"Fred Kaplan reads the supplemental budget so you don't have to. I haven't seen how the White House and its supporters are spinning this interpretation, but the document seems to state pretty clearly that only one of 90 Iraqi battalions is fully operational."

Fred Kaplan's article is asinine. I wouldn't have faith in his interpretation of a McDonald's menu, let alone a $97B budget.

Regarding Iraq, what do you expect?

All the military and paramilitary personnel in Iraq worked for Saddam.

The US has to find "good guys" who have been oppressed for most of their lifetimes and turn them into police and maybe soldiers.

You can't even determine who the good guys are, and you can't train them until you do. No one wants a repeat Afghanistan and train another bin laden.

Go see "Gunner Palace" and see firsthand.

The White House Stages Its 'Daily Show'
Published: February 20, 2005

cute. but it's February 17, 2005

I had a hunch this post would flush you out.

I'm not saying building Iraqi forces will be easy, but it still flies in the face of the 140,000 number trumpeted ad nauseum by the administration. There's no good way to get around that, except to use the obviously low bar of those who have actually started training as opposed to those who are actually ready to defend the country.

As for the Rich piece, I'm assuming it's not running in print until Sunday, so it's just an artifact of the process. Although I suspect Powerline and Drudge will point to it as a firing-worthy scandal.

" it still flies in the face of the 140,000 number trumpeted ad nauseum by the administration"

No, it doesn't.

"There's no good way to get around that, except to use the obviously low bar of those who have actually started training as opposed to those who are actually ready to defend the country."

Duh. 140,00 recruits who have decided to risk their lives for their country and its new government is a big achievement.

Do you have any idea how many innocent Iraqis and members of the new Iraqi police force have been killed by the insurgents?

Are you aware Drudge ranked highest in out of major news media in the study of media bias (I'll let you google it or find it in the Drudge Report Archives site) measuring liberal vs. conservative (or was it measuring pro- and anti- Democrat and Republican bias)?

I admittedly forgot the details about the research, but the impression I recall was it that it was non-partisan and scientific. Let us know if it's otherwise, please. Based on my observations, I like to think that Drudge and its readership would be smarter than to let fake research get used to bolster the site's credibility.

Even if Drudge did get played to help publicize the Oscars this year.

As to the date of the Rich item, even Anti-Propagandist isn't *that* stupid. Using the date of print publication is done all the time, even by, oh, commentators on the right:

Mort Zuckerman, 2/21/05
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/050221/opinion/21edit.htm

Michael Barone, 2/21/05
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/050221/opinion/21barone.htm

John Leo, 2/21/05
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/050221/opinion/21john.htm

All from that "Liberal MSM" rag US News and World Report

This is the new paradigm: when the substance of a story can't be attacked, attack anything else instead. Well, maybe this isn't so new....

NY Times lack of attention to detail regarding date information is an artifact of laziness, carelessness, and sloppiness. It's 2005 and their publishing "news" on the internet as though it was created from molten lead.

Not that there aren't countless other examples of shoddy information technology around.

I would be interested to learn if Jeff Gannon is truly a shill in the conspiracy that the liberals have been portraying. Thus far, everything I've seen can just easily be explained as it has been by the parties involved.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ certainly not much credible news or analysis there.

But, you're probably talking about the Bush quote quoted in the link.

Yes, it sounds like b.s. when a so-called "tax cut" is actually a reduction in some future rate. But, this is legitimate terminology and it's used the same way by both parties. If I understand, you're not singling out one party or the other, either, just politics in general.

(FWIW, I used to agree, my motto was "don't vote- it only encourages them".)

"This is the new paradigm: when the substance of a story can't be attacked, attack anything else instead. Well, maybe this isn't so new...."

Sorry if it came across that way. I didn't mention the article, did I? I noticed the date issue only because YOU called attention to temporal anomalies in your recent article about a CD release.

I was criticizing exactly what I criticized, nothing more nothing less.

Just because "everybody does it" doesn't make it right. Sorry if it appeared I was singling out NY Times.

oops YOU = notabbott, YOU is not Hank.

speaking of temporal accuracy, is the blog software tagging the comments with the time the comments were submitted, or when they actually appear here after being approved?

because the chronology gets strange if the submission time is recorded, but the comments appear at a later time.

I think I commented about Jeff Gannon before seeing Hank's remarks, but it hasn't appeared yet.

If it's approved, I'd like credit for pre-empting Hank's unfounded attack.

oops, I was right the first time.
YOU is notabbott, YOU is not Hank.

I was responding to notabbott's comments, but Hank's comments appeared after I clicked to send them. Seeing the Hank name but not the entire page, I wrongly thought the initial comments I replied to were from Hank.

"Are you aware Drudge ranked highest in out of major news media in the study of media bias?"

http://www.dkosopedia.com/index.php/Media_bias_study

Hmmm. Looking at the numbers, I'd say you're either remembering incorrectly or read A Pack Of Lies somewhere.

The study started with a flawed assumption (that the average congressman scores 50 on a scale of 1 to 100, 1 being conservative and 100 being liberal), but even granting that, the data seems to show the media ratings as follows:

# Fox News Special Report 26.4
# Drudge Report 44.1
# ABC World News Tonight 54.8
# Los Angeles Times 58.4
# NBC Nightly News 62.5
# USA Today 62.6
# CBS Evening News 64.5
# New York Times 64.6

So, only Fox scored more conservative than Drudge. And even if you take the incorrect assumption of 50 as average, ABC World News Tonight is *still* closer to this average than Drudge.

Factoring in the fact that 50 is not the average, but rather it's higher, then the whole "Drudge is the most unbiased" schtick falls to pieces.

Also, Drudge's list of 40 or so links to various pundits, both liberal and conservative, helped so skew his score towards "unbiased". So, I guess if The Daily Kos had a list of 100 conservative columnists/bloggers, he'd suddenly become more centrist?

Comments are fucked up right now, I know, but they should be showing up in order of entry, not approval. Right now I even have to approve my own comments, so it's going to take some major under-the-hood work to get that situated, and some of the problems are defying easy solution.

Looking at the bias report -- and I'm going off the actual report, as I'm wary of Kos' spin -- I notice that Drudge is also the second-most conservative of all the media options listed (and given the range of the data, I think median is a much better descriptor than mean), and that I need to check to see if the study authors can explain Deal and Stenholm. Could be that they're just Dixiecrats. Either way, the scale itself raises some questions. If I have time this weekend, maybe I'll really dig into the methodology.

Drudge also has a markedly lower number of overall citations, and I'd love to see the ratio of qualifying citations to overall number of news items/sentences/words to bear that out.

What can I say, I've been working on a lot of analysis lately.

As to Stenholm, this from Newshour:

"MARK SHIELDS: Well, to say the president will be without one of the great Democrats that he could have relied upon for counsel and real help in this election because of the incredibly short sightedness of the White House and Tom Delay -- Charlie Stenholm, Democrat from West Texas, blue dog Democrat --

JIM LEHRER: Explain what a blue dog Democrat is.

MARK SHIELDS: A blue dog Democrat are Democrats -- the moderate to conservative Democrats in the South mostly, border states, who believe in things like fiscal sanity, who oppose tax cuts but oppose big liberal spending, but continue to be Democrats. And Charlie Stenholm of West Texas was a ranking Democrat, respected on both sides of the aisle, Jim. And he was in favor of privatizing part of Social Security, one of the principal advocates. If Charlie Stenholm was in the House of Representatives today, he would get a minimum of ten or a dozen Democrats to join."

So yes. Dixiecrat. And that's somewhat of an understatement.

Thank you!

Your suspicions were correct. The link spins the true research results almost 180 degrees around to suit its own purposes. Those crafty leftists at it again.

The original research provided what I was describing (based on my second-hand knowledge):
http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/MediaBias.doc

"Using citations as the level of observation, Table 9 shows that Fox News’ Special Report is the most centrist news outlet in our sample, the Drudge Report is second, ABC World News Tonight is Third, and CBS Evening News is last.

For these results, the covariance of the estimate between any two media outlets is approximately 1.0. Thus, for instance, to test if the Drudge Report’s score is significantly different from the score of ABC World News Tonight, one uses the formula

(58.7-54.7)/sqrt( 5.21^2 + 2.28^2 – 2 x 1) = 0.73.

Thus, at standard levels of statistical significance, in this case, the scores of the Drudge Report and ABC World News Tonight are not significantly different. Similar calculations show that Fox News’ Special Report is significantly closer to the center than all media outlets except the Drudge Report."

AGAIN

"Similar calculations show that Fox News’ Special Report is significantly closer to the center than all media outlets except the Drudge Report."

AND AGAIN

"Similar calculations show that Fox News’ Special Report is significantly closer to the center than all media outlets except the Drudge Report."

Sorry, got carried away there.

If the leftists are quoting the research as authoritative, it must be legitimate.

Interesting to look at the research in more detail.

Thanks again.

# Fox News Special Report 26.4
# Drudge Report 44.1
# ABC World News Tonight 54.8
# Los Angeles Times 58.4
# NBC Nightly News 62.5
# USA Today 62.6
# CBS Evening News 64.5
# New York Times 64.6

39.0 was the "perfect" neutral score.

From the original research report:

"Results: How Close are Media Outlets to the Center?

We now compute the difference of a media outlet’s score from 39.0 to judge how centrist it is. Based on sentences as the level of observation (the results of which are listed in Table 8), the Drudge Report is the most centrist, Fox News’ Special Report is second, ABC World News Tonight is third, and CBS Evening is last."

Drudge is most centrist, even when comparing several different methodologies within the report.(Admittedly, still my first glance at the details here.)