The pile of liberal guests (and guest hosts) on ABC's The View Tuesday led to breathless admiration and excitement all around. Washington Post TV writer Lisa de Moraes noticed that guest host Maria Shriver cooed to comedian Stephen Colbert about the liberal Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear on October 30: "My daughter [Christina Schwarzenegger] goes to Georgetown and she's so excited to come to the rally. What should she expect?"

This must thrill liberal hearts, who want something (anything) that fires up liberal young people.

Barbara Walters was feeling warm and fuzzy introducing her good friend Arianna Huffington: "Full disclosure. This is a day when I have two -- with Maria and Arianna, when I have two women I have known forever. We have known each other for 30 years. [Referring to Huffington, and clutching her hand,] I am the godmother to her eldest child. So I'm slightly prejudiced." She waved around the cover of the new Forbes magazine Power Women issue, with Huffington on the cover.

Colbert, that "potent evangelist" for Catholics, was asked about teaching "Sunday school" (which isn't really Catholic terminology), and he joked about teaching about a "loosey-goosey Jesus."

On Monday's Joy Behar show, the host promoted the latest work of liberal actor Richard Dreyfuss, but soon turned the conversation to Dreyfuss playing Dick Cheney in the 2008 Oliver Stone flop "W." and how he could find the "satanic spot" in his soul to play Cheney. Dreyfuss said you can "find all the villainy in the world in your own heart," and said he tells students to focus on the Hitler inside you when playing a bad guy. Cheney as Hitler: this is just another night on the Joy Behar Show.

BEHAR: Now, you played a bad guy in "Red" and you also played a bad guy in "W," one of my favorite movies. So funny. 

DREYFUSS: Which you said I would never do. He would never do that. He would never play Dick Cheney. He's a liberal.

BEHAR: I was wrong. I was wrong. But was it hard to play Dick Cheney?

After layoffs cost him his job as a media reporter for socialist editor and author Greg Mitchell at Editor & Publisher magazine, Joe Strupp landed at Media Matters for America, where he can ask the liberal media elite why on Earth any of them would ever appear on that unethical Republican swamp known as Fox News (or Fox affiliates on Sundays).

In this case, Strupp went looking for former New York Times reporters and editors to denounce current Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller (the one who suggested to President Bush he should feel personally responsible for the 9/11 attacks) for sinking to an appearance on Fox News Sunday. Former Times media reporter Alex Jones even suggested Fox gets zero credit for open-mindedness for allowing a liberal Times reporter on their set:

"It is a bad idea, period," said Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. "I think the format is calculated to make you say things you would like to put back in your mouth."

...He said Times reporters appearing on any cable talk show is a mistake, but singled out Fox, stating, "Fox is an organ of the Republican party. I think everyone who goes on there shares in being used by them for their entertainment value. Fox uses them to demonstrate they are open-minded by putting the Times on there. But does it show Fox is open-minded? I don't think so."

CNN, like many liberal media outlets, is very interested in diversity -- in race, creed, sexual preference, everything but ideology.  But check out this image today, as CNN launched a new marketing gimmick asking viewers to fill in the sentence "My America Is...." If we're going to get into bean-counting here, judging from the graphic behind anchorman Tony Harris today, America is majority-black and has a lot of Muslim women.

The Style section of Monday's Washington Post has an enormous picture of Jimmy Carter with the simple headline "The Book of Jimmy." The Post is jarringly behind Carter's publicity curve for his latest book White House Diary, but reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia began with the usual goo from Carter's church in Plains, Georgia: "On those scattered weekends when Jimmy Carter isn't out enforcing Middle East harmony or slaying Guinea worms or compensating for presidential malaise with ex-presidential vim, the 86-year-old can be found in Sunday school."

Anyone who's paid attention to Carter would know that "enforcing Middle East harmony" is not the right description for someone who compares Israel to apartheid-era South Africa.

Readers who don't want a cavity from all that sugar might move on to the next story, but Roig-Franzia arrived at a sharper point in paragraph nine, after Carter has declared that America is the nation most committed to waging war in the entire world, and that the Iraq invasion was "horribly unnecessary" -- the reporter read Carter's book and finds that he's a preachy know-it-all: 

Perhaps the people at National Public Radio are worried that a new Republican Congress could threaten the lavishness of its federal subsidies again. Or maybe NPR is just a sandbox for the Left. But on Wednesday, the show Fresh Air spent most of its hour suggesting the Republican Party was dangerously infested with extremists. The guest was socialist Princeton professor Sean Wilentz, who has written that George W. Bush practiced "a radicalized version of Reaganism."  Host Terry Gross was promoting Wilentz's article in The New Yorker on Glenn Beck and the Tea Party:

GROSS: Can you think of another time in American history when there have been as many people running for Congress who seem to be on the extreme?

WILENTZ: Not running for Congress, no. I mean even back in the '50s.

This is par for the course, since Gross promoted a New Yorker piece by Jane Mayer just a few weeks ago (on August 26) on how the Koch brothers were funding the Tea Party as part of a "war" on that secular saint, President Obama. What stuck out in this interview was the use of "extreme" labels for the conservative movement and the GOP --  twelve of them. In Sesame Street lingo, the hour was brought to you by the letter E for Extreme. Most of them came in Gross's restate-the-thesis (or in this case, restate-the-attack-ad) "if you're just joining us" reintroductions.

It’s not every day that a front-page Washington Post report has copy that can be mocked as “Auditioning to Be the Next Obama Girl.” (That is, unless you count Eli “Obama's Chiseled Pectorals” Saslow.) James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal designated this florid passage for that title, from a sprawling 5,355-word Wednesday front-page article by reporters Michael Leahy and Juliet Eilperin.

The moment was vintage Obama -- emphasizing his zest for inquiry, his personal involvement, his willingness to make the tough call, his search for middle ground. If an Obama brand exists, it is his image as a probing, cerebral president conducting an exhaustive analysis of the issues so that the best ideas can emerge, and triumph.

Slogging through the entire article (eating up all of two inside pages) demonstrates that the Post reporters were praising Obama’s “zest” and thoughtfulness even as they summarized how Obama, in their view, struck too “centrist” a path by supporting offshore drilling and stiff-arming the Left – which Leahy and Eilperin never identify as liberals, merely as “environmental activists.” The Post reporters say Team Obama was trying to find a “grand bargain” to pass a “climate-change bill.”

In case Arianna Huffington plotting to spend an estimated quarter-million dollars on buses to the liberal Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rally didn’t paint it as an Obama event, how about Oprah Winfrey? The Obama-endorsing, Obama-campaign-stumping Winfrey appeared via satellite on Thursday night’s episode of The Daily Show to announce that she was going to fly Stewart’s audience to Washington, D.C., for the so-called Stewart half, the “Rally to Restore Sanity."

"I know that you've got this huge event coming up, and I'm really excited about it, because I think that we need a bit more sanity in the world," she said. "I'm sorry, Stephen, I'm not for the fear part, I'm for the sanity part. And I wanted to show my support for you, Jon, and also for your audience...(applause) so here's what I did. I had my staff sneak into your studio early this morning with a little gift. Okay?" She told the Daily Show audience to look under their seats, where they found red envelopes, which they opened. A woman screamed at the top of her lungs: "We're going to the rally!" Oprah repeated "You're going to the rally" four times.  “Now get out there and restore some sanity!”

Colbert crowed: “I've gotta say, just for the record, Jon, your rally was supposed to be about sanity, and that was insane!”

Media reporter Michael Calderone at The Upshot reported on Thursday that National Public Radio officials were surprised the outpouring of attention they drew with a memo insisting reporters shouldn't attend the liberal Comedy Central rallies of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. When Calderone asked NPR senior vice president Dana Davis Rehm why there was no memo for the Glenn Beck Restoring Honor rally or the recent liberal One Nation event, she explained that NPR felt "it was obvious to everyone that these were overtly political events" and staff would surely know not to attend. "It's different with the Colbert and Stewart rallies; they are ambiguous," she continued. "But their rallies will be perceived as political by many, whatever we think. As such, they are off limits except for those covering the events."

Calderone asked other media outlets if they had a policy on the Stewart-Colbert event. ABC said it would follow a similar policy to NPR, to be present only as journalists and observers. An NBC News spokeswoman responded in a statement: "NBC News prohibits employees who function in an editorial role from participating at partisan events, however on a case by case basis we have permitted MSNBC hosts to participate in such events."

The Washington Post sent out a similar-sounding memo to staff about being observers, not participants: