Quote of the Day 
...from George Will's column yesterday:

The green left understands that the direct route to government control of almost everything is to stigmatize, as a planetary menace, something involved in almost everything -- carbon.


Orwellian, for sure, and although Orwell doesn't explain how Big Brother came to power, I doubt this was how he did. Even Orwell could not have envisioned this route to a "license to intrude."

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Hawaii Six-O 



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Kwame Kilpatrick is a Democrat 
Heck, someone has to say it. NBC, CBS, and NBC can't bring themselves to say it. But when the accused is Larry Craig or David Vitter, according to that link, their party is mentioned without fail:
The big three broadcast networks have gone out of their way to avoid labeling scandal-scarred New York Governor Eliot Spitzer as a "Democrat." An examination of the fifteen ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening news shows through Wednesday night finds Spitzer was called a Democrat just 20 percent of the time -- twice on CBS, once on ABC, and never on NBC. So, how do the networks treat Republicans involved in sex scandals? Always, always as "Republicans." Looking at the ABC, CBS, NBC morning and evening shows in the days after the most recent scandals broke, Republican Senators David Vitter (July) and Larry Craig (August) were labeled "Republican" on every show (100 percent). Yet for Democrat Spitzer, four out of five news programs (80 percent) have skipped his party identification....


A Google search for "Kwame Kilpatrick is a democrat" yields 6 - SIX - results.

A Google search for "Larry Craig is a republican" yields 12,000 results.

If the search is changed to something more likely to appear in print:

"Democrat Kwame Kilpatrick" - we get 341 results.

"Republican Larry Craig" - we get 10,400 results.

What does this prove? One, the actions of a US Senator are more newsworthy than the actions of the mayor of the 11th largest city in the US*. A city, by the way, that has been beset with economic woes, shrinking population, and rampant crime. So, I suppose that scandal, corruption, and criminal activity by the mayor isn't really surprising. Two, when a Republican does something wrong, his party label follows him like a shadow, almost becoming part of his name. However, when a Democrat is accused of all sorts of debauchery, the party affiliation is treated like a non-essential piece of information.

In the Eliot Spitzer vs. Larry Craig Google News watch, a Google News search for Eliot Spitzer still yields over 35,000 results and Larry Craig yields about 2,800. The Spitzer searches may be inflated some as many hits yield stories about the woman involved too. I tried to filter those out by inserting "-call" "-girl" and still get about 17,000. I am sure Google will fix this problem by late summer (there is an election this year) and make sure the Larry Craig stories outnumber Spitzer ones. As for Kilpatrick, he hits about 5,300 now on Google News so he'll be below the Craig number much sooner.


*Unless, of course, if Kilpatrick were Republican and Craig a Democrat, the question would be "Larry who?"

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Eliot Spitzer is a Democrat 
...but you wouldn't know it from this AP article. How about this CNN story? Nope, not there. Don't tell me the MSM doesn't have a liberal bias.

New York has 19.3 million residents.
Idaho has 1.5 million residents.

It will be interesting to see if this scandal about a governor of a state with nearly 20 million people gets even one-third the press a scandal about a senator from a state with about 1.5 million people got.

This story is still breaking as I type this so who knows where this will go.

Update 1: the Corner (National Review) points out a slideshow of scandals put together by ABC. In short, 13 people are identified six of the seven Republicans are identified as such but only one of the six Democrats is identified as such. The Corner also notes the absence of Mel Reynolds which is understandable because they can't have the number of Democratic scandals equal to or greater than Republican; D must never be greater than R-1. As the old saying goes: "he who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future."

Update 2: Newsbusters points out how when the Larry Craig scandal broke in August, it was horns-a-blowin' and trumpets-a-blarin' time when it came to making sure we knew what party Larry Craig belonged to - the word 'Republican' was the fourth word out of Kate Snow's mouth on ABC and NBC's Brian Williams somehow managed to hold out until the middle of his second sentence.

The only way this Spitzer saga gets near the press Larry Craig did is if the media spends time discussing the good Spitzer has done.

Update 3: typing "eliot spitzer is a democrat" into Google does not yield a link to my site yet. Given how often Googlebot visits my site, this is suspicious.

Columns read: entry/hits/files/Kbytes/visits/hostname (March 2008 only)

1 579 8.05% 550 9.17% 16705 12.15% 73 5.59% crawl-66-249-67-207.googlebot.com

Alltheweb, it's sixth. Altavista, it's sixth also. Maybe Google has a quota on how many negative stories about Democrats it will return.

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