Liberal media, my ass (ver. 3.0)

Just when I thought it was safe to read the paper, I'm met with this headline on the front page (PDF) of today's Palm Beach Post:

Early votes' rise stirs unease
The state's eightfold increase since 2004 does little to boost turnout and may create errors, experts say.

What experts are quoted in the article, you ask? Let's take a look:

Although local elections supervisors have promoted absentee and early voting as a way to lure time-starved voters to the polls, some elections experts say the trend does little to improve overall turnout and injects more possibility of error into a state that has had plenty of voting blunders.

"You're maintaining three distinct (voting) systems, each with its own quirks," said John Fortier, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and author of Absentee and Early Voting: Trends, Promises and Perils.

"Some administrators like it because they think it evens out their flow," Fortier said, "but it robs people of information when they vote a month before the election."

Ah, okay, so it's a problem because ... hey, hold on a second! Did you see that? The "expert" is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Fortier's colleagues include such notables wankers as John Bolton, Lynne Cheney, David Frum, Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and John Yoo. In short, the AEI is a wingnut's wet dream.

The fact is that early voting allows greater turnout, despite the right-wing's desperate spin to the contrary. Of course, more people voting generally means more Democratic voting, so it's understandable that the AEI would want to depress voter turnout. But why is the Post quoting a wingnut "expert" on the front page? Look, Post, for every so-called "expert" from the right you want to quote, I'll throw three reality-based experts at you -- how does that sound? And when your wingnut expert skews the front-page headline this badly, that's a 15-yard penalty for unjournalistlike behavior.

I believe this may actually rise to the level of a letter to the editor ... by me. Again I say, as incredulously as ever: liberal media, my ass.

The neocon Family Circus

Let's say you're a primary architect of the vendetta war in Iraq. Your buddy has placed you in a cushy job and, despite your unusual grooming habits, you manage to find yourself a girlfriend. But, true to your neocon roots, you find a way to do something unethical, by helping this girlfriend get a raise and promotion at the organization you run.

Finally (and fittingly), you are forced to resign, and on top of that your girlfriend leaves you. What do you say? Whom do you blame?

Well, remember, you're a neocon. So above all else, you can't take responsibility yourself ... that would be, well, uncharacteristic.

Departing World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz in a radio interview broadcast Monday blamed an overheated atmosphere at the bank and in the media for forcing him to resign.

Wolfowitz, who has announced he will step down June 30, denied suggestions that his decision to leave was influenced by an apparent lack of support from the bank's employees.

"I think it tells us more about the media than about the bank and I'll leave it at that," he told the British Broadcasting Corp. "People were reacting to a whole string of inaccurate statements and by the time we got to anything approximating accuracy the passions were around the bend."

It's easy to be a neocon. All you really need is a little ghost named "Not Me."