I was reading the paper's wire service report on Tommy Thompson dropping out of the presidential race when I noticed the "Related Searches" sidebar:

Note item #4. That's wingnut welfare propaganda from "Newsbusters," the "all media that doesn't bow to conservative causes is liberal and biased" spew run by Brent Bozell and founded by the Bradley, Scaife, Olin, Castle Rock, Carthage, and JM foundations, etc. It's trying to pretend that it's "news" somehow that Markos is a Democrat, even when Kos has made clear since about, oh, day one that his major objective is to elect Democrats. The piece comes ready-made from the wingnut version of "current events Eliza," complete with references to the "Democrat Party," dishonesty about the effects of tax cuts, and flat-out lies that there "must" be money available for infrastructure because "Congress will spend almost $1 trillion more this year than in fiscal 2000," an observation more commonly and briefly spelled I-R-A-Q.

Why did this come up? Probably because the articles, collected by Inform.com, are selected using "relationship algorithsm and natural language processing" to find "relevant, interrelated content from the publisher's data repositories and other sources." In other words, the Oklahoman is full of dishonest conservative spin, so Inform.com selects the same thing for its pages. Item #3 is also a right-wing blogger.

(And in case your conservative friends go apopletic and point to "NPR! NPR! Sputter! Rage!" in the list, the two NPR links are either to straight news stories or to a five-minute, 27-second piece in which New Hampshire Public Radio interviews New Hampshire Republicans on George W. Bush and the GOP presidential candidates. I shouldn't even have to point this out, since it's such a straw argument, but I don't want to have to do it later just in case someone sputters that the presence of NPR as straight news mixed with two right-wing blogs and zero progressive sources somehow means "fair and balanced.")

If you'd like to read what really happened on Meet the Press, try here, complete with video links so you can watch it if you like. As long as you're there, don't miss this article about how Rudy Guliani closed a state-run psychiatric clinic and evicted all the patients, along with a senior citizens center and non-profit children's center, so he could repossess the building and put a homeless shelter in it as political payback to one of his opponents. You probably won't be reading that in the Oklahoman either.

"Here’s a guy who would go to that length, because I beat him on passing a law that requires smaller-bed shelters. Because we would not blink, he would throw kids, seniors, and the mentally ill out into the street. I mean, could I have written a better script to expose the fact of what he was?"

Last week, I mentioned that since Jim Inhofe is an incredibly unpopular moron, it was no surprise that the Oklahoman newspaper would focus its stories on decaying infrastructure on the unlikely topic of praising Inhofe instead of how the state GOP's candidates went way above and beyond to avoid fixing Oklahoma's bridges in 2005:

Yet it's also entirely unsurprising to see the Oklahoman's talk about remedies focused on praise for the state's senior senator, the dangerous moron idiot Jim Inhofe, who has not crossed 50% popularity in two years, is a national joke, has zero credibility on any of his pet issues, and will now face a popular Democratic state legislator in the race for his seat next year.

When Kos wrote about the possibility of a real Senate race in OK in 2008, I commented about Kos's blind spot for Brad Carson, but also mentioned how the Oklahoman was starting to fluff Inhofe:

It's not just poking fun at Andrew Rice - it's going to be subtly working into every other story how wonderful Inhofe is without mentioning anything else. Inhofe's quackery on science and war will never make it into the pages of the paper, and anything he does that might be considered "competent" will, without any dissenting facts. It's already started and no one should count on it ending. The Oklahoman has invested a lot of money in Jim Inhofe, and they're not abandoning that investment.

Exhibit #2: Today's article in the Sunday paper devoted entirely to pointing out how good Inhofe is on infrastructure, even to the point that Inhofe vows to override a threatened Bush veto of a public works bill and calls the president "dishonest:"

Inhofe contends the White House's opposition to the water resources bill is political, while critics of the bill contend the projects in the bill were chosen by lawmakers looking for political gains back home.

In an interview, Inhofe said the White House should wait to voice objections to projects that actually make it into spending bills.

The bill, he said, includes many projects that met certain criteria, but not all of them should ultimately be funded. What the bill does, though, he said, is establish the authority of the congressional committees with expertise — rather than the appropriators, those who allocate the money — to determine which water and sewer projects make the grade.

That, Inhofe said, is the conservative approach.

He told the Senate, "During the August recess, you are going to hear this person, who is rated the most conservative member of this body, out talking all over the nation why this is the conservative approach to logically authorize these projects and then determine which ones are worthwhile."

So as Bush descends into historic unpopularity and Inhofe faces re-election, the Oklahoman goes out of its way to find the "1%" area, the one position where Inhofe is willing to disagree with Bush and makes it into a feature article, boasting of technicalities like how "authorizing spending" is not the same as "spending."

It also hammers home Inhofe's spin that his position is "the true conservative position" because he's the most conservative Senator in America—more of the "stabbed in the back" narrative that conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed by people like George W. Bush who somehow stop being "conservative" when their conservative borrow-and-spend policies turn into fatal disasters.

Of course, Inhofe's commitment to infrastructure is no surprise. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Inhofe received $2.9 million in contributions between 2001 and 2006, even though his last election was in 2002. Of that, 21% comes from the energy (read "oil") industry, which doesn't have many customers without roads, bridges, and airports. Another 9% came from construction, and 8% more from the transportation industries themselves. That's a total of about 38% of all of Inhofe's campaign contributions, over $1 million, from industries that either are infrastructure or that directly profit from enhancing it.

As it turns out, I support enhancing national infrastructure for the same reason I support laying a strong foundation before you try to build a house—it's stupid to do it any other way. But Inhofe stands on infrastructure comes from the same place as his continued fact-free jeremiads against global warming—because that's what his contributors pay him to do. Chris Casteel and the Oklahoman surely know this, but that wouldn't help distance Inhofe from the cancerous Bush or help the miserable idiot's re-election chances, so it doesn't show up in the paper. They save that space for features that emphasize the "1%" of issues on which Inhofe is accidentally competent because it benefits his benefactors.

Get used to this, folks—the Oklahoman again has no intention of accurately reporting political issues that might paint Democrats positively or Republicans negatively. For example, Hillary Clinton has now raised $400,000 in Oklahoma, "at or near the top among money raised in Oklahoma for any of the presidential candidates," as quoted by the OK chairman of her campaign (Mike Turpen). That includes $100,000 raised in Tulsa yesterday.

The Oklahoman reported this, but buried it in the middle of the article. What was the headline, the one sentence that skimmers will take away from the story?

Clinton tries to rally support

For any GOP candidate, those numbers would garner a headline like "Politician tops fund-raising in Tulsa." For a Democrat, top fund raising is "trying" to "rally support," a phrase almost always used for a cause perceived to be failing.

15 more months of this to come, folks.

Cow and Boy, 2007.08.12:

Brevity, 2007.08.12:

And from the same syndicate, too. Though it did take me a couple of glances to realize that in Brevity, that's really a horse, not a cow, unless cows wear saddles.