NY Times Suddenly Concerned With Staged Photo Ops

Our own Dear Leader traipses around the county promoting his socialist healthcare boondoggle before union members at staged townhalls, takes staged questions from little girls, but the media finds nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's gotten so bad the media is now simply making up news to portray opponents in the worst possible light.

Yet now the fearless muckrakers at the New York Times are shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that photo ops aren't always what they seem to appear. Have they finally grown weary of the manipulation of the Democrats? Of course not, this happened in France.

It was apparently just a little summertime spinning with the aid of a grocery chain, but Luc Chatel, the education minister and government spokesman, found himself in some hot water over a supposedly staged visit to a quiet supermarket on Monday.

Journalists accompanying Mr. Chatel and Hervé Novelli, the secretary of state for commerce, on a trip to an Intermarché supermarket in Villeneuve-le-Roi, southeast of Paris, became suspicious when the aisles were suddenly filled with well-dressed, articulate women eager to praise a government freeze on the price of some school supplies before the new school year began.

One of the women was Virginie Meyniel, a local politician allied with the governing center-right party, who said she just happened to be in the store and also happens to help oversee schools for her town, Vulaines-sur-Seine, 30 miles away.

The radio station France Inter raised questions, and the newspaper Libération had a detailed article on Wednesday headlined, “Supercherie au Supermarché,” or “Hoax at the Supermarket.” It described how some of the women left the store together in a car after the minister left, without buying anything and leaving their school supplies in shopping baskets.

The journalists said that the store was empty a half-hour before the officials arrived, and that 15 minutes before they came about a dozen women entered the store together.

Simply shocking. Imagine having people come a long distance to make it appear that an event has more support than it actually does?

Imagine our own media actually reporting it. Now that would be a shocker.

Terror Suspects On Board Doomed Air France Flight?

Interesting. The question is if they were terror suspects how did they manage to get on board?

Two passengers with names linked to Islamic terrorism were on the Air France flight which crashed with the loss of 228 lives, it has emerged.

French secret servicemen established the connection while working through the list of those who boarded the doomed Airbus in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on 31 May.

Flight AF447 crashed in the mid-Atlantic en route to Paris during a violent storm.

While it is certain that there were computer malfunctions, terrorism has not been ruled out.

Soon after news of the fatal crash broke, agents working for the DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure), the French equivalent of MI6, were dispatched to Brazil.

It was there that they established that two names on the passenger list are also on highly-classified documents listing the names of radical Muslims considered a threat to the French Republic.

A source working for the French security services told Paris weekly L'Express that the link was "highly significant".

Agents are now trying to establish dates of birth for the two dead passengers, and family connections.

There is a possibility the name similarities are simply a "macabre coincidence", the source added, but the revelation is still being "taken very seriously".

Thanks to Dan Collins for the link.