From time to time, network news personalities betray their ideological sympathies by lending their fame and glamour to public events for liberal causes. On Tuesday, ABC's George Stephanopoulos and his wife Alexandra Wentworth are hosting a Washington awards dinner for the Children's Defense Fund, the liberal group which his boss Hillary Clinton used to serve as chair of the Board of Directors before becoming First Lady. CDF was an aggressive left-wing force opposed to welfare reform, even during the Clinton years. From the press release:

On Tuesday, Nov. 14, the Children's Defense Fund will host its 2006 Annual Beat the Odds Awards Dinner to honor five Washington, D.C. area high school seniors who have overcome tremendous adversity to demonstrate academic excellence and give back to their communities. Comedian Alexandra Wentworth and ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos will emcee the event at the Capital Hilton Hotel and actress Renee Zellweger will serve as award presenter. The event is sponsored by the Freddie Mac Foundation.

Former White House reporter (now columnist) Helen Thomas was interviewed by the Washington Post's Express newspaper (the free one you can read on the bus or train). Predictably, Helen thought that democracy has now prevailed in America, since democracy and Democrats are interchangeable terms:

EXPRESS: Did this past election start to show that?
THOMAS: I thought the election proved that democracy works. People finally get the message. I think they're fed up with the war and all the torture and all the other things that have been attached to [the United States].

The fauxtography scandal that characterized reporting of the Israeli-Hezbollah war continues. Charles Johnson at little green footballs reports that, according to the photographer who took a dramatic picture that ran in Time and US News & World Report, editors at Time deliberately changed the caption to slant the story against Israel. The caption claimed that the picture showed an Israeli plane burning after being shot down. It actually showed a fire at a Lebanese army base caused by a ground to ground missile that misfired after Israeli bombing.

What neither magazine chose to report is that the presence of the missile and launcher hidden in a civilian truck on the army base is a clear indication of collusion between the Lebanese army and the terrorist group Hezbollah.

Appearing on Monday's edition of the "The Colbert Report," Dan Rather promoted his new HDNet investigative series by touting an ability to report "quality news with integrity." The small cable channel will premiere "Dan Rather Reports" on November 14. The show will feature the ex-CBS anchor who famously left his network after overseeing a segment that included forged documents used to attack President Bush. Amazingly, when talking with Comedy Central's Colbert, Rather touted his reputation in Bob Dole-style third person:

Stephen Colbert: "Now, let me ask you something. Now, the show is called ‘Dan Rather Reports.’ Um, what is the show about? Like, what is Dan Rather reporting?"

Dan Rather: "Dan Rather is reporting, hopefully, quality news with integrity. I hope it will be news with guts and spine."

Perhaps the key qualifier there is "hopefully."

For the second day in a row, ABC’s Diane Sawyer questioned a guest as to whether the American voters are either secretly "more racist" or "more sexist" when they cast their ballots. During an interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on Tuesday’s Good Morning America, Sawyer inquired:

Sawyer: "...Ninety percent of Americans say race and gender make absolutely no difference in their vote in the polls. I asked Senator Obama yesterday if he believes it, and he thinks it's case by case. Let me ask you, do you think that there is secret sexism, secret, secret genderism in this country?"

Of course, the liberal columnist agreed with Sawyer’s premise that American society is sexist, but asserted that it is not, in fact, a secret:

Maureen Dowd: "Oh, I don't think it's, I don't think it's very secret. I'm not sure we've gotten so much farther along than with Ferraro, where she didn't get any guys in the south...I do think there is obviously racism and sexism, but I think that these are both two extraordinary candidates [Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama] who, you know, might be able to triumph over some of that, but we'll see."

Sawyer: "More sexism than racism, racism than sexism?"

< <updated June 29 '08>> H/T - Unsane & Mean Gene Dr. Love

North Korea. Iran. Syria. China. Russia. Venezula.

 

The list of countries that hate us includes many that either have access to, or may soon have access to Nuclear Weapons. Fortunately, National Missle Defense has been a priority of Bush(43), and we currently have several of the key pieces operational.

LAUNCH PHASE

• Airborne LASER (ABL) [Animation] - in development
• Kinetic Energy Interceptor (KEI) - in development

MIDCOURSE

• Ground Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) - semi-operational
• Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense - Operational

TERMINAL PHASE

Dems receive yet another setback with Iraq. Mr Rumsfeld is off the hook with regard to prosecution of war crimes.

...Even though a German law requires German prosecutors to investigate
allegations of war crimes even if they are not committed by Germans or
in Germans, German Federal Prosecutor Kay Nehm said US authorities bore
the initial responsibility to do so.

He added that his office could only act if US officials failed to do so, but said this
was not the case. A US organization called Center for Constitutional
Rights had filed the complained against Rumsfeld and other high-ranking
officials in Germany for the role they played in torture and abuse at
Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison...

Looking for an election-season boost, the Times opened up its exclusive Times Select product to non-paying proles last week, sending editor-columnist Frank Rich's "2006: The Year of the 'Macaca,'" to the #1 most e-mailed story of the week (the free window is now closed, so you have to pay for Rich's deep thoughts on why Bush-style conservatism lost this year).

"This was callous conservatism, if not just plain mean.

"It’s the kind of conservatism that remains silent when Rush Limbaugh does a mocking impersonation of Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's symptoms to score partisan points. It’s the kind of conservatism that talks of humane immigration reform but looks the other way when candidates demonize foreigners as predatory animals. It's the kind of conservatism that pays lip service to 'tolerance' but stalls for days before taking down a campaign ad caricaturing an African-American candidate as a sexual magnet for white women.

At about 11:00 AM Eastern Time Tuesday, CNBC reported that a highly-regarded research company, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, has determined that the well-touted theory that the world has or is close to “peak oil” is nonsense. CNBC’s Sharon Epperson covered the story (rough transcript):

There is this new report out that says, “Is the world running out of oil? No way!” The new report out today debunks the peak oil theory. That of course is the theory that when half of the oil is pumped out of the ground, then it’s going to peak and decline precipitously from there. Well, today, CERA, which is the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, is just out with a report saying that this in fact is a faulty theory; that the peak oil theory that the world is running out of oil is simply a faulty premise. It says that there are actually nearly 3 ¾ trillion barrels of oil out there. That is nearly three times the 1.2 trillion that most of the peak oil theorists think is out there. And they also say that this is too critical an issue to allow fear to enter into the equation. Really it takes careful analysis to really talk about some of the challenges that are out there in delivering these fuels to economies that really need them.

As CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso Cabrera read through the embargoed release, she mentioned that its author, Dan Yergin, is one of the most respected oil analysts in the world, and that in this report, he claimed:

Nancy Pelosi proves yet again she is here before us to stand behind us, literally.

Amazing as it has been, the dems cherish any opportunity to expose all RNC corruption, regardless of time attrition and with no respect to validity. If conservative the mindset focus is guilty until proven innocent.

Imagine Foley exposed, remaining in office, and running for a leadership position. What! That certainly could never be possible.

Watch the Murtha $50,000 Abscam meeting.

WT, 11/14

Murtha was an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the Abscam scandal of the
1980s when FBI agents posed as emissaries of an Arab sheik and lured
several congressmen into a Capitol Hill town house to hand out $50,000
bribes...

Chris Matthews is so blatantly anti-Iraq war that any time he's discussing it, he ought to be balanced out but that wasn't the case on this morning's Today show. NBC's Matt Lauer sat idly by as the host of Hardball compared Iraq to Vietnam and demanded the President relent to Democrats and withdraw troops as soon as possible. Matthews even was dismayed that the President still dared to use the word, "victory."

Matthews ranted to Lauer: "I mean the President lost the election. He, he still talks like he won the election. The Democrats who control both houses want to begin withdrawing our troops. It's all about numbers of troops and the timetable for getting them out and the President and Tony Snow right there said they don't, they don't go along with that thinking."

Republicans are in the news today with some GOP dissent over the appointment of Florida senator Mel Martinez to head the Republican National Committee. In 2008 news, Rudy Giuliani formed an "exploratory committee" for a presumptive presidential run.

The Boston Globe's recent article on Dick Cheney's "fate" after the recent elections is an interesting, if not subtle, attempt to make it seem as if the Vice President were somehow on his way out just like Donald Rumsfeld was. Even painting Bush as "forgetting" the VP was in a recent meeting intimating that Cheney is not included in running the country anymore.(Cheney doesn't need Rumsfeld anymore)

Here is the lead paragraph of the story:

WASHINGTON -- When President Bush and the two top Democrats in the House met with reporters on Thursday, Vice President Dick Cheney was largely silent, sitting impassively with his characteristic half-smile. "All three of us recognize that when you win, you have a responsibility to do the best you can for the country," declared Bush, apparently forgetting that the vice president was there to make it a foursome.

Half smile? Is that another way of saying smirk -- their favorite attack word against Bush himself?

As NewsBusters reported Saturday, the politically correct crowd appears to have lost this round concerning whether the Christmas season should be referred to as the holiday season so as not to offend, well…anybody. Another sign that it will once again be acceptable to recognize the religious aspects of this annual ritual with total impunity (meaning without fear that the ACLU will serve you papers instead of egg nog for the holidays!) is when we start seeing news reports concerning this on television.

With the official start of the shopping season now just ten days away, the following video of a report filed by WRCB in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is guaranteed to get you in the mood to shout from the rooftops -- as well as in your favorite store -- “Merry Christmas.”

What follows is a full transcript of this report.

I'm not sure how many will take this but I found a very interesting article of an interview (HT Jawa) with Dr. Tawfik Hamid, former member of the Egyptian Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya.  What he has to say concerning Islamofacisim is probably why he has to stay in hiding.

Michael Coren, National PostPublished: Friday, November 03, 2006

Dr. Tawfik Hamid doesn't tell people where he lives. Not the street, not the city, not even the country. It's safer that way. It's only the letters of testimony from some of the highest intelligence officers in the Western world that enable him to move freely. This medical doctor, author and activist once was a member of Egypt's Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (Arabic for "the Islamic Group"), a banned terrorist organization. He was trained under Ayman al-Zawahiri, the bearded jihadi who appears in Bin Laden's videos, telling the world that Islamic violence will stop only once we all become Muslims.

Early on in the recent Israel/Lebanon war, there was a photograph published by both U.S. News and World Report and Time Magazine, which according to captions published with the picture was of a burning Israeli jet, shot down by Hezbullah missiles. The blogosphere was quick to dispute the picture in question, and the widely-circulated story was that the photograph was actually that of a tire dump.

Well, it seems that the photographer responsible for taking the photograph, Bruno Stevens, has finally sounded off on Lightstalkers (the professional photographer's forum), explaining the photograph and telling the true story of how things ended up the way they did. He also notes that the site was not a tire dump, but was rather an old Lebanese Army base that had either been hit by an Israeli jet, or by a misfired Hezbullah rocket (both possibilites he appears to have recounted in his original captions). The key point that Bruno makes is that, while he sent in a fairly balanced caption to accompany the photograph, the wire services rewrote the caption completely, changing the pertinent facts surrounding the story. Where have we heard that before?

Bruno's story is available in full at Lightstalkers, and I recommend checking it out, even though it is mostly written as a response to someone who has been alleging that he was somehow covering up a civilian massacre or other indiscriminate act by the Israeli Air Force.

Here is an update to The Case For Invading Iraq And Removing Saddam Hussein From Power. (v.2.1b)

Hat Tip to Chris Donohoe, Sua Sponte 75, NL207, and (**) for some of the descriptions & links.

I. Saddam was known to have WMD and used it in at least 3 separate situations.

1. S. Hussein used Chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War [answers.com]
2. Hussein used Chemical weapons vs. the Kurds in N. Iraq  [phrusa.org] and here  [Free Republic]
3. S. Hussein used Chemical weapons against the Sunnis in S. Iraq [Human Rights Watch]
4. Statements to the effect that Iraq had or was seeking WMD made by: President Clinton, Madeline Albright, Sandy BergerRep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Carl Levin, V.P. Al Gore.  Also see this for many of the same or similar remarks [Snopes & acsa.net]
5. Letter to Pres. Clinton, signed by: Sens. Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, & others 10-09-1998. [Snopes]
6. Letter to Pres. Bush, Signed by Sen. Bob Graham & others, Dec, 5, 2001.  [Snopes]

II. There is a long list of WMD, delivery systems, and banned conventional weapons found in Iraq

Now that the Democrats hold the majority in the Senate, the New York Times is painting the new Senators firmly into the political middle. Reporter Timothy Egan profiled Sen.-Elect Jon Tester, one of the hard-left Daily Kos Democrats, in a story headlined "Fresh Off the Farm in Montana, a Senator-to-Be." Egan began his ode to the liberal man with a crew-cut: "When he joins the United States Senate in January, big Jon Tester — who is just under 300 pounds in his boots — will most likely be the only person in the world’s most exclusive club who knows how to butcher a cow or grease a combine." You have to read quite a way into the article to see that this good old boy is raising "organic lentils, barley, peas, and gluten-free grain" on his farm. No boutique liberal there, eh?

Egan insisted "the senator-elect from Montana truly is your grandfather’s Democrat — a pro-gun, anti-big-business prairie pragmatist whose life is defined by the treeless patch of hard Montana dirt that has been in the family since 1916." That definition would work, if your grandfather opposed wiretapping enemy communications in World War 2 or would have opposed a Patriot Act to help fight the Nazis.