Most liberal media outlets can't be bothered to visit, let alone cover the Conservative Political Action Conference every winter. But this year's event drew a large amount of publicity. CPAC hasn't been this notorious since reporter/fabricator Stephen Glass made up stories of wild sexual antics and drug use at CPAC hotel rooms and bathrooms ten years ago for The New Republic.

The furor surrounded author and columnist Ann Coulter, who cracked that she would like to comment on John Edwards, but "you have to go into rehab if you use the word `faggot.'" Coulter's joke was based on ABC's intense blitz recently to press "Grey's Anatomy" star Isaiah Washington into rehab after he used the new F-word at the Golden Globes. The word used to be coarse and insulting, but liberals are now elevating it into a profanity, which is odd, considering they're constantly desensitizing the culture to all the historic profanities.

The broadcast network evening newscast coverage Tuesday night, of the guilty verdicts for perjury and lying found against Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, painted the case through the prism of administration opponents who presumed a nefarious scheme led by Vice President Cheney against the heroic Joe Wilson. Though the legal status of Valerie Plame remains in dispute, ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas and CBS's Gloria Borger described her as an “undercover” CIA agent. And while ABC's Pierre Thomas noted how Plame “had been outed as a CIA operative in a column by Robert Novak,” neither Thomas, nor reporters on CBS or NBC, ever pointed out how Novak learned of Plame's identity from then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a war opponent outside the Cheney/Karl Rove circle.

CBS and NBC managed to connect Libby to the Reagan years. “Guilty,” Katie Couric teased at the top of the CBS Evening News, “the highest ranking White House official found guilty of a felony since the Iran-Contra scandal." Over on the NBC Nightly News, Kelly O'Donnell echoed: "What happened here today makes Lewis 'Scooter' Libby the highest-ranking White House official convicted of a felony since the Reagan era and the Iran-Contra scandal.”

CBS's Gloria Borger ominously concluded: "The prosecutor said there was a cloud over the Vice President's office. And today he said it's still there. Only now, Katie, it may be darker." Bob Schieffer soon piled on: “I think it's going to hurt the administration because it's going to raise new questions about their credibility when they already have more problems on their plate than they can really handle right now." On ABC, Vargas picked up on how “Joe Wilson...said today he wants Karl Rove fired from the White House. Do you think that might happen?" George Stephanopoulos rationally retorted: "No. It ain't going to happen.”

I'm sick of hearing doom and gloom about Iraq and the Global War on Terror. So here are links from the United States Central Command (CENTCOM) News Releases webpage reporting postive results and progress in the GWoT:

CLEARING SADR CITY: MND-B GENERAL PLEASED WITH INITIAL RESULTS: http://www.centcom.m...

LARGE CACHE DISCOVERIES HIGHLIGHT SECURITY EFFORTS: http://www.centcom.m...

AIR STRIKE DESTROYS BUILDING USED TO BUILD IEDS: http://www.centcom.m...

AIR STRIKE LEADS TO HOSTAGE RESCUE; WEAPONS CACHE UNCOVERED: http://www.centcom.m...

So, Libby is guilty of lying to cover up a crime that didn’t happen. I have lived way too long.

Had he said “I don’t recall” like Hillary and other Clinton administration people did, hundreds of times, there would have been no perjury.

If his name was Sandy Burger, he could have admitted to lying to government people and destroying classified documents and absolutely nothing would have happened.

Once again we are witness to crimes by the third major political party in this country. The media, that was intended to be a watchdog on the leaders of this country has instead become our strongest political party with, unfortunately, a destroy America agenda.

Avuncular he might be, but Bob Schieffer can sling Dem spin like a Shrum.

Appearing on the CBS Evening News to comment on the Libby verdict, not only did Katie Couric's predecessor in the anchor chair paint things in the grimmest possible terms for Vice-President Cheney, he took things an unsolicited step further. Katie Couric asked Schieffer "how badly does this reflect on Mr. Cheney in your view?"

Schieffer: "Very badly, and it's hard to conclude otherwise."

View video here.

If you hear Al Gore, Time magazine or the rest of the media echo chamber, then the global warming debate is done. “Case closed,” as the supposedly neutral journalists at Time put it.

Last night, Fox’s “Hannity & Colmes” reopened the case – in a big way. ‘Hannity’ showcased Dr. Timothy Ball, one of the climatologists in the new documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle.”

But for all of Ball’s excellent arguments, host Sean Hannity made the best point simply by listing more than 70 names of people “that indeed do question and that are skeptics of this new mad hysteria here” about global warming.

During Tuesday’s "Situation Room," Jack Cafferty used the conviction of a former aide to Vice President Cheney as a springboard for wild attacks against George W. Bush. According to the CNN correspondent, a decision by the President to pardon Lewis "Scooter" Libby would be symptomatic of "an administration that has come to view things like the Constitution and the nation’s laws as inconveniences that only serve to get in the way of their agenda."

Cafferty, who once giddily joked about Karl Rove being indicted in the CIA leak case, also furiously speculated about just who Lewis Libby is "protecting":

Jack Cafferty: "Remember this?"

George W. Bush (file footage): "America wants somebody to restore honor and dignity to the White House. That’s what America is looking for."

Cafferty: "That’s an interesting clip in light of today’s conviction of Vice President Cheney’s former top advisor Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby. He was found guilty on four of five counts against him and they all had to do with lying and obstructing justice when it came to details about Valerie Plame’s identity. Why would he lie? Who was he protecting? We’ll probably never know the answer to that."

As we prepare for a network TV onslaught on the Scooter Libby conviction today, remember that on March 2, 2000, an aide to the Vice President was convicted of illegal funneling foreign money to Democrats, crimes that benefited the 1996 Clinton-Gore re-election campaign. Her name was Maria Hsia (pronounced like Shaw). Vice President Gore at that time was the all-but-certain Democratic nominee for president. Coverage was minimal. ABC gave it 19 seconds and CBS gave it 23 seconds. On NBC, Tom Brokaw skipped it.  A few days later on the "Imus in the Morning" show, Brokaw had this telling exchange on Gore.

Imus jumped in: "He acted like he barely knew that this Maria Hsia, didn’t he? Like he was ready to drag her up out of a park someplace." Brokaw agreed: "Oh, I know, yeah, it was: ‘Did I miss that?’ It was as if he were saying, ‘Did she get convicted?’ He said, ‘It's still in the courts.’ It's no longer in the courts! The jury has ruled! Guilty! Five counts! Imus shot back: "Well, if he's watching NBC News he missed it."  Brokaw conceded: "Yeah, well that's true." Imus: "And he only saw 19 seconds of it with Dan [Rather]." Brokaw: "Yeah, I know."

"Your chances of being stuck on a stuffy airliner for hours on a taxiway – like passengers on recent JetBlue flights – are slim, the government reported yesterday," the Associated Press reported on March 6.

That was the very same day USA Today emphasized that "588 flights sat for more than two hours on taxiways before taking off in January," and highlighted "calls for federal regulation to prevent recurrences."

On this morning's Today show, NBC correspondent Dawn Fratangelo visited country music singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter at her home in Virginia to promote her latest album that Today host Meredith Vieira declared was her "most personal and political so far." Fratangelo even let Carpenter serenade her with one of its tracks that Fratangelo described as: "A song of solidarity with the Dixie Chicks." As Chapin strummed along on the guitar Today viewers were treated to the following anti-Bush lyrics: "This isn't for the ones who blindly follow...this isn't for the man who can't count the bodies and comfort the families and can't say what he's wrong."

As previously reported by Newsbusters here and here, the mainstream media highlighted Ann Coulter’s "faggot" remark, yet ignored Bill Maher’s implication that the vice president’s assassination would be a good thing. On the March 5 edition of CNN Newsroom, Rick Sanchez, in reporting on Ann Coulter and spiking the Maher story, unintentionally inserted some irony into the story.

When playing many of Ann Coulter’s controversial statements, CNN ran a sound bite of Bill Maher grilling Ann Coulter on the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination. CNN not only displayed its bias, but its lack of a sense of irony. The transcript, with Coulter/Maher exchange in bold, is below.

Alright, class. Imagine you're a reporter in the mainstream media and you want to write a formulaic profile of a conservative legislator but don't know how.

It's easy if you follow the simple steps I've written down below. For our purposes today, I'm illustrating from the March 6 Politico profile of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

First, start with some praise about said leader's legislative prowess:

During live coverage of the Lewis Libby verdict on MSNBC, Newsweek's Howard Fineman greenlit this potential line of attack for the Democrats: "If you're the Democrats you go up immediately with ads. You talk about lying. You use the word, 'lying' with reference to this administration and you can do it because there is a conviction in a court of law." Fineman also tied the mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital to the Libby verdict as he claimed: "The war in Iraq has now been bracketed on both sides politically. The Walter Reed story is about the human consequences of the war, the Scooter Libby trial was about how we got into the war and whether somebody was lying..."

It didn't take long for Chris Matthews to launch into his rant against Dick Cheney after news of the Lewis Libby verdict broke. Just 11 minutes into MSNBC's live coverage of the Libby decision the Cheney-obsessed Matthews to jumped into his anti-Iraq war routine as he repeated Patrick Fitzgerald's charge there the is now "a cloud" around the Vice President. Matthews also asserted Cheney was "now in the cross-hairs of national debate," and charged "This isn't like a hunting accident where he can walk away for two days and let someone else answer the questions. He's gonna have to answer the questions. Let's see if he puts out a statement. If it's anything more than remorse, well let's hope that it's something more than remorse because there's a lot of questions here."

Has Ann Coulter gone too far? “Good Morning America” reporter Jake Tapper posed that question on Tuesday’s program. Commenting on Coulter’s use of a slur at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, he used the words “vicious” and “mean spirited” to describe the author. An ABC graphic described the speech as “nasty.”

And yet, the ABC program has not aired a single story on prominent liberal HBO personality Bill Maher (he calls himself libertarian) and his March 2 comment regarding the attempted assassination of Vice President Cheney. On his “Real Time” program, Maher remarked, “I’m just saying, if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.” In comparison, NBC’s “Today” did manage at least a small mention of the HBO host’s statement. Mr. Tapper began the piece by insinuating that conservatives are drawn to Coulter because of her “vicious” disposition, and not because of an attraction to the conservative views the author expresses:

Well, sports fans, HBO’s Bill Maher has officially responded to Saturday’s NewsBusters’ article concerning statements he made on his “Real Time” program Friday evening about the failed assassination attempt on Vice President Dick Cheney last week. 

To quote Strother Martin from the movie “Cool Hand Luke,” what we have here is a failure to communicate.

This is how Maher began his response:

Just as I suspected, Scooter Libby was convicted in his trial moments ago:

Former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was convicted Tuesday of obstruction, perjury and lying to the FBI in an investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's identity.

Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was accused of lying and obstructing the investigation into the 2003 leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to reporters.

He was acquitted of one count of lying to the FBI.

"Ugh, now the Democrats like tax cuts too!"

That's essentially the tone of a March 5 Los Angeles Times article* that took Democrats to task for their plans for what President Clinton was fond of calling "targeted tax cuts." Apparently they just "cost" the government too much of our money:

WASHINGTON // After years of claiming that Republicans were cluttering
the tax code with provisions that enriched the wealthy, leading Democrats in Congress want to add more tax credits and deductions to benefit narrow groups of largely middle-class constituents.

Among potential beneficiaries: people with elderly parents in nursing homes, new parents, college students, volunteer firefighters and organ donors.

But all these goodies are raising questions about how the Democrats can give away tax revenues while keeping their pledge not to deepen the government's deficit.

But wait, there's more...

In case you tried to get in earlier today around 9:20 am Eastern or so, NewsBusters was hacked through a vulnerability in our web software. This is the first time it's happened. We'll be doing the upgrade this weekend however it is costing us several thousand dollars to do this. Please consider a donation to help us defray the costs.

My two cents:

http://jonquixotewor...

Excerpt:

There's an old saying: "It can take 50 years to earn a reputation, and 5 seconds to destroy it."

Apparently, the moral of that saying was completely lost on whichever CPAC executive(s) decided to provide Ann Coulter with a platform to speak upon at this confab, which she then used to call John Edwards "a faggot" (video here). It was also lost on those CPAC attendees who either applauded or laughed at it.

Actually, this terrible judgment goes further back than that --- to every one of those folks on the right who have provided Coulter with ever-larger platforms from which to express her incendiary, off-the-charts lunatic epithets like this.

Coulter was a time-bomb waiting to go off.

Talk about your inconvenient truth . . .

Reporting from Baghdad this morning, and continuing a theme that MRC's Brent Baker spotted last evening, NBC Nightly News host Brian Williams let a cat out of the bag that could leave some serious scratch marks on MSM/DNC calls for stopping the surge and withdrawing US troops from Iraq. Williams said that US troops:

"are also aware, especially in the outposts, that it's the Iraqi people who are very reluctant to see the Americans go, because in many cases that's what's keeping the peace in town."

View video here.