For decades now, the national media have insisted in each presidential election cycle that voters should ignore the liberal wizards hiding behind the curtain of the Democratic Party. Each plausible Democratic presidential contender is a "moderate" or "centrist," be he Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis or John Kerry. But now to describe Hillary Clinton as a "moral conservative" is so upside down and backwards it sounds like.... "This is your brain on drugs."

That’s what Time reporter Amy Sullivan announced on Tucker Carlson’s show on MSNBC. She suggested Hillary might be "fairly liberal" on economic issues, "but she’s a moral conservative." Sullivan was once an aide to Sen. Tom Daschle. In Hillary Clinton, Sullivan has allegedly found an authentic Christian conservative’s role model.

Instead of pounding President Bush with the usual media focus on failures in Iraq, ABC anchor Charles Gibson, in his Tuesday interview at Camp David with President and Mrs. Bush, actually pointed out how many doubted the surge strategy and wondered if he wanted to “crow?” Gibson inquired in an excerpt aired on World News: “You took a lot of doubting and rather skeptical questions about the surge. I'll give you a chance to crow. Do you want to say I told you so?” Bush demurred from the opportunity. Indeed, a January MRC report documented the media hostility toward Bush's plan: “TV's Pre-Emptive War Against Iraq 'Surge'; Before Iraq Plan Unveiled, Reporters Said It Was Unpopular, Wouldn't Work & War Was 'Lost Cause.'”(See text below)

Prompted by Bush's satisfaction that Iraqis are “beginning to see enough security so that reconciliation is taking place, as well as the economy's beginning to move,” Gibson pressed the President on problems with “reconciliation.” Leading to a correction from Bush, Gibson had earlier referred to “a lot of bellicose rhetoric that has been aimed at Iran” and cited how “you yourself at a news conference recently raised the specter of World War III.” Bush clarified: “I said if you want to avoid World War III.”

Don't you love it when you find out that leading political figures in America think just like you?

Before you answer, consider a recent comment made by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay about the New York Times "economic" columnist Paul Krugman.

Due to language that might offend some, the actual quote comes after the break.

However, let's just say that as reported by the Washington Examiner's Yeas and Nay's blog Tuesday, DeLay is about as fond of Krugman as most Americans with an above body temperature intelligence quotient (fair and final profanity warning):

(Since the Kudlow & Beck TV shows I'd referenced are now over, I changed the title to reflect a politically-incorrect reality of the recent theft!)

I figured this thread would work better than the somewhat-defiled Open thread for comments from folks who are actually interested in the issue of big government's attacks on honest money, rather than the continual personal attacks (tantrums can hopefully remain there-not-here!).

Brent Bozell, President of the MRC which publishes NewsBusters, is scheduled appear tonight (Tuesday) at about 9:30pm EST (8:30pm CST, 7:30pm MST, 6:30pm PST) on FNC's Hannity & Colmes (the show will re-run at midnight EST) and Wednesday morning on FNC's Fox & Friends at about 7:15am EST.

Topic for Hannity & Colmes tonight: Ex-ABC reporter/anchor Carole Simpson endorsing Hillary Clinton and her new claim that she didn't mean to do it. For background, check this and this NewsBusters postings.

Topic for Fox & Friends on Wednesday morning: Prompted by a Tuesday New York Times story, "Baghdad Starts to Exhale as Security Improves," how the news media have been avoiding good news from Iraq. This NewsBusters posting recounted how little time the broadcast networks have allocated lately to improving conditions in Iraq.

If the producers of "Good Morning America" need something to be thankful for this holiday season, one might suggest their ability to create downbeat economic news to report to fill in gaps in their daily programming.

See video here.

"[O]ne of the last parts of our travel survival guide, our Thanksgiving survival guide, of course, is the rising cost of the Thanksgiving dinner," "GMA" host Diane Sawyer said on the November 20 "GMA.". "As we said, the average price of a Thanksgiving dinner is up 11 percent from last year. So are there some ways to stretch the dollars and have no one know."

Also included in the segment was a story meant to tug at your heartstrings - a grandmother being forced to cut corners to make enough for her family's Thanksgiving feast.

Here's what a CNN e-mail I received said when the news was first released:

Here's how the headline at the home page turned out mid-morning:

If you can buy sperm or eggs, why are kidneys so radical to ABC? And what happens to the people who are dying if we don't change the system?

ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson" called a doctor's market driven approach to organ donation, in which individuals could sell kidneys to insurers, "radical" November 19.

"Now an outspoken doctor is proposing a radical solution, allow donors to sell one of their kidneys," anchor Gibson began.

University of Minnesota Children's Hospital's Dr. Arthur Matas supported a regulated market only for kidneys and has said that ruling out kidney sales completely is like sentencing some patients to death.

Teasing a story about the Supreme Court agreeing to hear an appeal concerning the Washington, D.C. handgun gun and whether it violates the 2nd Amendment's protection of an individual's right to keep and bear arms, CBSNews.com employed an ominous-looking graphic on its home page.

Pictured at right is the CBS/AP graphic showing in the foreground a right hand grasping a handgun, with an outline of the continental United States overlaid atop an American flag. Superimposed on the map and flag are the concentric circles of a shooting target. The corresponding story can be found here.

By contrast, ABCNews.com chose for its front page and story a graphic depicting a handgun beneath the seal of the United States Supreme Court (shown below the fold):

Imagine seeing this prediction on your television screen: "Oil will hit $150 or $200 during this commodity bull market."

Makes you want to stockpile oil while it is priced at $98 a barrel, but such was the case on CNBC today.

Credit Billionaire Jim Rogers, described as a commodities guru and a founding partner with the infamous George Soros of the Quantum Fund in 1970. He told Maria Bartiromo on the November 20 "Closing Bell" on CNBC he see's no slowdown in the rising price of oil, regardless of what OPEC does.

"OPEC had a big meeting this week," Rogers said. "If they had a lot more oil to produce, they would be producing it. They don't have it."

As the first anniversary of its grand declaration fast approaches, does NBC continue to believe that Iraq is in a state of civil war? Readers will recall that as we described here, Matt Lauer opened the Today show on November 27th, 2006 with these words:

Good morning. Civil war. A bloody weekend of sectarian clashes in Iraq and no sign it's letting up.

A bit later, Lauer portentously declared:

For months the White House rejected claims that the situation in Iraq has deteriorated into civil war. For the most part news organizations like NBC hesitated to characterize it as such. After careful consideration, NBC News has decided the change in terminology is warranted and what is going on in Iraq can now be characterized as civil war.

Apparently bridge has officially become edgy and provocative. I must not have gotten the memo.

On Tuesday’s CBS "Early Show," co-host Hannah Storm interviewed a championship bridge team that held up a sign that read "We didn’t vote for Bush," at the World Bridge Championship in China last month. As a result of this dissent, many in the mainstream media have dubbed the women the "Dixie Chicks of Bridge."

Co-host Julie Chen teased the segment at the top of the show by portraying the bridge players as victims: "Four previously mild-mannered bridge champions facing backlash and a ban for criticizing President Bush." Later, co-host Harry Smith made the Dixie Chicks comparison, lamenting:

Remember when the Dixie Chicks caused a firestorm of controversy back in 2003? Natalie Maines said she was ashamed of our foreign -- of U.S. foreign policy, criticizing President Bush. It was just ten days before the beginning of the war in Iraq. Radio stations burned their CDs. No one would play their songs. Now a much quieter group, some call the "Dixie Chicks of Bridge" is caught up in a somewhat similar storm of controversy. They had just won an international bridge tournament in China when one of them held up a sign. See what the sign says? "We didn't vote for Bush." We're going to talk to them in this half hour.

Those who believe in the civil right that the Second Amendment was created to protect were not surprised when the Supreme Court decided today to hear a case that challenges the District of Columbia's draconian gun laws, which are arguably the toughest in the nation.

The AP story on the decision correctly notes that the case "could produce the most in-depth examination of the constitutional right to ‘keep and bear arms' in nearly 70 years."

D.C. law only permits those people who had handguns when the gun-prohibition law was enacted 31 years ago to keep them, creating a privileged class of D.C. residents who, unlike the rest of us, have the ability to defend themselves from the thugs who terrorize large portions of the city. The blatantly unconstitutional law hasn't worked, and The Onion rightly mocked D.C.'s skyrocketing violent crime rate in a satirical news story in 2003, D.C. Once Again Murder Capital, Mayor Brags.

Radar Online reported Tuesday that before being signed as a contributor by Newsweek magazine, Rove was first shopped to Time, but that didn’t happen because "They think Karl is essentially an unindicted coconspirator in a whole string of felonies."

Wow, what a liberal smell Time puts out. For older media-watchers, this recalls the Washington bureau of Time sitting around on C-SPAN on the verge of the first Iraq war in 1991 dismissing John McCain and his "superpatriots" who marched around in "brown shirts." Radar media critic Charles Kaiser reported:

For its part, Time magazine said nothing publicly about Rove's arrival at Newsweek, but a well-placed source told me that Bob Barnett (every Washington literati's favorite lawyer, including Bill Clinton) had traveled to the Time-Life building on Sixth Avenue to offer Rove's services before Newsweek snared them. Time's editors apparently felt the cost/benefit analysis wouldn't be in their favor if they embraced the man who has done more than anyone to keep the spirit of Joe McCarthy alive and well in American politics. (Read Joshua Green's definitive profile from the Atlantic in 2004.) "Time thought this wouldn't be like hiring George Stephanopoulos," my source explained. "They think Karl is essentially like an unindicted coconspirator in a whole string of felonies."

Besides the obvious shock value, there was another reason Rove's arrival in the fourth estate was inevitable. In public, Rove is one of dozens of conservatives who assiduously bash the press. Last summer, channeling Agnew, Rove told Rush Limbaugh that "the people I see criticizing [Bush] are sort of elite effete snobs." But at the same time, Rove was constantly massaging big-time Washington journalists over long lunches at the Hay Adams Hotel.

The New York Times's liberal readership surely got indigestion over Tuesday's lead story from Baghdad by Damien Cave and Alissa Rubin, "Baghdad Starts to Exhale as Security Improves." It's even accompanied by three photos of normal life in the Iraqi capital.

Yes, this is the same New York Times that declared less than a month ago in the lead sentence to a lead editorial:

"The news out of Iraq just keeps getting worse."

But on Tuesday the Times made a public bow to the improving reality in Iraq, admitting:

"The security improvements in most neighborhoods are real. Days now pass without a car bomb, after a high of 44 in the city in February. The number of bodies appearing on Baghdad’s streets has plummeted to about 5 a day, from as many as 35 eight months ago, and suicide bombings across Iraq fell to 16 in October, half the number of last summer and down sharply from a recent peak of 59 in March, the American military says.

Since we're unlikely to see it otherwise....(Emphasis mine, sorry I don't have the time to properly-format it now.)
JMR

To the Editor

I read Mona Charen’s column on Friday and I had to clear a few things up. Outside of the name-calling (“kook,” as I’m sure you remember, was the attack word of choice used by critics of Barry Goldwater), Charen was way off base.

Long-time ABC News reporter Bob Zelnick provided a review of the MRC book Whitewash to CNSNews.com on Tuesday. While he found the evidence of a pro-Hillary bias (especially among female reporters) "convincing," he also suggested that the Clinton scandals in general have been a disappointing harvest for prosecutors and investigative journalists, and the pursuit of Bill Clinton’s adulteries a political loser. Here’s an excerpt:

No one does a better job than L. Brent Bozell III and his Media Research Center in documenting the liberal bias of much of the mainstream news media. Some of their citations of my former colleagues' wisdom make me laugh out loud. Others make me furious. Nearly all provide me with ammunition for verbal repartee with my cherished liberal students and faculty friends.

Bozell's new book, "Whitewash," written with his colleague Tim Graham, does much the same thing with respect to a single subject, the rise of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton from the status of bemused wife of a serial adulterer/alleged sexual predator to a seat in the U.S. Senate and frontrunner status for the 2008 Democratic nomination for president.

On Saturday, State Representative Carla Blanchard Dartez (D-La.) lost her re-election bid to Republican challenger Joe Harrison in a heated and controversial run-off. Yet the largest newspaper in Louisiana, The Times-Picayune (TP), chose to bury it as an afterthought in its coverage of the statewide election results. The Times-Picayune online edition, NOLA.com, placed this paragraph at the end of its story.

The only two incumbent lawmakers to lose in either chamber were Democrats. Chris Hazel dispatched Rep. Rick Farrar of Pineville in the 27th District primary. Challenger Joe Harrison topped Rep. Carla Blanchard Dartez of Morgan City to claim the 51st District seat in the runoff.

The TP made no mention of the 'Buckwheat' racial slur or the other controversies which surrounded this incumbent Democrat. Why is that?