School may not have started yet, but Christopher Fotos at the PostWatch blog has done some homework on the WashPost's Cindy Sheehan coverage. After reviewing a pile of 15 Post stories on "Mother Sheehan," he finds a regular pattern of omitting her most vicious language, such as:

President Bush is an "evil maniac" who should "sign up his two little party-animal girls" for the war. 

Bush is the "biggest terrorist" and is promoting the "cancer of Pax Americana" and "imperialism in the Middle East" with the help of other "war criminals" in the executive branch and Congress.

And yet Bush will not meet with her. Again.

Ken Shepherd noted that the front page of Monday's WashPost carried a story with the headline "Access to Abortion Pared at State Level." But I had a different take on reporter Ceci Connolly's piece. It begins: "This year's state legislative season draws to a close having produced a near-record number of laws imposing new restrictions on a woman's access to abortion or contraception." This language of danger to "women's access" sounds like abortion-advocate wording.

The question that emerges: is every pro-life measure a "restriction"? The third paragraph begins: "Three states have passed bills requiring that women seeking an abortion be warned that the fetus will feel pain, despite inconclusive scientific data on the question." Does an informed-consent rule really qualify as a restriction? The Post isn't going to call it what is really is: a restriction on an abortion clinic's ability to persuade women to buy what it's selling.

There's a lot of talk of parental notification and consent requirements in the story, which are restrictions, but then the question: is a 12-year-old girl a "woman"? (Ceci also cites the Alan Guttmacher Institute as a main source for the story, without noting it's an arm of Planned Parenthood.) She also includes in this "restrictions" story new bills recognizing the "fetus" as a human being under assault and murder laws, which again in no way "restrict" women's "access" to abortion.

Near the end of Ceci's story comes this passage: "Not all the restrictive measures came from Republican-controlled states. Democratic governors in Kansas and Pennsylvania signed budgets that steer millions of dollars to organizations that provide alternatives to abortion." Now how on Earth does that qualify as a "restriction" to women's "access"? It allows women to seek alternatives, if that's where they want to go. Once again, it is only a "restriction" on abortion clinic business, in that it might attract women away from an abortion. I don't think the Post would argue that funding anti-smoking programs is a "restriction" on smoking.

To people who heard Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan speak in Jackson Hole, Wyo., at the end of last week, the housing boom will “simmer down.” But to those viewers at home watching “CBS Evening News,” housing is in a bubble and bubbles typically burst.

The August 27 CBS broadcast began with a scary introduction by reporter Bob Orr asking, “Is the roof about to fall in on the hot condo market?” Later, a segment on house hunting opened with a graphic entitled “Condo Bubble” and a brief restatement of what Greenspan said. Anchor Russ Mitchell then turned the story from a discussion of housing growth to more bubble time by dwelling on the “condominium bubble” “showing signs of being overstretched.”

Greenspan addressed housing in a more reasoned manner, but that didn’t earn him much attention in the CBS report. The August 28 New York Times explained Greenspan’s position. “In Mr. Greenspan's view, the housing market will inevitably ‘simmer down,’ and sales and prices are all but certain to slow. ‘House turnover will decline from currently historic levels, while home price increases will slow and prices could even decrease,’ he said.”

Former Times' reporter Chris Hedges, who never let his job as a journalist get in the way of his strident anti-war activism, finds war veterans a self-pitying lot, blind to their own complicity in the horrors of war. At least that's how Hedges comes across in his review of "Black Virgin Mountain -- A Return to Vietnam," an autobiography by Vietnam veteran and author Larry Heinemann.

Hedges, a longtime NYT foreign affairs reporter, is now a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, affiliated with the left-wing Nation magazine. Strangely, the byline of the review says nothing about his years at the Times. Embarassment? And if so, on whose end?

The Green Day anti-conservative screed "American Idiot," was laughably labeled as "socially conscious" by the Associated Press in its coverage of the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards, at which the left-leaning punk group scored awards in seven of eight categories for which it was nominated.

(AP) For the first time in a while, the MTV Video Music Awards rocked more than it hip-hopped.

More than 11 years after their hit album "Dookie" reinvigorated punk rock, Green Day won seven video awards out of eight nominations Sunday for the socially conscious "American Idiot" and the melancholy "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," which frontman Billie Joe Armstrong called a "hangover" song.

For those unfamiliar with the song, I've copied and pasted the lyrics below. And no, so far as I can tell, they were not, contrary to appearances, penned by some ninth grade Noam Chomsky wannabe:

George Stephanopoulos was hired by ABC news several years ago to play a journalist on television. In 2002, he was given the keys to ABC's venerable "This Week," acting as sole host in replacing Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson. At the time, Stephanopoulos remarked that "if I were biased, I don't believe I would have gotten the job." A laughable comment, it would be funny if it weren't so delusional. But there he is, and the bias just shines through. It was in full bloom on Sunday morning, as he spoke with two US Senators about the newly drafted Iraqi Constitution. To pro-Bush Republican John Thune, he addressed questions from the left. To anti-Bush Democrat Joseph Biden, he addressed questions from even further on the left. Thune wasn't criticizing Bush, so Stephanopoulos had to do it. Biden was, but not enough, apparently, so Stephanopoulos had to go even further.

In Washington Post staff writer Ceci Connolly's below-the-fold piece, "Access to Abortion Pared at State Level," Ms. Connolly tagged abortion-regulating measures passed by state legislatures recently as "antiabortion measures" and the proponents of same as "antiabortion forces." Yet a search of Nexis by contrast reveals that efforts to regulate 2nd Amendment rights of American citizens are never tagged as "anti-gun" but rather as "gun control,"the term favored by liberals who advocate strictly regulating, if not banning, gun rights.

Cintra Wilson of Salon.com visited the White House press room and told of her adventure in an article entitled: "I invaded the White House press corps: I had front row seats at the media's Great Slave Rebellion over Karl Rove. No wonder our democracy's in trouble:

Wilson visited the press room during the height of the Valerie Plame incident last July and witnessed the "courage" of reporters who wanted to know why Karl Rove wasn't going to be fired. When the name of the new Supreme Court nominee was announced, she was sure it was a "classic slick Bush move" to draw attention away from Karl Rove.

"When one atrocity draws too much fire, it is good to change the subject -- in this case, to the beliefs of John Roberts, the president's Supreme Court nominee. It was a classic slick Bush move, wholly momentum-puncturing. The press corps now had another job to do, and they could no longer pester McClellan about Rove without appearing obsessive, unprofessional and 'unfair.' Rove had officially become Old News."

In his regular "cyber-column" at Mullings.com, Rich Galen finds something surprising in the September issue of Discover magazine:

[T]here is a "Discover Dialogue" with a meteorologist named Dr. William Gray whom the mag's editors say "may be the worlds most famous hurricane expert." Discover is big on global warming and generally falls into the column supporting the notion that if George W. Bush would only support the Kyoto thing we would be worrying about an impending ice age starting about Columbus Day.

The issue of whether man-made global warming is causing this spate of hurricanes is part of the interview:

GRAY: Right now, I'm trying to work on his human-induced global-warming thing that I think is grossly exaggerated.

“Free universal healthcare has long been the crowning achievement of this socialist state,” Boston Globe reporter Indira A.R. Lakshmanan touted from Havana in a front page story last Thursday. In the August 25 article headlined, “As Cuba loans doctors abroad, some patients object at home,” Lakshmanan relayed all the cliches, promoted by the left, about the wonders of Cuban health care, without any regard to the accuracy of the figures or the quality of the health care workers. But before that, Lakshmanan blamed the U.S., not Cuba’s communism, for the terrible state of its economy as she described it as “crippled by the U.S. embargo in place since 1963.” The Globe reporter championed how, thanks to “one of the best doctor-patient ratios in the world,” the “small country has made significant contributions to reducing infant mortality rates and serving disaster victims worldwide.” Lakshmanan trumpeted how “advocates of the Cuban system point out that all Cubans are entitled to free healthcare and medicine, while more than 44 million American residents -- nearly one of six people -- have no health insurance.”

Full CyberAlert follows. For today’s MRC CyberAlert.

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 weekday.

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