For those of you adult enough to go to prisonplanet, check out this very interesting story about Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Living here in Texas, I know first hand this is extremely important.

http://prisonplanet....

And here is another article discussing his agenda at the meeting...

http://prisonplanet....

As NewsBusters reported Thursday, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin did an interview with NPR wherein he stated, “I am not sure that it is fair to say that [global warming] is a problem we must wrestle with.”

Friday, ABC News’ Bill Blakemore wrote a piece for that network’s website asserting, “NASA administrator Michael Griffin continues to draw the ire of preeminent climate scientists inside and outside of NASA, as well as members of Congress, after apparently downplaying the need to combat global warming.”

In the article, Blakemore and co-author Clayton Sandell chose not to interview anyone that agreed with Griffin’s views, even as a press release was being distributed by “scientists from around the world who came to Griffin's support”:

Chris Matthews began his interview of Dan Bartlett by singing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" in his honor. He ended with an apparently heartelt plea that Bartlett, who today announced that he will be leaving his position as counselor to President Bush, not join Fox News.

View video here.

Bartlett was a guest on this afternoon's Hardball. In a segment beginning at 5:24 pm EDT, Matthews first sparred with Bartlett over the rift between President Bush and his conservative base over immigration reform. At the end of the interview, talk turned to Bartlett's future plans.

Bush Administration is a Disgrace to United States of America

Scooter Libby was convicted of 4 counts out of 5. Now the republicans are crying foul and calling for the pardon of Libby. You have got to be kidding me! What ever happened to the Bush promise (like that’s worth a tinkers damn) that he would fire anyone that was involved in the Valerie Plame leak. Well George, Cheney, Rove are still there… What you going to do?

Pardoning Libby is just the slap in the face Americans need. What the hell, GWB has arrogantly flown in the face of the American public by continuing to send American soldiers to Iraq. The war that Bush stared based on lies and trumped up intelligence has taken our military to the brink of destruction. Our military leaders have indicated that we are totally incapable of protecting our home land in the case of an emergency. Yet, Bush, the fearless cowboy “decider” has decided that that’s really not important and continuing the death sentence for our soldiers in Iraq is the path for us. “Stay the course” has become the death march for our military.

For those of you who are grown up enough to go to prisonplanet, there is a really good article about Gov. Perry of Texas and his involvement in the Bilderberg convention taking place right now in Istanbul. Perry's office has even acknowledged this fact.

http://prisonplanet....

Not that this is a competition or anything, but I think I've got Tim beat here.

At the very, very least, it's an odd juxtaposition:

A picture of a smiling Dr. Jack Kevorkian being released from prison, next to a tease of a Politico.com story about former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) having a "quick mind and smooth delivery" but a "lack of warmth."

As Conan O'Brien might say, "a whaaaa?!"

Here's the screencap from CBSNews.com from shortly after 15:30 EDT:

The mainstream media has a tendency to turn to prominent conservatives whenever a significant portion of the conservative movement and President Bush have a policy disagreement. On Friday, it was Laura Ingraham's turn, when she was interviewed by John Roberts on CNN's "American Morning." When Roberts asked her about President Bush's recent slam of opponents of the immigration "reform bill," Ingraham turned the tables and took a shot at CNN itself.

Video (0:57): Real (1.55 MB) or Windows (1.75 MB), plus MP3 (630 kB)

ABC's Diane Sawyer discusses tuberculosis.

America, turn your hearing aid back on.

I’m getting tired of America’s limited patience with the war in Iraq. There are lots of opinions as to why we need to end the war, but what information are those opinions based on? I hear people state that the majority of Americans wants us out of there. OK, but the majority of Americans can’t even tell you who the Secretary of State is during man-on-the-street interviews.

America’s lack of understanding in Iraq becomes more clear when you examine the media coverage. An example is this exchnge between NBC News Chief White House Correspondent David Gregory and conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham on the Today Show on March 21, 2006:

Gregory: "Laura what's your take on [coverage in Iraq] because obviously the White House has made a determination that speaking about the war candidly as they can is what's important now, and yet it's clear that the President's having a hard time being heard."

Is Time’s presidential coverage biased? Check out these headlines from the new edition today: "Barack Obama’s Inconvenient Truths" and "Mitt Romney’s Disappointing Campaign." When you read the actual articles, the contrast is even starker. Reporter Karen Tumulty touted Obama: "Whereas other candidates like to throw red meat before their audiences, Obama is developing a penchant for hurling cold water at them." Columnist Joe Klein blistered Romney: "the brazen cynicism of his candidacy became almost embarrassing...there isn't the slightest hint of courage or conviction in his stump act."

Joe Klein, who had his own turn ogling Obama on the campaign trail last fall, emphasized how Romney has no courage:

(14:50 EDT) Video of Tim Russert misspelling "Iraq" at bottom of post.

When California homeschooler Evan O’Dorney, 13, won the National Spelling Bee on Thursday night, the nation’s press reacted with a yawn.

Instead of focusing on the winner, The New York Times ran a story about an immigrant from India who lost in the second round of the competition. That boy, Kunal Sah, 12, who is living in Utah, had hoped a victory would secure his family’s legal status in the United States. Thus, the Times managed to use the National Spelling Bee as one more forum for pushing the plight of immigrants.

Not until the middle of the story did The Times get around to announcing the winner, noting only his name and hometown and the fact that the AP reported his victory.

The May 31 CBS "Evening News" spun a recent international health incident into ammunition for an attack on the pharmaceutical companies.

After the program updated viewers on the tuberculosis scare caused by one infected man's European honeymoon, reporter Nancy Cordes launched into the blame game.

“Why haven’t more drugs been developed to fight disease with the potential to kill thousands?” asked Cordes, the CBS Transportation and Consumer Safety correspondent.

She then quoted a doctor who blamed the bottom line.

“Pharmaceutical companies live to make a profit and if antibiotics, for example, because they’re used for usually 7 to 14 days, maybe as long as a month, can’t generate the same kind of profits as a new cholesterol agent or the new Viagra, which a person might take for years,” said Dr. Eric Nuermberger, an assistant professor of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases, at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberal Supreme Court justice, took the unusual step of reading from the bench her dissent against the Court's recent 5-4 ruling in a case against pay disparity in the workplace. The New York Times' Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse celebrated Ginsburg's activism in her Thursday "Supreme Court Memo," "Oral Dissents Give Ginsburg a New Voice on Court."

"Whatever else may be said about the Supreme Court's current term, which ends in about a month, it will be remembered as the time when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg found her voice, and used it.

"Both in the abortion case the court decided last month and the discrimination ruling it issued on Tuesday, Justice Ginsburg read forceful dissents from the bench. In each case, she spoke not only for herself but also for three other dissenting colleagues, Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer.

A friend recently sent me the following. Interesting reading, and scary if true (my perspective is that we're straddling Tyler's #6 and #7):

About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government."
"A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury."

"From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."

Valerie Plame Wilson claims her life was ruined, her career ended, and national security possibly compromised because her CIA employ was made public, but of course she now wants to cash in with a memoir.

The CIA, for good reason, wants to make sure nothing that compromises national security gets published, and now Plame is literally making a federal case out of that, suing over CIA objections that her dates of employ are and should remain classified.

Another layer of hypocrisy at its finest, but the icing on the cake is the recent allegation that Plame perjured herself in congressional testimony.

Fortunately for her, Time's Jay Carney didn't notice in this oh-shucks post to "Swampland" today.:

What’s going on lately at the station formerly known as the Clinton News Network?

Last week, CNN was the only major American news outlet other than Fox News to cover the al Qaeda torture manual story.

On Tuesday, unlike virtually every press organization that did its best to sidestep the issue while covering Cindy Sheehan’s resignation from the peace movement, Kiran Chetry actually said on “American Morning” “she renounced her ties to the Democratic Party.”

And, as reported by Allah at Hot Air Thursday:

A common practice in the liberal mainstream media is the exaggeration of certain headlines in order to increase the "scandal factor" of a given politically correct story.  This does not happen often at Fox News due to their "fair and balanced" approach.  Unfortunately, it did happen in a recent headline from a non-story about one disgruntled female employee suing GE for discrimination.

The headline reads: "Lawsuit: GE Discriminates Against 1,500 Female Workers"

Wow!  1,500 women are suing for this? Wait, look what we find out when we read deeper:

Schaefer's suit, which is seeking class-action status, seeks $500 million in damages for a class of about 1,500 to 1,700 GE women executives and lawyers, according her attorney, David Sanford of Sanford Wittels & Heisler LP.

On Tuesday (5/29/07), we published this post. We wrote how a recent book review in the Los Angeles Times didn't bother to disclose that the author of the reviewed book, Gustavo Arellano, happens to be a contributing editor to the Times.

This morning I opened the Times to find this on page A2:

For the Record
May 31, 2007

Mexican book: A review in Friday's Calendar section of Gustavo Arellano's book "¡Ask a Mexican!," a compilation of his columns by the same name for OC Weekly, should have added that Arellano is also a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times' Opinion page.

Well! I guess the Times's "Readers' Representative" received my e-mail and read our article!

Kudos to the Times for acknowledging their lack of proper disclosure.

Joke of the week: A long time ago, Britain and France were at war. During one battle, the French captured an English major. Taking the Major to their headquarters, the French general began to question him.

The French general asked, "Why do you English officers all wear red coats? Don't you know the red material makes you easier targets for us to shoot at?" In his bland English way, the major informed the general that the reason English officers wear red coats is so that if they are shot, the blood won't show and the men they are leading won't panic.

From that day forward, the French army decreed its officers should wear brown pants.

If George W. Bush had gone to law school and later flunked the bar exam, you can imagine that fact would have become a virtual part of his name in the MSM, as in "George Bush, who failed the bar exam, today criticized a law that . . ."

But it came as news to me when Carl Bernstein mentioned on this morning's "Today" that Hillary flunked the Washington, DC bar exam back in the '70s. OK, I'm not the most knowledegable guy, and the fact of Hillary's failure is not news -- after years of hiding the embarrassment, she revealed it, en passant, in her ghostwritten 2003 "autobiography." Note: according to that book, during the same period Hillary took and passed the Arkansas bar exam.  The pass rate in Arkansas was considerably higher than in DC.

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

Bill Clinton’s first Surgeon General, Joycelyn Elders, was an outspoken opponent of the religious right, and was pressed to resign in December 1994 for suggesting that masturbation should be taught in schools as part of sex education, as a "safe sex" option for teenagers. She resigned, but never felt she was wrong to say it. That’s obvious because National Public Radio put her on Wednesday still spreading the message that the best thing about autoeroticism is "you know you're having sex with somebody you love." On former ABC reporter Michel Martin’s new talk show "Tell Me More," Elders was brought on as part of a segment called "Wisdom Watch."

Martin explained: "Every so often, you want to talk over an issue with people who aren't just smart, but wise. So we came up with Wisdom Watch, where we ask some of our most-respected elders to guide us through some of today's most challenging and important issues. Today, we're joined by Doctor Joycelyn Elders."

Every time there is an anti-war rally, march, die-in, puke-in etc. you can find several protesters dressed in official military uniforms. The ones in uniform usually claim to have served in Iraq o