The broadcast network evening newscasts, which didn't care in 1993 about the Clinton administration's decision to ask for the resignations of all 93 U.S. attorneys, went apoplectic Tuesday night in leading with the “controversy,” fed by the media, over the Bush administration for replacing eight U.S. attorneys in late 2006 -- nearly two years after rejecting the idea of following the Clinton policy of replacing all the attorneys. Anchor Charles Gibson promised that ABC would “look at all the angles tonight,” but he skipped the Clinton comparison. Gibson teased: “New controversy at the White House after a string of U.S. attorneys is fired under questionable circumstances. There are calls for the Attorney General to resign.”

CBS's Katie Couric declared that “the uproar is growing tonight over the firing of eight federal prosecutors by the Justice Department” and fill-in NBC anchor Campbell Brown teased: “The Attorney General and the firestorm tonight over the controversial dismissal of several federal prosecutors. Was it political punishment?” Brown soon asserted that “it's a story that has been brewing for weeks and it exploded today” -- an explosion fueled by the news media.

Brit Hume led his Tuesday night Grapevine segment by scolding his media colleagues for how “news stories reporting that the Bush administration had considered firing all 93 U.S. attorneys across the country failed to mention that that is exactly what Bill Clinton did soon after taking office back in 1993.” Hume explained how that was not noted, “even in passing, in front-page stories today in the New York Times and the Washington Post, or in the AP's story on the subject.”

Earlier in the FNC newscast, reporter Steve Centanni pointed out how “the White House acknowledged there were talks in 2005, just after the President won his second term, about terminating all 93 U.S. attorneys just as President Clinton unceremoniously did 1993 after he won the White House.”

CBS legal expert Andrew Cohen took to the "Couric & Co." blog to blast Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as a Bush toadie, then turned to law scholars with a history of donating to liberal Democratic candidates to back up his claims.

We’ve indeed got trouble. Few attorneys general in recent history have
been more beholden to their President than Gonzales is to President
George W. Bush. In fact, two years ago, when asked by the Academy of
Achievement to list his role models, Gonzales listed his mother, his
father, and the President as the three people to whom he owed the most.
This would be more charming if the Attorney General had during the past
two years stood up to his hero-- on domestic surveillance, on
Guantanamo Bay, on protecting good federal prosecutors—instead of
simply defending or justifying White House policies and practices.

So, in essence, Cohen asserted that Gonzales has no independent thought on his own because Gonzales failed to act how Cohen thinks he should have. That is, Gonzales is at fault for doing his job: crafting and implementing the president's legal strategy for the war on terror.

Not content to leave his gripe with Gonzales as a matter of personal opinion, Cohen brought in two ostensibly politically neutral legal experts to lend credence to his attack on the attorney general's performance in office: Stanley Kutler of the University of Wisconsin and Stanley Katz of Princeton University.

Cohen was particularly enamored with Katz, quoting him as he closed his March 13 blog post:

The March 13 Washington Post erupted on the front page with the revelation that the White House played a role in the dismissal of eight U.S. Attorneys. "Firings Had Genesis In White House," screamed the headline. Documents showed that back in 2005, White House counsel Harriet Miers recommended the idea to the Justice Department that all 93 U.S. Attorneys be replaced. Instead, the Bush team dismissed only eight.

But something quite amazing was omitted by those hard-charging Post reporters Dan Eggen and John Solomon digging through White House E-mails for their scandalized front-page bombshell. Didn’t Bill Clinton’s brand new Attorney General Janet Reno demand resignations from all 93 U.S. attorneys on March 24, 1993? Wouldn’t that fact be relevant to the story? Wouldn’t it have the effect of lessening the oh-my-God hyperbole on the front page if the reader was shown that what Bush did was one-tenth as dramatic as what Team Clinton did? Yes, and yes.

Another left winger appeared on "The View." This time it was Roseanne Barr who felt she knew everything because she’s "old," claimed to stump for the middle and working class while admitting she’s rich, bashed the late Ronald Reagan, praised Rosie O’Donnell, and hinted at the left wing election "fixing" conspiracy theory.

Roseanne started with her explanation on why she thinks she knows everything, then demonstrated her love for her favorite "View" co-hosts, Rosie O’Donnell and Joy Behar. She even added that Rosie made this a "very intellectual hour." The multimillionaire comedienne proceeded to bring in her class warfare pitch by bashing the late President Ronald Reagan and then discussed with four rich women the horror that "most people like to hang out with rich people. They don’t give a damn about anyone else." The four rich co-hosts agreed.

Rosie, Roseanne, and Joy agreed on some commonly held left wing conspiracy theories. Roseanne called on "people who fix elections" to "let a Democrat in the next time." Then of course, much of the media feeds us is "the art of distraction." The transcript from key points of the discussion is below.

NBC's Today rolled out a rainbow-colored carpet for the gay-left Human Rights Campaign late on Monday morning's show. Eighties pop star Cyndi Lauper appeared to sing her hit "True Colors" and announce the HRC’s fundraising "True Colors Tour." She also bashed social conservatives for being against freedom for gays in America: "you're taught home of the free, you know, except for you guys there, not, not you."

Co-host Meredith Vieira played the publicist alongside her, asking her to explain how a dollar from every ticket goes to "something very important," that being the Human Rights Campaign. Not "something very liberal" or "something very pro-Hillary." When Lauper added other gay-activist groups as sponsors, Vieira could only manage an "Oh, terrific!"

On Monday’s "Nightline," the ABC program continued the media’s fascination with the Mayan "spiritual leaders" who protested a recent visit to Guatemala by President Bush. According to anchor Cynthia McFadden, "some say he's angered the gods."

While footage onscreen showed Uruguayan demonstrators (from a previous portion of the trip) burning an American flag, Reporter Jessica Yellin noted that "many in the region don’t care for Mr. Bush" and seriously reported on the President’s "bad vibes":

JESSICA YELLIN: "The spiritual leaders of the Guatemala's indigenous Mayan population are also worried about the President's bad vibes. They will perform a special cleansing ceremony to clear away the bad energy they say he left during his visit."

As most people are likely aware, the Democrats have pulled out of a presidential debate to be held in Nevada this August. Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly was none too pleased about this announcement, and made his feelings known Monday evening (video available here):   

The dishonesty of the far left on display again…Within the Democratic party, there are two elements, moderate Dems and radical left Dems. The radical movement is funded by George Soros and Peter Lewis, who pour millions of dollars into candidates and websites like MoveOn to do their bidding. Soros and Lewis have given MoveOn at least $5 million.

That was just the beginning. I suggest you fasten your seatbelts, for O’Reilly was loaded for bear:

MRC director of media analysis Tim Graham appeared Monday night near the top of FNC’s The Big Story with John Gibson. The topic was a Los Angeles Times editorial attacking “General Pelosi” for trying to micromanage the war, when the Times felt she should either support it or cut its funding off.

Tim said the weird thing about Speaker Pelosi news coverage is “just how absent she’s been from the national discussion. She was sworn in in January with all kinds of pomp and circumstance, and promptly went into a closet, never to return…When you watch television today, the only way you really see Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats are still those un-powerful critics of Bush who can’t seem to stop the surge, who can’t seem to cut the funding off, and now you as you said, you have the left-wingers going out and protesting her in San Francisco like she’s somehow not an ultraliberal." Video clip: Real (1.92 MB) or Windows (1.6 MB), plus MP3 (773 KB)

[Scroll below for 5:24pm EDT] On Tuesday’s "Good Morning America," ABC anchor Robin Roberts speculated and fretted over the allegations that some U.S. attorneys were fired because they wouldn’t aggressively investigate Democrats. Roberts dramatically stated that the firings highlight "a trail that points straight to the top" and wondered "how big could this be?"

Yet when President Clinton fired 93 attorneys at the beginning of his first term, ABC never mentioned the story.

The entire GMA report, filed by correspondent Pierre Thomas, was framed from the perspective of how the Democrats perceive this growing scandal and whom they suspect:

Mmm. Fresh open thread...

Please forgive the slightly vulgar headline, but HBO’s Bill Maher was Larry King’s guest on CNN Monday evening. As one would expect, the controversial comedian pulled no punches concerning his views about current events, and seemed to have the term in question quite on his mind.

For instance, Maher suggested what Ann Coulter really meant with her remark at CPAC about John Edwards was the following: "[It's code word for the Democrats are -- I hope I can say this -- you said faggot -- pussies.”

A tad later, Maher once again used this term to describe the left when he castigated Democrats for pulling out of the scheduled debate in Nevada due to the host station being Fox News. Maher declared emphatically, “They're pussies!”

In order for the context of his remarks to make sense, a partial transcript of this sequence follows for your entertainment pleasure (h/t Hot Air with video available here):

March 12, 2007, was a lousy day for soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore and his not so merry band of global warming alarmists.

Shortly before the publishing of a New York Times article discrediting some of the junk science on display in his schlockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” a poll was released by the Gallup Organization with the damning headline:

To Americans, The Risks of Global Warming Are Not Imminent

Daniel Powter better get ready, for this certainly wasn't a fine beginning of the week for the man who would be global warming king (emphasis mine throughout):

This is a Sunday Morning show called FLASHPOINT in Oklahoma City.
Hosted by local news anchor, co-hosted by local ex-politicians (big 'un is the DEM, thin one is the REPUB)
These links will pop-up the local ABC affiliate's web-player window.

It's worth it. Coburn is freaking brilliant.

from Feb 25th, 2007

PART 1
http://www.kfor.com/...

PART 2
http://www.kfor.com/...

Be on the watch for the spin. The Georgia State Supreme Court will be deciding an issue that has been bouncing around the courts since 2005. At stake is the state's attempt to reduce election fraud by requiring that all voters show a government sanctioned picture ID in order to vote.

Seems simple, right? Wrong.

The typical detractors, the ones who usually cry voter fraud whenever their favorite pet candidates lose at the polls, are the same groups that are upset over the ID requirement! They argue that the ID requirement is a poll tax that disenfranchises poor people by requiring that they pay to vote. The illogic being applied here is that ids cost money and that poor people are being disenfranchised because they can't afford the expense.

Here is an example of how the issue has been twisted by your typical activists in the mainstream media:

Washington Post arts critic Philip Kennicott is enraptured in Tuesday's paper that an annual lecture sponsored by the federal-arts-subsidy lobby had evolved from "conservative curmudgeon" William Safire to a more traditional "bold and perhaps even controversial speech that included sustained criticism of religious fundamentalism." From who? Former PBS anchor Robert MacNeil, who used to be one-half of the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour. Like your average liberal media anchor, MacNeil wouldn't know a fundamentalist from an evangelical from an orthodox Catholic as he lectured (sigh) that Christian fundamentalists are awfully similar to Islamic fundamentalists:

"It is inevitable that artists should become the targets of such fundamentalist anxieties," he said. "Because it is in the nature of artists to push the frontiers of taste and morality, to show society both its pieties and its hypocrisies."

Assembling a panel to discuss how the presidential contenders' marital histories may affect their candidacies, "Today" resorted to one of its favorite tricks this morning -- faux balance, in which a loyal Dem is which is matched with a renegade former Republican. Former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers was paired with Bay Buchanan,  who served as her brother Pat's campaign manager when he left the GOP and ran against George W. Bush as a third-party candidate in 2000.

The strategy paid dividends from NBC's perspective, as two of the roughest shots at the Republicans were taken by Bay. Consider these two bombs Bay dropped.

Regarding Rudy: "If they [responding to a question about Rudy] will treat their wives this way, with such disregard, their children, allow this kind of marriage to collapse in a public way, the voters don't have a prayer of a chance. You can't believe a word the man says."

Regarding Newt: "His first marriage, divorce, is going to be very critical, he delivered the divorce papers to his wife who was in a hospital bed being diagnosed with breast cancer. I can't find a lot of women who are going to vote for a man who did something like that."

View video here.

Unbelievably, disgraced newsreader, Dan Rather, claimed at a recent festival that American journalism "has in some ways lost its guts" and that the MSM has "adopted the go-along-to-get-along (attitude)."

As reported by CNETNews.com, Rather was a keynote speaker at the South by Southwest Interactive festival this past weekend where he gave a 2 hour talk on the shape of journalism and the Internet.

One has to wonder to which "gutless" American media he is referring? Is it the same media that was so weak-kneed as to leak damaging national security information, the same media that just "goes along" to undermine the war effort at every opportunity? Is it the same one that goes out of its way to malign the US and Israeli governments? It is that MSM Rather imagines has somehow gone soft?

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

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

ABC's World News on Sunday served as the latest example of media reluctance to label liberal public figures as "liberal" while more freely labeling conservative or moderate public figures as "conservative." During a story on the Democratic party's division on whether to push for a deadline for troop withdrawal from Iraq, correspondent John Hendren labeled those Democrats who oppose such a timetable as "conservative Democrats," but when discussing Democrats who support a faster withdrawal, he simply referred to them as "those who want to end the war and bring the troops home" or "those favoring immediate withdrawal."

Notably, the congressional Democrat who was featured as a supporter of a timetable, California Representative Lynn Woolsey, has a lifetime American Conservative Union rating of 4.3 percent. And for the year 2006, the liberal Americans for Democratic Action awarded Woolsey a rating of 95 percent. Tennessee Representative Jim Cooper, who was labeled by Hendren as a "conservative Democrat," received a lifetime rating of 27.3 percent from the American Conservative Union and, for the year 2006, Americans for Democratic Action awarded him an 85 percent rating. (Transcript follows)

...among other format changes under the new Rick Kaplan era.

PublicEye editor Brian Montopoli passed along the usual talking points senior management in broadcast news outlets always give when they are trying to save a sinking ship. You know the drill. "This time, more hard news. We swear!"

Unfortunately Montopoli left out some hard news in his own March 12 blog post: