Category: News

Instapundit links to a post at NewsBusters about ABC News’s use of [sic] that might indicate media bias or lack of belief in an afterlife.

NewsBusters says:

Adding religious insult to mortal injury in its coverage of the 3000th US service-person to die in Iraq, ABC seemed to suggest that there was something odd or erroneous in the expression of a traditional belief in the afterlife.

The quote to which ABC News applied the [sic] is:

“You were one of my best friends and I’ll never forget you. All my prayers go to your family and I’ll see you again.” (sic)

Come on, people. There is a grammar error in the sentence, so use of [sic] is appropriate. The second sentence is a compound sentence, which means there should be a comma before the conjunction between the clauses. It should be: All my prayers go to your family, and I’ll see you again.

Here’s a story on ABCNews.com that uses the comma appropriately:

Rumsfeld was supposed to be an honorary pall bearer at Saturday night’s ceremony, but bad weather in New Mexico apparently prevented him from making the earlier service.

See? ABC News was noting that the comma was missing in the source material. Not that it’s a bunch of godless heathen mocking Christians.

People ought to save their outrage for outrageous things, not inventions based on faulty understanding of grammar.

Hey, all the cool news agencies are doing it. Why not MfBJN?

Hussein had problems with Bush Iraq policy

BAGHDAD(AP) — Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein questioned the Bush administration’s rationale for the U.S. invasion and war in Iraq in interviews he granted on condition they not be released until after his death.

In his embargoed July 2004 interview with The Daily Mirror, Hussein said the Iraq war was not justified, the Mirror reported Saturday night.

Hussein “very strongly” disagreed with the current president’s justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as continuing the lucrative, er, punitive sanctions, much more vigorously, the Mirror’s Peter Arnett wrote. The story initially was posted on the newspaper’s Internet site.

“I don’t think I would have gone to war,” Hussein told Arnett a little more than a year after President Bush launched the invasion.

In the tape-recorded interview, Hussein was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

“Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. A sovereign leader should never justify; they should merely invade their neighbors and execute any dissidents,” Hussein said. “And now, I’ve never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error that they should justify what they were going to do.”

In an interview given with the same ground rules to the New York Daily News last May, Hussein said he thought Bush had erred by staking the invasion on claims he had weapons of mass destruction.

CNN, reporting on Saddam Hussein’s execution, gives Saddam the dark date graphic saved for statesmen and celebrities:

Me, I’m trying to figure out how a tyrant gets this. Pinochet didn’t when he died a couple weeks ago. Is this reverence reserved for cause celebres that one in the media would hope reflected badly on America, or the Bush administration?

I am so cynical.

In a story entitled Woman, 57, is shot, killed on her porch, we have these rich nonsequitors:

A neighbor said he had heard a gunshot about that time but didn’t see anything unusual.

“This is a very quiet neighborhood,” Capt. David Dorn said. “This is very unusual for this neighborhood.”

Neighbor hears a gunshot. In this very quiet neighborhood. Nothing unusual.

I wonder what my neighborhood rates on the very quiet neighborhood scale.

Kudos to AP, who found a way to turn Gerald Ford’s death into a means to flog the Bush administration:

Former President Gerald R. Ford questioned the Bush administration’s rationale for the U.S. invasion and war in Iraq in interviews he granted on condition they not be released until after his death.

In his embargoed July 2004 interview with The Washington Post, Ford said the Iraq war was not justified, the Post reported Wednesday night.

That takes skill and effort. Or lack thereof.

In Alaska, a woman suspected that a package had been delivered to her old residence by mistake, so she called the current resident. Current resident said he didn’t know anything about it. So the woman called the state police, and they searched the man’s home.

Sure, the troopers found a cornucopia of drugs in the man’s home, but that leads me to think he might have been under suspicion and the misdirected package provided a mere pretext for a search. But still, we’ve lowered the bar to the point where suspicion of a misdirected package can lead to a police search warrant.

Aw, who am I kidding? The police do this sort of thing based on the uncorroborated tips of informants.

The story seems to indicate that the woman got her Avon samples back, though. Well, she will, after they’re done being evidence in a trial.

U.S. Toll in Iraq Surpasses That of 9/11

Now, with that Grim Milestone™ out of the way, can we get on with continuing to win?

Not so that you’d know it from AP reports.

(Thanks to Ann Althouse for the direct link, since the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a different story linked from the home page with that headline, so I couldn’t direct you there.)

UPDATE: James Joyner provides other useful metrics.

MfBJN, September 2, 2006:

The two figures on the right; they’re falling forward, arms splayed out and in a grimace of pain as though they’ve been shot in the back by unknown assailants while trying to flee.

Life, Christmas 2006:

A security guard for MetroLink is reported in serious but stable condition today with a gunshot wound suffered at the Delmar Station, police say.

It brings miscreants to quiet suburbs, offers a locus for gunfire, scares off the normal people, and costs tax money for subsidies. Is there anything light rail cannot do?

I don’t know what’s more frightening about this story: Great Lakes live fire a no-go:

Bowing to pressure from a wide-ranging group of critics, the U.S. Coast Guard on Monday backed off from plans to permanently conduct live fire exercises on the Great Lakes.

• The Coast Guard holds live fire exercises and thought it would be fun to do so on waters heavily trafficked by civilians.
• The Army hasn’t publicly said it would not hold live fire exercises in American cities.

Apparently, a recent Missouri court decision has determined that it’s your obligation, after a divorce, to maximize your income to fund your court-anointed financial duties:

If you are well paid, a parent and living in Missouri, pay special attention to this column.

That’s because a recent ruling by the Missouri Court of Appeals seems to invite local courts to compel divorced parents to seek work anywhere in the world if doing so would maximize the payments they could make in support of their children and ex-spouses.

In Payne v Payne, which originated in St. Louis County, the husband had been employed as an oil trader at the time of his divorce. Based on yearly earnings of $141,000, the court set child and spousal support payments totaling nearly $36,000 per year. Unfortunately for Mr. Payne, he lost his job shortly after his divorce.

Four months later, the husband asked the court to reduce his support obligations, contending he had been unable to find a comparable job in his field in St. Louis or elsewhere, despite search efforts that reached across the nation and overseas. To support himself, he had started an antique business but was generating far less income than he had earned previously.

The courts decided that Mr. Payne had to continue working in his highly paid field, even if it meant relocating. The courts were going to dictate Mr. Payne’s career and job choices, under the threat of jail time for contempt no doubt.

The lower court’s decision was overturned on appeal, but still, this intervention of the courts on a citizen’s career choice is galling and chilling. And frighteningly potentially prescient.

Thousands in dark after Northwest storm:

Residents of the Pacific Northwest struggled to stay warm Saturday after the worst windstorm in more than a decade knocked out power to more than 1.5 million homes and businesses and killed at least six people.

More than 600,000 customers in Washington and Oregon still had no power Saturday, and utilities said some might have to wait into next week for their lights to go back on.

Me, I blame those who have sought out the devil of electricity and who now are dependent upon its snug snake-like embrace for their own survival and happiness. Also, I curse the Tennessee Valley Authority some 70 years later for bringing power to those outlying areas that could not hold it through the slightest adversity.

Nicole Ritchie, arrested and released on bail:

According to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Departmentexternal link report, Richie was set free on $15,000 bail. She was listed in her police report as being 5-foot-1 and 85 pounds.

There’s no jail that could hold her, as she could slip between the bars if she wanted to. So it’s good they got bail for her.

In today’s news, an insurgent opened fire in a Chicago high rise today, killing several. Meanwhile, in St. Louis, the crumbling infrastructure continues to pose problems as parts of the metropolitan area suffer from a loss of power in the feared Midwestern winter, where temperatures drop beneath freezing. Corruption remains a problem, as government officials continue to work with the insurgency. Authorities disrupted one plot to blow up a shopping mall but were powerless to prevent a dramatic explosion in an industrial facility.

Take a handful of incidents from across a country, dash in some weighted words, and blend them together nicely, and I guess you can make any kind of meal you want.

Harry Levins of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch rationalizes why the newspapers help Americans forget historic anniversaries:

The bombs had barely stopped falling on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, when Tin Pan Alley produced a tune that was eminently forgettable, except for its title:

“Let’s Remember Pearl Harbor.”

But today, precisely 65 years later, demography has determined that very few of us still “remember Pearl Harbor.”

Most of us have to be 5 years old before news events imprint themselves in our memory. And Census Bureau estimates drawn up last year show that only 26 million Americans are old enough to remember Pearl Harbor.

Funny. I think let’s remember Pearl Harbor is less a directive to think back to where we were than it is to work at not forgetting the lessons of history.

Never mind, there’s column inches to spend on Barry Bonds becoming a Cardinal.