It was quite a donnybrook on “Meet the Press” Sunday morning when Senators Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Jim Webb (D-Virginia) joined Tim Russert to discuss what’s going on in Iraq.

In fact, what began as a civil discussion between two southern gentlemen got quite testy towards the end.

With that in mind, I’m going to roll the tape so to speak, and will only break in when Webb refers to a poll done in May without sharing all the findings (video available here):

The Pulitzer Prize winner's latest syndicated column is an offbeat gem about the "suspension of operations" that appears to presage the death of Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Ohio:

There is, however, a minuscule market for what Antioch sells for a tuition, room and board of $35,221 -- repressive liberalism unleavened by learning.

Founded in 1852 -- its first president was Horace Mann -- Antioch was, for a while, admirable. One of the first colleges to enroll women and blacks, it was a destination for escaped slaves. Its alumni include Stephen Jay Gould, Coretta Scott King and Rod Serling, whose "Twilight Zone" never imagined anything weirder than what Antioch became when its liberalism curdled.

In 1972-73, Antioch had 2,470 students. In 1973, a protracted and embittering student and employee strike left the campus physically decrepit and intellectually toxic. By 1985, enrollment was down 80 percent. This fall there may be 300 students served by a faculty of 40.

There is a troubling undercurrent of seemingly routine violence and harassment that appears to have been the order of the day at the school:

The 21-year-old nephew of Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez has enlisted in the Marines, and Lopez isn't happy about it. "Don't become a pawn, I told my nephew," Lopez writes. His column is, "When the reality of Iraq hits home" (Sun., 7/15/07).

Says Lopez:

Some have argued that without a draft, enlisting in this war is a matter of choice, so what happens, happens.

But that's not necessarily true in the case of National Guard troops who have been called up. And as for soldiers as young as my nephew, I don't see enlistment as a well-informed choice but as a product of manipulation.

Not a "well-informed choice"? A "product of manipulation"? At 21 years old? Am I the only one who think this sounds a tad condescending?

As NewsBusters reported, the BBC published an article at its website Tuesday refuting there being a link between recent increases in global temperatures and solar activity. This piece went counter to one the BBC published just three years ago.

The author of the 2004 piece, former BBC science correspondent David Whitehouse, wrote an article published in the British Telegraph Sunday which slammed the BBC for its “enthusiastically one-sided, sloppy and confused” report on this subject.

*****Update: MIT's Richard Lindzen weighs in at end of post.

Whitehouse marvelously began (emphasis added throughout):

With an ever-increasing discussion that the Iraq surge is working, the old guard in the MSM is frantic to deride the administration’s war effort. This scenario played out in Bob Schieiffer’s interview of National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley on Sunday’s Face the Nation.

During the interview, Hadley stated the administration’s familiar position that it would give the surge a chance to succeed, at least until September’s assessment from General David Patreaus. A clearly perturbed Schieffer snapped, “With all due respect, [the Bush administration] set out this policy and it’s not working.” When Hadley disagreed, Schieffer responded, “I understand that’s your position,” and further commented that he wasn’t sure he agreed with Hadley. Further prodding Hadley to retreat from his position, Schieffer said, “I will give you a chance because we have to end this.” Hadley didn’t oblige.

Bruce Fein was a member of the Reagan Administration, but during the Dubya years, Fein sounds a lot like your typical "Bush hater," comparing the president to a long list of historical villains, which makes him a more acceptable guest for Bill Moyers or NPR’s Diane Rehm show. Here are the actual places in the Friday Bill Moyers Journal interview where squeaky-voiced Fein took Bush to the historical dark alley and tried to rough him up:

– Today’s Japanese Internment Camps? 

FEIN: Take World War II. We locked up 120,000 Japanese Americans, said they were all disloyal. Well, we got 120,000 mistakes. They lost their property. They lost their liberty for years and years because we made a huge mistake. And that can be true after 9/11 as well.

Americans are likely not familiar with Sir Antony Jay, but may become so soon given the knighted Brit’s just-released book entitled “Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer” in which he explains why media are liberally biased.

An excerpt of the book was published by Britain’s Telegraph Sunday, and, much like Bernard Goldberg’s “Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News,” gave a first-hand account as to what makes a television network lean so strongly to the left.

In fact, in an era when liberals are carping and whining about conservative talk radio, Jay's book should be required reading (h/t Hot Air, emphasis added throughout):

The MSM has been mostly silent on the scheming caught on video between Hillary Clinton and John Edwards as they plotted to purge the "lower tier" candidates from the Democrat debates. However, we now have Time Magazine's Washington Bureau Chief, Jay Carney, weighing in on the issue and he has come down firmly on the side of ridding the "lesser" candidates from the debates. In his July 13 Time blog post, Carney asks, "Are Crowded Debates Useless?" As you can see, Carney answers his own question in the affirmative:

It's Sunday...have you hugged your kids yet?

The meme: Income inequality during the Bush Administration has widened, as the rich have gotten ever richer.

A sub-meme: Income inequality during the previous administration lessened, or at least didn’t get any worse.

But facts are stubborn things, as information obtained from the Census Bureau and viewable at the full post shows (scroll down at the link to get to inflation-adjusted data):

On last night's Fox News Watch, panelist and conservative columnist Jim Pinkerton mentioned that, when it came to analyzing the reasons for the collapse of John McCain's candidacy, Media Research Center [MRC] got it right: it was the Arizona senator's avid support for the amnesty-based immigration plan, and not his backing of the Bush Iraq policy, that did him in with GOP primary voters.

FOX NEWS WATCH PANELIST JIM PINKERTON: The mainstream media said "[McCain's] toast because of the Iraq war. In fact, he's toast because of the immigration bill, and it was only the MRC that caught that, saying the real thing that hurt him with the Republican base, the people in the primaries, was immigration and not Iraq.

View video here.

PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers devoted his entire hour-long Bill Moyers Journal on Friday night to the need to impeach George Bush and Dick Cheney. The stacked hour had two guests, and both were aggressively pro-impeachment: John Nichols of The Nation magazine, author of the book "The Genius of Impeachment," and lawyer Bruce Fein, who Moyers labeled a "conservative," but he compared Bush to King George III, to Adolf Hitler, to the communist autocrats of the Gulag, and to, well, FDR, in suggesting the post 9-11 era could see a mistake like our interning of Japanese Americans. In this conversation, Moyers sometimes played the skeptic, but the overall tenor of the hour was not only anti-Bush, but anti-Speaker Pelosi for being so timid: "Why doesn't Nancy Pelosi see it her duty to take on at least the impeachment hearings that you say would educate the public?"

It’s really something when PBS is so far to the left it’s bashing both parties for not being radical enough, but this is a routine pose for Moyers, where he somehow thinks he’s "objective" when he sounds roughly in sync with the Dennis Kucinch for President campaign. Pelosi came in for whacks several times, first in this early exchange:

A terrorist website releases a tape of Osama Bin Laden, claiming it's new. And how do the MSM react? By rushing to air it, or in the case of wire services like AP, trumpet it in print. As of 6:30 A.M. EDT this morning, the AP story Bin Laden Appears in New al-Qaida Video was featured on Drudge.

There's only one problem. A senior Bush administration official informs this NewsBuster that:

"intelligence agencies have determined the video was previously aired as a portion of a longer show first on MBC TV (Middle East broadcast station) on April 17, 2002."

What's the result of the MSM's sloppy "air-first-verify-later" approach? The world’s most evil and despicable terrorists are given tons of free air time and print exposure.

A new poll released by Scott Rasmussen Friday identified that by almost a two to one margin, people believe the media are liberally biased.

As you might imagine, for the most part, those that don’t see it this way are registered Democrats.

Go figure.

Regardless, the data was quite illuminating to say the least (emphasis added throughout):

As NewsBusters reported Monday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., made some absurd statements about a number of conservative media members at Al Gore’s Live Earth concert in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

One of those Kennedy called a flat earther, ABC’s John Stossel, after debating Kennedy on Fox News’ “Your World with Neil Cavuto” Wednesday, spoke quite candidly about this issue with WOR radio’s Steve Malzberg.

It’s safe to say that Stossel was less than kind with his rebuttal (audio available here):