It is always amazing when a "news report" is merely just a rehash of some press release, or is, at the very least, a completely one sided report.

Such is the case with a recent UPI "report", "Fight anti-Arab bigotry, Gonzalez told".

UPI is wagging its finger at U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez via a group of "Arab leaders" who are warning the government "to fight anti-Arab bigotry." The whole UPI "report" is nothing but the warnings of these so-called leaders about how filled with bigotry the USA is and how the government must fight it.

With all this hooplah, one would imagine that Arabs are being attacked, mistreated and discriminated against all across the country at an alarming rate. Arab "leader" James Zogby even makes the claim that the government must "reverse this disturbing and increasingly accepted trend of anti-Arab and Muslim bias".

Where has Maxine Waters been? It wasn't until she turned up on Tucker Carlson's show this afternoon that I realized how long it's been. Now there is one fun lady. The Representative from California proved the perfect foil, helping Carlson score some wicked points at Nancy Pelosi's expense.

Carlson's fundamental question, and I think it's a good one, is, given that Dems ran and were elected on an anti-war platform, why are they apparently about to go along with the surge? The unstated answer is that they've made a cynical political calculation that it's in their interest to demagogue the issue rather than lead.

Here's how it went down:

Waters: "I certainly, do not trust the President of the United States to lay out a case that is believable . . . I don't trust him. I don't believe him, I won't be supporting it, for sure."

Carlson: "But [Pelosi's] naive enough to believe him. I think I understand the point you're making."

Anyone remembering the ascent of Newt Gingrich to House Speaker in 1995 surely noticed a difference between media coverage of that historic event and Nancy Pelosi taking the gavel back for the Democrats in 2007. One had all the joy of a child’s funeral. The other was New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.

CNN even had a countdown clock to the Democrats regaining the majority. All that was missing was a lighted crystal donkey that would descend down a pole on the top of the Capitol dome. CNN’s Dana Bash called Pelosi’s gavel grab a "moment to savor," surely true for her supporters, but the bitterest of pills to swallow for those who worked their hearts out last year to keep Pelosi and her liberal army from retaking the House. CNN left no doubt where it stood on this divide.

The liberal media despised Newt, and adore Nancy. They’ve demonstrated this by the way they played up the Gingrich threat in the weeks after the ’94 GOP tsunami, while virtually ignoring Pelosi and her radical agenda for the last two months.

Then again, what do I know? I'm just here representing the New York Money People:

Clark is talking about the possibility of military action against Iran:

"How can you talk about bombing a country when you won't even talk to them?" said Clark. "It's outrageous. We're the United States of America; we don't do that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the military option is off the table - but diplomacy is not what Jim Baker says it is. It's not, 'what will it take for you boys to support us on Iraq?' It's sitting down for a couple of days and talking about our families and our hopes, and building relationships."

When we asked him what made him so sure the Bush administration was headed in this direction, he replied: "You just have to read what's in the Israeli press. The Jewish community is divided, but there is so much pressure being channeled from the New York money people to the office seekers."

CBS "60 Minutes" correspondent Morley Safer interviewed Oscar-favored actress Helen Mirren for Sunday, and CBS sent out press materials highlighting her fondness for nude scenes. She even suggested she and Safer do their interview naked. At his routinely liberal blog for Broadcasting & Cable magazine, reporter John Eggerton applauded the silly idea as "a stroke of genius" in flouting those dictators downtown at the FCC:

For one brief shining moment I was ready to celebrate one of the gutsiest programming moves in recent years, one calculated to suggest the ludicrousness of a fixation on nudity. With CBS fighting the FCC's indecency crackdown, what a stroke of genius to have both Safer and Mirren in the nude for their interview about how Mirren, and her mother, think her past nude scenes (Caligula, Calendar Girls) are no big deal...

Open for discussion...

Christopher Hedges, the former NY Times reporter infamously booed off a college commencement stage in the middle of an anti-war rant in May 2003 , has a new book out with the hauntingly ambivalent title, "American Fascists -- The Christian Right and the War on America."

Contributor Rick Perlstein reviews it in the Times' Sunday book section and finds it unconvincing (although Perlstein seems to share some of Hedges' paranoia regarding conservative Christians):

"Hedges was a longtime foreign correspondent, for The New York Times and other publications. But he writes on this subject as a neophyte, and pads out his dispatches with ungrounded theorizing, unconvincing speculation and examples that fall far short of bearing out his thesis."

That's as far as the review goes about Hedges' 15-year-history at the Times.

Responding to a handful of liberal complainers, Monday’s NBC Nightly News basically repudiated a Friday evening story in which a NOAA meteorologist blamed the recent warmer-than-normal weather in the Northeast on an El Nino, an area of warmer than normal water in the Pacific Ocean that forms every five years or so.

After some mean-spirited comments on NBC’s “Daily Nightly” blog site, where writers attacked anchor Brian Williams as a tool of big business for not taking the opportunity to blame global warming, Nightly News flip-flopped. Monday’s newscast showcased a brand new expert, and he argued the El Nino cycle was being exacerbated “by humans using the atmosphere as a free place to dump our tailpipe wastes.” Reporter Robert Bazell suggested that “even the heavy snow in the Rockies this year might be partly caused by global warming.”

In case you haven't seen it, over on The Corner, Jonah Goldberg shared correspondence on the AP's Jamil Hussein problem from Michael Schrage, a former reporter for the Washington Post and columnist for the Los Angeles Times unleashing on the "mainstream" media:

Subject: You are, indeed, missing something -

I wrote this piece for the washington post a year ago. It speaks for itself...but the jamail hussein saga is a classic example of unprofessional, plame-like hypocrisy by the AP...

They named their source - many, many times - and it was challenged...there
was a myriad of ways they could have handled the query: they could have
called in a favor and gotten one of the AP-member newspapers in iraq to
'interview' the guy to vouch; they could have done a podcast with the guy;
if the bloggers still insisted the guy was a fraud, then AP itself would be
literally accused of not just perpetrating a hoax but perpetuating one...

Laura Kurtzman, AP, 12/9

To succeed with his plan to extend health care to 6.5 million uninsured Californians, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will have to find common ground between groups that often are at odds.
Union leaders quickly balked at a requirement that all Californians have insurance, calling it a tax on the middle class. A demand that allbut the smallest businesses offer their workers insurance upset many of Schwarzenegger's business allies.
"I look forward to everyone now having those debates," Schwarzenegger said via videolink to a panel of health care stakeholders who assembled Monday to hear his plan. "There are a lot of people around the table."
Under the proposal, all Californians must have insurance, although thepoorest will be subsidized. Those who go uncovered will be subject totax penalties.
Businesses with 10 or more employees will have to offer insurance to their workers or pay 4 percent of their payroll into a state fund.Smaller firms, which the governor's office said make up 80 percent of California businesses, will be exempt.
Insurers would no longer be allowed to deny coverage to people because of their medical problems. All children, regardless of their immigration status, will be covered through an expansion of the state
and federal Healthy Families program.
"If you can't afford it, the state will help you buy it. ...

At ABC's "World Newser" blog, Chuck Lustig, ABC's Director of Foreign News, laments big-money college athletics, represented by Nick Saban's reported eight-year, $32 million contract to coach college football at Alabama. Perhaps he can carry around a protest sign reading "Books Not (Long) Bombs." Expect another blog to follow from an ABC feminist complaining that Alabama's coaches for women's sports are being cheated of larger salaries, a sure Title IX violation. Lustig lamented:

Then I started to think about the $40 million Oprah Winfrey spent to build a school in South Africa and asked the question is there something wrong with our educational priorities in this country that a college coach can make so much money at a time when many of our country's school districts are wrangling with huge deficits?

In her story today on the resumption of the debate on embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) in the House, Laurie Kellman of the Associated Press reports the following as fact:

Polls show Americans overwhelmingly support federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. And scientists aren't sure that stem cells shed by a fetus and extracted from the surrounding fluid carry the same possibility for treatments and cures of diseases as those culled from embryos.

The facts are that:

• At least one poll involved asked a misleading question to get a still-not-"overwhelming" result that does not support the characterization of "overwhelming support" she employs.
• The poll's sample was skewed to Democrats and strong Democrats.
• The "possibility for treatments" for stem cells obtained from amniotic fluid may have MORE disease-eliminating possibilities than those obtained from ESCR will ever have.

First, the poll (overview article; PDF from Ipsos):

Fox News’s Geraldo Rivera was recently being interviewed on a radio station in Florida, and, according to an article at the Orlando Sentinel’s blog on Monday, he harbors some ill feelings towards MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.

This goes back to Rivera being kicked out of Iraq for divulging too much information about American troop movements. For whatever reason, Rivera feels that Olbermann was responsible for the media hype surrounding this incident (Update with video of KO's response follows):

Apparently Geraldo was visiting with 104.1 FM's Monsters just before Christmas, when they asked him about the time he made international headline [sic] for disclosing too much information about troops in Iraq. Geraldo claimed the incident was blown out of proportion, largely by NBC -- and specifically Olbermann. Geraldo then began mumbling semi-audible names, seemingly meant to describe Olbermann: "midget ... punk ... slimeball."

That wasn’t all Rivera had to say about KO:

Is there no bridge too far for Joe Scarborough to cross in defending charges of liberal bias against his NBC/MSNBC employers? On last night's Scarborough Country, Joe adopted a position so sycophantish, even Keith Olbermann might have been embarrassed by it.

Scarborough suggested that NBC News had done the right thing in assembling a panel on the Iraq surge composed exclusively of experts hostile to the President Bush's proposal. Scarborough's suggestion came in the course of a segment on Bill O'Reilly's revealing interview with Andrea Mitchell last week, during which he confronted her on NBC's liberal bias. Video: Real (4.3MB) or Windows (5MB) Plus MP3 (795 KB)

Virtually every time the ultra-liberal Rosie O’Donnell makes an offensive and/or politically insensitive remark on “The View,” right-thinking Americans across the fruited plain question how long host Barbara Walters and/or ABC executives are going to tolerate her extraordinary behavior. If a New York Post “Page Six” column Tuesday is accurate, the answer might be “Not much longer”:

THE tension between "The View" creator Barbara Walters and co-host Rosie O'Donnell, sparked by O'Donnell's feud with Donald Trump, boiled over yesterday morning when the portly comic called Walters "a [bleeping] liar."

The fight started around 8:30 a.m. when Walters, back from a two-week vacation, walked into the hair and makeup room at ABC studios and tried to hug O'Donnell, whom she hired onto the popular show.

The article detailed the melee (Update: Trump has sent a letter to Rosie about this article, hat tip to Hot Air):

It was the worst of times, it was the best of times on this morning's "Today." Throughout the show's long opening segment on Iraq, and regardless of the visuals: from David Gregory to President Bush, troops on the ground, Nancy Pelosi, Gordon Smith, etc., the screen graphic continued to skeptically ask "Lost Cause?"

So when Meredith Vieira began her subsequent interview of Ted Kennedy, there was every reason to expect her to lob softballs to the senator on the legislation he's introducing requiring Pres. Bush to obtain specific congressional authorization of a surge.

Surprisingly, that was not the case.

View an edited video clip of the interview here.

The blog "Couric & Co." at CBSNews.com has transformed from mostly Katie to mostly other CBS personnel in the last few weeks. On Monday, Couric writer (and former CNN anchor) Mary Alice Williams recounted how the ascent of Nancy Pelosi was a "very big deal" and went a little overboard about how much better women were:

The picture alone demonstrated what a difference her leadership will make. Instead of a lone male gaveling Congress into session, here was a female surrounded by children. Women, in ways far different from men, represent families.

Williams wrote that her 16-year-old daughter Alice was there to witness history, courtesy of her congressman (no name or party affiliation attached). She also made it seem likely that she's the one who wrote for Couric that it's taken too long: "In helping women gain true equality in every aspect of life, Susan B. Anthony always said 'failure is impossible.' Today the only quibble she might have is that it took so long."

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