Bob Marshall

CNN continued its ridiculous narrative of tying gay rights to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, on Tuesday's Starting Point. Anchor Brooke Baldwin and her panel battered Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall for blocking the nomination of a gay prosecutor to the state's bench, even though Marshall argued that he was unfit for the position because of his activism and not his orientation.

Baldwin went so far as to connect the nomination with desegregation and women's suffrage. "Obviously, you know, blacks used to have to sit in the back of the bus. They don't have to anymore. There was discriminate – women couldn't vote. They can vote now. Times have changed. Do you not – do you not agree that he could be given a chance?" she offered Marshall. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Updated below (Feb. 24)

The Washington Post was curiously silent about the ideological and/or partisan bent of blogs that prompted its coverage of a controversial statement made last Thursday by Virginia Delegate Robert Marshall (R), who suggested, the Post reports, "that women who have abortions risk having later children with birth defects as a punishment from God."

Kunkle noted that Marshall couched his controversial comments in reference to a study by Virginia Commonwealth University that "was published in 2008 in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health and suggested that there is a higher risk of premature birth and low birth weight in children born to women who have had an abortion."

"Few seized on the remarks at the time Marshall made them," the Post's Fredrick Kunkle noted in his page B2 February 23 story, "[b]ut outrage built on social networking sites and political blogs after some Virginia newspapers picked up the story from Capital News Service, a program at VCU's School of Mass Communications."

But which blogs, exactly? It's not a stretch to imagine it was mostly left-wing or Democratic blogs seeking to hype a controversy to make Virginia Republicans -- who control the House of Delegates -- look bad, particularly in an election year in which the Democratic majority in the state senate is in jeopardy.

Yet Kunkle failed to inform readers which blogs tipped him off to the story and what political axes they have to grind.

The media's Palin Derangement Syndrome hit new lows Monday when Keith Olbermann used a remark by a little-known Virginia state Delegate to suggest the former Alaskan governor had an abortion.

In his "Worst Person in the World" segment, the "Countdown" host recognized Bob Marshall (R-Va.) for his comments about abortion increasing the likelihood of handicaps in children born after the procedure was performed on their mother.

Much as the notorious "Family Guy" episode did recently, this reference to handicapped children disgustingly led Olbermann to bring Palin into the equation (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Story Balloon):