On October 15, NewsBusters reported the huge double standard at the Associated Press concerning former Florida Congressman Mark Foley and now deceased former Congressman Gerry Studds. On October 16, MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson logged a report on this very issue (grateful hat tip to Stephen Spruiell of NRO’s Media Blog) with some extraordinarily similar content.

Here’s what Carlson had to say that should be compared to NB's report (video here):

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15239205/site/newsweek

In this Newsweek article by Lisa Miller And Matthew Philips the issue of a new, greater Caliphate, or Islamic State, gets a perfect whitewash and Pres. Bush gets a dose of moral equivalency via OBL.

Is there any bias in the article? Well, try the first sentence:

When President George W. Bush starts using fifty-cent words in press conferences, one has to wonder why, and on Wednesday, during his Rose Garden appearance, he used the word "caliphate" four times.

A fifty cent word? Four times? Something is definitely afoot. In the same opening paragraph, we get the whitewash:

Caliphate? Really? Many people live long, fruitful lives without once using the word caliphate. Almost no one, with the exception of our president and some of his advisers, uses it as a pejorative.

Pejorative? Wow. A seventy five cent word? But, only used once...

Although a Monday CBS Evening News story included a soundbite from an expert dismissing the idea as “preposterous,” the newscast treated a far-left conspiracy theory -- about how the Bush administration is somehow manipulating the pump price for gas to help in the election -- as credible and worthy enough to deserve a broadcast network story. Citing how the price of a gallon of gas has fallen to the lowest all year, anchor Katie Couric wondered: “Is this an election year present from President Bush to fellow Republicans?” Over a shot of a "GOP: Grand Oil Party" bumper sticker laying on a dashboard, reporter Anthony Mason asserted: "Gas started going down just as the fall campaign started heating up. Coincidence? Some drivers don't think so." The man in the car insisted "I think it's basically a ploy to sort of get the American people to think, well, the economy is going good, let's vote Republican."

Over headlines from Daily Kos and Huffington Post, Mason conceded you can “call the conspiracy theory crazy,” but he touted how “it's spreading through Internet blogs and over the airwaves. And a recent poll found 42 percent of people actually believe the Bush administration has deliberately manipulated the price of gas to affect the election."

SARASOTA, FL. (NS/BuchananForCongress) -Showing the importance of the 13th FL. Congressional District Race, President George W. Bush will make an appearance at a Rally for GOP Congressional Candidate Vern Buchanan on Tuesday October the 24th in Sarasota, FL... Self-made businessman and community leader Vern Buchanan announced today that President George W. Bush will be in Sarasota next week for a grassroots event in support of Buchanan's bid for Congress... "Only in America can a blue collar kid grow up to host the President of their country," said Buchanan.  "I am honored to have the President play an active role in my candidacy.  But this isn't just about me.  It is about maintaining control of the U.S.

Doth Chris Matthews protest too much?

On this afternoon's 'Hardball,' interviewing James Baker about his new book on a life in politics, Matthews alluded to the risk of a political party fracturing in the course of a presidential primary campaign:

"How do you hold your party together when you have people, secular candidates like John McCain who's often in that [guest] chair, and Rudy Giuliani running against Brownback, and people like that, Frist and George Allen perhaps, who are real cultural conservatives?"

Riposted Baker: "We hold it together the same way that you hold your party together."

Interjected Matthews: "Well, it's not my party anymore."

Monday's morning shows displayed the Democratic diplomacy that may take over the House and Senate next year. Newsweek's Jonathan Alter was openly dismayed that President Bush refers to North Korea's murderous communist tyrant, Kim Jong Il, as "'The Pygmy'...Not every helpful, actually." On NBC's Today, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman lamented that it's too late for Bush to salvage peace: "North Korea has concluded that this administration wants their, their head on a wall, basically, and therefore there's probably nothing the United States can do now, to really reassure the North to give up their nukes, which is really their life insurance policy." This came just a minute or so after Friedman described Kim as the "Tony Soprano of Pyongyang."

NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell, President of the Media Research Center, appeared Monday on CNBC's "Kudlow and Company" where he discussed how the media are misreporting the economy.

The segment, in which Bozell appeared with Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, was prompted by a new Special Report study from the MRC's Business & Media Institute, "Bad News Bears: How Networks Distort a Good Economy and Batter President Bush."

Video clip (4:58): Windows Media (9.8 MB at higher-quality 256 kbps) or Real (3.8 MB at lower-quality 100 kbps) , plus MP3 audio (1.7 MB)

Has another Internet giant gotten the Liberal Bias Virus? Well, the Associated Press is reporting that Yahoo is extending its relationship with CBS to offer more of its news clips beginning Tuesday:

Yahoo already shows national and international news from CBS' "60 Minutes" as well as Walt Disney Co.'s ABC and Time Warner Inc.'s CNN.

The latest deal will allow Yahoo to post 10 to 20 local news clips from each of the CBS-owned TV stations covered in the exclusive arrangement. The stations encompass the nation's largest metropolitan markets.

I bet you didn't know that Yahoo was already showing "60 Minutes" and CNN clips. Isn't that special? Of course, not everybody is happy about this:

On the syndicated Chris Matthews Show NBC's Andrea Mitchell and CBS's Gloria Borger sounded like Blame America Firsters when explaining what the American public wants in a candidate for '08. Mitchell worried that world views the U.S. as "bullies" and "arrogant." Borger punctuated Mitchell's theory saying the American voter is "done with the arrogance of American foreign policy." The following exchange occurred on the October 15th edition of The Chris Matthews Show:

Andrea Mitchell: "That and I think what might most, could be the most profound problem beyond our men and women overseas in harm's way is how much hated the United States is for a variety of reasons. Fairly or not fairly. There is a perception abroad and it's in Europe and it's in the Islamic world and it's in Asia is that we are bullies, is that we're arrogant. It goes back to decisions that were made or perceptions of decisions, the wars. And whether it's fair or not somebody's gotta fix that and that cannot be fixed with Radio Free Europe or its descendants. It is a big, big problem."

There was more bad news for the White House on ABC Monday morning. Three weeks before the mid-term congressional elections, 'Good Morning America' chose to highlight the claims of a former White House staffer that Bush administration officials had "mocked" evangelical Christian leaders. Former deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, David Kuo, wrote a book, released today, in which he asserts that administration officials have referred to evangelical leaders as "nuts" and that his office was used to curry favor with "Republican base voters," evangelical Christians, rather than to help the poor.

Co-anchor Robin Roberts and substitute host Chris Cuomo teased the 7:40AM segment, which included a report from Jake Tapper and an interview with Kuo:

Chris Cuomo: "Also this half hour, we have new questions about the White House and the religious right. The faithful helped put Bush in the White House, but did the administration mock evangelicals behind their backs?"

Robin Roberts: "Coming up next, a White House insider blows the whistle, accusing the Bush administration of taking advantage of Christian conservatives."

It's not the crime, it's the... coverup. The BBC is trying to prevent the release of a study that looks at its coverage for bias. Like corrupt government bureaucrats, the government-funded organization is trying to keep the Freedom of Information Act from releasing the study of charges of anti-Israeli bias. Ironically, this same Freedom of Information Act is what hard-charging BBC reporters use to expose government wrongdoing elsewhere.

Reports the Telegraph:

The BBC has spent thousands of pounds of licence payers' money trying to block the release of a report which is believed to be highly critical of its Middle East coverage.

The corporation is mounting a landmark High Court action to prevent the release of The Balen Report under the Freedom of Information Act, despite the fact that BBC reporters often use the Act to pursue their journalism.

New York Times editor/columnist Frank Rich, fresh off last week's Oprah Winfrey appearance plugging his anti-Bush book, goes wild in his Sunday (TimesSelect $ required) column, "The Gay Old Party Comes Out," doing a little cowardly outing by proxy regarding the alleged "list" of prominent gay Republicans. He doesn't actually wave the list, Joe McCarthy style, but helpfully hints how you can dig it up.

"And while you're cruising the Internet, a little creative Googling will yield a long list of who else is gay, openly and not, in the highest ranks of both the Bush administration and the Republican hierarchy....The split between the Republicans' outward homophobia and inner gayness isn’t just hypocrisy; it's pathology. Take the bizarre case of Karl Rove. Every one of his Bush campaigns has been marked by a dirty dealing of the gay card, dating back to the lesbian whispers that pursued Ann Richards when Mr. Bush ousted her as Texas governor in 1994. Yet we now learn from 'The Architect,' the recent book by the Texas journalists James Moore and Wayne Slater, that Mr. Rove’s own (and beloved) adoptive father, Louis Rove, was openly gay in the years before his death in 2004. This will be a future case study for psychiatric clinicians as well as historians."

What does the "N-word" racial epithet and the pollster term "values voter" have in common? According to Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter, by some elastic calisthenics of the brain, the word "values" needs to be drained of its poison, deprived of its "sting" against liberals, deflated of any political advantage, so that liberals can be seen as just as morality-oriented as conservatives. In describing his column on MSNBC’s Imus in the Morning program on Monday, Alter said this "values voter" term is "driving me nuts," that certain people have a "monopoly" on "so-called traditional values." Alter also displayed an intense desire for the "demise" of "values voters" in the fall election. In his phone interview with Imus in the 6:30 am half hour, Alter told Imus:

In Monday's daily political chat at the Washington Post website, reporter Shailagh Murray was defending her Saturday front-pager on hot-looking Democrats. She claimed that it was not biased to say Democrats were better looking this year. The bias was "in the facts," she claimed:

Alexandria, Va.: On the good-looking thing: to do a story like that -- ooh, look at the Democratic hotties! -- in mid-October looks a bit like electioneering (leering electioneering?). When you have a good-looking Republican, the media treat them as automatically devoid of depth. That's why this article came across as tilted.

Shailagh Murray: This year, Republicans are incumbents and Democrats are challengers. That's why I focused on Democrats. Because they're the ones pushing the boulder up the mountain. As I pointed out, Republicans did something similar in 1994, when a lot of their candidates were younger and more fresh faced, less like traditional politicians. I realize that some people see bias in everything we all write, but sometimes the bias is in the facts.

If only we had a system like Britain's, where an unpopular Prime Minister can be turfed out by a simple vote of no-confidence. Unfortunately, we're saddled with a Constitution that requires the difficult and time-consuming process of impeachment. And thus, sadly, we're stuck with W until January, 2009. That in a nutshell, is the complaint of Sanford Levinson, professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin.

Now, it's true that the good professor notes some other beefs he has with our central document of government. But one suspects that it is the inability to summarily dispatch President Bush that prompted him to write his LA Times column of today, Our Broken Constitution. Laments Levinson:

[W]hatever happens, George W. Bush will continue to occupy the White House until Jan. 20, 2009, despite the fact that about 60% of Americans disapprove of the job he's doing.

I’m new to the NB site. So a friendly “Howdy!” and here goes…

Without meaning to be pandering, some of the comments aired in this website are the most insightful, factual, well thought-out and witty views that I have found. Only because of time considerations, (I have five children!) I really don’t surf the other conservative websites; this is my main source of conservative thought. That I stumbled onto this site is a personal blessing (although my wife says she has “lost” me to the internet!)

Five years ago, I’d have said, “I don’t like the approach that media is taking when presenting ‘news’ stories.” Today, I am convinced that a bias against conservativism blatantly exists in “journalism”. That the left can’t see it is sad and dangerous. It is too obvious…Demsm …GOOD, Republicans…BAD! A simple example…

There are plenty of alternate search engines such as askjeeves and dogpile to name a couple.

Awhile back, I installed Google Desktop for searching for files on my computer.  Today, I uninstalled it as a small token of protest against them.  Interestingly, after the uninstall program finished, a Google survey popped up asking for the reason for the uninstall.  There are several generic selections for the reason and the usual "other".  I selected "other" and typed in the response box that until I could be comfortable that my search requests were not being filtered for political content, I'd have to use some other search engine.

I'm only one, but I think if we all did that, maybe the message would get through.

"One small step for man........................................."

Give Paul Krugman credit for candor.  He could care less about a candidate's qualities.  He just wants you to vote Democrat.  As suggested by the headline - One-Letter Politics - of his pay-to-play column this morning, Krugman asserts:

"The fact is that this is a one-letter election. D or R, that’s all that matters.  It’s hard to think of an election in which the personal qualities of the people running in a given district or state have mattered less."

In a way, it's refreshing to see a Times columnist bare his partisanship in such bald-faced fashion.  And just what reasons make it so important that the Dems take back the majority?  Krugman offers two.  The first, which he describes as the lesser, is to bring "the G.O.P. juggernaut . . . to a shuddering halt."

Today's starter: A former Arabic translator for ABC and FNC has been charged with helping a terrorist leader communicate with his followers.

Send this to any misguided friends or family who have unfortunately heard only the negative, cynical and partisan "reporting" (agenda pushing) the MSM has provided.  We have got to accelerate putting the MSM out of busness, before they completely brainwash and destroy our country. Their isn't even a semblance of objectivity anymore, only liberal rhetoric.

Do We Have a Strategy in the War?
Yes, and a multifaceted one, at that.

By Victor Davis Hanson

It is often said that the United States has neither a long-term strategy in this larger war against terror nor an immediate one in Iraq.

Both are unfair charges, since we seem to have both.

Against the terrorists, our strategy is a six-pronged approach:

The following is a collaboration with Marc Sheppard originally posted at The American Thinker.

Five months ago, the Internet’s top search engine Google was accused of banning conservative websites from its news crawl. Last week, the e-behemoth offered to purchase YouTube, the preeminent provider of videos over the Web that has recently been implicated in censorship of its own. With their pending merger, serious questions arise about the future of the most powerful telecommunications medium on the landscape, and who if anyone is trying to control its content.

With the Foley scandal going flatter than Paris Hilton's bust, Democrats and their media accomplices must mine elsewhere for electoral gold.

Today's Washington Post piece, "Hastert's Team Mentality to Be Tested as Foley Scandal Unfolds", is an example of to what they've been reduced.

It could have been Speaker Dennis Hastert's team skills or dexterity or experience or ingenuity that is being tested, but no, it's his "mentality."

It takes until the second paragraph for the authors, Michael Grunwald and Jim VandeHei,  to make the relevant point that Mr. Hastert is "the beefy former wrestling coach - who's a bit bearlike himself." Just in case that's too subtle, we're later advised: "He looks like a cross between actor Wilford Brimley and Jabba the Hutt, and his unassuming Midwestern public demeanor makes for dull television."

Tennessee DEMOCRATS stealing millions, FEDERAL INDICMENT - not returning stolen campaign contributions, where's the MSM coverage ?

Frontpage with a link at The American Thinker.

[ One of the biggest donors to the Democrats of Tennessee was arrested on Friday for embezzling millions in retirement funds he was managing (including employee accounts of the TN Democratic Party, the TN Board of Regents and Nashville Metro). But the Democrats announced late last week that they intended to keep $50k+ in donations from him.]

So the demo and their big $$$ campaigners are looting pension funds and doing their campaigns with the stolen proceeds...and not giving it back when caught ---LOL - the real culture of corruption, with the seemingly standard DEFIANCE by the democrats !