There still is a Blame America First lobby. On Friday's edition of "Inside Washington" on PBS affiliate WETA, National Public Radio reporter Nina Totenberg couldn't simply deplore Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez's remarks that President Bush was "the devil." She had to put the blame on the United States government for paying excessive attention to him. After Colbert King of the Washington Post dismissed Chavez as a "class clown," Totenberg went into her spin cycle:

Nina Totenberg: "I want to see -- say one thing about him. He is the class clown, but we have made him. We should have ignored him long ago. We were demonizing him at the beginning, trying to get him overthrown."

A man has his limits, and for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, they were reached at a town hall meeting at the Pentagon today. It came at the end of a week in which:

• Hugo Chavez infamously called the President of the United States a "devil."
• Iran's Ahmadinejad accused the United States of abusing its power and engaging in intimidation.
• A prominent member of our country's putatively loyal opposition professed to "understand" why these tinpot dictators would condemn our nation.
• A certain member of the morning media warned us not to be too quick to dismiss the insults.

A soldier asked the Secretary to define just who is the enemy.  In professorial, avuncular fashion, Rumsfeld carefully described how a limited number of Muslim extremists have hijacked their faith and sought to impose their warped vision on their co-religionists. That others were seeking to regain power lost when the United States deposed dictatorial regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.  And that still others are simply criminal elements.

Imagine if you will a group of Major League Baseball’s top stars getting together to donate money for Iraqi citizens injured during the war, or for Lebanese civilians injured as a result of the recent bombings by Israel. Do you think America’s media would pay a lot of attention to such a charity? Probably every hour on the hour, right?

Well, at the beginning of the 2005 season, Cy Young award winner Barry Zito started a charity to raise money for American soldiers being treated at various military hospitals such as Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Hospital. In the past couple of years, he and other stars like Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, Curt Schilling, Chipper Jones, Jermaine Dye, Tim Hudson, and Dontrelle Willis have contributed several hundred thousand dollars to Zito’s “Strikeouts For Troops.” And yet, in the eighteen months since its creation, virtually no media outside of the San Francisco Bay Area where Zito plays and lives have bothered to report the existence of this marvelous charity.

This week was almost officially Bill Clinton Week, as he grants a round of interviews to surround his annual meeting for the Clinton Global Initiative. The event gave NBC viewers the opportunity to wonder: would Meredith Vieira be tougher on First Lady Laura Bush than she was with the man Rush Limbaugh calls Der Schlickmeister? Check it out. (Mark Finkelstein made bloggers like NRO's Stephen Spruiell laugh with his take.)

Clinton made "Daily Show" jokester Jon Stewart sit up and try to look serious and ask those tough questions like what's "fun" for Clinton. (Is that a trick question?) Stewart was also quite serious about trashing Robert Novak. Maybe he heard about Novak's comments from....here?

From the Baltimore Sun (HT Taranto at Best of the Web):

Democrats accuse Steele of 'political identity theft'

No, Maryland voters, the printer did not make an error. Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele's new campaign signs seem to identify him as a Democrat.

A "Steele Democrat," they read.

..... The group and accompanying signs appear to be the latest Steele effort to distance himself from an unpopular White House and a Republican Party struggling to maintain its hold on Congress. The state Democratic Party chairman immediately accused him of "identity theft."

What short memories everyone thinks we have:

MRC's Michelle Humphrey noticed that the BBC World rebroadcast Thursday night on Washington PBS affiliate WETA described Bush and McCain agreeing to a regime of "limited torture."

Reporter Matt Frei: "The President has basically agreed with, the White House has agreed with these rebel Republicans, that there will be a specific list, to quote here, to 'enumerate the actions that would constitute grave breaches of the Geneva Convention.' In other words, they will respect the Geneva Convention, especially Article Three which talks about the treatment of prisoners and if there are grave breaches of that article, then they, these people, CIA interrogators would be prosecuted and would not get the protection of the White House. And this is the key thing: we don't know what these grave breaches are --"

MSNBC.com:

He is the son of a blacksmith, he's the former mayor of Tehran, who won the presidency out of nowhere, and has made news often with his sometimes-outrageous statements. He speaks very little English and so our conversation was through an interpreter, beginning with his message, pointed at our audience.

On "The Daily Show" Thursday night, host Jon Stewart interviewed filmmaker C.C. Goldwater about her HBO documentary "Mr. Conservative," about her grandfather, Barry Goldwater. Stewart praised the film, and asked about the surprising liberal tilt of the talking heads in the film. (There were a few more conservatives in there than advertised, including Richard Viguerie and Morton Blackwell.) But the granddaughter clearly has a very chilly feeling about the present-day conservative movement:

Stewart: “Barry Goldwater, what’s an interesting story in the film, a lot of the people that are talking are considered the leading voices of the Democrats or the liberal side. Hillary Clinton -- ”

Last night viewers of MSNBC's Hardball were greeted with this jarring intro from Chris Matthews: "The country thought Bush was a pleasant, down to earth guy who would not rock the boat. Instead, swayed by some inner impulse, or the influence of Dick Cheney, he has proved to be lawless and reckless. He started a war he cannot finish, drove the government into debt, and repeatedly defied the Constitution,' the words today of David Broder, the country's premier political reporter. Let's play Hardball." Matthews celebrated Broder's Washington Post column as Hardball highlighted it not once but three times.

MSNBC's new general manager Dan Abrams is trying a few new things to increase ratings for the perennially third placed news channel. One is to have its hosts "punch up," meaning attack higher rated TV shows in the hope that viewers from the more popular shows will flip channels to see what's going on. On Sep. 18, "conservative" (the kind of conservative MSNBC will stomach) host Tucker Carlson made a deliberate grab at Bill O'Reilly's viewers: "You don’t have to [watch] because we’re gonna watch it for you."

Referring to O'Reilly's interview with game show host Bob Barker, who discussed his vegetarian beliefs, Carlson said O'Reilly was a hypocrite for condemning celebrity news.

"Just a recap: Just last week, Bill O’Reilly told his audience, quote, 'Please believe me when I tell you I have absolutely no interest in the lives of celebrities.'

Now that John McCain and his fellow “moderate” Republican Senators have made a deal with the White House allowing the CIA and U.S. military to go about the job of protecting America from terrorists, NBC’s Matt Lauer is distressed that the group didn’t “stand up” to the White House and insist on even softer treatment.

In an interview on Friday morning’s Today, Lauer confronted McCain: “Why didn’t you guys stand up and take a stand on specifics? Why didn’t you say look, OK, there’ve been reports, for example, with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at the secret CIA centers that he was waterboarded, we will not let that stand, Mr. President?”

And Lauer held up Colin Powell as the arbiter of whether this was a good deal, asking McCain: “Do you think now that this moves in the direction where he’ll be satisfied?”

In 2002, the Coalition to Stop Handgun Violence (CSHV) published a report on the alleged merits of gun owner licensing, beginning with an unproven premise:

For years, polls have shown strong, stable public support for the idea of licensing access to handguns. The public intuitively understands both the concept of licensing and why it is appropriate to license people who want access to handguns.[1]

Liberal press critics are quite the paradox. Most such writers like Eric Alterman, Michael Wolffe, and Michael Massing, are pretty sophisticated about the media in non-political matters, but when it comes to politics, they can't help repeating a slightly toned down version of rhetoric you'll find over at the Daily Kos. They deny the press is tilted toward the left (ignoring scores of content studies and surveys of reporters) and yet they cheer when the media chooses to favor the left, as if that's the media's natural role. Which it is, of course--if you're a liberal

This line of thought is far too common among left-wing media critics. In an interview with the Huffington Post, writer Michael Massing provided a textbook example of it, arguing that the press has properly began pushing back against the Bush Administration while also saying that conservative critics are fundamentally wrong in their opinion of the media:

My working hypothesis on all this, which I have mentioned in some of those articles, is that the more powerful the President, the more timid the press. There's an inverse relationship between the popularity of the President and the willingness of the press to challenge him. And right now, Bush's popularity is very low. I think we're seeing the press pushing back in a very strong way. If I were writing an article today about what's been happening, I would say more about how the press has been pushing back. And I think there's a big appetite for this among readers. The Bush administration is so beleaguered and has done so many things that have upset the public that the press sees an opening and has been moving to take advantage of it.

Today's the last full day of astronomical summer, and so in a sidebar on the Metro page of the September 22 Washington Post, the paper gives its readers a few handy stats about the weather this meteorological summer (June 1-August 31).

[Meteorological summer is a convention commonly used to examine data that provides consistency from year to year rather than adhering to the slightly different dates for seasonal changes on the solstices and equinoxes.]

Anyway, in D.C. at least, it was only the 19th warmest on record, as recorded since 1871. What's more, the average temperature in summer was 78.5 degrees. Toasty, but not exactly scalding, except for the late July-early August heat wave, where 101 was the hottest temperature achieved in Washington on August 3.

Of course, it's the spikes in temperature, the heat waves, that the media latched on to to in order to mount the soap box on global warming.

Remember the Reuters news vehicle that was fired upon, but not directly hit by an Israeli helicopter gunship while acting suspiciously near Israeli positions in Gaza?

The Israeli Government Press Office is now stating that they believe armored vehicles licensed to news agencies, such as the Reuters vehicle attacked, might be being used by terrorist groups to launch attacks against Israel:

Armored vehicles that were given to foreign news agencies operating in the country with the authorization of the State of Israel, may be used by hostile groups to carry out terror attacks against Israel, Director of the Government Press Office Danny Seaman warned in a letter addressed to Shin Bet Head Yuval Diskin.

On August 27 an Israel Defense Forces helicopter hit an armored vehicle that belonged to the Reuters news agency in Gaza. According to
Seaman, the incident illustrated the failures in overseeing the use of armored vehicles granted to the foreign media agencies with the permission of the State.

The vehicle's presence in Gaza in itself constituted a violation of its license terms, and moreover, the jeep was carrying only Palestinians – one with links to Hamas who was not a Reuters employee.

Open for your comment. Today's starter: Hugo Chavez catapults Noam Chomsky book to the top at Amazon. (Communists buying stuff? Who knew?)

It’s surprising that this column by the Washington Post’s David Broder on Thursday fell so far below the fold. After all, Broder had unkind things to say about virtually everybody that would have pleased and enraged both Democrats and Republicans alike. For instance, Broder didn’t have nice things to say about President Bush:

The country thought Bush was a pleasant, down-to-earth guy who would not rock the boat. Instead, swayed by some inner impulse or the influence of Dick Cheney, he has proved to be lawless and reckless. He started a war he cannot finish, drove the government into debt and repeatedly defied the Constitution.

Don’t mince words, David. Tell us what you really think. Fortunately, Broder’s attack wasn’t just on Bush:

As Mark Finkelstein reported earlier today, former Vice President Al Gore and billionaire CEO Richard Branson appeared together on Friday’s "Good Morning America" to discuss Branson’s decision to devote all the profits from his airline to combating global warming. Absent from the interview with Diane Sawyer was any mention of the scientific debate taking place over the cause of climate change, or whether, in fact, it actually exists.

While ABC ignored skeptics views of global warming, Fox’s "Special Report with Brit Hume" on Thursday highlighted one such doubter:

Brit Hume: "A leading climate expert from Colorado State University says the idea that humans are responsible for global warming is a fear perpetuated by the media, and by scientists trying to get grant money. Dr. William Gray is a noted global warming skeptic who says the current heating of the earth is part of a natural cycle."

The BBC's Story lead (HT Taranto at Best of the Web):

Israelis 'trains (sic) Kurdish forces'

The BBC has obtained evidence that Israelis have been giving military training to Kurds in northern Iraq.

A report on the BBC TV programme Newsnight showed Israeli experts in northern Iraq, drilling Kurdish militias in shooting techniques.

Kurdish officials have refused to comment on the report and Israel has denied it knows of any involvement.

From that point forward the story is literally riddled with assumptions about how other countries and the rest of Iraq will react, without a single quote or attribution from anyone who supposedly will object. Examples throughout the article's text (scare words in bold):

With Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan strongman and "sulfur sniffer," at the top of the news this week, it's high time to revisit the Business and Media Institute's Special Report on "Hugo the Boss." It can't be argued that the media cheered along with his remarks calling Bush "the devil." But the media's past record certainly underscores that Hugo hasn't exactly been presented as the far-left anti-American agitator now displayed on the world stage. BMI's Dan Gainor assembled a substantial study of TV coverage, and found it very soft:

The Media Research Center’s Business & Media Institute looked at all 139 news and news-related stories on the broadcast networks about Hugo Chavez since he took power in 1998. Here are some of the conclusions:

This is shaping up as a day for lefty unilateralism.  As noted here, liberal LA Times columnist Rosa Brooks saw no nuance in her Bush-hatred fueled tirade against any expansion of permitted techniques in interrogating terrorists.

Later, Good Morning America staged a global warming love-in, in which nary a dissenting voice was heard and the only question was whether it was too late to implement Al Gore's costly nostrums.

Diane Sawyer's guests were Gore and British magnate Richard Branson.  The proximate cause was the announcement that over a recent breakfast, Gore managed to convince Branson to devote 100% of the profits from Virgin Airlines to the effort against global warming [someone check the OJ for Grey Goose].

At the Daily Nightly blog, Brian Williams noted the arrival of a viewer mail segment on the NBC Nightly News, complete with a video clip. Brian's selection on the first big topic -- his interview with Ahmandinejad, the "president" of Iran -- was balanced between critics and supporters, but the critics were lumped together as censors who can't handle dictator interviews. One did compare NBC's roughness on our leaders compared to softness on foreign leaders. This one's just funny, over the top, but funny: "I hope that once Iran uses the nukes it develops, that we can replay this video interview to see how NBC handled this hero of theirs."

Congratulations and kudos to NBC for this feature. Here's how Williams saw it on the blog:

The bio of Los Angeles Times columnist Rosa Brooks couldn't be much more impressive in terms of conventional credentials: Harvard, Oxford, Yale.  Adviser to State Department.  Kennedy School Fellow. 

But despite having her ticket prestigiously punched time and again, her column of today reveals that nowhere has she learned much in the way of nuance or common sense.  Her opposition to President Bush's efforts to clarify interrogation rules so as to allow some more forceful techniques is absolute and implacable, utterly failing to acknowledge the realities of terrorism on a scale unimaginable when the Geneva Convention was drafted.