After airing what she described as a "hard-hitting" ad by the Center for Reproductive Rights which ominously warned, "Don't let Congress ban abortion coverage millions of women already have," MSNBC's Dr. Nancy Snyderman today lamented to Politico's Jeanne Cummings that with Sen. Ted Kennedy gone, Democrats lack a unifying figure who could defuse an abortion battle that could mar Democratic unity on health care reform.

Snyderman praised the late pro-choice politician as a "man of his church and of his faith" (MP3 audio here):

Well, now the Catholic Church is lobbying hard to get House language into the Senate bill and then hopefully get it passed. Politico's assistant managing editor Jeanne Cummings wrote about this. And she joins me now.

The Washington Post's Reliable Source gossip column reported on Friday that ABC anchor Charles Gibson was the emcee for a high-dollar fundraiser (thick with liberal Democrats) for the latest Boston building to honor the Kennedys, the so-called "royal family" of American politics: the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate.

Once again, ABC News seems to care not one ounce about the appearance of Democratic bias this creates. 

Here's how the Post unveiled the liberal-Democrat guest list:

RIP, Irving Kristol. Condolences to his family and his family and friends, along with intense gratitude from those who believe in individual freedom and liberty.

The Wall Street Journal has a compendium of key passages from Kristol's essays during his time there. The Weekly Standard's blog has links to several of his later columns. 

The Associated Press's Hillel Italie wanted to make sure that everyone reading the wire service's late Friday Kristol obituary (saved here in full for fair use and discussion purposes) came away knowing that "political writer" Kristol was a neoconservative.

It's almost as if AP has a once-a-month minimum on employing the word. Apparently hampered in using it since the election of Dear Leader last November, Kristol's passage gave Italie the opportunity to clean out the closet. Forms of the word "neoconservative" appear a remarkable 12 times in the obit's roughly 1,400 words, accompanied by eight appearances of forms of "conservative." Geez, we get it already, Hillel.

By contrast, AP's David Espo referred to the late Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy as "liberal" twice in roughly 2,000 words in his late-August Kennedy obituary (saved here).

Here are the first five paragraphs from Italie's report, followed by additional paragraphs with "neocon" labeling:

The Charlie Rose show on PBS was a natural place to get the warmest, most exaggerated praise for Ted Kennedy on the night after his death was announced, on August 26. Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of the networks’ favorite pundits, declared he was "an unparalleled giant in history." Rose said his record was a "towering, towering achievement, far beyond many presidents." Newsweek editor Jon Meacham was placing him in a tiny Senate Hall of Fame: "Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Ted Kennedy." After that, he said, a huge dropoff in talent.

Al Hunt was the strangest, but at least he began to realize his exaggeration was too implausible to continue: "He didn't demonize people at all. He demonized positions, but not people. Bob Bork might have been a rare exception of that."

Here are a few snippets of the conversation:

(image found at townnews.com)

Yesterday's Employment Situation Report from Uncle Sam's Bureau of Labor Statistics had lots of dismal news.

One of the bigger disappointments, but sadly not one of the bigger surprises, is that the teenage unemployment rate reached an all-time seasonally adjusted high of 25.5%.

People who know even a little bit about economics should understand why, but an oddly titled New York Times blog post by Catherine Rampall took a pass on realistically trying to explain it:

Oh What a Time to Be Young!

Pity the unemployed, but especially pity the teenage unemployed.

Ana Marie Cox, until the end of last year the Washington editor for Time magazine's Web site, concluded her Friday night (September 4) fill-in gig as host of MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show -- where she was hardly shy about conveying her liberal views as she spent much of the hour ridiculing conservatives -- by pulling open her jacket to display how underneath she was wearing a vintage “I'm Ready for Teddy Kennedy '76” T-shirt. (For the historically-challenged, Kennedy did not run in 1976.)

Now a weekend host for the left-wing Air America radio network, Cox explained: “It's a tribute, of sorts, to the fallen liberal lion.” A blogger for The Daily Beast, where the title for her last post was “God Loves Obama,” she quickly added that Kennedy was not her first apparel choice: “I actually was looking for a Wellstone shirt. If anyone can find a Wellstone shirt, very interested in it, classic.”

Anthony Stevens-Arroyo, the "Catholic America" blogger for the Newsweek-Washington Post "On Faith" blog, lauded the "most Catholic" section of the Ted Kennedy funeral Mass: the grandkids asking for nationalized health care.

The overt political statements came from the mouths of children who paraded before the microphones at the Prayer of the Faithful. Each petition was worded with quotes from a Kennedy speech. The most political asked us to pray that health care be recognized as a "right, not a privilege." Yet that petition was also the most Catholic, echoing passionate statements from popes and bishops to "take back our government" and make it an instrument of Catholic obligations to make God's Kingdom come. (Emphasis his.)

I don't know which pope or bishop the man is quoting here. But this is not the silliest blog post he’s written on liberalism and Catholicism being nearly synonymous. Check out this recent one: Is It A Sin to Listen to Rush? This was his answer:

National Public Radio ombudsman Alicia Shepard isn’t afraid to raise questions of liberal bias occasionally. Her latest column is titled "Too Much Kennedy." She reports NPR offered 53 stories on Ted Kennedy’s death in the first five days (August 26-30), "But on that first day, in the 23 on-air stories, only one mentioned the name Mary Jo Kopechne and 5 mentioned Chappaquiddick." When they did, it was passed over gently as an obstacle to the White House:

NPR's Brian Naylor did tell the Chappaquiddick story during a 9-minute obit for Morning Edition. But the focus was on how Chappaquiddick and the death of Kopechne derailed Kennedy's presidential ambitions.

"An effort to draft the youngest Kennedy for the White House was short lived at the Democratic convention of 1968, and his presidential aspirations were dealt a blow a year later when in July of 1969, his car went off a small bridge on the Massachusetts island of Chappaquiddick," said Naylor.

It’s not just liberal policy and charismatic personalities that the liberal media find alluring about the Kennedy clan, but also its decidedly upper-crust fashion sense. In Sunday’s Washington Post, fashion reporter Robin Givhan waxed eloquent about the “look of rich tradition” the patrician Kennedy clan brought to their oft-publicly photographed wardrobe.

Yet four years ago, Givhan derided as “syrupy nostalgia” similar classic preppy sensibilities when then-Supreme Court nominee John Roberts and his family were in the limelight.

Our good friend Mary Katharine Ham at the Weekly Standard caught the Givhan double standard:

With “Filling the VOID” as the on-screen heading, Monday's NBC Nightly News, without any consideration for how Massachusetts Democrats blocked the Governor's interim appointment power, fretted over the loss to Democrats of Ted Kennedy's Senate seat as a health care vote approaches. “Less than 48 hours after Ted Kennedy was laid to rest at Arlington Cemetery, the political reality of his vacant Senate seat has set in,” Chuck Todd warned.

Though you could argue Kennedy's plight left the seat empty all year so far, Todd explained: “Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick set January 19th, 2010 for the special election, leaving the potential for the seat to be vacant for five months. To avoid a lengthy vacancy, next week the Massachusetts legislature begins debating a change in the law to give the Governor the power to appoint an interim Senator, a power most Governors in other states already have. It was a wish Senator Kennedy himself and his family made known directly to Massachusetts' lawmakers.” Todd, however, failed to point out that in a crass 2004 political maneuver urged by Kennedy, Bay State Democrats changed the law so then-Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, could not replace John Kerry if he had won the presidency.

Dan Barry, who pens the "This Land" column for the New York Times, filed an ostensibly straight news story for Sunday's front page from the late Sen. Ted Kennedy's funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, "Kennedy Mourners Memorialize 'Soul of the Democratic Party." Instead, Barry got caught up in strained poeticism positioning Kennedy for secular sainthood.

The nation said final farewell on Saturday to Edward M. Kennedy, who used his privileged life to give consistent, passionate voice to the underprivileged for nearly a half-century as a United States senator from Massachusetts. He was the only one of four fabled Kennedy brothers to reach late adulthood, and he was remembered for making the most of it.

Along the rain-dappled roadways of Boston in the late morning, and then in the sweltering humidity of Washington in early evening, people waited for the fleeting moment of a passing hearse so that they could pay respects to the man known simply as Ted. At the United States Capitol, where Mr. Kennedy had served for so long, his wife, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, stepped out of a limousine to receive hugs, bow her head during prayers, and to hear the singing of "America the Beautiful."

On Sunday’s Face the Nation on CBS, host Bob Schieffer got reaction to Ted Kennedy’s death from left-wing Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson, who touted the Senator’s importance in the 2008 campaign: "Of course Barack Obama had the wings of hope and the winds of possibility behind him, but Ted Kennedy was an awful powerful gust of wind that gave him a necessary lift."

Dyson, who was not identified as liberal, went on to describe Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama as coronation: "This was a man of American royalty bestowing upon Mr. Obama, if you will, the mantle of that kind of liberal leadership...I think that Senator Kennedy identified in Barack Obama the same hopefulness that he had seen glowing in the face of his brother John and radiating from the heart of his brother Robert."

Dyson continued to glorify Kennedy and Obama quasi-religous terms:

ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl on Sunday hyperbolically declared that the Kennedys are "America’s family." Reporting on the funeral of Ted Kennedy for Good Morning America, the reporter read a letter from the Senator to the Pope about his Catholic faith and how it sustained him in life. Karl opined, "...Kennedy did a better job summing up his own life than any of the other hundreds of eulogies we have heard over the last days."

Describing the assembled clan at the funeral, Karl boldly asserted, "In the front, the Kennedys, America's family. Four generations shaped by the man who bore the torch when his brothers fell." Certainly, there are many independents, Republicans and non-Democrats who would disagree with bestowing such a label on the liberal Kennedy family.

The death of Edward Kennedy was undeniably a big political story, but the five days of intense media coverage also exposed how journalists see the Senator's ardent liberal agenda as an unquestionable good for America, not as controversial policies that fueled high-tax big government at the expense of the free market.

Reporters painted Kennedy as Mother Teresa. "Over five decades, Ted Kennedy carried the torch passed on by his brothers, for civil rights, for the poor, and for the sick," CBS's Harry Smith opened The Early Show on August 26, just hours after Kennedy's passing. "For nearly half a century in the Senate, Ted Kennedy spoke for the people who had no voice — the poor and the disabled, children and the elderly," anchor Katie Couric echoed on that night's CBS Evening News.

At the end of Sunday’s Face the Nation on CBS, host Bob Schieffer fondly remembered Ted Kennedy, exclaiming: "In a sense he was the classic American hero, the imperfect man who was sorely tested and yet in that testing found a way to overcome personal flaws and go on to accomplish great things."

Schieffer began his commentary by noting how Kennedy: "...crashed and crashed again during the early turns of his life, but somehow he kept on going through the sorrows and tragedies over which he had no control and the self-destructiveness over which he did. And in the final laps he won. His children loved him. His contemporaries, even those who often opposed him, admired him. And those whose causes he championed thanked him. To what else can a man aspire?"

In addition to touting the Senator as an "American hero," Schieffer praised his liberal legislative accomplishments: "The thousands of laws that he authored changed the lives of millions who were less fortunate, a legacy few can match....You didn’t have to agree with his politics to appreciate what he achieved. Ted Kennedy made a difference."

On the August 30 Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace seemed to pick up on Clay Waters' NewsBusters item, earlier posted at TimesWatch, pointing out the blatant double standard between the New York Times obituary for conservative Republican Senator Jesse Helms and that of liberal Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy.

Near the end of Sunday's show, Wallace read from the first paragraph from each obituary, with the Kennedy version tagging the liberal Senator as "a son of one of the most storied families in American politics, a man who knew acclaim and tragedy in near equal measure, and who will be remembered as one of the most effective lawmakers in the history of the Senate."

By contrast, the Helms version omitted such positive causes as his legislative fight against the tyranny of communism, and instead portrayed his Senate career in a negative light, referring to him as the "Senator with the courtly manner and mossy drawl, who turned his hard-edged conservatism against civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art."

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the August 30, Fox News Sunday:

Speaking with Ted Kennedy’s niece, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, on Monday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith wondered: "Does a Kennedy belong in your uncle’s old Senate seat?" Townsend replied: "I think if my brother, Joe, wanted to run, I think he’d put up a great race and be a great Senator, but there are a lot of people who can carry on Senator Kennedy’s legacy."

Just prior to that question, Townsend had boasted: "And I think what we saw over the last few days is that people said ‘Ted Kennedy, I don’t know how you got to be Senator, but when you were there, you did more than any other senator in American history.’"

On the very day Ted Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery near his two brothers, a Boston Globe editorial argued to undo part of his legacy.

The pertinent portion of Mr. Kennedy's legacy has to do with his strident opposition, despite a career of enthusiastically imposing environmental initiatives and costs on others, to the building of a wind farm on Cape Cod (the graphic at top right is from a 2006 post at a Greenpeace web site).

The ever-opportunistic Globe wrote a 450-word editorial virtually demanding that President Barack Obama get work started on Nantucket Sound right now, this very instant (HT to an e-mailer):

The man who believes he's got the top rated news program on cable told his tiny audience Thursday that the eldest Kennedy brother was "shot down in World War II."

In reality, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. was part of an experimental program called Operation Aphrodite that attempted to turn a bomb-laden plane into a remote controlled explosive device.

Kennedy was one of many pilots who lost their lives trying to make this program a reality.

But that's not what MSNBC's Keith Olbermann said on Thursday's "Countdown" (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript, History Channel video describing the mission after that, h/t NBer JEB Stewart):

Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn is thrilled that the cable networks weren't around to force Ted Kennedy out in 1969. His headline? "How wall-to-wall Chappaquiddick would have changed history -- for the worse." Zorn began:  

Of course every network would have had special logos featuring bridges, water, wrecked cars or portraits of the main players. And each would have had a snappy title for their non-stop coverage:

"The Bridge Too Far," "Tragedy on the Vineyard," "Teddy in Trouble," "Camelot Submerged" and so on.

If we'd had insatiable 24/7 cable news networks in July 1969, the accident on Chappaquiddick Island in which a passenger in a car driven by Sen. Edward Kennedy drowned would likely have dominated the national consciousness for months.

Special programs every night devoted to nothing but pundits bickering over the depths of the 37-year-old Kennedy's responsibility for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, 28.