Someone forgot to tell the Wall Street Journal's Kelly Evans and Justin Lahart, carried here at the Arizona Republic, that they're supposed to portray the economy in a bad light whenever and wherever possible. I'll get to the pair's report later.

That "bad light" directive seems seared into the minds of the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger and his AP colleagues, as they continue to "cling to recession," and attempt to convince consumers and businesses that if perchance we're not already in one, it's just around the bend.

The AP's persistence has borne dreadful fruit. Relentlessly downbeat reporting during at least the past six years by the wire service's business reporters -- who largely determine what most Americans see, hear, and read about the economy -- is a big reason, if not the most important reason, why most Americans, as seen in the latest consumer confidence report, have a negative economic outlook and are convinced that we are in a recession.

Friday, Crutsinger worked mightily to take the lemonade that was the good housing starts report and turn it into lemons:

Conservative radio talk show host and Constitutional lawyer Mark Levin on Friday called for MSNBC to suspend Keith Olbermann as a result of his deplorable remarks concerning American soldiers and President Bush.

As my colleague Brad Wilmouth reported, Olbermann on Wednesday's "Countdown" "accused the President of 'panoramic and murderous deceit,' and of 'creating' an America that 'includes cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives.'"

This didn't sit well with Levin who on Friday gave Olbermann the tongue-lashing his employers at MSNBC would give him if they possessed any shred of decency or common sense (audio available here thanks to our friend Johnny Dollar):

Hasn't the MSM learned anything from the unfortunate episodes of John "stuck in Iraq" Kerry and Stephen "if you don't read you've got the Army" King? Apparently not. Once again, the liberal media, this time in the form of the AFP, has perpetrated the canard that the our military is the last resort of the poor and uneducated. An AFP article of May 16 reported the story of Army sergeant Matthis Chiroux, who has refused deployment to Iraq, claiming he considers it "an illegal war."

Chiroux has said that he was "from a poor, white family from the south, and I did badly in school."

And how did AFP describe such young people? As:

[T]he kind of young American US military recruiters love.

BS, I'd say, based on everything I know about military recruiting. But let's let Bill Carr—the Dep. Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel Policy [pictured here]—respond, as he has in a NewsBusters exclusive.

I saw this on Drudge yesterday. The accompanying photo and video at the link made me think a bit. A soldier on active duty cannot grow his hair out like his. And if someone is unwilling to follow orders they can easily talk to their commander and be relieved from military service. Because of the length of his hair and his mohawked buddy next to him I am wondering if he isn't even a soldier to begin with. Sure he may be in the Reserves or National Guard, but they follow the Army appearance standards as well.

This kid (I know he's 24, but he's acting like a kid) is using the argument that he was poor and stupid so he had to join the military. The article mentions that he originally enlisted nearly 6 years ago straight out of high school. So if he enlisted for the maximum of 6 years he's almost done with his service. If he reenlisted, then it was his choice to continue to serve in the military. I think he's relying on a very shaky argument. People that think and feel the same as he does do not reenlist in the Army.

Imagine for a moment the race card had been used during the Republican presidential nomination process, and the United Nations was sending an envoy to investigate racism in America. Do you think the media would report it?

Probably 24 hours a day, seven days a week until every person in the country had heard about it, right?

Well, the U.N. announced on Friday that it is sending its "Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance" to visit our country from May 19 until June 6.

Although Reuters reported this at 2:48 PM EDT Friday, and strongly suggested the investigation is due to racism in the Democrat presidential campaign, LexisNexis and Google searches identified no other American news outlet covering this story. Not one!

Here was the official U.N. announcement:

Catching up with a fawning Associated Press story on Barack Obama from last Saturday, “Obama rises from political obscurity to verge of history,” on Friday the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto ridiculed the sycophant approach taken by the AP's Charles Babington, formerly of the Washington Post. Babington trumpeted in the May 10 dispatch: “There's ample evidence that Obama is something special, a man who makes difficult tasks look easy, who seems to touch millions of diverse people with a message of hope that somehow doesn't sound Pollyannaish.” Taranto, in his May 16 “Best of the Web Today” online compilation, poked fun at Babington:

Is Barack Obama merely something special, or is he truly extraordinary? Babington can't take a position on that. He's a professional reporter, after all, and has to maintain his detachment. But he does report that “without question, Obama is an electrifying speaker,” that “Obama has a compelling biography, too,” and that “for a politician with only four years of experience at the federal level, Obama also has spot-on instincts, associates say, and a steely confidence in his convictions, in good times and bad.”

Speaking truth to power Charles Babington isn't.

In today's "Can You Believe This Gall?" moment, Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama has actually blamed Fox News for his likely loss in next week's Kentucky primary.

Can someone that has been implicitly endorsed by virtually every press member in the nation get away with accusing a news network of negatively impacting his campaign efforts?

While you ponder, the following was reported by the Lexington Herald-Leader Friday (emphasis added, h/t Stuck on Stupid via NB reader Thomas Stewart):

You have to wonder how this CNN headline and story about the earthquake in China got out, as it includes a shocking statistic (400 million births "prevented") rarely seen in the West (bold is mine):

Parents' losses compounded by China's one-child policy

Li Yunxia wipes away tears as rescue crews dig through the ruins of a kindergarten class that has buried her only child -- a 5-year-old boy.

Other parents wail as soldiers in blue masks trudge through the mud, hauling bodies from the rubble on stretchers.

"Children were screaming, but I couldn't hear my son's voice," she says, sobbing.

This grim ritual repeated itself Thursday across southwestern China, as thousands of mothers and fathers await news about their sons and daughters.

..... The grief is compounded in many cases by a Chinese policy that limits most couples to one child, a measure meant to control explosive population growth.

Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Ma.) has been rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston as reported by CNN minutes ago:

A well-informed Democratic source in Massachusetts said the 76-year-old senator had "symptoms of a stroke" at the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port.

An official with the Hyannis Fire Department said it received a 911 call from the Kennedy compound at 8:19 a.m. and transported a patient to the hospital, arriving at 8:50 a.m. The official would not be more specific.

Kennedy had surgery in October to clear his carotid artery in hopes of preventing a stroke. Colleagues said he had recovered quickly and was working energetically recently.

Our hearts and best wishes go out to the Senator and his family. Let's hope this is all precautionary, and he has a speedy recovery.

NECN video report follows:

For several weeks, NewsBusters has been reporting the changing media tide concerning ethanol.

On Thursday, PBS's "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" joined the growing chorus of press outlets pointing fingers at biofuels as being partially responsible for the growing international food crisis:

The cost of food has soared as more and more corn is being produced for fuel, not food...[I]t is the government's mandate for ethanol that has doubled the demand for corn and sent prices soaring.

Sadly, the segment ignored Nobel Laureate Al Gore's involvement in this matter, as well as his biofuel investments, but still went where few mainstream media outlets would have gone just two months ago (video available here):

Although it's been a constant theme of the Clinton campaign to accuse the media for being in the tank for her Democrat presidential opponent, it is nonetheless deliciously ironic to see the woman that coined the phrase "vast right-wing conspiracy" blame her campaign problems on the press.

Of course, as experience has shown us since this couple first broke on the national scene in 1991 that they both consider it almost a virtue to blame their problems and shortcomings on somebody else, we certainly aren't the slightest bit surprised.

With that as pretext, the Clinton campaign unleashed a new television advertisement in Oregon Friday pointing fingers at some of America's top political pundits as reported by Politico (video embedded right):

Big sports weekend ahead:

• NBA ref bet on 100 games he worked!
• Kobe knocks out Jazz, Cavs-Celts Spurs-Hornets to game 7!
• NFL owners might opt out of labor agreement!
• NASCAR Sprint All-star Race in Charlotte today!
• Annika announces retirement, how should history look upon her?
• Big Brown odds to win Preakness -- 1-4!
• Pens and Wings look to close it out at home!
• Justine Henin retires at 25! (added by good suggestion)

Anything I missed?

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: Dick Morris says, "John McCain is America's favorite kind of candidate."

With his record of extraordinary patriotism and his distinctive Senate tenure, McCain is a nominee whom voters from both parties -- and independents, too -- could easily support...McCain needs to not run as a traditional Republican, which is easy, since he's not one. After all, how did an anti-torture, anti-tobacco, pro-campaign finance reform, anti-pork, pro-alternative-energy Republican ever emerge from the primaries alive? Simple: The GOP electorate, along with the rest of the country, has moved somewhat to the left. (In Florida, for example, exit polls showed that only 27 percent of Republican primary voters described themselves as "very conservative," while 28 percent said they were "moderate" and 2 percent said they were "very liberal.")

To sum it up: A candidate who cannot get elected [Obama] is being nominated by a party that cannot be defeated [Democrats], while a candidate who is eminently electable [McCain] is running as the nominee of a party doomed to defeat [Republicans]...In this environment, McCain can win by running to the center.

I'm sorry this was a weekend op-ed, because such talk would have evoked huge debate here on a weekday. :-) Regardless, Dick Morris says McCain is the ideal candidate at this moment in history, and he needs to court the center because Republicans have moved to the left. What say you, NewsBusters?

Dan Abrams, apparently still smarting from the castigation he received in April from Karl Rove, just cannot let go. Despite the fact that the "high level" Republican operative, Jill Simpson, who accused Rove of orchestrating the prosecution of convicted Democrat former Alabama governor, Dan Siegelman, never actually met nor talked to Karl Rove and whose "high level" operative activities in her own words never rose above typical volunteer work, Abrams continues to wander into the swamp created by this much less than credible source. On Thursday, Abrams and Catherine Crier were salivating with glee on MSNBC's Verdict over the prospect that the House Judiciary Committee might issue something called an 'inherent contempt' arrest for Karl Rove (emphasis mine):

President Bush's effort to coax the Saudis to boost oil output was given wildly different treatments on the front pages of the Washington Post than the British broadsheet the Financial Times.

"Saudis bow to oil pressure: Kingtom to lift output to highest in two years; US lobbying comes after price nears $128" reads the May 17 front page FT headline. (The headline for the online version is slightly different: "Saudis to boost oil output after US pressure.")

But the Washington Post headline painted Bush's diplomacy as an abject failure: "Oil Efforts Are Best Possible, Saudis Say: Bush Unable to Win Concessions Likely to Lower Gasoline Prices."

Of course, the Saudis DID agree to boost daily output by 300,000 barrels. As the Post's Abramowitz noted, "[t]hat would take Saudi production to 9.4 million barrels a day" whereas the max the kingdom can pump out a day would be "11.3 million barrels."

Brent Bozell's culture column this week discussed a forthcoming CBS series called "Swingtown," set to debut June 5. Cover your eyes, Angela Lansbury. As the title suggests, it's about swingers, wife-swapping suburban sybarites, set in 1976. This disco-soundtrack spectacle has been delayed for months, due to the writer's strike. The best thing that can be said about the shock jocks at CBS is that they are putting it in the last hour of prime time:

Smack dab in the Thursday-night time slot of "Without a Trace," the series which dug deep for the ratings gold with a teen-orgy scene a few years ago, CBS looks to set new records in broadcast debauchery. Jacques Steinberg of The New York Times reported the first episode is stacked with a sexual threesome; a high school junior smoking marijuana and then flirting with her English teacher; the glorified enjoyment of quaaludes and cocaine; and the sight of the "neighborhood scold" stumbling upon a basement orgy, only to hear some mutton-chopped participant say with a smirk "Why don’t you kick off your shoes, Mom, and join the party?"

Mollie at the Get Religion blog reports that the Obama campaign is circulating a pamphlet in Kentucky with Barack Obama standing in the pulpit with a gleaming cross behind him, and she wonders where all the media fuss is, compared to the hoots and hollers when Mike Huckabee put a slightly subliminal cross image in one ad and said he was a "Christian Leader" in another. On Thursday, the Washington Post ran a brief item:

The pamphlet has circulated in other primary states and is striking for its overt appeal on religion. The words across the top read “Faith. Hope. Change.” Obama is pictured at a church pulpit, with a large illuminated cross in the background. A quote at the bottom reads: “My faith teaches me that I can sit in church and pray all I want, but I won’t be fulfilling God’s will unless I go out and do the Lord’s work.”

Post reporter Shailagh Murray mentioned the campaign is seeking "to counteract the persistent and false belief held by some voters that Obama is Muslim," and to avoid a loss as wide as the one in West Virginia. But she makes no mention of Trinity United Church of Christ or Jeremiah Wright.

Many of you are aware of the ongoing Canadian "Human Rights Commision's" persecution of Mark Steyn and the Canadian Magazine "Maclean's".  In an article entitled "I am starring in one of those movies - you know the one where only the maverick investigator knows something scary is going on" Steyne says "This week, in a brief objecting to a constitutional challenge to Section 13 of Canada's "human rights" code, the Justice Department declared:

"Mr. Lemire complains that the prohibition against disseminating hatred via the Internet is not accompanied by the defences of truth and fair comment that are available to traditional news media in torts ranging from defamation to seditious libel. This argument is misleading. The defences of truth and fair comment remain available to torts such as defamation and seditious libel, regardless of the medium in which they occur. However, none of the traditional media can avail themselves of these defences in cases of alleged hate propaganda, whether the communication appears in print, on television or on a website.

"As the Federal Court has explained, defences that may be available in tort actions are not available in cases of hate propaganda because the prohibition is concerned with adverse effects, not with intent."