MSNBC viewers are used to seeing Hardball host Chris Matthews take on Republicans from the left, but in a new twist, he'll being doing the same this weekend on NBC's Sunday drama, The West Wing. As shown on Friday's Hardball, Matthews plays himself in a scene in which the “Josh Lyman” character, the campaign manager for imaginary left-wing Democratic presidential candidate “Matt Santos” (played by Jimmy Smits), cheers on Matthews for his questions to “Arnie Vinick,” the very un-conservative Republican presidential candidate played by Alan Alda. “Lyman” exclaims, "Yeah, welcome to Hardball, Arnie!" and "Chris, baby, keep slugging!"

Following the preview, MSNBC aired a taped interview by Matthews with Alda from the West Wing set. Matthews conceded “the script was written for me,” but he that he “thought it was really smart.” Matthews applauded Hollywood's ideal GOP candidate: “You come off as kind of a Giuliani guy. You're for abortion rights, but you don't like the idea of partial birth. You're kind of a maverick Republican, you're from California. You shine your own shoes. What an interesting guy you are.” Matthews admired how “your character this last season [said] he'd studied the Bible...and you just couldn't go along with having people die because they didn't go to church or didn't honor the Sabbath, but yet slavery was okay in the Bible back in those days.” Matthews fretted: “It's a very thoughtful sort of inquiry, but do you think a guy like that could ever be elected President in this church-going country of ours?"

Indeed, as recounted in an April MRC CyberAlert item: “Hollywood's ideal Republican President, as brought to life two weeks ago by NBC's The West Wing, is 'pro-choice,' 'pro-environment,' will save the party from the 'right wing,' engineers a deal to raise the minimum wage and lectures about keeping religion out of politics.” (See full rundown below)

In one of Newsweek’s online chats, political reporter Howard Fineman is floored by the hard-left harangues the chatters are offering up. (It’s par for the course for this site, but let’s hope Fineman doesn’t think of this gang as representative of public opinion in general. It might be representative of Newsweek subscribers in general.) The headline: Fineman’s circle thinks the GOP is toast in ‘06, and a little puzzled that Newsweek is being mistaken for a Republican shill sheet :

Las Cruces, NM: Why are there not calls for Mr. Bush's resignation or impeachment?...Could there be a public referendum—an open election with no Republican-led Electoral College—by the people, for the country's future?
Howard Fineman: I've been hearing impeachment stuff for a few months or more now. I doubt that it will come to that, but the consensus here now is that the Repubs are going to get whacked next year.

September employment was little-changed despite predictions of 500,000 job losses.

     Remember all those reports filed by the mainstream media predicting doom and gloom right after Katrina devastated New Orleans? Well, the first significant piece of economic data to be released since the hurricanes hit suggests that these media prognostications – as predicted by the Free Market Project on September 6 – had no basis in fact.

     This morning, the Labor Department released employment numbers for the month of September, and they were much stronger than forecast. In fact, they were so strong that the U.S. dollar rallied against most of the world’s currencies in expectation that the Federal Reserve might raise interest rates further than many economists had hoped.

     To refresh everyone’s memory, here is a sampling of what the media were saying about the economy after Katrina first made landfall:

The Associated Press is up to its old tricks again. In its latest doom and gloom piece, “Poll: Groups Unhappy with Bush Performance,” they report that the president’s approval rating dropped to 39% in the most recent AP/Ipsos poll. Add to that today’s CBS poll that has the number at 37% and Bush supporters might have reason to squirm…except that they don’t.

As is usual, these anti-Bush organizations under-poll Republicans while over-polling Democrats. The AP survey contained only 40% Republicans versus 48% Democrats, while the CBS boys tilted the playing field an amazing 43% to 57% in favor of the Dems.

The House of Representatives narrowly passed an energy bill today which would cut some federal red tape which prevents the timely approval and subsequent construction of oil refineries. This is to address what many oil industry watchers say is a shortage of refining capacity, which, moreso than the crude oil supply, impacts heavily on gas prices at the pump. CBSNews.com and The Hill newspaper have write-ups on their respective websites. I did notice The Hill's take was more comprehensive and did mention that Democratic leaders cajoled three dissenters from the party line to vote no, whereas the CBSNews.com article seems to skew heavily towards liberal Republican dissenters who voiced concerns about relaxed environmental protections.

Additionally, while I don't have a transcript available at time of publication, a report a few minutes ago on Special Report with Brit Hume hinted that Republicans believed going into the vote that they had many more Democratic votes for the measure than they did. This might indicate that Democratic leadership strongly leaned on dissenting members.

Keith Olbermann tries to pull a 'John Stewart' [and failed] by playing a montage of President Bush saying "Osama bin Laden" ... four times during a 37 minute long speech about the War on Terror. Liberals complain Bush doesn't speak about Osama bin Laden enough, yet when Bush does they also complain. I'm telling you, he's damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.

Olbermann continues his segment, rather statement with a conspiracy theory that the Bush administration was behind the terror threat to distract the news about Karl Rove. Brad Wilmouth has more of what Olbermann said here

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Asked this afternoon on FNC's DaySide whether “good things” happening in Iraq are being overlooked by the U.S. media, Kayla Williams, an Arabic interpreter for the U.S. Army who held the rank of Sergeant and appeared on FNC to tout her new book, Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army, replied: “Absolutely.” She explained that “one of the things that sticks out most clearly in my mind would be driving down the road and we would pass schools where children were getting to go to school for the first time in a generation. They would lean out their windows of their classrooms cheering and waving to us in their little school uniforms. And you don't see the images of soldiers passing out school supplies."

National Guardsman Jason Christopher Hartley, author of Just Another Soldier: A Year on the Ground in Iraq, offered a more generous assessment of media coverage, pointing out that even if you have good news on water treatment plants, voting and schools, but in “the process of those things, three civilians get killed,” then “there's going to be a lot of focus on that” and, therefore, “there is enough horrible things happening that kind of like overshadows maybe all of the great things that might take place there." Transcripts of the exchanges follow.

Al [Gore] - just a little matter here. Did CBS perform any earnest "investigative" reporting on John Kerry or his past (we're past the fact that they did their best to protect you)? By that, I don't mean did they (Rather) ever investigate the Swift Boat folks or the Swift Boat claims about Kerry. We all know that they spent much time trying to tear that down. What I want to know, Al, is what happened to journalism here? Seem to be working fine for you folks.  The only reason these so called "odd groups", "Swift Boaters of the United States .. mechanism" (thank you Donald Sutherland for that one) have reason, or need, to exist in the first place, is because the media is only investigating one group of people - the Republicans. If the news is not going to do its job, Al, then someone has to step up to the plate, be it the mechanisms of independent groups or bloggers. And yes, freedom of speech does extend to other people as well.

A sometimes overlooked minefield for media bias in print can be the obituary page, where the obit writer's labeling of social activists, politicians, and other persons who had a notable impact on society, can betray the liberal biases of the writer. A case in point is the Washington Post obituary yesterday of Catholic theologian Monika Hellwig, a former nun and Georgetown theologian who, we learn in the lead paragraph, "defended Catholic intellectualism against a Vatican crackdown."

A pro-life pal on the Hill says more people should read black columnist Courtland Milloy in the Washington Post. He responded to the Bennett brouhaha by making the point that blacks who are doing all the aborting (and black men who aren't doing any fathering) are more of a problem than Bennett's talk, which at least focuses on the problem, as he cites data from Planned Parenthood's Alan Guttmacher Institute:  

African American women, who make up only 13 percent of the U.S. female population, accounted for 32 percent of the 1,293,000 abortions performed in the United States in 2002.

That's 413,760 abortions performed on black women in one year -- or 1,133 a day. (In the District, half of all pregnancies ended in abortion, a higher percentage than in any state.) No outcry over that because those were just disposable fetuses, right?

There's one last hurrah for the controversial, now-shelved International Freedom Center in the New York Times in this morning's "Public Lives" section story by Robin Finn.

Many family members of 9-11 victims opposed the proposed museum as a possible base for leftist sentiments (the Times editorial page said such criticism "sounds un-American," a strange accusation from a newspaper typically hypersensitive when conservatives allegedly question liberal patrtiotism).

Reporter Robin Finn's profile of Richard Tofel, president and chief operating officer of the Freedom Center, reads as distinctly sympathetic to the museum: "Short-term political correctness has, he fears, snuffed out long-term vision. Instead of a memorial site that 'stands the test of time' and offers a continuing meditation on freedom's oft-threatened lifeline, there will be a 9/11 dead zone with 9/11 in perpetual focus. Reverent, yes. Forever relevant? He suspects not."

Former vice president and presidential candidate Al Gore gave a speech at The Media Center where he claimed democracy "is in grave danger" given what has happened in the media.

"I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled 'marketplace of ideas' now functions....

"As recently stated by Dan Rather - who was, of course, forced out of his anchor job after angering the White House - television news has been 'dumbed down and tarted up.'"

Our friends at the American Thinker have found a fabulous piece about falsified Iraq war propaganda at a British website called Sir Humphrey’s. What SH has identified is a series of pictures of “insurgents” in Iraq taken by an Associated Press and Reuters photographer that clearly appear to have been posed or set up. Even better, the same posed vignettes became part of a BBC report about violence in Iraq.

The New York Daily News reports that Andrew Heyward, CBS News president during the network's scandal over bogus documents meant to damage Bush, may be on the way out. His contract is up at the end of the year, and many have interpreted the words of CBS Chairman Les Moonves to mean Heyward is on the rocks.

Moonves was quoted in The New York Times Magazine as saying, "We have to break the mold in news," "I want to bomb the whole building" and that Heyward might not be able to "lead a revolution."

Others are speculating that another factor is the fallout from the soon-to-be-released book by fired 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes.

Also a possible factor, I'm told, is the expected fallout from fired producer Mary Mapes' memoir when it's published Nov. 8 and serialized in Vanity Fair. I hear that the book will cast Heyward unfavorably in the George Bush-National Guard controversy that forced Dan Rather from the anchor's chair.

Andrew Heyward has lasted for a comparatively long time as president of the news division. So long, in fact, that according to his official biography, his tenure "is the second-longest of any president in the 47-year history of CBS News." Dan Rather was known for forcing out presidents he didn't like, and Heyward demonstrated an ability to soothe the anchorman's ego.