In the current Newsweek (the February 25 issue), columnist George Will wrote about George McGovern and the current delegate selection rules on the Democratic side. But what stuck out was Will's subhead on McGovern: "He thinks he could have won in 1972 with a running mate called 'the most trusted man in America' -- Walter Cronkite." Will reported:

McGovern thinks he could have won with a running mate then called "the most trusted man in America"—Walter Cronkite. Before choosing Eagleton, McGovern considered asking Cronkite, who recently indicated he would have accepted.

President Bush is off in Africa this week enjoying plaudits from numerous African political leaders for his efforts to modernize and improve health and human rights situations there.

Just as they've done with positive Iraq news, however, the Western press is burying the story when it comes to the Bush administration's achievements in Africa. Irish rock star and human rights activist Bob Geldof chided the media today for the situation:

Mr. Geldof praised Mr. Bush for his work in delivering billions to fight disease and poverty in Africa, and blasted the U.S. press for ignoring the achievement.

Mr. Bush, said Mr. Geldof, "has done more than any other president so far."

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Congressman Burton, why do you think Cubans on the island still support the Castro brothers? What is it that allows that lock on those people to continue?

DAN BURTON: I don't think they do support Castro, I don't think they supported Fidel or Raul. That is a Communist regime where they have block captains who watch everybody in each invidual block, and anybody that even speaks out against the government ends up in a gulag.

On February 18, the Zenit News Service reported that the apostolic nunciature in Caracas, Venezuela - the Holy See’s equivalent of an embassy in the country - was bombed on Thursday [February 14]. The bombing "caused only minor damages. The facade of the structure was also vandalized by political graffiti." The Zenit story was one of only four items on the bombing that came up during a Google News search.

Two other recent bombing in Caracas have also gone under-reported by the media. On Monday [February 18], The Earth Times website reported that there was an explosion "in front of a mercantile court and congressional offices in Venezuela's capital. The blast caused some damage but no casualties and was the third explosion in Caracas in a week."

Earlier today NewsBusters Managing Editor Ken Shepherd briefly interviewed conservative publisher Al Regnery, author of a newly-published history of the modern American conservative movement, "Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism."

Regnery had just finished a lunchtime chat about "Upstream" with conservative bloggers at Heritage Foundation's weekly blogger briefing. Regnery will deliver a free lecture at Heritage tomorrow.

Audio is available here.

Book jacket photo via Amazon.com

Well, that didn’t take long. On CNN Monday night, John McCain was treated like any other conservative Republican, as correspondents and a tilted panel of ex-Clinton officials painted him as irresponsible for opposing a supposedly necessary increase in taxes. In a “Keeping Them Honest” segment on Anderson Cooper 360, reporter Tom Foreman wondered if McCain “can keep that promise” of “no new taxes,” before asserting: “Some economists say not.”

But Foreman’s sole economist was Robert Greenstein of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a longstanding proponent of higher taxes. Foreman provided no “liberal” tag nor gave any hint of Greenstein’s agenda, as the latter argued that “the problems in the future are so large that it’s pretty unthinkable we could close those deficits either by just cutting programs or just raising taxes.”

No one has ever accused Protectionist-in-Chief and CNN host Lou Dobbs of being one to exercise discretion when something has ticked him off.

The host of “Lou Dobbs Tonight” blew up after interview after CNN correspondent Christine Romans interviewed Nancy Nord, chairman of the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, on his a February 18 show.

“This – Nord, is she as imbecilic as she appears to be as absolutely insensitive to American consumers, as absolutely lacking the judgment to run a federal agency designed and created to protect the American consumer?” Dobbs asked. “I mean this woman is beyond belief.”

In the 8:30 half hour of Tuesday’s "Today," NBC’s Matt Lauer interviewed Washington lawyer Robert Bennett on his new book "In The Ring." Lauer began by noting Bennett’s been in all manner of Washington scandals. But Lauer and Bennett chose to hone in on just one: Paula Jones. Lauer didn’t suggest there was anything wrong with what Jones said Bill Clinton did at a Little Rock hotel room, in dropping his pants and asking her, a stranger and a state employee, to kiss his penis. Instead, as usual, the Jones case was defined as a "vehicle" for "Clinton haters," the "hunting of a president." Clinton was not the predator. Jones was:

LAUER: You say allowing that case to go forward against Bill Clinton was, was the equivalent of hunting a president. Why do you say that?

BENNETT: Well, well it was. What happened is Paula Jones' case became a vehicle by which the Clinton haters were trying to shut up his message and defeat his election in 1996.

For those that missed it, Mrs. Barack Obama recently told a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, crowd, "For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country."

On Monday, my colleague John Stephenson wisely asked, "Will Media Ignore Michelle Obama Remark?"

After looking at what MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski said on Tuesday's "Morning Joe," the answer to Stephenson's question is: media that don't ignore Obama's disgraceful comments will likely defend them.

Fortunately, conservative talk radio host Mark Levin isn't part of the mainstream media establishment, and on his program Monday, said what most press representatives would if they had any spine, and didn't behave like shills for the Democrat Party (audio available here):

‘View’ co-host Joy Behar followed up her anti-Catholic "saints are crazy" line, noting she "got in trouble with the Catholic Church." Though she emphasized it was "not all but some," she still called them "nuts" and "psychotic," and added that "not all of them deserved to be saints." Behar also added her opinions how crazy people in medieval Europe would be able to escape punishment by saying they were saints.

"I mean, let’s say that you were a person in those days, right? And you were hearing voices, and maybe you were mentally ill, but you were not stupid. As they say ‘I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid.’ So you said to yourself, ‘let’s see, if people think I’m crazy they’re going to put me in a dungeon. If I pretend to be a saint, they’ll name a church after me.’"

"Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country? If you are the first, then you are a parasite; if the second, then you are an oasis in a desert." Khalil Gibran

Why does this quote sound so familiar?

Update 14:16 | Matthew Sheffield. The level of excusing and tip-toeing around the truth about Castro is staggering. As of 2:13 ET when you do a Google News search for "Fidel Castro" you come up with 7,520 results. Add the word dictator after it and you come back with 1,417. That's 81 percent less.

Just a few headlines from major newspapers as Fidel Castro has called it quits as dictator:

• Castro resigns, ending era in Cuba (LATimes.com front page)
• Fidel Castro to step down as Cuba's leader (LATimes.com article)
• Fidel Castro will step down after 50 years at Cuba's helm (Miami Herald)
• Castro resigns presidency (BaltimoreSun.com front page)
• Fidel Castro resigns Cuban presidency (AP article at BaltimoreSun.com)

None of those articles directly referred to Castro as a dictator. Here's how AP's Anita Snow danced around the matter of Fidel's autocracy, conceding that "detractors called him a dictator" while throwing in the favored defense leftists often throw up for Castro (emphasis mine):

Early last month, when oil prices flirted with inflation-adjusted record highs, fears of sky-high gas prices were filtered through the media.

CNBC's Erin Burnett gave viewers a frightening prediction of $4-a-gallon gasoline during a January 2 appearance on the NBC "Nightly News." The "Street Signs" anchor cited John Kilduff, the vice president of risk management at the MF Global Ltd. Brokerage, as the source of this predicted high watermark for gasoline.

"And John Kilduff, who I know you speak with often, as well, Brian, he says we could see prices at the pump as high as $4 a gallon," Burnett said. "And that could be by the middle of February. So it could be anytime in the next six weeks. So that's going to be an increase, and we've seen it across the board, Brian. Commodity prices are going up, and that is causing worry for stocks."

While covering the breaking story on Tuesday of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's decision to step down from power, various "Good Morning America" anchors and reporters soft peddled the communist leader's crimes. In a profile piece that narrated a brief history of his life, co-host Diane sawyer enthused, "Castro knew life is a stage and played the part of the dashing revolutionary coming to New York, getting rock star treatment."

Now, she did add that many people overlooked the "ferocity of his communism, even as he bankrupted his country and history passed him by." But over the course of five segments, GMA managed to completely ignore Castro's record of firing squads, jailing dissidents, imprisoning AIDS patients and other crimes. Instead, Sawyer found time to romantically state, "The world's longest-serving political leader is leaving on his own terms, having survived efforts by ten different U.S. presidents to bring him down..." Note the use of the term "political leader" rather than dictator.

In another blow against freedom of speech on the Internet, Fox News is reporting that Google has taken the measure of de-listing the work of an anti-UN blogger named Matthew Lee. For several years, Lee has run the Inner City Press, a small news/opinion site that is focused on criticizing the United Nations. But since Google has teamed up with the UN on recent initiatives, Google has found that Lee's criticism is too much for them to handle.

Mr. Lee has been taking after big targets for a long time, so he is no newcomer to the scene. In 1987 he went after Citigroup with his corruption exposes, but since 2005 the United Nations has been his favorite target. He has especially focused on the "inner workings of what could be called the practical-applications arm of the international organization, the United Nations Development Programme."

As Fox News reports:

The "charismatic" Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's shock retirement for health reasons is covered on the New York Times web site this morning by James McKinley Jr., writing from Mexico City -- "Fidel Castro Resigns as Cuba's President."

President Castro? Was there nothing stronger in the NYT thesaurus this morning?

By contrast, when right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet died in December 2006, the headline that greeted him was (emphasis added): "Augusto Pinochet, Dictator Who Ruled by Terror in Chile, Dies at 91."

If you were to write an article about how the three cable news networks are covering a story, would you address the one with the highest ratings first, or the also-ran?

At the Washington Post, the answer is "the also-ran."

On Tuesday, in a piece about how political pundits are "overpopulating the news networks," staff writer Paul Farhi first highlighted what was going on at third-place MSNBC, and even gave Keith Olbermann the first crack at commenting on the matter (emphasis added throughout):

I'm in the unusual position of defending uber-liberal Margaret Carlson. Carlson, formerly of Time and CNN's old Capital Gang, now with uber-liberal Al Hunt's Bloomberg News, was unfairly ripped by Taylor Marsh over at Huffington Post Saturday.

Carlson sent an e-mail to someone suggesting that, as far as Hillary Clinton's candidacy is concerned:

..... I covered the Clinton White House for 8 years and don't think it would be good for the country to go back there.

Relatively innocuous stuff.

Not according to Marsh, who launched into a major rant:

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking points:

• Castro to step down. What will it mean to Cuba as well as for American relations with that nation?
• Clinton campaign accuses Obama of plagiarism. Is this a sign of desperation from the Clintons, or a good tactic?
• Would a sweep today by Obama signal the end for Hillary?
• Huckabee thinks he might be killing his political career by staying in the race. Is he right?
• The chairman of the International Obesity Taskforce wants world leaders to agree on a global pact to ensure that everyone is fed healthy food. Is this a lot of hooey, or something governments can really impact?