One frustrating thing about the Washington Post is you can't really throw out any section of the paper before scanning it for liberal bias. Take Thursday's Home section, newly redesigned. The big feature is by Sally Quinn, the wife of longtime Post executive editor Ben Bradlee. Her liberalism seeps in as she recalls her favorite household objects. In a photo on the section's front page, she points to her desk, bought in Newport, Rhode Island: "I was on assignment there the day that Jerry Ford pardoned Nixon. I was so distraught I couldn't work, so I went shopping."

Inside Home, she shows another picture of a household favorite in a frame: "The most fun thing, though, is in the adjacent powder room. It is a copy of notes taken by H.R. Haldeman as dictated by Richard Nixon. It reads: 'Never invite Sally Quinn. Violated the rules and attacked a guest at church.'" 

The Mason City (Iowa) Globe-Gazette has been running a series of uncritical articles on Soulforce, a gay activist group. Soulforce has been traveling to Christian colleges around the country "seeking dialog" and pressuring the colleges to repudiate Christian doctrine by adopting gay rights policies. Members of the group have been arrested in various locations.

The Globe-Gazette is getting reports from a Soulforce member who hails from Mason City. In the latest article (see http://www.globegaze...) about a Soulforce event at Bob Jones University, the reporter appears to accept the man's description of the hateful behavior of the university's representatives. Dean Genth was quoted as saying, “They were yelling and screaming and flailing their Bibles in the air. They were telling us that we were going to go to hell and we need to turn away from our wicked ways.” Another quote from Genth: “Bob Jones University is a very cloistered campus. It has a big iron fence all the way around it. The students don’t have a lot of liberty to come and go at will. On this stop we were totally barred from any access to the students.” The only apparent attempt to learn the other side of the story is a brief quote from BJU's website. Nothing in the story states or even implies that a phone call was placed to the university seeking comment.

The flip-flops on issues by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney have been a topic of discussion for months amongst GOP and conservative opinion leaders and pundits, but on Thursday's NBC Nightly News reporter Andrea Mitchell contended a critique in the Doonesbury comic strip is really what's the “worse” development for Romney this week. As if Republican primary voters care about the left-wing cartoonist's take.

Providing a rundown of the significant events this week in the presidential campaigns, Mitchell started with “a new Republican front-runner in the money race now facing new scrutiny. So when Mitt Romney cozied-up to the gun lobby,” -- Michell played a clip of him asserting that “I've been hunting pretty much all my life” -- “his campaign had to admit he's only been on hunting trips twice.” She then declared: “Even worse, Romney was lampooned in Doonesbury all week as a flip-flopper.” As she spoke, viewers saw a blow-up of a frame of Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury with a radio talk show fretting: “Say it ain't so, Governor Romney! Changed positions on abortion, gun control, and gay rights? What's next, immigration?”

Mitchell's decision to highlight Doonesbury says more about her, and how the Washington press corps apparently check the strip every day, than conservatives who largely ignore it.

Time magazine's eco-advice knows no bounds. This time they want to tell workers, and bosses, how to run their businesses, their computers and maybe even where to move their desks or take their staplers.

Number 29 on Time's "51 Things You Can Do to Make a Difference" list? "Remove the Tie"

Time wants us to emulate the Japanese strategy of keeping office temperatures at 82.4 degrees. It’s a way of saving energy – just not workers.

What Time ignored was that the Japanese also go to extremes in winter - extreme cold, according to a February 16 Washington Post article. Impact: 6. (The impact on workers goes up as summer temperatures rise.) Feel good factor: 9. (Let’s ask the freezing Japanese workers about that one.)

Instead of profiling the great Arnold Palmer or sizing up the competition on the first day of the Masters tournament, the Washington Post took the time to complain about a liberal standbye: gender discrimination.

"Augusta Chairman Averts Issue of Women" screamed the Post headline on April 5.

Writing about new Augusta National chairman Billy Payne, reporter Leonard Shapiro said, "he refused to be drawn into a discussion that marked the tenure of his predecessor."

Shapiro chose to bring up old news -- the 2003 controversy when women's groups opposed the private golf club because of its entirely male membership. One result was that the Masters was aired commercial-free that year.

Earlier today, NewsBusters senior editor Tim Graham wrote about ABC's Tahman Bradley and his coverage of President Bush's recess appointment of Sam Fox as ambassador to Belgium. The headline for Bradley's story read like that of a left-wing press release: "Bush Swift Boats Belgium, Congress."

Well, blogger Myra Langerhas of "Snarking Dawg" might have found the reason for Bradley's slanted treatment. The Howard University alumnus (Class of 2006) was active in College Democrats and was a 2005 Fellow for People for the American Way, according to a Web site for the left-wing interest group:

The New York Times Co. has been taking a beating over their increasing steep decline in the company's share price, extravagant executive compensation and the dual roles of Class B shareholder Arthur Sulzberger Jr. who acts as both the Chairman and Publisher of the company. These factors have prompted influential wall street investment advisor Institutional Shareholder Services to advise Class A shareholders to withhold votes for 4 directors who are up for election this month. A virtual vote of no confidence by one of the most influential investment advisors in the business according to the Gawker Manhattan Media News and Gossip website.

For those in desperate need of a little comic relief on a Thursday afternoon, the following video provided by our dear friend Ms Underestimated is an absolute must see.

Dennis Miller was Jon Stewart’s guest on last Friday’s “Daily Show,” and the pair were absolutely side-splittingly funny.

In a six-minute, commercial-free segment, Miller took on Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore, Robert Byrd, and a number of political figures in a fashion only he can.

For instance, here was Miller’s take on the current Speaker of the House:

CBS’s website’s feature "The Public Eye Chat" interviewed correspondent Allen Pizzey, who completely ignored some positive signs in Iraq in his grim report last month. Interviewer Brian Montopoli asked if John McCain’s optimistic statements on Iraqi progress "really sort of bothered reporters." Pizzey scuffed: "It’s disgraceful for a man seeking highest office, I think to talk utter rubbish." Pizzey claimed, that "no one in his right mind who has been to Baghdad believes that story," but he must not have checked the recent ABC story citing some improvement.

Montopoli followed up with a question of liberal bias, and quickly added that, that charge "has died down a little bit of late." Pizzey, of course denied that charge and accused the Bush administration of thinking "that anything that doesn’t wholly support everything they say is against them." The transcript of the relevant portion is below.

Imagine for a moment in the midst of the media’s current fixation with man-made global warming that Alaska experienced near-record high temperatures for the month of March. Do you think this would have been headline news, with folks like Meredith Vieira, Diane Sawyer, Charles Gibson, Brian Williams, and Katie Couric reporting the dire data with pictures of polar bears floating on broken ice flows?

Well, if the answer is a resounding “Yes,” why didn’t any of these news agencies bother sharing weather data from America’s 49th state concerning the previous month being one of the coldest on record?

As reported by the Alaska Climate Research Center (emphasis added):

It was a Vietnam flashback in Thursday's news pages, as New York Times reporter Jim Rutenberg deployed 2004-era Times language to attack the veracity of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the Vietnam veterans group that successfully challenged John Kerry's Vietnam war record. The story concerned Sam Fox, Bush's nominee for ambassador to Belgium, who was forced to withdraw from consideration after Sen. John Kerry made a stink that Fox donated $50,000 to the Swifties. Bush took advantage of the Congressional recess to install Fox as ambassador without waiting for Senate approval.

UPDATE at bottom of post.

Thursday home editions of the Washington Post come equipped with a Life magazine insert, and I was pleasantly surprised with the pro-religious, pro-faith content that graced its pages.

The cover for the current issue (April 6 weekend) is: "America's Coolest Churches: The amazing places where presidents, cowboys, and dog lovers go to pray."

The cover photo is a breathtaking shot of the Cadet Chapel at the U.S. Air Force Academy on a bright, sunny day.

I found the photo essay by Danny Freedman a quirky but respectful tribute to some of the more unusual houses of worship across the fruited plain. Pegged to hit American doorsteps during Holy Week it's a welcome change from other media outlets that often see Easter as a time to trudge out the usual suspects of gnostic revisionism. [continued...]

http://youtube.com/w...

"Bill O'Reilly, when he was on Inside Edition, reports on Oswald's association with the CIA.

Gee Bill, here you are spouting a conspiracy theory! That's unamerican. Why do you hate this country, you two-faced hypocrite?"

17 Questions About 9/11

9/11 Proof
Wednesday, April 4, 2007

1. Don't all the high-level officials agree on what happened on 9/11?

No. Numerous present and former high-level military leaders and politicians have questioned the administration's version of 9/11.

2. Isn't 9/11 a partisan political issue, where extremists in one party are simply trying to smear the other party for political gain?

No, credible people from across the political spectrum question 9/11, including prominent conservatives, prominent liberals, and prominent centrists.

3. Isn't it disrespectful to the victims of 9/11 and their families to question the events of that day?

No. Many of the families of the victims question the official story and are demanding that the truth be disclosed. The same is true of many dying heroes - the first responders who worked tirelessly to save lives on and after 9/11 - and are soon to become victims of the 9/11 attacks themselves. See this article.

For general discussion and comment...

Reporting a crime story from Colville, Wash., the Associated Press refused to use the term "unborn baby" to describe the intended victim of a crime that landed an 18-year-old man in prison for over six years:

(AP) An 18-year-old pleaded guilty to trying to hire a hit man to kill his ex-girlfriend's nearly full-term fetus and was sentenced to more than six years in prison.

Charles D. Young received 76½ months in prison Tuesday after pleading guilty to first-degree solicitation to commit manslaughter. State law allows for such a count when a viable fetus is the intended target.

Prosecutors allege Young, then 17, offered an undercover officer posing as a hit man $3,250 last October to injure his estranged 17-year-old girlfriend so badly that her fetus would die.

A rather inconvenient truth occurred in late March that went totally unreported by the global warming alarmists in the media.

On the very day that soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore was informing Congress of the planet’s imminent doom, the Anchorage Daily News reported that this winter has been so cold there that fire hydrants are exploding.

I bet your favorite drive-by media outlet didn’t share any of this as they were falling all over themselves with sycophantic praise for the global warming alarmist-in-chief (h/t NB member dscott, emphasis added throughout):

Better strap yourself in for this one, sports fans, for the Washington Post ran an editorial Thursday harshly criticizing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and the “foolish shuttle diplomacy” she exhibited on her controversial trip to Syria this week.

(UPDATE: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert issued a press release denying giving Pelosi a "peace message" for Syria.)

Entitled “Pratfall in Damascus,” the piece pounded Pelosi early and often (emphasis added throughout):

HOUSE SPEAKER Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) offered an excellent demonstration yesterday of why members of Congress should not attempt to supplant the secretary of state when traveling abroad.

Shocked? Well, the Post's editorial staff was just getting warmed up. Check those seatbelts again:

If it wouldn’t cause death, the Center for Science in the Public Interest would probably try to ban eating and drinking altogether, but when the media report on CSPI rarely are its extreme positions emphasized.

According to CSPI, "it takes more than willpower" to make decisions about what to eat, so it's here to help by promoting bans, more regulations and higher taxes on what it considers "unhealthy."

“[A] new study says that if you’re out for Chinese, even the good stuff could be bad for you,” said ABC’s Terry Moran on “Nightline” March 21.

In that same report, Jessica Yellin and CSPI executive director Michael Jacobson bantered happily about the problems with Chinese food: fat and sodium. Of course "Nightline" was reporting CSPI's latest study, the same day the food police released "Wok Carefully: CSPI Takes a (Second) Look at Chinese Restaurant Food."

Whatever happened to the notion of the "favorite son"? You know: the idea that a candidate's home state rallies around him. When it comes to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the Boston Globe seems to be adopting a mirror-image attitude. Call it the "disfavored son" approach to politics.

In perhaps the lamest bit of investigative journalism to stumble down the pike in a long time, months ago, as I noted here, the Globe breathlessly revealed not that Romney had hired illegal immigrants, but that the landscaping company tending his home had done so. Remember to run a thorough INS check on the guy who takes your order next time you drive through McDonald's -- wouldn't want to undermine your future candidacy.

ABC News, the outfit stuffed with people who proclaimed their need to "puke" when George W. Bush was allowed to speak ill of John Kerry in presidential debates in 2004, is still betraying their bitterness. In an article on Bush using a recess appointment to make Samuel Fox the Ambassador to Belgium, reporter Tahman Bradley explained on the ABC News website:

Kerry and Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., led Senate Democrats' opposition to Fox, who in 2004 contributed $50,000 to the slanderous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which used a series of television ads to undermine Kerry's combat record.

The headline was "Bush Swift Boats Belgium, Congress." That is a nonsense headline, unless we bow to ABC's affinity for liberal lingo, which has now tried to make "swift-boating" a verb, much like the conservative term "Borking." That would seem to be an improvement. As Greg Pollowitz noted at NRO's Media Blog, the original home page link was "Major Donor to 'Swift Boat' Smear Ads Is Made An Ambassador" (Emphasis Greg's). It now echoes the "Bush Swift Boats" line.

National Review's Jonah Goldberg knocked Rosie O'Donnell Wednesday in an article titled "Queen of Nice? Try Nuts."

The former “queen of nice” seems to think that the show [The View] is the perfect venue to audition as grand marshal for the next tinfoil hat parade. And if you visit O’Donnell’s website, you’ll find her application’s supporting materials: all sorts of unadulterated moonbattery presented in the Esperanto of global derangement — a form of instant-message-style free verse.

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

I have been waiting for the MSM to start the drumbeat against Fred Thompson that they so often and so boringly used (and still do) against Ronald Reagan; the refrain of "He's just an actor." Now, Rebecca Sinderbrand of the New York Observer has used the general theme for her latest piece, The Mysterious Appeal of Fred Thompson. Subtitled "Actor, Senator, presidential candidate... but what G.O.P. gap is he filling?", Sinderbrand makes liberal use of Thompson's "roles" as a foil for his seriousness as a candidate and seems to be saying that the only reason anyone is considering him is because he looks the part as a result of his "camera presence."

Sinderbrand's entire piece is dismissive and shallow in its approach to the Senator with constant allusions to his being an actor playing a role and treats the Senator as if his candidacy is an effort at bait and switch, or at the very least a silly proposition. Throughout, Sinderbrand constantly mentions the acting aspect of the Senator's life as if that is all there is to him just like they have always done with Reagan.