Reporting on a fresh development in the Fannie Mae accounting scandals, the media again dropped another opportunity to raise the Clinton administration connections. But when it was Enron which defrauded investors, the media wouldn't let the public forget the connections Enron executives had to President Bush.

You can find my article on this at FreeMarketProject.org. Here's an excerpt:

After Enron’s collapse, the media frequently reminded the public of political ties top executives in the failed energy company had to the Bush administration. The same standard, however, wasn’t applied to mortgage broker Fannie Mae (FNM), whose former CEO served in the Clinton White House and was speculated to be on presidential hopeful John Kerry’s short list for Treasury secretary. The print media continued that double standard in covering a comprehensive new report on the scandal released February 23 by former Sen. Warren Rudman (R-N.H.).

During this afternoon’s Situation Room, CNN’s Jack Cafferty mocked the President for referring to the Bush administration as "my government." Yesterday morning, President Bush, while responding to a reporter’s question on the controversy surrounding the management of six U.S. ports being turned over to a United Arab Emirates-owned company, remarked that the transaction had been vetted by "my government" and that the ports would remain secure.

This innocuous phrase seemed to tick Cafferty off during his daily Cafferty File segment shortly before 4:15pm.

Jack Cafferty: "Is it still Bush’s government? Remember in the cabinet meeting he said, don’t worry about security, my government has taken a look at this and everything’s alright?..That’s unbelievable."

Silly as this may sound, Cafferty took great offense that the President of the United States had referred to his administration as, well, his. Cafferty, bafflingly, interpreted "my government" to mean that President Bush had decided to take sole ownership of the U.S. government. When anchor Wolf Blitzer reassured Cafferty that it is indeed "our government," Cafferty fired back angrily:

Cafferty: "Well, not, not according to President Bush it isn’t. It’s my government, he said."

The full transcript is behind the cut.

CNN business contributor Andy Serwer cast aspersions on investor Boone Pickens, a contributor to the MRC's Free Market Project, for using perfectly legal tax deductions to lower his 2005 tax liability. He reminded viewers that it wasn't illegal, but that it "raised questions." But Serwer found nothing questionable in tax sheltering last December, reports the Free Market Project's Amy Menefee:

CNN’s Serwer advised his viewers to get “cute” with the tax code on the Dec. 26, 2005, “American Morning.” He wasn’t talking to billionaires, of course, but ordinary individuals who apparently, in his estimation, deserve to save money. Serwer encouraged his viewers to “Maximize those charitable deductions, your 529 college plans for the kiddies. And your gift exclusion, anyone in America can give anyone else $11,000 tax free.” He gave further advice on how to “lower your 2005 tax bill”:

Today's CNN.com carries the AP story "'Daily Show' humor befuddles governor." The article centers on Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who made a recent appearance on the program and now claims he didn't realize it is a spoof. "'It was going to be an interview on contraceptives ... that's all I knew about it,' Blagojevich laughingly told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a story for Thursday's editions. 'I had no idea I was going to be asked if I was 'the gay governor.'"

Blagojevich, who is running for reelection this year, is not identified in the CNN/AP article as a Democrat. Yet the same show also featured an appearance by an Illinois state legislator. He is identified as a Republican.

You never know what wacky line you're going to find leafing through the back pages of Time magazine, and in placing their bets in this week's elapsing issue, Time film critics Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel predict "Brokeback Mountain" will win the Best Picture Oscar. When they try to guess a reason why it might confound the betting line and not win, they suggest: "The Academy remains a somewhat conservative body, and although this is a handsome and superbly acted film, it may not yet wish to endorse that 'gay cowboy' movie."

That avoids the question: if the Academy is so moderately conservative, then what explains the rash of nominations for "Brokeback," and "Capote," and "TransAmerica"? In fact, they contradict themselves a bit in their note on Felicity Huffman's Best Actress nod for playing a guy who wants to be girl: "Terrific performance in a picture that has not found an audience. Its transgressiveness doesn't even set it apart in the year of Brokeback Mountain and Capote." If the Oscars are a field of "transgressive" films, how can the Academy nominating them be even remotely conservative?

Via Fishbowl DC, we learn that Howard Mortman's created a new feature on his blog asking famous media types what they read on the Internet. In the early going, both Newsweek top political reporter Howard Fineman and ABC correspondent Jake Tapper list some typical major-media sites, but more interesting to the reader is their claims to digest a balanced diet of blog intake on a daily basis.

Here's the Fineman list, when we separate the blogs on ideological lines. On the right, he lists InstaPundit, Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, Real Clear Politics, and a little less bloggy (sans Taranto) Opinion Journal. On the left, he views Daily Kos, Atrios, Talking Points Memo, the Huffington Post, Wonkette, and (I'd include on the lib side) CJR Daily. He likes his pal Mickey Kaus, and Slate and Salon in general. In a bow to his "Hardball" buddy Chris Matthews, he also lists "Hardblogger." 

CBS is in trouble for a "48 Hours" story that changed the front page photo of a Missouri newspaper. The original front page photo from the Columbia Daily Tribune showed convicted murder Ryan Ferguson wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. CBS altered the newspaper's front page by putting in a different picture but representing it as from the newspaper. The new picture showed Ferguson wearing a suit and tie.

The story, entitled "Dream Killer," questions whether Ryan Ferguson was convicted unjustly.

"48 Hours" executive producer Susan Zirinsky says it "was an egregious oversight for us not to know it," although "we don’t feel it changed the editorial value of the story, per se."

The Columbia Daily Tribune interviewed Bob Steele on the ethics of CBS' actions. Steele teaches ethics at the Poynter Institute, a journalism training center in Florida.

Sports columnist Harvey Araton ventured onto thin ice with an anti-Bush metaphor on Wednesday while relaying the simmering feud between Olympic speedskaters Chad Hedrick and Shani Davis:

“And at the root of the conflict is Davis's belief that Hedrick has been attempting to swift boat him here at the Olympics, use him as a prop as he wraps himself, Texas-style, in the flag, for the purpose of increasing his commercial appeal, while claiming that the feud has elevated their skating and is good for the sport.”

To translate Araton's esoteric comparison: Hedrick is President Bush (they both hail from Texas, you see), and Davis is a stand-in for John Kerry, unfairly attacked by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. We think.

NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman is for many the voice of the center-left foreign policy establishment in the U.S. So much so that, in introducing him this morning, GMA host Charlies Gibson declared that Friedman's latest book should be required reading. Given Friedman's status, his nuanced and not-altogether-bleak assessment of the situation in Iraq on this morning's GMA merits consideration.

It was tempting to headline this entry with the provocative notion Friedman floated that perhaps only a Saddam was capable of holding Iraq's fractious components together. But Friedman was by no means endorsing Saddam's despotic rule, musing rather whether Saddam was a cause or an effect. As Friedman put it:

Washington Post sports columnist Mike Wise took apart Bryant Gumbel's racial trash-talking about the Winter Olympics in Friday's paper as I hoped a sports writer would. (Although you could grumble that it would have more punch on the front page of Sports instead of the top of the Olympics section on E-11, But let's face it, on the test of its newness, we're all writing about "earlier this month" instead of "last night.") Wise began by noting that in sports TV, Gumbel was a racial pioneer in a pretty white sportscasting bastion, much like speed skater Shani Davis or bobsledder Vonetta Flowers, and then followed up:

Gumbel has a right not to like the Winter Olympics. He can trash curlers, lugers and snowboard-crossers all he wants. But who made him arbiter of all things culturally diverse? Superimposing your own idea of diversity upon athletes from 80 different nations, essentially equating diversity with only race, is just inane.

Here in Annapolis, Maryland, local, state, and national media remained silent while Democrats in the General Assembly quietly overrode no less than three vetos by Republican Governor Bob Ehrlich, making Maryland's voting laws the least transparent and most liberal in the nation. From local and state news sources, not a word was breathed. From the national media, including, even, Fox News... Nothing!

Only author and WSJ columnist John Fund seems to have noted Maryland's radical moves towards their new "vote early and often" elections policy. As Fund aptly notes:

It should normally be difficult to pick the worst state legislature in America, but Maryland's is way out in front. First it overrode GOP Gov. Bob Ehrlich's veto of a special health-care tax on Wal-Mart. Democratic legislators then passed three election-related bills and again mustered the necessary three-fifths votes to overturn his vetoes. Together the election laws would so weaken safeguards against voter fraud as to make Maryland the nation's prime example of Election Day irresponsibility.

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All the broadcast network evening newscasts on Thursday led with fears of “civil war” in Iraq, a topic of much cable focus too during the day, but unlike ABC and NBC, the CBS Evening News decided to highlight a slam at the Bush administration from a liberal hero, crusading anti-war Democratic Congressman John Murtha. After presenting the administration's view that Iraq is not falling into civil war, CBS White House correspondent Jim Axelrod showcased how, over still shots of Murtha, in uniform, getting a medal and in Iraq: “Democratic Congressman John Murtha, a former Marine colonel who's among the most outspoken critics of the war, says the administration is misjudging." Viewers then saw a soundbite from Murtha: “It's not going to get better. They've been overly optimistic. This is a civil war where two participants are fighting with each other trying to win supremacy, and our troops are caught in between." (Partial transcript follows.)