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The ASSociated Press has Protesters Outside, Bush Toes Iraq Line.

President Bush said Thursday he sympathizes with war protesters like the mother camped outside his Texas ranch demanding answers for her solider-son’s death, but he said he believes it would be a mistake to bring U.S. troops home now.

Bush said he had “heard the voices of those saying, `Pull out now.’” And he said, “I’ve thought about their cry and their sincere desire to reduce the loss of life by pulling our troops out. I just strongly disagree.”

“Pulling the troops out would send a terrible signal to the enemy,” the president told reporters between meetings with his military and foreign affairs advisers.

Outside his sprawling ranch, California mother Cindy Sheehan sat on the road with a growing group of war protesters who have pitched tents in shallow ditches. Sheehan’s son, Casey, was killed five days after he arrived in
Iraq last year at age 24.

Sheehan began her standoff on Saturday, declaring she would stay for the entire month that Bush plans to stay in Texas if he won’t meet with her. Since then, dozens of other activists have traveled from across the country to join her, including at least three other parents who have lost children in the war.

“The president says he feels compassion for me, but the best way to show that compassion is by meeting with me and the other mothers and families who are here,” Sheehan said. “All we’re asking is that he sacrifice an hour out of his five-week vacation to talk to us, before the next mother loses her son in Iraq.”

But, Cindy Sheehan has already met and talked with the President over a year ago.

The Leftie Press is full of her story.

Flap feels sorry for her but it is time for Cindy to go home.

She is making a spectacle of herself and her family has even asked her to stand down.

“I sympathize with Mrs. Sheehan,” Bush said. “She feels strongly about her position. She has every right in the world to say what she believes. This is America. She has a right to her position. And I’ve thought long and hard about her position. I’ve heard her position from others, which is, `Get out of Iraq now.’”

“And it would be a mistake for the security of this country and the ability to lay the foundations for peace in the long run if we were to do so,” the president said.

The White House put out an accounting of all the meetings that Bush has had with families of the war dead — 900 relatives of 272 people who have died in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Sheehan met the president in June 2004 but said she deserves another visit since there have been so many revelations about faulty pre-war intelligence since then.

End of story.

Go HOME Cindy!

Technorati Tags: Cindy Sheehan, President Bush, George Bush

Flap KNEW you would be glad you did!

The New York Times FINALLY has a story on the Air America Radio Scandel, Bronx Boys Club’s Finances Investigated.

The state attorney general’s office and the city’s Department of Investigation are looking into whether a boys and girls club serving poor children and ailing elderly people in the Bronx had improper financial dealings, including loans to the Air America radio network, state and city officials said yesterday.

Mr. Franken took up the issue on the air on Monday afternoon, telling his listeners that Mr. Cohen was “a crook” who had borrowed money from Gloria Wise.

“I don’t know why he did it,” Mr. Franken said, according to a transcript of the broadcast made by the Department of Investigation. “I don’t know where the money went. I don’t know if it was used for operations. I think he was borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.”

Mr. Franken also said that the network’s new owners “don’t legally have to pay it back” – referring to the loans – “because we’re a different company or something.”

“But morally we do,” he said.

Hey Al!

How about taking a cut in salary and pay those Poor KIDS back!

But, the New York Times quote of Franken is not accurate.

Michelle Malkin has AIR ENRON: THE NYTIMES SPEAKS! (OR RATHER, WHISPERS).

The article is a rehash of everything blogs and a sprinkling of MSM outlets have already reported. Underwhelming. Entirely expected. And wholly inadequate given the paper’s massive previous coverage of Air America.

Send your thoughts on the NYTimes’ slothful reporting to ombudsman Byron Calame.

Check out the Times’ Dowdification of Al Franken’s quote about what happened to the money.

The NYTimes reports:

“I don’t know why he did it,” Mr. Franken said, according to a transcript of the broadcast made by the Department of Investigation. “I don’t know where the money went. I don’t know if it was used for operations. I think he was borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.”

Here’s what Franken actually said (via audio at Brainster’s Blog and transcript
at Brian Maloney, who busted this story wide open in the blogosphere the Times sneers at):

I don’t know why they did it, and I don’t know where the money went, I don’t know if it was used for operations (softer, especially fast), which I imagine it was. I think he was robbing Peter to pay Paul.

The omission of those five little words matters because Al Franken’s actual statement suggests that the money was in fact stolen from poor kids to pay Air America’s bills–a speculation that the Times attributes to “conservative-leaning blogs,” but not to the Times’ favorite liberal talk show host who said it himself.

(Hat tip: Reader Michael V.)

Mr. Calame, care to explain the omission?

Hell, Michelle, it has taken them weeks to even write a story on this theft – albeit they buried off the front pages.

Can we really expect any better from the New York Times?

NO.

Patterico has More Problems with Quotes at the New York Times.

Technorati Tags: Air America, Al Franken, New York City, Evan Cohen, theft

Flap previously covered the NARAL debacle of an ad, John Roberts Watch: CNN to Air Bloody Abortion Clinic Ad.

But, now they have withdrawn it. Fox News has NARAL Withdraws Anti-Roberts Ad.

After a week of protests by conservatives, an abortion-rights group said Thursday night it is withdrawing a television advertisement linking Supreme Court nominee John Roberts to violent anti-abortion activists.

“We regret that many people have misconstrued our recent advertisement about Mr. Roberts’ record,” said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

“Unfortunately, the debate over that advertisement has become a distraction from the serious discussion we hoped to have with the American public,” she said in a letter Thursday to Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who had urged the group to withdraw the ad.

Specter, himself an abortion-rights supporter as well as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that will question Roberts next month, earlier Thursday had called the ad “blatantly untrue and unfair.”

Don’t worry this is a strategic political move by NARAL.

Unfortunately, we will hear from them again – opposing Judge Roberts.

Technorati Tags: John Roberts, NARAL, Supreme Court, Nancy Keenan

Norman Lear over at the Huffington Post blog has An American Mother Loses Her Son.

An American mother loses her son in a war, travels to Crawford, Texas to park herself in proximity to her President and dead son’s Commander In Chief, seeking the opportunity to meet with him and share her feelings. What is the worst that can happen to him? He has the Secret Service and the FBI and local cops up the wazoo to be certain she’s “clean.” And if she came at him with no weapon, woman-a-mano, the man’s been tilling the soil, sawing logs, working out — what’s one undernourished, grieving mother going to do to him?

So, Norman, what is your point? The Secret Service is unnecessary for the protection of the President because he can physically meet/handle a woman constituent because he has been working out?

You didn’t mention the fact that Cindy Sheehan has already met with the President.

From his and his Administration’s POV it seems to me just plain dumb for the President, especially the compassionate conservative in him, not to have made Mrs. Sheehan welcome in the first hours of her attempted visit. And where was Mr. Rove? Out to lunch? Or too caught up in the Plame game?

Oh Please! What does Karl Rove have to do with this story?

Damn, he is the FOIL for you Lefties isn’t he?

P.S. I see now that “The Sheehan Family” has issued a statement distancing them from Mrs. Sheehan, because they “…support the troops, our country, and our President…” Is there anything Mrs. Sheehan is doing that would suggest to any reasonable person that this Gold Star mother doesn’t support our troops, our country, and the office of the President? No American — let alone a Gold Star mother — is required to agree with every decision her president makes in order to secure her good name as a citizen and as a supporter of our troops and our country.

She does not have to agree with the President.

Flap does not agree that Cindy Sheehan has a RIGHT to see the President AGAIN.

She has expressed her views and the President does not agree with her but is OUR elected President.

Time for Cindy to go home…. and for the LEFT to stop using her and let her grieve.

Technorati Tags: Cindy Sheehan, Norman Lear, Huffington Post, George Bush

A photo of George Washington’s Teeth.

Notice they are not wooden!

H/T Baltimore Tales

Technorati Tags: dental, dentistry, teeth, George Washington

Ted Rall is a MORON.

Rall exaggerates the number of slain American soldiers in Iraq in his Monday cartoon and then offers up this lame retraction, Retraction: 9,000 Dead? Maybe, Maybe Not.

I draw more than 200 cartoons a year, but this has never happened to me before: commenting on a story that turns out to be, if not bogus, at least inadequately sourced. Of course, an editorial cartoonist is always commenting on other people’s reporting, so he or she is always vulnerable to the possibility of being taken in by some jackass. Consider, for example, all the cartoonists who did cartoons about Saddam postulating what he’d do with hiis nuclear weapons!

To be make this short, I’m not apologizing because I have nothing to apologize for. I read a story that came off as possible, sourced it using previously reliable informants, and ended up doing a cartoon that I wouldn’t have done had I known then what I know now.

So this is a retraction of this past Monday’s “C” cartoon. Did 9,000-plus soldiers get killed in Iraq? Maybe, maybe not. But as a cartoonist friend of mine points out: The relatives of those hidden 7,000 dead troops sure would be raising hell if the Pentagon were trying to hide them. To which I respond: Duh.

The battery in my BS detector must have been running low last week.

The cartoon with the 9,000 figure (E&P Online) (shown above) showed a soldier — as he helps carry a badly wounded man to a helicopter — saying: “You don’t count as war dead unless you die IN Iraq. If you die in Germany, or even on the plane leaving Baghdad, you’re not counted.” In the cartoon’s final panel, the soldier urges the wounded man to try to stay alive at least until the helicopter takes off.

Rall is just an idiot.

No wonder the Washington Post dropped him last Fall.

Technorati Tags: Ted Rall, moron