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

I Must admit George Bush Is No Ronald Reagan, But he did the right thing by going to Iraq with Ground Troops & Finishing the Job we started in 1990. we have been in Iraq 16 years now with no fly zones the first 13 of those years, so we need to finish this job & learn from the mistakes of our intelligent community that gave Bush The Bad Information for going to War in the first place. Everyone knows that George Tennet The CIA Director under Clinton said it was a "SLAM DUNK" with regard to WMD's As did the U.N. Russia, England, The French, etc, etc, so it was not The President's fault there were no weapons . After 9/11 & The Anthrax Attack thru our Postal Service the country was in a panic & Worried where the next attack was coming from. The Intelligence Community Said Iraq was a threat so The President had two Opptions.

The Associated Press reports that Tony Snow didn't say much on his first day at the White House.

President Bush had two press secretaries Monday — incoming Tony Snow and outgoing Scott McClellan.

The two men are sharing responsibilities in a final few days of transition.

Snow and McClellan stood behind the cameras in the Oval Office as Bush announced his nomination of Gen. Michael Hayden to be the next director of the CIA.

Then, Snow made his first solo appearance on the White House podium — but only to introduce John Negroponte, the national intelligence director, for a televised briefing on Hayden's nomination. Snow's role amounted to speaking 59 words.

Among other areas where the media slant coverage in an anti-business direction, the MRC's Business & Media Institute (formerly the Free Market Project) has doggedly tracked the media's biases against "Big Oil" and in favor of Big Government.

Now we've decided to engage bloggers and the media on the issue with a panel discussion on "Oil, Markets, and the Media" on Wednesday, May 10 from 9:30 to 11. The discussion will be followed by a free breakfast during which time panelists including Cato's Jerry Taylor and Congressman Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), will be able to field questions from attendees.

Best of all, the event is free. Simply RSVP with BMI's Charles Simpson.

Apparently Tim Russert has been paying attention to the misdeeds of Democrats. Last Friday the host of NBC’s Meet the Press appeared on the Today show. He commented that the Patrick Kennedy scandal will allow Republicans to "suggest to the country it’s not just Republicans who misbehave." I wondered if several misbehaving Democrats had somehow escaped his attention. Mr. Russert, on the May 7 edition of Meet the Press, grilled House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on that very subject:

Russert: "You have Congressman Jefferson of Louisiana, someone pleaded guilty and said he had paid him bribes. You have Cynthia McKinney investigated for roughing up a police officer. You have Congressman Kennedy who, in the wee hours, entangling himself with the police department. So the Democrats have ethical...the Democrats have ethical challenges, too, correct?"

CNN Headline News is set to debut a new show tonight (7pm ET) featuring radio host Glenn Beck. Already, liberals are up in arms about their sacred turf of non-FNC television being invaded, Broadcasting and Cable reports.

New CNN Headline News host Glenn Beck is already asking his fans to guess when his show will be canceled, and it doesn't even debut until Monday night.

The subject of an e-mail campaign from the left, the conservative talker is launching one of his own.

Beck's Web site, glennbeck.com, has a link to an online form that lets surfers guess when his talk show--weeknights, 7 and 9 p.m., starting May 8--will be off the air. His own staff gives it "three weeks," according to some streamed behind-the-scenes video also linked to Beck's Web site.

All together now…“Awwwwwwwww.”

Newspapers circulation rates took another steep decline in the six-month period ending in March according to a just released AP report (hat tip to Drudge): “The decline in average paid weekday circulation was about the same as the previous six-month reporting cycle for the period ending last September, according to the Newspaper Association of America, a trade group.”

Some of America’s most “popular” dailies were amongst the biggest losers: “Several top newspapers reported significant declines in the period, including Tribune Co.'s Los Angeles Times, down 5.4 percent at 851,832; The Washington Post, down 3.7 percent at 724,242; the New York Daily News, also down 3.7 percent at 708,477.”

The biggest percentage loser was the San Francisco Chronicle “where average paid weekday circulation fell 15.6

The Washington Post has yet to editorialize on the nomination of Air Force General Michael Hayden to replace Porter Goss as CIA Director, but they’ve already done a fine job of debunking the notion that a uniformed officer has no business running the civilian CIA. Of course, that was when a liberal president picked a liberal admiral to run the agency.

Nearly 30 years ago, the Post sided with President Jimmy Carter when he named Navy Admiral Stansfield Turner, at the time the commander-in chief of Allied Forces in Southern Europe. The Post called objections to Turner’s military pedigree “misguided” and “insulting.” An excerpt of the Post’s February 9, 1977 editorial, headlined "Why Not a Military Man at CIA?" retrieved via Nexis:

While the media is full of stories of Nancy Pelosi's "Miss Cleo" impression on the future of politics in America and fantasizing about Porter Goss playing poker while smoking a cigar, our brave military are still kicking butt over in Iraq (and Afghanistan). Here's one of the latest from Centcom.mil...

TERRORIST CHEMICAL EXPERT KILLED IN BAGHDAD RAID
"Ansar al-Islam member and chemical expert, Ali Wali, was killed May 6th at approximately 1 p.m. during a counterterrorist raid in the Mansur district of Baghdad. Iraqi civilians transported the two bodies to the morgue where Coalition forces later confirmed the identity of the wanted terrorist, Ali Wali.

Eleanor Clift, Newsweek's resident genius, had another stroke of brilliance Sunday with a column on the many similarities between Hillary Clinton and Ronald Reagan. Aside from that very arguable point, I couldn't help but notice this gem that somehow worked its way through Newsweek's legions of fact-checkers:

The late great Jerry Garcia used to say the Grateful Dead were like black licorice. People who loved them loved them a lot. People who hated them really hated them. "Hillary Clinton is black licorice," says a Democratic strategist. "There's a huge upside, and there's a huge downside. And we don't know how it will balance out."

When was the last time we had such a dominant front runner this early who raises such anxiety about electability? The answer is Ronald Reagan. It took a leap of imagination to believe an aging grade-B movie actor with orange hair could win the presidency.

For comment on the substance of the piece (such as it is), head over to Captain's Quarters.

Every week Bob Schieffer ends his Sunday political talk show "Face the Nation" with commentary. Yesterday he praised the virtues of putting America's national anthem "in a hundred languages."

Finally today in the ongoing effort to make our national debate about all the wrong things, we may have reached a milestone with a controversy whether over it is all right for the national anthem to be sung in Spanish. The blogs went nuts about it, of course. Going nuts is their natural state. Talk radio saw danger ahead, `Cover the children's ears.'

Now I'm with them on insisting that everyone who wants to be a citizen should learn English, and in an increasingly diverse country, common experiences have become rarer and rarer, and our language is one of the few things we all share. There is strength in that. But the anthem in English only? I don't get it.

On Saturday, The New York Times and the Washington Post had the same idea: line up average Americans to suggest any emerging macroeconomic happy talk is ignoring how "many people" are still feeling an economic pinch.

The Post put theirs on Page One, the Times on A-10. The Post headline was "Rising Expenses Have Consumers Feeling Pinched." The Times headline was "Despite a Sound Economy, Many Feel the Pinch of Daily Costs." (Online, it’s "Statistics Aside, Many Feel the Pinch of Daily Costs.") So the Post wins for pushing the theme harder, but the theme still suggests newspaper editors who are trying to throw mud pies at Pollyanna before anyone gets too thrilled with the macroeconomic picture.

An LA radio station is fed up with CNN anchor Lou Dobbs' constant attacks on illegal immigration. Lalo Alcaraz and Esteban Zul host the "Pocho Hour of Power" on KPFK, and don't like Dobbs' "soft bigotry in a three-piece suit." So far there have been no takers, despite prize offers.

Reports the New York Daily News:

"He used to have a business show, and now it's all-immigrant, all the time," Alcaraz told us. "Call me crazy, but if I had a TV show, I'd do different topics. And what he's doing is a kind of cultural bigotry that [immigrants] are inferior in some way. In reality, they're working their asses off. It leads viewers to think, 'Now I can discriminate against Panchito.'"

Last month, the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting called Dobbs' "tone on immigration consistently alarmist," with the Space.com founder claiming that Mexicans are "an army of invaders" who want to reannex parts of the U.S. for Mexico; that "illegal alien smugglers and drug traffickers are on the verge of ruining some of our national treasures," and that "the invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans" through "deadly imports" of diseases like malaria — and even leprosy.

For months, the media have blamed virtually anything but free market forces for the rise in oil and gas prices. NBC’s Lisa Myers attributed these increases to greed on a recent Nightly News report stating almost disgustedly “Exxon earned 9.5 cents on every dollar of gasoline and oil sold, cashing in at every stage of the process.”

Imagine the nerve of ExxonMobil actually making a profit. Oh the humanity.

A few days earlier, CBS’s Russ Mitchell, clearly concerned about price gouging, asked one of his guests on the Evening News, “How easy is it for a gas station, for an oil company to just jack up the price of gas?"

I bet you can’t guess the response.

Yet, in the midst of all this hysteria, a highly unlikely source – National Public Radio’s Internet website – published an article entitled “Q&A: What’s Behind High Gas Prices?” In it, author Scott Horsley adroitly cut through the hype, and

The worst possible 'solution' to the high cost of gasoline would be price controls, since they would simultaneously discourage production while driving up demand. But running a close second and third in the bad-idea sweepstakes would be a windfall-profits tax on oil companies and a cap on the amount oil companies can pay their executives. Two out of three ain't bad, so let's give GMA's Charlie Gibson an A- for his attempt to demagogue the gas-price issue this morning.

His guest was the soft-spoken James Mulva, Chairman and CEO of ConocoPhillips, the nation's third-largest oil company.

Gibson opening shot was to suggest that "consumers have a right to be angry" in light of the estimated $135 billion the six largest oil companies are expected to make in 2006. Gibson didn't attempt to suggest why high profits justify consumer anger. Remember, market economics dictate that sellers price their products at the level yielding the highest profits, not necessarily at the highest possible price. Consider Wal-Mart, for example, which has reaped huge profits by consistently offering prices lower than those of competitors.

The "Paper of Record" ran a piece today by Erik Eckholm which lays out the plight that the nation’s “near poor” face on a daily basis. According to “some experts” carefully selected for message compatibility, “vulnerability to poverty” is now the new “poverty.”

Its rather convenient for left-leaning media outlets, in a period of record economic expansion and robust growth (going on two straight years, with lower unemployment that in the 90’s), to find the “tens of millions” who may have financial troubles at some point. Don’t take my word for it – read the “expert” opinion:

In his weekly Monday "Media Notes" digest in the Washington Post Style section, Howard Kurtz digs into a little content analysis as to how the national newspapers haven't been too harsh on Congressman Patrick Kennedy's troubled past, dating back to disclosures in 1991 that he had abused cocaine, through his several embarrassing incidents in 2000:

Relatively little of this drew significant national coverage. Among the brief mentions in the New York Times, a 2002 piece on Kennedy's reelection campaign included a paragraph on his personal problems, quoting the congressman as saying: "If you are a Kennedy, people always make more of such things than really exists, and the true Kennedy haters just won't let go of it."