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Original caption:

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow (C) performs with his rock band Beats Workin' at the Congressional Picnic on the south lawn of the White House in Washington June 19, 2007.

Townhall's Paul Nowak has perfectly captured the absurdity inherent in liberal paranoia of talk radio (h/t Power Line and mystery NB reader):

                               

At the end of Friday’s Today show on NBC, the marketing of Al Gore’s Live Earth concerts began, just eight days shy of NBC’s big three-hour Live Earth concert in prime time, hosted by NBC anchor Ann Curry and Carson Daly. (Not to mention the other 72 hours donated to Gore by NBC Universal.) NBC’s Friday guest was David DeRothschild, author of "The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook." Like a good NBC employee, anchor Natalie Morales praised the climate-crisis cause: "Fantastic effort. It’s going to raise a lot of awareness."

The author mostly made the usual plugs for compact-fluorescent bulbs and other electricity savings, but the strange part (at least for late June) was urging everyone to wear a sweater and turn the thermostat down. Did they think they were recording a segment for Christmas break?

If the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to reinstate the controversial Fairness Doctrine which has not been in force since the ’80s, do you think it would have been headline news?

Well, on Thursday, an amendment to the Financial Services Appropriations bill prohibiting funds to be used to impose the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters passed in an extraordinary show of bipartisanship 309 to 115.

In fact, 113 Democrats joined 196 Republicans in favor of this funding ban. Yet, virtually no media reported the news.

Before we get to that, the following statement was made by one of the amendment’s sponsors, Congressman Mike Pence (R-Indiana) on Thursday:

As I mentioned earlier, I was covering the Democrats' presidential debate this week. After it ended, I took off to "spin alley" where the various candidates had little areas underneath those vertical political convention signs, intent on seeing if I could find (or make) something interesting.

The three top candidates did not show, although Clinton and Obama managed to get pretty good crowds with the b-team. John Edwards, meanwhile, got little attention. More than a few times, I saw other candidates' staffers slip over into his area. Edwards really owes Ann Coulter for saving him from being a silky version of Mike Gravel.

Speaking of slipping, Maureen Dowd was off the wagon at home instead of doing her job showing up to report on something. [Yes, lawyers, that was satire. She never did show incidentally.]

While Obama, Clinton and Edwards were off enjoying whatever it is that rich liberal Democrats enjoy, their less-popular rivals were out spinning the press. Chris Dodd was there. I didn't feel like talking to the guy. He just wasn't worth the time. I mean if you're going to run a snowball's-chance-in-hell campaign, you should at least have the common decency to be a little "off" for everyone's entertainment.

Remember when you were a kid and got caught telling a lie, but your excuse was that a pal "made you do it" and it was so hard to tell the truth anyway because of this reason or that? It didn't matter to your parents then, did it? Well, here we have Reuters revealing that they fell for a false story about 20 beheaded Iraqis that was planted by insurgents, but do they just admit it and take responsibility? No, they whine that it is "very hard" to get stories in Iraq because it is so dangerous for journalists there.

I can tell we are all rolling our eyes, aren't we?

On the 28th Reuters and the AP along with most major news sources recklessly reported that 20 beheaded bodies were found by "Iraqi Policemen" on the banks of the Tigris River near Salman Pak, 19 miles south of Baghdad.

I say recklessly because not one of these supposed professional news sources substantiated the story but merely accepted the "news" as fact with no corroboration. This is something we have seen dozens of times since we entered Iraq with these news services explaining away this breach of professional standards by saying that it is just too dangerous for journalists to be in those areas to do the leg work to make sure their stories are true before they publish them.

I’m not sure what derangement syndrome Bill Moyers is currently suffering from, but on Friday’s “Bill Moyers Journal” broadcast on PBS, the outspoken host went into an invective-filled tirade about media tycoon Rupert Murdoch that frankly was one of the most disgraceful exhibitions of liberal bias so far this year.

In his closing monologue, Moyers compared Murdoch to the Marquis de Sade, Imelda Marcos, and Satan himself.

I kid you not.

For those that can stomach it, what follows is a full transcript of this piece of…detritus. Those with a healthier GI tract can watch the video available here. And, more information concerning the press' biased coverage of Murdoch is available at the MRC’s Business and Media Institute.

Without further ado (h/t Dan Gainor, emphasis added, better fasten your seatbelts!):

In the eyes of most political observers, the Democratic takeover of Congress signaled tougher federal scrutiny of business interests, but those same pundits might make an exception for the entertainment industry given that Hollywood is a major financial base for Democrats. But when the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on children and TV violence on June 26, the roles seemed to be reversed: it was the Democrats taking the entertainment industry to task as socially irresponsible, while Republicans in general favored the do-nothing approach.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) began with a strong call for the television barons to stop pouring sewage into America’s living rooms, promising to introduce a tough bill next month to allow federal regulation of indecent, violent, and profane content on TV. He slammed Hollywood for putting its short-term profits ahead of the long-term interests of children by conducting "a never-ending race to the bottom," and insisted the industry was “unable and unwilling to police itself."

Happy Saturday.

Is Ron Hutcheson, White House correspondent of the McClatchy Newspapers, dreaming of a coup d'etat? You'd almost think so, judging by the opening line in the litany of gloom that is his article of yesterday, entitled Another Setback for Bush.

Writes Hutcheson:

The Senate's rejection Thursday of President Bush's immigration plan was the latest in a series of embarrassments that have exposed Bush's political weakness and shaken his hold on power.

"Shaken his hold on power"? Just what does Hutcheson mean? Are we in the United States of America or a banana republic? Does Hutcheson harbor hopes of turning on CNN tomorrow morning to find Hillary addressing the nation from the Oval Office, announcing that she has seized power to save the Republic?

The following was written for NewsBusters by Jason Aslinger, a private practice attorney from Greenville, Ohio. Portions in bold below reflect the editor's emphasis.

The media’s contempt for the conservative U.S. Supreme Court reached new lows this week when it used a dishonest play on words to imply that the Court was against racial diversity in public schools.

That distortion, however, paled in comparison to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who announced on his blog (appropriately named “The News Hole”) that the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education had been overturned!

Olbermann would have you believe that the U.S. Supreme Court had returned us to the days of segregated public schools.

Under the intentionally inflammatory heading “TURNING BACK HISTORY,” Olbermann's "Countdown" staff wrote:

Right on cue, as the illegal immigrant amnesty bill failed to get the required support for passage in the Senate, the MSM is here to tell us mean spirited LEGAL Americans how "hard" it is on all those poor, innocent ILLEGAL migrants who break the law to come here by the millions. Yes, folks, women and children hardest hit, as the old saw goes. Of course, it is nearly ignored by the MSM that these people are not just "innocents" but are here knowingly breaking our laws and then blaming us when they find life a bit uncomfortable -- and a bit uncomfortable is all they are facing it should be remembered.

Three quick reports are indicative of how the MSM is making the average, legal American out to be an evil, racist, selfish creep by urging their elected officials to think of their own constituents before they think of undeserving foreign invaders.

Update below with video:  

Alert Al Gore and Hillary Clinton! Capitalism has answered the call for better recycling methods, but you probably haven't heard about it. A US company, Global Resource Corporation (GRC), invented a revolutionary high-frequency microwave which recycles anything with a hydrocarbon base like plastic, rubber or automobile "scrap" into 20% diesel oil and 80% combustible gas. The Hawk-10 should reduce the amount of trash in landfills and numbers of abandoned junk piles, as well as to a lessor extent, provide some oil--all without producing (for those who care) greenhouse gasses. Aside from a handful of articles that are mostly on techie sites and in India, the major media ignored a June 26 New Scientist article about the Hawk-10.

It will now be profitable to clean up those previously useless mountains of discarded tires and old car dumps that enrage environmentalists, while reducing landfills in the process. Considering the media drum beat over oil, environmentalism and recycling, this discovery seemed like a perfect fit, but not even Katie Couric or the New York Times mentioned it. Maybe they were confused as to whether they should support or condemn the process because it creates that dastardly oil.

Here's what the media didn't tell you about how the Hawk-10 could change recycling (emphasis mine):

Fox News Channel's late-night host Greg Gutfeld has a blog entry up at Huffington Post (also cross-posted to his DailyGut.com Web site) that mocks the insane moonbattery of leftist blog commenters who can't possibly accept that today's attempted bombings in London were part of a terrorist plot.

Gutfeld has a wicked sense of humor, so I snipped a little excerpt below. You can catch "Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld" at 2:00 a.m. EDT on the Fox News Channel:

Folks, I just spent three hours surfing the net and did I learn a lot! Did you know that most of the news we get is controlled by the Bu$hies? Let me enlighten you about today's so-called terrorist bombing attempt in London:

You'd think successfully preserving the bald eagle and helping its population increase would garner a positive news report. You'd be wrong.

NBC "Nightly News" found reason to worry that the bald eagle, which is now flourishing, will be wiped out now that it has been removed from the endangered species list.

“[Nationwide resurgence of the eagle] is not the end of the story. Now the question is will man maintain the eagle’s habitat or will the eagles adapt to man,” said chief environmental affairs correspondent Anne Thompson on June 28.

Quoting biologist Bryan D. Watts, "Nightly News" condemned urban sprawl and compared it to DDT - which was banned in 1972.

Original caption:

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate, former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) and his wife Elizabeth appear on the "Tonight Show with Jay Leno" with host Jay Leno (R) during a taping of the show at NBC Studios in Burbank, California, June 25. 2007.

Roseanne Barr once suggested that while she has the qualifications to take Rosie O'Donnell's steel (which hopefully won't melt) reinforced chair (or is it perch?) on "The View," that she's a bit too anti-Israel to work on the gab fest. It's a shame, seeing as she has as much raw blogging talent as Rosie, although she sometimes slips into an ALL CAPS SHOUT FEST!!!!:

IMPEACH THE PRESIDENT AND THE VICE PRESIDENT, THEY ARE TRAITORS TO AMERICA, AND SO ARE ALL OF THEIR SUPPORTERS. IMPEACH! ANYONE IN CONGRESS WHO REFUSES TO SAVE OUR UNION FROM THESE TRAITORS BY DOING NOTHING NEEDS TO BE RECALLED. SAVE OUR TROOPS!!! SAVE OUR SCHOOLS AND HOSPITALS AND JOBS. FEED OUR HUNGRY AND POOR! SAVE THE DROWNING PEOPLE IN NEW ORLEANS! ANYONE WHO MENTIONS PARIS HILTON ONE MORE TIME MUST DIE!

You're welcome for the bump in traffic, Ms. Barr, and HAVE A HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY.

Photo above via E! Online.

Remember the Palestinian children's show starring the Mickey Mouse ripoff, "Farfur?" Yeah, the one preaching global Islamic supremacy and shooting Jewish people with an AK-47.

The show got canceled, but not for the right reasons and far, far from the right way.

In the latest Hamas outrage, the show, "Tomorrow's Pioneers," featured Farfur being beaten to death by an actor playing the role of an Israeli:

Hamas TV on Friday broadcast what it said was the last episode of a weekly children's show featuring "Farfur," a Mickey Mouse look-alike who had made worldwide headlines for preaching Islamic domination and armed struggle to youngsters.

In the final skit, Farfur was beaten to death by an actor posing as an Israeli official trying to buy Farfur's land. At one point, Farfur called the Israeli a "terrorist."

The feelings of illegal aliens who were disheartened by yesterday's failed cloture vote on the "comprehensive immigration reform" bill in the Senate are the focus of this Reuters piece by Tim Gaynor. Get your handkerchiefs ready...the Tearjerker Express is ready to leave the station.

PHOENIX (Reuters) - For day laborers seeking work in a sun-baked parking lot on Thursday, defeat of U.S. President George W. Bush's plans for an immigration overhaul has set back their dreams of a normal life.

CNSNews.com staff writer Monisha Bansal has done something I've seen very little, if any of, in mainstream media coverage. Reporting on yesterday's Supreme Court ruling striking down two race-based preference structures that governed public school districts in Louisville, Ky. and Seattle, Ms. Bansal documented the reaction of the lawyers who won the lawsuits in question.

As NewsBusters has repeatedly noted, most of the media focus has been on the political dimensions of a "rightward" shift in the Court, in Kennedy as the new swing justice, etc.

Below is an excerpt of Bansal's June 29 article, portions in bold are my emphasis:

While ABC and NBC both led off their Thursday night newscasts with the Supreme Court decision barring an exclusively race-based approach to assigning students to various schools, the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric began with the demise of the Senate immigration bill. CBS’s reporters emphasized how the vote was a defeat for President Bush, even though top Senate Democrats like Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid, plus a few Republicans like John McCain had also fought for the measure and failed.

CBS White House correspondent Jim Axelrod asserted that Thursday’s vote marked “a defining day in the Bush presidency.” CBS’s resident historian (and John Kerry biographer) Douglas Brinkley went even further: “George Bush is beyond being a lame duck President. He’s a dead duck President.”

The chinks in the armor that is a supposed scientific consensus regarding man’s role in global warming continued to grow this week when it was identified that many of the folks involved in the most recent report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were not in agreement with the study’s findings.

Didn't hear about this? Well, how could you? Nobody reported it!

In fact, what you also didn't hear or read due to the media's universal eschewing of this information was that many of the views expressed in the IPCC’s report go quite contrary to assertions regularly being made by the very press outlets not covering this new revelation and the Global Warmingist-in-Chief, soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore.

Think maybe that's why it's not being reported?

Regardless of the answer, the Heartland Institute, a non-profit social and economic think tank, issued the following press release concerning this matter Friday (emphasis added throughout):

One doesn't have to look very far to see opinionated assertions in the supposedly objective Old Media coverage of yesterday's immigration-bill failure in the Senate.

Here's part of what an unbylined AP report said almost immediately after it was clear that the bill would not get the 60 votes needed for cloture: "The carefully crafted compromise was left for dead after a similar vote three weeks ago but was revived by Bush and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, who gave opponents more chances to change it."

To say that there is disagreement over whether the bill was "carefully crafted" is quite an understatement.

A report in the Seattle Times "compiled from The Washington Post, Gannett News Service, The Associated Press and McClatchy Newspapers" made this claim about yesterday's vote: "In a mark of lawmakers' ambivalence, however, the outcome was substantially different from a test vote Tuesday, when a 64-35 vote revived the bill."

Was it lawmaker "ambivalence," or constituent persuasiveness? And how do they know?

But the biggest error, as often is the case, was one of omission. Senator Ted Kennedy from Massachusetts lit into opponents on the Senate floor yesterday with this over-the-top riff (video is at Hot Air; bold is mine):

On the Friday edition of "Good Morning America," "This Week" anchor George Stephanopoulos appeared to discuss the June 28 Democratic debate in Washington D.C. Stephanopoulos alternatively described Senator Hillary Clinton as giving a "solid debate performance," "spirited performances," and "solid performances."

Considering that the ABC host is a former top aide to Bill Clinton, his objectivity might be somewhat suspect. Additionally, Stephanopoulos appeared to go out of his way to attack obscure Democratic candidate Mike Gravel as "the skunk at the party." Perhaps not so coincidentally, Gravel has been a strident critic of Senator Clinton, among others, at recent debates.

The following is submitted by Jason Aslinger, a NewsBusters reader and a private practice attorney from Greenville, Ohio. Cohen pictured at right (file photo).

In his June 28 "Court Watch" article, CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen laments the conservative bent of the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts. But rather than give readers sound legal critiques, Cohen sounds out a decidely political lament.

With a title like “Rightward Ho!” you might think that Cohen would attack the Court’s conservative justices, and he does, dismissing Justice Samuel Alito as a "rigid starboard-facing ideologue" while he derides Chief Justice John Roberts as "silly and condescending."

Cohen lists several cases from the 2007 term in which, in Cohen’s view, Justice Alito delivered the deciding vote. Cohen writes:

After the network morning shows allowed Elizabeth Edwards to speak out against Ann Coulter, with limited challenge, host Bill O’Reilly discussed the subject with Ann Coulter and later Dick Morris on the June 28 edition of "The O’Reilly Factor." On two occasions, first with Ann Coulter then with Dick Morris, O’Reilly noted that he invited Elizabeth Edwards on "The Factor" to discuss personal attacks, not only on the right, but on the left as well. This is how the Fox News host described the situation first when interviewing Ann Coulter.

"Okay, now after that interview, and nobody knows this, we called Elizabeth Edwards. And we said, ‘you know we’re real interested in this personal attack stuff because we have a problem with that on the left. Would you come on, either sit, you know, on a set, or on the phone?’ ‘No.’ Now, I’m saying to myself, wait a minute, you call into a program that no one watches, alright. And you have a point, no one watches. She’s- nobody sees this. I’m giving you a forum where ten million people on radio and TV are going to see it and you say no."

With all the carping and whining about conservative talk radio these days, I’m beginning to wonder if this is indeed a larger cause of all the planet’s woes than global warming.

In fact, if you hadn’t noticed, there are a number of high-ranking political officials who believe the public’s opinion of illegal immigration emanates directly from radio talk show hosts that are enflaming the citizenry concerning this important issue.

Regardless of the sudden frequency of such publicly-aired sentiments, or their inanity, to hear them expressed on the floor of the Senate by the Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) Thursday was nevertheless entertaining (video available here courtesy of Allah at Hot Air):

Better have a barf bag handy, for Barbra Streisand was actually given a medal in France this week, and promptly stuck her foot in her mouth in response.

As reported by the Associated Press Thursday (emphasis added throughout):

Barbra Streisand performed her first-ever concert in France this week — and was rewarded with a medal of the Legion of Honor.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy awarded the medal to Streisand in a ceremony Thursday, the first time he has bestowed the honor since taking over from Jacques Chirac last month.

Get the barf bag ready:

Feelings...nothing more than feelings...