TILTPAT-BIDHAT4 (042108, Afternoon)

“Things I‘d Like To Post About Today; But I Don’t Have Any Time ‘4‘”:

• Wow, NewsBusters is on a roll, or should I say Old Media has generated a lot for NB’s bloggers to post about. This one by Lynn Davidson very early this morning is a doozy — “LAT Claims George Washington Only Served One Term in Office.” I don’t care if it is in the entertainment section, that’s pitiful.
• NBer Tim Graham noted the Huffington Post’s latest offering of elitism from the Democratic commentariat. It’s from Nora Ephron, who wrote, “This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don’t mean people, I mean white men.” She’s not joking.
• There are two NB posts (here by Paul Detrick and here by Jeff Poor) about Time Magazine’s Iwo Jima-mocking cover.
• Elsewhere, if you’re looking for a reason why oil prices have skyrocketed, look no further than Venezuela, where production continues to fall — about 25% in the past 10 years, and, based on eyeballing the graph at the link, at least 10% in the past two. Some think it’s due to incompetent management (that’s my vote), others think it’s by design to maximize revenues.
• I’m hearing on the bottom-of-hour radio news that the negative campaigning in the Pennsylvania Primary has reached a fever pitch. What a shame (/sarcasm).
• From the Associated Press’s Jeannine Aversa earlier today — “Survey: 30 percent believe economy will shrink (in the first half of this year).” Gee, Jeannine, 2-1/2 weeks ago you wrote, “It’s no longer a question of recession or not. Now it’s how deep and how long.” You then backtracked to “widening agreement” four paragraphs later in the same report. Now only a minority of the people who look closely at these things thinks the economy will shrink. What gives?
• Here’s an interesting Ohio story from last week — “Cleveland Clinic’s Michael Roizen criticizes Strickland over tobacco money.” Specifically, he called Ohio’s governor “stupid.” I posted about this in more civil terms a year ago, emphasizing, as Roizen did not, that much of the money being taken away will not go to farmers in the district Strickland used to represent. But the “fun” part of this is that the Plain Dealer chose to put Roizen’s clearly political statement into its Science & Medicine online blog instead of its Openers political blog. Obviously I don’t know where it ended up in the print edition, but the placement of the story in a blog political junkies wouldn’t normally go to is way too convenient.