Two June 23 Motor City newspaper reports -- one in the Detroit Free Press ("Group blasts subprime loans," by Amber Hunt), the other in the Detroit News ("ACORN focuses on vote," by Mike Martindale) -- portrayed the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) as a noble enterprise dedicated to helping troubled borrowers and increasing voter involvement in the political process.

Reality differs.

Hunt and Martindale were either unaware, or perhaps didn't care, that ACORN has had myriad problems over several years, including but not limited to voter-registration fraud, employee mistreatment and intimidation, and home-loan irregularities. Days before the group's national convention in Detroit, the Consumer Rights League, a group whose stated mission is "protecting consumer choice," issued a scathing whistleblower report charging ACORN with "misusing taxpayer dollars for political ends and by attacking lending corporations for the same 'predatory' lending practices it regularly engages in."

Here are selected paragraphs from each reporter's virtual press releases (HTs to Michelle Malkin here and here):

There are over 180,000 U.S. troops serving bravely in Iraq and Afghanistan and each of them are owed a great deal of gratitude for their service and sacrifice. In a first of its kind Web-A-Thon to raise funds to send the largest shipment of care packages in history to our troops abroad, Move America Forward will Web-cast "From the Front Lines" via streaming video at www.ustream.tv on Thursday, June 26 from 4 p.m. to midnight EDT (3 PM to 11 p.m. CDT, 1 PM to 9 p.m. PDT).

The Media Research Center is sponsoring the 5 to 6 p.m. EDT hour and MRC Founder and President Brent Bozell will be interviewed at the top of the hour, around 5:05 p.m.

Radio host Rush Limbaugh should briefly join the live Web cast around 4:20p.m. EDT and other conservative luminaries like Ann Coulter, Mark Levin, and Sean Hannity are also scheduled to participate in the Web cast.

You can find the Web cast here on Ustream.tv or embedded on this post below the page break.

You pathetic little people of the blogosphere. You're nothing more than "nitwits at home with [your] computers" who've deluded yourselves into imagining you're "part of the news media." Just ask Mike Barnicle. The former Boston Globe columnist broke the tough truth to us on today's Morning Joe. WaPo editorial writer Jonathan Capehart was "so glad" to agree.

Capehart was in full courtier mode to Mika Brzezinski, anchoring the show during Joe Scarborough's extended absence awaiting the birth of a child home in Florida. When executive producer Chris Licht read a viewer email critical of Mika, Capehart leapt to her defense, and it was then that Barnicle and he sniffed at the pretenders of the pajamahadeen.

View video here.

The Democrats and the mainstream media have long been pushing the meme that George W. Bush is a 'unilateral cowboy' who alienates our supposed allies. Funny thing about that, in the past six years, the governments who actively oppose American goals and who expressed their disdain for the current President have one by one been pushed out of office and replaced by governments who are much closer to the Bush Administration. This has happened so far in Germany (Angela Merkel), France (Nicolas Sarkozy), Canada (Stephen Harper) and now in one of Russia's closest allies, the Republic of Serbia.

As reported by the Washington Post, Serbia's pro-Western president declared victory in Sunday's parliamentary elections _ a stunning upset over ultranationalists who tried to exploit anger over Kosovo's independence. But his rivals vowed to fight on, and it was unclear if he could stave off their challenge. "This is a great day for Serbia," Boris Tadic proclaimed after an independent monitoring group that carried out a parallel vote count nationwide said his bloc won 39 percent _ about 10 percent more than the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party. Of course the Post managed to miss the fact that this is one more supposed ally of Russia's neo-Communist and imperialist president Vladimir Putin that has instead chosen closer ties with the free states of Europe and the United States. Michelle Malkin pointed out the fact that the Post managed to completely miss, writing:

Last week's issue of the Village Voice featured Roy Edroso's review of "10 conservative Web scribblers," described therein as "buffoons" and in the article's subhead as "a confederacy of dunces." (Actually, Edroso names twelve bloggers, arriving at his figure of ten by counting the Power Line trio as one person.)

Lefty snark aside, the piece is problematic in part because at least two of the bloggers Edroso scrutinizes, Ann Althouse and Megan McArdle, really aren't conservatives. Moreover, by emphasizing individual bloggers he almost completely ignores lively large-group sites such as the Corner (he examines only Jonah Goldberg's contributions to NRO) and, of course, NewsBusters.

Clarification: Apparently the Thursday night "Idol" included the "Jesus" lyric. In a somewhat-related item of interest to our readers, my colleague Tim Graham reminds me that West Coast viewers of ABC's "The View" in May 2002 heard a bleep when co-host Joy Behar said the word "Jesus."

Apparently Jesus just isn't alright with "American Idol." On Wednesday's "Idol Gives Back" special a choir singing "Shout to the Lord" had to excise "Jesus" from the song. (h/t Michelle Malkin)

To borrow from Simon Cowell, the decision was, to put it charitably, dreadful. See the YouTube video embedded below the page break.

The left and the media love to hyperventilate about the right wing “hate speech” on the Internet, but the anger and vitriol of the left dwarfs that of the right, especially where female or minority bloggers are concerned. Hateful comments are not uncommon at lefty blogs like Daily Kos. That kind of hostility forces the Huffington Post to occassionally close comments on articles involving certain topics like Israel, the military or even Margaret Thatcher.

Right Wing News addressed this trend in its excellent ongoing series “Blogging While Female: 5 Conservative Women Bloggers Talk About Gender Issues and the Blogosphere.” (Pt 2 here). RWN sampled a variety of righty opinion from Michelle Malkin, Mary Katherine Ham, LaShawn Barber, Rachel Lucas and more, and they discussed experiencing misogynistic and often disturbingly aggressive comments.

Pictures of them are photoshopped into violent or sexually explicit positions, and they are stalked, online and occasionally offline. Liberals track down their addresses and phone numbers and leave obscene messages, even threaten rape. Moderate blogger Ann Althouse nailed the root of the hostility, “...people on the Left think you are evil if you don't agree with them, that you're actually a bad person” (all bold mine). 

Pollster Frank Luntz has some 'splainin' to do writes Michelle Malkin, who has a post with video about one Granite State gentleman who's shown up in more than one Luntz focus group.

New Hampshire's a small state, but c'mon:

Yep. I think Frank Luntz, not any of the campaigns, is the one who needs to answer the questions about who Mr. Undecided is–and how he managed to end up in both focus groups. Transparency about how all of the people in the room ended up there would be wise.

The St. Petersburg Times, the "hometown newspaper" for the CNN-YouTube Republican debate, published an interesting story on CNN’s reactions to conservative criticism. Their list of excuses was extensive, and ridiculous. As far as conservatives are concerned, CNN has two choices: either they were extremely cynical in knowingly placing Democratic supporters into a Republican debate, or they were extremely unprofessional in failing to do five minutes of work to prevent the publicity fiasco of allowing Hillary supporters to try and embarrass her opponents on national TV.

CNN is responding by attacking their critics (Michelle Malkin by name) for being stalking horses for Fox News. In their report, Wes Alison and Eric Deggans asked if there wasn’t enough time for vetting (when they’ve been receiving questions for three months?):

As we at NewsBusters have noticed, the media often pass off professional or semi-professional liberal activists as average Joes and Janes. The effect, of course, is to give a feel of authenticity to the problems, real or perceived, that these folks are struggling with, and often demand government intervention for.

So it's not surprising that the "undecided voters" in the recent Democratic debate in Vegas were often liberal activists. Bryan Preston of Hot Air looked into it. You can check out his blog entry here, or watch the embedded video posted above. (h/t Michelle Malkin)

It's arguably not as explosive as rigging trucks to explode in vintage "Dateline NBC" fashion but it seems ABC News may be using phony gay couples to gin up an incendiary story that plays on the media's preconceived storyline about intolerance and "homophobia" in conservative parts of America, particularly the South. Here's an excerpt from Michelle Malkin:

When you don’t feel like covering the news, you manfacture it. Remember the story I broke last spring about NBC News engineering a sting at NASCAR to try and expose fans as anti-Muslim bigots? Well, it looks like the dinosaur networks haven’t learned from the embarrassing backlash to that pathetic episode. Or Rathergate. Or Shattered Glass. Or Janet Cooke. Or Scott Thomas Beauchamp. Etc. etc. etc.

Now, according to the local Fox affiliate in Birmingham, Alabama, it looks like ABC News is engaging in media stage management and Theater of Journalism to expose anti-homosexual bigotry in the South:

MSNBC's Keith "Chicken & Waffles" Olbermann attacked conservative blogger Michelle Malkin for "ethnic profiling" of Chinese restaurant dishwashers in New York City who donated to the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. Of course, running off of the liberal Media Matters script, Olbermann failed to note that Malkin's problem is not with the donors' ethnicity per se, but that it's highly suspicious when low-wage earners pony up a few thousand to give a political candidate. Especially when that candidate, Hillary Clinton, like her husband, has had a spotty history at best when it comes to suspicious or untoward campaign contributions.

After all, these aren't $50-checks or anything, it's big money, reported the not-so-right-wing Los Angeles Times on October 19:

In the midst of a Wall Street Journal editorial today about proponents' misrepresentations relating to the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) coverage, cost, and financing (characterized as "fiscal fraudulence"), the Journal took shots at blogs that have questioned the SCHIP eligibiliy of Graeme Frost, the 12-year-old boy the Democrats used to deliver a two-minute rebuttal to President Bush's veto of legislation that would vastly expand the program.

The Journal's criticisms of SCHIP expansion and the Democrats' overheated rhetoric after the veto are, on substance, very solid:

After President Bush vetoed Congress's major expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, Nancy Pelosi declared: "President Bush used his cruel veto pen to say, 'I forbid 10 million children from getting the health benefits they deserve.'" As far as political self-parody goes, that one ought to enter the record books.

It's wrong on the facts, for one, which Speaker Pelosi knows. ..... The Schip bill was not some all-or-nothing proposition: A continuing resolution fully funds the program through mid-November, so none of the 6.6 million recipients will lose coverage.

David Herszenhorn's front-page "Political Memo" for Wednesday's New York Times was devoted to the fight over Graeme Frost, the boy pushed forward by the Democrats to deliver the response to Bush's weekly radio address on the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP).

The inimitable Mark Steyn is one of several conservative writers unhappy with Democrats "desperate enough to send a boy to do a man's job."

Herszenhorn accused Republicans and "conservative bloggers" of attacking the boy and his family. While not as bad as the local coverage in the Baltimore Sun as outlined earlier by Ken Shepherd, there is a hostile tone:

On September 29, 2007, Baltimore 12-year old Graeme Frost became the Democratic poster child, literally, for SCHIP. Frost read the Democratic Party's official response to the president's weekly radio address, attacking President Bush for his veto of a Democratic-sponsored bill to balloon federal spending on the 10-year old program.

The Baltimore Sun ran a story that morning noting young Graeme Frost's brush with political football history, and two days earlier ran a gauzy profile on Graeme's mom and dad and their push for the Democratic SCHIP expansion here. But now that conservative bloggers have been raising questions about the portrayal by Democrats and the Baltimore Sun of the family's financial plight, the Sun is hitting back by attacking conservatives bloggers as heartless and obsessive, Michelle Malkin noted on her blog.

More than a week after Geraldo Rivera said he'd spit on Michelle Malkin if he ever saw her, the controversial Fox News anchor issued an apology on last night's "O'Reilly Factor."

"I just, you're so filled with emotion," Rivera said referring to the incident. "Someone calls you a liar and a fool, you want to strike back at them. It was an unguarded moment."

"I totally apologize, that's not me, I don't spit. I'm not a spitter," he said.

Transcript and video below the fold. Hat tip: Allahpundit.

I just viewed this video via Michelle Malkin of failed sportscaster Keith Olberman naming her Worst Person of the Week and pushing a quote by Geraldo Rivera in doing it:

“Michelle Malkin is the most vile, hateful commentator I’ve ever met in my life,” he says. “She actually believes that neighbors should start snitching out neighbors, and we should be deporting people.

“It’s good she’s in D.C. and I’m in New York,” Rivera sneers. “I’d spit on her if I saw her.”

Now it appears Michelle has had a small ad buy which served to call attention to the quote banned by Quigo. So, Rivera's ugliness is okay for broadcast on MSNBC in another sad attempt to further demean the target in this, but it's not okay to point a finger at Rivera with his own words?

Blogger Michelle Malkin has an excellent item today at RealClearPolitics.com about how the media have a lack of interest in stories about Christian missionaries kidnapped, brutalized, and tortured at the hands of Islamist terrorists. Here's an excerpt, after which I share my thoughts on what we could expect to see from the biased media should some of the South Korean missionaries make it back alive and find themselves interviewed on say "Dateline NBC":

The blood of innocent Christian missionaries spills on Afghan sands. The world watches and yawns. The United Nations offers nothing more than a formal expression of "concern." Where is the global uproar over the human rights abuses unfolding before our eyes?