Conservative Los Angeles radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt says he received a bundle of mail this morning about Joel Stein's Los Angeles Times op-ed (Tuesday, January 24, 2006), the one in which he declared, "I don't support our troops." After reading Stein's column, Hugh understood his listeners' anger. So he did what a good journalist should do. He booked Stein for an interview.

If you really want an inside look into a sheltered, out-of-touch, Hollywood mindset, Hugh's interview is a must-listen / must-read. A full transcript with audio is available at Radio Blogger. (Thanks, Duane! You rock!) A highlight:

For the third time in fewer than two weeks, the CBS Evening News on Tuesday night made sure that viewers realize how the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito would move the court “to the right.” (Neither ABC or NBC have shown such concern for alerting viewers as to the ideological direction of the Supreme Court.) Anchor Bob Schieffer recalled how “the President promised during the election to move this court to the right. And from what we heard in these hearings, what we've already seen with Judge Roberts on the bench, it is moving to the right, isn't it?" Jan Crawford Greenburg of the Chicago Tribune agreed: "That's right” and so “that means this court is poised for an historic shift to right on those key social issues like abortion, affirmative action, gay rights, the death penalty, and perhaps even questions of presidential power."

Last Wednesday (January 18), Schieffer proposed to Greenburg: “This court is moving to the right, isn't it?" Greenburg provided the same answer as she would six days later: "That's right.” She went on to point out how “President Bush said he was going to nominate conservatives like Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas.” And six days before that, on Thursday, January 12, as detailed in this NewsBusters item, Schieffer cued up Greenburg with an open-ended version of the same question: “How is he [Alito] going to make the court different than Sandra Day O'Connor, who he is going to replace?" Greenburg replied: “There's little question, Bob, that he would move this court to the right...” (Transcripts follow)

AND, Frey's Lies Grow in Size

A New York Times report today (HT Lucianne) by Edward Wyatt is shredding Oprah Winfrey's defenses relating to what has turned out to be a largely false book (third item at link), namely James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces."

Straight to the point: Oprah has a lot of explaining to do. After reading the article, you're almost forced to conclude one of two things:

• She runs an operation that's so intimidating that people within her company who knew better felt they couldn't speak out.
• Or, she knew about Frey's Lies and has been an active participant in a monumental literary hoax.

Are there any other choices?

Specifically, addiction counselors at the rehab center where Frey was treated, including a frequent guest on Oprah's show, are outraged at Frey's descriptions of what happened there; are concerned that Frey's Lies may keep others from getting needed treatment; and claim that Oprah's people, if not Oprah herself, knew well in advance that the parts of Frey's book relating to his rehab were largely false (free registration required; link within story added by me; bolds are mine):

It’s been apparent since the story broke about President Bush’s terrorism surveilance program that the media wanted to frame the debate as "domestic spying" and warrantless wiretaps, and nowhere has this been more clear than on CBS’s "The Early Show" this morning. In the span of 9 minutes, there were two stories regarding the subject, and four mentions of or references to this topic.

7:00 Story Tease:

Good morning, I'm Julie Chen. Despite questions about its legality, President Bush is vigorously defending his domestic spying program saying it's necessary to fight terrorists. We'll hear what the President had to say and talk to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

7:02

Chen: "First we want to get right to our top story this morning, domestic spying. President Bush is vigorously defending the controversial eavesdropping plan. He insists it's legal and vital to the war on terrorism. CBS Senior White House Correspondent Bill Plante has the very latest. Good morning to you, Bill."

A breakneck pace to change West Virginia’s mining laws, and kind words from the state’s governor about the cooperation of mining officials in revamping the Mountain State's mining laws didn’t deter CNN’s Anderson Cooper from pressing for even more stringent regulation when interviewing the state'schief executive on his evening news program.

Interviewing Gov. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) via satellite in the 11 p.m. hour of the Jan. 23 edition of “Anderson Cooper 360,” the silver-haired son of Gloria Vanderbilt pressed the Democratic governor repeatedly about his position on raising the dollar amount for fines levied on coal companies.

Cooper's last incarnation of the question anticipated an adversarial relationship between mining companies and the state. “They’re going to fight this when it starts really hitting their pocketbook, aren’t they,” Cooper cynically asked.

Joel Stein of the Los Angeles Times wrote an op-ed today (hat tip to the Drudge Report) entitled “Warriors and Wusses.” In it, he made his feelings about the war in Iraq quite clear in the opening sentence: “I don't support our troops.” In the heart of his piece, he elaborated:

“But I'm not for the war. And being against the war and saying you support the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken — and they're wussy by definition. It's as if the one lesson they took away from Vietnam wasn't to avoid foreign conflicts with no pressing national interest but to remember to throw a parade afterward.”

Stein then had the audacity to suggest that America’s support for the troops is actually keeping them in Iraq longer:

Gawker.com reports Rolling Stone is printing a magazine with Kanye West as a black Jesus on the cover: "The Passion of Kanye West." First impression: typical counter-cultural aging-hippie mag. Second impression: hey, so why are they also plugging a mock-the-religious-right story on "God's Senator?" Will they get a clue about the cognitive dissonance?

Here's your media bias test: will "Today" give outraged Christians a chance to fuss at the idea that a rapper whose "persecution" has only led to gold er, "records" should feel crucified like Christ? On March 21, 1997, Matt Lauer devoted a segment to outrage at National Review. As we reported at the time:

Ford Motor Company's recently-announced layoffs are the result of years of declining market share coupled with rising labor costs. But while the media have relayed information on Ford's declining market share, they've avoided discussing the role labor unions have had in driving up costs.

One such burden the media have ignored are "jobs banks" which companies like Ford and GM created in the mid-80s as a concession to the United Auto Workers. The Detroit Free Press reports that Ford pays out about $140 million per year from Ford's job bank, Guaranteed Employment Numbers (GEN), to some 1,100 presently-unemployed workers.

None of the Jan. 23 network newscasts mentioned the costly GEN program nor an alternative severance package Ford has for workers which would pay $15,000 per year in tuition for each fired worker.

BBC reports (HT Instapundit):

Poll finds surprising optimists

Iraqis and Afghans are among the most optimistic people in the world when it comes to their economic future, a new survey for the BBC suggests.

...In Afghanistan, 70% say their own circumstances are improving, and 57% believe that the country overall is on the way up.

In Iraq, 65% believe their personal life is getting better, and 56% are upbeat about the country's economy.

The experts at polling firm Globescan, who conducted the survey, venture the guess that war may have created a "year zero" experience of collectively starting again.

NormBlog has other ideas:

Here are two other suggestions: (1) Perhaps their recent past, before the experience of war, serves as a reference point for them, and they hope for a better life relative to their sufferings under the Taliban and the Baathist regime.

The Times again looks for holes in the strong U.S. economy, this time on the front page of Sunday’s special Job Market section, in a report by Eduardo Porter, “Pockets of Concern Slow a Strong U.S. Economy.” The caption to an accompanying chart emphasizes “A Weak Jobs Recovery.”

Times readers may find the article’s tone familiar. Here’s Porter from Sunday:

“If you believe most statistics, the national economy is doing quite well. Corporate profits are soaring. Consumer spending and business investment have been growing at a healthy clip. In the third quarter of last year, output expanded at an annual pace of about 4.1 percent. And private-sector economists are expecting growth above 3.5 percent this year. Yet, amid the vim and vigor, there is a weak spot that does not quite mesh with these readings. More than four years since the economy emerged from recession in November of 2001, businesses are still not hiring much. Employment grew by a mere 3.5 million jobs, or 2.7 percent, in 49 months' worth of this economic expansion. Last year, the job market grew by 1.5 percent.”

As Harry Belafonte proclaimed at Duke University that American policies were based on  "the demise of the poor," and Sen. Barack Obama declared on ABC that the GOP has "a very narrow agenda that advantages the most powerful," what about their own cozy fortunes?

Laura Ingraham noted today a report from the Wall Street Journal. Belafonte’s suffering from declining millionaire real-estate values:

Belafonte Cuts His Price

ENTERTAINER Harry Belafonte last month cut the price of his Manhattan apartment by $2 million, to $13 million. The Upper West Side co-operative, which he's owned for more than 40 years, went on the market last August. The 17-room home, facing Riverside Park on the western edge of Manhattan, has seven bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a library and four fireplaces.

Last September Mr. Belafonte, 78, sold his Mediterranean-style house in the Caribbean for $2.2 million. He bought that 3.3-acre property, in the French-administered part of St. Martin, in 1982. It has four bedrooms, gardener and caretaker cottages and a pool. Maria Pascal and Richard Mortimer of Prudential Douglas Elliman have the Manhattan listing. The price cut comes as the Manhattan real-estate market is showing signs of cooling...

This year’s Martin Luther King Day celebration was a wild and woolly collection of left-wing blather.

In Washington, showing remarkable feats of amnesia that he was ever vice president in a corrupt administration, Al Gore gave a speech claiming President Bush was a law-breaking president and his illegal actions a threat to the survival of our democracy, an extraordinary accusation for even this man to make, given the same policies were executed by the Clinton-Gore administration.

In New Orleans, Mayor Ray Nagin announced that God wanted New Orleans to be a “chocolate” city again. When challenged that this might make him sound like a little racist, he dug a deeper hole by claiming whites were the milk in his milk-chocolate shake.

Even in this stew of silliness, Hillary Rodham Clinton still managed to draw headlines for herself by marching into a Baptist church with Al Sharpton in Harlem and giving a fiery speech. First, Hillary sounded the same Clinton-amnesia notes as Gore, charging that President Bush’s team was historically filled with corrupt cronies, that his presidency "will go down in history as one of the worst.” But with Sharpton proudly looking on, she threw the race card on the table with a big, noisy thwack. “When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation, and you know what I'm talking about.” Bush is not only incompetent. Dennis Hastert is a slave master. Laura Bush was right. It was “ridiculous.”

Virginia state Sen. Russell Potts decided to run for governor last fall as an Independent, trashing GOP nominee Jerry Kilgore all the way. Democrat Tim Kaine ended up winning easily. But today, Washington Post reporter Rosalind Helderman takes GOP anger and goes a little wild with the metaphors: "Incensed by Potts's run against Republican nominee Jerry W. Kilgore, party activists had screamed for his blood."

But the very next sentence is more accurate and less hyperbolic: "They demanded that Potts's Republican colleagues throw him out of their caucus, kick him off his five committees and strip him of his chairmanship." Helderman then goes on to describe "seething" conservatives (and at least the reader learns why):

When Matt Lauer began peppering Bill O'Reilly with rapid-fire questions on this morning's Today show, the prime-time host complained "you're going so fast - it's 7:10 in the morning!"

Judging by his sub-par performance, O'Reilly wasn't kidding.

Oh, to be sure, in his very first sentence the No-Spin Zone-ster called the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee "pinheads." But is that much more than middle-school machismo?

When it came to the substance of the Alito hearings, O'Reilly's fastball had no bite. Said BOR in criticizing the Dems' performance "you don't go to his college club, and say look at this, he was in a club in college. That's just dopey."

Host Chris Matthews interviewed White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's mother, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, on Hardball last night. Strayhorn is running for Governor of Texas as an Independent. She is the current Comptroller of Texas and held the position as a Republican for over twenty years. She recently made the switch to an independent because she wanted to get rid of "partisan politics". Matthews, however, took her party change as a sign of anger with the Republican Party because it is "corrupt". Matthews brought up the subject of her party change many times during the interview and repeatedly tried to get her to say she left the party because of corruption, as if she had an ulterior motive. At one point in the interview he tried to link current Governor, Rick Perry (R) with Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay.

The interview included questions like “Did you leave the Republican party because of Rick Perry?”, “Are you a conservative”, and “Do you feel that Republicans have left their fiscal conservative roots”.

Video follows.

These pictures may be worth more than a thousand words. On Monday, White House officials acknowledged that, yes, photographs did exist of President Bush in a classic grip-and-grin with Jack Abramoff, the disgraced Republican lobbyist at the center of a bribery and corruption scandal in the capital. But that did not mean, they said, that Mr. Bush had a personal relationship with him.

Wow. Are you reading an issue of The Nation? No - it is none other than an objective, balanced and fair-minded NYT reporter suggesting that a half-dozen pictures of President Bush with Jack Abramoff at various events and fundraisers over the past five years is somehow proof of nefarious wrongdoing.

In a December 23 USA Today front page story, “USO cheers troops, but Iraq gigs tough to book; Safety concerns, disagreement with war keeping many celebrities from volunteering,” reporters Martin Kasindorf and Steven Komarow related how actor/comedian Robin Williams, “who like [Al] Franken has been an outspoken critic of Bush's management of the war -- and [Wayne] Newton, a Republican who backs Bush, say some stars have turned down the USO because they thought such performances would amount to endorsing the war.” But in a Friday evening Nightline story, Terry Moran, through his use of soundbites from two left-wingers, portrayed cowardly conservatives, including Rush Limbaugh who isn't a stage performer, as the problem facing the USO in trying to get stars to go to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Moran asserted: “While the USO has been able to attract some big names for tours in recent years -- Jessica Simpson, Robin Williams, the rapper 50 Cent -- some of the top stars are AWOL. Like, say-" Comedian Kathy Griffin charged: "Mel Gibson, big conservative. Go on over, Mel, anytime. They'd be glad to see you. They all love Braveheart." Moran elaborated on how Griffin, a “opponent of the war” who has done several USO tours, “loves performing for the troops and she wonders why some vocal war supporters have stayed home." Moran then featured this blast from Griffin: “I think Rush Limbaugh should, you know, pop a few of those Oxycontin that he probably still has laying around and go over. I mean, I'm not saying go straight, he's got to take the edge off, but, you know, put your money where your mouth is, O'Reilly, go do a book tour or something over there." (In fact, Limbaugh hasn't gone on a USO tour, but in late February 2005 he did go on a U.S. Agency for International Development trip to visit troops in Afghanistan.)

Moran let Al Franken tell an anecdote about how Sylvester Stallone was too afraid to go to Iraq before excusing liberals from any responsibility: "USO President Ned Powell insists the divisive politics of the Iraq war and the liberal tilt of Hollywood have had no impact on the organization's ability to recruit stars.”

Video excerpt: (1:55) Real (3.3 MB) or Windows Media (3.8 MB), plus MP3 audio (900 KB). (Update, with Limbaugh's take, and full transcript follows.)

The Public Broadcasting "Service" selected Paula Kerger from the mega-station WNET in New York to be their new president yesterday. Liberal AP media reporter Frazier Moore, a fan of "truth-telling" Bill Moyers, excluded any conservative reaction, but listed the fight over liberal bias to be among Kerger's challenges. She's ready to fight, not switch, to keep the liberal bias:

Success, she said, depends on "the ability to get the staff at PBS as well as the (station) leaders across the country to stand together. If I felt I couldn't do that, I wouldn't have taken the job."

But Jeff Chester, executive director of the [liberal] Center for Digital Democracy, proposed his own formula for success.

"On the one hand, she has to stay strong to her principles, and resist pressure from conservative critics. But she also has to appeal to those critics to get them to support a blueprint for the future.

"In order for her to succeed, I think she needs to ruffle some feathers -- and not just hide behind Big Bird."