The media’s idolizing of Democratic Congressman John Murtha, who in November advocated withdrawing from Iraq, will continue on Sunday’s 60 Minutes, which will feature a segment on him and his supposedly prescient forecast that most troops will soon leave Iraq, by Mike Wallace, a journalist who has already made clear that he shares Murtha’s view of the war. In late November on FNC, Wallace contended that "Iraq is becoming a kind of Vietnam" and asserted that "we should never have gone into Iraq. We were sold a bill of goods." Back in 2004 at a Smithsonian forum, Wallace argued that “this is not, in my estimation, a good war” and declared that “it sure is not a noble enterprise.'"

Previewing, on Friday's CBS Evening News the Sunday 60 Minutes segment, Wallace bucked up Murtha’s credibility by touting how he “is a decorated veteran of both the Korean and Vietnam Wars. He was a Marine for 37 years, knows a lot about the military, been a Congressman for 32 years, so he knows a bit about politics, too.” And “based on all of that, he told us that most American troops will be out of Iraq a lot sooner than we think." The brief excerpt from the Sunday 60 Minutes piece focused on Murtha’s prediction that by the end of the year the “vast majority” of troops will be out of Iraq. Wallace relayed: “Murtha told us that mounting pressure from constituents in this election year will force the Congress to pass his withdrawal plan or something like it to bring the troops home." I’d bet the full 13-14 minute version on Sunday night, which is previewed on CBSNews.com, will include a lot more admiration for Murtha and his cause. (Transcripts of the CBS Evening News story, as well as Wallace’s comments about Iraq, follow.)

At an event attended by Hillary Clinton, Harry Belafonte said that President Bush has begun to "suspend our Constitution" and that doing so is an "act of terror." The pop singer made these comments after giving a speech at a children’s charity dinner. The exchange was reported on the January 13^th edition of Fox and Friends, at 7:08AM EST. Co-hosts Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade and E.D. Hill began by discussing Mr. Belafonte’s earlier comments, where he referred to the President as "the greatest terrorist in the world." (Noel Sheppard reported this story for Newsbusters.) Ms. Hill set up the new Belafonte statements by saying, "You know what we did? We sent someone from Fox News Channel to go find out if that’s what he really meant to say." Mr. Belafonte told FNC:

Does President Bush resemble Adolf Hitler and Satan? That seemed to be the implication during the 9am half hour of CNN's American Morning. A protester wearing a George W. Bush mask, complete with a colored in Hitler-esque mustache and red horns attached to the forehead was deemed a Bush "look-alike" by reporter Susan Roesgen. In her report on how the bureaucracy at FEMA is delaying federal funds for rebuilding New Orleans, Roesgen highlighted a group of female Catholic school students demonstrating for money to repair the city's levees. The students, as Roesgen noted, "hoped the President would stop by" the protest.  It was then that the demonstrator wearing the Bush mask was highlighted on camera, while Roesgen narrated, "But while a look-alike showed up with a wad of cash, Mr. Bush did not." The "wad of cash" in the demonstrator's hand was actually several phony dollar bills mocking the Bush administration.

Susan Roesgen: "City officials aren’t the only ones wondering when federal money will materialize. Catholic school girls marched on Jackson Square. They and their teachers say more money is needed to fix the levees, and they hoped the President would stop by after his meeting with business leaders. But while a look-alike showed up with a wad of cash, Mr. Bush did not." Real Player or Windows Media

A transcript of the full report follows below.

While Ted Koppel is signing up with NPR and the New York Times, another veteran of his classic "Nightline" has found a new gig. Reporter Dave Marash is signing up with the English-language version of al-Jazeera. As Newsday's Verne Gay reports this morning, Marash insists that despite al-Jazeera's reputation as a mouthpiece for al Qaeda terrorists, "conventional and, dare I say, informed opinion is that the channel is thoroughly respected."

Dave Marash, the veteran "Nightline" correspondent who left the program late last year, has landed at Al-Jazeera International, the new English-language news channel that will be spun off from Al-Jazeera later this spring....

Readers will no doubt recall the hysteria from the mainstream media and anti-death penalty forces on the left over the execution of Stanley’s "Tookie" Williams last month.

Countless articles were written bemoaning Tookie’s loss and news anchors spoke glowingly of his supposed contributions to ending gang violence. That Tookie himself was the founder of the notorious "Crips" gang, responsible for so much murder and mayhem over the years, didn’t seem to enter into the equation. Neither did the four people he murdered in cold blood.

Now California’s next execution is scheduled for Tuesday, January 17, with multiple murderer Clarence Ray Allen doing the honors. As Allen’s execution approaches, one has to wonder when all the hoopla will commence? We're all waiting for the liberal glitterati to come out and show their support.

New York Times White House reporter Elisabeth Bumiller follows Bush back to the site of the Hurricane Katrina’s devastation for Friday’s “In New Orleans, Bush Speaks With Optimism but Sees Little of Ruin," and again tries to portray him as out of touch on Hurricane Katrina.

“Mr. Bush spent his brief visit in a meeting with political and business leaders on the edge of the Garden District, the grand neighborhood largely untouched by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina, and saw little devastation. He did not go into the city's hardest-hit areas or to Jackson Square, where several hundred girls from the Academy of the Sacred Heart staged a protest demanding stronger levees. Mr. Bush's motorcade did pass some abandoned neighborhoods as it traveled on Interstate 10 into the city.”

Way back in 1992 Roger Keith Coleman was Time magazine’s cover boy against the death penalty. Time ran the following over a photo of Coleman in chains: "This Man Might Be Innocent, This Man Is Due To Die." Fast forward to 2006 and DNA tests have proved Coleman was in fact rightfully convicted of raping and killing his 19-year-old sister-in-law. So far Time hasn’t touched the story in its online edition. As this morning’s Washington Post reports the DNA test results have hit anti-death penalty advocates hard: "The results stunned and disappointed those who have fought a 25-year crusade to prove that Roger K. Coleman was innocent. They also dashed hopes among death penalty foes that the case would catalyze opposition to capital punishment across the country."

In the May 18th, 1992 edition of Time reporter Jill Smolowe wrote breathlessly about how the legal system was failing this supposed innocent man.

Kudos to ABC reporter Jake Tapper, whose "Down and Dirty" blog carries an interview with Dinesh D'Souza, an editor for the magazine of Concerned Alumni of Princeton from 1983 to 1985, the time frame in which Sam Alito claimed membership in CAP when applying for a job in the Reagan Justice Department. As Brent Bozell noted, the network coverage of CAP has skipped over the responsible step of checking with the accused. Maybe the story was just too good to check. D'Souza said humorless Ted Kennedy actually made a boo-boo: one quoted article in the CAP magazine was a satire, not a serious argument:

First off, D'Souza says, one of the two stories from Prospect that Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-MA, read this week at the confirmation hearings was intended as a satire.

Discussing the Alito hearings on this morning's Today show, Matt Lauer and Tim Russert sounded less like host and analyst and more like two disappointed teenaged boys, griping as they exit the theater that the movie didn't deliver enough exploding cars and train wrecks.

Lauer's opening question sounded the theatrical theme: "did the event live up to its billing?"

Russert panned the paucity of pyrotechnics: "It sure didn't, Matt. People talked about a confrontation. It certainly wasn't that. It started off with a bang and ended with a whimper."

But to the extent things did get nasty, who was responsible? Lauer slyly suggested that it was . . . Alito's own fault.

ABC and NPR are acting like kissing cousins. Ted Koppel, now retired from "Nightline," will provide commentaries for NPR, about once a week, the report suggests. He professes his love for NPR and how he's stolen many ideas from them. (This might explain some of the liberal bias on ABC.) His producer Leroy Sievers has been working at NPR in recent months, too. In recent years, commentaries on NPR have been less political than you might expect, but I don't think Koppel will record chats about making icea tea in the sun. I'd bet on John Chancellor-style pompous-windbag political commentaries. (You can see the genre is you scroll down here.) Koppel will also write (liberal) editorials for the New York Times. Oh goody.

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

On his Countdown show Thursday night, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann delivered his latest attack on conservative commentators Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter by indirectly referring to them as "dogs" during a discussion of politicians who write children's books in the name of their pets.

The Countdown host brought aboard comedian Mo Rocca to discuss Senator Ted Kennedy's new children's book, The Senator and Me, about the Senator and his pet dog Splash. Although Olbermann rarely pokes fun at or attacks liberals, while going after conservatives habitually, even he could not resist the irony of the name Splash because of Kennedy's history at Chappaquiddick. But Olbermann couldn't get through the segment without taking a gratuitous shot at his two favorite conservative targets.

CBS’s Gloria Borger on Thursday night applied a disparaging and misleading description to Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP), providing only the assessment that the group “fought against admitting women and minorities to the school,” when the group, at least on the minority front, just wanted all those admitted to meet the same academic standards. (One wonders if when Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign gets going journalists will show such concern for her support of the sexist Wellesley College.) But Borger also, unlike the ABC or NBC evening newscasts, highlighted a “liberal” former law clerk for nominee Samuel Alito who denounced Democrats: “They are smearing a man of honor and integrity and I am, quite frankly, ashamed of my party at this time."

After Borger’s story, CBS Evening News anchor Bob Schieffer turned to the Chicago Tribune’s Jan Crawford Greenburg who warned that “there's little question” that Alito “would move this court to the right” since “Justice O'Connor provided the critical fifth vote with liberals on key social issues like abortion, religion, affirmative action, and the death penalty.” A confused Schieffer seemed to suggest that Alito alone could threaten Roe, or not: "Well, do you say that he might overturn Roe v. Wade, the key decision on abortion? That's not what you're saying?" Greenburg maintained that “Roe is not at stake with this nomination. Five justices on the court now would uphold Roe.” Framing the issue as one of abortion “rights,” not extending protection of the unborn, Greenburg predicted: “What is more likely is that he would be more willing than Justice O'Connor to allow states to restrict abortion, put greater regulations on the abortion right." (Partial transcript follows.)

On the Thursday January 12 CBS Evening News, anchor Bob Schieffer let slip to the audience that he already considers the Bush administration's controversial NSA wiretapping program to be "illegal," even though this issue is in dispute.

Correspondent Mika Brzezinski filed an unrelated story about phone record availability, which conveyed that anyone can purchase another person's cell phone records without that person's permission, and whether there should be government protection for the privacy of cell phone subscribers. After the story's completion, Schieffer quipped that the government could just buy people's phone records instead of doing "illegal eavesdropping":

Bob Schieffer: "Well, thank you very much, Mika. I mean, maybe the government doesn't need to do this illegal eavesdropping. They could just buy it."