NBC's Today carried a series on faith this week, and finished it Thursday morning with two liberal journalists about a new website Newsweek is setting up on faith. It all sounded very much like soft-soap Episcopalianism, no doubt because the preacher on the set was Newsweek editor and Episcopalian Jon Meacham, along with Sally Quinn, a writer best known as the wife of former top Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. Ann Curry began by saying Meacham and Quinn "started a conversation about religion over lunch one day, and that discussion hasn't stopped." Curry continued: 

"It's so interesting to think about how, just, what, 20 years ago, we would not speak about faith in America in any sort of big way.  We talked about basically the separation of church and state meant that we didn't speak about church because we felt it was going to inflame and cause problems.  What has changed?  What has changed fundamentally about America that now lets us talk so much about it?  In fact, have it influence policy in America.  Sally."

We’re at Camp Al Asad, about 150 miles west of Baghdad in Anbar Province. We began our day with the famous Navy Seabees, the construction battalions that historically have gone ashore with the Marines to build what needs to be built. We spoke with Seabees largely from a reserve unit from Washington State. Most of the men work construction jobs in civilian life, and here they were getting the job done in conditions about as far as can be imagined from those of the Pacific Northwest. I also spoke with the Chief in charge of food for the unit. He mentioned that, in the constant pursuit of improvement, the Navy actually draws upon the expertise of the Culinary Institute of America from my home state of New York.

A couple of the men were from an Alaska reserve unit. One of them works as a firefighter/EMT in a gold mine in the Fairbanks area. Once a month he makes the 350-mile roundtrip to his unit in Anchorage – on his own dime.

Reading the Globe's Nov 18th piece about vice President Cheney, one can palpably feel their fingers being crossed, their wishes being cast into the wishing well, that Cheney is on the outs with this supposed "big demotion" the paper sees for his immediate future.

In short, will Rumsfeld's abrupt dismissal finally diminish Cheney's unprecedented dominance of Bush? Or did the always cunning vice president read the writing on the wall and decide that it was time for his good friend Rumsfeld to go?

And typically, as with every story about the VP, one quotient missing in the analysis is the president himself, prosaically fitting into the the Cheney-as-puppetmaster story line the MSM has created for him. (Though, now they want to cast James Baker in Cheney's puppeteering shoes)

They even want us to believe that Cheney somehow strong-armed Bush into the Iraq policy and the War on Terror as if 9/11 never occurred.

Newspaper investors are surely hoping that the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Peter Scheer never gets anywhere near the executive suite after his column last Sunday evaluating the state of newspaper industry.

In fact, something unusual must have been in the latte Scheer was drinking at the Chronicle when he wrote this about how to save the print newspaper business (HT Techdirt, which calls it the "Let Everyone Else Break News First" strategy):

What to do? Here's my proposal: Newspapers and wire services need to figure out a way, without running afoul of antitrust laws, to agree to embargo their news content from the free Internet for a brief period -- say, 24 hours -- after it is made available to paying customers. The point is not to remove content from the Internet, but to delay its free release in that venue.

SARASOTA, FL. (NS) -

There is now a myth of where the missing votes in Florida's District 13 Congressional race are...

Some would want you to believe the touchscreen voting machines just failed to work, while others are trying to convince you that you may not have voted at all...

But few are telling you about the voter apathy that was induced into this campaign after the Republican Primary was over and all the negative ads were introduced...

For those who knew local Businessman Vern Buchanan, they knew that both Christine Jennings (D) and Tramm Hudson (R) had been personal Bankers for Vern Buchanan...

People also knew that neither Christine nor Tramm would have had anything to do with the kind of person each of their negative ads were portraying. This was the beginning of what turned voters off and caused them to purposely not vote in the FL District 13 Congressional race...

It was a pretty funny “Real Time with Bill Maher” on HBO this past Friday, although not for the reasons the host would have preferred. Maher invited deposed CBS anchor Dan Rather on to discuss whatever he wanted with total impunity, and what ensued was a full-fledged Fox News hate-fest. However, that wasn’t the funniest part, for Rather actually had the gall to insinuate that FNC gets talking points from the White House, and was doing its darnedest to influence the elections that just transpired.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Honestly, I’ve had to use four boxes of Kleenex to dry off my laptop in order to post this article for your reading pleasure.

Those unpleasantries out of the way, Maher opened this part of the discussion with the following (video available here courtesy of our friend at Ms Underestimated):