On Wednesday's CBS Evening News, anchor Katie Couric highlighted how “according to a new government report out today” the problem of homelessness “is worse than we knew. On any given day, as many as 754,000 people in this country are homeless. As Cynthia Bowers tells us, one-third of the homeless are families with children." As viewers saw a mother with two kids, and with “Faces of Despair” on screen, Bowers framed the story in the most empathetic way, “This may be the most heartbreaking face of today's findings: the homeless children in America. Like six-month-old Mariah, or one-year-old Erin, innocent victims caught up in their parents' problems.”

Though the report, from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), found that two-thirds of the homeless are men, Bowers focused on the minority, asking the mother: “What would you say to Americans who think the stereotypical homeless person is a guy on the streets with a bottle in his hands?” The woman ludicrously responded: “Most Americans are just a paycheck away from being on the streets or being in a shelter like this.” Bowers proceeded to relay how the report “suggests there are 300,000 more homeless people than beds in shelters and transitional housing, more than three-quarters of a million on any given night,” which is, Bowers helpfully illustrated, “nearly the population of South Dakota.”

Hey,guess what I just found out on CNN, after they spent 5 minutes defending WilliaimJefferson ?

William Jefferson was bribed by closest assistant set to go to prison tomorrow. His other assistant is headed for prison as well.
It was amazing how CNN showed over and over again how he was innocent, and at the end of the 5minute praisefest, they reluctantly mentioned the executive producer of CNN phoned the FBI, and as the Lou Dobbs replacement host dragged the info out of the redblonde correspondent, it was stated that WJ's two personal aides are headed for prison, one tomorrow, and one has admitted to bribing William Jefferson.

WOW ! I had no idea that the 2 closest personal aides of WJ are headed for prison, or had even been charged !
Great job covering it all up MSM... you've done a wonderful job protecting the corrupt deomcrats.

As NewsBusters previously reported, there is a climate change skeptics conference going on in Canberra, Australia. One of the function’s organizers is the influential Lavoisier Group whose co-founder Ray Evans has written a fascinating publication on this subject that the media and global warming alarmists would hate for Americans to read.

Simply called “Nine Facts About Climate Change,” this piece carefully outlined the major issues concerning the anthropogenic global warming debate while countering claims by the alarmists including former Vice President Al Gore.

Evans wonderfully categorized the problem at hand in his introduction (emphasis mine throughout):

MRC's Business & Media Institute director Dan Gainor appeared on "Your World with Neil Cavuto" earlier to talk about the way the media covered yesterday's stock market slide.

"CBS, which always ends up being the worst in all of our studies for covering the economy, took a 3 percent drop and turned it into a disastrous, uh -- made it look like it's, you know, the end of the world," Gainor told Fox News Channel viewers.

As for any good economic news, "they buried it in the middle of a report" and then compared it to the two biggest stock losses in history, Gainor continued.

Video (59 seconds): Real (1.6MB) or Windows (1.88 MB), plus MP3 (285KB)

I subscribe to e-mailed breaking news alerts from both Fox News and CNN. Out of curiosity today, I reviewed the news alerts about the market's performance from yesterday's precipitous drop and today's rally.

I found that yesterday Fox issued two alerts to CNN's one. Today, Fox sent an e-mail update about the market's 50-point gain for the day. No such e-mail was issued from CNN, however.

I took the liberty to lift the text from the updates. Here they are in chronological order from earliest to latest:

Fox News breaking news update | 2/27/2007, 15:07 EST

DOW INDUSTRIALS FALL MORE THAN 500 POINTS ON FEARS OF ECONOMIC SLOWDOWN IN U.S., CHINA AND EUROPE

CNN Breaking News | 2/27/2007, 16:05 EST

-- The Dow sees its biggest one-day drop in 3 years, ending about 400 points lower after plummeting more than 500 points earlier in the day. More soon.

• Ken Shepherd's blog
• 9 comments
• Read more

Duke lacrosse DA... AP

The prosecutor who drove the Duke lacrosse rape investigation didn't intentionally break any ethics rules, his attorneys said Wednesday as they argued that part of the state bar complaint that could lead to his disbarment be dismissed. ...

"A lot of people have been rushing to judgment on both the underlying case and this case," said Dudley Witt, one of Nifong's Winston-Salem-based attorneys. "And after you allow someone to have a full hearing, I think you will find that he didn't do anything wrong."

Wasn't it Sen Clinton who 'didn't intentionally' goofed on her taxes?

Considering that 'a lot of people have been rushed to judgement', why are we overlooking the real victims, the players?

Fresh off his Oscar coronation, Al Gore is stepping up his jihad  against global warming skeptics by continuing his campaign to stop the media from covering their viewpoint at all.

In a speech delivered Tuesday, Gore blasted media organizations for giving any credence at all to people who see things differently than him on global warming. The former veep denounced what he termed "balance as bias" in environment reporting:

Gore told a crowd of about 50 people at the U.S. Media Ethics Summit II that the presentation's single most provocative slide was one that contrasts results of two long-term studies. A 10-year University of California study found that essentially zero percent of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles disagreed that global warming exists, whereas, another study found that 53 percent of mainstream newspaper articles disagreed the global warming premise.

Why is it that conservative characters on prime time television, what few of them there are, almost always end up "evolving" into fuzzy liberals? "Entertainment Weekly" columnist Mark Harris asked that very question in the current issue of the media magazine [Emphasis added]:

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

Left wing inflammatory comments continue on The View. On the February 28th edition, co-host Joy Behar lashed out calling the American people "to really wake up and understand that they [the Bush administration] are liars and they are murderers."

Token non-liberal Elisabeth Hasselbeck tried to insert some common sense and stated that "some fringe liberals are taking this to a place to where we’re losing sight on the issue here." Behar, who just called the Bush administration, "liars" and "murderers" adamantly denied she’s a "fringe liberal" and said it’s "name calling."

The ladies discussed the Bob Woodruff special, To Iraq and Back, and shifted to the policy of not filming the arrival of coffins at Dover Air Force Base. The transcript is below.

Video clip (35 seconds): Real (1 MB) or Windows Media (1.16 MB), plus MP3 audio (180 KB)

It's one story that would seem to be of interest to the New York Times political blog "The Caucus" -- the nutty rants of the left-wing Huffington Post community and others, after Tuesday's news that a suicide bomber had blown himself up outside a military base in Afghanistan where Vice President Dick Cheney was staying.

Many Huffpost commenters posted regrets that the bomber had not managed to assassinate Cheney (the offensive comments have since been removed from the site, but Michelle Malkin reprints some and has a link to the full slimy set).

Update/Correction (3/1/2007, 10:32 EST): Oops. Ted Olsen is the online managing editor for Christianity Today and he e-mailed me to point out his byline as the "former solicitor general" was part of the satire. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go have lunch with James Cameron...

Former solicitor general Ted Olsen wrote a brief satire that illustrates the absurdity of filmmaker James Cameron's belief that he's found the remains of Christ because he found a family tomb in Israel bearing the names Jesus and Mary. It's posted at Christianity Today's Web log.

Here's an excerpt, you can find the full "interview" here.:

So, tell us about your interest in the historical Jesus.

Um, I guess I'm interested in Jesus, yeah. Where did you say you were from, again?

Christianity Today magazine.

Are you selling subscriptions or something?

No, we want to talk about your documentary.

What?

The one about Jesus' tomb.

Um, yeah, I think you have the wrong guy. I think you want the other James Cameron.

You're not James Cameron?

It's a tried and true tactic of interest groups seeking to influence public opinion -- and legislative policy -- on a controversial issue. Find the most sympathetic individual case you can, and get the media to focus on that, rather than on the broaders merits of the matter. A prime example of the phenomenon was on display today at Good Morning America. Congressman Marty Meehan [D-MA] has introduced legislation that would repeal the Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell policy, with the result that gays would be able to serve openly in the military. Hearings are scheduled to begin soon.

ABC senior national correspondent Jake Tapper narrated a segment on Marine Staff Sergeant Eric Alva [ret], described as the first member of the US military seriously injured in the Iraq invasion, losing a leg and part of a hand. In conjunction with the debate on the bill, Sergeant Alva publicly announced, apparently for the first time today, that he is gay.

Tapper interviewed Sergeant Alva at the offices of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group. Later in the segment, we heard from Dixon Osburn of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, another gay rights group that focuses specifically on gays in the military. It seems likely that one or both of these groups have identified Alva as a spokesman, then took his story to ABC, which ran with it.

View video here.

Sir Arvi Parbo is likely not a household name in America. However, the knighted business mogul originally from Estonia is highly regarded in Australia, so much so that he was the keynote speaker at Wednesday’s gathering of climate change skeptics in Canberra.

As reported by News.com, during his address, Sir Parbo had some rather harsh words for Dr. Global Warming, aka Al Gore, as well as for all alarmists including those in the media:

A CONCERTED and well-organised campaign has created alarm over human-induced climate change, industrial magnate Sir Arvi Parbo says.

Sir Arvi also said today key international reports warning of climate change, including Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth, are biased and scrutiny of them has been suppressed. [emphasis added in second paragraph]

Sir Arvi was just getting warmed up (emphasis mine throughout):

While journalists howl at the indignity of Helen Thomas being moved about six feet, from the first row to the second row of the new White House press room, there’s been relative silence about the Cuban dictatorship’s expulsion of Western journalists who published stories unflattering to the communist leadership.

[update added at the end of original post]

Today’s Investor’s Business Daily says the expulsion of the Chicago Tribune’s Gary Marx, the BBC’s Stephen Gibbs and Mexico’s El Universal reporter Cesar Gonzalez-Calero “was a minor story, but shouldn’t be.” With these three paying a penalty for reporting the uncomfortable truths about Castro’s dying dictatorship, IBD correctly asks “why the remaining correspondents inside Cuba aren’t red-faced about not being thrown out.”

Folks that aren’t familiar with columnist James Lileks will be pleasantly surprised by his recent op-ed concerning Sunday’s Academy Awards and the Church of Global Warming. As published by Newhouse News Services, Lileks marvelously observed (emphasis mine throughout):

If environmentalism is the new religion, the Oscar ceremony was the High Holy Mass.

Of course, if the Academy — a remarkable name for people who paint their faces and pretend they're secret agents or royalty — were truly serious about imminent global warming, it would have asked everyone to turn off their TVs and receive the results by some low-impact Earth-friendly means, such as carrier pigeon. Perhaps such drastic measures will be used in 2008, by which time the oceans will have risen 37 feet and everyone east of Cleveland will be clustered on the roof.

How delicious. Lileks continued:

Comment on news of the day and anything else.

Most people who tune in to morning TV "news" programs know the unbearable lightness of the product, full of celebrity cotton candy and tragic tales of tabloid woe, of climbers lost on mountains and teenagers lost in the tropics. So it was a little shocking to be diverted from that maudlin box of info-bon bons known as the Anna Nicole Smith deathmatch to questions on the grand and glorious subject of Biblical anthropology, and a "discovery" of the alleged bones of Jesus.

Why this whiplash-inducing change of subject? It's sad but true that the "Today" crew went into promotional hyperdrive for the Discovery Channel special on the alleged bones of Jesus because someone spread Hollywood glitter on it -- James Cameron, the director of "Titanic." (Christians are joking among themselves that Cameron doesn't seem to know who the real King of the World is.)  The Cameron connection has been a constant attraction for The Discovery Channel. 

NewsBusters has reported for months how the mainstream media did an absolutely lousy job covering the controversy surrounding former President Jimmy Carter’s book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict [see editor's note at bottom of post]. As odd as it may seem, the ombudsman for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution agreed with us.

Angela Tuck, the AJC’s public editor, wrote the following on February 24 (emphasis mine throughout):

The controversy surrounding former President Jimmy Carter's book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the story that won't go away. And frankly, this newspaper was slow to cover the book and the firestorm it created.

That was only the beginning of this fabulous account of liberal media bias that would make Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly proud:

It goes without saying that few people in America are aware that a former head of the ACLU in Virginia was arrested last week and charged with possession of child pornography.

Why might that be?

Well, America’s media chose not to report it, and according to Bill O’Reilly, it’s because “journalism in this country is at a low point.”

*****Update: video available here.

On Monday, the host of Fox News’s “O’Reilly Factor” took issue with this tremendous double standard concerning obvious omissions in reporting by the press when stories go counter to their prescribed liberal agenda. O’Reilly began:

When is a newspaper unable to determine the political ideology of someone despite an overwhelming body of evidence that clearly shows what his politics are? It happens when the person in question is a deranged Leftwing stalker whose antics are so embarrassing that liberals are anxious to not be identified with him.

Such was the case with Andrew Stone (pictured), a Leftwing stalker whose home invasion of a Republican was chronicled by Michelle Malkin. As reported by Malkin, Stone stalked University of Mary Washington student, Richard Reed Pannell, whose "high crime" as stated in his Facebook account, was being a College Republican. After finding Pannell's home address in Facebook, Stone showed up at the address pretending to be a military recruiter. Here is what happened next as posted by Malkin:

This is stunning, either in its ignorance or its misdirection (bold is mine):

Did the Drudge Report Help Tank the Stock Market?

Here's a headline sure to spook any investor or economist: "Greenspan warns of likely U.S. recession." That was the headline right near the top of the widely surfed Drudge Report yesterday afternoon and this morning, referring to a speech that former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan made the other day via satellite to a business conference in Hong Kong. Many market watchers are blaming those comments– along with a weak durable goods report and the plunge in the Chinese stock market – for today's stock market sell-off. But despite the inflammatory Drudge headline – which, in all fairness, linked to an Associated Press story with that same title – the Maestro was hardly so definitive as Drudge made him out to be. Here is what Greenspan said, according to AP:

The New York Post today has laid out the sordid tale of the AP's lionization of a convicted cop-killer, calling this criminal a "former freedom fighter."

The Post did a great Newsbusteresque job of detailing the AP's disgusting hero worship of this murderer, so I'll let them take it from here...

AP's Ode to a Cop-Killer

February 28, 2007 -- To those who remember the infamous 1981 Brinks heist in N