James Taranto really passed on a lulu of a quote today. It comes from a book review by Michael Browning of the Palm Beach Post, reviewing Stephen O'Shea's book Sea of Faith on medieval clashes between Christianity and Islam:

Instead, for every Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi we can show a Bill O'Reilly, an Ann Coulter, a Rush Limbaugh, a Glenn Beck and a Sean Hannity. Idiocy parades unashamed in the streets on both sides of the war on terror.

Over on Air America Radio on Monday, Sam Seder (Mr. FUBAR) was sitting in for Al Franken. Late in the show, he hosted the blogging artist known as Atrios, Duncan Black. Seder promised they would soon get into celebrating how Washington Post reporter Dana Priest "handed his ass" to Bill Bennett on "Meet the Press" Sunday, as we blogged yesterday.

Seder called Bennett a "bloviating gambling addict," but that charge wasn't wild enough. He then said Bennett's Book of Virtues left out the gambling, as well as "visiting a dominatrix when you're in Vegas as well," where Bennett allegedly had the dominatrix "do very, very strange odd things" to him. Is there any proof? Seder joked it would be "irresponsible as a commentator not to comment on that."

Katherine Graham, the late publisher of the Washington Post, presided over the paper as it brought down the Nixon administration with Watergate. She has been labeled one of the most influential women of the 20th century. But in a 1986 speech, she admitted that the media were to blame for bringing down the U.S. Marine Barracks in Beirut. The 1983 terrorist attack killed 241 servicemen.

The U.S. had broken the code used by the terrorists to communicate. When that information was leaked to the media, the code was no longer used, and five months later, 241 Marines lost their lives.

(Excerpt from Fear or Fact by Howard Nemerov)

(Author’s note: The United Nations is currently meeting to discuss ways of implementing “adequate controls” over the international arms trade. What this means in real language is that they seek a way to implement global civilian disarmament. Here is a glimpse of how that actually plays out.)

More than 500,000 people have been killed by firearms in Brazil between 1979 and 2003, according to a new report by the United Nations.

As we head into the Fourth of July holiday, remember it was just last year, headed into a long Independence Day weekend, when NBC anchor Brian Williams compared our founding fathers to terrorists.  How open-minded it was of Brian to perceive that perhaps our forefathers could have been considered "terrorists," when experts suggest the word wasn't really coined until years after our revolution. Here's how we summed up that June 30 evening newscast (watch it here):

Remote controls flew at TV sets across America last night as NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams came out of an Andrea Mitchell story on whether Iran's new President was one of the captors of U.S. hostages in 1979 during Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution. Williams suggested a sickening moral equivalence between the Iranian radicals and America's Founding Fathers.

After appearing on CNN last week and granting an interview with Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz (who naively pondered the ferocity of what he considered the unwarranted conservative assault on the New York Times), Times Executive Editor Bill Keller again goes to a sympathetic outlet, CBS’s Face the Nation hosted by liberal host Bob Schieffer. Keller again defended his paper by throwing dark hints of a conservative anti-Times conspiracy.

What do you call an ardent Arlen Specter supporter who proposes a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq and accuses Republicans of 'chicanery' for introducing proposals on gay marriage and flag burning? Why, a 'conservative' of course - if you're NBC's Today show and your guest is Michael Smerconish.

This is the MSM's means of convincing viewers that there is balance in their choice of guests. As I noted here, the mislabelling reached its pinnacle a while back when Today labelled Bush antagonist Pat Buchanan - someone who left the GOP seven years ago to run against W - a 'Republican strategist.'

Today was back at the name game this morning. As you'll note from the screen grab, it labelled Michael Smerconish a 'conservative.'

Readers of these columns might have noticed that I occasionally include at the foot the fact that I live in 'the liberal haven of Ithaca, NY.' To give you a flavor for what I'm talking about, consider today's op-ed page in my hometown daily, the Ithaca Journal. The Journal is a Gannett newspaper. That's the chain [led by USA Today] that, as I've documented, chose as a news editor someone who believes calling VP Cheney 'Satan' makes for the best commencement speech ever.

Back to this morning's Journal. There are two op-eds, by current or former area residents, and two letters to the editor. Let's have a look. First, an op-ed defending Iran's right to acquire nuclear weapons and accusing the United States of 'terrorism'.

Washington Post religion reporter Alan Cooperman put together a nice roundup of news on Katherine Jefferts Schori, the new ultraliberal woman elected to lead the Episcopal Church USA for Monday's front page. The worst thing you can say about it is the way it almost seems designed by the front-page editors to put the juicy news inside the paper, instead of up-front.

The headline is "Episcopal Protest of Top Bishop Increases: More Dioceses Reject New Female Leader." From this, you get the idea that conservatives object to a female leader, first and foremost. Cooperman begins by explaining that an increasing number of dioceses are rejecting her authority, and then right at the "jump" to page A-5, we read: "Gender is only part of the reason that some conservative in the church [turn the page] are unhappy about her election. Jefferts Schori, 52, is also firmly planted in the church's dominant liberal wing."

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