More On the Blindness of our Intelligence Agencies

Here's an interesting piece that sort of dovetails with something I posted just yesterday...

Nada Nadim Prouty, a Lebanese national, infiltrated both the FBI and CIA — even though she lied on her application about being a U.S. citizen. Both agencies failed to catch the fraud in their security checks.

Prouty went on to access secret files about Hezbollah to tip off family members linked to the Lebanon-based terror group, something investigators failed to turn up in their original background check.

So, the CIA and FBI are both unable to even determine which of their applicants is a citizen?

If we don't get on the ball, we are doomed as a nation.

Ya Done Good

Okay, I am a bit late, but the Project Valour-IT Veterans Day Fundraiser is over. The following note appears on the website:

Thank you to all for your amazing efforts in helping us to raise more than $200,000 during our 3rd Annual Veteran's Day fundraiser. No words can express our gratitude. Thank you!

So to all those who donated, whether through this humble blog or others, all I gotta say is, Ya Done Good!

However, even though the Veteran's Day fundraising push is over, the need goes on. If you didn't donate before, or want to donate again, you can do so through this page.

Comments Now Moderated

Because of the actions of one particular troll, who shall remain nameless but who doubtless knows who he is, I am left with two options if I wish to run a "tight ship" as one friend put it:

1. Ban the entire IP range of the troll's ISP, which is a large one.
2. Moderate and approve all comments before they appear.

Rather than ban a large segment of the population because of the actions of one person, I've chosen #2. Therefore, it may take some time before comments appear on the blog. However, being a geek, I do have a smartphone, and have verified that I can approve or delete comments using its web browser, so I can take care of it from work as well as from home.

Hopefully the troll will get the message that he is not welcome here and we can remove moderation at some point in the future.

A Russian Speaks About Western Intelligence Services

...and what he says isn't pretty.

The CIA did not call Reagan insane, but spoke mockingly about his “evil-empirism.”

Still, my day came. In the mid-1970s the CIA began to testify regularly in Congress about Soviet Russia and Maoist China. That is, the CIA presented its papers on the subject and answered the questions of members of Congress. The resulting texts were made accessible to the public, and on the basis of them I wrote an article for “Commentary” magazine (September 1978), whence it was reprinted or retold by about 500 periodicals all over the West.

I made it clear to the readers that the CIA presented as intelligence/espionage data what the CIA collected from open Soviet and Chinese texts, i.e., the propaganda data from the totalitarian press of the two countries.

But without Western intelligence/espionage in dictatorships like those of Soviet Russia and post-1949 China, the West is doomed. Surely a dictatorship will not issue true military information about itself, which will weaken its first strike (“by the assassin’s mace”) that is to ensure their victory. Only the Western intelligence/espionage could obtain such data, but here it turns out that the Western intelligence/espionage does not exist. Instead, there are a number of well-paid officials who sit in comfortable offices and are paid good salaries for passing the propaganda of a closed militarized dictatorship for the data, obtained by intelligence/espionage.

(emphasis mine)

So, there ya go. The CIA's main intelligence-gathering function seems to be watching CNN and maybe reading Pravda.

And these are the people that we're supposed to trust with figuring out where the next attack will come from?

NYT: Dems Must Keep At Fruitless Iraq Votes

Looks like the NY Times wants the Democrats to continue looking like total idiots, pushing forward Iraq withdrawal bills that it admits are fruitless.

Courtesy NRO's The Corner (since I refuse to link directly to the NY Times):

News section (Pg. 15): Iraq votes were ‘repeated and fruitless’

… House and Senate Democrats have made some rookie management mistakes in their first year of combined Congressional control. They have angered Republicans with occasional heavy-handed treatment, as well as repeated and fruitless votes on the war.

(“Off for Break, Congress May Still Face Stalemate,” November 17, 2007)

Editorial (Pg. 18): Democrats ‘must keep at it’

Democrats say they will continue to push the president and his Republican allies to concede their failed war policy and change course. They must keep at it.

(“Democrats Find Their Voice,” editorial, November 17, 2007)

So there ya go. The NY Times wants Democrats to "keep at" their "repeated and fruitless votes on the war."

Is Karl Rove running the NY Times now?

All The Anti-Israel Propaganda That's Fit To Show

Looks like another "fake but true" story is unraveling, this time in France:

Suffice it to say here that the iconic image of the child Mohammed al Durah, pictured crouching with his father behind a barrel next to a concrete wall in an apparently vain attempt to shelter from the gun-battle between Israel and the Palestinians that was raging around them before he was allegedly shot dead by the Israelis, served to incite terrorist violence and atrocities around the world after it was transmitted by France 2 at the beginning of the second intifada. Yet it is clear to anyone looking at this in detail that the whole thing was staged, not least from the devastating evidence here which shows the boy raising his arm and peeping through his fingers seconds after the France 2 correspondent Charles Enderlin said he had been shot dead.

After Philippe Karsenty, founder of the French online media watchdog, Media Ratings, accused France 2 of staging the al Durah ‘killing’ and called for the resignation of both Charles Enderlin and France 2’s News Director, Arlette Chabot, France 2 and Enderlin sued Karsenty for defamation, and won. In a disgraceful piece of judicial cronyism after the gratuitous intervention of the then French President Jacques Chirac, the court decided against Karsenty and in favour of France 2 and Enderlin. Karsenty appealed; the judge ordered France 2 to produce the unscreened footage of this incident; today it did so.

And here's a short list of the problems with the footage:

There were many very strange things about this footage which just didn’t add up. When it came to the footage of the ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah, the following stood out:

* This sequence was not a continuous narrative but was repeatedly broken up and spliced onto footage of other scenes from the demonstration

* Although the France 2 cameraman had told a German film-maker, Esther Schapira, that he had filmed six minutes of the al Durah father and son under continuous Israeli fire, the footage of them lasted for less than one minute

* There was a camera tripod next to them

* There was no evidence of the boy actually being hit

* At one point, people in the crowd cried out that the boy was dead, while he was sitting up large as life clinging onto his father with his mouth wide open

* After he was said to be dead, he moved his arm (the sequence I have already reported which has been available on the web for years).

Fortunately, it appears that this story is about to end up in the same file as Scott Beauchamp's Baghdad Diarist and Dan Rather's faked Texas Air National Guard memo.

You'd think that journalists, who are supposed to be aware of what's happening in the world, would realize that they just can't get away with this sort of distortion anymore. My gut feeling is that the journalists who are still trying to do things like this live and work in an isolated leftist "bubble" which has a tenuous connection to reality at best.

Saddam's Iranian Bluff

It sometimes happens that one small piece of information can help a lot of other things make sense. Thus it is with this revelation:

Ever since American forces invaded, overran and occupied Iraq in 2003, and discovered no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the great lingering question about the war has been why Saddam Hussein would spend an entire decade acting as though he possessed WMDs when he didn’t. Since the ceasefire agreement he’d signed in 1991, in order to remain in power after the first Gulf War, obligated him to get rid of them, why would Saddam intentionally endure crippling United Nations sanctions as he jerked around, and finally ejected, weapons inspectors? Why wouldn’t he just come clean if he had nothing to hide?

The answer, according Ronald Kessler in his new book, The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack, is that Saddam ultimately feared United Nations actions less than he feared an attack from Iran . . . which, he calculated, would be much more likely if the leaders of Iran knew he had no WMDs. Kessler based his conclusions on information obtained by an Arabic-speaking FBI agent named George Piro who debriefed and befriended Saddam after the dictator’s capture in Iraq, during his months of captivity before his eventual execution.

In retrospect, Saddam’s calculus looks altogether logical. He’d fought a brutal stalemated war against Iran in the 1980s and viciously persecuted Iraq’s Shiite majority out of fear they might align themselves with their Shiite neighbor. More alarming still, from Saddam’s standpoint, was the fact that his own military had been decimated by the 1991 conflict with the American led coalition. If Iran did attack, he had no chance in a conventional war.

His last option was a bluff: Since he once possessed WMDs, and the entire world knew it, he pretended he still did. He knew it would antagonize America, as well as the rest of the U.N. Security Council, but he figured that the threat of an American invasion to enforce the provisions of the 1991 ceasefire was less dire than the threat of an Iranian invasion to crush a bitter enemy and take control of Iraq’s oil resources. According to Kessler, “Saddam said that if America thought that he had WMDs, then of course Iran would, and this would fulfill his goal of making sure that Iran did not want to attack Iraq.”

What Saddam never counted on, of course, was September 11, 2001. Kessler’s book should put to rest, once and for all, the notion that Saddam was somehow involved in Osama bin Laden’s plot. The 9/11 attacks were Saddam’s worst nightmare because they changed the risk equation for the United States. Suddenly, the prospect of Saddam hiding WMDs went from being an ongoing nuisance to a mortal dread. What was to stop him from handing them off to al Qaeda?

President Bush decided the risk was intolerable — and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.

So now it all makes sense. All the evidence for Saddam's WMDs was indeed cooked up--by Saddam himself, in a desperate gamble to keep Iran at bay. It must be admitted, he succeeded in that. However, in the long run, his strategy was a dismal failure, since it brought the attention of a nation whose armed forces he could not hope to beat--namely, the USA. In attempting to forestall invasion by one nation, he invited invasion by another. Of course, he's now paid for that mistake with his life.

However, this is good ammunition against the Bush-lied-people-died meme. It would be better if it were reworded to Saddam-lied-Saddam-died.

Another Global Warming Claim Debunked

I'm sure everyone's heard of the claim that the arctic ice is melting too fast because of global warming.

A new study proves differently:

From 2002 to 2006, scientists and researchers from NASA and the University of Washington's Polar Science Center at the Applied Physics Laboratory observed a meaningful ongoing reversal in Arctic Ocean circulation. The cause is atmospheric circulation changes that vary in decade-long periods and the effect is, well, let the scientist who led the study explain it:

"Our study confirms many changes seen in upper Arctic Ocean circulation in the 1990s were mostly decadal in nature, rather than trends caused by global warming," said the University of Washington's James Morison.

In short, it's a cycle, not a catastrophe.

I won't hold my breath waiting for a retraction from High Priest Algore, tho.

The Clinton Quid Pro Pardon

Gotta love how the Clintons have no shame at all:

Three recipients of controversial 11th-hour pardons issued by former President Bill Clinton in January 2001 have donated thousands of dollars to the presidential campaign of his wife, Democratic front-runner Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., according to campaign finance records examined by ABC News, in what some good government groups said created an appearance of impropriety.

"It's not illegal," Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told ABC News. "But, of course, it's inappropriate and she should return the money. It does raise the appearance that this is payback.

"One can only hope that she wasn't yet aware of who made the donations," said Sloan.

"We have raised over $65 million from over 200,000 people," said Clinton campaign manager Howard Wolfson, adding sarcastically, "I appreciate your bringing the instance of this $5,300 and these three people to our attention."

-snip-

John Deutch is a different case, having served as President Clinton's CIA director.

Pardoned by President Clinton for charges he had mishandled government secrets -- but before the Department of Justice could file the proper paperwork against him -- Deutch, now a professor at MIT, gave Sen. Clinton the maximum allowable donation, $2,300.

No, it's not illegal, but imagine the howling from the left if, say, Scooter Libby donated to the presidential campaign of a member of the Bush or Cheney families.

Democrats and the Culture of Corruption, Part V

Once again, a Democrat with serious legal and corruption problems is somehow not mentioned in the leftymedia. Gee, I wonder why that could be?

U.S. Representative Alan Mollohan, (D-W.V.), has been under FBI investigation for steering federal money to a web of non-profits he helped create, questioned about suspicious land deals that made him a millionaire, and criticized for taking a European vacation paid for by federal contractors.

Mollohan has also paid the Washington, DC, law-firm of Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans and Figel a staggering $220,000 in legal fees. According to the firm’s website, they specialize in “white collar criminal defense,” and Mollohan has used his campaign account to pay the hefty legal bills.

With all the investigations the MoveOn-controlled Congress is running, do ya think they could spare a few hours to look into this one?

Naah, he's a Democrat.

Political Correctness Chills Christmas

This one shouldn't need much introduction or comment:

THERE'LL be no ho, ho, ho this Christmas. Aspiring Santas have been told not to use the term "ho" because it could be seen as derogatory to women.

Thirty trainees at a Santa course in Adelaide [Australia] last month, held by recruitment company Westaff, were urged to replace the traditional festive greeting with "ha, ha, ha".

Don't these busybodies have anything better to do with their time?

Thank You

I can't say it much better than this:

At the end of the 1954 film "The Bridges at Toko-Ri," based on the Korean War novel by James Michener, the crusty old captain of an American aircraft carrier, watching his pilots take off for another mission from which not all would return, asks rhetorically, "Where do we get such men?"

Where indeed? Thank you all.

Read the whole thing at the link in the title.

King of Spain tells Chavez "Shut Up."

Looks like the King of Spain doesn't like the way Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez talks about Spain and the Spanish government:

Mr Chavez called Mr Aznar, a close ally of US President George W Bush, a fascist, adding "fascists are not human. A snake is more human."

[Current Spanish Prime Minister] Mr Zapatero said: "[Former Prime Minister] Aznar was democratically elected by the Spanish people and was a legitimate representative of the Spanish people."

Mr Chavez repeatedly tried to interrupt, despite his microphone being turned off. The king leaned forward and said: "Why don't you shut up?"

According to reports, the king used a familiar term normally used only for close acquaintances - or children.

Score one for the good guys.

Iraqis Take On Al-Qaeda On Their Own

More signs of progress that Reid, Pelosi, MoveOn, and those of like mind will not care to see:

BAGHDAD - Former Sunni insurgents asked the United States to stay away, and then ambushed members of Al Qaeda in Iraq, killing 18 in a battle that raged for hours north of Baghdad, an ex-insurgent leader and Iraqi police said yesterday.

The Islamic Army in Iraq sent advance word to Iraqi police requesting that US helicopters keep out of the area because its fighters had no uniforms and were indistinguishable from Al Qaeda, according to the police and a top Islamic Army leader known as Abu Ibrahim.

Abu Ibrahim said his fighters killed 18 Al Qaeda militants and captured 16 in the fight southeast of Samarra, a mostly Sunni city about 60 miles north of Baghdad.

"We found out that Al Qaeda intended to attack us, so we ambushed them at 3 p.m. on Friday," Abu Ibrahim said. He would not say whether any Islamic Army members were killed.

Much of the Islamic Army in Iraq, a major Sunni Arab insurgent group that includes former members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, has joined the US-led fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq along with Sunni tribesmen and other former insurgents repelled by the terror group's brutality and extremism.

An Iraqi police officer corroborated Abu Ibrahim's account, but said police officers were not able to verify the number of casualties because the area was still too dangerous to enter.

(emphasis mine)

Then there's this:

Meanwhile, farther east, in Diyala Province, members of another former insurgent group, the 1920s Revolution Brigades, launched a military-style operation yesterday against Al Qaeda in Iraq, the Iraqi Army said.

About 60 militants were captured and handed over to Iraqi soldiers, an Army officer said on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak to media.

Afterward, hundreds of people paraded through Buhriz, about 35 miles north of Baghdad, witnesses said. Many danced and fired their guns into the air, shouting "Down with Al Qaeda!" and "Diyala is for all Iraqis!"

Like the Islamic Army, the 1920s Revolution Brigades includes former members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party and officers from his army. Hundreds of 1920s members now work as scouts and gather intelligence for American soldiers in Diyala.

And at Baghdad's most revered Sunni shrine, the Abu Hanifa mosque, voices blasted from loudspeakers yesterday urging residents to turn against Qaeda: "We are your sons, the sons of the awakening, and we want to end the operations of Al Qaeda."

Looks like we're doing good work there... but the Defeatocrats still want us to pull out.

Remember that next November.

Terrorists Support Hillary, Part II

Looks like it's more than just terrorists making pro-Hillary statements... they're also donating money to her, and she's taking it, not returning it as other Democratic campaigns have done.

Some of the donors, in fact, are under active federal investigation for supporting terrorism, money laundering and tax fraud. After the press reported their alleged terror ties in past elections, Democrat Reps. Jim Moran of Virginia and Cynthia McKinney of Georgia had to refund their donations, making national news.

But that hasn't stopped Hillary from pocketing their money. So much for her promise to fly-speck donations for criminal ties following her fund-raising scandal with fugitive donor Norman Hsu.

In the past several months, the Democrat front-runner has received at least $2,000 from M. Yaqub Mirza, M. Omar Ashraf and Omar Barzinji, records show. Federal agents raided the Virginia homes and offices of the Muslim donors after 9/11, as part of a counterterrorism investigation targeting the so-called Safa group, a Saudi-backed conglomerate of Muslim businesses and charities.

It's this sort of thing that makes me glad every time someone predicts that Hillary will be the Democratic nominee... she will not only be absurdly easy to beat, given stories like this, but she will drag the Party of MoveOn right down the toilet.

A Conservative Way of Providing Medicine to the Poor

Health care for the poor does not, I say again, not have to flow from the government. Just ask the people of Warren County, VA:

Warren County, Virginia, at the confluence of the North and South Forks of the Shenandoah River has neither the rolling hills of horse country nor the fertile plains of the Shenandoah Valley.

Of its 36,000 citizens, an estimated 6,000 are uninsured. Typically, when they get sick, the uninsured go to the emergency room, which is about the most inefficient and costly way of delivering primary medical care.

But, thanks to the initiative of some local Christians, the uninsured of Warren County can instead go to the St. Luke Community Clinic for free medical care. In FY 2006, 2,633 uninsured people did just that.

St. Luke Clinic is one of an estimated two thousand Free Clinics around the country, fifty of them in Virginia. In 2006, the total budget of all the Free Clinics in Virginia was about $18 million, which they leveraged to a value in excess of $80 million.

The Free Clinic movement is living embodiment of many conservative principles: the principles of subsidiarity and voluntarism, the spirit of enterprise and of community self-reliance. As health care becomes more and more of a national concern, if people are truly concerned about the less fortunate, there should be a population explosion in the number of free clinics around the country.

Please note, there are Free Clinics and then there are "free clinics":

Free Clinics are private, non-profit organizations that provide medical, dental, pharmaceutical and/or mental health services at little or no cost to low-income, uninsured and underinsured people. These clinics are truly free - both to their clients and to the taxpayers.

Unlike federally-qualified so-called "free clinics", they do not submit receipts to Medicare or Medicaid for reimbursement. St. Luke and the other authentic Free Clinics in Virginia do not submit bills to anybody for reimbursement.

How do they do it? Volunteers.

The small staff includes one part-time doctor, but most of the medical skills come from the volunteer nurses, doctors, labs, and hospitals.

And don't tell the lefties, but the eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil pharmaceutical companies help out a lot.

The biggest chunk of the leverage is pharmaceuticals. Every major pharmaceutical company has a free donation plan, or Patient Assistance Program. By maximizing those programs, St. Luke was able to dispense 31,134 prescriptions in 2006. However, every company has different medications, rules, forms, and schedules. The process is so complicated that the clinic employs two staff members work on it only slightly less than full-time. In 2006, the Free Clinics in Virginia provided about $42 million worth of donated medications to all their patients.

This is how you get health care to those with no insurance. Instead of installing a government program, you Americans, among the most generous people on the face of the planet, offer their services for free. The government can help, tho.

All the good intentions in the world would not make a free clinic possible in our litigious society. But that problem has been solved in Virginia, whose example could easily be followed.

With the help of the Virginia Association of Free Clinics, the state recently established the "VaRISK2" liability risk management program. Operating under the Division of Risk Management of the Department of the Treasury, of the Commonwealth of Virginia, the program indemnifies Directors, Officers, employees, and volunteers in a Free Clinic.

Volunteers in private medical clinics received federal tort claim coverage when Senator Dan Coats' 1996 Medical Volunteer Act became law as part of the Kennedy-Kassebaum Health Care Reform Act. Prior to Coats' action, only volunteers in government-funded clinics typically received coverage for liability at the federal level.

And it's that simple. No HillaryCare needed.

WaPo: Islamist = Conservative

Hot on the heels of the Harvard report on media bias comes a shining example, as explained by the Counterterrorism blog:

Regarding Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the November 5 Washington Post views him as "head of a conservative religious party", and reports Qazi Hussain Ahmed's calls against Musharraf as: "It's time to take a stand. It's a now-or-never chance, and people should come out on the streets and throw out this military dictator." The Washington Post reports that "[h]undreds of the party's activists had been arrested as of Monday morning, a party spokesman said". The Washington Post does not identify the organizations or the ideology that Qazi Hussain Ahmed and his political parties represent.

In fact, the "conservative religious party" that Qazi Hussain Ahmed leads is Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI), which is also part of the Muttahidah Majlis-e-'Amal (Council of United Action) (MMA) -- that he also leads. Neither are merely a "conservative religious party", but are Islamist political organizations, with reported support of Jihad by their leaders and some of their members.

Qazi Hussain Ahmed has been reported as a sympathizer and defender of Osama Bin Laden. One media report stated "Qazi Hussain Ahmed has earlier made flattering comments about Osama bin Laden, and his party, Jamaat-e-Islami, also has hailed al-Qaeda members as heroes." Qazi Hussain Ahmed views that the 9/11 attacks were "specially designed to crush Muslims all over the world under this garb".

In his own party's media news ("Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI) Media News"), Qazi Hussain Ahmed "has warned the government that unrest in the country would assume serious dimensions if it assisted the United States or any agency in arrest of Osama bin Laden." In May 2003, South Asia Intelligence Group reported potential links between Qazi Hussain Ahmed, JEI, and Bin Laden: "US intelligence officers posted in Pakistan have reportedly been making detailed enquiries into the likely links of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI) of Pakistan headed by Qazi Hussain Ahmed with Al Qaeda of Osama bin Laden".

Regarding Jamaat-e-Islami, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Pakistan's Interior Minister Makhdoom Faisel Saleh Hayat has alleged links between JEI and Al Qaeda stating "[a]ll of the activists and terrorists who have been apprehended in recent months have had links to the Jamaat-e-Islami, whether we have arrested them in Lahore or here or Karachi....[t]hey have been harboring them."

Prior to the Musharraf emergency declaration, the Pakistan Daily Times reported that Jamaat-e-Islami has been petitioning the Pakistani Supreme Court to halt all Pakistani military action in the Tribal Areas.

As GlobalSecurity.org states of Muttahidah Majlis-e-'Amal (MMA) political coalition: "it venomously attacked the Musharraf government for having betrayed the Taliban and sided with the US in its supposed 'war against Islam'. They...speak in favour of the militant groups banned by the Musharraf government Leaders under the MMA umbrella have issued fatwas of death on Americans and have denied the 9/11 attack by Osama bin Laden. The four parties are opposed to the present fiscal system and want it Islamised together with a complete enforcement of 'shariah'."

Now, granted, this may be viewed as "conservative" in Pakistan, which has a long history of being an Islamist haven, but the WaPo article makes no such distinction. By slapping the label "conservative" on this man and his party without explanation, they are at the very least negligent in not clearly explaining their terms, and at worst are trying to conflate the American conservative movement with these Islamoterrorists.

And don't get me started on the "religious" label. That's even worse, lumping all religions in with the radical terrorist wing of Islam.

The Washington Post deserves nothing but scorn for that article.

More Hillary Supporters

Looks like Hillary's recent comments on what she calls "George Bush’s faulty and offensive historical analogies" are gaining her support from at least one area she might not want to advertise:

So if you’re keeping score, Hillary Clinton finds Bush’s historical analogy, comparing Osama Bin Laden to Hitler and Lenin, wrong and offensive. She is joined by the Communist Party USA, who also find the analogy offensive — apparently because Lenin didn’t do anything wrong. The American Nazi Party is, frankly, flattered by the comparison — which it gleefully extends to George Washington for reasons only a mental health professional knows. And everybody involved hates George W. Bush.

So, I can see the updated Hillary ad now... Hillary '08: the choice of terrorists and the Communist Party USA.

Of course, given her own socialistic/communistic views, I guess that will surprise no one except a few DailyKOS readers who don't know any better.

Distorting Giuliani

It should be clear to everyone by now that I am not a Giuliani supporter, but this just couldn't go un-commented on:

The segment revealed, just as with Bush, the media has no problem broadcasting factual errors when targeting Giuliani. Olbermann misquoted Giuliani as saying that Democrats wanted to invite Osama bin Laden to the White House. In actuality, Giuliani didn't say Osama, he said Assad, as in Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, one of the leaders whom Barack Obama did in fact say he would be willing to meet with in Washington with no preconditions within the first year of his administration. Making the incident even more absurd, Olbermann ran the video clip of Giuliani's remarks on his show, and it was clear that Giuliani said Assad. How clear? The transcript appearing on the official MSNBC website for Olbermann's show had Giuliani saying Assad in the video clip.

Nevertheless, Olbermann asked his guest Arianna Huffington to comment on whether the former mayor was being hyperbolic or lying.

"Well, he's lying and also every day he reveals more and more of himself," Huffington said. "And you can see that he really has the soul of a thug and the disposition of a tyrant."

Huffington repeated the false Giuliani-Osama quote, and later in the interview, she added: "He's kind of channeling Rush Limbaugh. He's making the lunatic fringe mainstream."

And Olbermann wondered, "Has it reached a level yet where we should be considering examining whether or not this is compulsive lying that there is something endemic to [Giuliani]? Or this specific purpose driven lies?"

One might ask the same about Olbermann. Even though the AP issued a correction to its story that misquoted Giuliani following a report on AmSpecBlog, as of this writing, Olbermann has not corrected his erroneous segment. His spokeswoman did not return three calls or an email sent from TAS asking whether the news channel planned to correct the error, and if not, to explain its corrections policy.

So, Olbermann slips up with the proof right there in his own show, and he refuses to admit it? Is this guy trying to outdo Dan Rather and The New Republic for sheer unadulterated gall in the face of an obvious error?

Actually, I think it's just more of the same lefty mindset... we're never wrong, we are always right, and those who accuse us of being wrong are part of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.

Keith, you were wrong. Now, where'd I put that VRWC membership card?

Yes, Virginia, There Is Media Bias.

Yet another study has proven pro-Democrat bias in the media.

Just like so many reports before it, a joint survey by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy — hardly a bastion of conservative orthodoxy — found that in covering the current presidential race, the media are sympathetic to Democrats and hostile to Republicans.

Democrats are not only favored in the tone of the coverage. They get more coverage period. This is particularly evident on morning news shows, which "produced almost twice as many stories (51% to 27%) focused on Democratic candidates than on Republicans."

That, of course, is no surprise to anyone who watches or reads the news regularly.

Expect the media spin machine to go into high gear, tho.