If a prominent white man said all white men in Congress should vote for or against a pending piece of legislation, what do you think the media firestorm would be like?

As you ponder, consider that Jesse Jackson on Wednesday told a reception held by the Congressional Black Caucus, “You can’t vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man.”

Although the comment was first reported by The Hill at 5:42 PM EST Wednesday, LexisNexis and Google news searches identified astonishingly little media coverage.

Here's The Hill's report:

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.

As part of an ongoing retrospective of the the first decade of the 21st century, Newsweek has ginned up a boatload of top 10 lists and assigned some Hollywood celebrities and Washington politicians to pen brief blurbs to accompany some of the entries. One such list, the top 10 "History-Altering Decisions" of 2000-2009 has at least two such entries that are worthy of addressing here: Actor/comedian Dennis Leary's "Florida Uses Butterfly Ballots" [ranked #6] and Sen. John Kerry's self-congratulatory "Kerry Picks Obama to Give Keynote 2004 DNC Address" [ranked #1].

Befitting Newsweek's biases, Leary and Kerry's entries point to Obama as an almost messianic figure, as though he were the literal object of history, or at least the last 10 years of American history.

First, Leary opined about how one dramatic moment can set in motion a chain of events can profoundly affect history, in effect comparing the assassin's bullet that ended John Kennedy's life with the butterfly ballots used in 2000 in some Democrat-friendly Florida counties:

On Thursday’s CBS Early Show, after Rudy Giuliani suggested the Obama administration was trying to “satisfy left-wing critics” by trying 9/11 terrorists in civilian court, incredulous co-host Harry Smith saw no such connection: “But Hang on. So it’s – so the idea of them being tried in open court is a left-wing political agenda?”

Smith began the interview with the former New York City Mayor by skeptically wondering: “You said yesterday that this was a political decision. How is it – do you think it’s a political decision?” Giuliani responded: “Well, it’s a political decision because I believe that this is being done to satisfy left-wing critics....After all, it was lawyers in Attorney General Eric Holder’s law firm that challenged the military tribunal, challenged the habeas corpus, fought these cases all throughout. So I think this is a political agenda.”

After Smith was taken aback by the charge that liberal politics was involved in the decision, Giuliani began to explain: “Of course. Because they could be tried in military courts. As everyone else was up until now. And it would add-” Smith cut him off: “So as the attorney general yesterday, ‘we need not cower in the face of this enemy’” Giuliani shot back: “Please let me finish what I was saying. I didn’t get a chance to complete my thought.”

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.

ABC’s Robin Roberts on Thursday pressed a government official on rationing and a new recommendation that women under the age of 50 shouldn’t get regular mammograms. Talking to one of report's authors, she chided, "Dr. [Thomas] Wilt, you know many are feeling that this is trying to save money, that this is a political move."

Roberts challenged Wilt, who is with the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force. Although she didn’t specifically use the word rationing, the implication was clear: "You are an independent panel, but federally funded independent panel. How do you respond to those who feel that this is nothing more than a cost-saving measure?"

On Wednesday’s GMA, the program featured a clip of Dr. Peter Jokich, of Rush University Medical Center. Making a similar point, he derided the report: "I think it’s totally ridiculous. I may not be politically correct, but I think this is really about money and politics. It’s about the beginning of rationing care and I don’t think it’s really about the health of individual women."

Leave it to ABC and its obsession with alternate sexuality to characterize being a male or a female as a "difficult decision." Introducing an interview featuring Chastity (now Chaz) Bono on Nov. 19, "Good Morning America's" Diane Sawyer said, "There can be no decision that you make that is more complex and difficult than gender identification."

Bono explained the hardships of undergoing a sexual "transformation" and the "journey into manhood" to an extraordinarily sympathetic Chris Cuomo, saying, "Gender is between your ears, not between your legs."

This interview only adds to a long list that details ABC's fascination with the sexually bizarre. In July 2009, CMI released a study that found that ABC news programs had featured 76 segments about sexual activity in the past six months. Most of the reports related to political sex scandals or crime cases that contained a sexual element, but 11 promoted alternative sexual arrangements, such as gender changes and, even more disturbing, objectum sexualization - having romantic relationships with objects like F-15 fighter jets and the Eiffel Tower.

Members of the self-proclaimed fastest-growing union in North America have started fights at town hall meetings, share office space with ACORN and spent over $60 million to elect President Barack Obama.

The left-wing, 2.1 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and its president, Andy Stern, spent much of 2009 campaigning for health care reform that would include a government-run insurance plan, and for the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would make it easier to unionize. Critics of EFCA say it would result in worker intimidation (not something that would bother SEIU, if its recent history is any guide).

Well-connected, Stern was the most frequent White House visitor in the first six months of Obama's presidency.

But ABC, NBC and CBS haven't reported any of those things. In fact, a search of Nexis transcripts for all of 2009 only turned up one story mentioning either SEIU or Andy Stern. That was an Aug. 20 story from Jake Tapper of ABC which identified Stern as "a close ally of the President's and the leader of a major union."

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:

The attacks on former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin took an interesting turn Wednesday when MSNBC's Chris Matthews suggested that racism is at the heart of her support.

Much like mainstream media coverage of this year's Tea Parties, Matthews and "Hardball" guests Norah O'Donnell and Salon's Joan Walsh made an issue of how "white" the crowd was at a Palin book signing event in Michigan.

"This is a largely white -- almost no minorities in this crowd," reported MSNBC's O'Donnell live from the scene.

Matthews reiterated, "Well, they look like a white crowd to me," later claiming, "I think there is a tribal aspect to this thing, in other words, white vs. other people."

Walsh added, "I think you`ve got that same kind of paranoid tea party, maybe even birther crowd that talks about the Constitution, without really understanding what they are talking about" (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Greg Hengler via NBer Thomas Stewart):

The $1,000 bill has President Grover Cleveland’s face on it. The $100,000 bill has the dour image of President Woodrow Wilson.

We’ve already seen President Barack Obama attach his name and face to the $787 billion stimulus bill. And if the left has its way, the face on the $6 trillion “climate justice” bill will also be Obama’s. Or maybe it will belong to Al Gore.

December’s global warming conference in Copenhagen looms like a dark cloud on the horizon – just a few weeks away. The greedy left (and that’s pretty much all of them) is calling for “climate reparations.” A recent Rolling Stone article made it clear where lefties stand on American money going overseas. Writer Naomi Klein, who gained notoriety bashing ‘disaster capitalism,” said,  “shifting to renewable energy, according to a team of United Nations researchers, will raise the cost far more: to as much as $600 billion a year over the next decade.”

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: European lefties are slowly realizing that Obama is, well, American.

Barack Obama cast himself as a "citizen of the world" when he delivered his well-received campaign speech in Berlin in the summer of 2008. But the US president has now betrayed this claim. In his Berlin speech, he was dishonest with Europe. Since then, Obama has neglected the single most important issue for an American president who likes to imagine himself as a world citizen, namely, his country's addiction to fossil fuels and the risks of unchecked climate change...

Obama has proven himself to be unable to put an end to the lies that modern American society is based on.

An American president serving American interests? We're all doomed.

Here is more proof there is a vast chasm between Fox News and Fox Entertainment in Hollywood. In Wednesday night’s episode of Glee, a heartless Christian dad character is – of course – a big Glenn Beck watcher. The biggest liberal joke on the series is the pregnant cheerleader Quinn who leads the "Celibacy Club," who is preparing for the chastity ball, but the secret of her pregnancy gets out at the dinner table.

I don’t have the precise Beck quote, but it was an "ooh, Glenn Beck’s on" moment. TV Squad summarizes: "But the whole thing brought to light a lot about Quinn's home life: her dad watches Glenn Beck, is a heartless loser, and her mom won't stand up for her. That's all the important stuff."

In fact, she is thrown out of the house, because that’s apparently what Beck-watching Christians do when their teens get pregnant. They’re uninvolved, clueless alcoholics who don’t really know their children.

NBC's Chuck Todd and CBS's Chip Reid both concluded their interviews with President Obama conducted in Beijing by worrying about the “stress” of his job. “He laughed off the speculation about his reported weight loss,” Todd relayed on Wednesday's NBC Nightly News, “but admitted the burden of the office does weigh on him.” The MSNBC.com online video of the entire interview disclosed Todd's obsequious inquiry:

I've had a couple people ask me this at NBC, are you losing weight, do you feel the stress? Where is this coming from? Or at the one-year point, do you feel like, “Oh my God, I look in the mirror, boy, they're right, this job does age you?”

Echoing the same concern, on the CBS Evening News Chip Reid related: “Asked about the stress of the job, the President denied reports that he's skipping meals and losing weight, but he admitted it's taking a toll.” As viewers heard Obama's reply -- “You have a convergence of factors that have made this a difficult year not so much for me but for the American people. Absolutely that weighs on me” -- CBS displayed a photo of a solemn Obama, head bowed, gazing out of an Oval Office window.

"This week's abortion conversation is about politics. Let's not pretend it's about anything else," Newsweek's Lisa Miller huffed in a November 18 Newsweek.com post, complaining about how the moral issues surrounding abortion are taking on a life of their own in the health care debate.

We suffer, this week, from a moral myopia. Thanks to the passage in Congress of a health-reform bill, abortion is in the news again, but with the same old warriors brandishing their same old spears.

But while Miller went on to list both pro-life and pro-choice "old warriors," it's hard to believe her beef is with both sides of that fight equally. Miller laments that:

Our entire health-care system (and the proposed reform) is rife with "complex moral issues." To activate our consciences only in the realm of abortion relieves those consciences of too much responsibility. 

Tuesday’s World News with Charles Gibson showed clips of an interview between Barbara Walters and Sarah Palin which will air on Friday’s 20/20. At one point, Walters seemed to allude to the fact that there is a misconception that Palin once claimed that “I can see Russia from my house,” during the 2008 campaign, as evidence of her foreign policy experience. But Walters did not clearly identify those words as part of the famous Saturday Night Live skit as they were uttered by Tina Fey playing Palin to parody what the Alaska governor had actually said in an interview with Gibson from September 2008. Walters:

On the business of “I can see Russia from my backyard,” what you did say to Charlie Gibson was that there were places in Alaska where one could see Russia. Do you still feel that Alaska’s proximity to Russia from whatever place you can see it, is significant foreign policy experience?

As Gibson and Palin discussed the conflict between Russia and Georgia, Gibson had asked last year, "What insight into Russian actions particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of this state give you?"

Newsweek religion editor Lisa Miller, contributing to her magazine’s “20/10” list of top 10 cultural moments of the past decade, revisited the “furor surrounding...[the] alleged anti-Semitism” of Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ, and concluded “the film is, in fact, anti-Semitic.” Miller also accused Gibson of making “Jesus in his own image.”

The 2004 film was number eight on Newsweek’s list of cultural moments, and the religion editor began her synopsis by rehashing another of the critics’ main charges about the movie- its apparent glorification of violence: “Mel Gibson’s pious gorefest The Passion of the Christ may not be remembered for all the controversy it courted upon its release, or for its surprise opening-weekend take of $83 million—and perhaps not even for its director’s widely mocked decision to have his actors speak only Latin and Aramaic.” Widely-mocked? How did she come to that conclusion? More than a few outlets, including the notoriously liberal NPR, noted how the movie revived interest in Aramaic, the language spoken by the Jews in the 1st century AD.

With those lines of criticism of the way, Miller moved on to the criticism which she bought the most- its supposed anti-Semitism: “Nor will The Passion be chiefly remembered for the furor surrounding its alleged anti-Semitism. (The film is, in fact, anti-Semitic. Those most thirsty for Jesus’s blood are the Jews whose brown teeth and matted hair disallow any individuality. Meanwhile, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate—who, according to history, did sentence Jesus to death—is as soulful and ambivalent as Hamlet.).”

During Wednesday's Justice Department oversight hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) stumped Attorney General Eric Holder on what should have been a fairly routine question for America's top law enforcement official.

Maybe more surprisingly, NPR reported it at its website.

As NPR's Frank James noted, "The exchange started with Graham stumping Holder with a question one would have thought the attorney general would have been prepared for."

I quite agree (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript, h/t Steve Malzberg):

There’s liberal hypocrisy on the part of New York Times economics columnist and left-wing blog-follower Paul Krugman in his Monday nytimes.com blog post, "Proposed extensions of Godwin’s Law."

Leading into a discussion of how he thinks people should discuss inflation and interest rates, Krugman said:

Godwin’s Law -- which says that in any sufficiently long online discussion, someone will compare his opponent to Hitler -- is often interpreted to mean that if you do, in fact, start making Nazi comparisons, you’ve lost the argument and can no longer be taken seriously. I’m all for that. (Does this mean that we should no longer take any significant figure in the Republican Party seriously? Yes, it does.)

Newsweek's effort to take a stab at former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on the heels of her book tour appears to be backfiring - at least from a legal standpoint.

Recently, the latest cover of Newsweek took an image of Palin that originally appeared in Runner's World magazine. Palin has criticized the posting on her Facebook page, as NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard reported. "The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now," she wrote.

And Newsweek's Jon Meacham insists the magazine did nothing wrong - that this is just the nature of what they do at Newsweek.

"We chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover, which is what we always try to do," Meacham said to the Huffington Post on Nov. 17. "We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard."