What liberal media? The Pew Research folks have done a media poll, and one of the results is that Americans see a liberal bias, and although where you stand seems to affect what you see, even more Democrats see a liberal tilt than a conservative one.

Republicans see the press as more liberal than conservative by nearly three-to-one (65%- 22%). Among independents, the margin is two-to-one (50%-25%). And while a third of Democrats say there is a conservative tilt to the American press, a slight plurality (41%) says the press is more liberal than anything else.

Overall, by a 2-to-1 ratio, Americans see a liberal bias vs. a conservative bias. What’s more revealing is the percentage that think the press is truly unbiased: only 14%. That doesn’t speak well at all for journalists who supposedly do all they can to scrub their reports clean of bias. Yeah, we all see through our own lenses, but…14%?

Quote: “The most widely accepted study of sexual practices in the United States is the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS). The NHSLS found that 2.8% of the male, and 1.4% of the female, population identify themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.”

These numbers are, of course, far lower than gay rights activists have been quoting for decades (I’ve personally heard some people estimate as high as 20%). Anyone who’s ever said those numbers were 3% or less was considered homophobic at the very least. Therefore, where do you think the above quote is from:

A – Pat Robertson
B – Jerry Falwell
C – The Christian Coalition
D – A small footnote on page 16 of an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court in the recent “Lawrence v. Texas” sodomy case on behalf of 31 groups including Human Rights Campaign, National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, Parents, Families, & Friends of Lesbians and Gays, The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and the People for the Way Foundation.

I’ll let you look it up.

Stanley Crouch, writing in the NY Daily News, points out the hypocrisy of the civil right establishment in how they are reacting to Bush’s Africa trip.

On his first day in Africa, he gave a speech in Senegal from Goree Island, where slaves were gathered and sold to Europeans after being captured by other Africans (something self-righteous Negro Americans ignore at every turn). The speech shocked many because no Republican President since Lincoln has ever seriously addressed slavery or its consequences with such direct eloquence and depth of vision.

In fact, had a Democrat given such a speech, the civil rights establishment and our domestic left would have flipped. He would have been praised for facing up to the dark slave voyages of our history. He would have been commended for acknowledging the horrors of the plantation experience and for rightfully celebrating the ongoing struggle of black Americans that so fundamentally brought our nation closer to the ideals laid down in the Declaration of Independence. A march might have been organized in his honor.

But Bush is a Republican, which means the partisan civil rights establishment cannot acknowledge the greatness of his speech because he is not supposed to have given it, and, if he gave it, the motives could only be crass. That is why that establishment needs to reiterate the nonpartisan stance of the old leadership, which never would have sold out to the Democrats – or the Republicans!

And coverage of all this in the major media is pitiful. When I watched ABC News last night, the only coverage on the Africa trip was a short mention of the AIDS relief package and video of the Bush entourage happening across a pair of mating elephants. Nothing about a ground-breaking speech, although they did spend about 5 full minutes on a single sentence in his State of the Union address from months ago that was based on possibly bad intelligence.

Eric Alterman (author of “What Liberal Media?”), call your office.

Update: You can find a copy of the text of the speech here.

The Village Voice has an article by Noah Shachtman describing a system called “Combat Zones that See” or CTS. It’s a surveillance system using off-the-shelf parts that would be used for urban warfare and the like, but the folks bidding on creating it (and it ain’t that far off) say that there’s definite homeland security applications, and in fact that may be the intended ultimate use of it.

As currently configured, the old-line cameras speckled throughout every major city aren’t that much of a privacy concern. Yes, there are lenses everywhere-several thousand just in Manhattan. But they see so much, it’s almost impossible for snoops to sift through all the footage and find what’s important.

CTS would coordinate the cameras, gathering their views in a single information storehouse. The goal, according to a recent Pentagon presentation to defense contractors, is to “track everything that moves.”

“This gives the U.S. government capabilities Big Brother only pretended to have,” said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a defense think tank. “Before, we said Big Brother’s watching. But he really wasn’t, because there was too much to watch.”

Is this supposed to make me feel more secure in my own country? We’re continuing to see the truth to the statement that those who give up a little liberty for a little security will wind up with neither.

Oh, now this is rich! A story about two guys starting their own “Government Information Awareness” web site.

Annoyed by the prospect of a massive new federal surveillance system [TotalTerrorist Information Awareness], two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are celebrating the Fourth of July with a new Internet service that will let citizens create dossiers on government officials.

The system will start by offering standard background information on politicians, but then go one bold step further, by asking Internet users to submit their own intelligence reports on government officials — reports that will be published with no effort to verify their accuracy.

And here’s an interesting feature:

The site also takes advantage of round-the-clock political coverage provided by cable TV’s C-Span networks. McKinley and Csikszentmihalyi use video cameras to capture images of people appearing on C-Span, which generally includes the names of people shown on screen. A computer program “reads” each name, and links it to any information about that person stored in the database. By clicking on the picture, a GIA user instantly gets a complete rundown on all available data about that person.

The GIA site constantly displays snapshots of the people appearing on C-Span at that moment. If there’s a dossier on a particular person, clicking on the picture brings it up. A C-Span viewer watching a live government hearing could learn which companies have contributed to a member of Congress’s reelection campaign, before the politician had even finished speaking.

More power to ’em.

Democrat presidential hopeful Howard Dean says we should intervene in Liberia to head off a human rights crisis. How does this square with his opposition to the Iraq war?

“The situation in Liberia is exactly the opposite,” Dean said. “There is an imminent threat of serious human catastrophe and the world community is asking the United States to exercise its leadership.”

An “imminent threat”, which is “exactly the opposite” of an actual threat that had existed in Iraq for decades? Well gee, good thing Liberian President Charles Taylor hasn’t already started gassing his own people. Then the Democrats would consider him untouchable.

Back in my BBS days (“Bulletin Board Systems”, for the uninitiated, where you’d dial in to another computer and have discussion groups and could download files) I’d had discussions with folks about marijuana legalization, and why I thought that it was simply the first step to legalizing stronger drugs. Those who were for legalization always insisted that it would all stop with marijuana and go no further (to heroin, crack, etc.), ignoring centuries of human behavior that showed that when one barrier was removed, it never stopped there.

One of their reasons for placing marijuana in a separate class of drugs was that it wasn’t nearly as bad for you as the harder drugs. “There has never been a case of a marijuana-induced crime spree” was how one fellow put it. Perhaps not, but how about inducing schizophrenia?

Speaking at the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ annual conference in Edinburgh, [Professor Robin Murray of the Institute of Psychiatry in London] said: “In the last 18 months a number of studies have confirmed that cannabis consumption acts to increase later risk of schizophrenia. This research must not be ignored.”

Cannabis users were found to be 6 to 7 times more likely to develop psychotic symptoms or schizophrenia within 3-15 years following heavy use.

Professor Murray said these findings had been largely ignored.

Well of course. That would simply delay legalization.

Ralph Peters (retired Army officer) had a great editorial in the NY Post yesterday dealing with sensationalism winning the day on reports coming out of Iraq.

Our troops are doing remarkably well – but the headlines make it sound like a disaster. Last weekend, almost as many Americans died in a residential balcony collapse in Chicago as have been killed by hostile fire in “postwar” Iraq.

As a former soldier, I don’t discount any American casualties as unimportant. But the fact is that, despite real errors and miscues, reconstruction efforts in Iraq are going surprisingly well.

How bad is it in Iraq? It’s terrible – if you’re a former Saddam loyalist, ex-secret policeman or Ba’ath Party muckety-muck on the wrong end of Operation Sidewinder. The party’s over for Baghdad’s bully-boys, and they don’t much like it.

For perspective…

On our worst day last week, when two convoys came under attack, more than 600 other U.S. convoys didn’t hear a single shot. Two patrols got into firefights. The other 500 patrols didn’t even get hit with a water balloon.

Of course the same folks who predicted massive military and civilian casualties are the same folks predicting we’ll lose the peace. The same ones who didn’t blink at the long periods of time we took for nation-building in Somalia and Haiti are carping already at the short time we’ve been working on rebuilding what we had to break in Iraq getting rid of Saddam. You don’t suppose that it’s all a matter of who’s sitting in the Oval Office, do ya’?

[Note: This is a post from June 13th, but I accidentally posted it to my other blog, “Considerable Quotes”. When I went to post a new quote today, I saw this sitting in there. Blame my not keeping track of what blog the “w.bloggar” software was pointing to.]

James Taranto’s “Best of the Web Today” has a great “turnabout is fair play” item. After enumerating some of the things that anti-war folks predicted that turned out to be false or overblown, he includes this:

Some war foes even said–get this!–that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and would use them on American troops. Well pardon us for asking, but if Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, where are they?

It’s possible that this was all just a massive failure of intelligence, but we can’t help suspecting that war opponents knew better and deliberately misled the public in an effort to establish a pretext for keeping a mass-murdering dictator in power. In either case, they now face a yawning credibility gap. The American people deserve nothing less than a full congressional investigation into the false claims of antiwar politicians, scholars, journalists and activists. If they lied to us about Iraq, how can we ever trust them to talk us out of future wars?

Typical of Taranto’s sense of humor, this is both funny and pointed. You can add to the list of those who said Saddam had WMDs all the prewar doomsayers. There were plenty of them predicting massive US casualties because of that assumption. Where are they now?