Does someone in the legacy media finally get it?

Yet, the American public’s astonishing decision to pick someone with so little experience (a few years as the Junior Senator from Illinois, and before that, a “carreer” as a community organizer) as President of the United States underscores just how alarmingly expertise is discounted — or equated with elitism — in our increasingly democratized era, and just how thoroughly colorful personal narratives overshadow policy arguments and actual knowledge.

See the answer below.

You’ve got to love the coverage of today’s announcement regarding bringing the 9/11 terrorists to trial in New York. I’ve been reading a bit of it and this paragraph, in a Reuters story headlined New York split over plan to try September 11 plotters caught my attention.

Several security scares since 2001 — a 2007 steam pipe explosion and earlier this year a low flying plane trailed by a fighter jet flying over the Statue of Liberty for a photo shoot — have created panic among still jittery New Yorkers.

I added the bold, just in case you didn’t see what I saw.

Are you kidding me? A “low flying plane”? Uh, could you be a little more specific? It was one of the aircraft that becomes Airforce One when the President is on board.

As for the rest of this travesty, that will have to wait for later for comment.

While most of the attention is on the ongoing protests in Iran, and the blogospheric coverage it is receiving, there are other stories that deserve to be covered and followed.

The Real Cost of Health Care Reform

It is consistently sold under the guise of saving “us” money, but in fact the costs would be staggering. How staggering? How about $4 Trillion dollars. Thats $4,000,000,000,000.00!

Yesterday, the CBO estimated that the current Democratic Senate health care bill would increase the defict by $1 trillion over 10 years while leaving 30 million uninsured, forcing the White House to distance itself from the legislation. While liberals have tried to emphasize that the CBO provided only a partial analysis of the draft legislation from Ted Kennedy’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, a more comprehensive analysis of the legislation will only serve to drive the bill’s ultimate cost higher. For instance, because it was only working with a draft of the bill that had holes in it, the CBO did not estimate the costs associated with increasing Medicaid elgibility to 150 percent of the poverty level, or the full cost of providing subsidies to individuals with incomes at up to 500 percent of the poverty level to purchase insurance through state-run exchanges. Once this is taken into account, liberals are right that the final CBO estimate will reflect more people being insured, but the cost of the legislation will go up as well.

Related to that, but with a disturbingly different twist, is the sales job the Obama administration is doing on health care with the uncritical support of the MSM.

Obama’s ABC Infomercial

This story has many on the right re-naming ABC as the All Barack Channel. It fits.

First the story as reported on Drudge:

On the night of June 24, the media and government become one, when ABC turns its programming over to President Obama and White House officials to push government run health care — a move that has ignited an ethical firestorm!

Highlights on the agenda:

ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House.

The network plans a primetime special — ‘Prescription for America’ — originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.

The Director of Communications at the White House Office of Health Reform is Linda Douglass, who worked as a reporter for ABC News from 1998-2006.

Michael Laprarie writing at Wizbang comments:

It seems that the Obama Administration is prepared to bias the debate about single-payer health care not only with disinformation, but by working with the mainstream media in order to deliberately block efforts to present alternative solutions to our health care problems. Perhaps this is a lesson learned from the Clinton White House, which welcomed the debate over HillaryCare because they thought they would easily win it.

One missing element in all of this is any sort of opposing view, as Gaius points out.

They are apparently calling this a “debate”. But when only one side is presented, it is not a debate, it is a lecture. Or worse, propaganda.

This is also some very, very expensive free airtime for Obama. ABC is giving away the air time – and its credibility as a news organization.

[...]

They are not even trying to disguise that they are completely in Obama’s pocket anymore. That’s more than a bit worrisome.

Indeed it is. Michelle Malkin says, “ABC News should be required to register as a federal lobbyist.”

AllahPundit makes this point:

I’m honestly surprised, although it makes a certain sort of ruthless sense: If, as many righties have speculated, The One’s trying to ram through as many Great Society programs as he can before the political pendulum swings back to the center, the media might as well drop all pretense of objectivity and go for broke too.

There is much more on this story, but I’ll leave you with this link to a lighter look at the Sneak Preview of ABC’s Infomercial for Socialized Medicine from Doug Ross.

There’s one other story that deserves mention, but I’ve run out of time this morning. That is the firing of IG Gerald Walpin. This story deserves a lot of attention, something I’ll have to take care of when I return this afternoon.

I’m glad I grabbed the screen cap when I did. If you go to the story now you will see a picture of an off shore oil rig. Earlier it looked like this:

The story discusses the finding by a three judge panel that, “the Bush-era Interior Department failed to consider the effect on the environment and marine life before it began the process in August 2005 to expand an oil and gas leasing program in the Beaufort, Bering, and Chukchi seas.”

AP and/or Yahoo should have stuck with the original picture. It tells the story pretty well. Of course there may be a photo editor looking for new employement today.

Hugh Hewitt titles his post If This Is True, Obama Has A Serious Problem. Perhaps he should have said, If This Is True and TOM* Doesn’t Give Him Yet Another Pass, Obama Has A Serious Problem.

He links to this story at NewsBusters by Warner Todd Houston.

Barack Obama played the “me too” game during the Friday debates on September 26 after Senator John McCain mentioned that he was wearing a bracelet with the name of Cpl. Matthew Stanley, a resident of New Hampshire and a soldier that lost his life in Iraq in 2006. Obama said that he too had a bracelet. After fumbling and straining to remember the name, he revealed that his had the name of Sergeant Ryan David Jopek of Merrill, Wisconsin.

Shockingly, however, Madison resident Brian Jopek, the father of Ryan Jopek, the young soldier who tragically lost his life to a roadside bomb in 2006, recently said on a Wisconsin Public Radio show that his family had asked Barack Obama to stop wearing the bracelet with his son’s name on it. Yet Obama continues to do so despite the wishes of the family.

Do read the entire NB story to see the transcript of the interview with Mr. Jopek.

Houston says, “Obama’s use of this soldier that fell in the line of duty is tainted by his ambition and callousness. And the media is letting him get away with it.”

Kim Priestap writes at Wizbang, “So will we see this picked up by the mainstream media? Not a snowball’s chance in hell.”

Once again Hope and Change are revealed to mean “I Hope you won’t notice that I’ll do anything to Change my title to Mr. President”.

*TOM — The Old Media

It is great to get up in the morning and see a fine display of journalistic balance. </snark>

(Click for bigger view)

This is a view of my Google feed reader this morning in a folder I have labeled Elections. Sixteen headlines visible without scrolling, thirteen stories about the Obamessiah, one “Today on the presidential campaign trail”, and two on John McCain – one of those about the veterans group working against McCain.

So, here is journalistic balance — In A Nutshell:

AP expands on their original plan and has decided that it now owns all words and the alphabet.

Bloggers Must Pay For Using Words (AP*)

AP* spokesperson Kutoffyernose Spiteyerphace announced the daring new plan at a news conference earlier today.

“It has become increasingly clear that in today’s business climate companies must look at new and innovative ways to increase revenue. Let’s face it,” Spiteyerphace said, “paying people like Christopher Newton and Jamil Hussein isn’t cheep.”

While some details remain to be worked out, the basic plans asserts ownership of, “all letters, words, and phrases.”

According to Spiteyerphace, “As we were looking at our business plan we realized that we are really in the word business. People have been using words for years and we have been denied our fair share of the revenue.”

When asked about the “Fair Use” provision of U.S. Copyright law (Chapter 1, § 107) which states in part, “[T]he fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.” Spiteyerphace responded, “Clearly the federal government owes us for those 49 words. I expect a check very soon.”

*Another Planet

Michelle Malkin says that the AP owes her $132,125. Thanks for the link, Michelle (The currency of the blogosphere) and welcome to her readers.

One of the ways to see how much attention a story is getting is to notice the number of times it comes across the feed reader. For example, in the last two days there has been eight stories, mostly duplicates, about Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz.

In contrast, this story about the withdraw of 4000 troops from Iraq has come across once.

The US military on Thursday announced the withdrawal of another 4,000 troops from Iraq next month as violence across the country hit a four-year low.

Of course it’s nothing but straight reporting. [/ sarc]

The military said it was pulling out troops deployed as part of a controversial “surge” of forces in February 2007.

It must be painful to report good news.

The US military said that last week had seen the lowest level of violence in four years across Iraq, but gave no casualty figures.

Figures maintained by the independent website www.icasualties.org show that the number of US fatalities so far this month was 19, the lowest average since the American invasion in March 2003.

I wonder how much coverage this will get throughout the day.

NBC has pulled back from their original position regarding airing ads by Freedom’s Watch. They informed the group that they will accept the spots.

NBC reversed course Saturday and decided to air a conservative group’s television ad thanking U.S. troops.

The ad, by the group Freedom’s Watch, asks viewers to remember the troops during the holiday season. NBC had refused to air the ad because it guides viewers to the Freedom’s Watch Web site, which NBC said was too political.

But in a statement issued Saturday evening, NBC said:

“We have reviewed and changed our ad standards guidelines and made the decision that our policy will apply to content only and not to a referenced Web site. Based on these amended standards the Freedom’s Watch ad will begin to run as early as Sunday.”

My guess? They felt the heat. Good.

I didn’t think they would turn down money for any reason.

NBC has rejected a TV ad by Freedom’s Watch, a conservative group that supports administration policy in Iraq, that asks viewers to remember and thank U.S. troops during the holiday season.

NBC said it declined to air the ad because it refers to the group’s Web site, which the network said was too political, not because of the ad’s message.

So let me get this straight — There was nothing wrong with the ad, but because the group is conservative and hold “contorversial” views, they won’t air the ad. I guess that means that NBC won’t be running any political ads this year.

The spot was to be part of a seven-figure campaign that includes newspaper ads and television commercials. The ads are to run on CNN and Fox News Channel and are running in various newspapers. The New York Times ran a full-page Freedom’s Watch ad Friday that said “Thank You!” and depicted a soldier reading a letter. The newspaper ad also contained the Web site address.

Alan Wurtzel, NBC’s head of standards and practices, said the network decided not to run the Freedom’s Watch ad because the group insisted that the spot contain the URL address of its Web site.

Let me drop in one more link to their web site before I go: http://www.freedomswatch.org

It’s time for White House press room fixture Helen Thomas to move on. Dana Perino is proving to be a fine successor to Tony Snow.

Matt Margolis has a post looking at the exchange between Tom DeLay and Matt Lauer on a recent Today Show. The topic was corruption and you can imagine the path Lauer took on this.Read the whole thing at GOP Bloggers, but here is the dead-on accurate quote of the day, if not week, by DeLay:

There are scandals that need to be addressed. Republicans address them, Democrats re-elect them.

Zing!