Considerettes

What a difference a couple of days make. First this reader commentary by Todd Smyth on way-left-wing BuzzFlash, which says:

Gossip maven Matt Drudge has slapped together several different hair thin rumors that have been around for months to make one seemingly plausible thread. Alleging Senator John Kerry may be under suspicion by other news sources to have had a conversation with a woman that is not his wife. When the woman in question, Alex Polier, a Journalist (not an intern) traveled on assignment to Kenya, Matt Drudge reported that the mystery woman has fled the country. A key part of the report that is easily overlooked is this statement: “There is no evidence the pair had an affair.” John Kerry has flatly denied the rumor on the Don Imus show, Friday morning.

Todd takes Kerry’s denial at face value. Could be giving Kerry the benefit of the doubt, or it could be blind faith in his guy. Wonder if Mr. Smyth will give more or less credence to this story from the London Telegraph today:

“This is not going to go away,” one American friend of Miss Polier said yesterday. “What actually happened is much nastier than is being reported.”

Stay tuned to the BuzzFlash contributor archives and see if Mr. Smyth even notices this development.

32-to-0, 11-to-0, 9-to-0 and 18-to-1. Sports scores? Nope, they are the ratios of Democrats to Republicans in 4 departments at Duke University. The Duke Conservative Union wanted to discuss this situation, but it’s gone way beyond that. In response to the stats cited by the DCU, Robert Brandon, philosophy chairman, gave this insightful pronouncement:

We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill’s analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican Party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia.

As James Taranto is wont to say, if he were a Republican, that would be hate speech.

The good news is that some folks are waking up and taking notice.

Robert Munger, chairman of the political science department, said he was impressed by Duke’s intellectual diversity, which he called “relatively healthy” compared to other universities.

Still, Munger recalled a recent meeting in which he heard a fellow department chairman say it was Duke’s job to confront conservative students with their hypocrisies and that they didn’t need to say much to liberal students because they already understood the world.

“There was no big protest [at the meeting], and that was wrong,” Munger said.

Munger said the history department’s political makeup surprised him, however.

“Thirty-five Democrats and no Republicans? If you flip a coin 35 times, and it ends up heads every time, that’s not a fair coin,” he said.

The people who say, ‘I don’t think ideology is appropriate in hiring would have to look at the process that provides such a skewed outcome,” he said.

And what of other types of diversity?

“Basically, it’s sheer hypocrisy that on one hand racial diversity is important in education, but intellectual diversity isn’t,” Duke senior and DCU member Madison Kitchens said Thursday.

Precisely. Once again, “diversity”, in the dictionary of the liberal, goes only skin deep.

Here’s hoping that the arrogance of those like Robert Brandon will give way to some common sense.

UPDATE: Via Instapundit we get Brandon’s full response, and a devastating fisking of it by Carey Gage. The Payoff Paragraphs(tm):

I don’t doubt that Brandon denied the charge of hiring bias, but despite that denial, his Mills quote establishes beyond any doubt the contempt in which he holds conservatives, thus making the denial completely meaningless. Think of his statement as applied to minority candidates, instead of conservatives:

We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as the Grand Wizard of the KKK said, stupid people are generally black, then there are lots of blacks we will never hire.

Would you believe someone who said that and followed it by denying that there was no racial discrimination in his hiring policies? I wouldn’t.

Skin deep, like I said. When you try to apply their liberal bias to race, their much-hyped dedication to “diversity” melts away in the torrent of hypocrisy.

A new reciprocal blogroll for Aaron Meck doth appear. Enjoy.

Consider this: It takes Matt Drudge to report on big stories that cast Democrats in a bad light (scoops dealing with John Kerry and the Clinton’s Lewinsky scandal), and he still gets called just a gossip columnist, even after the mainstream media has picked up the story he broke. Recall that the mainstream media reported on the infamous Lewinsky blue dress 7 months after Drudge reported it.

But take the George W. Bush “AWOL” allegation, an allegation that the media has hashed, rehashed and rehashed again, every time Dubya’s run for any office, and they still spend most of a news conference trying to find anything scandal-worthy.

The comment by ABC News’ “The Note” blog seems to be right on the money, and the Washington press corps is determined to prove it right over and over.

Name the source of this quote:

Like every other institution, the Washington and political press corps operate with a good number of biases and predilections.

They include, but are not limited to, a near-universal shared sense that liberal political positions on social issues like gun control, homosexuality, abortion, and religion are the default, while more conservative positions are “conservative positions.”

They include a belief that government is a mechanism to solve the nation’s problems; that more taxes on corporations and the wealthy are good ways to cut the deficit and raise money for social spending and don’t have a negative affect on economic growth; and that emotional examples of suffering (provided by unions or consumer groups) are good ways to illustrate economic statistic stories.

Did this come from the Media Research Center? From Rush Limbaugh? From The Wall Street Journal’sJames Taranto? If you guessed Taranto, you’re almost right. He noted it in his Best of the Web Today column.

But the source is none other than a blog run by ABC News called The Note! There’s quite a bit more, and it’s worth reading. (Do it soon, though. I don’t see anything resembling “Permalinks” on the site, so if it scrolls off, it may be gone forever.)

The views are certainly not news to anyone with a reasonable set of eyes and ears that not only take in the news itself, but personal views of reporters that have been made public. What’s “Note”-worthy here is that the official website of a major media organization is finally coming right out and admitting what it has, for so long, tried to avoid, discount, or deny. And now, in black and white, here it is for all the world (including Eric Alterman, et. al.) to see, read, and really digest.

This is monumental, but will those who deny such bias really be swayed? Hold not thy breath. As Taranto predicts, “The times may be changing. Of course, you just know the left-wing ‘media critics’ will jump on this as evidence that the media are actually biased in favor of conservatives.” Of course, that’s not much of a “prediction”. It’s simply a matter of believing that what has happened in the past, regardless of how nutty, will just continue to happen.

ABC News, welcome to the blogroll. This is going to be interesting.

UPDATE: Looks like the closest thing to a permalink to the entry is here. (Thanks again to Taranto for chasing that down.)

Just a reminder of what Novak said back in September when the Plame affair hit the streets: “According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operative and not in charge of undercover operators.” This, in spite of all the titles the media gave her to the contrary. Keep that in mind when reading new stories that call her an “operative”, an “agent”, or an “undercover officer“. The media is really hoping for a scandal here, and manufacturing it via innuendo if it can’t find one.

Is the term “born-alive abortion” a contradiction in terms? No, just the logical next step to abortion, and going on more often that you may think.

Rosemary, over at Dean’s World, has links to show MoveOn.org’s multiple personality disorder regarding an independent investigation of pre-war intelligence. They demand one thing, and when you give them precisely what they want they turn around and dismiss it as partisan, which, ironically, is quite the definition of “partisan”.

As Rosemary says, MoveOn meet Sybill.

OK, one more time. Why did we go to war with Iraq?

Jobless recovery. Or not.

WASHINGTON (AP) – The nation’s unemployment rate dropped to 5.6 percent in January to the lowest level in more than two years as companies added just 112,000 new jobs – fewer than expected but enough to keep alive hope for a turnaround in the struggling job market.

That’s good news, and so is this:

The jobless rate fell 0.1 percentage point last month to the lowest level since October 2001, when it was 5.4 percent, the Labor Department said Friday. January’s rate matched the 5.6 percent posted in January 2002.

And so is this:

Employers added new jobs last month at a pace not seen in three years. The last time payrolls expanded more than 112,000 was in December 2000, when companies added 124,000 positions.

All this great news, and yet:

But economists were disappointed, saying they had expected a larger increase of 150,000 new jobs or more.

They must’ve lost a bet or something. The economy is trundling right along and they’re disappointed. And it’s not even as bad as they think it is:

Some economists think hiring really is occurring in the economy, but it is not being reflected in the Labor Department’s monthly survey of business payrolls. In the separate survey of households, employment jumped by 496,000 last month.

The household survey counts self-employed workers and contract workers, which are increasing. The survey of businesses does not.

“They’re not recording the outside contractors – they’re not reflecting something that is tremendously fundamental now to the American corporate scene, and that’s outsourcing to outside contractors,” Mayland said.

You’d think this would be fantastic news for Democrats who are (allegedly) for the small businessman and against big corporations. Let’s listen to them celebrate, shall we?

(Hold not thy breath.)

But listen to who is celebrating:

The US economy strengthened considerably in December, leading the global economic recovery and leaving Europe and Japan behind, the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said today.

You’re welcome, folks. Even the Canadians.