Last Friday, the National Security Archive, a research institute and library located at George Washington University that collects and publishes declassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, celebrated its 20th anniversary. Former PBS host Bill Moyers gave a speech to the attendees that evening in which, as has been typical for him, he didn’t have very nice things to say about the Bush administration. The full text is too long to do justice to the breadth of Moyers’ antagonism towards this White House, but some of the lowlights are: 

• “It has to be said: there has been nothing in our time like the Bush Administration's obsession with secrecy.”
• “No wonder the public knows so little about how this administration has deliberately ignored or distorted reputable scientific research to advance its political agenda and the wishes of its corporate patrons. I'm talking about the suppression of that EPA report questioning aspects of the White House Clear Skies Act; research censorship at the departments of health and human services, interior and agriculture; the elimination of qualified scientists from advisory committees on kids and lead poisoning, reproductive health, and drug abuse; the distortion of scientific knowledge on emergency contraception; the manipulation of the scientific process involving the Endangered Species Act; and the internal sabotage of government scientific reports on global warming.”
  
  
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Today's Chicago Tribune story on a group protesting Republican Congressional efforts to curb social spending identifies Rev. Jim Wallis as a "Christian activist."  The article reports he is a leader of "a Christian social justice group" and speaks of "Wallis and other progressive religious leaders." 

It would be more accurate to describe Wallis as an activist liberal Democrat.  He's long been a force within the Democratic party and, as noted in the Weekly Standard, has a " 35-year history of effectively pacifist, anti-capitalist, pro-socialist positions. With the exception of abortion and family values, the political issues that animate him today are the direct descendants of those that launched him into a career of activism back in his student days, when he and his friends were being tear-gassed protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam, in the heyday of the New Left."

Senate democrats are threatening GOP priorities on anti-terrorism, deficit reduction, oil drilling in Alaska, Alito appointment, Patriot Act... Prior to setting foot on foreign soil, the agreement was a need to protect against WMD, both existing and future development. Once there, 9/11 was quickly forgotten as was the threat of both WMD and terrorism.

Saddam's WMD Moved to Syria, An Israeli Says - NY SUN

Saddam Hussein moved his chemical weapons to Syria six weeks before the war started, Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom says.

The assertion comes as President Bush said yesterday that much of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was incorrect.

The Israeli officer, Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, asserted that Saddam spirited his chemical weapons out of the country on the eve of the war. "He transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria," General Yaalon told The New York Sun over dinner in New York on Tuesday night. "No one went to Syria to find it."...

Remember all those media claims that race was a factor in the federal government’s “slow” response to Hurricane Katrina? Well, according to information released by the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, whites died as a result of the devastating hurricane at the highest rate of any race living in New Orleans when measured as a function of population percentages.

As reported by Nathan Burchfiel of Cybercast News Service (hat tip to Drudge):

“According to the 2000 census, whites make up 28 percent of the city's population, but the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals indicates that whites constitute 36.6 percent of the storm's fatalities in the city.

CNN's Anderson Cooper reported that he went on a patrol with troops in Baquba, north of Baghdad. After it was all over, one soldier said to him, "Sorry it wasn't more exciting for you."

Cooper said that he "told him I wasn't looking for excitement, and in fact, I was glad the day unfolded as it did."

Why would a serviceman expect that a reporter wanted excitement? After seeing enough media reports, he assumes this reporter wants more of the same, more violence to serve as grist for the mill.

Cooper says he is always approached by soldiers complaining about media coverage.

"Every soldier I talked to today said the media hasn't done a good job of telling the full story from Iraq. It's a complaint I've heard before, and certainly understand. I do think television tends to focus on the bombs and the bullets, the most dramatic headlines. So much of what happens here never makes the nightly news."

MRC's Brent Baker noted in today's CyberAlert about Brian Williams's latest instance of describing a spending increase as a "cut" in spending. I emailed Williams's comments to the Heritage Foundation's lead budget analyst, Brian Riedl. Riedl's reply:

The reconciliation bill would reduce the 5-year growth of entitlement spending from 39% down to 38%. Spending would still increase.

Riedl then dropped a link which took me to a WebMemo from November. What follows should be required reading for any reporter, but broadcast ones especially, to read before covering spending bills on Capitol Hill. Portions in bold are my emphasis:

Ok so according to this link: http://www.newsday.c...

King Kong is racist.

But I found out an interesting little fact. The guy wrote the whole thing for effect. I posted this on my blog: http://damagedintran...

I got some nice comments on digg: http://digg.com/movi...

And some liberal ones. So if you are familiar with digg go ahead and digg it and get it to the front page.

So I email this guy..and I get a little angry and I say that the liberal's have a right to their gay cowboy movie but no one can enjoy a movie with tribes people in it. I also mention the Passion and how no one has respect for any movies the other side (right) likes.

Here is the reply I get:

Two weeks of vociferous criticism from homosexual activists not only succeeded in backing Ford away from its recent decision to restrict advertising some of its products from gay publications but forced the automaker into expanding such marketing efforts and all but begging for forgiveness for being politically incorrect on the issue.

The cave could not be more complete, according to this description in The New York Times:

"Ford's announcement, which gay advocates immediately praised, also included other steps to broaden the automaker's relations with gay consumers and repair damage from the initial decision to stop advertising.

Washington Post Associate Editor Robert G. Kaiser conducted an online chat with readers. A questioner from Toledo remarked that it is "amazing to see the variety of locales people are writing from, and the diversity of opinion in a relatively liberal newspaper."

Kaiser vigorously denied the paper was liberal.

This is NOT a 'relatively liberal newspaper.' This is the Web site of the Washington Post, where all shades of opinion are welcome all the time, as they are on The Post's op-ed page (heavily populated by conservative commentators, among others) and our Sunday Outlook section.

Kaiser offered no defense of the A section, the place that has many "shades of opinion" all from the left.

Margaret Friedenauer is a reporter for the Fairbanks News-Miner, and is currently embedded with the 172nd Stryker Brigade in Iraq. In addition to whatever reporting she's producing for the newspaper, she's also blogging her experiences. Yesterday, she put up an interesting entry on "The view from on the ground" which was enlightening in ways she intended, and also in ways that I don't think she intended. It dealt with the situation on the ground in Iraq, and the comment she had was that "everything I thought I knew was wrong."

As reported by Brent Baker in today's CyberAlert, on December 13th, during the second hour of Anderson Cooper 360, CNN highlighted Cindy Sheehan's trip to England, where she traveled to spread her anti-war message. CNN correspondent Paula Newton championed Sheehan as "America's most famous bereaved mom" who "isn't challenged on her opinions about President Bush here in Britain." Newton's piece also featured a British woman who "says she will stop Tony Blair a la Sheehan." The woman, of Stop the War-U.K., declared that President Bush is "nothing but a warmonger."

The transcript from today's CyberAlert continues below.

Forget about how cold it is outside — according to ABC, there’s no longer a debate about global warming: manmade greenhouse emissions have put Earth “under non-stop stress from the heat,” with deaths from global warming “conservatively” estimated at 150,000 per year.

In a stupendously one-sided story that aired on Thursday’s “Good Morning America” — a longer version of which will be shown tonight on “Nightline” — reporter Bill Blakemore announced that unless “serious greenhouse gas emission cuts” are underway within the next ten years “the Earth will start to experience temperatures higher than it has known in half a million years.”

Such cuts in emissions, however, would cause massive damage to the world economy. Financial columnist James Glassman recently highlighted a study from the International Council for Capital Formation which tried to assess the impact on just four European countries – Germany, Spain, the UK and Italy:

Washington Post TV writer Tom Shales, fresh from defending TV news no matter how wrong it is (as in Mary Mapes), is fussing this morning that Terry Moran had the unmitigated gall to question the TV coverage of Iraq as less than three-dimensional:

Moran sounded similarly specious Monday night with a report he taped in Iraq. "It's not the place you see on TV every night," he said. "Much of the media coverage here is one-dimensional." So then, what? We should put on our 3-D glasses? "Nightline" was going to show all the bad boys of broadcasting how to do it? Moran's report wasn't revolutionary and didn't justify his lecturing others in the TV news business.

Continuing a mini-trend at the New York Times of downplaying Holocaust denial among Middle East leaders, Thursday morning brings this headline to a Page 5 story regarding the latest anti-Semitic rantings of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: "Iran's President Clarifies His Stand on Holocaust: It's a European Myth" The Iranian leader called the Holocaust a "myth" used by Europeans to create a Jewish state.

In contrast, the Washington Post gives the outburst much stronger play, with a story from one of its own foreign service reporters, not just using AP copy as the Times does. The Post also places the story on the front page, accompanied by a solid headline: "Iran's President Calls Holocaust 'Myth' in Latest Assault on Jews."

While sugarplum fairies dance in other heads, Matt Lauer dreams of US withdrawal from Iraq and envisions democracy in Iraq as having negative consequences for the United States.

As reported here, Lauer set the stage earlier this week, couching Today's coverage of the then-impending Iraqi elections largely in terms of their potential for troop withdrawal.

Matt was back at it again this morning. At the top of the show, Lauer teased election coverage this way: "If the various factions there can work together it could make it easier for our administration to get US troops out."

Lauer interviewed Senators Lindsey Graham and Joe Biden, both in Iraq as election observers.

New York magazine's Meryl Gordon captured the end of Ted Koppel's arrogant reign over "Nightline," and Koppel grew especially cranky (he "drips with contempt") when asked about the Bush administration's public relations on the war in Iraq.

Twice in the past two years, Koppel has raised the ire of the Bush administration with segments called "The Fallen," in which he read aloud the names of the soldiers who had died in Iraq. "I didn’t do it to piss them off," he says. "It was to honor the people who have lost their lives, to remind us that a tiny fragment of the population is bearing a disproportionate burden." His voice drips with contempt as he talks about the Bush team’s spin tactics on Iraq. "There’s this sense, ‘Don’t worry your pretty little heads about what’s going on over there—just do what we tell you, don’t question it. We know what we’re doing, leave the grown-ups alone.’ It’s not smart, it’s not healthy, and in the final analysis, it doesn’t work."

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