As has been noted by NewsBusters correspondents Brent Baker, Kyle Drennen, and Clay Waters, the Mainstream Media has mostly assumed an attitude of respectful awe towards Barack Obama's March 18 speech on race. That emotional awe towards Obama's speech has reached the level of mass weeping in the Leftwing blogosphere. The leftists profess to be so awestruck by that speech that it seems mass crying will soon replace the fainting attacks at future Obama appearances.

The left and the media love to hyperventilate about the right wing “hate speech” on the Internet, but the anger and vitriol of the left dwarfs that of the right, especially where female or minority bloggers are concerned. Hateful comments are not uncommon at lefty blogs like Daily Kos. That kind of hostility forces the Huffington Post to occassionally close comments on articles involving certain topics like Israel, the military or even Margaret Thatcher.

Right Wing News addressed this trend in its excellent ongoing series “Blogging While Female: 5 Conservative Women Bloggers Talk About Gender Issues and the Blogosphere.” (Pt 2 here). RWN sampled a variety of righty opinion from Michelle Malkin, Mary Katherine Ham, LaShawn Barber, Rachel Lucas and more, and they discussed experiencing misogynistic and often disturbingly aggressive comments.

Pictures of them are photoshopped into violent or sexually explicit positions, and they are stalked, online and occasionally offline. Liberals track down their addresses and phone numbers and leave obscene messages, even threaten rape. Moderate blogger Ann Althouse nailed the root of the hostility, “...people on the Left think you are evil if you don't agree with them, that you're actually a bad person” (all bold mine). 

What is this? any time i click a link i get FOUR pop-ups. Is this something new for NB?

Let's talk some college basketball (full brackets after the jump):

The "Big Three" networks’ evening newscasts, marking the fifth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq on Wednesday evening, all chose to air news briefs on the anti-war protests across the United States. The news briefs all aired within the first ten minutes of each program. CBS "Evening News" anchor Katie Couric, as part of the first report on her program, used the protests as "evidence" of one of their recent poll results, that "more than half of Americans [59%] believe going to war in Iraq was a bad idea." "There are 155,000 troops in Iraq right now, and today, protesters in Washington and other U.S. cities reflected our poll. Nearly half the respondents [46%] said most U.S. troops should be pulled out within a year."

Five minutes into NBC "Nightly News," anchor Brian Williams chose to focus on the protests in Washington, DC. "There were anti-war protests today in several U.S. cities, including the nation's capital, where police arrested more than 30 people when they tried to block the entrance to the IRS, and they also tied up Connecticut Avenue, a major thoroughfare. There were also protests in New York's Times Square, downtown San Francisco, and in smaller towns as well, in places like Ohio and Vermont."

ABC’s "World News" anchor Charles Gibson, as part of his retrospective on the past five years of the Iraq war, mentioned the anti-war protests as well. "For some Americans, this is the fifth anniversary of a war they do not support. There were marches in California, and in the nation's capital, a dozen people were arrested for blocking the entrances of the Internal Revenue Service. The protesters oppose being taxed to help fund the war."

http://joeplummer.co...

Hey, I'm no conspiracy theorist, so we better prove this guy wrong! I know he is lying! I mean, what does Robert Bonner, ex head of the DEA know anyway? It's not like he has any evidence..

It seems the more Barack Obama tries to explain the peculiar statement he made Tuesday concerning his white grandmother's "fear of black men who passed by her on the street," the more he's assuring attention regarding the matter.

Though it remains to be seen how much focus a media clearly looking to move beyond this subject will devote to it, Obama called into a Philadelphia sports radio station on Thursday making comments that, if publicized, might get him in even more trouble with white voters.

As transcribed by Breitbart moments ago (audio available here):

A day after Barack Obama's speech in reaction to the bigoted and hateful rants of his long-time pastor, the network evening newscasts moved on -- with only ABC briefly mentioning the topic -- while NBC Nightly News, which has run just one clip of Jeremiah Wright and on Friday had instead featured a whole story about Obama's childhood friends cheering him on, centered a Wednesday night story around “a mistake” by John McCain. Anchor Brian Williams provided an ominous plug: “Did John McCain slip, or was his mistake intentional? His choice of words making news tonight.”

Kelly O'Donnell soon proposed: “Defense and national security are central to McCain's campaign. So a mistake he repeated this week has stood out. At least three times McCain incorrectly asserted that Iran is aiding al Qaeda.” After video of Senator Joe Lieberman whispering in McCain's ear, McCain corrected himself as O'Donnell explained: “The mistake, al Qaeda is a Sunni group while Iran is a Shia nation.” O'Donnell highlighted how “Senator Obama seized on the error,” concluding with the suggestion the one comment undermined McCain's image: “Leaving McCain to defend his expertise during a trip in which he intended to showcase it.”

It's a common trick the media employ when reporting on "skyrocketing" gas price stories: show photos or B-roll of price marquees that bear prices way above the actual average price.

MSNBC.com's front page this morning is no exception, as the screen cap at right shows regular unleaded for $3.979, or 21 percent higher than the national average of $3.27.

The article's headline reads, "Rising gas costs crimping budgets."

The caption for the same photo in the article reads, "Gas prices already top $4 a gallon at many stations including this Shell outlet in Menlo Park, Calif."

Although it already weighed in on Monday about District of Columbia v. Heller, the Post is clearly worried that the Court will find, shockingly enough, an individual right to keep and bear arms in the text of the Second Amendment. So the legal solons at the Post penned a second layman's lame brief, "Judging Guns," in the March 20 paper (emphasis mine):

BY THE END of oral arguments Tuesday in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, a majority of Supreme Court justices seemed to embrace the notion that the Second Amendment recognizes an individual right to keep and bear arms. Such a conclusion, however, should not automatically prove fatal to the District's admittedly tough gun control law.

Every right, including freedom of speech, is subject to some limitations. The legal and public policy arguments for allowing broad government regulation of firearms are compelling.

[...]

On Wednesday, Fox News became the first news network to pick up on the contradiction between claims made by Senator Hillary Clinton about her 1996 trip to Bosnia and the reality reported by journalists at the time. In a speech on Monday, Clinton asserted that “I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

But no news outlet mentioned sniper fire at the time, and TV news footage from the day of Clinton’s visit, which was first posted Tuesday on NewsBusters, shows Clinton and her daughter walking around without helmets, greeting various people including the acting President of Bosnia and a Bosnian child who read a little speech for the then-First Lady.

Sean Penn has wrapped filming of "Milk," a biopic of slain gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, and when filming a climactic scene, Ruthe Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle reported, Penn gave an "impromptu speech Milk would have loved," which included heavy Fox News-bashing:  

"I almost wish Jerry Falwell were alive to see this. Almost," Penn shouted to the crowd. After dropping some names of conservatives who are still with us - "Bill O'Reilly, who is too stupid to talk about," and "Sean Hannity, the butt boy of Rupert Murdoch," Penn said, "We know something more. We know their end is near."

Does that mean the end of their influence? Or is Penn encouraging something more final?

At ABCNews.com, Susan Donaldson James reported that Penn "narrates a new anti-war documentary that alleges U.S. presidents since Kennedy have manipulated the public to wage wars."

Illinois State Senator James Meeks has endorsed Barack Obama for president.

Here is how James Meeks and his relationship with Obama were described in a 2004 Men's News Daily report during Obama's 2004 US Senate campaign:

Obama’s closest religious advisers -- Fr. (Michael) Pfleger, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, and Illinois State Sen. James Meeks, who moonlights as the pastor of Chicago's Salem Baptist Church – may have quotes from Scripture always handy, but are theologically closer to Karl Marx and black nationalism, than to Christianity.

..... According to State Sen./Rev. James Meeks’ humble, personal church Web page, “Meeks’ practical and charismatic style of instruction motivates the hearer to take action and has resulted in accomplishments of miraculous proportions.” When the good Senator/Reverend is not accomplishing miracles and other feats “never before documented in history,” he serves as the executive vice president of Jesse Jackson Sr.’s National Rainbow-Push Coalition.

The Rev. Meeks appears to have a problem similar to that of the now-infamous Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, as this excerpt from an August 2006 story at CBS Chicago shows (bolds are mine):

Since the Rev. Jeremiah Wright revelations first shook the Obama campaign, one of America's so-called foremost civil rights leaders has been conspicuously silent about the subject.

With this in mind, Fox News producer Griff Jenkins went to the Take Back America convention in Washington, D.C., Wednesday to get Jesse Jackson's opinions about the controversy that virtually everyone in America is talking about.

Sadly, the Reverend wasn't interested in answering any of Jenkins' questions on this matter (video available here courtesy our friend Ms Underestimated):

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: Tibet.

Does the violence there concern you? Should this impact our most-favored nation trading status with China? How does this change the upcoming Olympics? Do you think America should consider boycotting the games, or is this not serious enough yet for such a measure?

Are you paying much attention to events there? Do you feel media are covering this enough and fairly? Or, has this been lost in all the election focus?

Time editor Rick Stengel made his regular Thursday Morning Joe appearance today, revealing the magazine's cover to be published tomorrow. But while we learned that the Dalai Lama's photo will appear there, the bigger story is the "cover" Time is trying to provide for Barack Obama's Rev. Wright problem.

Here's the gist of Time's defense of Obama, a distillation of Stengel's statements and Time articles by Amy Sullivan and Joe Klein:

• An important aspect of the problem is that white Americans are incredibly ignorant about black churches in America.
• In fact, Rev. Wright's church isn't that radical as black churches go.
• It was understandable for Obama to have joined Wright's church. At the time he was a 27-year old bi-racial man trying to figure out his identity as the son of an atheist father and skeptic mother and needed a church "he could learn from."
• It's understandable that Obama didn't leave the church: it's like reading a book--you don't necessarily agree with the author.
• Obama's speech was a "triumph," and Americans will be thinking "small" if they make the Wright thing a big issue in the campaign.

View the video here.

ABC’s Brian Ross is reporting that Barack Obama’s speech trying to get around the controversy over his pastor Jeremiah Wright doesn’t match his previous professions of ignorance about the vehemence of Wright’s sermons on the oppression wrought by America and "rich white people." (It also doesn’t match his account of Wright in his book Dreams of My Father.) Ross declared:

Buried in his eloquent, highly praised speech on America's racial divide, Sen. Barack Obama contradicted more than a year of denials and spin from him and his staff about his knowledge of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's controversial sermons....

Until yesterday, Obama said the only thing controversial he knew about Rev. Wright was his stand on issues relating to Africa, abortion and gay marriage.

"I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial," Obama said at a community meeting in Nelsonville, Ohio, earlier this month.

"He has said some things that are considered controversial because he's considered that part of his social gospel; so he was one of the leaders in calling for divestment from South Africa and some other issues like that," Obama said on March 2.

One of the more controversial statements from Barack Obama's speech on Tuesday was his reference to his white grandmother's "fear of black men who passed by her on the street."

Curiously, his most recent account of her anxieties doesn't mesh with what he wrote about this subject in his 1996 book "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance."

As neatly identified by Steve Sailer (h/t NB reader Rob Reardon via Power Line):