Last night, Rev. Jesse Jackson appeared on The Situation with Tucker Carlson to discuss the Duke lacrosse team rape allegations. Specifically, Jackson's RainbowPUSH Coalition has decided to offer the accuser in the case free college tuition--regardless of whether her accusations prove to be true. As usual, Jackson is shamelessly injecting himself into the "hot" race-related case of the day for sake of his own publicity. But, at this point, it hardly comes as a surprise.

Anyway, it was a great shootout and Carlson does a fine job of disputing Jackson's recycled talking points.

Video available here.

Now this is something you don’t see every day: Media outlet does an Internet poll about a movie star, and then claims that friends of the star intentionally skewed the results of the poll to make the star look good.

As amazing as it might seem, this is exactly what representatives of Parade magazine – yeah, that thing that’s stuck in your Sunday papers along with all the advertisements and coupons you typically throw in the gargage without reading – are claiming according to a New York Post piece Tuesday (hat tip to HuffnPuff). It appears Parade recently ran an online poll asking whether Cruise was to blame for his failing public image or the media, and the results displeased the media outlet doing the questioning: “A shocking 84 percent of respondents blamed the press.”

As you can imagine, Parade being a member of said press didn’t like the poll’s outcome. So, it began investigating how the answers could have been different from what they wanted…er, expected. According to a Parade spokesperson:

David Limbaugh has a good column about the liberal technique of finding former military officers to bash Rumsfeld and the war in Iraq. The reasoning is that when they find someone who is willing to speak against the war, "it's like finding a smoking gun."

These vultures have hovered over Rumsfeld's stubbornly vibrant carcass for way too long, and they just can't let him sprint out of yet another crisis: the call for his resignation by a half dozen retired generals.

Nothing inspires liberals in the press more than the opportunity to glorify liberals in uniform. Conservative military or ex-military types are just jingoistic hacks. But those critical of the military in general or of the Iraq War qualify for the Nobel Peace Prize or Time's Man of the Year.

Here's a new one. To add to the media's laundry list of supposed failures in Iraq is a unique allegation by the BBC. Apparently Saddam Hussein had a soft spot for the gay rights movement, and now that Bush has invaded, homosexuals are being persecuted.

To many Hollywood left types, this must truly be the reason we shouldn't of entered Iraq.

"I don't want to be gay anymore. When I go out to buy bread, I'm afraid. When the doorbell rings, I think that they have come for me."

That is the fear that haunts Hussein, and other gay men in Iraq.

They say that since the US-led invasion, gays are being killed because of their sexual orientation.

At The Corner on National Review Online, Jonah Goldberg passed along this precious nugget from Brit Hume's "Grapevine" on Fox News Channel:

Former Clinton CENTCOM commander, Anthony Zinni — the most prominent of the retired generals attacking Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — now says that, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, "What bothered me ... [was that] I was hearing a depiction of the intelligence that didn't fit what I knew. There was no solid proof, that I ever saw, that Saddam had WMD."

But in early 2000, Zinni told Congress "Iraq remains the most significant near-term threat to U.S. interests in the Arabian Gulf region," adding, "Iraq probably is continuing clandestine nuclear research, [and] retains stocks of chemical and biological munitions ... Even if Baghdad reversed its course and surrendered all WMD capabilities, it retains scientific, technical, and industrial infrastructure to replace agents and munitions within weeks or months."

Hope springs eternal, and thus it was with some optimism that I read the opening lines of this morning's Boston Globe editorial, The Tel Aviv Atrocity, regarding the latest barbarism in which "an Israeli woman was torn apart in sight of her two young daughters and her husband." Was the Globe really about to unequivocally call for those who target civilians to be brought to full justice?

No, the Globe wasn't, and call me naive for even thinking they might. To the contrary, it was more of the same moral relativism and outright falsehood we have come to expect from the MSM and in this specific case, the Globe, otherwise known as the Boston farm team of the NY Times.

On Monday, for the second straight weekday, Access Hollywood's New York correspondent, Tim Vincent, a veteran of the BBC, sported a hammer and sickle T-shirt as he introduced a story. Just as on Friday's show, as documented in an April 15 NewsBusters item, though he wore a jacket over the red shirt with the symbol of the regime which murdered tens of millions and oppressed hundreds of millions more for decades, a gold hammer and sickle was clearly visible inside a gold-outlined red star which, sans the hammer and sickle, would match the Soviet's Red Army emblem. On Friday's edition of the half-hour entertainment news program produced by NBC and aired on all NBC-owned stations (as well as other stations across the country), viewers saw Vincent in the shirt as he led into a preview of the American Dreamz movie. On Monday, viewers couldn't avoid him in the shirt as co-host Nancy O'Dell set him up and he introduced a piece on his role as an extra in an upcoming Nicole Kidman film.

Given Vincent's identical attire and the same background of Rockefeller Plaza, NBC's headquarters, I'd presume both segments were taped at the same time last week.

Video clip from April 17 (23 seconds): Real (760 KB) or Windows Media (880 KB)
Video clip from April 14 (20 seconds): Real (660 KB) or Windows Media (750 KB)

The annual Pulitzer Prize awards announced Monday night, by Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, rewarded Washington Post and New York Times reporters who exposed -- and thus undermined -- secret anti-terrorism efforts, as well as a Washington Post critic who mocked Vice President Cheney's outdoor apparel and ridiculed the supposed 1950s-era clothing worn by then-Supreme Court nominee John Roberts' kids. The Pulitzer board gave the “Beat Reporting” award to Dana Priest of the Washington Post “for her persistent, painstaking reports on secret 'black site' prisons and other controversial features of the government’s counterterrorism campaign.” The “National Reporting” award was won by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times “for their carefully sourced stories on secret domestic eavesdropping that stirred a national debate on the boundary line between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberty.” The duo infamously penned the damaging December 16 article, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.”

Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan grabbed the “Criticism” award “for her witty, closely observed essays that transform fashion criticism into cultural criticism.” In a January 2005 piece featured by the Post in a new page created to showcase her Pulitzer-winning work, Givhan complained that at a gathering of world leaders to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Dick Cheney “was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower.”

On Monday’s “Countdown,” host Keith Olbermann demonstrated, as he regularly does, why he should have stuck to being a sportscaster on ESPN (hat tip to Michelle Malkin with video link to follow). In his “Worst Person in the World” segment, Olbermann chose Michelle Malkin for posting the names and phone numbers of UC Santa Cruz students that recently forced military recruiters off the campus. In Olbermann’s words, the students, “as a result, have been inundated with death threats.”

What Keith conveniently failed to inform his viewers was that these phone numbers were actually part of a press release by the organization responsible for the protest, Students Against War. In addition, these names and phone numbers are still available at a number of left-wing websites including this one. I guess Olbermann didn’t think it was important to inform his viewers of this.

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As of this moment all we know for sure is that a state grand jury has issued sealed indictments against two Duke University lacrosse players in a case of ALLEGED rape. Are these two really guilty? That remains to be seen. But Jesse Jackson, appearing with Paula Zahn on CNN, has already set the racial fires burning with hot-button talk of “plantation” and “slavery” and “fantasies” of white men having their way with black women.

Jesse obviously waits by the phone for the next CAUSE to divide America. This time, the call came from Duke University and here he is, front page again.

It’s too bad that Paula failed to remind Jesse that “fantasies” work both ways. Plenty of prime time African American athletes somehow walk off with the sharpest blonde on campus. Is that a problem? No, as long as we remember that we’re all in this together and that race is a problem only when we (or some people) make it a problem.