http://www.youtube.c...

Granted 007memo has been a member for awhile, but he bears a striking resemblance to the recently-departed Barry Bonds.  Am I off here?

With First Lady Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey now in Copenhagen, CBS anchor Katie Couric on Wednesday night declared “the 'Dream Team' pushing Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympic summer games is nearly complete” and is now just awaiting “the team captain” -- that would be President Barack Obama, who “arrives Friday ahead of the final vote.”

On ABC, reporter Yunji de Nies marveled at her discovery that members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) are not as impressed by President Obama as are those in the American press corps: “Even the prospect of meeting President Obama on Friday leaves some of them unfazed.” She then showed a clip of herself asking an unidentified man: “So, you're not impressed by the President?” The man, who per a scan of the IOC site's pictures most-resembles Japan's Chiharu Igaya, confirmed: “Never, never.”

Uniquely among the broadcast network evening newscasts, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams gave attention to "incendiary" comments made by Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson of Florida, who charged that the Republican plan for health care is that people should "die quickly" if they get sick, prompting Republicans to demand an apology.

Williams seemed to signal his own disapproval of Grayson’s words as the NBC anchor introduced the item by remarking that "there’s something about this health care debate that makes some people say the most incendiary things." After playing a clip of Grayson’s comments, Williams informed viewers that the Democratic Congressman not only refused to apologize but "compared America’s health care situation to the Holocaust."

Below is a complete transcript of the relevant portion of the Wednesday, September 30, NBC Nightly News:

Karl Rove, David Axelrod - look out. CNBC "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer has the political climate figured out.

Since inauguration, President Barack Obama has seen his approval ratings fall by almost every poll and that's historically a normal reaction as the newness wears off a new president.

During his Sept. 30 "Stop Trading" segment on CNBC's "Street Signs," Cramer pointed out that although the prospects of Obama's ideal health care reform package passing are doubtful, health insurance providers are facing fallout from a publicity campaign meant by the administration to push through health insurance reform. That gives the administration a new villain.

Video below fold

CNN’s Jack Cafferty and Wolf Blitzer endorsed Thomas Friedman’s “scary and sobering column” in the New York Times on Wednesday’s Situation Room, where the liberal writer compared the current American political climate to that of Israel in 1995 prior to Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. After Cafferty remarked that “Friedman’s right,” Blitzer labeled the column “powerful.”

The CNN commentator began his 5 pm Eastern “Cafferty File” segment with his “scary and sobering” label of the New York Times column. After summarizing it and reading a quote where Friedman warned that “something very dangerous is happening” in the American political dialogue, Cafferty remarked that “Friedman’s right. You don’t have to look any further than protesters comparing President Obama to a Nazi, or a Facebook poll asking if he should be killed. Tom Friedman says even if you’re not worried about violence against Mr. Obama, you should be worried about what’s happening to American politics.”

NBC's Matt Lauer gave a "Today" show guest a free pass when she insisted  that director/criminal/former fugitive Roman Polanski did not rape a 13-year-old girl in 1977. Debra Tate, sister of Polanski's late wife Sharon Tate, told Lauer, "There is, as I said, rape and there is rape. It was determined Roman did not forcibly have sex with this young woman. It was a consensual matter."

Lauer's response was simply, "Right." 

Tate continued, "I am a victims' advocate, and I know the difference." Lauer agreed, saying "And I understand that, and yes, there is a difference."

Tate was the latest in a parade of Polanski defenders to appear on network television.

At no point in the interview did Lauer bring up the grand jury testimony of the 13-year-old girl which refuted the idea that Polanski's encounter was not "forcible" and that it was consensual. Only later did he note that Polanski did commit statutory rape.

By now you've likely seen Will Ferrell's hysterical public service announcement concerning healthcare reform.

In response, an as of yet unknown organization has created a fabulous video mocking Ferrell's efforts:

Something terrible is happening... Overpaid celebrities don't have a big enough voice when it comes to Healthcare Reform. 

Without further ado (video embedded below the fold, h/t Hot Air via reader David Nussbaum):

Is Newsweek even pretending to be a news magazine (or news site) any more? On their Gaggle blog, political writer Katie Connolly decried Sen. Orrin Hatch for reinstating federal funding for abstinence-only sex education: "I've been trying to think of a measured way to riff on this, but instead I'll be frank. It's an absolute waste of money." Newsweek doesn't favor a "measured" take these days. But Connolly’s conclusion about “pointless moralizing” really cranks up the editorializing:

Let's face it. Teenagers are going to have sex. They always have, they always will. Sure there will be a decent number of teens who choose to abstain and they should feel supported in that decision, but there will still be a large chunk of teenagers doing the dirty. Making them stop is a fools errand. It's about as likely a seeing the Pope in a speedo. It's like asking the Queen to declare her hatred for corgis. It's not going to happen. Sex education policies should take into account this basic reality and tailor programs that broadly educate teens about their choices, abstinence included. Policies should be set up to work. Anything else is just pointless moralizing.

Hours after the Senate Finance Committee rejected the public option as part of the proposed health care “reform” plan, CNN’s Campbell Brown couldn’t seem to find any conservatives to discuss the vote on her program on Tuesday. Her discussion segment brought three liberals to the table- former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich, Roland Martin, and senior political analyst Gloria Borger.

Brown first turned to Borger, who flatly stated that she thought the public option is dead: “I think it’s pretty dead, Campbell. I think it’s safe to say that right now it looks like it’s a goner.” The analyst continued that “the President has to settle for something less- something that may be a down payment on a public option, if the insurance companies don’t behave themselves. So, I think the President’s going to have to settle for less, and I think he’s signaling that he will settle for less.”

The Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute is now previewing its 2010 Great American Conservative Women calendar which will be available for sale on October 2.

The participants are: Kate Obenshain, Clare Boothe Luce, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Marji Ross, Bay Buchanan, Kellyanne Conway, Michele Bachmann, Carrie Prejean, Phyllis Schlafly, SE Cupp, and Star Parker.

Fox News has a slide show of the participants available here. Full size picture below the fold:

On Tuesday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith painted a glowing portrait of the Clinton administration while previewing a new book on the former president: "During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the nation prospered, he worked to broker peace in the Middle East and in the Balkans, championed welfare reform, and signed the NAFTA free trade agreement."

The book, entitled The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With The President was written by Clinton friend and historian Taylor Branch, who recorded a series of 79 conversations with the president while in office.

After listing Clinton’s supposed accomplishments, Smith lamented: "But his presidency was marred by numerous investigations, a lawsuit brought by Paula Jones charging sexual harassment, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal." Smith later asked Branch about the scandals: "What was he [Clinton] like during that time?" Branch responded sympathetically: "He talked about it seldom and painfully....He said ‘I cracked’....A little later he said he felt sorry for himself, that he thought he had beaten down all the scandals and then they would keep reviving and coming back....he just said this ‘it’s never going to stop.’" Smith repeated: "Never going to stop."

Here's more "civility" from the Left.

In a Chicago Tribune article today that appears to open as an attempt at humor but quickly devolves into nastiness, NPR-dependent radio host and author Garrison Keillor, among other things, attacks social conservatives, blames them and not those who have brought legal actions for years-long fights over keeping religious symbols right where they are, and -- while conveniently forgetting that Republican Mitt Romney gave us the Massachusetts disaster known as CommonwealthCare that current Bay State Democratic governor Deval Patrick considers the model for ObamaCare -- ponders the pros and cons of cutting Republicans "out of the health-care system entirely."

There are few if any indications in the last 2/3 of his column that Keillor was attempting anything resembling humor. If he was, he failed.

Here are some paragraphs from the screed:

Making a truly odious comparison, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman claimed parallels between the behavior of anti-Obama protestors (who have been quite peaceful) to that of "extreme right-wing settlers" in Israel before the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Friedman warned that "criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination." But where was this concern for the presidency when the left worked non-stop to delegitimize George W. Bush?

From Wednesday's column, "Where Did 'We' Go?"

I hate to write about this, but I have actually been to this play before and it is really disturbing.

I was in Israel interviewing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin just before he was assassinated in 1995. We had a beer in his office. He needed one. I remember the ugly mood in Israel then -- a mood in which extreme right-wing settlers and politicians were doing all they could to delegitimize Rabin, who was committed to trading land for peace as part of the Oslo accords. They questioned his authority. They accused him of treason. They created pictures depicting him as a Nazi SS officer, and they shouted death threats at rallies. His political opponents winked at it all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxVT8AZt6cA    More Conservative music at: www.goodguysusa.com   For more info on the Oct. 17 Event go to www.operationcanyouhearusnow.com

Congressman Pence: Almost all of us oppose the cap-and-trade bill, and I think every single House Republican is going to vote against this health care bill. So I think, first, we've got to provide that opposition to these government takeovers, to the borrowing and spending and bailout that's driving people to town hall meetings and drove over a million people here to Washington, D.C.

  Why is it we get more than 7 liberals together with a sign and we get the exact totals broken down by age, sex, weight, race, income, and shoe size? But here we are 2 and a half weeks later and I still don't even have a ball park figure for the number of people on the Washington streets on September 12th.

Has it really come to this? Is MSNBC so in the tank for the Democratic Party that it takes far-left documentary filmmaker Michael Moore to bring up malfeasance by a leading Democrat?

Moore appeared on MSNBC's Sept. 29 "Hardball" to promote his new film "Capitalism: A Love Story." With exception of "The Ed Show" fill-in host Lawrence O'Donnell noting the Senate Ethics Committee had cleared Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., of wrongdoing and only reprimanded him verbally, over the last couple of months, MSNBC's prime time shows have ignored a deal Dodd got on a mortgage with Countrywide. That is, until Moore brought it up.

"Chris Dodd may have a problem after being in this movie, I think," Matthews said.

On Wednesday’s Good Morning America, co-host Diane Sawyer and Dr. Tim Johnson touted the treatment members of Congress get as an example of the unfairness of the health care system. Sawyer speculated, "The question is continually raised, in this land of equal opportunity, should all Americans have, do all Americans deserve the same access to health care that members of Congress have?"

Johnson, a well known fan of government-run health care, explained how, for a yearly fee of $503, representatives receive free access to X-rays, EKGs and minor surgeries. Talking to a Democratic Congressman who refuses to use this Office of Attending Physician (OAP), Johnson marveled, "In fact, [Steve] Kagen and his hundreds fellow members of Congress receive some of the best health care in the country, without even using insurance."

Johnson didn’t explain how, exactly, such a program could be extrapolated to the entire country. And only at the very end of the segment did Sawyer raise the issue of cost: Speaking of the representatives who partake in this service, she finally wondered, "Yes. So, good for you, that you have it. But make it the standard of care for everybody else, too. But, is that realistic, economically?"

With each passing day the Fox News Channel and its various hosts come under more and more fire from the Left.

Democrats and their media minions have actually accused FNC of stirring up hatred in the nation that could result in violence against President Obama.

With this in mind, Fox's leading personality Bill O'Reilly on Tuesday invited media analyst and former CBSer Bernie Goldberg to discuss these criticisms of the cable news leader and to see if they had any merit.

What ensued was a marvelous discussion about what Fox does well compared to its liberal competitors, as well as what opportunities exist for even better news coverage.

Although Fox's detractors will jump on this segment as evidence the cable news network is indeed far too conservative given some of Goldberg's criticisms, those that can be impartial will see this as an organization refreshingly willing to examine itself while cameras are rolling (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Mediaite, file photo):

Media Research Center President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell appeared on this morning's edition of "Fox & Friends" to discuss how the mainstream media is downplaying or ignoring ACORN's history of legal trouble over voter fraud, all while casting the liberal community organizer as the victim of conservatives and Republicans.

Fox News anchor Steve Doocy had Mr. Bozell explain the inaccuracies in a September 23 USA Today article.

You can watch the video by clicking the play button in the embed at the right. A transcript appears below the page break: