Newsweek puts Katie Couric on the cover this week, and the cover story by Marc Peyser and Johnnie Roberts is easy, breezy, and totally free of any troublesome analysis of whether Couric is fair and balanced enough to attract non-liberal viewers. The most eye-opening line comes from former CBS reporter Marvin Kalb, responding to Andy Rooney's nobody's-happy-about-Katie rant on the Imus show:

"I remember when CBS hired [former game-show host] Mike Wallace and gave him the morning news," says Marvin Kalb, a former CBS correspondent who is now a senior fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center. "You should have heard the men's room conversation. My God, what have they done? They destroyed the Murrow tradition—all that. I think the negative spin on Katie Couric is unfair, and I think she is going to prove those people wrong. So take that, Andy Rooney, and screw you."

A Colorado school has banned camouflage as well as other assorted patriotic paraphernalia on the grounds that such raiment represents a divisive brand of patriotism (meaning any variety that does not support the sublimation of the United States into the New World Order) and thus presents a potential threat to public safety. In a similar decision in San Diego, a school there has banned the flag as well as red, white, and blue clothing.

It is about time people remembered just what country this is. If Old Glory offends you that much, you should have never come here in the first place. Maybe students can find happiness and prosperity back in the geographic trash-piles they fled from but from which they continue to derive their sense of pride and identity.

Just how far does promulgating regulations about clothing in the name of harmony at the expense of individuality extend? If skinheads don't like the Jewish kids wearing yarmulkes, are school administrators going to make students remove those?

In my last post about outspoken and unbelievably liberal actor Alec Baldwin, I kindly asked him to e-mail me when he wrote anything at Huff-n-Puff. Sadly, he hasn’t yet heeded my request. Regardless, his post on Sunday, once again and true to form, did not disappoint. 

Titled “DeLay Is the New Republican,” Baldwin chose to slay soon-to-be retiring Tom DeLay (R-Texas). Yet, his really juicy vitriol was directed at everybody he doesn’t agree with politically. (Readers are duly warned to fasten their seatbelts, for this is a bumpy ride!) He started with moderate Democrats that clearly offend his liberal sensibilities:

On this weekend's McLaughlin Group, Newsweek's Eleanor Clift -- referring the President Bush's September 2003 insistence, in the wake of the Valerie Plame controversy, that “I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information,” a technical accuracy since he had apparently declassified information released in order to counter claims made by Plame's husband, Joe Wilson -- charged: “President Clinton's manipulation of words did not set off a chain of events that took us into an unnecessary war and cost people's lives. It was a personal indiscretion of so much lesser magnitude than what we're dealing here.” Assessing Bush's credibility, she saw him as less credible than Wilson and accused Bush of having “lied” with the “consequence” of thousands being killed, “Wilson's credibility versus the President's credibility: I'd put my money on Wilson. This is a crystalizing piece of information that people can understand the storyline. The President lied, they see the video clips and they know the consequences of a war with over two thousand people dead.” (Partial transcripts follow.)

It’s certainly not often that a conservative can say this, but today’s editorial in the Washington Post entitled “A Good Leak” represents a bold and almost unprecedented demonstration of support for President George W. Bush by one of America’s leading liberal newspapers. Frankly, I had to check and double-check the web address while pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.

Yet, there it was: “PRESIDENT BUSH was right to approve the declassification of parts of a National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq three years ago in order to make clear why he had believed that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons. Presidents are authorized to declassify sensitive material, and the public benefits when they do.”

President Bush was right?!? The public actually benefitted from something he did? When’s the last time a member of the antique media said that? Maybe more amazing, WaPo’s editorial staff, after making it clear that “There was nothing illegal or even particularly unusual” about such a declassification, concluded: “As Mr. Fitzgerald pointed out at the time of Mr. Libby's indictment last fall, none of this is particularly relevant to the question of whether the grounds for war in Iraq were sound or bogus. It's unfortunate that those who seek to prove the latter would now claim that Mr. Bush did something wrong by releasing for public review some of the intelligence he used in making his most momentous decision.”

I imagine that most of you are likely double-checking that web address right about now. However, in between the first paragraph and this wonderful finale, WaPo also went after former ambassador Joe Wilson (emphasis mine):

Smart people know what's going on. I don't. Those experts on those TV shouting matches know exactly what's happening in regards to illegal immigration and aid to Hamas. I read the same reports that come out of Washington and instead of being enlightened I grow woozy from confusion.

Call me clueless. Be my guest.

As I've got it figured - well, wait a minute! Even the New York Times is confounded. One day the headline exults that Congress has paved the way for full citizenship for those 11 million illegals. Next day, it's just the opposite. Congress is bogged down. Here's the exact headline - IMMIGRATION DEAL FAILS IN SENATE VOTE.

If the paper of record can't figure it out, what do you want from me? Likewise, the people who run our country can't seem to figure anything out, either. Aren't they supposed to be of the people, for the people? The people, according to the stats, want a tight border, and don't want illegals hanging round. Legal, yes. Illegal, no.

Chris Matthews ended his Sunday Show with the words, "The future lies not in our stars, but in ourselves" and attributed the quote to Edward R Murrow.  Wrong on 2 counts, Chris!  The quote is actually "The Fault, Dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings" and hails from Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar".

Sure - Murrow used the line, and I suspect that Matthew's source of the error was the 2005 Film "Good Night and Good Luck", in which the Murrow character climaxes a rant objurgating the Junior Senator from Wisconsin with "Cassius was right - The fault, dear Brutus is not in our stars, but in ourselves.  Good night, and good luck.", but c’mon Chris – Was this really the first time you had heard the line?

Massachusetts prison officials were not happy at one officer's screening of "Brokeback Mountain" for inmates. They also are not happy with movies depicting violence against correctional staff.

Given that prisons have much higher rates of homosexual behavior than society, surely such a progressive audience would have appreciated a film depicting its lifestyle choice.

But in the First in the Nation state of Massachusetts, the first to allow gay marriage, it appears the state is trying its best to prevent such unions of holy matrimony from forming in its facilities.

Friday's enraptured major-media roll-out of a purported "Gospel of Judas," which claims that Judas was actually Christ's best buddy, betraying him only so he could slip out of his awful human body, drew harsh words from conservative bloggers. At The Volokh Conspiracy, media critic David Kopel whacked away (Hat tip: Instapundit):

This Friday's coverage of the so-called "Gospel of Judas" in much of the U.S. media was appallingly stupid. The Judas gospel is interesting in its own right, but the notion that it disproves, or casts into doubt, the traditional orthodox understanding of the betrayal of Jesus is preposterous...

Columnist and author George Weigel has a nice article on CBS's 60 Minutes and embryo-destroying stem cell research, which is mostly a list of the tough questions Lesley Stahl could have (but did not) ask the liberal advocate in the segment. He began:

The CBS news magazine 60 Minutes prides itself on asking the hard questions that other television news vehicles are too polite, or perhaps too afraid, to ask. That tough-minded approach to an important issue wasn't much in evidence, however, when 60 Minutes recently took on the question of whether "spare" embryos "left over" from in vitro fertilization procedures should be used for stem-cell research that would result in the embryos' death.

During the segment, Princeton's Robert P. George, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, tried to explain certain basic moral facts to Leslie Stahl...[But] The editing of the segment strongly suggested that 60 Minutes preferred the approach of the University of Pennsylvania’s Dr. Arthur Caplan, an enthusiast for research that, as he put it, would destroy "embryos...that no one will ever use for any purpose whatsoever." That, of course, is the conventional wisdom in the bioethics guild, which frequently serves as a permission-slip factory for scientists and the biotech industry.