Octavia Nasr, an editor with CNN, was fired yesterday for a tweet praising now dead Hezbollah spiritual leader Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah.  New York Daily News:

Less than 140 characters cost CNN‘s Octavia Nasr her job after she tweeted her “respect” for a terror-loving Hezbollah sheikh who died over the weekend.

Nasr, CNN’s Senior Editor of Mideast Affairs, ran into hot water after she posted on Twitter that she was “sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah… One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.”

Facing an immediate and harsh backlash, she backpedaled Tuesday in a blog post, saying she didn’t endorse the life work of Fadlallah – who was labeled a terrorist by US officials.

“Not the kind of life to be commenting about in a brief tweet. It’s something I deeply regret,” she wrote.  Still, she praised Fadlallah for being a pioneer on “woman’s rights,” and warning Muslim men against abusing their wives.

It was not enough. On Wednesday, CNN fired her.

Parisa Khosravi, senior vice president of CNN International Newsgathering, told the staff that Nasr accepts she shouldn’t have made such a “simplistic” comment without context.

“However,” Khorsravi wrote in a memo, “at this point, we believe that her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward.”

Other commentary. . .

Glenn Greenwald sees it as a move to placate the neocon right.

Inside Cable News writes:

But was Nasr truly compromised by making such an intellectual distinction about a terrorist? Having clarified what she meant, was it impossible to remain with CNN going forward? Or was CNN worried solely about blowback and bad PR, in which case the decision to sever ties with Nasr looks more like some sort of PC response? That’s the $64,000 question. I don’t have an answer. When you become radioactive as Nasr had sane reaction and analysis don’t apply anymore and it’s tough to second guess a decision.

And Paul Wachter of AOL News asks if CNN should also fire anyone who praises the pope.

More important, however, John Noonan over at The Weekly Standard asks why it’s not a bigger deal that the British ambassador to Lebanon is praising Fadlallah:

While CNN was busy firing senior editor for Middle East affairs Octavia Nasr for tweeting niceties about Hezbollah’s recently deceased spiritual leader, another effusive tribute to terrorist Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah seeped out into cyberspace — this one coming from, shockingly enough, the British Ambassador to Lebanon.  Said Ambassador Frances Guy of Fadlallah: 

One of the privileges of being a diplomat is the people you meet; great and small, passionate and furious.  People in Lebanon like to ask me which politician I admire most.  It is an unfair question, obviously, and many are seeking to make a political response of their own.  I usually avoid answering by referring to those I enjoy meeting the most and those that impress me the most.  Until yesterday my preferred answer was to refer to Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, head of the Shia clergy in Lebanon and much admired leader of many Shia muslims throughout the world.  When you visited him you could be sure of a real debate, a respectful argument and you knew you would leave his presence feeling a better person.  That for me is the real effect of a true man of religion; leaving an impact on everyone he meets, no matter what their faith….

The world needs more men like him willing to reach out across faiths, acknowledging the reality of the modern world and daring to confront old constraints.

The rest of John’s piece here.

The latest Field Poll from California holds good news for Republicans: Carly Fiorina trails the incumbent Democrat, Sen. Barbara Boxer, by just 47 to 44 percent. Our Jim Geraghty calls this “one of the least reassuring three-point leads ever.” But at least he admits what the results plainly show — that Boxer is leading, however tenuously. Other writers, including some of our astutest allies, have gone a step too far by calling the results a “statistical tie” or a “dead heat.”

For the record, there is no such thing as a “statistical tie,” unless the results show an actual tie. The kernel of truth in that phrase is that surveys like this have a margin of error — in this case, plus or minus 3.2 points. Roughly speaking, this means that if an actual election had been held at the time the poll was taken, and people had voted the way they told the pollsters, there’s a 95 percent probability that the election’s margin would have been within 3.2 points of the poll’s margin.

So far, so good. But some writers take this to mean that any result within that plus-or-minus-3.2-point range is just as likely as any other. That’s not true. In fact, the probability distribution is clustered around the middle, and it’s more than 50 percent likely that the actual result would be within 1 point of the reported figure. More important, perhaps, if being within the margin of error creates a “statistical tie” for Fiorina, it would be just as correct to call the results a “statistical 6-point lead” for Boxer.

It’s time to retire the phrase “statistical tie” and give readers credit for a little intelligence. A three-point lead four months before the election is like a three-point lead at halftime of a basketball game: It’s better than being behind, but it can be overcome fairly quickly. The message of the Field Poll results is that it’s a close race in California, and Boxer probably has a small lead. Calling this a tie, however well-intentioned one may be, is closer to spinning than reporting.

An exchange on yesterday’s Morning Joe has garnered national attention due to the panel’s collective calumny hurled at a major U.S. Senate candidate:

In case you don’t want to slog through it, noted plagiarist Mike Barnicle kicks things off by referring to Harry Reid’s Republican opponent, Sharron Angle, as “embarrassing” and a “mental patient.”  Chris “McTingles” Matthews joins the chorus by misquoting and mischaracterizing a(n admittedly sloppy and ill-conceived) comment from Angle in which she speculated about “Second Amendment remedies” to dealing with unpopular government policies and politicians.  Joe Scarborough, appearing suspicious of Matthews’s account, asks if and how Angle had “walked back” her quote.  Matthews proceeds to incorrectly assert that Angle hadn’t even made an attempt to do so. In fact, to her credit, she did.  Armed with false information, Scarborough promptly declares the race over and pronounces Angle a “jackass.”  

I suppose the MSNBC crew’s denunciations may have been warranted.  After all, Angle famously declared an ongoing American war “lost” in 2007:

She called the president of the United States a “loser.”

She imperiously complained about tourists’ body odor:

She mistakenly voted the wrong way – twice — on crucial legislation:

She marveled at the president’s light skin and lack of “Negro dialect.”

She claimed paying taxes is “voluntary.”

She celebrated the loss of “only” 36,000 American jobs as “really good.”

She told a constituent that she hoped his business would fail.

She demonized her opponents as “evil mongers” and compared them to supporters of slavery:

And she spearheaded an enormous new entitlement program against the will of the voters she was elected to represent.

Given all that embarrassing, borderline-insane jackassery, Scarborough is surely correct. This race must be over.

Byron York:

From a Nexis search a few moments ago:

Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program in the New York Times: 0.

Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program in the Washington Post: 0.

Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program on NBC Nightly News: 0.

Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program on ABC World News: 0.

Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program on CBS Evening News: 0.

If you were to receive your news from any one of these outlets, or even all of them together, and you heard about some sort of controversy involving the Obama administration redefining the space agency’s mission to feature outreach to Muslim countries, your response would be, “Huh?”  Among all the news these distinguished outlets have seen fit to cover in recent days, the NASA story has not made the cut.

Michael Ramirez on NASA’s new Muslim-outreach mission:

The Independent:

A broadcaster has been criticised for allowing a talent contest to go to air in which an entertainer cut off a chicken’s head and drank its blood.

The horrific scene, featuring a number of close-ups, was broadcast during the school holidays on a week day early evening.

It was repeated that night and at 11am the following day leading to worries that children would have seen it.

The programme Dum Hai Tou – “Entertain, If You Dare” – showed the performer struggle to cut the animal’s neck before eventually holding the flapping creature aloft and guzzling its blood.

The broadcaster, ARY Digital which serves a UK Pakistani audience, was blasted today by regulator Ofcom for transmitting “gratuitous”, “offensive” material before the watershed without a warning.

Paging Mark Steyn . . .

From a JohnKerry.com email I just received:

Hello Greg,

Hope you had a terrific Fourth of July — and I hope you’ll afford me what the Senate calls a “point of personal privilege.” All 3 million of you in the johnkerry.com community have done incredible work these last seven years on some of the biggest fights of our lives. This isn’t one of them. But it’s not small potatoes either if you’re a Red Sox fan. (If you’re a Yankees fan, read no further.)

Kevin Youkilis of the Red Sox is an All Star in anyone’s book. He plays the game the way it’s supposed to be played, he hustles, he has a great bat and a glove to match, and he brings with it the kind of intensity we respected for years in guys like Trot Nixon. Youk deserves to be in the All-Star game — while the team has grinded it out in spite of injury after injury, he’s been a rock. But now he needs to win a fan vote to make it to Anaheimn next week.

You can vote for him by clicking here.

The stakes are also just a little personal: in the fan voting, currently Nick Swisher of the Yankees is in first place. Swisher’s having a fine year, but Youk is better in just about every category, batting average, slugging, homeruns, everything and he plays Gold Glove defense to boot. Please don’t let anyone say that Swisher beat Youkilis because Sox fans have gone a little soft after ‘04 and ‘07. Let’s show we’re still the most ravenous fans in baseball.

Please vote Youkilis in.

Thanks,
JK

Especially when PolitiFact finds she was only half-true while debating Liz Cheny on ABC’s This Week. She writes today:

Whenever I speak about the future of media, I get the most positive reaction when I talk about the urgent need to create an online tool that makes it possible to instantly fact-check politicians and commentators as they speak (a bubble pops up, containing the actual facts supporting or contradicting what’s been said). Truth 2.0.

That’s why I had such high hopes when it was announced that PolitiFact.com, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking project of the St. Petersburg Times, was going to evaluate the truthfulness of statements made each Sunday an ABC’s This Week. It wasn’t going to be instant, but it was a step in the right direction.

Then my dust-up with Liz Cheney on the show last month was given the PolitiFact treatment — and I saw firsthand why the pursuit of Truth 2.0 is going to be harder than we think.

PolitiFact’s finding that my statement that Halliburton had defrauded American taxpayers of “hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraq” was “Half True” — after first documenting example after example of why it was completely true — was an object lesson in equivocation, and a prime exhibit of the kind of muddled thinking that dominates Washington and allows the powerful to escape accountability.

The rest here.

And since Arianna mentioned the “future of media,” one quick to her “future,” via the HuffPo: PHOTOS: Smokin’ Hot Eco Swimsuits For Summer. Ah, to dream of the “future” when all political websites have a NSFW section.

“The internet is completely over.“

Big Peace, covering National Security matters.