According to The Huffington Post, Michelle Malkin, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck and other right-of-center stars that regularly dominate the New York Times Hardcover Non-Fiction Bestsellers List are - or should be - in a league of their own.

No, that isn't Arianna Huffington's blog heaping praise on conservative authors. It's a literal suggestion. With right-leaning books and authors holding so many spots on the list, and more to come - former Sarah Palin, former Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush all have books due out -Huffington Post suggests conservatives should have their own category to differentiate from other works of non-fiction.

In a Nov. 9 entry on The Huffington Post that laments Fox News host Glenn Beck pulling a feat not done before - holding the number one spot on The New York Times' four lists: hardcover fiction, hardcover non-fiction, paperback non-fiction and children's - they suggest a separate category altogether, not for political non-fiction, but conservative non-fiction.

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn is stepping down at the end of the month.

NewsBusters readers should remember Dunn as the outspoken Adminstration official who made quite a splash in October when she said the Fox News Channel "really is not a news network at this point."

Now, according to the Associated Press, she's passing the baton:

Several weeks ago, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann used the bizarre – and arguably disturbing – term "big mashed-up bag of meat with lip stick on it" to refer to Michelle Malkin as he slammed the conservative blogger, leaving some wondering where his idea for such a crude term came from. This question remains unanswered, but, notably, on Sunday’s Football Night in America on NBC, as he recited plays between the Houston Texans and the Indianapolis Colts, Olbermann used a similar term to refer to Kris Brown of the Houston Texans after he failed to score, calling Brown "a big bag full of mashed-up Kris Brown," as he was lying on the ground. (Hat tip to Clint Bradford for emailing in the tip.)

It was on the Tuesday, October 13, Countdown show on MSNBC that Olbermann compared Malkin to a "big mashed-up bag of meat with lip stick on it" during the show's "Worst Person in the World" segment.

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the November 8 Football Night in America pregame:

The willingness of MSNBC on-air commentators to engage in political hackery for the Democratic Party knows no boundaries - as indicated by the latest charged hurled at former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. 

Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC's "Countdown," who once called conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, "big mashed up bag of meat with lipstick," almost on a nightly basis attacks Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and has also regularly drubbed Palin, is now charging her with sexism.

On his Nov. 2 broadcast, Olbermann accused Palin of forcing former GOP congressional candidate Dede Scozzafava out of the race for New York's 23rd Congressional District and said Palin should be charged with sexism for doing so.

Here's something you don't see every day: a far-left media outlet calling out one of the far-left's heroes to defend one of the far-left's most hated conservatives.

Yet that's what happened a few weeks ago when Air America's editor of news and politics took on MSNBC's Keith Olbermann for sexist and misogynistic comments he made about conservative author Michelle Malkin.

As NewsBusters' Brad Wilmouth reported on October 13, Olbermann on "Countdown" that evening called Malkin "a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it."

Air America's Megan Carpentier was quite displeased at this sexist display (h/t NB reader Joseph McMahon):

CNN featured pro-illegal immigration activist Isabel Garcia of Tucson, Arizona on two programs on Wednesday night, and inadvertently caught her giving inconsistent answers regarding a 2008 protest where she participated in the beating and decapitation of a pinata effigy of Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona [audio clips from programs available here].

Correspondent Soledad O’Brien featured Garcia in the first segment of her ‘Latino in America’ miniseries at 9 pm Eastern, where she was labeled as an “unapologetic champion of people many Americans love to hate- illegal immigrants.” After detailing her involvement with a high-profile deportation case, O’Brien stated that Garcia had “nothing to do with creating the pinata and only picked it up to defuse” the anti-Arpaio protest. The CNN correspondent cast a sympathetic light on the activist by noting how she has apparently received death threats for her work.

After conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh was forced out of a consortium seeking to buy the National Football League's St. Louis Rams, there's evidence there is a double standard at play in the NFL.

Last week, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said that people in "responsible positions" in his league are held to a "higher standard," reacting to the notion that Limbaugh could be a part-owner of an NFL franchise.

"I have said many times before that we are all held to a higher standard here," Goodell said. "I think divisive comments are not what the NFL is all about. I would not want to see those kind of comments from people who are in a responsible position within the NFL. No. Absolutely not."

Analysis and video below fold

On Tuesday’s Countdown show, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann spewed bile at conservative commentator Michelle Malkin, accusing her of possessing "fascistic hatred," and comparing her to a "mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it." During his show’s regular "Worst Person" segment, Olbermann attacked Malkin for her role in bringing attention to the recent controversy over school children in New Jersey singing a song about President Obama.

Blaming the conservative commentator for death threats made against a woman who posted video of the children singing, Malkin was crudely slammed by Olbermann: "She received death threats and hate-filled voice mails all thanks to the total mindless, morally bankrupt, knee-jerk, fascistic hatred, without which Michelle Malkin would just be a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it."

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Tuesday, October 13, Countdown show on MSNBC:

President Obama’s Saturday night declaration that " I will end ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’" at a fundraising dinner for the gay-left Human Rights Campaign seems like a front-page story. But not to the Washington Post. Instead, they put pensions, Pakistan, a profile of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell, and a Bush-era DNA-testing policy on the front page.

And at the top left: an attack on conservative blogger Michelle Malkin leading a charge of incivility that’s "sour, angry, even dangerous."

The headline was "In Today’s Viral World, Who Keeps a Civil Tongue?" Is the Post civil? They connected Malkin and her fans with anti-Semitic radio host Father Charles Coughlin, railing against Roosevelt in the 1930s.

The Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute is now previewing its 2010 Great American Conservative Women calendar which will be available for sale on October 2.

The participants are: Kate Obenshain, Clare Boothe Luce, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Marji Ross, Bay Buchanan, Kellyanne Conway, Michele Bachmann, Carrie Prejean, Phyllis Schlafly, SE Cupp, and Star Parker.

Fox News has a slide show of the participants available here. Full size picture below the fold:

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria gave President Obama’s diplomacy-first foreign policy a ringing endorsement on his program on Sunday, lauding it as a breath of fresh air: “Obama is betting that America has matured, and that we recognize that...without the cooperation of other countries, America cannot be secure at home or prosperous. It’s a bold gambit. Here’s hoping it pays off.”

Zakaria also slammed the Democrat’s critics on the right, hinting that conservatives were out of touch: “Obama’s talk at the U.N. was well received all over the world, except in the right-wing stratosphere in the United States. There, he was accused of selling out America, mounting a coup against the country, siding with dictators, and wishing America would perish. If you heard or read the speech, you would be hard pressed to find a single word that Obama said that fits these descriptions. But that is the nature of political attacks in America these days. They are totally divorced from reality.”

Once again, one of the masters of the universe trotted out on MSNBC has discovered the cure to one of society's ills - more Obama.

Daily Voice editor and CNBC contributor Keith Boykin waved off the reservations of some parents about President Barack Obama addressing their children in the classroom. Boykin appeared on MSNBC on Sept. 3 in a segment about the classroom controversy and added his insightful commentary on the matter.

"So much of the debate about President Obama has been politicized in an effort by some to delegitimize his presidency," Boykin said. "This is clearly much ado about nothing. We're talking about the President of the United States speaking to school kids. Why wouldn't schools want this to happen? That's why our kids are so dumb today, because they don't want to have basic common sense in the classroom."

Conservatives are resuming their historically dominant position atop the New York Times and Amazon.com bestsellers lists after a short hiatus that coincided, not coincidentally, with George W. Bush's tenure in the White House.

While the mainstream media raved about a new era of leftist intellectual supremacy during the liberal ascendance on the bestsellers lists, the return of conservative books to the tops of those lists seems to be going unnoticed.

Amazon, which, unlike the New York Times, ranks books according to the number of actual copies sold, shows Glenn Beck's Common Sense rounding out the top, with Michelle Malkin's Culture of Corruption coming in a close second. Ron Paul's End the Fed comes in at number seven, Mark Levin's Liberty and Tyranny is at number nine, and at number 22 is Dick Morris and Eileen Mcgann's Catastrophe, which carries the blunt sub-heading, "How Obama, Congress, and the special interests are transforming... a slump into a crash, freedom into socialism, and a disaster into a catastrophe... and how to fight back."

IMPORTANT UPDATE BELOW!  (Kansas City Star and Abouhalkah recognize their own ignorance, change title of post and disable old link).

Numerous reasons to oppose the ludicrous Obama health care plan aside, Yael T. Abouhalkah of the Kansas City Star has cut through to the real reason for dissent - Americans are ignorant.

While Abouhalkah will undoubtedly argue that the message was meant to apply merely to the aspect of health care knowledge, he is quite unsuccessful at holding back his overall disdain for the way American's have responded to the plan. 

The title of his most recent blog post says it all.  In referring to an NBC poll about the health care plan, one in which MSNBC titles Doubts About Obama's Plans, Abouhalkah titles his post - Poll: Ignorance abounds among Americans on health care plan. 

The message?  If you're not down with the President's plan, then you can only be classified as ignorant.

But what examples of ignorance does the author specifically cite?

(Continued Below) 

As the likelihood of President Barack Obama's style of health care/health insurance reform has looked more and more uncertain, health care sector stocks have rallied, nearly 10 percent over the last month.

But now as Obama is showing some signs of managing his message and could be trying to make a comeback, even as polls show the odds aren't his favor, CNBC market analyst Steve Grasso is cautioning viewers to be wary of health care stocks for the time being.

"You know, one of my picks has been health care," Grasso said. "I'm a little shaky on it the longer this process goes on, I think the more we have to look at it. I mean, I caught a glimpse of President Obama speaking today. If they're clapping, that was a hand-picked audience. I have yet to find anyone who likes the plan. So I think health care is on waivers for me at this point."

On the syndicated "The Chris Matthews Show," over the weekend, Chris Matthews and his panel linked Rush Limbaugh and the GOP to the birthers movement and accused them of playing racial politics. After showing clips of Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin, Matthews and his panel argued that the GOP and conservatives were trying to capitalize on a "dark undercurrent" in America, as Matthews charged: "Are, are the Republicans using this to sort of build the undercurrent of passion against this president? They may not admit it, but are they using it?" 

NBC's Norah O'Donnell responded, "Yes I think I do. There is a sense that there are forces out there that are doing harm to this country and so people are looking for a way to de-legitimize Barack Obama. And so whether they can do it by aligning his race or his birth, even though he was born in America, they are a way to de-legitimize him and I think it, it's this dark undercurrent in America. And the thing that concerns me is that rather than focusing on things that unite us, that people are concentrating on things that divide us." [audio available here]

For his part Newsweek's Howard Fineman accused the GOP of using the "anger" to win in 2010. 

It is not often that the women on “The View” are silenced by their own guest, but Michelle Malkin did exactly that when she appeared on the show August 2. Malkin’s new book, “Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Kronies” was bound to be attacked by the left-left leaning panel of “The View,” but Malkin did not give them an opportunity.

Malkin dominated the conversation from the beginning with facts and examples. When asked by Elisabeth Hasselbeck about the corruption her book uncovers, she had several examples. “I scoured from top to bottom,” and started to list some of the more known corruption scandals within the Obama administration, until Joy Behar interrupted and asked, “And there was nothing like that in the Bush administration?”

On Friday night's Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, the host mocked Michelle Malkin's new book on the ethically challenged Obama administration, then mocked Jonah Goldberg, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Glenn Beck with fake books that show how conservatives have "jumped the shark" [sic] in attacking Obama after only six months in office:  

He’s been in office, our president, for 6 months, and there is also, or there is already a book by Michelle Malkin. You know Michelle Malkin, she’s been on our show. She won’t come back, but. (Laughter.) But look at this. This is not a fake book we mocked up. This is a real book. Culture of Corruption. Look at him, it’s the American flag, he’s f—ed it up already. [Wrong. It's the Obama campaign logo.]

Six months in office! And already we can make this judgment! It blows my mind, because Bush always said ‘you can’t judge me now. Only history can judge me.' The long – we’ve got to wait 100 years to see how Iraq comes out.

NBC's Matt Lauer, on Wednesday's "Today" show, invited on conservative columnist and author Michelle Malkin to discuss several topics ranging from Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest to Malkin's critique of Michelle Obama, but when the subject of only one Republican voting for Sonia Sotomayor in the Senate Judiciary committee came up, Lauer wondered if that would hurt the GOP with Hispanics as he queried: "After the, the last election it was said that the Republicans need to broaden the tent, they need to reach out to minorities. Reach out to Hispanics. Is that, are those six 'no' votes gonna hurt Republicans down the road?"

Lauer also expressed incredulity that Malkin dared to "take on," the First Lady as seen in the following exchange:

MATT LAUER: Let me ask you about your book. In it -- I mean clearly we know by the co-, we know by the title where it goes – you take on Michelle Obama-

MICHELLE MALKIN: I certainly do.

LAUER: -in this book. You call her the "First Crony."

MALKIN: Yes I do.

LAUER: Why?

You know the saying, "When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging"? It seems liberal journalist Bonnie Erbe either never heard it, or just doesn't care.

Yesterday I noted how the PBS "To the Contrary" host denounced Playboy writer Guy Cimbalo's list of 10 conservative women he's like to "hate-f***," only to hint that she thought syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin deserved to be degraded by the nudie mag writer.

Today, the U.S. News & World Report contributing editor took to her Thomas Jefferson Street blog to take on conservative blogger Gateway Pundit for supposedly distorting her argument. You see, Erbe insists, she never said she thinks Malkin would have it coming to be raped, only that she has it coming to be viciously and obscenely degraded by some loser writing for a softcore porn mag: