What's $100 million of taxpayer money between a few U.S. Senators?

After reports surfaced of $100 million for Louisiana was added to the Senate's health care reform legislation, originally from ABC News, and subsequently commented upon by prominent lefties, like U.S. News and World Report's Bonnie Erbe as my colleague Noel Sheppard pointed out, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., took the Senate floor on Nov. 21 to announce she would vote in favor to proceed forward with the Senate Democratic leadership's bill.

She also responded to allegations that $100 million earmarked for the Louisiana was added to that legislation to sway her vote. She referred to the likes of ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl and Erbe as "very partisan Republican bloggers."

"I know that might time is up, but I would like to ask personal privilege for just one more minute to address an issue that has come up unfortunately in the last 24 hours by some very partisan Republican bloggers so I need to respond I think and will do so now," Landrieu said. "One of the provisions in the framework of this bill that I've just decided to move on to debate has to do with fixing a very difficult situation that Louisiana is facing and any other state that might have a catastrophic disaster - let's hope they don't - like we did in 2005."

U.S. News and World Report's Bonnie Erbe came down strongly Friday on the $100 million "bribe" given to Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) in the Senate's healthcare reform bill.

What makes this shocking is Erbe's consistently far-left leaning views regularly reported by NewsBusters.  

Readers are advised to strap themselves in tightly, for the following blog posting by Erbe is quite a departure from her normal liberal views:

U.S. News and World Report's Bonnie Erbe claimed in her latest blog post that the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, which bans federal funding of elective abortion in the recently passed House health care reform bill, is "a privacy invasion of massive proportions" because it "would allow government policy to intervene in the most private of medical decisions made by women and their private insurance companies."

Apparently Erbe is not concerned that federal funding of elective abortions would also prove to be a "privacy invasion of massive proportions" for people who do not want to pay for the taking of innocent human life.

CNN released a poll yesterday that found 61 percent of Americans do not want their tax dollars used to pay for the abortions of women who otherwise could not afford to pay for them. Over half, 51 percent, believe women who have abortions should pay for the procedure out of their own pockets, even if they have private health insurance.

Veteran Sarah Palin hater Bonnie Erbe is at it again, today proclaiming the former Alaska governor is "loony" for saying that she would open her dinner table at Thanksgiving to the father of her grandson:

Say what, Sarah? This is the guy who refused to marry her daughter, Bristol, pregnant. This is the guy who has made a career (or tried to) by telling the Palin family secrets. And they are not pretty.

Erbe then went on to quote some of Johnston's (unsubstantiated) claims, before rendering her verdict:

If Democrats get a spanking at the polls today, it's not because American voters are trending conservative or are frustrated with the direction liberal Democrats are leading the country, but because the electorate's disdain for the former Bush administration has abated.

That according to liberal PBS "To the Contrary" host and U.S. News contributing editor Bonnie Erbe.

From her November 2 blog post (emphasis mine):

Chief White House correspondent for U.S. News & World Report Kenneth Walsh is mighty impressed.  In "He's Still No-Drama Obama," posted on the magazine's Web site, Walsh writes:

Face to face, President Obama seems even more unflappable, cerebral, and dispassionate than he appears on television.

And later:

I have interviewed each of the past five presidents— Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and now Obama—and Obama seems the most cerebral and the least emotional of them all.

"Cerebral" is one of the media's favorite adjectives to describe Obama these days.  In the current Newsweek, Anna Quindlen notes:

(Obama) is methodical, thoughtful, cerebral, a believer in consensus and process.

National Public Radio blogger Frank James describes Obama as "the urbane, super cool, cerebral president."

Steve Waldman, the "founding soul of Beliefnet" and a former Newsweek reporter and US News & World Report editor is now spinning through the revolving door into the Obama FCC, reports Cathy Lynn Grossman of USA Today:

Steven Waldman, founder, editor and leading political blogger of Beliefnet.com, the nation's top Internet spirituality site, is leaving for a post in the Obama administration.

He's posted a farewell letter on his blog calling this "the most difficult (and surreal) post I've had to write" as he departs to become senior adviser to new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski.

Grossman's brief October 28 Faith & Reason blog post failed to mention Waldman's stint in the Clinton administration, but then again Waldman's Beliefnet blogger bio page also leaves out his work as senior advisor to the CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service -- the bureaucracy that runs AmeriCorps -- during the Clinton administration.

Barack Obama is just as much a woman-hater as the late conservative North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms in the wild eyes of radical abortion-mongering feminist and PBS "To the Contrary" host Bonnie Erbe.

And just why is Ms. Erbe so steamed at President Obama? Because, and I kid you not, the commander-in-chief doesn't shoot hoops with women.

Erbe -- who has still not gotten over Obama losing to her favored Democrat Hillary Clinton -- explained in her October 27 Jefferson Street blog entry in U.S. News & World Report:

Bonnie Erbe, contributing editor to U.S. News and World report and host of PBS' "To the Contrary" recently compared conservative Christians to terrorists.

A soon-to-be published study in the journal Reproductive Health that found states with a high level of residents who subscribe to conservative religious beliefs also have high teen birth rates sparked Erbe's September 18 observation that Christianity and radical Islamic terrorism share distinct similarities.

Erbe did not find this conclusion "surprising," and noted that "most of these ‘religious' states are also so-called red states." From there she bashed red states as uneducated and poor, and argued that those factors combined with "increased religiosity tend to intertwine and build on each other." Erbe offered as proof the following example:

As President Obama prepares to deliver his 29th speech on health care, this time before a joint session of Congress, it recalls Bill Clinton’s September 22, 1993 speech to Congress on the same topic. Back then, media liberals hit some of the exact same points journalists are making today: “reform” would end the “shame” of America being the only industrialized nation without universal coverage; that a bigger role for government would cost nothing or even save money in the long run, and that government bureaucrats were preferable to insurance companies.

After a year of media cheerleading, however, Congress finally scrapped Clinton’s health care ideas. But the unpopularity of Clinton’s government-based solutions contributed to the election of the first Republican-led House of Representatives in more than four decades. That’s not to say history will play out the same way this time, but the media spin on behalf of ObamaCare certainly echoes the language of the 1990s. A review:

Blogging for U.S. News & World Report, Paul Bedard reported a double standard in how President Obama and President Bush were treated (or ridiculed) when each wished Jews a Happy New Year a little early, or in Obama's case, a month early:

Washington Jewish Week and Politico tell us that Obama today reached out to about 1,000 Jewish leaders in his expanding campaign for health care reform. One of those on the call, Rabbi Jack Moline, tweeted through the call about what the president said. His Twitter page noted: Obama: "shanah tovah to all of you."

Reviewing a new NBC poll shortly after 3 p.m. EDT today, MSNBC's David Shuster today dismissed as "false" the fears of 50 percent of respondents that "tax dollars will help pay for abortions."

But Shuster's flat denial belies the fact that there is reasonable debate over what exactly Democratic health care proposals before Congress would mean when it comes to financing abortion via the so-called public option.

As U.S. News & World Report religion reporter Dan Gilgoff noted on August 4 (emphasis mine):

The question revolves largely around an amendment to the House healthcare bill that was adopted by the Energy and Commerce Committee last Thursday. The amendment prohibits federal funds from explicitly subsidizing abortion in the private healthcare plans to be offered through the health insurancehere). But it doesn't prevent "the public health insurance exchange (read it here) option from providing for or prohibiting coverage" of abortion.

Not one to disappoint her fans at NewsBusters, PBS "To the Contrary" host and U.S. News & World Report contributing editor Bonnie Erbe again shot from the hip with factually-challenged anti-gun rights bluster in an August 18 blog post.

Watching CNN between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. on Monday, I was treated to the sight of a young man with an automatic weapon strapped to his back across the street from a presidential rally in Arizona. This is not the first time armed persons have appeared outside a building where the president is making an appearance.

Of course the man she is referring to, who identified himself  to the media only by his first name "Chris," was carrying a semi-automatic AR-15, not an automatic weapon. Yet in the next paragraph, perhaps thinking automatic and semi-automatic are as interchangeable as the terms flammable and inflammable, Erbe described the AR-15 as a "semiautomatic mass killing machine":

Religiosity can “cloud” one’s thinking and human beings on life support are the “living dead,” according to Bonnie Erbe, contributing editor to U.S. News and World Report. Her August 11 blog post, “Sarah Palin's Lies About Obamacare Are Based on Religion,” attempted to rebut former Governor Sarah Palin’s controversial remarks about health care, and ended up insulting  people of faith.

It all started on August 7 when Palin wrote a Facebook note. “And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

To the liberal Erbe, “flailin’ Palin” went beyond the pale. “Once again, former Governor Palin is letting her religiosity cloud her thinking.” But Erbe didn’t stop there.

Did someone make this "Declare Your Devotion To a Dem Day" at MSNBC?  You have to wonder.  During the network's noon hour, Dr. Nancy Snyderman declared herself a "big fan" of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

Not to be outdone, during the following hour Andrea Mitchell ended her interview with Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Ia.) by thanking him profusely—and I mean at length—for having pushed through passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act 19 years ago today. 

In the world according to U.S. News & World Report contributing editor Bonnie Erbe, voyeuristic video of a female sportscaster primping naked in a hotel mirror is ultimately, in part, the blame of female sportscasters and sports fans.

In Erbe's July 27 blog post, the PBS "To the Contrary" host notes that she wishes "women would stop propping up men's sports" and that this type of a perverted incident would not happen "if women didn't attend NFL games or NBA games, or even watch them on TV to help drive up ratings."

Erbe adds that if they do this, "they would be doing more to stop men from behaving badly than they could ever do otherwise." By that logic, women should just stay out of anything that is predominantly male, in order to keep men from fantasizing and becoming perverts. Erbe went on to explain the popularity of the story on the Internet by explaining, without any awareness of the irony that:

Reliably liberal journalist Bonnie Erbe almost caused a few heads to explode here at Media Research Center headquarters today when yours truly passed along her July 21 blog post entitled, "Democrats' Meaningless "Tax the Rich" Proposals Will Lead to Class Warfare."

The PBS "To the Contrary" host and U.S. News & World Report contributing editor slammed the idea floating in Congress of adding a surtax on "the rich" to pay for health care:

Perhaps Democrats are developing some sensitivity on their "tax the rich" theme. I can't see NOT taxing the rich. It's just that I disagree with the Democrats' definition of rich. The only way to fairly assess all Americans for the ridiculously expensive programs Democrats are pushing is to enact a flat income tax. Then upper-income persons necessarily pay more in taxes, as 10 percent of $100,000 is a lot more than 10 percent of $20,000. But that'll never happen, so tax-hungry Democrats are going the route of class wars.

Fortunately for us, and you, our cranial pressure reduced when we came across the requisite Bush-bashing packed deeper in her blog post:

In a highly individualistic and pluralistic America, there's some truth to the notion that the average religious Protestant tends to be a bit of a church shopper. Recent polling data have shown that American Christians tend to hop around a bit over their lifetime between different denominations. So in some respect, the spiritual smorgasbord that is the American religious scene could be viewed, crassly, as a marketplace of competing brands and tastes.

That being said, it's not the only or primary lens through which religious reporters should see their beat. Enter US News & World Report "God & Country" blogger Dan Gilgoff, who wrote last week on the Episcopal Church USA's move to allow the ordination of openly gay clergy.

In a follow-up blog post entitled "Tapping the Market for Gay-Friendly Churches," Gilgoff painted the ECUSA and other liberal mainline churches as having been unable thus far to successfully market themselves to apolitical evangelicals. Yet in doing so, Gilgoff reveals not only that he views religious denominations as competing brands, but that he confuses fundamentally theological and ethical concerns with political ones (emphasis mine):

What could move avowed atheist Bonnie Erbe to say something positive about religious enthusiasm? Here's a hint, the colors of the rainbow:

I walked into a huge church auditorium and there were thousands of gays and lesbians singing hymns and crying as they watched a gay pastor deliver a sermon, many of them for the first time. It was an extremely emotional experience.

Erbe, a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report, shared this anecdote in a July 2 blog post entitled "Gays Aren't Necessarily Atheists," in which the journalist shared two experiences that blew apart her stereotype of openly gay people being atheists.

Spurred on by an article by colleague Dan Gilgoff entitled, "Gays Step Up Efforts to Reverse Gay-as-Godless Stereotype," the PBS "To the Contrary" host confesses:

"If Sarah Palin Weren't a Fanatic, I Might Feel Sorry For Her" blares the headline for Bonnie Erbe's June 30 blog post up at USNews.com. Gov. Palin joins blogger Michelle Malkin as a target of Erbe's rather catty disdain.

The PBS "To the Contrary" host and US News contributing editor alerted her readers of her antipathy for the former Republican vice presidential nominee in light of Todd Purdum's drive-by hit piece in Vanity Fair [see NB contributor Mike Sargent's excellent takedown of that here]:

Gov. Palin is a woman on a right-wing mission. She's clearly not ready for prime time. She's easy grist for any journalistic mill. If she weren't such a fanatic, I could feel sorry for her. But since she enjoys killing moose, wolves, and anything else in her rifle sight, I'll pass, thanks.

Erbe generally has been harsh on Palin, but once lauded the Alaska governor for admitting that for a very brief moment she considered aborting her youngest child Trig: