Remember this line with the word "Stupid" added? Seems cbs, the only channel we get, had just the part without the word 'stupid" added plastered front and center of their gloomy account of the economic news. Cutting the fed rate, slowest Christmas sales in 5 years, housing sales and prices collapsing, etc.

This was couched with an emphasis on how the dems were going to solve it each in their own way, but the Republicans were diminished in their assessment of how to solve "the economy." 

The Republican candidates (minus Duncan Hunter) will be debating tonight on the Fox News Channel at 9:00pm ET. Tune in, watch on the web and post your comments here.

We're also hosting another live chat for the debate. Click here to join.

We talk of liberalism in the news media every day here on NewsBusters, of course. But the leftist lack of standards and morals that we decry in the news media is reflected in much of our entertainment and art, as well. We've discussed leftism in music and in the movies many times, but here is another story where the degradation of western culture is plainly visible. Now we can add a new outrage to the world of "art" with the exhibit of Spent by "performance, installation" artist Jordan McKenzie that features the artist's ejaculation patterns on paper, sprinkled with colored powder to make the stream visible, then framing bunches of them on a wall.

Please excuse the language here, but here is the Sun’s report…

AN ARTIST has created a new exhibition of drawings by masturbating over paper.

Um, yeah. Hooray for “art.”

Would a Mike Bloomberg presidential candidacy be the Dems' worst nightmare? Yes, according to Bill Schneider. The CNN Senior Political Analyst described the NYC Mayor in terms that should make Hillary Clinton's blood run cold: "a Ralph Nader, with money."

Schneider offered his analysis at 4:40 PM ET today on the Situation Room.

View video here.

Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright has been in the public eye as of late out promoting her latest book and attacking the Bush administration on everything from global warming to globalization. So much so, that the Republican National Committee has fired back in kind.

Albright appeared at a Barnes & Noble in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. on January 9 to discuss what she thought would be important for the next president to consider. She saved the best and worst for last - using harsh words to criticize President George W. Bush.

[Click Here For Audio]

"This is a purely practical point here, and I think there's a lot of work to be done" Albright said. "And I think the judgment is that this is one of the worst presidencies we've had and people will wonder what it is that the role of the vice president is."

MSNBC host Chris Matthews didn’t just uncork his line on Primary Night about how New Hampshire Democrats would have displayed their racism to pollsters if they heard an "Archie Bunker voice" on the other end of the line. He repeated it on Wednesday’s "Morning Joe" show on MSNBC. He was upset at anyone who thought the pollsters and pundits were wrong about the Obama victory, when white voters lied to pollsters: "Methinks Paleface speak with forked tongue."

Matthews declared he thought this was over in 2006: "I thought white voters had stopped being what they want to be. And you know what it tells me? People aren't proud of who they are." Host Joe Scarborough, asking Matthews to address the alleged bigotry in New England, drew out Matthews, the former top aide to Boston-area Rep. Tip O’Neill, to denounce the whole Boston area: "There's different kinds of prejudice, as you know, in the north than there is in the south, but it exists. It may not be ‘I think I'm better than you,’ but it might be ‘I don't want to live next door to you.’"

Roughly 24 hours after essentially calling the saints mentally ill, "View" co-host Joy Behar claimed moral authority on inflammatory statements. Discussing Chris Matthews dismissing Hillary Clinton’s successes due to her husbands infidelities, Behar opined that Matthews’ comments were "inappropriate."

Behar previously admitted to having a "do as I say, not as I do" approach. When she railed against McCain for a supporter calling Hillary Clinton a "bitch," Sherri Shepherd called Joy out on the many personal attacks on President Bush asking "what’s the difference?" Joy Behar snidely responded "the difference is I don’t like [Bush]"

Congressman Jesse L. Jackson Jr. appeared on WLS Radio in Chicago yesterday morning to discuss the race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. During the interview Jackson launched in criticism of this years' Democratic party primary process and the media's coverage of Hillary Clinton. (short audio clip here, full interview here.)

Representative Jackson was specifically critical of the mainstream media for allowing Bill Clinton a platform from which to attack Obama while Hillary Clinton "is sitting around somewhere in a Deli", talking to voters and having "sensitive moments". Jackson concluded the criticism with a blunt "the media just needs to tell him [Bill Clinton] to butt out!"

This is a modest proposal for celebrities who find their antics don't get as much attention as usual. In this January 10 SFGate.com article, San Fransisco Chronicle's Peter Hartlaub satirically suggested matching attention-starved celebrities to dictators in a type of Hollywood outreach that features crushing dissent. 

I bet Lindsay and Paris would love to dabble in totalitarianism and go to a country where they are guaranteed positive press 100% of the time.

So, in the spirit of Gulliver's Travels, enjoy Hartlaub's modest proposal featuring such superstars as Vladimir Putin, Dolph Lundgren, Kim Jong Il, John Cougar Mellancamp and Pam Anderson:

Russia President Vladimir Putin and Dolph Lundgren: More than any other leader in history, Putin has the stare and demeanor of a James Bond villain.

At the top of Thursday’s CBS "Early Show," co-host Harry Smith questioned the authenticity of an audio tape of the confrontation between U.S. and Iranian ships on January 6:

We're going to try to re -- to deconstruct the Pentagon tapes just released of that hostile incident in the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian speedboats taunting a U.S. ship. A tape the Iranians are calling a hoax. There's something strange about the audio.

In the later segment on the issue, Smith talked to international security expert, Jeff McCausland, and again wondered if the Iranian hoax accusation had merit:

Iranian officials are calling this video a hoax, saying those voices sounded like they were recorded someplace else...As you have looked at this tape, listened to -- especially the English coming from the Iranians, does it ring authentic to you? Does it seem real?

*Update/Correction (15:28 | January 11): Grasmick has donated to Republicans running for statewide office (OpenSecrets tracks only federal contributions), as Mark Newgent of the RedMaryland blog notes, yet all told her state and federal contributions to the GOP are quite smaller than that of those to the Democratic Party. See Newgent's item here.

The January 10 Baltimore Sun, reporting on an escalating personnel struggle in Annapolis, dutifully noted liberal Gov. Martin O'Malley's (D) charge that state school superintendent Nancy Grasmick is a "pawn" of the GOP. Grasmick has served under three governors, two Democrats (Govs. Schaefer and Glendening), and Republican Robert Ehrlich.

Yet completely missing from reporter Liz Bowie's article was any mention of Grasmick's historic political ties to Democrats. Indeed, 30 seconds in an online would yield campaign contribution data showing Grasmick has only given money to Democrats.

According to OpenSecrets.org, in the past seven years Grasmick has given money to incumbent Democratic congressmen or congressional candidates such as Elijah Cummings, Dutch Ruppersburger, and John Sarbanes. Grasmick also gave $500 to the state Democratic Party in 1999, the first year of liberal Gov. Glendening's second term. Not once during her tenure was a contribution to a Republican* listed.

For more NB articles on Sun bias, check here.

After completely ignoring the story, ABC investigative correspondent Brian Ross finally featured a segment on a questionable real estate deal by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. On Thursday's "Good Morning America," the reporter looked at the Illinois senator's relationship with Tony Rezko, a political operator who raised cash for candidates. Rezko, who will go on trial in February for charges related to bribes and extortion, played a role in a house purchase by Obama.

Although local Illinois media outlets, such as the Chicago Sun Times, have been covering the story for much of 2006 and 2007, a Nexis search finds only one mention on ABC, prior to the Ross report on Thursday. (On May 13, 2007, "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos briefly quizzed Obama on the subject.) Ross's investigations of Republicans often include a sneering, sarcastic tone that was lacking in his segment on Obama. In October of '07, he claimed that after listening to 1973 Watergate tapes of '08 Republican candidate Fred Thompson, a "much different, less valiant picture of Thompson emerges."

New article showing Huckabee's attacks against Republicans.

In 2000, Huckabee insisted on controlling the state party’s separate Victory Committee, but the committee’s finances were so poorly handled that a Federal Election Commission investigation resulted in the largest fine ever handed down by the FEC to a state party. That same year Republican Rep. Jay Dickey lost the 4th District seat he’d held for eight years.

MSNBC is again reporting on the Dan Rather lawsuit against CBS without pointing out that the defamation of President Bush's TANG service was based on documents created on a PC using Microsoft Word.  Here are the two places where the story refers to the incident that led to Rather's firing:

"Rather, whose last months at CBS were clouded by a disputed story on President Bush’s Vietnam-era military service, says his employers made him a “scapegoat” to placate the White House after questions arose about the story.

The lawsuit names CBS Corp., former CBS parent Viacom Inc., CBS President Leslie Moonves, Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward. It seeks $20 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages."

......

"Rather was removed from his “CBS Evening News” post in March 2005, six months after he narrated a report that said Bush disobeyed orders and shirked some of his duties during his National Guard service. The report also said a commander felt pressured to sugarcoat Bush’s record."

Yesterday fellow NewsBuster Matthew Balan and I wrote about media bias in Reuters and Associated Press reporting on the death of CIA turncoat Philip Agee. Today the Washington Post devoted a 23-paragraph obituary to Agee that was also somewhat lacking.

The Post's Joe Holley did relay to readers that former President George H.W. Bush believes Agee's role in divulging the names of covert operatives resulted in at least one death, that of CIA agent Richard Welch at the hands of Greek terrorists in Athens in December 1975.

Yet while Holley mentioned that in 1987 then-Secretary of State George Schultz denied Agee a passport due to "CIA reports that Mr. Agee was a paid adviser to Cuban intelligence, had trained Nicaraguan security officials and had tried to thwart the U.S. invasion of Grenada," Holley failed to follow the thread any further on Agee's sympathy with the Marxist regimes, particularly Fidel Castro's.

As a January 9 AP obit noted, Agee was a Castro apologist, writing as late as 2003 in the propaganda newspaper Granma defending Castro's crackdowns on pro-democracy activists:

In the 1992 blockbuster movie "A League of Their Own," coach Jimmy Dugan, played by Tom Hanks, marvelously shouted at one of his weeping female players, "There's no crying in baseball!"

Sadly, on Monday morning, Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (D-NY), followed by her husband and former President Bill Clinton Tuesday evening, put crying in politics.

And the press ate it up.

In fact, by Tuesday night, there were a total of 74 nationally televised media reports concerning Hillary's weepy moment (un-audited LexisNexis count), with CNN leading the way with 28, Fox News with fifteen, MSNBC and ABC News tied at eleven, NBC News with seven, and CBS News with two (all also un-audited).

Here's one of the first reports concerning the matter from the 3PM EST installment of "CNN Newsroom" Monday:

Well, this strays from the usual silliness and less than credible work over at the Huffington Post and gets closer to a style of treasonous support for our espoused enemies than it does the normal fare. In a posting by one Hooman Majd, an Iranian born writer who dabbles in the music business, we are treated to the absurd conspiracy theory that the U.S. Military manufactured the incident last Tuesday in the Straits of Hormuz involving a few Iranian patrol boats and the the U.S. Navy. Majd seems to imagine that the Pentagon somehow faked the whole thing, and I'm not exaggerating. Catch the title of his posting: It's a Fake. No attempt at subtlety there!

Catch this claim...

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: CNN beat Fox on Tuesday's primary night. According to Drudge:

CNN 3,298,000
FOXNEWS 3,068,000
MSNBC 1,648,000

Why might this be? Are liberals more interested in these primaries due to the battle between Clinton and Obama? Is it more about the party not in the White House always being more energized? Are the Republican candidates not generating much enthusiasm? Are conservatives disinterested due to the absence of a true conservative candidate as a frontrunner thereby auguring poorly for the GOP? Or, do right-thinking people understand these early primaries in tiny states are irrelevant?

What do these figures mean if anything?

To know what's on a morning-show anchor's mind, it's often easy to read between the lines. Katie Couric famously employed the "some say" technique to put her own views in the mouths of unidentified others.

But it's relatively uncommon to hear an anchor flatly express an opinion in the way Matt Lauer did this morning. The topic was whether there were racial overtones to Bill Clinton's "fairy tale" tirade directed at Barack Obama in the closing days of the New Hampshire campaign. Matt's guests were radio talk show host Michael Smerconish and former Clinton advisor Paul Begala.

View video here.