On the night before Thanksgiving, just an hour after Rosie O’Donnell had publicly belly-flopped with a horrible attempt at an old-time variety show on NBC, Barbara Walters made a fool of herself interviewing Barack and Michelle Obama. The toughest questions dealt with whether there was enough "change" in his cabinet picks, and whether he was "waffling" on tax hikes for the rich – questions his (and ABC’s) liberal base would enjoy.

Let’s go back eight years. On the Friday before the Inauguration, Walters interviewed then-President-elect George Bush and his wife Laura. But it was only one part of a routine "20/20" hour, and she brought harsh questions to carve up Attorney General nominee John Ashcroft as a divisive disaster.

This time, the media’s favorite won. The Obama interview drew a whole hour, which Walters promoted with a gooey splash of Obama fawning and interview clips all across the ABC News schedule. She was so ubiquitous one might have expected her to plug the Obamas in a cameo appearance on an ABC soap opera like "All My Children."

Do as I say, not as I do.

That appears to be Jim Cramer's philosophy. The CNBC "Mad Monday" host told NBC "Today" show viewers Dec. 2 that comparisons between the current economy and the Great Depression were inappropriate.

 "[T]hat's got to be taken off the table," Cramer told "Today" host Meredith Vieira. "There have been enough things done by this government to absolutely preclude that. I, myself, do not want to use that term ever again on the ‘Today' show even to compare it. Things are very different. We do need help from Europe; we need help from China. But take the Great Depression talk off the table. That is scare tactics."

 "I'm reluctant to start talking like that," Cramer said of describing the current recession as "the longest since World War II," as Vieira did. "I've adopted a ‘just the facts, ma'am,' approach, kind of a little bit more of a ‘Dragnet' approach, so to speak. Because when we give those characterizations what happens is we can affect things."

He was right. Comparisons to the Great Depression are way off the mark - Cramer makes them enough, he ought to know.

Noel Sheppard said there’s more to the Frost/Nixon fallout with Ron Howard. Over at Foxnews.com, Jim Pinkerton blogged that Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace "threw a fair-and-balanced apple of discord" into the liberal Dubya-as-Nixon theorizing at a Monday night panel discussion after the movie was screened at the National Geographic Society. The Q&A was moderated by liberal historian Robert Dallek, and included director Ron Howard, screenwriter Peter Morgan, and James Reston Jr., son of the liberal New York Times columnist of the same name and a Frost researcher featured in the film. Reston said the film was a metaphor for Bush, and Wallace pounced:

"To compare George W. Bush to Richard Nixon is to trivialize Nixon’s crimes and is a disservice to Bush," Wallace said. Recalling that 3,000 people were killed on 9/11, and noting that there hadn’t been any attacks on U.S. soil since, Wallace suggested that something had been done right. That’s why, he said, "we are all sitting here tonight so comfortably"—and not afraid of another terrorist attack.

Director Ron Howard appeared for a C-SPAN Washington Journal interview Monday morning on Capitol Hill with British screenwriter Peter Morgan to discuss their new film Frost/Nixon, based on Morgan’s play on the 1977 interviews between British TV star David Frost and the Republican president who resigned. The jarring moment came near the end, when C-SPAN host Steve Scully asked "For a generation who doesn’t remember Nixon or these interviews, what do you want them to come away with?"

Howard replied that Nixon’s crimes were "quaint" compared to the current administration: "Well, it’s a great drama. It doesn’t have a political axe to grind, and yet you know, it speaks to democracy, the media, the way it all works in the modern era. The only thing that’s kind of quaint about the story at all is the fact that, you know, uh, that the Nixon crimes pale by comparison, with uh, with uh, um, um, [picks up pen] you know, what we’ve been reading about and hearing about in the last few years. Uh, and yet, it also reminds us that abuse of power at any level cannot be accepted, and, so if there’s a political point to be made, you know, I’d say it’s nonpartisan, but that’s the point."

On Sunday’s CBS Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer discussed the challenges President-elect Barack Obama will face with liberal authors: "Today we ask the authors of four of the year's most important books to assess the problems the new administration will face." Schieffer asked the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, author of ‘The War Within: A Secret White House History,’ about Obama picking Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Woodward replied: "It's an amazing national security team that Obama appears to have selected. It's kind of like 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears.' You've got too cool, which might be -- or at least appropriately cool, General Jones as the national security adviser; Gates is kind of just right, in the middle; and Hillary Clinton, hot."

Schieffer later turned to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, author of ‘The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals,’ and asked: "...your fascinating book, 'The Dark Side,' tells how the current vice president, Richard Cheney, amassed power unknown to any vice president in our history. I'd like to ask you first, how did he do that? And do you see Joe Biden having the kind of power?" Mayer replied: "it takes a president like Bush to have a vice president like Cheney. Obama, so far, seems to be so much more involved in the details and in kind of wanting to command the policies all the way up and down, really -- so I don't see it repeating." Mayer then went on to compare the Bush and Obama administrations:

Another difference that's very important is that both the president coming in and the vice president are lawyers, and one of the things that happened in the last administration was neither of them were. They were not constitutional scholars and they enacted policies that -- including legalizing torture for all purposes -- that really were not constitutional. And I don't think we're going to see that again. This is a -- this is a group of people who -- and the secretary of state is also a lawyer now. These people respect the law, I think.

Country music and "American Carol" star Trace Adkins appeared on the December 1 edition of "The O’Reilly Factor" to decry liberal pop stars preaching from the stage. Channeling Laura Ingraham, Adkins said of fellow entertainers "I just want to hear your tunes. I don’t want to hear you puke up your liberal stuff at me." Host Bill O’Reilly jokingly observed "that sounds like a song."

Adkins explained that. despite his conservative politics, he does not "use the stage as a political platform" because people spent their "hard earned money" to hear him sing not preach. When O’Reilly asked if such political preaching is "annoying" the country singer affirmatively replied "it is to me" to those artists who feel "more enlightened" than most.

Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens and Salon's Joan Walsh squared off Monday evening on MSNBC's "Hardball," and things deliciously got personal.

The topic on host Chris Matthews' mind was president-elect Barack Obama's choice for Secretary of State.

Hitchens was none too pleased with the nomination of Hillary Clinton for this position, while Walsh defended Obama's decision with all her soul.

With that as pretext, let's get ready to rummmmmmbbbbbble (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript, photo courtesy Huffington Post):

For general discussion and debate. Talking points' on you.

Today's run-off election for Georgia's Senate between incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss and Democrat Jim Martin has attracted a lot of attention, especially because it could put the Democratic majority one seat closer to the 60 seats needed for a filibuster-proof Senate. Michael Grunwald of Time magazine has a story up today about the importance of the outcome of the race, but instead of giving a fair-and-balanced look at how both candidates would affect the Senate, Grunwald uses the piece to attack Chambliss for being a "textbook Bush-Cheney Republican" and praise Martin for potentially being a repudiation of Bush and a "candidate of the middle class."

Grunwald starts off by reminding readers that Georgia is still "an extremely conservative state" despite a Time magazine article from June which wondered if Georgia would be "Obama's Ohio" in the election. The writer uses this characterization of Georgia to frame Martin's potential win as "a crowning embarrassment for the GOP" and attacks Republicans by saying it would "rival Obama's own victory as a repudiation of the Bush agenda of tax cuts for the rich, pork for the well-connected, belt-tightening for the working poor, drill-baby-drill, strict-construction judges and military adventurism." That's when the Chambliss-bashing starts, as Grunwald goes on to say, "not to mention the political cynicism that made Chambliss notorious after his ads in 2002 comparing his opponent, triple-amputee Max Cleland, to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein."

After months of mystery, as well as less than stellar performances from interim host Tom Brokaw, David Gregory appears to have emerged the winner in the "Meet the Press" sweepstakes.

I guess anything would be better than Andrea Mitchell, right?

Politico reported moments ago (file photo):

If Britney Spears wants to launch her grand return with a trite and tacky rough-sex pantomime, I suppose that's her business.  She's not known as a pop tart for nothing. What I do find noteworthy is the way GMA celebrated that bit of rough stuff, featuring it in its opening minutes. Even there, it's not ABC's descent into schlock that jumps out so much as the double standard.  Can you imagine the dutifully feminist ABC applauding such junk if the gender tables had been turned?  Me neither.

Diane Sawyer, uh, teased things during the show opening.

The only thing remotely interesting about San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's bizarre decision to upload his incredibly dull 7.5 hour "state of the city" speech to YouTube is the knowledge that it is sure to inspire parodies. So how dull is Newsom's speech? Well I challenge you to listen to just a couple of minutes of it without hearing the beckoning call of Mr. Sandman enticing you to enter a deep slumber. Here is the take on this YouTube speech by Michelle Malkin:

Hey, remember that judge who sentenced noise violators to Barry Manilow music? Here’s a worse sentence: Sitting through 7.5 hours of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom droning on and on and on about the “state of the city.” There are YouTube segments on health care, education, and the environment. But nada on the city’s infamously deadly illegal alien sanctuary policies.

He’s uploaded his entire speech on YouTube. Even his fellow libs can’t take it:

In reporting on who will replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate in Tuesday’s Washington Post, reporter Keith Richburg unspooled a weird sentence about someone being a conservative Democrat. "There is also pressure to replace Clinton with a woman; one name being mentioned is Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand, a conservative Blue Dog Democrat from Albany."

Gillibrand may be an up-and-coming talent and may have joined the Blue Dog Democrats, but she cannot be described as "conservative" based on her first year of votes in the House. For her 2007 votes, the American Conservative Union gave her a single-digit score of eight and the liberal Americans for Democratic Action classified her as a nearly perfect 95 percent liberal.

In her story about pardon applications submitted to the Bush Justice Department before the President leaves office, the Associated Press's Lara Jakes Jordan made it seem as if pardon applicants appealing directly to the president is a new thing, and whitewashed the last-minute flurry of pardons granted by Bill Clinton in 2001.

Here are the key passages from Jordan's story:

Some high-profile convicts past and present are among more than 2,000 people asking President George W. Bush to pardon them or commute their prison sentences before he leaves office.

Junk-bond king Michael Milken, media mogul Conrad Black and American-born Taliban soldier John Walker Lindh have applied to the Justice Department seeking official forgiveness.

But with Bush's term ending Jan. 20, some lawyers are lobbying the White House directly to pardon their clients. That raises the possibility that the president could excuse scores of people, including some who have not been charged, to protect them from future accusations, such as former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or star baseball pitcher Roger Clemens.

This particular Palin report is funny for it's cluelessness, but a spokesman for the Internet search engine company Lycos is astounded that people are still interested enough in Governor Sarah Palin to put her name in the search field of an Internet search engine like Lycos or Google. After all, we have Obama, now, the spokesman says. Why do we need Palin info still?

The quotes from Kathy O’Reilly, a spokeswoman for Lycos, were reported by Politico last week and goes to show that the appeal of Sarah Palin is still little understood in many quarters.

Sarah Palin has stayed in the list of the top 5 Internet searches since she was chosen as John McCain's running mate in October.

There is a terrific Gary Larson cartoon (right) showing a psychiatrist jotting notes down about his patient who is talking while reclining on a couch. On his notepad, the shrink is writing, "Just plain nuts!" Well, that is the feeling of your humble correspondent about psychologist Lauren Slater after reading the beyond bizarre recollections of her "love life" in the New York Times. And why on earth did the Times even publish her sanity challenged screed? Were they hoping the shock value would help boost their sagging circulation? In any event, I must warn the reader about continuing further. To read Slater's much too personal account could cause you to want to take a scorchingly hot shower to wash away all filthy memories of her sordid life: 

I COULD chalk it up to getting older, the fact that sex interests me these days about as much as playing checkers. But the fact is I’ve never much liked sex, even though it has, on occasion, captivated me. Says my proverbial therapist: “Sex threatens you, Lauren. You feel overcome.”

Another distinctly less sexy possibility is that I have never much liked sex because, when all is said and done, there’s not much to like. I mean, really: What is the big deal? Especially when it’s with the same person, over and over again; from an evolutionary standpoint, that simply couldn’t be right. I, for one, have always become bored of sex within the first six months of meeting a man, the act paling for me just as the sun pales at the approach of winter, and as predictably, too.

On the Swampland blog, Time’s Joe Klein is beating the press for asking "inane" questions that suggest that Barack Obama’s words on the campaign trail might still matter, not to mention tick-tock process questions about how Obama and Clinton hammered out this potentially troublesome team-of-rivals arrangement. While Klein suggested these questions don’t elicit news, you can also sense that Klein doesn’t want anyone trying to trip up Obama or make him look petty:

I was struck by the inanity of most of the questions from my colleagues. Granted, these are political reporters, not national security or foreign policy specialists, but what sort of journalist expects the President-elect to tell the "inside story" of how he selected Hillary Clinton? (Those sorts of stories, if told at all, are wrenched from aides on background--and reported only after consulting multiple sources.)

On Sunday's episode of "60 Minutes" (11/30/08), Lara Logan profiled Army hero Private Monica Brown, an 18-year-old medic who was awarded the Silver Star. Yet as wonderful as Brown's heroics were, Logan's profile could not shake the impression that it really wanted to get in some cheap shots at the United States military. Here's how Logan opened her piece:

Private Monica Brown is only the sec