Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad  and Industries Minister Ali Akbar.  February 7, 2010.  Photo Reuters/Raheb Homavandi

"Good Morning America" Wednesday broke the news about a new ABC News/Washington Post poll finding Republicans now favored over Democrats in the upcoming Congressional elections in November.

"Republicans are in a dramatically improved position for the midterm elections," said Jake Tapper. "They are much more competitive with Democrats and the President as to who the public trusts to handle key issues."

Tapper, with some help from co-host George Stephanopoulos, then walked viewers through some of the numbers (video embedded below the fold with poll highlights, h/t Glenn Reynolds):

Apparently in Rosie O'Donnell's world, people who don't subscribe to her beliefs are less than human, and she surrounds herself with people of like mind.

The former "View" moderator took the opportunity during the Feb. 8 broadcast of her Sirius XM radio show, "Rosie Radio" to outline how she tried to "humanize" her former colleague, Elisabeth Hasselbeck. O'Donnell's comments stemmed from a discussion about the conservative backlash to her recent HBO documentary about families, "A Family is a Family is a Family."

"I have that horrible, horrible, optimistic view that I could reach one of them. Remember, after Columbine, I used to write Wayne LaPierre letters, who was the head of the NRA at that time, saying, ‘Surely, sir, you can understand,' as if he's gonna [agree]," she explained. "It's sort of what I thought about Elisabeth Hasselbeck, too. I'm gonna love her, regardless of what she says, I'm gonna love her and the love, then, is going to win through in the end."

She continued, "I was positive of this, and we sort of got it a little bit. We started to sort of humanize her. Remember, after she came to my house, she actually said on television how she thought our family was so great? Can you imagine the amount of hate mail she got from her constituency?" [Audio available here.]

There are no second acts in American lives. ---F. Scott Fitzgerald

Apparently writers Nicole Allan and Niraj Chokshi of Atlantic Magazine wish to hold open the possibility of a second act for disgraced John Edwards as they speculate about Is John Edwards Done Forever?  Yes, all Sarah Palin has to do is read a few notes from the palm of her hand and this is enough to set off MSM liberals into a group hate rant about the former vice-presidential candidate. However, if you are a liberal the door is always open to you for a possible political comeback even if you cheat on your wife while she suffers from a deadly disease, make a sex tape with a mistress, lie about the paternity of your own child, initiate an elaborate coverup plan involving an aide falsely claiming paternity of the child, oh, and generally lie over a plethora of other issues while piously lecturing the country about "two Americas" as John Edwards has done.

So interested is the inadvertent comedy team of Allan and Chokshi in finding the possibities for a John Edwards comeback that they interviewed several experts on this subject. Stifle your bellylaughs as you read their findings:

Go on Oprah: "This whole notion of whether you're damaged goods or not has really changed in the last four or five years," said Peter Mirijanian of Mirijanian PR. " The public used to count people out and you wouldn't hear from them again. That's not the case anymore. There are so many ways to rehabilitate yourself ... The American public likes a feel-good story, they like a story of redemption." Five years ago, the well-trod path was to go on Larry King; today, it begins on Oprah. Edwards has "got to do the one interview. And I think it has to be a visual medium. I don't think the full-page story in the New York Times cuts it."

Barbara Walters took to her own soapbox Monday on ABC’s "The View" to deride Sarah Palin. But if viewers were only getting their news from Barbara, they’d be getting a very slanted version of what Palin said. Walters said she urged Obama to declare war on Iran, but "I don’t have the exact quote."

Walters also lined up with many liberals by suggesting Palin should have lashed out at Rush Limbaugh like she did for Rahm Emanuel for his use of the word "retard," but she skipped over the profanity of Emanuel’s tirade.

The panel was unanimously liberal again, with both Joy Behar and Elisabeth Hasselback out, and Meghan McCain was in. Walters gushed over Meghan, who quoted Maya Angelou and is clearly the kind of liberal that Barbara wants running the Republican Party. Walters admitted Palin was "very popular," but she clearly wants to put a stop to that.

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: the thought police descend on Western liberal democracy.

Criticism of Christianity is fair game. After all, when was the last hate law prosecution of a critic of Christianity? By contrast, Islam has special protective laws. The same happened in Canada when commentators Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant were hauled before anti-discrimination tribunals for expressing critical opinions about Islam. John Stuart Mill's defence of free speech has been buried. Muslim-style censorship now applies in the heart of Western liberal democracies.

The left-liberal press is not that interested in free speech either. Perhaps free speech does not matter to it. Or perhaps these kinds of prosecutions are now so commonplace, they don't warrant a headline. Either way, this spells the decay of Western liberal democracies.

Time for our own "marketplace of ideas." Debate and discuss.

Good Morning America co-host Robin Roberts tossed softballs to Michelle Obama in an interview on Tuesday, asking the First Lady to explain how she "feels" when people like Sarah Palin make "light" of her husband's efforts to "make a better world."

After referencing Palin's speech to the tea party convention on Saturday, Roberts played a clip of the former Alaska governor mocking, “How's that hope-y, change-y stuff working out for you?”  The GMA co-host offered this aggrieved question: "How do you feel when people are making light of something that was very important to the campaign and had every intent, and still do, to bring hope and change and make it a better world for people?"

A sympathetic Roberts then allowed the First Lady another chance to attack those who would criticize her husband. She empathized, "But, does it sting? Does it sting when you hear those things?"  The journalist then simply sat quietly as Mrs. Obama proceeded to blame the Republicans for incivility in Washington.

On a nightly basis, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann pompously presents himself as being the smartest guy in the room as he belittles every leading Republican in the nation.

But on Tuesday, the "Countdown" host exhibited a staggering level of ignorance as he claimed "federal budget debt" -- whatever that is! -- as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product is "about the same as it was in 1970," and "far less than it was throughout the Reagan administration."

To begin with, there is no "federal budget debt." There's a federal budget DEFICIT and federal DEBT. 

That this self-proclaimed genius doesn't know these are different things is by itself proof of his almost unimaginable incompetence on this subject. 

Yet, whether he meant debt or deficit, what he told viewers during his "Worst Person in the World" segment Tuesday was 100 percent wrong (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Right Scoop, file photo):

Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh absolutely trashed Wolf Blitzer Tuesday for ignoring Barack Obama's declining poll numbers.

As he opened the program, Limbaugh informed listeners about new data showing the President's approval rating at the lowest point since he moved into the White House.

"He's down to 44% in a couple of polls, 46% in another, and where is the State-Controlled Media reporting this?"

To drive home the point, Limbaugh shared a montage of how Blitzer one day in March 2006 reported George W. Bush's sagging poll numbers almost every hour on the hour (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Right Scoop):

No matter what former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin does, she's not going to win any friends in the mainstream modern feminism activist movement in the United States. But that might not be a bad thing.

On HLN's Feb. 8 "The Joy Behar Show," Eve Ensler, the writer of the infamous "The Vagina Monologues" appeared on the broadcast to promote her new book "I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World." During the interview, she was asked by the show's host Joy Behar what she thought about Sarah Palin, her political prospects and her belief system.

"Back with me is a woman who has done more for the vagina than the Brazilian wax - the talented Eve Ensler," Behar said. "You know, I must talk about Sarah Palin quickly with you because you do mention her in one monologue in the book. And you say a woman running for U.S. vice president believes in creationism but not global warming. What were you driving at there? May I ask?"

On Tuesday’s Countdown show, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann highlighted suggestions by former Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo that there should be civics literacy testing for registered voters made at the recent Tea Party convention, which Olbermann referred to as the "Tea Klux Klan," and painted Tea Party activists as wanting to deny minorities the right to vote using the tactics of the Jim Crow South. As if Tancredo wanted to discriminate against African-American voters, Olbermann referred to "Tancredo harking back fondly to the electoral strategies once used to keep poor people – specifically, explicitly, black people – from voting."

After bringing aboard the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson for further discussion, Olbermann’s first question employed the premise that "mainstream Republicans" wish to discriminate against minorities:

If you ever thought mainstream Republicans would openly reminisce about race-based election stealing, did you ever think that you would, as a grown man in the 21st century, see the once proud Republican party let it happen with the only kind of peep of integrity coming from the daughter of a Senator?

Robinson charged that Tea Party members were displaying "naked Jim Crow racism." Robinson:

It was only a year ago that liberal elites in Washington were shoveling dirt on conservatism. James Carville was writing boastful books about 40 years of Democrat dominance, boasting in his typical way that he could call "time of death" on the Republican Party. Liberals believed their hype that Barack Obama would be that black FDR they pictured on the cover of Time magazine.

Now newspaper headlines read otherwise: "Where did the hope for Obama go?" The hot-air balloon has crashed to Earth, and you can tell conservatism is back with a swagger. You can tell because the media’s daily output has gone from breathless valentines for Obama to angry denunciations of Tea Party protesters.

Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway has come a long way since her innocent breakout role in Disney’s “The Princess Diaries.” In a recent interview with British GQ, Hathaway stated that she and her family left the Catholic Church after her older brother announced that he was gay. USA Today, New York magazine and The Huffington Post used the public break as an opportunity to scold the Church.

Hathaway supposedly considered becoming a nun in childhood, so deep was her Catholic faith. But it wasn’t deep enough to get in the way when the “whole family converted to Episcoplianism.” USA Today reported Hathaway stating, “Why should I support an organization that has a limited view of my beloved brother?”

Bloomberg News managed to pen a full obituary of the late Congressman Jack Murtha today, calling him a "Supporter of Troops" in the headline, without once mentioning his incendiary--and unfounded--claims that a group of Marines had murdered 24 Iraqis in cold blood (h/t Washington Examiner's Mark Hemingway).

Murtha, himself a former Marine, said in 2005 after two dozen Iraqis were killed in the city of Haditha, "there was no firefight, there was no IED that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."

Eight Marines were charged in the killings. Charges against six of them have been dropped, one has been found not-guilty, and the case against the remaining Marine is pending. Murtha was unrepentant about the slanderous accusations he leveled against these Marines. He even compared the Haditha incident to the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War (see video below the fold).

Rosie O’Donnell is still spreading 9-11 conspiracy theories on her new Sirius/XM radio show. On Friday, she welcomed Broadway star (and one-season Saturday Night Live cast member) Christine Ebersole. The two entertainers agreed that something was fishy in Washington (just as they did on ABC's The View in 2007):

EBERSOLE: I don't need to know what happened [on 9/11], because I don't, and that's why we need another investigation...I do know that the official government story is a complete and total lie.

O'DONNELL: Yes, and that's what I've been saying, too.

Shelby Knox, a Huffington Post blogger who bills herself as a "full time speaker and organizer working with progressive organizations to promote sex education, women's rights, and youth empowerment" admitted to Fox News's Megyn Kelly this afternoon that women's groups are upset about the Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad because it was produced by the conservative organization Focus on the Family.

"We definitely respect Pam Tebow's choice, and the ad in itself, as was expected seemed very benign," claimed Knox. "The point is, Focus on the Family's agenda is not benign at all, and you can't consider something a choice when the entire agenda of the organization is to make sure other women can't make reproductive health decisions that are different than the one Pam Tebow made."

Knox also called Focus on the Family "a very radical, anti-choice, anti-woman organization" and decried the notion of CBS "partnering" with them to produce the ad.

"It is not irresponsible to demand that bureaucrats do the job we pay them to do. It is not irresponsible to expect people in authority to be held responsible for dumb, and perhaps fatal, mistakes. And, finally, it is not irresponsible, even in time of war, to raise questions about the presidency of…"

Can you guess whose name was dropped at the end of that quote? We'll have to go all the way back to…2002 and, of course, the George W. Bush presidency.

What's that? You thought this quote from Bill Press was referring to President Barack Obama? Quite reasonable, actually, given that one of his chief national security officials today took to the opinion pages of USA Today to call critics of the Obama Administration's handling of the war on terror unpatriotic.

Well, he didn't actually use the word "unpatriotic", but neither did then-Vice President Dick Cheney when he told Congress that criticism of the administration's war effort "is thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war." That was the quote Press took issue with in 2002, so where is his disdain for the Obama Administration?

(This post has been UPDATED; see end of entry.)

It seems that even the most [what appears to be] level-headed of comics writers these days just can't resist the pressure to delve into the "progressive" political cesspool. This time it's Captain America scribe Ed Brubaker. Hunting Muses lays it out:

Enter Captain America.

You know, the WW2 hero who died recently and just came back to life to fight a 20 ft tall Red Skull in front of the Lincoln memorial. I had heard a lot of good things from Ed Brubaker. I picked up some trades shortly before Cap’s death, read them, and then finished out Bru’s run because they were great. Right up there with Geoff John’s Green Lantern series as what I want from a comic.

Then Brubaker had to go and not only insult me, but violate the core of what Captain America is all about in issue 602 “Two Americas part 1″. Here are 3 consecutive pages from the comic to help you get a full context:

On Tuesday’s Morning Joe on MSNBC, on the same show in which host Joe Scarborough had earlier complained about FNC’s Bill Sammon claiming that the media "hate" Sarah Palin, guest David Remnick of the New Yorker magazine -- formerly of the Washington Post--  declared that "Sarah Palin’s entire career would be eliminated" if Americans were influenced by seeing "preposterousness" on public display. Remnick’s comment came during a discussion of the Senate’s adherence to the filibuster rule that makes it easier for the minority party to block the passage of legislation. At about 8:09 a.m., Scarborough contended that he would prefer that filibuster participants be required to actually stand up and speak in televised debate so that Americans might see the "preposterousness" of the practice.

Remnick then took his shot at Palin to dismiss Scarborough’s theory that "preposterousness" could wake up the American public. Remnick: "We see a lot of preposterous things in American politics. That doesn’t seem to convince us otherwise. Sarah Palin’s entire career would be eliminated, would pass out of history if preposterousness were somehow disqualifying, but it’s not."

Below is a transcript of the relevant exchange from the Tuesday, February 9, Morning Joe on MSNBC:

It's always nice to see Hollywood pitch in and do its bit for the nation. In WWII, Tinsel Town mobilized to help defeat the Axis powers. Today, the heirs of that proud tradition are going all out against today's forces of evil - medical insurance companies.

At least, that's the impression fans of Fox's "House M.D." got from the show's Feb.8 episode. Detailing a hectic day in the life of Princeton Plainsboro Hospital Administrator Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein), three of the episode's four story lines involved insurance.

In one story line, a former patient was suing the hospital for reattaching his severed thumb. The surgeon who had done it explained that, "his insurance only covered 60 percent of his in-patient expenses," so the patient wanted only the least expensive option. The surgeon reattached it anyway. "I wasn't going to let him throw his thumb away over a few dollars." Owing the money for the procedure to the insurance company, the man protested to Cuddy that he was in danger of losing his house.

In another scene, Cuddy was consulting a patient with cancer was convinced that human breast milk was his only cure. When she refused to write him a prescription for it, he accused her of being "some type of shill for the insurance company." He had paid premiums all this life, he said, and never been sick a day, but was now being denied the only thing that would save him. Cuddy assured him her refusal had nothing to do with insurance, and the scene ended.

They didn't understand the movement 6 months ago. When will they get it?

John Murtha, who represented the 12th district of Pennsylvania for 35 years, died Monday. David Stout's obituary in Tuesday's edition of the New York Times, "Representative John P. Murtha Dies at 77; Ex-Marine Was Iraq War Critic," focused on Murtha's influential anti-war turn and "history of hawkishness," but omitted Murtha's smear of the military -- his preemptory claim that Marines in the town of Haditha, Iraq had killed women and children ''in cold blood'' in a November 2005 incident. Of the eight Marines accused, only one still faces possible charges -- the rest were either acquitted or had the charges dropped.

Stout hit the sordid highlights of Murtha's legislative career, including the Abscam scandal, which he survived by the skin of his teeth, turning down money from an undercover FBI agent posing as a sheikh but said would be willing to talk about it later. Stout called it an "awkward moment." But Stout made Murtha's anti-Iraq war position a running theme of the obituary, while not once bringing up Murtha's smear of the Marines at Haditha.

On Tuesday’s Morning Joe, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough took exception with FNC analyst Bill Sammon for using the word "hate" to describe mainstream media sentiment toward Sarah Palin, contending that "you can't just say that people ‘hate’ Sarah Palin." But, while he spent more than two minutes complaining about Sammon’s use of the word "hate," Scarborough seemed to contradict himself at one point as he ended up using the word "hated" to describe media reaction to the former Alaska governor after she was first chosen as John McCain’s running mate.

The MSNBC host went on to suggest that the media got over their initial feeling of "hate" and "tried" to "start reporting on her down the middle." Scarborough: "And, by the way, we called out the media when they attacked her without even knowing who she was. And we said they hated her in the press early on without knowing her because she was a pro-life woman. Now, did they get past that and start reporting on her down the middle? They tried. But again, they don't hate her. I don't think they under-, a lot of people don't understand somebody from Wasilla who hunts, who is pro-life. There is a cultural gap. But to just say that they hate..."

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Tuesday, February 9, Morning Joe on MSNBC, with critical portions in bold:

In a story on American charitable giving on CBS’s Sunday Morning, correspondent Mark Strassmann cited liberal Princeton University bio-ethics professor Peter Singer on how much people should give: “[He’s] worked up a giving guide. The more you make, the more he believes you should give....He believes it’s within our power to virtually end world poverty.”

A clip was played of Singer arguing: “Well I think we should be giving something quite substantial....the right thing to do in this situation, where there are millions of children and adults, of course, dying from avoidable poverty related causes is to give something pretty significant. Something that makes a difference to how you live.”

While Strassmann simply introduced Singer as a bio-ethicist, in reality, the professor has a history of promoting radical ideas, such as justifying infanticide. In an excerpt of his 1993 book Practical Ethics, entitled “Taking Life: Humans,” Singer concluded: “Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.” CBS certainly picked an odd person to lecture Americans on caring for those less fortunate.

Yes. The GOP needs to show up and make an argument

No. Obama has stacked the deck

Doesn't matter. The media will spin it for the Dems regardless