The more I see about the timeline in Qana, the more I doubt the story being told to us by the world's media.

Katherine Shrader and Kathy Gannon of AP make the strike and its effect seem immediate:

A three-story house on the outskirts of Qana was leveled when a missile crashed into it at 1 a.m. Red Cross officials said 56 were killed and police said 34 children and 12 adult women were among the dead. It was worst single strike since Israel's campaign in Lebanon began on July 12 when Hezbollah militants crossed the border into Israel and abducted two soldiers.

But we know that the immediacy of the collapse given in this timeline to be a false construct. Many hours before this AP story was released, the IDF had already reported that the building did not collapse until 8 A.M.

Shrader and Gannon did not question the rather unique makeup of the families hardest hit in the attack (my bold):

Israel suspended air attacks on south Lebanon for 48 hours starting early Monday in the face of widespread outrage over an airstrike on a house that killed 56 Lebanese, almost all of them women and children.

[jump to page 2]

Red Cross officials said 56 were killed and police said 34 children and 12 adult women were among the dead.

[snip]

In Qana, workers pulled dirt-covered bodies of young boys and girls dressed in the shorts and T-shirts they had been sleeping in out of the mangled wreckage of the building. Bodies were carried in blankets.

Two extended families, the Shalhoubs and the Hashems, had gathered in the house for shelter from another night of Israeli bombardment in the border area when the strike brought the building down.

"I was so afraid. There was dirt and rocks and I couldn't see. Everything was black," said 13-year-old Noor Hashem, who survived, although her five siblings did not. She was pulled out of the ruins by her uncle, whose wife and five children also died.

34 children. 12 adult women. Not a single adult male officially listed among them. How strangely asexual these "civilian" families seem to be.

The men were elsewhere as under-reported elsewhere:

In Qana this morning, the Katyusha squads took their rocket launchers and rockets from inside the buildings, fired off the rockets at Israel and then rushed back inside.

It seems increasingly probable that the Shalhoub and Hashem men were likely members of Hezbollah, involved in launching the very rockets at Israel that called in the counter-battery fire that killed their families that were hiding deeper in the building.

It also seems possible that the deaths of the Shalhoub and Hashem women and children came not as a result of the initial Israeli air strike, but because of secondary explosions more than seven hours later, explosions that would seem to be consistent with ammunition and rockets "cooking off."

Based upon the evidence emerging, it seems more plausible than not that Hezbollah men were responsible for the deaths of Hezbollah women and children, and over-exploited that fact for media consumption.

Somehow, this more plausible scenario gets little play from Shrader and Gannon and the rest of the media.

It must be the CNN effect.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 05:56 AM | Comments (51) | Add Comment
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Baghdad Bob works for Al-Reuters... or maybe Yahoo!

"Look at these pictures! These are the pictures you are not supposed to see!"

Nothing like a screaming red border around the frame and PICTURE KILL in all caps to get people to ignore the pictures you don't want them to see. And just in case people aren't sure which pictures, reshow all four, and post them on a major internet news site.

[note: content of all four images were digitally airbrushed out by me -- ed.]

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:27 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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They forgot to call him a "stinky poopyhead."

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 05:13 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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For those of you in the midwest who've liked what you've seen of the Young Americans trailers I've linked to over the past weeks, you can now get a chance to listen to the man himself. Pat Dollard will be on Mancow's morning radio show this Friday, July 14, at 7:10 AM (CST).

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:06 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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"Those that live by the sword, die by the sword," goes the saying. If this Editor & Publisher article is correct, Ann Coulter, master conservative provocateur-wordsmith, has managed to deliver herself a serious wound:

Universal Press Syndicate has requested a copy of a report about Ann Coulter's alleged plagiarism, according to a post on the TPMmuckraker.com blog. Meanwhile, in her latest column, Coulter has hit back at the newspaper that aired the latest plagiarism charges -- but did not refute them.

The report was conducted by John Barrie, creator of the iThenticate plagiarism-probing system. A New York Post story this Sunday said Barrie found several examples of alleged plagiarism in Coulter's new "Godless" book as well as in her Universal column.

Universal Director of Communications Kathie Kerr, when contacted by E&P, said she called Barrie on Wednesday morning and left him a message asking him for a copy of his report. "Once we see a copy of the report, we'll be happy to comment on the findings," she added. "We take allegations of plagiarism very seriously." E&P has also left a message for Barrie, who appeared on MSNBC late Wesnesday.

There he explained that the Post had asked his company to put Coulter's book and the past 12 months of columns through his program. But his staffers stopped before completing the task--"we gave up after awhile, we'd seen enough," he explained. The many examples added up to "advanced plagiarism," he said, the kind of stuff that would "flunk any English student."

I firmly believe that all of us who read and write a great deal plagiarize at least some material from time-to–time, simply because we are information sponges. Right, left, or apolitical, we read constantly, absorbing data and delicately-turned phrases, and occasionally, despite our best intentions, we end up writing something suspiciously similar to someone else, presenting echoes of thoughts that stuck with us sometimes days, months, or even years later.

I'd like to see the examples that Barrie—a UC-Berkley graduate—claims his team has produced. Just because he was more than likely delighted to target Coulter does not mean he was incorrect.

If Barrie is right, Coulter has done far more than accidentally internalize and regurgitate the work of others. She has apparently engaged in willful, serial—here they call it "advanced"—plagiarism, and she owes all of her readers an explanation.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:22 AM | Comments (27) | Add Comment
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...the more they stay the same.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:05 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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