With all the news aggregator style websites around-the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, Stimulist, and True/Slant just to name a few-why does Tucker Carlson think he can have success with a new one?

It's true that none of the news aggregator sites have a conservative slant to them, so this site may attract a crowd of conservatives, but it will require a lot of work on Carlson's part, time that he may not have with his move to Fox News. Carlson told the Wall Street Journal, "One thing feeds the other. I wouldn't do something that wasn't too integrated into my life."

The site is going to emphasis constant updates and original reporting on aspects of Obama's administration that have been ignored by the press.  "There just aren't enough people covering this administration and telling the people what's going on," Carlson said.

Washington, D.C. -- The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) for 2009 is underway and NewsBusters is here to cover it at the lovely Omni Shoreham Hotel on Bloggers Row. We're not sure how much we'll blog per se, but you can also follow us on Twitter @TheMRC and @KenShepherd.

You can watch a Web stream of the CPAC proceedings at Ustream here.You can watch the streaming video embedded below the page break on this post.

Be sure to set your stopwatch alarm for 3:40 p.m. That will give you a good 5-minute warning for a CPAC panel discussion entitled Targets of the Fairness Doctrine, moderated by MRC/NewsBusters's own Seton Motley. Radio host Roger Hedgecock and former and current MSNBCers Tucker Carlson and Joe Scarborough will comprise the panel. 

Speaking of which, feel free to sign the MRC's Free Speech Alliance petition here if you haven't done so already.

Norah O'Donnell just mocked the manhood of the Senate Republicans. The MSNBC host was discussing with Tucker Carlson how—despite making noises about wanting more financial disclosure about donations to Bill Clinton's foundation—Republicans have announced their intention to vote for Hillary's confirmation as Secretary of State nonetheless.

O'Donnell wondered out loud whether the Republicans "have kind of lost their cojones."

Always irreverent, Tucker Carlson seems freer than ever to aim a few jabs at his network and the people that work there.  On today's Morning Joe, Tucker landed a one-two punch. With all the talk focusing on Detroit, Carlson let the cat out of the bag that NBC is implementing layoffs of its own.  Tucker played off that news, tweaking Chris Matthews along the way, by announcing that he too was planning a Senate run, one in which a bailout of the news networks would be the centerpiece.

Tucker, an unreconstructed libertarian, spoke in opposition to the Detroit bailout.  After observing that capitalism without failure is like religion without sin, he made his tongue-in-cheek announcement.

Chris Matthews was not happy and seemed overly sensitive when John McCain compared Barack Obama to his old boss Jimmy Carter. On Tuesday night's "Hardball," after Matthews played a clip of McCain saying Obama was running for "Carter's second" term, he declared "I don't like it," and tried to write the attack off by saying not enough voters "even remembered voting for the guy."

The following exchanges occurred throughout the June 10 edition of "Hardball":

JOHN HARWOOD, CNBC: Look John McCain has a more complicated task because he's got to try to discredit Obama but also say he's not gonna be like George Bush either. And I think the difficulty of this task is highlighted by, you look at the examples, Barack Obama is saying John McCain would be George Bush's third term and McCain comes back with Jimmy Carter. Well you know there are a lot of voters out there saying, "And who was Jimmy Carter exactly?" They don't remember that.

MATTHEWS: I know.

Let's take a little time off of more serious matters for some juicy gossip. Over at gawker.com there is a somewhat humorous little tale of an MSNBC photo shoot that saw TV yaker Chris Matthews of "thrill going up my leg" fame storming out after being told he might be required to share the camera frame with blog maven and born again lefty Arianna Huffington. Apparently Chris is still mad at her for supposedly having hired a private investigator to stalk Tim Russert after an unflattering 1994 article written by Russert's wife, Maureen Orth.

Matthews is reported as having said, "I will not be in the same f_ _ _ing picture as Arianna Huffington!! Not a chance of that!"

If NewsBusters were ever to use in its promotional material a photo this unflattering of Hillary Clinton, we'd be accused of the worst kind of sexism, of unfairly attacking a candidate based on her looks rather than her views. Check out the image of Hillary that MSNBC used in its promo of tonight's Hardball with Chris Matthews that aired at 5:59 AM EDT today just before Morning Joe came on the air.

Hillary, shot from below to highlight her wattles, lit like something in a horror flick about to emerge from a closet wielding an ax. If there's a less-becoming snap of Hillary in MSM circulation, I haven't seen it.

View video of promo, and Carlson's comments, here.

"Thrill up my leg"? Forget about it. Chris Matthews's famous description of the excitement he gets from Barack is nothing compared to the tumescent terms in which MSNBC senior campaign correspondent Tucker Carlson has depicted the intensity of the MSM's love affair with Obama. Tucker appeared on today's Morning Joe.

TUCKER CARLSON: It's gonna be such a great election; it has been so far.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Especially when you have the media loving one candidate as much as they love Barack Obama.

CARLSON: But it's more than love. I mean, it's the kind of love that anybody who's been a 9th-grade boy understands this species of love. Do you know what I mean?

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Wow.

SCARBOROUGH: No, it's the truth. It's all-consuming.

CARLSON: It's red-in-the-face, I-think-about-you-when-I-go-to-bed, too embarrassed to stand up, it's sealed-with-a-kiss love. I mean, it's real, it's palpable.

Were they commenting on the same speech? Rev. Jeremiah Wright goes before the Detroit NAACP, claims that black and white children learn with different parts of their brain, and offers a simpering, unflattering imitation of the way white pastors speak. CNN's Soledad O'Brien gushes that the speech was a "home run" and "really funny." But over at Morning Joe, Wright's words prompted a panel member to rip the reverend as a "mediocrity" and a "buffoon."

View video here.

Soledad O'Brien was in the hall when Wright spoke. She reported on the speech at the top of CNN's 6 AM ET hour.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: The whole thing, frankly, was really funny. I think a lot of people have seen Rev. Wright defined as controversial, defined as angry, defined as anti-American: not in that speech. Not in that speech at all. He was funny, he was witty. This is a guy who's got two masters and his doctorate in divinity. Here is a guy who speaks five languages, they took pains in his introduction to point out all his accomplishments.

She continued.

"After me, the deluge" (après moi, le déluge) -- popularly attributed to Louis XV

Look for Chris Matthews to start calling her "Louie." The Hardball host was as roiled as Robespierre today at Hillary Clinton's threat to take the Dem party down in a convention credentials fight over the seating of the Florida and Michigan delegates.

In the course of an interview with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News yesterday, Clinton made clear her intention to take things to a floor fight if necessary, and went so far as to preemptively undermine Barack Obama's legitimacy as a candidate if he doesn't go along with her proposal to seat the Florida and Michigan delegates. That set Matthews off, though it was panelist Tucker Carlson who supplied the most colorful language, describing Hillary as a "kamikaze" who is "ready to wreck the party."

View video here.

Time editor Rick Stengel made his regular Thursday Morning Joe appearance today, revealing the magazine's cover to be published tomorrow. But while we learned that the Dalai Lama's photo will appear there, the bigger story is the "cover" Time is trying to provide for Barack Obama's Rev. Wright problem.

Here's the gist of Time's defense of Obama, a distillation of Stengel's statements and Time articles by Amy Sullivan and Joe Klein:

• An important aspect of the problem is that white Americans are incredibly ignorant about black churches in America.
• In fact, Rev. Wright's church isn't that radical as black churches go.
• It was understandable for Obama to have joined Wright's church. At the time he was a 27-year old bi-racial man trying to figure out his identity as the son of an atheist father and skeptic mother and needed a church "he could learn from."
• It's understandable that Obama didn't leave the church: it's like reading a book--you don't necessarily agree with the author.
• Obama's speech was a "triumph," and Americans will be thinking "small" if they make the Wright thing a big issue in the campaign.

View the video here.

Appearing on the last episode of Tucker on March 14, 2008, Barack Obama fan and LA Times columnist Rosa Brooks grimaces after claiming Obama "probably wasn't listening" in church when Rev. Jeremiah Wright made his controversial statements.

I've enjoyed Tucker Carlson's show and can't let it pass into history, as it did last night, without a mention here. MSNBC has said that Tucker will remain at the network as an at-large commentator, and I have a feeling that, liberated from show-host concerns, he might become even more uninhibited in the expression of his quirkily conservative/libertarian views.

So let's usher Tucker out by focusing on one of our favorite nemeses, Rosa Brooks, the liberal LA Times columnist who appeared on the show's final episode. The unreconstructed Obama apologist offered the lamest excuse yet for his failure to have disassociated himself earlier from the ugly rhetoric of Rev. Jeremiah Wright: Barack simply wasn’t paying attention in the pews.

View video here.

Even Tucker Carlson, MSNBC's uninhibited house libertarian, was a bit taken aback. But good Dem Bill Press has had the, um, gumption to say what others may have thought about Hillary Clinton: that she has "balls of brass."

Press's comment came on this evening's Tucker in the course of a discussion of Clinton's shameless assertion that the Michigan primary was "fair" despite the fact that the DNC had agreed it wouldn't count and that Obama's name did not even appear on the ballot.

TUCKER CARLSON: You know this term "Orwellian"? Everything's "Orwellian." But rarely do you hear a statement that is in fact Orwellian. That actually reaches the threshold of "war is peace," "hate is love" and it's this right here. Hillary Clinton talking about the Potemkin primaries in Michigan and Florida and saying this: "If you're a voter from Florida or Michigan, you know that we should count your votes. The results of those primaries were fair and should be honored." They were fair in Michigan? Barack Obama was not on the ballot!

View video here.

Some joker at the Washington Post-published Express tabloid apparently isn't a big fan of MSNBC's Tucker Carlson. The caption accompanying Carlson's picture in a March 11 story reads "Go ahead: Slap him in your imagination."

The photo appeared above a snarky headline reading "Haze of Smug Disappears From Washington Skies," referring to Carlson being dislodged from his one-hour MSNBC perch in favor of a "Race for the White House" program to be anchored by NBC White House correspondent David "Dance Dance Revolution" Gregory.

A kinder, gentler take, sans caption, can be found online at the Express Web site.

There's no word yet on whether Gregory will reprise his famous dance moves on his new show.

Update/Correction (17:26): Corrected from earlier post that mistakenly referred to the Express as the DC Examiner. My apologies for the mislabeling.

"We'll deal with him later." -- Clinton co-chair Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, on Mark Penn.

"It's disgusting for him to do this . . . that's just disgusting." -- Clinton supporter Hilary Rosen.

Mark Penn sleeps with the fishes. Metaphorically speaking only, of course.

On this evening's Tucker, Clinton's chief campaign strategist came in for some industrial-strength opprobrium from two prominent members of Team Hillary for his attempt to flee what might be a sinking ship.

View video here.

Of all the qualities Hillary might have emphasized to her advantage, can you imagine basing her campaign on her "warmth" and "likability"? Chris Kofinis can. The former communications director of the John Edwards campaign appeared on Tucker Carlson's show this evening.

Kofinis offered his only-slightly premature post mortem of the Clinton campaign.

Now that David Shuster has returned from MSNBC exile after the Clinton campaign complained about his comments on Chelsea, will Tucker Carlson's be the next head Camp Hillary hunts?

Senior Clinton advisor Kiki McClean comprehensively rapped Carlson's knuckles this evening over comments Tucker made about Clinton campaign spokesman Phil Singer.

View video here.

Tucker Carlson, on his MSNBC show this evening, describing the Clinton campaign's press relations . . .

TUCKER CARLSON: They're awful to the media: let's be totally blunt. They're awful to the press. They treat the press like enemies. [Clinton Communication Director] Howard Wolfson's always calling around threatening people. Threatening people! News organizations! They do that! People hate you if you do that. I mean, they've earned the enmity of the press, in my view. They have. I mean, it's been hard but they've done it.

View video here.

The affable Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post tried to defuse matters, to no avail . . .

You vill obey update . . .

The domestic policy differences between Hillary and Obama are negligible. But the Clinton camp likes to claim that his national health care plan would leave 15 million people out, whereas hers covers everyone. Let's put aside for the moment the fact that former Clinton cabinet member Robert Reich says the Obama plan would actually wind up covering more people. The key to Hillary's claim that she would cover everyone is that . . . she would punish people who refuse to fall in line.

Naturally, Clinton isn't eager to specify just what such punishment would be. But under intense questioning by Tucker Carlson on his MSNBC show this evening, senior Clinton advisor Kiki McLean employed an Orwellian euphemism. People who didn't comply wouldn't be punished. They'd simply incur an . . . "outcome."

View video here.