If you had information about local organized crime activities, and were contemplating giving this information to the police, would you be more or less willing to be an informant if you knew your name might be associated with that information?  Would you be willing to take that chance?

Yeah, me neither.

NewsBusters, in a post regarding all the classified information dumped to the public via the NY Times and, more recently, by Wikileaks, noted Jim Miklaszewski discussing this on MSNBC.

Not only are those named put at risk, but those who might potentially cooperate with the Americans are probably not going to do it now. You know, often allies, U.S. allies, have told the Pentagon, State Department, why should we cooperate with you, because whatever we tell you is going to end up on the front pages of the New York Times.

That’s one of the complaints, actually, specifically from Pakistan.  Every time U.S. officials travel to Islamabad to sit down and try to gain increased cooperation from Pakistan, inevitably, we are told, they complain about press leaks that jeopardize anything they’re going to do in conjunction with the U.S.

(Emphasis supplied by NB.) 

While Pfc. Bradley Manning may have had a legitimate beef with how portions of the Afghanistan War have been run, his implication in this massive document dump to Wikileaks far overshadows his initial charges.  If he’d kept the dump relevant to his whistleblowing, I’d think much better of him (aside from the fact that he didn’t go through the normal channels the military has set up for whistleblowers). 

But this dump, purporting to merely foster transparency, has damaged our credibility with potential sources, and given our enemies a boatload of late summer reading.  Just as there were other, proper ways for Pfc. Manning to get his point across, there are better ways to foster transparency than giving aid to our enemies and discomfort to those who might help us defend ourselves.

I’ve been on vacation for about 10 days, so I have some catch-up to do here.  Here are some stories I noticed over the break.  Others will get their own post.

"Young Men’s Christian Association" to be renamed "Young".  This is ostensibly to remain more inclusive, but it’s not like folks have been staying away in droves or anything.  Just some more political correctness, removing even the hint of anything Christian in our culture, even if only ever referred to by its initial.

Handing out the Gospel of John is now "disturbing the peace" in Dearborn, Michigan.  Four kids from a group called Acts 17 Apologetics face jail time for handing out the text and talking to people at a Muslim festival.  The link on their name goes to their YouTube channel.  I’ve watched some of the videos, and I just don’t see "harassment" or "disturbing" going on.

Christian beliefs are now "unethical" when it comes to counseling, according to Augusta (GA) State University.  They want Jennifer Keeton to agree to a plan that includes "diversity sensitivity training" and changing her beliefs before they will allow her to graduate.  Read the article and, even if you disagree with her, tell me that this doesn’t sound like Soviet Russia.

The "JournoList" situation really blew up while I was out.  Oh, that liberal media.  Kenneth Anderson said it best, "To all you non-JournoLister reporters out there, please be aware that your credibility has just taken a big hit, because we, your faithful readers, don’t actually know who is or who isn’t.  You can thank JournoList for that, you can thank Ezra Klein, and you can thank the Washington Post, which has done its outstanding professionals absolutely no favors in any of this."

When even Democrats are poised to revolt over taxes (however temporary that might be), you know there’s a problem

And an appropriate cartoon from Chuck Asay:

A typical reason couples live together before getting married is that, supposedly, this will allow them to find out if they are compatible and thus ensure their marriage lasts longer.  But a new study says, nope, they are less likely to stay married.

Read my lips; no new taxes on those making $250,000 or less.  Well, we may soon add to the many exceptions since that promise was made, "unless you own a home".

The revolving door between the MSM and the Democratic Party.  Oh, that liberal media.

If the Gulf oil spill had happened on Bush’s watch, do you really think the environmental groups would be as virtually silent as they are now?  (Me neither.)

Remember how the UN climate change panel was supposed to be the result of boatloads of scientists in agreement?  Turns out the boat was a dingy.

And from the "Beware of Governments Bearing Gifts" department:

Churches and other faith-based organizations that receive government funds, beware. In an agreement that will be enforced by a federal court, government agencies in New York have agreed to monitor the Salvation Army to ensure that it doesn’t impose religion on the people its serves through its tax-funded social services.

The agreement just effects the Salvation Army’s social work in New York, but it’s more than a cautionary tale for religious groups in this era of government-backed faith-based initiatives. "With this settlement, government is watching out," co-counsel Deborah Karpatkin of the N.Y. Civil Liberties Union said in a statement. "It will not fund religious organizations to proselytize to recipients of government-funded social services."

The Salvation Army’s social services are intended to be an expression of faith in God and love for fellow man, but if they are prevented from doing the former while performing the latter, they’re being hobbled.  My suggestion has always been to avoid government money at all costs.

My blogging was rather light this week, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t collecting links.

Sarah Palin got skewered for suggesting that ObamaCare(tm) would bring about what she called "Death Panels".  Well, turns out that Obama’s pick for the guy to oversee government health care programs is all in favor of them.

Jobs saved and created … and created and created and created.  "Last week, one of the millions of workers hired by Census 2010 to parade around the country counting Americans blew the whistle on some statistical tricks. The worker, Naomi Cohn, told The Post that she was hired and fired a number of times by Census. Each time she was hired back, it seems, Census was able to report the creation of a new job to the Labor Department."

"Unexpected" is the term the MSM uses to describe Obama’s economic failures.  We were promised it would work, and they’re shocked when it didn’t.  But’s that’s so last week.  Now the phrase is "little-noticed", as in "a little-noticed provision of the health care bill is unexpectedly discovered."  (Well, little-notice by the MSM.  Opponents mostly knew it already.)

And finally, some "smart" diplomacy, courtesy of Michael Ramirez (click for a larger image):

Penn Jillette, magician, liberal, and critic of religion in general, has a program on Showtime where, among other things, he pokes fun and mocks all sorts of religions.  In an interview with George Lopez, he confessed that American Christians are "the most tolerant people worldwide", and admitted that he was shocked by that discovery.  (And this even when his attacks on said religion are riddled with falsehoods.)

Now why would that be?  Why would the perception of Christians be so far from the reality?  How would the word get out that Christians are such intolerant folks, if they’re not the ones doing it?

Oh, that liberal media!

If by "late" you mean "bordering on stale".  Walter Mead notes that the NY Times is singing long after the opera is over.

“Climate Fears Turn To Doubts Among Britons,” blares the headline.

The story begins:

LONDON — Last month hundreds of environmental activists crammed into an auditorium here to ponder an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?

Last month? The conference was last month and we are only hearing about it now, at the end of this month?

It turns out, however, that by Times standards a report on a conference from last month is a late breaking newsflash.  The main evidence that ace reporter Elizabeth Rosenthal has tracked down for her story about changing public sentiment comes from a BBC opinion poll from February.

The last I looked, we were approaching the end of May.  This is deliberative journalism at its best: only ninety swift days between a BBC poll and the time that the New York Times thinks you are ready to hear about it.

Rosenthal has tracked down some other elusive leads.  Concern about climate change, she reports, has also dropped dramatically among Germans — from 62 percent to 42 percent.  This time, the news dates only  from March.  Sixty days from simmer to serve: the head spins at the speed of information in this globalized world of ours.

And there’s nothing as thorough as a professional journalist hunting a good story; she’s also got another late breaking revelation.  As recently as January, a scant four months ago, a mere flick of the eyelid in geological time,  a survey of Conservative political candidates in the UK showed that stopping climate change rated as the lowest among 19 priorities for the new government.

Now six months after the rest of the world found out about it, Times readers are finally learning that Climategate and Glaciergate so seriously reduced public confidence in climate science in so many countries that there is little or no chance that serious global climate change legislation will be enacted.  At the time, the story did not merit much attention in the print pages of the Times; but sometimes a good story has to age like a fine wine.

"All the news that’s fit to print…eventually." 

Betsy Newmark notes the collective disinterest in new documents that give us a much better look into the waning day of the former Soviet Union.

This is amazing stuff: Claire Berlinski reports on documents smuggled out of Russia about the last years of the Cold War. These are documents from Gorbachev’s own files and are an amazing treasure trove of notes from his meetings with foreign dignitaries and from the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Simply fascinating stuff. But no western publisher seems to be interested in publishing any of this.

Why wouldn’t western researchers and publishers be interested in documents containing such tidbits as Gorbachev’s response to the Chinese killing dissidents in Tiananmen Square? Maybe they don’t like the real story of how he just shrugged it off. Or his laughter at the news of the Soviets shooting down a Korean jetliner.

The press and the Left in this country were apologists for the Soviet Union, very nearly lionizing Gorbachev.  So it’s no wonder that this is not getting more notice in the network news.  Again, it’s all about the narrative (and not wanting to be shown to be horribly wrong about them).  And not only the US press but the European press as well which, again, were all too ready to seek the USSR’s approval rather than take the hard positions on what was right.

(This is the same press/Left/Europe that freaked out when Reagan stood up to the Communists and set in motion their downfall soon after.)

Betsy has more, and Clair Berlinski has lots more.  And you gotta’ wonder if “USSR” was replaced by “Nazis”, whether this would be equally as ignored.

Shire Network News #179 has been released, and I’m the guest host! The feature this time is a look at Operation Millenium, the bombing of the German city of Cologne and how it would have been covered by the mainstream media of today.  There are also some great blog news items. Click here for the show notes, links, and ways to listen to the show; directly from the web site, by downloading the mp3 file, or by subscribing with your podcatcher of choice.

Below is the text of my commentary.

Hi, this is Doug Payton for Shire Network News asking you to "Consider this!"

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, according to its website, is a group that "brings together the governments of countries committed to democracy and the market economy from around the world to:    

• Support sustainable economic growth

• Boost employment

• Raise living standards

• Maintain financial stability

• Assist other countries’ economic development

• Contribute to growth in world trade"

The idea is that they invite in countries that show leadership and results in their economic policies.  In that sense, they are sort of the anti-United-Nations.  Instead of inviting any old dictator with a tin pot to stand on, you have to show you are serious about economic progress before you have a seat at the table to both get answers for your problems and offer solutions to other countries.  If you can’t keep your own house in order, no sense allowing you a chance to give building advice to others.  Get down to the hardware store yourself first, and then, maybe, we’ll see.

Which is clearly why they’re not even thinking about considering Venezuela as a member.  But there is one Latin American country that they recently allowed to join; the first one since Mexico, and the first one in South America.  That country is Chile.

Is this a result of fortune’s wind blowing favorably?  Hardly.  Investor’s Business Daily notes that just 3 decades ago this was an impoverished country, with labor unions shutting down international trade.  So much for blaming "globalists" for your woes.  It was ranked 71st in Economic Freedom.  Out of 72.  Now, however, it’s per capita GDP is over 10 times what it was then, and at the same time it’s now the 3rd most open economy according to the Cato Institute.

What brought about this huge turnaround in such a short time?  Was it more government control?  Was it dabbling in socialism, making everything completely fair (by government standards)?  No, it was free trade and market economics.

They opened wide their trade borders and didn’t, as labor unions would like you to believe, hemorrhage jobs.  They have pursued market policies and, in half a generation, have become the economic powerhouse of the neighborhood. 

So why does the Left think that moving away from that is the secret to combating poverty, or halting rising unemployment, or coming out of a recession?  Chile is marinating in a sea of neighbors that have attempted to save their economies by dabbling, to differing extents, with socialism.  How’s that working out for you guys, eh?  Chile, instead, bucked the peer pressure, stayed in school, and graduated magna cum laude from the Milton Freedman School of Economic Reality. 

Great job, guys.  Just one bit of advice:  When things get temporarily difficult, don’t divorce the lady who brought you here in the first place.  Every marriage goes through difficulties.  You just stay true to her, and when all the others around you are falling apart, you’ll come out of those tough times with a stronger commitment to each other.  You take care of her, and she’ll take care of you.  Consider this.

Jim Finnegan, writing in the Naples (Florida) News, was responding to some folks who had commented on his original article on the Catholic Church priest child abuse cases.  Apparently, some folks read his words and though he was saying something directly opposite to them.  In his follow-up, he first had to give the obligatory disclaimers that he’s not excusing anyone, but he quoted some information that puts this all in perspective.

Charol Shakeshaft, a researcher of a little remembered 2004 study for the U.S. Department of Eduction [sic] on the physical sexual abuse of students in schools, pointed out " the physical sexual abuse of students in schools, is likely more than 100 times the abuse of Priests." I am sure this is easy to Google for the entire study should you wish.

Shakeshaft also pointed out that "nearly 9.6% of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometimes durin [sic] their school career." Creditable accounts of Priestly abuse occured [sic] from but 1.7% of the total Priests in the U.S. Thankfully, Shakeshaft’s study is now being revisited by news commentators seeking to restore some sense of proportion to the media’s aggressive coverage of the Catholic Church.

While Priestly sex abuse can never be mitigated by these figures, they do point out the gross imbalance, and bring question to the motives of the news media that are pouring resources into digging up decades old dirt on the Church. Sadly,the nerative [sic] that has been constructed is often less about the protection of the young (for whom the Catholic Church is, by empirical measure now the safest environment for young people in America today

Aside from Finnegan’s need for a spell checker, this does point out a stark double standard in play, by both liberals and the media (apologies for the repetition).  Just going by numbers, you’d think there would be more coverage about abuse in schools, which (if you don’t homeschool) have a mandatory attendance requirement, vs. church, which is entirely voluntary.  Not to mention the fact that the school abuse continues while…

The facts show that Priestly sex abuse is a phenomenon that spiked in the mid 1960’s into the 1980’s. This at the time that the "anything goes" sexual revolution began. These are the old cases that the media has chosen to resurrect in their recent attacks on the Church.

Again, none of this should be construed as excusing anyone of these horrible deeds.  But a little perspective is in order, and the media, since it goes against "the narrative", is simply not providing it. 

When windows are broken at the headquarters of a Democratic politician, it makes the news.  Racial epithets allegedly yelled at Congressmen (for which no actual evidence exists currently) get days of coverage.  But when Republican political operatives, leaving a Republican fundraiser, get beaten outside it and have bones broken, the MSM heaves a sigh of boredom and virtually ignore it.

Left wing blogs spring into action and report that the brutal attack was not politically motivated.  So, that explains the (lack of) media coverage?

To steal Limbaugh’s phrase, Andrew Breibart and company don’t need to be balanced by equal time.  They are equal time.  As Frank Ross says in his article:

Here we have a beautiful 26-year-old woman who has pins and screws keeping her leg together. We have her boyfriend with a broken jaw and nose. At what point does the media become a willing accomplice, through its silence and utter lack of curiosity, in these crimes?

When indeed?