How many of you have ever had some pictures developed, only to find a picture of yourself with your eyes closed and laughed "it looks like I was sleeping", when in fact the picture just happened to capture you in a blink? I think we've all done this at least once or twice, but apparently it's unacceptable for Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Checking out the Drudge Report (part of a daily routine), I see a headline that reads: DID CHENEY FALL ASLEEP DURING HU VISIT?. Following the link takes you to a short slideshow from ABC News. But Drudge is using a different photo, this AP photo from Yahoo! News (I've also included their caption):

Vice President Dick Cheney and various members of the Bush administration, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, right, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, center, listen as President Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao hold a press availability in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Thursday, April 20, 2006. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

No mention there of a "sleeping Cheney" (that comes in on the ABC slideshow, as we'll discuss shortly). But look at Cheney here... It's tough to tell if his eyes are closed, or if he's looking down at his notes. Also, would he be stupid enough to not know there were cameras there, and that no one would have nudged him to stand up with the rest of the crowd? I think we can assume that because of his known health issues, he might be advised to stay seated when possible. Of course he could also be in the process of slowly standing up, who knows? These are just guesses, but to assume he's sleeping is to assume that he and everyone else in the room is unaware of cameras.

Yahoo provides a second photo. This one he really seems to be looking over some papers, but it's so far away and taken at an angle that it's a total guess by anyone. Again, no mention of "sleeping" here.

Vice President Dick Cheney reads documents while President Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao, unseen, hold a press availability in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington Thursday, April 20, 2006. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Now, back to the ABC News link from Drudge... The first image and caption follow:

Vice President Dick Cheney says he was looking at his notes, not sleeping, during a briefing by President Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao in Hu's first Oval Office visit.
(Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images)

Of course at first glance, he would appear to be catching some zs. But gain, first you have to wonder if he would be that stupid, knowing that there were cameras there, particularly knowing that the media is even interested in things like Presidential potty breaks. I think Cheney's a little smarter than that. In fact, I'm not so sure this is even during the briefing. Notice in the first picture (from Yahoo!) that administration folks are standing and listening attentively, but in this photo, someone (Rumsfeld?) is leaning back against a table with his head down. Not sure what is going on, but the next photo shows Condi sitting so one can only guess that these two photos were taken a few minutes before or after the AP photos (via Yahoo!) I think the one thing we can be certain of is that due to the caption and headline on the page, this is an example of the media trying to create news rather than report it.

On to the final photo, as I mentioned it's Condoleezza Rice, in her own "is she sleeping?" shot.

Either Hu was a less-than-charismatic speaker or he was speaking to a very drowsy crowd. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice looks a little sleepy here.
(Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images)

This picture sort of mixes everything up because Cheney was seated by himself in the others, but he's clearly looking at his notes with Condi seated right next to him, supposedly looking sleepy herself. This photo of a clearly awake Cheney, looks to me like a cleverly snapped shot of Condi briefly looking down. But like I said, either way, this all seems to be another case of the media trying to make rather than report the news.

Who knows though, maybe the briefing was just that boring and they were both taking a snooze? I think they're smart enough to know better, but you can make up your own minds.

 

A couple weeks ago the big news story was "Bush Authorized Leak". At least in most of these cases, if you could get past the headlines (something the media knew most wouldn't, which is why they they wrote them in such a way, you'd actually realize that the President didn't authorize any leak. He declassified information, under an act that's been around since the Clinton days. It was completely legal and not even shady, despite what the media would have you believe. But it ABSOLUTELY had NOTHING to do with Valerie Plame. NOTHING!

Now, again, the headlines and even much of the meat of the articles lead you to believe that the President had authorized the "leak" of Plames name, but there was usually one or two solid sentences (if you looked for them) that made it clear, that declassifying NIE information was unrelated to Plame. Even everyone's favorite site for court paperse and the like, The Smoking Gun, got it wrong with their headline:

I was a little surprised to run across that today, because they don't usually walk in lockstep with the rest of the liberal MSM, but that was pretty bad.

Anyway, that was old news by now. The liberal media, as always with their "scandal of the day/week", got their hit and run Bush bash out there and did the damage, hoping to chip away at the President. We all saw what they tried to pull right away, though the lefty blogs went nuts. You could just feel the "today is finally the day!", "we're going to take down Bush!" emotion pouring out of them. Sadly, like with all of the left and the media's trumped up smear campaigns, it fell flat in a few days.

Now if I recall, that "Bush authorized leak.." (or some variation of that) headline sat on the Yahoo! home page for at least a day or two. Why am I not surprised that this headline isn't on there right now:

Read the Bloomberg story here. Libby is obviously wanting to make it very clear that no one authorized him to leak Plame's name. Something that again, doesn't seem to be a crime (according to experts, including one of the authors of the law who says she wasn't covered, which is probably why Libby isn't charged with the "leak").

Libby's lawyers underscored that point in their response last night. ``Consistent with his grand jury testimony, Mr. Libby does not contend that he was instructed to make any disclosures concerning Ms. Wilson by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, or anyone else,'' they said.

In other Plamegate and anti-Bush media news... A big embarrassment for the prosecuter, Patrick Fitzgerald, when he had to go in and change a inaccurate sentence in a court filing. This wouldn't be the biggest deal if the original inaccurate version hadn't been one of the latest "bush lied" "scandals" that the media blew up to attack the President. I would probably make it more confusing if I were to try to explain it, so I'll let The New York Sun do it for me with this opening excerpt:

In a startling move, a special prosecutor investigating the leak of a CIA operative's identity retreated yesterday from an assertion that news outlets and critics of the administration seized on as evidence that President Bush and Vice President Cheney deliberately distorted a crucial intelligence summary on Iraq.

The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, claimed in a court filing last week that a former White House aide facing criminal charges for obstructing the probe, I. Lewis Libby, said he was told by Mr. Cheney to inform a New York Times reporter that one of the key judgments of a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq was that the country was "vigorously trying to procure" uranium.

While the intelligence report indeed alleged that Iraq was aggressively seeking nuclear materials, that finding was not among the key judgments contained in the document's early pages. The allegation that Mr. Cheney told Mr. Libby to misstate that fact to the Times journalist, Judith Miller, was noted prominently in some news accounts and contributed to an uproar that threw the White House into a tailspin last week.

However, in a letter yesterday, Mr. Fitzgerald advised the judge overseeing the case, Reggie Walton, that the government's April 5 filing was inaccurate. "We are writing to correct a sentence," Mr. Fitzgerald's letter begins. He told the judge an error occurred in the following statement: "Defendant understood that he was to tell Miller, among other things, that a key judgment of the NIE held that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium."

The prosecutor said the government brief should have said, "Defendant understood that he was to tell Miller, among other things, some of the key judgments of the NIE, and that the NIE stated that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium."

Read more here...

Why is this a big deal? Oh maybe because the paper (chuckle) of... record (chuckle, chuckle) the New York Times ran a front page story on the FALSE sentence in the original court filing, claiming that Libby had been ordered to lie and tell Times reporter Judith Miller that the non-key judgement about uranium was a key judgement. So basically the implication was that Bush/Cheney ordered Libby to lie and make a bigger deal out of the uranium claims by calling them a "key judgement".

The now-withdrawn assertion that Mr. Libby was ordered to tell a reporter that a secondary and disputed finding in the report was, in fact, a "key judgment" was featured in the second paragraph of a front-page New York Times story on Sunday arguing that the leak to Ms. Miller was skewed.

And of course it wasn't just the NY Times, but we always like to pick on them because they are all about pushing anti-Bush pieces on the front page, even after being discredited time and time again, and burying stories that might reflect positively on the President or negatively on Democrats, way in the back. Anyway, as I was saying, it wasn't just the Times, but they are such a huge paper they're practically a wire service because much of the rest of the establishment media gets their news from them, and pretty much regurgitates it.

As always, despite the correct, the media won't be racing to be the first to report that. If any readers actually get the NY Times, and they did run this correction on the front page please let me know. They do have the story on their web site, but not prominently featured and you have to scroll and find it in a small section under "Washington". They are also linking to this editor's note. I guess that's something (although it should be expected), but again, I would be shocked to find this making the front page in the actual paper.

Alright, time for Randy to sleep. I'll be counting media manufactured Bush scandals to help me drift off (although I'll admit, this one wasn't so much media manufactured, as it was an excited hate Bush media running with an incorrect court filing. Kind of reminiscent of Rathergate and Koran/Toiletgate).

***UPDTATE***
Expose the Left shares similar thoughts about this new development, and how the media is treating all of this.

 

Last week TheSmokingGun.com posted scans of Dick Cheney's hotel demands, or "downtime requirements". It was more funny than anything, but many liberal blogs predictably whined about it, as if he were making all sorts of unreasonable demands. I guess they weren't expecting the Smoking Gun to get a hold of 4 pages of Kerry's list of demands (admittedly some information seems to be duplicated or updated within the 4 scanned pages). Kerry's lists are so extensive, I won't be able to cover everything without stealing the entire images from the Smoking Gun, so you can view all for pages here - 1, 2, 3, 4. But for what I will cover, let's start with news intake.

Libs who always accuse Fox News of being a mouthpiece for the administration were giddy to see that Cheney wants his hotel room TV tuned to Fox News.

But we now have the opportunity to shoot back with Kerry's news outlets of choice:

Is anyone shocked that Kerry chooses to read the NY Times and the Washington Post. Perhaps he might rethink that if he's seriously considering an '08 run, and question if this might have had to do with not connecting with voters. I mean we all know that many Democrats didn't want him, but only voted for him as a vote against Bush. Perhaps these papers were giving him a skewed view of America and the people's concerns and opinions. Of course on Cheney's list, we see written in a list of papers, including those papers too, but again it's written in later, and it's part of a larger package.

Now, lets move on to the food portion. Cheney's list doesn't talk about food, it just mentions just water, coffee, and soda, so this will be a stricly Kerry portion. Believe it or not, Kerry even manages to flip-flop in his choices of food!!! His lists of food are so extensive and broken down in to every meal and even what must be carried in the vehicle he's traveling in, I'll just try to stick to the flip-flops and anything else I think might be of interest.

First we have specially filtered water for the Senator, and a preference for organic food "not precut":

Again, I would have to steal everything from The Smoking Gun for you to get an idea of the size of his food lists, but below is just an example of the type of thing we see over and over again:

Now for some flip-flopping:

"I actually did like tomatos, before I decided to hate them. I actually did like milano and chocolate chip cookies, before I voted against chocolate. I actually did eat lemons and oranges, before I opposed citrus. I actually loved grilled tuna and halibut, before I didn't like it. I actually did like celery, before I didn't."

Okay, upon closer inspection, some of those might be a bit of a stretch, but it was a funny extension of the flip-flopping either way. What it looks like is that Kerry might have been having some kind of problem that he needed to stop eatting tomato, citrus, and chocolate and it may be that his wife was the one who won't eat tuna or halibut and will eat celery. As I look at the documents, I see nothing to indicate the third and fourth pages are Teresa's demands, but after reading The Smoking Gun's intro to the documents, I see that is what they are saying so I'll take their word on it.

So again, that may have really been flip flopping if some of it was a change because of heartburn or something, and the rest were actually just his wife's preferences. But you gotta admit, at a glance it looks hilarious. I mean that's quite a coincidence that things he hates, his wife has to keep in the vehicle with her, and things he loves, she says NO to in capital letters. By the way, I'm assuming the "no tomatos" stuff for "JK" was written after this photo

Anyway, a couple other interesting things of note.

Assuming The Smoking Gun is right, the Teresa Heinz Kerry pages have some interesting "comfort" demands too, but these are a couple of Kerry's.

So let me get this straight, Cheney would like the lights on, and his TV set to Fox News (presumably because you never know what channel it is from city to city), but Kerry needs a special exercise bike, and his phone and pay-per-view ready to roll! So maybe it wasn't all the NY Times and WaPo that messed up Kerry's campaign, perhaps it was lounging around ordering movies in his hotel room and gabbing on the phone with the gals about how cut John Edwards is and how they're going steady now, instead of getting out and connecting with the folks.

Again, check this all out at The Smoking Gun.

In the mean time, I've exclusively obtained some lists from some other Washington politicians. I'm not releasing them yet, but here is a bit of a preview:

Ted Kennedy

- Jack Daniels or anything with alcohol that you find laying around.
- One of those amphibious vehicles the military uses (to avoid any more unfortunate accidents)
- Lawyer friends on hand

(a couple for the lefties, kind of in the spirit of Conan O'Brien)
George Bush

Hotel Requirements
- Game Boy Advance
- Nightlight
- The Latest Harry Potter Book

Food Preferences
- Cheetos
- Anything Little Debbie
- Fruit Roll-Ups

Karl Rove

hotel
- Hotel room should have all lights shut off, pentagram drawn in the middle of the room.
- KR would prefer to have skulls and lit candles throughout the room
- Heat should be cranked as high as it can go (so he feels at home)

food
- if available, human hearts and/or your soul

Hillary Clinton

- separate room for Bill
- HC likes hot dogs, chopped up in to tiny pieces
- a prepared list of insane comparisons to choose from for a later speech like "congress = plantation" or "illegal immigrants = Jesus".

Coming soon...

 

h/t Drudge

I don't think this is the same as the annual Press Club dinner (or whatever it's called) where we similar roasting take place, but sounds like it might have been pretty funny either way.

A few excerpts from AP by way of Yahoo! News

Bush pointed out that the vice president's full name is Richard B. Cheney.

"B. stands for bulls eye," Bush said to laughter from the hundreds of reporters and officials from the administration and Congress. The press, Bush joked, blew the matter way out of proportion: "Good Lord, you'd thought he shot somebody or something."

Bush said that while pundits speculate about whether Cheney or White House political adviser Karl Rove run the government, it's another person who actually pulls the strings. Cheney, Bush said, tells him what to do but Cheney's wife, Lynne, tells the vice president what to do.

"Lynne, I think you're doing a heck of a job. Although I have to say you dropped the ball big time on that Dubai deal," he said, in a joke about the controversial ports deal.

"What do we stand for? We don't know. What's our platform? We ain't sure. All we know is Dubya's got it wrong," reporters sang, using a nickname for Bush.

Founded in 1885, the invitation-only Gridiron Club is the oldest organization for Washington journalists. It exists only for the annual dinner.

Now in its 121st year, the Gridiron claims to "singe, but never burn."

 

I don't want to repeat myself, so if you aren't caught up on this, read my previous post. Here's the gist though... We've seen the MSM photoshop and mess with photos of Republicans in the past, and often sneakily take photos with words in the background to send subliminal messages, and this photo of Vice President Dick Cheney appears to be one of those:

Well I just happened upon the site of another blogger by the name of Chris Christner and it seems he may have single handedly blown the lid of something even more disturbing about this photo. It looks like it might have been and outright photoshop job. If this is the case, not only are they trying to send the subliminal message, but they couldn't even get a real photo to do it so they could claim a coincidence!

Chris notes that another photo from the same event doesn't show the word "Retire" behind him at all. I found the link to check out the handful of photos taken at the event, do you see the word "Retire" anywhere besides the photo in question? Incase they decide to pull something and remove them, here they are, linking to their original locations:

Reuters

Reuters

AP

Chris was able to find this State Dept. photo that shows the word "Retire" only appears many feet above Cheney's head:

That had to be one heck of a tricky angle to take the photo in question, no? I won't issue a final judgement here, but this seems really fishy.

MORE:
Now that Michelle Malkin is on this, it will get the wider attention it deserves. Maybe now we'll get some sort of response from Reuters.

Others:
Junkyard Blog, Two or Three, Instapunk, Neal Boortz, Shock and Blog, MacStansbury, Gina Cobb, Ed Driscoll, The World According to Nick, Capital Region People, Sensible Mom, Reverse Vampyr, Wuzzadem, High Desert Wanderer, Expose the Left

And again, there's nothing subliminal about this... though I admit that I photoshopped it. Your turn to come clean Reuters.

UPDATE
Chris seems to believe it was possible to actually take this photo (meaning there may not have been photoshopping)... I'm still not convinced and I think it would be in the interests of everyone for Reuters to issue the originals, etc. It just seems like that would have to be a magic camera no matter what type of lens you had and angle you were at. Again, the photoshopping aspect was only piling on to the more obvious subliminal attack. If one is to believe that this was the actual photo (not photoshopped) then you would certainly have to admit that they deliberately took this picture with the word "Retire" above the VP... Trying so hard that they had to crop out part of his neck just to get the desired photo!

 

Both the right and the left have been accused of running images of their opponents that are taken at the right angle to have certain word from a banner or something in the background, correspond with an emotion or feeling about the particular person. Probably the most known is when Democrats said that the Bush campaign used the word "RATS" (part of "Bureaucrats") in a TV ad, when referring to Gore's prescription plan.

We've seen countless other examples of supposed subliminal message photos, usually cropped photos of politicians at speaking events, where parts of words from a banner/backdrop are cut off to form other words. I remember there being a couple on both sides during during the 2004 campaigns, but a quick search didn't pull them up for me. I suspect this is because it's usually the media doing the dirty work for the Dems, and the (suspect) subliminal photos are disguised as news photos from services like the AP and Reuters.

Even more shameful is the photoshopping of Republicans by the media. Remember what they did to Condi? I suspect that Dan Rather probably supports the AP on their decision to doctor a photo to make Condi look evil, because he probably believes that even though it's a fake photo, that is probably what her eyes really look like.

And who could forget President Potty Break? Not a photoshop, but equally stupid and annoying, and meant to do nothing but mock the President, instead of actually covering real UN news like the Oil For Food Scandal, or the raping of thousands of little girls in Africa by UN workers, etc. etc. etc. Similarly the media loves the photos where they catch Bush in mid sentence, causing him to look like a monkey, or mid-wave to give the impression he's giving a Nazi salute.

Anyway, I generally don't put to much in to the conspiracy theories about the subliminal background words, sort of on the fence, even though I am one of the biggest liberal media haters/basherse you'll find... It just sometimes seems like we're really fishing sometimes when we're looking at background photos. But on the other hand, the anti-Bush/Republican/Conservative media have a hate that has lead them to do some crazy things.

Here's today's example (h/t Drudge). Again, I'm not sure about these... but I personally think this one is a little suspicious:

Hmmm... What do you think?

In somewhat related news, there is nothing subliminal about this...