Newsweek's Evan Thomas regretted the Fort Hood mass murderer, Major Nidal Hasan, is a Muslim because of how that reality will be abused by conservatives. On this weekend's Inside Washington, Thomas, now Editor at Large with Newsweek after stints as Assistant Managing Editor and Washington bureau chief, rued:

I cringe that he's a Muslim. I mean, because it inflames all the fears. I think he's probably just a nut case. But with that label attached to him, it will get the right wing going and it just -- I mean these things are tragic, but that makes it much worse.

NPR's Nina Totenberg soon chimed in with agreement: “It really is tragic that he was a Muslim.”

Audio: MP3 clip

ABC doubled the length of its evening newscast on Friday night and World News used its second half hour to suggest an exculpatory reason behind Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan's mass killing at Fort Hood -- as anchor Charles Gibson reasoned “treating the mentally wounded can be stressful” -- then to devote a story to the plight of Muslim soldiers: “It's not easy for anyone serving in the armed forces these days, but with America fighting Islamic enemies overseas, Muslim troops face a unique burden.” Reporter Bill Weir despaired:

The Pentagon has made a real concerted effort to create a military that is culturally sensitive and religiously tolerant, but Muslims in uniform today face a challenge not seen since Japanese-Americans fought in World War II. They taste suspicion from some fellow soldiers who question their loyalty and resentment from fellow Muslims opposed to both American wars.

Weir featured a Muslim soldier who lamented “our religion teaches better,” before Weir painted Muslim soldiers as victims of intolerance, highlighting the experience of one Muslim soldier who “began his overseas deployment on 9/11, and taunts followed him throughout his four-year enlistment.”

Despite the mass shooting at Fort Hood, the ABC, CBS and NBC newscasts Thursday night squeezed in full stories pegged to a “kill the bill” anti-Pelosi/ObamaCare rally outside the U.S. Capitol attended by “angry protesters” as all the stories also stressed how President Obama got a “boost” from “big,” “powerful” “key” and “major” endorsements from the AARP and AMA.

NBC's Brian Williams contrasted “big endorsements by two influential groups” with “a big, noisy rally urging lawmakers to just say no,” while reporter Kelly O'Donnell minimized the conservative event as “a few thousand protesters.” ABC's Jonathan Karl, however, recognized how “the hastily-planned protest drew one of the largest crowds in memory for a congressional event. The crowd extends all the way up around to the House side of the building, across to the Senate side, literally surrounding the western front of the Capitol.”

NBC's Kelly recounted how the House bill would “expand health coverage to 96 percent of Americans, and create government-backed insurance called a public option. Today that plan won a powerful endorsement. AARP, the lobby group for Americans over 50, signed on and showed off boxes of supportive petitions” and that was “followed by another boost, the doctors' lobby, the American Medical Association.”

Neither the CBS Evening News nor NBC Nightly News, in their East coast feeds Thursday night, noted the Muslim religious beliefs of the mass killer at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas, but ABC anchor Charles Gibson wasn't cowed by political correctness as he teased World News, “Fort Hood tragedy: An Army officer, a Muslim convert, is the suspect in a shooting spree...” Introducing his first story, Gibson referred to how Major Nidal Malik Hasan “an army officer, a Muslim, opened fire with handguns...” (With a range of frequency, during late afternoon/early evening coverage, CNN, FNC and MSNBC all identified Hasan as a Muslim.)

Cryptically, ABC's senior foreign affairs correspondent, Martha Raddatz, concluded a story on reaction at Fort Hood: “As for the suspect, Nadal Hasan, as one officer's wife told me, 'I wish his name was Smith.'” So, a concern this will lead to groundless fear of Muslims?

The CBS Evening News avoided any mention of Islam or Muslim faith as Katie Couric provided this benign description: “Today, according to the Army, a soldier opened fire....He's identified tonight as Army Major Nadal Malik Hasan, a licensed psychiatrist and drug and rehab specialist from Bethesda, Maryland.” NBC anchor Brian Williams: “The soldier, identified as the initial gunman here, is an Army psychiatrist, Nadal Malik Hasan. He's an officer, a Major, and he was apparently armed with two handguns.” NBC's Pete Williams insisted, the MRC's Brad Wilmouth noticed, “everything about his background is rock solid, and nothing extraordinary stands out about his background.”

CBS's Bob Schieffer on Wednesday night offered the hindsight that everyone knew the Democratic gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey would lose, they did lose and so the losses mean nothing. “I think what we saw last night were snap shots. I don't think we saw predictors,” Schieffer declared on the CBS Evening News in absolving President Obama of any culpability. “I don't think they told us much except that people are very frustrated out in the country.” And that, apparently, has nothing to do with Obama.

Schieffer recited what happened with remarkable prescience: In Virginia, “they run someone for Governor [Creigh Deeds] who is a rural candidate who's little-known in Northern Virginia and who could not seem to connect with the African-American voters. So he got beat and he got beat bad. Most people thought that was going to happen and it did.” Up Interstate 95 in New Jersey, Governor Jon Corzine “was just so unpopular that I think he just didn't have a chance from the get-go.”

During a live midnight EST hour Larry King Live Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, CNN's Larry King repeatedly employed the “far right” pejorative to describe those who backed the unsuccessful New York congressional bid of the Conservative Party's Doug Hoffman. After Wolf Blitzer announced at 12:15 AM EST that CNN had declared Democrat Bill Owens the winner, King blurted: “That may be the first defeat for the far right tonight.”

About 15 minutes later, King pressed Amanda Carpenter of the Washington Times: “Since the far right did get into that race in upstate New York, is this a legitimate defeat for them tonight?”

And a few minutes after that, King forwarded the notion “the far right” is a “threat” to the GOP, asking Ben Stein: “Do you see the far right as evidenced by -- we all know who they are -- as a threat to your party?”

Shortly before the polls closed, CBS's chief Washington correspondent, Bob Schieffer, rejected any effort to tie President Barack Obama to two the Democratic gubernatorial candidates for whom Obama campaigned, insisting on Tuesday's CBS Evening News that the contests were more about local issues and so “I don't think they had much to do with anything but New Jersey and Virginia.”

Citing the special congressional race in New York, Schieffer rued “this third-party conservative who literally pushed a moderate Republican out of the race,” and proceeded to analogize Republicans this year to leftist activists who in 1972 pushed Democrats to pick an un-electable presidential candidate:

The Republican Party is really split and it is the conservatives who seem to have the juice right now. It's very much like what Democrats went through in 1972. The party activists on the left were so upset with mainstream candidates that in an effort to purify their party they pushed it so far to the left that they nominated the very liberal George McGovern for President. Now it's conservative Republicans who are upset with their mainstream candidates. They want to push the party to the right.

ABC's 'V' mini-series, which will debut tonight (Tuesday) in the first hour of prime time, is “nominally a rousing sci-fi space opera about alien invaders bent on the conquest (and digestion) of all humanity,” but “it's also a barbed commentary on Obamamania that will infuriate the President's supporters and delight his detractors,” Miami Herald TV critic Glenn Garvin asserted in a review distributed by the McClatchy/Tribune news service and run in Tuesday's Chicago Tribune, among other papers. Garvin contended:

From the fawning reaction of the news media...to the recruiting of human supporters into an alien front group that could easily be mistaken for “community organizing,” the parallels to Obama are unmistakable.

Though the leader of the aliens, in Garvin's words, “is secretly a totalitarian space lizard who's come here to eat us,” the plot has a featured character, a TV journalist, aiding the effort. “Some welcome their arrival,” USA Today's Gary Levin recounted, “but the suspicious form a resistance movement, which leads the visitors' charismatic leader, Anna (Morena Baccarin), to enlist an ambitious TV reporter (Scott Wolf) as a propaganda tool.” Garvin, presumably citing the same character: “One simpering anchorman even shouts at a reporter who asks a tough question.”

A storyline ripped from real-life!

“President Obama may not have delivered on all the policy changes he promised since his election a year ago, but he and his family have brought dramatic social change to the nation's capital and to the country's collective image of its first family,” USA Today's Mimi Hall and Maria Puente gushed in a front page story on Tuesday marking a year since President Obama's election, “With cultural 'flair,' Obamas updating first family's image.” The two reporters began by describing Barack and Michelle Obama as just like any other hip couple:

He carries a smartphone on his hip, goes out for burgers and plays pickup hoops. She goes to their daughters' soccer games, works in the garden and loves listening to her iPod. Together, they host poets, artists and musicians at their house and invite neighborhood kids to drop by.

The journalistic duo soon featured this glowing assessment: “'The Obamas' White House is the most open for cultural and intellectual activities since the Kennedy administration,' says Douglas Brinkley, author and presidential historian at Rice University in Houston. 'It's not simply a matter of doing events of statecraft and cultural gravitas. They have a great flair for American pop culture.'”

Earning a chuckle even from Al Gore himself for the over the top glorification, CBS's Katie Couric opened her “@katiecouric” CBSNews.com Web show interview with Al Gore by extolling: “I'm honored to be joined today by the Godfather of Green, the King of Conservation: Former Vice President Al Gore.” The very friendly 30-minute Monday interview was prompted by the release of Gore new book, 'Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.'

Monday's CBS Evening News carried a brief excerpt, sans the excessively laudatory introduction: “Today I spoke with someone who knows a bit about Washington politics and the environment, former Vice President Al Gore. He's out with a new book and is on the cover of this week's edition of Newsweek.”

Audio: MP3 clip which matches the video.

Following a Monday night look at Tuesday's special election to fill New York's 23rd congressional district seat in which Republican Dede Scozzafava dropped out after falling behind the Democrat and the Conservative Party nominee, ABC anchor Charles Gibson -- instead of wondering why the GOP establishment failed to pick a candidate who upholds basic Republican principles -- delivered the usual liberal media upset over the GOP's lack of a “big tent,” a phrase you never hear when Democrats pick left-wing candidates:

A liberal Republican gets forced out of the race by a more conservative guy who was actually not a Republican, was running on the Conservative ticket. What happened to the big tent in the Republican Party?

John Berman framed the preceding story on the “moderate” Scozzafava “who supports abortion rights and the President’s stimulus plan,” around the premise that going with a conservative candidate will hurt in the long run: “A Republican drops out of a race which might guarantee Republicans keep the seat, which might be bad for the Republican party long term.” Berman concluded with how the conservative candidate, Douglas Hoffman, “says not all views are welcome” as he suggested “there's always boundaries.” To which Berman intoned: “The question for Republicans is will those boundaries become a burden?”

TVNewswer reported Monday that Katie Couric “will sit down this afternoon for an exclusive interview with former Vice President Al Gore in advance of the release of his new book, Our Choice, to be released tomorrow. Portions of the interview will air tonight on the CBS Evening News.” Full title of his latest left-wing tract, 'Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.' Don't count on Couric, however, to challenge any of Gore's premises since she's been more interested in trumpeting his cause.

Back in March and May of 2007, Couric celebrated “a lot of excitement on Capitol Hill. A movie star showed up to testify before Congress -- a movie star named Al Gore” and hailed: “He was once called 'Mr. Stiff.' Now he's known as 'The Goreacle,' the new Al Gore.” With “Gore 2.0” on screen, Couric set up the subsequent tribute by asserting that “no one's getting more attention than the latest edition of Al Gore.”

(Meanwhile, this week's Newsweek cover champions: “The Thinking Man's Thinking Man: Al Gore's New Plan for the Planet.” See cover image below the jump.)

Rosie O'Donnell returns to the media today, but in quite a step down the media ladder from national TV prominence -- with a daily two-hour show on XM and Sirius satellite radio she'll host from her Nyack, New York home. “Rosie Radio is a radio show that is compelling, intriguing, unpredictable, and thought-provoking,” the radio service proclaims of the program which will air three times a day on the “XM Sirius Stars” channel (XM 155 and Sirius 102) which also carries shows hosted by Barbara Walters, Dr. Laura Schlesinger, Depak Chopra, Judith Regan and Bill Bradley.

O'Donnell's as angry as ever, offering up this vitriol, in the guise of praising President Obama for earning the Nobel Peace Prize, in an interview with USA Today published last week: “But the fact of the matter is, the world stood up in unison and gratitude and said, thank you, perhaps the beacon of light and hope that America has been for 200 years is once again lit. It was diminished criminally by the last administration.”

Rush Limbaugh's tough criticisms of President Barack Obama on Fox News Sunday “broke” the White House's truce with Fox News, Bob Schieffer suggested during an interview with Obama's Senior Adviser, David Axelrod, on Face the Nation.

After playing a clip of Limbaugh dismissing as “a photo-op” Obama's trip to Dover Air Force Base to witness returning casualties from Afghanistan and quoting Limbaugh's characterizations of Obama as “narcissistic,” “immature, inexperienced” and “in over his head,” Schieffer, seemingly referring to Limbaugh's remarks -- or, at least the decision by Fox News to feature Limbaugh on its Sunday interview show -- forwarded:

Last week your man Robert Gibbs met with the folks at Fox News, declared a truce in this war you've been having with them. Was the truce broken this morning?

Axelrod insisted: “We're not at war with anyone. We're at war only with people who represent mistruths...”

In the wake of liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava suspending her congressional campaign after polls put her behind the Democrat and New York's Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman who has earned support from many conservatives, Los Angeles Times veteran Ron Brownstein fretted over how it's “a sign that the leash that the base is holding on the party is tightening and that the Palins, the talk radio, Rush Limbaughs, the Fox, the definition of what is acceptable as a Republican I think is narrowing.”

Brownstein, who joined National Journal in 2007 after nearly two decades at the LA Times and three years as “chief staff writer” for Ralph Nader, conceded that “in the short run there's clear energy here in the small government/anti–government argument, but in the long run,” he warned, “I do wonder about whether Republicans are going to have the freedom to maneuver they'll need to recover in some of those blue states where they've significantly eroded?”

Undermining his credibility, Brownstein painted Senator Arlen Specter as another victim of the awful right-wingers, claiming “Specter essentially was forced to leave the party after voting for the stimulus.”

Rush Limbaugh will be the guest on this weekend's Fox News Sunday. Host Chris Wallace traveled to Palm Beach, Florida to record the interview with Limbaugh today.

List of air times, by city, for the program on Fox broadcast stations at various times on Sunday morning.

Don't forget, Daylight Savings Time ends at 2 AM on Sunday, so if you don't see the show at the time you think it is on, wait an hour.

Fox News Sunday re-runs twice on FNC on Sunday: 2 PM and 6 PM ET -- at what then will be EST.

Penning the lead story for the “Yes He Can (But He Sure Hasn't Yet)” Newsweek cover, “A Liberal's Survival Guide,” Anna Quindlen defended President Obama from liberal complaints he's not enacting liberal policies fast enough as she explained that he's “saddled” by the “incremental” constitutional structure, but she fretted: “Universal health care is the area in which the gap between what's needed and what's likely is most glaring, and the limitations of the president's power most apparent.” Not hesitating to share her opinion, Quindlen despaired:

It is dispiriting to watch the cheerleaders of American exceptionalism pound their chests and insist that our citizens do not need the kind of system that virtually every other developed nation finds workable....

As elected officials posture and temporize, families are bankrupted by health-care costs and forgo treatment they can't afford. Statistical measures of the national health, from life expectancy to infant mortality, continue to be substandard. And because we have that system of checks and balances, in which movement usually happens slowly and sporadically, a great need for sweeping reform may be met with a jury-rigged bill neither sufficiently deep nor broad, which perhaps someday will give way to a better one, and then eventually a truly good one.

ABC anchor Charles Gibson on Wednesday night had time to convey President Barack Obama's praise of Edward Brooke for “breaking barriers” as the first popularly-elected black U.S. Senator, but not to inform viewers he broke that barrier as a Republican. On NBC, however, David Gregory noted Brooke's party affiliation: “The Massachusetts Republican urged the lawmakers who gathered to congratulate him to put aside partisan differences and work together.”

Neither Gibson nor Gregory pointed out that after two terms representing Massachusetts, in 1978 Brooke, a fairly liberal Republican, was challenged and beaten by one of the media's liberal heroes, the late Paul Tsongas -- a Democrat who was a white guy.

The CBS Evening News didn't mention the honor for Brooke, which was actually approved more than a year ago.

Hard to imagine that if George W. Bush were still in office journalists would hesitate a moment to invoke his name in identifying a culprit for the current shortage and delay in delivery, well beyond the schedule promised by HHS's Centers for Disease Control, of the vaccine for the H1N1 “swine flu” virus. Remember Katrina? Coverage Monday night matches what I've seen over the past several days with no mention of Obama or his administration, beyond reporting his issuance of a “national emergency” decree, as journalists instead cited “federal officials” and “the government.”

On the CBS Evening News, fill-in anchor Harry Smith reported: “Now to the H1N1 flu. Federal health officials admitted today their projected timetable for producing the vaccine was way off. They originally said there would be about 40 million doses by the end of the month. But as of today, there's less than half that number.” Subsituting on the NBC Nightly News, Ann Curry blandly announced: “President Obama declared the swine flu pandemic a national emergency over the weekend, but still the amount of vaccine to protect against it is running way behind what the government had promised.”

From liberal Democrat Howard Dean to top editor of the magazine which proclaims it has “The Website Washington Lives By.” The “preppy-looking 28-year-old” Garrett Graff “has eased his way up the ladder -- from presidential campaign speechwriter to media blogger, from Washingtonian freelancer to top dog -- with remarkable fluidity,” Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz marveled in a Monday “Style” section profile of Graff.

Kurtz outlined how, when his father was toiling in Montpelier for the AP, a 14-year-old Graff went to work in the summer for then-Governor Howard Dean, soon “building Dean's first Web site in 1997.” Graff got into Harvard and landed “Washington internships at ABC and the Atlantic” and “when Dean launched his presidential bid, Graff was his deputy national press secretary.” Then, “after Dean imploded, Graff moved to Washington and launched the Fishbowl DC blog for Media Bistro, showing a flair for self-promotion.”