There can be little doubt now that Old Media is applying full-court pressure to anoint Barack Obama with the Democratic nomination, and on Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race.

The New York Times's stories for tomorrow's print edition ("Support for Clinton Wanes as Obama Sees Finish Line" and "Pundits Declare the Race Over") clearly point in those directions. The first describes North Carolina as "a decisive loss" for Mrs. Clinton. The second shows how determined the Times appears to be to come up with evidence that Obama has the nomination in the bag, as it actually notes the despised Matt Drudge's headline link earier today to Tim Russert's "The Nominee" video.

Wait a minute.

Jim Geraghty at National Review online appears to be about the only person to have caught the obvious: Barack Obama's overwhelming support from African-Americans means that he performed miserably with the rest of the voters.

Did he ever:

There is a news report starting to make the rounds amongst the MSM on a study that claims to have discovered why conservatives tend to be happier than liberals and it is just the sort of bilge that the MSM loves to promulgate. We may see more of it over the next several days because, while it is titled "Conservatives Happier Than Liberals," it is basically saying that the reason conservatives are happier is because they just don't care about other people. This purported research claims to pinpoint the reason conservatives are happier and it is because they have theirs and they don't care if everyone else is poor and downtrodden. In contrast they claim liberals are less happy because they care more about people and are all heartbroken that people suffer "inequalities."

Yes, they are telling us that if you're a happy conservative, it's because you are a hateful, meanie. Thank you New York University.

Wednesday’s broadcast network morning shows sounded eager to drum Hillary Clinton out of the Democratic presidential race and turn all critical eyes on John McCain. NBC was most emphatic. Today ran MSNBC midnight footage of Tim Russert declaring Barack Obama the winner: "We now know who the Democratic nominee is gonna be and no one is gonna dispute it." Russert added live: "I cannot find an objective Democrat who does not think this race is over." On ABC, George Stephanopoulos endorsed the New York tabloid newspaper headlines: "Toast. Hil Needs a Miracle. That's exactly right....this nomination fight is over." On CBS, co-host Harry Smith suggested to Bob Schieffer: "Bob, this party needs a nominee and fast. What do you think? Will Hillary Clinton get out, and when?" Schieffer declared "This race is over."

The same message came through in the screen graphics. For example, ABC pictured Mrs. Clinton with the words "End of the Road?" as co-host Robin Roberts began the show: "This morning, is it over?" NBC’s Matt Lauer also asked "Is it over?" and so did the NBC screen. The segments to follow answered the question with an emphatic yes.

Last October the NBC Nightly News was the first broadcast network evening newscast to highlight the first Medal of Honor award since Vietnam for a member of the Navy, Lieutenant Michael Murphy, a SEAL killed in combat in Afghanistan in June of 2005, and on Wednesday the newscast stood alone in highlighting the Navy's announcement that a guided-missile destroyer will be named the “USS Michael Murphy.” Anchor Brian Williams outlined what earned Murphy the Medal of Honor recognition:

During an intense firefight in Hindu Kush Mountains in Afghanistan back in '05, while pinned down under fire, he chose to stand up to get a signal on his satellite phone to communicate their location. He knew that standing up would expose him to withering fire. It did. He was hit several times and killed.

Williams also noted that a park in Patchogue, New York was dedicated Wednesday “in his name on what would have been his 32nd birthday.” Secretary of the Navy Donald C. Winter made the ship naming announcement during the dedication ceremony at the park along side Lake Ronkonkoma where Murphy had been a lifeguard.

As reported earlier by Noel Sheppard, the drive-by media that previously downplayed Rush Limbaugh's Operation Chaos has changed it's tune now that Barack Obama's campaign is blaming the Limbaugh effect for keeping Hillary Clinton in the race.

Too bad for Keith Olberman and MSNBC because they apparently missed the memo; instead choosing to do a segment refuting the effect altogether. Last night Olbermann openly mocked Rush Limbaugh alongside his sidekick Chris Matthews who was honking in the background with giddy joy at the prospect of Limbaugh's failure. (video at Webloggin)

For Stephen King's benefit, our friends at Are We Lumberjacks have updated an hysterical picture from November 2006 which humorously mocked John Kerry's offensive anti-military remark:

PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers was interviewed on the radical taxpayer-subsidized Pacifica Radio network's Democracy Now program on Wednesday, and declared that Hillary Clinton wishes the worst on Barack Obama -- "she keeps hoping for every day, is that lightning will strike him" and insisted "She can only win in a way that would leave the Democratic Party in shambles." Even so, Moyers complained that all three candidates are failing to correct a "dysfunctional" capitalist system.

Moyers also made excuses for Jeremiah Wright's wild sermons about 9/11 and AIDS, and brushed off suggestions that his interview could have been tougher. "I’m not a very adversarial fellow. I’m not a gotcha kind of journalist," he claimed. "I knew that they were going to be asking all of these questions. I leave that to those people whose job it is for the commercial media." He decried the ABC debate questions to Obama as "a great exercise in irrelevance."

Got this in an email - thought it would make a good summary of the sad state of our nation's culture...

Horror author Stephen King's comments regarding illiteracy and the military have drawn criticism from the United States Army according to a report by CBS-TV affiliate in Washington, DC, WUSA channel 9.

As NewsBusters reported Monday, King recently told a group of high school students at the Library of Congress, "If you don't [read], then you've got, the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that."

According to WUSA, Paul Boyce of Army Public Affairs issued the following statement (video embedded right):

Wolf Blitzer, on Friday’s "The Situation Room," conducted a softball interview of Arianna Huffington, helping her to promote her new book, "Right is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe," and asking her for her take on the three presidential candidates. He failed to identify her "Huffington Post" website, "one of the most popular websites," as he put it, as a liberal stomping ground, and basically sucked up to her during the entire segment. "I read ‘Huffington Post.’ I read your blog on Huffington Post all the time." Also, "You've really created an enormous success with HuffingtonPost.com, in part because everyone there seems to be blunt, honest. They don't hedge."

Blitzer’s gentle treatment of Huffington could be put into the context of what happened two days later. The Fishbowl DC blog exposed that on Sunday night, Blitzer himself appeared at Huffington’s "Right Is Wrong" book release party, which major Democratic contributor Beth Dozoretz held at her home [see picture above, via Fishbowl DC].

A funny friend e-mailed me this joke about the ABC special tonight selling the new Barbara Walters boudoir-opening memoir: "Just a few hours now until the most eagerly awaited program of the May sweeps, 'Barbara Walters: Skanky In the Seventies.' I can't wait."

From Us Magazine through TV Newser: Star Jones lets her old "View" boss Barbara Walters have it on how she's using her tale of adultery with black Republican Sen. Edward Brooke in the Seventies to sell books: "It is a sad day when an icon like Barbara Walters in the sunset of her life is reduced to publicly branding herself as an adulterer, humiliating an innocent family with accounts of her illicit affair and speaking negatively against me all for the sake of selling a book. It speaks to her true character."

Aside from the never-ending controversy over how Star Jones dramatically lost weight, it's amazing to see how everyone from Oprah to Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post today see Barbara's tale of being a mistress as a fascinating life story, and not a tale of sleazy immorality. It also raises the obvious point of how Barbara's bed-hopping affected her coverage of the Clintons and the famous Monica Lewinsky interview in 1999. It might have helped viewers process that interview with some on-screen graphics that said "Barbara Walters has been a mistress just like her interviewee."

I'm no medical doctor or psychiatrist, but I believe there's a disturbing condition sweeping the left-wing blogosphere, closely related to the well-documented malady of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Call it Limbaugh Derangement Syndrome if you will, and I will.

What else do you call it when a lib blogger compares the radio talk show host to agitators of Rwandan genocide? From Jeffrey Feldman's May 7 blog over at Huffington Post (emphasis mine; h/t NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez):

The right-wing pundit's 'orders' to his Republican listeners have been clear: vote in the Democratic primaries as a coordinated tactic for sewing [sic] division in the opposition party. The goal of such 'chaos,' Limbaugh has stated explicitly, is to foment hatred between different parts of the Democratic Party leading, ultimately, to street riots during the Denver convention.

The ongoing incident raises a serious question:

How far left do you have to be to make the networks' progressive candidates dream team? CBS News Senior Political Correspondent Jeff Greenfield twice referred to Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) as "relatively liberal senators" during a live interview on Washington, D.C.'s WTOP News this morning during drive time.

Discussing the Indiana and North Carolina Democratic primaries, Greenfield first described Obama and Clinton as "both relatively liberal senators," and then later as "relatively liberal senators from blue states."

Given that both have widely-recognized liberal voting records, with the National Journal naming Obama as "the most liberal" member of the U.S. Senate -- even to the left of Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and socialist Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) -- one wonders what an actual "liberal" would look like to Mr. Greenfield. Would it be Raul Castro? Ted Turner? Who?

Hillary's odds of overtaking Obama among elected delegates are not much better than those of the milk-wagon nag's winning the Preakness. But is it "mathematically impossible" for Clinton to win the nomination? No way. Many superdelegates remain undeclared. And even those who have come out for Obama are not bound. If another shoe of the Rev. Wright variety were to drop, it's far from inconceivable that the supers would move to Hillary.

But perhaps in a sign of how much the MSM wants Hillary out and their guy in, Norah O'Donnell has had the chutzpah to proclaim to Hillary honcho Terry McAuliffe that it is "mathematically impossible" for Clinton to win. At 12:03 PM ET today on MSNBC, O'Donnell began by playing for McAuliffe's benefit a clip from last night of Tim Russert declaring that "we now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be." When McAuliffe denied that the race was over, Norah challenged him.

NORAH O'DONNELL: Yeah, but Terry, Terry, under what scenario, under what possible scenario, could Senator Clinton win this nomination? It is mathematically impossible.

View video here.

Another celebrity has seen Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and found green religion.

Supermodel-turned-mommy Cindy Crawford, now a blogger for Vanity Fair's Web site, appeared on ABC's May 7 "Good Morning America" to tell viewers they can save the environment by buying a $20 water bottle.

"But my kids go to a school in Malibu and it's super-environmentally conscious," Crawford said. "We do beach clean ups, try to use less plastic as a school. And so, that kind of made me think what can I do? And, I teamed up with PUR, which is a water filtration company. They do the things you can attach to your faucets, as well as those pitchers and we came up with a reusable water bottle."

This morning's "Fox & Friends" repeated some misreporting on a dozen nuns who were supposedly "barred" from voting yesterday at their South Bend, Indiana, polling station due to lack of proper ID. As I noted in my May 6 blog entry, the sisters were not refused the vote, they chose not to vote using the provisional balloting option. [audio available here]

As the AP's Deborah Hastings reported in an early draft that was later excised from her story:

They weren't given provisional ballots because it would be impossible to get them to a motor vehicle branch and back in the 10-day time frame allotted by the law, Sister McGuire said. "You have to remember that some of these ladies don't walk well. They're in wheelchairs or on walkers or electric carts."

Of course last night's race between Clinton and Obama was close, but not by a margin of 12 votes. Simply put, these sisters could have voted and opted to not follow up with the validation process should none of the races they voted in remain undecided within the 10-day window. In other words, no one barred these sisters from voting but the sisters themselves.

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: not a good night for Hillary.

Sure, she won in Indiana, but not by much. And, North Carolina, no matter how you spin it, was a disaster.

Does she have to get out now? Will Democrat leaders start putting the pressure on her?

That's certainly not the way it looked during her "victory" speech last night in Indiana.

On another note: how much do you think Operation Chaos impacted the results in the Hoosier state?