National Public Radio’s website has a section called "Books We Like," and NPR is unafraid to declare it likes books that please the hard left. NPR book critic Simon Maxwell Apter lauded a book on white supremacists called Blood and Politics by the author Leonard Zeskind, a man who recently declared on Pacifica Radio that Sean Hannity and Pat Buchanan offer "a rational sense of justification" to hardened racists. Apter revealed that he liked not only the book, but the election of Barack Obama:

The recent murder of a security guard at D.C.'s Holocaust museum reminds us that racial and religious fanaticism live on in the U.S. But thankfully, while a handful of bigots are still grumbling on about the South's loss of the Civil War, the tyranny of "ZOG" (the "Zionist Occupied Government" currently reigning in Washington) and the "eight Jewish families" who "own" the Federal Reserve, some 70 million others have, in a testament to the overwhelming tolerance of contemporary American society, gone ahead and elected Barack Obama president.

On Thursday’s edition of Democracy Now on the radical-left Pacifica Radio network, co-hosts Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman discussed the Holocaust Museum shooting with Leonard Zeskind, author of the book Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream. But Gonzalez wanted Zeskind to connect dots from the racist fringe to Sean Hannity and Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh:

JUAN GONZALEZ: And when you talk about the mainstream part of the movement, the mainstreamers, what role does television, shows like Sean Hannity and the impact of Pat Buchanan and other right-wing populists who are always on a lot of the cable shows and on radio, the Limbaughs of the world—how does this affect the ability of the right wing, of this most extreme right-wing movement, to win sympathizers and supporters?

On Wednesday’s Democracy Now program on the taxpayer-subsidized radical-left Pacifica Radio network, host Amy Goodman devoted the whole show to lionizing late-term abortionist George Tiller, gunned down on Sunday in his church in Kansas. Tiller’s colleague Dr. Susan Robinson vehemently denounced pro-lifers for breaking all kinds of city ordinances for their use of city property, and she even compared their crosses to the Ku Klux Klan’s:

So, these anti-abortion protesters—and let’s not call them "pro-life." You know, they’re not pro-life; they’re anti-abortion. These anti-abortion protesters would come every morning. They had little kind of holder locations drilled in the grass in the easement between the sidewalk and the street, which is city property. And I don’t know how many, over a hundred, 150 or so, I would guess, and these are little receptacles where they would put crosses. And so, as the patients would drive up to the clinic, they’d be faced with this forest of crosses....

In case you were hungry for really, really bad news from Iraq, one set of stations is still pumping it out: radical Pacifica Radio, subsidized by millions from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

On April 9, the sixth anniversary of liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein, their flagship program "Democracy Now!" renounced its own name by decrying the imperialistic American transformation from a dictatorship into a parliamentary democracy. The headline was "We Didn't Create a Paradise In Iraq; We Created a Hell." The guest was Nir Rosen of the New America Foundation (Neuter America Foundation?), whose hatred of all American intervention sounded like it veered into tall-tale territory, like this:

I saw in southern Baghdad, on basically a vast pile of mud and sewage, a man had built a home entirely out of air conditioners. He piled air conditioners three high and built walls and threw on a tarp over it, and that was his home. It’s almost impossible to breathe when you visit many of these people, because the stench of the sewage and garbage is so strong.

There is one famous journalist who’s unafraid to denounce Barack Obama’s agenda. Legendary left-wing journalist Helen Thomas appeared on Tuesday’s Democracy Now on radical Pacifica Radio, and denounced Obama’s acceptance of pro-Israel U.S. foreign policy: "I think that Obama, during the campaign, made many promises, as every president, potential president does to Israel, that they seem somehow bounded by their promises, promises to uphold all Israeli goals. I don't see how the U.S. can provide F-16s, gunships, Apache gunships, phosphorus, possibly phosphorus, and cluster bombs and so forth to kill helpless people, children who are starving to death."

Thomas also denounced the White House press corps for bowing to Bush yesterday at his final press conference, offering a "platform of self-defense and self-delusion," and then compared the Israelis to the Nazis: "I remember the rabbi who spoke at the Martin Luther King march on Washington. [Rabbi Abraham] Heschel had a cameo appearance, and he said, ‘The greatest sin of all in the Nazi era was silence.’ When you remain silent to the suffering and the incredible aggression against a people, then you are culpable."

The radical-left Pacifica Radio network, enriched by subsidies from Corporation for Public Broadcasting, attempted to have a Third Party Day on its Democracy Now! program on Thursday. Only other radical leftist presidential candidates – Ralph Nader and Green Party nominee Cynthia McKinney – were present. They claimed Libertarian Bob Barr and Constitution Party nominee Chuck Baldwin bowed out. Host Amy Goodman played clips of the final debate, and asked the lefties to chime in on Bob Schieffer's questions. When it came to the Ayers part of the debate, Nader raged that Ayers is a small-time saboteur next to those "clinically verifiable mass terrorists," George Bush and Dick Cheney. First he praised the public-spirited activists of ACORN:

Second, on the Bill Ayers thing, who is a lapsed small-time saboteur with the Weather Underground many years ago, what should have been said was the big-time terrorists, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, these are clinically verifiable mass terrorists who have killed innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in their criminal wars of aggression. These are criminal wars of aggression. These are war crimes. These are war criminals.

The absence of liberal outrage over Barack Obama’s decision to reject public financing for his presidential campaign took a jaw-dropping turn on the hard-left Pacifica Radio network and its show "Democracy Now!" Host Amy Goodman, who regularly welcomes long screeds from Bill Moyers and his fervor about our bought-and-sold elections, welcomed two campaign "reformers" on Monday, and both failed to criticize Obama or his decision. Goodman proclaimed: "I have to say, it’s interesting to hear campaign finance groups be so uncritical of this decision when this is the very issue that, for example, you, John Rauh, have set up your organization around, Americans for Campaign Reform, and particularly around the issue of clean money and elections and cutting down the role money plays in elections."

This raises the question: have liberals been touting campaign finance "reform" out of genuine socialist conviction, or has it all just been a cynical pose that only lasts as long as they perceive conservatives and Republicans will have a campaign fundraising advantage? Where is Bill Moyers on this? He skipped the fire-and-brimstone sermonizing about it on his Bill Moyers Journal last Friday, a day after Obama’s announcement.

PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers was interviewed on the radical taxpayer-subsidized Pacifica Radio network's Democracy Now program on Wednesday, and declared that Hillary Clinton wishes the worst on Barack Obama -- "she keeps hoping for every day, is that lightning will strike him" and insisted "She can only win in a way that would leave the Democratic Party in shambles." Even so, Moyers complained that all three candidates are failing to correct a "dysfunctional" capitalist system.

Moyers also made excuses for Jeremiah Wright's wild sermons about 9/11 and AIDS, and brushed off suggestions that his interview could have been tougher. "I’m not a very adversarial fellow. I’m not a gotcha kind of journalist," he claimed. "I knew that they were going to be asking all of these questions. I leave that to those people whose job it is for the commercial media." He decried the ABC debate questions to Obama as "a great exercise in irrelevance."

So much for the alleged conservative conglomerate media. Broadcasting & Cable magazine reports leftist actor Tim Robbins drew a standing ovation last week before the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas for attacking the corporate media for distracting the country from real (liberal) issues with Britney and Hasselhoff stories. But Robbins also sneered that "talk radio geniuses" like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly called him a "traitor" for opposing the Iraq war, and now he "stands chastened" as everything in Iraq is a utopia of democracy and prosperity. The magazine did not note that in April 2003, ABC touted Robbins claiming a McCarthyesque "chill wind" of censorship was blowing across America.

Broadcasting & Cable critic David Bianculli was supposed to host Robbins for a Q&A at the convention, but when Robbins said he brought a speech that he was told was too preachy and negative to give, broadcasters yelled that he should give the speech, so he did. Far from being miffed at having his moderator’s role snuffed, Bianculli glowingly recounted the highlights:

Pacifica Radio’s "Democracy Now" program hit Barack Obama from the left on Wednesday after he lost in New Hampshire, so far from the left that Professor Michael Eric Dyson, a leftist favored by NBC anchor Brian Williams, was almost the conservative in a debate with Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report. Ford thought Obama was "relentlessly sending out signals to white people that a vote for Barack Obama, an Obama presidency, would signal the beginning of the end of black-specific agitation, that it would take race discourse off of the table."

An end to racial agitation like Jesse Jackson’s and Al Sharpton’s? Has Obama specifically promised that anywhere? But "Democracy Now" host Amy Goodman added her two pennies to that, airing an interview segment where Jesse Jackson confirmed that Obama wants "distance" for "strategic purposes," and will not campaign with Jackson:

How left-wing is taxpayer-supported radio? WBAI-FM, the New York City home of the radical Pacifica Radio network that gets roughly $1 million each year in federal funds, is asking for contributions and offering a premium for $100 donors: a President Bush trash can that says "White Trash" on it.

For a short time only, WBAI offers a signed and numbered limited edition replica of New York artist, Robert Cenedella's "Basket Sculpture." This round metal construction is functional as a waste basket. Each measures 12" x 10".

For $100, which includes both shipping and a donation to WBAI, you can have the pleasure of trashing the President every day just as he has trashed the United States Constitution.

Public radio is a left-wing preserve, but some corners of public radio are so far to the left that they treat liberals as gangsters and monsters. A brief listen to Pacifica Radio's "Democracy Now" program on Thursday brought me to a segment on the presidential candidates, and how they're all, from left to right, compromised by their warmongering national-security experts. Radical journalist Allan Nairn attacked Mike Huckabee, for example, for failing to treat Bill Clinton as a war criminal: 

In the musty but hallowed halls of the Old Media, the first item for target practice is often the New Media, the ones formed and made popular by the atrocious biases of their predecessors. The Old Media continue watching their numbers bleed away; continue to paint themselves as fair and balanced, despite the preponderance of evidence to the contrary; and continue to smear the New Media, especially talk radio, as the divisive haters and fact-manglers ruining civil discourse in America.

Former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw is on the publicity tour for his new book "Boom!" about the 1960s. On the November 26 Laura Ingraham show, when he was challenged with his soundbite broadsiding talk radio as "instantly jingoistic and savagely critical" of war protesters, Brokaw quickly put his anti-radio rant back into rotation.

He suggested incivility was a "big cancer" on America, and talk radio is the number one tumor. Front and center in Brokaw’s pathology was Limbaugh: "My problem with the whole spectrum is there is not -- you know what Rush’s, what his whole drill is. He doesn’t want to hear another point of view. Except his."

The radical-left Pacifica Foundation's radio stations -- in Berkeley, Los Angeles, Houston, Washington, and New York -- draw about a million dollars a year in federal grants through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. What they put on the air can be some pretty strange brew.

On Friday's "Democracy Now" show -- as they led into a discussion of how viciously demagogic and racist were the opponents of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's plan to grant driver's licenses to illegal immigrants -- a rapper blaming the 9-11 attacks as government-detonated was aired. It caught my attention because you seldom hear the words "popping and locking" followed by "Wolfowitz doctrine." The rapper is named Immortal Technique.

The song is "Underground Railroad Freestyle," and the lyrics were like this: 

Pacifica Radio defines the idea of ideological pork barrel. Every year, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting offers community-service grants in the area of about $1 million to Pacifica stations like WPFW in Washington, DC and KPFK in Los Angeles to spew their radical politics. Their flagship show "Democracy Now" celebrated the Fourth of July with an hour with Pete Seeger, the radical socialist folk singer. In this passage, they discussed how Pete's dad was a communist (Pete was a member of the CPUSA after Daddy):

But he, in those early days, linked up with the Communist movement. He and Aaron Copland and Henry Cowell and Marc Blitzstein. They had a thing they called the Composers' Collective. After all, in Russia they had collectives this and collective that. And there, they decided, as skilled musicians, they would compose the new music for the new society. Well, their attempts were laughable. Aaron Copland put music to a poem by Alfred Hayes, same man who wrote "Joe Hill" -- "Into the Streets May 1st." But only a very expert singer could sing it, tremendous range, and only a very expert pianist could accompany it properly. Of course, no proletariat ever sang him.

In an interview on Monday’s edition of “Democracy Now” on radical (and taxpayer-supported) Pacifica Radio, host Amy Goodman relayed listener questions to Cindy Sheehan on her self-pitying Withdrawal from Politics tour. We learned again that Sheehan will not run for office: “I have been asked by the Green Party to run for president, but, you know, that’s not anything that I want.” (Imagine what Hillary Clinton would try to do to a female third-party threat. Eek.) 

It was funnier when Goodman passed along a question from left wing “PR Watch” guru John Stauber: “What is your opinion of MoveOn and the role it played in the recent congressional debate over war funding?” Sheehan found it hilarious that the “corporate media” would categorize MoveOn as part of the “antiwar left.” So where the devil on the ideological spectrum is it? She said:

As part of his tour of public-broadcasting publicity spots, PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers appeared Wednesday morning on radical-left Pacifica Radio’s "Democracy Now" program with Amy Goodman, a show Moyers celebrated at a radical "media reform" conference in January by suggesting he had a private "fantasy" about Goodman, that every PBS station would put her on their air. They referred to him as "legendary." Goodman played large chunks of the Moyers PBS special "Buying the War" in advance, and Moyers uncorked a series of left-wing howlers for her.

The mainstream media were cheerleaders for Bush. "Pro-war pundits" need to be banned from TV, put in a "penalty box." Implausibly, he claimed his documentary "talks to people on all sides of the story." Jon Stewart is the "Mark Twain of our day." Dan Rather is an "honest man" but at CBS, he was a "good man caught in a rigged system," contained by corporate owners at Viacom who voted Republican. And, weirdest of all, Moyers claims he and PBS "serve a sort of centrist role," and PBS needs to break free of control from Congress. Let’s take the Moyers claims one at a time.

Over on radical Pacifica Radio's "Democracy Now" propaganda-cast, they're still recycling lectures from the big National Conference on Media Reform weeks back. On Thursday, they rebroadcast a lecture from actress Geena Davis on how children's entertainment cruelly stereotypes women, especially back in the Dark Ages of the last century. Is Judy Jetson too thin? And what's up with Smurfette? Davis started a foundation to fight for the image of women in children's entertainment, as she explained:

Do you remember the kinds of stuff that they made for us, for kids, in the oldie old days? Let’s see, the first animation, of course, was Disney's Minnie Mouse and -- where is she? I’m pushing the button -- Daisy Duck, who didn’t really do much at all, except ask to go shopping, I think. There were a lot of Hanna-Barbera cartoons -- Magilla Gorilla, Wally Gator, George of the Jungle -- virtually no female characters. I had a vague recollection that Yogi Bear had a girlfriend, and I searched and searched, and I finally found her, Cindy Bear, as you all remember.

Since I mentioned Helen Thomas's honors in Washington last night, I should add she was hailed as a celebrity at the radical-left National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis a couple of weeks ago. One of her interviews there was with the radical Pacifica Radio show "Democracy Now." She lamented that there aren't enough protesters hitting the street against the war in Iraq like in the glory days of the Vietnam War. But she also praised Jimmy Carter's book condemning Israel for "Apartheid" against the Palestinians. First, the Vietnam talk:

AMY GOODMAN: But how does this compare? Does it bring back any memories of other wars?

HELEN THOMAS: It's deja-vu all over again with Vietnam, except the difference is our passive society. At least during Vietnam, they hit the streets. The people hit the streets finally, when they realized there had been deception, and it was a no-go. Too many -- we were killing people 10,000 miles away, and the reason could not be explained, except the domino theory, which was fading.

In his latest left-wing tirade at a radical "media reform" conference in Memphis last Friday, long-time PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers announced he would resurface again with another regular show on PBS this spring, titled once again Bill Moyers’ Journal. He also is creating a documentary titled "Buying the War." In his Castro-length speech, rebroadcast for an hour on Tuesday on Pacifica’s nationally distributed "Democracy Now" radio/TV simulcast, Moyers decried an alleged conservative stranglehold on the American news media (apparently, the New York Times are "sitting ducks" for "neoconservative propaganda"), cited left-wing media watchdog theories and studies, and said his private "fantasy" was all about strident leftist "Democracy Now" host Amy Goodman: that the Memphis crowd would lobby every public TV station to run her daily radical hootenanny.

PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers previewed large chunks of his Jack Abramoff "Capitol Crimes" documentary (airing on PBS Wednesday) on far-left Pacifica Radio's "Democracy Now" program on Tuesday. Asked why he was once again hammering away on conservatives on taxpayer-funded PBS stations, just weeks before the elections, Moyers predictably declared that America is going to hell in a handbasket under the right wing: "our democratic form of government is in the most precarious state since the Depression." He told host Amy Goodman:

As I listened to you begin this broadcast with the litany of reality that you report, I got a slow burn, you know, at just what's happening to this country, to our government and to America under the reign of the corporate, political and religious right. And there are so few places that, as you are doing, are just simply telling the other side of the story, letting the facts add up, that I realize I couldn't sit in the rocking chair and comfortably enjoy the books I’m reading, while our democracy, it needs all the information those of us who are independent journalists can provide. So I came back, because there just is too much to report and too much to tell, at a particular time when I think we’re in a -- when our democratic form of government is in the most precarious state since the Depression.

S. R. Sidarth, the Jim Webb for Senate volunteer who filmed Sen. George Allen nicknaming him 'Macaca,' appeared Tuesday on the far-left Pacifica Radio network show "Democracy Now" with Amy Goodman, the playground of wild-eyed radical leftists like Cindy Sheehan, Ramsey Clark, and Noam Chomsky. Sidarth replayed his outrage. But the show also featured Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an expert The Washington Post also used to denounce Allen. He was denouncing Allen as a racist on the nationally distributed show, traveling rapidly from little off-the-cuff nicknames to "neo-Confederate hate groups" and Trent Lott praising Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrat campaign for president:

Over at TimesWatch on Thursday, Clay Waters tackled a controversy over a postponed play celebrating the life and activism of Rachel Corrie, an American-flag-burning activist for Israel-hating Palestinian terrorism. The third anniversary of Corrie’s death by standing in front of an Israeli bulldozer drew Jesse McKinley to write in the Times about how a Manhattan theatre company was delaying its staging of a British Corrie-celebrating play drawn from her life and writings. As Clay reported:

McKinley presents a false choice on how to take Corrie's activism: "Given the sharply divided opinions of Ms. Corrie -- idealistic or recklessly naive, depending on one's political point of view -- Mr. Nicola said on Monday that the workshop needed ‘more time to learn more and figure a way to proceed.’"

The hard-left Pacifica Radio network is a network of five public radio stations in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Houston. Together, these stations have regularly drawn about a combined $1 million a year in federal money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (For a while, conservative Rep. Joel Hefley would push an amendment every year to reduce the federal CPB budget by $1 million in protest.) Perhaps their signature program is "Democracy Now!" with Amy Goodman, which boasts of public TV and radio stations far beyond the Pacifica-owned affiliates. On Monday, they went on one of their pledge drives with a new premium: a DVD of celebrities reading from leftist historian Howard Zinn's "Voices of a People's History of the United States."

Celebrities included Danny Glover, Sandra Oh (of "Grey's Anatomy"), Viggo "Aragorn" Mortensen, and the one reader that really surprised me: Marisa Tomei doing a dramatic reading of Cindy Sheehan.

I'm a little surprised that disgraced CBS producer Mary Mapes hasn't drawn a little more blogger interest for her (okay, tired and bitter) latest appearance on the Pacifica Radio show "Democracy Now." It was a two-part interview. Last Thursday, she was reliving her downfall after her Bush-bashing October Surprise as those obsessive bloggers took over: "in fact, by the time our story was off the air on the west coast, I mean, the moment it went off the air, it was -- it went nuts. From attacks on the authenticity of the documents, typeface and proportional spacing and all kinds of stuff that no sane person would obsess themselves with." Certainly, Mapes didn't obsess enough over her documents' authenticity. The first half of the interview ended with Mapes mauling Little Green Footballs as a hate site:

On his nightly PBS talk show Monday, Tavis Smiley questioned John Edwards about the Harriet Miers nomination. Oddly enough, Edwards, who presumed he was ready to be President of the United States after being in the Senate about the same amount of time Miers was in the White House, suggested the big Miers issue was her lack of experience:

"I mean, the first question about her, of course, is that she has no record. Never been a judge, has no judicial experience. And that is certainly not disqualifying by itself, but what it means is that we don't know much about what her positions are. She has never written an opinion."

When Edwards said Senate Democrats will have to question her with vigor, Smiley wondered: "How vigorous do you expect them to be? There are some who would argue that they weren't terribly vigorous on Mr. Roberts, now the Chief Justice. And the Democrats split voting for the guy." Didn't they know they were supposed to vote 44 to 0 against?

U.S. News & World Report's idea of "news" this week is what amounts to another warmed-over press release from the folks at the liberal Southern Poverty Law Center about the far-right threat. The story's headline is: "Fighting Fire On The Right: The Feds Are Keeping An Eye on Homegrown Extremists." (Why is is always just the "Right," not even the "Far Right" or the "Kooky Right"?) It quotes the SPLC, the Anti-Defamation League, a liberal Democratic congressman, an FBI agent who specialized in infiltrating white-supremacist groups, and a bureaucratic spokesman from the Department of Homeland Security. The story hammers DHS for being soft on the right-wing threat.