Monday's CBS Evening News featured a recounting, by Lara Logan, of how over the weekend U.S. Army soldiers rescued an Iraqi surgeon and his family who were trapped for eight days on Baghdad's Haifa Street, suffering in dire conditions and in danger of getting killed in fighting between Sunni militias and the Iraqi army. After the rescue, Dr. Quraish Fajir al-Kasir proclaimed on camera: "These are days that I will never forget in my life. Thank you American military, thank you people!" The “Crazyhorse” troops of the 4th Squadron, 9th Cavalry of the U.S. Army conducted the mission after the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq saw CBS's Friday story on the plight of Dr. al-Kasir, a very prominent Iraqi doctor who once attended a meeting at the White House.

As everyone knows and Andrea Mitchell has confirmed, Chris Matthews is no liberal. Don't let the fact that he describes the goal of the impending Iraq surge as "ethnic cleansing" fool you.

Matthews discussed the impending surge into Baghdad on this evening's Hardball with David Ignatius of the Washington Post and Gary Berntsen, the former CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora.

Said Matthews, speaking of the role of US troops:

"If they are forced to do patrol duty in the streets of the Sunni areas where they are expected to basically be part of the ethnic cleansing because they will be shooting at Sunnis, they are going to get shot back at."

It has been said that we have come as far as we have only because we stand on the shoulders of giants. One of the strengths of ethics when studied as part of a survey of Western civilization has been the discipline’s emphasis on consulting the accumulated wisdom of the past. However, in doing so one must not fail to apply these principles to the situations arising in our own time.

‘Talbot School of Theology Professor Scott Rae in “Moral Choices: An Introduction To Ethics” maintains this balance by not only analyzing the foundations of this field as set forth in Biblical and historical sources as well as more contemporary systems but also by examining a number of issues arising from advances in technology.

“Moral Choices” is an excellent resource for believers to investigate the complexities of this field of study since Rae does not overly advocate any one particular position per say but rather examines both sides by comparing where each either measures up to or falls short of either the outright teachings of Scripture or the traditional ethical norms derived from sacred revelation. The student will also come away with a better understanding of the legal or scientific developments giving rise to these disputes.

Monday’s Fox and Friends First stated the obvious: NBC is a liberal network. Fox News elaborated on the recent controversy, most notably between FNC’s Bill O’Reilly and several MSNBC commentators.

As some major figures at NBC denied there is any bias, co-host Brian Kilmeade asked the question "why don’t they just say they’re a liberal network?" Good question. Even far left MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann denies he has a political agenda.

The co-hosts then played a clip of Chris Matthews stating Vice President Cheney "always wants to kill." At the end of the segment Kilmeade read one of Olbermann’s many inflammatory comments, without mentioning the MSNBC commentator’s name, that President Bush is taking the money "out of the pockets of dead soldiers in the battlefield."

The January 12 front-page story in the New York Times, "Duke Accuser Contradicts Herself," on the Duke lacrosse "rape" case, catches the case just as it's entering final meltdown phase.

NYT reporter Duff Wilson begins:

"In an interview last month with a district attorney’s investigator, the woman who has accused three Duke lacrosse players of sexual assault contradicted critical evidence and parts of her earlier accounts, dealing a new blow to a faltering case."

Decmber's rebound of the Institute for Supply Management's (ISM) Manufacturing Index (from contraction in November at 49.5 to expansion in December at 51.4; noted as part of this post; any reading over 50.0 is considered expansion) was unprecedented.

Every long period of manufacturing expansion in the past 60 years has been followed by at least seven months of contraction. But the most recently ended expansion was followed by only one month of contraction before manufacturing moved right back into expansion mode again, as you'll see.

The following is from ISM history going all the way back to 1948; parenthetical values are for the month following the end of each streak, the lowest value it went to during the subsequent contraction, and the number of months of sub-50 performance occurred before the Index went back to 50.0 or higher (previous info carried forward from this previous post):

More than a decade after publisher Steve Forbes’s flat-tax platform temporarily vaulted him to the top of the pack of GOP presidential candidates, another prospective Republican presidential candidate is making tax simplification a centerpiece of his 2008 campaign. In announcing his exploratory committee, Kansas Senator Sam Brownback argued “We need a flat tax instead of the dreadful, incomprehensible tax code we now have,” today’s Wichita Eagle reported.

But unlike back in 1996, the media are now confronted with the evidence that the flat tax help boost wealth-producing economic growth. This week’s "Time" reports on the economic boom in the former Soviet republic of Estonia, which like many Eastern European countries has seen its fortunes rise since dumping socialism and instituting a flat tax. “The economy is now one of Europe’s most dynamic, racing along at an 11.3% growth clip,” Peter Gumbel writes this week in his “Letter from Estonia.”

Nearly eleven years ago, "Time" took dead aim at Forbes’s flat tax in a January 29, 1996 cover package, “Does the Flat Tax Make Any Sense,” an issue which hit mailboxes right before the New Hampshire primary.

MLK's Family Feels VindicatedMEMPHIS, Tennessee, Dec. 9, 1999 (CBS) The widow of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. says she feels vindicated by a jury's finding in December 1999 that her husband was the victim of a conspiracy, not a lone assassin, and says it is the duty of the Justice Department to look at the information presented in the Memphis case.

"I think that if people will look at the evidence that we have, it's conclusive and I think the Justice Department has a responsibility to do what it feels is the right thing to do, the just thing to do," Coretta Scott King, told CBS Early Show Anchor Bryant Gumbel a day after the trial.

The jury of six blacks and six whites deliberated only about three hours before returning the verdict in a civil lawsuit brought by the King family, reports CBS News Correspondent Jennifer Jones. They had sued Lloyd Jowers, a 73-year-old retired Memphis businessman who claimed six years ago that he paid someone other than James Earl Ray to kill King.

Woman sues Ottawa over CIA brainwashing at Montreal hospital
Victim seeks approval for class-action lawsuit

CanWest News Service | January 12, 2007 
Katherine Wilton

MONTREAL -- Five decades after unwittingly participating in brainwashing experiments that were funded by the CIA and the federal government, 78-year-old Janine Huard went to Federal Court yesterday to try and persuade a judge she is entitled to compensation.

"They demolished me," Huard told reporters yesterday before her court hearing. "They gave me terrible drugs, electroshocks and made me stay in a bed with a mask over my face listening to recordings for hours."

Prussian Blue.

They're blond, they're racist, and they can't sing. What more can I say?

<<Update - Sep 9>>

I know what else I can say. What the &%$#@! is wrong with their mother raising kids to hate so much?

In retracing the early steps of the O'Reilly vs. Scarborough battle, it's funny to see that when O'Reilly attacked NBC and MSNBC on January 4, he probably hadn't left the parking lot at Fox when attack dog Joe Scarborough was already protesting his complaints on MSNBC, and running audio from O'Reilly's radio show earlier in the day. This exchange shows that Scarborough is either (a) making fun of himself, or (b) completely misleading his audience about his attention-grasping "Is Bush An Idiot?" segment last August:

O’Reilly, from his radio show: “Bush can't win. No matter what he does. NBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, they're going to say he's an idiot. There's no sense of balance or fairness in their reporting. That's activist journalism.”

Scarborough: “Bush an idiot? I've never said Bush is an idiot. Chris? If I ever said -- do you think Bush is an idiot?

"Do you owe the Iraqi people an apology for not doing a better job?"

This is one of the questions President Bush faced from "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley on Sunday’s program. Pelley also cited the same "Military Times" CBS’s Chief White House correspondent Jim Axelrod cited on the January 11 edition of the "Evening News," which shows more miltiary troops now disapprove of the President’s handling of the war in Iraq, and was highlighted by Brent Baker here on Newsbusters. However, when John Kerry and John Edwards and their wives were jointly interviewed on the program on July 11, 2004, correspondent Lesley Stahl did not mention a CBS poll that showed war veterans supporting President Bush for reelection by a large margin, and that poll was significant in that veterans were a group that Senator Kerry was actively courting.

Fill 'er up.

Miami Herald TV critic Glenn Garvin is blogging from the annual Television Critics Association tour, and found some hot talk in recounting the Clintonista war against ABC's movie on 9/11.

Asked during his appearance on the TV critics' tour if he was embarrassed that the network had to "backpedal" on its Clinton-unfriendly movie The Path To 9/11, [ABC programming chief Stephen] McPherson took no prisoners -- particularly when it came to Clinton's national security adviser Sandy Berger, one of the film's chief critics. "We didn't backpedal," McPherson said. "We aired the movie. We didn't change anything for those guys. We aired it as planned on the dates that were planned. I mean, it's a little odd to have Sandy Berger telling you about what's truthful or not when he was indicted for stuffing documents into his pants on this very subject."

Let me guess: before making up your mind about Barbara Boxer's recent controversial remark to Condi Rice, you wanted to have the benefit of Joy Behar's expert analysis. Good news! Joy weighed in just a few minutes ago; her considered opinion is now available to an impatient public.

Rosie O'Donnell kicked off a segment of this morning's View by playing the video clip of Boxer's remark on Iraq, in which the senator from CA told the Secretary of State: "You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family."

Behar acknowledged that Boxer's comment was "a sabotage way to say it," but then added:

"Condi is part of an administration that did start an unjust war. So she deserved it, in my opinion."

When CBS launched their blog Public Eye in Sept. of 2005 they claimed it would give us "the journalists who make the important editorial decisions at CBS News and CBSNews.com" and that those journalists "will now be asked to explain and answer questions about those decisions in a public forum."

While the jury might be out on the success of their task, we can certainly wonder at their ability to step away from themselves to render balanced judgment. Especially in the case of their recent story, "Biased In Both Directions", where they declare that the MSM is reporting "in the middle" where it concerns stories about Iraq.

James Carroll, whose Boston Globe columns might be viewed less as reasoned discourse and more as auto-therapy for his famous rift with his father, predictably turns his MLK, Jr. Day piece into a condemnation of all things American.

Vietnam was at the root of his split with his father, as Carroll documented in God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us. So Carroll naturally drags a Vietnam/Iraq analogy into his piece: "like Bush, Johnson was presiding over a lost war." Of course, if there was a lesson of Vietnam it's that we lost it because we lost the political will to win it.

In his Monday "Media Notes" column, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz promotes the Bill O'Reilly vs. NBC/MSNBC feud as the media-bias equivalent of the Donald Trump vs. Rosie O'Donnell "smackdown." O'Reilly declined to comment, but Fox News spokeswoman Irena Briganti says he "has exposed media bias for the last 10 years. This is nothing new. We don't know why NBC finds the label 'liberal' so insulting."

The strongest voice in the Kurtz piece is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Joe Scarborough, once again proclaiming how he's more liberal (ahem, "independent") than any other supposedly conservative commentator on the tube:

Scarborough, a former Republican congressman who has been trying to demonstrate his independence from the GOP, says in an interview that O'Reilly "really does toe the party line more than I ever have."

Has Chris Matthews surged and accelerated his war against President Bush? Did the MSNBC host and analyst refer to the Commander-in-Chief as "evil"?

In the course of Matthews dialogue with Lester Holt, guest-hosting on this morning's "Today," Holt raised the possibility that President Bush might choose to expand the war into Iran:

Holt: "The president of course has stepped up language against Iran for its interference within Iraq. He sent a naval aircraft carrier group to the Persian Gulf. If he makes this now against Ahmadinejad, if Ahmadinejad becomes the 'poster thug' in this case, does that increase support for the war?"

Matthews: "Well, the president may well choose to widen the war for political reasons . He may do it for military reasons. We do have our troops under assault in Iraq and he has to protect the troops. And if there is Iraqi [sic, presumably Iranian] involvement in the other side he has to take steps. The danger is we might cross the border into Iraq [sic, again surely referring to Iran], therefore triggering a reaction from Iraq, from Iran rather, and then we go to war with Iran. And I think the President might well want to do that. Who knows what evil lurks? But the fact of the matter is that the American public may never get a say in this. The Congress may never get a say in it."

Click here for instructions on running Gaggle daily on your own site. There's also an archive of previous toons available here.

Those not fortunate enough to live in the San Francisco Bay Area might find it hard to believe that this liberal community sports an extremely conservative radio station. Conceivably less shocking is that in recent weeks, it has come under attack from liberal bloggers unhappy with its content.

For those unfamiliar, KSFO is a Northern California broadcaster of radio programs hosted by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Dr. Laura, and Mark Levin. In the Netroots’ crosshairs are local conservative personalities such as Melanie Morgan (who should be familiar to Fox News watchers), Lee Rodgers, and Tom Benner (AKA Officer Vic), all of the drive-time “Morning Show.” Also under attack is Brian Sussman, a former local weatherman turned radio host.

(Update: The New York Times published its own take on this issue Monday.)

The Vinyl Frontier

The troubles for KSFO began in 2006 when a fifth-tier liberal blogger from San Francisco, hiding behind the pseudonym “Spocko’s Brain,” started sending the station’s advertisers complaint letters. Such correspondence included cherry-picked audio clips and mini-transcripts from previous broadcasts. One such letter, as posted by Daily Kos contributor Mike Stark on January 3, began:

Instapundit linked to this Boston Globe story about Mitt Romney and his stand on gun control.

The article has captioned this photo "Presidential prospect Mitt Romney checked out a display of shotguns Friday during his NRA-guided tour of a sprawling gun trade show in Orlando, Fla. (Gerardo Mora/ Getty Images for the Boston Globe)"

Too bad the reporters can't tell the difference between a shotgun and a pellet gun.  In case you're not familiar with them, all the rifles in that display are pellet guns.  See the break point at the end of the stock.  Here's a close up of some Chinese models.

Compare Denver with Katrina?

DENVER WEATHER BULLETIN

Up here, in the "Mile-Hi City", we just recovered from a Historic  event--- may I even say a "Weather Event" of "Biblical Proportions" ---  with a historic blizzard of up to 44" inches of snow and winds to 90 MPH  that broke trees in half, knocked down utility poles, stranded hundreds  of motorists in lethal snow banks, closed ALL roads, isolated scores of  communities and cut power to 10's of thousands.

FYI:
The President did not come.
FEMA did nothing.
No one howled for the government.
No one blamed the government.
No one even uttered an expletive on TV.
Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton did not visit.