Our man Dickens also discovered that over the weekend on the syndicated "Chris Matthews Show," Time columnist (and Clinton-loving "Anonymous" author) Joe Klein disagreed with Matthews on the artistic and political merit of the Best Picture winner, "Crash":

Joe Klein: “You look at these five, you look at these five movies and they are like a right-wing fantasy of what the Democratic Party is all about. It’s, one movie is about blacks, another movie is about Jews, another movie is about journalists, another movie is about a gay journalist and finally you have gay cowboys just to poke an eye in your face. Since all politics is local.”

MRC's Geoff Dickens reported that in the 9 am half hour of "Today," Katie Couric went mushy for "Crash," a movie even liberal critics disliked for its manipulative (and at times unrealistic) plotting. Couric even mentioned how she liked that her daughter's ninth grade class was shown the fictional L.A.-stuffed-with-racism flick to spur discussion about America's unending race problem.

Katie Couric: "And also I think, Chris [Bridges], don't you think that, that the things weren't so black and white, so to speak, in the, in the movie. You know people were very nuanced. They had very different sides to them. So there weren't clear cut lines between bad characters and good characters were there?"

Don't expect to see Chris Matthews and Hillary Clinton dining tête à tête any time soon. On this evening's Hardball, he described her as "Dukakis in a dress."

The comment arose in the course of his interview of House Majority Leader John Boehner. The topic was McCain. Boehner, perhaps with a grain of reluctance, labelled McCain a "good guy." But Boehner cut Matthews short when he floated a scenario in which the GOP would turn to McCain as its candidate "if you see Hillary coming, if it looks like she's got up a head of steam."

Boehner: "Wait a minute. You know, if ifs and buts and were candy and nuts, every day would be Christmas. I don't think she can win."

Orlando Sentinel ombudsman Manning Pynn apologizes for unknowingly exposing incompetence in the Florida school system. In a story that ran last week about how middle-income kids aren't getting what they should from schools, the Sentinel ran a picture of a teacher standing in front of a whiteboard with the word "government' written on it. Except the "r" was missing.

Wouldn't you want to know if your children were in a classroom with a teacher who can't spell 'government'? Not if you're a left-bent journalist covering for the education status quo.

Although that photo had been in the newsroom since it was taken Dec. 14 and had been seen by numerous editors, no one noticed the misspelling until early the morning of publication, well into the press run -- too late to redesign the front page. "We should have caught it," Photo Editor Ken Lyons lamented. He's right, of course. But if editors had caught the misspelling before the presses rolled, should they have substituted another picture? Would that act of seeming compassion have distorted reality and shielded readers from the truth? Yes and definitely not.

The real story here is that public education is a broken system, and journalists deliberately try to frame this story in a way that fuels more money being poured into the broken system rather than in a way to promote vouchers. Why? The short answer is control. When you have a voucher, you choose where you child goes and what they learn to a much larger extent. That is antithetical to journalists who would much rather your child be indoctrinated in a system that rejects God, promotes sex, "alternative lifestyles", and embraces tranny teachers.

Talk about Orwellian double-speak: the AP on Monday called the effort by some law professors to ban military recruitment on their campuses a "free-speech challenge" -- even though it was the law professors who wanted to ban the speech. (Hat tip to NR's The Corner.)

Here are the first two paragraphs of this morning's AP story, as posted soon after on CBSNews.com:

"The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that colleges that accept federal money must allow military recruiters on campus, despite university objections to the Pentagon's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy on gays."

"Justices rejected a free-speech challenge from law schools and their professors who claimed they should not be forced to associate with military recruiters or promote their campus appearances."

This was a dramatically liberal year for Oscar, but the more political winners at last night's Oscars didn't get pointed questions from the right. The news media's general feeling is to cheer movies for the "social good," and never imagine that the movies could be riddled with errors (Good Night and Good Luck), riddled with profanity (Crash), or just be assessed by critics as a lovably confusing in its conspiracy theorizing (Syriana).

ABC's Diane Sawyer interviewed George Clooney this morning about his Oscar victory speech on "Good Morning America" and asked benignly: "Was it a political speech, were you interjecting politics?" Clooney spoke diplomatically about a "portion" of America being on his side, and a portion were not. Clooney's claim that Hollywood was "out of touch" in all the good ways was underlined by ABC as they ran a clip of black actress Hattie McDaniel winning an Oscar for the 1939 film "Gone With The Wind."

Today the Supreme Court ruled that colleges that accept federal funds must allow equal access to military recruiters on their campuses.  Breaking news

The Washington Times reports on Army Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, who says the reports of Iraqi sectarian violence during a ten-day period have been "exaggerated."

"The overall levels of violence did not increase substantially as a result of the bombing" of the Golden Mosque, he said, which is in stark contrast to media propaganda portraying the opposite. "It took us a few days to sort our way through what we considered in a lot of cases to be exaggerated reports."

The media tried to hype violence on Iraqi Mosques, but "Gen. Casey said that in a reported 30 attacks on mosques, only two were severely damaged. Of eight mosques that were reported damaged, inspections showed only one had damage -- a broken window."

Last week’s Associated Press release of a video, taken just prior to Hurricane Katrina’s arrival in New Orleans last August, has generated a new round of second-guessing and finger pointing regarding who is to blame for the supposedly slow, poor response to this natural disaster. Falling under the fold was an in-depth cover story on this subject by an unlikely source, Popular Mechanics.

In its March issue, PM took on virtually all of the media myths and misnomers that were so drilled into the citizenry by press representatives that many have become part of the public psyche. Thankfully, its authors made it clear right in the first paragraph that they planned on pulling no punches:

“In the months since the storm, many of the first impressions conveyed by the media have turned out to be mistaken.”

How mistaken? Well, PM and its staff put together a list of seven myths concerning Katrina that have been purported by the media, and like a good mechanic, quickly isolated the flaws inherent in the press coverage while making much-needed repairs.

How does the Washington Post tackle the thorny problem of liberal Hollywood being so far out of the cultural and political mainstream? This is a touchy issue for WashPost liberals, since they are living in the same ideological neighborhood and know all the landmarks. One funny way was to avoid the L-word altogether. The front-page headline on the Sunday paper was "And This Year's Oscar Goes to Social Issues." And, then, almost automatically, came the snide sub-headline suggesting the rest of the country just isn't as wonderfully humane: "Hollywood Is Pushing Hot-Button Topics, but Does America Care?"

Give Katie Couric a Best Supporting Actress in the MSM production of "Doom & Gloom: the Iraq Story." Interviewing NBC military analyst Gen. Wayne Downing on this morning's Today Show, Couric was skeptical that Iraqi forces would ever be able to defend the country, underlined the view of a "vicious cycle" there, and darkly conjectured that civil war was only "a matter of time."

Couric noted reports that U.S. and British troops will pull out of Iraq by the spring of 2007, then stated: "The U.S. military denies those reports saying there is no time-table and U.S. troops will withdraw when the Iraqi forces can secure and defend that country."

At the 78th Academy Awards Sunday evening, actor George Clooney won the Oscar for best supporting actor. During his acceptance speech, Clooney admitted that Hollywood is out of touch. However, he said that this was a good thing, and actually had the gall to suggest that Hollywood is responsible for bringing attention to problems like civil rights and AIDS.

In what was a pretty lackluster evening with very little political references, instead of winning the award for best supporting actor, Clooney should have won for the most self-serving, pompous, and inane acceptance speech. 

What follows is a transcript of the part of his speech dealing specifically with how wonderful Hollywood is, along with a video link courtesy of Ian Schwartz and Expose the Left.

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Here in Washington, the affiliate that carried the Oscars was ABC channel WJLA. Immediately after the show, Anchor Leon Harris spoke with reporter Kyle Osborn about the only "officially sanctioned Oscar party" held in Washington, where 400 political fat cats raised money for charity as they cheered their favorite Hollywood liberals.

Said Kyle Osborn, who attended the event:

"The crowd cheered on Jon Stewart, his monologue went over well. George Clooney, they loved him, and especially loved his, I'd say, politically minded acceptance speech."

George Clooney defended Hollywood's status of being out of touch with the rest of America, saying Hollywood has always led the way on such issues as civil rights while the rest of America dragged its feet.