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NewsBusters senior editor/MRC director of research Rich Noyes appeared on "Your World with Neil Cavuto" a few moments ago discussing the agenda of silly, liberally-biased questions in last night's GOP debate on MSNBC.

Video: Real (4 MB) or Windows (3.2 MB), plus MP3 (1.6 MB)

Discussing the agenda of questions posed by Chris Matthews and the reporters from Politico.com, Noyes observed: "It's the kind of stuff you find liberal bloggers complaining about, questions like, 'Is Karl Rove your friend,' 'Do you believe in evolution,' [questions] designed to trip up Republicans and make them look like they were against science. The question from Jim VandeHei, 'What's the deal with the corruption in your party?' This was all a series of very left-leaning questions to G.O.P. candidates. And there's no problem asking Republicans tough questions, but if you look at the tone of the Democratic debate, it was all softballs compared to what Republicans got last night. There's really two different standards for the two parties." After running down some of the more obnoxious questions thrown at the candidates at last night's debate, Cavuto pointed out how "none of those Republicans was afraid to be at a venue where they knew they would probably get snide questions like this on a network or with a host who has a certain leaning. Yet none of their counterparts in the Democratic Party would dare appear here." Noyes agreed: "Well, that's true. It's amazing that Democrats are trying to avoid having a debate on the Fox News Channel. Fox News had debates in the last cycle. A lot of the questioners brought in — they were not Fox employees — they were some liberal reporters like Gwen Ifill and Juan Williams, along with some of Fox's own people like Carl Cameron. Nobody had any complaints about that [debate]. Now, because they want to please the left-wing blogosphere, they're acting like if appearing on Fox is somehow a dangerous and terrible thing to do. Here you have Republicans going on MSNBC, which is a really, become a very far-left wing network in the last few months, few years, and they all seemed to have a pretty good time and got their message out."

"No CEO dares say it, yet it must be said: The shaming is over," wrote Fortune senior editor-at-large Geoff Colvin.

So how did the era of business shaming come to an end, according to Fortune? Business has taken a left turn toward embracing more government intrusion on climate, health care and other issues.

Colvin specifically cited two examples that have helped corporate America become "respectable" again:

“The Business Roundtable, comprising the CEOs of America's 200 biggest companies, in January joined with AARP and the Service Employees International Union to propose universal national health care.”

I'm really blessed as an evangelical Christian to have Bill Redeker at ABCNews.com to tell me that my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ are "evolving."

The evangelical movement has long been considered a powerful political entity. An estimated 65 million Americans consider themselves conservative Christians. Their anti-gay, anti-abortion views are well known as is their support for mostly Republican political candidates.

But times are changing.

Now there are evangelicals speaking out on global warming and supporting adoption. Neither would have been endorsed only a few years ago.

Really? I must have missed the sermons all those years about how adoption is not Christ-like, despite the Bible using the adoption analogy to describe Christ's relationship with His Church.

And what about global warming? That's not really a concern germane to biblical ethics, although , yes, many evangelicals that happen to be conservative and Republican are likely to be skeptical of the theory of anthropocentric global warming.

Evangelical blogger Ted Olsen put it succinctly in a Christianity Today Liveblog post today (emphasis mine):

Original caption:

Moderator Chris Matthews opens the first republican presidential primary debate of the 2008 election at the Ronald Reagan Library, Thursday, May 3, 2007, in Simi Valley, Calif.

Print accounts of the House of Representatives turning into Pelosi Palace, passing a so-called "hate crimes" expansion act to please the gay left, don't seem to notice there is a left side on the debate over this bill. There are "civil rights groups" on one side, and "conservatives" on the other. That apparently would make them an "anti-civil rights" group.

In The Washington Post, reporter Jonathan Weisman quotes Speaker Nancy Pelosi using words from the Pledge of Allegiance to back the left wing, not to mention Ted Kennedy and Steny Hoyer, but none of them are described as liberals. Weisman can't even call the bill's backers "gay advocates," just "advocates," as if idealistic blandness (and not ideological severity) defined the left, while these idealists were opposed by the staunchest of conservatives:

Reminiscent of an earlier review of "Spider-Man 3" that complained about the American flag's cameo in the superhero blockbuster, Times of London film critic James Christopher added "Sunday School morality" as a black mark against the action flick.

This incessant Tom and Jerry action makes it impossible to actually care. The Sunday School morality, and the inevitable flash of the American flag, are perfectly irritating. It’s extraordinary how often the third movie of a tent-pole franchise fails to deliver, in this case by trying to deliver too much. It’s hardly the kiss of death for Raimi, but with a budget as huge as his the pressure is surely on to pull in more than $400 million.

That's much harsher than critic Leo Lewis, who said it was "disappointing" that director Sam Raimi was unable "to end the romp without a fleeting shot of the American flag."

On Friday’s "Good Morning America," co-host Robin Roberts complained about the "staggering" salaries of American CEOs. Citing a new Forbes magazine report claiming that these individuals received a 38 percent raise last year, Roberts engaged in typical class warfare. She incredulously stated, "It has us saying, come on, you must be kidding."

Reporter Dan Harris and guest William Baldwin, editor of Forbes, listed several examples of supposedly outrageous CEO salaries and proceeded to divine who deserved such money and who did not:

Dan Harris: "Even the editor of Forbes has some trouble stomaching some of the things his staff uncovered this year. Oddly enough, number one on the list is Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, who makes just $1 a year in salary."

Here's a rather ludicrous headline from USA Today's "On Deadline" blog:

"Did a violinist in a red dress quash detente between Iran, USA?"

The story?

Iranian Foreign Minister Manucher Mottaki exchanged pleasantries with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during regional talks in Egypt this week, but reports suggest that he didn't stay for dinner Thursday night because of concerns about the way a female violinist was dressed.

"I have been told by one of the U.S. State Department officials, who did not want to be named, that as soon as Secretary Rice walked in, Manuchehr Mottaki, the Iranian foreign minister, left. But then [Mottaki's] excuse was that there was a lady violinist who was wearing a sexy red dress -- she was wearing a shawl on it -- but he was objecting to the fact the lady was wearing a revealing red dress," says Mahtab Farid, a reporter with Radio Farda, a U.S. government-funded radio station that broadcasts in Farsi.

Eco-tastic celebrities, politicians and even CEOs made Time magazine's 100 "people who shape our world."

Former Vice President Al Gore was included in the "Scientists and Thinkers" category. Hmm...he's not a scientist so would that make him a thinker? Just call him Al-istotle.

Actor and green activist Leonardo DiCaprio, Virgin Airlines' Richard Branson (who has offered a $25 million prize for a solution to global warming), talk show host Oprah Winfrey, and media personality Brian Williams also made the list.

Celebrities were well represented: Cate Blanchett, who marched in protest of global warming in Sydney, Australia; George Clooney, who made the cover of Vanity Fair’s 2006 “Green Issue”; and “Light Green” musician John Mayer who advocates changing one thing each year. Others included Brad Pitt, who has worked with Global Green on “sustainable” building, and Oprah Winfrey, who recently handed out compact fluorescent light bulbs to her audience.

While being interviewed on Friday's “Today” show by Meredith Vieira, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews attempted to explain the rationale behind a bizarre question he posed to Republicans the night before at the debate he moderated. Matthews had asked the presidential candidates: "Seriously, would it be good for America to have Bill Clinton back living in the White House?"

Republicans laughed in unison, with Mitt Romney retorting: "You have got to be kidding."

On the May 4 "Today," from the site of the debate, the Air Force One Pavilion at the Ronald Reagan Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California, Matthews defended his question:

Directly following the tragic death of Katherine Sykes, the mother of the Wisconsin conservative radio talk show host and blogger Charlie Sykes, liberal talk show host Micheal McGee, Sr. has come out with this statement, live on his radio show (via Channel 12):

“Mother Sykes, she dead. To me it’s the vengeance of God. I ain’t got no tears. Matter of fact a woman that would have a fool like that deserve whatever is coming her. She raised a sure enough idiot,” McGee said on his radio show. “My instincts say Charlie Sykes killed his momma, cuz she live out in this big palace in Mequon all isolated. He got tired of waiting for her money.”

Where is the outrage? Only one small local media outlet, Channel 12, and a number of blogs (Badger Blogger, Marquette Warrior, Michelle Malkin and Gop3.com) have covered it. If this story was reversed, and a conservative said this about McGee's mother, the entire national media along with Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would be on the scene. The article on Channel 12 has indicated that McGee's next show will not air but subsequent shows are not in jeopardy yet. Without public outcry, this type of double standard will continue.

Weighing in on Time's "Swampland" blog, journalist Joe Klein opined that the best question of last night's GOP primary debate was the infamous "What do you dislike most about America" question. Klein slammed the candidates' performances, but particularly picked on Romney, whom he mocked as overly optimistic:

I could imagine him doing the Reagan nice-guy, slightly-boggled head twitch, especially when he was asked the question of the night: What do you dislike most about America?

Romney's answer: I love America. Great. Good. Great Great. Creative. People. The American People. Love. Great....

[...]

This is a basic DNA difference between the parties. Republicans see the American people as perfect; the American government as an alien import from France. You put America and Flawed in the same sentence, and any Republican will go all (faux) De Toqueville--great good great good etc.

Al Gore's prophecy tour of doom hit a snag the other day. Apparently, he caused a stir among some atheist environmentalists for stating that he believes in creation science. Amazingly, no one in the media has picked it up. The irony is especially delicious since many on the left are making fun of some of the GOP presidential candidates for having the same belief.

One liberal Canadian blogger who was at a Gore presentation reports Gore's act of blasphemy:

The slide I found particularly interesting/shocking/sad, was his new(?) slide containing a graph of human population growth over the past couple hundred-thousand years. It started off good. He pointed at the beginning of the graph, showing the population of humans on Earth from 200,000 years ago, and referred to the “rise of humans." Cool beans. So he believes that Homo sapiens evolved from other hominid ancestors, right? Nope.

Today's joke is below the fold...

Are the media intentionally downplaying or ignoring reports that indicate a growing al Qaeda involvement in Iraq?

Late Thursday evening, CNN.com reported (h/t LGF, emphasis added):

American soldiers discovered a girls school being built north of Baghdad had become an explosives-rigged "death trap," the U.S. military said Thursday.”

This was a compilation of a report that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer did earlier in the day on “The Situation Room.”

However, Stars and Stripes actually reported Tuesday that military officials shared this information on Monday (emphasis added):

When a lie makes it into print once, it's happenstance. A mere accident, no doubt, due to a lapse of judgment in editing the news feed. What, then, is it called when a lie is repeated countless times without apology? Apparently, it's called "business as usual" for the media. Whenever a funeral is presented by photographers embedded in the Palestinian territories, we're faced with dozens of photographs of crowds of weeping, screaming, shouting people parading around in the streets. We're also inevitably presented with a caption describing how the Israeli occupiers are responsible for the deaths, and how Israel is pouring out suffering all over the innocent, helpless Palestinian people. While these photos always make for a powerful statement, and are picked up by news organizations worldwide for their raw emotional appeal, the information presented along with them isn't always what it appears at first glance to be.

Romney won, Rudy lost. That's Chris Matthews' take on the GOP presidential debate he moderated on MSNBC last night. Matthews made his views clear during his appearance on this morning's "Today." Meredith Vieira, who interviewed Matthews at 7:09 EDT, seemed to share her colleague's assessment.

TODAY CO-HOST MEREDITH VIEIRA: Winners and losers in your assessment?

MSNBC HOST CHRIS MATTHEWS: Oh, come on. Well, let me just say I thought that just factually, Giuliani stood out on the issue of abortion rights, clearly. At one point I asked if they would be happy, if it would be a good day for America, if the courts struck down Roe v. Wade, the court decision back in '73 that gave a woman the right to an abortion, and he said 'that would be OK,' Very tentative. And then later on he reasserted his position that he is for abortion rights. So I think that separated him on a big issue.

VIEIRA: Yeah, but Chris, he also said it would be OK if a strict constructionist judge upheld Roe v. Wade. It sounded like he was talking out of both sides of his mouth there.

View video here

Diane Sawyer granted an interview for the May issue of Reader’s Digest. In it, Sawyer said she is eager to interview North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, and would jump at the chance to interview Osama bin Laden. The interviewer, Sara Davidson, did not press Sawyer on the question of whether she was too soft or light in her interviews with anti-American heads of state (as with asking Syrian dictator Bashar Assad whether he has Shania Twain on his iPod). But Sawyer did use the words "fanatic extremists" and "horrific terrorists," which doesn’t always emerge first in journalistic conversations.

RD: Who else are you most eager to interview?
Sawyer: Kim Jong-il. I think he is unlike anyone else in a leadership position in the world right now, and North Korea is such an intriguing country.

If a high-ranking member of the Taliban told Al-Jazeera that the recent attempted assassination of Vice President Dick Cheney was devised by Osama bin Laden, would you expect the media to report it?

In reality, after this interview, the claim was largely discredited. However, one has to wonder why Mullah Dadullah’s (the believed leader of the Taliban in southern Afghanistan) statement made last Wednesday went largely ignored.

Was this an attempt by a media seemingly always interested in downplaying the war on terror to keep the public from even considering that bin Laden could have been involved?

Regardless of the answer, Dadullah’s words certainly seemed newsworthy (video available here courtesy Memri TV):

Update (15:33): MRC/NB's Rich Noyes will be on Fox News at 4:15 p.m. to discuss this. Look for a new post shortly thereafter with video.

In a debate packed with silly questions and ones matching left-wing attack points on GOP candidates, in the first “Interactive Round” of questions submitted by the public on Politico.com, a co-sponsor of the debate, Mitt Romney got the most bizarre. The Politico Executive Editor Jim VandeHei, a Washington Post political reporter before jumping to The Politico earlier this year, found this one worth posing: “Daniel Dekovnick [sp phonetic] from Walnut Creek, California wants to know, 'What do you dislike most about America?'" Romney responded: “Gosh, I love America. I'm afraid I'm going to be at a loss for words...”(More questions below)

Video clip of VandeHei posing the “what do you dislike most about America?” question and Romney's response (45 secs): Real (1.3 MB) or Windows Media (1.5 MB), plus MP3 audio (260 KB)

Read past the jump for more oddball questions and a huge blog roundup.

Anti-Americanism at its finest in the first GOPer presidential debate. Video at this NewsBusters node.

20:58. Chris Matthews seems to be ignorant of the term "altered nuclear transfer" in stem-cell debate. Appears confused when Mitt Romney brings it up.

21:20. Matthews continues his obsession with Scooter Libby. Asks the insignificant question of whether he should be pardoned. C'mon.

21:24. More Matthews genius: "Do you think it would be a good thing to have Bill Clinton in the White House again?"

21:29. Unrelated but I wanted everyone to see that Andrew Sullivan recently fell for a hoax about a "kids version of '24.'"

CBS Radio might be about to get a very expensive lesson in contract law, for terminated former “shock-jock” Don Imus has just hired topnotch legal counsel in what could be the most-watched trial since O.J. Simpson’s.

As reported by Hollywood Today (h/t Glenn Reynolds, emphasis added throughout):

Don Imus is suing CBS Radio for more than $40 million. He is suing for vindication, according to a media expert, who said “(Imus) wants his name cleared.”

The former talk show host hired one of the country’s top First Amendment trial lawyers to sue CBS for firing him over racial and sexual on-air comments. But Imus points out his contract calls for “irreverent” and “controversial,” and his “nappy-headed ho” remark was certainly that.

Hmmm. That was in the contract? It appears CBS somehow forgot:

The bad news just keeps coming for CBS anchor Katie Couric. First she was trashed in a very public way in the Philadelphia Inquirer, next it was let out that the man she replaced, Bob Schieffer, was probably behind the attacks. Now comes news that she lags quite a bit behind her ABC and NBC rivals in public opinion polls:

One-third of Americans say they have a negative view of Katie Couric, her personal popularity lagging behind rivals Charles Gibson and Brian Williams just as her evening news program trails in the ratings.

Barack Obama's campaign has gotten itself into a bit of trouble over a Myspace profile. Not just any Myspace profile, however:

For the past two and a half years, the page has been run by an Obama supporter from Los Angeles named Joe Anthony. At first, that arrangement was fine with the Obama team, which worked with Anthony on the content and even had the password to make changes themselves.

But as the site exploded in popularity in recent months, the campaign became concerned about an outsider having control of the content and responses going out under Obama's name and told Anthony they wanted him to turn it over.

If you missed it last night, Glenn Beck’s skeptical program about anthropogenic global warming, “Exposed: The Climate of Fear,” aired on CNN Headline News.

In it, Beck skewered many of the misnomers advanced by global warming alarmists, especially soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore (full transcript available here).

 

Video (3:05): Real (2.28 MB) or Windows (1.90 MB), plus MP3 (2.83 MB).

One particularly delicious segment occurred early in the program as Beck presented the facts about the Kyoto Protocol that few on the left care to recall, especially former Vice President Gore:

 Over the past few days, Gates of Vienna discussed a very troubling story about Finnish blogger Mikko Ellila, “who has been summoned by the police for a hearing next week, all because of the content of his blog posts.” Mikko posts in Finnish but contacted several people in English about this, such as the Australian blogger Prodos, who owns the site that hosts the potentially criminal blog.  Mikko explained to Prodos why he is going to be questioned by Finnish police:

According to the letter, I am suspected of “hate speech” merely
 because I have pointed out that Islam is a fascist ideology that
 advocates killing Jews, atheists, homosexuals etc.

 Fellow Finnish blogger Vasarahammer explained more about Mikko's problem:

New York Times reporters can't stand it when President Bush actually has the nerve to speak in front of supportive crowds, and neither did the headline writer to reporter Jim Rutenberg's Thursday story, "Outing Finds Bush in the Thick of Softball Season." The text box reads: "In a challenging time, the president turns to a friendly audience."

That "friendly audience" would be the Associated General Contractors of America. Rutenberg, as if in disbelief, quoted chapter and verse the often-religious, positive bent of some of the audience questions to Bush.

A “promising” new drug could save lives of people fighting osteoporosis, but neither ABC “World News with Charles Gibson,” nor CBS “Evening News” even mentioned the drug’s manufacturer - Novartis Pharmaceuticals (NYSE: NVS) - in May 2 broadcasts.

Zoledronic acid “may be just what the doctor ordered,” according to Katie Couric. The broadcasts cited a new study that found a 70-percent decline in spine fractures and a 41-percent decline in hip fractures among the patients studied.

Yesterday, NewsBusters executive editor Matthew Sheffield passed along how bloggers had picked up on Virgin Airlines screening the 9/11 conspiracy documentary "Loose Change" as an in-flight movie selection.

Ace notes the development here. Ericka Andersen of Human Events and Bryan of Hot Air also covered the story.

Thanks to radio host Andrew Wilkow's Sirius radio program, Virgin has decided to pull the selection from its cinematic library.

Andersen reminds her readers that "one simple phone call" can make all the difference, as was the case with Wilkow's producer complaining to Virgin. I suspect, however, that a large, irate blog readership also had a role to play. Over 15,000 hits came up for my "loose change" search on Technorati, while over 600 hits came up when I looked for "Virgin Airlines" on the blog search site.

Hundreds of thousands of potential airline passengers are not worth messing with, after all.