Serious conviction: Most of New York's media folk are stuck indoors, looking for something to write about to fill blogs with content. Guilty as charged myself. However, while social media collapses with updates of Sandy's destruction, there have been flares of America's severe electoral illness. Symptoms include: taking any event and asking "What does this mean for the election?"

infrogmation

That information might not come as a shock to anyone possessed of basic media literacy. But a report released today documents 20 different instances in which the Journal ran columns by nine different authors without disclosing that each of them has formal ties to the Romney campaign.

Unnamed sources sparked a media furor -- now being questioned -- linking DNA from an Occupy-Wall-Street-affiliated protest to an eight-year-old murder.

Last night, the local NBC affiliate ran a story based on an unnamed source leaking the following information: There had been a break in the eight-years-cold investigation of the murder of Sarah Fox in Inwood. DNA evidence recovered from her CD player, found near her corpse, matched DNA taken from a chain used to hold open a subway door in the fare strike conducted by wildcat transit union members and Occupy Wall Street affiliated activists.

The appeared to be based on a single unnamed source, seemingly speaking from within the NYPD investigation, though the NBC story didn't so much as identify the basis of the source's expertise.

Tyler Coates just brought a Reuters item to our attention which details an allegedly abusive exorcism.

Before the body of the story,
readers are cautioned: "Note: graphic language in 7th paragraph."

Now, we counted to what sure seems like the seventh paragraph, and it looks like the explicit language might concern the word "vagina."

What the fuck, right?

Enter Nicole Gelinas.

Raising minimum wage -- as per the Fair Wages for New Yorkers Act -- is "left-wing social engineering." (Classic Post prose, really.)

This happened.

Well, it doesn't, but that's what the New York Post's Abby Schachter suggests.

"Bill Maher pretty much summed up the left's attitude toward the United States when he declared that Barack Obama came up from poverty to become 'the first black president of the racist states of America,' she writes.

For Schachter, of course, this is evidence that, "according to liberals like Maher, nothing has changed in all that time. This country is racist, many liberals believe, so it ever was and so it shall ever be. The election of a black president has done nothing to change our nation's true nature, says the left, because at its heart this is a racist country."

Somehow, Maher's one comment corroborates something about all liberals and suggests that white people get the short end of the stick. Oh, and apparently, the Trayvon Martin case is an example of "the liberal racist narrative."

She really said all this!

Now, most of the author's "complete guide" is pretty solid. Basically, West makes the argument that ironic racism -- people pretending to say or subtly implying racist things instead of actually saying them -- has replaced the more overt bigotry of the past.

Some examples cited by West include Navajo panties, white people getting upset that they can't use the n-word for "literary" reasons, and white people thinking that American racism in the U.S. is over because Barack Obama is president.

We totally buy these examples, and and fully agree that this kind of thinking is as smarmy as overt bias.

Because John Edwards is not the first powerful man to get caught with his pants down, Ghitis wonders whether dudes are just dumb, writing: "Are men stupid? How else can we explain the endless parade of otherwise successful individuals, who by all appearances seem intelligent and competent, and yet risk destroying their careers and their personal lives over the chance to have a sexual escapade?"

Ugh.

Before we hit our head against the keyboard out of frustration -- apparently, we are still not beyond genital-based generalizations in America -- let's clear up a few things.