Schiavo Memo Update

A couple of important updates on the Schiavo memo at powerline here and here.

San Francisco East?

Maryland lawmakers just passed a bill requiring Wal-Mart to spend 8 percent of its payroll on health benefits for its workers. The bill technically applies to any company with more than 10,000 employees in the state, but since Wal-Mart, which employs 15,000 workers in Maryland, is the only company that meets the criteria it's clear they were specifically targeted. Now might be a good time to invest in manufacturers of self-checkout machines. As this article points out:

[They] can save money for the retailer. Each unit costs about $24,000 to buy and install, plus another $4,000 or so per year for maintenance, according to IHL Consulting. The firm estimates that the devices pay for themselves in fewer than 15 months through labor savings, increased customer use and because they take up less floor space than typical checkouts, opening up more room for promotions or products. IHL President Greg Buzek said the systems have also cut down significantly on theft, or, in industry parlance, "shrinkage." "The single biggest factor in shrinkage is employee theft, and at the front end, this is the cashier giving their friends big discounts by scanning a pack of gum but putting a higher priced item in the bag," Buzek said.

According to IT Facts the number of self-checkout machines is already predicted to grow from 34,000 in 2003 to 244,000 in 2007. Maryland's Gosplanites will certainly accelerate the process.

Post Bias

William Booth of The Washington Post takes labeling bias to a new low in a feature story today on Andrew Mickel, an anti-corporate leftist who gunned down police officer David Mobilio of Red Bluff, California in 2002:

The coming revolution against the United States government was announced on the Internet via a manifesto by a self-described "proud and insolent youth," a college sophomore who sought to be our leader. This was to be the spark: At 1:27 a.m. on Nov. 19, 2002, Officer David Mobilio of the Red Bluff Police Department was working the graveyard shift when he pulled his cruiser into a gas station in his quiet little farm town. As he stood beside the car, the 31-year-old husband and father of a toddler was shot three times, twice in the back and once in the head, at very close range. Beside Mobilio's dead body, someone left a handmade flag with a picture of a snake's head and the words "Don't Tread on Us." ... Mickel explained that "prior to my action in Red Bluff, I formed a corporation under the name 'Proud and Insolent Youth Incorporated,' so that I could use the destructive immunity of corporations and turn it on something that actually should be destroyed." The name is a reference to the novel "Peter Pan." "Just before their final duel and Capt. Hook's demise, Hook said to Peter, 'Proud and Insolent Youth, prepare to meet thy doom,' " Mickel wrote.

So what does all this bring to Booth's mind? Why right-wingers of course:

But seen another way, as the prosecutors do, Mickel -- with his stubborn stoicism, his cold calculation, his military training, his anti-government diatribes -- seems a cousin to McVeigh. Mickel sees himself as the vanguard of revolution. McVeigh thought the same thing. It is as if Mickel, in his thinking, had gone so far to the fringe left that he started to look a lot like the fringe right.

Never mind that the story spends several paragraphs discussing Mickel's similarities to Ted Kaczynski, the left-wing Unabomber--though he is not labeled as such. Or that there are plenty of other plain-old, left-wing, terrorist extremists out there who blow things up and kill people. Unfair labeling is perhaps the most quantifiable type of anti-conservative media bias, and groups such as the Media Research Center have assembled quite a catalog of examples. But the Post takes this to a new low. In the Post's world even leftists can be accredited to the political right when they become inconvenient. The Post wants to draw parallels with McVeigh, so I have a question: When does the blame for Mickel's crime get apportioned to Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, and other leaders of the angry left for their inflammatory rhetoric, as conservatives were so quickly tagged with guilt for McVeigh's?

Fake GOP Memo

Powerline sums up the evidence against the so-called GOP talking points memo on Terry Schiavo:

So it seems clear what happened. The Post originally wrote a story that explicitly claimed that the "talking points memo" was drafted and distributed by the Republican leadership. That version of the story went out over the Post's wire service and was picked up by dozens of news outlets. Before the paper went to press, however, someone at the Post apparently realized that the paper had no basis for attributing the memo to the Republicans, and the key language was deleted from the story that actually appeared in print. That story said: "An unsigned one-page memo, distributed to Republican senators, said the debate over Schiavo would appeal to the party's base, or core, supporters." And ever since, reporter Mike Allen and others at the Post have said that they never meant to imply that the memo was created or distributed by Republicans. This position seems disingenuous. The Post apparently did distribute a version of the story that explicitly attributed the memo to the GOP's leadership. And even in the revised version that appeared in print, the implication that the "talking points memo" was a Republican strategy document is clear. That is how everyone understood it. And, as we have pointed out in our prior posts, the Republican party has taken a giant PR hit as a result of the popular belief, fueled by news reports on the fake memo, that the party pursued the Schiavo case out of political calculation rather than principle. Both the Post and ABC now claim that they never meant to accuse the Republicans of authoring or distributing the notorious memo. But neither has printed a retraction, clarification or correction. The Post has done nothing to correct or retract the version of its story that apparently went out on the evening of March 19. And to our knowledge, not a single one of the dozens of newspapers and other news outlets that printed the false claim that the memo was circulated by the Republican leadership has retracted or corrected that defamatory claim.

UPDATE: A couple of important updates on the Schiavo memo at powerline here and here.