Keith Olbermann might be on vacation, but that doesn't mean MSNBC's mean-spiritedness took a day off. If guest host Alison Stewart was auditioning for the Olbermann seat, she might well have ingratiated herself with her MSNBC bosses with the disdain she dispensed on the day of Caspar Weinberger's death.

Weinberger passed away today at age 88. He had served as President Reagan's Secretary of Defense. As Bloomberg News put it:

"Weinberger . . . oversaw the U.S. military buildup under President Ronald Reagan that helped hasten the Soviet Union's collapse."

I was beginning to think I would never get this done, but I finally found a way to format a readable thread following procedure. It allows you to navigate to any of your old comments and check back on posters that have commented a few days after your last post.  Often, this is after most of us have forgotten where we were, and don't want to take the time to search all comments under an article, if we can even remember which article we posted in.

Anyway, go here and see if this helps.

nofate

Three Christian peace activists held by Iraqi insurgents have been rescued by U.S. and British military forces.

Though the story makes clear that the hostages were freed without firing a shot, I don't imagine the soldiers went into a potentially hostile environment unprepared or unprotected.

And that brings us to an interesting point.

If it is the position of these peace activists that it is an abomination before the eyes of God to even have a military or that it is wrong to use force to overcome evil in all instances, shouldn't these prisoners have been willing to remain in the custody of their captors, who are themselves merely adherents of the "religion of peace" responding to the aggression of decadent Western powers, until social workers or other do-gooder types arrived on the scene to negotiate their release through rational persuasion alone?

On March 24, the Today show featured a segment on the Vice President’s personal needs for hotel visits. The piece, which aired at 7:20AM EST, featured three references to Cheney’s request that all televisions be tuned to Fox News. A few days later, the Smoking Gun,  the website that broke the Cheney story, did a follow up on John Kerry’s requirements. The NBC series has yet to cover this. And if they did, they would probably not report this demand:

"Newspapers: all local plus New York Times, Washington Post"

Caitlin Johnson on ABCNews.com thinks it's about time for a woman president and hopes that all the "presidential talk surrounding" Hillary Clinton means America is finally "ready to accept a woman president and ready to catch up with the rest of the world."

Washington, D.C., is buzzing about New York Sen. Hillary Clinton. Some have called her the future president, others, like Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, say she is too angry to be a viable candidate for the Democrats.

Perhaps the presidential talk surrounding Clinton indicates that the United States is ready to accept a woman president and ready to catch up with the rest of the world. Women are now heads of state in Germany, Liberia and Chile. Finland's president, Tarja Halonen, was just re-elected last week. But in the United States, shifting the balance of power between men and women has been a slow, and sometimes frustrating process.

As a Catholic, I'm long used to finding the media has a chronic case of schizophrenia on the Catholic bishops conference: they are an oppressive caucus of Nosy Nates if they get involved on social issues like abortion, an emerging threat to the separation of church and state. But if they get involved on the liberal side of the divide -- as the American bishops did on nuclear weapons and economics in 1980s, or when they oppose capital punishment -- they're great moral authorities demonstrating a surge in public opinion. Clay Waters finds that case of the gymnastic splits again today at TimesWatch:

Reporter Nina Bernstein evidently caught the spirit of the weekend protests by illegal immigrants and their supporters in Los Angeles, judging by the positive tone of her Monday article, "In the Streets, Suddenly, An Immigrant Groundswell"....Bernstein gushes in the next sentence: "But if events of recent days hold true, they will be facing much more than that. Rallies in support of immigrants around the country have attracted crowds that have astonished even their organizers. More than a half-million demonstrators marched in Los Angeles on Saturday, as many as 300,000 in Chicago on March 10, and -- in between -- tens of thousands in Denver, Phoenix, Milwaukee and elsewhere..."

There’s some odd wording in Pentagon reporter Thom Shanker’s short piece Tuesday on an unusual ceremony in a Pennsylvania meadow.

“Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld gazed across a rolling meadow on Monday, its grass yellow in late winter's grip, and toward the stand of hemlock trees marking the area where Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11, 2001. He then bent and wordlessly placed a medallion at the base of a temporary memorial here.

“Known as the defense secretary's ‘coin,’ the medallion is an elaborately pressed memento that Mr. Rumsfeld hands out to troops he meets in combat zones overseas.

“His visit was his first to the site where passengers of Flight 93 overpowered their hijackers and sent an airliner crashing into the countryside instead of its intended target, the Capitol in Washington. His gesture was intended to link that event, through the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, to the wars started by the Bush administration in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

The problem with advocacy journalism is that once one has switched from “mediator” to “advocate,” the other side becomes the “adversary” — and news stories have all the fairness of campaign commercials.

On the issue of global warming, the media are cursed with a surplus of advocates and a paucity of real journalists. This week’s Time cover story, for example, begins with the kind of fear-mongering that liberals find so offensive when it crops up in debates about the war on terror. Time’s cover screams: “BE WORRIED. BE VERY WORRIED,” with the word “VERY” in bright red letters, in case anyone missed the point.

Imagine if Vice President Cheney asked us to “be worried, be very worried” about al Qaeda or the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Time would be at the front of the liberal media mob, hissing for an end to politically-motivated scare tactics.

TV Newser spotted an item from NBC anchor Brian Williams' Daily Nightly blog about his ABC colleague Bob Woodruff, who was hit by a roadside bomb in Iraq and is still in the hospital.

I would only remind everyone that our colleague at ABC News, Bob Woodruff, is engaged in a personal and titanic struggle to fully recover from the wounds he received while trying to cover the "good news" in Iraq. That was exactly the mission he was on when his world was put on hold. Many of the journalists killed while covering this war were doing the exact same thing. The brave men and women who have volunteered for duty in our own NBC News Bureau in Baghdad put their own lives on the line each day. They will tell you -- as we have experienced for ourselves in Iraq -- that we'd like very much to beam home more stories of positive developments (especially the achievements of U.S. soldiers there, who I find are so mightily impressive when seen on the job) were it not for the palpable risk to life and limb that comes with each and every moment and movement on the streets.

Why just boycott ABC? Why not boycott all the miserable Mainstream Media (MSM). Encourage all your family and friends to do the same. Vote with your feet, or your dollar. Don't let your sister or your mother or your uncle buy garbage magazines like Time or Newsweek. If they talk about something they saw on CNN or quote the NY Times, laugh at them, and discount the source.  There are finally some great alternatives to the cancer that is the MSM. Lets not keep the MSM alive any longer than we have to by giving them our dollars or viewership.

Why just boycott ABC? Why not boycott all the miserable Mainstream Media (MSM). Encourage all your family and friends to do the same. Vote with your feet, or your dollar. Don't let your sister or your mother or your uncle buy garbage magazines like Time or Newsweek. If they talk about something they saw on CNN or quote the NY Times, laugh at them, and discount the source.  There are finally some great alternatives to the cancer that is the MSM. Lets not keep the MSM alive any longer than we have to by giving them our dollars or viewership. 

Starter topics: Washington Post says it shouldn't have implied pro-war blogger Bill Roggio was part of military propaganda operation even as it lauds anti-war reporter as "legendary." (HT: Polipundit) Did an AP reporter plagiarize a story from a blog?

Former Reagan press secretary Lyn Nofziger dies. Supreme Court allows libel suit against NYT by man who says he was defamed as 2001 anthrax mailer. In other SCOTUS news, it appears that justice Antonin Scalia flipped the bird at the media who questioned him about his objectivity on religious matters--shortly after he left church.

Politics: ABC News's Note predicts McCain vs. Clinton in '08. (They're wrong on at least the first one.) Long-serving WH chief of staff Andy Card resigns. Congressional GOP gets Saddam regime documents posted online for anyone to analyze.

Joel Stein is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times – officially a "humor" columnist, but that’s a matter of debate. A few months ago, he drew attention for baldly stating he did not support the troops in the Iraq war, and that "an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying."

Last week, he decided to mock the Federal Communications Commission for a $3.6 million fine of individual CBS stations for airing a teenager-orgy scene on the Thursday night drama "Without A Trace." But a funny thing happened on the way to the Janet Jackson jokes. He asked CBS for a DVD of the episode: "And, to my shock, I was honestly disgusted."

In all its cacophony and moments of absurdity, this morning's Today show segment on immigration was a supremely edifying example of the confusion, high emotion and complexity of the immigration debate. Matters reached their Alice-in-Wonderland apotheosis when Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California was shown arguing that illegal immigrants are good . . . 'citizens.' Said Feinstein:

"They pay taxes, their children are Americans, they go to schools, they're good citizens and they're needed."

This was in line with the fait accompli argument advanced by La Raza representative Janet Murguia. She referred to what she estimated as the 11-12 million illegal aliens in the country as "people are working in backbreaking work that nobody else wants to do in this country. We need to . . . understand that they are already part of this country."

President Bush spoke at a Naturalization Ceremony Monday and renewed his call for immigration reform. The transcript of the speech is 5 pages long. The Associated Press and Reuters published less than 8 lines from the entire speech. To add insult to injury, both news organizations used the exact same quotes from the speech. The statements used were included at the end of the speech during the wrap up. They neglected to cite any statements from the speech where the President restated his stance on immigration and laid out his ideas on immigration reform.

Here are a few excerpts from the body of the speech via White House transcripts:

“I believe every new citizen has an obligation to learn the customs and values that define our nation, including liberty and civic responsibility, equality under God, tolerance for others and the English language.”

“Immigration is also an emotional topic. And we need to maintain our perspective as we conduct this debate.”

Actor Sean Penn was apparently interviewed for an upcoming issue of The New Yorker magazine. According to a couple of sources, Penn was quoted in the piece as having a plastic doll with the likeness of Ann Coulter that he “likes to abuse when angry.”

As reported by ContactMusic.com (hat tip to Drudge): “The Oscar-winner actor has hated Coulter ever since she blacklisted his director father LEO PENN in her book TREASON. And he takes out his frustrations with Coulter, who is a best-selling author, lawyer and television pundit, on the Barbie-like doll.”

The Post Chronicle reported:

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

In a victory for the first amendment, a unanimous Federal Election Commission said Monday that it will not regulate political opinioneering on the internet. The ruling (official link) comes as a defeat for self-described "reform advocates" who see any speech that isn't subsidized by the government as evil.

The decision should give pause to those who would censor the most important form of speech and it ought to do the same to the mainstream media that beat the drums loudly for years for McCain-Feingold but was oddly silent as the commission considered whether to extend the bill to snuff out the new media.

On this issue, both liberal and conservative bloggers appear to be unanimous that, as one Daily Kos poster puts it, "To those who opposed us along the way, know that we have long memories and vigilant friends. Nevermore will we abandon this turf to the 'experts' who fear and criticize what they do not understand."