Yesterday, CBS News.com's Political Hotsheet blog reported on "Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln and the Politics of the Health Care Vote."  It notes:

The focus is also on some Democrats with doubts, notably Louisiana's Mary Landrieu and Nebraska's Ben Nelson, who aren't up but do represent very red states, and Arkansas' Blanche Lincoln, who is, and could face a tough test in 2010.

The piece later states that Nelson:

has cast many a conservative vote in representing a state that, while historically willing to send Democrats to the Senate, is nonetheless firmly Republican overall.

Many a conservative vote?  According to interest group ratings compiled by Project Vote Smart, for 2008 the American Conservative Union assigned Nelson a rating of 16.  The National Taxpayers Union gave him a rating of F. Nelson received a 100 from the liberal AFL-CIO for 2008 and an A for 2007-2008 from the liberal National Education Association.  For 2007, Nelson racked up a 5 with Americans for Tax Reform.

At this point, there should be little doubt that there is a concerted attempt underway to use the war in Afghanistan as a justification for punitively taxing high earners.

Last weekend (noted at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), the New York Times discovered that wars cost money. It cited Wisconsin Democratic Congressman David Obey's concern that funding the Afghanistan effort at the level requested months ago by General Stanley A. McChrystal would "devour virtually any other priorities that the president or anyone in Congress had."

Thursday, as reported by AFP (noted last night at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), House Democratic heavy-hitters Barney Frank, John Murtha, and (no surprise) Obey announced the "Share The Sacrifice Act of 2010," an income-tax surcharge that overwhelmingly targets high-income earners.

Now Michigan Democratic Senator Carl Levin has weighed in. Bloomberg dutifully carried his water, as seen in this graphic containing the first four paragraphs of the report:

You've got to hand it to the propagandists at the AFP. When heavy-hitting members of the party they favor announce an idea whose main purpose is, as the New York Times suddenly "discovered" last weekend, to remind people that wars cost money and distract from supposedly more important priorities, the wire service leaps into action.

Even AFP acknowledges that the tax proposal by several top-tier Democrats has no chance of becoming law. But again, that's not the point. Their proposal's purpose is to remind people that spending money on wars supposedly takes money out of the mouths of children and other living things, even those in non-existent congressional districts, and to attempt to make the climate for increasing taxes in the near future more favorable.

Here are key paragraphs of the unbylined report (bolds are mine):

On today's CNN Newsroom, anchor Kyra Phillips went after the kids who supposedly bully a 10-year-old boy who refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance because homosexual marriage isn't widely accepted.  Some of his classmates allegedly call him names.  Phillips's weapon of choice was name calling:

And a message to you boys who are bullying Will, shame on you. It's obvious you are jealous that Will is smarter and more well spoken than you are. Hopefully one day you will grow up and realize that you were being the wads, dork wads.

Phillips didn't say how she knows that Will is smarter and more well spoken than his purported tormentors.  On Monday, she reported that Will is "a terrific kid."  So what makes him so smart and terrific?

UPDATE: Also see Noel Sheppard's post on the same topic, where more names are named. 

Two months ago, there was the "Dog Ate My Global Warming Data" episode. As noted at NewsBusters and at BizzyBlog (original source: National Review Online), we learned that important original information forming the underpinning of global warming alarmists' claims about the earth heating up has vanished. It is longer available and apparently can't be reverse engineered.

Today, e-mails hacked from a UK climate research facility appear at a minimum to indicate a willingness by scientists to fudge the data to make alleged warming trends more clear and convincing. At worst, the whole enterprise could be totally discredited.

Important and damming passages from certain of the e-mails have been acknowledged as authentic.

The Australian Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt claims, as paraphrased by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, that "that those e-mails expose a conspiracy to hide detrimental information from the public that argues against global warming."

Here are key paragraphs from Bolt's blog post (presented out of order because of frequent updates at that post):

In what could easily be labeled the understatement of the week and probably of the entire month of November, the Washington Post today headlined a page A22 story today "GAO warns stimulus jobs data could contain inaccuracies."

The print story is accompanied by a screenshot of Recovery.gov, which the caption beneath it notes "is the government's stimulus-tracking Web site."

Of course, the biggest inaccuracies recently observed on Recovery.gov are non-existent congressional districts purported to have been "saved or created" jobs thanks to stimulus pork sent their way. Yet Post staffer Ed O'Keefe was careful to keep that juiciest tidbit out of his entire 10-paragraph November 19 story.

As Michelle Groat of Examiner.com noted Wednesday:

Really, who knew?

In what appears to be the opening round of a rearguard action against what leftists used to call "the good war" (only because they felt they needed to pretend they had pro-war bona fides to make their anti-Iraq War arguments look stronger to the general populace), the New York Times's Christopher Drew reported last Saturday for the Sunday print edition that sending more troops to Afghanistan as General Stanley A. McChrystal has requested might cost tens of billions of dollars.

Imagine that:

High Costs Weigh on Troop Debate for Afghan War

While President Obama’s decision about sending more troops to Afghanistan is primarily a military one, it also has substantial budget implications that are adding pressure to limit the commitment, senior administration officials say.

GQ Magazine is telling a tale of two leaders. On the one side you have Barack Obama, champion of the left, leader of the mainstream media; GQ's Leader of the Year. On the other side you have Sarah Palin, pariah of the right, dangerous and poisonous to the American way according to an interview in the very same publication.

Think I'm kidding? I couldn't make this garbage up.

I'm not sure what accomplishments helped the Conde Naste publication come up with these dubious distinctions. Perhaps it is the tripling of the nation's deficit in 10 short months, bungling the swine flu vaccine, overseeing an economy with record double digit unemployment or pitting one American against the other with unpopular proposals such as socializing health care that made them annoint President Obama. Whatever it is, none of that is apparently as terrible as Sarah Palin who the author describes as showing back up on the scene despite having been "driven her back into her hole" after last year's election.

Sarah Palin is like the mole in that addictively frustrating, ultimately futile carnival game whack-a-mole. Just when we think we've driven her back into her hole, out pops the side-swept updo and rimless Kazuo Kawasaki eyeglasses from another burrow. Katie Couric plays her the fool; she discovers Twitter. The hard right champions her as the frontrunner for 2012; she leaves office. Lawsuits threaten to sack her; she comes up with death panels.

On Nov. 19, Dan Gainor, Vice President of Business & Culture for the Media Research Center, appeared on FNC's "America's Newsroom" to debate with Julia Piscitelli, a Democratic Media Consultant, about how the media has treated Sarah Palin's new book.

Today on its Web site and in its printed version, the Chicago Tribune reported on the large crowds greeting former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on her book tour.  More than a thousand enthusiastic admirers greeted her Wednesday in Grand Rapids.  Another thousand were already in line at 7:00 a.m. today for a book signing scheduled for 6:00 p.m. in Noblesville, Indiana.  Hundreds more gathered in line hours ahead of her appearance at a Ft. Wayne Meijer store.

The vision of Sarah Palin being cheered by so many common people in such common towns as Grand Rapids and Ft. Wayne and in such common venues as a Meijer store must be just too much for the deep thinkers at the Chicago Tribune.  Palin Derangement Syndrome kicked in.  Bad.  They had to provide their own version of what's happening.

"All this rightist hoopla is all so predictable," writes the newspaper's former national editor, Charles Madigan.  In the first part of the piece he decries criticism of Barack Obama's how low can you go bow to Japan's emperor and anti-Obama sentiment from the right:

Their congressional caucus, their blurting mouthpieces, their nattering nabobs of neocon nonsense, their Limbeckians (sounds like Jonathan Swift, doesn't it?) their addled and confused tea baggers, their Michelle Backmanians, they are all coming from the same place, a losers fantasyland where there is no reality other than what they think.

The Washington Post's Anne Kornblut (saved here in case her report is modified or disappears) captured a comment Obama made to U.S troops at Osan Air Base in South Korea while heading back to Washington after his Asian trip.

I believe that the comment (bolded) could be seen as shining a less than flattering light on the president's mindset:

Obama arrived on the base 3:19 p.m. local time (1 a.m. Eastern Standard Time), and received a rousing welcome from 1,500 troops in camouflage uniforms, many holding cameras or pointing cell phones to snap pictures.

"You guys make a pretty good photo op," the president said.

Does anyone think that a similar comment by Bush 43 would have escaped establishment media criticism? Let's see if this Obamism slides by without criticism.

Earlier in the report, Kornblut noted that Obama's Afghan dither continues:

Three days ago, I argued that the Washington Post was ginning up a new campaign to discredit Republican governor-elect Bob McDonnell, having failed to sink his candidacy  by its continual harping about his culturally conservative graduate's thesis at Pat Robertson's Regent University.

Today the Post confirmed my suspicions as its editorial board officially weighed in, proclaiming Robertson -- who made some controversial statements following the Fort Hood shootings about Islam -- to be "Mr. McDonnell's albatross":

It's unfair to expect politicians to be held accountable for every asinine thing that a supporter happens to say. But in this case -- when the supporter is among Mr. McDonnell's most prominent associates, and the level of support is extremely high -- it's important to know that he is as disgusted by Mr. Robertson's casual bigotry as millions of his constituents are. 

This begs the question how the Post handled the Obama/Rev. Wright controversy. My research indicates the Post was thrilled at Obama's March 2008 non-denunciation denunciation of Wright so much that the next month it all but declared it would never hound Obama ever again for anything stupid Wright should say. Let's look first at the March 19, 2008 "Moment of Truth" editorial (emphases mine):

CNN's Rick Sanchez hosted a forum of 'average joes' yesterday in a sort of focus group on Sarah Palin. CNN did not feel, however, that it needed to invite any Palin supporters. Despite claims that the group accurately represented American opinion, its responses demonstrated a total disconnect from actual public sentiment.

Sanchez, shown right in a file photo, asked the group to inform viewers of their political and party affiliations, concluding that there was "a pretty good cross-section" of Americans participating. He then asked about Palin. None of the viewers said they would vote for her in a presidential run, and none said they plan on purchasing her new book (video and transcript below the fold - h/t Townhall).

A screening of the show's guests would hardly be a surprise given Sanchez's history of playing fast and loose with the facts when conservatives are involved. He touted one of the quotes falsely attributed to Rush Limbaugh, and later apologized for his mistake, adding to his long list of retractions. He has blamed the murder of a police officer on "right wing radio" and berated Fox News for alleged bias while ignoring CNN's.

Sanchez's coverage of Palin herself has not exactly been stellar. He suggested after she stepped down as governor that she might be pregnant.

Leftists including those in the White House who presumptively and obsessively attack Fox News will not be pleased with this.

At Forbes (HT Hot Air Headlines), S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University's Center for Media and Public Affairs, asks the question, "Fox News: Fair And Balanced?" -- and answers in the affirmative. In the process, the GMU Professor of Communications also makes a number of interesting points about Fox's competitors, discusses the convergence of news and analysis, and provides useful historical context.

Using a methodology that would be difficult to refute, Lichter's work relating to campaign 2008 is in sync with what CMPA found in late 2007 (noted at the time at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) during the opening stages of the presidential campaign.

Here are key paragraphs from Lichter's commentary (bolds are mine):

Openly gay actor Ian McKellen recently told Details magazine that he proudly defaces Bibles left in hotel nightstands, ripping out pages containing verses which condemn homosexual behavior. USA Today's Leslie Miller picked up on this yesterday for the paper's "Faith & Reason" blog, after spying a blog post by colleague Barbara De Lollis in a November 16 post for her Hotel Check-In blog for USA Today.

For her part, De Lollis relayed the news item and wondered, "Could word of McKellen's habit spark a movement?" De Lollis went on to ask:

That the Associated Press's basement-level poll-cooking and poll-reporting standards are quite low, and quite agenda-driven, might as well be an article of faith by this time.

But the wire service-commissioned poll on health care, and Erica Warner's report on it (saved here for future reference, fair use, and discussion purposes; HT JammieWearingFool via Instapundit; the full poll report in PDF format is here) plumbs new depths of partisanship while making errors of both omission and commission.

Warner and AP want the big takeaway to be that taxing "the rich" is the idea the public overwhelmingly favors to pay for ObamaCare -- never mind that the same public also opposes the plan itself.

What follows is a graphic containing selected paragraphs from Werner's report:

As several networks run around with new ratify-our-liberal-bias polls insisting that Sarah Palin is completely unqualified to be president -- exquisitely timed to ruin her book tour and channel all their very obvious and partisan Palin-loathing -- where are the polls that are about 2009, as opposed to 2012?

A scan of Gallup.com and Pollingreport.com suggests that neither Gallup nor any of the networks are asking about the Fort Hood shooting -- either about whether it was terrorism or about whether it shakes people's confidence in the government's ability to protect American citizens from domestic terrorism attacks. Rasmussen had a poll that found 60 percent think Major Nidal Hasan should be tried for terrorism (and liberal blogger Greg Sargent also pulled out of that poll that a majority worried about a backlash against Muslims.)

On the KSM trial decision, there is one poll by CNN and the Opinion Research Corporation, but there is no question about the judgment of President Obama or Attorney General Holder. As Polling Report listed the questions:

Twitter has announced that it will end a list service that blatantly favored Democratic politicians by attracting viewers to their profiles while excluding GOP officials from the service.

The list service provided new Twitter users with lists of prominent message-posters they might like to follow. Watchdog groups discovered late last month that Democratic officials were prominently listed by the service, and gaining large swaths of followers as a result, while many prominent GOP politicians were excluded.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who has since withdrawn his bid for Governor, was one suggested user, and had roughly 1.2 million followers when the Associated Press reported the story on October 27. His opponent in the race for the Democratic nomination also appeared on the lists, and garnered 960,000 followers.

But none of the GOP's gubernatorial contenders appeared on the lists, and all three had fewer than 5,000 followers.

Former CNN host Lou Dobbs stuck to his guns when questions were raised if he was forced out at CNN in an interview with Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly.

However, Dobbs did make one distinction - how his detractors decided to pile on when he was critical of President Barack Obama instead of former President George W. Bush. He elaborated on this on Fox News Channel's Nov. 16 "The O'Reilly Factor."

"I discerned more of a difference between then, which was under the Bush administration, whom I was criticizing and now when it is the Obama administration and an entirely different tone was taken, not so much in the case of CNN management certainly, because there is no - my contract is very explicit. I have absolute editorial control. What I reported is what I chose to report."

After airing what she described as a "hard-hitting" ad by the Center for Reproductive Rights which ominously warned, "Don't let Congress ban abortion coverage millions of women already have," MSNBC's Dr. Nancy Snyderman today lamented to Politico's Jeanne Cummings that with Sen. Ted Kennedy gone, Democrats lack a unifying figure who could defuse an abortion battle that could mar Democratic unity on health care reform.

Snyderman praised the late pro-choice politician as a "man of his church and of his faith" (MP3 audio here):

Well, now the Catholic Church is lobbying hard to get House language into the Senate bill and then hopefully get it passed. Politico's assistant managing editor Jeanne Cummings wrote about this. And she joins me now.