From Editor & Publisher:

“Joe The Plumber is putting down his wrenches and picking up a reporter’s notebook.
The Ohio man who became a household name during the presidential campaign says he is heading to Israel as a war correspondent for the conservative Web site pjtv.com.

Samuel J. Wurzelbacher (WUR’-zuhl-bah-kur) says he’ll spend 10 days covering the fighting. He tells WNWO-TV in Toledo that he wants to let Israel’s “‘Average Joes’ share their story.”“

Well, it was bound to come down to this for your not-so-average Joe… All I can say is maybe Joe will actually report what is going on in Gaza (or even Israel), because so far almost every major media outlet has pitifully failed at doing it’s job.

Only the New York Times today (finally) gave some actual numbers: “around” 660 Palestinians have died so far (including at least 160 children according to an earlier version of this article. That section of the article was changed just recently to read instead, “The United Nations has estimated that about one-fourth of those dying in Gaza are civilians, but there is little certainty about the current figures.”). Something else removed in the revised version of the article was that there have been 7 Israeli soldiers killed on the ground in the invasion and a handful of Israeli civilians killed by Hamas’ rockets. At least the NY Times is pretending to report on this tragedy, but they are falling well short so far and we’re almost two weeks into this latest explosion of violence. Can’t wait to see if Joe the Reporter can do any better by knocking on doors in Tel Aviv…

If you want to get an idea of what it might be like in Gaza right now, take a look at these pictures from photographer Scout Tufankjian at Slate.com and then remember, these were taken during one of the quieter times that region has seen in 2004. Imagine today, the bloodiest since this all began again…

A Palestinian doctor with a man who lies in the Shifa Hospital ICU after being wounded in an Israeli air attack.

UPDATE: On a lighter note, having just finished this post and browsing the rest of my RSS feeds for the hour, I came across the following from 23/6 which might sound familiar:

“Open Plea to Hamas: Do not accept a ceasefire before Joe the Plumber arrives in Israel”

I would like to give thanks this season for two things: One is knowing that Sarah Palin still holds “the same values and convictions” today (that apparently she held yesterday). Number two is the awareness that Slate Video was put on this Net to entertain us all with the mindless babbling of this idiot some call guvna… (pronounced the same, but spelled ‘gowno’ in Polish for a similar meaning).

Here is the original interview with Sarah Palin after she pardoned a turkey. (WARNING: If you don’t want to know where your Thanksgiving bird comes from, just skip to the second video).

And here are the deleted scenes:

Thanks to Slate.com I don’t have to read Bob Woodward’s new book entitled, “The War Within” to figure out what’s going on in this country. Juliet Lapidos has written the real-world version of CliffsNotes for Woodward’s own CliffNotes to the past two years in the White House. First of all, the fact that such a book is now necessary to understand what is really going on with this nation’s government is a tragedy and a disgrace. However, given Woodward’s tireless research, interviews and time spent writing this journal, I figure it is at least worth the two minutes it takes to scan Lapidos’ highlights to know what my government is up to. As Lapidos starts,

“Bob Woodward’s first three books on George W. Bush were national best-sellers, and it’s all but certain that his newly released fourth will be the talk of your next cocktail party.”

Who am I to pass up the opportunity to look learned at the next cocktail party?!

Sam Zell is a real estate magnate and the head of The Tribune Company which owns the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, the Chicago Cubs as well as a number of TV stations and smaller newspapers. Slate.com on Monday had a piece titled, “Words, Words, Words” written by Michael Kinsley about the upcoming changes within the Tribune Company’s newspapers, such as the new policy shift taken by Tribune management to measure “Reporters’ Value By the Inch.” In an article written last week on Editor and Publisher’s website, Jennifer Saba says,

“One of the main strategies outlined by Tribune Chief Operating Officer Randy Michaels involves measuring the productivity of journalists. “This is a new thing,” he said. “Nobody ever said, ‘How many column inches did someone produce?’”

The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson makes a compelling argument today why Sam Zell is eligible for life in prison for his massacre of the LA Times. In response to Slate’s article mentioned above, Meyerson starts,

“On Oct. 1, 1910, a bomb set by James McNamara, an operative of the Iron Workers union, then embroiled in a ferocious dispute with the Los Angeles Times, blew up the Times building, killing 21 pressmen. McNamara was arrested the following April, convicted and later sentenced to life in prison. He died in San Quentin in 1941. The question for today is: Would a similar sentence be appropriate for Sam Zell?”

Meyerson ends this very fair rant by putting things in perspective for us.

“Great newspapers take decades to build. We are discovering that they can be dismantled in relatively short order. The Los Angeles Times was a hyperpartisan, parochial broadsheet until Otis Chandler became its publisher in 1960 and began the work of transforming it into the paper of both record and insight that it’s been for the past half-century. The diminution of such a paper diminishes its city, which is why L.A.’s otherwise disparate civic elites have periodically tried to restore the Times to local control since the Trib bought it at the turn of this century. Instead, in Zell, what Los Angeles has is a visiting Visigoth, whose civic influence is about as positive as that of the Crips, the Bloods and the Mexican mafia. Life in San Quentin sounds about right.”

Robert Bryce is an Austin-based beekeeper who also happens to have some pretty smart ideas* about energy policy, public consumption and the ability to say what no one else wants to say (or hear, for that matter): Gasoline in the United States is Cheap! Invariably, your local “news” broadcast has mentioned, if not lead with the story of high gas prices and how it is affecting our local and national economies. WHDH Channel-7 (the Boston-based NBC affiliate) even has a “Pump Patrol” section right on the front page of its website. Everything from food prices to increased airline tickets is linked to high gas prices these days. But is it really all that high compared to what we have been paying or compared with what people pay in the rest of the world?

Robert Bryce published a fascinating story on Slate.com today about how and why gasoline in the United States is cheap and it is certainly worth the read. We don’t like to hear that we might have to change our daily routines and rituals to adapt to these higher prices (by comparison to what we have been paying, without inflation) but at least some people are willing to discuss the issue. The anchors and reporters at WHDH and many other media outlets who discuss high gas prices one moment and global warming the next, never actually relate this to our daily lives other than to say we should recycle more and commiserating that gas prices are breaking the bank.

*Edit: Not all of Bryce’s ideas are smart or brilliant, but this one happens to be pretty good.