Via Michelle Malkin comes word that shares in the Tribune Company (which owns the L.A. Times) have tumbled on news of falling revenue:

Shares in Tribune Co. tumbled Thursday after the media company reported a 6.1% drop in revenue last month on declines in both its newspaper and television businesses.

. . . .

Revenue from the publishing unit, consisting of its newspapers, dipped 4.2% to $413 million from $431 million in December 2004. The company said about $6 million of that $18 million drop was due to the timing of Christmas on Sunday and the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma in Florida.

Advertising revenue in the publishing division fell 4.5% to $333 million, down from $349 million. The decline included a 5.2% decrease in retail ad revenue and a 9.6% decline in national ad revenue, mainly at the Los Angeles Times. Classified ad revenue edged up 2.5%.

Circulation revenue was down 3.5%, the company said, citing volume declines at most of its newspapers and selectively higher discounting.

The continuing decline in circulation will apparently come as news to the paper’s business columnist. As I mentioned recently, a blogger said he left a comment on the business columnist’s L.A. Times-sponsored blog, pointing out the paper’s recent declines in circulation as an indication of reader dissatisfaction. According to the commenter, his comments were deleted, and the columnist wrote him an e-mail calling his comments a “lie” and “too stupid to countenance.”

Will the columnist call the reports of the Tribune Company’s decline in revenue and stock prices a lie as well? Only time will tell.

One thing’s for sure: anonymous Tribune Company commenter Biff can’t be too happy.

So Hillary is taking some heat for describing the Republican House of Representatives as a “plantation,” according to the L.A. Times.

I’m confused, L.A. Times. I thought that, according to you guys she was a centrist! Somehow this absurd remark doesn’t strike me as a particularly “centrist” remark — and I guess that the Democrat party doesn’t think so either, as it felt the need to send out Barack Obama to defend the comment.

Still, the story says: “Her partisan attacks keep the Democratic Party’s base energized and her liberal supporters reasonably happy, even as she works in the Senate to burnish an image as a centrist, which would help her in a presidential campaign.” They might have said: “even as this newspaper works tirelessly to burnish her image as a centrist.”

Boston’s Pundit Review Radio, where I have been a guest on a couple of occasions, has expanded to two hours and is featured in a Boston Herald article. Read about it here. Congratulations to Kevin and Gregg.

[Posted by See Dubya]

This is very bad:

A comatose girl beaten with a baseball bat is responding to medical stimuli, officials said Wednesday, a day after Massachusetts’ highest court ruled the state could take her off life support.

The state, which has custody, had asked that Haleigh Poutre’s ventilator and feeding tube be withdrawn after doctors said she was in an irreversible vegetative state.

Her alleged piece of dirt stepfather allegedly hit her with the bat. He is now in the interesting position of trying to keep her tubes in place, because if the state pulls the tube and she dies, he will be charged with her murder. But as the state is her guardian, the state (specifically the Massachusetts Department of Social Services) can ignore his wishes, finish the job he started of murdering Haleigh, and then throw him in jail for it.

It’s not that I’m decrying the rough justice against the stepfather, Jason Strickland. Hell, hang him up for a pinata.

But the state is acting as his accomplice.

This really frightens me. The state shouldn’t be pulling the tubes on eleven year old girls. Unlike the Schiavo case, not only has Haleigh not told anyone of her true wishes, but she legally can’t make these kind of decisions. There should be a presumption that people, that children, even brain-damaged orphans, ought to live.

But the social services bureaucrats in the State of Massachusetts have decided she must die, and they are preparing to take affirmative acts to carry that decision out.

If she dies, however, the state’s accomplice in her murder will not die. Massachusetts decided this year that murderers will not face the death penalty.

Keep Haleigh in your prayers. And keep America in your prayers.

H/t: Alarming News. Cross-posted at the Jawa Report.

— See Dubya

Good news UPDATE: This article in the Boston Globe, linked at Michelle Malkin’s post on the subject, states that DSS “has no immediate plans to remove her feeding tube”. I hope they do proceed with caution here. I also wonder at what point it would become illegal to remove the tube…if, for example, Haleigh should regain some consciousness, would the court ruling still enable the state to dehydrate her?