Tonight (Sunday, May 14 at 8pm EDT/PDT, 7pm CDT/MDT) NBC will air the final episode of The West Wing. Since its debut in September of 1999 when "President Josiah Bartlet," played by Martin Sheen, told some cartoon-ish conservative religious leaders to "get your fat asses out of my White House" (an episode NBC will re-air before the final episode), the prime time drama regularly advocated liberal policies and showcased liberal causes. The MRC has compiled text and video/audio for a "Top Ten Left Wing Scenes on NBC's The West Wing" presentation of some of the program's most notorious liberal moments and crusades. Actually, you'll find nine scenes pushing liberal ideas followed by one unusual scene which mocked liberal opposition to tax cuts.

House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Michigan) wrote an op-ed in Saturday’s Los Angeles Times that should be must reading for all Americans, especially those that believe the leaking of national security information is actually a good thing if it helps your party regain power. In it, Hoekstra practically attacked USA Today for its recent front-page article concerning the National Security Agency collecting domestic phone records:

“WE ARE IN the first war of the Information Age, and we have a critical advantage over our enemy: We are far better at gathering intelligence. It's an advantage we must utilize, and it's keeping us safe. But every time classified national security information is leaked, our ability to gather information on those who would do us harm is eroded.”

Hoekstra continued: “We suffered a setback Thursday when USA Today ran a front-page story alleging that the National Security Agency was collecting domestic phone records. This article hurt our efforts to protect Americans by giving the enemy valuable insights into the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which has been focused like a laser beam on Al Qaeda and its known associates.”

Hoekstra then stepped forward to defend the actions of the NSA and the president:

Natalie Angier, the feminist writer for Science Times, best known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Woman: An Intimate Geography," hailed by Gloria Steinem as "nothing less than revolutionary biology," has a strange way of writing up Mother’s Day. She turns to the animal kingdom, and notes that many species are anything but maternal. On the front page of Tuesday's Science Times section, The article began:

"Oh, mothers! Dear noble, selfless, tender and ferocious defenders of progeny: How well you deserve our admiration as Mother’s Day draws near, and how photogenically you grace the greeting cards that we thrifty offspring will send in lieu of a proper gift." Then she explains that in nature, animal mothers are often heartless and cruel, from the guinea hen to the panda bear to the African black eagle.

If you're not outraged by the NSA program that monitors phone-calling patterns, you're probably . . . too dumb to understand its implications. That, in a nutshell, and I do mean nutshell, was Ellen Ratner's argument on this morning's 'Long & the Short of It' segment on Fox & Friends Weekend. Oh, well, that - and opening our borders with Mexico.

Host Julian Phillips [who expressed his personal opposition to the NSA program] put it to Ratner that "most Americans don't care about this. They say the NSA should do that to keep our security intact."

Replied Ratner:

"Until some neighbor who might work at a spy agency gets their phone records and starts spewing it around town that somebody is talking to somebody or divorce records get subpoenaed or something like that. You know, most people don't understand the impact of how bad this really is."

It's the weekend, so under the more relaxed weekend rules, permit a somewhat aged item. Like a nice cheese. MRC's Geoff Dickens just recently found a Geraldo Rivera rant from the end of his syndicated show on the night of the May 1 work-boycott protest for illegal immigration.

They are demonstrating for justice and fair play for the 11 or 12 million living and working in the United States illegally. Many taking to the streets for these May 1st rallies are drawn from the community of the undocumented, others are citizens of the U.S. who, like myself, believe this nation of immigrants has room for more. Driven in part by the hysterical response of vigilante groups like the so-called Minutemen and by opportunistic congressmen who’d make felons of all those who are here illegally. Millions more of us today ask our fellow countrymen to treat the undocumented as honored guests.

Okay, selling Oprah as God-like has been done as a joke before, but Yahoo is highlighting an Ann Oldenburg article in USA Today taking it seriously, headlined "The divine Miss Winfrey?" Oldenburg began:

After two decades of searching for her authentic self -- exploring New Age theories, giving away cars, trotting out fat, recommending good books and tackling countless issues from serious to frivolous – Oprah Winfrey has risen to a new level of guru...Over the past year, Winfrey, 52, has emerged as a spiritual leader for the new millennium, a moral voice of authority for the nation.

"She's a really hip and materialistic Mother Teresa," says Kathryn Lofton, a professor at Reed College in Portland, Ore., who has written two papers analyzing the religious aspects of Winfrey. "Oprah has emerged as a symbolic figurehead of spirituality." (Later, Lofton added, "She's a moral monitor, using herself as the template against which she measures the decency of a nation.")