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It shouldn't surprise anyone that Viacom's Comedy Central is developing an animated show practically designed to offend Christians. But the network's handling of recent controversy over depictions of the Muslim prophet Muhammad illustrates a stark double standard in how the entertainment media deal with issues of religion.

Comedy Central announced it is developing the script for an animated show tentatively titled "JC." According to the network's release, the show is about Jesus Christ "wanting to escape his father's enormous shadow to live life in [New York City] as a regular guy." The announcement described God as "all-powerful yet apathetic" and said the show would be a "playful take on religion and society with a sprinkle of dumb."

The show promises to stand in sharp contrast to the network's treatment of another religious figure: Muhammad. In 2006, Comedy Central censored a segment of "South Park" that depicted Muhammad. In April of this year, the network added audio bleeps to the second of a two-part episode to cover any mention of the prophet, as well as an end-of-show speech about freedom of expression and giving in to intimidation. The first episode of the story arc featured Mohammad hidden inside a moving truck and a bear costume.

This censorship came in response to a threat from a radical Islamic website, based in the United States, which warned that "South Park" creators would face violent retribution for "insulting" Muhammad by featuring (although not showing him) on the episode.

What will it take for the MSM to stop smearing the falsely-accused Duke lacrosse players?  Judging by the performance of ESPN's Steve Weissman this morning, legal exoneration is not enough.

Introducing an ESPNNEWS item on a lacrosse game between Duke and the University of Virginia, Weissman claimed that three years ago, the Duke team had been involved in "a devastating scandal," and that while the accused players had been exonerated, "the questions remain."

Weissman, looking for a hook to intro the story, went for the cheap moral equivalence between the false charges leveled against the Duke players, and the murder charge against a UVA player in the death of a women's lacrosse player.

Has it dawned on the MSM that the only thing that would have carried any weight today would have been Joe Sestak unequivocally stating that he wasn't offered the Sec. of the Navy job?  He didn't.  Sure, Pres. Obama's mouthpiece issued a denial.  But if there was any way under heaven that the White House could have strong-armed Sestak into flatly stating that no one offered him the Navy post, it would have happened. It didn't.

Instead, all Sestak says is that Pres. Clinton offered him some measly advisory board position, which he rejected.  And indeed, Sestak tells a reporter that Clinton told him that "Rahm Emanuel" had mentioned the possibility of an advisory board position.  So we know Emanuel was in the mix. Sestak is quoted as saying that he only had "one phone call" with Pres. Clinton.  But he never said he didn't subsequently hear from Emanuel or some other senior Obama aide.

Here is a feel-good video to enjoy as you begin your Memorial Day weekend:

Make sure you visit this post at the Eyeblast Blog for the details of how this is possible.

Just how desperately does the MSM want to bury the Sestak job-bribe story?  Yesterday we reported Time editor Rick Stengel's risibly feigned ignorance of the matter.

On Morning Joe today, Joe Scarborough broke off a colorful metaphor to describe the liberal media's see-no-evil approach to the subject, saying the MSM wouldn't cover the story "if Rahm Emanuel announced it in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue wearing nothing but a Speedo."

Mika Brzezinski broached the subject by mentioning that she had gotten "hammered" by her husband and friends for her criticism of the MSM's failure to ask the tough questions on the matter.

Most probably wouldn't think of Rolling Stone magazine as a primary source for information on something like financial regulation reform. However, if you listen to some of the left-wing talking heads like Ezra Klein, Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi is in the know on major policy issues.

So how do Taibbi and the other folks at Rolling Stone keep their readers interested in a topic that wouldn't suit their usual demographic? They do so with "insults" according to Taibbi.

In the May 26 issue of Rolling Stone, Taibbi's article, "Wall Street War," lamented the impact lobbyists in Washington, D.C. have had on the legislative process of the financial regulation reform. And in order to keep readers interested, he painted Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., as a villain with a degree of insult:

An 80-year-old Chicago man recently defended himself and his family from an armed burglar, using a firearm banned under the Windy City's stringent gun ban. Despite the robber getting off the first shot the elderly man was unhurt:

Make sure you read this post at the Eyeblast Blog to get more details on what happened.

On Thursday's edition of "The View," Joy Behar and her mostly left-wing co-hosts attempted to associate a strong, independent woman with liberalism. The occasion, actress Rachel Weisz appeared on the program to promote her new role in the upcoming movie "Agora."

The film is set in Roman Egypt during the fourth century and focuses on the life of Hypatia, a female philosopher and scholar. Behar insisted the character must have been a "liberal."

During the exchange, Weisz began discussing her role as Hypatia and how her character, “believed in having the people from different backgrounds with different political views, rather like you ladies sitting here.” Immediately following this assertion, Joy Behar announced, “Oh, so she was liberal” and “bipartisan.”

President Obama didn't call on CNN, but he decided to provide Helen Thomas with the privilege of being one of ten members of the White House press corps allowed to pose a question at this afternoon's presidential news conference.

She came through with one of her usual crackpot rants – with the inevitable dose of gratuitous Bush-bashing mixed in [MP3 audio available here]:

When are you going to get out of Afghanistan? Why are we continuing to kill and die there? What is the real excuse and don't give us this Bushism “if we don't go there they'll all come here.”

On the one hand, you might say it was the least surprising coming-out since Ricky Martin announced he was gay. On the other, it was refreshing to hear Mika Brzezinski say words we knew to be true but at least in my case had never heard her unequivocally pronounce before: "I'm a Democrat."

Mika made her declaration in the context of arguing that just because she's a Democrat doesn't mean she shouldn't ask tough questions about the Sestak job-offer allegations or Pres. Obama's handling of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Mika also took a surprising shot at her fellow MSMers for failing to ask the tough questions . . . 

"Psycho Talk" is a regular segment on Ed Schultz's regular MSNBC show.  But after his bizarre outburst this evening, you really have to wonder whether Ed's the one ready for the rubber room . . .

Interviewing a liberal Dem congressman, Schultz expressed concern that the 1,200 National Guard troops that Pres. Obama has ordered to the Mexican border may have been issued "shoot to kill" orders.

Ed, have you forgotten who's Commander-in-Chief?  If you're truly worried that the president has issued shoot-to-kill orders on illegal immigrants, then PBO is certainly in much worse political shape than even the most pessimistic observers have imagined.

Schultz indulged his paranoid fantasy while chatting with far-left Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Illinois).

President Obama's nominee to the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Robert N. Chatigny, holds a disturbing fringe opinion that sexual sadism should be a legal mitigating factor. In fact, Chatigny put this belief in action while presiding over the case against the "Roadside Strangler" where he did everything in his power to keep serial rapist and killer Michael Ross from getting the death penalty. (WARNING: DISTURBING CONTENT)

Make sure you read this post at the Eyeblast Blog for more details on Judge Chatigny.

"Law & Order," the popular courtroom drama that concluded its 20th and final season May 24, is a primetime TV legend. But the show that boasted its stories were "ripped from the headlines" often provided its viewers a distorted reality in which businesspeople were mostly portrayed as villains.

The Business & Media Institute examined "Law & Order," along with other television dramas' treatment of businessmen in 2005. BMI found that you were 21 times more likely to be kidnapped or killed by a businessman that a mobster.

Since 1990, the cop/attorney drama created by liberal Dick Wolf has covered a host of "bad" businesses from the company secretly testing roach poison on children and the greedy pharmaceutical execs selling a bad vaccine to the military to allegedly dirty defense contractors, landlords and medical device manufacturers.

In two out of three of its final episodes, the original "Law & Order" continued to demonize businessmen. One of those anti-business episodes villainized a bio-research firm, HemaLabs, for "stealing" DNA and blood samples from a family to create cancer treatment drugs. The company never compensated the impoverished family.

“Sex and the City 2” hits theaters May 27 and the media have been promoting the new film. NBC’s “The Today Show” joined in touting the movie by having star Cynthia Nixon, who plays Miranda Hobbes, on May 25. But the interview took a curious turn when Nixon was given a platform to support same-sex marriage in New York.

Host Meredith Vieira was discussing a Hollywood Reporter review that called the movie “proudly feminist, but blatantly anti-Muslim, when she stated, “In real life, you are engaged to Christine Mariononi.”

Nixon began dating Mariononi after splitting with her husband, Danny Mozes, with whom she has two children. Nixon and Mariononi became engaged last year.

After Nixon confirmed she still was, Vieira said, “Your partner for six years. And you have said if the, the same sex-marriage bill passes in this state, you plan to get married.”

He may be out of office, but Cheney Derangement Syndrome lives on.

This time, and just like other times in the past, "The View" co-host and host of her own HLN show, Joy Behar used the BP oil spill to attack the Bush administration, specifically former Vice President Dick Cheney by suggesting he was really behind the oil spill.  Her source - it was an outspoken critic of the Bush administration and aid to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson.

"There is a lot of blame to go around, obviously," Behar said on the May 25 broadcast of "The View." "But I was listening to this guy, Lawrence Wilkerson. Who was the -- he is now a retired army colonel and he worked with Colin Powell during the Bush administration. He was the undersecretary to him. And he says, and I quote him, ‘The whole oil spill can be laid at Cheney's feet.'"

Durring a protest against the Arizona immigration law and for open borders, ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis was arrested. Apparently she believes in purposely breaking the law in order to advocate for those that purposely break U.S. immigration laws.

Make sure you visit this post on the Eyeblast Blog for more details on what happened

NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell appeared on the May 25 "Fox & Friends" to discuss the media's double standard when it comes to politicians lying about their military records.

The Media Research Center president noted the most apt parallel to Richard Blumenthal was Bruce Caputo, a Republican who ran for U.S. Senate in the 1980s, only to drop out after Tim Russert -- then a staffer for Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- found that Caputo had falsely claimed to have been drafted during the Vietnam War.

At that time, "the media were relentless" against Caputo after the revelation and "it was the end of his career," Bozell noted, contrasting that with last week's Blumenthal story which to the mainstream media came and went as a "one-night story."

For the full interview, click play on the embed above at right.

In prepared remarks he gave to the European Union, Vice President Joe Biden advocated for Brussels to be considered the capital of the free world. Is European Exceptionalism becoming an official policy of the Obama administration?:

Make sure you read this post at the new Eyeblast Blog for more details.

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough has had a few missteps and stumbles over the years, perhaps tarnishing his conservative credentials in some people's view, but he still raises some great points every now and then.

On the broadcast of his May 24 "Morning Joe" program, Scarborough, in a segment with Politico's Mike Allen, wanted to know why an alleged deal that occurred between then-prospective Pennsylvania Democratic senatorial nominee, Rep. Joe Sestak and President Barack Obama, had not gotten more attention.

Sestak has hinted that he was offered the Secretary of Navy position if he were to have withdrawn his intentions to run for the U.S. Senate against Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa. With a raised voice, he said reporters eagerly wanted to give the White House a pass and suggested there was a double standard compared to the previous administration.

"We've had several reporters on today that seem to be going, bending over backwards giving the White House the benefit of the doubt, when if Dick Cheney had offered this had deal, indictments would already be down," Scarborough said. "This is so clear-cut."

Media Research Center Vice President for Business and Culture Dan Gainor told “Fox & Friends Sunday” May 23 that attacks on Rand Paul aren’t about skin color, but another kind of race: the 2010 elections.

Paul, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky (and son of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul), has come under fire from the media – particularly MSNBC – for comments he made suggesting he would not have supported parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In an interview with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, Paul criticized policies including those mandating desegregation in private business because he believes they infringe on Free Speech. He also stated that he believes discrimination and racism are “horrible” and that he doesn’t want government-sponsored discrimination in the public spehere.

Gainor told “Fox & Friends Sunday” that the attacks on Paul were primarily about race – but not skin color. Instead, they’re about the 2010 political race for control of Congress.

“This isn’t about race, this is about the race, the 2010 race, the 2012 race,” Gainor said. “They don’t care if they take down Rand Paul whatsoever. They care if they take down Republicans. They want to make their caricature of Rand Paul, not who he really is but just what they say he is, they want to make that the poster child for the election in 2010 and so they can use it to wreck the GOP – and the media are just buying into it hook, line, and sinker.”

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (D) "loves to prosecute businesses for potentially misleading advertising" but when he's exposed as a serial liar about his Vietnam War service, the media refuse to hammer him for the scandal, NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell told viewers of the Saturday, May 22 "Fox & Friends."

While credit is due the New York Times for breaking the story, the network evening newscasts "ran it one night, and then they walked away from it," the Media Research Center president noted, adding by way of contrast that when South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford (R) got entangled in his web of lies, "they were on him relentlessly,as they should have been."

But Bozell added of Blumenthal, "this guy's a liberal Democrat, and [so] they walk away."

For the full segment's video, click the play button in the embed at right. You can find the MP3 audio available here.

At first, Michael Mann, a Penn State professor and a central figure in the Climategate scandal, but best known for his discredited "hockey stick graph" didn't like being mocked in a YouTube video. Now Mann is alleging he's a victim of hate groups. 

On ABC's May 23 "World News Sunday," a segment from anchor Dan Harris alleged that threatening e-mails Mann received were part of a "spike" in violence aimed at the global warming alarmist community.

"The ongoing oil spill crisis in the Gulf is keeping the debate over climate and energy very much in the headlines and that debate is becoming increasingly venomous with many prominent scientists now saying that they are being severely harassed," Harris said.

Curiously Harris makes no mention of the real violence in the form of eco-terrorism that has come from the environmental left or Greenpeace repeatedly targeting the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Chris Horner, by stealing his garbage on a weekly basis, as his Web site points out. Instead, this "severe harassment" ABC warned about were e-mails from fringe Internet elements sent to Mann.

Joe Scarborough was on fire this morning, his ire trained on twin targets: Dick Blumenthal, and the New York Times' John Harwood, who casually dismissed the candidate's lies about having served in Vietnam as just a case of getting "a little carried away."  At one point, Scarborough claimed he wasn't calling Blumenthal a "scumbag"—but it sure sounded like it.

Harwood began his Blumenthal defense with a barroom analogy: "the occasions where he was loose is more akin to a guy who had a few too many at the bar and hit on somebody rather than somebody actually trying to slip a mickey into the girls drink." He later added this lame defense: that even if Blumenthal lied to the veterans groups about his record, they weren't deceived by it.  "Were all those veterans groups fooled by it?", asked Harwood, implying they weren't.  "You're a reporter, you go ask them," snapped Scarborough.

Scarborough later pointed out that Blumenthal lied and trafficked on the valor of others on precisely those occasions when, appearing before veterans groups, it would benefit him politically. Harwood miscast Joe's criticism of Blumenthal as a demand that all candidates explain why they didn't serve.  A peeved Scarborough called Harwood out: "John, I don't know show, what feed you're listening to."

It's turned into something of a week for TV hosts, if not to bite, then at least to nibble hard on the hands that feed them . . .

First, as noted here, on Friday Joe Scarborough passed along the comment of an unnamed conservative biggie who wondered "what the hell [Rand Paul] was doing on MSNBC?", where during an interview with Rachel Maddow he caused controversy with his comments on the Civil Rights Act.

Today, it was Howard Kurtz's turn.  In the wake of Campbell Brown's withdrawal from CNN, in which she cited her show's poor ratings, Kurtz, host of Reliable Sources also on CNN wondered whether the network's business strategy of offering news in contrast to the opinion-oriented programming on Fox News and MSNBC is "viable."   For good measure, Kurtz also managed to suggest that Brown, Connie Chung and Paula Zahn—all of whose CNN shows failed—weren't strong enough personalities to attract an audience during the 8 PM hour, up against the likes of O'Reilly and Olbermann. Ouch!

On this weekend's Fox News Watch, panelist Jim Pinkerton cited this NewsBusters item in which Joe Scarborough passed along the comment from an unnamed conservative insider questioning "what the hell was [Rand Paul] doing on MSNBC?", a reference to Paul's appearance on the Rachel Maddow show in which he made comments on the 1964 Civil Rights Act that have caused controversy.  The irony of course is that Scarborough is himself an MSNBC host. H/t NB reader Gat New York.

Pinkerton and his fellow News Watch panelists got a chuckle out of this NewsBuster's fond wish which concluded the item: "Oh to be an olive when Joe and Rachel sip martinis together at the MSNBC TGIF."

Since Rand Paul has dropped out of this week's episode of "Meet the Press," Mark Levin has challenged MTP host David Gregory to appear on his syndicated radio show.

MP3 audio for download here or you can enjoy this clip from our friends at The Right Scoop:

Almost instantaneously, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) vetoed a just-passed tax hike. Thus far Christie has stuck to his conservative guns in a not-so-conservative state.

Make sure you visit this post at the new Eyeblast Blog for the full details and to weigh in on whether or not Christie is a conservative superhero.

Joe Scarborough might not have won any brownie points with his employer, but he gets credit for candor . . .

Commenting on the Rand Paul matter, Scarborough passed along the comments of an unidentified conservative insider who asked "what the hell was he [Paul] doing on MSNBC?" That of course was a reference to Paul's appearance on the Rachel Maddow show in which he made comments on the 1964 Civil Rights Act that have caused controversy.

With the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) taking another tumble of 376 points on May 20, some investors are pointing to problems in Europe for the sell-off. However, there may be problems at home as well.

CNBC's CME Group floor reporter Rick Santelli explained on the May 20 broadcast of "Closing Bell" it had a lot to do with the Europe and the Euro, however it isn't all coming from abroad.

"Well, a couple of things," Santelli said. Well, first of all, if you look at the high-grades, they widened out with the high-yields widened out more today at levels today that are wider than the day of the flash crash. That's ‘a.' And ‘b,' you know Maria, we have a 1.2511 on the Euro. This is so much more than just focusing on the Euro."

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