Sarah and James Brady decided to add their two cents to Vice President Dick Cheney's hunting accident on Sunday.

     James Brady, if you remember, was shot during an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in 1981.  Brady remains in a wheelchair and paralyzed to this day.

     Throughout the years, the Brady's have been anti-gun zealots, and correspondingly, more and more anti-GOP.  Sarah Brady's remarks may be looked upon by many as partisan, and hostile.

     Said Sarah Brady: "I've thought Cheney was scary for a long time...Now I know I was right to be nervous."

The American media have been in full lather over the existence of pictures containing former lobbyist Jack Abramoff with President George W. Bush. TIME magazine published the first such “evidence of a White House connection” at its website on Saturday, with The New York Times following suit on Sunday. TIME reported: “Now, finally, the first such photo has come to light. It shows a bearded Abramoff in the background as Bush greets an Abramoff client, Raul Garza, who was then the chairman of the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas; Bush senior advisor Karl Rove looks on. The photograph was provided to TIME by Mr. Garza.” The Times said: “By itself, the picture hardly seems worthy of the White House's efforts to keep it out of the public eye. Mr. Abramoff, a leading Republican fund-raiser who pleaded guilty last month to conspiring to corrupt public officials, is little more than a blurry, bearded figure in the background at a gathering of about two dozen people.”

After that statement, the Times became more conspiratorial:

Even though Al Gore never became president, Karenna Gore Schiff is getting another round of puffery over her new 500-page-plus book on female heroes, "Lighting the Way." (She did "Today" on NBC last week.) Yesterday's big profile in the Washington Post Style section displayed how they can let their hair down and display their less objective, more personal style -- and it's clear that personally, they're just in love with her. Post writer Bob Thompson theorized to her that it's odd that she would delight in women fighting mainstream opinion, since her dad was mainstream enough to almost get elected: 

We're not criticizing dad , we assure her. [Italics his] Yet we're talking about the son of a U.S. senator, a Harvard-educated family scion seemingly born to high office. We're talking about a congressman, senator and then a vice presidential candidate who balanced a centrist presidential ticket by carefully tipping it neither left nor right.

The British newspaper calls itself "The Independent," but an article in today's edition indicates it's hardly independent of the kind of environmentalist scare-mongering common in the US press.

How's this for an over-the-top headline?: "Starving Polar Bears Shame Bush to Act"

The gist is that global warming is causing Arctic ice to melt, depriving polar bears of territory to hunt seals, the staple of their diet.

Author Geoffrey Lean [special sympathy for the hungry?] brands Bush's stance on climate change "obdurate," which last I looked means "hardened in wrongdoing or wickedness; stubbornly impenitent." No media bias there!

Carsten Juste, the editor of the Danish newspaper that set off an international kerfuffle by publishing cartoons of the founder of Islam was interviewed in yesterday's edition. An excerpt from the Q&A:

There were some journalists here at the paper, including some who write regularly about Muslims, immigration, and integration, who strongly advised us not to do it. It was quite a discussion. Personally I thought the cartoons were harmless - very much in fitting with our Danish tradition for caricature. If some of the cartoons had been cruder - if an illustrator had given us Mohammed pissing on the Koran, for example - then it would have been pulled. The same way I've pulled a lot of cartoons over the years that devout Christians might have found insulting. Or others because they were too vulgar or too crude. I didn't feel that these were, and so we went ahead.'

Saturday's CBS Evening News devoted its “Weekend Journal” segment to, as anchor Russ Mitchell explained, “the Senate veteran who is known far and wide as 'Saint Jack.'" Bill Whitaker proceeded to relay, without any competing voices, the anti-Christian Right enmity of former moderate, at best, Missouri Republican Senator Jack Danforth who is on a crusade to rid the Republican Party of the influence of Christian conservatives. Whitaker began with a clip of Danforth declaring: "I am concerned about the Republican Party becoming, in essence, the party of the Christian conservatives." Whitaker then bucked-up Danforth's authority: "This is no Republican-basher speaking. It's party stalwart John Danforth, a lifelong Republican with rock solid conservative credentials.” To support the ludicrous claim that Danforth holds “solid conservative credentials,” Whitaker cited how he “led the bitter partisan battle to put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court” -- when that just reflected personal loyalty to Thomas who had worked on Danforth's staff when he was Missouri's Attorney General -- and how as “an episcopal priest, he presided over the funeral of Ronald Reagan," as if all those involved in the service were right-wingers.

The Los Angeles-based Whitaker, who traveled to La Quinta, California to interview Danforth, trumpeted how “this faithful Republican is worried about the direction his party is taking." After relating Danforth's contention that the involvement of religious conservatives “makes the party seem exclusive, and I think it makes American politics meaner” as well as his complaint that Republicans “pander” in “the conscious development of wedge issues in order to excite religious passion,” Whitaker sighed: "But even he admits it works. The GOP now controls the White House, the Senate, the House. But at what cost?" Danforth alleged: "If by winning an election we've caused such divisions in the country that we are unable to address the really big issues before us, then we've done more harm than good." (Transcript follows.)