P.J. Gladnick's blog

As covered by NewsBusters managing editor Ken Shepherd in his post last Wednesday, Seattle Times executive editor David Boardman scolded his staffers for cheering when news of Karl Rove's resignation from the White House was announced. Now one of those cheering staffers has issued an apology...of sorts.  In a column reeking with self-righteousness while at the same time attacking bloggers for bringing down the level of  journalism,  staff columnist Nicole Brodeur writes:

That was me.

I was one of the people who cheered in The Seattle Times news meeting Monday when it was announced that presidential adviser Karl Rove had resigned.

It has been less than a day since Tropical Storm Dean has developed into a hurricane and already global warming is being mentioned in a news story about this weather development. Credit for the first known citing of global warming in a Hurricane Dean story goes to The Daily Green. Correspondent Chris Mooney starts out by giving his story, Nothing But Land to Stop Hurricane Dean … or Supertyphoon Sepat, an authentic all caps touch with  this weather advisory from the National Hurricane Center:

It often seems to be the attitude of the MSM to marginalize Republicans as some sort of square alien creatures who are not really hip like the rest of us...meaning Democrats. Such was the assumption of Miami Herald columnist, Beth Reinhard, when she began "My search for cool among Republicans." Her search was inspired by a Sunglass Hut billboard in South Florida that suggests that even Republicans could look hip with the right shades:

The good-looking hipster with the slicked back, slightly mussed hair looks out from his dark shades.

''He's a Republican,'' reads the billboard spotted around South Florida in recent weeks. ``But you don't see that.''

With the announcement of Karl Rove resigning his position from the White House, it is time to revisit that infamous report by MSNBC's David Shuster who on Keith Olbermann's Countdown show on May 8, 2006 flatly stated:

I am convinced that Karl Rove will, in fact, be indicted.

When a month later it was announced that Rove would not be indicted, a sheepish Shuster came up with several lame excuses for his monumental misreporting as chronicled by NewsBusters editor Brent Baker in his June 13, 2006 post. Under questioning by Countdown substitute host, Brian Unger, Shuster began by blaming the defense lawyers for his embarrassing error:

Apparently Hardball host Chris Matthews has a bit of a problem keeping his lust in check on the air. On Friday evening's Hardball, Matthews was interviewing CNBC's Street Signs anchor, Erin Burnett, about the latest Wall Street news when suddenly he switched gears as you can see in this video. The official transcript isn't up yet on the MSNBC website but here is a transcription of the conversation as best I could understand it:

MATTHEWS: Could you get a little closer to the camera?

BURNETT: What is it? Is it (garbled) in strangely?

It seemed like a comedy sketch meant to parody the unique Larry King interviewing style but last night satire met reality when King interviewed several transgendered people on his show. Because Larry didn't change his typical interview style a bit, the show came off as both extremely surreal as well as unintentionally hilarious. Here is a portion of the transcript from King's August 10 show which melodramatically begins with this introduction:

With the success of the surge in Iraq becoming more evident with each passing day, a new ailment has gripped the Mainstream Media and the liberals: Surge Derangement Sydrome (SDS). The earliest known case of SDS occurred on April 23 when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid responded to a question by CNN's congressional correspondent Dana Bash about whether he would believe General David Petraeus if he reported that the "so-called surge" is working:

REID: No, I don't believe him, because it's not happening. All you have to do is look at the facts.

Most members of the Mainstream Media keep their opinions to themselves if they are uneasy about the character of any of the major Democrat candidates for president. One of the few who broke ranks in this area was Brad Warthen, the Editorial Page Editor of The State newspaper in South Carolina. Although Warthen's observations about Edwards originally appeared in his blog last February, it wasn't until it was written up yesterday as an editorial column, Why "I See John Edwards as a Big Phony," that it sparked an angry reaction from the Edwards campaign. Warthen's view of Edwards as a phony comes from three personal encounters which he calls strikes against him. Strike One:

Let's say you are a scandal-ridden governor looking for some love. Where would you find it? Well, if you are New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, aka Steamroller Spitzer, immersed in a scandal that threatens to destroy your political career, you go looking for love in the Daily Kos with a divorced from reality "Happy Talk" blog post that makes no mention any pending unpleasantries. Spitzer's "Happy Talk" love fest on the Daily Kos will have no effect in stopping the scandal investigations but perhaps it is temporarily therapeutic to brag about himself to his fellow leftists in his blog post titled, Congratulations on a Great Weekend :

While we are seeing a mounting reform movement at the national level, I would also urge you to be aware of some of the important developments that are occurring in statehouses across the country. There are some exciting things happening, demonstrating that your activism is also paying dividends at the state level.

Anybody who reads Web forums dedicated to current events is familiar with the phenomenom of BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) in which leftwingers rant wildly about the supposed crimes of the EVIL Bush regime. Most of the time those postings can be written off as just another case of the left having mental problems handling the fact that they do not control the executive branch of government. However, we might now have a case in which BDS has the positive effect of actually causing a high level government leaker of super secret information to expose himself. The story about the alleged leaker to the press of the FISA (Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act) program details was written up in the August 13 Newsweek article, Looking For a Leaker:

Perhaps we should have expected this but apparently The Bourne Ultimatum which opened this weekend is chock full of liberal proganda. So who is making this charge? Some vicious rightwinger with an axe to grind against liberal Hollywood producers? Nope. This is the claim of a liberal movie reviewer, Anthony Kaufman, who wrote the following in his Huffington Post blog, Jason Bourne: An Anti-Cheney American Hero?

A stinging rebuke against Cheney-esque black ops and torture tactics, Universal Pictures' The Bourne Ultimatum is more than just a heart-stopping international espionage thriller: It is Hollywood's most direct attack against the Bush Regime since George Clooney's one-two punch of Good Night and Good Luck and Syriana. If those more "sophisticated" dramas preached to the choir about our deteriorating civil liberties and oil-fueled overseas obsessions, the third film in the mega-successful Bourne action franchise offers up a picture of corrupt clandestine leadership for all to see -- where every Matt Damon fan can also enjoy high-powered American government officials as arch-villains committing treasonous and reckless activities without oversight.

Apparently one of the movie roles that Alec Baldwin won't be playing in the future is that of Sherlock Holmes. Baldwin writes an entire Huffington Post blog, Prosecuting Those Responsible For Outing Valerie Plame, without once mentioning the name of the leaker---Richard Armitage. Baldwin starts out with a fantasy about the things he would do if he were play-acting as president:

The fifth thing that I would do is to prosecute whoever is responsible for outing Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.

At this point you would think that Baldwin would lash out at the leaker, Richard Armitage, or at Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald for protecting Armitage by failing to prosecute him despite knowing that Armitage was the guilty one from the very beginning of his laughable investigation. Instead, Baldwin flails wildly away in all directions with the exception of the obvious one:

Among the very few Huffington Post bloggers willing to break the predictable liberal mold is John Ridley (pictured) who has frequently appeared as a guest panelist on Joe Scarborough's Morning Joe show on MSNBC. Although many of Ridley's previous opinions might have made the Huffington Post readers somewhat uncomfortable, I doubt that any of his other postings sparked the firestorm of outrage of his July 31 blog, The Left Fringe Needs to Quit Being Scared of the Fox. The only problem I have with that title is that it isn't just the "Left Fringe" that is afraid of appearing on Fox. It is also the mainstream Democrats, including such pandering presidential candidates as John Edwards and Barack Obama.

Although most reviews of the comedy movie, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, were generally scathing, a Huffington Post blogger has claimed that you need to wear "special gay decoder glasses" to really appreciate the message that seems to have been hidden from the other reviewers. Joan Garry, Executive Director of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), admits that she at first hated this movie:

A recent article by writer Manish Vij, The Apu travesty, in The Guardian has stirred up something of a hornets nest of controversy as was chronicled here in NewsBusters. Vij took a strictly PC approach and condemned the portrayal of Apu from "The Simpsons" as being racist. However, his opinion is far from universal among people of ethnic Indian background. Journalist Saptarshi Ray who is based in the Washington, D.C. bureau of The Guardian has a very different view of the Apu character in his response, The wonder of Apu:

In this day and age of Political Correctness it can almost be expected that someone will object to the portrayal of Apu in the upcoming "The Simpsons" movie as racist. Sure enough, writer Manish Vij, made just that accusation in the July 17 issue of the British newspaper The Guardian with an article titled, The Apu travesty:

...The Simpsons has long irritated some Indian-Americans because of the thickly stereotypical character of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the effete cornershop owner with fractured English, excess fertility, bizarre religious practices, illegal immigration status and a penchant for cheating customers.

Apu is quite a unique character on The Simpsons. Unlike the show's parodies of policemen and Irish-Americans, he's the only character to mock a small American minority relatively unknown in the mainstream, and he's by far the most visible immigrant. For desis (South Asians) growing up in America, just one eighth as concentrated and visible as in the UK, Apu shadowed us at every turn.

Imagine the firestorm of reaction from the MSM political pundit class if Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani had been caught on video secretly scheming to rid the Republican debates of the lower tier candidates. This would only be a prelude to the outrage that would have been expressed by the MSM if it turned out that one attempted to shift the blame on the other and the other candidate made up the lame excuse that he was really talking about breaking down the debates into smaller groups but still favored keeping all the participants. This is exactly what is happening now with Hillary Clinton attempting to shift the blame to Edwards and Edwards not very convincingly pretending he really meant to break the debates down into smaller units.

Although there has as yet been little reaction from the MSM over this incident caught on video, even the leftwing blogosphere is now reacting to the debate limit scheme in a big way. An example of this reaction can be seen in the Daily Kos where even many hardcore leftists are having a hard time swallowing the tortured but laughable explanations by Hillary and Edwards:

The MSM has been mostly silent on the scheming caught on video between Hillary Clinton and John Edwards as they plotted to purge the "lower tier" candidates from the Democrat debates. However, we now have Time Magazine's Washington Bureau Chief, Jay Carney, weighing in on the issue and he has come down firmly on the side of ridding the "lesser" candidates from the debates. In his July 13 Time blog post, Carney asks, "Are Crowded Debates Useless?" As you can see, Carney answers his own question in the affirmative:

Sometimes a newspaper story is so bizarre that you have to review it twice just to be sure you really read what you had just read. Such was the case with this Palm Beach Post column, "Immigrants new right-wing fear factor," by Frank Cerabino (pictured at right). We enter the surreal zone with this report:

I feel bad for Jennifer Lasko, the Delray Beach firefighter who made a significant sacrifice for her favorite presidential candidate.

Especially because it's an unnecessary sacrifice.

Although most media coverage of the closure of RCTV by the Hugo Chavez government in Venezuela has been somewhat bland, we now have an example of a journalist who actually supports the takeover of that long established television station. It is the former Associated Press reporter in Venezuela, Bart Jones, who wrote an approving article in today's Los Angeles Times, Hugo Chavez versus RCTV. Jones justifies the closing of that station by the Chavistas by claiming that it supported the 2002 coup against Chavez:

RCTV's most infamous effort to topple Chavez came during the April 11, 2002, coup attempt against him. For two days before the putsch, RCTV preempted regular programming and ran wall-to-wall coverage of a general strike aimed at ousting Chavez. A stream of commentators spewed nonstop vitriolic attacks against him — while permitting no response from the government.

As the clock ticks down on the Bush administration, the leftwing blogosphere is becoming ever more infected with impeachment fever to often comedic effect. In just the past week there have been almost 5 dozen Daily Kos threads on the topic of impeachment alone. Most of these impeachment threads lack the vital element of legal grounds for impeachment so the leftwing nutroots have to be very creative to justify this course of action. The latest of the leftwing grounds for impeachment is a real doozy: Bush did NOT lie. I kid you not. When Bush was asked by a reporter if he sent his chief of staff and legal counsel to ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft's hospital room in March 2004 to sign a reauthorization of an electronic surveillance program, he anwered that it was an important program. And now the nutroots are running with the notion that Bush's non-lie is grounds for impeachment as can be seen in many of the comments in this Daily Kos thread,  WE GOT HIM!!!

Almost from the moment that Jerry Falwell's death was announced on Tuesday, the leftwing nutroots at the Democratic Underground began gleefully dancing upon his grave. Here are just a few of their hate rants about Falwell:

Uncharitable or not, I am sorry his death was not more painful and drawn out. He did not deserve a relatively peaceful, painless and quick death.

Rot in Hell Falwell!

May Pat Robertson and James Dobson be next.

We can get a sneak preview of the MSM worship of Al Gore sure to follow his testimony before Congress tomorrow on the subject of global warming by reading David Remnick's glowing commentary about the former veep in the March 5 edition of the New Yorker. If you suffer at all from tooth decay, I advise you to skip over the rest because Remnick's idolatrous saccharine coated praise for Gore is sure to exacerbate your condition.

Without a trace of ironic awareness that a Saturday Night Live skit is mocking people such as himself who believe that a Gore win in 2000 would have led to an American paradise, Remnick longingly sets up the premise of the show in his You Know Me, Al commentary in the New Yorker:

When is a newspaper unable to determine the political ideology of someone despite an overwhelming body of evidence that clearly shows what his politics are? It happens when the person in question is a deranged Leftwing stalker whose antics are so embarrassing that liberals are anxious to not be identified with him.

Such was the case with Andrew Stone (pictured), a Leftwing stalker whose home invasion of a Republican was chronicled by Michelle Malkin. As reported by Malkin, Stone stalked University of Mary Washington student, Richard Reed Pannell, whose "high crime" as stated in his Facebook account, was being a College Republican. After finding Pannell's home address in Facebook, Stone showed up at the address pretending to be a military recruiter. Here is what happened next as posted by Malkin:

Talk about bad timing. Dennis Kucinich yesterday announced that he will be running for the Democrat presidential nomination in '08 and almost no one noticed. No wonder. It was impossible for Kucinich to get the least bit of attention focused on himself because most of the media was in the midst of an orgy of Obama worship even though the junior Senator from Illinois hasn't even officially announced that he is running for president. In case you think things couldn't get any worse for the Kucinich campaign, they do. The day before Kucinich made his announcement that almost no one noticed, his former press secretary made a startling confession of personal incompetence and declared that Kucinich might not be qualified to become president because he was clueless enough to hire a press secretary with absolutely no ability such as himself. In case you think this is a skit for a comedy show, it's not. You can read for yourself the confession of incompetence by William Rivers Pitt at the Democratic Underground:

Barack Obama Superstar worship continues unabated in the media. One of the most devoted of the starry-eyed reporters is Susan Milligan of the Boston Globe. Acting like a latter day Mary Magdalene, Milligan wrote a love note to Obama in the form of a "news" story, Obama's star power shows on N.H. visit. Milligan doesn't waste any time expressing her awe for Obama by starting out her story with this pean for her liberal savior:

Barack Obama , a national political newcomer with an uncomplicated message of hope and promise, won standing ovations from enthusiastic crowds yesterday as he tested the New Hampshire landscape for support for a 2008 Democratic presidential run.

One of the big stories of last week was the buying frenzy over the limited number of the new PlayStation 3 consoles that were put on sale. There was a humorous political angle in this as well which was widely covered with the notable exceptions of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. An unpaid volunteer for John Edwards contacted a Wal-Mart store in Raleigh, NC and invoked the name of his boss in order to get first dibs on a PlayStation 3. Since Edwards has been in the forefront of slamming Wal-Mart recently his hypocrisy was especially glaring and resulted in this press release from that retailer:

I don't know if reporter Naftali Bendavid intended it that way but her glowing Chicago Tribune article about Rahm Emanuel revealed some big Democrat fault lines that will have implications in the near future. We see one example of such tension at the beginning of The House That Rahm Built.

Rahm Emanuel was seething.

He was hurtling down an asphalt road in upstate New York on the 47th trip of his ferocious campaign to win back the House. A lecture, even from political consultant James Carville, was the last thing he needed.