The headline to today's lead story in the New York Times by Jim Rutenberg and Steven Lee Myers on the impending resignation of Karl Rove, Bush's chief political advisor, included the subhead "A Bare-Knuckle Style of Politics."

Rove as ruthless partisan brawler was indeed a theme that permeated both Tuesday's lead story and chief political reporter Adam Nagourney's accompanying analysis.

From Rutenberg and Rove's lead:

"With his voice breaking at times, and with President Bush at his side on the South Lawn of the White House, Karl Rove said Monday that he would resign as a deputy White House chief of staff at the end of the month. The decision ends Mr. Rove's role as the president's longest-serving and closest aide, and the one who most personified the bare-knuckle brand of politics Mr. Bush favors."

YouTube video update at bottom of post.

New York Times political reporter Adam Nagourney is typically hyper-sensitive to any hint of a Republican "attack" on a Democrat (not so much the other way around). So it was refreshing to read him actually having a little fun needling Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards on Friday as "The Breck Girl" for his preening over his hair and looks when he thinks he's off-camera (most notoriously in a widely seen YouTube video set to "I Feel Pretty")

Nagourney on Friday wrote about the mini-flap over Edwards' two $400 haircuts and brought up the YouTube video while suggesting a perception of hypocrisy.

"John Edwards, the North Carolina Democrat, announced on Thursday that he was reimbursing his campaign $800 to cover what his aides said was the cost of two haircuts -- yes, you read that correctly -- by a Beverly Hills barber, though, perhaps, the word stylist is more applicable….Mr. Edwards has presented himself in the Democratic field as an advocate of working-class Americans, lamenting the nation’s growing economic disparity."

Chief New York Times political reporter Adam Nagourney went to CPAC, the 3-day conservervapalooza gathering in Washington, D.C., and came back with profiles of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, both trying to appeal to social conservatives despite their past liberal stands on some social issues.

But Nagourney also guarded the Clintons' right flank on its history of fighting terror by misleadingly suggesting former New York City Mayor Rudy Guiliani gave the Clinton administration a pass in its response to terrorism before 9-11, although Giuilani devoted several minutes of his CPAC speech to criticizing the Democratic mindset on fighting terror.

For the second time in less than three months, the New York Times is forced to correct basic facts in a story regarding Sen. John Kerry's "botched joke" about U.S. troops being "stuck in Iraq." (TimesWatch pointed out the repeat flub yesterday.)

The Times has appended a thorough correction to political reporter Adam Nagourney's Thursday article.

Why is it so hard for the New York Times to obtain the basic facts of Sen. John Kerry's "botched joke"?

Political reporter Adam Nagourney, like Kate Zernike before him, spins Kerry's November gaffe about U.S. troops "stuck in Iraq" at a political rally in California to make them seem less harmful, in Thursday's "Kerry Will Not Enter Presidential Race."

"But Mr. Kerry’s hopes were probably most damaged by what he said was a botched joke he told while campaigning on behalf of Congressional candidates in the final week of the 2006 election campaigns.

Is Times political reporter Adam Nagourney outflanking DNC Chairman Howard Dean on the Democratic left?

That appears to be the case, judging by Sunday's report from Jeff Zeleny on Dean's weekend speech in Washington, "Democratic Leader Reminds Party That Victory Is No Mandate." (The online headline is different.)

Zeleny quotes Dean: "'The other party made mistakes in the past claiming that elections are mandates. Elections are not mandates. The voters of this country loaned the Democrats the power of the country for two years. Now it’s our job to earn it back again.''

Chief political reporter Adam Nagourney's last "Political Memo" before the election, "For Buoyant Democrats, Even a Big Gain May Feel Like a Failure," dramatically lowers expectations for Democrats – expectations he himself raised in a front-page story just two days ago.

"For a combination of reasons -- increasingly bullish prognostications by independent handicappers, galloping optimism by Democratic leaders and bloggers, and polls that promise a Democratic blowout -- expectations for the party have soared into the stratosphere. Democrats are widely expected to take the House, and by a significant margin, and perhaps the Senate as well, while capturing a majority of governorships and legislatures.

Sunday's lead story from Adam Nagourney and Robin Toner casts Republican party prospects in unrelieved grim tones ("G.O.P. Glum as It Struggles to Hold Congress -- Lost Seats Seen, Even in Best Outcome").

"The battle for Congress rolled into a climactic final weekend with Republican Party leaders saying the best outcome they could foresee was losing 12 seats in the House. But they were increasingly steeling themselves for the loss of at least 15 seats and therefore control of the House for the first time in 12 years.

The latest CBS/New York Times poll is reported out in Thursday's lead story by reporters Adam Nagourney and Janet Elder: "Only 25% In Poll Voice Approval of the Congress -- An Echo of 1994 Findings -- Links to Special Interests Are Cited -- Standing of Bush Also Lags."

Nagourney and his headline writer see parallels to the 1994 Republican sweep of Congress -- an event, incidentally, that the Times never saw coming, and certainly didn't anticipate as eagerly as it now does a Democratic reclamation.

Chief political reporter Adam Nagourney today writes the first edition of "Political Action," a new political column in the Times that will run in the paper every Tuesday until the November elections. The first entry is (rather predictably) "The Republican Divide."

"With fewer than 50 days left until Election Day, as many as 40 House and 10 Senate seats are in play, fueling Democratic hopes of capturing power in November. Washington is awaiting polling data that will show how much success the White House has had in trying to put Democrats on the defensive on national security -- and whether that effort has been undercut by the battle among Republicans over what is permissible in interrogating terrorism suspects.

As President Bush speaks today at the NAACP convention for the first time, political reporter Adam Nagourney found the G.O.P.'s black outreach failing in Tuesday's "Republicans Coming Up Short in Effort to Reach Out to African-American Voters."

"There has been no end to speculation about what the party was up to. Was it simply a ploy to improve the party’s image with moderate white voters? Did the White House see an opportunity to make small though significant changes in the American political system by pulling even a relative few black voters into its corner in important states like Ohio? (Yes, and yes.)

"But as Mr. Bush is tentatively scheduled to speak at the N.A.A.C.P. convention in Washington this week -- after five years of declining to appear before an organization with which he has had tense relations -- it seems fair to say that whatever the motivation, the effort has faltered.

Outgoing CBS Evening News anchor Bob Schieffer is a man who's never been ashamed to portray himself as not always the first guy to get the news -- or stay with the news as it happens. (Remember how he took a nap as Trent Lott destroyed his career? It's the last quote here.) MRC's Brian Boyd reports it happened again this morning on the Imus simulcast on MSNBC at 7:42 AM EDT:

Don Imus: “Hey, how about Hillary Clinton getting booed at this liberal gathering in New York for her stance on Iraq. Did you hear about that?”

Bob Schieffer: “No, I haven’t. Tell me about it.”

Sometimes I think that if you really want to know what’s going on in the world, you should read The New York Times…and assume the exact opposite is true. Take Saturday’s article “Gathering Highlights Power of the Blog” for example. Author Adam Nagourney visited Las Vegas to attend the meeting of mostly liberal bloggers discussing how they’re going to change the world in an event called “Yearly Kos” not so inconspicuously named after the blogosphere’s liberal mainstay, Daily Kos. Unfortunately, after listing and quoting some Democrat dignitaries in attendance – quotes to follow for your amusement! – Nagourney actually wrote (emphasis mine), “Blogging is nowhere near the force among Republicans as it is among Democrats.”

Really, Adam? And exactly how did you come to this conclusion? Could you provide some statistics to support this assertion, or did you pull this non sequitur out off your…hat?

In reality, the data quite refute Nagourney’s contentions. NewsBusters executive editor Matthew Sheffield recently compiled some statistics on this very subject that quite go counter to this report. Now, to be sure, the two most popular political “blogs” as measured by Alexa are the Huffington Post and Daily Kos. Yet, as the following list demonstrates, ten of the top 20 political blogs are conservative leaning:

A Republican won a special congressional election in Southern California yesterday – so why does the Times make it sound as if the Republicans got beat?

Chief political reporter Adam Nagourney’s online filing Wednesday morning on last night's electoral victory by Republican Brian Bilbray begins:

One hopes this Time mag profile of leftist blogger Markos "Kos" Moulitsas from ex-pseudo blogger Ana Marie Cox (occasionally formerly of wonkette.com), is not allowed into the magazine lest more innocent people will be exposed to its fatuousness.

Compact and wiry, Moulitsas, 34, exudes quivering intensity. He speaks in staccato paragraphs, punctuated by intense stares and a raised eyebrow. His eyes bulge slightly outward, as if reacting to the pressure of all the ideas inside his head. Many of those ideas find a home on Daily Kos. A clearinghouse for liberal screeds and progressive perspective on the news, the site claims to get more than 500,000 unique visitors daily and more than 10,000 members maintain their own sub-blogs (called "diaries") within its reaches.

In other words, he's nuts but it's in a good way. The nonsense hardly stops there, though:

Moulitsas’s rhetoric and passion have made him a posterboy bomb-thrower. He's the left's own Kurt Cobain and Che Guevera rolled into one, dripping sex appeal for progressives for whom debate has become synonymous with losing, who need a muscular liberal answer to the cowboy swagger adopted by the Bush Administration and its fans.