ABC’s Jessica Yellin, live on Wednesday’s Good Morning America, exploited First Lady Laura Bush’s tour of White House Christmas displays, cards and decorations to hit her with an emotion-laden inquiry about regretting the war in Iraq: “Have you ever met with a mother whose own loss has made you question, even for a moment, whether the U.S. should be in Iraq?" Mrs. Bush replied with how “every loss is too many” and said that “I want to encourage Americans to reach out to our military families who suffer the most.” Yellin followed up by continuing her agenda: "And do you hope the U.S. will be out of Iraq by this time next year?" Yellin posed her serious questions about three minutes into Mrs. Bush’s descriptions of the cards and ornaments in the East Room. (Transcript follows.)

Don't miss my latest writing for the Free Market Project: Media claims about a “housing bubble” are nothing new. Since before the 9/11 terror attacks, the media have been calling the housing market a “bubble” while predicting an imminent, devastating decline. Not only have they been wrong in forecasting such a top, they have thoroughly mischaracterized what an investment bubble is. Now that the market for homes has finally slowed a bit, the media are declaring the bubble has burst.

• A Bubble?: Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has denied the existence of a national housing bubble for several years, but the media have used the term repeatedly.
• Strong Gains: The increase in real estate values the past five years has not resembled the rapid rise typically seen in a bubble. In 2000, the national median existing-home value was $139,000. This grew to $215,900 by the third quarter of 2005 – a 55-percent nominal increase but a 34-percent inflation-adjusted gain.
• Home Sales Still Going Up: New home sales jumped another 13 percent in October. While sales of existing homes were down 2.7 percent from September, the median national price rose to $218,000, a 16.6 percent increase since October 2004.

James Taranto begins his Opinion Journal piece today by reporting that the TV show "Journal Editorial Report" will not be discontinued after it leaves PBS. It will be moving to the Fox News Channel beginning in January. Its last PBS airing is December 2.  This will no doubt annoy liberals who can't stand the Wall Street Journal's editorialists, but it's quite imaginable that those who like their PBS to be a complete liberal playground will say the Paul Gigot show is moving to its more natural home. It's good news that this smart show continues.

Now for the bad news: AdAge.com reports that U.S. News & World Report is dumping the "On Society" column by John Leo. (He will blog for the U.S. News website.) Your best Ken-Tomlinson-intrigue imitations are invited: is U.S. News taking Leo out of the magazine because he's been so strong in recent years at assailing liberal media bias and inaccuracy?

It will be liberal night tonight (Wednesday) on the late night shows, according to the guests listed on their Web sites: New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is scheduled to appear on CBS's Late Show with David Letterman, DNC Chairman Howard Dean is set to appear on NBC's Tonight Show with Jay Leno, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is listed as the guest for Comedy Central's Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Comedy Central's The Colbert Report will feature Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Editor of the far-left The Nation magazine. The slightly less liberal, but still liberal Detroit columnist/talk radio host Mitch Albom is scheduled to come aboard CBS’s Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.

Plus, on Thursday night actor Alan Alda is slotted to appear on NBC’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien.

Dan Froomkin writes a White House column weekdays for the Washington Post’s web site. In case you're not familiar with his work, let's just say that in terms of bias and tone, he's sort of an online version of Dana Milbank. (And, in case you're not familiar with Milbank: Lucky you.) 

Here's the lead to Froomkin's Tuesday column: 

On page A-8 of today's Washington Post, Report on FBI Tool Disputed by Christopher Lee covers the FBI's rebuttal to a front-page story that ran Nov. 6, The FBI's Secret Scrutiny by Barton Gellman. Lee's lede today:

The Justice Department has criticized as misleading and inaccurate a Washington Post report about the FBI's expanded power to collect the private records of ordinary Americans while conducting terrorism and espionage investigations.

The Nov. 6 article detailed the dramatic increase in the use of "national security letters," a three-decade-old investigative tool that was given new life with the passage of the USA Patriot Act in 2001. The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, a hundredfold increase over historic norms, the article said....

"The experts have spoken, this hurricane season will go down as the biggest, baddest, deadliest, and costliest of all time," Jim Acosta ominously intoned opening his report on the November 29 edition of the CBS Evening News. Yet while the loss of life and livelihood from Hurricane Katrina was horrific, the loss of life in the 2005 season was not record-breaking.

Over 20,000 died in the Great Hurricane of 1780, Hurricane Mitch in 1998 killed over 11,000* in Central America, and the Galveston hurricane of 1900 killed 8,000. [see link]

See my article with more detail at FreeMarketProject.com

* NOAA's Chris Vaccaro gave me a more conservative 9,000-total death toll figure over the phone, which I included in my article. At any rate, the death toll from these hurricanes far surpasses the death toll for Katrina.

It’s easy to get sentimental when long-standing TV personalities bow out of the shows that made them a household name, whether it’s an entertainer like Johnny Carson or a news man like Ted Koppel, who just pulled the curtain on a 26-year career as host of ABC’s “Nightline.” His timing seemed perfect: after the retirement of Tom Brokaw, the self-immolation of Dan Rather, and the cancer death of Peter Jennings, the loss of Koppel’s nightly presence drew on fond memories of the so-called glory days of TV news. An era is finished.

Koppel is especially beloved in journalism circles as a symbol and a spokesman for substance in TV news. Saying goodbye on “Good Morning America,” Koppel declared, “I think the mission statement would be that our responsibility is to tell people what's important, not to stick our finger up in the air and test the winds to see what the public thinks is, is important.”

To use a favorite phrase of ESPN's Dan Patrick, Bill O'Reilly was "en fuego" in his Today show appearance this morning

The main subject was President Bush's scheduled speech today to discuss his Iraq strategy.

Katie Couric described the impending speech as "very important" and asked O'Reilly what people need to hear from it.

O'Reilly got matters off to an unexpected start by declaring: "I'm not even going to listen to the speech. Maybe that shocks people, but [the speech] really doesn't mean anything."

You've come to Newsbusters because you want to see a concrete example of liberal bias. Who delivers that better than the New York Times?

This is reality. We're 4 years out from the worst attack since Pearl Harbor, post dot-com crash, we've had more hurricanes than any year since some old man first started keeping track, and we just about had a major U.S. city -- an economically important city -- wiped off the face of the planet. The hurricanes took out oil infrastructure at a time when we can ill afford a disruption in supply.

And yet the economy is, quite simply, running hot.

That would be great, except for the fact that a religious conservative is sitting in the White House. Will the powerful New York Times stand for this? After all, there has been so much invested in making Bush look like a religious idiot.

The article starts by calling out the obvious.

By most measures, the economy appears to be doing just fine. No, scratch that, it appears to be booming.

Now without reading ahead, pause here. What do you think the next word in this article is going to be?

Catching up on an item from a couple of weeks ago, on Monday November 14, MSNBC's Countdown host Keith Olbermann posted on his Bloggermann Web site a blog entry that, while actually praising one show from Fox News Channel, also charged that FNC generally is a "network devoted to reinforcing prejudices and stereotypes."

The topic of Olbermann's posting was "Ten television shows worth watching." FNC's Fox News Watch made number seven on Olbermann's list, in spite of Olbermann's well-known low opinion of the rest of FNC's lineup. Olbermann also mocked FNC's motto by quipping that Fox News Watch was created by Roger Ailes "to fulfill some legal requirement that his network actually be at least .0005% 'fair and balanced.'"

The complete transcript of Olbermann's November 14 blog posting can be found at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/ while the transcript for the section regarding FNC appears below:

Gaggle is a daily comic strip about the Washington press corps and Larry the press secretary. Larry deals with the shenanigans of reporters who couldn't imagine anyone voting for a Republican.

Click here for instructions on running Gaggle daily on your own site. There's also an archive of previous toons available here.

I just finished watching the latest installment of "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" and here's my report. The whole disgusting story.

It was the most pathetic anti-government episode I think I have ever seen. Let me set the story up just a bit then I'll get into the nitty gritty. The story is about 3 young girls that disappeared from New Orleans and are being held captive by a child rapist. Then somehow they all show up in NY City and the story goes on from there.

My goal here is not to tell you what happened in this 60 minute program, instead let me tell you what the liberal writers were able to inject in a mere 40 minutes (20 minutes of commercials).

They used Katrina as the backdrop to an assortment of liberal rants. First, they kept calling these people from New Orleans "refugees". Then they got in how badly the Government handled security at a Federal CDC site (no mention of local failures). How federal convicts records were lost in the hurricane. How Anthrax was left unguarded. How infected animals are running loose because of experimentation done by the Government. How the feds scammed the NYC police. How Big Brother was watching our every move. How the liberal media saves the day. How the media is so honorable that they fall on a sword (go to jail) because they won't give up a source. How the government bombs countries back into the Stoneage. And all this while trying to save the lives of 3 young girls.

In an interview taped for ABC’s Barbara Walters Presents: The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2005, rapper Kanye West, who in September during NBC's Concert for Hurricane Relief had declared that “George Bush doesn't care about black people,” told Walters that he stands by the allegation. In the ABC special aired Tuesday night, in which Walters featured West as the second of her ten “most fascinating people,” she played the clip and then asked him: “Do you think what you said then you still feel today?" West responded: "I spoke from, I spoke from my heart, and I stand by my statement." (Brief transcript follows.)

Re.: MSNBC  Web Article: "Vatican affirms ban on gay priests". Quote: "Experts on sex offenders say homosexuals are no more likely than heterosexuals to molest young people, but that did not stifle questions about gay seminarians." Who are these so-called "experts"? "Experts" claim that gays make up no more than 3-10% of the population, yet account for 30% of pedophile attacks on boys. Do the math!@!

Reference:

 "Pedophilia More Common Among 'Gays"", World Net Daily, 4/29/02, http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?article_id=27431

 "Gay Priests Cited in Abuse of Boys", The Washington Times", 2/28/04, http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040227-111236-5901r.htm