Apparently he's broadened his hatred from simply "black people" to now hating an entire generation of children from middle-income families... if you believe the bias in Reuters.

The Bush administration has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for states to extend health coverage to children in middle-income families, The New York Times reported on Monday.

But what's really going on?

The letter from Dennis Smith, the director of the federal Center for Medicaid and State Operations, set a high standard for states that want to raise eligibility for the program above 250 percent of the poverty level, the Times said.

Here are the facts: The federal deficit is "down sharply"...

WASHINGTON - The deficit for the first five months of the budget year is down sharply from a year ago as the growth in government tax collections continues to outpace growth in spending.

...and "down sharply" means more than 25 percent over last year.

The Treasury Department reported that the deficit from October through February totaled $162.2 billion, down 25.5 percent from the same period last year.

The federal deficit was up 0.6 percent to $120 billion in February...

That improvement came even though the deficit in February hit $120 billion, up 0.6 percent from last February's deficit of $119.2 billion.

...but that's normal for this time of year as the numbers get skewed up because the government is sending out more money in the form of tax refunds to earlier tax filers.

One factor that contributes to higher deficits in February are the refund payments the Internal Revenue Service is mailing out during the month to people who have filed early tax returns. The February 2006 imbalance was the largest monthly deficit for that year.

...add this little tidbit to the story:

The MSM seems to be focusing on the replacement of Katie Couric's producer as a story about her poor ratings.

Six months after Katie Couric's much-ballyhooed debut as "CBS Evening News" anchor, the network signaled on Thursday an overhaul of her flagging newscast by hiring one of the industry's most experienced hands to oversee her program.

But despite Couric's ratings being at the predicted "bottom of the toilet bowl" range, it appears there's something else behind this move. The new producer is Rick Kaplan. He's being billed as:

"...among the most experienced, and most traveled, producers in TV news, having worked for ABC News, CNN and MSNBC as well as CBS over a 35-year career.

It's amazing how much better off the world is just knowing that Democrats have won control of Congress, isn't it? They haven't even taken control yet, and in 3 days, look how the prospects in Afghanistan have made an earth-shattering reversal.

Afghanistan on November 6, 2006 - the day before the election:

Poverty, anger with government fueling Taliban support in Afghanistan

...Many in Kandahar say their confidence in the government is falling, and some say that is helping fuel support for the Taliban....

Afghanistan on November 9, 2006 - two days after the election

Poll: Afghans express confidence in country's direction, security

John Kerry shows us that his apology was completely hollow and that his comments about the military being dumb and lazy weren't really a botched joke afterall. Why else would his campaign website have this on the front page?

 Click for larger image

This isn't just a simple case of software picking up a feed with keywords, as the image above shows Kerry's people took the time to design the torn paper image of the key part of the editorial. It's a link to this editorial from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer entitled:

Now we know where Robert Novak learned about Valerie Plame. To the Left's dismay, it wasn't some mega-whopper conspiracy of historical proportions aimed at paying back a critic of the administration... instead, it was just a guy who liked Washington gossip, and actually once called Bush, Cheney, et al. a "bunch of jerks".

In the early morning of Oct. 1, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell received an urgent phone call from his No. 2 at the State Department. Richard Armitage was clearly agitated. As recounted in a new book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," Armitage had been at home reading the newspaper and had come across a column by journalist Robert Novak. Months earlier, Novak had caused a huge stir when he revealed that Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq-war critic Joseph Wilson, was a CIA officer. Ever since, Washington had been trying to find out who leaked the information to Novak. The columnist himself had kept quiet. But now, in a second column, Novak provided a tantalizing clue: his primary source, he wrote, was a "senior administration official" who was "not a partisan gunslinger." Armitage was shaken. After reading the column, he knew immediately who the leaker was. On the phone with Powell that morning, Armitage was "in deep distress," says a source directly familiar with the conversation who asked not to be identified because of legal sensitivities. "I'm sure he's talking about me."

According to Michael Isikoff, peddling his new book (written with liberal David Corn) in Newsweek:

Armitage's central role as the primary source on Plame is detailed for the first time in "Hubris," which recounts the leak case and the inside battles at the CIA and White House in the run-up to the war. The disclosures about Armitage, gleaned from interviews with colleagues, friends and lawyers directly involved in the case, underscore one of the ironies of the Plame investigation: that the initial leak, seized on by administration critics as evidence of how far the White House was willing to go to smear an opponent, came from a man who had no apparent intention of harming anyone.

Oops.

When Harvey Weinstein's company decides to fund a conservative documentary about illegal immigration, the media is eerily silent.

But let Harvey Weinstein's company decide to fund a documentary about the Dixie Chicks and you'll see headlines like, "Dixie Chicks documentary could be election issue".

I'd love to see the statistics on how many Americans have replaced illegal immigration with the Dixie Chicks failed tour on their list of important election issues...

"Michael Moore says gets lots of Republican hugs"

Michael Moore -- gadfly filmmaker, liberal activist and political lightning rod -- says he finds himself being hugged by a lot of Republicans these days.

...the Oscar-winning director says he is approached all the time by conservatives ready to make peace.

Some in solidly Republican northern Michigan and elsewhere now believe that they made a "colossal mistake" in initially supporting the war in Iraq, Moore said, and they have let him know it in chance encounters on the streets of Traverse City, a resort town where he has relocated from New York.

The BBC has an article out today claiming they have a “new Iraqi massacre tape“. The most curious thing about this article is not the massacre claim itself, but a line buried 15 paragraphs into the 16 paragraph article:

The pictures came from a hardline Sunni group opposed to coalition forces.

That’s like interviewing Hitler for his take on life at a concentration camp. Who needs fact-checking when you have such unbiased and trustworthy sources?

Not only are the sources questionable, but so is the motive for re-running this story now... a story that's several months old. The motive is pretty obvious based on what the BBC chose to include above the fold: