Well blow me down

Three excellent columns at Powerline...

John Kerry disgraced himself yet again...when he launched a salvo against the Bush administration at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

...Kerry's latest folly.

...“When we walk away from global warming, Kyoto, when we are irresponsibly slow in moving toward AIDS in Africa, when we don’t advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards, we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy,” Kerry said.

Speaking of duplicity and hypocrisy...Kerry himself has actually had the opportunity to vote on the Kyoto carbon emissions treaty.

...this says it all…

U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 105th Congress - 1st Session

Vote Date: July 25, 1997, 11:37 AM

Question: On the Resolution (s.res.98 )

Declares that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol to, or other agreement regarding, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992, at negotiations in Kyoto in December 1997 or thereafter which would: (1) mandate new commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for the Annex 1 Parties, unless the protocol or other agreement also mandates new specific scheduled commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for Developing Country Parties within the same compliance period; or (2) result in serious harm to the U.S. economy.

YEAs 95
NAYs 0
Not Voting 5

Kerry (D-MA), Yea

Duplicitous and hypocritical: that pretty well sums up John Kerry.

What Makes A Protest Newsworthy?

This point is closely related to the "Grim Milestones" post immediately below. Earlier today, "tens of thousands" of demonstrators gathered on the Mall in Washington, D.C. to protest the Iraq war. The cast of speakers was less than impressive: Dennis Kucinich, Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, Jane Fonda.

...Organizers said the biggest challenge facing the anti-war movement today is how to hold together a loose coalition of groups with divergent agendas using celebrities who peaked in popularity 10 to 30 years ago.

“The speaker roster reminds me of the old Hollywood Squares game show,” said one unnamed staffer of Vegan Lesbians for Racial and Nuclear Justice, whose dozens of members will cross the continent to join the rally today. “I mean Fonda, Sarandon, Glover and Jackson might as well be Charo, Joan Rivers, George Gobel and Paul Lynde. How am I going get my group excited about geopolitical and military strategy with these has beens leading the way?”

It's hard to say how many people attended the demonstration; the Washington police no longer issue estimates of crowd sizes. Organizers said they were hoping for 100,000, and news accounts say there were "tens of thousands." I haven't seen a photo that shows the entire crowd; this one comes closest:

You can't judge from a single picture, but I haven't seen anything that makes me think the demonstration was anything special in terms of turnout.

Contrast this with a demonstration that occurred in the same place, just a few days ago, when"tens of thousands" of demonstrators gathered to protest the 34th anniversary of Roe v. Wade:

I don't know which protest was bigger, but I'm pretty sure I can predict which one will get more press coverage. My home-town paper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, didn't cover the abortion protest at all. Again, whether and how a demonstration is covered has a lot more to do with the political agenda of reporters and editors than with the number or enthusiasm of the demonstrators. And I think we all know what narrative the liberal media are now pushing. It's the "will to lose" that John O'Sullivan identified at the National Review summit last night.

Grim Milestones

...people are talking about a statistic that has been kicking around for a while: illegal aliens murder approximately 12 Americans a day. Is this accurate? I'm not sure; this isn't a statistic that is officially kept, so estimates are based on more informal surveys. The number seems to have been popularized by Congressman Steve King.

While I'm not sure that it's right, the 12 per day figure is plausible. There are 16,000+ murders a year in the U.S., so, if my math is correct, that number implies that, if there are around ten million illegal aliens, they commit about ten times their pro rata share of murders.

Twelve per day works out to 4,380 a year, or around 16,600 during the time that has elapsed since we have been engaged in Iraq. This is more than five times the number of military deaths in Iraq.

My point here is not to argue for the accuracy of Representative King's numbers, but rather to note how discretionary the concept of a "grim milestone" is. If the mainstream media kept a "grim milestone" count on murders of Americans by illegal aliens, imagine how it would re-frame the debate over illegal immigration. But the media have no interest in that particular set of "milestones." What constitutes a "milestone" depends not on the actual magnitude of the issue, but rather on the political agenda of the mainstream media.