As most of you know by now, Comedy Central censored last night’s episode of “South Park,” refusing to run an image of Mohammed—evidently out of cultural sensitivity to those who Comedy Central executives fear might, I dunno, key their cars?  Write angry emails? Or maybe there really is something to this jihadist threat after all, for all the time spent by other Comedy Central shows and personalities ironizing the threat

Via Reuters: New York Times Co., McClatchy Co. and Tribune Co.  on Thursday posted sharply lower quarterly earnings on high newsprint costs and depressed advertising sales. The results from the three large publishers underscored the troubles faced by the industry, including circulation declines, high costs and competition for advertising money from the Internet and other new media. It almost has to be that printing costs have risen—although you’d think the

From the Jerusalem Post: According to a Thursday report on Al-Jazeera, the Hamas government will recognize Israel if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders. Hamas officials close to Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh expect Haniyeh to announce the change in the organization’s platform in the next few days, Army Radio reported. The international community has pressured Hamas since the group assumed power to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. The

From the WSJ (subscription only): If Republicans lose control of Congress in November, they might want to look back at last Thursday as the day it was lost. That’s when the big spenders among House Republicans blew up a deal between the leadership and rank-in-file to impose some modest spending discipline. Unlike the collapse of the immigration bill, this fiasco can’t be blamed on Senate Democrats. This one is all

The moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat.  This is a generation of wingless chickens, which is what I suppose Nietzsche meant when he said God is dead.”—Flannery O’Connor

More spawn of EVIL below the fold…

Poll here, courtesy Davids Medienkritik, which notes: 28 % think that Iran is a greater threat. For 16 %, the U.S. and Iran pose identical threats. The results don’t surprise me at all. I mean, Iran is economically extremly promising for Germany. And Iran has made it clear what it expects in return for economic favours: “The international deputy of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, Dr. Fereidoun Entezari, believes that business

In the comments to my post yesterday about the spin used by an ideologically-driven press to forge a particular narrative about a war with which they disagree, commenter rls pointed out this Washington Post story on a Pentagon team’s assessment of Saddam’s supposed biolabs.  The tenor of the story—and this is one of the points I made yesterday—is clearly designed to suggest that the President knew full well that those