Yesterday’s “Best of the Web Today” column by James Taranto (a daily must-read) has a rather long section (scroll down to “High Bias”) on how the news organizations keep spinning the news, including:

• A New York Time headline that says precisely the opposite of what the story says.
• An AP headline that sounds more ominous than it really is.
• Speculation and editorializing in an AP news report.
• Headlining poll results with selectively aggregated information.
• Poorly worded poll questions.

And guess which way–pro- or anti-Bush–all these stories are slanted? (Do I really have to ask?)

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out. Comments welcome.)

Today’s Odd “Considerettes” Search Phrase – examples of dropped unpopular vaudeville acts [#1! on Google]

The revelation yesterday that the NSA has the same phone records that they pull weekly on “Law & Order” has Washington in a tizzy. However, it’s not causing much concern outside of there.

A majority of Americans initially support a controversial National Security Agency program to collect information on telephone calls made in the United States in an effort to identify and investigate potential terrorist threats, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The new survey found that 63 percent of Americans said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, including 44 percent who strongly endorsed the effort. Another 35 percent said the program was unacceptable, which included 24 percent who strongly objected to it.

A slightly larger majority–66 percent–said they would not be bothered if NSA collected records of personal calls they had made, the poll found.

I’m not a big fan of polls in general, especially when they ask Americans about information outside their expertise. (Would a poll on how far away people think the moon is really mean anything? Should it affect policy on anything? The Patriot Post has a great article today on what it calls “Pollaganda” that’s well worth reading.) But what this poll does show is that what some folks are calling “controversial” is only a controversy in their own mind. Is it illegal? Is it good or bad policy? This poll answers none of this, and as such doesn’t really give us much information. What it does do is expose the bias of anyone suggesting that this program is currently controversial, unless their bar of controversy is somewhere north of 3/4ths agreement, which is rather silly and self-serving.

As to those who have an extremely low secrecy threshold, Scott Ott nails it.

Concerned that the National Security Agency (NSA) may have violated the civil liberties of Americans by analyzing records of millions of phone calls to detect patterns that might indicate terrorist activity, a bipartisan coalition in Congress today will unveil legislation to scrap the NSA and replace it with a more ‘transparent’ spy agency.

According to language in the measure, the new intelligence unit, dubbed Open-Source Intelligence (OSI), will “harness the power of the internet to protect the right of the American people to know how their spy dollar is spent.”

“There’s nothing like sunshine to ensure accountability,” said an unnamed Congressional aide who spoke in exchange for a lobster dinner, a fine chianti and a $12 Macanudo cigar. “Just because the enemy is among us, using our telecommunications infrastructure to plot the next major attack, doesn’t mean the government can sneak around doing secret stuff simply to save a few thousand, or million, lives. We have rights.”

Many of the same people who blamed Bush for not “connecting the dots” prior to 9/11 are probably in that 35 percent that now want to make collecting those dots illegal.

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out and Blogger News Network. Comments welcome.)

Go get ’em, Tony.

New White House Press Secretary Tony Snow is starting off in a combative mode against the press by issuing detailed rebuttals to what he considers unfair coverage of Bush.

“The New York Times continues to ignore America’s economic progress,” blared the headline of an e-mail sent to reporters Wednesday by the White House press office.

Minutes earlier, another e-mail blasted CBS News, which has had an unusually rocky relationship with the White House since 2004, when CBS aired what turned out to be forged documents in a failed effort to question the president’s military service.

“CBS News misleadingly reports that only 8 million seniors have signed up for Medicare prescription drug coverage,” Wednesday’s missive said. “But 37 million seniors have coverage.” On Tuesday, the White House railed against “USA Today’s misleading Medicare story.”

“USA Today claims ‘poor, often minority’ Medicare beneficiaries are not enrolling in Medicare drug coverage,” the press office complained. “But by April, more than 70 percent of eligible African Americans, more than 70 percent of eligible Hispanics, and more than 75 percent of eligible Asian Americans are enrolled or have retiree drug coverage.”

White House sources said Snow, who started on the job Monday and has yet to give his first public press briefing, is determined to aggressively counter what the administration considers unfair assertions in both news and editorials about Bush. At the same time, he is eager to make the notoriously secretive administration more accessible to the press.

The administration needs both. Hopefully, this will mean less editorializing from press questioners and better and more information coming from the White House. I don’t know how much latitude a press secretary gets, but it looks like it’s not a static thing. Whether Tony lobbied for it or whether he was granted it, he’s still the right man for the job.

Where is the outcry among activists about the fact that over 2 billion of the world’s citizens do not have electricity, or that over 2.5 billion do not have access to basic sanitation? Where is the outrage that over 4 million preventable deaths occur each year due to tuberculosis and other lung infections stemming from indoor pollution caused by using dung as fuel for fires? What about the 6 million people who die from unsafe water or spoiled food?

These are not hypothetical future deaths; these are real deaths that are occurring right under our noses, which could be easily thwarted if the proper technology were applied to certain poor regions of the world.

Read this article by Daniel Son for the reason these conditions haven’t improved when indeed they can.

Taking the ‘play’ out of ‘playground’.

Most adults can remember the carefree days of childhood, climbing trees and jumping from swings, often on schoolyard playgrounds.

Climbing, swinging and sliding was once a rite of passage during recess, a time for adventure, to see how high, how far and how fast we could go as a kid.

Today, kids find themselves grounded, victims of a culture of fear and injury litigation.

A growing number of school districts are going so far as to ban the game of tag and are even posting signs that read “no running on the playground.”

It’s a shame that people are trying to save children mostly from a few knee scrapes. Granted, there are serious injuries that can happen, but does that mean it’s better to places kids in a padded rubber room during “playtime”? No running, no playing tag, no swings, dodge ball, or tether ball? What kind of childhood is that?

And are these same litigious nannies the same ones complaining that our kids are getting obese? You can point the finger at McDonald’s if you like, but that’s rather hypocritical if you deny the kids the chance to get even a little exercise, never mind the social interaction required at early ages.

One more reason to homeschool.

Religion in schools will not be tolerated. Anti-religious views are just fine.

The Sampson County school system stands behind a decision to suspend a student for passing out Christian leaflets at Midway High School, Superintendent Stewart Hobbs said Friday.

Hobbs said the student was given in-school suspension for insubordination after disobeying the principal about distributing the fliers.

The handouts, which presented a Christian viewpoint on homosexuality, caused a disturbance in the school and prompted some students, teachers and a parent to complain, Hobbs said.

Bias and nonsense, both in the same line of news. First of all, handouts themselves can’t cause disturbances. They are, in fact, simply pieces of paper, incapable of independent action. Yes, I know that all sounds rather silly to have to explain, but the journalist who presumably studied Language Arts got this wrong, and I just wanted to set the record straight if others had the same misconception.

Second, if handing out fliers is “disturbing”, then the very same handing out of fliers by students on the previous day’s Day of Silence should not have been allowed either. I doubt that’s the “disturbance” being referred to, however. Instead, I would bet that there were students who got upset at the contents of these fliers and likely they caused this disturbance. Unfortunately, this journalist did not answer all the proper questions a news article should, and we’re left with the impression that the student handing out the fliers was the responsible party. There’s your bias; not reporting the whole story and thus implicitly placing the responsibility for the disturbance on the guy voicing non-PC viewpoints.

But the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal group, said the student, Benjamin Arthurs, was wrongfully punished for expressing his religious beliefs. The group has filed a federal lawsuit against the school system, saying it violated Arthurs’ freedom of speech by not allowing him to wear a Day of Truth shirt and to pass out the leaflets during noninstructional time.

“That, in our opinion, is unconstitutional,” said David Cortman, a lawyer with the alliance.

Hobbs said the student was allowed to wear the shirt but told not to hand out the fliers. “The only thing the T-shirt said was, ‘Day of Truth,’ and we felt that was not forcing his religion on others,” Hobbs said. The handouts, however, did present religious views, he said.

If you have to voluntarily accept a flier, how is that “forcing” anything? No one is compelled to take the flier. The problem for the school is that religion, to them, has no place in the public square, even during noninstructional time.

Arthurs, a ninth-grader, handed out the fliers following the April 26 Day of Silence, an event promoted by the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network. He asked Canady if he could wear the shirt and hand out Day of Truth cards, the lawsuit said. He was told he could not wear a religious T-shirt or distribute religious literature because that would be “pushing his religion on others,” the lawsuit said, and “religion is not allowed in school.”

“Religion is not allowed in school”? Banned? You’re not allowed to speak about it? I mean, if you can’t hand out printed material to those who volunteer to take it, what about actually talking about it? Those who think the First Amendment is doing just fine in America need to know what educators think about it.

Students don’t lose their constitutional rights in school, but there are valid restrictions on them while in public school. In fact, I would agree that Arthurs should have been punished for disobeying the administration. If you don’t have some semblance of order in school, you soon have little else. So even though I think the rules are being misapplied and use a double-standard, I agree with the suspension. I also, however, agree that the decision and the rules that led up to it need to be dealt with, and if that requires the courts to (hopefully) clarify the Constitution and possibly reverse the punishment, so be it.

Cortman said it is unfair that the school system allowed students to participate in the Day of Silence but did not let Arthurs express his Christian views. Day of Silence is a nationwide movement that allows students to protest anti-homosexual bullying and discrimination. Students hand out fliers and remain silent throughout the day.

So it’s not the handing out of fliers that is the issue, and again this points out the misinformation given in the first paragraph of this story. If handing out fliers was a “disturbance”, it should have been so on the Day of Silence as well. Thus, the disturbance was most likely caused by other students reacting to these fliers, not the student handing them out (nor the allegedly self-aware fliers themselves). No mention is made of these students or (possibly) teachers that really caused the disturbance. Whether this is due to journalistic incompetence or bias is not known, but it doesn’t speak well of the writer.

The Day of Truth, which is held after the Day of Silence, was established by the Alliance Defense Fund to express the Christian perspective on homosexuality.

“School officials shouldn’t be treating religious students any differently than they treat other students,” Cortman said, “and that’s exactly what is happening here.”

According to the lawsuit, Arthurs belongs to the Bible Club, the National Honor Society and Who’s Who of American High School students. The lawsuit says his religious beliefs “compel him to share his faith and to address relevant subjects from a Biblical point of view with other students.”

In the lawsuit, the alliance is asking that Arthurs’ in-school suspension be removed from his record and that the school system write a policy giving students the right to free speech including religious speech.

I remember a video I saw of students praying around a school flagpole before school started in one of the early “See You at the Pole” events. School had not yet started for the day, and the event took place outside, so no disruption of learning occurred and no religion was “forced” on anyone. And yet, students were arrested because educators didn’t understand the whole “free exercise of religion” concept. It’s been 15 years since “See You at the Pole” got started, and yet the ignorance and double-standards continue (and this ignorance dates back long before that). And still educators keep needing further education on this topic.

This is a sad commentary on the public school system, and further exposure of the double-standard applied to Christians, both in actions taken against them and in the reporting of those actions.

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out, Blogger News Network and Redstate. Comments welcome.)

Today’s Odd “Considerettes” Search Phrase – If I want good luck where do I pinch Joseph [#1! on MSN Search]

I’m at a loss to explain the phrase or the reason why anyone would click on my link from that search. The “Joseph” MSN found on my blog was Joseph Stalin, and I don’t think he’s in a pinching mood.

Sorry for the light blogging this week. My brother gets married this weekend, I’m the best man, and I’m also putting together the Powerpoint presentation of old photos and mini-roast at the rehearsal dinner. So I’ve been busy with all that, and then we leave Wednesday for the festivities. Thus it’s going to stay pretty light to non-existent for a few days yet.

Stay tuned. I’ll be back.

Tomorrow is Independence Day in Israel, celebrating their 58th year. In honor of this, The Israel Project has put together some numbers about Israel and its history. Very enlightening.