As much as liberals decry major corporations that act as if they’re above the law, there’s always quiet when the subject is Planned Parenthood, America’s number one corporate provider of abortions. During its 2005-2006 fiscal year, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America performed a record 264,943 abortions, reported a tidy profit of $55.8 million – and received a record high in taxpayer funding of $305.3 million.

This is one corporation the media hold in the highest regard. They’re not "merchants of death." That would be the tobacco companies, or gun manufacturers, or hamburger joints. These are the heroic "providers" of "a woman’s right to choose."

They’re also sleazy in their business practices. In Aurora, Illinois, Planned Parenthood planned to build the biggest abortion clinic in the country, but they lied by omission to the city. Throughout the construction process, the McDonald’s of the abortion industry applied for permits by listing the owner as "Gemini Office Development," not as Planned Parenthood.

This is very interesting article. It is a bit of a long read but I will give you a couple of highlights and a link to the whole:

ABC and CBS stuck Tuesday night with news stories on the impact of the roaring California wild fires, but as houses were still burning NBC Nightly News found it an opportune time to make the case that global warming caused the fires. NBC's sole expert, however, delivered a circular argument in which the lack of scientific proof did not detract at all from his media-shared presumption that anything bad which occurs in the environment can be tied to global warming. After reporter Anne Thompson cautioned scientists say you can't know “after just one season” whether warming is to blame, Princeton professor Michael Oppenheimer, a leading global warming alarmist who, NBC failed to mention, serves as a science adviser to Environmental Defense, reasoned:

The weather we've seen this fall may or may not be due to the global warming trend, but it's certainly a clear picture of what the future is going to look like if we don't act quickly to cut emissions of the greenhouse gases.

President Bush has shown that he can be empathetic, sensitive and decisive. But those qualities eluded him for days after Hurricane Katrina . . . He didn't cancel his vacation until two days after Katrina struck and didn't visit the region until four days after the storm. -- "A compassionate Bush was absent right after Katrina", USA Today, 9-9-05

USA Today's broadside is typical of the MSM criticism leveled at Pres. Bush for his failure to visit New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. So, now that President Bush has announced that he will be visiting California on Thursday while the wildfire flames are still burning, naturally the MSM and Dems will put politics aside and laud his decision, right?

I did say "the MSM and Dems."

View video here.

As NewsBusters reported Friday, Rep. Pete Stark (D-Cal.) made some rather disgusting comments on the floor of the House last week about kids being sent "to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president`s amusement."

On Tuesday, Stark took to the floor once again, this time remarkably to apologize for his previous statement.

As the broadcast networks almost completely ignored Stark's comments Thursday - not one of the evening news programs bothered to report it all - one wonders whether the Congressman's statement today will get any more attention.

After all, what left-thinking media outlet is going to want to report a Democrat Congressman actually apologizing to a Republican President this way (video available here, h/t Hot Air):

With Southern California in the midst of dealing with disastrous wildfires, on Sunday’s "60 Minutes," anchor Scott Pelley used the issue to promote Global Warming ideology. He did a segment on wildfires in the American west and declared in traditional alarmist fashion: "It appears that we're living in a new age of mega-fires, forest infernos ten times bigger than the fires we're used to seeing." It did not take long for Pelley to find the culprit for this crisis as he talked to University of Arizona professor, Tom Swetnam:

Swetnam says that climate change-- global warming-- has increased temperatures in the west about one degree, and that has caused four times more fires. Swetnam and his colleagues published those findings in the journal "Science," and the world's leading researchers on climate change have endorsed their conclusions.

Earlier in the segment, Pelley talked to head of federal fire operations, Tom Boatner:

Monica Guzman, an online reporter with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, told readers in an October 22 blog post that global warming could be causing the number of stray cats in Seattle to increase. In an interview with shelter director (and amateur climatologist) Don Jordan, he said:

"A decade ago or two decades ago, when there were cold spells in the winter, a certain part of the cat population died off. But if we're not having those real cold spells, a lot more animals stay alive through the breeding season."

But then Guzman wrote this argument-defeating statement: "He hasn't seen any data to back that up, but it's ‘certainly been discussed' among directors of other shelters, he said."

Why this is even mentioned as something that could be feasible is lost on me.

It is no secret that Air America is a favorite of most if not all the liberal denizens of many newsrooms. In Austin today, Austin Statesman reporter W. Gardner Selby cemented that reputation in his/her publicity piece on Air America's demise in Austin, Texas. Wrote Selby,

Air America seeks another home in Central Texas, but nothing is imminent, Kaufman said. He'd welcome tips at dkaufman@airamerica.com. "If someone can point me in the direction of someone more amenable to picking up our format, I'll take all the help I can get," Kaufman said.

I am aware that the liberal media will do virtually anything to try to counteract the conservative dominance of talk radio, but for a supposedly neutral reporter to publish the liberal talk radio's contact information along with a barely-disguised plea for someone to add Air America to their radio lineup strikes me as somehow beyond the pale.

Don Feder doesn't take Ann Coulter seriously "as an evangelist," but "no one can get the left going like Ann." He captures some stunning Coulter-hatred in the media.

The piece de hysteria (believe me, the competition was stiff) was a column by L.A. Times media critic Tim Rutten, who darkly warned that, "The rails leading to Auschwitz were greased by precisely the opinion Coulter expressed on American television this week."

Rutten -- who's saying that evangelizing facilitates genocide -- needs to be kept away from a keyboard, for his own safety.

On October 7, NewsBusters shared the astonishing statements of journalists from the Washington Post and CNN as to why good news from Iraq should not get reported.

Two weeks later, the Iraq Interior Ministry announced: "Violence in Iraq has dropped by 70 percent since the end of June, when U.S. forces completed their build-up of 30,000 extra troops to stabilize the war-torn country."

Such was reported by Reuters at 1:01 PM EST Monday. Not surprisingly, the major American media outlets ignored the good news.

Deliciously coincident, military blogger Michael Yon posted a piece at his website Monday appropriately titled "Resistance is futile: You will be (mis)informed" that should be must-reading for all Americans, especially elected officials (emphasis added throughout):

Valerie Plame (wife of serial anti-war misleader Joe Wilson) has just published "Fair Game," the biography of her life before and after columnist Robert Novak "outed" her as a "CIA operative" in a column in 2003, starting a domino effect that made her and her husband heroes of the antiwar movement and the media, including the New York Times.

Times critic Janet Maslin's review Monday neither questioned Plame's story nor raised a single inconvenient truth.

"Needless to say, the story of how her career was derailed and her C.I.A. cover blown also has its combative side. But the real proof of Ms. Wilson's fighting spirit is the form in which her version of events has been brought into the light of day. 'Anyone not living in a cave for the last few years knew I had a career at the C.I.A.,' writes Ms. Wilson (who has gone by that name since she married former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV in 1998). Once that career was destroyed, she wrote this account of her experiences as a means of both supporting herself and settling scores. She was contractually obligated to submit a draft of the book to the Central Intelligence Agency's Publications Review Board. That draft came back heavily expurgated. She was then expected to rewrite her book so that it made sense despite many deletions."

Every time the media feature an ostensibly Average Joe to further a liberal Democratic talking point, my curiosity is piqued as to how that person was singled out by a news agency to flesh out the human dimension of a policy argument. Many times it turns out the poster child/family in question is delivered to the media on a silver platter courtesy of a professional liberal activist.

The Frost family of Baltimore seems to be no exception, as Lisa Rein of the Washington Post noted in passing deep in her October 23 article on Bonnie Frost's pro-socialized health care activism.:

"Bonnie's a symbol of the true depth of the health-care crisis in Maryland," said Vincent DeMarco, president of the Maryland Citizens' Health Initiative, which is sponsoring the new radio ad. "Luckily, CHIP is there for their kids, but there's nothing for them."

Want to know the fate of humanity? Why pick up a copy of Rolling Stone, of course. There you'll find the latest eco-extremist prediction designed to scare the world into global warming action. Gaia theory creator James Lovelock is in the latest issue predicting mankind will almost be wiped out by 2100 from global warming.

Lovelock told Rolling Stone that predictions of the earth's warming will be "nearly double the likeliest predictions of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change." Rolling Stone summed it up by saying "The human race is doomed," in a story posted on its site October 17. Only as few as 500 million will survive "with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes - Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin."

Want more evidence of victory in Iraq? Look no further than Newsweek's amazing attempt at spin:

The Bush administration is starving for good news out of Iraq, and it may finally have some: new U.S. government statistics showing that violent attacks of all kinds are down to levels not seen since 2005. But until recently, the administration appears to have resisted acknowledging a key element of the new data, because it flies in the face of President George W. Bush's ongoing rhetorical confrontation with Iran's clerical regime. According to three senior U.S. officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, the decline in Iraq violence also includes a decrease in the number of attacks attributable to insurgents backed or armed by Iran. Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell confirmed to Newsweek that "there has indeed been a drop" in such attacks, but he added that "it's not entirely clear what the reason for that is."

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Bush administration has now been accused of trying to cover up good news from Iraq. The second paragraph just piles on the ignorance - with a shocking secret revealed:

After dedicating nearly 10,000 words over two months to promoting feminist author Susan Faludi's bizarre screed "The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America," the New York Times finally ran into some opposition: its own book reviewer.

Clay Waters described the paper's September 27 interview with the author here. It was one of five articles the paper dedicated to the book, which argues that the reaction to the 9/11 attacks amounted to little more than an attack on feminism.

Today, the paper's book reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, cuts right to the chase: "This, sadly, is the sort of tendentious, self-important, sloppily reasoned book that gives feminism a bad name."

Keep in mind, the review totaled little more than 1,000 words. That leaves the Times dedicating about 9,000 words to sloppy reasoning on a very important subject. But, given the paper has great influence over how history is written, this dissent -- the shortest of the five pieces on the book, including an October 22 reprint of the whole first chapter -- should be noted, especially because Kakutani's effective shredding of Faludi's theory stands in such contrast to the four, earlier puff pieces.

In an interview on Tuesday's CBS "Early Show" with Sally Bedell Smith, author of the new book ""For Love of Politics: Bill and Hillary Clinton, the White House Years," co-host Harry Smith began the fluffy segment with this adoring intro (emphasis mine):

Brad and Angelina, Charles and Diana, Burton and Taylor, and you can count Bill and Hillary's union as one of the most scrutinized marriages of our time. A simple Google search reveals there are more than 40 books about this still-young couple. They met in law school, two bookish, wonkish, idealistic kids who somehow transformed themselves into political rock stars. Remember when Bill grabbed a sax on the Arsenio Hall show during the '92 campaign? Now it's Hillary who's handling Letterman and trading one-liners with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show.

Despite Bill Clinton being one of the most famous adulterers of all time, Smith managed to get through the interview without ever discussing the former president’s infidelity with the author, Bedell-Smith. Instead, Smith set up the interview with this question, "This is a meticulous reconstruction, or even deconstruction, of their lives, and the thing that I came away with...is ambition trumps everything. Could that be the subtitle?"

On Tuesday's "Good Morning America," reporter Brian Ross continued his critical series of investigations into Republican presidential candidates. Just two weeks after he slammed Fred Thompson for his role in the 1973 Watergate investigation, the ABC correspondent looked into the fact that Rudy Giuliani's consulting firm has employed a priest that has been accused of molesting children in the '70s.

Of course, neither Ross, nor "Good Morning America" have seen fit to investigate Hillary Clinton's hiring of Sandy Berger, a man who has been convicted of stealing documents from the National Archives and stuffing them down his pants. Ross has similarly ignored the growing scandal of poor Chinese workers donating large sums of money to the Hillary Clinton campaign

As NewsBusters reported Saturday, Neal Gabler implied on FNC's "Fox News Watch" that he wanted the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol to go to Iraq and be killed so that he could attend the conservative writer's funeral.

On Monday, FNC's John Gibson took issue with Gabler's despicable comments during his radio program, calling Gabler a "lowlife," and "a coward" because "he will not come on the air to defend the things he says."

But that was just the beginning (audio available here courtesy our friend Johnny Dollar):