The Denver Post has managed the amazing feat of criticizing Rush Limbaugh for supposedly calling for riots at this summer's Democrat convention in Denver while completely downplaying the role of the very organization calling for recreating 68 and all the problems of Chicago '68 that implies in their article provocatively titled Limbaugh dreams of DNC riot:

Rush Limbaugh says he is not calling for a riot in Denver during the Democratic National Convention — he only "dreams" of it, to the tune of "White Christmas."

The conservative talker discussed the possibility of Mile High unrest in August on his national radio show for a second day in a row Thursday.

"Now, I am not inspiring or inciting riots. I'm dreaming, I'm dreaming of riots in Denver," he said mimicking the holiday tune.

In Monday's Washington Post environmental reporter Juliet Eilperin wrote up a large article on Al Gore's latest climate heroics, headlined "Gore Launches Ambitious Advocacy Campaign on Climate." Gore has pledged to spend $300 million over 3 years "aimed at mobilizing Americans to push for aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, a move that ranks as one of the most ambitious and costly public advocacy campaigns in U.S. history."

Skeptics of catastrophic global warming theory do show up -- in paragraph 20. Before that, we learn Al Gore's putting together strange bedfellows: "One of its early ads will feature the unlikely alliance of clergymen Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton sitting on a couch on Virginia Beach, talking about their commitment to address climate change."

Eilperin also notes that John McCain is at least partially committed to Gore's global goals, and he also has the support of former Republican congressman Sherwood Boehlert. (She doesn't note Boehlert is the most liberal of Republicans and a Sierra Club favorite.)

"The opening of a trapdoor and the sudden snap of a hangman's noose at dawn yesterday brought an extraordinary end to a political era in Iraq." -- Opening line from The Guardian's report of the execution of Saddam, Dec. 31, 2006

"Senator Clinton never gave a second thought to opening the trap door beneath her fellow Democrat." -- Bob Herbert of the NYT, Confronting the Kitchen Sink, March 8, 2008 [emphasis added in both citations].

When Bill O'Reilly, in an impromptu response to a phone caller's question, said that he didn't want to "lynch" Michelle Obama, critics on the left from Media Matters to Keith Olbermann were outraged. Star Jones condemned O'Reilly's statement as "racist, unacceptable and inappropriate on every level."

In the midst of their seeming support for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, the good folks at NBC's "Saturday Night Live" appeared to advise Barack Obama last evening to do everything within his power to distance himself from Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

In an animated sketch entitled "The Obama Files," candidate Barack is seen hiding Jackson from the press by talking to him in a broom closet as he instructs the reverend to go abroad as a "special envoy" to what ends up being non-existent countries.

Later, Sharpton showed up complaining that Obama had sent him to East Paraguay (h/t Tim Graham):

Following a segment on Monday wondering if America was "finally color-blind" in the wake of Barack Obama’s Iowa caucus win, on Friday’s CBS "Early Show," co-host Harry Smith seemed to say no as he previewed a segment on recent comments made about Tiger Woods: "Also coming up in this half hour words that wound, Tiger Woods reacts to a racial slur from a Golf Channel anchor."

During the segment, Smith talked to the liberal Reverend Al Sharpton and liberal former New York radio host Ron Kuby about the comments. Smith began by observing: "...for years we've been navigating a changing world when it comes to racially insensitive remarks, but with the Don Imus incident, the national dialogue has changed a lot." Smith then played the clip of Golf Channel Anchor Kelly Tilghman who suggested that the only way for other golfers to beat Tiger Woods was to "lynch him in a back alley." However, Smith also mentioned that, "Tiger Woods said not to worry, that he and Tilghman are long time friends."

Smith asked Sharpton, "You think this is a big deal?" to which Sharpton responded:

I think that it is. Either you're going to have standards or you're not. I think if you give Tilghman a pass, then who then stops the next person from saying something insensitive and saying Tilghman is an example of how come I can say this. And I think the problem with Tilghman's statement, regardless to the reaction of Tiger Woods, is it was very offensive, if I had said about a Jewish person, let's throw them in a gas chamber, I don't think there would have been a question I'd have been off the radio and I have a radio show. So I think you've got to either have standards or you don't have standards.

After his surprisingly easy victory in the Iowa Caucuses, the New York Times is joining the rest of the media in promoting the historic candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama. Check how the Times flooded the country to get favorable Obama soundbites for Saturday's front-page story by Diane Cardwell, "Daring to Believe, Blacks Savor Obama Victory." The full byline:

"Reporting was contributed by James Barron, Timothy Williams and John Eligon from New York; Lakiesha R. Carr and Holli Chmela from Washington; Rebecca Cathcart from Los Angeles; Brenda Goodman from Birmingham, Ala.; Rachel Mosteller from Houston; Susan Saulny from Chicago; Kirk Semple from Miami; and Katie Zezima from Boston."

The beginning:

"For Sadou Brown in a Los Angeles suburb, the decisive victory of Senator Barack Obama in Iowa was a moment to show his 14-year-old son what is possible.

The rise of Barack Obama with a message of racial reconciliation has led some to question whether race-baiting leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are yesterday’s news. But on the front page of Wednesday’s Washington Post came a rebuttal, a news story headlined "Not Relevant? Sharpton Scoffs at the Idea: Activist’s Busy Calendar and Ringing Phone Speak to His Role in Civil Rights." Reporter Keith Richburg toyed with the idea of an irrelevant Sharpton, but the lion’s share of his story worked on shoring up his clout.

All the Democratic presidential contenders are seeking his endorsement, reported Richburg. After his high-profile turns in getting Don Imus fired and the "Jena 6" celebrated, Sharpton declared "smiling contentedly over coffee" in the story, "I think this has been a banner year, to say the least...This year proved the real revival of civil rights activism."

Imagine for a moment that the FBI raided televangelist Pat Robertson's office for any reason whatsoever, much less say his 1988 presidential campaign. It'd be a story in the broadcast evening news programs, right?

So why the utter lack of interest in the December 12 federal probe into Al Sharpton's 2004 campaign? A review of Nexis for ABC, NBC, and CBS network news stories for December 12-18 yielded nothing on a December 13 FBI raid.

Here's an excerpt from the AP's reporting from December 13:

He might be a middle-aged white guy from the Mountain West, but Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) suddenly understands the travails of people stopped for "DWB": driving while black. In the course of his interview with Matt Lauer, aired last night and excerpted on this morning's "Today," Craig tried to play the profiling card.

MATT LAUER: The fact that these motions seemed to replicate a well-established sequence of signals for soliciting anonymous sex, it's a coincidence?

View video here.

"View" moderator Whoopi Goldberg surprisingly called out Reverend Al Sharpton for sometimes jumping to conclusions too swiftly, particularly on the false Duke lacrosse sexual assault allegation. In discussing Al Sharpton calling for Isiah Thomas to apologize for his conduct with a female New York Knicks staffer, Whoopi Goldberg called for Sharpton to apologize for protesting the innocent Duke lacrosse players.

WHOOPI GOLDBERG: Will you do me a favor? Will you ask him to please apologize to the Duke lacrosse players?

JOY BEHAR: Oh

This could be a first: Al Sharpton criticized for being insufficiently inflammatory; faulted for not shooting from the hip.

At the opening of today's "Morning Joe," host Joe Scarborough panned the Rev's "O'Reilly Factor" performance last evening, in which the normally obstreperous one was relatively subdued on the subject of his host's comments on Sylvia's restaurant in Harlem. Scarborough later escalated his criticism, calling O'Reilly a "moron," and accusing him of making "racist" comments.

View video here.

In the midst of the media's typically one-sided view of Thursday's civil rights protests in Jena, Louisiana, Jason Whitlock, the black sportswriter who called Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton terrorists during April's Don Imus controversy, penned an op-ed in the Kansas City Star that should be must-reading for all Americans.

Entitled "Lessons From Jena, LA," Whitlock's piece marvelously exposed a side of this story that mainstream media outlets, as well as folks like Jackson and Sharpton, want to desperately withhold from the public in order to provoke racial tension rather than reduce it.

After a wonderful introduction, Whitlock got down to business (emphasis added throughout, h/t NB reader Thomas Rosenbrook):

On Thursday, Alex Johnson wrote an article about beleaguered quarterback Michael Vick published at MSNBC.com.

In it, he quoted Rev. Al Sharpton as basically saying that the whole issue was being over-hyped due to racism stating, "If the police caught Brett Favre (a white quarterback for the Green Bay Packers) running a dolphin-fighting ring out of his pool, where dolphins with spears attached to their foreheads fought each other," Favre wouldn't get arrested.

Problem is that quote came from a parody website called News Groper.

Here's the entire hysterical quote reported at National Review's Media blog Friday which has subsequently been removed from the MSNBC.com story (h/t Koshlan Mayer-Blackwell of News Groper):

Chris Matthews, presumably away on vacation, handed the reigns of MSNBC's Hardball to Democratic activist Reverend Al Sharpton. The first two guests, in the first half-hour, of the Sharpton hosted July 2 episode, were Democrats - Howard Dean and Terry McAuliffe. The hot topic of the discussion with Dean was about how the John McCain campaign and the GOP, overall, were suffering in their fundraising efforts. The following "hardball" segment, with McAuliffe, featured the Hillary Clinton campaign chairman crowing about her fundraising success.

After the McAuliffe segment, Sharpton, actually interviewed a Republican. Predictably, Sharpton's questions to presidential candidate, Representative Duncan Hunter, were tougher than the ones to his Democratic colleagues. Following the Hunter segment, Sharpton quickly returned to his Democratic friends, as he invited on Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Chris Dodd.

Maybe this afternoon's oppressive heat and humidity on the Hardball Plaza in DC were getting to Chris Matthews. I'm not sure how else to explain his complaint, to the effect that it is wrong of the Roman Catholic Church to apply its rules to politicians as it does to other adherents.

His remark came in the course of a debate on religion on this afternoon's edition of "Hardball" between Christopher Hitchens, author of the atheist polemic "God Is Not Great", and the Reverend Al Sharpton.

HARDBALL HOST CHRIS MATTHEWS: Today you have the Roman Catholic church through its bishops challenging the rights of Catholic office-holders to take positions for abortion rights. They basically say you have to be for imprisonment of people involved with abortion or else you're not a Catholic and you'll be excommunicated. It seems to be an era, not just because of Islam, to keep religion out of politics . . . Why are they foisting themselves, why are the religious leaders jumping into the political marketplace and saying to politically-elected people, who are duly elected, "you cannot take that position and be in our church, or we will excommunicate you"? That seems to be what's going on.

View video here.

As we all know, Andrea Mitchell having told us so, Chris Matthews is no liberal. However the Hardball host did emphatically state on this afternoon's show that, at least when it comes to health care, he agrees with Michael Moore.

Matthews had just aired an impromptu interview that MSNBC's David Shuster had snared with Moore when the filmmaker appeared on Capitol Hill today on the occasion of this week's release of his latest work, "Sicko," regarding health care in the United States. In both Shuster's depiction of Moore's views, and in Moore's own statements in the course of the interview, Moore made clear that he wants to eliminate private-sector participation in health care insurance.

As Shuster put it: "in this movie, Moore calls for the end, the end, of for-profit healthcare."

In the aired interview, Moore described private-sector insurers as a "racket" and said "I want private insurance companies out of the equation."

So how did Matthews react to Moore's call for the killing of private-sector health care?

HARDBALL HOST CHRIS MATTHEWS: You know, I gotta agree with him on this stuff. I gotta agree with him. He's got a case. Healthcare in this country is not working.

The Today show’s very belated attack on Rush Limbaugh on Monday, complete with Hillary’s minions comparing the hilarious Al Sharpton parody to a "minstrel show" (complete with blackface film clip), reminds me: how did NBC cover the last blackface controversy? That would be leftist blogger Jane Hamsher Photo-shopping Joe Lieberman in blackface on The Huffington Post last August 2 as she claimed he was an "integral part of the GOP’s bully machine for the last six years."

NBC didn’t. A Nexis search for terms like "minstrel show" and "blackface" found no mention of the blogger who stepped over the line. On the August 6 edition of Meet the Press, in a segment featuring Lanny Davis for Lieberman and Jim (brother of Howard) Dean for Ned Lamont, host Tim Russert ended with a very weak tip to the bloggers in that race:

Brent Bozell's culture column this week deals with Opie & Anthony's sick XM shock-jock routine about raping Condoleezza Rice (and raping Laura Bush "to death.") You may not be shocked, but Al Sharpton made no attempt to express his outrage at the XM sickos in defense of this black woman, despite how this routine is so much worse than the Don Imus "ho" comment (video is here):

Rev. Al Sharpton showed up to debate May 15 on the CNN Headline News program “Showbiz Tonight.” But he didn’t say a single word against Opie and Anthony or one word in defense of Condi Rice. He insisted that the Imus gaffe was much more offensive! “I think that these cases are different than Imus. Imus was a repeat offender that stood out, in a different situation...Imus’s situation cannot be compared to other arguments” about free speech, he said.

For those that missed it, Friday night’s debate on Fox News’ “Hannity & Colmes” between “Imus in the Morning” producer Bernard McGuirk and Rev. Al Sharpton was a fireworks-filled extravaganza (video in three parts available here, here, and here; full transcript follows).

Without question, McGuirk came prepared to take on the man conceivably most responsible for his termination by CBS Radio, as well as his boss’s, Don Imus.

In fact, with McGuirk’s first words, it was made infinitely clear that viewers were in for quite a barnburner: “Let's get ready to box on FOX, I guess, huh?”

After the first question was posed to McGuirk, he tried to explain to the audience that Imus was an equal opportunity offender (readers are warned that some of the language is a bit graphic. As such, proceed with caution):

Al Sharpton, victim?

Yup -- according to Chris Matthews. The MSNBC host suggested that Mitt Romney had landed a "sucker punch" on Sharpton in reacting to the reverend's assertion that "true believers" will defeat the Mormon in the presidential race. Matthews laced his interview with Sharpton on this afternoon's "Hardball" with a number of comments painting Sharpton as the offended, not the offender.

After playing a tape of Sharpton's remark, and Romney's response in which he characterized Sharpton's comment as bigoted, Matthews went off on a riff.

View video here.