Among Friday's broadcast evening newscasts, NBC Nightly News uniquely reported a federal appeals court ruling, tagged by anchor Lester Holt as a "victory for the Bush administration," regarding the controversial NSA spying program that involves warrantless monitoring of international phone calls when one participant is a terrorist suspect. Friday's court action overruled an August 2006 court decision against the program by a liberal judge appointed by President Carter.

As documented by the MRC's Rich Noyes, all three broadcast evening newscasts had trumpeted the earlier ruling against the administration on August 17 of last year. ABC's Charles Gibson had labeled it a "major legal defeat" while ABC's Martha Raddatz had called it a "significant blow" to the administration. But neither ABC's World News with Charles Gibson nor the CBS Evening News mentioned Friday's ruling. But even on NBC, while Holt read news of the ruling, the words "Domestic Spying" appeared on screen, thus not conveying to the audience the international nature of the calls. Those words had similarly appeared during the NBC Nightly News coverage of the August 17 ruling. (Transcripts follow)

An editorial in Friday's Los Angeles Times (7/6/07) is one of the dumbest in quite a while - and that's saying a lot.

Writing on the recently disclosed affair of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat, the Times ridiculously opines that "it seems that Democrats' sexual shenanigans do more damage to their political careers than Republicans' do." The Times cheekily writes that the "political bible" states, "Thou shalt not commit adultery, unless you're a Republican." (All emphasis mine.)

Oh, really? Just looking at the Villaraigosa affair, the Times' editorial conveniently fails to consider a few things:

• Just today (Sat. 7/7/07), the Times wrote, "[V]oters can be very forgiving, as Villaraigosa himself proved by winning election [as mayor in 2005] despite admitting a separate affair in 1994 that nearly ended his marriage." So ... Where was the "damage" there, LA Times?
  
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Original caption:

Former US Vice President Al Gore(R) embraces actor Leonardo DiCaprio during the Live Earth concert in Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Pop stars, politicians and Hollywood celebrities drummed home the dangers of global warming Saturday in a series of Live Earth concerts spanning the globe, which urged people to go green.

As NewsBusters noted, in June Rolling Stone published a “green” issue that still didn't please the enviro-left. Well, now Radar Online exposed the magazine's founder and publisher Jann Wenner's not-so-green lifestyle which contrast with his ecological stunts and stances.

 Radar's July 3 article and July 6 update about Wenner's high-living, carbon-spewing lifestyle which is filled with globe-spanning Gulfstreams, big SUVs, lending his evil Global Warming Inducing Death Plane to high-profile friends (like John Kerry) and staffers ferrying lunches back and forth should really tick the green crowd off. Oh, and he doesn't even recycle. Bad environmentalist, bad!

Wenner is reportedly planning to spend his summer jetting between Europe and his vacation home in the Rocky Mountains. How much carbon dioxide would this add up to for, say, just one get-away trip? Let's count. Wenner flies to his son's wedding in Greece and back to New York, then speeds off to Sun Valley, Idaho with his family. Counting just one round trip in each direction, the miles total to about 14,000.

Now for the fun eco-math (emphasis mine):

Just in time for worldwide concerts to draw attention to the planet’s imminent doom at the hands of anthropogenic global warming, a new find in Greenland suggests that much of the hysteria in Al Gore’s schlockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth” has absolutely no basis in scientific fact.

Even though this study will likely get little to no attention from a media in full fawn mode over Gore and his Live Earth concerts, the findings throw a huge monkey wrench into alarmist warnings of climate-related devastation to the planet and species offered as reasons for developed nations to radically change behavior.

As marvelously reported by the Boston Globe Friday (h/t Benny Peiser, emphasis added throughout):

Global warming skeptics have reveled the last few years in climate change rallies and events occurring at venues or towns experiencing colder than normal temperatures as well as late season snows.

It goes without saying that one of the funniest was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-California) visit to Europe in April to discuss global warming with various European leaders just when parts of the continent were hit with some of the latest snows in history.

With that in mind, it would be only fitting if Live Earth concert goers around the world were greeted with sub-average temperatures as they come together to draw attention to the planet’s imminent doom caused by global warming.

The first concert began Saturday in Sydney, Australia, with temperatures fitting in perfectly for AGW skeptics looking for a chuckle (put down your soft drinks and coffee):

For general discussion on Live Earth day.

An old adage posits that what you don’t know can’t hurt you. Whoever came up with that one obviously had little imagination to foresee the horrors about to be set loose upon the earth in the years and decades to come.

In my column “Scientists Suggest Bestiality”, I wrote about findings by MIT and Harvard researchers suggesting that millions of years ago ancient humans and chimpanzees engaged in interspecies liaisons resulting in fecund offspring, bolstering the claims by a growing number of geneticists and the like that the boundaries between the species might not be as set in stone (or at least DNA) as at one time thought. It is deplorable enough some would interpret the data in this fashion (as frankly there aren’t that many interspecies pornos dating back that far to serve as irrefutable evidence) to further undermine the uniqueness of man in their attempt to bolster the Darwinian hypothesis that one form of life is essentially no better than any other. However, things grow even more disturbing when one realizes that there are adherents of this particular worldview that believe that it is not enough that all species are the same morally but that they must all be merged into the same species ontologically.

The AP, taking their cue from the new because-she-said-so story offered by the L.A.Times, has run with a short clip on a story that claims Fred Thompson was working as a lobbyist for an abortion agency in 1991, giving the hearsay evidence against him but not offering the meat of his against the claim. The result is that the AP offers more "evidence" against Thompson than it does for him making it too easy to conclude he is "guilty" of the charge of lobbying for an abortion advocacy organization.

The AP did a wonderful job making this story seem more cut and dried than it really is, of course, but the fact is, this claim of Thompson's supposed lobbying for the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association is nothing but an unproven (and maybe unprovable) claim against Thompson made by people who are well-known, far left activists and heavy contributors to the Hillary Clinton for President campaign. Naturally, neither the AP nor the L.A.Times wastes any time to detail the history of those making these claims against Thompson, leaving their relevant backgrounds completely out of the story.

Gee... why do you think they'd forget to let readers know that this story is based solely of the good word of Hillary supporters?