Anwyn passes along this little gem regarding New York Times reporter David Rohde, who recently escaped from terrorists who had kidnapped him last November, but whose abduction was not reported in the meantime. Money quote:

Afghan officials confirmed the kidnapping in the days after the abduction, but The Associated Press and most other Western news outlets respected a request from the [New York] Times to not report on the abductions because the publicity could negatively affect hostage rescue efforts and imperil Rohde’s life.

“From the early days of this ordeal, the prevailing view among David’s family, experts in kidnapping cases, officials of several governments and others we consulted was that going public could increase the danger to David and the other hostages. The kidnappers initially said as much,” Bill Keller, the Times’ executive editor, said in a story posted on the Times’ Web site.

“We decided to respect that advice, as we have in other kidnapping cases, and a number of other news organizations that learned of David’s plight have done the same. We are enormously grateful for their support.”

She notes (and I concur) how comforting it is to know that the Paper With A Record really does know how to keep its yap shut as long as it’s one of their own they’re trying to protect, rather than some piddling lightweight stuff like … oh, I dunno … NATIONAL FRIGGIN’ SECURITY????!!!!!!

Marc Danziger has more.

I’m as happy as the next guy to see Creigh Deeds trounce Terry “I’m a Virginian” McAuliffe, but I could really do without a subpar editorial disguised as news reporting:
 

Only toward the end of the campaign, after Deeds began surging in polls, did his two opponents take aim at him for Senate votes against efforts to close a loophole in state laws that exempt firearms sales at gun shows from the background checks required of federally licensed gun retailers.

 
Note that the Ass. Press didn’t say Moran and McAuliffe accused Deeds of voting against laws to change a law they called a loophole that supposedly exempted firearms sales at gun shows from regulation.  That statement may very well be true.  In fact, given the track record of that weasel McAuliffe, it almost certainly is true.  However, it is not true that any federal or state law, voted on by Deeds or not, exempts firearms sales at gun shows from anything.  Federal law requires background checks for all retail handgun purchases, and so does Virginia.  Federal law does not require background checks for any private handgun purchases, and neither does Virginia.  Federal law does not treat a sale any differently based on whether it does or does not occur at a gun show, and neither does Virginia.  A decent argument can be made that private sales that happen to occur at gun shows should be regulated as though they were retail sales (I’ve offered qualified support for this view myself in the past), but it’s hardly a slam dunk.  Certainly not the slam dunk it would have to be to justify using such a loaded word as “loophole” in a news story.

I don’t know much. I don’t know too much, but I know this: stuff is messed up.

While I recently bashed the media for their failure to distinguish AIG the hedge fund from AIG the insurer, it now appears (h/t: Kevin Murphy) that I failed to draw an even finer – but equally important – distinction myself. That is to say – and I blush to admit this – that even while I bashed the media for being too dumb to tell an insurer from a hedge fund, I simultaneously trusted that same media to get the story right with respect to the hedge fund itself. If former EVP Jake DeSantis is to be believed (and I have no less reason to believe him than Chuck Schumer, Chris Dodd, Dick Blumenthal, Earl Pomeroy, Steven Lynch, or any of the other contenders in the pompous ass contest that has been going on for weeks now) AIG Financial Products actually offered more than one financial product, and some of those other products actually did all right. And apparently it is the guys who had their act together, not the losers who crapped the company with their credit default swaps, who are now getting bashed for the bonuses they earned.

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know what to do about AIG. The second person to admit that should be Edward Liddy, whose knowledge of the hedge fund and Connecticut labor law have revealed him to be an … err …. accomplished insurance executive who earns every dollar he is paid for his current gig. The third person to admit that should everyone friggin’ else. The one thing we all should be able to agree on is that the government has no business here.

On a side note, a really smart guy published a letter in the Whizz-Urinal on the topic yesterday. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke aptly described AIG as a hedge fund attached to an insurance company. It’s important to keep the two AIGs straight, as AIG Financial Products, a hedge fund, basically went belly up writing credit default swaps while the group of insurance companies known as AIG are doing fine. Unfortunately, the MSM rarely captures this distinction, typically referring to AIG not as a hedge fund but as an insurer, in articles having nothing to do with the company’s insurance operations. Some politicians are as ignorant on this distinction as the rest of us, while others cynically exploit this popular confusion for political gain. For example, House Democrats Gene Taylor of Mississippi and Peter DeFazio of Oregon are both pimping A.I.G. as an excuse to exhume their past efforts to repeal the antitrust “exemption”^* for insurers. Per National Underwriter:

They had introduced such legislation in earlier Congresses, and said they count on the controversy over bonuses paid to American International Group employees to help advance their measure.

“Shouldn’t the $170 billion bailout of AIG be the third and final strike to the ‘business as usual’ attitude toward the insurance industry?” they asked.

Perhaps it should be, if the $170 billion bailout had anything to do with either the insurance industry or antitrust law, preferably both. Does anyone seriously think that a hedge fund went bust by writing a bunch of crazy default swaps because its well-capitalized and solvent sister companies were out colluding with competitors?

At the other end of the spectrum, California Republican (yeah, there still are a few of those) Ed Royce exploits the same popular confusion in support of optional federal charter (OFC) legislation which, like Taylor and DeFazio’s antitrust issue, was a pet project of his long before the AIG scandal. Royce argues that “the 54 various state insurance regulators didn’t have the capacity to deal with a global insurance company” like AIG, as if to suggest that one regulator could succeed where 50 real regulators and 4 imaginary ones had failed. On the one hand, I guess I should congratulate the guy for thinking there are only 54 states rather than 57, which is three states closer to the real number than the President’s conception of the country. On the other, what the hell do any of the 50 state regulators have to do with AIG Financial Products, which was regulated by 0 of them?

As full disclosure, I should note that I work for an insurance company, which may well have its own positions on antitrust and OFC. I don’t know my company’s positions on these issues, and in any event I speak for myself, not for them. Personally, I favor optional federal charter and couldn’t care less about the antitrust question either way. My beef is not with either concept in principle, but with their supporters’ lame efforts to turn popular confusion into their own political gain. The same could likely be said of the AIG bailouts themselves; if everyone had understood that taxpayers were only bailing out a hedge fund, and not a group of insurers who were in need of no help, the already unpopular bailouts would surely have been a tougher sell politically.

^*Scare quotes because contrary to popular opinion, insurance companies are not generally exempt from antitrust law. The McCarran-Ferguson Act generally provides that federal laws will not trump state insurance laws, but the effect of this rule is that insurers are only exempt from federal antitrust laws to the extent that the states regulate in this area instead.

Don’t get to excited by the subject line, Southerners, ‘cuz I mean it in the international sense of the world, which doesn’t care which side of the Mason-Dixon line you hail from. I refer to this dumbed-down version of a Times of London article about a man who died when some rescue workers decided he wasn’t worth saving. The story itself is obscene enough, and probably warrants a blog entry of its own, if only to show that 911 horror stories are not limited to the United States, though in this case it wasn’t the operator who screwed things up, but the “help” that wasn’t. But that’s another matter. My concern with this post was FoxNews’s editorial decision to falsely state that a British man had dialed 911 in an emergency, when of course he had actually dialed 999. A bit pedantic on my part? Maybe, but then again, some of us ‘Mercuns might actually like to travel to Britain someday, and if we do, it would be good for all of us to know what number to dial in the event of an emergency. And what better way to help educate us on this matter, than to report what actually happened rather than what would have happened if the same event had occurred here?

Coming next: FoxNews inverting all photos that show cars on streets, so it will look as though the Brits drive on the right rather than the left. And maybe a few superimposed guns here and there, just so we gun-loving Yanks can relate.

Via commenter Trained Dog, it’s amazing how the L.A. Times can publish this without even mentioning this.

If you’re one of the three people on the planet who reads this blog but not Patterico’s, read this.

Hillary Clinton Tamara Dietrich of the Newport News Daily Press pokes fun at gun owners who think Barack Obama is not a friend of gun owners.

A black man gets elected president and half the country dives for the panic room, buying up guns and squirreling away supplies like fatalists awaiting the End of Days. That’s an exaggeration, of course. Barack Obama is biracial, not black.

Lovely of Ms. Dietrich to bring up race in an article on guns, or for that matter, any other topic except … um … race. I know plenty of gun owners who fear new restrictions on their right to own or carry guns. I also know plenty of gunophobes who think guns are icky, can’t imagine why an sane person would want to own one, and would be delighted to see government take everyone else’s guns away. I do not know a single individual, however, who is in favor of having his guns taken away from a white guy, but opposed to having them taken away from a black guy. Do you? Does Dietrich? If not, what the hell point is there in bringing race up?

Further, even if race were a legitimate topic of discussion in this context, the notion that Obama’s white mother precludes him from being “black” is evidence that the infamous “one drop rule” never really went away, it just came full circle. In the days of Jim Crow, one drop of black blood meant you were black. Now, per Ms. Dietrich, one drop of white blood apparently means you can’t be. Query how many American blacks meet Ms. Dietrich’s definition of “black.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know why the average African-American has a lighter complexion than the average African-African. But I digress.

“Hee hee heeeee …” chortles “HG Robinson” in the very first post to reporter Peter Dujardin’s story last week on the local run on weaponry. “Clearly President Obama is looking to ban handguns and close loopholes in the law first chance he can. … You gun nuts better stock up now.”

First, Obama hasn’t said he wants to ban handguns.

His former colleague John Lott begs to differ on that, but just for grits and shins, let’s go Lambert on the guy and assume he’s lying. For all you or I know, maybe Obama never really did say he wanted to ban handguns. He did, however, write that he did, nodded when asked if he did, voted against the law stripping his home town and a few suburbs of their “right” to perosecute homeowners who use otherwise lawfully owned handguns in otherwise lawful self defense, refused to sign the Heller brief supporting a common-senes reading of the Second Amendment (or even the wishy-washy brief offered by the Bush Administration) and appointed Eric Holder, who had signed a different Heller brief advocating the “collective” (read: no) rights interpretation, a view too extreme even for the four dissenting Justices in that case. So pardon me when I refuse to take an ounce of solace from the fact that Obama supposedly never came out and said “I hereby want to ban handguns.” To the extent that actions speak louder than words, he screamed it.
(more…)

In a piece about the interplay between the election and the World Series, the Ass. Press helpfully “fact” checks Senator McCain in a manner that would make Annenberg Political proud:

McCain told several hundred people standing in a cavernous warehouse: “Now, I’m not dumb enough to get mixed up in a World Series between swing states. But I think I may have detected a little pattern with Sen. Obama. It’s pretty simple really. When he’s campaigning in Philadelphia, he roots for the Phillies, and when he’s campaigning in Tampa Bay, he ‘shows love’ to the Rays.”

As a chorus of boos built, he added:”It’s kind of like the way he campaigns on tax cuts, but then votes for tax increases after he’s elected. Or the way he says he backs the middle class and then goes and attacks Joe the Plumber after Sen. Obama’s asked a tough question. What’s that all about?”

In fact, Obama did not attack Joe the Plumber; rather he criticized McCain for suggesting that the Ohio plumber who wants to purchase the plumbing business where he works is in the same economic shape as most working class voters.

It sure is comforting to know that “in fact” Obama and his followers never attacked Joe the Plumber. The Ass. Press said so, and even dropped in an f-bomb on top of it, so who am I to question?