Anti-Barack Obama ads from Hillary Clinton's campaign didn't concern CBS, but on Wednesday night anchor Harry Smith denounced an accurate ad from the North Carolina Republican Party, pointing out Obama's closeness to Reverend Jeremiah Wright and showing the very same “God Damn America” soundbite the CBS Evening News ran a month earlier, as proof the campaign is getting “nastier.”

Smith teased his top story: “The first day of the rest of the campaign, and if you think it can't get nastier.” Viewers than saw a clip of the ad, “He's just too extreme for North Carolina,” before Smith finished his sentence: “Republicans roll out a new attack ad as the battleground shifts.”

After playing clips of the ad -- the narrator saying “For 20 years, Barack Obama sat in his pew listening to his pastor,” Wright yelling “Not God Bless America, God [bleep] America!” and the narrator declaring “He's just too extreme for North Carolina" -- Reynolds focused on how “John McCain disowned it.” Reynolds used the ad as another chance to resurrect Bill Cunningham (with a “Barack Hussein Obama” clip) as Reynolds rued: “McCain has been down this path before, repeatedly apologizing or rejecting statements from supporters who have questioned Obama's patriotism.” McCain's requests, Reynolds lamented, “have not been effective” since the North Carolina Republicans “put their ad on the Internet.” Reynolds then highlighted how “Obama said McCain could do more to stop it.”

In case you hadn't heard, the world is running scared about the world running out of rice.

As a result, here in America, various food retailers have actually begun rationing the amount of the white stuff consumers are allowed to buy.

Deliciously -- pun definitely intended -- the CEO of the nation's leading warehouse club, Costco's James Sinegal, blamed a lot of the problem on the media.

As marvelously reported by Reuters Wednesday (emphasis added throughout):

In Chris Matthews's mind, a bigot is someone who's "culturally conservative" on race. Matthews equated the two on this evening's Hardball in attempting to explain exit polling from yesterday's PA primary showing that 38% of white Catholic Democrats wouldn't vote for Obama in the general election.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, somebody who doesn't like that group of voters might call them Archie Bunkers. I'll call them Reagan Democrats, John [Baer of the Philadelphia Daily News], they're Reagan Democrats: people who are culturally conservative, maybe a little culturally conservative on the racial front, on the ethnic front. They like to think of themselves as Democrats on the economic issues, but when it comes to the squeeze, on some of these cultural issues--didn't this all come up earlier about three weeks ago in San Francisco, this conversation.

On Wednesday night's "Hardball," Chris Matthews thought he saw racism in two ads targeted against Barack Obama, but when his media panel full of liberal journalists disagreed he back-pedaled a bit.

First up Matthews ran a clip of what he called a "nasty," ad by the North Carolina Republican Party. The Politico's Roger Simon agreed with Matthews that it was "nasty" but said, he wasn’t sure it was "unfair."

Then Matthews ran an ad hitting Obama for opposing the death penalty in Chicago for gang members and claimed:

"It's a giant permission slip to somebody who doesn't want to vote for him to begin with. And it’s also a permission slip for the Republican Party to use him as a target throughout the general election."

However Simon disagreed with Matthews’ implication that it had a racial tinge as he pointed out:

According to The Hollywood Reporter, film director Paul Verhoeven is soon to release a book that is claimed to be a new "biography" of Jesus Christ. In this new publication, Verhoeven feels that he successfully proves that Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, was raped by a Roman soldier during the Jewish uprising in Galilee and the boy Jesus was the result of that attack. No virgin birth for Christ, but instead a rape.

Verhoeven is best known as the director of the films "Basic Instinct," the Arnold Schwarzenegger film "Total Recall," as well as the spectacular flop "Showgirls." The Dutch director reports that he's had a "lifelong ambition" to make a movie about Jesus and hopes this book will spur interest in his film ideas. Verhoeven spent 20 years writing the tome and this has led Catholic League President Bill Donohue to scoff at the claims as being overwrought and unproven even with 20 years of research. Donohue says they are "laughable" claims and wonders why 20 years of research only led to a claim that Christ is "probably" descended from a rapist.

At the end of Wednesday’s CBS "Early Show" co-host Harry Smith introduced a segment on a new group of environmentally-friendly young professionals: "Earth Day, of course, was yesterday, but for many Earth Day is every day, especially for a growing number of Americans of means." Correspondent Priya David went on define this new demographic: "Scuppies, so interesting, that's what the people in this group are called. Scuppies, it's short for Socially Conscious Upwardly Mobile Person, and there are more of them out there than you may realize. They are the new yuppies. Young, upwardly mobile, friends of the Earth."

David further explained that: "The term, coined by financial planner Chuck Fallia, refers to green young people who love both money and mother nature." She then went on to contrast today’s well-meaning "scuppies" with the greedy "yuppies," or young urban professionals, of the 1980's:

DAVID: Today's scuppies aren't like the yuppies of the 1980s.

MICHAEL DOUGLAS: Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.

DAVID: Instead, they want to do good.

Rachel Sklar of The Huffington Post interviewed Dan Rather, which is not a real surprise, since she’s been supportive of his vengeful lawsuit against CBS News (and his partner in fraud Mary Mapes is a Huff-Poster). But why would she ask Rather to decry the dishonesty of the Bush administration, considering his own wallowing in falsehoods? Does the Huffington Post need to share Rather’s apparent delusion that the phony documents are real until he can be convinced otherwise? In Part II of her interview, after Rather denounced how bad economic news snuck up on us because "we were lied to and people dealt in sophistry at best and misled by big people in positions of power," the honesty question followed.

SKLAR: You mentioned people in positions of power not being forthright, or lying outright. There are so many echoes in that elsewhere, especially with respect to the Iraq war, obviously. Do you see this as a pattern of how this administration has operated?

Is this the network all of the Democrats were afraid of just months ago? Glowing from her victory in Pennsylvania, Senator Hillary Clinton braved the April 23 edition of FNC’s "Fox and Friends" to face a barrage of...softball questions. This is not new for the Fox News morning show as they've already given Senator Clinton two other easy interviews.

Co-host Gretchen Carlson started the segment asking "May I call you ‘Rocky’ this morning, Senator?" Carlson and fellow co-host Steve Doocy allowed Clinton to answer any way she pleases and did not interrupt the New York senator. At one point, it appeared as if Doocy was setting up a tough question, recounting some of the many Clinton scandals, but gave Clinton a tee-ball, opining "I thought Barack Obama wasn’t going to run that kind of a campaign." [audio available here]

Whoopi and Joy admit, a part of them wants McCain to win. Why? They want a Republican to clean up after a "Republican mess." Whoopi added that if Hillary or Obama wins "they" (without saying who "they" are, Republicans? The media?) will mercilessly pursue scandal allegations the way "they" allegedly did to former President Bill Clinton.

Joy Behar, to her credit, added "but they also have the other side to get on McCain." Behar added that she agrees with Whoopi to "let them clean up their own mess. They broke it. Let them fix it." She also worried "that they make much more damage than we even have dreamed of."

The entire transcript is below.

WHOOPI GOLDBERG: You know, part of me wants McCain to win because this is, in my mind, this is really a Republican mess that he says he can clean it up. I want him to. But I also know that if Hillary wins, that she’s going to spend the first four years doing exactly what Bill Clinton ended up doing, that, you know they’re going to have girdlegate and muddlegate and dookygate.

ELISABETH HASSELBECK: You think so?

GOLDBERG: Yeah I do. I do.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich recently did a global warming ad with Nancy Pelosi that was sponsored by Nobel Laureate Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection (embedded right).

Obviously, he has taken a lot of heat -- no pun intended -- from conservatives for not only staking out a seemingly unconservative position on this controversial issue, but doing so in such a high-profile way with the likes of Pelosi and Gore.

Update: Sheppard responds to his critics at end of post.

With that in mind, Gingrich posted the following explanation at his blog (emphasis added, h/t Terra Rossa):

This is too good to pass up..

http://www.theaustra...

 

 

Last week's issue of the Village Voice featured Roy Edroso's review of "10 conservative Web scribblers," described therein as "buffoons" and in the article's subhead as "a confederacy of dunces." (Actually, Edroso names twelve bloggers, arriving at his figure of ten by counting the Power Line trio as one person.)

Lefty snark aside, the piece is problematic in part because at least two of the bloggers Edroso scrutinizes, Ann Althouse and Megan McArdle, really aren't conservatives. Moreover, by emphasizing individual bloggers he almost completely ignores lively large-group sites such as the Corner (he examines only Jonah Goldberg's contributions to NRO) and, of course, NewsBusters.

Worried that the extended primary season is tearing the Democratic Party apart, the New York Times is all but taking back its previous endorsement of Hillary Clinton.

Wednesday's lead editorial, "The Low Road to Victory," ludicrously claimed that she squandered Pennsylvania by not winning by a much larger margin and concluded by commanding her to "call off the dogs" -- though it could also be read as a subliminal message for her to get with the program and pack it up so as not to hurt the Democrats in the fall.

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.

See that green thing over there? It's MSNBC's fig leaf. The network has decided to take it all off and admit what everyone knew was obvious: that it's trying to become the far-left's cable channel of choice.

That's really about all you can say after learning the news that the MSNBC show "Race for the White House" will now be simulcast live at 6pm ET on Air America, the low-rated radio network for liberals.

"Race" is a nightly show about the 2008 campaign hosted by liberal NBC reporter David Gregory and prominently features Air America host Rachel Maddow as a panelist. The simulcast move is just one of the latest in a long series of leftward moves made by MSNBC since it determined that pandering to the nutroots left could rescue it from the ratings cellar.

The Chicago Tribune continued today to dance around the party affiliation of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) in its ongoing coverage of the Tony Rezko trial. [See Lyndsi Thomas's March 18 blog post here]

While Blagojevich's party affiliation was not explicitly mentioned, writers Jeff Coen and Bob Secter did note that a former Democratic fundraiser has testified that the governor "linked state contracts, business and favors with the raising of campaign cash." That came 20 paragraphs deep into the 26-paragraph article:

Ali Ata, a former high-ranking Blagojevich administration official, pleaded guilty Tuesday in a separate criminal case involving Rezko. Ata admitted he bought his $127,000-a-year state job by bribing Rezko and making campaign contributions to Blagojevich.

[...]

Tuesday's plea by Ata could have significant implications for both Rezko and Blagojevich. Ata becomes the third person to testify under oath that the governor had direct knowledge of Rezko's activities. Both Stuart Levine and former national Democratic fundraiser Joe Cari testified about separate conversations with Blagojevich in which he linked state contracts, business and favors with the raising of campaign cash.

Andy Warhol famously opined that everyone would eventually experience their own "15 minutes" of fame. Little did he know that, like a drug, having once experienced 15 minutes of fame, many people would become addicted. And with the growth of 24/7 news cycles, many others would go to desperate lengths to achieve their own 15 minutes of fame, by any means.

Take Yale student, Aliza Schvarts, who is currently enjoying her very own 15 minutes, reveling in the controversy sparked by her desperate bid for relevance. She concocted an art project guaranteed to shock an already shell-shocked nation. No mean feat. And it worked. It trumped the video-taped beatings of children posted on the net by other children. It trumped public non-sex performed by teen tramps on their willing boyfriends (?) and even beat out the nude pics those same teen tramps circulated on the net in hopes of becoming as famous as Britney.

Last evening, Chicago's Fox News at Nine aired the segment "Cardinal George Talks About Pope's Visit to America." Reporter Nancy Pender's interview with Chicago's Cardinal Francis George included video of Pope Benedict XVI touring the United States as Ms. Pender provided the voice-over:

"The Cardinal says the visit reinforced his view of the Pope as a warm, compassionate man, and not the hardline conservative he's reputed to be."

CARDINAL GEORGE: None of us is totally responsible for our reputations, it's what you make of it. So if that's the reputation he had, then it turns out not to be entirely true, because the man I saw during this visit is the man I've known for the last 20 years since being a bishop.

It’s really amazing at times to see how the media greet the War on Terrorism with the same detente-loving impulses they used during the Cold War. (They never seem to contemplate whether detente would have ever won the Cold War, or just prolonged it ad infinitum.) In the Los Angeles Times, reporter Jeffrey Fleishman reported on "Iran watching U.S. campaigns with hope for detente." Fleishman’s breath was intoxicated with the old-time brew of moral equivalence, as Iranian theocrats and American conservatives are oddly alike:

Some analysts wonder whether the Islamic Republic, led by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wants a significant improvement in relations with the U.S. Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when militants in Tehran seized 52 American hostages and held them for 444 days, the weekly chants of "Death to America" have become a defining mantra, much in the same way Bush's "axis of evil" resonates with American conservatives.

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: the food crisis:

• Farmers and food executives appealed fruitlessly to federal officials yesterday for regulatory steps to limit speculative buying that is helping to drive food prices higher.
• Bay Area Shoppers Asked To Limit Rice Purchases
• Gordon Brown responded to mounting concerns about the global rise in food prices by signalling that he might scale back Britain’s commitment to biofuels, which critics say has exacerbated the food crisis because land has been given over to grow crops for energy rather than food.

How serious do you think this "food crisis" is? How much of a factor is ethanol? How much is it being exacerbated by hedge funds and speculators driving prices higher much as what is happening in oil? Are there any solutions, or like any speculative bubble, does it just have to play itself out?

Could it be a continuation of Hillary's winning shot-and-a-beer strategy? Appearing on Morning Joe the day after her PA primary win, Clinton popped the top on an even six-pack of cackles. Perhaps her good humor was inspired not only by her victory, but by Joe Scarborough's unabashed [if possibly facetious] pandering, describing himself and sidekick Willie Geist as Hillary's "only shameless flacks in the media."

For your listening pleasure, I've edited a clip of Hillary's cavalcade of laughs. Watch and listen here.

Hillary made the rounds of all the morning news show, and as is her wont was relentlessly on message:

• big win
• sloughs off NY Times editorial criticizing her negativity
• she leads in actual votes [including Michiga