Six vacations in 18 months – yep, great gig if you can get it. Nearly 10 percent unemployment during this “recovery summer” and Joe Biden is practically giddy with the “opportunity to do something great.” I sure hope so because we are all dying out here down in the real world, outside of the beltway.

He relentlessly plugs the $5 billion for weatherization as “one of our signature programs,” never mentioning, as the Associated Press puts it, that the program “has experienced spending delays, inefficiencies and mismanagement. In Biden’s home state of Delaware, the entire program has been suspended since May, and last month federal auditors identified possible fraud.” Oops, sorry. Forgot that little detail about how it isn’t even working where he lives.

Bill Clinton could look into the camera and you could imagine what he was thinking, and then he would do what he said he would do. You could feel it. Now, when Mr. Obama looks into the camera – you imagine what he is thinking and you can smell it.

The other night as he took the credit for “ending combat in Iraq” his ego wouldn’t even allow him to give credit to those who actually DID make the tough decision – to have a “surge.” Without Mr. Bush’s plan – the one that this president opposed, Iraq wouldn’t be in a position today to even visualize American troops withdrawing, much less actually sending some home. “Look at me, ma!” is what I saw last night and almost daily on television from this president.

Where is the empathy now? As the boy who cried wolf was eventually ignored, so is the case here. I see him talking but I don’t hear anything. I see neighbors losing jobs, cars, homes and moving out. I see their pain. I don’t want change for America – I want what we had in America again.

SILVER SPRING, MD (YBH) – Call it a testament to the era of the social networking sites. While environmental activist James Jay Lee (aka James Jae Lee) was holding three hostages at gunpoint at the Discovery Channel headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, supporters of his radical agenda were setting up Facebook pages to applaud the leftist extremist.

James Lee in a mugshot from a previous arrest.

Lee ran the website savetheplanetprotest.com (which, at present, has crashed due to traffic volume). His radical environmental agenda was outlined in his rambling, Unabomber-reminiscent “manifesto.” Lee believes that the only long-term solution to global warming and other supposed risks to the environment is the eventual phasing out of the human race via a global commitment to decrease the human population. Lee advocates sterilization as a practical strategy to “end human procreation.” “Humans are the most destructive, filthy, pollutive [sic] creatures around and are wrecking what’s left of the planet with their false morals and breeding culture,” he writes.

Lee also rages against the evils of war, claiming that gradually phasing out the human race is the best long-term solution to that problem as well, proclaiming “MORE HUMANS EQUALS MORE WAR!”

Lee targeted the Discovery Channel because he felt they ran too many programs about human childbirth and babies. On his website, he demands: “All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions.”

By the time the hostage standoff was ended mid-afternoon on Wednesday (police snipers shot and killed Lee; no hostages were injured), like-minded environmentalists were sounding off in defense of Lee on Facebook. By 3:30pm Pacific Time, Lee’s Facebook “fan pages” had several hundred members (although some were people who joined the pages to condemn Lee).

Among the supportive comments:

From AJ Mattis:

Before you call this guy an idiot look at yourself in the mirror. As for what this guy is doing, aside from the violence part, he isn’t that far off with his beliefs. Humans are destroying the planet and we all know it. He just got pushed to the limits and today he had enough. Discovery Channel airs all the retarded f*****g shows about midgets and their families and people who have a million f*****g kids and nothing about the Earth.

I don’t care if the Discovery Channel plays commercials about energy efficient light bulbs. They don’t play anything worth watching on this channel anymore. Does that mean I or anyone else should march into the building strapped with a bomb? Probably not. I wouldn’t, but I can understand his frustration.

From Shenna Ferry:

Humans are destroying the planet and Discovery Channel is wasting air time by promoting trash and their trash families.

From Charlotte Laws (in response to other posters who called Lee crazy):

Calling someone crazy is a way to marginalize them.

From Damon Foster:

I support his message, though his method is drastic. But then, what’s also drastic is indeed mankind’s destruction of the earth. So his frustration strikes me as understandable.

From Jesus Ramirez (in response to other posters who condemned Lee for putting innocent lives in jeopardy):

Innocent people ??? What about all of the INNOCENT ANIMALS THAT HAVE DIED BY HUMAN HANDS ??????? He is opening peoples eyes MORE POWER TO Mr. Lee. I DO believe that there should be limitations of breading [sic] for ALL animals even US.

From Dynasty Palaganas:

I simply don’t approve of his method, but when no one listens people will go to extremes.

Needless to say, a good half or more of the Facebook posters are not only critical of Lee, but also of extremism within the environmentalist movement.

MORE UPDATES TO COME

Don’t miss Steve Jobs’ announcement today on cnn.com/live and CNN’s app for the iPhone starting at 1:30 p.m. ET.

(CNN) — In the tech world, it’s become an annual rite of fall.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs and company have, for the past five years, used September as the time to announce new products and services among the company’s music offerings.

Last year, Jobs — making his first public appearance since returning to work after a liver transplant — unveiled some changes to the iPod lineup, including new Nanos with video cameras, and announced slashed prices on the portable music players.

In 2005, the iPod Nano was unveiled and, in 2007, the iPod Touch.

This year, the invitation to Apple’s annual September media event, at 1 p.m. ET in San Francisco, California, features the image of an acoustic guitar with the Apple logo carved into it. As usual, the tech media dissected the image for clues, even joking that Apple was preparing to unveil a new product, the iGuitar.

Read the entire post at CNN.

As President Obama announced the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq, he acknowledged his predecessor and revealed he had phoned him before the speech. Mark McKinnon on why Obama would do well to learn more from Bush.

The gracefully arched ceiling of the Oval Office can make the biggest of men look small. Its soft beauty belies its cruelty as it presses down with the weight of a nation’s hopes and fears on the shoulders of those who dare sit at the Resolute desk.

An impatient people, we are quick to judge those who occupy this office. As a nation, we measure the service of these mortal men against the long shadows cast by giants of the past, sanctified for posterity in marble and granite. But time passes, and truth is discovered.

As President Obama struggles to right a ship swamped by economic and natural disasters, and unrest at home and abroad, he wonders at the fickle nature of a once hopeful but now seemingly ungrateful nation.

Read the entire article at the Daily Beast.

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is opening a new round of Mideast peacemaking, bringing Israeli and Palestinian leaders together Wednesday for talks aimed at forging agreement within one year on a two-state solution: a sovereign Palestine and a secure Israel.

Expectations were low as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas arrived Tuesday for preparatory talks with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has spent months coaxing the parties back to the bargaining table.

The talks will be the first face-to-face sessions between the Israelis and Palestinians since December 2008, but the two sides are far apart on all key issues, so major progress in the early going is seen as unlikely.

Pointing up the tensions that will probably test Obama’s diplomacy, a Palestinian gunman opened fire Tuesday on an Israeli vehicle traveling near the West Bank city of Hebron, killing four passengers. The militant Hamas movement, which rejects Israel’s right to exist and opposes peace talks, claimed responsibility. Israeli officials called the shooting an attempt to sabotage the discussions and the White House weighed in with its own condemnation.

Read the entire article at Yahoo! News.

By Jim Jubak

On the surface, bidding a couple of billion dollars for a company that hasn’t made an operating profit in the past five years looks nuts.

Photo: AP

Dig deeper, though, and the battle between Dell (DELL, news, msgs) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, news, msgs) to buy data storage company 3Par (PAR, news, msgs) doesn’t look nuts — it looks insane. 3Par’s sales are projected to hit all of $235 million for the fiscal year that ends in March 2011. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or EBITDA, are projected at just $21 million.

On Aug. 26, Dell proposed paying $1.5 billion for 3Par. Later in the day, Hewlett-Packard bid $1.7 billion. Each bid came to roughly 80 times EBITDA for 3Par. Then both raised those bids the next day, Friday, with HP ready to pay nearly $1.9 billion.

Read the entire article at MSN.

Since World War II, Americans have seen little reward for their wars. The Korean conflict ended in a menacing 57-year stalemate. Vietnam brought demoralizing defeat. The Afghanistan invasion, so justified and satisfying at the start, degenerated into an unfocused miasma. Even the Persian Gulf War, a military and diplomatic tour de force in its time, was tarnished by its stumbling sequel.

So no one should be surprised that President Obama’s speech Tuesday night, marking the official end of combat operations in Iraq, didn’t sound like Harry Truman celebrating the Japanese surrender.

It hardly could. The war isn’t over, and the outcome remains in doubt. As for the declared end of combat operations, Obama did indeed meet his deadline for drawing down U.S. force levels and handing off primary responsibility for security to the Iraqis. But Americans will still be fighting and dying, and moving a bit slower would have been wiser — long enough at least for a unified Iraqi government to emerge and limit chances the country will spin back into civil war.

Read the entire post at USA Today

Any person with reading comprehension skills above the sixth grade level would likely interpret the above as: the majority of the GOP BELIEVES that Obama SYMPATHIZES with Islamic fundamentalists AND that HE WANTS worldwide Islamic law.

GOP: Barack, the Sharia man? Hardly.

That is simply not the question that was asked nor what the poll results stated.

The poll in question is from Newsweek.  The “majority” of Republicans (remember the Huffington Post did not say “the majority of those responding to a poll by Newsweek”, but simply “majority of GOP”) that the Huffington Post is referring to is actually 314 self-described Republicans.  More than 58 million people voted for John McCain in the last election, yet The Huffington Post is asserting that 314 random self-described Republicans are speaking for the entire GOP.  Hardly a true analysis of GOP sentiment.

Already, over 2,000 comments have been posted about the article on the Huffington Post.  Many feature comments like “They [the GOP] are the cave dwellers,” or “I thought [the GOP] were only ignorant, but I have to add they are bordering on insanity too,” and “The poll also suggests the majority GOP think the earth is square and if you walk long enough you would fall from the corner.”  Based on the reporting in the Huffington Post article, it is easy to see why comments like the above are so common.

The actual question asked by Newsweek in the poll was:

“Some people have alleged that Barack Obama sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world.  From what you know about Obama, what is your opinion of these  allegations?  Do you think they are… definitely true, probably true, probably not true, OR definitely not true?”

The question of whether Mr. Obama personally wants to bring Islamic or “sharia” law, as the Huffington Post headline asserts the GOP thinks he does, to the United States is not asked in the poll.

To get a GOP “majority” The Huffington Post lumps together “definitely true” (14%) and “probably true” (38%) respondents to get a majority of 52%, hence the headline of the article.  What the Huffington Post doesn’t mention is, that using their method, fully 17% of Democrats and 27% of Independents think the same thing.  Nowhere in the article does Mr. Stein point out this fact.

Taken a step further, the poll had a sample size of 958 people. Of those 958, 314 were self-described Republicans, 334 were Democrats, and 310 were Independents. Each of the groups had a margin of error listed between +/-6.5% to +/-6.9%. The overall poll had 1,029 respondents with a margin of error of +/-3.7%.  Using the percentages above, and the Huff Po methodology of combining “definitely” and “probably” respondents into one group, out of 958 people 163 Republicans, 56 Democrats, and 83 Independents thought that “Obama sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world.”  Only 24 more Republicans (163) than a combined number of Independents and Democrats (139) responded with “definitely” or “probably” to Newsweek’s question. Hardly a gap wide enough for Sam Stein to ignore.  Yet, he does so anyway, why?

Is the Huffington Post changing any minds with this type of journalism (are Republicans disavowing Jesus and Sarah Palin because of articles like these?) or are they just harvesting its existing user base for more and more page views and ad revenues?

Misleading headlines and omission of facts makes me think it is the latter. Shame on them.  Perhaps the real purpose of such articles on The Huffington Post can be summed up by a comment left by a user named “awiff” a short time ago:

Please, all Democrats, progressives,liberals,leftists, please register and vote.Please register and vote.Please register and vote for the Democratic party, again.America is still in danger of rethug [GOP] racism and religious persecution. It is up to the liberals to protect the meaning of equal rights guaranteed to us in the Constitution.

Heck, the comment count is now over 3,100.  That’s 1,000 plus more comments in the hour I’ve been writing and editing this rebuttal piece.  Most are in line with those printed above, someone is buying what the Huffington Post is selling.

Hopefully, Americans that consider themselves either Foxinistas or Sons and Daughters of the Mighty Arianna Tribe or just plain old web news browsers continue to take the time to look behind the headlines.  It matters.

WASHINGTON D.C. (YBH) – On Saturday, Mary C. Curtis, the national correspondent for AOL’s Politics Daily, posted a detailed article about TV and radio host Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally, which had wrapped earlier that day. Ms. Curtis hit all of the expected mainstream media “talking points.” Twice she pointed out the race of the rally’s attendees (they were “predominantly white” and not “diverse”), and she rigorously avoided quoting from the speech given by Dr. Alveda King, Martin Luther King’s niece (Ms. Curtis did use Dr. King’s presence at the rally to take another shot at the racial makeup of the crowd). Ms. Curtis claimed that the rally was packed with Tea Partiers, and she quoted the Reverend Al Sharpton on the reasons for his counter-rally.

All standard MSM stuff. But one line in her article stood out for its audaciously Beck-friendly assertion. Commenting on the size of the crowd, Ms. Curtis wrote:

“Organizers had a permit for a gathering of 300,000, the AP said, and it appeared that was close to the mark. But the National Park Service no longer provides estimates for the size of crowds at the many rallies on the Mall.”

Glenn Beck and Mary Curtis

“Close to the mark” of 300,000 attendees? Surely, many conservatives would have assumed that the MSM would do everything it could to give low-ball estimates for the crowd’s size. It’s a knee-jerk reaction by many on the right to automatically expect the MSM to disparage, downplay, and downsize any large conservative-tinted event.

But here was AOL’s high-profile news site giving a most definitely high-ball estimate. Perhaps conservatives need to rethink their assumptions about the MSM.

Or maybe not.

Because within hours, the “close to the mark” line had magically vanished from Ms. Curtis’ piece. The sentences now read, “Organizers had a permit for a gathering of 300,000, the AP said. But the National Park Service no longer provides estimates for the size of crowds at the many rallies on the Mall.” The removal of the “close to the mark” line renders the National Park Service reference clumsy and pointless.

Of course, maybe the person or persons who removed the line did so not because of anti-Beck bias, but out of a sincere desire to remove assertions that could not be definitively and objectively proved. Perhaps the late-night word-snatchers were motivated by a journalistic integrity so great, so vast, that they simply could not allow any wide-ranging, unsubstantiated, and unconfirmable claims about the attendees. Politics be damned…the article had to be cleansed of any impossible-to-prove statements!

Well, if that was their intention, they missed a spot.

Because in yet another swipe at the crowd’s “lack of diversity,” Ms. Curtis wrote,

“When the African American singers joined her in a snippet of ‘Lift every Voice and Sing’ – the James Weldon Johnson poem set to music and known as the black national anthem – few in the crowd knew any of the words.”

So in a crowd that she estimated to be nearly 300,000 strong, Ms. Curtis had the superhuman omnipresence to know that “few in the crowd” knew the words to the song, even though the crowd stretched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument (nearly one mile in length). Not only was she apparently able to be everywhere in the crowd at once, but she also had the omniscience to know that those who weren’t singing along were doing so not because they wanted to enjoy listening to the professional singers, but because they didn’t know the words.

If the editors at Politics Daily believe that Ms. Curtis has such extraordinary powers of observation, you’d think they’d have trusted her ability to estimate the size of the crowd.

By Toby Harnden

It took a Manhattan taxi driver called Ahmed Sharif to speak out for America, which is being vilified as bigoted and Islamophobic because of the controversy generated by opposition to the so-called “Ground Zero mosque”.

Barack Obama Photo: GETTY

The United States was his dream country, he enthused, and he loved New York City. “I feel like I belong here. This is the city actually [for] all colours, races, religion, everyone. We live here side by side peacefully.”

Which was a pretty noble sentiment coming from a man whose throat had been slashed by a drunken, deranged passenger who had inquired whether he was a Muslim before pulling out a knife and shouting “Peace be upon you” in Arabic.

As the whole world knows, there is a furore raging over the proposed building of a 15-storey Islamic community centre, containing a mosque, two blocks from Ground Zero, site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda.

Read the entire article at Telegraph.co.uk.