On Friday night's CBS Evening News, substitute anchor Russ Mitchell read a short item relaying Bill Clinton's criticism of President Bush, with Clinton calling him "flat wrong" for opposing the Kyoto treaty in a speech at the UN conference on climate change in Montreal. In contrast to FNC, Mitchell did not add perspective to Clinton's attack by noting the Senate's history of strong opposition to the Kyoto treaty, and of Clinton's own failure to submit the treaty to the Senate out of fear of its rejection.

As recounted by Jim Angle during Friday night's "Grapevine" segment on FNC's Special Report with Brit Hume, in July of 1997, "the Senate voted 95-0 against even considering the treaty and warned President Clinton not to even send it up to them, saying the United States shouldn't sign anything that would, quote, 'result in serious harm to the economy of the United States.'" Angle added, "As a result, President Clinton never submitted the Kyoto treaty for ratification." Below is a complete transcript of Mitchell's story on the Clinton speech from the CBS Evening News, followed by Angle's version of the story from Special Report with Brit Hume, both from Friday December 9:

Terry Mattingly at the Get Religion blog is on my wavelength on the Bush's-clumsy-over-Christmas issue (as opposed to my pal Kathryn Lopez, who suggests I shouldn't be spouting silly Bush wimp nonsense.) He says Bush's joke the other day cheekily replacing Jesus with Santa as our Christmas savior is "a sign of how tone deaf the whole Bush clan is about the cultural style and lingo of evangelical Christianity. I know there are people who think that George W. is a raging theocrat, but I just don’t see it." He contrasts this year's joke with 2002's earnest Christian commentary.

I'm not saying Bush's Christianity isn't sincere, and he's not just president of Christian America. But he does seem quite spooked out of being a public personal Jesus freak like he was in the 2000 primaries.  It's easy to see how the freaked-out secular liberal media might discourage you. Perhaps it's never been the same since 2001 began the Era of We're Not At War With Islam, the Peaceful Religion. If the Christmas card flap started by the Washington Post is much ado about nothing (and I can be sympathetic to that view), it's also worth noting that it wouldn't ruin him to stick to a few statements like his Christmas message in 2002.

Duncan vows to import drugs
Jon Ward, THE WASHINGTON TIMES, November 11, 2005

Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan said yesterday that he
would defy the federal government by importing prescription drugs from
Canada, only to say later that he would not advise county employees to
break the law...

Legislation on floor in Congress to price nuclear components more competitively.

Senate minority leader Harry Reid has introduced a bill to promote equality of nuclear arms and in turn not only further world peace, but stimulate American exports.

Senator Reid who claims to have the backing of the entire democratic party (with the exception of Senator Lieberman), as well as five republicans, assured all attending his press conference of it’s passage.

"The exportation of products based on fair market value has worked well for us in the past. Consider the pharmaceutical industry and the medications which we are now able to provide our citizens at fair costs... Also, stipulations would mandate these weapons could be imported, why should our military suffer such exorbitant costs?"

The proposal will receive further discussion before recess although it’s unlikely that it will be voted upon until January.

Watching a TV talking head or reading a article, sometimes one wonders at how much a journalist is willing to sell him/herself. Apparently in the UK, the price is about $59.

That may seem an unusual thing to say but this eBay auction for a "used" editorial staff of a southwestern English newspaper is hardly something you see every day.

Apparently, the staff of the Western Daily Press is about to be the subject of a downsizing as its parent company prepares to sell the paper and several others. To get around this, the Press's editorial staff is offering interested buyers the "the right to employ every redundant member of staff to produce the newspaper of your choice."

"This could be the start of your media empire," the listing reads, later offering a "FREE guarantee of dedication to our prospective new employer" with a promise that the staff is willing to work unpaid overtime hours.

An excerpt from the online ad:

Friday morning, NBC Today show reporter Natalie Morales was covering the snow fall in Central Park. Upon completing her report, at 7:54AM EST, the camera pulled back to reveal two ice sculptures of co-hosts Matt Lauer and Katie Couric. (Ice portraits might be a more appropriate term -- the ice was carved with images of Lauer and Couric from approximately the waist up.)

Lauer remarked, "No harm intended to the fine artists, but they look a little like our tombstones."

I have just watched the orgy of press coverage on the Southwest plane that ran off the runway and into the street from Midway Airport in Chicago, last night. Despite the fact that the investigators said repeatedly that they would "get all the facts" and "review all possible causes to rule them in, or out," reporters persisted in questions demanding that the investigators guess about the cause of the accident.

When the experts could not be bullied or tricked into guessing about the cause of this accident, the press jumped into the breach of irresponsibility, with both feet. On Fox, CNN and MSNBC, there was speculation that "the plane never should have landed in that weather at that time." The same speculation sprouted up in the print media as well, per Google News. The press have even played clips or used quotes from ordinary citizens who raised this precise question.

Doesn't his latest girlfriend live in Canada?  No mention of that in CNN piece.

The Associated Press/Ipsos released results of a new poll concerning the public’s opinion of political corruption. In its report about this survey, the AP categorized the public’s negative view as being almost exclusively a Republican problem. In fact, not one Democrat is specifically named in this article, while seven Republicans are. Yet, buried very deep in one of the final paragraphs is the finding that, within the poll’s margin of error, Democrats and Republicans are considered equally ethical.

For some reason, New York Times science reporter Andrew Revkin, in Montreal to cover a climate change conference, instead gives prominent coverage to an ongoing rave of young leftwing environmental activists.

Friday's "Youths Make Spirited Case at Climate Meeting" gives a shout-out to the lefties:

"But a stream of participants hiked through the frigid night to a corner building on the far side of Chinatown that pulsed with light and thudding music. Inside, a local nonprofit group called Apathy Is Boring was giving a party. There was no apathy in attendance -- just 300 people, most in their 20's, who had come from as far away as Australia and Los Angeles to pester the 'fossils' -- the legions of gray-suited negotiators who, these young people said, were hijacking their future."

When you wonder if the national media's biggest film critics rave over movies based on their own personal politics instead of the product they're watching, you can always think of Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday. The D.C. premiere (in one art house theater) of a revival of the hard-left documentary "Winter Soldier," chronicling John Kerry and others trying to create (often falsified) accounts of American soldier atrocities in Vietnam, gives Hornaday the chance to rave over it today, calling it "extraordinary," "spellbinding," "impressive," "stunning," and even authentic as it reminds of our atrocious position in Iraq:

Recreational killing of civilians, rape, arson, torture: They did it, or saw it, all. Having been trained to see their enemies as less than human -- they were always called gooks or commies -- and having been taught to dissociate from the violence they were committing lest they be killed themselves, they simply learned not to care...

Call it 'Keffiyeh-gate.'

Was Matt Lauer wearing a Palestinian support scarf this morning?

Alright, I can already hear some folks out there chuckling at the notion.

But before you dismiss this as the product of the over-active mind of an MSM-bias hunter, consider:

So-called "Palestinian support scarves" have become items of radical fashion chic. Check out this web-site, which advertises "Palestinian support scarves," explaining:

"The traditional Palestinian headdress has become a symbol of support for the Palestinian people against the Israeli occupation. From political rallies to talk shows, supporters of the Palestinian cause have begun donning this traditional scarf as a show of solidarity." [emphasis added]

With a hat tip to the Drudge Report, in what could be an advancement of media protestations that air marshals on American Airlines flight 924 overreacted when they shot and killed distraught passenger Rigoberto Alpizar, TIME magazine reported last night that another passenger on the plane is claiming he never heard the word “bomb”:

“‘I don't think they needed to use deadly force with the guy,’ says John McAlhany, a 44-year-old construction worker from Sebastian, Fla. "He was getting off the plane." McAlhany also maintains that Alpizar never mentioned having a bomb.

How does one analyze the economy's performance without considering tax policy?

In a column posted on the afternoon of December 8 at MSNBC's web site, James C. Cooper and Kathleen Madigan of Business Week Online devote over 1,100 words to analyzing and explaining the current strong economy, and fail to cite the 2003 Bush tax cuts as a possible contributing factor. In fact, the words "tax," "Bush," and even "government," do not appear at all!

Cooper's and Madigan's explanations center around spending:

So why has the economy performed above expectations amid unexpected developments? The main explanation seems to be that, despite the Fed's desire to tighten monetary conditions, consumers and businesses, on average, still have access to cash, whether through cheap borrowing, better income and profit growth, or rising housing and stock market wealth. Accommodative financial conditions are proving to be the economy's Peyton Manning, quarterbacking the steady forward movement in demand.

It’s long been known that NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams dropped out of the George Washington University in 1979 to intern in the Carter White House’s correspondence office sorting letters. But in the 7:30 half hour of Thursday’s Today we learned that 13 years earlier, in a 1966 letter to President Lyndon Johnson, he had proclaimed his commitment to the “Democret” party. Williams came aboard the Today show to plug a National Geographic book for which he wrote an introduction, Dear Mr. President: Letters to the Oval Office from the Files of the National Archives. As viewers saw Williams’ 1966 handwritten letter to Johnson, Lauer noted how the seven-year-old Williams “signed off the letter ‘one of your young Democrets,' not Democrats." Williams quipped: “You know, I was a young sycophant is what I was. And yeah, we've done Democrets. I think that's a chewing gum product. We've looked it up. It is no political party and for a registered independent it's now very embarrassing." Lauer razzed him: "Independart, you mean." Williams replied: "Oh, very funny." (Full text of the letter follows.)

On the December 7, 2005, broadcast of MSNBC's Scarborough Country, guest Al Franken claimed that Saddam's WMD "were destroyed by President Clinton" in 1998 and asserted that "the Duelfer Report said that very thing."

The Truth? The Duelfer Report says no such thing. There's no such basis for Franken's claims.

In fact, this is what the Duelfer Report (.pdf file) said in part about President's Clinton's 1998 strikes, called Operation Desert Fox (emphasis mine):

“UNSCOM and IAEA inspectors departed Iraq just before the bombing and never returned. The Iraqis were satisfied with the outcome. They said, given a choice of sanctions with inspections or sanctions without inspections, they would prefer without." (Vol. 1, p. 11)

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 heard Laura Ingraham notice Thursday that New York Times reporter Sarah Lyall used an L-word in her story on playwright and Nobel Literature Prize winner Harold Pinter's "furious howl of outrage" against America in his Wednesday acceptance remarks. It comes in paragraph five: "The literature prize has in recent years often gone to writers with left-wing ideologies. These include the European writers José Saramago of Portugal, Günter Grass of Germany and Dario Fo of Italy." Actually, these men could all be placed on the "hard left," if Lyall wanted to pick that label. Lyall's story is the top e-mailed story of the last 24 hours, as of 10 PM Eastern. The headline is wimpy in comparison to the howling speech: "Playwright Takes A Prize and a Jab at the U.S.," it says. See if the second paragraph sounds like a little "jab" to you:

The Thursday NBC Nightly News framed the House vote, to extend dividend and capital gain tax rate reductions another two years beyond their December 31, 2008 scheduled end, through a liberal prism which assumes all the money earned belongs to the government and that measures the fairness by the dollar amount of cuts for the rich versus the poor -- a silly notion since the wealthy pay most of the taxes. If the extension is not passed by the Senate and signed by the President, tax rates would rise at the beginning of 2009.

Anchor Brian Williams set up the story: “The House passed its version of a bill that would keep tax cuts for capital gains and dividends in place through the year 2010. It is a top priority for the Bush administration, but some in Congress today said those priorities are misplaced.” Chip Reid interwove soundbites from two liberal Democrats around his observation that “it was at times a furious debate, Democrats accusing Republicans of using tax cuts to reward the rich.” With a matching graphic on screen, Reid relayed how “Democrats say” that “nearly half” of the cut, 48 percent, “will go to people making more than $500,000 a year.” Reid segued to a third Democratic soundbite: “Mississippi Democrat Gene Taylor, whose district was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, says the cuts show Republican priorities are, quote, 'screwed up.'" Reid ran two Republican soundbites as he noted how “Republicans defend the cuts as an essential part of President Bush's domestic agenda. Tax cuts for investors, they say, fuel a growing economy," but he countered that with how “a non-partisan deficit watchdog says tax cuts can hurt the economy when Congress fails to pay for them." Yes, tax cuts must be “paid for.” (Transcript follows.)

Ted Rall has struck again - this time with words instead of his little cartoons. In his Dec. 6, 2005 editorial, "We're Looking for a Few Good Refuseniks", Rall attacks the US military and veterans again. Rall credits the "unelected" President Bush for the military turning its back on its once "honorable calling". Rall then blames the US soldiers for "torturing, maiming and murdering POWs, robbing and subjecting civilians to collective punishment, dropping white phosphorus and depleted uranium bombs on civilian targets."

Pooh-poohing the "they are just following orders" excuse, Rall reminds his readers that the illegal, immoral and unjust war could not have been waged without a "compliant and complicit US military". He calls for the "men and women of our armed forces" to be "held individually accountable for the carnage". Rall continues that our "government's poorly paid contract killers" do not deserve our support for blindly following orders. So much for "we support the troops but not their mission".