Crusty CNN commentator Jack Cafferty had a "Live Chat" on The Huffington Post on Wednesday, and he sounded like a regular HuffPost blogger, charging that Bush lied us into war to enrich his friends, and never wants America to leave: "I don't think President Bush ever had any intention of leaving Iraq. I think we have been lied to about that the same way we were lied to about WMD. Military bases are under construction all over the country including one on the Iran-Iraq border." Cafferty also agreed with a questioner complaining about how the "good concepts" of "Kucinich, Paul, Richardson, and Gravel" are ignored by the media, and suggested the country needs publicly-funded political campaigns, but it will never happen.

The typical Bush-buried-3,000-troops-for-his-rich-friends line tumbled out this way:

The Democrats hit General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker with the results of an ABC/BBC poll of Iraqi citizens during the two days of testimony. Barbara Boxer was so immersed in the poll results that she couldn't even muster up a question for General Petraeus. Since the poll results were not released until Monday September 10, 2007, it left little time for an indepth look at the poll, the sampling size, the surveyors and the results from all the questions.

First of all - the sample size. The number of Iraqis questioned for the poll was approximately 2100 people. 2100 people in a country with an estimated population of 27,499,638 according to the CIA Factbook. That means the poll results were from 1/1000 of the population. How can a sample size that small even be considered partially representative of the population?

As NB's Ken Shepherd wrote yesterday (Tue. 9/11/07, here), MSNBC reported on some harsh and offensive remarks spewed from comedienne Kathy Griffin during an acceptance speech set to air on an awards show. (Read the story here.) Yet when they reported the story, MSNBC left out the most inflammatory words that Griffin voiced. And if you picked up today's Los Angeles Times (Wed. 9/12/07), the paper did the exact same thing.

The Times quoted the exact same words that MSNBC did. And like MSNBC, they made no reference to Griffin's most offensive words of her speech: "Suck it, Jesus. This award is my God now."

When television cook and personality Rachael Ray signed a deal with Oprah Winfrey's production company to host a daily syndicated talk show, she said, "People know me for my love of food, but I have so much more I want to share."

Viewers of her program today got a good look at one of the things she wants to share: Her undiluted enthusiasm for guest Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards. Ms. Ray devoted almost a third of today's program to Elizabeth.

Rachael expressed her admiration for Mrs. Edwards in her continuing battle with cancer and said "her speeches help inspire women across the country." She told Mrs. Edwards that her book "is a great read and you're a wonderful writer." Other sentiments from Ms. Ray included, "We all love you so much," and "I feel this connection with you."

As far as MSNBC's Chris Matthews is concerned, David Petraeus, four-star general, commander of the Multi-National Force-Iraq, someone who has devoted his life to serving our country, is no better than Charlie McCarthy, a ventriloquist's dummy.

View video here.

I think you will remember NewsBusters being one of the first to question the authenticity of the latest Osama tapes. Well now a digital forensics expert validates our skeptism. It was a Big Fake!

In analyzing the video, Neal Krawetz of Hactor Factor, an expert on digital image forensics, said in his latest blogs that the video contained many visual and audio splices, and that all of the modifications were of very low quality.

Most striking is bin Laden’s beard, which has been gray in recent images. For this video it is black. “As far as my tools can detect, there has been no image manipulation of the bin Laden portion of the image beyond contrast adjustment. His beard really does appear to be that color.”

….

Tennis lovers saddened by the conclusion of the U.S. Open Sunday should take heart, for a great match is being waged in the blogosphere between editors at Salon and NewsBusters.

Initially at issue was whether or not "CBS Evening News" anchor Katie Couric has become a shill for the Bush administration and the war in Iraq as avowed by Salon editor-in-chief Joan Walsh on Sunday.

As set two got under way, the point of contention was whether or not Walsh was in bed with MoveOn?

Not surprisingly, Walsh doesn't think so (emphasis added throughout):

Communist (and FBI informant) Dalton Trumbo, hero of the Red Scare. That's how New York Times reporter Michael Cieply portrayed him in Tuesday's Arts section story "Voice From the Blacklist, Through Voices of Others."

"Sixty years after a Congressional panel grilled 10 uncooperative writers, directors and producers about their supposed Communist connections, Hollywood still quarrels over the heroes and villains of its Red Scare."

Notice how the phrase "Red Scare" comes without quotation marks, as if that liberal term is the objective view.

"The propriety of giving Elia Kazan -- one who 'named names' -- an honorary Oscar in 1999 remains a contentious subject. And only five years ago Stanley Kramer's widow bitterly battled the makers of a television documentary that depicted her late husband using the blacklist to deny his former partner Carl Foreman a producer's credit on 'High Noon.'

James Joyner of Outside the Beltway complains that the New York Times buried the lede with an article about an Israeli airstrike in Syria. Turns out there's reason to believe that North Korea may be smuggling "nuclear material" to terror-sponsoring states Iran and Syria:

Talk about burying your lede. This is seven “paragraphs” down in the story (I use scarce quotes because newspaper style favors incredibly short paragraphs and breaks even when the subject has not changed for ease of editing). It’s wise to be wary of assertions from unnamed officials about this sort of thing, especially when the target is those perennial bogeymen Iran and Syria but it’s hardly inconceivable that the DPRK would sell nuclear materials to our adversaries.

While right-thinking people across the fruited plain cast their anger at MoveOn for its disgraceful ad placed in Monday's New York Times, "Countdown" host Keith Olbermann should be sharing the dishonor.

As adroitly identified at Olbermann Watch Wednesday: "Long before the moveon [sic] ‘Betray Us' advertisement, back on August 16th, the infamous, deplorable Keith Olbermann began his ‘newscast' in the usual fashion, bellowing the opening spiel."

Taken directly from MSNBC.com's transcript that evening (emphasis added):

In the 1990s, Laura Ingraham was an exception to the rule, a conservative allowed into the rarefied air of network news. She was a Sunday night commentator on CBS Evening News -- matched on the left by Sen. Bill Bradley -- and then a host of a live morning show on MSNBC. In her brand spanking new book Power to the People, just out yesterday, Laura dishes on what it was like in the lion's den:

From Day One, I was a fish out of water in the television news business. I didn’t come from their world and I didn’t buy into their worldview. They knew it and I knew it. As a conservative lawyer who had worked for the Reagan administration and clerked on the Supreme Court for Clarence Thomas, I didn’t fit the CBS mold of the earnest, idealistic, liberal, "citizen-of-the-world" type attracted to the news business. I might as well have dropped in from a blinking spaceship from Saturn. One of the closet conservatives at the network told me that most of the producers and on-air talent thought the top brass’s decision to hire me was a "pathetic sell-out to the Right."

In an entry entitled, "Protest du Jour," Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Candace Heckman let the paper's "The Big Blog" readers know that, "[c]oast to coast, Sept. 12 has been declared National Call-In Day to End the Iraq War by a conglomeration of advocacy groups."

Oh how nice.

Today's protest is expected to take place all day over the telephone. The idea is to call your congressman or congresswoman (or any congressman or congresswoman) to express displeasure in the United States' continuing involvement in Iraq.

Heckman proceeded to give out the phone numbers for the state of Washington's delegation to the 110th Congress. The P-I blogger noted that "as with all demonstrations, war and troop supporters are also expected to counter-protest, also by telephone."

Iraqi ethnic cleansing, a "positive thing"? That's what Barack Obama seemed to say on this morning's "Today." The Dem presidential contender spoke with substitute co-anchor David Gregory on the heels of Meredith Vieira's ill-tempered interview of Condoleezza Rice.

View video here.

Today's New York Times includes the article, "A General Faces Questions From 5 Potential Bosses," an account of yesterday's testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by General David Petraeus and Iraq Ambassador Ryan Crocker. The item noted an exchange between Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) and Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), both Democratic presidential candidates:

The senators were allowed only seven minutes each for questions, a limit that Mr. Biden, as a committee chairman, tried to enforce. But he did not try overly hard to cut off Mr. Obama, perhaps because he did not want to be seen in the ungentlemanly act of silencing a political rival. “Why don’t you try to summarize quickly what you said, O.K.?” Mr. Biden genially asked him as his time ran out.

NewsBusters reported Sunday that the media's fascination with record low ice in the Arctic ignored history while relying on satellite data that's only been around since 1979.

At the same time, the press have totally boycotted news from the Southern Hemisphere where ice and snow levels are currently at their highest since data have been collected.

Pretty convenient wouldn't you agree?

Meteorologist Joe D'Aleo wrote at IceCap Tuesday (emphasis added throughout, h/t Marc Morano):

I need to update everyone on the power of blogs. If it were not for blogs like NewsBusters, that reported this earlier, and our readers exposing media bias, British children would still be learning a rewritten version of history. The BBC has taken down the original quoted page that implied 911 was America’s fault. It is rare that media outlets are so prompt in their self corrections. I am sure that blogs and blog readers were a huge part of making that happen. After all, the earlier reported quote had been there since 2001. Nothing mentioning the correction was posted, but a much more acceptable narrative of facts has replaced it.

The Daily Mail, which seemingly has a reputation for being a "conservative" newspaper in the UK, has performed an act of self-censorship. An article in the September 12 edition of Britain’s second most-popular newspaper featured the accounts of seven British women who had abortions. It appeared in both the web and print editions of the newspaper.

Dawn Eden of the popular Dawn Patrol blog highlighted one woman’s account on Tuesday night, in which she gave a graphic description of her abortion. By Wednesday morning, the account had been removed from the web edition of the article on the Daily Mail’s website.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) might not be familiar to many, but its reports and analyses are used by nations across the globe to set policy.

Unfortunately, American media only cover papers and announcements from this organization when its findings support a liberal agenda.

For instance, when the OECD presented its new paper, "Biofuels: Is the Curse Worse Than the Disease?" at Tuesday's Paris meeting, American media ignored it, likely due to conclusions which go counter to soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore's views concerning the need to expand ethanol usage in order to solve manmade global warming.

As the Financial Times reported Monday, the OECD believes "the current rush to support alternative energy sources will lead to surging food prices and the potential destruction of natural habitats" (emphasis added throughout, h/t Benny Peiser):

A few days ago I wrote about how blogger Flip Pidot of Suitably Flip found that while the Hillary Clinton campaign vowed to give the Norman Hsu campaign contributions to charity, his name still appeared in a list of "HillRaisers," top-dollar fundraisers and bundlers for the Hillary Clinton 2008 presidential race.

Now reporter and blogger Robert Stacy McCain has an interview on the Washington Times Web site with Pidot. Below are some questions pertaining to Hsu and Pidot's research and blogging about the Clinton contributor:

Q: You actually went to the New York address listed on Norman Hsu's [Federal Election Commission] forms. ... Did you see anything?

Here at NewsBusters, we try to stay on the cutting edge of both media and technology, which is why I'm pleased to announce the addition of “NewsBusted,” a comedy show we're releasing today. You can watch the video now over on