Popular radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham is broadcasting from Iraq this week, and she has spent quite a bit of time talking with our fine troops.

On today's show (Tuesday, February 7, 2006), Laura talked with Major Doug Anderson, from Fairbanks, Alaska, and he had some words for those of us back home (audiotape on file):

"To the American people, I just wanted to say: Don't let a bunch of whiny, Marxist sycophants back home lose this thing."

Laura (in addition to countless listeners also, I'm sure) let out a loud "Yes!"

Amen! Thank you, Major Anderson! As we've seen in the past (Remember this?), sometimes when you give a soldier the mike, you will hear the truth!

Today's (Tuesday February 7, 2006) tasteless anti-Bush digs at Coretta Scott King's memorial service by Rev. Joseph Lowery and Jimmy Carter, a former President (!), are certainly newsworthy, but one place you didn't hear about them was during the 5 pm PST (8 pm EST) top-of-the-hour headlines on ABC News Radio. Instead, the announcers highlighted the fact that several Atlanta schools had the day off to make the day "educational."

It looks like additional education was delivered today through a lesson in classic media bias-by-omission.

If George Bush and Karl Rove had set out to deliberately sabotage the movie business in 2005, they could not have done a better job.

Instead, the leading lights of the movie business did it to themselves, and continue to.

Steven Spielberg articulated the current groupthink in Hollywood just before the names of the Oscar nominees were released last week:

Bush "inspires" political films

..... Spielberg, whose film Munich deals with the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, said directors were "trying to declare their independence".

"No-one is really representing us, so we're now representing our own feelings and trying to strike back," he said.

Monday’s front page at the Washington Post had one of those sunny-for-Democrats wishful-thinking pieces, headlined: "Handful of Races May Tip Control of Congress." Reporters Dan Balz and Chris Cillizza insisted Democratic gains were inevitable:

The result is a midterm already headed toward what appears to be an inevitable conclusion: Democrats are poised to gain seats in the House and in the Senate for the first time since 2000. The difference between modest gains (a few seats in the Senate and fewer than 10 in the House) and significant gains (half a dozen in the Senate and well more than a dozen in the House) is where the battle for control of Congress will be fought.

On last night's (Monday's) Hardball NBC's Andrea Mitchell portrayed Hillary Clinton as a centrist in defense of Ken Mehlman's charges of Hillary Clinton being too angry. Hardball host Chris Matthews postulated that Republicans were playing the gender card in portraying Hillary Clinton as emotional. Mitchell said that it wasn't necessarily a gender-based attack but agreed that the it was an attempt to "demonize her," and "try to make her seem more extreme than I think she really is."

Mitchell also used the terminology of the far-left in referring to pro-life Democratic Senate candidate Bob Casey as "anti-choice."

The following is the complete exchange between Matthews and Mitchell:

After its puzzling failure to defend the Mohammad cartoons and free speech in a Sunday news report, the Times recovers, if only slightly, in its Tuesday editorial, “Those Danish Cartoons.”

Although the Times didn’t join the Philadelphia Inquirer in actually publishing the most controversial cartoon (Mohammad with a bomb for a turban), its tentative stand for free speech is nonetheless braver than the editorial page of the NYT Co.’s subsidiary paper, The Boston Globe.

In a Saturday editorial, “Forms of Intolerance,” the Globe made this bizarre comparison:

In his web chat today, Washington Post humor columnist Gene Weingarten stated that there was "nothing wrong" with Tom Toles' now (in)famous amputee cartoon -- a cartoon which, in Weingarten's words, "is deeply critical of a callous administration that deserves deep criticism."

Here's the Q&A from the chat:

Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C.: Gene - You are the arbiter of all that is funny. What are your thoughts on the recent controversy over Tom Toles' cartoon depicting a soldier who had lost both arms and legs in Iraq? Does it cross the line, as the Joint Chiefs of Staff are claiming?

MSNBC isn’t the only network mentioning the I-word. Fox News Analyst and Cavuto on Business regular Gregg Hymowitz recently raised the specter of impeaching President Bush. On the February 4^th edition of his show, Neil Cavuto opened a roundtable business discussion. At about 10:42AM EST, he asked whether Wall Street should support President Bush’s wiretapping program. Hymowitz quickly jumped in and responded:

"Stocks go up in free and open societies. Here we have an administration that has violated the law and the law, by the way, which allows-... A law which allowed for secret wiretaps and for warrants retroactively. This is a complete violation of the law and quite frankly, you may not like this, but the president should be impeached for this."

Citing liberal Republican Senator Arlen Specter as his authority on whether President Bush's actions were “illegal,” and with “Invoking the 'I' Word” on screen beneath a picture of Bush, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann opened his Monday night Countdown program: “So if the Republican Chairman of the Senate committee investigating the wiretaps says the wiretaps were illegal, and the President says he personally authorized the wiretaps, doesn't that mean the President should be impeached?"

Olbermann proceeded to fondly recall, without any notion that those hearings led to impairing intelligence agencies, how back in the 1970s, “Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho and other lawmakers became the first to lift the veil on the super-secret world of the National Security Agency. Our fifth story on the Countdown: Deja vu all over again. New President, new technology, same danger, perhaps. Today's re-make of the cautionary drama beginning with promise, Senate Judiciary Chair Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, repeating, in milder form, his Sunday talk show conclusions that the present-day spying program is or could be illegal." Olbermann soon cued up his guest, John Dean: “Not to put too fine a point on this, but if the authorization of wiretaps without warrants is indeed illegal, as its critics say it is, has the President committed an impeachable offense?” Dean agreed: “Well he certainly has.” (Transcript follows.)

Video excerpt (18 seconds) Real (500 KB) or Windows Media (600 KB)

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee for most of the day, yesterday, explaining in some detail why the NSA Terrorist Surveillance program is legal, why it's necessary, and why it is not "domestic spying." It was the lead news story on CBS' The Early Show this morning, and they demonstrated that, while they saw it, it didn't all meet their criteria for news. Obviously, you cannot capture the entirety of an 8-hour hearing in a 2-minute report, but, as always, it is instructive to see what makes the cut, and what doesn't. Here are some of the comments from the hearing, a couple from Attorney General Gonzales and a couple from different US Senators.

At a time when radical Muslims are rioting in the streets over images of Muhammad, the Washington Post somehow thinks it's a perfect time to pretend once again that images of communist guerrilla/butcher Che Guevara are cool. In an article headlined "The Che Cachet," Post reporter David Segal writes about how "An Exhibition Traces How the Marxist Revolutionary's Photo Inspired An Army of Capitalists."

This article has been done before. And done before. And done before. But that apparently doesn't mean it can't be done again. And badly again.

The dumbest sentence by far: Segal writes "Rifle-wielding freedom fighters around the world have revered this image the way Christians revere saints." Appalling. The second half is not untrue -- communists and leftists do revere the image like a religious icon of "socialist realism." It's the first half, the idea that communist guerillas are "freedom fighters." As if Marxists ever brought anyone freedom. That's so 20th century...

According to a large story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on January 26th, income inequality is widening. Wrote David Westphal, "income inequality is likely to deepen beyond its growth of the 1980s and 1990s, when incomes of affluent Americans grew more than three times faster than those of the low-income."

"Inequality is growing in all parts of the country," said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

However, as Patrick Chisholm observed in the Christian Science Monitor,

"Certain trends have been favoring the left for the past several decades. In the early 1960s, transfer payments (entitlements and welfare) constituted less than a third of the federal government's budget. Now they constitute almost 60 percent of the budget, or about $1.4 trillion per year. Measured according to this, the US government's main function now is redistribution: taking money from one segment of the population and giving it to another segment. In a few decades, transfer payments are expected to make up more than 75 percent of federal government spending."

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

Federal spending has soared 33 percent since 2001 and will continue to surge under President Bush’s budget proposal released Monday afternoon, yet network reporters referred to imaginary “cuts” in programs and departments. On World News Tonight, ABC’s Martha Raddatz outlined Bush’s proposal to increase defense and homeland security spending before she asked: “How to pay for all this? There are no tax increases. Instead, there are a host of spending reductions. On top of the list: Slowing spending on Medicare by $36 billion through 2011." While she at least said “slowing spending,” the on-screen graphic falsely stated about Medicare: "Reduced by $36 billion by 2011.” She went on to recount how “the budget calls for doing away with or making substantial cuts in 141 programs for a saving of $15 billion,” a minuscule amount, zeroing in on how “one-third of the cuts would target education, reducing money for the arts, parent resource centers and drug-free school programs.”