Martha Stewart on Friday said former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is "a dangerous person," and "anyone like that in government is a real problem."

Speaking with HLN's "Showbiz Tonight" producer Jenny D'Attoma, Stewart also said Palin is "very boring" and "confused." 

Ironically, when asked if she has seen any of Palin's recent interviews, Stewart replied without recognizing the hypocrisy, "I wouldn't watch her if you paid me" (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Mediaite):

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Saturday said the Senate shouldn't "focus on a man who has been retired for many years and writes a column once in a while."

This comment was directed at Washington Post columnist David Broder whose article to be published Sunday and already available online was harshly criticial of the healthcare bills in both chambers of Congress.

Given Broder's well-known stance as a left-leaning writer, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) referred to the piece in his opening remarks to Saturday's healthcare legislation debate noting that the Post's "distinguished senior columnist, certainly not a political conservative, expresses his reservation as a citizen about the steps that we could be about to take."

This led Reid to make his disparaging remark moments later (video embedded below the fold, relevant sections at 1:00 and 8:45):

A major charitable event is happening in Little Rock, Arkansas, Saturday, and former Bill Clinton apparently will not be in attendance because MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has politicized it on his "Countdown" program.

As Arkansas News reported hours ago, "Nine hundred people or more will get free medical attention from noon to 7 p.m. at the Statehouse Convention Center."

Unfortunately, according to the liberal website FireDogLake, Clinton has decided not to attend as a result of some of the things Olbermann has done on his program related to this event (h/t Hot Air):

In contending America already has health care rationing, ABC's Dr. Tim Johnson, a universal coverage advocate, on Friday night's World News asserted “we have a lot of rationing, based on income, the kind of insurance you have, the way you can navigate the health system” and “a recent Harvard study estimated that 45,000 people died each year in this country because of lack of health insurance. If that's not rationing, I don't know what is.”

That “Harvard study,” which the CBS Evening News promoted two months ago, was really produced by the Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), a left-wing advocacy group which touts itself as “the only national physician organization in the United States dedicated exclusively to implementing a single-payer national health program.” Study co-author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler of PNHP is one of five signers of an “Open Letter to President Obama to Support Single-Payer Health Care.”

What's $100 million of taxpayer money between a few U.S. Senators?

After reports surfaced of $100 million for Louisiana was added to the Senate's health care reform legislation, originally from ABC News, and subsequently commented upon by prominent lefties, like U.S. News and World Report's Bonnie Erbe as my colleague Noel Sheppard pointed out, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., took the Senate floor on Nov. 21 to announce she would vote in favor to proceed forward with the Senate Democratic leadership's bill.

She also responded to allegations that $100 million earmarked for the Louisiana was added to that legislation to sway her vote. She referred to the likes of ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl and Erbe as "very partisan Republican bloggers."

"I know that might time is up, but I would like to ask personal privilege for just one more minute to address an issue that has come up unfortunately in the last 24 hours by some very partisan Republican bloggers so I need to respond I think and will do so now," Landrieu said. "One of the provisions in the framework of this bill that I've just decided to move on to debate has to do with fixing a very difficult situation that Louisiana is facing and any other state that might have a catastrophic disaster - let's hope they don't - like we did in 2005."

With the holiday season approaching, the latest liberal fashion in media bias by omission will be papering over any hard feelings about White House holiday celebrations. Already (as Patrick Gavin of Politico has pointed out), the Jerusalem Post reported that the guest list of the annual White House Hanukkah party is being shrunk in half, from 800 to 400.

Hillary Leila Krieger wrote "Though several Jewish leaders expressed understanding for the economic and other reasons behind the cut, they acknowledged that it would likely help feed feelings in some quarters of the American Jewish community that the White House is giving them the cold shoulder."

It comes as a different attempt at outreach to Jews -- an Obama appearance before the General Assembly of North American Jewish Federations last week -- was cancelled so Obama could attend the Fort Hood memorial service. Krieger added:

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.

U.S. News and World Report's Bonnie Erbe came down strongly Friday on the $100 million "bribe" given to Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) in the Senate's healthcare reform bill.

What makes this shocking is Erbe's consistently far-left leaning views regularly reported by NewsBusters.  

Readers are advised to strap themselves in tightly, for the following blog posting by Erbe is quite a departure from her normal liberal views:

CNN's John King on Thursday claimed Attorney General Eric Holder intentionally avoided Sen. Lindsey Graham's "stumping" question during the previous day's Senate Judiciary Committtee hearing because he didn't want to admit that trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 suspects in a criminal courtroom is indeed precedent setting.

As NewsBusters reported Wednesday, Holder appeared stumped when Graham asked, "Can you give me a case in United States history where a enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?"

Speaking with WOR radio's Steve Malzberg Thursday, King said, "He knew the answer to the question. He just wasn't going to say it because...he did not want to be the one saying this is the first time we've ever done this" (15-minute audio available here, relevant section at 6:50, partial transcript follows along with embedded video of Graham-Holder exchange):

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:

What are today's biggest Big games and biggest upsets?

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: WHAT ELSE?

SENATE DEBATES HEALTHCARE REFORM

ON CSPAN 2 RIGHT NOW

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;
Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

Forget about the Great Recession. Pay no heed to home foreclosures. Ignore double digit unemployment.

The stimulus package is working! That is thrust of a New York Times article written from the alternate economic universe. Here is the happy face appraisal of the stimulus package presented by Times writers Jackie Calmes and Michael Cooper who counter the criticism of that program with this gem:

But with roughly a quarter of the stimulus money out the door after nine months, the accumulation of hard data and real-life experience has allowed more dispassionate analysts to reach a consensus that the stimulus package, messy as it is, is working.

It is amazing how a phrase can emerge seemingly out of nowhere to become the statement du jour – used, overused, and ultimately abused. Last year there was "low hanging fruit" everywhere. Today everyone’s being "thrown under the bus."

Sometimes, it’s just one word.

"As a writer, you’re always reaching for a more potent way to call somebody a jerk," Dan Harmon, the creator of the new NBC sitcom "Community" told The New York Times. In a surprisingly controversial front-page story on November 14, Times reporter Edward Wyatt tried to identify the zeitgeist by one hot "potent" word for jerk: "douche."

In total, the word has surfaced at least 76 times already this year on 26 prime-time network series, according to research by the Parents Television Council, which compiled the statistics at the request of The New York Times. That is up from 30 uses on 15 shows in all of 2007 and just six instances on four programs in 2005.

You could call it progress in media bias. For years, liberal journalists have blamed Team Bush for the death of hundreds in Hurricane Katrina. The major media found that theme of fatal incompetence simply irresistible. Time’s Michael Grunwald, who has written in-depth articles and a book about the Army Corps of Engineers, is bringing the focus back to long-standing government policies over decades.

But even Grunwald is using harsh language that Time magazine would usually disparage as talk-radio bluster. He said "Hurricane Katrina was a man-made disaster. And some of us have been screaming about that for several years...those of us who have followed this -- you know, we‘re angry about the Army Corps killing 1,000 people."

The occasion to revisit Katrina came from federal District Judge Stanwood Duval, who ruled in favor of plaintiffs who sued the federal government for compensation over hurricane damage. Duval charged the Army Corps with "monumental negligence" in its maintenance of a man-made shipping channel called the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet:

Remember earlier this year when the new era of hope and change was ushered into Washington, D.C. and President Barack Obama made the statement on day one his policies would "represent a clean break from business as usual"?

Not so fast says Charles Krauthammer, columnist for The Washington Post and Fox News regular. Krauthammer on the Nov. 20 broadcast of Fox News "Special Report with Bret Baier" explained that a certain provision put into to the Senate version of health care legislation to favor undecided Democratic senators, specifically Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., represents a different brand of politics from what Obama advertised (emphasis added).

"You asked what [Sen.] Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas will ask for," Krauthammer said. "Well, after watching Louisiana get $100 million in what have some have called 'The Louisiana Purchase,' she ought to ask for $500 million at least. And that's because Obama said he would end business as usual in Washington. If you look at the sections, it is 2006 in which the Louisiana money, it looks as if it is provision for all states which have had a proclamation of a disaster area in the last seven years, and then the fine print inside eliminates all the others except Louisiana. So it's a new kind of business as usual. I think that Steve [Hayes] is right. There is almost no way imaginable that the vote will fail tomorrow. If it is, it is the ultimate humiliation. It's the rejection of the debate even before it starts."

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):

Cam Edwards giggled as he shared his "Headline of the Week" with his audience Friday night at NRANews.com. It comes from Indianapolis: "Homeowner Holds Burglar Hostage."

Understandably, while that headline remains on Google, WXIN (Fox 59) has changed the headline now to the more appropriate "Homeowner holds burglar until police arrive." The lesson is a gun owner beats a burglar with a screwdriver:

22 year-old Jorge Barrera now faces burglary charges.

According to police, Barrera entered the home on the southwest side of Indianapolis late last night armed with a screw driver.

Let us give New York Times environmental writer Andrew Revkin credit. He is one of the few in the mainstream media reporting on the hacked global warming e-mails story which has gone viral in the blogosphere and was covered in-depth by NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard. If you aren't yet familiar with this brewing scandal then I recommend you get up to speed on this controversy by reading Sheppard's blog post.

Despite Revkin's commendable willingness to at least cover this controversy, he is still stubbornly clinging to his global warming belief...for now. Perhaps his stubbornness against veering away from the global warming doctrine is more a matter of inertia. After all, he has invested over 10 years of his life in that particular dogma and it is not easy to give it up overnight despite the shocking revelations of the e-mails. Here is Revkin's not very convincing money quote disclaimer:

The documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists. But the evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so broad and deep that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument.

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?