CNN on Tuesday afternoon gave credibility to the ruminations from a few hardcore leftists that President Bush should be impeached over authorizing, without prior court approval, eavesdropping on people within U.S. borders communicating with those abroad who have ties to al-Qaeda. Both Jack Cafferty and anchor Wolf Blitzer raised the subject during the 4pm EST hour of The Situation Room. Cafferty's question of the hour: “Do you think it's an impeachable offense for the President to authorize domestic spying without a warrant?” He set that up by insisting that “if you listen carefully, you can hear the word impeachment.” He asserted that “two congressional Democrats are using it, and they're not the only ones,” referring to how “Senator Barbara Boxer sent a letter to legal experts yesterday asking if they think the President's wiretapping of phone calls without a warrant is a quote, ‘impeachable offense,' unquote.” Cafferty cited the claims of John Dean and touted how Newsweek's Jonathan Alter “says that similar abuse of power was part of the impeachment charge brought against Richard Nixon in 1974.” (Tom Johnson filed a NewsBusters item on Alter's online rant.)

Sandwiched between Cafferty's question and his reading of e-mail replies, Blitzer set up a live interview with Boxer on Capitol Hill: “Some Democrats now are raising the possibility that Mr. Bush's authorization of the plan may be an actual impeachable offense. Joining us now, one of the staunchest critics, Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer of California. Precisely, Senator Boxer, where do you stand on this very sensitive issue of impeachment?" Blitzer did, however, soon move on to challenging Democratic spin on the “domestic spying” matter. (Transcripts follow.)

Chris Matthews might be off tonight, but with Andrea Mitchell sitting in, the hysterical anti-Bush beat goes on at Hardball.

Mitchell interviewed a panel in which far-left Jonathan Alter was 'balanced' by the politically-androgynous David Gergen.

When Alter surmised that the impeachment of President Bush is a real possibility in light of the NSA surveillance matter, Mitchell, rather than bursting into laughter, asked Gergen with a straight face:

"Are we headed toward a constitutional crisis?"

Gergen didn't seem to think so, but, ever the suck-up, later bent over backwards to congratulate Alter on his "excellent" column in Newsweek.

On Tuesday morning, the network morning shows all began with full stories on the New York City transit strike (no doubt involving dozens of struggling network employees). As I remarked today to Mark Finkelstein on his strike blog post, the New York-based media has an annoying tendency to elevate itself into the center of the news universe on local issues. (Put  the same event in San Francisco or Seattle, and the national media would barely whisper.) And now, an example: merely a few weeks ago, at Halloween time, Philadelphia also had a transit strike. As Rich Noyes pointed out to me, it drew an 800-word story in the November 1 New York Times headlined "400,000 Hit by Philadelphia Transit Strike." Major morning show hubbub? Of course not.

Editor and Puiblisher story about the Times Spy article:

But while most urged the paper to better explain what went into the decision-making process, others praised the Times' journalistic effort and stressed that the onus should be on what the Bush administration is doing, not the paper.

...Some noted a weariness over the paper continuing to be hammered for its actions, while others were angry that people were ignoring the fact that the paper broke a major story and continued to break others.

Others say that the powerful journalism underlying this latest controversy should be the issue, not the related elements.

Dan Rather, September 9, 2004:

"Today, on the Internet and elsewhere, some people including many who are partisan political operatives, concentrated not on the key questions of the overall story but on the documents that were part of the support of the story."

Gee, don't you wish it was the 80s again. Back in the good old days when the public didn't have a voice to ask questions and just followed mainstream media stories blindly.

There were only two subjects that concerned the media during President Bush’s December 19th news conference: Bad news on Iraq and domestic spying. Problems in Iraq accounted for six questions, while there were seven on domestic spying. (Note: Questions were counted based on their topic. Follow-ups on the same subject were not counted as separate questions.)

The assembled members of the press seemed relatively uninterested in the successful Iraqi elections. In fact, there were no questions specifically about the elections or about the improving economy.

Hot topic: NYT's delaying of domestic spying report.

The year 2005 is ending as it began, with another successful election in Iraq and a liberal media still flapping around trying to find other controversies to submerge it. It does not matter to them that a Gallup poll found that 74 percent of Americans express confidence in their military, but only 28 percent express confidence in their newspapers or TV news outlets. The “mainstream” media excels in excoriating the performance of nearly everyone else, but acts as if nothing they do should be held up as ineffective, inaccurate, or just plain absurd.

That’s why the Media Research Center and a panel of more than 50 judges have compiled an annual “Best Notable Quotables,” a collection of the media’s greatest stinkers in the past 12 months. The utterances speak volumes about our supposedly ideologically detached press corps.

Not long after he was elected in 1980, President Reagan was confronted by a militant public employees union that put the nation's commercial air travel in jeopardy by striking.

Reagan responded by giving the striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) 48 hours to return to work or be fired. When the smoke cleared two days later, more than 11,000 of the striker were handed pink slips.

Go here for the History Channel's audio clip of Reagan delivering his ultimatum to PATCo. Go here for a detailed history of a short-lived strike that provided Reagan with an opportunity to demonstrate to all, including the Soviets, that he meant business.

Dear journalists of the New York Times,

Perhaps you'd like to take a few moments to gather yourselves and figure out which of your stories are correct and which stories are politically motivated fabrications.

COURT SAYS U.S. SPY AGENCY CAN TAP OVERSEAS MESSAGES

By DAVID BURNHAM, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (NYT) 1051 words Published: November 7, 1982

A Federal appeals court has ruled that the National Security Agency may lawfully intercept messages between United States citizens and people overseas, even if there is no cause to believe the Americans are foreign agents, and then provide summaries of these messages to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Because the National Security Agency is among the largest and most secretive intelligence agencies and because millions of electronic messages enter and leave the United States each day, lawyers familiar with the intelligence agency consider the decision to mark a significant increase in the legal authority of the Government to keep track of its citizens.

As one might have suspected, ABC's Good Morning America did not grant nearly the same amount of coverage to President Bush's improving poll numbers in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, as they did to his declining ratings over a month ago when the program unfavorably compared Bush's low numbers to LBJ's.

The new ABC poll, which shows Bush's approval rating rising eight points to 47 percent, was hidden in a two-sentence story read by news anchor Robin Roberts shortly before 7:15 this morning. In contrast, an earlier ABC News poll showing Bush's approval rating down to 39 percent merited a full report from national correspondent Claire Shipman on November 4th. In that report, Shipman declared that while the 39 percent rating was "grim," the noteworthy story from the poll was "the White House hemorrhaging on those issues of trust and credibility." In the November 2nd poll, Shipman reported that "just 40 percent call President Bush honest and trustworthy," which she deemed "extremely bad news." Did GMA note this morning that Bush's ratings on the issues of trust and credibility had rebounded to 49 percent? Of course not.

This morning on CBS's "The Early Show," in the 7:00 half hour, Rene Syler interviewed their regular political analyst Craig Crawford about whether the President broke the law in authorizing eavesdropping without a warrant, and the President’s poll numbers. This segment was one sided and negative towards the President.

Syler opened her segment saying "In a news conference Monday, President Bush vehemently defended spying on Americans to protect them against terrorism. The President said he broke no law authorizing the secret program and said the practice would continue despite concerns that it infringes on civil liberties." In introducing a story in this way, it would be fair to assume the bulk of the interview would be on this subject. Wrong. The interview ranged from the foreign surveillance issue, to finding the negatives in improving poll numbers for the President, to an assertion by Craig Crawford, in answering a question about what this is all about and what these issues mean, that what’s at stake here is not only control of Congress, but the Constitution.

It may not be as inane as Anna Quindlen's lumping of Nazis with the religious right, but Jonathan Alter's web-only piece about President Bush and the NSA "scandal" nonetheless contains some of this week's worst overstatements from a Newsweek columnist. (Hat tips to Kathryn Lopez and Jonah Goldberg in the Corner.)

Excerpts from Alter on what he calls "Snoopgate" (fo' shizzle!):

President Bush...made it seem as if those who didn’t agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda—but it will not work. We’re seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War...

CBS’ Thalia Assuras did a piece for “The Early Show” this morning concerning the domestic spying controversy (video link to follow). In it, she exclusively presented the views of Democrat members of Congress as well as a “legal scholar” who believes this program is illegal. Yet, she chose to not question any Republicans concerning this issue, or bring on a constitutional attorney with an opposing view. As a result, she presented a segment wherein Democrats and detractors of this program were seen countering each videotaped position the president made during his press conference yesterday. This gave the appearance that the president is on an island with nobody in Congress or in the legal community willing to defend this newly revealed covert program.

Dennis Anderson writes in Editor and Publisher that most reporters are viewed negatively by US troops in Iraq.

Not that reporters are particularly trusted anyway, but as a class of people having a high and visible participation in the war in Iraq, dozens of GIs and Marines I've spoken with allow as how they just don't trust reporters.

There was Staff Sgt. Cory Blackwell of Lancaster, recently headed for his second tour in Iraq with the 4th Infantry Division, nicknamed the "Ivy Division" and "The Regulars."

Blackwell, 27, is a professional soldier. He holds the customary glum view of professional news gatherers in the Iraq war.

"We tried to stay away from them," he said. "You had the feeling that whatever you might be doing, they wanted to catch you at something on tape. That would make their career."

In an interview conducted Sunday in Iraq with Vice President Dick Cheney, and shown on Monday’s Nightline, Terry Moran decided “to put this personally” and condescendingly proposed to Cheney that the VP’s refusal to refute prisoner-abuse allegations and “surveilling Americans” by the Bush administration, leaves Moran ashamed of a country he would not want to “pass on” to his daughters. Moran asked: “I'd like to put this personally, if I can. You're a grandfather. I'm a father. When we look at those girls and we think that the country we're about to pass to them is a country where the Vice President can't say whether or not we have secret prisons around the world, whether water-boarding and mock executions is consistent with our values, and a country where the government is surveilling Americans without the warrant of a court -- is that the country we want to pass on to them?" Moran followed up by declaring that thanks to administration policies, “it's not the America we grew up in" and he countered Cheney’s defense of tough anti-terror policies: "Even if it's changing who we are?"

Moran’s contention, that Cheney and Bush are changing America for the worse, came during a series of questions about prisoner treatment which Moran fired at Cheney as the two sat outside on stools at a military base in Iraq. Moran demanded: "Should American interrogators be staging mock executions, water-boarding prisoners?” Cheney answered: "I'm not getting into specifics. You're getting into questions about sources and methods and I don't talk about that, Terry." In mock indignation, Moran retorted, before Cheney cut him off: "As Vice President of the United States you can't tell the American people whether or not-" Moran also pursued questions about whether “the United States maintain secret prisons around the world?" And: “Does the International Red Cross have access to everyone in U.S. custody, as we are obliged?" (Transcript follows.)

Video excerpt: Real or Windows Media, plus MP3 audio

Let's get one thing straight: the the Transport Workers Union strike in NYC is illegal.  Even the New York Times, in this article, had to acknowledge that stubborn fact:

"The state's Taylor Law bars strikes by public employees and carries penalties of two days' pay for each day on strike, but the transit union decided it was worth risking the substantial fines to continue the fight for what it regards as an acceptable contract."

In addition to the tremendous inconvenience the strike inflicts on the seven-million largely working-class people who use the transit system daily, the economic loss has been estimated at as much as $400 million per day.  

The December 15 disclosure by The New York Times that President Bush had authorized eavesdropping on suspected terrorist connected telephone conversations inside the United States has developed into a national debate about the legality of such an intelligence operation.

There have been allegations of overstepping presidential authority and even criminal action being taken by the administration. Seldom is it mentioned that Congress was given a detailed briefing on the special program.

Even the New York Times hid that element of the story, placing one it in the 22nd paragraph of its very lengthy article, writing, “After the special program started, Congressional leaders from both political parties were brought to Vice President Dick Cheney’s office in the White House. The leaders, who included the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate and House intelligence committees, learned of the N.S.A. operation from Mr. Cheney, General Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force, who was then the agency’s director and is now the principal deputy director of national intelligence, and George J. Tenet, then director of the C.I.A., officials said.”

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