In an October 20, 2005 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times on the issue of abortion and Roe vs. Wade, columnist Dahlia Lithwick claimed (emphasis mine),

Roe is quickly becoming legally irrelevant. The number of abortions in the United States has fallen dramatically in the last two decades ...

"Fallen dramatically"? Let's look at the same numbers (link) that Planned Parenthood sees, per the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI). In 1985, there were a reported 1,588,600 abortions. In June of this year, AGI reported that there were about 1,290,000 abortions in 2002 (the most recent data available (pdf file)). That is a difference of approximately 18.8%. Is that really "dramatic"?

On this morning’s “The Chris Matthews Show,” Matthews played a videotape of British broadcaster David Frost interviewing former president Richard M. Nixon. In that interview, Nixon spoke about anti-war activist Daniel Ellsberg. After the clip, Matthews suggested that the “outing” of CIA agent Valerie Plame was the current White House’s attempt to eliminate dissention to the Iraq war:

Chris: Sometimes you do things on your own and the boss afterwards says things like “Is this one of yours?” Or sometimes you know you're supposed to do something, and you do it. Could this be the story -- the pattern we see here of how a White House gets into trouble? Of course, the reigning champion of White House scandals was Watergate. Here is Richard Nixon telling David Frost years later that the scheme to trash anti-war activist Daniel Ellsberg was really to discredit all opponents of the Vietnam War.

Many Americans that are truly concerned about bias in the media fear that what is reported by the press will immediately be accepted as fact by the citizenry regardless of accuracy. This morning on ABC’s “This Week,” Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean cited the opinion of an ABC News correspondent, Martha Raddatz, as evidence that rampant fraud occurred in the recent Iraq referendum (video link of Raddatz's comments to follow):

Dean: Secondly, on "Washington Week" this week Martha Raddatz from ABC said she had recorded on tape I believe that she saw a gentleman come in, fill out seven ballots, yes, yes, yes and stick them all in the box. If that's what we're fighting for in Iraq, we don't belong there.

When, on this weekend’s Inside Washington, host Gordon Peterson recited a list of issues Democratic congressional candidates could use against Republican incumbents -- “you've got Iraq, you've got Harriet Miers, you've got Katrina, you got Tom DeLay being indicted. You've got a lot of ammunition” -- NPR reporter Nina Totenberg jumped in to shout: "And you've got the tax cuts!" She soon offered her recommendation on how Democrats should campaign: “One of the other things is you say, 'look, we're in this mess fiscally and they want to increase the tax cuts for the most wealthy people in the United States,’ the top one half of one percent would get a hundred thousand dollars, people who make over a million dollars or something like that." (Still shot of Totenberg and John Harwood.)

Totenberg’s been on a crusade. On the same show last month, as detailed in a September 24 NewsBusters posting, she dismissed the idea of cancelling $24 billion of transportation bill earmarks, to pay for Katrina recovery, as small change and suggested that “if you canceled the tax cuts, you'd get $225 billion." A week earlier, she asserted that President Bush’s New Orleans speech “would have been a great opportunity to say, 'look, I'm for tax cuts, but we need a Katrina tax, we need to really pay, to do this and to pay for it.’" And two weeks before that, as recounted with a video clip on NewsBusters, Totenberg blamed tax cuts for the levee breakage: “For years, we have cut our taxes, cut our taxes and let the infrastructure throughout the country go and this is just the first of a number of other crumbling things that are going to happen to us.”