CNN pulled this video from its site after complaints started circulating that the video was clearly faked. I especially liked this part:

Voiceover: "Mahmoud and his 14 year old cousin Ahmed were allowed to play on the roof.... Now they are both dead."

Mashharawi: "The Israeli plane targeted them with a small rocket just for them, just for them, and killed both of them."

Wow! Those evil Israelis built a special rocket just to kill little boys! The roof of course, is curiously undamaged by this special child-killer rocket.

Watch the guy allegedly pumping the child's chest, trying to revive him--his hands don't actually make contact with the figure's chest.

Dirty dead baby with curiously clean soother--Qana "massacre"-->

We have of course seen plenty of this kind of staging before. There were deep suspicions that the Qana massacre (where Israelis destroyed a rocket launch site that was in a building full of allegedly disabled people) was a set-up; the bodies brought in with a refrigerated hearse, distributed and then the media invited in to "record" the atrocity.

For CNN, this is a disturbing echo of the Killian memo scandal for CBS--another case of finding evidence to suit preconceived notions--an attitude tailor-made for fraud.

UPDATE: Will CNN disavow or double-down?

Agence France Presse submits a small piece about Obama's reluctance to surrender his Blackberry after he assumes office. A perfectly legitimate, although innocuous story, but when you get to the middle, you read this.

But Obama, who succeeds the unpopular George W. Bush on Tuesday, said the phone was a valuable part of a wider strategy to escape the White House fishbowl.

These guys just can't help themselves. They'd find a way to shoe-horn in a dig at Bush on a call to Grandma.

Pathetic little creatures.

VDH on the Obama winning formula--which can't be complete without our idiotarians of the year, the MSM:

...we have no media anymore, only a group of rather elite socializers who believe they play a key role in ensuring social justice by their enlightened ethical commentary. A successful journalist in DC or New York is instead a social position, analogous to the thousands who lived in 18th-century Versailles, and occasionally were invited to dine with Louis himself.

... MSM, Gaza-style.

I can't ever remember agreeing with anything Glenn Greenwald has written ever before, but as strange as it is for a guy best known for creating comment avatars to flatter himself on other people's blogs (sock puppets), he's dead on about the professional ethics of Washington journalists.

David Gregory explicitly and proudly defends the role of the press in the Bush era generally, and the role the press played in the run-up to the Iraq War specifically, and then gets elevated to one of the most visible and prominent positions at NBC News. That's obviously not a coincidence. Rather obviously, that's the kind of "journalist" which NBC wants -- the kind that respectfully refrains from scrutinizing and pointing out official state lies because to do so is "not their role," thereby ensuring that NBC and its various corporate appendages maintain good relations with high government officials, a vital goal for them for countless reasons.

This is true as far as it goes, but as usual with left-wing harangues I deign to read--they miss the larger point. Deliberately or not I cannot say.

The ceiling of the Draper temple celestial room, a room representing the celestial kingdom, a metaphor for the highest moral law. Mormon temples and everything that goes on in them, is highly symbolic, including the elements of architecture-->

I seen an episode of Big Love--one episode. Apparently that one more than most people. With an average viewership of 1.9 million per episode, Big Love is the equivalent of foreign films for cable.

HBO has nevertheless renewed the series for a fourth season, and reflecting the liberal anger at getting their butts kicked on Prop 8, the show is incorporating distorted portrayals of mainstream Mormons. Where lack of talent and imagination failed, perhaps controversy can succeed.

This Sunday's show purports to show aspects of the Mormon temple ceremony. Ooooh. Inside scoop on all the secret Mormon stuff. I bet you want to watch it now, don't you?

Of course you could always come to Salt Lake City and tour the Mormon Temple recently completed in Draper. Its been open to the public for eight weeks and has had over a million visitors processed by 32,000 Mormon volunteers. My father-in-law loved it. They even feed you snacks afterwards. Yeah, not quite as salacious and sensational as Tom Hanks and his fellow liberal bigots would have you believe.

Whether Hanks etal manage to boost ratings and ridicule Mormons is an open question, but he has insulted a few million of them. No matter though, Mormons are unlikely to cut off his head, well, at least I hope that's true...

I'm doing more blogging today than I've done in a week. I hope this makes somebody happy.

This I couldn't resist though.

CNN's Jeffrey Toobin reportedly "crossed the line" with Casey Greenfield, daughter of a CBS reporter. Columnists Rush & Molloy don't give details, but one can speculate from what they omit: Greenfield is pregnant.

Toobin, 13 years Greenfield's senior, is still married (with children) to Amy McIntosh.

Casey Greenfield is CBS political commentator, Jeff Greenfield's daughter.

Apparently, being a liberal means compassion in the abstract--for people you'll never meet, in fact people you pay security never to meet. Everybody close to you can expect betrayal. Casey Greenfield is a working attorney who went to the finest schools. Did she get inadequate sex education? Unclear on how to use a condom? Nobody told her that breaking up the marriage of a married man is scum-of-the-earth behavior?

Jeffrey Toobin is just, well pathetic. Its a mystery to me how such smart people (Toobin graduated twice Magna Cum Laude) can be so incredibly foolish. At least Mrs. Toobin won't have to stand besides her man at a press conference.

No political affiliation has a monopoly on virtue, but they do tend to pick similar vices.

'Birther' is the name given to someone who wants Presidential candidates to show that they are 'natural born citizens' as required under the Constitution. The name is meant to carry the connotation of 'Truther', someone who understands that the Truth about 9/11 is that Bush and Cheney bombed the Pentagon. In the same way "Climate Change Denier" carries a bad smell across from "Holocaust Denier."

Conservative opinion formers like NRO, Powerline, John Hawkins have reflexively dissociated themselves from the audacious idea that Obama is not a natural born citizen, but the tenor of rational commentary by the readers of these articles is that something smells bad. Perhaps the readers feel less peer pressure on this charged subject.

Now the esteemed Andrew McCarthy has revised his stance in a must-read article, "Suborned in the USA." The point of McCarthy's article is that Obama is acting like he's ineligible.

He is shown to have lied materially in his autobiography and to have produced a certification of live birth which means nothing.

He is asked to permit Hawaii to release a routine document often required for business throughout US life in order to show that he is a legitimate President under the Constitution - the certificate of live birth.

In McCain's case there was full discovery and Congressional hearings.

He spends serious money to avoid doing that and to avoid producing other elementary primary biographical documents. It seems he's covering something up, tho not necessarily his place of birth.

There's an anxiety to corral the issue as a tin-foil hat or racist fantasy - ie to make it unrespectable to require that the President show his birth certificate. Bill Maher in the LA Times:

it's so important that we the few, the proud, the reality-based attack this stuff before it has a chance to fester and spread. This isn't a case of Democrats versus Republicans. It's sentient beings versus the lizard people, and it is to them I offer this deal: I'll show you Obama's birth certificate when you show me Sarah Palin's high school diploma.

For this purpose it doesn't matter what Obama's politics are and I'd say the same were it Romney or Palin or Ron Paul. There's an incipient move in Congress to require this elementary qualifying documentation for future candidates. This matters for the 2012 election as well as the deeper Constitutional principle.

Hope, change, race - all irrelevant.

I suspect that nothing illustrates the dissolution of the elite media that the fact that its now routine for the blogosphere to scoop the 'big boys'. In fact, I can't think of a single major story that was broken by broadcast or cable news in the past year.

While the morning shows are bumping "the end of the world" for tidbits about Tiger Wood's affairs, they are in fact missing a much, much, bigger story. No worries though--the blogosphere will fill you in.

The biggest misconception about the Tiger cheating scandal is that Rachel Uchitel and Kalika Moquin, two of the first three women named by the tabloids, were his full-time lovers. They may have been at some point (especially Rachel, some say on numerous occasions) but that was not their primary function. No, Uchitel's main job was to provide women for Tiger during his globetrotting excursions to various tournaments, charity functions and f__k-and-run private-jet weekends with his Fortune 500 party pals that he seemed to enjoy so much. Kalika Moquin? Many Las Vegas insiders doubt that she ever slept with Tiger. But she did set him up with some sweet VIP service at The Bank or at Bare like any good hostess would: a roomful of available girls with a certain look that Tiger wanted, flown in just for the occasion. This is the world of high-end nightclub VIP treatment, where velvet ropes guard comfy, cloistered areas with leathery couches and bottles of Grey Goose, everything catered to the wishes of the much sought-after professional athlete clientele. And, yes, sports fans, that means loading their velvet-roped stable with fake-boobied ponies to f__k. "The fact that people don't understand that these affairs are well-orchestrated is pretty naive," says one VIP concierge who has worked with Uchitel (we'll call him "Serge" for the sake of not always having to say "VIP Concierge Number 1" when using his quotes). "Rachel Uchitel works for Tiger the minute he gets off the plane wherever he is: from dinner, to photos, to nightclubs, to drugs, to girls — whatever he wants."

That might explain why Rachel Uchitel first denied an affair (almost certainly true), and the admitted to one (almost certainly false). As a professional "event planner", Woods isn't her only client. Better to take one for the team than become the next Heidi Fleiss, especially when it completely legal and there is this much money involved.

...she's probably on retainer for about 10-15k per month to handle all his dirty business, and the tips for successful Tiger poontang-wrangling (among other things) could net her upwards of 50k in tips

That doesn't include what nightclubs kick back to her for bringing in Woods and his entourage. Its a great business and it all depends on her keeping her mouth shut.

The irony here is that its virtually impossible for members of the media, particularly the sports media, not to know what's going on. Once again, the people paid to "give you the news" actually make their living making sure you never know what's really going on.

Blogging on the other hand, rarely involved direct contact with the perps. Following the Drudge model, bloggers get their news second hand from first hand observers---the abused servant class, what used to be called "a reliable source".

That's how we got the climate priesthood's emails and just about every other juicy piece of information about what's really going on--overlooked little people just disgusted by the antics of moral retards with too much money and power.

Heh!

The New York Times has been destroyed as a newspaper business. Now its working on destroying its brand.

A little more than a year ago, when the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim increased his stake in the New York Times Company (NYT), I wrote "I pity the Times Mexico bureau chief who has to tiptoe through who is and isn't out of favor with the paper's new sugar daddy." Now we have a very clear example of how the Times treats Slim within its pages; it's not pretty, and the journalistic compromise can be seen well beyond Mexico.

Carlos Slim clearly threw a life-line to the paper-of-record specifically because it was the paper of record. No doubt his thinking was that getting an unfavorable story suppressed in the New York Times would effectively muzzle the rest of the American media as well, who traditionally have followed the Times' narrative for the news of the day.

Sorry Charlie, but that day passed some years ago. The story was nevertheless reported in the Wallstreet Journal and Bloomberg. Ironically, in covering up Slim's shenanigans, the Times' deals itself a double injury. Its demonstrated that it can and has been bought, and perhaps worse, that buying off the Times doesn't get you what you expect it might.

The gray lady is a whore who disappoints, and it doesn't get much more pathetic than that.

Yesterday the AP reported a CBO finding that the Senate health care bill would actually reduce the deficit:

In a bit of bookkeeping, the Congressional Budget Office on Thursday released its final cost estimates for the bill the Senate passed on Christmas Eve. That 10-year, $875 billion plan would reduce the federal deficit and cover 31 million people who'd otherwise be uninsured. The Senate bill is the foundation of the proposal that Obama wants Congress to pass in the next few weeks. But the numbers will change yet again with the new version.

The AP failed to mention the fantastical ground rules the CBO was operating with to arrive at such happy news. Somehow though the public opinion is being informed despite the perfidy of the AP:

Two-out-of-three voters (66%) also believe the health care plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats is likely to increase the federal deficit. That's up six points from late November and comparable to findings just after the contentious August congressional recess. Ten percent (10%) say the plan is more likely to reduce the deficit and 14% say it will have no impact on the deficit.

Underlying this concern is a lack of trust in the government numbers. Eighty-one percent (81%) believe it is at least somewhat likely that the health care reform plan will cost more than official estimates. That number includes 66% who say it is very likely that the official projections understate the true cost of the plan.

AP - All Propaganda. Just another reason why the legacy media is being bypassed.

I am chagrined to read Michael Yon's posts these days. Yon, who provided riveting and informative coverage of the Iran and Iraq wars during the Bush administration, has effectively been shut out by the Obama administration's Soviet-style censorship of news coming out of Afghanistan.

Yon has been relegated to taking pictures of soldiers collecting biometric information on Afghanis, and still had his embed status pulled in violation of a written agreement. He's been muzzled, pure and simple.

His conclusions are being conveyed in emails to those registered on his site, no doubt to avoid further hassles with Gen. McChyrstal's Ministry of Truth.

We are losing the war in Afghanistan, and you haven't and won't hear a word about it from the American news media who as far as I can tell, aren't even bothering to cover a war in which troop casualties exceed the worst years in Iraq. Iraq casualties were reported in great detail by virtually every major newspaper in the country. No one is bothering to photograph flag-draped caskets arriving home for burial, in spite of the fact that its now permitted.

Ultimately, its not going to be possible to hide Obama's Vietnam. When Karzai flees into exile, it will become clear what happened, and Progressives will be free to write their own version of what happened (its Bush's fault...).

The incompetence and fascist instincts of this administration seems to know no bounds.