It was a hot night of hard-left talk on PBS’s Tavis Smiley show on Thursday night, when Smiley’s guest was radical Pacifica Radio anchorwoman Amy Goodman. The host of the daily Democracy Now program was decrying how American liberties have disappeared under George W. Bush, and Smiley wasn’t asking hostile questions, but softballs: "How do you explain how this Patriot Act has, in fact, crushed so many people? Crushed people, threatened people, put people at all types of unease?" Smiley never named one.

Goodman played up how awful it was, with Big Bad Bush crushing librarians and booksellers: "It is a very big problem. It was written before 9/11; it was just passed after 9/11, and that's the big problem. I travel around the country and we support independent bookstores all over. It's not only the librarians; it's the independent booksellers who also fall under the purview of the Patriot Act. It says that they and the librarians have to hand over information."

Leave it to Reuters in this April 29 article, to express surprise that Hugo Chavez' planned economy, complete with “land reform,” price controls and forced production, is failing. Even worse, reporter Frank Jack Daniels relied on a Marxist outlook and socialist jargon to pretend that those tired policies weren't to blam.

Chavez wants to increase domestic food production; so, of course, the logical solution is to base the recovery on Marxist economics. After watching the failed totalitarian agronomics of Cuba and Russia, you'd think they could have invested a few bucks in a SimCity game so they could practice a little first.

Unbelievably, Reuters said Chavez “sheltered consumers from rising world food costs with subsidies and price controls,” and then in spite of all of that awesome planning, something surprisingly went wrong (all bolded portions mine):

Remember the high and mighty rapper named Kanye West who during a telethon for Hurricane Katrina victims in September 2005 had the nerve to say on national television "George Bush doesn't care about black people?"

Well, the man media gushed over for weeks as a result of this disgraceful display apparently doesn't like receiving reviews of his concerts that give him anything less than an A-plus.

As such, on Friday, he posted a vulgarity-laden response to Entertainment Weekly which had the nerve to only rate his recent performance at the Seattle Key Arena a B-plus.

Even more absurd, according to TMZ.com, some time after posting his tirade, West edited out the most virulent of his invective:

What is it about Hollywoodans that makes so many of them believe that any time political leaders they revere get caught in a scandal, it's because of some vast conspiracy?

While you ponder, consider how just days after "View" co-host Joy Behar suggested that Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama's pastor "might be being paid by the Republicans," film director Spike Lee said, "It looks like [Rev. Jeremiah Wright's] being paid to keep talking."

I kid you not.

As reported by Britain's Guardian Thursday (emphasis added, h/t Deceiver via NBer bias-fighter, picture courtesy New York magazine):

Kenny Leitner of Grafton, IL mows what little grass isn't covered by Illinois River floodwaters (Alton Telegraph photo by John Badman)

On May 2, the Associated Press uncritically reported that an effort to clarify where "evangelicals" stand in the culture/political war in America is soon to be released. It is to be called "An Evangelical Manifesto" and is touted by the AP as a statement by "evangelicals" that "faith is now too political." That isn't all. The AP is claiming that it isn't just Christian leaders in general that are saying this but that it is "conservative Christian leaders" who are standing up and denouncing politics in religion. But a little investigation proves that "conservative leaders" is not a very good description of those who have signed onto this "manifesto." In fact, many of the most well-known conservative Christian leaders in the country have decided not to sign onto the "manifesto" and many more weren't even consulted or included in the creation of this highly political document that pretends it stands against politics.

Sadly, this "manifesto" that is claiming to want to take religion back from its political involvement is itself a political statement, one that was created by people that refused to include Christian leaders from the right side of the political spectrum. This so-called "manifesto" seems to be just another attempt by the political left to undermine the devotion of Christians to the political right.

On Friday's Countdown show, MSNBC analyst Jonathan Alter, also of Newsweek, suggested that voters who support Hillary Clinton's call for a temporary suspension of the federal gasoline tax are "stupid" as he contended that the Clinton campaign team are "assuming that people are too stupid to realize that this is a bad idea that won't save them any money at the pump." Alter later argued that the tax cut strategy may end up succeeding politically for Clinton because "there are a lot of what are called 'low information' voters" who are "not reading the unanimous, unanimous newspaper editorials against this. They're not talking to the environmentalists, the economists, everybody who unanimously believes this is a bad idea. They're, you know, understandably struggling, and at the pump, they're paying a lot for gas, and they want some relief." (Transcript follows)

Do my tax dollars really have to support the anti-American vitriol that comes out of the mouth of PBS's Bill Moyers every week?

Before you answer, consider that the host of "Bill Moyers Journal" followed up last week's much publicized sycophantic lovefest with Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama's America-hating pastor by going on a six minute defense of the junior senator from Illinois and the reverend this Friday which was filled with Democrat talking points.

Readers are warned to proceed with caution before either reviewing the highly-offensive transcript that follows, or clicking on the embedded video in the upper-right (h/t TVNewser):

Despite all the global warming hysteria emanating from the usual media suspects and Nobel Laureate Al Gore, it's been a cold, harsh, long winter throughout most of America.

Apparently, some of the citizens in the small, Idaho panhandle town of Craigmont are so fed up with the cold weather that they placed a request to "Bring Back Global Warming" on the marquee of their local high school.

With this in mind, the following hysterical picture was first published in the Lewiston Tribune, and reprinted Friday by the San Francisco Chronicle with the caption "Burn more fossil fuels so we don't have to wear sweaters: It's 35 degrees in Craigmont, Idaho, in May. What more proof do you need that global warming has ended?":

For all things related to sports. Possible talking point: Tejada does a Babe Ruth:

When Miguel Tejada met 8-year-old Jacob Scott on Friday, he was so touched by the little boy with muscular dystrophy he promised him a home run.Tejada fulfilled his vow to the youngster by hitting the first of three straight Houston home runs in a 7-4 win over the Milwaukee Brewers.

"I was so excited," said Tejada, who'd never promised a home run before. "I know it's hard to tell someone you'll hit a home run and do it. But today when I went to lunch with this kid I wanted him to be happy. So I told him I'd do it."

Stop it. You can't actually promise someone you'll hit a homer, and actually do it. But Miggy did. If this doesn't bring a tear to your eye, turn off your computer, and back away from your desk.

For general debate and discussion. Possible talking point: England makes a HUGE right turn:

Boris Johnson, the floppy-haired media celebrity and Conservative member of Parliament who transformed himself from a shambling, amusing-aphorism-uttering figure of fun into a plausible political force, was elected mayor of London on Friday...With final votes in for the 159 local councils in which seats were being contested, Labor lost 331 seats overall, and the Conservative opposition gained 256. The Labor Party took an estimated 24 percent of the overall vote, placing it a woeful third behind the Conservatives, with 44 percent, and the Liberal Democrats, with 25 percent.

This is a HUGE win for the Conservatives in the UK. Does this have any portent for our elections in November? Before you answer, consider what the Tory victory in 1979 under Margaret Thatcher's leadership did for Ronald Reagan the following year.

John Kass, a right-leaning columnist for the Chicago Tribune, asked the obvious question in a Wednesday column:

Obama can't worry about Clinton's troubles. He's got a few of his own. And he'll be thinking what every one of us would be thinking, if we were running for president as Barack Obama: How the heck will "Saturday Night Live" ridicule me and Jeremiah Wright?

Kass had a few ideas of how SNL should do it:

Wright, Obama's ridiculously controversial longtime pastor, torpedoed the Obama campaign by releasing copious amounts of natural gas in separate speeches, one at an NAACP meeting in Detroit and the other before the National Press Club this week in Washington.

Though SNL writers haven't asked me, I'd suggest a skit called "The Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Clapping School For White Liberal Folks."

ABC’s Nightline featured yet another Cynthia McFadden trip with Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail Thursday, but it wasn’t all sympathetic questions about how hard it is to be a feminist pioneer. (There was one about how all the criticism must be hard on her mother.) Instead, on the trail in Indiana, McFadden pushed hard from the left on how Barack Obama thought her gas-tax holiday proposal was "phony" and "pandering," and how columnist Thomas Friedman of the New York Times thought it was "ridiculous," and how Iran thought her remarks about them were irresponsible. She also wondered if the Reverend Wright issue was "guilt by association...Does it worry you a little bit about the taint of association? Because, you know, you’ve been tarred by the same brush over the years."

McFadden began somewhat sympathetically, although it wasn’t good news, about how Indiana superdelegate Joe Andrew switched sides to Obama, despite President Clinton making him DNC chairman in the late 1990s. Then she switched to arguing against any gas-tax relief: