Patterico's Pontifications

2/3/2005

John Carroll Memo on Kaus Gossip Suggestion

Filed under: Dog Trainer — Patterico @ 11:00 pm



The cutesy introductions to the L.A. Times‘s new “Outside the Tent” feature suggest that the paper’s editors aren’t really taking the column (or the criticisms leveled therein) seriously. But apparently they are.

Editor John Carroll wrote an internal memo about Mickey Kaus’s suggestion that the paper run a gossip column. (Via L.A. Observed.) Carroll’s memo was leaked to Kaus, who says here that Carroll missed the point entirely. In an amusing aside, Kaus adds:

Actually, that raises another issue the Times‘ editors could discuss at their next meeting: Would Los Angeles be better off if the Times magically, without loss of human life, disappeared from the face of the earth? It’s a no-brainer!

Heh. Still, the fact that Carroll actually wrote a memo about Kaus’s suggestion is a hopeful sign.

I wonder what he’ll think about my suggestion . . .

L.A. Times Repeats the “Imminent Threat” Canard

Filed under: Dog Trainer — Patterico @ 9:36 pm



How many times do we have to go through this, folks?

Our venerable L.A. Times editorializes this morning:

If the Iraqi people’s freedom was once seen as merely a bonus from an unavoidable war, that freedom has moved to center stage as the war’s primary justification. That’s because contrary to what Bush said in a previous State of the Union speech, we now know the threat posed by Hussein was not imminent.

Sigh.

Once more, with feeling:

President Bush did not say in any State of the Union address that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was “imminent.” In fact, he said the exact opposite:

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

So where did the editorialist get the idea that Bush had said in a State of the Union speech that Iraq posed an “imminent threat”? Perhaps from reading his own fact-challenged paper. The day after Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech, Times reporter Maura Reynolds penned a story titled — you guessed it — Bush Calls Iraq Imminent Threat:

A somber and steely President Bush, speaking to a skeptical world Tuesday in his State of the Union address, provided a forceful and detailed denunciation of Iraq, promising new evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime poses an imminent danger to the world and demanding the United Nations convene in just one week to consider the threat.

I guess it’s a little late to seek a correction of that 2003 story. But I have written the L.A. Times Readers’ Representative seeking a retraction of the statement in this morning’s editorial.

P.S. Please understand: I do not deny that officials in the Bush Administration have made statements along these lines. As the Spinsanity folks note, Ari Fleischer agreed with reporters’ characterizations of the threat as “imminent,” and Rumsfeld characterized the threat as “immediate.”

But Bush himself, by contrast, “argued that Iraq was an enemy for which the concept of ‘imminent threat’ was insufficient.” And one of the places where he did so was in his 2003 State of the Union address.

P.P.S. Thanks to alert reader Ken K.

UPDATE: Welcome to Instapundit readers. If you are interested in media bias, especially at the L.A. Times, please consider bookmarking the main page.

If I Wrote the Headlines at the L.A. Times

Filed under: Dog Trainer — Patterico @ 7:52 pm



A story in today’s paper is headlined: A Nobel Nominee Faces Execution.

My headline would have read: “Convicted Quadruple Murderer and Crips Founder Faces Execution.”

I know, I know, too wordy. I still like it better.

Subscribe to the New Feeds

Filed under: Blogging Matters — Patterico @ 7:13 am



I have a new RSS feed, and I am hoping that the 182 subscribers to my previous feed will find this new feed. There’s actually more than one: two for the blog and one for the comments.

The feed I recommend for the blog is the Atom feed, which is here. I prefer this feed to the other feed because it tells you who the author of the post is. I recommend it as a good way to keep up with the conversation, at least until One Fine Jay gets my “recent comments” feature up and running on WordPress.

If you want to subscribe to comments via RSS, you can do so with this feed.

Start subscribing! Sorry for the inconvenience of this transfer, but it will make the site much better in the long run. Note, for example, that you can now comment without getting an error message!

More L.A. Times Cop-Bashing

Filed under: Dog Trainer — Patterico @ 6:28 am



The Los Angeles Times reports:

A man attacked a sheriff’s deputy at a Montebello burger restaurant Monday with a machete, nearly severing his finger, before another deputy shot and wounded him, authorities said.

Sounds like a righteous shooting to me. But the story is quick to portray it as one in a recent string of shootings:

Reuben Sifuentes, 30, was the ninth person in nine days to be shot by police in Los Angeles County, five of them fatally

His shooting came a day after a 25-year-old Carson man who had threatened a girlfriend with a knife was shot and killed by a deputy.

Sounds like yet another righteous shooting. It sounds even more righteous when you find out — at the end of the article — that the guy didn’t just threaten his girlfriend with the knife. He also tried to stab a deputy sheriff with it:

About 1:30 p.m. Sunday, sheriff deputies were called to 24000 Fries Ave. in Carson, where a woman allegedly had been stabbed by her boyfriend. Deputy Luis Castro said that as the suspect fled on foot, deputies blocked off the surrounding neighborhood. The man then tried to stab a deputy, Castro said. As the man advanced, the deputy shot him in the upper body, Castro said

Couldn’t you have told us that fact at the beginning of the article?

(Incidentally, why does the article have two sentences that end without periods? Aren’t there any editors reading this stuff?)

This is the part that gets me:

The string of officer-involved shootings has occurred against a backdrop of steadily increasing use of guns by sheriff’s deputies.

More significantly, it sounds to me like these shootings have occurred against a backdrop of steadily increasing attacks on sheriff’s deputies. There is a phrase for this: “Suicide by cop” — and it sounds to me like more and more people are taking this road off our planet. After all, the only two shootings specifically mentioned in this article are ones where someone attacked sheriff’s deputies.

But, of course, The Times has to suggest that this is really about the police and their propensity to shoot — with no evidence to back it up.


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