Snark of the Day: Michelle Malkin

Michelle Malkin gets today’s “Snark of the day” award, in her reaction to the Press melting all over Caroline Giuliani.

HEADLINE NEWS! A teenager disagrees with her father!

Yes, who indeed would have thought it would come to this?

Trust me when I tell you, that this is more likely the girl being concerned about her own popularity, within her given circle, versus any serious political considerations.  Apparently, it’s been long enough since these people were seventeen, that they find themselves unable to detect such things when they fall over them.

Basically what we have here, is people throwing any mud they can possibly get their hands on. Michelle’s reaction is right on target, and a decent snark, at that… and so she wins the “Snark of the Day” award.

Billy;

Saw your note this morning…. As I stated in my comments we have seen this before.  It’s a typical ploy of Erb and his ilk, once cornered on a factual point to claim “it doesn’t matter. ” Aesop and his fable of the sour grapes seems to roar to mind here.

It seems to me that to take the position he does, suggests that what Erb is really arguing is that people like Foer lying to the American people is inconsequential.  I can’t help but think his position would be as far as possible from his current one, were the lies in question to advantage anything but the lockstep left.

I’d like you to pay particular attention to the comments that I posted to Rick Moran, publicly, last evening.  That bears on our discussion with Erb, in this way: Rick seems to be concerned with the credibility of Bloggers as a group, incidental to what he sees as their “piling on” .  The point that he is neglecting is what would happen incidental to our not responding to such lies. In other words responding to it as Erb would: “It doesn’t matter.”

Clearly, in Rick’s case, Rick thinks it does matter, but he seems overly concerned about how that friction gets handled by bloggers, for fear of credibility losses. (Moran and his writings usually have much to commend them.  In this case, I think they suffer from his being higher up in the stratosphere of Blogdom for too long to see the real sitrep.)
What Rick misses out on, is that bloggers as a whole, are not “pundits”, and they are not “news people”.  (Certainly, there are exceptions.) The people who engaged in the “piling on”, as Rick describes it, are average Americans, just Joe and Jane Lunchbox, who are reacting, I think correctly, to being lied to.  In my view, the larger the numbers of individuals screaming, (Note the wording) the more the perception gets out there, that “hey, perhaps this does matter”.  Which in turn effectively counters the nutty professor and his ilk, and their claims that ‘it doesn’t matter”.

This is, in the end, a matter of perceptions; perception is all. Certainly, perceptions, and the bending of them, were why Beuachamp’s articles were sought and printed in the TNR in the first place.
As an aside, I would further suggest that their not being pundits, and their not being news people, is in addition to their credibility, not a subtraction from it, but then again, that’s just me.

Rick: You say:

Decloaking Beauchamp will not bring us closer to “victory” in Iraq – if such a thing existed outside of the fevered imaginations of an ever dwindling number of conservatives. It will not make up for Abu Ghraib – another story whose perceived importance far, far outweighed any relationship to the reality of what actually happened. It will not induce the American people to change their minds and embrace the war effort. Nor will it shut the left up which, while something devoutly to be desired, is alas an effort doomed to failure.

This medium, we have to keep reminding ourselves, is still fairly new. And as more and more people enter the blog universe – many looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow – it is inevitable that they too, wish to get in on the fun of scalp hunting. One way to climb up the winding stairs to the top of the ziggurat is to outshout your competitors while attaching more importance to a story than it deserves. This will get you traffic, links, and the admiration of your fellow bloggers.

I understand the game. I’ve played it for three years, shamelessly piling on and then shooting off emails to big bloggers hoping they would find my insightful, pithy comments about the swarm du jour good enough to link. There’s nothing inherently dishonest in this method of self-promotion – unless what you write isn’t what you truly feel in which case you won’t last long anyway. But I truly believe now that blogs have to move beyond this phase. To what end, I have no idea. I couldn’t have foreseen where blogs are now 3 years ago when I started so my powers of prognostication when it comes to blogging and internet media are practically nil.

I only know a growing sense of unease elicited by the notion that by overhyping stories like the Beauchamp caper, the credibility of the medium suffers. For that reason alone, it may be time to put down the blood stained hatchets and begin to seriously examine just what we should be doing that will increase our influence rather than make us look like a bunch of one dimensional attack dogs.

With all respect, Rick, blogs are by definition reactionary.  We react to what is out there.  The bottom line here is that all this “piling on” that you’re talking about, that occurred in the Beauchamp case, was a large number of people reacting correctly to being lied to.  It’s the kind of thing that lease the editorial boards of newspapers, if not the news staff, used to do.  Alas, they don’t do it much anymore.  Which, in turn, is precisely why this new medium exists.

I don’t know how others play this particular game, Rick, but I will tell you the truth about BitsBlog; it’s very seldom indeed, then I have tried to promote one of my posts by emailing other bloggers. perhaps this explains why my hit rates are not nearly what I think they should be.  The reason I haven’t done it, is it has always struck me as seeking approval from people you’re competing with.

For my part, I speak my mind, and let it go at that. I am active on other people’s Blogs for the same reason. If somebody else is going my way, that’s just fine.  If not, see ya.  But I notice a certain talk show host who shall remain nameless, within the studios of WSB has taken note of your efforts. That’s not a bad thing.  What that notice suggests is, people are starting to take this medium seriously.

But perhaps you need to study a little more closely why it is they do so… And perhaps the best way to do that, is to examine what would happen without our being here.  Believe me when I tell you, there are those in government who are hitting the prayer mats every night for just such an occurrence.

Imagine with me, the results of taking Beauchamp at his word with no resistance. what kind of image would be sent into the minds of the average American?  What kind of image would be sent into the minds of our military in the rest of the world?  Trust me what I tell you that’s precisely why the article was written and printed.  Make no mistake; these people are working for the other side.
It is precisely because of the incidents like this Beauchamp affair that we in Blogdom are being taken seriously. Far from such Blog Swarms being a BAD thing, I will guarantee you that going forward for at least a little while the media will take fact checking very seriously indeed.  TNR got caught with their pants down on this one.  Again.  To the extent that my adding on my little voice to that particular pig pile help that process along, I consider it a good thing.  Certainly, it is better than the absence of that kind of pressure.

Glenn would call it an Army of Davids.

• Raining here, today. So much for getting any work done on the trailer.
• Honorable mention at OTB’s Caption Contest.. For once it wasn’t just the trailer park.
• TNR has released a statement on Beauchamp. Basically, the story amounted to “that’s my story and I’m sticking to it” as Bruce wonders, I will ask the same question..Who is at the helm of The New Republic, for heaven sake and don’t they understand the word “shipwreck” at all? They have an awful lot invested in these lies being accepted as truth,so I suppose that they’re sticking to this doesn’t surprise me.  But at some point, this stuff is all going to feedback on them.  It’s got to.  The resulting fireworks will be interesting, I think.
  
• Oh, speaking of which… Ace is on fire today.  Not only does he have the Snark of the Day as regards the “premium content columnists” that they decided to foist off on us, and that whole thing blowing up in their face, but his running commentary on this whole Beuchamp thing is bloody well priceless. 
  
• What amazes me, Billy, is that they’re just getting to the point where they’re figuring this mortgage stuff out.  The bottom line is this stuff is been twenty years in the building, and really started taking hold during the Clinton administration.  Need I say more?  By the way, your comments about Barry Bonds are very much in sympathy with my own.  Most particularly, I said back in March, that baseball will never recover its full glory so long as people like him are involved with the game. MLB finds itself in what can only be described as an untenable situation.  They can’t ignore that the numbers being broken, and yet they can’t be acknowledging that Aarons’ numbers are being broken by a syringe, not by talent. That said, I have no sympathy for them; this is a problem of their own making.  Thing is, I wonder if they understand just what the situation is costing them, both in terms of dollars, and in terms of fans.  Young fans, particularly, which, after all, are the future of the game.
  

Ace, regards the “Premium” content wall coming down. Seems, the Times has decided nobody’s paying the extra freight for Dowd, etc… and so they’re taking the wall down.

NYT Threatens: Now You’ll All Have To Come Up With New Excuses To Ignore Our Soporific, Sophomoric Columnists

The New York Time$ $elect wall is coming down.

It was so nice to not even have to pretend to give a wet $#!+ about what any of these imbeciles had to say.

This one was simply way too easy to pass up on.  Hugo Chavez staged a photo-op with Sean Penn.  Ian James, Associated Press:

LA GRITA, Venezuela – Aboard the presidential jet, a grinning Hugo Chavez put a hand on Sean Penn‘s shoulder, praised his acting and added: “And he’s anti-Bush!”

The Venezuelan president reveled in his role as host to the Hollywood star as they flew across the country Friday and traveled through the countryside in a military jeep with Chavez at the wheel, stopping to greet cheering supporters.

This quote of Chavez struck me:

Enlivened by his conversations with Penn, the socialist president lambasted the U.S. government for “destroying the world” with war and warned of brewing economic troubles, saying Washington should do much more for its own poor.

I dust off my quote from earlier today   A description of our poor:

[H]as a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family’s essential needs.

A description of Caracas, we posted earlier this year:

CARACAS, Venezuela, Feb. 16 — Faced with an accelerating inflation rate and shortages of basic foods like beef, chicken and milk, President Hugo Chávez has threatened to jail grocery store owners and nationalize their businesses if they violate the country’s expanding price controls.

In the country of George W. Bush, the poor have plenty to eat.   In Mr. Chavez’s country, even the middle class do not have sufficient food.   So which country does Sean Penn profess to perfer?  But in whch one does Penn live?   Answer, where he can eat.

?

James Joyner takes on the word    “Poor”

Julian Sanchez takes issue with the use of the words “underresourced” and “underprivileged” as euphemism for “poor,” arguing that the former is ungrammatical and the latter incoherent.

He’s right, I think, that “poor” is both descriptive and inoffensive. Arguably, though, some substantial percentage of Americans living in “poverty” are in fact merely “underprivileged” in precisely the way Julian objects to the use of the word:

Underprivileged makes no sense because a “privilege” is a special favor or advantage. It is, by definition, not the sort of thing everyone is supposed to have. You can wish to live in a society where nobody is poor, but it’s just incoherent to wish for a society in which “everybody is privileged,” though the “under” implies that this would be desirable.

We live in a society in which case it is not only possible but commonplace to be simultaneously fat and poor. Almost any “poor” American would be considered “privileged” indeed by a poor African.

True. In the end, the only reason I can see for switching it from “Poor” to “underresourced” and “underprivileged” is that the latter are far easier to tag as ‘victims”.

Victimization, of course, being a central theme of those promoting the welfare state, these days.

Addendum: (David L)   As the term poor is commonly accepted, the lack of access to the essential commodities of life, the poor simply do not exist in the United States.   Plainly speeking, we have no poor.

How would you describe a person in this situation:

[H]as a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family’s essential needs.

The federal goverment describes this as poor.  The problem is that poverty is the lack of access to the necessary commodities of life.  The Census Bureau only measures the lack of access to cash.

Gerry Rafferty, call your office…

Bret Baier last night:

Texas congressman and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul — who is campaigning as a critic of congressional overspending — has revealed that he is requesting $400 million worth of earmarks this year.

The Wall Street Journal reports Paul’s office says those requests include $8 million for the marketing of wild American shrimp and $2.3 million to pay for research into shrimp fishing.

A spokesman says, “Reducing earmarks does not reduce government spending, and it does not prohibit spending upon those things that are earmarked. What people who push earmark reform are doing is they are particularly misleading the public — and I have to presume it’s not by accident.”

Well, no shock for that. I think we figured out Ron Paul a long time ago.

Also in the same link:

Actor Sean Penn‘s recent trip to Venezuela to pal around with President Hugo Chavez has even some Hollywood liberals upset.

Columnist Bill Zwecker of the Chicago Sun-Times reports that one major producer who asked not to be identified — and who is a big liberal and Democratic supporter — said, “It’s no secret that Sean is very left-wing, even in a town where liberal or even radical politics have long been common. But as much as many people here despise President Bush, a lot of us think this trip to Venezuela by Penn was wrong. Danny Glover did it too… It isn’t the proper thing and only gives ammunition to conservatives who like to point to Hollywood as being anti-American.”

Hmmmf.

We figured him up quite a while ago, too.  The question is an open one, as to whether or not liberals will publicly denounce his actions.  I suspect they will not, (His politics, I think are really too close to their own, so it would be like denouncing your own POV, which was exactly what we ran into with that moron, Glover) but time will tell.

(Voice of America)- Mia Farrow has offered to relinquish her freedom so that an ailing Darfur rebel can get safe passage out of a hospital.

In an August 6 letter posted on her website, the 62-year-old actress-activist made the offer to Sudan’s President Omar Al-Bashir.

I’ve said it for years, dear reader, that anyone that could take Woody Allen seriously , much less marry him, isn’t too tightly wrapped.

I’ve been seeing this meme for several days now, ever since it started coming out that we were actually winning, militarily, in Iraq.  I guess I’m a little surprised that the comments are coming from this source, but I’ll let it go except to comment.

AP’s John Burns left his “base” in Washington for a two week tour of Iraq and pronounces the Surge a great success. The all-important political reconciliation, on the other hand ….

The new U.S. military strategy in Iraq, unveiled six months ago to little acclaim, is working.

In two weeks of observing the U.S. military on the ground and interviewing commanders, strategists and intelligence officers, it’s apparent that the war has entered a new phase in its fifth year. It is a phase with fresh promise yet the same old worry: Iraq may be too fractured to make whole.

No matter how well or how long the U.S. military carries out its counterinsurgency mission, it cannot guarantee victory. Only the Iraqis can. And to do so they probably need many more months of heavy U.S. military involvement. Even then, it is far from certain that they are capable of putting this shattered country together again. It’s been an uphill struggle from the start to build Iraqi security forces that are able to fight and—more importantly at this juncture—able to divorce themselves from deep-rooted sectarian loyalties. It is the latter requirement—evenhandedness and reliability—that is furthest from being fulfilled.

There is no magic formula for success. And magic is what it may take to turn military gains into the strategy’s ultimate goal: a political process that moves Iraq’s rival Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds from the brink of civil war to the threshold of peace—and to get there on a timetable that takes account of growing war fatigue in the United States.

Efforts at Iraqi reconciliation saw another blow Monday: Five Cabinet ministers loyal to Iraq’s first post-Saddam Hussein leader decided to boycott government meetings, further deepening a crisis that threatens Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The boycott would leave the Shiite-led government with no Sunni participants, at least temporarily.

Despite political setbacks, American commanders are clinging to a hope that stability might be built from the bottom up—with local groups joining or aiding U.S. efforts to root out extremists—rather than from the top down, where national leaders have failed to act. Commanders are encouraged by signs that more Iraqis are growing fed up with violence. They are also counting on improvements in the Iraqi army and police, which are burdened by religious rivalries and are not ready to take over national defense duties from U.S. troops this year.

U.S. military leaders want Congress and President Bush to give them more time to keep trying—to reach a point, perhaps in 2009, when the Iraqis will be closer to reconciliation and ready to provide much of their own security. The idea, after all, is not to kill or capture every terrorist and insurgent. That can’t be done. The idea is to create a security environment more favorable to political action by the government, to provide breathing space for leaders of rival factions to work out a peaceful way to share power.

That’s the hope we all share. It’s increasingly hard to believe there’s much reason for it, given the incompetence of the Maliki government and the lack of better alternatives.

…

And second: Would Iraqi political leaders be more likely to settle their sectarian differences if they knew that America’s patience was ending and that its troops were leaving—at least the combat forces?

The second question is pure conjecture, although it depends on what one means by “settle.” My strong guess is that post-intervention Iraq would quickly explode into full-on civil war, eventually resulting in multiple mini-states. And the process may well be accompanied by direct or proxy wars involving Iraq’s neighbors.

OK I admit it, i.e. edited out a few points that I want to comment on.  I will tell you should go and RTWT, to get a better feel for his comments and mine.

There are many from center to left, who have been banging the drum up on this “military victory means nothing without reconciliation” business for some time now, and the volume on that has been cranked up significantly since the meme about how we were losing the Iraq war militarily, has been discredited, and summarily dumped.

The fact, however, is that full reconciliation is an impossible standard to meet, in any event, regardless of how the military play works out.  That’s not just the rule in Iraq, or Afghanistan, but any war.  There are always a large number of holdouts at the end of any war.  Always has been.  Regardless of where these events occur.  Regardless of the cultural influences involved.

Some extreme examples would be the partitioning in response to communist expansionism: Korea, Vietnam, Germany, and so on.  Even within the region, the religious and ethnic tensions have been going on literally for thousands of years.  Yet, while their frequency has been larger than some other areas of the world, still, wars have been relatively infrequent.  Certainly, their differences were not reconciled through that period.

I submit, that the question is not full reconciliation, but rather the question is whether or not the Iraqi government is capable of maintaining the peace.  Certainly, that has been the major issue in any other war we have ever fought in.  Those are two completely different issues.  Maintaining the peace, is not dependent on full reconciliation.

Frankly, I have begun to think that this call for full reconciliation, being the conditioned upon which victory stands, is just another attempt by the left to declare Iraq a failure.  Nothing else has worked to so label it, so far.

Here it is, my freinds;

Reconciliation is a nice to have, not a necessity.  What is a necessity for peace, is winning the war, and defeating the enemy.  Peace is secondary to winning the war, foreign is a direct product of it.   Reconciliation, in large part, comes from taking away the enemies willingness to fight.

McQ does a fair job of following up on this Beauchamp thing:

“They told stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”

This myth, essentially left unchallenged, stained a generation of soldiers. It, of course wasn’t the only myth circulated by the anti-war, anti-military crowd. We’re all familiar with the composite it built of the ‘crazy Vietnam vet’. I say “essentially unchallenged” because rebuttal wasn’t invited and those who did rebut the meme mostly had no voice.

That was then, this is now, and those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, to borrow a phrase. Well I refuse to ignore it and I certainly refuse to allow it to repeat in the case of our soldiers in Iraq. Once more for the slow among us – I am not denying that bad things happen or that soldiers do bad things. However, that certainly doesn’t mean I can’t spot reports and stories that are bogus and meant to hurt the overall view the public at large has of our soldiers. I’m not claiming some grand conspiracy, or some concerted effort on the left. But I am claiming that the sort of stories Beauchamp offered lent themselves to that sort of perception whether the author intended that or not (and I’m of the opinion that’s precisely what he intended, but I’ll leave it there).

I agree, that’s precisely what he intended.  more, I am firmly convinced that is precisely what TNR intended by printing it. they saw that has an advantage, because they knew their leftist readership would lap it up. They lap it up, because it furthers the whole anti-Bush, anti-war meme, and furthers the power of Democrats.

Make no mistake, that’s all this was ever about.  But that they were willing to this march the good name of the American military in the process of all of that, tells me it all I need to know about the kind of people we are dealing with.

Meanwhile, Kudos to McQ. Kudos, too, to Jawa, who says in part:

Looks like TNR picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

Actually, I see no evidence that they have, as yet, stopped. Cute line, though.

Update: (Bit)

Don Surber correctly identifies the pattern:

TNR fell for him the same way the Democratic Senate subcommittee fell for Lt. John Kerry’s wild tales of “Jenjis Khan” in Vietnam some 36 years ago.

TNR fell for him the same way the Washington Post fell for Janet Cooke’s wild tales of an 8-year-old heroin addict.

TNR fell for him the same way TNR fell for Stephen Glass or the New York Times fell for Jayson Blair.

In each case the fabricator told the listener exactly what the listener wanted to hear. I suggest doubling the dose of skepticism when someone tells you something that fits your take on an issue.

I figure that’s pretty much an impossibility, given that it asks the average liberal to question his position. But… there is something that all this reveals, but not many people are talking about: The leftist media is about spreading these falsehoods, because they do not have any truths that match their agenda.

Garbage in, garbage out.  One Chris Goodall demonstrates.  What an attention grabbing headline:

Walking to the shops ‘damages planet more than going by car’
 

Shame the headlines is not supported by by facts contained within the article itself.

Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated.

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.

Sure sounds scary, until you get the supposed reasoning:

“Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,” he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. “If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.

Normal people simply do not get all there dietary energy from meat, nor do lie on their sofa with both the air conditioning and television off.

Basic energy supply comes from carbohydrates and not meat.

Carbohydrates, especially complex carbohydrates, are so important nutritionally that it’s a good idea to plan meals around them. Natural unrefined carbohydrates are the only food category not linked to life-threatening diseases.

Complex carbohydrates – legumes, fruits and vegetables, enriched and whole breads, cereals and pasta – are more than an energy source. They are economical, relatively low in calories and fat, rich in vitamins and minerals, and often a good source of fiber and protein. It is recommended that 55 to 60 percent of your calories should come from carbohydrates, with the emphasis being on complex carbohydrates.

More, Sister Toldjah.

Hat tip photo:  Austrialian Real Estate Blog

Aside:  I like an award for garbage like this.  Suggestions?

Rush mentioned this yesterday, while I was in the truck, and I didn’t get the chance to write it down. But I see Boortz mentions it this morning:

It’s a blog called Duvallbuck’s Diary. In this blog you will find an incredibly moronic piece of complete bullshit. The writer says that he would “rather die in a terrorist attack then have a CIA operative outed by the Office of the Vice President because her husband wrote an op-ed telling the truth about lies told by President Bush.”

Now … never mind that the aforementioned op-ed actually lied about the truths being told by President Bush. We don’t want to confuse this leftist blogger with any facts. He seems to be quite on the edge already.

And, as usual .. .there’s more! This blogger also says that he would rather die in a terrorist (we assume he means “Islamic” terrorist) that have to endure any of the following:

• The domestic surveillance of any citizen’s email, phone calls, medical records, library usage or financial transactions.
• Forsaking the Geneva conventions in the name of our nation.
• Giving up anyone’s right of habeas corpus.

A few more people like him in our country and he may get his wish.

No kidding. I’ve got into knockdown drag outs, with otherwise well meaning and staunch conservative people.  My point here, is that this moron that Neal links  is hardly unique.  Wherein, lies part of a problem.  those making such an argument, will, however unwittingly, cause our country to lose to these terrorists.  It’s really that simple.

Idiots.

LAS VEGAS —AP-  Lee Hazlewood, a singer and songwriter best known for writing and producing “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'” for Nancy Sinatra, has died. He was 78.

Barton Lee Hazlewood died at his home in Henderson of kidney cancer on Saturday evening, the Clark County coroner’s office said.

Hazelwood also did three albums with Nancy Sinatra, (THe first two of which were amazingly listenable, given neither had what you would call operatic ability… and I never heard the third one, whichw as released in 2004)…  He worked with Duane Eddy.  He wrote “Houston” for Dean Martin, produced “Something Stupid” for Frank and Nancy Sinatra… His songs have attained something of a cult status, and are being recorded by some of the cutting edge of today’s rockers.

I didn’t bother posting anything about the six miners trapped in Utah, because I estimated that the thing would be over by the time I got it posted.  As it turned out, they’re still not out of there… And what was a fast moving rescue, now has become a long, hard slog:

HUNTINGTON, Utah —AP- Teams of rescuers frantically cleared debris from underground tunnels early Tuesday, trying to reach six coal miners trapped by a cave-in beneath more than 1,500 feet of solid rock.

In early morning darkness, workers in hard hats came and went along a road leading to the mine in a forested canyon among mountains.

“Right now I can’t say if it’s looking any better,” said one weary miner, Leland Lobato, as he ended an eight-hour shift. “They’re doing what they can to keep everybody as fresh as possible so nobody gets tired.”

They’re not even sure they’re alive, yet.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll be thinking of those folks, today.