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As reported on Newsbusters by Michelle Humphrey, actor Danny Devito was on ABC's "The View" today and went into a seemingly drunken tirade against President Bush and generally acted the fool on the show.

And, as Michelle added in her update to her original entry, ABCNews issued Devito's "apology" on their website.

But, this "apology" is interesting in that ABCNews mentions all the wild statements and strange behavior by Devito on every subject except his Bush bashing. We are left wondering why it was "proper" reporting to mention Devito's seeming inebriation, his mention of partying with actor George Clooney, his slurred speech, his being bleeped, his Clinton White House story and then his "apology" to Barbra Walters.... yet not a single mention of his attack on president Bush.

I understand that NBC Today star Matt Lauer is the toast of Manhattan, but letting your wife name your son "Thijs"? Way too precious if you don't live in Amsterdam. He'll clearly hate his brother, who is simply named "Jack." Clearly, this boy is never going to see the inside of a public school with a name like that. Even the teachers might think the name is somehow a typographical error. It's pronounced Tice, as in the best you could do as a dad to explain it to men is say "ahem, you know, Tice, like Mike Tice, the former Minnesota Vikings coach." Lauer certainly can't argue he's a '70s music nut and fan of Thijs van Leer, responsible for that big hit "Hocus Pocus"

“Those two campaigns have now come together to bring the strength of both communities, the disarmament community, and the women’s rights communities together in order to stop armed violence against women, recognizing that the disarmament conversation, too often does not involve women, and that the women’s rights movement has too often not realized the importance of taking away the weapons.”[1]

Clay Waters, Editor of the MRC's TimesWatch site and a regular contributor to NewsBusters, was a guest this afternoon on FNC's Your World with Neil Cavuto. Topic: Liberal bias in the New York Times and the impact of its publishing leaked information, specifically the timing of the Wednesday front page story: “Bush Adviser’s Memo Cites Doubts About Iraqi Leader.”

Clay appeared as part of a panel at the top of the 4pm EST show which will re-run at 5am EST Thursday morning.

Video clip (6:05): Real (4.52 MB) or Windows (3.76 MB) plus MP3 (1.76 MB)

The media’s fascination and love affair with Jimmy Carter apparently have no limits. CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer interviewed the ex-president on Tuesday’s "Situation Room" and cited his knowledge and experience of dealing with Iran:

Wolf Blitzer: "You know a lot about Iran. You spent the last 444 days of your presidency focusing in on the American hostages."

Jimmy Carter: "I remember that."

Blitzer: "I know. I remember it very well. I think everyone who was alive remembers it, as well. This is a regime -- basically, the same people who were in charge then, who took over for the shah, are still in charge right now, led by a supreme ayatollah, who has been meeting today with Talabani, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad met yesterday with Jalal Talabani, the president of Iraq."

Carter: "Yes."

Blitzer may remember the event, but it’s unclear if he recalls the botched Carter rescue attempts, including one that left eight U.S. servicemen dead. If he did recollect the event, the CNN anchor certainly didn’t bring the subject up.

The Dan Rather Rehabilitation Tour traveled to "Live with Regis and Kelly" on Wednesday,  and Rather said very little that was new. Philbin greeted him with an over-enthusiastic schmooze: “It’s like lookin’ at Mount Rushmore!”

In between explaining how you can get your HDNet so you can be one of the 40 viewers of Rather's show, Rather did get in his belief that “journalism is an important part of our system of checks and balances in this government” and that his show is “a wee small voice for journalism with integrity and quality journalism on Tuesday nights.” He's so dedicated that he said journalism twice. Nobody asked if using phony memos really fits Rather's definition of "journalism with integrity." When Philbin asked his opinion of the "Brit Pack," the new celebrity party girls hanging out with Britney Spears, Rather would only say, “None of them are as pretty as Kelly.”

Vice President Dick Cheney's financial advisers are apparently betting on a rise in inflation and interest rates and on a decline in the value of the dollar against foreign currencies. That's the conclusion we draw after scouring the financial disclosure form released by Cheney recently.

As of the end of last year, Cheney and his wife, Lynne, held between $10 million and $25 million in Vanguard Short-Term Tax-Exempt fund (VWSTX, news, msgs) (it's impossible to be more precise because the disclosure form lists holdings within ranges). The fund's holdings of tax-free municipal bonds mature, on average, in a little more than a year -- meaning that the fund should hold up well if rates rise.

As artificial as a breast augmentation surgery itself, the media's hype over dangers from silicone breast implants has been pretty much debunked by over a decade of scientific review. But that hasn't prompted the media to admit to and deflate the unfounded fears it blew up 16 years ago. From my colleague Julia Seymour's BMI newsletter article.

The FDA has put silicone breast implants back on the market. But journalists, who hyped the implants’ dangers more than a decade ago, have shown they’re not convinced.

“Given the history of this product, I think a lot of people are going to have a hard time with the government blessing for this particular product, being a foreign substance being sewn inside the bodies of women,” said NBC anchor Brian Williams on the Nov. 17, 2006, “Nightly News.”

Under the guise of combating the stigma of mental illness, the U.S. government will soon begin a massive campaign of psychiatric indoctrination, designed to increase the acceptance of psychiatric chemical imbalance theories and labeling, and to pave the way for national psychiatric screening, driving more Americans into seeking psychiatric drug treatment.

Regional meetings in support of the National Anti-Stigma Campaign (NASC), a nationwide television, radio and print public service advertising program funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), were held this past summer in Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago and Washington, D.C. According to a senior technical assistance specialist at the SAMHSA Resource Center to Address Discrimination and Stigma Associated with Mental Illness (ADS Center), the ad campaign, which will target 18-25-year olds, will be launched today. A campaign directed at older adults and ethnic and racial minorities will follow.

It seems safe to say that Keith Olbermann has found his audience, and hit his stride. At this point, all he has to do is find a well-known conservative to bash and belittle each night, and his viewers comprised of Netroots denizens and Michael Moore devotees across the country will gush over and applaud each vitriolic statement.

With that in mind, the Tuesday installment of “Countdown” certainly didn’t disappoint such folks, as the conservative in the crosshairs du jour was former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (video available here). At issue was a speech Gingrich gave Monday night at the Nackey S. Loeb First Amendment Award dinner in New Hampshire wherein he suggested that due to the ongoing war on terror, new rules might need to be applied to our Constitution to protect the citizens. Olbermann didn’t like this idea very much, and badly misquoted a famous German theologian to evoke images of Hitler and Nazis:

As Matt Drudge reported earlier, actor Danny DeVito seemed drunk when he went on an anti-Bush tirade on ABC’s The View on Wednesday. DeVito recounted how he last visited the White House during the Clinton years, warmly noting that "the place was, had that kind of Clinton feeling, you know," before denigrating President Bush as "numb nuts" (or something like that — ABC bleeped over the last part of that word).

DeVito then began what was supposed to be mimicry of Bush, making a variety of weird sounds and facial expressions. It’s impossible to really capture DeVito’s performance in words (he’d admitted he’d been up partying all night with George Clooney), so I’ve posted a short video of one of his more explosive moments. Video Clip: Real (1.97 MB), Windows (2.26 MB), MP3 (338KB)

Staffers for the Washington Post are now being graded, in an attempt to make those in the newsroom feel the same pressure as those in the boardroom. The grading options: “frequently exceeds expectations,” “sometimes exceeds expectations,” “meets expectations,” “sometimes fails to meet expectations,” or “frequently does not meet expectations.”

Unfortunately, there are no options for "somewhat biased," "hideously biased," or "Pelosi's press agent biased."

The New York Observer has more on this.

“I initiated this because we’ve had complaints over the years from reporters who would be evaluated and feel that their evaluations were inconclusive,” said Peter Perl, assistant managing editor for training and career development.

For general discussion and chat.

Today's KidsPost section of The Washington Post gives young readers an introduction to the anti-artistic agenda of the smoke nazis.

Reporter Susan Levine gave The American Legacy Foundation plenty of ink to promote their cause in today's article "Hollywood Not Yet Kicking Butts."

Basically they think any movie involving fictional characters that smoke should merit an automatic R-rating. A picture showing historical figures who actually smoked, like FDR, is fine and dandy, however.

In contrast, the Motion Picture Association of America was given one paragraph to defend artistic license, and even then most of the graf was centered on reiterating the warning that, yes, smoking is bad for you.

Call me crazy, but how hard is it to find a libertarian or conservative pundit with the other side to be quoted for this article? (post continues after jump)

The other networks are not quite ready to jump on NBC's "civil war" bandwagon. "Secretary of State Matt Lauer" (according to Howard Kurtz) and other NBC reporters have decided to declare the situation in Iraq a civil war, a move that is praised by some in the MSM and denounced by others. Reports the New York Observer:

“It was their decision to make and their process,” said Jon Banner, the executive producer of ABC’s World News. “We constantly discuss editorial matters here—all the time, every day. How that decision got made there I have no idea, nor do I want to guess.”

“To be honest with you, I think it’s a political statement, not a news judgment,” said Rome Hartman, the executive producer of the CBS Evening News. “We deal with the events of the day, and we decide the best way to describe those events based on the news of the day, not by—never mind, I’m not gonna go there.”
Then he did.

ABC’s John Stossel is well known for his libertarian views and for challenging liberal conventional wisdom. On Wednesday’s Good Morning America, Stossel was at it again as he debunked the widely held perception that liberals are more generous in their charitable contributions than conservatives. As part of a 20/20 special airing Wednesday night, Stossel interviewed Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks, who conducted a study which found that conservatives, while making slightly less money than liberals, actually contribute more:

John Stossel: "But it turns out that this idea that liberals give more is a myth. These are the twenty-five states where people give an above average percent of their income, twenty-four were red states in the last presidential election."

Arthur Brooks, Who Really Cares, author: "When you look at the data, it turns out the conservatives give about thirty percent more per conservative-headed family than per liberal-headed family. And incidentally, conservative-headed families make slightly less money."

On November 27, 2006, the media stepped up their demands for an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq by officially naming the incursion a civil war. While questioning their motives, Americans must also be extremely concerned with how quickly these same voices will demand our military be sent back in a humanitarian effort to halt the inevitable post-retreat genocide.

Amid all the seemingly principled antiwar discussions that have transpired the past several years, one issue has been shamelessly and immorally absent: if American troops leave Iraq too soon, one of the largest mass-murders of innocent people in history might ensue.

I felt myself cringing from the very beginning of Maureen Dowd's column this morning. You had a dread sense of where the story was headed when Dowd opened by writing "Nick Rapavi’s family and friends described him as a tough guy with a selfless streak. He’d wanted to be a Marine since high school, and his dress uniform had a parade of medals for heroism in Afghanistan and Iraq, including a Purple Heart." Sure and sadly enough, Dowd informed us that "the kid described as being 'full of life' died Friday in Anbar Province, the heartless heart of darkness in western Iraq, the hole-in-the-desert stronghold of the Sunni insurgency and Al Qaeda fighters."

In one of those "analysis" pieces reporters love to write, Washington Post White House reporter Peter Baker underlined on Wednesday one reason why NBC might have started using "civil war" to define Iraq: it severely undercuts the Iraq war in opinion polls.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, said Bush would rather frame it in the terrorism context to preserve public support. "If it's a civil war and only a small portion of it involves al-Qaeda operatives, then it's suddenly not the central front in the war on terror, it's a struggle by Iraqis for political power," he said. "That means the rationales for this are severely undercut."

Polls suggest that most Americans have already settled this debate in their minds -- 61 percent of those surveyed in September by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal described the situation in Iraq as a civil war, while 65 percent agreed in a CNN poll and 72 percent in a Gallup poll. Of those who described the conflict as "out of control" and a "civil war" in a later Gallup-USA Today poll, 84 percent called U.S. involvement a mistake, compared with 25 percent of those who did not view the situation that way.

SARASOTA, FL (NS)  - The first test expected to help restore public confidence in SarasotaCounty's electronic voting machines instead raised some more questionson Tuesday... The results of a simulated election held on spare machines didn'texactly match what state elections officials had scripted. Of fourmachines, the results of which were compared to actual election-dayresults, three had one to three fewer votes for Democrat ChristineJennings in the 13th Congressional District race... Officials quickly called the discrepancies "minor and not surprising,"and predicted that a review today would determine their cause... "It's going to be human error when we go back to look at it, that'swhat we expect," said Jenny Nash, spokeswoman for the Florida Secretaryof State's office, which conducted the mock election as part of anaudit of the county's voting system...Now please ask me if anybody is surprised to hear that the voters and 'human error', either intentional by not voting or unintentional by not paying attention, are mostly the cause for the undervote??? "Possible causes for discrepencies also include state electionsemployees not following scripts telling them how to vote and errors inthe scripts themselves," Nash said.

Late on Tuesday night, National Review reporter Byron York provided some early grist to challenge strange claims by media critics like William Powers that "journalists are more aggressive under Democratic rule." Somehow, the nation's leading newspapers weren't hustling alongside York as he chased the story of whether Nancy Pelosi would give the reins of the House Intelligence Committee to Rep. Alcee Hastings, who was impeached as a federal judge:

Tomorrow the Washington Post, on its front page, reports the news that Alcee Hastings will not be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.  For a story about Nancy Pelosi's decision, the Post piece gets into a number of details about the Hastings case itself.  Why?  One reason might be that, during the last few months when concerns about Hastings' impeachment and conviction were being raised, the Post never reported the basic facts of the case.  A Nexis search for Hastings' name and that of William Borders, Hastings' co-conspirator in soliciting bribes, reveals exactly one recent story — a November 1 column by the Post's Ruth Marcus, who had covered the Hastings story years ago.  As Congress buzzed, and Pelosi deliberated, the Post never bothered to tell its readers what the controversy was about.  

By the way, if you do the same search for the New York Times, you'll find the same thing — just without the Ruth Marcus column.  Which means that perhaps the most interesting so-far-unnoticed aspect of the story is that so much political pressure built up on Capitol Hill while the nation's two leading newspapers were looking the other way.

there i was watching SNL re-