Blogged to Death

Here's a list of items that others have blogged about already, leaving me late to the party, but I will offer my shortened remarks thereupon:

• Greg Sargent notes that in his presser yesterday, the President made fun of a reporter for wearing sunglasses, it turned out the guy was legally blind, bloggers figured it out fairly quickly, and yet the venerable New York Times reported it as Bush "commenting about one man's sunglasses" without mentioning the blindness. A fact they later scrubbed from the story.

• Steve Benen sees Bush arguing straw men, again, in his press conference, with lines like these:

* "…I fully understand how people might have made the decision that America is no longer under threat, or the lessons of September the 11th were just momentary lessons."

Who thinks the threat is over? Who believes the lessons of 9/11 were "momentary"? Bush didn't say, probably because no one actually thinks that.

* "I said that if people say, well, there's got to be no violence in order for this to be a successful experience, then it's not going to happen."

And who created this "no violence = victory" standard? Apparently, Bush did — in order for him to shoot it down.

I like the part where he said "Some people out there say puppies are here to kill us and take our babies. I don't agree." A longer piece by the traditional media on that phenomenon here.

•Glenn Greenwald catches Instapundit being either ignorant or willfully stupid, or both, claiming that Jim Webb's primary victory in Virginia is "bad for the Howard Dean-Kos fringe" when in fact Kos endorsed Webb.

•emptywheel catches Byron York misleading about the YearlyKos CIA Leak Investigation panel. It was clear to me, being in the room, that the panel was really about what it meant for the media to be complicit in a major case like this, and how they've fallen down in their coverage of it. Plus, as emptywheel said, most of the panel believed Rove was cooperating with Fitzgerald anyway, and Murray Waas explicitly stated that "this whole thing may fizzle."

•Echidne of the Snakes looks at women in Iran getting beaten for protesting sexist discrimation.

•This poster at My Left Wing explains how Bush set aside a large marine protection area, mainly because he heard about it in a movie.

A turning point came in April, when Bush sat through a 65-minute private White House screening of a PBS documentary that unveiled the beauty of — and perils facing — the archipelago's aquamarine waters and its nesting seabirds, sea turtles and sleepy-eyed monk seals, all threatened by extinction.

The film seemed to catch Bush's imagination, according to senior officials and others in attendance. The president popped up from his front-row seat after the screening; congratulated filmmaker Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of the late underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau; and urged the White House staff to get moving on protecting these waters.

"He was enthusiastic," Cousteau said. "The show had a major impact on him, the way my father's shows had on so many people. I think he really made a discovery — a connection between the quality of our lives and the oceans."

I think the "human-animal hybrid" thing came from watching "X-Men United."