NOTE: This post was moved to the top,
and will stay at the top for the rest of Tuesday.
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The folks at Gannett’s satellite branch in Cincinnati don’t seem to care, but those who are limiting themselves to reading Greater Cincinnati news and blogs to keep up with local and statewide political races should know that The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Openers blog is running circles around The Cincinnati Enquirer’s Invisibler’s Politics Extra (link provided as an undeserved courtesy).

The latest example: Openers mentions John Mitchel’s withdrawal from the race (covered on Sunday here at BizzyBlog) in a post “primarily” (pun intended) to cover Bill Pierce’s just-expressed and legitimate concerns about the general-election viability of David Smith, the other remaining challenger to incumbent Senator Mike DeWine. Mr. Smith’s campaign bio, perhaps conveniently, doesn’t mention how much he has moved around, or even where he grew up. Mr. Smith has been in Ohio only a year, and cannot expect (and will not get) the kid-glove treatment carpetbagger Hillary Clinton got from the fawning press in New York in her 2000 US Senate run if he somehow ended up against Sherrod Brown’s decades of in-state residency in a general election.

I could not find a word about any of this in the Enquirer Invisibler, or its blog. A search on “Bill Pierce” (in quotes) at the Enquirer’s Invisibler’s site yielded this: A January comment at the Politics Extra blog, and a February op-ed piece by guest writer Tim Holloway. No original reportage on Mr. Pierce has taken place in months at the Enquirer Invisibler, despite the fact that he:

• Won the endorsement contest in Knox County.
• Won a Well Qualified rating in nearby Clermont County (DeWine did not earn any rating).
• Tied DeWine in Preble County.
• Is the only challenger of the original three (now two) to defeat DeWine in an endorsement meeting, anywhere.
• Was infamously shut out of the endorsement process in Hamilton County in a scripted “kangaroo” process that in most towns would be yet another GOP party establishment scandal, but, because it was instead studiously ignored by the Enquirer Invisibler, instead gained a totally unearned general perception of legitimacy.
• Has, according to several accounts (right, I said “several“), received the back-of-the-hand treatment (and worse) from the state party establishment.

So ….. To make sure you have all the news about the leading challenger to Mike DeWine, Bill Pierce of Warren County (the county 20 miles northeast of Downtown Cincinnati where the Kings Island Eiffel Tower is — “oh, now I know where it is”), it is still the case that you must (once again) visit a blog over 200 miles from Gannett’s Cincinnati satellite branch (in addition, of course, to stopping by at the sites of the illustrious State of Ohio Blog Alliance members :–>).
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UPDATE: An encore Hat Tip to the R-Rated Whistleblower on catching the Mitchel withdrawal announcement first in his Sunday e-mail (posted to the web here at the “This Nice Man Just Withdrew from the Senate Race” link at the bottom of the page).

Howard Kurtz should not throw this fastball right down the middle of the plate and not expect me to take a whack at it.

Kurtz, who as some of you know is not, I mean really not, my personal fave, is wailing and gnashing his teeth (it goes on for 1-1/2 pages) over the uncertain fates of employees at the twelve newspapers McClatchy plans to unload, including the supposedly venerable Philadelphia Inquirer, shortly after it buys Knight Ridder. All of this, especially McClatchy’s talk of getting into high-growth markets and staying out of low-growth ones (where the 12 papers to be unloaded are) is driving many of the reflexively anti-capitalistic WORMs (Worn-Out Reactionary Media, known to most as The Mainstream Media) absolutely crazy (check out the whiny quotes from one of the Inquirer’s way-back-when owners).

In the midst of the tearfest, Kurtz has this to say about the Washington Post’s own 10% newsroom downsizing that was announced late last week:

Clearly, it will hurt somewhat, no question about it, especially since some of the most talented and employable folks tend to take these buyouts.

I believe that means Howard is staying.

At first glance, this looks like one of those “It’s About Time” things, but hold on.
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Credit bureaus are adopting a new scoring system (HT S.O.B. Alliance member Made 4 The Internet, who forgot that it’s against the rules for him to find this stuff before I do; bolds are mine):

The announcement by Equifax, Experian and TransUnion said the new “VantageScore” was “a direct result of market demand for a more consistent and objective approach to credit scoring.”

The agencies in the past each provided their own scores, meaning that a lender dealing with a consumer’s application for a credit card or a mortgage might have to reconcile three different scores. The scores are important because they measure how much debt a consumer is carrying and how well the consumer keeps up with bills.

The higher the score, the more creditworthy the consumer is considered and the lower the interest rate the consumer is likely to be charged.

The three credit agencies termed the move to a unified score as “unprecedented.”

In its joint announcement, the agencies said: “Under the new scoring system, credit score variance between credit reporting companies will be attributed to data differences within each of the three consumer credit files and not to the structure of the scoring model or data interpretation.”

It added that VantageScore “will provide consumers and businesses with a highly predictive, consistent score that is easy to understand and apply.”

The scores will range from 501 to 990. The top end is slightly higher than scores currently in use.

This is obviously an attempt by the bureaus to do an end-run around Fair Isaac, which has come to dominate the credit scoring business with its FICO score, and which has been extracting a great deal of lucre from the bureaus over the years by providing those scores. You can be sure that the bureaus have been bristling at the dominance Fair Isaac has achieved.

But, Fair Isaac, whose stock dropped 6.6% on Tuesday, makes a potentially valid point in pooh-poohing the bureaus’ announcement — that the vast majority of lenders use the FICO score:

To be useful to consumers, a credit score has to match the score at which lenders are looking. After all, if you’re looking at a 750 score but your lender sees 650, you’re in for a surprise — either a higher-than-expected interest rate, or a denial of credit altogether.

Right now, plenty of the scores pitched to consumers are not the same as the scores lenders use. Lenders don’t buy some of the scores aimed at consumers, or use their own internal scoring system to generate a unique score.

Until now, the FICO score has been the one score that’s both available to consumers and highly likely to be used by lenders.

Of course, the bureaus want to fix that “problem” too:

But if lenders embrace the VantageScore, that situation could change.

Each of the three credit-reporting firms says they’ve just started rolling out their new product to lenders. Once credit-granting companies are on board, then they’ll start selling VantageScore to consumers, the companies said.

After lenders have a chance to test and adopt the new risk model, “then you have relevancy for the consumers, so this number means something in the credit process,” said Paul Springman, chief marketing officer with Equifax.

For its part, Experian says lenders will soon jump on board with the VantageScore.

Unfortunately, it looks like all of this is going to add an extra step to the process of prudently obtaining credit. It used to be that you could get your FICO score(s) in advance for $10-$35 (cheaper if you shopped a little), and pretty much know how things would turn out when actually applying for credit. It doesn’t seem to make sense to get two sets of scores, FICO and VantageScore, and spend anywhere from $20 to probably $60-$80 before you even apply. For the moment, unless you really don’t care about spending the extra money for two sets of scores ahead of time, the best advice to consumers while this sorts itself out (and that may never happen) is to ask the credit provider you are considering which scoring system they will use when evaluating your application for credit. They’d better tell you; if they don’t, I’d go somewhere that will. If you have any concerns about approval, get that score (either VantageScore or FICO) before you apply. If it’s clear, after getting the score and reviewing your underlying detailed credit history for errors (many credit files still have quite a few), that you need to improve your financial situation first, DON’T apply.

I hope the bureaus, Fair Isaac, and the lenders don’t make things too confusing, because if they do, they’ll find regulators wanting to join the party.
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UPDATE: A possibly good effect of what the bureaus are doing may be that, because of the competition, the prices to get those credit scores may come down to the point where it doesn’t cost that much to get two full sets.

This is a post about media coverage of The Second District GOP Primary, and not the politics of the 2nd District GOP race itself.

Here’s the story:
“Congresswoman Questions Legality of Opponent’s Radio Ad”

Here’s the paragraph in question:

In the 30-second ad, an announcer says that as a congressman from 1981 to 1993, McEwen “helped write a reform agenda that led to the Contract with America.” But because the document was unveiled several months after McEwen left office, Freeman said he couldn’t claim credit.

Note that the closest document to “the document” in the final sentence is the “Contract with America” — so that must be “the document” Hammer is referring to.

A direct link to the radio ad is at the top of the home page of the BobMcEwenForCongress.com web site.

The Contract with America, according to the second paragraph at this Wikipedia entry and several others I could cite, was released six weeks before the (November 8, 1994) election. That would be on or about September 27, 1994.

Bob McEwen left Congress in January 1993.

Perhaps Mr. Freeman said that the Contract with America was released a few months after Mr. McEwen left office, but Mr. Hammer and the AP, an allegedly professional organization with a supposedly detailed knowledge and institutional memory of recent American history, should have known that and corrected it.

Perhaps Mr. Freeman didn’t say that, and Mr. Hammer incorrectly identified the length of time involved on his own. Editors above him should have caught and corrected the error.

Perhaps Mr. Hammer meant to say the the “reform agenda” Mr. McEwen’s radio ad refers to was released several months after Mr. McEwen left office (though it seems unlikely that any reform agenda would have been released in the Spring or Summer of 1993, given that the GOP was in a distinct minority in both houses of Congress; I could not find any evidence of a “reform agenda being released by the GOP in Spring or Summer of 1993, but if I’m wrong, e-mail me and give me a link). If that’s what Mr. Hammer meant, the grammar is botched, and again his editors should have caught and corrected it.

No matter — The fact is that the Contract with America was released roughly twenty months after Bob McEwen left office. How long the Contract with America was released after any “reform agenda” Bob McEwen may have been involved with was released is not stated.

So….. Readers can edit the AP’s paragraph in their own minds now that they have the facts.

By the way, I spoke to the AP Columbus Bureau about the story last night and followed up this afternoon. Mr. Hammer and his editor saw no need to revise the story. They are (obviously, and objectively) wrong.
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UPDATE: More AP slop — the announcer never says “1981 to 1993″ as a lead-in to “helped write a reform agenda …..” text in the actual radio ad. Hammer’s sentence almost makes it seem as if that’s all Mr. McEwen accomplished in his 12 years in Congress, or alternatively that he spent all 12 years on just that one project. Both assertions are obviously absurd, and describe something the ad’s announcer never said. But that’s how Mr. Hammer wrote it.

From today’s Best of the Web at OpinionJournal.com (links that were in original added):

Torturing the News–II

Yesterday we noted that the New York Times had published a page 1 story on Abu Ghraib on the same day that it published a story on page 8 about the murder of a hostage, who, as the Times reported the next day on page 10, was apparently tortured before being slain. Today the Times reports its Abu Ghraib story may have been fake:

The online magazine Salon is challenging the identity of a man profiled by The New York Times in a front-page article on Saturday who says he is the iconic hooded figure in a published photograph who was abused by Americans at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 and 2004.Salon bases its challenge on an examination of a set of 280 Abu Ghraib photographs it has been studying for several weeks and an interview with an official of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, known as the C.I.D., who says the man identified by The Times is not the detainee in the photograph.

On Monday, Chris Grey, chief spokesman for the investigations unit, asked about the challenge, confirmed to The Times in an e-mail message: “We have had several detainees claim they were the person depicted in the photograph in question. Our investigation indicates that the person you have is not the detainee who was depicted in the photograph released in connection with the Abu Ghraib investigation.

The story raising doubts about the page 1 story appeared on page 17.

Words fail.
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