wrong, it's a clue. The funniest part is the blatant attempt to posthumously award Ed Bradley with credit -- three months later -- for the charges being dropped. He got his own paragraph in case you missed the emphasis.

Lafsky is what I did too, when I read the article. Out loud.

EU oil supplies threatened

The Times of London reports that Russians have turned off Europe's oil supply in a bitter dispute with Belarus. The scale of the problem can be seen in the volume of oil that will be affected.

"More than 1.2 million barrels of oil a day flow from Russia through the Druzhba, or Friendship, pipeline, providing almost a quarter of Germany’s needs and 96 per cent of Poland’s imports, as well as supplies to Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic."

It's tempting to say "welcome to European socialism" where ineptness and criminality are on every side of the coin. Or tell them that looking on the bright side, with global warming they won't need a lot of Russian oil. The fact is that it's a problem that the EU can't resolve. They've made themselves economic satellites of Russia.

You'd think Germany would get a break since Gerhard Schröder, Merkels' chubby predecessor, is on the board of a German-Russian consortium constructing a gas pipeline linking Russian gasfields with Western Europe.

There's a gap, however, between the dream and reality. The pipeline won't be complete until 2010, however, and if it pursued in the same manner as every other socialist project, it'll be delayed 3 years, cost $90 billion more than predicted, and the cost overruns on bribes alone will set the citizens of the EU back another $100 billion or so.

I wish i could say I feel sorry for them. They had years of under-the-table deals with Iraq for cheap oil that meant bribes and lucrative construction contracts, but Russia isn't going to play the kinds of games with them they had going with Saddam.

It's payback time. Russia wants to buy into EU markets and not as a consumer, which explains the oblique reference to "persistent speculation that Gazprom, the Kremlin-controlled gas group, will seek to buy Centrica, the British Gas group, which has 16 million gas and electricity customers in the UK." The not-so-oblique answer is, yes, if they want oil this winter.

BARF ALERT - career of public service

Former House speaker Thomas M. Finneran reinforces the public image of politicians as crooks who exempt themselves from the laws they write.

He was sentenced to an astonishingly inadequate 18 months unsupervised probation for lying under oath in a civil case. The plea agreement dropped three perjury charges in exchange for a guilty plea to obstruction of justice.

US District Judge Richard G. Stearns also ordered him to pay a $25,000 fine, saying he had considered "the lack of any evil motive" by Finneran, his distinguished career of public service, and his exemplary private life. (As evidence of how much that hurt, Finnegan left the court and then returned an hour later because he'd forgotten to pay his fine and wanted to write a $25,000 check immediately to resolve the case.)

All of which is total bullshirt. Had we lied under oath even with a high priced attorney claiming we were having a bad day and had an attitude, we'd be holding up little cards with numbers in front of our chest and trying not to squint for the cameras.

But in Boston, the New York Times-owned Boston Globe quotes the creep as if he was Dan Rostenkowski.

"If I could erase that lapse in judgment, I would do so in a moment," Finneran, told reporters as he left the federal courthouse after being sentenced to 18 months of unsupervised probation. "But I cannot undo it, and the wound I have inflicted on myself will be with me and will hurt for the rest of my life."

Even the U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the case banally noted that he hoped it sent a powerful message to all those public officials and private citizens to be faithful to your oath."

No wonder people don't vote and Democrats want to take away our guns.

Where's Jamil? (Continued)

Look who's asking the question now. None other than, the Columbia Journalism Review. Paul McCleary, writing in CJR, is asking the Associated Press to "Produce the Phantom Iraqi Source." It's significant that "phantom" isn't even in quotes in the headline.

McCleary credits Editor & Publisher's Strupp for challenging the AP. However, what set E&P thinking (at long last) was Easton Jordan's questioning of AP after his independent investigation.

McCleary, however, thinks it's time to fess up.

Either the captain exists, or he does not, or the name is a pseudonym for someone who fears for his safety -- a very real possibility in chaotic Baghdad. But whatever the truth is, the AP is hurting itself every day it refuses to acknowledge its critics. It's time to present its case, for better or worse.

And the fact that I found the link to the CJR story was through Romenesko's blog at Poynter is telling.

Update: I know I feel better now that the AP has written a definitive story on Capt. Jamil Hussein. The AP interviewed the Interior Minister who previously denied Jamil existed. You see, Jamil could be arrested for talking to the media, the AP says, despite the fact that they claim Jamil has been a source since 2004.

And now they think they can sign their own excuse cards? I DON'T THINK SO!!

Update; So now bloggers are responsible for endangering the life of Jamil Hussein despite the inconvenient fact that Jamil Hussein was a named source for over 60 AP stories. That isn't going to wash either.

Gerald Ford, RIP

I missed Gerald Ford's funeral. But, then, I missed his entire presidency. Leaving the snarky obituary to Christopher Hitchens, my complaint about Gerald Ford is that even in the timing of his death he did absolutely nothing for the Republican party. He's a man who was nearly assassinated three times and, amazingly, evoked no sympathy whatsoever. He was a staple entertainment on Saturday Night Live and he more or less let that define his presidency. He avoided public controversy after his presidency, unlike Jimmy Carter, but, then, Ford was the only president who wasn't elected. But what I really resented in the man was that he represented the "A minority FOREVER!" faction of the party, happy I guess just to be employed and have great benefits.

He may have been liked by his colleagues. I don't know, but it is said that Ronald Reagan never invited him to a single White House function. I trust Reagan had his reasons.

Another reason I didn't like Ford.
And yet another reason. Doubled.