A week ago I was mystified when Chris Matthews went out of his way to butter up Ed Rendell when the Dem Pennsylvania governor appeared on Hardball, and described the schmoozing here. Now, call it mystery likely solved. According to one account, Matthews has approached Rendell for help in a possible 2010 U.S. Senate run. That seems an ever-more-likely scenario, given Matthews's decidely non-Shermanesque response to a suggestion that he's well-positioned to make a run against Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) in 2010.

The "Hardball" host's intriguing comments came in response to Philly-based radio talk show host Michael Smerconish who speculated on Wednesday's show about the possibility of a Matthews Senate campaign.

Unexpectedly, the former Tip O'Neill aide declined to tamp down the rumor:

"Memo to Petraeus: When you're making the case for more patriotic gore, go easy on the glitter."

That's how Los Angeles-based writer Matthew DeBord concluded his LA Times op-ed entitled "Petraeus' 'ribbon creep.'"

So DeBord apparently thinks ribbons worn on the service dress uniform are the equivalent of "flair" that Chotchkie's waiters wore in the comedy classic "Office Space"? Here's how DeBord began his screed against Petraeus being decked out in "martial bling":

On Wednesday's "Hardball" Chris Matthews repeated his charge that neo-cons believe in enforcing human rights only at the "point of gun." During a discussion on protests following the Olympic torch's path to China, "The Financial Times'," Chrystia Freeland pointed out that "neo-cons" as well as liberals, believed in spreading human rights to which Matthews interjected: "Yeah but at the point of a gun!"

The following exchange occurred on the April 9 edition of "Hardball":

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, is this a bit of an elitist issue Chrystia? In other words, college students, people who are perhaps more interested in international events than it is a trade issue?

By ROGER J. STONE JR.

MSNBC TV star Chris Matthews has been quietly sounding out Democrats
across Pennsylvania about seeking the Democratic nomination to oppose
Senator Arlen Specter, who shows no signs of slowing down or retiring,
in 2010.

Matthews has pondered a Senate bid in Pennsylvania before but deemed
the water too cold. Matthews has been meeting with former Philadelphia
City Comptroller Tommy Leonard and has approached Governor Ed Rendell
to inquire about recruiting campaign personnel.

Unfortunately, like Pat Buchanan before him, Chris Matthews has
hours and hours of television tape going back 20 years and thousands of
words in columns written in the same time period. His Senate bid will
die of his own words.

The New York Times Magazine will publish story by Mark Leibovich this Sunday which will illustrate the point.

News agencies across the country are still largely refusing to inform readers of the liberal-leanings of Families USA. The organization has a fresh crop of new news articles thanks to its latest study.

In March, Families USA published a report which attributes lack of health care coverage with premature death. Local newspapers across the country are attracted to this report because it includes state-specific data that give the number of fatalities in each state which are linked to a lack of insurance.

You might remember Families USA from its advocacy for expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) which would have increased the income eligibility limit from 200 percent to 300 percent above the Federal Poverty Level and started a contingency fund which would serve to come to the rescue of states who spend over the amount of their federal allotment. Needless to say, liberal Democrats including Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) and Sen Barack Obama (D-Ill.) make up the organization’s political allies.

Our news analysts at the MRC have combed through the April 9 editions of ABC's "Good Morning America," CBS's "The Early Show," and NBC's "Today," and found zero mentions of the comments that Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) made smearing McCain and military pilots past and present.

[See a related NewsBusters item by Clay Waters here.]

Yesterday I noted how news agencies were slow to cover the story, and certainly were not blowing up the incident into a major gaffe for Sen. Barack Obama, whom Rockefeller supports for president, to publicly and personally denounce.

Rockefeller's offensive remarks, as reported in an April 8 AP wire story (emphasis mine):

On his April 8 "Countdown," host Keith Olbermann smeared Iraq war veteran David Bellavia as a racist:

OLBERMANN, from the April 8 "Countdown" opening credits: Nothing obscure about this: Racism as a Republican campaign plank. Sen. McCain introduced at a rally on Capitol Hill."

BELLAVIA, introducing then hugging McCain: You can have your Tiger Woods. We've got Sen. McCain.

OLBERMANN: Did he actually just say that? And why did McCain then embrace him?

Bellavia is running as a Republican for Congress in upstate New York and is pitted against another Iraq veteran, Democratic nominee Jon Powers, in that contest. Olbermann turned to liberal professor Michael Eric Dyson to sanction Olbermann's specious charge that the McCain campaign is racist:

Last summer NBC told viewers bottled water was bad for the environment because of its packaging and transportation demands.

This time, NBC's April 9 "Today" warned viewers some reusable water bottles are bad for society because they contain a dangerous substance.

"[M]any of those sturdy, reusable plastic bottles contain a chemical, bisphenol-A, that many scientists are worried about," NBC correspondent Michelle Kosinski said.

What did "Today base these concerns on? They based them on a study with lab rats given doses of biphenol-A "thousands" of times higher than what exists in the bottles.

Old liberal-media errors never die. They fade away, then pop back up. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen recycled a 20-year-old inaccuracy on Tuesday, suggesting the George H. W. Bush campaign used Willie Horton’s face in a 1988 commercial. Wrong.

He was a convicted murderer who was given a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison and went on to rape a woman in Maryland. Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts when Horton was furloughed. The Bush campaign seized on Horton and, in a powerful and repugnant commercial, ran his mug shot: an image of a bearded black man. There it was in one nifty package -- race, crime and liberalism. It's a wonder Dukakis didn't stay in that tank.

As we pointed out back in the George H.W. Bush years, the usual ad featured in news reports (and now in college poli-sci courses) was funded by the National Security PAC, not the Bush campaign. Their Dukakis-furlough ad featured all races and never mentioned Horton's name.

The New York Times's Kate Phillips filed a dutiful story on offensive comments against John McCain by a Senate Democrat who recently endorsed Barack Obama in Wednesday's "West Virginia Senator Apologizes for McCain Comments."

Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia managed to smear both McCain and fighter pilots in general when he told his home state paper, The Charleston Gazette, on Monday that:

"McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues."

Phillips led off with Rockefeller's apology, not his offensive comments, then moved quickly on to his endorsement and praise of Obama.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV personally apologized to Senator John McCain of Arizona on Tuesday after remarking in an interview that Mr. McCain's years as a Navy fighter pilot would not have given him an understanding of everyday issues faced by Americans.

Confirming the important role that NewsBusters played in exposing Hillary Clinton’s bogus “sniper fire” story, CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson told the Los Angeles Times’s “Web Scout” blog that it was in fact our March 18 NewsBusters item that prompted her to debunk Clinton’s claims in a March 24 report for the CBS Evening News.

According to the April 8 posting by David Sarno, the Times’ Internet culture and online entertainment writer:

CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson didn’t realize she had a story on her hands until a colleague e-mailed her a link to 12-year-old footage of the Bosnia trip that she herself had reported on, which had been posted on newsbusters.com [actually, NewsBusters.org] several days earlier. “I clicked on a link and was stunned to see it was the same trip,” Attkisson said in an interview.

During an interview with Elizabeth Edwards, "Good Morning America" co-host Robin Roberts spun the wife of the former Democratic presidential candidate as a non-partisan advocate for change on the issue of health care. She lauded her fellow cancer survivor as a "passionate voice in the debate" over the subject.

Roberts also nonchalantly explained that a new chapter in Edwards's life includes "working at the Center for American Progress [CAP]." Of course, the GMA host didn't bother explaining that CAP is a left-wing organization founded by Clinton operative John Podesta. Instead, Roberts described Edwards's advocacy for a major government take-over of the health care industry in personal and emotional terms. The ABC journalist extolled, "The idea that's become Edwards's passion: Health care reform, inspired by her own cancer and Americans she met during the campaign." Would Roberts ever characterize a pro-lifer's advocacy in terms that divorce the issue from its political context?

On Wednesday’s CBS "Early Show," co-host Russ Mitchell began an interview with Senator Joe Biden on the testimony of General Petraeus before Congress this way: "As a long-time critic of the way the Bush Administration has handled the war, were you encouraged by anything General Petraeus said yesterday?" After Biden responded by saying "I'm not at all encouraged that the president has any plan to end this war," Mitchell followed with a setup for Biden to propose his own plan: "You have said you cannot think of a circumstance where General Petraeus, or any military leader, would recommend withdrawal. At this point specifically, what are you proposing?"

On Wednesday’s NBC "Today," co-host Matt Lauer began his interview with Biden with a similar question to Mitchell’s: "Yesterday as you heard the General say, he said the progress is real but it's fragile and reversible. Did he say anything yesterday that changed your mind?" However, unlike Mitchell, Lauer actually followed up with a challenging question: "In, in terms of the security improvements that have been made and General Petraeus laid those out, while addressing the challenges that remain with the Iraqi government. When he, when he uses those words "fragile," and "reversible" Senator, are you okay with the fact that withdrawing troops might take us backward in Iraq?"

 

Ted Turner was not only interviewed, but celebrated on PBS – on April Fool’s Day. The prank was apparently on PBS. It was as if Turner had a subversive mission, to prove that PBS isn’t just for smart people. True to form, Turner walked off a cliff of rhetorical excess on the "Charlie Rose" show, charging that global warming was going to grow so severe, that in a few decades, most of humanity would be extinct. "We'll be eight degrees hotter in ten -- not ten, but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals."

 

News of the day, funny links, etc.

Showing that the left doesn't have a monopoly on political music or political videos, a rapper going by the handle DJ Clayvis released an anti-Barack Obama video, inspired in part by Rush Limbaugh's Operation Chaos.

Here it is:

I'd shorten it up a bit but this is a very good effort, compares very well to the Obama "Yes We Can" video. H/t: TechRepublican.

Some activists at the Public Broadcasting Service seem jealous that CNN is alone in offering yet more free debate time to the Democrats. Last year, PBS offered a liberal debate forum to both parties, hosted by black activist Tavis Smiley. Cornelia Dean reports on The Caucus blog at The New York Times that some PBS producers want a science debate between the Democrats with a group called Science Debate 2008: 

Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have turned down a chance to debate science issues next week in Philadelphia, but the would-be organizers, a group of scientists and others called ScienceDebate2008, hope to arrange an alternative in Oregon, which holds primaries May 20.

Ty West, senior producer for the PBS weekly news program NOW, said he has been working with the group in hopes of scheduling a debate either May 2 or May 9 to be broadcast by the Public Broadcasting System from Portland State University. He said the effort was a cooperative effort involving WNET in New York, which produces NOW, WGBH in Boston, which produces the science program NOVA, and WOPB, the public broadcasting station in Portland.

More news from the front of the Wiki Wars, the ideological battle for the soul of Wikipedia: it seems left-wingers at the online encyclopedia site are angry that anyone would want to mention Absolut's reconquista controversy in the vodka maker's article.

How do we know this? From reading the "Talk" page for the Wikipedia entry "Absolut Vodka," where people can discuss the article and changes they'd like to see made to it. Apparently liberals there do not want the public to know that the company got in big trouble win consumers after it ran an ad in Mexico portraying that country as having taken over certain parts of the United States.

The discussion starts off with an anonymous person (apparently from Loyola University judging by their IP address) who asks that the Absolut entry be partially blocked from editing to prevent "vandalism:"

As accusations against Americans go, surely there's none more serious than that of responsibility for 9/11. Yet Maureen Dowd has seen fit to level just such a charge against Condi Rice en passant: as a simple afterthought, no explanation offered.

There I was this morning reading Maureen's musings on yesterday's hearings with Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker. Pretty standard Dowd fare: a couple Shakespearean quotes pressed into service, a snippy sobriquet [dubbing Petraeus and Croker the "Surge Twins"], when suddenly came this [emphasis added]: