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On Friday’s "Good Morning America," liberal weatherman Sam Champion featured actor/activist Ed Begley Jr. to promote the concept of carbon offsets. The ABC meteorologist gushed over the emotional benefits of this environmental program. He exclaimed, "And you, kind of, pay into them and they fund projects that are doing good work. So you feel better about your energy use by helping create greener energy, basically."

The segment featured no skepticism as to the validity of these offsets. Rather, the tone was set by Champion’s introduction. He lectured, "We just can't help it. But every time we flip on a light switch, we're making pollution..." Later, Mr. Begley excitedly asserted that if enough people purchase carbon offsets, "...Guess what? They're going to shut down power plants."

Barry Manilow epitomizes the liberal reaction to being forced to share a stage with someone with whom he disagrees- instant flight! Manilow is apparently cancelling his scheduled appearance on the mostly-liberal gabfest show 'The View' because new host Elizabeth Hasselbeck is a conservative. According to TMZ, Manilow said of Hasselbeck,

In an exclusive statement to TMZ, Barry says, "I strongly disagree with her views. I think she's dangerous and offensive. I will not be on the same stage as her."

So it seems that is is perfectly acceptable for liberals and/or Democrats to only go where their views will not be challenged, isn't it, Barry?

Since NASA's James Hansen finally released computer codes related to how climate data are collected and adjusted, anthropogenic global warming skeptics around the world have been waiting to see what a scientific examination of this information would produce.

On Monday, Canada's Steve McIntyre, who himself debunked Michael Mann's ridiculous "Hockey Stick" theory as well as identified Hansen's Y2K bug, released information identifying that Hansen recently made additional changes to climate data akin to how companies like Enron used creative accounting to exaggerate earnings and defraud investors.

As published at Climate Audit moments ago (emphasis added, h/t Anthony Watts):

Sure, it was just an acceptance speech at some silly awards ceremony. However, when Hollywoodans say ridiculous things on television that media applaud along with the Hollywoodans in attendance, someone's got to point out the inanity.

As such, when Sally Field said at Sunday's Emmy awards ceremony as reported by the MRC's Tim Graham, "And, let's face it, if the mothers ruled the war, there would be no (expletive) wars in the first place," I can't sit idly by without contesting such nonsense.

After all, it appears Field has never heard of some famous female leaders who brought their nation's to war:

When we put together a packet of the Greatest Hates of the Huffington Post, we didn’t focus on the issue of the blog’s accuracy. Over the weekend, HuffPost blogger Steve Young decided to address my appearance on The O’Reilly Factor to create a fantasy in his mind of how I would crumble under the weight of O’Reilly’s pro-Huffington Post questions. The headline was "O’Reilly Lauds HuffPo as the Most Principled Website on the Internet; Condemns MRC Report." Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Nowhere in this blog does it actually say it’s a bad satire, other than an asterisk, leading to this self-amused sentence at the end: "Apologies if I may not have caught some of the segment's quotes exactly, but I'm sure I got the gist of the truth behind them."

In the middle of this routine, he was right I goofed in dating the nasty John Cusack blog post as 2006 rather than 2005. We’ll fix that. But then he adds his own errors:

It's fitting that now that he's left his post as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan's words are being as closely scrutinized as they were back in his days at the Fed.

Not carefully enough, though, it seems.

Over the weekend, a media firestorm errupted after the Washington Post printed a news article claiming that in his memoirs, Greenspan said the ouster of the Saddam Hussein government was just about oil.

Unfortunately for the liberal press and blogosphere, Greenspan did not say what was attributed to him. After the news broke, Greenspan called up the Post to say he'd been quoted out of context:

We've had some big changes of late here at NB but we're not the only division of the Media Research Center that's doing big things. Earlier today, the Cybercast News Service (aka CNSNews.com) hired former Human Events editor Terence Jeffrey to head up the online news site:

Today, Cybercast News Service, the online news division of the Media Research Center, is pleased to announce the hiring of Terence P. Jeffrey as its new editor-in-chief.

Jeffrey joins CNSNews.com after serving as editor of Human Events, the national conservative newsweekly, for more than a decade.

"I've known Terry for many years. He's a man of keen insight and extraordinary vision, and we're delighted to have him join us," said L. Brent Bozell III, president and founder of Cybercast News Service and its parent organization, the Media Research Center.

Mimicking NBC's Matt Lauer on "Today" with Tom DeLay a few weeks ago, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz chose Monday to address a number of political scandals in America, all of them of course dealing with Republicans.

Yet, there was a brewing campaign finance scandal conspicuously absent from Kurtz's list. Need a hint what it might be?

Maybe Glenn Reynolds' comical quip will help: "Hsoot, it's on the tip of my tongue..."

Yep. Nowhere was Norman Hsu to be found. Instead, here's what concerned Kurtz (emphasis added):

Apparently, the world's largest Internet search business believes it has little to fear from those who object to its continued involvement with government censorship in communist China. Google agreed to censor its search-engine results in accordance with government wishes in January 2006. That control regime is still in place, as comparative searches on "Tiananmen" at Google.com and Google.cn readily show.

Oh, company co-founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page have said that what they agreed to do in Mainland China was a "mistake." But that's only because of the fallout, not the cooperation decision itself, as this January excerpt from the UK Guardian shows:

See if you can spot the error in the following opening paragraph from the Associated Press concerning the exploits of soon-to-be-Nobel Prize laureate Al Gore:

So he wasn't elected president. Big deal. How many other presidential candidates have an Emmy and an Oscar to brag about?

Or this one from Reuters:

Your turn...

"War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength" -- Slogan of the ruling party in George Orwell's "1984"

With the health care proposal she is about to introduce, Hillary Clinton adds another spooky non sequitur to the list: Compulsory Coverage is Choice. Will the MSM take notice?

Hillary Clinton will have a hard time triangulating her way out of the thanks the Daily Kos gave her for suggesting that General David Petraeus was a liar. There is no doubt about their appreciation of her "services" as can be seen in the very title of the Daily Kos thread, "Thank you Hillary for calling Petraeus a liar!" Appreciation for the "services" rendered by Hillary was duly noted by Daily Kos blogger, gopher747:

Thank you Hillary for calling out Petraeus for what he is, a liar and a distorter of facts.

While I still prefer an Edwards/Obama ticket, I just wanted to show some progressive blogosphere love here for Hillary for her calling a spade a spade here, and subsequently setting the right wing howling.

Fox’s swear-word hunters were quick on the button at the Sunday night Emmys, including an "anti-war rant" from actress Sally Field. A cursing Flying Nun? AP reported that Field "screeched at the audience to stop applauding so she could finish talking — and then was bleeped by Fox censors as she stammered through an anti-war rant." AP added:

"And, let's face it, if the mothers ruled the war, there would be no (expletive) wars in the first place," Field said, but Fox cut away for much of her comment.

Backstage, Field told reporters that she wanted to recognize mothers who wait for their sons to come home from war. She added, however, that she "didn't have a political agenda."

Told that she had been bleeped, Field responded: "Oh well. I've been there before. Well, good. I don't care. I have no comment other than, oh well. I said what I wanted to say. I wanted to pay homage to the mothers of the world, and let their work be seen and valued."

If there's one thing that the New York Times editorial page has inveighed against for the last six years, it's those horrid tax cuts that the Bush administraton pushed through. But now that the economy might be encountering some turbulence, the Times regrets, of all things, that taxes can't be cut more.

Here's how the Times frames its plaint in this morning's "As the Economy Turns Down" [emphasis added]:

Now, you’re gonna read that headline and laugh imagining that I must surely be employing the best hyperbole. Reuters can’t possibly be touting a story that says wooly mammoth dung could be making global warming worse… could they? I am sad to say that they are, indeed, making this claim in a story on the crackpot theories of a Russian “scientist.”

I know, I know. It seems like an entry from “The Onion” news satire website, but it isn’t. Reuters gives us the pooper scoop in “Mammoth dung, prehistoric goo may speed warming,” posted on the 16th.

Sounding like a bad copy of an old Cheech and Chong skit, “scientist” Sergei Zimov grabs some wooly mammoth dung, puts it to his face and proclaims, "It smells like mammoth dung." Reuters gives him the space to revel in his crappy theory that this millions-year-old, melted mammoth dung is speeding globaloney.

Harvard Magazine, a magazine that caters to the alumnus of Harvard University, gives us the blather of one of their professors, Howard Gardner, who is despairing on how we eeeevil conservatives are taking over his country.

To start with, the short Harvard Mag piece tries hard to explain why anyone should care about Gardner. Apparently it's mostly because of his 1983 theory of "multiple intelligences." This theory holds that humanity has different types of intelligences, that an IQ test cannot measure a person's intelligence effectively, and that our different kinds of intelligence (I've heard it called "genius") is often hard to quantify. Some have a genius in dealing with people, some have their ability in music, some in mathematics, etc. Everyone's great ability is different than the next fellow's. That this particular theory seemed innovative or groundbreaking proves that the only "genius" that people in academia have is that of stating the obvious and pompously proclaiming it to be of great insight.

In Sunday's Washington Post, ombudsman Deborah Howell laid out the internal deliberations behind the Post's decision to shelve two "Opus" Sunday comic strips mocking the character Lola Granola's flirtation with radical Islam. Howell concluded: "I think Post editors overreacted in killing the strips. Comics are meant to be artful, fun and provocative. The two strips were all of that and worth publishing. Let comics be comics."

Worse yet for the Post pluckers, Howell found that the Council for Islamic-American Relations (CAIR) didn't favor the censorship. CAIR's Ibraham Hooper said the strip "poked fun at the strip's characters, not Muslims or Islam. I see hundreds worse on the Internet every day." And:

 

Original Caption:

Outgoing White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, left, leaves the podium at the end of his final on-camera press briefing, Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2007, in the White House briefing room at the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Since the Norman Hsu campaign finance scandal first broke weeks ago, conservatives have wondered when liberal media members will get concerned about how this might impact the presidential aspirations of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY).

If Sunday's "The Chris Matthews Show" is a barometer, the news is not good for Hillary supporters.

As The Anchoress accurately reported Saturday, NBC's Andrea Mitchell made a statement concerning the Clintons that was absolutely shocking:

A truly extraordinary event occurred on CNN Sunday: Howard Kurtz actually supported President Bush sitting down with milbloggers to discuss what's going on in Iraq.

I kid you not.

When this issue was raised on the most recent installment of "Reliable Sources" - that Bush had a meeting Friday attended by ten military bloggers - it seemed almost a metaphysical certitude the President would be lambasted for catering to the extreme right.

Surprisingly, such was not the case:

This was first reported at FreeRepublic on Sunday, September 9 at 6:55 PM Pacific Time (3:55 PM Eastern), with follow-up posts here, here, and here.

The incident took place on or some time prior to Friday, September 7. The original Freeper report, with plentiful pictures, states that:

..... It looks like the person who did this walked along The Wall with some type of container, perhaps hidden at their side so that they could squirt the oily substance without being caught in the act.

..... It is unknown who did this to The Wall, and apparently the US Park Police did not know about this damage until today; though the Park Service employees knew about it.

Will MoveOn's "General Betray Us" ad be a large enough rallying cry for Republicans to become a seminal moment in politics?

See Update at foot with list of Petraeus press appearances.

The gravest charge you can level at a military man, as MoveOn.org essentially did to Gen. Petraeus with its infamous "General Betray Us" ad, is to call him a traitor.

But close behind in the catalog of calumny is to call a soldier a coward. And that's effectively what Frank Rich did in his [p.p.v.] New York Times column of today.

Writes Rich [emphasis added]:

General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker could grab an hour of prime television time only by slinking into the safe foxhole of Fox News, where Brit Hume chaperoned them on a gloomy, bunkerlike set before an audience of merely 1.5 million true believers.

Keep your eye out for this story. It has the potential to go big… IF the MSM will report it wider than just by the local paper that broke the story. But, since it is a story that once again reveals the anti-American propaganda so prevalent in our government funded schools, will it get the coverage it deserves?

One often hears that government schools in totalitarian nations brainwash their children to love the government. People in free nations decry that as oppressing the free will of innocent children, and rightly so. In American schools, however, just the opposite is true as with the case of an anti-American teacher in a public school in Chico, California who hates this country so much that he sent a letter home to his student's parents urging them to renounce their citizenship in the U.S. as he announced he was so doing.

MoveOn's "General Betray Us" advertisement in Monday's New York Times could end up being the gift that keeps on giving.

Though most of the Democrat presidential candidates have distanced themselves from this disgrace, John Edwards' wife Elizabeth made some remarks in Iowa Friday that have drawn the ire of leading netroots member Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake (h/t Protein Wisdom).

For those that have forgotten, Hamsher rose in infamy to national prominence last August when she posted a picture of Sen. Joe Lieberman in blackface.

This time, Hamsher was irked by the following remarks made by Edwards as reported by the Des Moines Register (emphasis added):

Republican anger continues to mount over MoveOn's disgraceful ad in Monday's New York Times that referred to "General Betray Us."

Thursday night, Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) voiced one of the sharpes rebukes of the far-left organization since the ad was first published.

Speaking in front of a group in Hudson, New Hampshire, while holding a blown-up copy of the ad, McCain said (video available here, h/t Gateway Pundit):

Here's something you don't see every day: a liberal publication blaming actress Jane Fonda for anything bad.

Yet, although not written by New York Times staffers, the idea that its Sunday magazine would even consider publishing an article blaming Fonda's 1979 movie "The China Syndrome" for global warming is quite shocking.

Authored by "Freakonomics" writers Stephen J. Dubiner and Steven D. Levitt, "The Jane Fonda Effect" stated quite adroitly what many climate change skeptics have been saying for years (emphasis added throughout, h/t Glenn Reynolds):

As NewsBusters reported Wednesday, wheat prices soared last week to their highest levels in history.

As many consumer products are made from this grain, and media love to carp and whine about inflation, one would have expected great focus to be given to this issue.

However, as some of the upward pressure on wheat prices is directly attributable to biofuels, a global warming obsessed media seemed concerned to address this inflationary issue for fear that it would bring negative attention on soon-to-be-to-Dr. Al Gore's beloved ethanol.

Bucking the wheat boycott trend was the Washington Post which published a very balanced article on this subject Saturday (emphasis added throughout):

In March, the nation’s leading Democratic presidential contenders backed out of a debate sponsored by Fox News Channel, even though Democrats consented to two FNC presidential debates in the last electoral cycle. This time, leftist Web sites like MoveOn.org sent around petitions demanding that the nation’s liberal party provide no bow of respect or prestige to Fox News, since it was a “mouthpiece for the Republican party, not a legitimate news channel.” Leftist bloggers like Matt Stoller of MyDD.com were explicit in their censorious desire that Fox News should not exist: “The lies of FOX News and Roger Ailes have no place in public discourse, journalism, or the Democratic Party presidential debates.”

Instead, this week, as MoveOn showed their outrageousness by attacking Gen. David Petraeus as "Betray Us," the Democratic presidential candidates who spurned Fox for being too coarsely conservative consented to a debate – or “candidate mashup,” as the sponsors called it – with the search site Yahoo and the liberal Web sites Slate and The Huffington Post. So why would the Democrats award their respect or prestige to The Huffington Post? Their “place in public discourse” is very coarse, indeed.