Time and Newsweek covers will both be about Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident, according to a Drudge Flash:

This just in… Both TIME and NEWSWEEK are planning high impact covers of Cheney for newsstands starting tomorrow, with each magazine rolling out top staff bylines and thousands of words on the hunting incident: TIME: With deep reporting by John Cloud, Mike Allen and Matthew Cooper/ Washington, Cathy Booth Thomas and Patricia Kilday Hart/ Austin, and Hilary Hylton. NEWSWEEK urgently brings in its big investigative guns: Evan Thomas, Michael Isikoff, Daniel Klaidman, Richard Wolffe, Holly Bailey, Mark Hosenball and Eleanor Clift in Washington and Carol Rust in Texas.

Good thing nothing, else, important, is happening in the rest of the world. (/sarcasm)
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UPDATE: The news priorities noted above go along way towards explaining the fact that while the US population increased by roughly 20% from 1988-2003, this is what has happened to the circulations of the three major newsweeklies:

The bleeding has continued. The source for the graph notes:

Along with those general circulation trends, newsstand sales continued to fall into 2004. Time was off by about 4% in the first half of 2004 compared to 2003, Newsweek slipped by about 7% over the same period and U.S. News saw a 4% newsstand decline.

And does anyone think that Newsweek’s circulation has gone up or recovered since the “Flush the Koran” hoax?

UPDATE 2: Michelle Malkin has more examples of “Cheney Derangement Syndrome,” plus a link to and excerpts of a a great Chris Wallace interview with former Senatory Alan Simpson of Wyoming about the absurdity of the media frenzy.

UPDATE 3: Brutally Honest also has a long list of “Never Mind” stories that are being downplayed in favor of all-Cheney, all-the-time.

UPDATE 4: Varifrank, who I hope is getting over his emergency-room incident and surviving the medication regimen, has an observation from when he was at the hospital: “NBC’s Today show was on the Emergency Room TV. Katie Couric was flogging the ‘Shotgun Cheney’ story and interviewing Mary Matalin when the entire room let out a groan. After Katie started with the ‘let me read to you a few reactions..’ line of questioning to Mary; a senior citizen threw a magazine across the room at the TV and shouted ‘isn’t it illegal to beat a dead horse’?” The incident Varifrank reports occured on Thursday, and shows that people were obviously tired of it even then.

UPDATE 5, Feb. 20: Other acrid comments from Macsmind and PunditGuy, plus a a great comment at Riehl World View: “Still better to hunt with Dick Cheney than ride in Ted Kennedy’s car.”
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Previous post:
May 17, 2005 — The Fall of the Weekly Mags, and Newsweek’s Double Standard

UPDATED Feb. 26: The Dubai Deal: Confessions of a Knee-Jerk Reactor (with a Few “Good” Excuses)
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Sorry for the shaky title, but I can’t keep up with the nitty gritty of every story.

So give me a couple of minutes and I’ll look this article over…….

……….

OK, I’m caught up.

It’s an outrage. It should be stopped. It shouldn’t have taken bipartisan Congressional objections to call attention to the dangers of this deal.

And how many others don’t we know about?
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To Be Clear — I don’t think foreign ownership or operation (especially if it’s quasi-governmental) of port facilities is a good idea, period, regardless of the country involved, for the reason indicated here (third-to-last paragraph):

“When you have a foreign government involved, you are injecting foreign national interests,” Kreitzer said. “A country that may be a friend of ours today may not be on the same side tomorrow. You don’t know in advance what the politics of that country will be in the future.

For the record: The ports involved are New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.

In commenting on Bruce Bawer’s new book, “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within,” Dr. Helen the Instawife noted an alarming statistic, and the circumstances that surround it:

Bawer points out that in Denmark, Muslims make up only 5% of the population but receive 40% of welfare outlays. Many of these immigrants are told by their leaders that Muslim law gives them the right to “cheat and lie in the countries that harbor them.” They are told to view the benefits they receive as jizya–the tributes that “the infidel natives of Muslim-occupied countries are obliged to pay to Muslims in order to preserve their lives.” And the welfare offices in Denmark can be the setting for violence–termed “culture clashes” by Danish journalists. “Some clients lay waste to social security offices and hit social workers–not out of frustration but because they’ve learned that bullying gets them what they want. The Danish government is not repressive; welfare workers tend to be sympathetic and eager to help. Many immigrants perceive this as weakness, and exploit it, ‘tyrannizing’ the social workers.” The Danish solution? More PC behavior–get translators to translate not only between languages but between cultures. Yeah, that will work.

I never thought of the welfare reform passed in 1996 as a national security measure. Now I do.

The Washingon Post (registration probably required) has a very good front-page story today with an over-the-top headline (”The Click That Broke a Government’s Grip”; HT Instapundit). A courageous senior editor at a Chinese newspaper tactically used a 90-minute meeting as a delaying tactic after he “posted a blistering letter on the newspaper’s computer system attacking the Communist Party’s propaganda czars and a plan by the editor in chief to dock reporters’ pay if their stories upset party officials.”

The letter spread so fast that the Chinese government censors eventually gave up trying to stop it.

Fine. But the article also reveals the inner workings of the Chinese government’s press system of press censorship that shows that the government’s grip is anything but “broken”:

System of Censorship

Every Friday morning, executives from a dozen of China’s most popular Internet news sites are summoned downtown by the Beijing Municipal Information Office, an agency that reports to the party’s propaganda department.

The man who usually runs the meetings, Chen Hua, director of the Internet Propaganda Management Department, declined to be interviewed. But participants say he or one of his colleagues tells the executives what news they should keep off their sites and what items they should highlight in the week ahead.

These firms are private enterprises, and several, including Sina, Sohu and Yahoo! China, are listed on U.S. stock exchanges or have attracted U.S. investment. But because they need licenses to operate in China, they comply with the government’s requests.

The meetings are part of a censorship system that includes a blacklist of foreign sites blocked in China and filters that can stop e-mail and make Web pages inaccessible if they contain certain keywords. Several agencies, most notably the police and propaganda authorities, assign personnel to monitor the Web.

The system is far from airtight. Software can help evade filters and provide access to blacklisted sites, and Internet companies often test the censors’ limits in order to attract readers and boost profits. If an item isn’t stopped by the filters and hasn’t been covered in the Friday meetings, the government can be caught off guard.

That is what happened with Li Datong’s letter. Minutes after he posted it, people in the newsroom began copying it and sending it to friends via e-mail and the instant messaging programs used by more than 81 million Chinese.

“We had to move quickly, before they started blocking it,” recalled one senior editor, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The fact that the information control system doesn’t work perfectly now from a technological standpoint doesn’t mean it can’t achieve near-perfection with the help of the members of BizzyBlog’s Internet Wall of Shame. And the technology doesn’t have to be perfect to achieve its ultimate aim of information control. The closer it gets to perfection, the more difficult it will be to disseminate dissenting messages and content, and the more personally dangerous it will be for those wishing to do so. Once the controls are near-perfect, the government can simply round up those it considers the worst offenders and make examples of them. Most of those who remain will be successfully intimidated. At that point, some kind of edict barring publication without pre-approval, with stiff penalties for violators, would seal the deal. Does anyone think Yahoo! China (named above) would not cooperate?

The preceding paragraph is why I’m not comfortable with the blithe assumptions that there will always be technology workarounds, and that there will always be courageous journalists willing to put their safety on the line. It’s why current inititiatives in Congress will hopefully rein in our high-tech companies’ ability to passively or actively assist the Chinese government’s censorship apparatus.

Let’s also not forget the ultimate result of this one act of defiance on the publication involved, Freezing Point, and on the person who disseminated the unapproved news:

Freezing Point enjoyed a renaissance in the months that followed. Li Erliang appeared chastened, unwilling to risk another fight he might lose, reporters said.

But in January, propaganda officials finally shut down the section. Before doing so, they called executives from all the major Web sites to a special meeting and warned them not to allow any discussion of the action.

The news spread quickly anyway.

Maybe the government wanted it to spread, in order to discourage others.

QUESTION 3: Is the United States’ higher level of spending on health care as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product worth it?

I have to apologize for not remembering where I came across the table below, and I recognize one of the key numbers isn’t there for the US, and that it’s a bit dated. Nevertheless, it presents interesting data on survival rates for a couple of common diseases in the US vs. elsewhere:

So is it worth it? I personally tend to favor higher survival rates, and am willing to be in a system that costs a bit more if that will be the result. How about you?

Boy Survives without Immune System; Transplant Cures

This occurred in Townsland, in Australia. Check out what the boy’s pregnant mom will have to endure even though her family’s son is now home and safe:

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