Cursor's Media Patrol - 07/28/06

"Lebanon has now become Condi's war," writes Eugene Robinson, arguing that "she took personal ownership of the bloody, escalating war" by failing to act and by trumpeting fantasies "of somehow making the world's tinderbox into something 'new.'"

Asked by some cable networks if they were going overboard in their coverage of Lebanon, Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell replied that the amount of coverage is not the problem, it is the failure to explain "our own deep involvement in that war," in particular, the amount of arms we supply to Israel.

The Conservative Voice reports that a private U.S.-Israeli company Security Solutions International is "sponsoring "training missions to Israel for U.S. law enforcement and security officers," and a Montgomery, Alabama SWAT team is learning Israeli tactics.

As Gen. Peter Pace insists that the Taliban "cannot take over" again, an article in American Journalism Review on 'The Forgotten War' argues that sparse coverage has failed to make Americans aware that this has been a bad year in Afghanistan.

Glenn Greenwald flags an essay by neoconservative David Frum, who now concedes that the invasion he so desperately wanted "has delivered control of Iraq into the hands of our arch Iranian enemies," and Media Matters reviews the record of the "Pollyanna pundits."

Democrats are seeking legislative changes allowing Medicare to negotiate the price of drugs in an effort to plug what's been called "the doughnut hole" in the program's coverage, but lack of information is seen as an obstacle in making this an issue in the fall elections.

A dismal GDP report leads one analyst to predict a recession by the end of the year, and a former chief economist at the IMF says "the odds of a U.S. recession next year have doubled to 25% or 30%, mainly due to rising energy prices."