Did you notice a television ad during Thanksgiving's NFL football games featuring President Barack Obama?

Joined by children from the Washington, D.C. area, the President and players come together for a friendly game of touch football, reminding fans about the importance of being active as part of NFL PLAY 60, the league's youth health and fitness campaign. Filmed on the White House lawn earlier this month by NFL Films, the PSA also encourages viewers to get involved in their communities and remember the importance of service. 

Such was a collaboration between NFL Play 60, an effort to fight child obesity, and United We Serve, the President's initiative to encourage community service.

The NFL issued a press release about this last week (video of ad embedded below the fold):

Some sectorsof the retail economy are doing well this Black Friday per the Wall Street Journal:

Discounters were doing well early Black Friday morning, with door-busters bringing in big crowds, while higher-end and some apparel retailers were seeing somewhat muted traffic despite big discounts.

Mass merchants like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp., as well as lower-end department stores like J.C. Penney Co. and electronics retailer Best Buy Inc., saw strong demand for big sales items, with electronics an early winner. But there was some robust demand for tougher-sell items like cookware and jewelry.

Big news on the Climategate front. The chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, has issued a major response to the Climategate scandal. As a result a big rift has developed between the IPCC and a delegate to that organization on the topic of Climategate. This is big news, is it not? Does this not sound like a huge news story? Well, guess how many MSM reporters have covered this story? The answer as of this moment is one. ONE!

The sole reporter who went where the rest of the MSM dares not tread was Andrew Revkin, the New York Times environmental reporter, who covered this story in his Dot Earth blog. Revkin is hardly what one would call a global warming "denier" or skeptic but to give him credit he will report on breaking climate stories even if contradicts the prevailing MSM agenda on this topic. And his latest report covers both the IPCC chairman's response as well as the huge rift over Climategate that has now developed as resuult of that scandal:

Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has distributed a statement on the unauthorized disclosure of thousands of e-mail messages and documents involving a variety of contributors to the panel’s reports. One e-mail message from July 8, 2004, particularly related to the workings of the climate panel, has been the subject of much discussion. 

Even though all three of Wednesday’s broadcast network evening newscasts reported on President Obama’s decision to attend the climate change summit in Copenhagen, they also continued to ignore email evidence that scientists who push global warming theory have distorted data to support their assertions while trying to suppress the views of dissenters. FNC’s Special Report with Bret Baier gave attention to the Climategate controversy on Monday and Wednesday, while Wednesday’s The Situation Room on CNN, guest hosted by Suzanne Malveaux, ran what appears to be CNN’s first story on the controversy, but the news network downplayed the story’s significance.

Correspondent Brooke Baldwin fretted over the timing of the revelation as coming so soon before the climate change summit in Copenhagen, and twice referred to a climate change "consensus," a term which is normally employed by those who believe global warming theory is not debatable. Baldwin began her report rhetorically asking, "How about the timing of all of this?"

Tuesday night’s state dinner was yet another occasion for the media to fumble around in the basket of superlatives for the Obamas. In a typically unctuous passage on Wednesday, Washington Post writers Robin Givhan and Roxanne Roberts declared the First Lady had brought sexy glamour back to the capital:

The first lady, however, was the star of the show. She glittered in a strapless silver, embroidered gown by the Indian-born designer Naeem Khan. She wore her hair swept back and had piles of sparkling "churis," traditional Indian bracelets, on her wrist. Her ensemble announced that no-holds-barred, Hollywood-style sexy glamour had arrived in Washington.

Left unsaid (but implied): Laura Bush was a sexless, paint-by-numbers wallflower. NPR reporter Andrea Seabrook filed a giddy story on her personal feelings for Wednesday’s Morning Edition that delved into Shakespeare for inspiration: ‘The whole room had a kind of ‘Midsummer Night's Dream’ feeling." Seabrook also thought Mrs. Obama was just perfect:

Wednesday’s Fox and Friends on FNC passed on a piece of information not likely to receive much attention from the mainstream media – that Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue is so far outpacing Hillary Clinton’s Living History in sales. Co-anchor Alisyn Camerota relayed that "now there's a comparison between how Sarah Palin's book has done in the first week and how Hillary Clinton's memoir did the first week, and the winner is: Sarah Palin."

Co-anchor Clayton Morris, noting that Clinton had received a larger advance than Palin, elaborated on the number of first-week sales: "A lot of the number of sales, so far here, the numbers, Sarah Palin 700,000 for Going Rogue. Hillary Clinton's Living History got 600,000. But maybe Hillary's Clinton's sort of laughing all the way to the bank because she made – look at that number there – for her advance from the book, from the publisher, $8 million. Sarah Palin got $5 million."

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Wednesday, November 25, Fox and Friends on FNC:

After the U.S. House of Representatives passed cap-and-trade legislation earlier this year by a thin seven-vote margin earlier this year, the possibility that it could become law seemed like it was a real one.

But after the dust settled some, the White House shifted its focused to so-called health care reform. And additionally, leaked emails surrounding the recent event known ClimateGate have put the entire premise of anthropogenic global warming in doubt. Thus, the likelihood of congressional Democrats getting a bill to the President's desk and signed into law has somewhat dimmed.

And that's a topic a special Thanksgiving Nov. 26 broadcast of Fox News "Special Report" took on. Host Bret Baier explained that there's pending legislation put forward by Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., with some rigid guidelines for carbon emissions.

Several people around the MRC loved the Thanksgiving message of Amanda Reinecker at the Heritage Foundation's myHeritage.org website:

America was founded upon sound conservative principles grounded firmly in human nature and not in radical idealism. And today, we see that these principles, though under attack from the Left, are still very much alive.

As Heritage Foundation scholar Matthew Spalding explained in 2003, Thanksgiving maintains the tradition of the American Founding and affirms that "while we are committed to upholding religious liberty, we remain one nation under God."

So, despite these tough times, conservatives and Americans have much to be thankful for:

For those that missed it Wednesday evening, Karl Rove had a lengthy discussion with Fox News's Greta Van Susteren about a variety of issues including Sarah Palin's future.

Early on in this "On the Record" segment, Rove made a statement about the former Alaska governor that's guaranteed to anger liberals across the fruited plain:

I think she's an interesting personality who relates well to a lot of Americans. And a lot of people who have been heretofore on the fringes of politics and sitting on the sidelines were motivated during the campaign to get involved and since that time have become even more enamored of her. 

Rove also referred to a recent column by our friend Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times "where he pointed out Barack Obama's approval rating is 49 and Sarah Palin's approval rating has now risen to 43" (video embedded below the fold with transcript):

Has the emerging international ClimateGate scandal changed President Obama's global warming strategy?

After winning the Nobel Peace Prize last month, expectations were that Obama would not attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen due to it conflicting with the Nobel awards ceremony in Oslo.

This speculation was supported in the past couple of weeks when world leaders meeting in Singapore punted on reaching any firm agreements at the upcoming Copenhagen meeting, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (R-Nev.) delayed action on cap-and-trade legislation until next spring.

Yet, within days of the ClimateGate scandal breaking, Obama surprisingly announced that he's going to Copenhagen with a pledge for serious carbon dioxide emissions cuts.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute's Chris Horner told FBN's Charles Payne Wednesday that this is by no means a coincidence (video embedded below the fold with transcript):

For several days NewsBusters has been chronicling media outrage over Catholic bishop Tom Tobin asking pro-choice Patrick Kennedy to refrain from the sacrament of communion.

In all of their indignation over a church being involved in politics, they must have forgotten about the recent past when President Obama asked churches to help him push government-mandated healthcare. When ministers stepped into the politicial discussion back then, media outlets were more than willing to celebrate it.

In late August of this year, President Obama held a meeting with left-leaning religious leaders to convince them that government mandated healthcare was a "moral imperative," and that ministers should be involved in educating their fold on the issue.

The media protrayed the meeting as a great idea and praised the ministers who attended. MSNBC ran an article from CQ writer Jane Norman that gushed with excitement over sermons laced with politics and prayer meetings aimed at congressional districts:

It only took CNN six days to notice the growing international scandal known as Climategate, and when it finally reported on the matter, it predictably did so by downplaying the significance.

Maybe even more embarrassing for the supposedly "Most Trusted Name In News," Russia Today did a far better job of detailing what happened at Britain's Climate Research Unit and how the global warming debate is impacted by it.

Throughout her report on Wednesday's "The Situation Room," CNN correspondent Brooke Baldwin regularly referred to the "global warming consensus."

Even worse, she complained about there being "very little context" in the e-mail messages hacked from a "climate research institute," but never actually read ONE complete message or named ONE of the scientists involved.

Baldwin also withheld from viewers the connection these scientists have to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as their ties to the White House and Congressional Democrats (videos embedded below the fold with CNN transcript):

Oops! If the mainstream media was hoping that the Climategate scandal would be limited to the University of East Anglia's Climate Reasearch Unit (CRU) in Norwich, England, they are out of luck. This scandal has now reared its ugly head on the other side of the globe at New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research (NIWA)  which is that nation's chief climate advisory unit.

Watts Up With That? reposting from New Zealand's TBR.cc Investigate magazine's breaking news forum explains this latest development in the widening Climategate scandal: 

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre.

In New Zealand’s case, the figures published on NIWA’s website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century.

Happy Thanksgiving to all NewsBusters readers!

What are you cooking for your feasts?

Yesterday Brian Williams delivered an NBC Nightly News report about President Obama attending the Copenhagen global warming summit. Guess what hot topic was left untouched? If you had guessed Climategate you would have been correct. Not only Williams but also the other TV networks, with the exception of FOX News, have completely ignored what is considered to be the biggest scientific scandal in history. However, new Climategate revelations made by the Canada Free Press about a White House connection to the scandal will soon make it much more difficult (and ridiculous) for the networks to ignore.

Canada Free Press editor Judi McLeod and Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball reveal the involvement of White House Science Czar John Holdren (photo) in the Climategate Scandal. The picture presented of Holdren is not a pretty one:

It’s one thing for people to complain about those uptight traditional-values folks when they’re criticizing a piece of entertainment they haven’t seen yet. But it’s mildly amusing to see the libertarians criticizing traditionalists while utterly refusing to see the piece of entertainment under discussion, and then saying the other side is "out of touch."

W. Kenneth Ferree of the Progress & Freedom Foundation takes off on their blog after our associates at the Parents Television Council for objecting to Adam Lambert’s S&M/oral sex/guy-kissing routine on Sunday night’s ABC broadcast of the American Music Awards. Ferree royally declares that he will not lower himself to watch the performance, but that Adam Lambert is about as relevant to today’s kids as James Joyce. 　

When viewers tune into watch CNBC's "The Kudlow Report," they may not anticipate a host interrupting conservative Republican Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla.

But on CNBC's Nov. 24 "The Kudlow Report," fill-in host Simon Hobbs attempted to do just that. Hobbs, a regular on CNBC Europe, suggested there was nothing to emails unveiled after a hacker allegedly accessed the Climate Research Unit at University of East Anglia in Britain. These emails showed an effort by scientists, some on the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to manipulate data to strengthen the claim of anthropogenic global warming.

"You're well-known as a campaigner or man that believes humans are not the cause of global warming," Hobbs said. "I mean, specifically if you look at the coverage we have, the allegation is that the emails indicated that they were declining to share data with fellow scientists or they were seeking to keep other researchers with dissenting views from perhaps joining them on some platform. It doesn't indicate that the science was wrong or that the science was manipulated."

Want to understand the liberal mind?  Check out Daily Kos creator Markos Moulitsas on this evening's Schultz show . .

Why does Kos say he hates the Taliban?  Because they aided and abetted Osama Bin Laden in the murder of thousands of Americans?  Nope.  That they are actively engaged in killing American troops in Afghanistan? Guess again.  No, the Taliban's real crime—the only complaint Kos mentions— is that . . . they're not PC.  Not feminist. Not gay-friendly. Hell, they might even be opposed to stem cell research.

Oh, and for good measure, Kos calls conservative Republicans like Michelle Bachmann "the American Taliban."  What was that about dissent being patriotic?

CNN correspondent Max Foster’s short report about Richard Dawkins on Tuesday’s Situation Room played more like a commercial which promoted the militant atheist’s new book. Despite Dawkins’s past inflammatory statements about Christianity, Foster only labeled him “an outspoken critic of creationism....[whose] atheist views have put him at the center of controversy” [audio clip available here].

Anchor Suzanne Malveaux’s introduction for the correspondent’s report highlighted the 150th anniversary of the printing of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” and how Dawkins was a “controversial successor [to Darwin] carrying the torch for evolution.” Foster gave a very basic description of Dawkins’s career during his report, only mentioning his controversial stances only in passing. Video straight from the Richard Dawkins Foundation ran on-screen as Foster, an anchor for CNN’s sister network CNN International, gave his voice-over.

Mark December 13 on your calendars, for Oprah Winfrey will be doing a primetime Christmas special with Barack and Michelle Obama.

In fact, and not coincidentally, it's called "Christmas at the White House: An Oprah Primetime Special."

With all the money this woman has, they couldn't come up with a better name?

Apparently not according to THR's Live Feed: