On his Thursday night radio show, Mark Levin laid into MSNBC's Joe Scarborough over a Thursday morning interview with Arianna Huffington. (He calls the host "the Morning Schmo.") Scarborough had no answer for Huffington when she stoutly defended the MoveOn.org ad bashing Gen. David Petraeus. She added: "And again and again, despite the administration's best efforts to present him as this figure beyond reproach, we see that he's playing politics. He's playing politics with soldiers' lives in Iraq."

Levin found it disgusting that Huffington can sit in her luxury home and sip Chardonnay while Gen. Petraeus and his troops have their boots on the ground on the front lines every day sacrificing for the country. Here's the exchange from MSNBC:

During a heated interview over the Iraq war on Thursday’s "The Situation Room" with substitute host Suzanne Malveaux, White House press secretary Tony Snow went on the offensive against the mainstream media. In response to a question from Malveaux about how President Bush could "regain credibility" with the American people about the success of the troop surge in Iraq, Snow replied, "Well, you know what Suzanne, your credibility rating -- journalists’ credibility ratings are lower than the President’s."

The most heated exchange came in the last three minutes of the 5pm EDT hour interview. Malveaux brought up the results of a recent New York Times/CBS News poll that found that 71% of those polled disapproved of the way President Bush is handling the situation with Iraq.

Video clip (1:35): Real (2.8 MB) or Windows Media (3.1 MB), plus MP3 audio (550 KB).

According to the Manhattan Borough President and the New York Civil Liberties Union, "military recruiters are frequently given free reign in New York City public schools and allowed into classes in violation of the school system’s regulations." That's basically the first paragraph of the article. The next few read as follows:

The report, based on surveys of nearly 1,000 students at 45 high schools citywide last spring, said the city’s Department of Education exercised almost no oversight over how much access recruiters had to students at high schools.

In his speech preview over lunch with television anchors and Sunday hosts, President George W. Bush expressed anger over the MoveOn.org ad which maligned General David Petraeus, a view Katie Couric vaguely relayed Thursday night without mentioning MoveOn.org while, on NBC, Brian Williams and Tim Russert specifically highlighted Bush's “outrage.” Russert related how Bush said “those who are responsible could, in effect, stuff it.” On ABC's World News, George Stephanopoulos, who attended the lunch, discussed some of Bush's comments during the gathering, but didn't mention his take on the full page ad, in Monday's New York Times, which declared: “GENERAL PETRAEUS OR GENERAL BETRAY US? Cooking the Books for the White House.”

Fred Thompson: “It’s more and more apparent to me every day that the average 20 year old who is serving us in Iraq knows more about national security than many of the 20 year veterans in Congress.”

See the video here

Nearly everyone with a television can make jokes about TV awards shows, especially the speech-making. How many times have people made the hoariest jokes about thanking the "little people," or mimicking Sally Field’s Oscar speech: "You like me! You really like me!" But Kathy Griffin, the comedienne with the self-satirizing "My Life on the D-List" show on that D-list network Bravo, took the ritual to a new low when she won an Emmy for Outstanding Reality Program.

She mocked Jesus Christ.

"A lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award," she declared. "I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. So, all I can say is, 'suck it, Jesus.' This award is my god now." The audience reaction? Reporters noted laughter in the crowd. Griffin certainly knew Hollywood die-hards would be pounding the tables over that one.

The New York Times evidently didn't do much vetting on the adolescent, infamous, and deeply discounted anti-war ad from MoveOn.org that appeared in the front section of Monday's paper.

The ad, headlined "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?", cited the Times' own reporting in defense of its argument that Petraeus is a liar.

"Every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed. Yet the General claims a reduction in violence. That's because, according to the New York Times, the Pentagon has adopted a bizarre formula for keeping tabs on violence. For example, death by car bombs don't count."

Huh? Not even the Times anti-war editorial page has gone that far. Here's an excerpt from an article by Times reporter Michael Gordon from September 8, two days before the MoveOn.org ad appeared, that directly contradicts MoveOn.org's claims. As Gordon makes clear, types of deaths may be classified differently, but they are all counted.

At Ed Morrissey's secondary blog, Heading Right, the Captain's Quarters editor and Blog Talk Radio host noted that by giving MoveOn.org a discount to smear General Petraeus, the paper of record has exposed itself as a radical activist shill willing to engage in character assassination (emphasis mine):

By writing off more than half of its normal price, it encouraged the publication of a nasty hit piece on the honor of a serving commander in a theater of war. The Paper of Record helped call Petraeus a traitor, surely one of the worst moments in modern American media.

It certainly shouldn't come as a great surprise that there are people who think human beings are the worst species on the planet, and that Earth would be a much better place without us.

However, though Slate's Daniel Engber did add some skepticism to his "Global Swarming: Is it time for Americans to start cutting our baby emissions?" article, his conclusion made it quite clear his answer to this question was "Yes":

We know that babies add more to global warming than anything else in our home. Isn't it time to cut back?

For those with a strong stomach, here are some of the lowlights (emphasis added throughout, h/t Ken Shepherd):

This sounds like a job for South Park's Eric Cartman.

The vaunted e-elite of the Left, the so-called Netroots, aren't quite what they and the media would have us believe. Far from a mostly middle-class Gen X and Gen Y coalition, blogger Joshua Trevino reminds us the data show Kossacks tend to be rich, areligious, aging hippies forever mentally mired in their glory days of Vietnam protests and Nixon-hating:

Last fall, CBS granted Arianna Huffington two softball interviews promoting her book "Fearless," one on "Sunday Morning" with Rita Braver, and another two days later on "The Early Show" with Hannah Storm. Arianna counseled from her book that people need to "Identify the Obnoxious Roommate" in their own head to grow fearless. Our new MRC report on "Huffington's House of Horrors" demonstrates that Arianna’s blog the Huffington Post can be identified as the Obnoxious Roommate of the Liberal Media Elite. Here’s our summary:

When she founded her blog two years ago, Arianna Huffington made a pledge that was quoted by Newsweek: "If you’re looking for the usual flame-throwing, name-calling, and simplistic attack dog rhetoric....don’t bother coming to The Huffington Post." But an MRC review of the first two years of the HuffPost’s content reveals that flame-throwing, name-calling, and hate speech against conservatives are all on the Web site’s everyday menu.

When climate change activists Sheryl Crow and Laurie David went on their "Stop Global Warming College Tour" last spring, media sycophants followed their every move reporting their exploits on almost a daily basis.

With that in mind, if a serious, scientific error were discovered in the global warming children's book co-authored by David, shouldn't that be newsworthy as well?

As you ponder, Robert Ferguson of the Science and Public Policy Institute published his findings Thursday concerning a material error in "The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming" which media seem destined to ignore for the benefit of the climate change movement (emphasis added throughout):

Marshall University psychology professor W. Joseph Wyatt should probably stick to psychology as oposed to attempting media analysis. However, he has decided to write an op-ed in the Huntington, West Viriginia Herald Dispatch claiming that media bias is a myth. Professor Wyatt begins by claiming that,

However, a 2002 Gallup poll showed that slightly more than a third of journalists describe themselves as Democrats, meaning that the vast majority are something else, and unlikely to be liberal.

Unfortunately for the good professor, a 2007 Gallup poll as reported in the American Journalist actually found that,

When it came to the subject of party affiliation, 36% of the journalists said they were Democrats in 2002 compared with 44% in 1992.

Wow! This story is wearing me out! The editor of NewsRound, Sinead Rocks, speaks out about the outrage from Americans to her biased 911 guide for children in her Editor Section. You can read the whole non apology there, but I'll summarize for you here. In short she said that the majority of people clicked through Drudge to an older version and provides a Drudge Archive. As reported earlier, she said she took that page down (we will come back to this). Down a few paragraphs in her piece she says that she later realized that many blogs were actually complaining about the newer version...which you can find here. She wants it to be known that her apology did not apply to the newer version and that BBC stands by it. Problem #1: The Drudge Archive she links to links to the exact same web address as what she claims is the newer version. A Blog called Biased BBC has the entire transformation history captured from google caches.

Even more curiously, having retrieved the original guide on 11SEP2007, watched it disappear on 12SEP2007 (page not found) to reappear as a sanitised single page version, it now seems today that the 11SEP2007 guide version is back online (compare with versions retrieved from Google's cache at Biased BBC) - or is it still not fully purged from your systems (even though the timestamps have been updated to say 12SEP2007)? What gives?

NBC's Meredith Vieira actually seemed disappointed that a Republican senator wasn't running for re-election, of course that Republican senator, Chuck Hagel, is a noted war-critic. On the Thursday "Today" show, a crestfallen Vieira asked the RINO: "Senator, very quickly now, this, this week you announced you that you are not running for any office in 2008. Why quit now, given how impassioned you are about this war?...But why did you decide not to run for president? That surprised a lot of people."

Just before the Hagel interview Vieira plugged NBC News's primetime coverage of the President's speech tonight but didn't exactly give it a hard sell as she wondered if anybody would even care: "Meanwhile we're gonna turn now to President Bush addressing the nation tonight about the future of U.S. troops in Iraq but his words may fall on deaf ears."

Lost in the outrage yesterday over the New York Times's decision to discount its ad price for the disgraceful MoveOn.org "Betray Us" ad about General David Petraeus from at least $167,000 to $65,000 (described by NewsBusters' Brent Bozell as, in effect, co-sponsorship) was this awful financial news:

UPDATE: New York Times Reports Weak Ad Sales

CHICAGO (Dow Jones) -- Shares of New York Times Co. hit a new 52-week low Wednesday after the company reported a steep advertising revenue decline in August at the unit that includes its flagship newspaper and the Boston Globe.

Revenue at the publisher's News Media Group dropped 4.6% from the same month a year ago, to $121.5 million. Classified revenue, traditionally considered the most vital component of newspaper advertising, plunged 20% on weakness in real estate, help-wanted and automotive ads.

Appearing on the September 13 edition of "Fox News Live," MRC president and NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell questioned the deep 60 percent discount that liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org received for its infamous "Betray Us" ad attacking the honor of Gen. David Petraeus.

Bozell noted that "unless the New York Times can explain itself away and show how this was some incredible coincidence" that the paper is in effect "a co-sponsor of that despicable ad."

Video (2:10): Real and Windows, plus MP3 audio.

Below is a transcript of the interview:

While Democrats, media, and far-left groups like MoveOn did their level best to smear the good name of Gen. David Petraeus this week, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) stood up on the Senate floor to state what most right-thinking Americans have been feeling.

Speaking specifically about the disgraceful advertisement published Monday in the New York Times referring to General "Betray Us," Hatch called these "dangerous and unwarranted allegations" emanating from MoveOn and other groups like it that "are called the nutroots of our society."

How delicious.

Don Surber caught this fabulous video from C-SPAN2. Transcript of the juicy section, beginning in the final 30 seconds, follows (video available here, h/t Hot Air):

Interviewing General David Petraeus for Wednesday's NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams insisted he admit “al Qaeda in Iraq wasn't around” on 9/11, demanded to know “how are we so sure all of these insurgents can be labeled al-Qaeda?” and derided Petraeus's admission that he's not sure if the war has made Americans safer: “I heard a commentator on television say, 'Can you imagine Eisenhower saying the same thing?'” That unnamed commentator: Williams's corporate colleague, Chris Matthews.

Williams challenged Petraeus: “Over the last two days of testimony, you mentioned al-Qaeda by our count 160 times. Now, for a lot of Americans, al-Qaeda, that's the guys who flew those planes into the buildings in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania. Explain what you mean because al-Qaeda in Iraq wasn't around that day.” When Petraeus answered that “they're the organization that has carried out the most horrific, most damaging terrorist actions in Iraq with just barbaric casualties,” Williams pressed Petraeus over “all these insurgents, how can you be so sure in a war without uniforms or membership cards, the claim by the critics is it fuzzes it up, it makes it a convenient, unified argument....How are we so sure all of these insurgents can be labeled al-Qaeda?” Williams ended by recalling how “moments after you responded to a question that you weren't sure that the war in Iraq had made Americans safer, I heard a commentator on television say, 'Can you imagine Eisenhower saying the same thing?'”