Melanie Morgan might not have a profile as high as some other pundits on the right, but she is emerging, in my book, as one of conservatism's most fearless and articulate advocates.

Last month, I noted an epic dust-up on "Hardball" between talk radio host Morgan and feminist Naomi Wolf. On today's show, the two again clashed. Last time around, I suggested that Wolf might be America's most passive-aggressive woman. Today, she showed herself to be one of its most alarmist. The topic was the controversy over the extent to which Alberto Gonzales [at the time Pres. Bush's White House counsel] pressured a then-hospitalized Attorney General John Ashcroft into approving the extension of the anti-terror wiretap program.

View video here.

Morgan was unapologetic.

MELANIE MORGAN: Anbody that doesn't get what a truly dangerous world we live in should just take a look at this wireless wiretapping program. It was a valuable program and it still is. And if there was pressure applied by Gonzales, then good! . . . We needed that program and I'm really glad that if there was pressure applied, it kept it in place, because otherwise, Americans could die.

Wolf's response was a case study in breathless, alarmist, deconstruction-speak.

NAOMI WOLF: What's scary to me about listening to Melanie and various people at the White House is how Orwell [bonus points for Orwellian allusion] describes people who want to close down an open society don't just lie, they make lies the ground of the discourse. There's this extraordinary fudging [demerit for use of everyday word; consider "circumvention" next time] of reality, not just to change the record, but to disorient us [seems to have worked on Naomi].

The AP posted a hit piece on Giuliani that I found on Drudge and in spite of their best efforts to make him seem like a soulless bastard, I found myself endeared to him. The piece is available at: http://www.breitbart... . Everyone who is ambitious and wants to make a difference in this world can have problems with loved ones. It's a shame, but I found myself identifying with Giuliani because I can recognize his humanity. Mind you, I'm in a happy marriage, but it is difficult balancing it with doctoral school. I can only imagine how much tougher it is with someone aspiring to be president like Giuliani. I think he is the man of the times, and I will vote for him if he is on the ballot. I also think religion is your own business and should not be a matter of national politics, so I strongly oppose Christian fundamentalists trying to impose their will on the rest of the American populace. And I'm a Christian (or at least I try to be)!

On November 17, 2005, Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa.), who had previously supported the Iraq war, announced his call for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The story led all three broadcast network evening news reports.

A mirror-image shift of position was reported today: a previously anti-war Dem has announced, after a visit to Iraq, that he now opposes withdrawal at this time. Will the MSM give anything like equal time to the story?

Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wa.) is a five-term member of Congress, representing Washington's 3rd District. Baird voted against the initial resolution authorizing the war. But now, having recently returned from Iraq, he has another perspective on events there, telling his hometown newspaper, the Olympian, as reported in this article, the following, :

We're on the ground now. We have a responsibility to the Iraqi people and a strategic interest in making this work.

I think we're making real progress.

I think the consequences of pulling back precipitously would be potentially catastrophic for the Iraqi people themselves, to whom we have a tremendous responsibility … and in the long run chaotic for the region as a whole and for our own security.

Economist and columnist for The New York Times Paul Krugman is interviewed in the September issue of GQ magazine where he says that he "has a very strong, economist's sense about the advantages of open markets," but claims a total shutdown in free trade would barely affect U.S. GDP. He also called for a shift to a high-tax Franklin Delano Roosevelt economy and universal health care.

On the income gap between rich and poor:

PAUL KRUGMAN: I have spent a lot of time looking back at what happened under FDR, when we narrowed the income gaps between rich and poor through stronger unions, wartime wage controls, and a change in tax policy. We can do some of that.

GQ: "Well, what happens if we let the income gap remain?"

The pro-socialized medicine lobbyists like to circulate U.S. health care system horror stories, such as this one they are circulating on email lists today (and which Daily Kos editorialized about here) about a man who allegedly murdered his wife, supposedly because he couldn't afford her medical bills.

The Los Angeles Times reported a run of Countrywide Bank by its customers as more and more are panicked about the potential of the nation’s largest home lender to go bankruptcy – something fueled by many of the reports in the media.

“[S]ales of existing homes fell in 41 states from April through June,” said CBS correspondent Susan McGinnis on the August 16 “The Early Show.” “Meanwhile, foreclosures continue to soar. And there are growing worries about the nation's biggest mortgage lender; Countrywide Financial could be forced into bankruptcy.”

But some experts seem to think this scare from the media over Countrywide’s bankruptcy is a little premature.

Original caption:

President Bush, left looks on as outgoing White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove makes a statement on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Monday, Aug. 13, 2007. Rove, President Bush's close friend and chief political strategist, plans to leave the White House at the end of August.

The TIME headline is ironic: “Study Finds Abortion Pill Safe.” Safe for whom exactly?  Certainly not for the millions of pre-born children who have died when their mothers took it.  Nor is it “safe” for their mothers.

The August 15 article by Sara Song (and the story run by AP on August 16) touts the findings released in the New England Journal of Medicine that show use of the RU-486 abortion pill “in the long term, is safe.”

That’s a message the feminist influenced, pro-choice media want to promote. In her article Song wrote “women who use mifepristone (RU 486) are no better or worse off than those who choose surgical abortion” and that “most existing research shows that surgical abortions have no effect on overall health risks.” 

Of the three morning shows, only ABC’s "Good Morning America" has reported the comment by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama that part of the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan is made up of "air-raiding villages and killing civilians." Both CBS’s "Early Show" and "Today" on NBC have ignored the August 14 comment. On Friday’s GMA, however, reporter David Wright filed a report on the statement and wondered if Obama is ready to be president. An ABC graphic pointedly asked, "Obama’s Foot in Mouth Disease? Too Inexperienced For Campaign?"

After playing a brief clip of the Illinois senator’s comment, which he made during a speech in New Hampshire on Tuesday, Wright mentioned previous impolitic statements by Obama, such as threatening to invade Pakistan. The ABC journalist noted that Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, raised the issue of civilian casualties with President Bush. He asserted, "...Presumably, Hamid Karzai used language that was more diplomatic, more presidential."

Soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore is now encouraging citizens "to engage in peaceful protests to block major new carbon sources" stating that he "‘can't understand why there aren't rings of young people blocking bulldozers, and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants.'''

I kid you not.

Yet, as amazing as it might seem, these weren't the most absurd statements penned by the New York Times' Nicholas D. Kristof yesterday in a column available only to TimesSelect subscribers.

Some of the real inanities included (emphasis added throughout):

Reliably liberal New York Times movie critic Manohla Dargis lauded activist-actor Leonardo DiCaprio's "The 11th Hour," the latest documentary of environmental apocalypse.

"To judge from all the gas-guzzlers still fouling the air and the plastic bottles clogging the dumps, it appears that the news that we are killing ourselves and the world with our greed and garbage hasn't sunk in. That's one reason 'The 11th Hour,' an unnerving, surprisingly affecting documentary about our environmental calamity, is such essential viewing. It may not change your life, but it may inspire you to recycle that old slogan-button your folks pinned on their dashikis back in the day: If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

In a recent blog post by CBS Evening News correspondent Cynthia Bowers we find that she has had some problems with the housing market herself. Bowers apparently didn’t grasp the fact that her Adjustable Rate Mortgage (ARM) can actually adjust:

“For a while we were okay. Then that Fed rate started going up, and so did our ARM. Over a five-month period it increased the cost of our monthly mortgage by nearly 40%!” Bowers wrote.

But Bowers shouldn’t have been surprised about her rate adjustment. According to Nexis, Cynthia Bowers has been reporting on the mortgage and housing market since at least 1997. With a decade of industry reporting under her belt, you’d think she’d be able to anticipate the fact that rates shift and payments adjust.

Tonight we're celebrating the second-year anniversary of NewsBusters. If you're in the DC vicinity, stop by and hoist a few with us over at Pat Troy's in Alexandria, Virginia. It's running roughly 5 to 7pm.

Update 21:18. Party's over! It was a great time. Great enough that I think we will have to do this sort of thing more often. Which leads me to this question...

In a post yesterday headlined Rarely Regretting the Errors, I discussed new research showing that the newspaper industry only corrects about 2 percent of the actual errors that make it into print, and wondered why newspapers don't implement one of the many "quality management" methods other industries use to reduce errors and improve quality, such as management guru W. Edwards Deming's Total Quality Management.

Craig Silverman, editor of RegretTheError.com and a Montreal-based columnist for Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper, emails:

On yesterday's Hardball on MSNBC, Chris Matthews was in hyper rabid mode, even for him. The subject was the report on Iraq progress scheduled for September:

Is the White House going to pull a Lucy again with the football trick all over again? For months, President Bush has been asking us to wait for a report from General Petraeus. How many times did we hear that phrase, Wait for the report from General Petraeus? Now we learn that the White House is going to write the report - the White House! - and that the general will testify publicly before Congress only after the report has been written by Bush‘s people.

And later as he hosted a panel discussion on the topic:

Day Deux of the "MSNBC Booed Bush" controversy, and Joe Scarborough was looking to make up ground . . .

For those who missed the story, in a burst of candor "Morning Joe" host Scarborough mentioned on yesterday's show that members of the MSNBC newsroom had booed President Bush nearly continuously during the 2003 State of the Union.

Today, Scarborough asserted that most of the boo-birds were gone from the network, and claimed for good measure that rival Fox News Channel is "all Republicans." Joe was peeved that Bill O'Reilly had expounded on the booing incident on last evening's O'Reilly Factor.

View video here [that's MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski making sympathetic sounds in the background.]

TVNewser is reporting that CBS News executives are in Cuba. While the Tiffany network won't say what for, speculation is there may be negotiations with the Castro government for a full-time Havana bureau for the network.:

A TVNewser tipster tells us, and a CBS News spokesperson confirms, that CBS News & Sports President Sean McManus and Evening News EP Rick Kaplan are in Cuba. The spokesperson could not tell TVNewser the mission of the trip. However, Kaplan has met with Cuban president Fidel Castro on past occasions, dating back to 1978.

>More: An emailer adds, "...being a past insider at CBS News I can tell you that this trip to Cuba is most likely an effort to open the first fully functional U.S. News bureau in Cuba."

Liberal Democrats and their allies on the Left are eager to restore the "Fairness Doctrine," which would empower the FCC to regulate the content of broadcast media, including talk radio. Besides their addiction to government regulation, the Left may be remembering "the good old days" where they used the "Fairness Doctrine" for partisan advantage in the 1960s.

Former CBS News President Fred Friendly, in his 1976 book The Good Guys, The Bad Guys and the First Amendment, wrote about the Democrats' organized campaign to use the "Fairness Doctrine" to derail conservative radio. Friendly's account was summarized by the CATO Institute's Thomas W. Hazlett and David W. Sosa in their 1997 paper Chilling the Internet: Lessons from FCC Regulation of Radio Broadcast.

Update below (11:26): ThinkProgress responds.

(h/t Ace)

NonPartyPolitics has picked up on how the liberal ThinkProgress blog smells something fishy in presidential daughter Jenna Bush's engagement to beau Henry Hager. Basically the lefty blog suggests that first lady Laura Bush lied to the press -- in 2005.

That's right, there's got to be something sinister and mendacious in Laura Bush's 2005 prediction that Jenna and Henry were "not serious." I mean, it's not like true love can blossom in a courtship in two years. Not for someone that close to President Bush!