By Dan Riehl | September 8, 2006 | 1:28 AM EDT
This is getting entirely out of hand. What a crock. This is disgusting.

New York, NY (September 7, 2006) -- Scholastic, the global children’s publishing, education and media company, today announced that it is removing from its website the materials originally created for classroom use in conjunction with the ABC Television Network docudrama, “The Path to 9/ll,” scheduled to air on the ABC Television Network on September 10 and 11, 2006. A new classroom discussion guide for high school students is being created and will focus more specifically on media literacy, critical thinking, and historical background.

“After a thorough review of the original guide that we offered online to about 25,000 high school teachers, we determined that the materials did not meet our high standards for dealing with controversial issues,” said Dick Robinson, Chairman, President and CEO of Scholastic. “At the same time, we believe that developing critical thinking and media literacy skills is crucial for students in today’s society in order to participate fully in our democracy and that a program such as ‘The Path to 9/11’ provides a very ‘teachable moment’ for developing these skills at the high school level. We encourage teachers not to shy away from the controversy surrounding the program, but rather to engage their students in meaningful, in-depth discussion.”

Here's the pdf for section 5 in html below. That'll give you a feel for what they were like in pdf. And here is a file of the original main page of the guide. H/t BizzyBlog. (The guide was attacked by the liberal Media Matters site.)

By Matthew Sheffield | July 11, 2006 | 12:34 AM EDT

Last week, the media reported rather quickly on charges that conservative author and columnist Ann Coulter had plagiarized material in her writings. Will they be as quick to report that both her syndicate and her publisher believe the charges to be illegitimate?

The syndicator of Ann Coulter's newspaper columns rejected allegations that she had lifted material from other sources, saying a review of the work in question turned up nothing that merited concern.

"There are only so many ways you can rewrite a fact and minimal matching text is not plagiarism," Lee Salem, editor and president of Universal Press Syndicate, said Monday in a statement.

"Universal Press Syndicate is confident in the ability of Ms. Coulter, an attorney and frequent media target, to know when to make attribution and when not to."

Of note: while AP reporter Hillel Italie instantly jumped on the plagiarism charges against "the right-wing pundit", mentioning specific liberal web sites by name where readers could go to investigate the charges, they have failed to do so for a litany of charges made by critics against the equally vocal (but liberal) Michael Moore. Not one of the litany of charges made by sites like MooreWatch.com has been covered by the AP according to Nexis.
By Noel Sheppard | July 6, 2006 | 11:00 AM EDT

Brian Maloney (The Radio Equalizer) has identified something interesting at Amazon.com: “Is liberal Air America host Sam Seder's new book inadvertently encouraging readers to join the conservative cause?”

He continued: “In what is either a strange error, an Amazon.com staffer with a real sense of humor, or a bona fide trend, Air America host Sam Seder's new book FUBAR: America's Right-Wing Nightmare seems to be encouraging buyers to purchase Ann Coulter's Godless instead!”

For those not familiar with how Amazon works, when you go to the site and enter a book title, a page comes up that describes the book, gives some reader reviews, offers other books of typically similar content or style that readers might also enjoy, and then documents what people have actually purchased after looking at such titles. In the case of the F.U.B.A.R. page, these numbers are currently (at 10:50 AM ET, July 6):

What do customers ultimately buy after viewing items like this?

90% buy Godless: The Church of Liberalism by Ann Coulter $15.65

8% buy the item featured on this page: F.U.B.A.R. : America's Right-Wing Nightmare by Sam Seder $15.57

Hmmm. So, eleven times as many people “after viewing items like this” opt for Coulter’s “Godless”? Maloney tried to explain this seeming paradox:

By Noel Sheppard | June 15, 2006 | 9:38 AM EDT

Hillary Clinton called her “mean-spirited” and “heartless.” Rahm Emanuel called her a “hatemonger.” Jane Smiley said her parents should be “ashamed” for raising such a person. And, an Ad Age columnist suggested she should kill herself. Yet, despite all these awful reviews, as reported by NewsMax Wednesday, the New York Times is going to call Ann Coulter its number one bestseller of nonfiction “reflecting an extraordinary first week of sales.”

Certainly, Ann should thank all of the free publicity by the drive-by media for assisting her marketing efforts, which, of course represents a delicious irony concerning their disgust that is causing the conservative author to laugh all the way to the bank.

Let's all laugh with her, shall we?

For those interested, the entire story is here.
By Tim Graham | June 8, 2006 | 5:52 AM EDT

As the networks robotically followed the New York Daily News and its "Coulter Was Cruel"  cover -- probably the best TV day for the Daily News since they put Newt Gingrich in diapers in the mid-90s -- they did not consider that some of the 9-11 widows she mocked were also champions of political trash talk.

By Warner Todd Huston | June 5, 2006 | 1:40 AM EDT

Those terrorists are really just misunderstood.

The New York Times recently conducted an interview with author John Updike about his newest novel. This interview was revealing of why liberals will never understand this age in which we live. It is indicative of how they just don’t understand the evil we face in Islamofascism. (See story - Click here)

By Mark Finkelstein | May 24, 2006 | 8:34 AM EDT

Let's imagine that instead of Al Gore, Katie Couric's guest this morning was a Republican presidential hopeful whose message on the environment was that we should not let alarmism push us into measures that would undermine our economy and way of life. Could you ever - ever! - imagine Katie flashing at him the 10,000 megawatt smile she has on display here for Al?