Half-serious warning: those with heart conditions are advised to have their medications handy when reading this.

With Democrats in congressional power, are leftists feeling suddenly empowered to express formerly taboo views? First came a column in the Los Angeles Times arguing we have overreacted to 9-11. Now comes Washington Post columnist William Arkin to express contempt for our troops and question how much we really owe them after all.

Excerpts from The Troops Also Need to Support the American People:

• "I've been mulling over an NBC Nightly News report from Iraq last Friday in which a number of soldiers expressed frustration with opposition to war in the United States. I'm all for everyone expressing their opinion, even those who wear the uniform of the United States Army. But I also hope that military commanders took the soldiers aside after the story and explained to them why it wasn't for them to disapprove of the American people."
• "These soldiers should be grateful that the American public, which by all polls overwhelmingly disapproves of the Iraq war and the President's handling of it, do still offer their support to them, and their respect."
• "Through every Abu Ghraib and Haditha, through every rape and murder, the American public has indulged those in uniform, accepting that the incidents were the product of bad apples or even of some administration or command order."
• "We pay the soldiers a decent wage, take care of their families, provide them with housing and medical care and vast social support systems and ship obscene amenities into the war zone for them, we support them in every possible way, and their attitude is that we should in addition roll over and play dead, defer to the military and the generals and let them fight their war, and give up our rights and responsibilities to speak up because they are above society?"
  
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Discuss amongst yourselves...

Brooklyn College professor Robert KC Johnson has done more than anyone except defense attorneys to expose the investigative and legal travesties of what’s really the DA Nifong Hoax case but is usually called the Duke lacrosse case.

Johnson hasn’t just taken on Nifong and certain Durham police officers who conspired to frame the players. He’s also called attention to those such as Duke’s administration, much of it’s faculty, and some media and “rights groups,” who by silence or active encouragement, have enabled the ten month long series of injustices that grew from the false witness made at Duke Hospital the morning of March 14, 2006.

The New York Times has been one of Nifong’s most consistent enablers.

Johnson takes The Times on in a NY Post op-ed which begins:

Democratic presidential candidate (for now, anyway) Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware got headlines for all the wrong reasons yesterday when he referred to Sen. Barack Obama, who's also running for president, as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" in an interview with the New York Observer.

"Biden Unwraps His Bid for '08 With an Oops!" read the headline over Adam Nagourney's Thursday story in the New York Times. Credit the Times for putting it on the front page, and to Nagourney for bringing up Biden's equally strange comment last summer that aired on C-Span: “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”

There was an extraordinary debate about global warming on CNN’s “Larry King Live” Wednesday night that perfectly demonstrated the battle that is waging on this issue. In particular, it marvelously depicted the hysteria being exhibited by the media versus the reason of those who actually make a living analyzing the problem.

For instance, King began the discussion:

Tonight, what is global warming? Could it really kill us all, submerge cities like New York and Washington and San Francisco under floods from melting Arctic ice caps? Cause deadly heat waves lasting weeks? Would such a disaster be manmade?

Some bedside manner, wouldn’t you agree?

After playing some video clips of frightened Senators, and a petrified Al Gore, King turned to Weather Channel climate expert Heidi Cullen:

Most media storylines on the economy are predictable. Tax cuts "cost" the government money. The wealthy don't pay their fair share, and, socialized medicine is the only comprehensive way to address health care problems.

That last one's been in vogue lately as Democrats have raised health care as part of their "100 Hours" agenda. So our very own Julia Seymour took a look at the media's push for Big Brother to play doctor to 300 million Americans.

You can find that here.

But then there's the ones that are just patently laughable. Like where the media pick the interests of say fish, over people. Look to none other than our friends at The Washington Post for that one. You can find our writeup on that here.:

Like describing a spiral staircase without using your hands, "Today" pulled off the impressive feat this morning of getting through an entire segment about the UK terror plot uncovered yesterday without once mentioning that the suspects are Muslim. Oh, the word "Muslim" did pop up - but only or purposes of describing the intended victim of the plot and concerned area residents.

NBC's Keith Miller reported from London, mentioned that "the alleged target of the kidnaping [was] a British Muslim soldier on leave from Afghanistan."

View edited video clip here.

In our continuing calvalcade of coverage of the Biden "clean and articulate" comments, we thought it would be interesting to see how three of the leading liberal newspapers treated the story on their respective front pages this morning.

At the New York Times, the headline on the smallish front-page article brought a dash of downplaying humor to the story: "Biden Unwraps His Bid for ’08 With an Oops!"

But that was better than nothing - which was exactly how much coverage the Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times devoted to the story on their front pages.

Now, you might cut the Globe some slack since Beantown was focused on the Turner Broadcasting System marketing stunt for a Cartoon Network television show that littered the city with small battery-powered light screens, igniting fears of terrorism and shutting down much of the city for the day. Even so, the Globe editors found room on the front page for a variety of other stories including one on a pol caught in a sick leave scandal.

In any case, what's the LA Times excuse? Not a word about Biden on the front page, but plenty of inches for such vital matters as Las Vegas side bets on whether Prince will rip his pants during the Superbowl half-time show.

Jonah Goldberg at The Corner noticed the Associated Press covered the budget process with more attitude than objectivity with this introduction from reporter Andrew Taylor:

"The House passed a $463.5 billion spending bill Wednesday that covers about one-sixth of the federal budget as Democrats cleared away the financial mess they inherited from Republicans."

Cleared away the financial mess, all in one spending bill? That's not just editorializing, it's bald-faced partisan rhetoric, not fact. Just paragraphs later, Taylor suggests the Democrats are still a lot like Republicans:

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

Does Barack Obama have a thick enough skin to survive another nineteen months of constant media attention and scrutiny on the presidential campaign trail?

An article by the Washington Post’s Mary Ann Akers has to make one wonder (emphasis mine throughout):

Sources tell The Sleuth that the Obama camp has "frozen out" Fox News reporters and producers in the wake of the network's major screw-up in running with the erroneous Obama-the-jihadist story reported by Insight magazine.

Please tell us more, Sleuthy. As you might imagine given the subject matter, we're all ears:

The House Democrats got big media publicity for a huff-and-puff committee session on global warming this week, yet no one seems to have noticed that on the hot-button issue of Iraq, the congress which has been clamoring for "oversight" opportunities wasn't as interested Wednesday morning:

Though all 435 members of the House were invited to participate in a classified briefing Wednesday morning providing an update on implementation of the president's surge strategy in Iraq, only about 25-30 members accepted the invitation.

The two-hour closed event at started at 8:00 a.m. EST. Members who attended told FOX News that the meeting was "helpful" and "useful" in that the officials essentially confirmed a lot of what has been reported publicly about the strategy.

Department of Defense Undersecretary for Policy Eric Edelman, who was testifying later in the day to the Senate Armed Services Committee on the troop surge, appeared with the directors of intelligence and operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a high ranking State Department official, for a closed-door briefing.