Back in the days of our MediaWatch newsletter, we used to have a feature called "Revolving Door" to note reporters swapping their jobs for political appointments or political appointees swapping their jobs for reporting gigs. (See the NB Revolving Door topic for more recent updates.) The Minneapolis Star Tribune announced that its editorial writer Dave Hage is leaving "to become communications director for first-term Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. Hage, 52, will take over Klobuchar's fledgling press operation," which has already lost its top press aide. Hage, a Minneapolis native, was an economics correspondent for for U.S. News & World Report magazine in Washington from 1991 to 1995, where he drew our attention as he repeatedly attacked Reaganomics and boosted Clintonomics. So the new Democrat job isn’t a shocker.

From our Notable Quotables in March 1993, the myth that health socialism-pushing Clinton would have a "healthy respect" for free enterprise:

In a great illustration of how many mainstream media journalists view the war in Iraq through the prism of the war in Vietnam, twice on Wednesday's NBC Nightly News veteran foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell said “Vietnam” when she meant to say “Iraq.” Offering a brief summary of how State Department foreign service employees are fighting a plan to involuntarily assign 40 of them to the embassy in Baghdad, Mitchell told anchor Brian Williams about a meeting held Wednesday:

There were a couple of hundred diplomats -- this is extraordinary -- they rebelled against being ordered to Vietnam. Basically, 40 of them will have to go to Vietnam or lose their, excuse me, go to Iraq. This is the first time this has happened since the Vietnam war. There have not been such orders and they could lose their jobs if they don't go to Iraq and they clearly don't want to...

Video clip (25 secs): Real (800 Kb) or Windows Media (900 Kb), plus MP3 audio (150 Kb)

It is sad that Nickelodeon is too stupid to realize how big of a backlash this will cause. Time to get in high gear folks! Just wait till Bill O’Reilly rants on this one! Nickelodean will soon be backpedaling on this leftist propaganda.

Army Wife Toddler Mom has the best summary on this, but you really just have to see it for yourself.

This Nickelodeon “news program”, is not a news program. It is a leftist primer on how to be a “left-wing radical REBEL”.

I am not a blind follower of our Government, and I also think that Government should be watched by it’s citizens. It is our civic duty.

However this program led by Ellerby, is anti-war, anti- GWOT, anti-military.

This “news program” is not about people changing the World around them.

Ms. Ellerby uses leftist propaganda buzz words like “taking on the establishment”.

CNN’s Jack Cafferty, putting on his conspiratorial hat, questioned the timing of Karen Hughes’ resignation from her post at the State Department during the introduction of his "Cafferty File" segment. "Is it just a coincidence... that Karen Hughes left the State Department the day after we found out that the State Department granted some sort of immunity to 17 -- to these Blackwater guards who are suspected in the murders of 17 Iraqi civilians?" Even with this, Cafferty complimented Hughes as one of the "brighter bulbs" in the Bush Administration.

Cafferty then went on to criticize Hillary Clinton’s failure to answer questions she was asked at the Democratic presidential debate in Philadelphia. "She was also asked about conflicting statements on Social Security, a question she ducked, saying she believed in fiscal responsibility. What the hell does that mean? And when Clinton was asked why she wouldn't release her White House records from the time she was First Lady, her answer was, 'Well, that's not my decision to make.' Baloney, whose decision is it, the Easter Bunny's? Come on." His "Question of the Hour" reflected this criticism. "Why won't Hillary Clinton give a straight answer to the questions she's being asked?"

Coal-fired electric power plants might be in danger of extinction at the hands of global warming alarmists, possibly setting the nation up for a looming energy crisis like none it's ever experienced.

Yet, for the most part, national media outlets have been quite silent on this issue, making it appear that green press members don't want the public to understand the real ramifications of solutions being offered by climate alarmists such as Nobel Laureate Al Gore, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Cal.), and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.).

For some background, on October 20, NewsBusters reported a decision by the State of Kansas to deny an electricity producer a license to build coal-fired power plants citing global warming concerns as one of the primary reasons. As it turns out, this wasn't the first such incident, as the Associated Press reported on October 18 (h/t NBer dscott):

Profit takers beware – if you get too wise with your investing, the class warfare soldiers are coming after you.

Over the last year, Angelo Mozilo, CEO of Countrywide (NYSE:CFC), decided to periodically sell some of the stock he owns in the company he co-founded 40 years ago and what is now the nation's largest mortgage lender – part of a prearranged measure known as a 10b5-1 trading plan. This was all done to prepare him for his December 2009 retirement date.

Despite his upcoming retirement, that drew the ire of some liberal pro-union groups and CBS’s Anthony Mason, whereas anyone defending his decision to sell his stock was not found in Mason’s report.

"Bill Clinton: caution, slippery when wet." -- George H.W. Bush, 1992 RNC convention.

"The Clintons have a reputation of being slippery and hard to pin down. Last night Clinton underscored that on the issue of whether illegal immigrants should have drivers licenses." -- David Shuster, "Hardball," 10-31-07

Was that really David Shuster? Or could Shuster, like opera singer Enrico Pallazzo in "Naked Gun," have been tied up in a dressing room as a Halloween impostor echoed George H.W.'s 1992 characterization of the Clintons? Be that as it may, on this afternoon's "Hardball" someone looking like the normally Dem-friendly Shuster did indeed accuse Hillary of underscoring her slippery reputation with her drivers-license debate dodge.

View video here.

As we've noted at NewsBusters before, it's perfectly sporting to liberal reporters to scoff at conservative activism by college-aged Republicans. Just the same, the left-wing activists of kids not old enough to drive is enough to make journalists warm and gushy inside.

Take Linda Ellerbee, formerly of NBC and CNN, who has a new Nick News special on kids engaging in political activism, and yes, it's heavy on left-wing action items from protesting alleged "torture" sanctioned by the Bush administration, to decrying standardized testing in Seattle, Washington, as racist, to aiding PETA in protesting the use of circus animals. (h/t Blackfive)

The 22-minute Ellerbee report, "Rebels with a Cause," can be found at the Nickelodeon Web site.

Here's the condescending patter with which Ellerbee opened her program:

In his "Final Word" on Sunday’s "Face the Nation" on CBS, host Bob Schieffer denounced a fake news conference held by FEMA officials in the wake of the California wildfires. Not content to just say the staged conference was a bad mistake, Schieffer decided to be as arrogant and condescending as possible:

The last time I was at Disney World, they had sticks of a certain height stuck in the ground with signs that said something like, `You must be this tall to ride this ride.' Well, FEMA, the disaster relief agency, must use a variation of that to hire its public relations staff. Somewhere on their employment application there must be a clause that says, `Your IQ must be below a certain level to work here.'

From "the Sun" website, 31 Oct 07 article by Andrew Parker entitled "Teacher's Muslim Dress Order" here:  http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article407311.ece

In addition to having to dress Muslim, "The morning assembly will be open to all parents – but dads are BARRED from a women-only party in the afternoon because Muslim husbands object to wives mixing with other men. "

At the site of the article, someone using the screen name "mcc99" had this to say "...Bizarrely, feminist-separatists and conservative Muslims in some ways seem to have the same goals, eliminating men from the company of women being one. They make strange bedfellows indeed.You can be sure that if it were in the "tradition" of Islam that men-only parties be held in the afternoon, that one would be ignored."

How often have you heard folks in the media, and climate alarmists such as Nobel Laureate Al Gore, state unequivocally that the global warming debate is over?

Too many to count, yes?

On the flipside, did you ever think you'd see a major media report suggesting the environmental movement, including global warming alarmism, was "premised on a 'politics of fear'?"

Well, on Wednesday, Sewell Chan posted a rather lengthy piece at the New York Times City Room blog concerning an exceptionally provocative discussion about environmental politics that occurred Tuesday evening at the New York Public Library.

Frankly, readers are going to be shocked by some of the article's contents, especially the astounding opening paragraph (emphasis added throughout):

Sunny Hostin, a legal analyst for CNN’s "American Morning," demonstrated that she could not give an objective analysis on the legality of the death penalty during a segment on Wednesday’s show. Hostin, in a response to a question asked by co-host Kiran Chetry on the future of capitol punishment in the U.S., answered, "I think, as a society, perhaps, now we're moving towards the fact that, perhaps, killing by the state is not humane at all."

This "curious" reply, which came 21 minutes into the 7 am hour of "American Morning," wasn’t the only one Hostin made during the segment. Earlier, Hostin said that "people really are suffering" during lethal injection executions.

This would be a no-brainer to most people, but for David Leonhardt, business columnist for The New York Times, it’s a question that deserves deep thoughtful deliberation.

“There are big philosophical questions about taxes that facts alone can’t answer. How important is it to let people keep the money that they earn?” Leonhardt asked in the October 31 Times.

The answer seems fairly cut and dried, at least to someone who wouldn’t mind having the extra money in their wallet, but Leonhardt actually says having a lower tax burden is of no consequence.

I had every intention of letting "Cheney Flag-gate" go uncommented upon as a non-story. Vice President Cheney went pheasant hunting at an exclusive preserve in Dutchess County, New York yesterday, and the hunt itself left only pheasants hitting the ground. It was a local interest story for the most part, until a sharp-eyed photographer and a self-promoting blowhard turned this local interest story into a national non-story when it was discovered that the inside of the back door of a garage at the hunt club was draped in a Confederate battle flag.

There is precisely no evidence that Cheney or anyone on his staff saw the flag, but that didn't keep the Daily News from running straight to Al Sharpton. The story ended in lots of hot air being spit by a man in love with the sound of his own voice, and many people fruitlessly wishing they had a way to somehow blame the Vice President.

I only mention this story at all because of the eye for detail it reveals in our media. Consider this a "teachable moment" for media fact-checkers.

Below is the flag photo, as captured by a Daily News photographer.

O'Donnell was a guest on Martha Stewart's Halloween program and was ostensibly dressed as Queen Elizabeth I, who presided over a fledgling Royal Navy that defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588. Their ships were fashioned of wood then, probably because fire didn't always melt steel.

What's with going for Queen Elizabeth, though? Some hidden message about "View" co-star Elisabeth Hasselbeck? And given her volatile personality, the antagonism between Queens Mary and Elizabeth, and the ghost fable by the same name, wouldn't "Bloody Mary" have been a better choice?

Leave your captions, but don't be too mean or I'm shooting a Koosh ball at you.

Given that it's Halloween, we can't let the day go by without noting the ghoulish MSM habit of burying good news from the Iraq War.

Blogger Don Surber noticed the latest such example with the October 31 edition of the Washington Post:

Winning the war is ho-hum

Stories the Washington Post thought were more important than “Attacks in Iraq Continue to Decline”

I wrote about this last night, but it still bugs me that the Washington Post put on Page 14 today: “Attacks in Iraq Continue to Decline.”

On both Tuesday’s "Evening News" and Wednesday’s "Early Show" CBS gave prominent coverage to Nancy Pelosi’s call for the resignation of the head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Nancy Nord. In an interview with Nord on Wednesday’s "Early Show" co-host Julie Chen asked:

American parents are upset, they're frightened, they feel like their Halloween and their Christmas is now ruined. They don't know what to buy. Members of Congress are calling for your resignation. Are you going to resign?

The "Evening News" featured a portion of Pelosi’s rant against the Bush Administration, "I'm calling upon the President of the United States to ask for the resignation. It is, after all, his administration, his policy, his appointee." That was followed by reporter Chip Reid’s explanation that "Pelosi says it's clear that Nancy Nord, the Acting Chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, doesn't understand the gravity of the situation because Nord opposes legislation now before Congress that would double the agency's budget over the next seven years to more than $141 million a year." Later, Reid did present Nord’s perspective that "Democrats...want to change the mission of the agency to less testing of products and more litigation against companies."

However, on the "Early Show" Reid again reported from Capitol Hill, but this time followed Nord’s explanation with "Consumer advocates say what's really going on here is the Bush Administration protecting big business at the expense of consumers, a charge the White House vigorously denies." Why the sudden addition of an attack on the administration?

ABC's Good Morning America didn't sugarcoat the Democratic debate in favor of Hillary Clinton on Wednesday morning. Reporter David Wright sounded a little weak: "At times Clinton gave answers so carefully calibrated, she seemed to contradict herself." Seemed? But news anchor Chris Cuomo did attempt one lame pro-Hillary spin -- that Barack Obama didn't look presidential by dancing on the Ellen DeGeneres talk show. Even George Stephanopoulos wasn't biting on that spin.

Hasn't Cuomo considered that Hillary Clinton's been on the Ellen show at least twice in the last year? She didn't dance, but she came with a goofy fake book called "Running for President for Dummies." Cuomo also ignored Bill Clinton playing saxophone in sunglasses on the Arsenio Hall show in 1992. Here's the exchange:

Boxing enthusiasts saw quite a barnburner Tuesday evening when conservative author Ann Coulter took on liberal media member Alan Colmes on Fox News's "Hannity and Colmes."

As this was the first time the pair met since Coulter's now famous "Jews need to be perfected" comment, it was a metaphysical certitude this issue would surface.

Not surprisingly, Colmes did not disappoint, as irrespective of any other pressing matters facing the nation, this was the first topic he raised with his guest, and in so doing, set off quite a firestorm when he said Coulter was using "the classic language of anti-Semitism."

As this is just too marvelous to interrupt with needless commentary, what follows is a partial transcript of this delicious battle between right and left with a video available here for your added entertainment pleasure (h/t Hot Air):