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NOTE: Go to the end of this post to see my reaction to an email NB received from OpenSecrets.org. 

The web site OpenSecrets.org has done a great deal of useful work. Especially helpful are its lists of high-dollar political campaign donor organizations.

The web site's 1989-2014 and 2012-specific lists, to name just two, demonstrate that the hyperventilating on the left and in the establishment press about the eeeevil Koch Brothers is completely out of line:

In a report aired on Monday's NBC Today from the Sochi Olympic games, correspondent Stephanie Gosk toured the Russian capital: "Moscow evokes powerful images. The Kremlin, Soviet leaders, the Red Army. But beyond the Cold War symbols, this city of 10 million people is a modern bustling metropolis..." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Later in the segment, Gosk described the city's subway system as "one of Moscow's hidden gems," even to the point of praising the ruthless Soviet dictator who created it: "Stalin promised the metro would be a palace for the people, and so it is. Open architecture, mosaics, even chandeliers."

The “new media” is expanding in the digital realm, but one trend of liberal bias certainly isn’t new: While The New York Times repeated and repeated that expanding Breitbart News network is “conservative,” left-wing ventures by Glenn Greenwald and Ezra Klein were apparently non-ideological, and drew no ideological labels of any kind – liberal, leftist, progressive – at all.

On the front of Monday’s Business Day section, the Times promoted “The conservative news group begun by Andrew Breitbart, who died in 2012, is going global.” The headline on B-3 was “Conservative News Group to Add Staff to Websites.” Leslie Kaufman's story began with another two C-labels in the first 45 words:

MSNBC.com has drawn a line in the sand regarding where it stands on the “consensus” of man-made climate change. Following Bill Nye’s appearance on Sunday’s Meet the Press, MSNBC.com’s Ned Resnikoff continued to peddle the liberal line on climate change and conveniently dismissed any skepticism of human involvement on the issue.

Just yesterday, David Gregory, moderator of Meet the Press, used the term “consensus” six times when objecting to Rep. Marsha Blackburn’s (R-Tenn.) hesitation on whether or not the federal government should spend billions of dollars on climate change related programs. Resnikoff must have gotten Gregory’s memo as he ran a website article nearly mirroring Gregory’s liberal talking points on climate change, including using the “consensus” phrase. 

Robert McCartney slimed a Northern Virginia Catholic priest in a Sunday column in the Washington Post for his decision to end his parish's relationship with the Boy Scouts for letting openly-homosexual youth to join as scouts. McCartney blasted Father John De Celles, pastor of St. Raymond of Peñafort parish in Springfield, for his supposed "diatribes against gay behavior, liberal activists and similar targets in his weekly columns."

The columnist later touted how "De Celles is in the minority" in disbanding his parish's Cub Scout pack and Boy Scout troop, and bringing in an alternative youth group that "discriminates against boys who refuse to hide their homosexuality," as he spun it. He all but called for discrimination against those who defend traditional sexual morals: "I hope and expect that those with narrow-minded views will be the ones who end up 'marginalized.'"

In near identical fashion to their treatment of abortion-activist Sandra Fluke, MSNBC has been running the unofficial political campaign for Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis. During her failed filibuster of new abortion laws in Texas, MSNBC helped propel Ms. Davis into the national spotlight, with host Chris Hayes going so far as to claim that her campaign is a “matter of life of death for many Texans.”

On the February 17 Morning Joe, the entire panel, sans conservative co-host Joe Scarborough, continued with the Wendy Davis love-fest before ultimately conceding that the liberal Democrat will likely not become the next governor of Texas.

 In 2014, one wealthy Obama donor after another has been rewarded with ambassadorships to strategically important countries. Yet, NBC has skipped the embarrassing details of these men and women and their unfamiliarity with the places they are to serve. ABC's World News and CBS This Morning investigated the high profile donors.

This Morning guest co-host Anthony Mason spun it as a "growing controversy over gaffes by some of President Obama's picks." Correspondent Margaret Brennan recounted the messy details: "Senator John McCain appeared frustrated that hotel owner George Tsunis, nominated to serve in Norway, was confused about which political party makes up its government." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] Brennan also noted that the number of donors selected to serve by the President is higher than President Clinton, George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush.

MSNBC’s Alex Witt is clearly one of those journalists who wishes Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky sex scandal would completely fade from memory so as not to obstruct Hillary Clinton’s potential bid for the White House in 2016. On Sunday’s edition of Weekends with Alex Witt, the host went so far as to apologize after her guest mentioned Lewinsky’s name. [Video below. MP3 audio here.]

Witt was talking to Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) about Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) attempts to link Mrs. Clinton to her husband’s sexual misdeeds in the 1990s. Cicilline, a loyal Democrat, stuck up for Hillary and downplayed the importance of the scandal:

On Sunday's NBC Meet the Press, supposed moderator David Gregory teamed up with global warming activist Bill Nye to condemn skepticism on the issue voiced by Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

When Blackburn dared to point out that "there is not consensus" on manmade global warming –  citing two dissenting climate scientists – Gregory quickly jumped in to stop her blasphemy: "Well, hold on. I just have to interrupt you. I'm sorry, Congresswoman. Let me just interrupt you because it's not – you can pick out particular skeptics, but you can't really say, can you, that the hundreds of scientists around the world who have looked at this have gotten together and conspired to manipulate data."

Democrat and former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, who has been "shadowing" Chris Christie while taking every possible opportunity to accuse New Jersey's GOP Governor of either "lying" or of being "the most inept, incompetent chief executive imaginable," tried his schtick yesterday morning on Chris Wallace's Fox News show.

Unfortunately for Ted, establishment Republican and former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove was there to do what the press should have been doing, namely calling out his blatant hypocrisy. But the clever Strickland managed to get in the last word. Viewers not familiar with the details of how Strickland's Buckeye State government went after Joe the Plumber after his preelection encounter with Barack Obama in October 2008 will likely believe that the argument ended in a standoff. That situation needs to be remedied.

On his latest "Real Time with Bill Maher" show on HBO over the weekend, Bill Maher went where no comedian wants to find himself -- the dead zone of awkward silence from an audience.

Maher and his guests were talking about textbook bad hire/turncoat Edward Snowden seeking asylum in Russia and a WikiLeaks tweet praising this allegedly "democratic country" under Putin. (Video after the jump)

So who's being the sexist?  Mika Brzezinski went ballistic on today's Morning Joe over Republicans like Rand Paul raising Monica Lewinsky in the context of a possible Hillary presidential run, calling them "sexist" and "misogynistic."  But in the course of her rant, Mika mockingly referred to such Republicans as "little peanuts." Hmm.

Did Mika need to use such suggestive, demeaning language in making her point? You have to view the video to get just how derisive was Mika with her "little peanut" line. View the video after the jump.

Andrew Kirell of Mediaite filed a story from a convention of globalist libertarians, a panel discussion entitled “Imperial Overreach and the National Security State,”  that demonstrated that they really don’t like Barack Obama on the radical left. They thought he would be one of them, but instead he's a tool of the "warfare state." They’re also disgusted with MSNBC.

“The vast majority of the hate mail that I get today is from hard-core partisan Democrats, who are nothing more than lemmings for the White House, and when you watch MSNBC, it's like watching one big Obama For America meet-up,” radical journalist Jeremy Scahill said, “and when you watch Fox News it's full of conspiracies about the scary black Marxist Manchurian candidate who wants to resurrect Chairman Mao and put him in charge of our economy.” Movie director Oliver Stone condemned Obama as a “weak man” who’s essentially a black George Bush:

On Fox News Sunday earlier today, George Will got in some tremendous rips at global warming/"climate change" alarmism.

Although Will's criticism was primarily aimed at politicians, we cannot overlook the fact that their enablers in the establishment press have made their immature "climate denier" and "flat earther" name-calling rants possible by unskeptically allowing their so-called "settled science" to be seen as explanations for Britain's recent floods and California's droughts. President Obama is pushing the drought nonsense, when it's bad man-made water policy which is to blame. Video and the relevant portion of the FNS transcript are after the jump (HT Mediaite; bolds are mine):

On Sunday's Meet the Press, host David Gregory seemed to pick up where Andrea Mitchell left off, expressing shock that the Republicans would think it's fair to revisit the 1990s to assess Hillary Clinton.

Gregory's interviewee was Mitt Romney, who somehow refrained from saying "You people thought allegations of my high-school bullying in 1965 were relevant, but not the Clinton presidency?"  Romney dared to say Bill Clinton "embarrassed the nation" and didn't act like an adult. (Video below):

ABC’s Jonathan Karl is usually the lone voice of reason at ABC News, but every now and then he reveals his liberal partisanship and will take a cheap shot at Republicans.

Appearing as a guest on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Karl claimed that “Ted Cruz is so hated among his Republicans…he’s going to need a food taster.” [See video below.]

If it’s the Lord’s Day, The Washington Post is observing it again as LGBT Day. Splashed on the front of the Sunday Outlook section is this, in large capital letters: “GENDERQUEER AT THE GYM: If your identity seems ambiguous, asks law studient Marion Cory, which looker room do you use?”

Like Sandra Fluke, Cory is a law student at allegedly Catholic Georgetown University.  Cory didn’t feel that even liberal Washington is progressive enough, and neither are gay gyms:

CBS News host Charles Osgood rarely catches our attention at NewsBusters, but every now and then he does something that makes us shake our heads in dismay.

During his weekly Sunday morning program CBS News Sunday Morning, Osgood touted a recent speech by Secretary of State John Kerry in which Kerry “likened deniers of climate change to those who once believed Earth is flat.” [See video below.]

Candy Crowley is no stranger to injecting herself into political debates. Readers of NewsBusters will remember that her worst offense was during a 2012 presidential debate when she teamed up with President Obama to attack Mitt Romney over Benghazi.

Despite Ms. Crowley’s past offenses, Ms. Crowley continued to show her dislike of the GOP during her February 16 State of the Union program. Speaking to her panel, Crowley invoked the famous song from “The Sound of Music” to ask “How do they solve a problem like Ted Cruz in the Republican caucus in the Senate?” [See video below.]

Meredith Vieira needs to understand that Americans don’t want to mix their sports with their politics. Following the United States’ thrilling shootout victory over the Russians in hockey on Saturday, NBC’s Meredith Vieira used the opportunity to lobby Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential ambitions.

Speaking to NBC’s Al Michaels, Vieira commented that she overheard a Canadian spectator sat that, “if that Hillary Clinton wants to run for president she should have Oshie as her running mate and she’s a shoo in.” [See video below.]

The Los Angeles Times and Belgium see eye to eye. In an editorial on Valentine's Day, Times editorial writer Scott Martelle wrote “Extend assisted suicide to children? Belgium says yes; so should we.”

“The Times’ editorial board has gone on record supporting the right of terminally ill patients to end their lives on their own terms, and I hope state lawmakers — or voters — eventually agree,” Martelle wrote. So why not Euthanasia for Kiddies?

The London Daily Mail reported this week that “CNN caused a firestorm when it included a war monument in Brest, a city in the former Soviet republic of Belarus, in an article on the 'world's ugliest monuments' published last month.” This isn’t Ted Turner’s CNN, where a reporter would be disciplined for saying the word “foreign” in a sentence. The online article from a travel-piece contributor was intended as humor.          

A Russian news commentator responded by suggesting the Marine Corps War Memorial – the Iwo Jima sculpture just north of Arlington National Cemetery – is “easy to mock” for its homoerotic look, and "you don't have to be very smart to get it." (video below):

The three Associated Press reports I've seen on the UAW's failure to win the right to represent hourly workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee — the first two were covered in NewsBusters posts here and here; the wire service's 3:52 p.m. report is here — all mention in one way or another what UAW President Bob King is now calling "unprecedented outside interference" in the runup to the election. (VW, which can only run the factory with the kind of "workers councils" it has at its other worldwide plants in the U.S. if its workers are represented by an outside union, supported the UAW's efforts.)

But AP reporters Tom Krisher and Erik Schelzig, as well as panelists discussing the aftermath on Melissa Harris-Perry's MSNBC program this morning, "somehow" ignored the "outside interference" of the person who holds the most powerful political office on earth. That's right. President Obama, whose National Labor Relations Board conducted the election, weighed in on Friday morning with statements at a "closed door" meeting which were clearly designed to be leaked. Here is what Richard Cowan and Bernie Woodall at Reuters reported on Friday morning (HT Gateway Pundit):

“Being born gay is one of the great blessings of my life,” Anderson Cooper proclaimed to a crowd of nearly 6,000 at University of Texas in Arlington on Monday night, according to The Advocate.

Cooper acknowledged different viewpoints on homosexuality, but suggested the "arc of history" was going to take the respectability out of opposition to homosexuality. In the discussion over NFL draft prospect Michael Sam coming out as gay, Cooper compared it to being black or Jewish or Christian. (Video below)

It is a sign of the unseriousness of the mainstream media that the NBC program "Meet the Press" will be hosting a climate debate Sunday featuring a person who plays a scientist on TV.

Yes, tomorrow it is "Bill Nye the Science Guy" versus Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Kyra Phillips heralded Facebook's recent decision to add more than 50 gender categories on Friday's CNN Newsroom. Phillips brought on Rich Ferraro of GLAAD to boost the LGBT activist group's role in the social media website's left-wing change, and tossed softball questions at her guest: "Rich, you actually worked on this project with Facebook. So, whose idea was it, and why did it become an issue and an important move for Facebook?"

The anchor, who has a long history of promoting the social left's LGBT agenda and didn't bother to bring on a social conservative voice to respond to the story, made her feelings clear on the development to Ferraro: [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]

Following revisions to initial stories at the Associated Press, aka the Adminstration's Press, can be a revealing if sometimes tedious exercise.

A case in point is how reporters Tom Krisher and Erik Schelzig, who are both more than likely represented by the News Media Guild in their jobs at the wire service, changed the tone of their second report following the rejection by employees at Volkswagen's Chattanooga, Tennessee plant of representation by the United Auto Workers union. And speaking of changed tones, UAW President Bob King suddenly moved from conciliatory to confrontational in the 3-1/2 hours between the first and second AP reports.