Winning the prize for Weirdest Front Page Story of the Week is the Tuesday Washington Post story on the NAACP spreading out to all colors – in the Maine State Prison. So now it’s the National Association for the Advancement of Criminals and Prisoners?

Post reporter Krissah Williams described the scene as NAACP leader Benjamin Todd Jealous surveyed the troops: "White face after white face, inmate after inmate -- a sea of white men with few exceptions. Here they are: the Maine State Prison Chapter of the NAACP."

With a stagnant black membership level, Jealous is seeking a more "inclusive" approach:

Though the organization has 2,200 chapters, Jealous has taken a special interest in this Maine group because of the NAACP's ongoing attempts to reach beyond its core in the black community. The association's membership has been stagnant at about half a million members for years, and part of Jealous's plan to increase that number is to be more inclusive.

Word choice can be a subtle but effective way in which the media colorfully editorialize on the news, skewing the perceptions of readers in one direction or another. Take Washington Post's Philip Rucker, who did masterful job in skewing his 19-paragaph-long page A4 story "Activists bring 'tea party' to Capitol Hill" in favor of ObamaCare proponents while smearing conservatives in a negative light.

Rucker's labeling bias was a thread woven through the entire piece, starting with the lead paragraph (emphasis mine):

The Washington Post this afternoon reported "President Obama delivers remarks on Ft. Hood shooting at end of tribal leaders conference." The transcript begins:

SPEAKER: PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

[*] OBAMA: Please, everybody, have a seat. Let me first of all just thank Ken and the entire Department of the Interior staff for organizing just an extraordinary conference.

I want to thank my Cabinet members and senior administration officials who participated today. I hear that Dr. Joe Medicine Crow (ph) was around, and so I want to give a shout out to that Congressional Medal of Honor winner. It's good to see you.

Ah, the dangers of giving shout outs without a teleprompter.  Crow is not a Medal of Honor recipient.  As noted by the Congressional Medal of Honor Society:

Leave to a brilliant mind like Keith Olbermann, who finally decided to show his face on live TV after Nov. 3's Democratic defeat, to throw a temper tantrum about the public display of opposition to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's that occurred on the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol on Nov.5.

After Olbermann and Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson all but declared Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., organizer of the "House Call" event, an enemy of the state, they predictably came to the conclusion the event was racist. However to overcome that hurdle, Olbermann suggested organizers "pay" minorities to show up to make the cause look more diverse.

"On an associated point with this, how do the organizers of this not realize, ‘You know what, we had better get somehow, even if we have to pay them to show up, some black faces, some brown faces, some Asian people or somebody in this crowd other than the crowd we were seeing?'" Olbermann said. "Every piece of videotape I looked at looks exactly the same. This is otherwise going to look like a pro-Apartheid rally in South Africa 35 or 40 years ago."

An openly gay city council candidate is targeted by malicious campaign literature suggesting he may be a pedophile and subsequently loses his bid for alderman.

It's the type of story highlighting bigotry and homophobia that the mainstream media would love to trumpet and it happened just days ago in the 2009 city elections in Annapolis, Md.

Unfortunately for Scott Bowling, he's a Republican in the liberal capital city of Maryland.

Aside from coverage in the Annapolis Capital and the Baltimore Sun's Maryland Politics blog, a Google News search and Nexis searches of the AP wire, major newspapers, and network transcripts revealed no coverage of the story in the mainstream media:

During the 2009 Virginia gubernatorial election, the Washington Post waged a relentless campaign to defeat Republican Bob McDonnell. Starting on Wednesday, after the GOP nominee received almost 59 percent of the vote, the newspaper began dispensing advice: Raise taxes.

On Wednesday, a Post editorial assessed the "lessons" of the election and whined, "We remain skeptical of the flimsy filigree he passed off as a transportation plan, which rejects any fresh taxes to pay for new roads. But by dint of his victory he has earned the right to show it will work." [Emphasis added.]

Even though voters overwhelmingly opposed the higher taxes candidate, Democrat Creigh Deeds, the editorial continued: "Yet it remains true that the two of the most successful, best-respected and most popular of Virginia's governors in the past quarter century...raised taxes to put the state's finances on a surer footing and invest in the long-term health of its roads, bridges, school and public safety."

Here's news you can virtually guarantee won't get noticed by what remains of the establishment media.

Whole Foods (WFMI) announced its financial results for the quarter ended September 30 yesterday. The quarter closed about 50 days after outraged leftists called for a boycott of the grocery chain to retaliate for a Wall Street Journal op-ed written by CEO John Mackey. In that column, Mackey identified "Eight things we can do to improve health care without adding to the deficit," asserting that:

The last thing our country needs is a massive new health care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction — toward less government control and more individual empowerment.

Well, if there's so much support out there for statist health care, you would think that the Whole Foods boycott dedicated to punishing an opponent would have had a significant impact on the company's most recent quarterly results.

You would be wrong:

Today's Metro section front-pager by Washington Post's Amy Gardner -- "McDonnell team rose to challenge in darkest hour" -- reminded me of a line from "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy"

"From deep down in my stomach, with every inch of me, I pure, straight hate you. But g*d***it, do I respect you!" seethes rival TV station anchor Wes Mantooth (Vince Vaughn) to Burgundy (Will Ferrell).

The Washington Post hatefully threw all it had at making the "thesis issue" a career killer for McDonnell, who went on to win 54 percent of the women's vote in Tuesday election. But looking back, Post staffer Amy Gardner gave readers a look into how the McDonnell campaign hunkered down, stuck with a disciplined message, and thwarted the paper's scheme to "macaca" McDonnell:

Unlike some Washington Post ombudsmen (ahem, Geneva Overholser), Andrew Alexander deserves credit for raising the question of liberal bias, and reporters’ connections to the liberal movement, even by marriage. But he didn’t tell the whole story. At best, he gets an I for Incomplete. On Sunday, Alexander reported:

Post reporter Juliet Eilperin covers the contentious issue of climate change. Her husband, a noted expert on the subject, coordinates international climate policy as a part-time senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. She has quoted officials from the liberal think tank in her stories, although not her spouse. Climate change is discussed at home, she said, but a "church-state separation" exists for areas where their work overlaps.

This kind of spousal connection would not be easily tolerated by the Post if Eilperin was a married to an expert for ExxonMobil. She would be moved off the green beat. Alexander bows briefly to that notion, but doesn’t really buy it:

How much is a Washington Post endorsement worth? Not a lot, apparently. The Post endorsed 26 candidates in Virginia’s November 4 elections. Only 12 of them won. The liberal newspaper’s picks for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general, all Democrats, lost, averaging only 42.4 percent of the vote. Almost 239,000 Virginians voted against the wishes of this establishment news outlet.

The Post lobbied heavily for their gubernatorial candidate, Creigh Deeds (who received only 41.2 percent of the vote), offering a seemingly endless number of stories about Republican Bob McDonnell and a thesis he wrote in 1989. (McDonnell garnered 58.6 percent of the vote.) As for the Virginia House of Democrats, the paper endorsed in 23 races and only 12 won. Adding up all the numbers, the Post's candidates combined for 229,596 votes, compared to 238,854 against, for a 51 to 49 percent defeat.

In the State House, the Post supported just four Republicans. Three of those, in heavily liberal districts, lost. The other one, Thomas D. Rust, has repeatedly bucked his own party. He won.

This afternoon, the Washington Post's Web site offers readers two looks at how the Democrats and the GOP will proceed following the 2009 elections, but, surprise, surprise, the paper only forsees internecine squabbles for the GOP.

"Republicans revel in wins but ideological fissures loom," the headline to Washington Post staffer Philip Rucker and Perry Bacon's news piece filed at 2:30 p.m. EST today. On the other side of the coin, the Post offered an "analysis" piece from Dan Balz published shortly after 10 a.m. today that posits that the "Contests serve as warning to Democrats: It's not 2008 anymore."

Even before delving into the content of the articles, it's clear by the  labeling that the Post sees the GOP's pending "ideological fissures" as a matter of objective news reporting, while the Democratic postmortem is a matter of informed "analysis," not hard news.

For their part, Rucker and Bacon aimed, like others in the mainstream media -- click here, here, and here --  to gin up an ominous narrative for the GOP party-wide from the New York 23rd congressional district saga:

On the home page of the Washington Post website this morning, the headline for liberal columnist Ruth Marcus is "Ignore the hype." Inside the newspaper, it's "As Virginia goes, not so much." Marcus advises that this GOP landslide is all some meaningless fairy tale:

Advice to readers about the coming orgy of analysis about the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections: Ignore it. Disquisitions on The Meaning of It All for President Obama or the 2009 results as a harbinger for Congress in 2010 have scant basis in reality.

Over-interpreting election results is an occupational hazard for political reporters. This problem is particularly acute in the year after a presidential contest, when we are suffering from a bad case of electoral withdrawal.

Marcus marshals some numbers to argue that governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey are not always great predictors of midterm and presidential elections to come. Let's stipulate that for a second, but ask: doesn't it also argue that reporters may have over-interpreted the mandate and charisma of Barack Hussein Obama?

"Couple mix Christian and pagan rituals" the teaser headline called out to me at the bottom of the page A1 of the November 2 edition of the Washington Post. Promising a look at a couple  "celebrat[ing] the rites of marriage in a most unorthodox fashion," I turned to the Style section front page to read more.

But what followed in Ellen McCarthy's "For heathens' sake" only confirmed when it comes to religion, particularly orthodox Christianity, the media just don't get it.

McCarthy's feature made abundantly clear to any orthodox Christian reader than the cermony she witnessed was 100 percent pagan. The only tenuous claim to Christian influence in the ceremony presided over by a "black-robed high priest and priestess" was the use of the "Christian" ritual of the "unity candle" and the fact that the bride, raised Catholic, has not "formally dedicated herself to the [pagan] religion but now refers to herself as a Catholic witch."

Although he spent 14 paragraphs fleshing out all the ways that lightning-fast (25 mph) $19,000 retail-priced Wheego Whip LSV is "a tough sell" to readers in the nation's capital region, Washington Post auto columnist Warren Brown concluded his November 1 review by hailing the electric car as a ride "meant for visionaries."

That's right, although the Wheego is a puny two-seater that gets an average 40 miles per full charge, and its range could be "negatively affected by" things like uphill driving, listening to the radio, and cold weather, the Wheego is really important as a multi-thousand dollar way of telling the world you're forward-thinking:

Pity the staff at the Washington Post. Their compatriots at the New York or Los Angeles Times luxuriate in a sea of enlightenment, with blue state voters as far as the eye can see. But the Posties must live and work in uncomfortable proximity to Red State Virginia, with only the thin buffer of the Northern Virginia suburbs between them and the gun-toting snake handlers.

Every now and then the Post publishes the journalistic equivalent of an involuntary shudder at its plight. The latest was an Oct. 30 editorial excoriating Ken Cuccinelli, the GOP candidate for Virginia attorney general. What gave the Post the vapors are statements Cuccinelli made about homosexuality in an interview with the Norfolk-based Virginian-Pilot.

When a woman writes a book in which she claims she had 15 abortions in 15 years, it’s amazing that The Washington Post can write a sympathetic account of her barrage of life-ending "choices" and save the moral judgment for pro-lifers. But that’s exactly what reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia did in Friday’s Post. In paragraph 44 of their profile of "abortion addict" Irene Vilar, the pro-life movement finally gets to speak – as a hateful cartoon.

Lately, he [her husband] has tried to shield her from "violent, hateful and utterly un-Christian comments" on blogs, he says. On the Internet, she has been called a "monster," "scuzzy," a "skank." A poster at USbacklash.org wrote that she is "one of the sickest people who ever lived, including Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, or any other murderer I can think of! Too bad one of her suicide attempts didn't take. . . . We hope she keeps trying!"

The Washington Post on Thursday continued its quest to defeat Virginia’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, bizarrely citing a "non-partisan" group that, in reality, has endorsed Bob McDonnell’s Democratic opponent. The article by Anita Kumar contained this loaded headline: "McDonnell critics question ideology: Some saw agenda in legal opinions."

Kumar quoted Claire Guthrie Gastanaga, a lobbyist for "Equality Virginia, a nonpartisan gay rights group." Yet, the front page of Equality Virginia’s website features a press release entitled, "Equality Virginia PAC Endorses Deeds for Governor." The organization’s website makes a distinction between its political action committee (EVPAC) and its "non-partisan" activities. However, Kumar made no such clarification. How can a group be non-partisan and endorse the Democratic nominee?

The latest report by the Parents Television Council on violence against women in prime-time broadcast TV drew major-media attention – some of it flagrantly incorrect. Washington Post TV writer Lisa de Moraes complained that PTC should have studied cable shows instead of broadcast shows, and only mangled statistics by a favor of...a million:

The PTC report brings us no closer to understanding the situation. In Feburary 2004, 2.9 children ages 2 to 11 watched those four broadcast networks that PTC whomped on in this study. Meanwhile more than 5 million children watched prime-time cable TV. And, in May 2009, 1.5 million children watched ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox in prime time, while more than 7 million children chose cable programming instead.

Want to be noticed by any one of the hosts that have a primetime show on MSNBC's weeknight lineup? Just figure out a way to make Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.  the subject matter, and there's an excellent chance either Ed Schultz, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow will take a shot at it, or her, during their shows.

In the Oct. 25 Washington Post, George Will penned a column about Bachmann, outlining her ascendancy into the national spotlight, which told of her start in politics and how she grew to become reviled by the left. And it was just a matter time before one of the charming personalities on MSNBC made some sort of remarks about the column, albeit two days later. That came on Olbermann's Oct. 27 "Countdown" broadcast.

The Left is ecstatic about the latest ABC News-Washington Post poll, which claimed a surge in public support for the so-called "public option," wrapped in the (insincere) rhetoric of "choice" and "competition." The poll asks if the government should "create a new health insurance plan to compete with private insurance plans," and 57 percent agree. Happy days are here again for liberals.

Liberals in the media found even better news to declare: a new low for the Republican Party, since only 20 percent of those surveyed "usually" think of themselves as Republicans. (Another 19 percent "lean more" toward the Republicans, but that number is being ignored because 20 percent sounds better.) MSNBC’s David Shuster openly hoped: "Have centrists been frightened away from the Republican Party by the right-wing birthers, Tenthers, and town hall screamers?"