Neal Gabler might not look like an athlete, but don't be surprised to see him lining up for the long jump at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. For on this evening's Fox News Watch, Neal made a logical leap of Beamonesque proportions.

According to Gabler, the fact that a drunken Gibson made anti-Semitic remarks retroactively proves that his 'Passion of the Christ' was anti-Semitic too.

Here's how the liberal media critic put it:

"The interest here is 'The Passion.' It made something like $400 million. It was accused of being anti-Semitic. The mainstream press didn't really want to touch it. Because they were afraid of being clobbered from the right.

In the weeks leading up to the release of The Passion of the Christ film over two years ago, Tim Rutten, media columnist for the Los Angeles Times, wrote no less than six hyperventilating columns that dealt almost exclusively with breathless concerns over anti-Semitism in Mel Gibson's film. At one point, Rutten attacked Mel Gibson as "a little brat" and "an unwholesomely willful child playing with matches."  Yet when the blatantly anti-Christian and anti-Catholic The Da Vinci Code was released a few months ago, Rutten's reaction was a ho-hum and a yawn; far from a concern, Da Vinci is "only a movie," asserted Rutten! Bigotry, anyone? Of course. As we've catalogued before (here and here, for example), anti-Christian and anti-Catholic prejudice is alive and well at the Los Angeles Times.

With this as a backdrop, it was no surprise to see the shameless Rutten juice Gibson's arrest to plaster Mel anew in his latest column (Saturday, August 5, 2006). Especially brazen is Rutten's implication that cheerleaders of Gibson's The Passion of the Christ have been exposed as supporters of anti-Semitism. This is a shameless and ugly column, folks.

Dontcha love it when liberal media members are confounded by poll results that don’t fit their view of the world? It drives them so batty that they suddenly start espousing all manner of absurd rationalizations they believe explain why so many Americans disagree with them.

Such was the case during the 7PM installment of “The Situation Room” Friday when Jack Cafferty shared with his viewers recent poll statistics showing that half of the country believes that Saddam Hussein had WMD before America invaded Iraq in March 2003. This didn’t sit well with Cafferty, who, true to form, blamed the public’s sentiments on Republicans.

This is really wonderful stuff necessitating the reader to be careful with drinking vessels (video link to follow):

When it comes to toadying up to the Castro regime, it's going to be tough for the Associated Press to top its achievement noted by Clay Waters - Some Cubans Enjoy Comforts of Communism.

Even so, the AP - in the person of writer Andrew Selsky - put in a more-than-respectable effort today with the article No Photos of Castro Since His Surgery.

Here's the key line:

"Most Cubans have insisted that they are sure Castro will recover and that the government will function fine until then. But others have privately expressed worries that their leader may be more sick than the world knows."

In the latest edition of Human Events Online, Benjamin Van Horrick has a fascinating piece entitled, Why Are Arab Armies Always Defeated? In this piece he details that while the Arab fighter has long been lauded as a ferocious foe, Arab Armies have long been known for their inability to win. In every conflict of the modern era, the Armies of Middle Eastern countries have proven themselves unable to sustain combat. The Arab, or in the case of our battle against militant Islam, the Muslim fighter, is ill equipped in the modern world to wage war, better suited to the type of guerrilla warfare we see waged against us in Iraq. Perhaps, a better understanding of this inability of their armies to function, and their natural propensity toward clan warfare, might have made our present battles less costly.

It seems safe to say that many Republicans are fed up with the propagandist ways of America’s “newspaper of record,” the New York Times. On Friday, majority members of the Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works issued a statement regarding an August 3 op-ed by the Times’ Bob Herbert.

Herbert’s column began, “It may be time to get serious about trying to slow the catastrophic trend of global warming.” As you will see, Republicans on the EPW committee believe it may be time to get serious about trying to slow the catastrophic trend of global warmingism:

The August 3 New York Times op-ed by Bob Herbert titled “Hot Enough Yet,” makes several dubious global warming claims. See: http://select.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/opinion/03herbert.html?hp Herbert promotes the idea that the recent heat wave that has swept across the United States is another example of human caused catastrophic global warming. But the facts do not support this latest example of climate hysteria.

The statement then went point for point with Herbert, basically tearing apart all of his insipid falsehoods. Put your drinking vessels at a safe distance, for this is really delicious stuff:

There’s a new poll out from Scripps Howard/Ohio University claiming “Thirty-six percent of respondents overall said it is ‘very likely’ or ‘somewhat likely’ that federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them ‘because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.’"

When you watch the following video (with graphic images and language that might be offensive to some), you will understand why (hat tip to Ms Underestimated). This nine-minute clip includes an interview done by Jack Blood, a syndicated radio talk show host with some bizarre ideas about America. His guest was Dylan Avery, the 22-year old director of the 9/11 conspiracy theory schlockumentary “Loose Change.”

As you watch, you will be amazed to hear two Americans mock the

If there is such a thing as a “good liberal,” Peter Beinart of The New Republic is certainly one. Whether or not you agree with his point of view, at least Beinart’s columns are well-reasoned and intelligently presented as opposed to much of the shrill non sequiturs plastered across the opinion pages of most MSM.

With that in mind, Beinart entered the ring Friday night against Ann Coulter, on CNBC’s “Kudlow & Company.” Beinart clearly looked like an able opponent right from the start:

Well, look, if the Democrats take control, you're going to see a lot more aggressive oversight from both houses, and I think as you have said, look, as a nonpartisan matter, we have checks and balances in this country. Our government works when the Congress is aggressively checking the executive branch and vice-versa, and that really hasn't been happening very much as the Republican Congress, particularly in the House, has acted as an arm of the White House rather than an independent branch, and I think it has hurt the congressional Republicans themselves. The ones who looked the best, people like Lindsey Graham, are those who have exercised some independence, and I would gather that if Republicans in Congress had exercised a little more oversight and a little more independence, not only would we be in better shape as a country but they would be in better shape as a party running for re-election this year.

Coulter responded with a few jabs of her own:

Amongst Derrick Z. Jackson's many fulminations in his Boston Globe column of this morning, The Divide Remains, this one leapt out at me: "the great gorge between the working poor and the wasteful rich remains far from being bridged."

Since Jackson never gets around to substantiating his 'wasteful rich' allegation, it's hard to see it as other than a gratuitous slur by a entrenched class warrior. Jackson is the apparent captive of a socialist mindset in which 'the rich' are straight-from-Monopoly caricatures who steal from the poor while not laying about or downing champagne in big-band nightclubs.

Thanks to the media blog at National Review Online for pointing out an Associated Press story from Friday on how Cubans love Fidel Castro and how they find “genuine comfort in the communist system.”

It comes complete with a “no, it’s-not-a-parody” headline, “Some Cubans Enjoy Comforts of Communism.”

It was only a matter of time, perhaps, and here it is: an op-ed in the Washington Post by former WashPost reporter (and current Hollywood screenwriter) Tom Grubisich demanding that Gibson and the U.S. Catholic hierarchy apologize for the anti-Semitism of the movie  "The Passion of the Christ", not just the drunken-driving slurs.

The movie exhumed and restaged some of the ugliest features of the pre-1980, notoriously anti-Semitic Passion play of Oberammergau, Germany. The movie was internationally distributed and continues to be marketed today as a DVD and used as a spiritual teaching tool. Just as in the old Oberammergau play, Gibson's Pilate was a civilized, even sensitive, soul -- in contrast to the moviemaker's stereotyped Jewish priests, among whom a personified Devil comfortably moved with a smile of satisfaction, as if among friends.

At CNN, the moral relativism never ends. In the wake of shootings by a Muslim at a Seattle Jewish center that left one person dead and others injured, CNN somehow managed to equate the fears of American Jews that there could be other such incidents . . . with the fears of American supporters of Hezbollah.

The focus of the 'Safe at Home?' segment narrated by CNN's Kelli Arena on today's Saturday Morning show was indeed the aftermath of that Seattle shooting, and how Jewish groups around the country are expressing fears and taking precautions.

But you could almost hear the CNN producer's gears grinding: "Wait! We can't have a segment that focuses exclusively on Jewish fears. Quick: get me some balance!" What CNN came up with was an interview with Rami Nuseir, an Arab-American activist.

CNN's Arena started the relativistic slide by claiming that the FBI's program of reaching out to Arab-American leaders for help in identifying potential threats has 'backfired': "Arab-Americans feel as though they are constantly under suspicion."

From the blog at Current.org, the insider publication for the public broadcasting industry, we learn that greed can also be a problem in the non-commercial world:

-- KCPW-FM in Salt Lake City ran a $609,366 deficit in fiscal year 2005 while paying its General Manager Blair Feulner $179,815, reports the city's Tribune. The sale of an unused license covered the losses and also paid Feulner and his wife a bonus of $895,000, the paper says.

-- A former underwriting rep for Michigan Radio in Ann Arbor was convicted July 26 of conspiracy to commit embezzlement, the Ann Arbor Times reported. Jeremy Nordquist was one of three former employees tried in the investigation. (Earlier coverage in Current.)

Ben Franklin is attributed with saying that those desiring safety above liberty deserve neither safety nor liberty. If one particular proposal being suggested as a potential solution to the seemingly insurmountable immigration problem is implemented, those living in the United States --- both those with the right to be here as well as those that should be tossed back over the border --- will have neither safety nor liberty.

Both the chairman of Verichip and the President of Columbia are on record as suggesting that the vaunted guest workers heralded as the future backbone of the U.S. economy could be implanted with radio frequency identification chips in order to ease security concerns by tracking the movements of migrants and reliably confirming their identities.

Citizens might respond, “So? This doesn’t concern us. This only applies to those that want to come here in compliance with the law and the first thing any law-abiding person does is always comply with the law no matter what.” You know, a variation of the old why-are-you-so-concerned-about-privacy-if-you- haven’t-got-anything-to-hide thing.