Congress

Friday's New York Times predictably led with the dramatic stalling in the Senate of the immigration bill endorsed by President Bush (a story by Carl Hulse and Robert Pear that offers the pleasant surprise of the term "liberal Democrats" to characterize some opponents of the bill). As a counterweight, the Metro section fronted a sob-story by Jennifer Medina, "Arrests of 31 In U.S. Sweep Bring Fear In New Haven."

Some of those in federal custody are suspected of being illegal immigrants, and Medina described in sympathetic terms the liberal attitude toward illegal immigrants by New Haven, Conn. officials who "wanted to bring them out of the shadows."

"Within hours, any sense of sanctuary that the city and advocates for immigrants advocates [sic] had developed over the years was turned upside down, replaced with fear."

In an interesting slam against the Left-Wing Blogosphere, one time Clinton man, now Time Magazine writer, Joe Klein, hits 'em hard. Left-Wing Bloggers are vile. Left-Wing Bloggers are mean. Left-Wing Bloggers are disloyal. Left-Wing Bloggers jump to wild, unsupported conclusions... So says Klein in a June 6th piece titled "Beware the Bloggers' Bile." But, don't get your hopes up because, while everything he says about the nut-roots is dead on, it all ends up being Bush's and Radio icon Rush Limbaugh's fault, instead of the left's fault -- it's not as if the left could ever imagine anything is ever their fault, I suppose.

Still, for most of the piece, Klein slams his nut-roots followers in just about every which way you can imagine but calling them ugly and having bad B.O. and it's fun to read.

Update I & II at bottom:

In this June 4 article, the AP worked hard to leave out something very important but very basic in an article about Democratic US Representative William Jefferson’s 16-count bribery indictment. What the AP left out was any identification of Jefferson’s party affiliation. In almost 30 paragraphs, no where is there any hint of what party Jefferson belongs to, not even a “(D-LA).”

When a politician is in trouble and the party is not identified, it a safe bet to assume that the missing letter is a Big “D,” as in this AP piece.

How were other politicians identified? Nancy Pelosi is identified as “Pelosi, D-Calif.” John Boehner is identified as “House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio.” But Jefferson is not a Democrat, just “Louisiana congressman William Jefferson.” Strange how that works, huh?

Since party is usually identified in the first paragraphs, the AP had many opportunities to note that Jefferson is a Democrat and simply did not (emphasis mine):

On Monday’s "Good Morning America," ABC co-anchor Chris Cuomo acted as lawyer for the defense when he interviewed the co-authors of a new book that contains critical revelations about 2008 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Cuomo grilled Don Van Natta and Jeff Gerth, the New York Times investigative journalists behind "Her Way," asking if their book was a "sleeper" and an "Ambien substitute."  

The ABC host, who didn’t appear comfortable even discussing a book critical of Senator Clinton, began the interview by derisively wondering, "...Do you think you have the silver bullet in this book? Is this is this the book that derails the campaign?" Then, Cuomo, the son of a Democratic governor and the brother of New York’s Democratic Attorney General, questioned the standards of the two authors with this loaded query:

Chris Cuomo: "The [Clinton] campaign said it is an Ambien substitute. They say the book is just a rehash. How do you respond to that, that your book is a sleeper? It’s all been done before. You only needed a library card to report this out. Your response?"

Jeff Gerth: "Well, The New York Times chose to put 8,000 words of our book on the cover of the Sunday magazine and we feel that their news judgement is better than that of Senator Clinton’s."

The mainstream media has a tendency to turn to prominent conservatives whenever a significant portion of the conservative movement and President Bush have a policy disagreement. On Friday, it was Laura Ingraham's turn, when she was interviewed by John Roberts on CNN's "American Morning." When Roberts asked her about President Bush's recent slam of opponents of the immigration "reform bill," Ingraham turned the tables and took a shot at CNN itself.

Video (0:57): Real (1.55 MB) or Windows (1.75 MB), plus MP3 (630 kB)

If you knew an institution was incapable of keeping tabs on one, crucially-important, person, why would you believe it could track 12 million? And yet . . .

The government knew that one man in Atlanta had a highly-infectious, potentially fatal, disease that puts the lives of untold numbers of people at risk. The MSM is quick to point its finger at the government for its failure to keep track of him. But the same MSM is largely supportive of an amnesty-based immigration bill that would require that same government to keep tabs on untold millions of immigrants and administer a highly-complex "pathway to citizenship."

The MSM is turning the tale of the Georgia man with TB who roamed over Europe and flew back to the US, endangering his fellow passengers, into a story of government misfeasance. Typical of the MSM take was that of Chris Cuomo on today's "Good Morning America." Cuomo spoke to ABC medical consultant Dr. Tim Johnson at 7:04 am EDT this morning.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may have said she saw evidence of climate change in a recent trip to Greenland, but leave it to CNN to press her and other Democrats from the left for not doing enough to stop greenhouse gas emissions "in their own backyard." Both "American Morning" and "The Situation Room" on Tuesday featured CNN congressional correspondent Andrea Koppel's segment on how the heating and cooling power supplied to the U.S. Capitol building comes from the Capitol Power Plant, which is half-fueled by coal, and emits "tens of thousands of tons of greenhouse gases into the air." The blame for these emissions is placed on the politics of Senators Robert Byrd and Mitch McConnell, both of whom come from "two of the biggest coal-producing states."

Koppel interviewed two people for her segment, both of whom have left-wing affiliations. The first was Pelosi's chief administrative officer for the House, Dan Beard, who talked about the massive environmental advantage of switching to compact fluorescent bulbs. The second, Frank O'Donnell of the group Clean Air Watch, was given two sound bites in the segment. O'Donnell compared Senators Byrd and McConnell to a famous television mobster. "It's as if Tony Soprano had a seat in the Senate. They're saying this plant must stay alive. It must keep burning coal, even though it is causing pollution and global warming."

Politicians like Nancy Pelosi who carp about high gas prices and brood about gouging while simultaneously bemoaning global warming are hypocrites. That's the gist of Robert J. Samuelson's column in today's Washington Post. The actual title is A Full Tank of Hypocrisy, but the teaser headline for it on the online op-ed home page is "The Case for Gouging."

Samuelson in fact disputes that gouging, in the sense of collusion among oil producers/refiners, is taking place. He points out, for example, that concentration of ownership in the oil industry has been deemed low-to-moderate, "less concentrated than the auto industry, which is considered intensely competitive." But the long-time WaPo columnist does make the case than many politicians in the global-warming crowd are engaging in some have-it-both-ways hypocrisy on the issue of higher gasoline prices.

David Espo of the Associated Press appeared to be unhappy with the result of the House vote on Iraq war funding, and to be offering an excuse for the House Democratic leadership (bolds are mine throughout this post):

WASHINGTON - Bowing to President Bush, the Democratic-controlled House reluctantly approved fresh billions for the Iraq war on Thursday, minus the troop withdrawal timeline that drew his earlier veto.

The 280-142 vote sent the bill to the Senate for final passage, expected later in the evening.

..... Five months in power on Capitol Hill, Democrats coupled their concession to the president with pledges to challenge his policies anew. "This debate will go on," vowed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, announcing plans to hold votes by fall on four separate measures seeking a change in course.

A later unbylined AP report about President Bush's impending signature on the funding bill after Senate passage almost seems to have been written by the DNC, while providing cover for the party's two leading presidential candidates:

You're Hillary Clinton [work with me here] tuning into "Today" the morning after you've voted against funding the Iraq war . What's the one image you dread seeing pop up? But there it was.

This isn't shaping up as Hillary's favorite day. As the Washington Post reports here, two books about Clinton have hit the shelves, and neither paint a flattering portrait of the former First Lady. What's more, Hillary won't be able to blame this one on the VRWC. The authors are, respectively, the very lefty Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame, and a pair of New York Times reporters.

But while the Hillary camp is surely less than thrilled about those books, my sense is that in the long run, her candidacy has more to fear from being stuck with the dreaded Kerry flip-flop label. Imagine the paroxysms of pain for the Hillary camp while watching this morning's "Today." Discussing Hillary's 'no' vote on Iraq funding, the NBC show broke out the dreaded footage of Kerry's "I actually voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it."

View video here.

During Monica Goodling's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee testimony Dem congressman Steven Cohen of Tennessee quizzed the former Justice Department official regarding her Christian faith and the law school at Regent University, founded by Pat Robertson, that she attended.

An internet search reveals brief references to the interrogation in articles by Dana Milbank in the Washington Post and Maura Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times. But I saw no coverage of the grilling on any of the morning news shows, nor have CNN or MSNBC picked it up as far as I have noticed.

I'm setting forth the actual transcript below, taken from this article, with the following changes. In place of "Regent" university, I'm substituting the name of an apocryphal Islamic university, which I'm calling "Prophet." In place of Christian or Christianity, I'm substituting Muslim. And in place of God, Allah.

Now imagine what kind of MSM uproar there would have been if a Republican congressman had posed these questions to a person of Muslim faith.

Congressman: And it says you went -- chose Muslim universities in part because they -- value they placed on service. What was the other [reason] that you chose Muslim universities?

When it comes to anti-war politics, Rosie O'Donnell is one bedfellow Chris Matthews would gladly do without. The MSNBC host made that crystal clear on this afternoon's Hardball. Matthews played a clip of O'Donnell's recent slanging spate in which she unmistakably intimated to Elizabeth Hasselbeck that US troops are terrorists, responsible for 655,000 civilian deaths in Iraq [itself a grossly exaggerated figure in any case].

MSNBC HOST CHRIS MATTHEWS: While I generally sympathize with her point of view, her skepticism about this war, I do have a problem with her suggestion that we're the terrorists, which is clearly what the intent of that conversation was.

View video here.

The American left loves to chant "no blood for oil." But those same liberals would eagerly sacrifice American interests in the name of . . . a cheaper Caesar salad.

Take this morning's report on CNN which came at about 7:35 am EDT. Entitled "Farm-Fresh Problems," the segment, narrated by CNN's Chris Lawrence, focused on the lack of illegal immigrant labor to harvest California's fruit and vegetable crops.

CNN REPORTER CHRIS LAWRENCE: California harvests about half the nation's fruits and vegetables and every summer, farmers need half-a-million workers to pick those crops. But the crackdown on illegal immigrants is keeping workers out of their fields, leaving unpicked fruit left to rot.

HENRY VEGA [California farmer]: They're definitely worried about being raided and deported.

View video here.

Imagine for a moment that a high-ranking Republican was accused by a Democrat of violating House rules in order to get a $23 million earmark approved for his district.

Would the media report it?

Probably on front-pages all across the country, and on morning and evening network newscasts for days, right?

Well, last Thursday evening, Politico reported (emphasis added throughout):

Catching up with George Stephanopoulos' interview on Sunday's This Week with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Stephanopoulos took the opportunity to banter with Pelosi about the possibility of a woman President in front of her on the podium at the next State of the Union. Over video of Congressman John Boehner back in January handing the gavel to Pelosi, Stephanopoulos, one once toiled for the administration of the only woman candidate, marveled: “Seeing you up at the podium, first female Speaker of the House. Do you ever think what it would be like to be standing at that podium as the first female President of the United States comes up to give the State of the Union?” A giggling Pelosi exclaimed: “Wouldn't that be exciting to have the woman as the President and woman as the Speaker of the House? It'd be pretty exciting...” When Pelosi soon contended that “it's harder to become Speaker of the House than President of the United States for a woman,” Stephanopoulos empathized with how “you had to prove you were tough enough.”

If an illegal immigrant can openly show his face on national television and divulge many details about his life and circumstances, apparently without fear of detention or deportation, how can Americans have any confidence that the government will enforce the proposed new immigration law?

At 6:43 am EDT this morning, CNN ran a segment sympathetic to illegal aliens, suggesting that the proposed immigration law created too many hurdles for them. "American Morning" host Alina Cho narrated the piece, which focused on an illegal Mexican immigrant in New York City. Among the details about him that were, with his obvious cooperation, revealed:

• His name, apparently not an alias, is Juan. He is from Mexico. We saw and heard him in a completely open and undisguised manner throughout the segment.
• He is a cashier in a wine store in New York City, where he earns $400/week. Considerable footage of the interior of the store and the street on which it is located were aired.
• Juan has a "long-time partner," Reina, and two children. Footage of Reina and the interior of his apartment were shown.

Here's another example of how blogs can be a great outlet for objective reporting, even if the outlet in question is traditionally biased to the Left.

[Update (18:26 EDT): NewsBusters' own Warner Todd Huston wrote about congressional travel expenses 10 days ago.]

At the "Anderson Cooper 360" blog, CNN correspondent Drew Griffin took a look at "Spring break travel... Congress-style.":

Flying in military jets is especially important when our leaders need to go to Iraq, or remote parts of Africa, Afghanistan -- places that are hard to get to or dangerous to visit.

But the Virgin Islands, Trinidad, London? At $10,000 a flight hour, those places are where some of your representatives took these military planes over spring break.

As Al Gore and his band of not so merry global warming alarmists in buses and in the press try to convince Americans that they need to alter behaviors in order to save the planet, an inconvenient truth is being cynically withheld: this is going to cost a lot of money.

Of course, one of the delicious hypocrisies is that these are the same people who decry the current economic boom as only helping the rich, and state regularly and fervently that the poor and middle-class are being left behind.

At the same time, such mid- to lower-level wage earners should be saddled with exorbitant additional expenses to shelter them from a wolf that might never come knocking at their doors.

Makes sense, right?

With that in mind, the Chicago Tribune’s Laurie Goering wrote a fabulous piece recently exposing some of the potential costs of this exercise that most media don’t want you to know (emphasis added throughout, h/t Benny Peiser):

"Early Show’s" cheery weatherman Dave Price used his forum to feature Dan Lewis, Starbucks regional marketing manager, and Matt Petersen, the CEO of, Global Green USA, a left wing environmental group.

While much of the story focused on what individuals can do to save the planet, Petersen noted that "global warming is a serious issue, and we need our leaders in Washington to act, our corporate leaders to act." Petersen also encouraged the viewers to "send a message to Washington" about what viewers "think they should be doing about global warming."

The featured interest group, Global Green USA, is a left wing environmental group founded by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Its most notable campaign is "The Pledge of Allegiance to American Energy Independence" where it calls on the Congress to take action combating global warming. The transcript is below.

The Howard Dean-Kathleen Sebelius-Kansas tornado story has taken an interesting turn.

Scott Johnson at Power Line reported Saturday that attorneys representing the Democratic National Committee have sent a cease and desist letter to Free Republic due to a post at its website concerning allegations made on the “Quinn & Rose” XM Satellite radio show Thursday (h/t Glenn Reynolds).

Howard Dean appears to be doing another “I Have a Scream” speech, only this time through his attorneys.

Isn’t that special?

The letter stated:

Liberal newspapers like The Washington Post will try to drag every Democrat into the mainstream, even the radical ones. On today's Federal Page, reporter/columnist Lois Romano tells the tale of Rep. Barbara Lee of Berkeley, the only member of the House so radical that she voted against a military response to 9/11. The headline puts her in the current vogue: "A Voice Against Presidential War-Making Now Leads A Chorus." Romano describes how she's getting standing ovations in the Democratic caucus for her pragmatism: 

Don't get her wrong; she says she will never vote for any measure that funds this war, including the one that could come for a vote today. But she is credited by Democrats with being able to balance principle and pragmatism...Lee, 60, is soft-spoken and is no lefty flame thrower. The daughter of a veteran of two wars (whom she still calls "Colonel"), she says she is not a pacifist.

If Democrats had accused former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Illinois) last year of earmarking funds that could help real estate investments owned by his wife, would the media have reported it?

Probably on the front pages of every newspaper, and as the lead story of all of the evening news programs, right?

Well, the Associated Press published a story Monday about current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) possibly earmarking funds that would benefit her husband's investments around the San Francisco Bay. Yet, the media showed virtually no interest (emphasis added):

Support for the actions of the Dem leadership continues to flow in from America's enemies around the world.

Last week, Al Qaeda's #2, Ayman al-Zawahri, said a Dem-sponsored bill calling for a troop withdrawal from Iraq was proof of America's defeat.

Now the leader of Syria's thugocracy has weighed in, defending House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) against criticism of her recent tête-à-tête with him.

NBC's Ann Curry has followed ABC's Diane Sawyer's footsteps to Damascus, interviewing Bashir Assad. An excerpt of the interview aired during the first half-hour of this morning's "Today." It included this exchange.

NBC CORRESPONDENT ANN CURRY: The Bush administration harshly criticized Nancy Pelosi for meeting with you last month. Vice-President Cheney accused her of having "bad behavior." You're smiling. Why do you smile?

SYRIAN RULER BASHIR ASSAD: It's a funny description to say it's bad behavior, because I think the other way: she was doing her job as an American official in a very high position. She wants to know what's going on.

View video here

What’s going on at the Washington Post?

After recent editorials condemning House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-California) trip to Syria, a good job covering the conviction of Harold Ford, Jr.’s (D-Tennessee) uncle, and a David Broder column harshly critical of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), the Post published a front-page story Saturday declaring the Democrats’ domestic agenda is languishing.

What must Jonathan Weisman and Lyndsey Layton have been thinking when they wrote the following lead paragraphs (emphasis added throughout):

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:

Harry Smith, who has a habit of double standards when conducting interviews, hammered returning White House press secretary Tony Snow on April 30's edition of The Early Show. After discussing Snow’s cancer treatment, Smith said "let’s go to work." Snow stated what many believe, that incorporated timetables are a stunt. An astonished Harry Smith interrupted and harshly inquired: "So the White House regards this, their, their insistence on troop withdrawals as a stunt?"

Snow, who previously accused Harry Smith of sounding like a partisan, immediately backpedaled, but pointed out that the current bill is "something [the Democrats] knew was never going to get passed." After Snow mentioned that Democrats "exhausted nearly three months doing this," Smith retorted "with the support of the American people by the way." Although it is true that, according to CBS’s own poll, 64 percent of Americans do support a timetable for withdrawal, they also found when they asked if Congress should allow continued troop funding without a timetable if it comes to that, 56 percent said yes. Harry never mentioned that polling result.

For at least the second time this month, the Washington Post went after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) for meeting with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.

For those that have forgotten, the Post was harshly critical of the Speaker’s trip at the time, calling it “foolish” and “ludicrous.”

On Friday, the Post editorial staff, in a piece entitled “No Results in Damascus,” chronicled what’s happened in Syria, and the rest of the region, since Pelosi returned.

As you might imagine, the news wasn’t good (h/t Glenn Reynolds and Gateway Pundit, emphasis added throughout):

Better secure your computer from all combustibles, potables, and sharp objects, sports fans, for the Washington Post published a Letter to the Editor on Friday that is guaranteed to elicit uncontrollable fits of laughter.

Are you ready? Good.

In response to David Broder’s Thursday column about the horrible job Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) is doing as Majority Leader – a sentiment likely an overwhelming majority of Americans share – Senate Democrats actually wrote the Post a complaint letter.

I kid you not.

As the Post didn’t feature this correspondence on the front page – instead including it with the other four “letters” published that day on page A22 – and since Broder wasn’t asked to make a correction or retraction, it doesn’t seem that this puff piece, hysterically titled “Sen. Reid’s Fine Leadership,” was taken very seriously (emphasis added throughout):

One of the most marvelous aspects of today’s liberal media is how members of “the club” better not say or write anything bad about another member or risk excommunication.

Such is clearly the mantra of CNN’s Paul Begala, who published a scathing rebuke of the Washington Post’s David Broder on Thursday.

In it, he referred to the clearly left-of-center columnist as “a gasbag,” “the Hindenburg of pundits,” who has been “downright venomous lately,” especially with his most recent "bed-wetting tantrum."

And you thought Begala reserved such contempt exclusively for Republicans.

What got Paul in such a snit? Well, Broder had the gall, in a column also published Thursday, to criticize Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada):

Does it give the Dem leaders of Congress pause to realize that the enemies of the United States in Iraq, the people killing our troops, are banking on their political success? Reid and Pelosi might be tempted to dismiss this as the raving of a right-wing blogger. They shouldn't. It is in fact the considered view of someone they surely see as a respected, nay, an authoritative source: no less than the Baghdad bureau chief of the New York Times, John Burns.

Burns was a guest on this morning's "Today." In the set-up piece, NBC White House correspondent Kelly O'Donnell rolled a clip of precisely the kind of politics to which Burns later alluded, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid [D-NV] fumed: "No more will the Congress turn a blind eye to the Bush administration's incompetence and dishonesty." When's the last time Reid spoke with such vitriol about al-Qaeda? Just wondering.

View video here.

Moments later, Matt Lauer asked Burns: "By its very nature a surge is a temporary dynamic. What is the biggest factor in your opinion as to whether they can have success in the near term and the longer term?"

NYT BAGHDAD BUREAU CHIEF JOHN BURNS: Well, the number of troops, that's finite. The amount of time they can stay, we think that's probably finite, too. And the calculations of the insurgents, who, as one military officer said to me, will always trade territory for time. That's to say, they will move out, they will wait. Because they know the political dynamic in the United States is moving in a direction that is probably going to be favorable to them.