As Chico Marx said, "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?"

That's easy when it comes to Gaza. The Jewish state's brutal use of white phosphorus — alleged over the weekend by observers on the ground dispatched by NYC-based Human Rights Watch — is lighting up the landscape.

However, most of the U.S. press (a notable recent exception is Newsweek) has its usual blind spot when it comes to Israel's war on Gaza. As the Daily News noted late last week in "'Concentration camp' Gaza stirs fire":

Confirming that is Human Rights Watch, whose observers belie Hikind's claim that the brutality in Gaza is propaganda.

In fact, it's even worse than the cardinal says, according to HRW.

You question the watchdog group's credibility? HRW broke several major stories of U.S. atrocities in Iraq — including the horrific tale of the American soldiers in Fallujah who proudly called themselves the "Murderous Maniacs" and admitted to kicking the shit out of Iraqis just for the fun of it. (See my September 2005 item "U.S. Soldiers Reveal New Torture Tales.")

Now, here's what HRW says about what's going on:

If the Nazis had had white phosphorus — the 21st century version of napalm — they would have used it against the Jews.

Now for less bad news...

NO PARTICULAR ORDER:

N.Y. Times: 'Adding to Recession's Pain, Thousands to Lose Jobless Benefits'

Wall Street Journal: 'Retail Bankruptcy Wave Expected'

N.Y. Times: 'Storm Sinks Indonesian Ferry, 250 Feared Dead'

Bloomberg: 'U.S. Consumers Keep Autos Longer, Shun Showrooms as Cuts in Payrolls Mount'

N.Y. Post: 'INFANT DUMPED IN B'KLYN'

N.Y. Post: 'Sex, Drugs & Death at Luxe Hotel'

Wall Street Journal: 'Obama Plans To Keep Estate Tax'

N.Y. Times: 'Obama Signals His Reluctance to Look Into Bush Policies'

N.Y. Times: 'Democrats Look for Ways to Undo Late Bush Administration Rules'

Harper's: 'The $10 trillion hangover: Paying the price for eight years of Bush' (Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes)

N.Y. Post: 'ISRAEL VS. B'KLYN IN FAKE-AND-BAKE MATZO WAR'

Wall Street Journal: 'New Playing Field In Electric Car Push'

N.Y. Post: 'PLACARD BLITZ NAILS DA COPS: PARKING-PERK ABUSERS'

N.Y. Times: 'In Emphasis on Economy, Obama Looks to History'

Harper's: 'A Farewell to Dick Cheney'

Harper's: 'Harper's Index: A retrospective of the Bush era'

Bloomberg: 'Paulson Bailout Fails to Give Taxpayers Buffett's Terms With Goldman Sachs'

Salon: 'Bill Moyers on Israel/Gaza' (Glenn Greenwald)

N.Y. Times: 'Citi Is Urged to Replace Chairman'

Newsweek: 'If Obama is Serious: He should get tough with Israel' (Aaron David Miller)

N.Y. Post: 'PATERSON JOINS ISRAEL SUPPORTERS IN MIDTOWN'

Jewish Daily Forward: 'Eyeless in Israel'

N.Y. Times: 'Few in U.S. See Jazeera's Coverage of Gaza War'

Jewish Daily Forward: 'Timeline: The Gaza Strip, From Disengagement to Operation Cast Lead'

N.Y. Daily News: 'Israel hints at end of Gaza operations'

N.Y. Daily News: 'Analysis: Ceasefire hinges on Egypt closing smuggling routes'

New Republic: 'Can Labor Revive the American Dream?'

Jewish Daily Forward: 'If at First You Don't Succeed: Hasidic Singer, Subject of Rabbinic Ban, Tries Again'

Jewish Daily Forward: 'What Happens to Gaza When the Fighting Stops?'

Nation: 'Moral Blindness on Gaza' (Robert Scheer)

Jewish Daily Forward: 'Fact or Fiction?: The Story of the Fake Holocaust Memoir'

N.Y. Daily News: 'ABC's hidden cameras unveil anti-immigrant prejudice'

Investment News: 'Morgan Stanley, Citi in retail merger talks'

Nation: 'Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction' (Naomi Klein)

Nation: 'Toward Peace in Gaza'

Investment News: 'Rubin retires from Citi'

Nation: 'Caroline and Me' (Katha Pollitt)

Nation: 'Obama Anoints Kaine, Praises (And Snubs?) Dean'

N.Y. Daily News: 'Big shakeup at fatal psych ward'

'"Victims" of Madoff Scandal Do Math, Realize They Profited'

From Fox News: "Hundreds and maybe thousands of investors in Madoff's funds have been withdrawing money from their accounts for many years. In many cases, those investors have withdrawn far more than their principal investment." And more:

N.Y. Daily News: 'Madoff vics: Let him rot in jail'

N.Y. Times: 'Eight Years of Madoffs' (Frank Rich)

Wall Street Journal: 'Madoff Prosecutors Push Back Deadline'

Jewish Daily Forward: 'AJCongress Crippled by Madoff Scandal'

Newsday: '"Hellishly hot" sauce dedicated to Bernard Madoff'

Wall Street Journal: 'New Ponzi Case Pursued'

Gothamist: 'Bernie's Weekend at Home, Before Judge's Decision'

N.Y. Times: 'GMAC Chairman With Ties to Madoff Steps Down'

Gawker: 'Marc Rich Lost "Insignificant" Millions to Madoff'

N.Y. Times: 'New Description of Timing on Madoff's Confession'

Wall Street Journal: 'Madoff Brother, at Arm's Length?: Peter Was No. 2 and Close to Bernard; Investigators Now Scrutinizing Role'

Crain's New York Business: 'Bernie Madoff's bagman had everything to lose'

Wall Street Journal: 'Funds of Funds & Madoff: "Like Presiding Over the Long-Term Funeral"'

Advanced Trading: 'Fund-of-Hedge Funds Lacked Technology to Avoid Madoff Losses'

Investment News: 'Madoff scam hurts Mackenzie Financial'

HedgeFund.net: 'Activist Gunning For Yeshiva Board'

HedgeFund.net: 'Commentary From Our Publisher: Bernie, We Hardly Knew Ya'

HedgeFund.net: 'Merkin Liquidation Stymied By NYU'

HedgeFund.net: 'Woman Tied to Madoff in Hiding'

Who would have guessed that, with the end of the disastrous Bush regime in sight, we would have been so gloomy on New Year's Eve 2008?

You'd think this would be a time of celebration, or at least some happy whistling to ourselves as we sweep out Dick Cheney's accumulated droppings from the past eight years.

But the dropping's not done, and the deepest suffering is yet to come, as the fallout from Wall Street's wreckage turns from flurries tonight on Times Square into a blizzard next year throughout the country.

It figures that Arctic temps are swooping in to make this an especially cold night in the city.

Global warning: It's hot in the Middle East, where bombs are dropping on Gaza (with Mayor Mike Bloomberg's support). And, to put it mildly, it's intemperate elsewhere: Aside from the numerous places like the auto junkyard in Detroit, builders and contractors will soon be dropping even those skilled workers who never drop tools. At this rate, things will be so bad by next Christmas that even Jesus's dad wouldn't be able to get a carpentry gig.

The shakes aren't typically a warning sign of an onrushing depression, but everybody's got them, especially bosses. The city's dropping Snapple from its vending machines, and one of Mike Bloomberg's aides is dropping his feverish P.R. campaign to give Princess Caroline Kennedy the vacant Senate seat. (See the Post's "MIKE'S AIDE COOLING HIS CAROLINE PUSH."

A whole lotta droppin' goin' on. As usual, few of those who are dropping the ball aren't themselves getting dropped.

And then there are those millions of Americans who wish that Bernie Madoff would simply drop dead. If it does happen, I hope it's on my watch.

Now it turns out, as the Madoff yarn keeps unraveling, that his outrageous behavior is dearly costing a slew of organizations like Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First (see this Bloomberg list), in addition to the big and small charities we already knew about.

So, Happy New Year to civil libertarians everywhere!

Madoff's not the only source of grief. Many journalists are being dropped every day — prompting a jeremiad (in both senses of the word) for Nat Hentoff, a modern-day Jeremiah who I'm pretty sure was a contemporary of the prophet himself. (For Hentoff, I'll drop an IBM Selectric typeball tonight in Times Square; it's the most I can do.)

Whatever you drop, hang onto your laptop. You need it to click on these stories ...

NO PARTICULAR ORDER:

Bloomberg: 'Americans Under 70 May Find 2008 Was Their Least Favorite Year'

N.Y. Times: 'Glamour Still Rules, but With Fewer Debutantes'

N.Y. Post: 'UNREAL ESTATE PLUNGE: FISCAL CRISIS HITS HOME AS LOCAL PRICES FALL 7.5 PERCENT'

Crain's New York Business: 'Foreclosure suit filed against developers'

N.Y. Daily News: 'Gaza Strip invasion is right thing to do, Mike Bloomberg says'

N.Y. Times: 'No Mug? Drug Makers Cut Out Goodies for Doctors'

Jewish Daily Forward: 'Even With Aid, Groups Scramble To Cope With Post-Madoff Mess'

N.Y. Post: '"SOFT" DRINK SALES: CITY YANKING SNAPPLE'

Crain's New York Business: 'Big projects mask declines in construction spending'

N.Y. Times: 'Village Voice Lays Off Nat Hentoff and 2 Others'

N.Y. Post: 'CONEY GRINCH BOOTS BOUTIQUE'

N.Y. Times: 'After Unofficial Tally, Senator Trails Rival in Minnesota Race'

Crain's New York Business: 'Yeshiva revises Madoff losses to just $14.5M'

N.Y. Daily News: 'Bernie Burns Bacon: Actors Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick among Bernie Madoff victims'

N.Y. Times: 'SAT Changes Policy, Opening Rift With Colleges'

Jewish Daily Forward: 'YouTube Yanks Israeli Army Videos'

N.Y. Times: 'Madoff Spotlight Turns to Role of Offshore Funds'

N.Y. Post: 'SPINNING WHEELS OF JUSTICE'

Bloomberg: 'Macy's, New York Times Haunted by Debt Loads From Ill-Timed Stock Buybacks'

N.Y. Post: 'GET SET FOR A COLD LANG SYNE: ARCTIC TEMPS IN TIMES SQUARE FOR NEW YEAR'S BASH'

Bloomberg: 'Texaco Toxic Past Haunts Chevron as Judgment Looms'

N.Y. Times: 'In 2009, Economy Will Depend on Unlocking Credit'

N.Y. Times: 'Ad Agencies Fashion Their Own Horn, and Toot It'

N.Y. Times: 'Still Paging Mr. Salinger'

N.Y. Times: 'As Another Memoir Is Faked, Trust Suffers'

N.Y. Times: 'Films Reach Theaters a Drib Here, Drab There'

Bloomberg: 'Dollar Heads for Biggest Annual Drop Against Yen in Two Decades'

N.Y. Daily News: 'CHURCH-FLEECE PONZI RAP'

Running down the press:

Daily News: 'First look at wife of John Lennon slayer in decades - she says let me be'

Jesus Christ! I'd forgotten that Mark David Chapman was such a sicko/twisted Lennon wannabe that he had also married a woman of Japanese descent.

Post: 'ARK. ASSASSIN GUNS DOWN TOP CLINTON ALLY'

Congratulations to the Post for not only mentioning in the second paragraph that the shooter had just been fired from a Target store but also for showing the maturity not to hammer into readers that grim irony, as I am immaturely doing right now.

Post: 'COLOR BY NUMBERS: MAC GAINS MORE WHITES VS. OBAMA'

Good story, better head. The fourth graf is key:

At least that should make the rest of us whites feel better — that we're not quite as bad at acting on our institutionalized, internalized racist impulses.

Being upfront about race is something that much of the media is not doing. Witness this CNN story:

"Values voters" my shiny metal ass. The rest of us also vote our "values." These are white conservative Christians (99 percent of them), so call them that in the headlines. Christ, there are even political parties in Europe that use "Christian" in their names.

Newsday: 'Revealed: Julia Child was a U.S. spy in World War II'

This AP story is old news, but it does remind us why she seemed to have such mixed feelings about turkey.

Post: 'BRETT FEELIN' UP THE CREAK'

Clever hed on this:

Brett Favre is one pro athlete who talks like a real person, unlike the platitudinous Derek Jeter, for example, or the former Giant blowhard Jeremy Shockey or the guarded-beyond-all-reason, high-paid choker Alex Rodriguez. Favre sez:

In his case, he probably won't. A rare celebrity.

Times: 'In a Generation, Minorities May Be the U.S. Majority'

Warning to whitey: Your reign as The Man will end sooner than predicted. Sam Roberts reports:

The British press doesn't whitewash this news with P.C. tentativeness. The BBC's lede, for example:

The Times more subtly emits a red-alert tone:

Unless you're talking about the Cherokee Nation. In that previous monumental conflict in Georgia (even before Sherman's march), Andrew Jackson ethnically cleansed the Cherokees, herding them to the Ozarks along the Trail of Tears and replacing them with slaves and ballcap-wearing, NASCAR-loving rednecks.

Anyway, the Times just loves trend stories, and here's a trend in the Times itself: Just last week (as I noted on August 7), the paper blared "'Minorities Often a Majority of the Population Under 20' "

Next topic for the Times: How do we protect the Upper West Side from these Visigoths?

Human Rights Watch: 'High Toll from Attacks on Populated Areas'

Yes, NYC-based Human Rights Watch has an open bias as a Goody Two-Shoes, but also does some great reporting — unlike its better-known but stodgy fellow NGO Amnesty International — so why not include it in "the press"?

Mainstream international papers, like the Guardian (U.K.), have no problem giving HRW full credit when it breaks news stories. This morning the Guardian's Mark Tran notes:

HRW is somewhat schizoid as a news source, because it always follows its great nuggets of news with predictable appeals to officials to stop the madness. For example, today it reports:

Memo to HRW: Lose the second sentence, please, because your news reporting speaks for itself and you're clouding the impact of that reporting with that squishy, predictable statement of "deep concern." (I guess HRW feels it has to do that, but I ignore such statements of concern — who could disagree with such sentiments? — and take its reporting seriously. Keep reading this item and you'll see why.)

U.S. papers refuse to include HRW and like groups in their press club, but the Internet dissolves that separation because HRW's reports are as freely and directly available as news from other sources.

You may have forgotten — and the mainstream press has done nothing to help you remember — that HRW broke one of the most grim and explosive stories (so far) from the Iraq War.

Back in September 2005, HRW revealed that U.S. troops at Camp Mercury, outside Fallujah, proudly called themselves "Murderous Maniacs" as they tortured and beat up hapless Iraqi prisoners merely for sport — and in a highly sexualized way that was worse than at Abu Ghraib. As I wrote back then:

HRW wasn't guessing, nor was it chiding from its Fifth Avenue offices. It waded right in and talked to U.S. troops about it. From its own report, "Leadership Failure: Firsthand Accounts of Torture of Iraqi Detainees by the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division":

Three years later, HRW has made its own march into Georgia. So keep tabs on its reporting. For that matter, keep checking the Guardian's Georgia page.

NY Observer: 'Penguin Group Wins Rights to Steinbeck Novels'

Minor note on a major author, especially compared with Tony Ortega's unique yarn about Steinbeck and Mexican-American farmworkers in today's Voice: "John Steinbeck's Ghosts."

Times: 'Ruling Is a Victory for Supporters of Free Software'

John Markoff's piece about a court ruling in favor of open-source software is a little confusing, but the upshot is that a major pothole has been patched on our major transportation artery, the information highway.

Times: 'Conflict Narrows Oil Options for West'

In other transportation news: Good piece by Jad Mouawad about our latest loss in the centuries-old Great Game in Central Asia, and bad news for us SUV owners:

Times: 'Downtowns Across the U.S. See Streetcars in Their Future'

Yet another transportation story.

Unfortunately, the Times blows this story by just briefly noting that cities and even small towns across the country had functioning streetcar lines until the mid 1950s, and not mentioning at all that it was the automobile lobby that killed them as it pressured pols to build the Interstate Highway System.

I don't blanch at this new development because when I was a kid in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, I depended on the kindness of streetcars. Public transit is a blessing, no matter how much my fellow straphangers grouse about the MTA and Long Island Rail Road.

Post: 'BIZMAN HAD A "LOT" OF NERVE'

Carolyn Salazar's lede is right to the point:

Whereas powerful pol Shelly Silver is squatting like Jabba the Hutt on a vacant lot on the Lower East Side, as the Voice's Tom Robbins reports.

Daily News: 'Gloomy Gotti trip to Sunshine State'

The latest installment of news about the fading Italian-American Gangster Era. John Marzulli reports:

Who gives a shit?

Daily News: 'Elizabeth Edwards stayed with cheating husband John for children's sake'

A perfect example of how the Daily News almost always lags behind the Post in tabloidian terms. The lede:

Only five tabloidian buzzers: "anguished," "cheating," "dying, "worried," and "closest friend." Yesterday, I noted eight in a Post Edwards lede.