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As NewsBusters has reported, American media have been relaying to the citizenry that the recent floods in England are caused by - what else? - manmade global warming.

Addressing such nonsense Friday was London-based geological-, biological-, and political-history researcher Don Stewart.

In an article published at PR-GB.com, Stewart mocked the hysteria surrounding England's floods, and pointed out how history actually shows them to be neither of biblical proportion nor in any way caused by anthropogenic global warming (emphasis added throughout):

The war over climate change got much hotter Friday, so much so that anthropogenic global warming skeptics who have claimed that there is a huge number of scientists staying silent about this issue to protect their careers may have been validated.

As NewsBusters previously reported, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Stephen Johnson, was apprised by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) during a Senate hearing Thursday of a threatening e-mail message sent to a climate change analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

On Friday, the e-mail sender, Michael T. Eckhart, President of the American Council on Renewable Energy, responded by letter to Inhofe.

Much of the letter's content was similar to what Eckhart's representative Tom Weirich sent me by e-mail Friday morning, and to what Eckhart e-mailed me himself Friday afternoon:

Sweet Saturday...

Especially since registration is back open now.

In the New York Post, gossip columnist Liz Smith previewed some of the charges in Ed Klein’s book on CBS anchor Katie Couric, due at the end of August. It seems the Katie camp is already trying to do damage control and insist that the scoops that are leaking out are not really scoops, they’re all yawners. (See what happens when you hire a Hillary publicist like Matthew Hiltzik? Your media strategy suddenly sounds exactly like Hillary’s.) The only scooplet that Smith thought had power: "‘But the majority of people at 60 Minutes, including the correspondents, dislike her intensely. They think she's a lightweight.’ Well, that probably hurts, but Katie has to ignore it."

Once again, and engaging in perfect Soviet styled historical revisionism, our glorious MSM presents the "truth" of how failed Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was really the one who "helped" the U.S. win the Cold War. AP claims Gorby brought about the fall of the Soviet Union but this "ushered in an era of U.S. imperialism," which the AP claims is responsible for "many of the world's gravest problems." So, according to the AP Gorby helped the U.S. win the Cold War, but his good deed is now the cause of all the world's ills? How losing the game can equate to an assist to the winners is anyone's guess.

Every couple of months the left leaning western MSM dusts off this old loser to beat up the United States. And with this one the AP mixes their hero worship of Mikhail Gorbachev with their hatred of the U.S.A. in a crescendo of far left double speak that is just incredible for its cluelessness. The very mind boggling leftist dogma of their first two sentences is head spinning.

Keith Olbermann opened Friday night's Countdown show on MSNBC:

Tomorrow morning Vice President Cheney will undergo surgery to have the battery replaced on his heart defibrillator -- which means an exact reversal of last week's colonoscopy and invocation of the 25th amendment. For a few hours, at least, George W. Bush will actually get to be President. Our fifth story on the Countdown, let's hope he uses his alone-time wisely because today his administration was again reduced to try to reform clear reality into foggy myth with a dedication of language-parsing that makes Bill Clinton look like a chronic generalizer. Not that you would have known anything wrong from Mr. Bush's schedule today devoted to an economic speech and to handing out science medals....

The news:

Taylor to have plea agreement hearing on Monday
Posted: Friday July 27, 2007 9:02PM; Updated: Friday July 27, 2007 9:45PM

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) -- One of Michael Vick's co-defendants doesn't want to wait for trial.

Instead, a plea agreement hearing has been scheduled for Tony Taylor at 9 a.m. Monday in the federal dogfighting conspiracy case.

Taylor's hearing was added to U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson's docket Friday, a day after he and the other three defendants pleaded not guilty before the same judge. Vick and the others still are scheduled for trial Nov. 26.

Prosecutors claim Taylor, 34, found the Surry County property purchased by Vick and used it as the site of "Bad Newz Kennels," a dogfighting enterprise. The Hampton man also allegedly helped purchase pit bulls and killed at least two dogs that fared poorly in test fights.

Perhaps Taylor's impending plea will squelch the annoying Old Media comparisons of the Vick case to that of the innocent Duke lacrosse players wrongly indicted by Prosecutor Mike Nifong last year.

A week ago, in probably the most egregious example of Duke-Vick projection, Sports Illustrated writer Peter King appointed himself to be NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell's translator:

We all had the opportunity for some real political fun this week when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama contradicted each other in the CNN/YouTube debate. If you did not already see it, one of the YouTube questioners asked the candidates whether they would be willing to meet with the leaders of rogue nations, without preconditions, during their first year in office. Obama answered that he would. Clinton answered that she would not.

Those are differing positions, right? Diametrically opposed, actually? Well, maybe not, or at least not according to Jonathan Alter of Newsweek. In his July 27 article "Talking to Dictators," Alter wrote: "[o]n the substance, their views are almost indistinguishable." Indistinguishable?

Alter's surprising conclusion comes after his own summary of the post-debate fracas between Clinton and Obama:

The ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts on Friday all devoted full stories to the fall in the stock market, touted as “the worst two-day point drop for the Dow in five years,” but barely had time for a sentence about the 3.4 percent second quarter jump in the GDP, the biggest in over a year. In fact, neither ABC nor NBC cited the specific 3.4 percent rise in the Gross Domestic Product, the measure which the AP on Friday described as the “best barometer of the country's economic fitness.” Not one of the three evening newscasts mentioned how the Dow is still well above the 13,000 level it broke through in April and none noted fresh good news on inflation.

ABC was the most negative. “Stock slide,” World News anchor Charles Gibson teased, “Wall Street finishes the worst week of the year down nearly 600 points.” Gibson soon highlighted that news, as he only alluded to the good GDP number, when he reported “the worst week for the Dow in five years. Even positive news on economic growth wasn't enough to keep investors from selling. Among other things, they had to contend with a battered housing market.” Reporter Betsy Stark agreed as she too only made a passing reference to the GDP: “It sure is, Charlie. In fact, buried inside that positive report on Gross Domestic Product today was more evidence of what economists now describe as an outright recession in the housing sector.” ABC didn't even put the GDP number on screen as Stark devoted her entire story to the impact of the declining housing market before concluding that “it increases the odds of a downturn in the overall economy since housing now accounts for roughly one in ten American jobs.”

In addition to insisting the U.S. needs universal health insurance, Michael Moore introduced another plan to help Americans on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" July 26.

He urged audience members to use threats and intimidation with his new "SiCKO health care card:"

Well, sports fans, the tale of the threatening global warming e-mail message took an interesting turn Friday morning when a representative from the American Council on Renewable Energy sent a message to yours truly containing a response from ACORE President Michael T. Eckhart.

As NewsBusters reported here and here, Eckhart sent the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Dr. Marlo Lewis an e-mail message on July 13 threatening to ruin his career as a result of their differences over whether man is responsible for warming the planet.

On July 15, Eckhart posted an explanation for his actions at ACORE's blog, and ACORE representative Tom Weirich has asked me to present its contents for your review.

As it turns out, Lewis had already published a response to Eckhart at CEI's blog on July 24. This included the text of an e-mail message from Eckhart to CEI President Fred Smith in which Eckhart admitted saying to Smith, "I [will] give you 90 days to show that CEI is reversing its position on [global warming], or I will take every action I can think of to shut you down."

Before we get there, here are some of the key points made by Eckhart (emphasis added throughout):

The Dow dropped again today.

Scary.

And that's exactly how the mainstream press treated it. What goes down, must go down further. Even with the sour coverage on NBC and CBS on July 26, there were voices of reason that warrant commitment to the markets.

"So this is not a crash, if anything, it's a correction," said CNN "American Morning" business correspondent Ali Velshi. "It might not even be a correction; it might just be a stop on the way."

Wow, good news, even on CNN.

Others experts point at signs our economy is still in tact and still moving in the right direction as evidence not to panic.

The Washington Post 2008 campaign blog "The Trail" has an update on Cleavage-gate, a minor row that seems to have caught the paper's fashion critic Robin Givhan with a dear-in-the-headlights look while giving New York's junior senator a change to perk up her campaign's finances. [Update: Tim Graham has an excellent take on the matter, coming at it from a different angle than I did here. It's a good read. Check it out.]

As the Post's Howard Kurtz and Anne E. Kornblut note, Givhan protests that she:

...would never say the column was about a body part... It was about a style of dress. People have gone down the road of saying, 'I can't believe you're writing about her breasts.' I wasn't writing about her breasts. I was writing about her neckline.

No matter. Kurtz and Kornblut note that Hillary's acolytes are using Givhan's July 20 article to push-up fundraising:

Correction (July 31 | 14:40): Colbert's wrist was broken. He injured it running around his studio before a show. I regret the error.

Bob Shrum, the Democratic political strategist who has only slightly fewer losses on his resume than the Philadelphia Phillies, appeared on the Colbert Report last night to tout his book, “No Excuses: Confessions of a Serial Complainer,” err, I mean, “No Excuses: Confessions of a Serial Campaigner.”

Colbert, who was pretending to be gravely hurt and wearing a fake cast on his arm, was ushered in by wheelchair. Shrum, not missing an opportunity to shill for the Democrats, quipped:

“I hope all the suffering has made you more inclined to support national health insurance, so everybody can get the same kind of risk care you do.”

Clever as ever Mr. Shrum. But that was only the beginning.

Colbert immediately turned his attention to what Shrum, the Susan Lucci of political campaigning, is best known for, losing.

A transcript of Colbert and Shrum’s conversation follows. Colbert’s show is designed as a satirical homage to Bill O’Reilly and usually makes fun of conservatives and certainly Shrum knows this. Even so, he’s dead serious about his Bush-stole-Ohio charge.

Here’s the transcript. More commentary follows.:

For various reasons, the majority of the Republican presidential campaigns have said they are not going to participate in a CNN debate co-sponsored with the Google-owned YouTube.com.

Despite the fact that the Democrats' YouTube debate featured left-wing questions far out of proportion to questions from the right (see NB's prior coverage of the debate here), Republican activist Patrick Ruffini is arguing the GOP is really dropping the ball. Here's an excerpt from an open letter he's attached to a petition urging the candidates to change their minds:

We've read the news reports that only two of your fellow candidates have agreed to attend the Republican Party of Florida/YouTube debate, and there are major candidates considering snubbing the event.

As Republicans, we believe this is a serious mistake. Every Democratic candidate eagerly accepted the opportunity to answer questions from the American people via YouTube, even Hillary Clinton, the most cautious and calculating of the bunch.

 

Original caption:

Democratic presidential candidates stand on stage prior to the start of the CNN/YouTube Democratic Presidential Candidates Debate at the Citadel Military College in Charleston, South Carolina.

Wow. It appears that choreographers Mia Michaels and Wade Robson whipped up quite a bit of controversy in response to the 10 anti-war dance solos that were performed on Wednesday night's episode of the Fox TV reality series So You Think You Can Dance. I hadn't realized that Mia Michaels was wearing Marine Dress Blues with upside down Marine emblems on the sleeves when I wrote yesterday's article discussing the solos. (video here)

According to Michaels the blouse was a gift and she had no idea that anyone would be offended. But her explanation misses the point. (all emphasis mine throughout)

CNN's Wolf Blitzer conducted a hardball interview of White House press secretary Tony Snow on Thursday's edition of The Situation Room about the Democrats' subpoena of Karl Rove and the possible perjury investigation against Alberto Gonzales. Blitzer asked Snow a series of tough questions that you might find on any Democrat pundit's list. Contrast this with Blitzer's colleague at CNN, John Roberts, who earlier the same day, did a softball interview of Sen. Charles Schumer, which helped the New York Democrat echo his talking points. Actually, both Roberts and Blitzer helped forward the Democrat talking points, but the major difference was the approach towards the person being interviewed.

Covering Raul Castro's July 26 hour-long Revolution Day speech, the Washington Post characterized the fill-in dictator's latest speech as one that "hits capitalist notes while placating hard-line party loyalists." But in truth Castro's speech was the typical Communist agitprop fare: empty promises for more pay, a call for harder work from the people, and above all else, blaming the United States for the collectivist economy's failure.

"Wearing his trademark tinted eyeglasses and military uniform, Castro, 76, struck distinctly capitalist notes before tens of thousands of flag-waving Communist Party loyalists," reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia noted in his July 27 story, filed the day before from Camaguey, a city 350 miles east of Havana.

Yet from Roig-Franzia's article itself, it becomes clear Castro is not a Latin incarnation of Milton Friedman. A little more foreign investment is the only capitalist bone to be thrown Cuba's way.

Yale law professor Ian Ayres raised a very interesting question Tuesday: Is ABC possibly committing sexual discrimination by only hiring women as hosts on the daily coffee klatch "The View?"

Great question, wouldn't you agree?

In an article posted at Balkanization blog (h/t Ann Althouse via Glenn Reynolds), Ayres began his analysis of this issue by first looking at the recent announcement that comedian Drew Carey would be the new host of the "The Price is Right."

His concern was raised when former "Price" host Bob Barker said the following last month:

Nepotism alert! Tim Russert’s college-age son Luke – yes, the youngster with the XM satellite radio sports show with James Carville – was sitting in as one of the wise-cracking sidekicks on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Friday, and Joe Scarborough was mocking him and his "New Age parents" for drinking green tea from Starbucks. Apparently, "morning joe" humor is required, considering the show name. Channeling the spirit of Don Imus, with his regular drug jokes, Luke quipped: “Starbucks are legalized opium dens, and I agree with that.” He’s obviously joking, but you wouldn’t want to run for office and have Tim Russert put that quote up on screen, would you?

Nothing biased here, just an amusing video to kick off your weekend. Yesterday shortly after 3:30 p.m. Eastern on "Studio B," Fox News anchor Shep Smith cracked up his guests and crew by joking about the all-too-frequent incidence of false fire alarms at Fox News Headquarters in New York.

Enjoy the YouTube video embedded below the fold.

Thank God it's...well, you know...

Scanning the columns at Townhall.com is part of my early-morning routine, and it was at about 6 A.M. today that I read Charles Krauthammer's "Obama Bombing." I marveled at how perfectly the Pulitzer Prize-winning author had captured the essence of Hugo Chavez, calling the Venezuelan thug "a malevolent clown."

Krauthammer's words obviously impressed Matt Lauer, too. For barely an hour later, I was pleasantly surprised to find the psychiatrist-turned-pundit's phrase turning up on the screen at "Today," with Lauer clearly seeming to advance the conservative commentator's theory.

Lauer was interviewing MSNBC's Chris Matthews on this week's Hillary-Obama dust-up.

"TODAY" CO-ANCHOR MATT LAUER: Let me ask you about this debate, the issue that came out of the debate, this whole inexperience-versus-change thing, when Barack Obama answered that in the first year of his presidency he would meet with people like Castro and Chavez. Let me read you what Charles Krauthammer wrote in the Washington Post this morning:

Do the Democrats want to risk strike three, another national security question blown, but this time perhaps in a final presidential debate before the '08 election, rather than a midseason intraparty cattle call? The country might decide that it prefers, yes, a Republican -- say, 9/11 veteran Rudy Giuliani -- to a freshman senator who does not instinctively understand why an American president does not share the honor of his office with a malevolent clown like Hugo Chavez.

View video here.

One of the chief reasons that Republicans in general and Conservatives in particular were always wary of John "the maverick" McCain is the slobbering love that the MSM so constantly lavished upon him. The MSM is so distrusted that their love for McCain relayed to the country that there must be something wrong with him. As his campaign descends into ever lower depths of disarray, we may begin to see the MSM fall to the floor in abject lamentations over his demise. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth now that their favorite Republican looks to be a goner, at least if Michael Hirsh of Newsweek is any indication. In "Why McCain’s Collapse Matters", Hirsh not only laments McCain's diminishment of influence, but blames the American people for not listening to military "heroes" on how evil this war is. Hirsh also uses his piece as an excuse to repeatedly bash Fred Thompson using the media's "He's just an actor" mantra. Naturally, Hirsh learns all the wrong lessons from his review of history and displays it in this little tsk tsking tirade aimed at the American people for their gall in not fawning over McCain like the MSM does.

Newsweek’s Jonathan Darman lamented this week that the John Edwards poverty tour/publicity tour didn’t passionately grip America, that it did not immediately become a mythic event, like filthy-rich Bobby Kennedy's poverty tour in 1968. In a dramatic flourish, the young Harvard-educated whipper-snapper blames this tragedy on not-very-compassionate America:

"There is something tragic about Edwards's failure to break through. Today, 37 million Americans live below the poverty line, 12 million more than at the time of Kennedy's death. And yet Edwards's call of conscience has not resonated. By all rights, Edwards, the son of a millworker, should have an easier time talking about poverty than did Kennedy, the son of a millionaire. His difficulty speaks to the candidate's inability to connect. It also speaks to the nation's inability to be moved."

Yesterday, Brent Baker at NewsBusters caught the Old Media emphasis on the decline in existing-home unit sales, even though the median existing-home price went up. CBS and Katie Couric apparently invoked the Great Depression in their existing-home sales commentary (I think any number of those 90 and older could say: "I knew the Depression, and Katie, this is no Depression.").

Today we have the Commerce report (PDF) that new-home sales volume is down, AND the media crowing (unfortunately fed by the lack of Commerce Dept. detail) that the nationwide median new-home selling price is down:

The median price of a new home sold last month dropped to $237,900, down by 2.2 percent from a year ago. It was the biggest year-over-year price drop since a 6.5 percent fall in April. The median price is the point where half the homes sold for more and half for less.

But at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'm forced to make the same point I made a couple of months ago in more detail -- by the time you consider changes in the regional mix in home sales, you're left with an overall new-home market where regional prices are holding steady or perhaps even slightly increasing -- and definitely NOT in decline.

A quick look at the following figures will illustrate the point:

Thursday's NBC Nightly News combined the usual with the unusual for an evening newscast story: A breast cancer survivor story which would appeal to woman and a look at an Army Sergeant who has now fulfilled her 'dream' of getting to serve in Iraq, hardly a view expressed very often on network news. Anchor Brian Williams introduced the profile: “Tonight we have a story of a woman who is serving her country and serving as an example, in her bravery, to the rest of us.” Checking in on the state-side training being undergone by Army Sergeant Elizabeth Cowie, reporter Jennifer London explained how “it's been her dream to serve in Iraq.” Cowie, however, was sidelined by breast cancer. But now that she successfully treated it, her dream has been “realized,” London related, as “this was Sergeant Cowie's final training mission before deployment.” Cowie expressed her idealism and commitment: “We have a lot of liberties, we have a lot of freedoms that other people around the world don't have, and so for me that's important, so I'm willing to do what I have to do and put my own life at risk.”

After London's piece, Williams followed up with how Cowie arrived in Iraq and sent an e-mail to NBC News “with the following request, quote: 'Keep our soldiers in your prayers. They are the best of America.'”

The current political buzzword is "naive." That's of course what Hillary called Obama, and he has responded in kind. But when it comes to being an ingenue, Obama has a long way to go to top Sally Quinn, grande dame of the DC set and wife of former WaPo editor Ben Bradlee. Here's what she said on this afternoon's "Hardball."

SALLY QUINN: The fact is that the new word these days is 'dialogue.' [Ed.: New? Well shut Socrates mouth!] And so many of these dictators, quote, dictators [Ed.: we wouldn't want to offend Assad or Kim Jong Il] are really sort of shallow people who are looking for respect, and if you talk to them, you can immediately sort of get them down and get them on your side.

View video here.