I had no intention of watching the Winter Olympics until Brian Scumble made his comment about them being as white as a GOP convention.  I have watched the event now everynight since Scumble's racist comment for spite and have enjoyed every minute of it.   NASCAR anyone?

  I live in the south and have heard more than one oldtimer state that he used to be a" yellow dog democrat" which meant that a person would vote for a yellow dog before voting for a Republican.  Why? Simple.  Lincoln was a Republican.   Enough said.

Back on February 11th, I was very troubled to learn that a government-run United Arab Emirate (UAE) company called Dubai Ports World (DPW) had bought out a UK-owned ports group called the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, giving it control of roughly 30 percent of the terminals at U.S. seaports in New York, Miami, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Baltimore and New Orleans.

To be honest, I had little understanding of what exactly the deal entailed when I first read about it in a Middle Eastern newspaper called the Daily Star, and although I've learned considerably more facts regarding the situation since then, few of those facts have helped to ease my mind about the potential threat to our national security that such a takeover represents.

National Public Radio's "Diane Rehm Show" is created at American University NPR station WAMU (88.5 FM), but is nationally syndicated to about 100 stations. Today's first hour tilted to the left. On one side was retired Air Force officer Randall Larsen, a founder of the Institute for Homeland Security, calmly arguing that the DPW deal is not a grave threat. On the other side was a pile of Democrats arguing against soft-on-defense President Bush: Sen. Chris Dodd, Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, and P.J. Crowley of the liberal Center for American Progress, a former staffer on Bill Clinton's National Security Council. That's 3-to-1 liberal (unless you count the host and make if 4 to 1).

On Monday, Rehm's first hour focused on presidential secrecy, with an unopposed liberal duo of "historians," the former Washington Post reporter and columnist Haynes Johnson and Tim Russert's favorite pop-historian, former LBJ aide and Hillary pal Doris Kearns Goodwin. (At least Tuesday's show on voting rights featured conservative expert Roger Clegg.)

Ex-ABCer Josh Gerstein reports in the New York Sun on the struggles of Al Gore's cable channel, named Current TV. We not only learn it's not widespread enough to be studied for ratings, but that it has an unsurprising liberal bias, a potentially Tipper-shocking appetite for raunch, and a legal problem: those greedheads at Minnesota Public Radio are taking them to court over the "Current" name. First, Gerstein's report on the liberal bias:

The network's staff is clearly wary about the channel being perceived as political. Mr. Gore is not an on-air presence. According to a question-and-answer posting on the channel's Web site, it is "absolutely not" a requirement that videos present a Democratic Party viewpoint.

British tech site The Register reported that Linda Callahan was trying to sign up for an email account with Verizon and was not allowed to because her name was blasphemous to Yahoo, which is in partnership with Verizon.

Yahoo banned any name that has "Allah" in it, including Callahan or Kallahar. The blasphemy policy didn't, however, cover God, Jesus or Buddah.

The Associated Press headlines:

Arab Co., White House Had Secret Agreement

And follows with:

The Bush administration secretly required a company in the United Arab Emirates to cooperate with future U.S. investigations before approving its takeover of operations at six American ports, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. It chose not to impose other, routine restrictions.

Later in the story we read:

Outside legal experts said such obligations are routinely attached to U.S. approvals of foreign sales in other industries.

"They're not lax but they're not draconian," said James Lewis, a former U.S. official who worked on such agreements. If officials had predicted the firestorm of criticism over the deal, Lewis said, "they might have made them sound harder."

You know the old line: find me a one-handed expert. The kind that doesn't say 'on the one hand, but on the other hand.' The Today show found one this morning. Terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey was single-handedly unequivocal in his support of the UAE port deal when interviewed by Matt Lauer.

Lauer: "Take the politics out of it. Will this really damage national security especially at these ports?"

Cressey: "The simple answer is that it won't. We've had foreign ownership of the ports . . . for a number of years now. The American security apparatus is still going to have responsibility for how security is dealt with. So it won't."

On his February 22 Scarborough Country, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough gave time to conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham to relay her experiences talking to American troops and doing her show in Iraq, and what she saw that contrasts with the predominantly negative view of the Iraq War as reported by the mainstream media. Scarborough found that her words confirmed the sentiments of e-mails he has received from U.S. troops in Iraq that "there is a huge disconnect from what Americans are hearing in the media and what they're seeing on the ground over there," which is "misleading the American people on how things are really going in Iraq."

Ingraham began by passing on the "great respect and admiration between American military trainers and their Iraqi counterparts," and the "important cooperation between average Iraqis, who are giving more tips to American and Iraqi forces than ever before."

Time and Newsweek put Dick Cheney’s hunting accident on their covers this week, a dying story already eight days old. The shooting victim, Texas lawyer Harry Whittington, went home after apologizing for all that Cheney had to go through, meaning the thoroughly juvenile media frenzy that followed.

Time and Newsweek no doubt imagined Cheney delayed alerting the press until Sunday so that they couldn’t put him on their Earth-changing covers last week. We’ll show you, they said, fists shaking at being so obviously dissed.

But we already know every single bit of the story, having heard it hundreds of times over the last week. How to make these covers newsworthy? Easy, if you’re a melodramatist at these magazines.

Newsweek’s cover promised a look at “Cheney’s Secret World,” over a picture of Cheney shooting his gun in the field. They headlined their cover story “The Shot Heard Around the World.” Now, whoa, as they say in Wyoming. Muslim rioters are killing people over mild Muhammad cartoons in Denmark, and this birdshot accident was the “shot heard around the world”? It gets worse. The subheadline told a conspiratorial tale: “He peppered a man in the face, but didn't tell his boss. Inside Dick Cheney's dark, secretive mindset – and the forces that made it that way.” Cue the “Phantom of the Opera” soundtrack.

Click here for instructions on running Gaggle daily on your site. There's also an archive of previous toons available here.

Nine months ago, CBS anchor Bob Schieffer painted Iraq as spiraling into civil war. It didn't happen then, yet on Wednesday night Schieffer renewed his ominous forecast. But unlike in May, this time his ABC and NBC anchor colleagues expressed the same prospect. Back on May 19 of last year, Schieffer teased the CBS Evening News with this unique warning: "Good evening. I'm Bob Schieffer. It just keeps getting worse in Iraq. The death toll is rising. Tension is growing between Shiites and Sunnis. Is the country sliding toward civil war?" He soon added: “Now there's been a surge of attacks on Shiite and Sunni Muslim clerics, and some fear that Iraq is sliding toward civil war.” From Baghdad, Mark Strassmann backed up Schieffer's thesis: "Tit-for-tat terror seems to be pushing Iraq towards civil war. This man says, 'We are heading toward a catastrophe.'"

On Wednesday night, Schieffer teased: “One of the worst days ever in Iraq, and it's Iraqis against Iraqis. A Middle East expert tells us the country has been plunged into civil war.” Schieffer also relayed how “some are saying Iraq has been plunged into civil war.” On World News Tonight, ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas asserted: “One of the great fears of the American mission in Iraq has always been the prospect of civil war. Tonight, those fears are particularly real.” Over on the NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams, just back to Manhattan from two weeks in Torino, warned of how "tonight there are new fears that Iraq is on the brink of civil war." (Transcripts follow)

Not to be outdone by their liberal brethren in the printed press and TV mediums, AOL has once again loaded the web site's home page with another "We hate Bush, too!" headline, followed by those ever-present yet predictable AOL poll questions.

Centering around the recent political upheaval of the impending sale (6.8 billion dollars) and takeover of the operation of 6 American ports by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Dubai Ports World specifically, today's AOL Home page hopefully asks : "Is His Power Fading Away?" placed alongside a head-drooping and cryptic silhouette of what can only be President Bush. The sentence below then reads: “Bush Faces More Challenges," whereupon clicking on it brings one to a battery of poll questions in a section that AOL calls "The Daily Pulse"