AARP the Magazine boasts a circulation that's seven times greater than that of Time.  For the first half of this year, AARP the Magazine's circulation averaged more than 24 million copies.

AARP claims it's a "nonpartisan organization," an assertion increasingly challenged by senior citizens.  The magazine's September-October issue may give members more evidence for that conclusion.  It carries a cover story on rocker Bruce Springsteen, prominent in the presidential campaigns of both Barack Obama and John Kerry.  The piece is adulatory, noting that Springsteen at his upcoming concerts "will play several roles - hero, leader, preacher, rebel - the performances unfolding like a novel."

The magazine devotes several pages to observations from his friends.  One is liberal activist Bonnie Raitt:

It was an incredible boost when Bruce committed to joining the No Nukes concerts.  From the groundbreaking Amnesty International tour, to helping stop Contra aid in the '80s, to a steady stream of benefits, I don't know if any American artist has made as profound a difference.

Ford and the United Auto Workers are set to begin new contract talks under a set of circumstances radically different from any previously faced by either party. There is the "minor" matter of the union's ownership stakes in General Motors and Chrysler that arose in the wake of those two companies' government-engineered bankruptcy filings, accomplished with more than a little rule-bending by the Obama administration and its car czars.

But you wouldn't learn about any of this, let alone its potential effect on negotiations, from reading coverage of the situation by the Associated Press's Kimberly Johnson. Additionally, there's quite a bit of emphasis on the idea that Ford can supposedly afford to be more generous with pay and benefits than its two major Detroit rivals. How convenient -- for the union and the the other two companies.

Here are key paragraphs from Johnson's very incomplete report:

With “Filling the VOID” as the on-screen heading, Monday's NBC Nightly News, without any consideration for how Massachusetts Democrats blocked the Governor's interim appointment power, fretted over the loss to Democrats of Ted Kennedy's Senate seat as a health care vote approaches. “Less than 48 hours after Ted Kennedy was laid to rest at Arlington Cemetery, the political reality of his vacant Senate seat has set in,” Chuck Todd warned.

Though you could argue Kennedy's plight left the seat empty all year so far, Todd explained: “Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick set January 19th, 2010 for the special election, leaving the potential for the seat to be vacant for five months. To avoid a lengthy vacancy, next week the Massachusetts legislature begins debating a change in the law to give the Governor the power to appoint an interim Senator, a power most Governors in other states already have. It was a wish Senator Kennedy himself and his family made known directly to Massachusetts' lawmakers.” Todd, however, failed to point out that in a crass 2004 political maneuver urged by Kennedy, Bay State Democrats changed the law so then-Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, could not replace John Kerry if he had won the presidency.

Remember when Michael Moore depicted the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) as a superior health care system in his 2007 documentary "Sicko"?

That romanticizing on the silver screen might have seemed like a good idea for the American society, but according to Lord Ara Darzi, it's not ideal for the United States. Darzi, a former British Health Minister, appeared on CNBC's Aug. 31 "Street Signs" to defend the NHS from attacks made in a TV spot, which had been rejected by ABC and NBC for airing because they were "too partisan."

"Street Signs' host Erin Burnett presented the hypothetical question to Darzi that if the U.S. would ever go to a single-payer system, would stifle innovation and would that mean rationing of care. According to Darzi - those decisions are made on a local level.

Chris Matthews, on Monday's "Hardball," threw out a couple of crazy comparisons as he likened the socially conservative Sarah Palin to shock jock Howard Stern and the rakish Bill Clinton to God. First up, in his "Hardball Sideshow" segment, Matthews claimed the reason the former Alaska governor was so popular on the lecture circuit is because, "just like Howard Stern the reason people will pay to hear her is that they have no idea what she's gonna say next." However Matthews outdid himself, just a little later, as he declared listening to Clinton's strategic advice for Democrats on passing health care reform was like hearing, "The Voice of God." [audio available here]

The following Matthews observations were made on the August 31, edition of "Hardball":

Carrie Prejean, the former Miss USA runnerup, has filed a lawsuit against the Miss California Organization claiming it discriminated against her religious beliefs thereby causing her emotional distress as well as financial loss.

According to FoxNews.com, Prejean "filed a complaint Monday morning in Los Angeles Superior Court against K2 Productions (the franchise that operates the Miss California Organization) as well as co-executive directors Keith Lewis and Shanna Moakler and publicist Roger Neal."

The article continued (h/t Kevin McCullough):

The Iraqi who threw his shoes at Pres. Bush will be getting out of jail after serving only nine months of what was originally a three-year sentence . . . and David Shuster is pysched.

Reporting on the news at the end of MSNBC's 4 PM hour today, Shuster exclaimed: "Good for him!"

Co-host Tamron Hall wasn't so sure, making the indisputable point that Shuster wouldn't be so happy if the guy who walked early had hurled his Hush Puppies at Pres. Obama.

MRC's Seton Motley will be on the Glenn Beck program in just a few moments on Fox News Channel.

Dan Barry, who pens the "This Land" column for the New York Times, filed an ostensibly straight news story for Sunday's front page from the late Sen. Ted Kennedy's funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, "Kennedy Mourners Memorialize 'Soul of the Democratic Party." Instead, Barry got caught up in strained poeticism positioning Kennedy for secular sainthood.

The nation said final farewell on Saturday to Edward M. Kennedy, who used his privileged life to give consistent, passionate voice to the underprivileged for nearly a half-century as a United States senator from Massachusetts. He was the only one of four fabled Kennedy brothers to reach late adulthood, and he was remembered for making the most of it.

Along the rain-dappled roadways of Boston in the late morning, and then in the sweltering humidity of Washington in early evening, people waited for the fleeting moment of a passing hearse so that they could pay respects to the man known simply as Ted. At the United States Capitol, where Mr. Kennedy had served for so long, his wife, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, stepped out of a limousine to receive hugs, bow her head during prayers, and to hear the singing of "America the Beautiful."

On Sunday’s Face the Nation on CBS, host Bob Schieffer got reaction to Ted Kennedy’s death from left-wing Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson, who touted the Senator’s importance in the 2008 campaign: "Of course Barack Obama had the wings of hope and the winds of possibility behind him, but Ted Kennedy was an awful powerful gust of wind that gave him a necessary lift."

Dyson, who was not identified as liberal, went on to describe Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama as coronation: "This was a man of American royalty bestowing upon Mr. Obama, if you will, the mantle of that kind of liberal leadership...I think that Senator Kennedy identified in Barack Obama the same hopefulness that he had seen glowing in the face of his brother John and radiating from the heart of his brother Robert."

Dyson continued to glorify Kennedy and Obama quasi-religous terms:

Some of us have been wondering how viable the Voluntary Employee Benefit Arrangements (VEBAs) set up by the United Auto Workers for its auto industry employees really are. This is of particular concern at the VEBAs tied in to General Motors and Chrysler. What happens to the employer stock these VEBAs own will heavily influence whether they have the money to pay promised benefits.

The answer to the viability question must be "not very," because the House version of health care that has made it out of committee has a $10 billion provision tucked into it that would largely work to back the VEBAs up in case GM and Chrysler are never able to stand on their own -- or in case other high-wage, high-benefit companies, many of which are unionized, follow them into serious financial difficulty.

Maybe it's because $10 billion doesn't mean much any more in an era of trillion-dollar deficits, but media coverage of this "little" provision has been very, very light. A Google News search on "retiree health care UAW" (not typed in quotes) came back with only about 25 relevant items of roughly 100 total results earlier this afternoon. Many of those results are outraged editorials and op-eds. There is precious little original news coverage of the topic.

One of the few examples of original coverage is an August 24 report by Justin Hyde and Todd Spangler of the Detroit Free Press that explains the provision and provides background:

The Walt Disney Company is synonymous with two things: family entertainment and an iron grip on its intellectual property. Unless gays are involved. They can do what they want.

Currently, a parody of a Miley Cyrus video is an Internet phenomenon. “Party in the FIP” is a take-off on Cyrus’ hit “Party in the USA,” which is on Hollywood Records, a Walt Disney Company. “FIP” refers to Fire Island Pines, a famously gay New York beach. The video features, in the words of MSNBC host Carlos Watson, “guys dancing on the beach in Speedos.”

In a segment on August 31, Watson said, “It appears that Disney is in on the joke, or at least they’re laughing at it too.” He turned to cohost Kerry Eleveld, of gay publication The Advocate. “What do you think about Disney, who doesn’t always seem to be the most progressive company in the world, seeming not only to be to be okay with it but making phone calls to the creator of it?”

“They might not be incredibly progressive,” Eleveld said, “but they’re smart business people. It never hurts to have gay men on your side.”

ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl on Sunday hyperbolically declared that the Kennedys are "America’s family." Reporting on the funeral of Ted Kennedy for Good Morning America, the reporter read a letter from the Senator to the Pope about his Catholic faith and how it sustained him in life. Karl opined, "...Kennedy did a better job summing up his own life than any of the other hundreds of eulogies we have heard over the last days."

Describing the assembled clan at the funeral, Karl boldly asserted, "In the front, the Kennedys, America's family. Four generations shaped by the man who bore the torch when his brothers fell." Certainly, there are many independents, Republicans and non-Democrats who would disagree with bestowing such a label on the liberal Kennedy family.

The death of Edward Kennedy was undeniably a big political story, but the five days of intense media coverage also exposed how journalists see the Senator's ardent liberal agenda as an unquestionable good for America, not as controversial policies that fueled high-tax big government at the expense of the free market.

Reporters painted Kennedy as Mother Teresa. "Over five decades, Ted Kennedy carried the torch passed on by his brothers, for civil rights, for the poor, and for the sick," CBS's Harry Smith opened The Early Show on August 26, just hours after Kennedy's passing. "For nearly half a century in the Senate, Ted Kennedy spoke for the people who had no voice — the poor and the disabled, children and the elderly," anchor Katie Couric echoed on that night's CBS Evening News.

It's a cute theory and maybe it deserves brief (pardon the pun) coverage in some other section of the paper, but the front page of the Monday Washington Post?

Readers of the August 31 edition were greeted by a 17-paragraph below-the-fold front page story by business writer Ylan Q. Mui about "What Underwear Says About the Economy."

Mui explains:

At the end of Sunday’s Face the Nation on CBS, host Bob Schieffer fondly remembered Ted Kennedy, exclaiming: "In a sense he was the classic American hero, the imperfect man who was sorely tested and yet in that testing found a way to overcome personal flaws and go on to accomplish great things."

Schieffer began his commentary by noting how Kennedy: "...crashed and crashed again during the early turns of his life, but somehow he kept on going through the sorrows and tragedies over which he had no control and the self-destructiveness over which he did. And in the final laps he won. His children loved him. His contemporaries, even those who often opposed him, admired him. And those whose causes he championed thanked him. To what else can a man aspire?"

In addition to touting the Senator as an "American hero," Schieffer praised his liberal legislative accomplishments: "The thousands of laws that he authored changed the lives of millions who were less fortunate, a legacy few can match....You didn’t have to agree with his politics to appreciate what he achieved. Ted Kennedy made a difference."

On the August 30 Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace seemed to pick up on Clay Waters' NewsBusters item, earlier posted at TimesWatch, pointing out the blatant double standard between the New York Times obituary for conservative Republican Senator Jesse Helms and that of liberal Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy.

Near the end of Sunday's show, Wallace read from the first paragraph from each obituary, with the Kennedy version tagging the liberal Senator as "a son of one of the most storied families in American politics, a man who knew acclaim and tragedy in near equal measure, and who will be remembered as one of the most effective lawmakers in the history of the Senate."

By contrast, the Helms version omitted such positive causes as his legislative fight against the tyranny of communism, and instead portrayed his Senate career in a negative light, referring to him as the "Senator with the courtly manner and mossy drawl, who turned his hard-edged conservatism against civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art."

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the August 30, Fox News Sunday:

Speaking with Ted Kennedy’s niece, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, on Monday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith wondered: "Does a Kennedy belong in your uncle’s old Senate seat?" Townsend replied: "I think if my brother, Joe, wanted to run, I think he’d put up a great race and be a great Senator, but there are a lot of people who can carry on Senator Kennedy’s legacy."

Just prior to that question, Townsend had boasted: "And I think what we saw over the last few days is that people said ‘Ted Kennedy, I don’t know how you got to be Senator, but when you were there, you did more than any other senator in American history.’"

On a Sunday evening in August four summers ago the NBC Nightly News devoted its “In Depth” segment to how Cindy Sheehan was “single-handedly bringing the Iraq debate to Mr. Bush’s doorstep” with her protest in Crawford, Texas. But Sunday night this year, after Sheehan departed Martha's Vineyard without earning any network media coverage as President Barack Obama's wrapped up his vacation there, NBC's Ron Allen began a story: “Hours before President Obama's vacation ended, he treated his girls to ice cream and candy -- the kind of family time the President said he had in mind for the week on Martha's Vineyard. A chance, friends say, to renew himself.”
    
A week ago, a MRC Media Reality Check asked: “Will Nets Note Sheehan's Anti-Obama Protest? Media Embraced Cindy Sheehan's Anti-Bush Push in 2005; ABC Anchor Now Says: 'Enough Already.'” (NB posting) The answer: No. Though she spent four days on the island and held an event on Thursday right next to the media set up in the Oak Bluffs School, her anti-Obama efforts were ignored by all the networks (cable too) as well as major newspapers.

Who needs to make health care Barack Obama's Waterloo, as Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C. suggested? Why not make it the president's Alamo?

That's the advice PBS host Bill Moyers had for President Barack Obama in an appearance on HBO's August 28 "Real Time with Bill Maher." According to the former press secretary for President Lyndon B. Johnson, a defeat on health care/health insurance reform would do the left more good than crafting some sort of compromise.

"I mean, I would rather see Barack Obama go down fighting for vigorous, strong principled public insurance, than to lose with a bill - look, BusinessWeek had a cover story last week, ‘The Insurers are Winning,'" Moyers said.