With recent articles stating that there has been a 20% increase of military suicides since last year, one must always wonder wonder how this fact might have been taken out of context. Well, I’m not going to make you wonder too long because Gateway Pundit has done some research and found that military suicides were in fact more prevalent during the Clinton years.
Israel has been taking a lot of flak in the news this past week due to it stopping the normal flow of commercial goods into the Gaza Strip. Many have said that this Israeli “blockade” eventually led to a blackout throughout Gaza. However, when looking at the facts more closely, one will find that the terrorist organization Hamas is actually responsible for the outage. Take a look at what Bob Owens from Pajamas Media has to say about this:
By Sunday evening, Gaza City was in a complete blackout. And of course, it was Israel’s fault. Or was it?
Hamas spokesmen blamed Israel for the power shortage, claiming that they were forced to shut down power because of a fuel shortage brought about by the blockade. That same night, Al Jazeera began live broadcasts of a “spontaneous” candlelight protest in a darkened Gaza. The heart-wrenching images were broadcast throughout the Arab world and picked up by wire services and cable news outlets internationally.
It was great theater, but it was far from accurate news reporting. Gaza was not without electrical power during that time, and both the darkness and the candlelight protests were the results of a calculated ploy by Hamas.
The Gaza Strip receives 70 percent of its electricity from the Israeli Electric Company (IEC) (perhaps the only power company in the world regularly attacked by their customers.) Egyptian power companies chip in another five percent. The energy flowing into Gaza from Israel and Egypt, and making up three-quarters of Gaza’s power supply never ceased and never slowed during the “blackout.”
And who is responsible for these blatant falsehoods being paraded as facts worldwide? If you guessed the MSM then you are correct. Remember: a little bit a skepticism can often help you find a whole lot of truth.
The NYT has an article that tries to explain why the polls in New Hampshire were so off in their predictions. Here is what they came up with:
What is more likely is that New Hampshire voters’ opinions were very much in flux, with voters buffeted by the intense media coverage until the moment they finally stepped into the voting booth and registered what pollsters call “considered opinion,” the kind of opinion born of reflection rather than one elicited in an instant by a poll taker.
The New Hampshire primary was an unusual race for another reason, explained Kathleen A. Frankovic, director of the CBS News polling operation. “Voters were faced with a choice they never get, they had three candidates all of whom they liked, and it wasn’t an easy decision,” she said, “which may explain some of the movement.”
As late as the week before the primary many voters were not fully committed to their candidate and said they might change their minds. In last minute polling by CBS, which ended Sunday, (The New York Times conducts polls with CBS News but did not participate in the pre-primary polling), they found an unusually high number of voters who said they could still change their minds, 28 percent and another nine percent who said they were still undecided. Those who said they were going to vote for Mrs. Clinton were more strongly committed to her than those who said they would vote for Mr. Obama.
Tonight, Hannity and Colmes made their predictions for who might win the Iowa caucus. Drum roll please….
Colmes:
Democrats : Edwards
Republicans: Romney/ McCain
Hannity:
Democrats: Hillary
Republicans: One of the top four
Yea, that wasn’t nearly as interesting as I was hoping it would be.
I subscribe to Google News Alerts, a service that emails me news articles for topics I specify, and the Iraq War is one of such topics. Today, I received an email from Google that had these two news articles in in: “2007: Deadliest year for US forces in Iraq” and “US December death toll in Iraq second-lowest of war“. Now, both articles state the same two basic facts: 2007 was the deadliest year in Iraq and December had the second lowest monthly death toll of the war. However, as you can see from the titles of the stories, each spins this information to show a different light.
My question to you now is how will you view 2007? Will you view it as a year where we initiated a successful plan in Iraq or only as the deadliest year in Iraq? Are you a glass is half empty or half full kind of person?
Gateway Pundit has a good article on the military deaths in Iraq and the media’s spin on this subject.
The apparent success of the surge in Iraq is definitely something that has been overlooked in the media today. This overlook (or intentional ignoring) of our success is regretful because, as Michael Barone explains, there are many lessons we can learn from the surge. Here is just one of the lessons Barone gives in this article:
Lesson two is that societies can more easily be transformed from the bottom up than from the top down. Bush’s critics are still concentrating on the failure of the central Iraqi government to reach agreement on important issues — even though the oil revenues are already being distributed to the provinces. We persuaded the Iraqis to elect their parliament from national party lists (reportedly so that it would include more women) rather than to elect them from single-member districts that would have elected community leaders more in touch with local opinion.
But the impetus for change has come from the bottom up, from tribal sheiks in Anbar province who got tired of the violence and oppression of al Qaeda in Iraq, from Shiites and Sunnis who, once confident of the protection of American forces and of the new Iraqi military, decided to quit killing each other. They did not wait for orders from Baghdad or for legislation to be passed with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed.
Our own recent history should have taught us that bottom-up transformation, in local laboratories of reform, can often achieve results that seemed impossible to national leaders. At the beginning of the 1990s we seemed to have intractable problems of high crime and welfare dependency. Experts argued that we couldn’t hope for improvement. But state and local leaders got to work and showed that change for the better was possible. They included Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson on welfare and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on crime control and many others, mostly Republicans but many Democrats as well. The federal government came charging in only after success was achieved in states and cities across the country. By now welfare dependency and crime have fallen by more than half, and they have virtually disappeared as political issues.
As the article states in the last paragraph, the success of the surge in Iraq is definitely “something to be thankful for as the new year begins.”
Michael Yon is scheduled to appear this weekend on CNN for their “This Week at War” series.
With recent reports showing that the surge is, in fact, working in Iraq, you would think that the news reports from Iraq would stay the same or actually increase in number. However, we can see that this is not the case. The top three news agencies, ABC, CBS, and NBC, have actually seen a decrease in the number of stories concerning the war, according to a recent study by the Media Research Center. Also, by using Google Trends, we can even see a sharp decrease in the number of stories online about the Iraq War as early as the end of September. The graph below represents the number of searches for the Iraq War on the top and the number of news references of Iraq War on the bottom.
As you can see, the number of searches for the Iraq War stayed the same while the number of stories out there sharply decreased. This decrease of news stories availability was easily the largest so far this year. Could this be attributed to the success in Iraq? The media’s coverage has almost dropped to nil concerning Afghanistan because we, on the whole, are actually accomplishing our goals there. If the surge keeps working and everything else remains constant, I bet that we will see a continuing drop in media coverage of Iraq.
For those of you who don’t understand how Google Trends works or would like to learn more about it, go here.
According the AIM.org, the Left is going to once again bring up the Fairness Doctrine in tomorrow’s hearing by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. Fellow bloggers, I guess we better prepare for another battle for free speech or, more likely, against politicians thinking they are above reproach from their electorate. Good luck everyone.
Gateway Pundit is calling on everyone to hold TIME magazine responsible for not retracting or at least acknowledging the false reporting concerning “20 headless bodies” story. If you go to his post, the email address of TIME magazine’s editor is given so you can express you disappointment in their lack of reporting integrity.
