This blog is mainly about the spectacular train wreck at The Sacramento Bee and its parent company, the McClatchy Company. But I also post about current events, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, politics, anything else that grabs my attention. Take a look around this blog, hope you enjoy it.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Monday October 12 -- Got news or an update?
If you have news or an update, leave it in comments. . . .
14 comments:
Anonymous
said...
Chamberlain should have got one, too (The Ottawa Citizen)
Before we go anywhere, with the Nobel Peace Prize, I think something should be said in defence of Neville Chamberlain.
Chamberlain has received a bad press, these last 70 years, though famously it was a good press after he signed the Munich agreement 71 years ago with Adolf Hitler, and flew home to England promising, "Peace in our time."
Let us grant, the result of his policy of appeasement was not what he intended; and let us allow, that Hitler negotiated in bad faith.........
CBS News Shills for Simon and Schuster (New York Post)
Legit broadcast journalism, so important yet nearly dead, last week took another hit when CBS News’ “48 Hours” presented an “exclusive” with the Gotti Family.
Three days later, Victoria Gotti’s tell-all was released by Simon & Schuster, the publishing division of CBS.
Attacking the news media is a time-honored White House tactic but to an unusual degree, the Obama administration has narrowed its sights to one specific organization, the Fox News Channel, calling it, in essence, part of the political opposition.
“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” said Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, in a telephone interview on Sunday.
“As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”
Sick Iraq war veteran dies after being given smoker's cancerous lungs in transplant (dailymail.co.uk)
An Iraq war veteran died after a hospital transplant gave him a pair of cancerous lungs donated by a smoker.
Matthew Millington, 31, a corporal in the Queen's Royal Lancers, had the operation to save him from an incurable lung condition.
But the donated organs - from someone who smoked 30 to 50 roll-up cigarettes a day - gave him cancer.
Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, which carried out the transplant, said early X-rays on the organs did not find any sign of cancer.
In fact it had been missed. The tumour was discovered only after six months. Drugs to ensure Mr Millington's body accepted the new organs actually sped up its spread.
The soldier from Stoke-on-Trent was given radiotherapy but finally died at home in February last year.
Daughter Saves Mother, 80, Left By Doctors To Starve (Government Healthcare in U.K.)Times Online
AN 80-year-old grandmother who doctors identified as terminally ill and left to starve to death has recovered after her outraged daughter intervened.
Hazel Fenton, from East Sussex, is alive nine months after medics ruled she had only days to live, withdrew her antibiotics and denied her artificial feeding.
The former school matron had been placed on a controversial care plan intended to ease the last days of dying patients.
Doctors say Fenton is an example of patients who have been condemned to death on the Liverpool care pathway plan.
They argue that while it is suitable for patients who do have only days to live, it is being used more widely in the NHS, denying treatment to elderly patients who are not dying.
snip
Fenton was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia. Although Ball acknowledged that her mother was very ill she was astonished when a junior doctor told her she was going to be placed on the plan to “make her more comfortable” in her last days.
Ball insisted that her mother was not dying but her objections were ignored. A nurse even approached her to say: “What do you want done with your mother’s body?”
Baucus Bill Would Cost More than $2Trillion (CATO@LIBERTY)
Sen. Max Baucus’s (D-MT) health care overhaul would cost more than $2 trillion. It would expand the deficit. But he has carefully and methodically hidden those facts – so well that he has completely hoodwinked nearly all the major media.
The media are reporting that the Baucus bill would reduce the deficit by $81 billion over 10 years. Wrong.
The Baucus bill assumes that Congress will allow the “sustainable growth rate” cuts in Medicare’s physician payments to occur beginning in 2012.
Yet Congress has routinely and repeatedly blocked those cuts, making Baucus’s assumption preposterous. The CBO handled the issue delicately, but essentially said, “Sure, provided that the sun rises in the west in 2012, then yes, this bill would reduce the deficit.”
That means Baucus will come up at least $200 billion short on the revenue side, making his bill a budget-buster.
The media are reporting that the Baucus bill would cost just $829 billion over 10 years. Wrong.
As Donald Marron observes, that number omits as much as $75 billion in new federal spending. It also omits a $33 billion unfunded mandate on state governments.
But the worst part is that the Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary cost estimate omits the cost of the private sector mandates in the Baucus bill.
In Massachusetts, those costs accounted for 60 percent of the total cost of reform. That suggests the actual cost of the Baucus bill – $829 billion plus $75billion plus $33 billion, times 2.5 – is well over $2 trillion.
Yet the CBO score pretends those costs aren’t even there. It’s like a mystery novel that’s missing the last 50 pages. And the media aren’t even curious.
In the words of Brad DeLong, why, oh why, can’t we have a better press corps?
Democrats face defeat in Virginia as Barack Obama becomes liability Telegraph (U.K.)
President Barack Obama is facing defeat in his first electoral test since he won the White House, with the Republicans leading the polls for the governor's race in the swing state of Virginia.
Just nine months into his presidency, Mr Obama has proved more of a hindrance than a help to the Democratic candidate, Creigh Deeds. Unlike Democrats across the country in 2008, the state senator is keeping a very loose grip on the president's coat-tails.
"Frankly, a lot of what's going on in Washington has made it very tough," he said at a recent forum, adding that voters were "just uncomfortable with the spending, they were uncomfortable with a lot of what was going on".
Mr Obama has made only one appearance with Mr Deeds, and will probably make just one more before polling day. The Democrat is trailing his Republican rival, Bob McDonnell, by nine points in a poll published in the Washington Post last week.
Mr Deeds, 51, may have earned the displeasure of the White House with his honesty, but no one has contradicted his assessment that Mr Obama's massive stimulus bill, and the cost of proposed health care and energy reforms, have raised concern among Virginians.
Gore Vidal says Obama will lose next vote ("incompetent," )Press TV
Renowned American historian Gore Vidal says that President Barack Obama would lose 2012 presidential elections, calling the first black US president "incompetent."
In an interview with the Independent, Vidal sharply criticized Obama who took power when the United States was involved in two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
About the election of Obama, Vidal said that he was initially optimistic, but after witnessing the administration, he has relegated himself to despair.
"He's incompetent. He will be defeated for re-election.
The BBC's amazing U-turn on climate change (Telegraph)
I think the BBC wanted to slip this one out quietly, but a Matt Drudge link put paid to that.
The climate change correspondent of BBC News has admitted that global warming stopped in 1998 – and he reports that leading scientists believe that the earth’s cooling-off may last for decades.
“Whatever happened to global warming?” is the title of an article by Paul Hudson that represents a clear departure from the BBC’s fanatical espousal of climate change orthodoxy.
The climate change campaigners will go nuts, particularly in the run-up to Copenhagen. So, I suspect, will devout believers inside the BBC. Hudson’s story was not placed very prominently by his colleagues – but a link right at the top of Drudge will have delivered at least a million page views, possibly many more.
Hudson’s piece is a U-turn – not because he has joined the ranks of sceptics who reject the theory of man-made global warming, but because at last he has written a story about the well-established fact that the earth’s temperature has not risen since 1998, and reports seriously the theories of climatologists (themselves not sceptics) who believe that we are in for 30 years of cooling caused by the falling temperatures of the oceans.
Polanski Lawyer and Eric Holder BFF Lobbies DOJ to Drop Extradition PATTERICO
Lawyers for Roman Polanski met with U.S. Department of Justice officials to make their case against extraditing the 76-year-old fugitive film director from Switzerland to the U.S., according to court documents released Friday.
Why do I find it ominous that Polanski’s lawyer is talking to the DOJ? The reason can be found in this September 29 New York Times article:
While a backlash emerged Tuesday among French politicians of all stripes about whether their government and others should have rushed to embrace the cause of the jailed film director Roman Polanski, his American legal team picked up an influential new member: the lawyer Reid Weingarten, a well-known Washington power player and close friend and associate of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
Do you think Congress should vote on bills without reading them? How about voting on bills that don’t even exist yet, except in fragments?
The Senate Finance Committee is poised to vote on a massive health care reform bill on Tuesday allegedly authored by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.). A glaring, outrageous, unreported fact is that the bill’s actual text has been kept secret.
No one actually knows what’s in it – not even the senators who will be told to vote for it.
For the first time in 4 years Algore answers questions about his agenda. It doesn't go well and "The Society of Environmental Journalists" are forced to show their true colors.
This morning we are announcing plans for organizational changes in our company that will result in the elimination of 7 full-time positions throughout various departments.
Employees affected were contacted earlier today by members of the Human Resources department and information will be sent to members of the newsroom bargaining unit later today.
Those impacted will be eligible for severance benefits and outplacement services. We will do everything we can to help them through this transition.
While these changes are especially difficult considering the changes we have made in recent months and the impact it has on affected employees, they are necessary based on our prolonged advertising revenue challenges.
We had hoped – especially after respectively positive results were reported for the second quarter – that the overall economic outlook and revenue trend for our area would improve as the year progressed. Unfortunately that hasn’t proven to be the case.
Saying goodbye to longtime friends and colleagues is never easy. Those who are leaving are valued members of our team and we thank them for their years of service and dedication to our company.
Our continued success depends on your focus and professionalism through these difficult times. I appreciate everything you do.
14 comments:
Chamberlain should have got one, too (The Ottawa Citizen)
Before we go anywhere, with the Nobel Peace Prize, I think something should be said in defence of Neville Chamberlain.
Chamberlain has received a bad press, these last 70 years, though famously it was a good press after he signed the Munich agreement 71 years ago with Adolf Hitler, and flew home to England promising, "Peace in our time."
Let us grant, the result of his policy of appeasement was not what he intended; and let us allow, that Hitler negotiated in bad faith.........
CBS News Shills for Simon and Schuster (New York Post)
Legit broadcast journalism, so important yet nearly dead, last week took another hit when CBS News’ “48 Hours” presented an “exclusive” with the Gotti Family.
Three days later, Victoria Gotti’s tell-all was released by Simon & Schuster, the publishing division of CBS.
White House Attacks Fox News as ‘Research Arm of the Republican Party’ (Act of Desperation)
CNN: "Let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is."
Fox’s Volley With Obama Intensifying (NYTimes)
Attacking the news media is a time-honored White House tactic but to an unusual degree, the Obama administration has narrowed its sights to one specific organization, the Fox News Channel, calling it, in essence, part of the political opposition.
“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” said Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, in a telephone interview on Sunday.
“As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”
Sick Iraq war veteran dies after being given smoker's cancerous lungs in transplant (dailymail.co.uk)
An Iraq war veteran died after a hospital transplant gave him a pair of cancerous lungs donated by a smoker.
Matthew Millington, 31, a corporal in the Queen's Royal Lancers, had the operation to save him from an incurable lung condition.
But the donated organs - from someone who smoked 30 to 50 roll-up cigarettes a day - gave him cancer.
Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, which carried out the transplant, said early X-rays on the organs did not find any sign of cancer.
In fact it had been missed. The tumour was discovered only after six months. Drugs to ensure Mr Millington's body accepted the new organs actually sped up its spread.
The soldier from Stoke-on-Trent was given radiotherapy but finally died at home in February last year.
Daughter Saves Mother, 80, Left By Doctors To Starve (Government Healthcare in U.K.)Times Online
AN 80-year-old grandmother who doctors identified as terminally ill and left to starve to death has recovered after her outraged daughter intervened.
Hazel Fenton, from East Sussex, is alive nine months after medics ruled she had only days to live, withdrew her antibiotics and denied her artificial feeding.
The former school matron had been placed on a controversial care plan intended to ease the last days of dying patients.
Doctors say Fenton is an example of patients who have been condemned to death on the Liverpool care pathway plan.
They argue that while it is suitable for patients who do have only days to live, it is being used more widely in the NHS, denying treatment to elderly patients who are not dying.
snip
Fenton was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia. Although Ball acknowledged that her mother was very ill she was astonished when a junior doctor told her she was going to be placed on the plan to “make her more comfortable” in her last days.
Ball insisted that her mother was not dying but her objections were ignored. A nurse even approached her to say: “What do you want done with your mother’s body?”
Baucus Bill Would Cost More than $2Trillion (CATO@LIBERTY)
Sen. Max Baucus’s (D-MT) health care overhaul would cost more than $2 trillion. It would expand the deficit. But he has carefully and methodically hidden those facts – so well that he has completely hoodwinked nearly all the major media.
The media are reporting that the Baucus bill would reduce the deficit by $81 billion over 10 years. Wrong.
The Baucus bill assumes that Congress will allow the “sustainable growth rate” cuts in Medicare’s physician payments to occur beginning in 2012.
Yet Congress has routinely and repeatedly blocked those cuts, making Baucus’s assumption preposterous. The CBO handled the issue delicately, but essentially said, “Sure, provided that the sun rises in the west in 2012, then yes, this bill would reduce the deficit.”
That means Baucus will come up at least $200 billion short on the revenue side, making his bill a budget-buster.
The media are reporting that the Baucus bill would cost just $829 billion over 10 years. Wrong.
As Donald Marron observes, that number omits as much as $75 billion in new federal spending. It also omits a $33 billion unfunded mandate on state governments.
But the worst part is that the Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary cost estimate omits the cost of the private sector mandates in the Baucus bill.
In Massachusetts, those costs accounted for 60 percent of the total cost of reform. That suggests the actual cost of the Baucus bill – $829 billion plus $75billion plus $33 billion, times 2.5 – is well over $2 trillion.
Yet the CBO score pretends those costs aren’t even there. It’s like a mystery novel that’s missing the last 50 pages. And the media aren’t even curious.
In the words of Brad DeLong, why, oh why, can’t we have a better press corps?
Democrats face defeat in Virginia as Barack Obama becomes liability
Telegraph (U.K.)
President Barack Obama is facing defeat in his first electoral test since he won the White House, with the Republicans leading the polls for the governor's race in the swing state of Virginia.
Just nine months into his presidency, Mr Obama has proved more of a hindrance than a help to the Democratic candidate, Creigh Deeds. Unlike Democrats across the country in 2008, the state senator is keeping a very loose grip on the president's coat-tails.
"Frankly, a lot of what's going on in Washington has made it very tough," he said at a recent forum, adding that voters were "just uncomfortable with the spending, they were uncomfortable with a lot of what was going on".
Mr Obama has made only one appearance with Mr Deeds, and will probably make just one more before polling day. The Democrat is trailing his Republican rival, Bob McDonnell, by nine points in a poll published in the Washington Post last week.
Mr Deeds, 51, may have earned the displeasure of the White House with his honesty, but no one has contradicted his assessment that Mr Obama's massive stimulus bill, and the cost of proposed health care and energy reforms, have raised concern among Virginians.
Gore Vidal says Obama will lose next vote ("incompetent," )Press TV
Renowned American historian Gore Vidal says that President Barack Obama would lose 2012 presidential elections, calling the first black US president "incompetent."
In an interview with the Independent, Vidal sharply criticized Obama who took power when the United States was involved in two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
About the election of Obama, Vidal said that he was initially optimistic, but after witnessing the administration, he has relegated himself to despair.
"He's incompetent. He will be defeated for re-election.
The BBC's amazing U-turn on climate change (Telegraph)
I think the BBC wanted to slip this one out quietly, but a Matt Drudge link put paid to that.
The climate change correspondent of BBC News has admitted that global warming stopped in 1998 – and he reports that leading scientists believe that the earth’s cooling-off may last for decades.
“Whatever happened to global warming?” is the title of an article by Paul Hudson that represents a clear departure from the BBC’s fanatical espousal of climate change orthodoxy.
The climate change campaigners will go nuts, particularly in the run-up to Copenhagen. So, I suspect, will devout believers inside the BBC. Hudson’s story was not placed very prominently by his colleagues – but a link right at the top of Drudge will have delivered at least a million page views, possibly many more.
Hudson’s piece is a U-turn – not because he has joined the ranks of sceptics who reject the theory of man-made global warming, but because at last he has written a story about the well-established fact that the earth’s temperature has not risen since 1998, and reports seriously the theories of climatologists (themselves not sceptics) who believe that we are in for 30 years of cooling caused by the falling temperatures of the oceans.
Polanski Lawyer and Eric Holder BFF Lobbies DOJ to Drop Extradition
PATTERICO
Lawyers for Roman Polanski met with U.S. Department of Justice officials to make their case against extraditing the 76-year-old fugitive film director from Switzerland to the U.S., according to court documents released Friday.
Why do I find it ominous that Polanski’s lawyer is talking to the DOJ? The reason can be found in this September 29 New York Times article:
While a backlash emerged Tuesday among French politicians of all stripes about whether their government and others should have rushed to embrace the cause of the jailed film director Roman Polanski, his American legal team picked up an influential new member: the lawyer Reid Weingarten, a well-known Washington power player and close friend and associate of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
Show Me the Bill! (Townhall.com)
Do you think Congress should vote on bills without reading them? How about voting on bills that don’t even exist yet, except in fragments?
The Senate Finance Committee is poised to vote on a massive health care reform bill on Tuesday allegedly authored by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.). A glaring, outrageous, unreported fact is that the bill’s actual text has been kept secret.
No one actually knows what’s in it – not even the senators who will be told to vote for it.
For the first time in 4 years Algore answers questions about his agenda. It doesn't go well and "The Society of Environmental Journalists" are forced to show their true colors.
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/annmcelhinney/2009/10/11/al-gore-the-death-of-journalism/
October 12, 2009
To all employees of The Modesto Bee,
This morning we are announcing plans for organizational changes in our company that will result in the elimination of 7 full-time positions throughout various departments.
Employees affected were contacted earlier today by members of the Human Resources department and information will be sent to members of the newsroom bargaining unit later today.
Those impacted will be eligible for severance benefits and outplacement services. We will do everything we can to help them through this transition.
While these changes are especially difficult considering the changes we have made in recent months and the impact it has on affected employees, they are necessary based on our prolonged advertising revenue challenges.
We had hoped – especially after respectively positive results were reported for the second quarter – that the overall economic outlook and revenue trend for our area would improve as the year progressed. Unfortunately that hasn’t proven to be the case.
Saying goodbye to longtime friends and colleagues is never easy. Those who are leaving are valued members of our team and we thank them for their years of service and dedication to our company.
Our continued success depends on your focus and professionalism through these difficult times. I appreciate everything you do.
Eric
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