No one should be surprised, but journalists -- you know, those fair, balanced and unbiased professionals -- give more of their political donations to Democrats than they do Republicans. Not by just a little, either. By a 15 to 1 margin.

Brit Hume has a small bit on his Political Grapevine about political donations and he mentions an IBD editorial on the money trail. The piece is by William Tate (a better version of Tate's piece is at Americanthinker.com) and it shows a whopping bias towards the Democrats in donations from our fourth estate (or is that fifth column?).

Appearing on the Monday, July 21, Tonight Show, MSNBC host Chris Matthews defended his declaration from last February that a Barack Obama speech caused him to feel a "thrill going up my leg," and suggested he really is not biased in the presidential race as he contended that "I’m a freaking American" and "who I’m rooting for" is "us." Referring to Obama having "seen on both sides of that San Andreas Fault of race in this country," Matthews effused that Obama was "inspiring." Matthews: "I was inspired by it, and I said so at the time, and I took some heat for it, but I’d rather be honest and say what I feel ...You know, I mean, I'm a freaking American. I do have a reaction to things, and I do react emotionally to my country. I care about this country. I want to look out for it. It's my job. I'm not just some umpire. You know, I take a side: Us. That's who I'm rooting for." Video of Matthews' "thrill" comment from February 12 can be found here.

But after seeming to claim that he was not cheering for either candidate, as he discussed the expected closeness of the election, Matthews focused on his fear that many 70- and 80-year-olds will be "suspicious of change," which sounds like a reference to Obama, as he advised the elderly to "think like your kids for once." Matthews: "I hope one thing. When people go to vote, they look at the guy's background, they look at the age of the two candidates, they look at their abilities and really open up their hearts and say what's really good for my kids, who don't have any color awareness. Kids don't think about that, race. Think like your kids for once. Think the way they think. It would be great if the older people in the country, the 70-year-olds, the 80-year-olds who are suspicious of change, to say, ‘You know, why don't I think the way my kids are thinking and think about the future?’ Whatever they decide, just open up your heart to this prospect of something different. That's what I hope we do." (Transcript follows)

The Sunday Times (UK) has just ratcheted up the pressure on the American media in their continuing effort to maintain their silence on the alleged John Edwards scandal. While becoming the largest English language newspaper so far to publish the juicy details, The Sunday Times, in tomorrow's edition, also took a bit of delight in tweaking the American newspapers for their desperate efforts to put a lid on this scandal such as the directive by the Los Angeles Times muzzling their staff from reporting on this as has been chronicled here in NewsBusters today. The Sunday Times story set the tone with this catchy headline, "Sleaze scuppers Democrat golden boy," followed by this subtitle, "Gotcha: Senator John Edwards, whose wife has cancer, has been caught in a sex scandal that ends his vice-presidential hopes." The Sunday Times story itself goes where the American MSM fears to tread (emphasis mine):

Stop the presses: the world's leading wire service declared on July 26, 2008, that America is now winning the war in Iraq.

Think I'm kidding?

Well, prepare yourself for an alternate reality, for the "defeat" and "slipping into civil war" Iraq coverage the past three years took an interesting turn Saturday when the Associated Press published an article amazingly entitled, "Analysis: US Now Winning Iraq War That Seemed Lost" (emphasis added, h/t NBer DaBird):

Much of the mainstream media is gushing over French President Nicolas Sarkozy gushing over Barack Obama.  The Chicago Sun-Times's Lynn Sweet, for example, wrote that "The beaming looks Sarkozy showered on Obama needed no interpretation."  Unfortunately for the media, those looks of love didn't lead to an explicit Sarkozy endorsement, something they could have really gushed over.

While overseas, Obama did receive an outright endorsement.  John McCaslin yesterday reported in his "Inside the Beltway" Washington Times column:

Minutes after both Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and the U.S. Supreme Court denied appeals to spare his life and he was put to death by lethal injection Wednesday evening for his role in a 1998 claw hammer bludgeoning of a friend, 34-year-old Dale Leo Bishop urged Americans to vote for the Illinois senator for president.

According to the Natchez Democrat, after being strapped to a gurney Wednesday evening and apologizing for the crime, the goateed Bishop uttered these final words:

In 2003, Showtime's Penn & Teller program with a name not appropriate above the fold -- unless, of course, you're a member of the Netroots! -- marvelously exposed what's behind the global warming and environmental hysteria in America today.

The videos have just come available on YouTube.

In part one (embedded right), the comedy team accurately depicted environmentalists as political and social activists who use green rhetoric to "cloak agendas that actually have more to do with anti-corporatism, anti-globalization, anti-business, and very little to do with science and ecology."

Exactly. Parts two and three are embedded below the fold with a warning that these videos contain mild vulgarity. Actually, it's typically one word that most shouldn't find too offensive for it properly characterizes what's behind all this nonsense:

Imagine if a bunch of disgruntled Mitt Romney supporters were currently stalking John McCain or Republican events loudly demanding that their candidate be nominated. Think the national press would be featuring it bigtime as an example of Republican party disunity? Well, the same thing is happening except the people are disgruntled Democrats expressing their opposition of Barack Obama while loudly continuing to support Hillary Clinton. They are known as PUMA ("People United Means Action" or "Party Unity My Ass").  PUMA was formed last month in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton conceding the Democrat nomination to Obama. However, contrary to being just a desperate last gasp by Hillary's supporters, PUMA activities seem to be surging lately despite the overseas trip by Obama which was widely heralded by the mainstream media. In fact, the official PUMA PAC website has today announced, in a message directed towards Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod, their view that the Obama trip was a "flop":

Im paul jensen running for state house 55 dis GOP

IM surprised that no negative news is portrayed about Obama in the news

Im upset (http://blog.mlive.com/a2politics/)

That the liberal would stoop so low as to delete my musings about the upcomming elections

Ever heard of freedom of speech

As NewsBusters has been reporting for a number of weeks, some key figures at the Washington Post have been breaking from the Obama-loving pack and actually pointing out the absence of substance behind all the junior senator from Illinois' flash.

Add Jim Hoagland to the list who clearly wasn't as impressed with the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee's speech in Berlin as most of his colleagues in the press.

Here's what he told PBS's Charlie Rose Thursday (video embedded right):

On July 16, Andrew Malcolm at the Los Angeles Times's Top of the Ticket Blog wrote the following (bold is mine):

When President Bush ordered the surge in January 2007, (Barack) Obama said: "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse," a position he maintained throughout 2007. This year he acknowledged progress, but maintained his position that political progress was lacking.

This YouTube video (different from the compare/contrast video at the bottom of the LAT's link) shows Obama reciting the lines just quoted.

The LAT Blog notes earlier in its entry that "The parts (of Obama's web site) that stressed his opposition to the 2007 troop surge and his statement that more troops would make no difference in a civil war have somehow disappeared."

Something else disappeared this week. Team Obama, for all its posturing, probably saw something like this coming -- which explains their web site scrubbing.

Hopefully this event will repeat itself frequently. You have to get all the way to the end of an apparently weekly routine Associated Press report to see it, but there it is:

We're talkin' sports here:

• Duke ranked most prestigious college B-ball team...yippee!
• Will Team USA take home B-ball gold in China?
• Who's gonna win the Brett Favre sweepstakes?
• Pre-season football approaches, any thoughts?
• I just can't get excited about baseball this year, how 'bout you?
• Anybody have ESPN Insider to tell us the 10 must-see college football games this year?
• Is Kyle Busch a young version of Dale Earnhardt?
• Anything else?

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: oil speculation regulation.

Senate Republicans on Friday blocked a vote on legislation to rein in speculation in the energy markets, instead calling for energy votes that would expand domestic petroleum production and more nuclear power development...The Democrats' legislation would require the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to set limits on the amount of speculative trades that can be made by participants who aren't buying futures to offset their exposure to the actual commodity, including in over-the-counter markets and other exchanges exempt from the same oversight as the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Is there anything wrong with limiting this kind of speculation? Consider this NRO piece before you answer.

The New York Times, while fawning all over Barack Obama's European sojourn, just couldn't resist taking potshots at John McCain who remained here in the United States -- you know, campaigning for the votes of people that can actually vote for him:

On Thursday evening in a glittering Berlin, cheered by as many as 200,000 people, Mr. Obama delivered a tone poem to American and European ideals and shared history. In contrast, just before he spoke, Mr. McCain, was sitting in Schmidt’s Sausage Haus und Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, having a bratwurst, and saying grumpily that he would prefer to speak to Germans when he is president, not before.

And if that wasn't enough, on a back page story of the previous day's edition, the Times ignored their own story located elsewhere in the paper, and in the process impugned John McCain's call for more oil drilling (along with taking a few more cheap digs at the GOP presidential nominee):

** Now With Update... A Soldier Speaks **

The New York Times is miffed. They aren't happy that there has been a dearth of news photos showing dead American soldiers in the war in Iraq. The Times is lamenting that there have been "4,000 U.S. Combat Deaths, and Just a Handful of Images," so more carnage and death is their druthers. Well, more American dead, anyway. They aren't interested in the dead of the enemy, to be sure.

Using the story of photog Zoriah Miller who had his embed status removed when he publicized photos of dead U.S. Marines after a suicide bombing, the Times reveals their pique over the fact that not enough dead Americans have been peddled to the American public. The Times denounces the military for protecting the troops and their families saying, "after five years and more than 4,000 American combat deaths, searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half-dozen graphic photographs of dead American soldiers."

Complaining for opponents of the war that the lack of casualty photos has created a a situation where the "public portrayal of the war is being sanitized," the Times wonders if the homefront is being badly served because we here are not seeing the "human cost of a war that polls consistently show is unpopular with Americans."