Visiting Iraq, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams learned from Army officers that Iraqis want U.S. forces to remain in their country, from NBC News Baghdad reporter Richard Engel that Al-Sadr's insurgents have stepped down and are counting on pressure from anti-war opponents to provide them with victory, and from retired General and NBC News military analyst Wayne Downey that U.S. troops are proud of their mission. Traveling with Lieutenant General Ray Odierno for stories on his Monday newscast, Williams ran a clip of Army Colonel John Charlton proclaiming that Iraqis “do not want us to leave” and a soundbite from Army Lt. Colonel Charles Ferry who asserted: "The people here are very glad to see us.” Williams marveled: "You just said, 'They don't want us to leave.' That's the tenth time today I've heard that. I've got to go back to the States and do a newscast that every night has another politician or 12 of them saying, 'We have got to get out of that godforsaken place.'"

To explain the decrease violence in Baghdad, Engel noted how “the militia decided they fought the U.S. two-and-a-half years ago, didn't have a lot of success. They decided this time they're going to wait it out, see if political pressure in the U.S. can help them win this time." Downey related how “every soldier that I ran across today I asked him: 'How do you feel about what's going on,” and “without exception -- this was spontaneous, especially when you start talking to PFCs and Spec 4s, they're going to tell you the truth, no party line. Very proud of what they're doing. Very, very dedicated.”

According to the official website of Selma, Alabama, Selma is exactly 2,000 miles from Los Angeles. But distance did not stop the Los Angeles Times from making sure you got a really good look at Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (with Bill) when they were there on Sunday. The Times trumpeted their appearance with a huge 42-square-inch, full-color photo on the top and center of today's paper (Mon. March 5, 2007). (See the front-page image here.)

But that's not all. When you turn to the continuation of the front-page article on page A11, you get three more color photos, including an absolutely humongous 60-square-inch picture that spans the entire top of the page! (See the image here. Again, there are two more color photos below the big picture. My scanner couldn't fit it all.) Oh, yeah. The article itself is 1,531 words.

On Monday, MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer discussed the recent meeting of 2008 Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in Selma, Alabama. Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky reeled off all the racial and cultural firsts that the upcoming primaries will have, including Hispanic candidate Bill Richardson. MSNBC News Live host Brewer responded with perhaps a revealing comment:

Julie Roginsky: "Well, I think Hillary Clinton started out with a set of name recognition that nobody else in the Democratic field has. And I think as Barack Obama becomes more known, obviously it makes sense that he would- his name recognition and his numbers would go up. But I think what's important to note here is that this is a set of firsts, not just for the African-American community, but for women, for Hispanics and Bill Richardson. There are so many firsts in this Democratic primary that I think it's really a good time to be a Democrat."

Contessa Brewer: "It's sort of like we're all rooting for everybody all at once."

The Associated Press is reporting Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards responded harshly Ann Coulter’s "faggot" remark. At an appearance in Berkeley, California, he said:

"I think it is important that we not reward hateful, selfish, childish behavior with attention. I also believe it is important for all of us to speak out against language of this kind; it is the place where hatred gets its foothold, and we can’t stand silently by and allow this kind of language to be used."

If only the former Senator would follow his own advice. Didn’t he reward "hateful, selfish, childish behavior" by hiring two harsh feminist, anti-Catholic, anti-Christian bloggers and then refusing to fire them? On the February 16 edition of CNN’s The Situation Room, host Wolf Blitzer asked him about his staffers (unlike the evasive anchors Meredith Vieira at NBC, Terry Moran at ABC, and Bob Schieffer at CBS). Edwards passively said that he "rejected" their statements and he "strongly disagrees with them." He stated that their resignations were "a personal decision" and dismissed the criticism as coming "particularly from people on the far right of the political spectrum." The transcript from The Situation Room is below.

"Well you know I wish I had better news, but the numbers this week were just horrific," said CNN correspondent Gerri Willis.

The numbers she referred to were home prices and new-home sales, which were down. After briefly mentioning the increase in existing-home sales (which make up a larger share of the housing market), Willis dismissed it.

With the help of CNN's Allen Wastler, the duo played up fears of recession on the March 3 program.

Wastler and Willis wrapped up the housing segment playing on viewers’ fears of a recession after an up-and-down week on Wall Street. Willis said the question wasn’t simply what happens in the housing market, but in the overall economy.

“The conversation about recession this week isn’t just bad for the stock markets; it’s also bad for housing,” Willis said. “When people lose their jobs, we know what happens.” You can read the Business & Media Institute article here.

It's a good thing I wasn't sipping my coffee when I saw this on the front page of the Baltimore Sun in Starbucks this afternoon.

"Checks, balances rule Md. capital: Democratic leaders split on key issues, how to raise money."

Reporter Andrew Green began his March 5 article by conceding that "in ways large and small, Annapolis is showing signs of a leftward tilt" ever since Gov. Martin O'Malley took the helm on the second floor of the State House. But relax, Green continued, competing egos in the state government ensure that the legislative track isn't laden with runaway trains.

Maybe so, but all the freight the Maryland General Assembly is steaming into the station is filled with liberal goodies:

In the March 5-11 edition of Variety, film critic Scott Foundas hailed "Everything's Cool," a new documentary from the Sundance Film Festival featuring Heidi Cullen of the Weather Channel and former Boston Globe-nik Ross Gelbspan (the man who believes global warming will soon ruin professional baseball.) Foundas asked: "Can a movie about global warming be called lighthearted? If so, Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand's "Everything's Cool" comes as close as one imagines possible, essaying yet more inconvenient truths about the future of our planet in the same buoyant, irreverent style the filmmakers brought to their last activist docu, 'Blue Vinyl.'"

Bill Maher accused Vice-President Cheney of being responsible for people "dying needlessly." In its own way, today's Boston Globe editorial cartoon takes that calumny one step further, suggesting that the vice-president flatly welcomes as many American deaths in Iraq as possible, as a sign of national strength.

When it comes to portraying the image of the Vice-President, the Dan Wasserman effort is also remarkable for its sheer malice.

Mark was in Iraq in November. Contact him at mark@gunhill.net

A cold wind blows. Or is it a cool wind? Actually, it’s a cool wind, growing warmer by one tenth of a degree every 15 years. Yes, Hurricane Gore is barreling into America’s homes with his recent Liberal … er … Oscar victory, for An Inconvenient Truth. Andrea Mitchell has labeled Gore as ‘suddenly cool.’ That is Bush-league (pun intended) compared to Meridith Vieira’s gushing, proclaiming Gore as ‘definitely the coolest guy in the room’ at the Oscars. And did anyone notice Leonardo Dicaprio drooling over the man like some school girl drooling over, well, Leonardo Dicaprio?

I’m struggling to verify the exact moment that Gore, oft criticized during his public service days as too robotic or unemotional, became the life of the party. The Democratic party anyway. Geek is chic once again. Al Gore is the Budweiser Clydesdale, in a party full of one-trick ponies. Why? Because he is the only member of the party who has a platform other than ‘We oppose everything Bush does.’ While I am sure that anti-Bush rants are a staple of Gore’s mindset, he does offer a different talking point to the American public, Global Warming. However, it is more difficult to decipher whether the sky is falling because of his position on climate catastrophe, or because he may be a political player once again.

Time magazine is not going to play to the stereotype of only praising Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They can find obscure Democratic presidential campaigns to praise. The infamous Joel "I Don't Support Our Troops" Stein has filed a piece praising fringy Dennis Kucinich, the candidate who would create a Department of Peace. Stein acknowledges he's on the outer edges of political feasibility, and yet there's something so right in his "progressive" idealism:

"And yet the universe has been going his way lately. Even his old kooky ideas are looking pretty good these days. His decision to allow Cleveland to default instead of selling its electric-utility company cost him re-election and landed him in a book about the worst mayors in American history, but he was later honored by the city council for refusing to sell, a move that saved customers nearly $200 million over 10 years. More inconceivable, less than two years ago, his office was visited by a stunning 6-ft.-tall Julianne Moore look-alike 31 years his junior, a Brit who was working for the American Monetary Institute. After some smooth wooing on his part ("I gave her a copy of my Department of Peace legislation and my e-mail address") and one date (at MacLaine's house), she agreed to marry him. If that happened to you, you'd think you could be President too."

Chief New York Times political reporter Adam Nagourney went to CPAC, the 3-day conservervapalooza gathering in Washington, D.C., and came back with profiles of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, both trying to appeal to social conservatives despite their past liberal stands on some social issues.

But Nagourney also guarded the Clintons' right flank on its history of fighting terror by misleadingly suggesting former New York City Mayor Rudy Guiliani gave the Clinton administration a pass in its response to terrorism before 9-11, although Giuilani devoted several minutes of his CPAC speech to criticizing the Democratic mindset on fighting terror.

By now most of you have heard about the Discover Channel "documentary" fronted by executive director James Cameron that claims to refute conventional religious wisdom on the resurrection of Jesus. Specifically the filmmakers claim that they have scientific proof that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had a son, Judah based on DNA evidence in combination with lexical analysis of names found on a tomb.

Since then the announcement of claims by the filmmakers has been met by scorn and ridicule by scholars of all walks who soundly denounce the claims as one sided speculation at best. But that rarely stops those with an agenda. Instead the doubters are summarily dismissed and often put in unflattering light as if they are the ones who have something to prove.

CBS blogger Brian Montopoli took a swipe at conservative CPAC attendees in his entry on Ann Coulter today, blaming them for her "faggot" crack about presidential candidate and former senator John Edwards (D-N.C.). Montopoli described Coulter's audience as a "gathering of right-wing true believers."

As the Skeptic's Dictionary notes, "True-believer syndrome is an expression coined by M. Lamar Keene to describe an apparent cognitive disorder characterized by believing in the reality of paranormal or supernatural events after one has been presented overwhelming evidence that the event was fraudulently staged."

So conservative activists are superstitious adherents to an ideology disproven by overwhelming evidence?

[continues after jump]

"As many political observers see it, [Virginia House of Delegates Speaker William] Howell is maturing into the leadership role he took on four years ago," wrote The Washington Post's Tim Craig in today's paper. And what exactly is developing the Republican speaker into an upstanding young chap?

Nothing more than a newfound willingness to raise taxes in the Old Dominion.

Here's the first two paragraphs of Craig's Metro section front pager:

How is Al Gore going to explain this one? Multi-platinum-selling rapper Kanye West, who infamously said during the Katrina telethon, "George Bush doesn't care about black people" has something else to explain. The AP reports that Kanye asked a restaurant in Cardiff, Wales to fly a chef and a meal across the Atlantic ocean to a Manhattan business meeting this Wednesday for about $4000 "plus travel and accomodation for the restaurant's head chef"  and the addition of lots of Earth-killing greenhouse gases. OK, that seems typical for the music biz, after all, Bono did have a forgotten favorite hat flown first class that was flown from London to Italy for about $1700, but now people are now paying attention to celebrity hypocrisy more closely. Kanye is signed up for Al Gore's Live Earth, which is designed to raise money for and awareness of human-caused global climate change and is the latest giant concert that will save the world. (AP didn't connect the political dots.)

As modern media has seen a fusion of news, opinion, and entertainment, are too many things being politicized? I think so.

The news media have contributed to this state of affairs more than any other group so it was refreshing to see the New York Times actually point out a case of inappropriate politicization in an article about "300" the new movie about a group of Spartans who held off a large Persian army.

The Times also makes the point that in many cases a media outlet will attempt to gin up controversy about its product to get the public to tune in.

Three weeks ago a handful of reporters at an international press junket here for the Warner Brothers movie “300,” about the battle of Thermopylae some 2,500 years ago, cornered the director Zack Snyder with an unanticipated question.

“Is George Bush Leonidas or Xerxes?” one of them asked.

The questioner, by Mr. Snyder’s recollection, insisted that Mr. Bush was Xerxes, the Persian emperor who led his force against Greek’s city states in 480 B.C., unleashing an army on a small country guarded by fanatical guerilla fighters so he could finish a job his father had left undone. More likely, another reporter chimed in, Mr. Bush was Leonidas, the Spartan king who would defend freedom at any cost.

Mr. Snyder, who said he intended neither analogy when he set out to adapt the graphic novel created by Frank Miller with Lynn Varley in 1998, suddenly knew he had the contemporary version of a water-cooler movie on his hands. And it has turned out to be one that could be construed as a thinly veiled polemic against the Bush administration, or be seen by others as slyly supporting it.

If the nation’s educators really wanted to obtain a long-term perspective on the job they were doing teaching Americans reading comprehension skills, they should publish conservative articles on the Internet which included a feedback mechanism. As they read all the vitriolic hate mail, they’d be amazed at the percentage of responses indicating a third grade level or lower understanding of what they actually published.

No finer example of this premise has occurred recently than when NewsBusters published an article about HBO’s Bill Maher clearly showing regret over the failure of terrorists to assassinate Vice President Cheney.

To begin with, the headline read:

Today's starter: Does Natsu Taylor Saito, the wife of left-wing Colorado university professor Ward Churchill, like giving her own books positive reviews on the web?

We'll see how the electorate decides, but there's no doubt who won the "Today" show primaries this morning. For the Dems, it was Barack, and among Republicans, Rudy.

Narrating the segment on the political duel between Obama and Hillary in Selma, Alabama this weekend, Andrea Mitchell portrayed Obama as having authentic appeal, while picturing Hillary resorting to heavy-handed political tactics.

Consider Mitchell's opening line: "On the 42nd anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the historic clash over voting rights in Selma, Alabama, Barack Obama was supposed to be the main attraction, until Hillary Clinton, slipping in the polls to Obama among African-Americans, decided to come." Translation: a sinking Hillary tries to steal Barack's limelight. Not very flattering.

As Mitchell mentioned that Hillary had brought Bill because of his "enormous popularity with black voters," a clip rolled of a woman literally squealing in excitement and delight as Bill walked by in the parade. But doesn't that highlight Hillary's relative weakness as much as Bill's strength?

After stating that "Obama answered critics who say his mixed ancestry makes him not black enough," Mitchell rolled a clip of Obama speaking in a preacher's cadence as he told a church gathering: "don't tell me I'm not coming home when I come to Selma, Alabama. I'm here because somebody walked."

Compare and contrast Obama's strong -- versus Hillary's screeching -- pulpit performances here.

The double standard of Leftists who are ignoring the outrage of Bill Maher -- who alluded to his wish that Vice President Dick Cheney was assassinated – while at the same time are wildly fanning themselves in mock outrage as if they had the vapors over Ann Coulter -- for calling Democrat John Edwards a bad name -- was on full display in the MSM over the weekend.

If you are a conservative who stays up on the "happenings" in conservative news, you'd have by now heard that firebrand Columnist Ann Coulter called Democratic Candidate John Edwards a "faggot" at the CPAC convention the other day. You are also probably aware of all the lefty types wading into the waters of high dudgeon over her typically button-pushing remark and you'll have seen Democrats and their supporters coming out of the woodwork to claim astonishment at Coulter's comment, demanding that conservatives distance themselves from her.

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

"Bush Iraq Strategy Has No Option for Failure," read the headline on the Washington Post home page when I accessed it at 1:30 this morning. [UPDATE with some thoughts from Captain's Quarters tacked to bottom of post]

But is that just a statement of fact or a lament about a lack of a "failure option" for the war in Iraq itself. Here's the blurb that followed teaser headline:

Eager to appear resolute and reluctant to provide fodder for skeptics,U.S. officials rebuff questions about failure with a mix of optimism and evasion.

And what exactly does the Post find evasive? You need look no further than the first two paragraphs of Karen DeYoung and Thomas Ricks's front page March 5 article to find that it's a determination to win the war in Iraq.: