seen both recent ones

Excellent movies.  Should be required viewing in high school civics class.  If, like Mrs. Palin wishes, creationism be taught along side science, then Michael Moore's beautifully patriotic films should be too.

• an open letter to God - see inside
  • consider the source. MM is the sicko.... - ms
    • black and white thinking - sim
      • in other words seeing someone as all bad or all good is not an indicator of high intelligence. Bewa - sam
        • please note...the title line of the previous post were.... - sam
    • have you even seen that movie?? - x
      • seen both recent ones - sim
        • Oh yeah..... - sam
        • well once there is evidence for creationism - i would agree wholeheartedly
    • Yeah, I hope he becomes the poster child for... - sam

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influx of rudeness on this board change your mind about coming here.  As you can see by reading the whole board, most of us don't treat each other rudely.

I don't agree with the present administration in this country, but I'm basically a very happy, cordial, friendly person.  Most of the other posters on this board seem to be very friendly and easy going, too.

So don't let a few bad apples spoil your experience here.

interview.  There is much more to the story that the article does not include.  Biden's explanation seemed reasonable when I heard it.  You can, of course, disagree with me on that point.

Take a look at the date... Olbermann Still Lying About O’Reilly, Fox Ratings

Sunday, November 9, 2008 8:45 PM By: David A. Patten Article Font Size

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann has won the Worst Liar in the World Award once again. His latest big fib is not a new one. He continues to claim that he is beating “The O’Reilly Factor,” the longtime king of cable news programs hosted by Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. But the numbers show otherwise. But that apparently doesn’t bother Olbermann. MSNBC took out a full-page ad in The New York Times proclaiming “A Sweeping Victory” for its ratings and declared “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” the No. 1 cable news program. Independent ratings consistently show O’Reilly gets about twice the ratings Olbermann does. Although Olbermann frequently leads his viewers to believe he has overtaken “The O’Reilly Factor,” in this case the numbers really do speak for themselves. O’Reilly’s program, which Fox airs at 8 and 11 p.m. ET Monday through Friday, averaged about 4 million viewers a night during the month of October, compared with Olbermann’s average of about 2 million, according to TVbytheNumbers.com, a leading Web site that analyzes the Nielsen ratings. Olbermann not only overlooks the fact that O’Reilly trounces him but also claims the opposite is true. Olbermann wrote on MSNBC’s Web site on Oct. 24 that O’Reilly “has seen the ratings spike here at MSNBC and decided that it is the result of a fraudulent conspiracy . . . ” So how can a news network tout ratings that actual Nielsen research doesn't support? The explanation is an almost-invisible line of fine print at the bottom of the ad, stating it refers to the 8 to 9 p.m. time slot for the dates Oct. 27 through Oct. 31, for viewers between 25 and 54 years of age. In other words, MSNBC is touting one time period or ratings category, which is the exception to the overall ratings. Consider: According to the Nielsen ratings, show on Thursday was the single most-watched program on cable television that week, other than Disney’s “Hannah Montana” and “Monday Night Football.” The second-most-watched program the week of Oct. 27 was O’Reilly’s program that Tuesday. And by the way, O’Reilly also hosted the fourth-most-watched cable program that week. The highest any of Olbermann’s programs placed that week was 19th. (It was the only Olbermann show to crack cable’s top 40 programs that week.) “O’Reilly’s lead in average viewers is large and has never been challenged by Olbermann,” Bill Gorman, co-founder of TVbytheNumbers.com, tells Newsmax. He points that “Olbermann has substantially increased both his average viewers and adults 24 to 54 substantially over time.” But data shows Reilly continues to regularly outpace Olbermann even in that key demographic group. Olbermann appeared elated this past week with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. But the win may be a Pyrrhic victory for the liberal news anchor. Olbermann had positioned himself as the anti-Bush, anti-Republican news source on MSNBC. With Democrats firmly in control of the White House and Congress, it’s questionable that his audience will grow. Fox, meanwhile, may be a big beneficiary of the Obama win. So far, the “early returns” suggest Fox may be growing already. On Nov. 5, the day after the elections, Fox kept about 12 percent more of its Election Day audience than MSNBC.

This was pulled from journalism.org.

After four years of war in Iraq, the journalists reporting from that country give their coverage a mixed but generally positive assessment, but they believe they have done a better job of covering the American military and the insurgency than they have the lives of ordinary Iraqis. And they do not believe the coverage of Iraq over time has been too negative. If anything, many believe the situation over the course of the war has been worse than the American public has perceived, according to a new survey of journalists covering the war from Iraq.

Above all, the journalists—most of them veteran war correspondents—describe conditions in Iraq as the most perilous they have ever encountered, and this above everything else is influencing the reporting. A majority of journalists surveyed (57%) report that at least one of their Iraqi staff had been killed or kidnapped in the last year alone—and many more are continually threatened. “Seven staffers killed since 2003, including three last July,” one bureau chief wrote with chilling brevity. “At least three have been kidnapped. All were freed.”

A majority of journalists surveyed say most of the country is too dangerous to visit. Nine out of ten say that about at least half of Baghdad itself. Wherever they go, traveling with armed guards and chase vehicles is the norm for more than seven out of ten surveyed.

Even the basics of getting the story are remarkably difficult. Outside of the heavily-fortified Green Zone, most U.S. journalists must rely on local staff to do the necessary face-to-face reporting. Yet nearly nine out of ten journalists say their local staff cannot carry any equipment—not even a notebook—that might identify them as working for the western media for fear of being killed. Some local staffers do not even tell their own families.

Most journalists also have a positive view of the U.S. military’s embedding program for reporters. While they acknowledge the limited perspective it provides, they believe it offers access to information they could not otherwise get.

And most journalists, eight out of ten, feel that, over time, conditions for telling the story of Iraq have gotten worse, not better.

The survey, conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism from September 28 through November 7, was developed to get a sense of the conditions journalists have faced in trying to cover the war over the last couple of years. It was not designed to poll their sense of the situation in Iraq at this one or any other particular moment in time, or to offer a referendum on the success of the surge. It will be followed, later this year, with a content analysis of coverage on the ground from Iraq.

The survey included responses from 111 journalists who have worked or are currently working in Iraq. The vast majority, 90 of them, were in Iraq when they took the survey or have worked there in 2007, and most have spent at least seven months in the country cumulatively since the war began.

The journalists are from 29 different news organizations (all of them U.S. based except for one) that have had staff in Iraq—including newspapers, wire services, magazines, radio, and network and cable TV. This represents, by best estimates, every news organization in the U.S. save one that has had a correspondent in Iraq for at least one month since January 2006.¹

Nearly everyone surveyed also responded to open-ended questions – often at length – offering a vivid and sobering portrait of trying to report an extraordinarily difficult story under terrifying conditions.

“The dangers can’t be overstated,” one print journalist wrote. “It’s been an ambush – two staff killed, one wounded – various firefights, and our ‘home’ has been rocked and mortared (by accident, I’m pretty sure). It’s not fun; it’s not safe, but I go back because it needs to be told.”

Whatever the problems, a magazine reporter offered, “The press….have carried out the classic journalistic mission of bearing witness.”

“Welcome to the new world of journalism, boys and girls. This is where we lost our innocence. Security teams, body armor and armored cars will forever now be pushed in between journalism and stories,” one bureau chief declared.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, which is non-partisan and non-political, is one of eight projects that make up the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C., a “fact tank” funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Princeton Survey Research was contracted to host and administer the online survey.

I agree that we should stay OUT of this, though I fear the timing of this all was purposely designed to drag us into it right before Inauguration Day.

Gaza truce broken as Israeli raid kills six Hamas gunmen

A four-month ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza was in jeopardy today after Israeli troops killed six Hamas gunmen in a raid into the territory.

Hamas responded by firing a wave of rockets into southern Israel, although no one was injured. The violence represented the most serious break in a ceasefire agreed in mid-June, yet both sides suggested they wanted to return to atmosphere of calm.

Israeli troops crossed into the Gaza Strip late last night near the town of Deir al-Balah. The Israeli military said the target of the raid was a tunnel that they said Hamas was planning to use to capture Israeli soldiers positioned on the border fence 250m away. Four Israeli soldiers were injured in the operation, two moderately and two lightly, the military said.

One Hamas gunman was killed and Palestinians launched a volley of mortars at the Israeli military. An Israeli air strike then killed five more Hamas fighters. In response, Hamas launched 35 rockets into southern Israel, one reaching the city of Ashkelon.

"This was a pinpoint operation intended to prevent an immediate threat," the Israeli military said in a statement. "There is no intention to disrupt the ceasefire, rather the purpose of the operation was to remove an immediate and dangerous threat posted by the Hamas terror organisation."

In Gaza, a Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum, said the group had fired rockets out of Gaza as a "response to Israel's massive breach of the truce".

"The Israelis began this tension and they must pay an expensive price. They cannot leave us drowning in blood while they sleep soundly in their beds," he said.

The attack comes shortly before a key meeting this Sunday in Cairo when Hamas and its political rival Fatah will hold talks on reconciling their differences and creating a single, unified government. It will be the first time the two sides have met at this level since fighting a near civil war more than a year ago.

Until now it had appeared both Israel and Hamas, which seized full control of Gaza last summer, had an interest in maintaining the ceasefire. For Israel it has meant an end to the daily barrage of rockets landing in southern towns, particularly Sderot. For Gazans it has meant an end to the regular Israeli military raids that have caused hundreds of casualties, many of them civilian, in the past year. Israel, however, has maintained its economic blockade on the strip, severely limiting imports and preventing all exports from Gaza.

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, had personally approved the Gaza raid, the Associated Press said. The Israeli military concluded that Hamas was likely to want to continue the ceasefire despite the raid, it said. The ceasefire was due to run for six months and it is still unclear whether it will stretch beyond that limit.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/05/israelandthepalestinians