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A few months ago, the blogosphere and talk radio were abuzz with the story of how the nation's various weather stations and temperature reading devices have been improperly located or badly constructed and how the data received from these improper devices must be suspected as inaccurate. The MSM briefly mentioned this story but quickly dropped it like the proverbial hot rock. It makes one wonder why? Since global warming research often uses the suspect data that is gotten from these failed stations, the accuracy of the entire theory must therefore be called into question as its conclusions are derived from likely false data. Still the MSM ignores this explosive story. But, it is evident that the so-called scientific community has also ignored the arguments in this story as there has yet to be a weather station moved or its location and/or construction reevaluated.

CBS's 60 Minutes got the first interview with Clarence Thomas on the occasion of the release of his memoir and ABC's Good Morning America is in line for the morning show exclusive interview with him to air multiple days this week, thus leaving NBC News out of the mix. So, the losing network decided to resurrect Anita Hill. Anchor Lester Holt teased Sunday's NBC Nightly News: “Her story. Justice Clarence Thomas speaks out, and tonight so does the woman who nearly derailed his confirmation. My exclusive interview with Anita Hill.” Though Hill's charges against Thomas look pretty tame through the later revelations of Bill Clinton's actions with women, Holt depicted them as “charges of crude sexual advances” and “shocking allegations.” Also, without any mention of the left-wing activists with whom Hill colluded, Holt sympathetically described her as “a reluctant witness.”

Sad news. Cox & Forkum are no more. John Cox and Allen Forkum hung up their spurs and turned their horses out to pasture.

Through their editorial cartoons, John Cox and Allen Forkum poked fun at liberal silliness—and conservative silliness, but today's drawing, called "Final Bow," was their last regular edition. 

Since August 2001, Cox & Forkum took on everything from 9/11 to the recent Washington Post “Opus” drama and did it all with biting wit and professional pen work.

In a September 30 goodbye post, Forkum explained their future plans and gave a little insight into why they are stopping:

On Sunday's Reliable Sources, CNN host Howard Kurtz led a discussion of Hillary Clinton's recent media attention, commenting that the networks "lust after putting her on," and also quipped that the New York Senator did "the full Ginsburg" when she appeared on all the Sunday morning talk shows last week, during which, as Kurtz noted, she gave the "Clinton cackle" response to a number of questions. While discussing the recent Democratic debate moderated by NBC's Tim Russert, Kurtz also pointed out that Clinton had flip-flopped on the issue of whether she would be willing to torture a terrorist prisoner, as he noted the lack of media coverage. Kurtz: "That was a flip-flop by Hillary Clinton. She had earlier said, taken the opposite position saying that torture would be acceptable in that kind of extreme situation. The AP, the New York Daily News pointed this out, but you didn't get a lot of flip-flop coverage." (Transcript follows)

When elitist politicians and pundits in Old Media rail against "the rich," the implicit assumption is that it's the same people, year after year, who are getting over on the rest of us.

On Friday, using the 1982 and 2007 Forbes 400 lists (2007's main page is here), John Tamny at Real Clear Politics nuked that perception (HT Instapundit; bolds are mine), and landed a not-so-subtle broadside on the campaign of John Edwards:

This is really hysterical, folks, and definitely requires all drinking vessels be properly stowed before continuing.

Just days before Rush Limbaugh was attacked by a number of press outlets for discussing "phony soldiers" on the air, ABC's Brian Ross did a segment on "World News with Charles Gibson" dealing with "phony heroes...scam artists...posing as the war heroes they never were, claiming credit for acts of courage in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Marvelously, this story was aired on Monday, September 24, just two days before Limbaugh made his comments. And, as noted in a NewsBusters posting by the MRC's Brent Baker, the report even mentioned the same "phony soldier," Jesse Macbeth (pictured to the right), that Limbaugh did on his program Wednesday.

Will media attack ABC with the same zeal they did Limbaugh? Maybe even more important, will House Democrats offer a resolution to condemn Ross, Gibson, and everyone involved in ABC's report?

While you ponder, what follows is a full transcript of this segment (video available here, h/t Rush Limbaugh.com):

The smear campaign against conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh will take a dramatic turn Monday if Greg Sargent of TPM Election Central is correct.

According to a blog posting by Sargent Friday evening, "Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO) will be introducing a resolution in the House of Representatives on Monday condemning Rush Limbaugh for his ‘phony soldiers' remark."

Unfortunately, no major media outlets are reporting this. However, Limbaugh has posted an alert at his website concerning the matter: "House Democrats Prepare to Introduce Resolution Castigating Rush Limbaugh on House Floor Monday."

The TPM piece continued (emphasis added):

Last week, two of the leading conservatives in the media, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, were dishonestly and unprofessionally attacked by press outlets that cherry-picked out of context remarks from lengthy radio broadcasts in order to vilify outspoken personalities whose opinions they don’t agree with.

Unfortunately, as folks around the country saw this play out on their television sets and newspapers, few were at all familiar with the organization behind the smear campaigns, or that this same group started the firestorm which ended with radio host Don Imus being terminated by NBC and CBS in April.

Maybe more importantly, even fewer citizens are aware that this organization is linked directly to Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as billionaire leftist George Soros.

For some background, John Perazzo wrote a column for FrontPage Magazine in July entitled “Media Matters: Hillary’s Lap Dogs,” that should be must-reading for all citizens interested in who's targeting America’s leading conservative personalities (emphasis added throughout):

MSM coverage over the non-racist statements of right-of-center pundit Bill O'Reilly has been trumpeted loudly and lots.  But when John Edwards says to a group of kids on MTV that young black men will soon either be in prison or dead, there is barely a blip on the radar.  If a Republican cadidate would have said this, the MSM would have made certain it was a campaign killer.  It would have been red meat for the echo chambers.  Here is what he said.

“We cannot build enough prisons to solve this problem. And the idea that we can keep incarcerating and keep incarcerating — pretty soon we’re not going to have a young African-American male population in America. They’re all going to be in prison or dead. One of the two.”

ABC's George Stephanopoulos put on a sycophantic display in his pre-taped interview on Sunday's This Week with his former boss, ex-President Bill Clinton. Holding up the magazine as the two sat in a room at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting, Stephanopoulos touted “this great story in The Atlantic this month about your philanthropy” which “says you're basically re-inventing philanthropy” and, quoting the author, “'history may remember Bill Clinton as the philanthropist who happened to be President.' You okay with that?” The ever humble Clinton insisted: “I'll have to live a very long time to have as positive an impact on as many people in the United States and around the world in my after life as I did as President.” Next, Stephanopoulos oozed that the 1991 campaign slogan of “buy one, get one free” with Bill and Hillary is now “about as resonant as ever” with Hillary and Bill. As Clinton chuckled, Stephanopoulos wondered: “Is it more true now than it was then?”

Your turn...

ABC may have set a loathsome new MSM low in insulting traditional Christians. On today's "Good Morning America," the network lumped the "Christan right" with the 9-11 Islamic terrorists as driving people to atheism.

Keying off an atheists convention being held this weekend, GMA ran a segment on the "Rise in Atheism." Seeking to explain the phenomenon, as images rolled first of the WTC in flames and then of a man placidly holding a sign that simply read "One Nation Under God" and of a display at a demonstration of the Ten Commandments, ABC's Liz Marlantes stated:

Thomas Friedman thinks you are "stupid" if you still care about the atrocity committed against this country by Islamofascists in New York on 9/11/2001. He thinks "9/11 is over" and we all should just move on. Even worse, he has decided that we are no longer a great country, but are filled with seemingly meaningless "fear," that we have a dilapidated infrastructure, and that while America used to be "the gold standard," he believes "We aren’t anymore." Friedman is falling for the typical, leftist doom-and-gloom scenario and imagines that China is better than we are, Europe is more inviting, and we have become the new Rome after the fall. His closing line is "We can’t afford to keep being this stupid!" By contrast to Friedman, my opening line to him is "We can't afford to be this self-loathing!" Friedman starts his piece off comparing the current state of the U.S. to a satirical piece in the Onion, which is fitting because Frideman's own piece might be mistaken for a satire on the frivolousness and unserious nature of the left today. Unfortunately, he is serious about his self-inflicted amnesia and seems utterly unconcerned about the threats we face as a nation and a people. Like most truthers he seems to imagine that it has all been hype, a conspiracy theory made up by eeeevil Republicans who merely want to fool enough people to stay in power.

In a September 28 article on Time.com entitled, "What Bill O'Reilly Really Told Me," Fox News contributor Juan Williams explained the context of his conversation with O'Reilly that found itself fodder for context-mangling by liberal interest groups and O'Reilly's perpetual ratings victim, Keith Olbermann:

So, O'Reilly says to me that the reality to black life is very different from the lowlife behavior glorified by the rappers. He told me he was at a restaurant in Harlem recently and there was no one shouting profanity, no one threatening people. Then he mentioned going to an Anita Baker concert with an audience that was half black, and in sharp contrast to the corrosive images on TV, well dressed and well behaved.

NewsBusters editor Brent Baker has done a superb job reporting on the smear job against Bill O'Reilly from the liberal group Media Matters. Fox News's John Gibson does an awesome job at tearing them apart. If you haven't heard the audio from his show yet... you should definitely take a listen.

Quoting Gibson:

This thing about Rush is really crystal clear. You can see how they lie. In this case, they said Rush said something, posted an audio recording of it and an audio transcript and cut it off at the precise moment where the next thing he said proved them wrong. Heres how it went down. I'll play this bit and you can hear what Media Matters posted of what Rush said and then I'll play you what he said next....the words that came next. The words that came right after they cut it off....and you will see...here...because this is radio...you will hear the live admission by this Soros backed group called Media Matters.

A respected state climatologist resigns his post citing inability to do his job due to political pressure. Sounds exactly like the "inconvenient truth" scenario that Al Gore complained about in his book and documentary. Only thing is in this case it's a Democratic governor, Tim Kaine of Virginia, arguably silencing a climatologist who believes the globe is warming, but that the Gore-ian forecasts of doom are overwrought.

So how did the Washington Post report Dr. Pat Michaels's complaint of political pressure infringing on his academic freedom? By penning an article downplaying an arguable intrusion of political influence in the sanctuary of scientific inquest.

While the Post has been keen on furthering the meme that President Bush and his administration have conducted a campaign to silence scientists who believe in man-made global warming, staffer Jackie Spinner spun out an article on page B3 of the Saturday Post that found no substantial loss to the Old Dominion's citizens in Michaels's resignation.:

Here's something you don't see every day on the front page of a major American newspaper: an article about how the rising demand for ethanol has sent corn and grain prices so high that it's resulted in more people around the world going hungry.

Even more shocking: the article in question was on the front page of Saturday's New York Times.

In a piece entitled "As Prices Soar, U.S. Food Aid Buys Less," author Celia W. Dugger shockingly presented the dirty little secret about soon-to-be-Nobel Laureate Al Gore's grand solution for manmade global warming that NewsBusters has been writing about for months while most in the media remained silent (emphasis added, h/t Glenn Reynolds):

It has been regularly reported by NewsBusters that media are doing everything in their power to withhold from the public the financial ramifications of global warming alarmism.

Be it the marketing of totally useless carbon offsets, or proposals for additional taxes on consumers and corporations, press outlets have been seemingly coordinated in their silence regarding such matters.

Another fine example of such a boycott occurred last week when House Energy and Commerce Committee chair John Dingell (D-MI) discussed a rather elaborate tax plan with the Associated Press Wednesday that virtually no major media outlet outside of Detroit bothered to report (emphasis added throughout):

Original caption:

In this photograph provided by 'Meet the Press, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., is seen on a television monitor as she appears via satellite for an interview with Tim Russert on 'Meet the Press'' Sunday, Sept. 23, 2007, at the NBC studios in Washington.

Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama might have talk show host Oprah Winfrey in his corner, but a new study from the Pew Research Center found that such celebrity endorsements have little impact on voting habits.

In fact, state governors carry more weight with potential voters than celebrities.

How delicious.

Here were some of the study's key findings:

Today's Washington Post carries the story, "Justice Thomas Lashes Out in Memoir." The article focuses on Justice Clarence Thomas's memoir "My Grandfather's Son" and begins:

Justice Clarence Thomas settles scores in an angry and vivid forthcoming memoir, scathingly condemning the media, the Democratic senators who opposed his nomination to the Supreme Court, and the "mob" of liberal elites and activist groups that he says desecrated his life.

The piece later notes that "Thomas has particularly caustic comments about the Democratic senators who opposed his nomination."

Settling scores. Angry. Scathingly condemning. Caustic comments.

It all sounds pretty mean-spirited, to use one of the liberals' favorite adjectives.

Compare this article to the Washington Post's appraisal of former President Clinton's "My Life." The June 28, 2004 review by Walter Isaacson noted:

In March, a NewsBusters headline asked, "Is Bill Maher Becoming the Rosie O'Donnell of Cable Television?"

On Friday, the host of HBO's "Real Time" once again proved he has, for in coming to the defense of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Maher rationalized the Iranian president sending munitions to kill American soldiers in Iraq by asking, "Doesn't Bush have American blood on his hands?"

Maybe worse, Maher said that Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust, and statements that "Israel should be wiped off the map," are just "things he says to get elected," and "are the equivalent of when the Republicans in this country say, ‘Gay marriage will lead to death.'"

After introducing his panel, Maher began the discussion with Ahmadinejad's visit to New York City stating (video available here, relevant sections at 1:28 and 5:00):

Remember that BBC-produced children's guide to 9/11 that blamed it on America's foreign policy?

It's now facing some real public pressure in the form of Pauline Neville Jones, a former British spy and now powerful member of that country's Conservative party. She's also a former governor (aka board member) of the BBC. And she wants some changes to the program:

Britain’s former spy chief accused the BBC of “parroting” Al Qaeda propaganda to children as young as six.

The Clarence Thomas book story wasn’t the weirdest book story on the front page of Saturday's Washington Post. That would be Bob Thompson’s story on presidential daughter Jenna Bush and her new book on an HIV-afflicted single mother titled "Ana’s Story." Here’s the first sentence: "Jenna Bush wants to clear up this pregnancy nonsense right now." Having dropped that bomb of a rumor on page one, the Post then leaves that matter totally unresolved for six paragraphs, until the jump onto page A9:

"‘I’m not pregnant,’ she deadpans, then throws her head back and laughs. Voice raised, she repeats the point for emphasis. [This means the reporter suggested he didn’t believe her?] It’s as if she’s trying to outshout the din of unsought celebrity that has engulfed her since she was in her teens. "I’m not even pregnant!" she says. (Italics theirs.)

Other than Cal vs. Oregon, what are today's big games and big upsets?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (R-Iran)

This week, Alan Colmes proved, yet again, that Fox News has its own liberals willing to say crazy things. The host asserted that right-wingers should have embraced the visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad because the dictator is a "conservative" like them.

Those Hateful Republicans

Speaking of angry liberals, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann has claimed that the reason that "white wing" Republican presidential candidates are skipping minority debates is because they want to re-segregate America. Of course, given the host’s insensitive comments during a football broadcast, perhaps he shouldn’t be throwing stones.

The top of Saturday’s Washington Post front page reads "Justice Thomas Lashes Out in Memoir: Book Attacks Liberals and the Media, Breaks Near-Silence on Anita Hill." The story by Robert Barnes, Michael Fletcher, and Kevin Merida begins by describing an "angry and vivid forthcoming memoir, scathingly condemning the media," Democrats and a "mob" of liberal activists. But the reader would be frustrated if he wanted details on the condemnation of the media: it’s never described.

Instead, inside on A7, there are snippets on racism in the Catholic Church, on Anita Hill, on his father, his mother, abortion, and "affirmative action," but no snippet on the media. Did someone edit out the media stuff after the headline and opening were written? We were hoping for some attack snippets on his NPR tormentor, Nina Totenberg.

I would defy anyone to label Maureen Dowd by party affiliation or ideology. I've known her and worked closely with her for 20 years and I can't tell you the answer to either one -- Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor of The New York Times

What would be worse: that when Times editorial page editor Rosenthal claims not to know Maureen Dowd's politics he's not being honest -- or that he is?

All day Friday, even after Rush Limbaugh corrected the misinformation, MSNBC promoted a story fed to them by the far-left Media Matters about how Rush Limbaugh had called military personnel who served in Iraq and oppose the war “phony soldiers.” Limbaugh opened his noon EDT radio show on Friday by explaining how he was referring not to any real soldier but a phony one, notably Jesse MacBeth, who became a hero to the left when he recounted how his Army unit murdered innocent Iraqis. In fact, he hadn't even completed basic training.

Nonetheless, MSNBC headlined a 4pm EDT segment “'PHONY SOLDIERS' INSULT; Rush Limbaugh: U.S. Troops Who Oppose Iraq War are 'Phony.'” Anchor Tamron Hall asserted: “Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh never served in the armed forces, so when he made the following comments about Iraq War veterans who return home to oppose the war, it set off a firestorm of outrage.” Hall ran a clip of Limbaugh saying it is Democrats who need to apologize for insulting the troops, but failed to relay Limbaugh's explanation of who he said was “phony.” Pairing it with MoveOn's “General Betray Us” ad, retired Colonel Jack Jacobs called it “stupid talk” and suggested those in the military “would like people who don't know what they're talking about to just shut up.”

At the top of the next hour, Chris Matthews teased Hardball: “Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh says veterans who support withdrawing the troops are 'phony soldiers.' Those are his words.” A guest charged Limbaugh “didn't go to Vietnam because he had a bump on his butt. So, I mean, this guy's a draft-dodger.” Then at 8pm EDT, with “Limbaugh Bashes Vets for Withdrawal” on screen, and briefly “...Phony Soldiers...” over video of Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann teased Countdown: “Comedian Rush Limbaugh tries to back out of his quote: Servicemen protesting the war are quote, 'phony soldiers.'”

Of all people, you'd think a movie director would understand the importance of sticking to the script. But no . . .

There was a delicious moment on this afternoon's "Hardball." Host Chris Matthews had billed a new movie as standing for the proposition that Saudis hate Americans [note the screen graphic]. But when the movie's director came on, he declined to buy into Matthews's sweeping generalization, pitched capitalism as the answer to the region's problems, and even speculated that Iraq war has helped America's relations in the Middle East.

In his opening tease, Matthews proclaimed "Let's talk about why the Saudis hate us . . . in our second story tonight, why do Saudis hate Americans?"

Then, after an interview about Iran with Mario Cuomo [yes, he's still around], Matthews, teasing the next segment: