Journalist Kirk Leech at GoldenMyths.com rips apart the PBS broadcast "Gold Futures," exposing a myriad of lies within the documentary by Hungarian filmmaker Tibor Kocsis.

In the 7pm EDT hour of Tuesday's The Situation Room on CNN, Jack Cafferty expressed disappointment in Democratic presidential candidate Chris Dodd for rejecting efforts to impeach President Bush because of how it would hurt Democratic chances in 2008. “So, Senator Dodd is putting the election prospects of the Democratic Party next year ahead of whether or not President Bush might be guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors of a kind which would mandate his removal from office,” Cafferty lamented. He noted that “Congress's job is oversight of the executive branch” and then, he sniffed, with a disapproving shake of his head: “Unless, of course, that oversight interferes with getting elected.” Cafferty soon reiterated his displeasure with the liberal Connecticut Senator: “It's a pretty amazing statement to come out of Senator Dodd's mouth.”

Is anyone else here worried about what Putin has been doing and what his plans are?

More importantly, are the Democrats worried? And if they win the White House, how will they counter Putin?

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The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is refusing to run the photos of two men the FBI is seeking to question in connection with suspicious behavior aboard a Puget Sound ferry - behavior that could be a precursor to a terror plot, or could be nothing nefarious at all.

The Seattle PI reports the story here and explains its rationalization for not publishing the photos here. And - in a steller example of complete touchy-feely uselessness - the paper is holding a haiku-writing contest for readers to write about how they feel about the FBI alert and the way the paper handled it.

From the report:

All you global warming skeptics, deniers, and court jesters better stow your potables, combustibles, and sharp objects safely from proximity of electronic equipment, because it was absolutely a frigid August day in the Big Apple Tuesday.

HOW COLD WAS IT?

Well, as reported by WCBSTV.com, this is the coldest August day in New York City in almost a century (h/t NBer Dave in Texas, emphasis added throughout):

In the appropriately-titled "Media Backtalk" chat on August 21, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz defended a fellow reporter's self-described "smart-assed" remark to President Bush about adviser Karl Rove's political acumen.

Kurtz defended CBS White House correspondent Bill Plante's August 13 question as "the Sam Donaldson technique of trying to get the president and top aides to say something, anything at a scripted event where they are determined not to respond to reporters."

"If he's so smart, how come you lost Congress?" Plante shouted to President Bush at an August 13 White House news gaggle. Three days later, Plante defended his question in a CBSNews.com interview saying:

So, did you know that climate change is the biggest security challenge since the Cold War?

Hadn't heard that?

Well, you're just not reading the finer alarmist wire services!

As extraordinarily reported by Reuters Tuesday (emphasis added):

Liberals around the country are smiling today at an Associated Press poll and story circulating on the web claiming that conservatives read less than liberals, none more so than former Colorado Democratic congresswoman Pat Schroeder who despite being president of the American Association of Publishers decided she felt like insulting half of her potential reading audience by dusting off an old liberal refrain:

"The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple slogans: 'No, don't raise my taxes, no new taxes,' [...] It's pretty hard to write a book saying, 'No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes' on every page. [...] She said liberals tend to be policy wonks who "can't say anything in less than paragraphs. We really want the whole picture, want to peel the onion."

It's all too familiar and really kind of sad since this poll is hardly conclusive (more on that in a minute). For all their talk about being "regular people," the left sure loves calling their fellow citizens stupid and moronic. You'd think that after employing this method for so long—think Reagan-as-idiot-savant, rationalizing the radio failure of Mario Cuomo, Air America, etc.—that the left would realize their elitist and snobbish attitude and either drop it or drop the whole "party of the people" nonsense. After all, how can you be for the common man if you regard him as an ignorant dolt?

On Tuesday’s "Morning Joe," MSNBC host Joe Scarborough mocked the very concept of CNN’s upcoming specials on Muslim, Christian and Jewish extremism. Anticipating the possible moral relativism that the Christiane Amanpour-hosted series may take, Scarborough sarcastically observed, "They’re going to study Muslim extremism, then Christian extremism, because we know Christians have, have slaughtered thousands of people across the globe in bombings..."

Comparing the CNN anchor to a liberal talk show host, an incredulous Scarborough added, "Is this Rosie O'Donnell or is this Christine Amanpour?" (In 2006, O’Donnell famously claimed that "radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam...") Returning to the subject later in the 7am hour, Scarborough derided the cable network again. He complained, "But to say, as CNN appears to be saying, that Muslim extremism and Jewish extremism and Christian extremism, sort of, is equal, that there is moral equivalence...between those three, that’s just ridiculous."

There’s been plenty of blame placed on home lenders, and that’s led to a call for more regulation by many politicos.

But what about the borrowers who agreed to the loans’ terms and the cost of any regulatory action enacted to protect these borrowers?

Barbara Kiviat disregarded those key points in her article “Ground Zero of the Real Estate Bust,” published in the August 27 issue of Time. She suggested there was a predatory element involved meant to lure the unsuspecting “addictive” borrower to get in over his head.

“Still, the EZ Credit addiction is tough to cure,” wrote Kiviat. “Drive through Green Valley Ranch, and you still see signs for 0 DOWN PAYMENT, 100% FINANCING.”

For a long time, the San Antonio Express-News was unique, not in its predictably liberal editorial page or in its port-skewing news coverage. No, instead, it was one of the few American newspapers to have two editorial cartoonists, one liberal and one conservative.

That is no longer the case. Under pressure to cut jobs and staff in the midst of the overall decline of print media, Express-News editorial page editor Bruce Davidson decided that the paper should drop conservative cartoonist Leo Garza, a fixture at the paper for over 20 years. Liberal cartoonist John Branch will remain on the staff.

You'd think that given the Express-News's posture of demanding accountability from government and (other) businesses, that it would be consistent and respect the "public's right to know" what prompted this politically charged decision. Alas, no such explanation seems in the offing for us plebs.

On Monday evening, CNN began a three-part special entitled "God, Sex and Greed." At issue: in a supposedly religious country like ours, why are sex and greed so prominent?

With that as the premise, who do you think CNN chose as one of the examples of greed in our country?

Disgracefully, a 24-year-old Jewish hedge fund manager who took his Bar Mitzvah money and turned it into millions.

Nice stereotype of a greedy Jew, wouldn't you agree?

Anchor Roland Martin introduced the segment (h/t Steve Malzberg):

A Kansas court of appeals has ruled that it's illegal for an illegal alien to enter the country, but not illegal for an illegal alien to be in the country if the illegal alien can illegally make it past the Border Patrol without getting caught.

Huh? What? I like to think I can wield the mighty power of semantics with the best of them - but, huh? What? I thought the "illegal" in illegal alien spoke for itself. Apparently not.

Ruling that it is illegal to enter the country without the proper documents and permissions, but it is not necessarily illegal to be in the country if you don't get caught upon entry, the court threw out the sentence of an illegal immigrant who pleaded guilty to possession of cocaine and endangering a child.

Times Watch hasn't dealt with arts editor-liberal columnist Frank Rich in a while (especially since the Times Select pay to read program walled him and other columnists out of view).

Folks, you haven't been missing a thing. Rich's anti-Republican frippery simply lights on different targets each week. This week it's retiring Bush advisor Karl Rove ("He Got Out While the Getting Was Good").

Rich introduced the main villain, Rove, through the side character ex-Virginia Sen. George Allen and his overblown "macaca moment":

Try to imagine what the New York Times did with the following data:

Go ahead. Then go to the full post to find out.

Rather than attack the government for its inability to manage air traffic, the August 20 “NBC Nightly News” shifted the blame to the airlines – specifically attacking American Airlines.

“So far this summer, Flightstats.com has reported American Airlines has had the lowest on-time arrival rate at 65 percent. But yet another Dallas-based carrier, Southwest, has had the highest on-time rate at 78 percent,” said correspondent Tom Costello making the case against American.

However, Costello’s comparison was faulty because it ignored major differences between the two airlines.

It's not a scientific survey, but a recent poll of Chicago Tribune readers showed an overwhelming majority of readers support the arrest and deportation of illegal immigrant and Social Security fraudster Elvira Arellano. You'll recall I wrote about the Trib's bias on Monday.

The results of the four poll questions were published in an August 21 post at Eric Zorn's "Change of Subject" blog:

We asked chicagotribune.com readers for their views on the Elvira Arellano case. Here are the results after approximately 23,900 votes were registered:

The Hollywood Reporter has the news that actress-comedian and former Air America talk show host Janeane Garofalo will be joining the cast of Fox's "24" next season:

The political left and the political right are going to meet on Fox's "24" this coming season.

Actress-comedian Janeane Garofalo, an outspoken liberal, is set to co-star on the conservative-leaning real-time drama, whose co-creator/executive producer Joel Surnow jokingly describes himself as a "right-wing nut job."

On the Imagine TV/20th Century Fox TV series, Garofalo will play a government agent who is part of the team investigating the crisis befalling Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) and company in the upcoming season.

Charges of bias leveled at PBS yesterday in this post here at Newsbusters about PBS's airing nationwide tonight of "Gold Futures," documentary regarding a proposed gold mine in Romania, are backed up today with new information revealed by John Fund in the Wall Street Journal.

"Gold Futures," by Hungarian filmmaker Tibor Kocsis, apparently is based on Kocsis' 2004-released documentary titled "New Eldorado," which had the subtitle "Gold. The Curse of Rosia Montana," and is clearly biased against the mining project.

Fund writes:

Two earlier articles we published on the provocative case of the Neo Nazi Kinijit party of the Abyssinian Amhara tribe drew attention, positive and negative, from many readers in Africa, America and Europe.

Before advancing in the analysis of the Kinijit website texts and propagandist material, we find opportune to denounce the attitude of several totalitarian Amhara readers who write to express their opposition to the facts we refer to, and the textual analysis we use as method to reveal their true, execrably dictatorial and obscurantist, impermissible ‘ideas’.

Certainly the impoverished, starving, and analphabetic Amharas never had an opportunity to learn and understand what Renaissance, Enlightenment, Freedom, Equality, Fraternity, Democracy, and Human Rights are; they live in eras antedating the Dark Ages, with an unprecedented record of illiteracy that encompasses their odious Debteras the analphabetic monks.