It's been nearly two weeks since a scandal shook many people's faith in the scientists behind global warming alarmism. The scandal forced the University of East Anglia (UK) to divulge that it threw away raw temperature data and prompted the temporary resignation of Phil Jones of the university's Climate Research Unit.

Despite that resignation and calls by a U.S. senator to investigate the matter, ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening news programming has remained silent - not mentioning a word about the scandal since it broke on Nov. 20, even as world leaders including President Barack Obama prepare to meet in Copenhagen, Denmark next week to promote a pact to reduce greenhouse gases.

MRC's President Brent Bozell called the networks' silence a "cover-up" Dec. 2.

Other news outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and Associated Press have deemed ClimateGate worthy of reporting, but the networks were too busy reporting on celebrity car accidents and the killer whale that ate a great white shark. Instead of airing a broadcast news segment that might inform the public about the science scandal, both ABC and CBS relegated the story to their Web sites. There was one mention of the scandal on ABC's Sunday talk show: "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

Meredith Baxter, known for her role as the liberal matriarch Elyse Keaton in "Family Ties," came out as a lesbian this morning on NBC's "Today."

Baxter told host Matt Lauer that she's a "very private person" and "not a very political person," but that she understands coming out "is a political act."

"My understanding is that so much research has been done that says that if anybody knows someone who is gay or lesbian, then when they are addressing gay or lesbian issues, political issues that affect their rights, they're less likely to vote against them, to take away their rights," Baxter explained.

"If you knew me before, and you cared about me before, I'm the same woman," Baxter continued. "I'm the same mother to all these children. And if I can be that lesbian you now know, okay, well if I vote this way, than, than that actually might affect this person I know, that Meredith."

CNN’s Larry King carried water for President Obama’s move to send more troops to Afghanistan during an interview of Michael Moore on early Wednesday morning. King later shifted further to the left, asking Moore if he agreed with Jesse Ventura’s call for a new draft and a “war tax” and quoting from Bob Herbert of the New York Times, who labeled the Afghan war a “tragic mistake.”

The CNN host interviewed the famous left-wing director for the first two segments of his program. Near the end of the first segment, King sought Moore’s take on something from his interview of Ventura, whom he interviewed the night before: “Jesse Ventura said last night- and he agrees with your position, by the way- that we should consider bringing back the draft and we should have a war tax so that people suffer if we’re all going to pay a price for this. What do you think?”

The leftist one-upped his celebrity counterpart: “There would be no increase in the troops if there was a draft and if people had to pay for it. I actually have proposed bringing back the draft now for some years, but only draft the children of those in the upper five percent income bracket, because if the wealthy have to send their kids over to Iraq or Afghanistan, trust me, there won’t be many wars.”

The host quoted from Herbert in his last question to Moore: “Bob Herbert, writing in The New York Times today, called this a ‘tragic mistake,’ and then he quotes Dwight David Eisenhower...Eisenhower said, ‘I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can and as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, and its stupidity.’And then he said- this will impress you, I think- Eisenhower: ‘Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.’ That’s from a four star general and a president.”

ABC, CBS and NBC’s collective silence on “ClimateGate” has reached ridiculous levels as the broadcast networks continued to ignore the great and growing scandal. The bias by omission has now become scandalous.

“The networks’ silence on ClimateGate is deafening. Scandal, cover-ups and conspiracy are the bread and butter of the media. Yet they have selectively and deliberately decided not to report this bombshell – or any of the incriminating details surrounding the scandal – because it goes against their left-wing agenda," Media Research Center President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell complained in a statement released today.

Phil Jones announced yesterday that he is temporarily leaving his post as head of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) pending the investigation into the controversial e-mails and documents that started ClimateGate.

Yet none of the broadcast network weekday morning and evening news shows addressed ClimateGate or the incriminating Jones development since the news broke yesterday. This marked 12 days since the information was first uncovered that they have ignored this global scandal.

Imagine if you will that former Alaska governor Sarah Palin was accused of taking gift cards donated to her office for redistribution to needy constituents and using them instead for a personal spending spree.

The media firestorm would swirl uncontrollably, of course, and certainly you couldn't fault the media for reporting on the ensuing criminal trial.

Well, this sort of this has happened, only to the Democratic mayor of Baltimore Sheila Dixon who was convicted yesterday on a misdemeanor charge of embezzling, yet the coverage from the broadcast networks has been non-existent until the trial's conclusion.

A search of "Sheila Dixon" among ABC, CBS, and NBC news transcripts catalogued on Nexis from January 1, 2007 to December 2, 2009 yielded only three hits. None of the stories were about Dixon's trial, and one, an April 30, 2008 "Nightline" story on predatory mortgage lending, cast Dixon in a favorable light as a champion of citizens who have been exploited by mortgage lenders.

Maybe President Barack Obama's administration is just trying to trying to get some George Soros funding. Why else would Obama's people be playing the media criticism game again?

In the latest of a series of White House - media head-on confrontations, Jared Bernstein, the chief economist and economic policy advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, took on the Wall Street Journal in a Dec. 1 post on the federal government's WhiteHouse.gov Web site.

"There's a new report out from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on the economic impact of the Recovery Act," Bernstein wrote. "I'll get to the findings in a second, but somebody over at the Wall St. Journal's editorial page has a whole lot of explaining to do."

Your humble correspondent has been checking the Huffington Post Green section every day since the ClimateGate scandal exploded. After all, that Green section is pretty much predicated on the theory that the earth is warming dangerously and that Man is the cause of it. At first, the Green section had a few relatively minor stories attempting to dispute the revelations of the ClimateGate scandal. However, today the Huffington Post went into a complete panic mode on this topic. Bigtime.

The Green section now features a huge story at the top of the page by Katherine Goldstein which features a slideshow supposedly exposing "The 7 Biggest Lies About the Supposed 'Global Warming Hoax'." However, even many of their own readers aren't buying the lame excuses presented as you will see here. 

So let us now join the Huffington Post Green section as irritation is expressed over the term "ClimateGate" as they wish it to be replaced by "SwiftHack":

Good Morning America’s Diane Sawyer on Wednesday conducted a generally tough interview with Joe Biden on the subject of Afghanistan, but ignored an embarrassing gaffe from the Vice President: "Our number one enemy concern is the existential threat, al Qaeda. Number two is the stability of a nuclear state called Afghanistan, under siege by radicals." Did the Vice President, perhaps, mean Pakistan? It's unclear as Sawyer didn't follow up. [Audio available here.]

Earlier in the segment, responding to Sawyer’s comment that Republicans believe setting a date for removing troops is a bad idea, Biden argued, "How are they emboldened, knowing that by the time we train up the Afghanis, we're going to be gradually handing off, beginning in 2003 [sic]?" Beginning in 2003? Would journalists allow Sarah Palin to get away with such obvious malapropisms?

Media Research Center President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell will appear on a live 20 to 30-minute-long Web cast starting at noon EST. You can submit a comment or question in the comments field below the video window there.

Be sure to catch the Webcast, hosted by Heritage New Media Partners, live at live.mrc.org.

It's perhaps indicative of the culture, but there has been a media obsession with the scandalous aspects of Michaele and Tareq Salahi crashing a White House State Dinner on Nov. 24. 

However, the incident also demonstrated how vulnerable President Barack Obama could be to outside intruders, and that fact isn't getting the lion's share of the attention. Instead, coverage like that from NBC's "Today" show has been about reality TV and exclusive interviews. This soft focus, argued Fox News host Glenn Beck on his Dec. 1 broadcast, could have repercussions.

"Let me ask you, what's more reasonable: people walking by the Secret Service, and they're just, like, I don't know, sleeping - zzzz ... Really?" Beck said. "Or this is a publicity stunt? I don't think either of these are reasonable, but given the choice just between those two, I think I'd probably go with the publicity stunt."

If you needed any more assurance the growing ClimateGate scandal is far more significant than America's media has been portraying, you got it Tuesday night from Comedy Central's Jon Stewart.

Somewhat surprisingly, "The Daily Show" host in his opening sketch tore apart the scientists involved in sending the obtained e-mail messages for showing "a clear effort to raise fears about global warming, and hide evidence against it."

Stewart even mocked the man responsible for spreading more fear on this subject than anyone on the planet: 

Poor Al Gore. Global warming completely debunked via the very Internet you invented. OH. OH the irony. 

Irony indeed (video embedded below the fold with transcript, vulgarity alert, h/t Story Balloon):

There's something about these big events that cause MSNBC "Hardball" host Chris Matthews to go off script and say something seemingly ridiculous.

Matthews has publicly admitted President Barack Obama has given him a thrill up his leg after a campaign speech in Feb. 2008, and uttered "oh God," earlier this year after an Obama address to Congress, prior to the Republican response from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal earlier this year. And on Dec. 1, he referred to West Point as "the enemy camp" in coverage following a speech from Obama announcing his intentions to increase troops in Afghanistan. And, later that night - Matthews took a shot at former Vice President Dick Cheney (emphasis added).

"The president said tonight that we're fighting in Afghanistan because al Qaeda is in Pakistan," Matthews said. "Is that what this is all about? Is that why we're fighting and some are dying in Afghanistan? To deliver the message to the government over in Pakistan to fight harder against al Qaeda. It sounds more Rube Goldberg than ‘Remember the Alamo.' Also try tonight to workout whether the president's goals in Afghanistan are achievable. Are they? And of course, there's always Dick Cheney who jumped it from under his bridge to bite the president's ankle even before he made the speech tonight."

How much can the left-wing blogosphere hate Dick Cheney? Apparently enough to compare him to notorious Seventies serial killers. The blogger calling himself "Meteor Blades" at Daily Kos compared Cheney to Ted Bundy in a post Tuesday afternoon titled "The Last Person Who Should Be Opening His Mouth."

Whatever Democrats think about Obama's plans for Afghanistan, he writes, "the one thing we can all agree on is that we're sick of hearing arsonists hanging around the fire they started telling us the best way put it out." He's furious that Politico would carry Cheney's criticism of Obama:

It takes no special effort or reading between the lines to see the main theme behind Cheney's remarks: Obama is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Nothing any Democratic President can do will ever stop the flow of "weak-on-defense" canards that began 60 years ago with shrieks of "Who Lost China?"....

During a special 9:00 p.m. edition of Countdown after President Obama's Tuesday speech, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann attacked former Vice President Cheney for a recent interview criticizing President Obama for some of his actions in the war on terrorism, with Olbermann accusing Cheney of being "cowardly" for opposing the administration's plan to try suspects behind the 9/11 attacks -- like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- in New York City: "So cowardly is Mr. Cheney, in fact, that he trembles at the thought of an accused terrorist coming to New York City in chains." Olbermann also charged: "Mr. Cheney revealed that unlike authentically tough people, he is still so panicked that he still mistakes acting tough for being tough and makes the corollary error that failing to act tough implies that you are weak."

And because the former Cheney took exception with Obama for giving an unusually "deep bow" to some world leaders, after invoking President Nixon bowing to Japanese Emperor Hirohito, Olbermann snapped: "If you can`t summon up just the boilerplate grim respect your former responsibilities still demand, maybe you should shut up, Dick."

Last week, Fox News reported a jaw-dropping story about how our War on Terror has now become a war on ourselves. In September a team of Navy SEALs captured terrorist Ahmed Hashim Abed, a man known to the U.S. military as "Objective Amber," the architect of the vicious and deadly attack on four American contractors in the summer of 2004. These poor men were shot, burned, and then their bodies were desecrated, hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River.

But instead of hailing the SEALs as heroes for bringing this vicious murderer to justice, three of them have been brought up on charges.

When Abed was captured, he was brought to Camp Baharia, a U.S. base two miles outside Fallujah. According to one attorney, Abed was turned over to the Iraqis by mistake and was later returned to U.S. custody. There are differing reports that he was punched in the gut and given a bloody lip.

The SEALs were faced with two options. One, choose an administrative hearing, facing no possibility of jail time or dishonorable discharge, but having their reputations forever tarnished. Two, choose a court-martial which could exonerate them completely or, if convicted, land them behind bars and end their military careers.

Either MSNBC "Hardball" host Chris Matthews let one slip tonight, or it was an extremely poor choice of words.

Following President Barack Obama's Dec. 1 speech, which he announced his intentions for increasing troop levels in Afghanistan, MSNBC followed with wrap-up coverage of his speech with arguably three of their most prominent on-air personalities - "Countdown" host Keith Olbermann, "The Rachel Maddow Show" host Rachel Maddow and Matthews.

Matthews referred to a scene from "Gone with the Wind" about the American Civil War as an example of "excitement" going into a war. He said that was lacking in the room during Obama's speech.

"Australia's parliament rejected laws to set up a sweeping carbon emissions trade scheme on Wednesday, scuttling a key policy of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and setting a trigger for an early election."

So reported Reuters moments ago.

With global warming-obsessed media pushing for cap and trade legislation to pass here next year as well as for something positive to come out of the upcoming climate conference in Copenhagen, it's going to be very interesting to see how this gets covered in the next 24 hours:

President Obama is scheduled to address the nation in less than an hour.

The primary topic of discussion: Afghanistan.

Please express your thoughts either here, or in the chatroom here.

And for those that would rather watch "A Charlie Brown Christmas" -- which has been shamefully bumped to next Tuesday! -- here are a few clips (videos embedded below the fold):

Have Associated Press's Seth Borenstein and Chris Matthews had a Vulcan mind-meld? Two weeks ago, you may recall, the MSNBC "Hardball" hosts wondered if the president was just "too darned intellectual."

Today, AP's Borenstein wondered, "Is Obama another Mr. Spock?":

WASHINGTON -- He shows a fascination with science, an all-too deliberate decision-making demeanor, an adherence to logic and some pretty, ahem, prominent ears.

They all add up to a quite logical conclusion, at least for "Star Trek" fans: Barack Obama is Washington's Mr. Spock, the chief science officer for the ship of state.

"I guess it's somewhat unusual for a politician to be so precise, logical, in his thought process," actor Leonard Nimoy, who has portrayed Spock for more than 40 years, told The Associated Press in an e-mail interview. "The comparison to Spock is, in my opinion, a compliment to him and to the character."

Rupert Murdoch sees a future in journalism. With newspaper circulation at post-war lows and major dailies shutting down in a number of cities, he may be one of the few optimists left. But first, Murdoch claims, the American government must change its obsolete and destructive regulatory policies that, he says, are preventing major news outlets from competing.

"Good journalism is an expensive commodity," Murdoch told an audience at a Federal Trade Commission workshop on the future of journalism today. "Critics say people won’t pay, but I say they will. But only if you give them something good." Murdoch has announced plans to institute paywalls for all online content offered by his giant news conglomerate, News Corp.

Though Murdoch is confident that paywalls would more than make up for revenue lost by shortfalls in advertising dollars, other newspapers' experiences with the system have failed to do so. The New York Times in 2005 began charging for many of its columns, but eliminated the paywall after revenues failed to outweigh advertising dollars. Still, there are a number of unexplored options for online news payment schemes, and Murdoch is no rookie in the news business.