Newsweek.com on Tuesday offered a bizarre, liberal fantasy that posited what would happen if Al Gore won the 2000 election. Writer David Rakoff composed the supposedly satirical article, which features Gore averting the 9/11 terrorist attacks: "An August 2001 Daily Intelligence Briefing warns, 'Bin Ladin [sic] Determined to Strike in the U.S.,' which prompts the president to authorize the strategic bombing of targets in the Khost province of Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border."

Rakoff, who has written for Salon.com and contributed to the audio version of Jon Stewart’s book, portrayed Joe Lieberman as a disloyal vice president who ultimately resigns.

He also spun Gore as a quick acting President who took action after Hurricane Katrina and kept the death count down to 17 people:

Media Research Center President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell will appear on a live 20 to 30-minute-long Web cast starting at noon EST. You can submit a comment or question in the comments field below the video window there.

Be sure to catch the Webcast, hosted by Heritage New Media Partners, live at live.mrc.org.

Rupert Murdoch sees a future in journalism. With newspaper circulation at post-war lows and major dailies shutting down in a number of cities, he may be one of the few optimists left. But first, Murdoch claims, the American government must change its obsolete and destructive regulatory policies that, he says, are preventing major news outlets from competing.

"Good journalism is an expensive commodity," Murdoch told an audience at a Federal Trade Commission workshop on the future of journalism today. "Critics say people won’t pay, but I say they will. But only if you give them something good." Murdoch has announced plans to institute paywalls for all online content offered by his giant news conglomerate, News Corp.

Though Murdoch is confident that paywalls would more than make up for revenue lost by shortfalls in advertising dollars, other newspapers' experiences with the system have failed to do so. The New York Times in 2005 began charging for many of its columns, but eliminated the paywall after revenues failed to outweigh advertising dollars. Still, there are a number of unexplored options for online news payment schemes, and Murdoch is no rookie in the news business.

The same CBS legal analyst who...:

• wrote that former Vice President Cheney "is just a dick"
• labeled Chief Justice John Roberts "silly and condescending" and Justice Alito a "rigid starboard-facing ideologue"
• and blamed Karl Rove for the Valerie Plame leak despite the fact that Richard Armitage admitted that he was the inadvertent leaker of that information

...is now ending his CourtWatch blog, all the while insisting that his writings over the years were mostly dry legalese and that those which were not, well, that's the fault of the people he was writing about, namely, the Bush adminstration.

CBS's Andrew Cohen in his Nov. 30 "Banging the Final Gavel" retrospective:

Anthony Stevens-Arroyo of the Washington Post’s On Faith blog took left-wing moral equivalency to new lows in a November 24 post where he compared Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hassan to General Patton and World War I hero Alvin York. What does this mass murderer have in common with two American heroes, in Stevens-Arroyo’s view? All three recited what he labeled “bad prayers.”

Matthew Archbold of the Creative Minority Report blog devoted an entire post on Monday to picking apart the Washington Post writer’s arguments. Before Stevens-Arroyo compared Hassan to Patton and York, he cited other examples of such “bad prayers.”

A liberal Washington Post columnist laments today of the loss of civility in the public discourse. Strange that he is suddenly outraged that Americans would dare call Obama a socialist or a fascist, given that Bush-Hitler comparisons were widespread during the previous administration.

Liberals in the media spent the summer and early fall bemoaning signs at town hall protests and tea party rallies calling Obama a socialist or communist comparing him to Hitler (incidentally, many of these signs were actually created by supporters of uber-leftist Lyndon LaRouche, as reported by Seton Motley here and here). These pundits had no such admonitions for signs at anti-war rallies during the Bush administration comparing him to Hitler and the Devil, and calling the president a fascist.

So the Post's E.J. Dionne's complaints about the loss of civility in the debate over federal politics fit right in with the narrative liberal pundits have been pushing since last year: comparing an American president to a murderous dictator is unacceptable...if that president is a Democrat.

"Unemployed, Underemployed Look to Jobs Summit for Help" is posted on ABC News's Web site today.  Authored by senior Washington correspondent John Cochran, the piece is notable in that nothing in it supports the headline.  Cochran writes:

Boosting confidence is at the top of President Obama's list at the Jobs Summit he is scheduled to host on Thursday. The invitation list includes business leaders, mayors, academics, and experts from the green jobs sector.

They will consider many proposals to boost the economy including:

More stimulus money for construction projects;

rewards for firms that hire more workers;

more steps to ease credit;

extending unemployment benefits through 2010.

Excuse this post's brevity, but I'm computer-challenged at the moment, and not much elaboration is necessary (except by commenters, of course).

How do you make "the Homeless Problem" disappear? 

The answer, even in the worst economy in a long, long time -- Have a Democrat President in office.

Haven’t heard much, have you (total unique listings on “homelessness rising” not in quotes from November 24-28 are really only 22)?

New York Times environment reporter Andrew C. Revkin had a post yesterday that was primarily about an open letter from Judith Curry.

Revkin describes her as "a seasoned climate scientist at Georgia Tech .... (who) has no skepticism about a growing human influence on climate." Revkin writes that "Dr. Curry has written a fresh essay that’s essentially a message to young scientists potentially disheartened in various ways by recent events."

Here are some of the key paragraphs from Curry's letter that touch on that matter:

Well, it's not quite as bad as Paul Krugman critiquing the Fox Business Network, but a little troubling because tax dollars are being spent to undertake such an effort.

A Nov. 27 post by incoming White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer on the The White House Blog attempted to fact check a Nov. 27 column by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, proving the left-wing noise machine isn't the only shop in Washington, D.C. criticizing conservative voices (h/t Amanda Carpenter of The Washington Times).

"In today's Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer takes great pains to paint a bleak picture of health care reform as ‘monstrous,' ‘overregulated,' and rife with ‘arbitrary bureaucratic inventions,'" Pfeiffer wrote. "The columnist's argument may be cogent and well-written, but it is wholly inaccurate."

Who's denyin' now?

There may not be a better example of establishment media Climategate denial than Jim Tankersley's "breaking" story at the Los Angeles Times's Greenspace blog that President Barack Obama will attend the December 7-19 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Tankersley identifies all kinds of supposed factors that seem to have influenced the president's alleged change of heart on attending, while ignoring one that seems more than a little possible -- the need to get some kind of one-world commitment done before enough of the world learns of the fraud that is Climategate.

Here are some excerpts from in-the-tank Tankersley (HT Hot Air Headlines):

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.

This is the fifth year I have looked into how the media treats these two topics:

• The use of "Christmas shopping season" vs. "holiday shopping season" (note how the AP photo at right uses "holiday" and not "shopping," even though there is a C-C-, Chr-Chr-Christmas tree in the picture).
• The frequency of Christmas and holiday layoff references.

I have done three sets of simple Google News searches each year in late November, followed by identical searches roughly two and four weeks later.

The cumulative results of all three search sets during the past four years are in this graphic.

Year-to-year changes have often been subtle. That is anything but the case with the results of the first set of searches I did at roughly 10 a.m. ET. In the context of the current economy, they are stunning, and very revealing:

The ClimateGate email leak has demonstrated in full force a glaring double standard in the mainstream media's coverage of leaked information. Too often, liberal media outlets jump at the chance to damage conservative figures by publishing sensitive information, but refuse to publish such information if it discredits or hinders the left's efforts.

As Clay Waters reported yesterday, Andew Revkin, who writes for the New York Times's Dot Earth blog, refused to publish emails from Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit showing efforts to manipulate climate data and marginalize global warming skeptics.

Said Revkin, "The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here."

Revkin is correct that the emails were never intended for the public eye, contained private communications, and were released by hackers who violated the law in obtaining them. But apparently this standard for publication of such documents does not apply to information about Sarah Palin.

E-mail messages between high-ranking scientists appear to indicate a conspiracy by some of the world's leading global warming alarmists to falsify temperature data in order to exaggerate global averages.

Those involved allegedly include: James Hansen, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Michael Mann, famous for Mann's "Hockey Stick"; Gavin Schmidt, NASA climate modeler, and; Stephen Schneider, Stanford professor and Al Gore confidant.

A statement released Friday by the alarmist website RealClimate has confirmed that e-mail servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Norwich, England, were hacked recently with contents illegally made available over the Internet. 

Although the authenticity of all these e-mail messages has yet to be proven, what's currently available points to a coordinated attempt to manipulate climate data by those directly involved in advancing the theory of anthropogenic global warming.

New Zealand's Investigate magazine reported Friday that it has verified these e-mail messages are indeed real:

UPDATE: Also see Noel Sheppard's post on the same topic, where more names are named. 

Two months ago, there was the "Dog Ate My Global Warming Data" episode. As noted at NewsBusters and at BizzyBlog (original source: National Review Online), we learned that important original information forming the underpinning of global warming alarmists' claims about the earth heating up has vanished. It is longer available and apparently can't be reverse engineered.

Today, e-mails hacked from a UK climate research facility appear at a minimum to indicate a willingness by scientists to fudge the data to make alleged warming trends more clear and convincing. At worst, the whole enterprise could be totally discredited.

Important and damming passages from certain of the e-mails have been acknowledged as authentic.

The Australian Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt claims, as paraphrased by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, that "that those e-mails expose a conspiracy to hide detrimental information from the public that argues against global warming."

Here are key paragraphs from Bolt's blog post (presented out of order because of frequent updates at that post):

The scandal surrounding the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now has provided a number of case studies in liberal media bias. The initial silence of the vast majority of media outlets on the story, the attempts by leftist commentators to excuse ACORN and discredit the group's critics, and Andrew Breitbart's strategy of rolling out video exposes periodically to counter those commentators, all speak to the liberal media paradigm, and activists' efforts to combat it.

Breitbart and his filmmaking proteges James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles have released another video showing an ACORN employee volunteering her help in establishing an underage prostitution business. This employee, Lavelle Stewart, had been trumpeted by liberal pundits as a shining example of ACORN's refusal to aid in criminal deeds. Stewart, they claimed, had refused to help Giles and O'Keefe as many other employees had.

But the new videos (Part 1 video embedded below the fold) tell a different story. "There are ways, people do it all the time," Stewart told O'Keefe when asked if he could launder prostitution money into his congressional campaign. "Yeah there are ways, especially out here in California," she added. Stewart, who works in an ACORN office in Los Angeles, was the latest staffer of the organization to volunteer her services in smuggling underage girls into the country, setting up a prostitution ring with those girls, and laundering the proceeds into a political campaign.

GQ Magazine is telling a tale of two leaders. On the one side you have Barack Obama, champion of the left, leader of the mainstream media; GQ's Leader of the Year. On the other side you have Sarah Palin, pariah of the right, dangerous and poisonous to the American way according to an interview in the very same publication.

Think I'm kidding? I couldn't make this garbage up.

I'm not sure what accomplishments helped the Conde Naste publication come up with these dubious distinctions. Perhaps it is the tripling of the nation's deficit in 10 short months, bungling the swine flu vaccine, overseeing an economy with record double digit unemployment or pitting one American against the other with unpopular proposals such as socializing health care that made them annoint President Obama. Whatever it is, none of that is apparently as terrible as Sarah Palin who the author describes as showing back up on the scene despite having been "driven her back into her hole" after last year's election.

Sarah Palin is like the mole in that addictively frustrating, ultimately futile carnival game whack-a-mole. Just when we think we've driven her back into her hole, out pops the side-swept updo and rimless Kazuo Kawasaki eyeglasses from another burrow. Katie Couric plays her the fool; she discovers Twitter. The hard right champions her as the frontrunner for 2012; she leaves office. Lawsuits threaten to sack her; she comes up with death panels.

"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. 

I haven’t seen “The Blind Side” yet, so I won’t say anything about the quality of the film. But based on the trailer and the true story, my wife and I are as excited about this as any film in a long time. It tells the true story of the adoption of Michael Oher by the Tuohy family in Tennessee and how they helped him go from homeless teenager to professional football star. The book was incredible, the story miraculous. We’re especially excited because we’re big adoption advocates, currently in the middle of our first of many planned adoptions. Also, the Tuohys happen to be conservative Christians like we are, and we don’t normally get to see families like that on screen, at least in movies that are watchable.

Apparently, this makes me a racist.

You see, Michael Oher happens to be black, and the Tuohys happen to be white. I actually think that’s pretty cool, especially because they live in Tennessee, and what gets us farther from the evil days of segregation than an increased number of mixed-race families? One would assume that liberals especially would be excited about that, right?

Not so fast.