[Video to be added shortly] Talk show host Dick Cavett, whose TV show went off the air in 1982, appeared on MSNBC, Friday, to trash Sarah Palin as a "know nothing" and someone who has "no first language." Mostly, however, he seemed interested only in talking about himself, prompting News Live host Norah O’Donnell to chide, "Dick, this segment is about Sarah Palin, not about you, Dick."

John Harwood, New York Times writer and CNBC contributor, co-hosted and kicked off the segment with this condescending question: "Let me ask you what you make of the Sarah Palin phenomenon and, in particular, the argument that some people make, well, she might not be a good President, but she'd be a good talk show host. You think so?"

Cavett clearly wanted to bash Palin, but he really wanted to tout his own brilliance and a column he wrote for the New York Times over a year ago: "The subject is a dear one to me because I wrote a notorious, apparently, column about Sarah Palin called the Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla for my Times Online blog. And, you know, it is interesting. When you are quoted for something you said on the air, it's one thing. But, when they quoted something you wrote, it is in a pleasing way."

On Nov. 18, Newsweek's Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson wrote an article titled "The Real Shock of Fort Hood." If you thought that the shock of Fort Hood was that an Army Major fired over 100 rounds into a crowded processing center on a military base - killing 13 and wounding 29 - you're wrong. "It's not that the massacre occurred," said the article. "It's that it hadn't occurred before."

According to Simon and Stevenson, Major Nidal Malik Hasan was simply another American Muslim that was the victim of "innumerable stresses, including discrimination and the strain of divided loyalties in their country's eight-year-long war against Muslims in the Middle East and Central Asia."  

The authors argued that such circumstances would be "enough to inspire conflict in the minds of even the most patriotic of American Muslims in the U.S." So much so that it should be "no surprise" that "one unstable member of this community finally erupted in violence."

It's our fault. Americans aren't making Muslims "comfortable." And the article specifically cited "Christian right-wing rhetoric" as a catalyst in the "Muslim alienation" which led to Hasan's shooting spree.

An unsigned CNN.com article on Friday noted that the Senate Ethics Committee had reproved Senator Roland Burris “for actions and statements reflecting unfavorably upon the Senate,” but did not directly mention the Illinois senator’s affiliation with the Democratic Party. The article did mention that Burris was “the only African-American U.S. senator.”

The first two paragraphs from the CNN Political Ticker story excerpted the letter that the Senate committee sent to the successor to President Obama: “The Senate Ethics Committee issued a letter Friday admonishing embattled Illinois Sen. Roland Burris ‘for actions and statements reflecting unfavorably upon the Senate’ in connection with his controversial appointment by former Gov. Rod Blagojevich. ‘While the committee did not find that the evidence before it supported any actionable violations of law, senators must meet a much higher standard of conduct,’ the letter stated.”

As if we needed more proof that Christians are the only group left in America that it’s safe to make fun of. A popular YouTube video purports to be an ad for a Wii-like game system called “Mass: We Pray,” which will be available at Easter 2010. In reality, the anti-religious video is a commercial for a new video game.

In it, viewers see a family at home as a saccharine-voiced narrator reminiscent of the one from the old “Mr. Bill” skit on “Saturday Night Live,” says, “A family shouldn't have to wait until Sunday to worship the Lord. Now you can go to church every day without leaving your home.”

The family’s two children are then shown pantomiming the movements of priests and congregants during mass, using “the wireless cross controller,” a large white plastic cross with a rosary bead strap. “Every twist of the hand and nuance of a blessing is recreated onscreen,” says the narrator. The point, he explains, is to collect “grace points,” and move a number of pews toward the altar. “Then trade in your Grace points to unlock the Holy Mysteries. Add the kneeler accessory, and get off the couch and into the action.” Players can download the “seven sacraments and holy rituals expansion pack.”

E-mail messages between high-ranking scientists appear to indicate a conspiracy by some of the world's leading global warming alarmists to falsify temperature data in order to exaggerate global averages.

Those involved allegedly include: James Hansen, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Michael Mann, famous for Mann's "Hockey Stick"; Gavin Schmidt, NASA climate modeler, and; Stephen Schneider, Stanford professor and Al Gore confidant.

A statement released Friday by the alarmist website RealClimate has confirmed that e-mail servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich, England, were hacked recently with contents illegally made available over the Internet. 

Although the authenticity of all these e-mail messages has yet to be proven, what's currently available points to a coordinated attempt to manipulate climate data by those directly involved in advancing the theory of anthropogenic global warming.

New Zealand's Investigate magazine reported Friday that it has verified these e-mail messages are indeed real:

UPDATE: Also see Noel Sheppard's post on the same topic, where more names are named. 

Two months ago, there was the "Dog Ate My Global Warming Data" episode. As noted at NewsBusters and at BizzyBlog (original source: National Review Online), we learned that important original information forming the underpinning of global warming alarmists' claims about the earth heating up has vanished. It is longer available and apparently can't be reverse engineered.

Today, e-mails hacked from a UK climate research facility appear at a minimum to indicate a willingness by scientists to fudge the data to make alleged warming trends more clear and convincing. At worst, the whole enterprise could be totally discredited.

Important and damming passages from certain of the e-mails have been acknowledged as authentic.

The Australian Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt claims, as paraphrased by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, that "that those e-mails expose a conspiracy to hide detrimental information from the public that argues against global warming."

Here are key paragraphs from Bolt's blog post (presented out of order because of frequent updates at that post):

In what could easily be labeled the understatement of the week and probably of the entire month of November, the Washington Post today headlined a page A22 story today "GAO warns stimulus jobs data could contain inaccuracies."

The print story is accompanied by a screenshot of Recovery.gov, which the caption beneath it notes "is the government's stimulus-tracking Web site."

Of course, the biggest inaccuracies recently observed on Recovery.gov are non-existent congressional districts purported to have been "saved or created" jobs thanks to stimulus pork sent their way. Yet Post staffer Ed O'Keefe was careful to keep that juiciest tidbit out of his entire 10-paragraph November 19 story.

As Michelle Groat of Examiner.com noted yesterday:

Citing a Democratic congressman who recently proposed a no whining day, on Friday’s Morning Meeting on MSNBC, host Dylan Ratigan asked: “...unemployment, health care, a couple of wars, Americans got plenty to be frustrated about these days...But some people say stop the whining....Is ‘shut up and deal’ the new American mantra?”

Ratigan made that question the topic of discussion for the ‘Trend or Talker’ segment near the end of 9:00AM ET hour of the show with correspondent Contessa Brewer and Financial Times U.S. managing editor Chrystia Freeland. Ratigan explained: “...the congressman, by the name of Emmanuel Cleaver, wants to declare the day before Thanksgiving complaint-free Wednesday.” He wondered: “Worthy proposition?”

Brewer replied: “Yeah, absolutely. Here you get a two-fer. No complaints on Wednesday and Thursday gives you something to be grateful for.” Freeland enthusiastically agreed with the idea: “I think the no whining day is a fabulous idea....What they say in preschools, you get what you get and don’t get upset.”

The scandal surrounding the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now has provided a number of case studies in liberal media bias. The initial silence of the vast majority of media outlets on the story, the attempts by leftist commentators to excuse ACORN and discredit the group's critics, and Andrew Breitbart's strategy of rolling out video exposes periodically to counter those commentators, all speak to the liberal media paradigm, and activists' efforts to combat it.

Breitbart and his filmmaking proteges James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles have released another video showing an ACORN employee volunteering her help in establishing an underage prostitution business. This employee, Lavelle Stewart, had been trumpeted by liberal pundits as a shining example of ACORN's refusal to aid in criminal deeds. Stewart, they claimed, had refused to help Giles and O'Keefe as many other employees had.

But the new videos (Part 1 video embedded below the fold) tell a different story. "There are ways, people do it all the time," Stewart told O'Keefe when asked if he could launder prostitution money into his congressional campaign. "Yeah there are ways, especially out here in California," she added. Stewart, who works in an ACORN office in Los Angeles, was the latest staffer of the organization to volunteer her services in smuggling underage girls into the country, setting up a prostitution ring with those girls, and laundering the proceeds into a political campaign.

MSNBC publicized Ebony magazine's “Power 150” picks by bringing aboard two left-wing honorees, Al Sharpton and Michael Eric Dyson, during Friday's 11 AM EST hour.

“To be on any list with Al Sharpton,” Dyson, an author and sociology professor at Georgetown University glowed, “is extraordinarily beautiful.” He proceeded to rejoice:

We have a man in the White House who has made, you know, thinking sexy, who's brought sexy brilliance back to the White House.

Dyson on MSNBC, at about 11:40 AM EST on Friday, November 20:

CBS’s Early Show on Friday completely ignored the grilling Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner received on Capitol Hill on Thursday and the calls for his resignation by members of Congress. ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today both covered the contentious exchanges.

ABC’s Good Morning America provided the most coverage. Correspondent Bianna Golodryga observed that "a handful of Republicans and one Democrat are calling for his resignation" based on the current economic situation. She then played video of Republican Michael Burgess deriding Geithner: "I don't think you should be fired. I thought you never should have been hired."

Another clip featured Republican Kevin Brady directly asking the Treasury Secretary: "For the sake of our jobs, will you step down from your post?" But, even though the Early Show found time for generous coverage of Oprah Winfrey and the announcement that she’s retiring in two years, the news program skipped reporting on the calls for Geithner’s resignation by these Republicans. (House Democrat Peter DeFazio and Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell both have previously made similar announcements.)

At first glance it appeared that NBC's Meredith Vieira and David Gregory, on Friday's Today show, did a decent job of recounting all of the struggles the Obama administration is dealing with from unemployment to foreign policy, but ultimately the pair concluded, in every instance, they weren't actual problems, but merely problems of "perception." First up Vieira mentioned Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner being criticized on Capitol Hill for 10.2 percent unemployment, something that Gregory wrote off as simply "a perception problem that the administration has to deal with." Then on Obama's recent trip overseas Vieira queried Gregory: "Speaking about perception problems, President Obama just returned from a eight-day trip overseas to Asia. Some critics are saying that it was a failure, more style and no substance. Is that a fair analysis?" To which Gregory responded the Obama team just needed to do a better job of "winning the perception battle."

The following is a transcript of the segment as it was aired on the November 20, Today show:

After introducing Lopez on her CNN Headline News program last night, Behar played a clip of Lopez's HBO special in which he said, "There are a lot of politicians that would be Latinos and a lot now who are Latino. Sarah Palin, Latina. Believe me. She's got all the signs. She works and her husband don't."  

Later in the segment, after commenting about Palin's lack of experience, Lopez stated, "I mean, the concept of Todd Palin being a stay-at-home dad-listen Joy, when I was a kid, those guys were called bums."

"Uh-huh. They're still called bums," agreed Behar.

The Associated Press "fact check" of Sarah Palin's new book wasn't enough. Now the left is just coming out and claiming Palin is a flat out liar. That was the argument made by Bella DePaulo in a Psychology Today blog entitled "Sarah Palin's Lies."

DePaulo, who has a Harvard Ph.D. in psychology and experience in analyzing lying, claims Palin excels at it. "From my post as an outside observer, it seems to me that Sarah Palin doesn't care much about the truth. In that way, she is a very special liar," she wrote in the Nov. 19 "Living Single" blog.

The article went on to say how "Palin seems to love the effect her disingenuous pronouncements have on her audience" and discounted Palin's comments about Obama "palling around with terrorists." (Apparently Psychology Today never heard about Obama's ties to William Ayers who "helped found the radical Weathermen, launching a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and United States Capitol," according to The New York Times.)

Want to know how the left really feels about free speech?  Look no further than Huffington Post editor and co-founder Arianna Huffington.

Huffington appeared on MSNBC's Nov. 19 "Countdown" to discuss a report by the Anti-Defamation League that alleges Fox News host Glenn Beck is "the most important mainstream media figure who has repeatedly helped to stoke fires of anti-government anger" and therefore endangering society.

"It would be nice to think of Glenn Beck just as a joke, as fodder for this show and the "Daily Show" and others that point out how stupid some of this stuff is," "Countdown" host Keith Olbermann said. "But this report, you know, suggests something else, this is - fear-monger-in-chief term is frightening."

Now that former CNN host Lou Dobbs has been freed of his duties with his former network, he has been making the rounds on other networks - Fox News "The O'Reilly Factor," Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" and now with his long-time rival's show CNBC's "The Kudlow Report." 

One of the issues debated among a panel consisting of Dobbs, host Larry Kudlow, former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and CNBC CME Group reporter Rick Santelli on Nov. 19 was the issue of wage stagnation - which Dobbs blamed on outsourcing, immigration policy and technological advancement.

"I believe that the issue of unemployment in this country and job creation fundamentally will have to be taken on as a matter of government policy," Dobbs said. "It will also have to be taken on as a matter of business leadership. As to the idea that wages have been stagnant in this country for 35 year, point of fact, we have to understand what the causes are."

Video Below Fold

As reported on NewsBusters recently, the kill-joy food police are here just in time for the holidays.

 On Nov. 19 ABC's "Good Morning America" aired a recycled study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a liberal activist group that, if it were given the power, would ban everything from remote controls to Chinese food to donuts to casual dining. But even without that power, the anti-food activists still have the networks eating out of their hand.

For the third time in just two months, ABC's early morning show devoted an entire segment to a CSPI study. The past two studies reported that health labels were too "confusing" for consumers while "leafy greens" were life-threatening. Now CSPI's latest publication attacks movie theater popcorn.

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: Unemployment is higher among Dems and unaligned voters than among Republicans.

Data from Rasmussen Reports national telephone surveys shows that 15.0% of Democrats in the workforce are currently unemployed and looking for a job. Among adults not affiliated with either major party, that number is 15.6% while just 9.9% of Republicans are in the same situation.

Correlation or causation?

ManBearPig!

A funny thing happened on the road to global warming. Mother Nature is simply not cooperating. Germany's Der Spiegel noted this "problem" for global warming alarmists yesterday:

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

...The Earth's average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.

On Friday, The Washington Post explored the guilt of the millionaire liberal in a story on the front of the Metro section headlined: "Grappling with a wealth of guilt: Young heirs seek moral balance between inherited windfalls, social responsibilities."

But one subject in Ian Shapira’s story of "moral balance" is working for the Marxists in El Salvador. The caption under his photo read: "Burke Stansbury, who inherited $1 million in stock, works at the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador in the District."

Shapira never explains that CISPES was founded in 1980 to support the Marxist guerrillas of the FMLN, or even that this death-squad-turned-political-party now holds the presidency of that democracy. It’s merely a group "devoted to labor issues," reported the Post: