An article by Stephanie Simon in today's Los Angeles Times (Wednesday, March 21, 2007) states that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger "did not support coerced birth control." However, Sanger's own words suggest otherwise (all emphasis mine):

"[M]odern society ... is now confronted with the problem of protecting itself and its future generations against the inevitable consequences of this long-practised policy of LAISSER-FAIRE.

"The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization must be faced immediately. Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period. Otherwise, she is almost certain to bear imbecile children, who in turn are just as certain to breed other defectives. The male defectives are no less dangerous. Segregation carried out for one or two generations would give us only partial control of the problem. Moreover, when we realize that each feeble-minded person is a potential source of an endless progeny of defect, we prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded.

ABC anchor Charles Gibson teased his lead Wednesday night story by touting how “Al Gore goes back to Capitol Hill for the first time since the year 2000 and finds a heated debate on global warming.” But the broadcast network evening newscasts didn't get to the debate. They were too busy trumpeting Gore's cause and barely touching his critics. ABC's Kate Snow gave a doubter ten words before running a much longer laudatory clip from former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill) which ended with Hastert calling Gore “a movie star.” When Gore demurred that “I just have a slide show,” Snow, far from exploring the “debate,” endorsed the premises of Gore's most dire ideas: “Of course, that slide show won an Oscar. And the man dubbed the 'Goracle' now jets around the planet trying to save it. Gore today called on Congress to freeze carbon emissions and figure out how to drastically reduce all greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050. The message endorsed by much of the scientific community.”

With “Planetary Emergency” on screen, NBC anchor Brian Williams excitedly announced, “Look who was back on Capitol Hill today: Al Gore.” Over on CBS, Katie Couric celebrated “a lot of excitement on Capitol Hill. A movie star showed up to testify before Congress -- a movie star named Al Gore.” Gloria Borger recalled that “the last time Gore appeared on Capitol Hill was in his official role as Vice President, certifying his own loss in the disputed 2000 election,” but she championed how “he came back today as a winner, his popular movie, An Inconvenient Truth, grabbing an Oscar.” Borger concluded: “Gore could still get in late and run for President. Maybe that's why Hillary Clinton didn't gush all over him today like her fellow Democrats.” What excuse do journalists have for their gushing?

Since Katie Couric is so fond of reporting on France’s utopian workforce, will she report French enthusiasm for…the mostly-capitalist England? Couric once salivated over the French socialist version of what the US business could be if only America let go of that ridiculous capitalist "anti-worker" propaganda that brainwashes people into thinking there is nothing wrong with a little hard work and the silly, old-fashioned idea that the customer is always right, not the employee. According to Katie and the other socialist cheerleaders, the French love their worker’s paradise, right? Well, according to this Reuters article on Yahoo, not all of them do:

Perhaps channeling her youthful experience as a cheerleader, CBS's Katie Couric pumped her rhetorical pom poms for Al Gore in a "Couric & Co." blog today.

Below you can see how she lauded his "triumphant" return to Congress on her "Couric & Co." blog at CBSNews.com, all the while insisting "scientific consensus" is on Gore's side and that Congress should "act boldly" on the issue.

Portions in bold are my emphasis:

Here we go again...another forecast for an "exceptionally active" hurricane season. Last spring, similar forecasts were touted following the horrific 2005 hurricane season. But what went largely unreported regarding last year's hurricane season was how quiet it ended up being and how horribly incorrect those forecasts were. Obviously we have yet to know how accurate this year's forecasts will be; only time will tell. At least a few big names are going on record as forecasting another busier-than-average season. I would imagine this will grab plenty of headlines over the coming days:

“Sixty bucks! That’s ridiculous,” said one woman filling up her gas tank, on ABC’s “World News with Charles Gibson” March 12.

Consumer complaints and frequent mentions of "the most expensive gasoline" in the country are used by the media to hype rising gas prices. And what state has the most expensive gasoline? California.

“Let me show you what is the most expensive gasoline location in the country. A gallon of unleaded in California right now going for $3.08 a gallon,” said NBC reporter Tom Costello during the March 12 “Nightly News.”

Costello's report, like many others on NBC, CBS and ABC left out the explanation for exorbitant prices at California pumps: higher taxes and excessive environmental regulation.

An interesting event took place during soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore’s visit to Congress on Wednesday. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) asked the former Vice President to take a pledge that he would not use more energy in his personal residence than the average American, and Gore refused (video available here).

As reported at the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works website: "Senator Inhofe showed Gore a film frame from 'An Inconvenient Truth' where it asks viewers: 'Are you ready to change the way you live?'” 

On the playground, one would call this “Put up or Shut up.” Do you think Gore put up? The press release deliciously continued:

Judging by the excerpt Tucker Carlson played on his MSNBC show this afternoon at about 4:15 PM ET, Richard Engel's War Zone Diary is a powerful and moving documentary of the NBC reporter's experiences in Iraq. To his credit, Engel has accompanied troops on many combat patrols. Among other clips, we saw particularly compelling footage of Marines on a night mission in the mean streets of Ramadi, in Anbar province, searching for - and finding unharmed - one of their comrades who had gotten separated during an earlier patrol there.

Speaking of combat, Engel did at at one point state that "it is very brutal but after some time you do start to see things from their [U.S. soldiers' and Marines'] perspective."

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

CNN anchor Don Lemon just couldn’t resist editorializing over liberal Senator Barbara Boxer’s slam against a conservative colleague, James Inhofe. During the 3pm EDT hour of the "CNN Newsroom" program, anchors Lemon and Brianna Keilar played a contentious exchange between Boxer and Inhofe in which the Democratic Senator chastised the Republican for interrupting former Vice President Al Gore’s global warming testimony. After the clip, this exchange followed:

Video clip: Real (1.6 MB) or Windows (1.8 MB) plus MP3 audio (280 KB)

Brianna Keilar: "Wow. All right. That was quite an exchange. And, you know, we were expecting something from Senator James Inhofe. He is a critic of global warming....We thought maybe it might be with him and former Senator, former Vice President Al Gore, but it ended up between him and Senator Barbara Boxer. She really got a stinger in there, I will say."

Don Lemon: [Laughs, then quietly] "Good for her."

On Wednesday’s "American Morning," CNN co-host Soledad O’Brien must have surprised former Clinton administration official and Illinois Representative Rahm Emanuel (D) with a tough question concerning the Bush administration’s use of executive privilege versus the Clinton administration’s use. Emanuel tried to claim the privilege is usually "reserved for national security," which even CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin wasn’t buying. Here’s the exchange:

SOLEDAD O’BRIEN: "You worked in the White House, the Clinton Administration, where they claimed executive privilege for Bruce Lindsey and for Sidney Blumenthal in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, essentially. Why that time around was the efforts you made -- it failed, but there was an effort to say executive privilege. Let's protect these guys. They shouldn't have to go testify before Congress. It failed. But that was what was claimed, so why this time around does it not seem fair?"

As most of you know, former Vice President and soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore spoke in front of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and the House Committee on Science and Technology Wednesday about the dangers of anthropogenic global warming (video available here).

What you probably didn't know is that the global warmingest-in-chief actually recommended a tax on pollution to solve the problem.

I kid you not.

*****Update: Prepared text of Gore's testimony is available here.

As ABC News reported (emphasis added):

"The Early Show" continued its double standard treatment of Democrats and Republicans. "Capitol Bob" Schieffer added some analysis to the Alberto Gonzales situation. On the March 20 edition, Schieffer editorialized that Gonzales, who is not under any criminal investigation, "may not be a dead man walking right now, but he’s certainly a wounded man limping" and "there’s (sic) some very serious questions here to be answered."

In 1993, however, Schieffer interviewed then Democratic Congressman Dan Rostenkowski, who was under criminal investigation at the time, and later convicted. Schieffer only raised the concern in passing at the end of a long interview.

John McCain thinks condoms don't stop the transmission of AIDS, don't ya know? I read it in the liberal strata of the blogosphere. Only, that's not exactly what the Republican Arizona senator said.

Blogger Ana Marie Cox of Time magazine's "Swampland" blog should know better, but she's only the latest to exult in McCain's interview gaffe with, and this is a real shocker, the New York Times's Adam Nagourney. [/sarcasm]

Cox began her March 21 post by pointing to a post in The New Republic's blog "The Plank":

Michael Crowley makes a point over at TNR's blog about McCain's senior moment regarding condoms (Do they prevent AIDS? “You’ve stumped me.”) and how his "old fashioned" bus-tour-talkathon is a bad fit with this whole "blogging" phenomenon:

Answer: When you're a NASA scientist who has repeatedly ignored policies you agreed to upon employment with said agency and you'd like to gain more headlines by claiming you've been silenced. Newspapers, magazines, and TV newscasts are lit up with Gore's senate testimony today...but the global warming hearing testimony actually began on Monday.

The name James Hansen was splashed across headlines worldwide last month when he claimed to have been muzzled by the Bush administration. After being denied the opportunity to complete an interview with NPR (such limitations are apparently standard practice by NASA and other government agencies) Hansen claimed the Bush administration was attempting to silence his alarmist viewpoints on global warming. Upon questioning Monday in Washington DC, it was revealed that the NASA employee had already completed over a thousand media interviews prior to the NPR request (emphasis mine throughout):

In the first hour of this morning's Today show, there were not one but two segments that would make Al Gore smile. First NBC's Andrea Mitchell explored whether Al "warrior for climate change" Gore would consider jumping into the presidential race, then in the second half hour Today co-host Matt Lauer, in a segment about environmentally-friendly gadgets, gave Gore face time via a clip from An Inconvenient Truth. In fact both segments featured preachy clips from the documentary.

First up Mitchell's piece featured the following clip:

Al Gore: "The misconception that there's disagreement about the science has been deliberately created by a relatively small group of people."

In time for the Persian New Year, CBS's Melissa McNamara trawled the blogosphere (including MySpace blog entries) and found bloggers who think Iran's Islamic extremist government has a point about "300" being "anti-Persian." In doing she, she produced a handful of blogs that appear to generate light traffic and in at least one case is just a rambling screed.

McNamara told readers that the "Islamic Republic News Agency" (IRNA) finds fault with the film's version of historical events. She left out that IRNA is Iran's official state-controlled news/propaganda service. CBSNews.com's resident "Blogophile" also noted objections from an Iranian newspaper, Hamshahri, which she described simply as "Iran's biggest circulation newspaper."

That's akin to a journalist during the Cold War describing Pravda as simply the Soviet Union's best-selling newspaper. Hamshahri co-sponsored a political cartoon contest that the Iranian government held last year that generated hundreds of entries that were anti-Jewish or anti-Israeli. Portions in bold are my emphasis:

Today's starter: The media (as manifested in this Patterico take-down of the LA Times) continue to misreport the fired U.S. attorney "scandal." The facts show the administration compiled reasons that certain attorneys should be fired before the fact, not after.

Wednesday’s "Good Morning America" continued its hyperbolic, Democratic-friendly coverage of the scandal revolving around the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys and President Bush’s announcement that White House officials such as Karl Rove would not be testifying under oath on the subject.

An ABC graphic described the disagreement between the White House and Congress as a "constitutional showdown." Co-host Diane Sawyer asserted that Bush was "double-daring the Democrats in Congress," while fellow host Robin Roberts wondered if the White House could even survive more revelations.

The first report, which aired at 7:02am on March 21, featured ABC reporter Jessica Yellin derisively using the "decider" nickname to describe President Bush:

There was quite a kangaroo court put together on CNN Tuesday evening largely designed to discredit recent confessions by al Qaeda terrorists Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Waleed Bin Attash while pointing accusatory fingers of blame at American interrogation methods (video available here).

Joining the host on “Paula Zahn Now” was Air America Radio’s Rachel Maddow, Republican strategist Amy Holmes, and CNN contributor Roland Martin.

As the panel was nicely stocked with only one view from the right, the views expressed were clearly sympathetic to our enemy, and suggestive that not only is America using inappropriate interrogation techniques, but also that any information we obtain “almost gets comical.”

After introducing some of the pertinent facts about the recent confessions, Zahn skeptically asked:

...but being the gracious guy he is, Andrew Cohen helpfully offers a way for the White House to escape Washington's favorite three-ring circus: televised congressional hearings.

Silly me, I thought network legal analysts weren't paid for political strategy but for cogent analysis of, well, legal developments.

Cohen writes at the "Couric & Co." blog:

First, Congress should relent and allow these sessions to take place in private. Sure, I would love to see Rove grilled in public— who wouldn’t? I mean, watching Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, question Rove could be a pay-per-view event in many parts of the country. A long, savory public hearing would be good for my career, I suspect, and sure would beat talking more about the paternity hearing for Anna Nicole Smith’s baby. But I am willing to get behind private sessions if it gives the President a measure of comfort about releasing his subordinates to talk candidly about who did what to whom and why when it came to firing those eight federal prosecutors. So, Point One of my Plan is: Private Hearings.

Oy, did Google's algorithims ever misfire. There at the top of my Gmail inbox this morning was an ad, which the Google wizards presumably determined to be geared to my predilections, for a book called . . . "Why Mommy Is a Democrat."

I suppose Google was right, in the sense that the ad piqued my interest, though the odds of my buying a copy of the book are as remote as Outer Mongolia. But let's have a look. According to the About page:

Why Mommy is a Democrat brings to life the core values of the Democratic party in ways that young children will easily understand and thoroughly enjoy. . . this colorful 28-page paperback illustrates the Democratic principles of fairness, tolerance and peace, and concern for the well-being of others. It's a great way for parents to gently communicate their committment to these principles and explain their support for the party.

Why Mommy is a Democrat may look like a traditional children's book, but it definitely isn't just for children. With numerous subtle (and not-so-subtle) swipes at the Bush administration and the Republican party, Why Mommy is a Democrat will appeal to Democrats of all ages.