ABC News on Wednesday framed its coverage, of President Bush's veto of a bill to provide federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, from the point of view of those upset by his decision. Charles Gibson, anchor of the newly-named World News with Charles Gibson, delivered a tease and a plug which conveyed only the view of those in favor of the bill and earlier in the day, before the veto occurred, Good Morning America featured an uncontested pleading by actor Michael Fox in favor of the taxpayer funding.

Gibson teased, over video of Fox: "President Bush denies new funding for stem cell research, bringing outrage from some high-profile proponents." Before the first ad break, Gibson highlighted how Bush “vetoed expanded stem cell research and proponents are livid." GMA co-host Bill Ritter touted how “supporters believe this research could bring new hope to millions of people suffering from diseases like Parkinson's, people like actor Michael J. Fox, who spoke to us in a GMA exclusive.” Viewers then saw an uninterrupted minute and 45 seconds from Fox, who lamented how “I find it frustrating that the President will use his first veto of his time in office to thwart this research. It just seems a shame to me.” After the lecture, Ritter admired: "Michael J. Fox boldly in his own words."

It is axiomatic that the goal of the foreign policy of the United States should be the advancement of the interests of the United States and not of any other country, no matter how sympathetic, including Israel. That said, should it not give Chris Matthews pause that his pointed anti-neo-con spiel has become indistinguishable from the well-rehearsed Pat Buchanan line on the matter? In a weird twist, Dem hyper-partisan Bob Shrum, a supporter of Israel, was the odd man out on this evening's Hardball.

To demonstrate my point, let's play a little game. Guess who made the following statements?

A. "The neo-cons are out there complaining that this president isn't tough enough. I have no idea what they mean. 50,000 dead in Iraq - it was supposed to be a cakewalk, Ken Adelman is out there today saying we should go other places, you have other guys that want to blow up every Arab country on the list."

One of our heroes has been exonerated after being accused of cold blooded murder in Iraq. According to an AP article carried by Fox News (which is the ONLY news outlet carrying this story right now)...

BAGHDAD, Iraq — A U.S. Marine has been cleared of criminal wrongdoing in last year's fatal shooting of a relative of Iraq's ambassador to the United States, a U.S. official said Wednesday. The 21-year-old engineering student, Mohammed Sumaidaie, was killed during a search of his family's home near Haditha on June 25, 2005.

U.S. authorities ordered an investigation after Samir Sumaidaie complained that his unarmed cousin had been shot in cold blood. However, Maj, Douglas Powell, a U.S. military spokesman, said the Naval Criminal Investigative Service determined that the Marine "acted properly in self defense in response to unexpectedly encountering a man pointing an AK-47 at him."

On the same day that a Hezbollah rocket killed two children in Nazareth, Israel, NBC's Brian Williams visited an Israeli Defense Force artillery outpost in northern Israel and noted how the soldiers “don't think a whole lot about where these shells go” in Lebanon and laid a guilt trip on an Israeli officer by predicting how one of his shells will inevitably “kill a six-year old boy.” Williams proposed to the officer: “One of these shells today or tomorrow, if we go with the law of averages, is going to kill a six-year-old boy somewhere. And it's not the intended target of one of these shells."

Earlier on Wednesday's NBC Nightly News, Richard Engel highlighted how “in Qasmiya in south Lebanon, an Israeli bomb left a crater where children were playing. Ismail lost his son today. 'They were small children. Do you see Hezbollah here?' he asked." Martin Fletcher soon related how a Hezbollah rocket “smashed into the roof of a car dealership in the Arab town of Nazareth. Two boys playing in the garden were killed instantly. They were ages three and nine.” (Partial transcript of Williams follows)

In a misleading expose on the various "end times" religious concepts that are increasingly in the news today, the L.A. Times' Louis Sahagun; conflates Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's violent 12th Imam ravings with several different Christian and Jewish end times concepts as if the ideas are one and the same when, in reality, they aren't even comparable.

Ignoring clear Biblical claims that no man shall know when the end times are near, (Matthew 24:35-36) Sahagun focuses on the minority of Christian leaders who claim that despite that Biblical injunction it must be near. But if it isn't they want to attempt to bring it about. Sahagun warns us...

"Their end game is to speed the promised arrival of a messiah."

After briefly mentioning Christian, Jewish and Ahmadinejad's concepts, Sahagun attempts to loosely link them all together.

Hugh Miles, author of "Al Jazeera: The Inside Story of the Arab News Channel that Is Challenging the West," offers wishful thinking in Foreign Policy magazine. Now that there will be an English version of the Arab channel, Al Jazeera International, he says that the new network "might just become your network of choice."

The number one criticism of Al Jazeera by the West is that it is too close to terrorists, and is used as a terrorist mouthpiece to enable the dissemination of the Jihad message. Miles says this is merely because Al Jazeera has its own version of Fox News' "fair and balanced": "The opinion and the other opinion." I assume it sounds catchier in Arabic.

Has Israel already gone too far, waged too successful of a counterattack against an incursion and double kidnapping by the terrorist group Hezbollah?

As the assault on the Syria-and-Iran backed terrorist group goes on over Lebanon, the Times takes a breath and begins to revert to its usual biases.

Jerusalem bureau chief Steven Erlanger frets about "asymmetrical" death rates in his lead story, "With Israeli Use of Force, Debate Over Proportion."

"The asymmetry in the reported death tolls is marked and growing: some 230 Lebanese dead, most of them civilians, to 25 Israeli dead, 13 of them civilians. In Gaza, one Israel soldier has died from his own army’s fire, and 103 Palestinians have been killed, 70 percent of them militants.

Last night (Tuesday) on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, senior international correspondent Nic Robertson touted his “exclusive” exchange with a Hezbollah propagandist who led Robertson on a tour of a bombed-out block of southern Beirut. Hezbollah claimed to show that Israeli bombs had struck civilian areas of the city, not the terrorist group’s headquarters.

The Hezbollah “press officer,” Hussein Nabulsi, even directed CNN’s camera: “Just look. Shoot. Look at this building. Is it a military base? Is it a military base, or just civilians living in this building?” A few moments later, Nabulsi instructed CNN to videotape him as he ran up to a pile of rubble: “Shoot me. Shoot. This is here where they said Sheikh Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, is living. This is wrong!”

Video clip (1:44): Windows Media (3.5 MB) or Real (3.1 MB), plus: MP3 audio (500 KB)

Snappy Greetings has a parody Al Gore global warming video that uses the theme from the movie "Grease." Al and Tipper Gore, dressed in 50s-era attire, sing the praises of global warming.

"Global warming, so good for me," Al says as he gestures to himself.

"May help you win the presidency," informs Tipper as a "Vote Gore 2008" sign appears.

Will we finally see the end of the media-manufactured Plame scandal? Christopher Hitchens thinks so:

Robert Novak's July 12 column and his appearance on "Meet the Press" Sunday night have dissolved any remaining doubt about the mad theory that the Bush administration "outed" Ms. Valerie Plame as revenge for her husband's refusal to confirm the report by British intelligence that Iraqi officials had visited Niger in search of uranium. To summarize, we now know that:

1. Novak was never approached by any administration officials but approached them instead.
2. He was never told the name Plame but discovered it from Who's Who in America, which contained it in Joseph Wilson's entry.
3. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had all along known which sources had responded to Novak's questions.

When one thinks of the oceans of ink and acres of paper that have been wasted on this mother of all nonstories, one wants to weep for the journalistic profession as well as for the trees.

With an eye on building audience anticipation, and maybe a little political gravitas, CBS sent its anchor-in-waiting Katie Couric on a six-city promotional tour complete with town meetings. AP reporter David Bauder compared her “listening tour” to Hillary Clinton’s, and like the former First Lady’s sojourns, these were frantically pre-screened to be safe and boring. (A blogger in Minneapolis had his pen confiscated.)

Couric told gossip writer James Brady in Aspen she was going out to see “real people,” but Couric has been doing something else at tour stops. She’s been raising money for local cancer charities at $150 a plate. Since her husband Jay Monahan and her sister Emily Couric died of cancer, Couric has been a very active fundraiser for anti-cancer causes. Working with a charity called the Entertainment Industries Foundation (EIF), she is a co-founder of the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance (NCCRA). They have built a Jay Monahan Center for Gastrointestinal Health at New York’s Presbyterian Hospital.

In her sister’s memory, she has pledged to serve as honorary chairwoman of a campaign to raise $100 million for a new cancer center at the University of Virginia, her alma mater. In May, Couric gave a short commencement address at the University of Oklahoma for an eye-popping fee of $115,000 paid by private donors. The six-figure sum was sent directly to the UVA charity. Will she do more six-figure speeches for charity cash?

Couric has established an admirable record of public activism in the fight against cancer and is to be commended for her efforts. But this also being the first time we’ve had one of the nation’s leading news anchors have an aggressive high-profile side career in philanthropy (we’re not counting Dan Rather’s one-night stand helping raise $20,000 for the Democratic Party of Travis County, Texas in 2001). Couric's activity triggers the uncomfortable but necessary question: Is there a political conflict of interest at play here?

On Tuesday’s “Countdown,” host Keith Olbermann chose to virulently attack two of America’s most prominent conservatives in his Worst Person in the World segment: radio host Michael Savage, and author Ann Coulter. Olbermann began with Savage (video courtesy of Crooks and Liars):

"Our runner-up tonight, Michael Savage. Now, the bar is higher for him because ordinarily we do not like to mock the insane. But get this from his radio show 'The American left is cheering today. They`ll probably break open the jug wine and cheer that Jews are dying. They can tear off their masks once and for all and show themselves to be what they really are, which is the Nazis of our time.'

"This just in from hell: Satan has chosen Michael Savage`s show to broadcast over the P.A. system to torture the souls of the eternally damned."

Olbermann then went after Coulter for a comical e-mail response sent to a fashion magazine as reported by NewsBusters Tuesday:

Is CNN correspondent Nic Robertson looking to be the next Peter Arnett? I've been getting tips that this may be the case. They're starting to wonder at Israpundit after watching Robertson uncritically relay a Hezbollah claim that Israel had been targeting civilians.

Elsewhere from the sympathy-for-terrorists department, Michelle Malkin has a great vivisection of the New York Times and its terrorist-embedded photographers.

UPDATE 12:42. NB's Rich Noyes has the full details on Robertson's shillery.

It's been a tough week for the MSM. You just know they'd like to find a way to spin events in Lebanon and Israel for purposes of criticizing the Bush administration. But one senses they've had a tough time getting traction. Even for our liberal media heroes, making common cause with Hezbollah might be a bridge too far.

When the MSM is reduced to fixating on a mild four-letter word the president let fly, and to second-guessing tactics - as opposed to goals - you know the media's Bush-bashing cupboard is alarmingly bare.

The last best hope for the MSM seemed to be the alleged slowness of the evacuation of Americans in Lebanon. There was Tucker Carlson accusing Israel of 'doing nothing' to help stranded Americans. And the MSM widely reported the number of Americans in Lebanon at 25,000, downplaying the fact that the great majority have dual Lebanese citizenship and are not looking to leave. The actual number of those wishing to get out is apparently in the 5-8,000 range.

Remember as a kid trying to build the tallest building you could with Legos, or whatever it was in your day? Derrick Jackson doesn't. Judging by his column - High and Mighty - in today's Boston Globe, young Derrick built one-story affordable units, maybe even buried them underground in his backyard - just to be safe. Jackson's op-ed is a condemnation of proposals to build or rebuild towers in major cities, including his own Boston.

Jackson's anti-tower argument is four-fold:

• Tall buildings taunt terrorists.
• Towers are a cruel reminder of class differences.
• Contrary to what politicians claim, there is no symbolism or inspiration to be had in a tall building.
• It's a disgrace to spend money on big buildings while not everyone has healthcare and other government goodies.

Excerpts:

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