psychosis: 'A severe mental illness in which the person has lost contact with reality."

OK, I'm not kidding: judging from tonight's episode of Hardball, either the MSM is psychotic, or I am. You be the armchair psychiatrist.

Chris Matthews' guest was NY Times media reporter Bill Carter. Matthews, discussing W's low poll numbers, observed:

"Bush is down there, Lou Harris, a liberal pollster, let's get straight on that, has got him down at 29. Is it too easy now to bash him? Even the money guys now in our business are saying, 'hit him again'. Is it too easy now to bash him?"

Carter: "You have to say, the media didn't go after him for a long time."

ABC's Elizabeth Vargas and George Stephanopoulos reported Friday night that lawmakers opposed to the NSA's program, which collects phone numbers dialed, were “surprised” that by two-to-one Americans consider the effort an “acceptable” anti-terrorism program. But given the media's hyperbolic negative reaction to the supposed “Big Brother” program, which spread into a second day on Friday, it's Vargas and Stephanopoulos -- along with the rest of the mainstream media -- who should be embarrassed by news judgment so out of touch with the public.

“An ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that Americans overwhelmingly support the surveillance of phone records as a way to protect them against a potential terrorist strike,” Vargas reported as she cued up George Stephanopoulos by relaying how “some lawmakers were taken by surprise by this widespread public support for the program." Stephanopoulos echoed: "That's right, Elizabeth. When I was speaking to opponents of the program today they were really surprised that more Americans didn't share their outrage.” (Those "opponents" are presumably in politics, but I'm sure the same could be said for journalists.)  Stephanopoulos further marveled at how “two-thirds of Americans wouldn't be bothered, even if the NSA was collecting their own phone records.” (ABC transcript, plus brief quotes from CBS and NBC on Friday night, follow)

It's that time of the week again and since Wednesday was Scott McClellan's last day on the job, we figured we'd use this photo for the weekend captionfest. Original AP wording: "Press Secretary Scott McClellan passes out brownies to members of the press during the flight back to Washington on Air Force One, Wednesday, May 10."

A quick note to drive-by journalists about NSA illegally collecting telephone records without first obtaining a warrant.

U.S. Supreme Court
SMITH v. MARYLAND,
442 U.S. 735 (1979)
No. 78-5374.
Argued March 28, 1979.
Decided June 20, 1979.

The telephone company, at police request, installed at its central offices a pen register to record the numbers dialed from the telephone at petitioner's home.
Held: The installation and use of the pen register was not a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and hence no warrant was required. Pp. 739-746.

Not that this story is any newer than the last go-round. Also a quick note to the drive-by journalists complaining about more "tax cuts for the rich."

Breitbart
April Tax Revenue 2nd-Highest in History
It marked the largest one-month receipt total since the government collected $332 billion in revenue in April 2001

See that? Tax cuts = more tax revenue. So the only logical reason to complain about "tax cuts for the rich" is that you really want the economy to tank or that you don't really care about getting the most tax money you can but rather you hate that others are doing so well and want to punish them.

Hey Big Media, don't punish others just because you chose a profession that doesn't pay squat. In fact, you should go after your CEOs who take food out of your mouths with multi-million dollar retirement packages (that sounds familiar.)

Without a doubt the most absurd claim made during all the recent NSA stories has to come from Fox News' Geraldo Rivera when he warned: "If Congress doesn’t stop this guy, General Hayden, next he’ll be peeking in our bedrooms. " The following came from Rivera's final commentary segment on last night's syndicated Geraldo At Large:

Geraldo Rivera: "Now it’s your problem too. Remember when President Bush acknowledged that the super secret National Security Agency was indeed spying on Americans without search warrants by listening in to and taping international phone calls? Remember how the President justified it?"

[George W. Bush: "If they’re making phone calls into the United States we need to know why to protect you."]

Today chicagotribune.com headlines:

”DNA links 3rd player to alleged attack”

The Tribune news services' story begins:

Prosecutors believe they have DNA evidence to tie a third Duke lacrosse player to the alleged attack on a 27-year-old exotic dancer, news outlets in Durham reported Thursday.

The local ABC affiliate, citing sources, reported that the third player is the same person who was identified with "90 percent" certainty by the alleged victim in a photo lineup. That lineup was conducted by police weeks after the March 13 off-campus lacrosse team party where the alleged incident took place.

Liberal nanny-state advocate Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is at it again: suing the makers of 7-Up for false advertising by tagging its new incarnation of the lemon-lime flavored drink as "7-Up Natural."

Picking up on the story, ABC's "World News Tonight" on May 11 presented CSPI as merely a non-profit group concerned with truth-in-advertising. But the group is far more concerned with what you eat and drink than what is printed on the label:

Recently, CSPI pulled an anti-soda lawsuit filed in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts only after a settlement with soft drink manufacturers brokered by former President Bill Clinton.

As Rich Noyes pointed out yesterday, the morning shows jumped on the "USA Today" story about the NSA having phone records of ordinary Americans. This morning, CBS’s "The Early Show" continued with the coverage, and used the story to revive one of their favorite terms, "Domestic Spying." In covering this story this morning, co-host Harry Smith interviewed Delaware Senator Joe Biden, a critic of the NSA program, and asked softball questions. With the exception of 2 short clips of President Bush and 1 clip of General Michael Hayden, the President’s nominee to be CIA Director, viewers did not hear from any supporters of the NSA’s actions.

Harry Smith opened the broadcast with the following tease:

"Good morning I’m Harry Smith. The heat turns up again on the domestic spy scandal as members of Congress call for an investigation into a report that the government collected the phone records of millions of Americans. We'll have the latest."

Incoming NBC Today show co-host Meredith Vieira, on Friday's ABC daytime show The View, showcased her susceptibility to baseless media hype and her own economic ignorance. Interviewing ABC's John Stossel, on to plug his new book, Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel -- Why Everything You Know is Wrong, and a Friday night 20/20 about it, Vieira demanded: "You say there is no gas 'crisis.' How can you say that?" Stossel explained it's plentiful and half the price as in Europe, but Vieira remained unswayed, ridiculously insisting: "But it's still a crisis, I mean in the sense that gas prices are going up. That's a crisis for us." A few minutes later, a befuddled Vieira exposed not only a lack of basic economic knowledge, but also unfamiliarity with a common conservative argument: "Why does raising the minimum wage, this is one I don't get, actually hurt poor people? I don't understand that one at all." (Partial transcript follows)

According to the May 12 Today show, if you’re an "ordinary" American, you should be afraid of the President’s "snooping." Using the time honored media tradition of word repetition, the NBC program sought to portray the NSA’s gathering of phone numbers as highly sinister. In a report that aired at 7:07AM EDT, reporter Kelly O’Donnell stated that the phone records of "ordinary citizens" were compiled. In the 8AM hour, Ann Curry reported that the phone information of "millions of ordinary Americans" had been compiled. An hour later she again announced that those "ordinary Americans" had been targeted. Get it? It’s the average citizens who ought to be worried.

On Friday, Good Morning America devoted its first three stories to the collection of phone numbers by the National Security Agency. GMA reporters portrayed the news as creating a "firestorm of controversy" and as hitting Capitol Hill "like a ton of bricks." Yet the white-hot criticism was all coming from liberal Democrats during an election year. And as an ABC poll found, by two to one Americans think the program is justified.

Diane Sawyer introduced the first story, "But let's begin now with those 200 million Americans who may have had their phone calls tracked by the NSA. It has touched off a firestorm of controversy in Washington, pitting privacy against the war on terror. But ABC's Kate Snow and George Stephanopoulos have been covering this story from all angles for us. And we begin with Kate, who's in our Time Square studios here."

The host of NBC's "Meet the Press" Tim Russert gave an interview to New York Times Magazine. Editor and Publisher obtained a preview.

Russert criticized Arriana Huffington of HuffingtonPost.com for her regular critiques of him, saying he doesn't read it because there are "so many untruths, it is scary. You know, there's a long history there."

He talked about Tony Snow, the incoming White House press secretary, and how he prepares for interviews the day before his Sunday talk show.

Elsewhere in his Times interveiw, Russert was asked if the White House, with ex-Fox News employee Tony Snow now running the press end, will give favorable treatment to Fox. "I don't think so," he replied. "No more than they got so far."

Have at it, folks.

Wade Zirkle, a combat veteran of the Iraq war and cofounder of VetsforFreedom.org, says journalists don't go out with the troops much any more. Instead, they hang around in the Green Zone and wait for the troops to come back from their missions. With a "vulture syndrome," they travel from unit to unit asking about bad news.

While many journalists were embedded with U.S. military units during the initial invasion of Iraq, today such deployments are few and far between. Today instead, what is often portrayed as reports from "on the ground" are more often what we veterans call "balcony reporting."..

We've gone from 692 journalists embedded with coalition units during the invasion to 32 today, according to the Defense Department. The result is an information void from which the American public cannot fully evaluate the mission.

Tony Snow is starting out his new job as press secretary, and Bill Sammon writes in the Washington Examiner that after writing pieces criticizing five different news outlets, it's clear "he will be more aggressive than his mild-mannered predecessor, Scott McClellan."

All of the write-ups, entitled "Setting the Record Straight," can be viewed on the White House website.

The most recent two were about the Washington Post and who really gets tax relief, and the AP about military recruiting.

Attacking the Washington Post:

Setting the Record Straight: President Bush's Tax Relief Benefits All Taxpayers

NBC’s medical drama ER included more anti-war speeches last night, as the show’s writers killed off a character who used to work as a doctor at the Chicago hospital but has lately been serving as a National Guard medical officer in Iraq. One doctor railed against how the “whole war smell[s]...of right-wing cronyism,” while another complained the U.S. was spending “$6 billion a month in a war all the way across the world to kill a few more of the other kids who actually get to make it to their teens!” (See video)

Earlier this season, “Dr. Neela Rasgotra” railed against the war in a March 16 episode, as Brent Baker noted in an earlier post on NewsBusters. Her character had married “Dr. Michael Gallant” after Gallant had returned from his first tour of duty in Iraq.

Last night, the truck carrying Gallant and several other soldiers was blown up by a roadside bomb during the first few moments of the show, right after he tried in vain to save a soldier shot in an insurgent ambush. That left the rest of the show for the other characters to complain about the war as they learned of their friend’s death.

Video clip of doctor's rant (1:10): Real (2.9 MB) or Windows Media (2.2 MB)

Apparently it's old news week at the broadcast networks. After hyping the year-old revelation about the NSA's telephone record program, CBS has invited the Dixie Chicks, the formerly popular country music group whose penchant for spouting liberal platitudes alienated their fan base, to talk about death threats they received in 2003.

Ostensibly, the purpose of the Chicks' appearance on "60 Minutes" this Sunday is to promote a new album, but the lead of CBS's online promotional piece about the interview focuses entirely on three-year-old threats.There's apparently an effort to "make news" here most likely, but it's so feeble as to be laughable.

Any person who cuts even a slightly bigger-than-average public profile has received death threats. Doing a story on them is of questionable value; doing one on threats received in 2003 can only be attributed to the fact that the Dixie Chicks are liberal. Much-reviled conservative women like Linda Tripp or Katherine Harris both received many death threats but were never granted interviews with "60 Minutes" to talk about their experiences in a sympathetic manner.

The Denver Post reports that among Joe Nacchio's other problems, he was the first Qwest CEO to refuse to help the NSA analyze phone records in the pursuit & deconstruction of terrorist networks. Even as,

"This is a case where (Qwest) showed some independence and courage," said Phil Weiser, a University of Colorado law professor who specializes in telecommunications issues.

...

In 2002 he chaired the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, a group of industry executives who advised President Bush. He also chaired the Network Reliability and Interoperability Council, an advisory panel on emergency communications networks and homeland security to the Federal Communications Commission.

Just to get things started on a Friday, "The Early Show" on CBS had a segment on Milwaukee's missing Alexis Patterson, who was something of a cause celebre a few years back for being the barely known black girl that proved the Only Missing White Girls Matter rule. But CBS used graphics for the story with the words "Without A Trace." Repeatedly.

While that may describe the Patterson case, they also ape the title of a hit CBS Thursday night program. What next? What CBS shows lend themselves most easily to cross-promotional graphic word play?

The easy list: Close to Home, Cold Case, Criminal Minds, Out of Practice, Still Standing, Yes Dear.

The would-never-work list: Numb3rs, The New Adventures of Old Christine.

Okay, now I'm not a regular CBS entertainment watcher, but Hillary Profita on the CBS News "Public Eye" website explains how the "Without A Trace" feature is a follow-up from the Thursday night drama:

One thing is certain: the people within the government leaking the existence of secret anti-terror programs to the press are trying to hurt the president politically. Chris Matthews believes they have been more successful in achieving that goal with the recent leak of the phone data collection program than they were with the terrorist surveillance program leak.

On this morning's Today show, Matt Lauer asked Matthews: "Will there be a huge political fallout? Americans are evenly split on the domestic program [i.e., the terrorist surveillance progam]. Do you see this as the same situation?"

Matthews:

"No. Nobody can imagine being on the telephone with an Al Qaeda agent but they can imagine privacy matters.

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

A journalist named Nir Rosen appeared as a guest on tonight's edition of The O'Reilly Factor (Thu. May 11, 2006). He has a new book out called In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq. To write the book, Rosen "gained an impressive measure of access to both the Sunni and Shia resistance" and probably obtained "more sources in the insurgency than any other American reporter" (emphasis mine, sourced here). So O'Reilly began his interview with the obvious question:

"How did you do that? Very few people, journalists, particularly writers, have been able to get in there without getting their head cut off. How did you do it?"

Rosen responded (emphasis mine),

World Net Daily points out that the Associated Press drove by a Swedish study that finds lesbians react differently to sex hormones than heterosexual women. Evidently, the desire of the AP was to claim that homosexuality is genetic, that it can't be helped. This, presumably, would make homosexuals a protected class affording special legal protections. Specifically, the AP made claims like "the findings add weight to the idea that homosexuality has a physical basis and is not learned behavior."

The problem is that the study says no such thing. In fact, Dr. Ivanka Savic of the Stockholm Brain Institute and the author of the study said: "This is incorrect and not stated in the paper."

As WorldNet points out, "the Swedish study merely found that lesbians respond differently, not that their brains were hardwired that way before any sexual activity."

It is unknown whether the lesbian nose is trained or bred, at least to everybody except the AP.

Matching the agenda of the morning shows, Thursday's network evening newscasts led with USA Today's front page story, “NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls," with none noting how the New York Times reported the same information back on December 24. Unlike CBS, however, both ABC and NBC at least pointed out how many Members of Congress were aware of how Verizon, AT&T and Bell South were providing the NSA with the numbers called by their customers, but didn't complain. Didn't complain, that is, until the news media decided to make it a big issue on which they could rail, thus providing the news media with material for further coverage.

CBS anchor Bob Schieffer demanded: “Does the government need to know who you've been talking to on the phone? Then why is it collecting millions of our phone records?” Schieffer led with how the phone companies “have been turning over the telephone records of tens o