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

There will be a new Gaggle strip, fully colored, every day. Stay tuned for a list of characters.

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Washington Post foreign affairs reporter Robin Wright has no sense of humor -- at least when it comes to a conservative daring to make any kind of joke related to women in the workplace, even a little girl. Saying “I don't know whether they were quips,” on Friday's Washington Week on PBS, Wright proceeded to act offended as she made clear that “as a woman” she was “struck” by how, in the Reagan-era memos written by Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, he “questioned whether it was a good thing for a woman to go back later in life to law school” and he dubbed, as a “little huckster,” a Girl Scout who wanted to sell some cookies” to President Reagan. The humor-challenged Wright arrogantly judged: "I have to say, you know, one case of this is one thing, but to see this repeatedly was really striking, as a woman, to me."

Host Alan Murray pointed out that Roberts' asides were “jokes” and, as noted in an earlier NewsBusters posting by me about the Post's deliberate distortion of his quip in a story headlined “Roberts Resisted Women's Rights,” his remark about homemakers becoming lawyers was a slap not at women but at how there are too many lawyers. NBC's Pete Williams, however, chimed in with how “the President of NOW said his views are, quote, 'neanderthal.'"

Charles Jaco (whom older people might remember as "C.D. Jaco" from his days as a reporter for NBC and CNN) goes a little berserk in attacking bloggers on the Romenesko Letters page. It's one thing to protest the idea that the press isn't positive enough on Iraq, but he lost me when he started mocking conservatives' lack of "opposable thumbs," not to mention the crackpot Nazi smear at the end:

One advantage to being spineless is that you can easily bend over backwards. How else to explain the media anguish and soul-searching due the anonymous bulk e-mails berating us for not covering more "positive" Iraq stories?

I first covered Baghdad in 1990. I've been back twice since then. I would suggest the bloggers who sent out the e-mails should get off their chickenhawk tailfeathers and go see for themselves. I would also suggest my colleagues in the media stop paying attention to people who don't let their lack of opposable thumbs get in the way of their blogging.

These fringe elements of our society are not "citizen journalists", nor are they "the media's conscience", nor are they "stakeholders". We had simpler names for them back in the day when they communicated with us through scrawled postcards and letters with unidentifiable stains and references to UFO's on the envelopes. They were known as "kooks", "cranks", and every so often, "escaped felons".

It is, unfortunately, not surprising that a media too spineless to ask the tough questions prior to the invasion of Iraq continues that grand tradition by bending over backwards to accommodate people on the far edge of American political life who yell "liberal" with the same gusto that Nurembergers shouted "Jew!" in 1936.

So you've been waiting for your electric car? The car that's better than a Prius? The car you can just plug in at night and drive all day? The car that doesn't even use oil or even any fossil fuels? Wait on. AP and Denver Post salivating aside, energy independence at a reasonable price is not just around the corner.

Politicians and automakers say a car that can reduce greenhouse gases and free America from its reliance on foreign oil is years or even decades away. Ron Gremban says such a car is parked in his garage. It looks like a typical Toyota Prius hybrid, but in the trunk sits an 80- miles-per-gallon secret: a stack of 18 brick-sized batteries that boosts the car's high mileage with an extra electrical charge so it can burn even less fuel.