If we are to believe this article in today's New York Daily News (Wednesday, October 19, 2005), former Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger will be signing on to be an advisor on ABC's Tuesday night drama, Commander in Chief. The Daily News also reports that Ron Klain, a longtime aide to Al Gore, will join the show.

Berger and Klain join two others with Clinton connections who currently work on the show. Capricia Marshall, a series consultant, was social secretary at the Clinton White House. Steve Cohen, a writer on the show, was once a communications aide for Hillary.

I'm wondering ... How many former Bush or Reagan staffers are on the show?

I saw an impassioned speech by Republican representative Curt Weldon on the floor of the house of represtatives tonight.  He detailed how the DIA, the CIA, and possibly unknown political operatives are out to DESTROY Army Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Anthony Schaeffer for speaking out about the Able Danger revelations.

If you remember, Able Danger was the military intelligence unit that supposedly identified 3 of the 9-11 hijackers over a year before 9-11 took place, but were prevented from sharing that information with aurhorities due to beaurocratic red tape.

The 9-11 commission ignored the Able Danger information completely and didn't even INTERVIEW any of the members of the able Danger team.  Members of the 9-11 commission attempted to discredit LTC Schaeffer when he began to speak out, but suddenly became "silent" when 4 MORE members of the Able Danger team surfaced to corroborate LTC Schaeffer's claims.

     One of the few pieces of major legislation that has recently passed with overwhelming support from both parties was the bankruptcy reform bill, signed into law by President George Bush in April. While a bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress endorsed the bill, the media have lamented the new law’s reforms.

     Journalists on NBC, CBS, and ABC have called Chapter 7 bankruptcy a “safety net,” a “new lease on life,” and “a fresh start.” In contrast, as one interviewee put it, there’s “a special place in hell” for those who crafted the reform bill. While not every story took such a hyperbolic tone, the media used the victims of Hurricane Katrina to lobby against a reform they didn’t particularly like.

     The networks showed roughly the same interest in bankruptcy after Katrina as they did when the bill was in Congress. The Free Market Project analyzed network news stories between April 1 and October 17, finding six full stories in the weeks surrounding the bill’s passage. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction, as the new law’s effective date approached, the media coverage was seven full stories. The recent stories tied the victims’ welfare to the “obvious choice … to file bankruptcy,” as NBC’s Alexis Glick put it on the October 10 “Today” show.

I don't know about the ABQ, but this smells like an MSM article. A minute man picks up a pair of hitch hikers (that speak english) near the boarder and has the courtsey to give them a ride to the town he is traveling too and has now been dismissed? No charges were filed, Local, State or Federal? What do they know that is not being printed (ABQ that is)?

Could use some help one this one guy's, these men have sacrificed way too much to let this one ride without being questioned. I want to know what the real story is, because if he (the minuteman) did in fact deliver two Illegals to a point beyond the American Border, would that not be Illegal?

Newsbusters, I could us some help on this one, prove me right or wrong, but lets at least look at this one. These guy's try to hard to ensure our borders for us, lets help.

The first words out of Chris Matthews' mouth, at the top of Wednesday's Hardball on MSNBC, raised the specter of Watergate: "What did the President know and when did he know it?” Matthews proceeded to trumpet “the New York Daily News now out in front on this story, reported this morning that President Bush rebuked ramrod Karl Rove over the leak story.” Repeating his tease, Matthews previewed his first segment: “So tonight on Hardball, we try to figure it out again if people in the Bush administration crossed the line separating political hardball -- tough, clean, Machiavellian politics -- and criminality. We're led tonight by the news coverage to that unsavory tandem of questions: What did the President know and when did he know it?”

On Tuesday night, Matthews opened with a dire scenario for a Vice President with a bad temper: “Did the fierce battle of leaks between elements of the Central Intelligence Agency who opposed going to war in Iraq and the hawks in the Vice President's office escalate to actual law breaking? Did the Vice President in an effort to defend himself from an onslaught of charges by Joseph Wilson urge his staff to silence the former ambassador? Did Cheney, through anger or loss of temper, create a climate for political hardball and worse? Did he stoke his staff in the late spring and early summer of 2003 to such a level of ferocity that some of its members crossed the line into illegality? And will Patrick Fitzgerald determine that in doing so, he crossed that dire line himself?"

Funny ass flash game- dats Crackhead Jeopardy/Ghettofied Trivial Pursuit=ebonic pursuit

http://collegenut.com/show.php?id=4680

The USA Today published an op-ed this morning by Sandy Grady entitled “Grounded by Hubris, Greed.” In it, Grady basically wrote Tom DeLay’s (R-Tex) career totally off, while making it clear for the reader that a trial at this point is just a formality:

“Indicted on charges of conspiracy and funneling $190,000 in illegal corporate dough so Republicans could dominate the Texas Legislature, he has lost his clout, his ornate office and those free golf junkets — probably forever.”

On Saturday, millions of Iraqis walked with determination to the polls to vote for a new constitution. The turnout was high. The violence was down dramatically from the triumphant elections of January. But the network found all this boring. On the night before the historic vote, ABC led with bird-flu panic. CBS imagined Karl Rove in a prison jumpsuit. NBC hyped inflation.

They say that news is a man-bites-dog story. In the Middle East, how common is a constitutional referendum? Have they had one in Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Syria? Jordan? Until the last few years, the phrase "Arab constitutional democracy" sounded like a pipe dream or an oxymoron. But today the reporters can only kvetch. NBC’s Richard Engel growled online that the new constitution was "a deeply flawed document, peppered with religious slogans, and leaves plenty of room for Shiites and Kurds to govern themselves." Engel says Iraqis disagree on the constitution, but "with the daily pressures of the insurgency, power cuts and lawlessness, there might not be enough time to start over before this country and the people lose hope -- along with many of their lives."

When Cindy Sheehan showed up outside of President Bush's Crawford, TX ranch in August, it was, to a certain degree, understandable that there would be some press coverage. She was there, the media was there, there wasn't a lot to write about. But the coverage was weak and biased in almost all cases, carrying her message uncritically, with no evaluation of who she was or what she was saying. The attitude seemed to be that she lost her son, she was criticizing the President, so she was credible and newsworthy, no matter what else there was in her views and attitudes. Indeed, I noted at the time how the Associated Press was acting as a PR firm for Sheehan, as opposed to an actual news organization.

Actress/comedian Roseanne Barr, who claims to be a psychic (“I channel the higher mind, the higher universal mind”), used the made-up word “overcomeable” and employed teenage phrases such as “like” and “totally,” insisted on Monday night's Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC that she would win a battle of intelligence with President Bush. Barr recounted how she's “going around telling jokes about our country and our people and the world and how screwed up everything is. And I just basically bitch.” She soon maintained about Bush: "I could totally win him in a mind contest." Barr, the star of the mid-1980s to early 1990s ABC sit-com Roseanne, elaborated: “Like if it was like a psychic thing and he was like, okay Rosanne, bring your best powers against my best powers, even though he's like totally world-wide connected, and I'm not so world-wide, I could so totally still win on account of like being female, being a grandmother and like, you know, being intelligent. I could totally win."

Barr, who made the appearance to plug a new DVD of the first season of the Roseanne sit-com, boasted: “I have been psychic since I was very young, about three-years-old. Whenever I touch someone, I pick up all their vibes and stuff. So that's why I don't like to shake hands or touch people because I see like, you know, them dying in horrible car wrecks and stuff like that and it's depressing." Apparently, that was just a joke. (Full transcript follows.)

Video excerpt: Real or Windows Media

Bernard Goldberg never got on CBS' Early Show, but that's because he was not supporting MSM dominance.

CBS Political Analyst Craig Crawford recently released a new book entitled Attack The Messenger: How Politicians Turn You Against The Media and it was very well-received at CBS, which helped launch the book on The Early Show on Wednesday. Among the book's claims is that it is politicians and their supporters who are making it seem as though the Media is biased, and not that the media actually is biased. People claiming Media Bias are merely "attacking the messenger" instead of the message.

The title is, of course, an ancient joke from the vaudeville circuit. It’s an appropriate way to praise, rather than attack, one particular article – and in the process to attack ten thousand others.

Here is the lede from “Show Me the Risk!” by Deroy Murdock in NRO (National Review Online) on 19 October 2005:

“According to The Archives of Internal Medicine, pharmaceutical companies market a drug that kills some 7,000 Americans annually. These people don’t die instantly, but instead expire after slowly suffering gastrointestinal bleeding. Oddly enough, TV-news producers are ho-hum about this deadly medicine. The Food and Drug Administration has yet to prohibit it. Personal-injury attorneys aim their crosshairs elsewhere. No one seems much concerned about a lethal substance called aspirin.”

Over at Human Events, Todd Manzi reports the timeline on the Bill Bennett gaffe story shows a liberal press-release campaign (John Conyers, NAACP, People for the American Way, Leadership Conference on Civil rights) to get AP and other media outlets to pick it up.

According to the Google timeline, all of the above press releases were issued BEFORE any of the main stream media (MSM) published one story about the Bennett call. At this moment the only people in the general public who knew what Bennett said were those who heard it on the radio. [Or as Manzi, acknowledges, monitor Media Matters.]

This unseemly group of barnacles attempted to get ahead of the issue and attach themselves to it for their own self promotion. They were also sending a strong signal to the (AP) that they want this to be a national story.

NBC showed some photographic bias Tuesday morning as Today host Katie Couric explored the topic of women and leadership:

Katie Couric: "It's been more than 30 years since women began entering the workforce in large numbers and yes, we've come a long way. But still only nine of the Fortune 500 companies are actually run by women. Despite that statistic there are numerous powerful, talented and driven women in leadership roles all across the country and this week's issue of Newsweek magazine takes a look at how women lead. We asked a few powerful women just how their gender has influenced their success."

[Photo of rally with women holding ERA Yes! signs and Gloria Steinem]

Vera Wang: "We were that Gloria Steinem generation that, you know, just wanted, you know equal pay for an equal day's work and I think wanted equal consideration as to our intelligence, as to our ability, as to our passion, as to our desires and I think that's happening now. I think that many women don't even know about a time when it wasn't really that common. So in that respect we have succeeded. On the other hand there's still more work to be done."

Judith Miller denies she went to jail as a "career move."

"I did not go to jail to get a large advance on my next book contract or to martyr myself. Anyone who thinks that I would spend 85 days in jail as a canny career move, or simply because I misunderstood communication, or a lack of such from my source, knows nothing about jail, nothing about me and nothing about the admittedly complicated facts in this case."

Miller is surprised at the skepticism she now faces from fellow journalists. She enjoyed blanket support from her colleagues until more facts from the case began to emerge, including her claim that she didn't recall who it was who gave her the name Valerie "Flame."

The Society of Professional Journalists gave her their First Amendment award in Las Vegas and the Las Vegas Review Journal noted the reaction she got: