Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” had Arianna Huffington on March 1. Host Stephen Colbert, aping a conservative commentator, had a lot of fun with the liberal proprietor of the Huffington Post. One of the highlights was when Huffington boasted of all the Hollywood types who post at her blog. Colbert, with a total straight face, stated that it was marvelous that celebrities finally had an avenue to voice their opinions (video link to follow).

Huffington: If you want to know what Al Franken, or Nora Ephron, or Larry David, or Steve Martin, or Bill Maher are thinking about anything, right now in real time, go to the Huffington Post…

The media at all levels on Wednesday pounced on video released by the AP of government conference calls held as Hurricane Katrina hit last August, with most stories portraying them as containing a smoking gun about how President Bush was warned about potential levee failure. But as FNC's Brit Hume noted on his show Thursday night, the video, which MSNBC's Hardball hyped Wednesday as “breaking news,” was hardly any such thing, or “confidential video” as the AP hyped, since the video was made public at the time and the sessions were open to the press.

During Hume's panel segment, Bill Sammon, fresh to the Washington Examiner from the Washington Times, excoriated his press corps colleagues for “journalistic fraud” as well as “disingenuous” and "bogus" reporting. Referring to the video of a meeting President Bush participated in from his Texas ranch, Sammon charged: “It's held out today and yesterday as almost a smoking gun. I would say not only is it not a smoking bun gun, it's actually a journalistic fraud for some of the reasons you've outlined where they suggested it was ‘confidential' videotape where it wasn't. It was open press. Also, they make Max Mayfield out to sound like he was sounding the alarm bells when clearly he was ambivalent in the extreme....So, to suggest that was the warning that Bush should have heeded and didn't, is disingenuous in the extreme.” Sammon also took on the press for denigrating Michael Brown as an incompetent, but now they want to “rehabilitate him because he's now willing to trash the Department of Homeland Security....This is disingenuous of the mainstream media to suddenly rehabilitate Michael Brown for their own political purposes." (Transcript follows.)

Interesting how when Americans go to place money in an account of an established financial institution, one has to produce multiple forms of identification such as driving permits, social security numbers, and credit cards.

Withdrawing these funds is an even greater ordeal as, not only does one have to produce the collection of ID's, one is burdened with the additional responsibility of having to justify why one desires to take repossession of one's own money. And if one wishes to extract more than an arbitrary limited amount, Big Brother must often be informed that one is doing so.

However, a new credit new credit union is opening in Washington, DC for the purposes of serving the area’s expanding population of illegal aliens. This raises a number of issues and questions.

So what do longshoremen, the unionized men and women who offload and onload cargo ships at our nation's ports, feel about the Dubai Ports World acquisition of port terminal operations in six U.S. ports? Depends whom you ask.

CNN's Lou Dobbs, long a crusader against the "exporting of America" on his Feb. 28 program presented longshoremen as monolithicly opposed.

DOBBS: The hard-working men and women at our nation's ports know better than anyone about the dangerous gaps in our nation's port security. And these workers say unquestionably that the Dubai Ports World deal will leave our ports more vulnerable to terrorist attack.

Casey Wian reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

While the New York Times preaches to us about the shameful lack of diversity in schools, politics and redistricting, while they talk down to us about the "race ceiling", write about those who call our President a racist, or just generally paint conservatives as racists themselves, it appears that they have a little house cleaning of their own to do.

An article from The New York Observer talks about the 39-page confidential internal report that surfaced yesterday at The Times about the racial makeup of the company.

According to the report, the Times newsroom is currently 82.5 percent white, slightly less than the industry average of 86.5 percent. Only 14 percent of newsroom managers are minorities, the council found, and there are currently no minorities on the newspaper masthead and only one nonwhite on the company's executive committee.

It apparently isn't just George Bush who doesn't care about black people.

My personal favorite part of the article:

The council defined diversity in terms of employees' race, gender and sexual orientation. Religious and political differences were not accounted for.

After President Bush made a surprise visit to Afghanistan yesterday, putting it back in the news, the question became how long would it be before the media would try to frame the war in Afghanistan in a negative light? For CBS, the answer was this morning as reporters on "The Early Show" sounded almost like Taliban cheerleaders in their attempt to undermine President Bush’s credibility and tout bad news coming out of Afghanistan. For instance, Julie Chen introduced a report from Sheila MacVicar:

Julie Chen: "Julie Chen: "Before India, the President's first stop was Afghanistan where despite his reassurances that things are going well, the Taliban are, in fact, staging fierce new attacks."

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

It’s a question that has been asked many times: If Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg fell asleep during a case, would the media notice? The answer, apparently, is no. On March 1, the Supreme Court heard arguments on the constitutionality of a Texas redistricting plan. One only has to look at the accompanying graphic to see how exciting Justice Ginsburg found the case. FNC correspondent Megyn Kendall reported it this way on Wednesday's Special Report:

"It is one of the biggest redistricting cases the high court has heard in years, but the special two hour argument proved less then compelling to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who at times appeared to be, well, asleep.

While Jon Stewart and George Clooney have denied any disconnect between Hollywood and middle America, as reported by Tim Graham here, today’s American Morning aired a piece shortly before 8am that seems to disprove what these members of the liberal Hollywood elite were claiming. CNN entertainment reporter Brooke Anderson spoke to residents of small town Lebanon, Kansas, who expressed their view that Hollywood is not honoring or promoting the type of films that they enjoy.

Randy Maus, Lebanon resident: "Out here, at least in rural America, where it’s–you could say it’s the Bible belt, we’re still looking for movies that have creative substance and a storyline."

Unidentified Female: "We’re just not interested in all the sex and skin."

Brooke Anderson: "What kind of movies do you want Hollywood to make?"

Unidentified Female: "What about Sound of Music and some of those?"

The same media that joins the Democrats in accusing the Bush administration of using terrorism to scare the American people, seems to think scare tactics are okay when used to support a liberal agenda. On Thursday's Good Morning America, ABC's Bill Blakemore, for the second time in the past two months, used a one-sided story in an attempt to create paranoia about global warming.

When Blakemore fear-mongered about global warming on the January 11th GMA, he linked warming to a potential massive extinction of species around the world: "One study calculates within 45 years between 18 and 35 percent of Earth's plant and animal species will be extinct or committed to extinction because of global warming."

This past Monday, CBS, otherwise known as See? BS!, Al-Jazeera West, and the Corrupt Broadcasting System, proved once again that it is nothing but a shameless propaganda tool of the Democrat party, by releasing the results of a poll it rigged... uh... conducted recently showing that President Bush's popularity rating has plummeted to an all-time low of 34 percent.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/27/opinion/polls/main1350874.shtml

Of course, when one looks at the internals of the poll, one sees that, of the 1018 people who responded to it, only 28 percent were Republicans. 38 percent, however, were Democrats (big surprise there), and the remaining 34 percent were described as Independents.

What issue will doom Congressional Republicans in 2006? In February, it was Abramoff, while the month of March is shaping up as the UAE ports controversy.

This morning, the Times once again insists that the Republicans will face trouble in the 2006 elections. Last month it was ethics scandals and Jack Abramoff. This month’s Times-selected Republican killer is shaping up to be the ports deal with United Arab Emirates.

A story by Carl Hulse and Scott Shane, “Doubts Back Home Fuel G.O.P. Worries About Ports Deal,” drives that idea hard.

“Senator Jon Kyl, a staunch supporter of President Bush who faces a potentially difficult re-election fight this year, is hearing a lot from constituents in Arizona about the plan to allow a Dubai company to operate shipping terminals at Eastern ports. Most think the deal should be stopped.”

Americans who read the New York Times must have wrinkled their brows in puzzlement after reading the February 26, 2006 article about a former government official and spokesman for the Taliban walking the campus of Yale University as a student.

Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi has been granted special student status and the state department has awarded him entry into the United States on a student visa. This is an interesting turn of events for a person who could just as easily have ended up as a guest of the United States in a cell at Guantanamo Bay.

Prior to his arrival as a student, Rahmatullah had been imprisoned at Bagram Air Base. He had been a member of the Taliban government, serving both in Afghanistan and in the United States as Second Foreign Secretary and Ambassador-at-Large.