Michelle Malkin links to Brian Maloney at The Radio Equalizer who reports:

While Air America Radio's loss of two affiliates in Phoenix and Missoula, Montana is generating news this week, the company itself probably hasn't been able to give either city a second thought.

Why? In a development sure to rip the heart right out of the liberal radio network's already ailing body, it appears extremely likely their leased New York City flagship station WLIB-AM will soon abandon Air America programming.

Even worse, litigation looks probable over the station's lease.

I don't watch the network evening news shows. Really. But for whatever perverse reason, I decided to flip among ABC, NBC and CBS tonight, and hit some morally relativistic pay dirt. CBS Evening News equated attempted murder with the exercise of basic First Amendment freedoms.

Readers here are familiar with the incident in which the Iranian Mohammed Reza Taheri, with the reportedly admitted intent of avenging the mistreatment of Muslims, drove an SUV into a crowd on the campus of the University of North Carolina.

Introducing a segment on the incident, CBS stated: "It is the second skirmish over religion on campus in a few weeks."

It's not often that a guest on a TV news program has the boldness to put the interviewer's political activism record in play, but Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter of California, who appeared on Sunday's This Week from San Diego to criticize the ports deal, made sure viewers were reminded of host George Stephanopoulos' past work on behalf of President Bill Clinton's agenda. On three occasions, Hunter answered questions from Stephanopoulos by including a reference to “your former boss,” as in how “your former boss, President Clinton,” gave the Emir of the United Arab Emirates “advice on who he should hire to get this deal through.” Hunter, who appeared with a Republican Senator from the other side of the nation, Susan Collins of Maine, also proposed: “I don't think President Clinton, your old boss, knows the facts of the transshipments that take place through Dubai, sending nuclear components to all parts of the world and especially to people who don't like America.” That slam prompted a defensive Stephanopoulos to jump in: “He actually supports the legislation proposed by you and Senator Clinton which would ban foreign entities from managing our ports." A bit later, when Stephanopoulos wondered if the ports deal would hurt Republicans in the fall election, Hunter came back with how “a few years ago when the Chinese military tried to buy the old naval base in Long Beach, California, we stopped that and that was stopped by Republicans in Congress, even though your boss, President Clinton, supported that.” (Transcripts follow.)

Sometimes the naiveté of the press is nothing less than startling. For many months, the media have been expressing tremendous outrage concerning leaks from the Bush administration that allegedly “outed” a member of the CIA. Now, the White House is looking into legal ways to prevent such leaks, and the media are equally dismayed. Sunday’s “Reliable Sources” on CNN represented a fine example of this hypocrisy. Host Howard Kurtz discussed this matter with U.S. News & World Report editor-at-large David Gergen, and former ABC News correspondent Linda Douglass (video link to follow).

First, Gergen suggested that he has not seen so secretive a White House for over thirty years, bringing up one of the media’s favorite Republican whipping boys – “we haven't seen it since the days of Nixon” – while appearing incredulous when he stated:

Former PBS host Bill Moyers wrote a recent blog entry for the Huffington Post that could be used as an advertisement for Democratic political candidates in the upcoming midterm elections. In his piece, Moyers addressed corruption in Congress as exclusively a Republican scandal, tying all of the problems on the Hill to Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay, while conveniently ignoring the various Democrats, including Senate minority leader Harry Reid, that have taken money from the now disgraced lobbyist.

After a brief introduction, Moyers went right into the Democratic talking points:

“DeLay was a man on the move and on the take. But he needed help to sustain the cash flow. He found it in a fellow right wing ideologue named Jack Abramoff. Abramoff personifies the Republican money machine of which DeLay with the blessing of the House leadership was the major domo.”

Moyers continued with such talking points by going after “young Republican” organizations and their previous leaders:

The editor of the liberal American Prospect magazine used an AP story on Bush allegedly being warned about levees being breached in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina touched down as a jumping off point to seethe with wrath against Bush, calling him stupid and a liar and his conservative supporters “sociopaths.”

The next day, the AP story was “clarified” in a way that completely undermined both its and editor Michael Tomasky’s point.

(Update: A reprint of Tomasky's piece tops CBS's Opinion page today, which is even less excusable, given that the underlying AP story was knocked down two days ago.)

Former FEMA Director Michael Brown offered Chris Wallace and Fox News Sunday an exclusive this morning, and in return Wallace gave Brown a platform from which to tee off on the Bush administration and in particular on DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend.  Wallace probed Brown's arguments on occasion, but largely gave Brown free rein.

Highlights from the Brown hit parade:

"I think we had dropped the ball long before Katrina hit in not doing the kind of catastrophic disaster planning that the federal government should have been doing."

"Secretary Chertoff's order for me to stay [in the operations center] in Baton Rouge is one of the tipping points that made this disaster worse."

Clay Waters told me I had to look at Dawn Eden's latest post on a discussion she had with a British reporter friend (apparently Harry Mount of the London Telegraph) about a story he was doing from South Dakota on abortion. The article's aerobically slanted (that is, the reporter worked so hard to be biased that he must have been winded). I love this part:

Mindful of the threat to their lives, and the precedent of other doctors killed by "pro-life" zealots, each flies in once a month to perform up to 30 operations and leaves the same day.

Abortion is dividing opinion across the United States again, nowhere more so than in the heartland where the Bible and the right to bear arms are held in equal reverence.

Trolling through the wire-service news on Yahoo! can be a bit of an adventure. This Agence France Presse dispatch on China's "parliament" is a good example. To the less educated among us, they might think China's a Western-style democracy. The unbylined article began with the usual liberal focus on the maldistribution of wealth:

China's parliament opens its annual session amid high security with Premier Wen Jiabao listing the plight of the nation's rural poor and the fast-rising wealth gap as top national priorities.

You have to read all the waaaay down to paragraph 20 (!)  to get the obvious point: "Although the congress is the world's largest parliament, it is regarded as a rubber-stamp body for the country's Communist Party rulers who have led China since 1949." That is the first time in the article the word "communist" appears.

Despite the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of public trials, nearly all records are being kept secret for more than 5,000 defendants who completed their journey through the federal courts over the last three years.

The data show a sharp increase in secret case files over time as the Bush administration's well-documented reliance on secrecy in the executive branch has crept into the federal courts through the war on drugs, anti-terrorism efforts and other criminal matters."This follows the pattern of this administration," said John Wesley Hall, an Arkansas defense attorney and second vice president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

• An Associated Press investigation found, and court observers agree, that most of these defendants are cooperating government witnesses
• But the AP investigation found, and court observers agree, that the overwhelming number of these cases sealed for a limited time involve a use of secrecy that draws no criticism.

On top of that, look at the statistics they used to build this case of a "widespread pattern of secrecy in the Bush administration":