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Reuters Admits, Pulls Doctored Photos
fragmentate points to a post on PopPhoto which says "Reuters pulled a photograph of burning buildings in Beirut yesterday after a post on the Little Green Footballs blog outed it as digitally manipulated. The photo, filed on Saturday by freelance photographer Adnan Hajj, ran with the caption "Smoke billows from burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut's suburbs."
Fragmentate adds "Another image from the same photographer was found to have been doctored.
Whether you're a CNN fan, or a FoxNEWS fan, you have to wonder how much of what we see is fake, or exaggerated."
Would it surprise you to learn that these doctored photos were placed by someone on the far Right trying to discredit the centrist media? Sort of like the way the fake 60 Minutes article on Bush's little vacation from the Air National Guard was placed by a GOP operative trying to smear CBS and Dan Rather. The goons on the Right in this country are playing a very deep game. Their sophisticated enough to data mine, and they're morally deformed enough to try to smear the patriotism of a triple amputee war hero. It's just fascinating that the paste-eaters at LGF are always the ones who find these doctored photos, but never say a word about the ones on GOP web sites that show too much smoke on the destroyed World Trade Center. With a news media that's run by press agents, and a government run by lobbyists, you should just be prepared to only believe your own experience, and the media that you absolutely trust. Other than that, expect it to be lies. Then, get ready for the struggle to save our freedom that is inevitable.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'll assume that you were trying to be sarcastic at several points in your first paragraph, if only because your post makes slightly more sense under that assumption. However, that means that you completely misunderstood my point, so I will spell it out.
Thirty years ago, the Democrats controlled congress, held the presidency, and (if memory serves) had appointed the majority of sitting federal judges. This was what I referred to as the Republicans "being on the mat".
Thirty years is three decades.
Rather than laying down and dying, the Republicans decided to fight back, and today the situation is completely reversed.
They did not do it by accident, nor by luck. It was intentional, and a great deal of time, money and effort was invested in the process.
As for your final paragraph, in the first place I'm not sure what bald-faced lies you are referring to, and in the second your conspiracy of divisiveness is easily explained as a natural consequence of the two party system. In such a system, both parties will look for ways to build a coalition of roughly 51% -- the minimum needed to win, yet leave the fewest number of supporters to be rewarded. You can get the same result in a classroom setting by handing out red and blue jackets. For that matter, the math behind it is rough;y the same as that for the evolutionary forces behind the nearly equal split between the sexes.
--MarkusQ