Today's starters

Media: Keith Olbermann wants a raise (despite still remaining in fourth-place). The champion of the people is gunning for $4 million a year. TV reporter Max Robbins says CNN is purportedly interested in hiring the left-wing commentator but I doubt that.

"Why did CNN and MSNBC give air time to David Duke? What purpose did it serve the viewers?" Media columnist Jon Friedman asks today. Easy answer: Because to them, Duke represents two useful commodities: 1) he pisses people off, and 2) he represents what the right "really" thinks about race, in the view of the average liberal producer (HT: TVN).

Of course, when it comes to racists, if you're a non-American willing to bash President Bush, it earns you a suck-up interview in Time magazine and such accolades from that same magazine as "global Everyman," "champion of the dispossessed.

Politics: Illinois senator Barack Obama is being hyped so much, but if he's smart he won't believe it, John Fund argues.

Tennessee governor Phil Bredensen is under fire for putting a "young Muslim woman" on his official Christmas cards. Apparently it was some sort of goodwill gesture gone horribly awry.

Check out the top ten politically incorrect words of 2006.

This was certainly a bizarre headline to see in Monday’s New York Times: “After Bankruptcy Filing, Recriminations Fly at Air America.” Now, follow that up with these opening paragraphs (emphasis mine throughout):

In its search for a new chief executive this past summer, Air America Radio interviewed seasoned media executives in an effort to revive the faltering network. One interview took a bizarre turn, however, when the executive got into a political argument with Randi Rhodes, one of the network’s on-air hosts.

“I laughed and said, ‘You sound like Republican talking points,’ ” Ms. Rhodes recalled.

Yep. That’ll certainly help you recruit a top executive, Randi! Nice job! Yet, that was just the beginning of a startling analyis from an unlikely source as to how extreme liberal views made the success of this network almost impossible:

It was such a cheap play to the left-wing peanut gallery that it doesn't even pay to be disgusted. Discussing the "Time" magazine person of the year choice on "The View" this morning, yenta-in-residence Joy Behar blurted out:

"You have to put like a Hitler type. Like you put Donald Rumsfeld there or something."

When some in the audience began to jeer, Behar broke into a huge, mock-surprised smile, as if to say "what's wrong with that?"

And the winner of this year’s Media Research Center award for the worst quote of 2006 is...you! Well, only if “you” are Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the liberal activist who is also publisher of the New York Times. Sulzberger “won” for his May 21 commencement address in which he declared abortion and gay marriage were “fundamental human rights” and decried how America was “fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land.”

For our 19th annual Best Notable Quotables issue, the Media Research Center asked a panel of 58 distinguished media observers (top radio hosts, columnists, editorial page writers, etc.) to select their choices for the most outrageous quotes of the year in 16 different categories (such as the “Good Morning Morons” category, or the “Cranky Dinosaur Award for Trashing New Media”).

The front page of Monday’s Washington Post is a topped with a local religion story, as seven Episcopal parishes voted to break with the Episcopal Church USA over the church’s tilt away from the Bible and toward a "progressive" future with gay bishops and gay "marriage" ceremonies. Reporters Michelle Boorstein and Bill Turque describe these dissidents as "conservative" four times in the story (and once in the headline), but there are no "liberals" in the piece, not gay Bishop Gene Robinson and not the top Presiding Bishop, Kathleen Jefferts Schori. In paragraph 17, the reporters do attribute talk of a "leftward drift" to a disgruntled parishioner.

(Perhaps most surprising is the picture: conservative opponents of homosexuality embracing after the decision to split away. Nearly every national newspaper story on gay issues is illustrated by gay plaintiffs, gay protesters, gay parents – and social conservatives go for years without being pictured.)

That's Meredith Vieira beaming at Hillary Clinton on this morning's Today. Someone might suggest to Meredith that when trying to ingratiate oneself with Hillary, it's advisable to avoid words bringing "imperious" to mind. But if the execution was flawed, no one can deny the fervor with which Vieira endorsed Hillary's paean to big-government, 'It Takes A Village'. Here's how Vieira opened the interview:

"I want to start with 'It Takes a Village' '07 because this book came out ten years ago, and a lot has happened in the past ten years that makes it I think even more imperative that we will need a village to raise healthy, secure children."

View video here.

"Put down the candles and step slowly away from the menorah." Reading her pay-per-view New York Times column of today, that's what I felt like shouting at Jennifer Michael Hecht. Hecht manages to turn the Festival of Light into a celebration of the rejection of traditional Judaism - and an odd bow in the direction of colonialism and cultural imperialism.

Hanukkah celebrates "a revolution against assimilation and the suppression of Jewish religion." Syrian-Greeks had colonialized Israel, overturned the Temple, and turned Jews away from their religion. A small band of faithful Jews defeated the Greek army, drove them from the Israel, reclaimed the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and rededicated it to the service of God.

According to Hecht, that was . . .a bad thing. In her view, "progressive, modern Jews" should actually consider the Syrian-Greeks the heroes of the story, and those who fought against them to restore traditional Judaism the villians.

In the era of Bill Clinton, the liberal media was not shy about locating "Clinton haters." In March of 1994, Washington Post reporter Ann Devroy reported from the front of conservatism, "Bill Clinton’s enemies are making their hatred clear, with a burning intensity and in some case with an organized passion." She listed as haters Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan, and so on. But the Post doesn’t seem to use the term "Bush hater," even when Bush haters are dancing right in front of them.

See Monday’s Style section for a feature on a Bush-hating ballet. Sarah Kaufman’s review of a Kennedy Center performance by the Paul Taylor Dance Company is mildly headlined "Paul Taylor, Hitting Close To Home: At His 'Banquet of Vultures,' George Bush Is the Centerpiece." What a treat, another "antiwar" artist trashing the warmongers, with Bush cast as uncaring about troop deaths, and even committing one himself:

Editor and Publisher seems hardly able to hold back their excitement over the possibility that someone has found proof of the existence of the mysterious "Captain Jamil Hussein" who the Associated Press claimed as a source for the supposed burning of 6 Sunni Iraqis in retaliation for the depredations of that sect on their Shi'ite neighbors.

In a Sunday posting on their site, E&P is crowing about "Conservative Bloggers in the U.S." eating crow.

Though far from definitive proof, it was strong enough to cause at least one conservative blogger to wonder if those who had mocked the AP might have to eat "a huge shinola sandwich."

The tag for the story on the Hot Air home page currently reads, "Anyone got any good recipes for crow?"

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Steven Spruiell of NRO Media Blog offered a few thoughts on Tony Snow's apology to David Gregory for suggesting a question about how Bush is a failure was partisan in character. (To me, it had a bit of a "sorry I said the sky is blue" logic to it.) I'm more in line with Steve's POV than Noel Sheppard's praise for Snow's decency:

Snow's smart enough to realize that the White House simply doesn't enjoy the kind of popularity it would need to survive a war with the beltway media right now, and the last thing he needs is the Milbanks of the world attacking his credibility on the eve of a major policy change in Iraq.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was Tim Russert’s "guest" on “Meet the Press” Sunday, and it’s safe to assume the eloquent Georgian would have preferred something more pleasant for Christmas like a root canal, a colonoscopy, or an income tax audit. In fact, Russert gave Gingrich a grilling that many murder suspects don’t receive from hostile police officers in an interrogation room.

With that as pretext, while you read some of Russert’s inquiries, just imagine how incredibly unlikely it is that any Democrat candidate for president will ever face the kinds of questions Gingrich did this fine day. For instance, can you in your wildest dreams envision Russert asking John Edwards or Hillary Clinton something like this: