The Washington Post is at it yet again. Almost a month after Sen. George Allen said "Macaca," it's back on the top of the front page of the Metro section again Sunday, with another happy-days-for-Democrats headline: "'Macaca Moment' Marks a Shift in Momentum: Allen's Gaffe, Demographic Changes Give Webb a Boost."

Reporter Michael D. Shear is clearly dedicated to making this nonsense word into the defining moment of Sen. Allen's entire political career:

Allen's "macaca moment" -- a term that has rapidly become part of America's political lexicon -- has breathed new life into Webb, a former Republican and Vietnam war hero who worked for Ronald Reagan.

On this long holiday weekend, let's take a short break from looking at the media's political bias and instead examine the possibility of their sports bias. In the past month, two columnists for ESPN's web site have suggested that when the sports media cover the steroid issue, they tend to come down considerably harder on major-league baseball than they do on the NFL.  In early August, ESPN.com baseball columnist Jerry Crasnick wrote that 

with the continued fallout from the BALCO scandal, baseball is receiving a huge -- and some might say, disproportionate -- share of attention as the whipping boy for performance enhancing drugs. While the stray Floyd Landis or Justin Gatlin might seize the headlines temporarily as sports' resident cheater du jour, it's a virtual lock that the focus will eventually drift back to baseball.

Just for fun, we Googled the words "Bud Selig" and "steroids" and came up with 263,000 matches. A similar search for departing NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue yielded a mere 33,900 matches...

In a Sunday, September 3, 2006, opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times ("A centrist Dem takes on a GOP culture warrior"*), writer Michael McGough falsely asserted that Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) "once likened gay relationships to 'man on dog' sex."

The truth? Sen. Santorum did no such thing. The myth of Santorum equating gay relationships to "'man on dog' sex" stems from an April 2003 interview with the Associated Press. An unedited excerpt of the interview can be found here at USA Today's web site. Here's what Sen. Santorum actually said in response to a question from the interviewer (emphasis mine):

In an “On the Trail” segment from Rhode Island on Sunday's This Week, ABC's George Stephanopoulos lectured Stephen Laffey, the Republican primary challenger to incumbent Senator Lincoln Chafee, about taking a pledge to not raise federal income taxes: “If the deficit continued to grow, it's not responsible to say you're never going to raise taxes." When Laffey pointed out how Ronald Reagan's tax cuts “worked very well,” Stephanopoulos retorted: “Ronald Reagan also increased taxes." After Laffey touted the benefits of the Bush tax cuts, an exasperated Stephanopoulos resignedly concluded: "So it's 'read my lips,' you're never going to vote to raise taxes?"

Labor Day’s as appropriate a time as any to reflect on deaths in the workplace. Last year, 5,702 people died in U.S. job-related accidents, according to figures compiled and recently released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Of that number, men accounted for 93 percent, or 5,300, of those deaths [1]. That’s an average of more than 14 dead men a day. Women accounted for 7 percent of all work-related deaths last year.

White men paid the heaviest toll, suffering 70 percent of U.S. workplace deaths. Hispanic men accounted for 16 percent of all workplace deaths and African American men, 10 percent. Regardless of race, these men died building and maintaining our roads and utilities, our offices and houses and while at work on ranches and farms that supply our food and on oil rigs and in mines that provide us with energy resources.

Among political consultants, the general rule of thumb is that a disapproval rating of 40% spells a candidate's near-certain defeat.  After all, virtually no one who disapproves of a candidate will vote for him, while approving of someone is no guarantee of a vote.

Hillary Clinton's disapproval rating of 44% in a recent Time magazine poll thus bodes very ill for her presidential prospects.  Yet the Sunday Times of London has managed to put a rosy gloss on what would have most politicians looking for another line of work.  Pollyannas the Times of the poll results:

"Only 44% viewed her negatively, figures that President George W Bush can only dream of at the moment."

Bill Maher on HBO’s September 1 “Real Time” went on quite an anti-theistic rant that clearly demonstrated his utter disdain for Christians as well as conservatives. To be sure, this wasn’t the first time Maher went so atheistically ballistic as reported by NewsBusters here.

In this instance, Maher suggested that, “If converting to Islam is all it takes to get the terrorists off our backs, then all I have to say is, ‘Lalalalalalala!’” He referred to Americans as “Christians in name only,” asserting that "the best part is that nothing that really matters to you will be different. It’s not like we’re asking you to change your e-mail address." And, he stated that converting to Islam would make conservative Christians happy: “You mean we can stone homosexuals instead of just bitching about them on talk-radio? Thank you Jesus…I mean, Allah.”

To fully appreciate the level of the vitriol – albeit disguised as comedy with some admittedly humorous moments – one must see the video here (go to minute two). Hat tip to our old friend Ian Schwartz who now works for Hot Air. A full transcript follows:

It was a rollicking episode of 'The Long & The Short of It' this morning, and even taking my personal biases into account, it was hard not to score it 2-0 for the tall man. The regular Sunday-morning feature of Fox & Friends Weekend pits long, conservative Newsday and TCS columnist Jim Pinkerton against short, liberal Ellen Ratner of Talk Radio News.

The opening topic this morning, in a match refereed by FNC host Kiran Chetry, was a report that retired General and former Dem presidential nomination-seeker Wesley Clark will be issuing on behalf of Democrats this week, intended to "detail the failures of Republicans" on national security.

The ostensible topic was the NFL fantasy-league draft that members of the Today show crew recently conducted.  But in sharing her strategy for making draft picks, Campbell Brown might have unintentionally offered hope to Republicans looking nervously to November and beyond.

Campbell admitted to weekend co-host Lester Holt that she knows little about football.  So in making her picks, Brown said she simply adopted this strategy: "I picked the ones who looked tough and mean."

It wasn't easy, but I battled my way this morning to the end of Frank Rich's pay-per-view column, Donald Rumsfeld’s Dance With the Nazis. Tempting as it was, I didn't turn the cyber-page despite prose that you might find in the dictionary next to the definition of 'turgid'.  Take Rich's description of Donald Rumsfeld's recent remarks: "[a] toxic effort to impugn the patriotism of administration critics by conflating dissent on Iraq with cut-and-run surrender and incipient treason."

My persistence was rewarded with two nuggets from the column's concluding paragraphs. First, as a certified spokesman for MSM sentiment, Rich made clear that in liberal media-land, Iraq is not part of the war on terror.  Rich dismissed Pres. Bush's assertion that Al-Qaeda and our foes in Iraq are part of the same “ideological struggle of the 21st century.”  Sniffed Rich: "One more drop in the polls, and he may yet rebrand this mess War of the Worlds." Movie titles aside, and messy as it might be, we are indeed engaged in a new kind of world war.  And if more proof were needed that the MSM doesn't understand that, here it was.

For his debut on The American Prospect’s "Horse’s Mouth" blog on political reportage, Brendan Nyhan accurately explained the new frontier of "progressive" media criticism: that the Clintonistas at Media Matters for America have surpassed the Noam Chomskyites at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR).

There’s two easy reasons he doesn’t cite: MMFA is the liberal Democrat establishment, while FAIR is ultra-left. Or put it this way: MMFA is in the tank for Hillary, while FAIR favors her hard-left primary challenger, Jonathan Tasini. Two, MMFA has to have a lot more cash. Nyhan is right that MMFA’s online methods are more up to date, but I’m not so sure about "they are vastly more useful than FAIR because they write articles that are often convincing to non-liberals." I’m non-liberal, and I almost never find them convincing. I don’t really take issue, though, until Nyhan suggests the MRC is an untrustworthy pile of hacks:

Asked at the Aspen Institute's “Ideas Festival” in early July -- but just broadcast Saturday night on C-SPAN -- about the charge of liberal bias, incoming CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric was condescendingly dismissive. She blamed her viewers, calling it a “Rorschach test” which demonstrated how “oftentimes people put their, they see you from their own individual prisms. And if you're not reflecting their point of view or you're asking an antagonistic question of someone they might agree with in terms of policy, they see you as the enemy.” Later in the July 5 session, however, she presumed FNC does have a bias: “You have Fox which espouses a particular point of view."

Bob Schieffer appeared alongside Couric at the Colorado forum hosted by Aspen Institute President Walter Isaacson, the former CEO of CNN and Managing Editor of Time magazine. Schieffer contended that “the press is like a draft army. It generally reflects the society that it comes from” and insisted: “I know some reporters who have very hard-right views and some who have hard-left views.” I'd like to learn which journalists he considers “hard-right.” Schieffer also forwarded another common argument in rejection of liberal bias: “The greatest defense against charges of bias is accuracy.” In fact, a story can be accurate and yet still reflect a biased agenda. (Transcript follows)

On Friday night, MSNBC hosts Keith Olbermann and Joe Scarborough featured opposite takes on a Friday Washington Post editorial proclaiming that the recent revelation that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the original leaker of Valerie Plame's identity discredits Joe Wilson's accusations about a White House conspiracy to punish him by ruining his wife's career. On his Countdown show, Olbermann slammed the Washington Post for its "startling conclusions" and attacked the logic of the Post's reasoning. On Scarborough Country, Scarborough hit the New York Times and other media, including "left-leaning TV hosts," for not following the Post's lead and correcting its "character assassination" of the Bush team. Scarborough also delved into the inaccuracy of some of Wilson's claims about his trip to Niger and whether it really contradicted Bush's State of the Union claims about Iraq's efforts to acquire uranium. And while Scarborough presented some balance on his show by allowing one of his two guests to defend Wilson (Rachel Sklar after Wilson critic Christopher Hitchens), Olbermann followed his normal routine of choosing guests who will bolster his anti-Bush views, this time in the form of Wilson/Plame attorney Melanie Sloan. (Transcripts follow)