If you're curious to see how the mainstream Washington, D.C. press views the global warming debate, Newsweek's Eleanor Clift may have tipped off the public off.

On the Nov. 29 edition of "The McLaughlin Group," host John McLaughlin asked about the prospects of a Copenhagen climate change treaty and its possible impact on the U.S. economy. MSNBC and "The McLaughlin Group" regular Pat Buchanan gave some spot-on analysis on global warming alarmist about former Vice President Al Gore and how it pertains to the climate change issue.

"Well, I don't think it's going to have any impact, John, because I don't think it's going to get through the United States Senate," Buchanan said. "And there's a reason for that John, and that's Al Gore's moment has come and gone. The truth is they're changing the name to climate change rather than global warming for a reason."

Newsweek deputy editor Julia Baird only arrived in America in 2007 from Australia, but she knows how to play a good corporate soldier. In the wake of Newsweek’s Sarah Palin cover fiasco, she wrote a column for the November 30 issue loyally dedicated to making excuses for her editor Jon Meacham’s bratty cover theatrics, like he was the editor of Spy magazine for a week. Palin’s complaints of sexism are lame, declared Baird:

And now Palin thinks she has been Palinized by NEWSWEEK, for last week’s cover image of her looking fit and posing in running shorts, even though she has been photographed and filmed more than once in aerobic gear (most recently on Oprah just a few days ago.)

Baird knows that Barack Obama has been photographed topless in a swimming suit, too, and that didn’t make the cover of Newsweek. (A few pages before Baird’s column in the November 30 issue is a photograph of Obama topless in the surf, illustrating the Palin quote that her Newsweek cover was "sexist and a wee bit degrading.")

After a Census Bureau worker was found dead in rural Kentucky in September, liberals jumped at the chance to attribute his death to right-wing extremists whipped into a frenzy by the hate-filled sermons of Michelle Bachmann and Glenn Beck. It turns out the Census employee committed suicide and tried to make it seem like a murder to recoup life insurance payments for his son.

USA Today reports that Bill Sparkman "committed suicide and staged his death to look like a homicide." He was not murdered by a government-hating extremist with Fox News prime time cued up on his Tivo. Given this revelation, let us review what some in the liberal media and the lefty blogosphere had to say upon the discovery of Sparkman's body.

Will anyone try to spin the Obamas' first state dinner (with Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh) as a ritzy affair utterly clashing with today's hard times? They did with the Bushes in 2001, as we reported in the September 11, 2001 morning Cyber Alert. MRC's Ken Shepherd found Newsweek magazine's snarky Conventional Wisdom box introduced its up and down arrows with this Bush-bashing blurb:

The Bushes held their first state dinner. POTUS served buffalo meat, wore cowboy boots and welcomed Clint Eastwood. Meanwhile, the rest of America priced horse meat.

On Tuesday's Good Morning America, two ABC personalities expressed their excitement about being on the Obama guest list:

CLAIRE SHIPMAN: Of course, we're all looking forward to see what magic will happen tonight. And if anybody has any complaints about not being on the guest list, Mrs. Obama makes all of the final decisions. But I know there's one lucky person up there in New York who is on the guest list. Our own Robin Roberts. Robin, looking forward to it?

DIANE SAWYER: Expect dancing until dawn?

UPDATE: The New York Times confirmed the rumors:  CBS's Early Show has picked Adam Lambert up for tomorrow.

Was "American Idol" runner-up Adam Lambert's disgraceful performance at the American Music Awards Sunday a career ender?

Such thinking might be a tad premature.

However, TVNewser's Chris Ariens has learned that ABC has cancelled his scheduled concert on Wednesday's "Good Morning America":

The broadcast networks still haven’t uttered a single word about the revelations late last week of e-mails showing scientists on the left-wing side of the global warming debate plotting to hide data and silence those on the other side in an effort prop up the notion of a “consensus” on the issue. But when the liberal side of the debate charged that their opponents were involved in a “conspiracy” to tilt the debate in their favor, those same networks eagerly jumped on the story and castigated the evil “deniers.”

In 2007, as Brent Baker chronicled at the time in the MRC's CyberAlert, the broadcast network evening newscasts jumped to hype a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing meant to publicize a report from two far-left groups about how the Bush administration supposedly suppressed science about the dire threat of global warming — as if that view wasn’t getting plenty of play in the mainstream media.

Americans have watched a parade of painful episodes of public humiliation of politicians' wives in sex scandals. But in constructing a list of Top Ten Sex Scandal Details of the Decade for its 20/10 project, Newsweek recruited a porn star named Sasha Grey to slam these wronged spouses as knowing shrews and lecture about the horror of "Bible-belt-infused guilt." The number ten scandal detail on the list was "Governor Sanford's Appalachian Adventure," and Jenny Sanford apparently hadn't been insulted enough:

I have to believe that many women who are married to men with power are aware of affairs, and accept it. Don’t ask, don’t tell; as long as they receive something in exchange from their husband—whether that exchange be children, money, material items, or sex. We create our own morals. It’s once the affair goes public that morals change.

Over the weekend, Newsweek assistant managing editor Evan Thomas offered an intriguing insight into the MSM’s approach to the liberal health care bill slowly rolling its way through the Democratic-controlled Congress. After conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer accurately pointed out how the Senate bill only pretends to be “deficit-neutral” by front-loading the tax collection process while delaying the payouts, Thomas agreed: “Charles is right. This bill is a fiscal fraud.”

But he quickly added: “I’d still vote for it.” (Video here.)

NPR’s Nina Totenberg attempted to defend the Senate bill as one that “actually tries to do something about costs.” But she, too, was insistent on the need for congressional passage: “I am not saying it’s ideal. But we have to start this.  But if we don't get a health care bill this time, it is probably the last chance.”

Newsweek’s 20/10 Project has a list of the Decade’s Worst Tactical Blunders. It might not be a shock that Newsweek decided three of the top four were made by Team Bush – and the fourth was John Kerry for letting Swift Boaters prevent him from taking that awful Bush out. What might be surprising are the authors of the little articles that accompany the list. The number one blunder was "Bush’s Katrina Flyover." The author was Bush-hating atheist scold Bill Maher:

But there was something about Bush’s response to Katrina that did bother me—oh, yeah, it was that he didn’t have one. Nor did the former dildo salesman he appointed to head FEMA. In other words, I get far more angry when politicians don’t do their jobs than when they get their pictures taken pretending to do somebody else’s.

The second biggest blunder of the decade was "Kerry Lets Himself Get Swift-Boated" by Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter. Conservative "lies" outpaced liberal "facts," thanks to Kerry’s decision to stay out of the rebuttal battle:

Newsweek's Howard Fineman thinks Barack Obama is a lot like Ronald Reagan.

This humorously comes coincident with MSNBC's Chris Matthews declaring the current White House resident "Carteresque."

Obviously they can't both be right, right?

Of course not, for in the case of "Channeling the Gipper: For inspiration, Obama looks to Reagan," Fineman couldn't be more wrong (h/t Jennifer Rubin):

On Nov. 18, Foreign Policy's Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson wrote an article titled "The Real Shock of Fort Hood." If you thought that the shock of Fort Hood was that an Army Major fired over 100 rounds into a crowded processing center on a military base - killing 13 and wounding 29 - you're wrong. "It's not that the massacre occurred," said the article. "It's that it hadn't occurred before."

According to Simon and Stevenson, Major Nidal Malik Hasan was simply another American Muslim that was the victim of "innumerable stresses, including discrimination and the strain of divided loyalties in their country's eight-year-long war against Muslims in the Middle East and Central Asia."  

The authors argued that such circumstances would be "enough to inspire conflict in the minds of even the most patriotic of American Muslims in the U.S." So much so that it should be "no surprise" that "one unstable member of this community finally erupted in violence."

It's our fault. Americans aren't making Muslims "comfortable." And the article specifically cited "Christian right-wing rhetoric" as a catalyst in the "Muslim alienation" which led to Hasan's shooting spree.

As part of an ongoing retrospective of the the first decade of the 21st century, Newsweek has ginned up a boatload of top 10 lists and assigned some Hollywood celebrities and Washington politicians to pen brief blurbs to accompany some of the entries. One such list, the top 10 "History-Altering Decisions" of 2000-2009 has at least two such entries that are worthy of addressing here: Actor/comedian Dennis Leary's "Florida Uses Butterfly Ballots" [ranked #6] and Sen. John Kerry's self-congratulatory "Kerry Picks Obama to Give Keynote 2004 DNC Address" [ranked #1].

Befitting Newsweek's biases, Leary and Kerry's entries point to Obama as an almost messianic figure, as though he were the literal object of history, or at least the last 10 years of American history.

First, Leary opined about how one dramatic moment can set in motion a chain of events can profoundly affect history, in effect comparing the assassin's bullet that ended John Kennedy's life with the butterfly ballots used in 2000 in some Democrat-friendly Florida counties:

"This week's abortion conversation is about politics. Let's not pretend it's about anything else," Newsweek's Lisa Miller huffed in a November 18 Newsweek.com post, complaining about how the moral issues surrounding abortion are taking on a life of their own in the health care debate.

We suffer, this week, from a moral myopia. Thanks to the passage in Congress of a health-reform bill, abortion is in the news again, but with the same old warriors brandishing their same old spears.

But while Miller went on to list both pro-life and pro-choice "old warriors," it's hard to believe her beef is with both sides of that fight equally. Miller laments that:

Our entire health-care system (and the proposed reform) is rife with "complex moral issues." To activate our consciences only in the realm of abortion relieves those consciences of too much responsibility. 

Newsweek religion editor Lisa Miller, contributing to her magazine’s “20/10” list of top 10 cultural moments of the past decade, revisited the “furor surrounding...[the] alleged anti-Semitism” of Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ, and concluded “the film is, in fact, anti-Semitic.” Miller also accused Gibson of making “Jesus in his own image.”

The 2004 film was number eight on Newsweek’s list of cultural moments, and the religion editor began her synopsis by rehashing another of the critics’ main charges about the movie- its apparent glorification of violence: “Mel Gibson’s pious gorefest The Passion of the Christ may not be remembered for all the controversy it courted upon its release, or for its surprise opening-weekend take of $83 million—and perhaps not even for its director’s widely mocked decision to have his actors speak only Latin and Aramaic.” Widely-mocked? How did she come to that conclusion? More than a few outlets, including the notoriously liberal NPR, noted how the movie revived interest in Aramaic, the language spoken by the Jews in the 1st century AD.

With those lines of criticism of the way, Miller moved on to the criticism which she bought the most- its supposed anti-Semitism: “Nor will The Passion be chiefly remembered for the furor surrounding its alleged anti-Semitism. (The film is, in fact, anti-Semitic. Those most thirsty for Jesus’s blood are the Jews whose brown teeth and matted hair disallow any individuality. Meanwhile, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate—who, according to history, did sentence Jesus to death—is as soulful and ambivalent as Hamlet.).”

NBC's Matt Lauer invited on Newsweek managing editor Dan Klaidman, on Wednesday's Today, to answer Sarah Palin's charge that the magazine's recent cover photo of her, in a jogging outfit, was "sexist," but Klaidman denied the accusation as he claimed: "Well, what it really represented was what the story was about, and that's what our mission is. I mean, look, since she's been on the national stage, there have been these questions about her gravitas, about her seriousness." The photo – which was a reprint of a Runners World cover – was, as Palin noted "taken out of context," and intended to diminish her as a political figure, something that even Lauer, to his credit, noticed as seen in the following exchange with Klaidman and his other guest, the Daily Beast's editor-in-chief Tina Brown: [audio available here]

MATT LAUER: But on this week, as she's launching this book that, that she wants to use to kind of establish herself and perhaps as a run for 2012, why that image? Why do you think that represented what she's all about at this point in time?

Posing the question, "Will Gun Measure Threaten Amtrak [with] Terror Attacks," Newsweek's Michael Isikoff informed readers of a legislative battle to allow passengers aboard Amtrak to transport unloaded firearms in their checked luggage.

Isikoff pitted supporters of gun rights, particularly the National Rifle Association (NRA) against "security-minded" legislators worried about gun use in terrorist attacks on the nation's railways:

Just how much clout does the gun lobby have on Capitol Hill? This week may prove to be a crucial test: A House-Senate conference committee is about to take up a massive transportation-funding bill that is pitting advocates of gun rights against security-minded members worried about the threat of terrorist attacks on Amtrak trains. Tucked into the measure is a controversial National Rifle Association-backed amendment that would cut off $1.5 billion in subsidies to Amtrak unless the federally backed national passenger-train company reverses its post-9/11 security policies and permits train passengers to travel with handguns and other firearms as part of their checked luggage.

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has responded to Newsweek's cover of her, and needless to say she was none too pleased.

As NewsBusters reported Saturday, Newsweek ran a cover story on Palin in its most recent issue, and the picture they decided to use was of her in jogging shorts and sneakers.

"The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now," wrote Palin in a posting at her Facebook page Monday evening:

Newsweek has done it again: a few weeks after acknowledging half its letters were critical of Joe Biden (but publishing none of them), they proclaimed their Al Gore cover was unpopular. Forty-six percent of their letter writers wrote on the subject of Gore, and 74 percent of them were critical. Still, Newsweek ran only positive letters. The first, most prominent one (in larger red type) read: "Until each nation makes responsibility for this earth a priority, we will continue to devastate it – and ourselves."

The next letter praises Gore's courage and conscience, but still presses him from the left to crush the problem of human overpopulation:

As a six-continent bicycle traveler for the past 35 years, I admire Al Gore addressing climate change. However, he fails to highlight the basic factor accelerating it: human overpopulation. Either we address it, or Mother Nature will do it for us. – Frosty Wooldridge, Golden, Colo.

Then the reading gets really hair-curling. Lee Bidgood Jr of Gainesville, Florida compared global-warming deniers to people who denied the Holocaust:

On the November 14 Saturday Early Show on CBS, as substitute co-anchor Debbye Turner Bell hosted Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh for a discussion of Sarah Palin’s soon-to-be released book, Going Rogue: An American Life, Turner Bell suggested that there was "a little bit of revisionist history" in the book -- a book which, according to her, is "already stirring controversy." She also contended that one of Palin’s quotes praising her husband Todd’s good looks "doesn’t sound very presidential," and suggested that Palin showed "naivete" by complaining about vicious attacks made against her early on in the campaign by some liberals.

For his part, Hirsh agreed with Turner Bell’s suggestion about "revisionist history," and called it "somewhat disturbing" that Palin responded to some of the criticism against her, calling it a "streak of vindictiveness toward her political enemies."

Here's a sub-headline you probably never imagined seeing in a liberal magazine:

Gays on TV once helped promote tolerance. Now they may be hurting it.

Shocking, yes?

Even more so was the point of Newsweek's "Kings of Queens" -- the overly-sexual, "flaming" characterization of gays on television is actually increasing a negative stereotype (h/t Big Hollywood):