Inspired by an Esquire magazine interview in which Republican Senator Chuck Hagel mentioned the possibility that some of President Bush's critics may push impeachment at some point, CNN's Wolf Blitzer devoted considerable time on Monday's The Situation Room to discussing the significance of Hagel's impeachment talk, remarking that "it's not good for President Bush, to put it bluntly." Blitzer characterized impeachment talk as "a little bit louder" and, after Democratic Senator Chris Dodd, appearing as a guest, showed disinterest in a Bush impeachment, Blitzer still clung to the possibility, characterizing Dodd's words as "leaving the door slightly open," and remarking, "What I'm hearing is you're not completely ruling it out." (Transcript follows)

Big Tobacco typically takes a beating in the press, so the positive March 27 Wall Street Journal story about smokeless tobacco was a surprise.

According to the Journal, people trying to kick the smoking habit might try dipping instead because it poses a "substantially reduced health risk compared with smoking."

"Low-nitrosamine smokeless tobacco poses 10% or less of the health risks of cigarettes, according to various studies, including a 2004 National Cancer Institute-funded article," the Journal wrote.

The Journal quoted Michael Thun of the American Cancer Society who said, "There's no question that switching to spit tobacco and quitting tobacco altogether are both far less lethal than continuing to smoke."

(h/t Snarking Dawg)

From Ana Marie Cox's post to the "Swampland" blog at Time magazine:

Let me say that I did some self-cringing last week, when I choose to describe Tony as the "most fun" press secretary of the administration. I was looking for something non-controversial, non-partisan and true to say about the guy. "Fun" seemed like something he'd appreciate -- he is fun. The biggest change in the press operations of the WH since he's gotten there is that the briefings are no longer thuddingly boring. So, really, "most fun" was kind of a low bar.

He's also a class act. He clearly respects the press, and his tangles with them are leavened with a humor and self-awareness that make him hard to dislike, even when you violently disagree.

I -- and I'm sure my fellow bloggers here -- wish him well.

I'm guessing Cox's successors at Wonkette didn't get the memo. Emphasis mine, expletive edited for content:

On Monday, a blogger had to cancel a speaking engagement at a tech conference because she was receiving death threats from people through her e-mail and at other websites.

On Tuesday, a radio personality and blogger at the Huffington Post suggested that White House Press Secretary Tony Snow has cancer because he lies and works for Fox News.

I kid you not.

His name is Charles Karel Bouley, and what follows are excerpts from this abomination intentionally placed after the break for those that would prefer to not read this kind of deplorable vitriol (h/t Allah at Hot Air, emphasis added throughout):

According to CNN’s Jack Cafferty, President Bush would jump at the opportunity to use the kidnapping of 15 British soldiers as a pretext to invade Iran. On the Monday edition of "Situation Room," Cafferty asserted that he hoped U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair doesn’t ask George W. Bush to join a coalition of the willing whose goal it is to free the captives.

Jack Cafferty: "Let’s hope British Prime Minister Tony Blair doesn’t ask the United States to join a coalition of the willing to invade Iran and get its hostages back. My feeling is President Bush would be on that like a bird on a worm."

The CNN host also saw scary implications in the fact that the U.S. Navy is just off the coast of Iran:

A just released Harris Interactive poll showed a different side to voter opinion than what one normally encounters in the daily news media trough.

Amazingly, from a liberal perspective, their 1960's prophet had been stepped on. Sen Clinton was truly detached from the mainstay potential voter sectors of whom her party was focused.

...69 percent of those 62 and older said that they would not vote for Clinton...

This is the largest voting group, the baby boomers, Social Security and Medicare entitled, yet they shun sen Clinton. How many of these people are veterans?

...Nearly half of the respondents said that they dislike Clinton’s political opinions and Clinton as a person. Fifty-two percent of people also said that “she does not appear to connect with people on a personal level.”

Yesterday's indictment of former Reagan budget director David Stockman was cause enough for the Washington Post's Jeffrey Birnbaum to use Stockman's personal ethical and possibly criminal lapses in the private sector as a way to lodge liberal attacks on the Reagan tax cuts. But that was just the beginning for Birnbaum, who, in a Washington Post chat later that day, said that "without question, the Reagan tax cuts went too far."

Four paragraphs into his March 27 Business section story, Birnbaum found a Stockman critic to assail the Reagan fiscal policy that Stockman defended in the late president's first term.

"I have vivid memories of his misusing and misstating data and using obviously phony economic forecasts," said veteran budget analyst Stanley E. Collender. "You wonder if those were habits that stuck with him when he became a Wall Street deal-maker."

Collender may be a crack budget analyst, but he's also politically active. A search of OpenSecrets.org found Collender gave $1,000 to Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) in her first Senate race in 2000.

Birnbaum continued:

Veteran reporter and New York Times theatre critic Wilborn Hampton reviewed a revival of the ancient Greek mythological play "Prometheus Bound," showing in Manhattan's East Village, and predictably finds modern-day resonance in the tale of an "autocratic ruler."

"Even for the Greek gods, what goes around comes around. If Zeus has the upper hand in Aeschylus’ 'Prometheus Bound,' it is a sure bet that Prometheus, the Olympian rebel who defied authority and saved the human race, will have the last laugh.

Writing in the "Swampland" blog for Time magazine today, Karen Tumulty insisted the U.S. attorney firings deserved "massive commitment of journalistic resources" before going on to cite a study showing that media attention in the past few weeks has skewed heavily towards the non-scandal scandal:

... And before all our commenters jump on me, let me stipulate: I think the unfolding U.S. Attorneys story is a huge one, it deserves a massive commitment of journalistic resources, it is not likely to go away any time soon and I'm skeptical that Alberto Gonzales is going to survive it. I also believe that history has shown us many times that the broadest measures of public interest are a lagging indicator of the significance of a story. Finally, the blogosphere deserves huge credit for leading the way on it.

Translation: "the public don't know it yet, but this is an important story, we're going to make it an important story, and, kudos to liberal bloggers for making a fuss over it."

In 1993, Time magazine didn't show the same interest in blowing up the Clinton/Reno firings into a story the public would care about. [continued...]

To bolster their hypothetical link between concealed carry and workplace violence, Brady Campaign references a paper published by researchers from the University of North Carolina:

As a result of the NRA’s shall-issue laws, companies that have not taken affirmative steps to keep guns out of the workplace and off company property have faced an increased risk of workplace violence. Indeed, a study published in May 2005 in the American Journal of Public Health concluded:

“[W]orkplaces where guns were specifically permitted were 5 to 7 times more likely to be the site of a worker homicide relative to those where all weapons were prohibited.”1

Open for general discussion and comment.

Today marks four days since Iran's Revolutionary Guard captured 15 British servicemen in what they claim are Iranian territorial waters. A similar incident in 2004 lasted just three days.

Yet the Washington Post, which has never hesitated to front-page negative developments in the war in Iraq, gave just 51 words on page A8 to the ongoing detention of 15 British servicemen.

By contrast, the March 27 New York Times devoted a full story to hostage-taking while the March 27 Los Angeles Times ran a 12-paragraph Reuters story on Iraq's government pressing the Iranians to release the captured sailors and Royal Marines. [continued...]

Bloggers receiving death threats? Can’t happen, right? After all, blogosphere denizens are all intelligent, thoughtful people with intellectual capacities and moralities far beyond most mortals, correct?

Well, think again, because a programming instructor/blogger from Colorado by the name of Kathy Sierra cancelled her appearance at the O’Reilly ETech conference in San Diego after receiving astoundingly horrid death threats via e-mail and postings at a number of rather debased websites.

What follows is a disturbing tale as the creator of the “Head First’ series of books about computer programming posted Monday at her “Creating Passionate Users” blog (h/t Instapundit). However, the reader is cautioned to proceed with care, for her account is raw, vulgar, and extremely shocking:

When Rosie O’Donnell wasn’t urging the Googling of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident on ABC's "The View" on Monday, she was boasting of her knowledge of the Old Testament, based on her weekly private Bible study. She told Elisabeth Hasselbeck she could whip her in Jeopardy on the Bible.

The topic was teaching the Bible in public schools, as discussed in newspapers (and in this week’s Time magazine cover story). Like many secular journalists, Barbara Walters asserted "I know nothing about the Bible, and I think most people don’t." Joy Behar insisted "you can’t teach it as nonfiction. You have to teach it as fiction in many ways." When challenged about how the Bible could be taught, Behar blurted out: "People masturbate anyway." 

Paging Dr. Freud . . .

On this morning's "Today," NBC's Pete Williams engaged in slip that would have made Sigmund proud, so let's bring in the father of modern psychotherapy to analyze it. After all, he's only been dead for 68 years, plenty fresh enough for purposes of punditry.

Williams had scored quite a journalistic coup, an exclusive sit-down with embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Later, Williams chatted live from DC with Matt Lauer back in the New York studio. Discussing the decision by a senior aide to Gonzales to invoke the Fifth Amendment should she be called to testify before congress regarding the firing of the U.S. attorneys, Williams said:

"Congress could try to force Monica Lewinsky -- uh, Monica Goodling, rather, to testify by giving her immunity. But it's more likely they'll simply use her reluctance to testify as another reason to wonder what really happened. Matt."

Matt managed to control his mirth, as did Williams in signing off, but you sensed a nervous chuckle was just below the surface on both ends of the conversation.

View video here.

Hillary Clinton finally meets Cartman! South Park Studios and Comedy Central announced that the March 28 episode of the culturally satirical cartoon "South Park" is called "The Snuke" and involves a "24" parody where Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton visits the cartoon town of South Park, Colo., for a campaign rally. Ubiquitous entertainment reporter Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood describes the ep:

Mixing it up with those foul-mouthed brats this Wednesday, Hillary is in town for a big campaign rally. But Cartman suspects the new Muslim student is behind a terrorist threat. The clock is ticking as the citizens of South Park prepare for the Clinton rally. Every minute counts as Cartman uses his own methods to interrogate the suspect. But could the plan to target Clinton be just the tip of the iceberg? Comedy Central's website messsage board had this to say about upcoming episode: "Is there nowhere she won't campaign?"

The creator of the Discovery Channel’s sensationalistic documentary supposedly finding the lost bones of Jesus is rushing his flick to DVD, since the cable channel yanked its repeats and otherwise downplayed the film after it drew harsh criticism for its extremely sketchy claims. TV Week reports that Simcha Jacobovici said one of the yanked reruns was supposed to be his "105-minute special edition, which included re-enactment scenes such as showing a pregnant Mary Magdalene" that Discovery executives deemed too "sensitive" for U.S. audiences. Maybe because it's not exactly a "re-enactment" if it's fictional? Doesn't he know The DaVinci Code is already on DVD?

"This may be the most talked-about documentary ever," Mr. Jacobovici said. "The fact that nobody has been able to punch a hole in our reporting is a testament to how well we’ve done our homework. Even if it’s only a 50-50 chance [of being Jesus’ tomb], it’s still the biggest story on the planet."

Thanks to "clever" writing by Andrew Taylor of the Associated Press in a Saturday story, it took a while to get to the most important point about the "budget" that the US Senate supposedly "passed."

This writer's antennae went up on comparing the headline to Taylor's two opening paragraphs:

Senate Passes Democrats' budget aimed at balance, keeping tax cuts

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Washington -- The Senate approved a Democratic budget plan Friday that promises a balanced budget in five years by mixing spending increases with partial renewal of expiring tax cuts.

The $2.9 trillion budget outline won approval on a 52-47 vote, but only after Democratic moderates rewrote it to favor extending several popular tax cuts that are to expire at the end of the decade.

Plan? Outline? Since when is a "budget" (the headline) just an "outline"?

Reading on, it takes Taylor until the 9th paragraph to get to the truth:

On March 18th, the New York Times published a piece titled "The Women's War". It was a feature of great length (18 pages on the Internet) centered around the plight of several female Veterans of the war in Iraq. It detailed the mistreatment they suffered by the US Military, sexual harassment they received at the hands of army officers, and their PTSDs (post traumatic distress disorders). A shocking expose is what the Times was going for, it is sure. These women certainly deserved better treatment and the story should be well publicized, of course. It might have had more impact but for the fact that the Times knew that one of the subjects featured in the article wasn't even in Iraq and that her story was a complete lie.

Worse yet, the Times published the story knowing full well that one of their subjects had lied to them. Finally, a whole week after their initial story was published on the 18th, on March 25th, the Times published a mea culpa, correcting the story.

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

Well, I guess the media drumbeat will stop now.  Bill Clinton says that ‘24’ tries to be ‘fair’ and shows both conservatives and liberals as baddies, even though the co-creator Joel Surnow is part of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.  Well, Clinton didn’t call it that,  he called Surnow an ‘uber right-wing guy.'  The Hollywood Reporter reveals Clinton’s betrayal of liberal meme to TV advertisers at the TV Land upfront presentation during a Q & A with ad buyers:

Seymour Hersh of “The New Yorker” has been an outspoken critic of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq for many years. This certainly should come as no surprise to folks familiar with his name, his work, and his style of dangerously activist journalism.

On March 11, Hersh added a new wrinkle to his résumé by not only doing a radio interview with the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, but also actually discussing what he believes is the American military strategy towards Iran including what he called "an intensive planning for an air strike" and  "some sort of on the ground operation."

I kid you not.

The shocking interview was transcribed at the IRIB website (h/t NRO’s Michael Rubin, emphasis added throughout):

Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace unloads on Countdown to No Ratings’ Keith Olbermann last Friday on the nationally syndicated Mike Gallagher show. After Gallagher tells Wallace that Olbermann dubbed him Worst Person in the World, Wallace pummels Olbermann for several minutes. He calls out the deranged MSNBC windbag for casting himself as the next Edward R. Murrow.

Source - Hotair.com
http://hotair.com/ar...