A special Captionfest, inspired by Gawker, which today published photos it says are of Katie Couric from a September 5, 2006 party celebrating Couric's first spin behind the anchor desk for the CBS "Evening News."

Americans have watched a parade of painful episodes of public humiliation of politicians' wives in sex scandals. But in constructing a list of Top Ten Sex Scandal Details of the Decade for its 20/10 project, Newsweek recruited a porn star named Sasha Grey to slam these wronged spouses as knowing shrews and lecture about the horror of "Bible-belt-infused guilt." The number ten scandal detail on the list was "Governor Sanford's Appalachian Adventure," and Jenny Sanford apparently hadn't been insulted enough:

I have to believe that many women who are married to men with power are aware of affairs, and accept it. Don’t ask, don’t tell; as long as they receive something in exchange from their husband—whether that exchange be children, money, material items, or sex. We create our own morals. It’s once the affair goes public that morals change.

"American Idol" runner-up Adam Lambert's vocals weren't top-notch at last night's American Music Awards, but nobody really noticed. How could they, given his over-the-top and in-your-face sexual choreography?

Lambert's act during the show, aired on ABC, featured male dancers on leashes, an open-mouth kiss between Lambert and his male keyboardist, and simulated oral sex, both male-on-male and female-on-male.

Naturally, boundary-pushing Hollywood writers hailed Lambert's performance.

"As a TV viewer, I thought Lambert's performance was a gas, a delight, a blast of brash vulgarity in the midst of ordinary vulgarity," wrote Entertainment Weekly's Ken Tucker.

The release of internal emails from Britain's University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit shows scientists plotting to ostracize and marginalize other researchers who question their assumptions on anthropogenic global warming. Yet the Washington Post finds that such a strategy is but a natural reaction to attacks on these scientists by climate skeptics.

The Post characterizes the CRU, and the larger circle of scientists pushing the global warming theory, as "an intellectual circle that appears to feel very much under attack." Readers must be forgiven for their confusion about who exactly is being attacked, as the Post goes on to detail CRU communications calling for a boycott of academic journals that publish articles critical of the supposed "consensus" on global warming. (Noel Sheppard reported on these and other incendiary statements in a Friday post.)

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report," CRU director Phil Jones wrote of two skeptical academic works. "Kevin and I will keep them out somehow--even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

Over the weekend, Newsweek assistant managing editor Evan Thomas offered an intriguing insight into the MSM’s approach to the liberal health care bill slowly rolling its way through the Democratic-controlled Congress. After conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer accurately pointed out how the Senate bill only pretends to be “deficit-neutral” by front-loading the tax collection process while delaying the payouts, Thomas agreed: “Charles is right. This bill is a fiscal fraud.”

But he quickly added: “I’d still vote for it.”

NPR’s Nina Totenberg attempted to defend the Senate bill as one that “actually tries to do something about costs.” But she, too, was insistent on the need for congressional passage: “I am not saying it’s ideal. But we have to start this.  But if we don't get a health care bill this time, it is probably the last chance.”

Considering how fond liberals are of "teachable moments," it was surprising that CBS's "60 Minutes" missed one on its Nov. 22 broadcast.

"60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft took an in-depth look at one of the most expensive aspects of modern health care - the cost of end of life care. However, he didn't highlight the federal government's culpability in driving up those costs, or what it might mean for health care reform.

"Every medical study ever conducted has concluded 100 percent of all Americans will eventually die," Kroft said. "This comes as no great surprise. But, the amount of money being spent at the end of people lives probably will. Last year, Medicare paid $50 billion just for doctors' and hospital bills during the last two months of patients lives. That's more than the budget of the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of Education. And it's been estimated that 20 to 30 percent of these medical expenditures may have had no meaningful impact."

Continuing the push for medical marijuana, on Monday’s CBS Early Show co-host Russ Mitchell declared: “As more youngsters are being diagnosed with autism, there is a growing need for alternative treatments. One California mother says medical marijuana has made vast improvements in her autistic son.”

Correspondent Hattie Kauffman reported: “Joey is severely autistic, so uninterested in food he was wasting away....But Mieko [Joey’s mother] claims it all changed with marijuana brownies.” Meiko Perez argued: “They’re seeing Joey come out. He’s never made noises. We didn’t even know he could make noise until the first batch of brownies.”

At the end of the brief report, Kauffman noted mild criticism of the controversial treatment: “The American Academy of Pediatrics opposes legalization of marijuana, but supports more research.” She then concluded: “Though there’s absolutely no evidence Marijuana cures autism, this mom says it has improved her child’s life.”

Twelve days ago I noted how the Baltimore Sun failed to mention indicted Mayor Sheila Dixon's Democratic Party affiliation in a story about an embezzlement trial. The mayor stands accused of misappropriating gift cards intended for poor Baltimoreans. Instead of making sure the donated retail gift cards got into the hands of needy folks, Dixon is alleged to have used them for her own personal shopping spree.

Today, with the Dixon jury literally still out, the Sun's Annie Linskey and Julie Bykowicz did mention Dixon's Democratic Party affiliation, albeit in the very last sentence of their November 23 14-paragraph story published in the Metro section of the Washington Post*:

A trove of emails back and forth among climatologists stolen from a server at the University of East Anglia in Britain has caused shock waves and may even have repercussions against the idea that humans are making a significant and harmful contribution to global warming. The emails include some shockingly shoddy science and venomous attacks on climate-change dissenters by ostensibly objective climate scientists.

In a New York Times Saturday front-page story, environmental reporter Andrew Revkin showed, albeit too politely, that the emails show global warming propagandists in a bad light: “Hacked E-Mail Is  New Fodder For Climate Change Dispute.”

But why won’t the Times post the raw documents on its site?

Revkin’s corresponding post on his nytimes.com Dot Earth blog displayed institutional hypocrisy:

The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.

On Saturday, Fox News analyst Jim Pinkerton credited the Media Research Center for highlighting the lack of media outrage over the Obama administration’s fake congressional district scandal. After referencing the revelation that the Recovery.gov website claimed thousands of jobs had been saved in districts that don’t exist, Pinkerton suggested, "They [Obama officials] were embarrassed, but as the Media Research Center pointed out, the morning shows gave the story exactly 21 seconds."

Pinkerton was referencing a November 17 NewsBusters blog which noted that Tuesday’s Early Show on CBS and NBC’s Today show completely skipped the developing story. ABC’s Good Morning America devoted just 21 seconds to the topic. On Saturday’s Fox News Watch, Pinkerton concluded, "So, no, [the Obama administration will] get over it, because the media aren't going to turn this into another Watergate."

Leave it to Larry to fan the flames . . .

On today's Morning Joe, Larry O'Donnell called the Roman Catholic bishop who barred Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.) from taking communion a "political hack."

Interestingly, Mika Brzezinski had a totally different take, arguing the controversy was not about the Church but about Kennedy publicizing the matter in a play to his base. Though Bishop Thomas Tobin sent his letter to Kennedy more than two years ago, its contents didn't come to light until Kennedy recently revealed them to a Rhode Island newspaper.

Without question one of the most vehement, unapologetic Sarah Palin haters on national television is NBC's Norah O'Donnell.

So contemptuous of the former Alaska Governor is O'Donnell that she actually went to a Palin book signing event last week armed with crib notes to attack fans of the outspoken conservative.

Seeing this as the straw that broke the camel's back, Palin documentarian John Ziegler has called for NBC to fire O'Donnell.

In a piece he published at his website, Ziegler outlined his reasons:  

Newsweek’s 20/10 Project has a list of the Decade’s Worst Tactical Blunders. It might not be a shock that Newsweek decided three of the top four were made by Team Bush – and the fourth was John Kerry for letting Swift Boaters prevent him from taking that awful Bush out. What might be surprising are the authors of the little articles that accompany the list. The number one blunder was "Bush’s Katrina Flyover." The author was Bush-hating atheist scold Bill Maher:

But there was something about Bush’s response to Katrina that did bother me—oh, yeah, it was that he didn’t have one. Nor did the former dildo salesman he appointed to head FEMA. In other words, I get far more angry when politicians don’t do their jobs than when they get their pictures taken pretending to do somebody else’s.

The second biggest blunder of the decade was "Kerry Lets Himself Get Swift-Boated" by Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter. Conservative "lies" outpaced liberal "facts," thanks to Kerry’s decision to stay out of the rebuttal battle:

Newsweek's Howard Fineman thinks Barack Obama is a lot like Ronald Reagan.

This humorously comes coincident with MSNBC's Chris Matthews declaring the current White House resident "Carteresque."

Obviously they can't both be right, right?

Of course not, for in the case of "Channeling the Gipper: For inspiration, Obama looks to Reagan," Fineman couldn't be more wrong (h/t Jennifer Rubin):

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: the liberal elite's hostility towards capitalism.

The elite hostility to business — a holdover from Europe, perhaps, where aristocrats looked down on “trade,” or an unconscious echo of Marxism — is unseemly and harmful to both general prosperity and the individuals who are influenced by it to avoid productive enterprise. It crops up in President Obama’s commencement addresses sneering at students who want to “take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy” and in Michelle Obama’s urging hard-pressed women in Ohio, “Don’t go into corporate America.” It’s nice that some people, like senators’ wives, can make $300,000 a year in “the helping industry,” but it’s business that produces the wealth that allows such nonprofit generosity.

Killing the goose that lays the golden egg?

Um...Let me guess. Nancy Franklin is somewhat less than enamored with Glenn Beck. In fact, she downright hates and despises him as you can see in her New Yorker article. Ironically Franklin accuses Beck of spreading venom in her incredibly venomous story which concludes by comparing him to the character of Lonesome Rhodes in the excellent 1957 film, A Face in the Crowd.

A few of the "love notes" tossed in Beck's direction:

Glenn Beck, the energetically hateful, truth-twisting radio and Fox News Channel talk-show host, was absent from the airwaves for a week...

The persona that Beck has cobbled together over the past few years combines a determination to draw attention to himself, because what he has to say is so important, with an outsized, in-your-face show of modesty...

Beck looks cherubic, with his boyish crewcut, his rubbery, expressive face, his wide eyes, and his seemingly innocent smile, but he has a wizened heart and a sulfurous outlook on American life and politics.

The Library of Congress' new exhibit on Herbert Block (often known as "Herblock") completely avoids labeling the famous cartoonist as a liberal, instead portraying him as an "independent spirit." The retrospective features 81 poster-sized drawings by the late Washington Post artist and never once identifies Block's politics.

The exhibit, which opened on October 13, 2009, and can be found in Washington, D.C., pretends that the cartoonist was a bold truth-teller. Taking in the display on Saturday, I was struck by how often this myth was touted. One section gushed over Block, who worked for the Post from 1946 to his death in 2001, for practicing his art "with fearless independence." Yet, he was really just a liberal journalist, something the exhibits celebrate, even if the L-word isn’t used.

Visitors are told that "Reagan appalled Block in a way that only Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon had done before." One cartoon showed Ronald Reagan driving by the homeless, ignoring their plight. (In the comic, the President quipped, "Strange how some choose to live like that, instead of choosing to be rich like us.")

Following in the wake of CNN last week, MSNBC.com ran an Associated Press dispatch from Rachel D’Oro somehow finding headline news in the months-old Southern Poverty Law Center’s guesstimate that 50 new right-wing militias have been formed since Barack Obama became president.

Could this recycled storyline be an attempt to shift the focus from the Fort Hood attack? The SPLC is identified not as a left-wing group founded by a George McGovern fundraiser, but simply as a "nonpartisan civil-rights organization." The AP article plays up Janet Napolitano’s report on the coming right-wing terrorist threat, and then D’Oro plays up another (unlabeled) leftist expert:

In the first five months of Obama's presidency, racist, right-wing extremists killed at least nine people, according to Chip Berlet, senior analyst with Political Research Associates, a Somerville, Mass., think tank.

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing.net notes that Associated Press has a warped view of fair use. While they try to get bloggers to pay a license fee to quote five or more words from AP articles, when it came to the Sarah Palin book they turned it inside out.

"The AP was determined to get the first copy," Oreskes [a senior managing editor] wrote, detailing how the writers learned a store had "inadvertently placed the book on sale five days before its official Nov. 17 release date." "They bought a copy, ripped it from its spine and scanned it into the system so it could be read and electronically searched," he wrote.

Not only is this an abomination of fair use, I don't think it's the least bit legal given they likely did it in part so 11 different investigative reporters could read one copy at the same time.

In the wake of Saturday's Senate vote to move forward with debate on controversial healthcare reform legislation, CNN's John King may have posed one of the best questions asked on any of Sunday's political talk shows:

To get Senator [Mary] Landrieu's vote, just to proceed, just to go across the starting line, language was inserted in the bill that gives her state up to $300 million. To get Senator [Ben] Nelson's vote, [Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid] agreed to drop a request that you take away the antitrust exemptions for insurance companies...[Is healthcare reform] important enough to buy votes?

This marvelous question was asked on Sunday's "State of the Union." In attendance were Democrat Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Michael Bennet of Colorado, and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire.

Better still, King pointed a finger at President Obama who promised during the campaign "to change the way Washington works" (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript, h/t Breitbart TV):