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NBC "Today" show co-host and weatherman Al Roker invited on Susan Sarandon to promote her latest movie, Mr. Woodcock, but couldn’t get through the full interview without praising her liberal activism, as he called her a "good role model," and celebrated her "great job" of combining acting and protesting. For her part, Sarandon actually took a dig at NBC News on its own airwaves, on the Monday edition of "Today", as she wistfully recalled the good old days when "news programs" showed "what was going on, not like now."

The following is the relevant out-take from the Sarandon interview as it took place on the September 10, "Today" show:

So, 10 of the 11 New Jersey officials arrested last week on bribery and corruption charges were Democrats? Where's the establishment media outcry about a Democratic "culture of corruption" in the state?

A criminal probe targeting elected officials operating at most levels of government in New Jersey resulted in the arrest of 11 public officials and one private citizen last week. All 12 suspects have been charged with taking cash payments in exchange for influencing the distribution of public contracts, according to the criminal complaints. As part of the investigation, the FBI created an undercover insurance brokerage firm to offer bribes through undercover agents. The suspects are accused of accepting payments ranging from $3,500 to $32,000.

Although the scandal has been widely reported, a Nexis search indicates the establishment media have been unwilling to link the alleged criminal infractions with the Democratic Party. A Nexis search by CNSNews.com shows more than 30 media citations using innocuous phrases such as "public officials" instead of "Democratic Party officials" or a similar label.

Brian Montopoli's writing at CBS's Public Eye blog has been sparse of late. Now the co-ombudsblogger is announcing he's moving elsewhere within the network:

Starting today, I’m officially becoming a political reporter for the new CBSNews.com politics section, which will be relaunching in its shiny new form soon. And that means, after two years, I’m saying goodbye to Public Eye.

This should be fun. NewsBusters has taken Montopoli to task before for his work with Public Eye, including a January 17 post where he hit a network correspondent from the left for not being biased enough:

Yet another story is in the media highlighting the supposed superiority of liberals' brains to those of conservatives. Not long after the president of the American Publishers' Association claimed that liberals were simply more intelligent, based on a poll that showed liberals tend to read more books (one a year) than conservatives, a new study is highlighted by the Agencie France-Presse claiming that liberals and conservatives brain functions differ. The story waits only four short paragraphs beofre focusing on the supposed superiority of liberals by claiming that,

Conservatives tend to crave order and structure in their lives, and are more consistent in the way they make decisions. Liberals, by contrast, show a higher tolerance for ambiguity and complexity, and adapt more easily to unexpected circumstances.

The New York Times is determined to minimize any political traction Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani gets for his leadership after 9-11. Marc Santora's Monday "Political Memo," "In Campaign Year, Invoking 9/11 Raises New Debates," suggested Giuliani is misleading voters by breaking some kind of promise not to talk about his leadership as mayor of New York City after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

"During a Republican presidential debate on Wednesday, Rudolph W. Giuliani asserted, 'The reality is that I'm not running on what I did on Sept. 11.'

"Two days later, a crowd of nearly 1,000 filed into a ballroom here for a 9/11 Remembrance Luncheon. Graphic images of the exploding towers, dust-covered survivors and even a series of photos that showed someone leaping from a tower were flashed on two giant screens flanking the stage where Mr. Giuliani was about to speak.

"'America must never forget the lessons of Sept. 11,' Mr. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, later told the crowd.

Persistent Bush critic and recurring Sunday morning talk show fixture Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) is announcing his retirement from the U.S. Senate. Reporting the story in the Sunday paper, the Washington Post's Jonathan Weisman and Chris Cillizza described the Iraq war critic as a "mainstream conservative who raised his profile nationally through his fierce opposition to President Bush's Iraq policies."

While it is true that Hagel has a respectable 85.2 (out of a possible 100) lifetime score from the American Conservative Union, the Associated Press's Anna Jo Bratton more colorfully described the senator as "a thorn in his party's side when it comes to Iraq." The characterization is apt but perhaps a bit charitable given the retiring politician's suggestion that President Bush could be impeached over the war.

While both the Bratton and Post accounts focused on Hagel's retirement as another obstacle in the uphill battle for control of the Senate in 2008, neither article mentioned that Hagel made an oblique reference in March to the potential to impeach President George W. Bush over the Iraq war:

DailyKos.com, the Left's most popular website and a key source of fund-raising for Democrats from coast to coast, says Osama bin Laden and Ronald Reagan have a lot in common:

So is Osama bin Laden truly "evil?" Most people who lost family members at the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001 would probably consider him to be evil. Was President Ronald Reagan evil? Most residents of Beirut who lost family members when the USS New Jersey rained 2,700 pound Mark 7 shells on residential neighborhoods in 1983 during the Lebanese Civil War probably considered Reagan to have been evil. Bottom line? Bin Laden is no more evil than other revolutionary leaders in other times or even than ordinary national leaders who propel their countries to war for "national honor," or to acquire the resources of others, or even to "do good."

To translate Kos-speak: Osama bin Laden isn't a terrorist, he's a freedom fighter. And Reagan wasn't a freedom fighter - he was a terrorist.

On Monday’s "Good Morning America," correspondent David Wright highlighted an ABC poll which claims a "stunning" 100 percent of Iraqis in Baghdad and Anbar Province view the troop surge negatively. Wright offered this rather amazing statistic during a dour preview of the Iraq progress report that General Petraeus will give to Congress this week. In October of 2002, the veteran journalist highlighted another nearly unanimous poll. Showing extreme naivete, he famously observed on "World News Tonight that in a 1995 Iraqi election, "... Saddam Hussein won 99.96 percent of the vote. Of course, it is impossible to say whether that's a true measure of the Iraqi people's feelings."

While discussing the ABC survey of Iraqi households, Wright didn’t question the fact that not one person could be found who viewed the troop surge positively. After comparing Petraeus’s testimony to that of General William Westmoreland at the height of the Vietnam War, Wright went on to discuss how the poll indicates that Iraqis believe the prospects for the future are "grim at best." He then closed the report by stating the obvious: Unlike ABC, General Petraeus will actually mention signs of progress, in addition to discussing the struggles. "And no doubt we're going to be hearing a starkly different assessment today from this chair by General Petraeus," he concluded.

Chalk up another in a litany of absurd statements made by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann.

As part of an interview published in Playboy magazine's October issue, Olbermann actually said, "Fox News is worse than Al Qaeda."

I kid you not.

The entire disgraceful quote, offered as a teaser for the full interview at Playboy's website (be advised that pictures of scantily clad women exist on the page as well), was as follows (h/t Inside Cable News via Johnny Dollar):

I'll ask all of my readers to please check out Pajamas Media after noon (Eastern U.S.) today [update: it's up now], and see what you think of my exclusive interview which should be coming online right about then.

In the meantime, Michelle Malkin and her team at Hot Air released a crushing "Vent" today, interviewing Michael Goldfarb, the writer for the Weekly Standard that broke the story with his post, "Fact or Fiction?" on July 18, and also paying a surprise visit to the offices of the New Republic to try to get in to see Franklin Foer.

Watch the whole thing.

All in all, this is going to be a very bad day for Franklin Foer and the New Republic, who by now, just wish this story would go away. What they don't seem to grasp is that at this point, they are the story.

Touting it as a “Geraldo at Large investigation you won’t soon forget,” FNC’s Laurie Dhue filed a report from inside a men’s bathroom on what supposedly happened last June between Senator Larry Craig and an undercover police officer, with actors in separate stalls rubbing their feet together.

After pointing out that the chances that Craig’s conduct was simply misunderstood by the police officer were “extremely low,” Dhue suggested that any stigma on homosexual behavior was the fault of the Republican Party.

Dhue declared: “I think the sad part about all this is that Larry Craig had to go to a public place — if it’s true, if he is gay — he had to go to a public place, and that’s the shame of homosexuality in this country right, today — at least the shame that the Republican Party puts on it.”

Your turn...

"This is John Smith, reporting live from the beaches of Normandy, where Allied troops have launched a massive invasion aiming to defeat the Axis."

"John, this is Bob Brown back in the studio. When does General Eisenhower think the first Allied troops can start to come home?"

"What the . . . ?"

OK, the surge isn't D-Day. But surely an important part of what we are looking for in General Petraeus's report today is his assessment of the prospects for success in Iraq, right? Wrong -- if by "we" you include CNN. According to it's 9 A.M. EDT preview of the report, the only thing "everyone" cares about is the timing of withdrawal:

By now, most conservatives have likely seen or heard about the video Fox News's Sean Hannity aired on Sunday's "Hannity's America" wherein the Global Warmingist-in-Chief, soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore, was seen getting off a private, fuel inefficient jet at San Francisco Airport before stepping into a non-hybrid, Lincoln Town Car.

This raises a question: Should we expect to see this video on CNN and MSNBC all day Monday, as well as on the morning and evening news programs of ABC, NBC, and CBS?

If the answer is "No," then why not? After all, as Redstate reported about this video Sunday (emphasis added, video available here):

And here I thought liberals were the ones who love to glorify those "hard-working average Americans." The mythic salt of the earth who sit around the supper table discussing the need for universal health care, or whatever, before getting up in the morning, grabbing their lunch buckets and heading off to work hard and play by the rules.

Isn't it supposed to be those mean-spirited conservatives who denigrate those same folks as irresponsible?

And yet . . .

Proving that there's no elitism like liberal elitism, the Boston Globe emits an astonishing editorial this morning, analogizing those with less-than-ideal credit to a bunch of drunks who can't resist the handout of a bottle.

Candidate Fred Thompson is the butt of media jokes, once again. This time it is due to the reporting by the New York Daily News of Thompson's comments in Sioux City, Iowa over the weekend. Thompson's claim that an al Qaeda enforced smoking ban in Iraq led to many Iraqi citizens joining the U.S. side in the attempt to rid the country of the foreign terror network was reported to the misinformed media's amusement, becoming an excuse to make fun of the candidate. But, as is the case with most "reporting" by the MSM, Thompson turns out to be right in his assertions and the MSM has egg on their faces, once again. It seems more and more that the media has decided to do their level best to destroy Fred Thompson's bid for the White House. I wonder what that says of their fear of him?

The NYDNews reported Thompson's comments on Saturday.

Bloggers have caught a politician saying one thing in a speech, while carrying a very different rendering of a critical passage at a supposed "transcript" of that speech.

The difference is significant.

The transcript whitewashes a slander on the performance of US troops in Iraq delivered by a United States senator.

Specifically, New York's Charles Schumer gave a made a speech on the floor of the Senate last week ascribing the turnaround in the Anbar province in Iraq to the locals, and discrediting the notion that American troops could have had anything to do with it.

Here is the relevant portion of Armchair General Schumer's speech you will hear at the YouTube video:

And let me be clear. The violence in Anbar has gone down in spite of the Surge, not because of the Surge.

The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes from Al Qaeda said to these tribes, "We have to fight Al Qaeda ourselves."

However, that section of the "transcript" of Schumer's speech posted at his Senate web site (a backup screen cap, in case the transcript gets revised at a future date, is here) reads thusly:

On the one hand, I was very pleased to see CNN's Howard Kurtz mention on Sunday's "Reliable Sources" the recent decision by the BBC to cancel "Planet Earth," a proposed daylong special to focus attention on anthropogenic global warming.

On the other hand, I was surprised when Kurtz chose not to include one of the key reasons this project was scrapped, namely, the failure of Al Gore's Live Earth concerts.

Here's what Kurtz said on the subject:

For several years as the manmade global warming myth has taken center stage, the media have led people to believe that reports published by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were written by thousands of scientists around the world all sharing a consensus view regarding this controversial issue.

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

On Thursday, climate data analyst John McLean wrote a fabulous analysis of the most recent IPCC Assessment Report released in April, and in so doing, obliterated many of the press assertions that have become prominent fixtures in climate change lore.

Published by the Science and Public Policy Institute, this paper should be must reading for all media members and global warming alarmists. It began with a rather harsh review of the important Summary for Policy Makers (emphasis added throughout):

There has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about Osama’s beard.Was it fake? Was it dyed?

There has also been a lot of discussion about the politics in the video. Some suggesting they sound a lot like the American left.

There are a lot of oddities that open up questions on the authenticity of the latest Al Qaeda propaganda. Michael Leeden, at the Corner, ponders whether this was really Osama with many good points. Another significant find was pointed out by the leftist site, Booman Tribune.

"Osama Bin Laden’s widely publicized video address to the American people has a peculiarity that casts serious doubt on its authenticity: the video freezes at about 1 minute and 36 seconds, and motion only resumes again at 12:30. The video then freezes again at 14:02 remains frozen until the end. All references to current events, such as the 62nd anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan, and Sarkozy and Brown being the leaders of France and the UK, respectively, occur when the video is frozen! The words spoken when the video is in motion contain no references to contemporary events and could have been (and likely were) made before the U.S. invasion of Iraq."

The Los Angeles Times's love affair with Barack Obama continues to writhe hot and heavy. We've reported on it in the past here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The paper continued its string of flattering, adulatory profiles of Obama yesterday (Sat. 9/8/07) with a generous, front-page, 2100+-word piece. With the article are two photos, including a nice full-color pic of Barack and his wife Michelle enjoying a smooch (see images of the article here and here). As with other pieces the paper has run on Obama, any unflattering episodes about the candidate are downplayed or excused.

During a report on Friday's The Situation Room about each party's message regarding the war on terrorism, CNN's Bill Schneider slanted the piece toward plugging Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards' challenge to Republicans. Schneider relayed the desire by Republicans to make the 2008 election about the war on terror, and, after summarizing Edwards' proposal for an "aggressive new policy against terrorism," Schneider concluded the report: "Edwards' message is: If the Republicans want to refight the 2004 campaign, bring'em on." (Transcript follows)

Since it is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's ground-breaking book, "On The Road," many are using the occasion to reminisce about the author. However, Tom Hayden is using this anniversary as a way to lament in the Huffington Post over the fact that Kerouac was too much of an iconoclast to buy into his collectivist leftwing agenda:

Every now and then one has to read an article four or five times to actually believe someone could possibly write such nonsense.

The following item, from Time magazine's special report "The 50 Worst Cars of All Time," has to qualify as one of the most absurd pieces of...journalism I've come across so far this year (h/t NB reader Paul Head).

To set this up, it goes without saying that Ford's creation of the Model T represents a seminal moment in American history as it made cars affordable to the general population for the very first time, and caused a huge economic explosion in our nation.

Alas, that's not how Time sees it (emphasis added to really point out the stupidity):

Never's a long time, but, "Never Enough" seems appropriate for the state Democrats and their enablers over at the Denver Post. This morning, the paper's Local & Western Politics Blog runs an uncritical story about the desire of state Democrats to raise taxes again under the title, "Seventeen tax proposals under discussion in Colorado." The two liberal groups quoted, the Bell Policy Center and the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute, are not identified as such. Members of Bell campagned with Ref C supporters a couple of years ago. And the CFPI's parent institute, the Colorado Center on Law and Policy, describes its mission as: "The Colorado Center on Law and Policy's mission is to promote justice and economic security for all Coloradans, particularly lower income people.

"CBS Evening News" anchor Katie Couric couldn't possibly expect to be criticized by a fellow, female, liberal journalist when she went to Iraq last week to report firsthand what was going on in that embattled nation.

Yet, on Sunday's "Reliable Sources," Salon editor-in-chief Joan Walsh ripped the leading member of the media sisterhood for "lobbing kind of softball questions," and not "working terribly hard to go beyond that kind of puff piece drop in for a few days kind of journalism."

In fact, Walsh demonstrated what happens when a discernibly liberal press representative dares to do an impartial, balanced report which doesn't exclusively bash Republicans, the president, and the war:

If you watched any television newscasts Friday, or read a paper Saturday, you were bombarded with claims of doom and gloom as a result of the August unemployment report showing 4,000 fewer people on American payrolls than in July.

Yet, what media largely ignored were shifting sociological population dynamics indicating this summer's poor jobs gains could be caused by the smallest percentage of teenagers seeking work since such data started being collected in 1948.

In fact, though the "civilian noninstitutional population" of persons sixteen to nineteen-years-old reached 17 million for the first time in history last month, only 5.665 million of these teens were employed, the fewest for any August since 1965 when the population of such young adults was only 13 million.

Isn't this newsworthy? Well, there's much more that was ignored in this report for those actually interested in facts rather than excessively bearish, pessimistic spin.

The state of Delaware's largest daily, the News Journal, writes that the state's 'All-white court casts long shadow' and laments that there is no African-American serving on the state's Supreme Court.

A former border state whose citizens kept slaves but also supported the Underground Railroad, Delaware today has a rich tradition of black culture and achievement.

But unlike other states with such diverse populations -- and many whose residents are far more monochromatic -- Delaware has never had a black jurist on its Supreme Court, the last stop for most criminal and civil decision-making.

For general debate and discussion.