Lying to the FBI? Obstruction of justice? A possible "coverup at high levels of our government"? Sure. But what the Los Angeles Times really wants you to know about the completed investigation of former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros is how much it cost. Check this out from yesterday's Times (Friday, January 20, 2006) (emphasis mine):

PAGE A1, in a preview block at the bottom corner of the page, under a picture of Cisneros: "Prosecutor Ends Cisneros Probe: After about 10 years and $21 million spent ..."

PAGE A2, Today's News (a preview section), "Coverup is Alleged: ... The inquiry began in 1995 and cost $21 million."

PAGE A16, Times staffer David G. Savage begins the actual 1139-word article: "After 10 years and $21 million spent  ..."

PAGE A16, near the end of the piece, Savage quotes Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA): "It's outrageous that taxpayers were charged $22 million over 10 years for so little." (21? 22? Whatever ...)

PAGE A16, under an accompanying picture of Cisneros, the caption reads: "Ex-HUD chief: Henry G. Cisneros pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor in 1999. The inquiry cost about $21 million."

Did everyone get that? Did you get the cost? Now back to that possible coverup ...

Q: How does a lefty media maven know he's gone off the deep end?

A. When even fellow liberal Jane Hall laughs at him.

Neal Gabler should take the lesson to heart, because that's exactly what befell him on tonight's Fox Media Watch. The subject matter was the media's handling of Hillary's 'Plantation Declaration'. Jane began with a surprisingly candid assessment of Clinton and her presidential ambitions:

"She's clearly running for President and I think the media should quit going around that fact. She's tiptoeing around that fact. The question I have was whether [her plantation remark] was spontaneous or planned. She's been so planned - that's what she's been known for. [She might have given an impromptu answer to a question] but if she reached for the race card, then that's a different context."

Sometimes a story just doesn't seem to be "all there." Cinnamon Stillwell suspected as much in a NewsBusters item on January 10:

Call me overly suspicious, but the story of 16-year-old Farris Hassan traveling to Iraq on a whim strikes me as unbelievable.

Hassan's interview with Rita Cosby of MSNBC, a Florida newspaper columnist's skepticism, and a January 18 posting by the Northeast Intelligence Network (NIN), which describes itself as "a small contingent of experienced investigators ..... founded by veteran private investigator Douglas J. Hagmann," all appear to confirm Stillwell's suspicions. What is known of Farris Hassan's saga at this point should also, one would think, raise some red flags with Homeland Security.

MSNBC “Hardball” host Chris Matthews got himself into some hot water Thursday evening when he suggested that Osama bin Laden in his recently released tape sounded “like an over-the-top Michael Moore here, if not a Michael Moore” (video link to follow). On last night’s installment, Matthews invited on MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough to discuss this issue in greater detail (video link to follow).

After being asked by Matthews if bin Laden was playing politician, Scarborough moved the discussion in a media direction: “You look at, like, for instance, him saying that George Bush went to war because of -- because he wanted to help his buddies out, his oil buddies out. Well, that sounds a lot like not only Michael Moore, it also sounds like Ted Kennedy who said this whole thing was invented, this war was invented in Texas by Karl Rove to help his political supporters out.”

Matthews then asked:

As reported yesterday by NewsBusters’ Mark Finkelstein, Katie Couric of NBC’s “Today Show” wondered aloud on yesterday’s program if Osama bin Laden might be getting information from the New York Times. It turns out that Couric isn’t the only media representative asking this same question. A just released Editor and Publisher article reported on more such media opining. First, MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson said the following on that network’s “Scarborough Country” Thursday evening (full transcript to follow):

“By the merchants of war who financed Bush's presidential campaign, in the words of Osama bin Laden and many on the left. In other words, Halliburton is responsible for this war, every single talking point. I hate to think of Osama bin Laden reclining in his cave in Waziristan, reading the op-ed page of ‘The New York Times.’ But, clearly, he is. He's got every talking point. It's uncanny.”

According to E&P, Carlson wasn’t the only one to suggest that Osama is paying attention to the American press:

If we turn up our Media Sensitivity Meter to the level of Extremely Nitpicky, note the AP headline this week to Laura Bush's description of Hillary's Congress-as-"plantation" remarks as "ridiculous." The headline was "First Lady Assails Sen. Clinton for Remark," repeated all over the web and in newspapers. But when I searched the words "First Lady assail" in Nexis for the Associated Press in the Clinton years, I didn't get a single headline. (And doesn't Hillary strike everyone as more of an "assailer" than Laura?) I did find one article from October 20, 1999 by reporter Ben Dobbin. It began:

Without uttering his name, Hillary Rodham Clinton laid out Wednesday her stark differences with Republican New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on a raft of national issues - from the minimum wage to health care and gun control.

In a speech at a labor union convention, the first lady assailed her likely opponent in next year's Senate race and Republicans in Congress "who want to turn the clock back and return us to the days when a lot of what we enjoy was not even thought possible."

According to the Associated Press (hat tip to the Drudge Report), Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Thursday “challenged Europe to take back the Jews who emigrated to Israel, adding that no Jews would remain in Israel if Europe were to open its doors.” Strangely, a thorough Google and LexisNexis search identified that, until now, no major American media outlet has reported this new round of anti-Semitic statements by the controversial Iranian leader who is also threatening to expand his country’s nuclear activities. (The New York Times published an online AP story Friday evening at its website that included this information. However, it appears that this did not make their Saturday print editions.)

The first time AP logged this report was via its Worldstream unit at 10:25PM GMT Friday. That calculates to 5:25PM Eastern Time. Yet, according to Google and LexisNexis, not one American media outlet besides the Drudge Report is covering this story:

It’s become a cliche to note that the Golden Globe Awards voter pool is an extremely small clique for such a big-buzz awards show. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) boasts “about 90" members, many of them Europeans. But their influence over the Oscars, and then the culture, is enormous. And what they are asking us to celebrate, with increasing regularity, are standards that echo the decadent culture of Old Europe, in love with illicit sex, drugs, dysfunctionality – and even anti-Western political weirdness.

In addition to George Clooney’s supporting actor award for his conspiracy-theorizing, anti-war-for-oil flick “Syriana,” the Best Foreign Movie award went to “Paradise Now,” a lyrical German-funded film about “heroic,” yet conflicted....Palestinian terrorists blowing up buses. The HFPA even officially claimed the film was from “Palestine,” as if Israel had already been wiped off the map.

Seems even the Christian Research Institute has fallen to the spirit of the age.

Though the article is not on-line, the author was interviewed by Todd Wilken of Issues Etc..

As usual, the author was spouting how the true Christian does not judge by appearance since God looks on the heart. But doesn't the true Christian realize the outside is a reflection of what's on the inside?

Actually, if these people weren’t so wrapped up in appearances, why are they in such a rush to look like every other slob on the streets today? Even those that got them in the military know doubt did so as a result of peer pressure and often regret having done so later in life often after coming to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.

I like Kiran Chetry. Kiran Chetry is a friend of mine. Alright, she isn't a friend of mine. But the mother-to-be is a pleasant presence in her role of co-host on Fox & Friends Weekend. Still, in her comments on Karl Rove this morning, she let show a certain DNC-mindset.

The topic was Rove's appearance yesterday at the winter meeting of the Republican National Committee, at which he laid out a battle plan for the 2006 mid-term elections. Rove was shown saying "honorable people can have honest political differences, and we should strive for civility and intellectual integrity in our debates and arguments."

That seemed to surprise Kiran: "Rove, known for being the one who is the attack dog at the White House, was actually calling for civility."

I have always been a news junkie, but lately I am finding it more and more difficult to keep my eyes on the tube when it is tuned in to any cable news network. The reason for my ire is simple...These news outlets have turned my television screen into a garbage can.

By that I mean that nowadays the entire viewing surface seems to be filled with assorted junk. Most of what we are being subjected to is just self-promotion for the show being aired or the station being telecast. The other distracting additions have very little to do with the news being presented at that moment and could wait for a less invasive time to flash onto the screen.

If I am recalling correctly, this all started a few years back when cable was presenting lengthy time blocks of hearings, trials, or congressional actions. To keep viewers abreast of the news, they started running streamers at the bottom of the screen that contained news headlines. From that point on, they added more and more, from logos to stock reports. The end result are the most junkyard looking news presentations found anywhere.

Last night I reported that Chris Matthews lied and misquoted Laura Bush in the Wednesday evening edition of Hardball. Matthews claimed -- and said it no less than three times -- that the First Lady said "God wants New Orleans to be rebuilt". On tonight's program, Matthews showed the correct quote in a visual, however did not say anything about the misquotation or issue an apology. The screen capture on the right reads "I think it's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous comment - That's what I think".

Joe Klein of TIME magazine fame wrote a fabulous piece recently entitled “How to Stay Out of Power; Why liberal democrats are playing too fast and too loose with issues of war and peace.” In it, the typically liberal Klein offered a typically liberal readership a side of the domestic spying issue that must have made many subscribers wonder if their mailman had accidentally put a copy of the National Review in their mailbox.

Klein began by addressing the hypocrisy of a letter that House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California) recently released that was supposedly written on October 11, 2001 to then National Security Agency director General Michael V. Hayden. “In it she expressed concern that Hayden, who had briefed the House Intelligence Committee about the steps he was taking to track down al-Qaeda terrorists after the 9/11 attacks, was not acting with "specific presidential authorization."

With an “Uncle Sam Is Watching You” graphic on screen, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann opened Friday night's Countdown by exaggerating the threat of the federal request for Google records to check the exposure of pornography to children and, of course, the NSA “spying”policy. “If you Googled it, the government wants to know about it,” Olbermann warned, “and if you made a phone call or sent an e-mail that was monitored by the NSA without court approval, the government wants you to know it feels its actions were plenty legal.” Olbermann reported: “President Bush starts taking his domestic spying defense tour on the road. How about we all Google the name George Orwell?” Olbermann proceeded to describe the public relations events as a “big brother PR blitz” with “President Bush heading back to the National Security Agency for another visit next week on Wednesday, all part of the administration's latest push to convince everybody else that the President has the constitutional power to order all the spying, with none of the bothersome warrants, that he wants.”

Citing the administration's contention that only those who had contact with terrorist-affiliated people were monitored, Olbermann charged, while interviewing Craig Crawford, that “there has been a lot of condescension from the administration over the years since the election, but honestly, do they think everybody here is a 6-year-old idiot?" Olbermann went on to complain about Karl Rove's “post 9/11 mindsets drivel." Olbermann also quoted the Justice Department's contention that the 9/11 congressional resolution “places the President at the zenith of his powers” and asked: “Is there is somebody in the White House saying, 'look, it's to our advantage to make the President look as much like either a Superhero or would-be dictator as possible?'” (Transcript follows.)