Last Saturday's comedy video open thread was the most popular yet with almost 6,500 reads. Sweet.

Tonight, as we're hours away from our nation's most highly-watched sporting event, it seems appropriate to focus on comedy in sports. As Archie Bunker used to say, can you folly that?

Readers are encouraged to submit suggestions to Noel and Warner via PM or EM (nsheppard@newsbusters.org, igcolonel@hotmail.com).

Our first offering is a collection of sports bloopers:

A Commemorative Inaugural Edition of Newsweek arrived at the office in the mail this week, and it included a column by Eleanor Clift titled "Suffrage, Hillary Style" which touted Hillary Clinton’s "18 million cracks in the glass ceiling" and sang the same old song about how sexism is still more acceptable than racism:

Hillary’s campaign illustrates how far we’ve come and how far we haven’t come. The tone and tenor of the debate around Hillary, and around Sarah Palin, was far more personal and mocking than toward their male counterparts. Maybe the material was richer, but there was no attempt to dance around gender issues the way there is with race. As a society, we still condone sexism; we view it as a part of nature, a given that isn’t worth bothering our pretty heads about.

Bringing Palin in for sympathatic treatment on sexism is a little strange for Eleanor, since this is how she greeted the choice on The McLaughlin Group last year:

Gov. Sarah Palin has instituted a hiring freeze and pledged to work with state lawmakers to rein in spending as Alaska faces the possibility of a more than billion dollar deficit this year.

She told lawmakers Thursday night in her annual State of the State address that she also has restricted nonessential spending as oil prices remain low.

AP adds this later:

Alaska's treasury is 90-percent reliant upon oil revenues. Last year, when oil prices were high, about $140 a barrel, lawmakers stashed away billions.

http://www.forbes.co...

I would bet many AP users deleted that little note. Indeed, McClatchy published an excerpt from the Anchorage Daily News that managed to not mention any of the good news.

http://www.mcclatchy...

That was somewhat understandable, considering the only mention the ADN article made was the following in paragraph 22:
Palin said Alaska is in a better position than other states, having put billions of dollars in savings last year when oil prices were high.

http://www.adn.com/n...

As we reported a couple days ago, when a veteran middle-school teacher in nearby Santa Monica pleaded guilty last month to "multiple counts of illegal sex acts" and molesting nine young girls, the Los Angeles Times didn't print a single syllable about it in their paper. Not one. The teacher was sentenced to 14 years in state prison. Although the Times had reported the teacher's original arrest and some follow-up last May and June, the story of the teacher's guilty plea and sentencing only made it to the paper's blog.

Now look at the front page of today's Times' 'California' B section (Sat. 1/31/09). Prominently displayed on the top of the page are two color photos related to the sentencing yesterday (1/30/09) of a former Catholic priest.

Brent Bozell's culture column this week tackled the new F-bomb single from Britney Spears and the kid who received death threats for starting a No Cussing club:

McKay Hatch is a 15-year-old boy from South Pasadena, California who people clearly hate. He’s received over 60,000 negative E-mails, most of them vicious, some including death threats that have spawned police and FBI investigations. What has this boy done that’s caused such anger? Was he caught dealing drugs? Did he rage? Did he kill? No. He started a No Cussing Club.

And for that he is vilified. Hatch says some people are going out of their way to curse him at school, on the Internet and on the phone. They send him pornographic magazine subscriptions. Not long ago, someone ordered $2,000 worth of pizza delivered to Hatch's house. Then came the death threats.

Brent Hatch, the teenager’s father, told reporters one death threat in particular crossed the line. "I was at the hospital with my wife, we were visiting family, and some guy had called on my cell phone said, 'I know you you're gone, you're not there, and I'm in front of your house and I'm going to kill your family.’"

On the January 1 CBS Evening News, correspondent Mark Phillips took out of context an Israeli statement that "there is no humanitarian crisis" in Gaza and paired it with images of suffering Palestinian children, as if to blatantly embarrass the Israelis and make it appear that they were in denial of or indifferent to civilians who had been injured. After showing a clip of Israeli Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni talking about keeping "pressure on the extremists like Hamas," made during her trip to France, Phillips continued: "But the pressure is not just being felt by Hamas extremists. However well they are aimed, the bombs kill and injure the innocents as well." Pairing a voiceover of himself with heartwrenching clips of Palestinian children who are either injured or who have terrified facial expressions, Phillips concluded: "Israel says there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Mark Phillips, CBS News, Ashdod."

CNN's Campbell Brown isn't happy with what Rush Limbaugh said about her colleague Ali Velshi Friday, and has invited the conservative radio host to debate him on her program.

As some background, Velshi was on Brown's "No Bias, No Bull" show Thursday and claimed: "This is not the economy that Ronald Reagan ever saw or anybody with the last name Bush ever saw, or Clinton. We have not seen anything like this in our lifetime."

After the fourth quarter Gross Domestic Product numbers were released Friday showing a much lower-than-expected decline, Limbaugh took issue with what Velshi said the night before:

Mr. Velshi, you are incompetent. You are a disservice to your business, except you fit right in at CNN. Disinformation, character assaults. This economy is nowhere near as bad as it was in 1982.

Brown took issue with this Friday evening (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript, file photo):

In the past several hours, I have received multiple e-mail messages from readers claiming that internet behemoth Google, for a brief period of time Saturday morning, flagged a number of conservative websites including NewsBusters, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Fox News as possibly harmful to computers.

UPDATE: This is NOT a problem exclusive to conservative websites. 

NewsBusters has reported such instances before when they happened to Lucianne and the American Spectator. 

NewsBusters reader James Marie e-mailed moments ago (with permission):

CNN's Paul Begala, in response to Friday's announcement that former Maryland governor Michael Steele had been named Republican National Committee chairman, said, "The real leader of the Republican Party in America today is a corpulent drug addict with an AM radio talk show, Rush Limbaugh."

He also said Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is "very bitter, and divisive," "Obama is stylistically much more like Reagan," and that George W. Bush was a "spectacularly lazy president."

Readers are cautioned to have their blood pressure medications nearby before proceeding any further (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript, h/t Hot Air, file photo):

President Barack Obama's olive branch to Iran was seriously snubbed in the past couple of days as key figures within the Islamic nation made it clear that they have no interest in talking with America unless we change our policies.

Even worse, an Iranian government spokesman said Obama's statement on Al Arabiya Wednesday concerning a willingness to talk to Iran "means Western ideology has become passive, that capitalist thought and the system of domination have failed."

Might this alter the press's repeated view the previous eight years that tensions in the Middle East were largely caused by President Bush's refusal to talk to Iran without preconditions concerning that nation's nuclear buildup, and that all would be well in the world if we would just agree to meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on any terms?

Such analysis seems critical given Saturday's report from Xinhua:

On Thursday's Late Show, actress Renee Zellweger recounted her “emotional” experience seeing Barack Obama's inauguration, but Obama isn't the only liberal politician she idolizes. Zellweger, who stars in a new movie that apparently ridicules small town America and Christians, told USA Today: “I have a crush on Jimmy Carter. I admit it. He has an extraordinary mind. He's an exceptional human being. And he writes poetry, for crying out loud. He's all good things.”

In a Friday “Life” section profile, “A low-key Renee Zellweger loves to hide in plain sight,” reporter Donna Freydkin relayed: “So wowed was Zellweger that she waited in the blistering Manhattan cold for 2 1/2 hours on Monday to have the 39th President sign her copy of his latest book, We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work.”

Humorously, three pages later, USA Today film reviewer Claudia Puig trashed Zellweger's movie which opened Friday, The New Town, as not only “the worst movie of this fledgling year,” but as “one of the worst movies of any year.” Puig condemned it: “Not content to be merely inane and predictable, it is downright insulting, humorlessly deriding those who choose to live in rural America, labor in factories or have a strong Christian faith.”

Obviously, most will want to talk about tomorrow's Super Bowl. So, have it.

Other topics:

• Serena's #1 
• Where do you rank Federer/Nadal rivalry?
• Are you surprised by how well Orlando is doing?
• It's looking like Bruins and Sharks are the best in the NHL.
• After Wake's win over Duke, what will new rankings be?
• Your choice.

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: Thou shalt be saved, just not as many of you nor as quickly as I promised.

[President Obama] repeated his mantra that the country's economic picture would likely get worse before it got better and seemed to hedge a bit on how many jobs his proposals would create and by when.

In Saturday's address he said his stimulus package would save or create at least 3 million jobs "over the next few years." During his address on January 10, before he had taken over the presidency from Republican George W. Bush, Obama said an analysis by his advisers showed up to 4 million jobs could be saved or created by 2010 through the package.

Isn't this called a bait and switch?

The liberal media were flagrant supporters of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, as documented in literally thousands of postings here at NewsBusters and detailed research reports over at our parent site, www.MRC.org.

Now along comes former CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg with “A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media.” The book pulls together the evidence of the media’s indisputable tilt, making the case that journalists’ abdication of their professional responsibility to provide fair and balanced coverage does great harm to their profession and the nation:

The grim reaper is knocking on the mainstream media’s door, and they remain gloriously oblivious. They have reached a tipping point but refuse to believe it. The corrosion that is eating away at their credibility had been happening slowly. It’s like acid rain; one day you look around and all the trees are dead. Nobody pays attention until it’s too late.

Sleep a little, miss a lot.

As noted Friday evening (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), Jake Tapper at ABC's Political Punch blog revealed that former South Dakota senator Tom Daschle, Barack Obama's nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, had failed to pay over $100,000 in federal income taxes for 2005, 2006, and 2007, because he did not originally report the "the services of (a free) car and driver" provided to him by his employer, private equity firm InterMedia Advisers.

At 11:24 last night, Tapper posted a separate update (HT to NB commenter "slickwillie2001") indicating that Daschle's tax problems involve larger amounts, go well beyond the matter of a "mere" car and driver, and are not completely resolved (bolds are mine):

Sing it.... "I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, I feel Obama in the air he makes us all friendly, he's the real thing" .... OK, maybe that wonderful sentiment can't last. But, as Andrew Breitbart reports, this emotional high has only lasted the Obamagassed Ashton Kutcher a mere 10 days. 10 measly days was all the love-your-neighbor that Mr. Demi Moore could take.

Not long ago, Kutcher was involved in a video of sycophantic Obamaists from Hollyweird where he "pledged" his fealty to a politician. He also pledged to be a more civil fellow saying that he would "always represent my country with pride, dignity and honesty." I'd suggest that this young man should go look some of those words up in a dictionary somewhere because with the uncivil tirade he spewed out against his neighbor for early morning construction noise Ashie was being neither neighborly nor dignified.

Time magazine acknowledged that Michael Steele’s election as chairman of the Republican National Committee "makes history," but their story quoted only social and political liberals for analysis. Steven Gray insisted: "In a TIME interview during that [post-election] period, Steele praised Obama's election as America's first black President. He made clear that as RNC chairman, he would move to temper the party's rigidity and truculence." Truculence? Here's the dictionary definition:  

1. feeling or displaying ferocity: CRUEL, SAVAGE

2. DEADLY, DESTRUCTIVE

3. scathingly harsh; VITRIOLIC

4. aggressively self-assertive: BELLIGERENT

Steele fans and foes alike in the GOP would love to see what Steele actually said on this front, since the Time writer described it so colorfully. (Doesn't it sound like the Time writer's thinking of....Rush Limbaugh?) Then Gray turned to how Steele could display less "rigidity" on snuffing out the lives of the unborn:

Remember the days when news agencies claimed they were the fourth estate? Remember when they claimed to be "objective" and pretended at being separate from the controlling power in Washington D.C.? Apparently that whole claim has proven somewhat chimeric if the several stories we've detailed this week are any indication. And now, to add to the gathering evidence that the Old Media are actively joining Team Obama and the political left, comes CNN to hawk a new line of Obama T-Shirts. So much for being objective. So much for staying above joining a political campaign.

Judi McLeod of the Canada Free Press was alerted by one of her readers to CNN's participation in Barack Obama's permanent political campaign with its new capitalist venture. CNN's headline shirts, where CNN fans can pick from various CNN headlines and have them emblazoned on a T-Shirt for their wearing pleasure, have been a round for a little while, of course. But never before has the TV Cable Newser dedicated an entire series of such shirts to celebrate a single politician... until The One descended upon Washington.

Two nights after the CBS Evening News commiserated with President Obama over his unrewarded efforts to win Republican House votes for the “stimulus” plan as Chip Reid chafed over how “Republicans relentlessly attacked the bill despite the President's extraordinary efforts to get bipartisan support,” Friday's newscast provided the first broadcast network rundown of the ineffective spending provisions to which GOP Congressmen objected. Fill-in anchor Harry Smith noted: “The Republicans' biggest complaint about the stimulus bill is it just gives Democrats an excuse to make government bigger. Wyatt Andrews says the examples are not hard to find.”

Reporter Wyatt Andrews began: “If you are one of those taxpayers who does not want to spend $25 million to repair ATV trails, or $150 million for agricultural losses like damaged beehives, then you'll understand why no Republican supported the stimulus in the House and why most Republicans are trashing it in the Senate.” Andrews related how “Congressman Eric Cantor says around one-fourth of the stimulus spending will never go away,” such as “$15 billion for Pell grants.” Andrews pointed out “anything that Congress couldn't afford before -- $50 million to support the arts, or $70 million to help people stop smoking -- has found its way into the stimulus now.”

Former South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle (picture at right is part of a Getty Images pic at a related New York Times story) has just upped the ante in Washington's tax-avoiding/evading game of "Can you top this?"

Whereas recently confirmed Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner "only" $40,000 in back taxes and interest, principally relating to unpaid Social Security and Medicare taxes (with a dash of retirement-plan penalty and illegally deducted overnight summer camp expenses included in the mix), the man who Rush Limbaugh used to call "Puff" Daschle during his Senate days has upped to ante to six figures.

Jake Tapper at ABC's Political Punch appears to be the one breaking the story (HT NRO's The Corner):

Bumps in the Road: Obama's HHS Secretary Nominee Faces Tax Questions Over Car and Driver