This is about as disgusting as Palin Derangement Syndrome can get.

A blog just published at the Huffington Post is disgracefully titled "Palin Will Run In '12 On More Retardation Platform."

The author, fiction and comedy writer Erik Sean Nelson (pictured right), actually wrote the following (readers are seriously warned to proceed with caution as this is really vile stuff):

On ABCnews.com’s blog Political Punch, Yunji de Nies reported on the first celebration of gay pride month held in the White House by President Obama.

“President Obama told the group he is committed to equality for their community,” she reported, continuing on to quote Obama himself: “‘This struggle continues today, for even as we face extraordinary challenges as a nation, we cannot and will not put aside issues of basic equality,’ he said, ‘We seek an America in which no one feels the pain of discrimination based on who you are or who you love.’”

De Nies noted the gay community’s disappointment in a president they had hoped would actively promote their agenda: “Many gay and lesbians believe the President has been slow to act on major issues like the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, and the Defense of Marriage Act,” she wrote, neglecting to report on Obama’s personal belief that marriage should be between a man and a woman, or his administration’s recent defense of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

An article on advocate.com also neglected to admit Obama’s personal belief, but did quote Richard Socarides, a former LGBT advisor to President Bill Clinton, as saying, “No one ever questioned whether President Obama's heart was in the right place, but now we have the beginning of some action …”

ABC's online "The Note" describes itself as "Washington's Original and Most Influential Tipsheet." ABC News's Senior Political Reporter Richard Klein is its current content creator.

We'll see how influential "The Note" really is if what Klein writes about the machinations behind the attempt to make us forget that the Obama stimulus plan was supposedly going to be making some kind of difference at this point gets out anywhere else. Color me skeptical.

No doubt, Klein gets in some pretty strong, accurate, and long-overdue rips (links are in original):

Wikipedia can be a vehicle for tearing down barriers and democratizing information. Unless the New York Times is involved.

Just as the Times was able to keep 40 other media organizations from reporting on the capture of their own David Rohde, so too were they able to keep Wikipedia from reporting it. They also used his Wikipedia page to try to win favor with the Taliban.

Just three days after Rohde was captured, a user edited his Wikipedia page to reflect his capture, but that edit was quickly deleted, and with the help of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, news of Rohde’s capture was kept off the page until his release.

Those who have followed my posts for a while know that I have a particularly low regard for the work of MarketWatch's Rex Nutting (pictured at right). It goes back to the pre-housing mess days when he tried to tell me that the the drop in housing prices would look like the 75%-plus drop in the NASDAQ from 2000-2002 or the collapse of Dutch tulip prices centuries ago. As of April 2009, according the Federal Housing Finance Authority (FHFA), the successor to the Office of Housing Enterprise Oversight, the two-year drop in housing prices since the April 2007 peak has been 11.2% (PDF). Of course, give the Obama administration enough time, and who knows what it might do to housing values?

After the government's "final" GDP report for the first quarter of 2009 on Thursday (future comprehensive revisions during the next two years could still ultimately change the outcome), it occurred to me that the reported annualized contraction of 5.5%, in combination with the annualized 6.3% contraction logged in the fourth quarter of last year, might be some kind of record. I looked at historical info, and found that the most recent two-quarter dive is the worst since the same quarters of 1957-58. Then in seeing who might have written this up, I came across Nutting's related report, which contains two statements that are patently untrue.

What's remarkable is that one of his errors indicates that he or someone else at MarketWatch must have looked for the numbers in question and, along with his editors (if they exist), blown right by them.

Nutting's erroneous statements in his Thursday MarketWatch report are the first two sentences (bolded by me) in the following paragraph:

Clearly, the most important takeaway from ABC's low-rated White House forum on health care was President Barack Obama's admission that he would go outside the constraints of a nationalized system to get the "very best care" if necessary for his own family.

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey noted that Obama's response should properly be seen as "a Michael Dukakis moment that exposed him as a hypocrite."

A video of the exchange is at YouTube. To the extent possible, see if you think Diane Sawyer, standing next to the inquiring doctor, looks a bit peeved as the nature of his question becomes clear.

ABC's Jake Tapper and Karen Travers understood the newsworthiness of what Obama said, and led with it in their post-forum coverage:

If beating dead horses were an Olympic event, Joe Klein would have more medals gracing his neck than Michael Phelps.

On his magazine's Swampland blog, the Time columnist returned to his latest overwrought left-wing pandering point: labeling hardliner President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the Iranian version of George W. Bush:

The protesters admire our freedom, but they are appalled--and insulted--by our neocolonialist condescension over the past 50 years. The reformers, and even some conservatives, consider Ahmadinejad the George W. Bush of Iran--a crude, unsophisticated demagogue, who puts a strong Potemkin face to the world without very much knowledge of what the rest of the world is about. This was an anology [sic] that came up in interview after interview, with reformers and conservatives alike.

Klein doesn't explicitly reference the "axis of evil" remarks  in then-President Bush's 2002 State of the Union address as an offense, although he quite probably has it in mind. Yet a review of the relevant passage from that speech shows Bush was dead-on and arguably eerily prophetic about the iron-fisted repression that the world is witness to presently on the streets of Tehran (portion in bold is my emphasis):

In today's "Truly Delicious Irony" segment, the Federal Trade Commission, just months after so-called journalists decided who should win a presidential primary and subsequent election, is going to begin going after bloggers who make false claims about products and/or don't fully disclose conflicts of interest.

Imagine that.

As reported by the Associated Press Sunday:

Boy, the press can really do the nitty-gritty detail work (also saved here) when they set their minds to it (graphics at right via West Coast Outpost):

Whenever Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore releases a new documentary the reaction in the press is typically jubilant. Rave reviews. Fawning interviews which rarely ask tough questions. Oscar buzz aplenty.

But this time could be different.

Moore’s last film, “Slacker Uprising,” didn’t go straight to DVD. It went straight to download. Now, Moore’s catching heat from Movieline.com, the online film magazine which routinely taunts conservative targets like Gov. Sarah Palin. The site’s new Moore-related post swats the filmmaker for a less than sharp attempt at marketing his upcoming film about the country’s economic collapse. The movie blogger sets up his critique here:

In the midst of his June 16 Swampland blog screed leveled against the "unhinged" Sen. John McCain for his criticism of President Obama's low-key response to the Iranian election, Time magazine's Joe Klein [shown in file photo at right] also worked in a comparison of hardliner Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's support base with former U.S. President George W. Bush's core supporters:

It is not even clear that Ahmadinejad--who has significant backing from the sort of people who support Republicans here (the elderly, the religious extremists) plus a real following among working-class Iranians--would have lost this election, if the votes had been counted fairly. (I tend to believe that they weren't counted at all, but that's just my opinion.)

Twelve days earlier, Klein more subtly made the Ahmadinejad/Bush connection in a comparison that favorably compared Iranian presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi to Bush's 2004 rival Sen. John Kerry (emphasis mine):

For all the bluster from the Left during the Bush administration about the doctrine of preemptive warfare, it seems at least one journalist favors the doctrine adapted for use within the U.S. justice system to prevent lone-wolf terroristic violence.

U.S. News & World Report contributor and PBS "To the Contrary" host Bonnie Erbe on June 11 sounded a decidedly authoritarian note in a Thomas Jefferson Street blog post in which she called for "rounding up" hatemongers like James von Brunn or Scott Roeder before they turn violent.

Oddly enough, Erbe -- who has always favored Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama  -- seems to suggest that the president's former pastor might be such a killer-in-waiting:

On June 9 a rally that saw thousands of participants in support of traditional marriage assembled at Albany, New York, the state capitol. One month earlier, a similar rally was held in Midtown Manhattan that also saw thousands in attendance. And in neither case was there much by the way of media coverage.

A Google search of the words marriage rally in New York June 9 turns up many hits on the story. But almost all of them are from blogs as opposed to traditional media sources, though the Village Voice covered the May rally in Manhattan.

You can't make this stuff up. The titled quote comes from a Bloomberg story today about new GM Chairman Ed Whitacre. You also can't make up most of the media's calm acceptance of yet another person heavily involved with running General Motors, aka Government Motors, who knows next to nothing about cars except as a consumer who drives them.

At least it's refreshing that this guy has experience running a business, which is more than you can say about the other two architects of the company as it currently subsists.

On May 31, the New York Times put out a fawning portrayal of the a Mr. Brian Deese, the guy who was the only full-timer on President-elect and then President Obama's car team from Election Night until mid-February.

Fasten your seat belts, this guy's lack of any kind of pedigree will have you death-gripping the steering wheel, as will the smug dismissiveness of a business system that has been the most successful in human history:

Bad news for those living in “Middle America.” Actress Megan Fox would like Megatron, the evil character from her new movie “Transformers,” to blow you up. Kat Giantis, of Wonderwall, reported the actress was recently interviewed by “Total Film UK.” Although nobody asked her who she would like Megatron to obliterate, she volunteered it anyway.

When asked how she would stop the ruthless Megatron from demolishing the world, Fox first said that she would “barter with him.” She then, however, went on to say, “... and instead of the entire planet, can you just take out all of the white trash, hillbilly, anti-gay, super bible-beating people in Middle America?"

Time magazine's Joe "Anonymous" Klein is at it again.

Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb yesterday picked up on how the journalist -- who as we've documented is harsher on Israel than Iran -- credited a terrorist with having a "good question" about what pressure the Obama administration will place on the Netanyahu government regarding settlements in Palestinian territories:

Joe Klein, who has in the past boldly declared himself "not a big fan" of Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, sits down with the terror group's commander in chief for an interview in the wake of Obama's speech:

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It doesn't seem like it would be too much to ask CNNMoney's headline e-mailers to read past the first sentence of a government announcement. But, maybe it is.

Here are the first two sentences of the Employment Situation Report from Uncle Sam's Bureau of Labor Statistics released this morning:

Nonfarm payroll employment fell by 345,000 in May, about half the average monthly decline for the prior 6 months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today.  The unemployment rate continued to rise, increasing from 8.9 to 9.4 percent.

Ahead of the 8:30 a.m. report, according to Reuters, Dow futures were up 54 points, while S&P and NASDAQ futures were up 5 and 5.75 points, respectively (the time-stamp is 9:22, but the narrative is clearly pre-8:30).

Just after the market opened, I received this CNNMoney e-mail:

It takes a big man to admit when he’s been bested. I have to say however, that after this one I had to walk away with my head hanging in shame.  You win this round, Mr Olbermann… You win this round. [video below page break]

In my defense however, I will say that Maddow came way out of left field with the double-teaming.  I personally found it to be distasteful… But well played on Maddow’s part.

Today's Employment Situation Report from Uncle Sam (link will be updated for May results at 8:30 a.m.) will almost certainly report hundreds of thousands of seasonally adjusted jobs lost.

According to this AFP report, "Most analysts expect employers to have cut 520,000 jobs, down from 539,000 in April. But the unemployment rate is still expected to have jumped to 9.2 percent, its highest since 1983." (UPDATE: 345,000 seasonally adjusted jobs were lost in May, but the unemployment rate rose sharply to 9.4%.)

"Down from April"? Given the vagaries in the governmnent's estimates, and that the figure will be revised in the following two months, how about "virtually the same as April"?

At least AFP gave us two numbers to compare. An e-mail I received on Wednesday morning from CNNMoney.com about ADP's monthly National Employment Report didn't even do that:

President Obama is apparently out of touch with Americans on gay right issues according to the June 4 article by Politico’s Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin. In the article “Gay Groups Grow Impatient With Obama,” Smith and Martin criticized Obama for the not taking an active role in supporting gay rights, such as same-sex marriage, but paint an inaccurate portrayal of the American peoples’ stance toward same-sex marriage.

The article was critical of Obama for not helping advance gay and lesbian rights “President Barack Obama’s promises of change are falling short for one core Democratic constituency: gays and lesbians.”  But Obama never promised to change traditional marriage during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Updated below

It was wrong of Playboy to publish a top ten list of conservative women its writer Guy Cimbalo would like to "hate-f***" but, c'mon, we all know Michelle Malkin had it coming. That's the gist of PBS "To the Contrary" host and U.S. News contributing editor Bonnie Erbe's June 3 blog post, "Playboy Mix of Sex, Hate, and Politics Demeans Conservative Women" (emphasis mine):

Yesterday, I was contacted by the executive director of SmartGirlPolitics.org, a conservative women's website, to stand up for conservative women treated despicably by the media. Here I am, doing just that.... A couple of caveats are in order. First, I probably disagree politically with much of SmartGirlPolitics.org's agenda--I know I disagree completely with the group's position on abortion rights. But as a nonpartisan, I'm also a firm believer in supporting all members of my gender when attacked due to their gender. I am supporting these women herewith.

Last night at about 8 p.m., the Associated Press's Roxana Hegeman became an early purveyor of the myth that abortion clinic-related violence and violence against abortionists has been a frequent and consistent occurrence during the past two decades when she wrote the following about the murder of Kansas abortionist George Tiller (saved here at host for future reference; bold is mine):

There was no immediate word of the motive (of) Tiller's assailant. But the doctor's violent death was the latest in a string of shootings and bombings over two decades directed against abortion clinics, doctors and staff.

But a look at the actual history of such violence accumulated by a pro-abortion group demonstrates that Tiller's murder is correctly seen as a horrible, isolated incident following a long, sustained decline in violence.

Here is the "History of Violence" accumulated by the National Abortion Federation (NAF), broken down into four categories:

Steven Ertelt at LifeNews.com is telling us more about the alleged murderer of Kansas abortionist George Tiller than establishment media news sources (bold is mine):

George Tiller Shooting Suspect Caught, No Connection With Pro-Life Groups

Authorities have apprehended a Kansas man suspected of killing late-term abortion practitioner George Tiller on Sunday morning at his church. Police have identified the man as 51-year-old Scott Roeder of Merriam, Kansas and he has been detained but has not yet been officially charged.

As has been the case with most previous incidents of abortion-related violence, Roeder appears to have an affiliation with extremist political groups but not with the mainstream pro-life movement.

Pro-life groups have quickly and genuinely condemned the Tiller shooting.

There is little argument that the British press is doing a better job than its U.S. counterparts covering the Obama administration's less than perfect performance.

If the reactions of Nile Gardiner and James Delingpole at the UK Telegraph to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs's blanket criticism of British journalism are any indication, UK reporters are also more willing to stand up for themselves instead of filing toothless complaints and letting veiled threats go by without blowback.

First, via Howard Kurtz, here's the fine whine from Associated Press reporter, President of the White House Correspondents' Association, and Democratic operative Jennifer Loven about the Obama administration's penchant for anonymous, "on background" briefings:

Maybe it should be put to music:

Blago and Burris,
Sitting in a tree,
But they'd rather we not know their political party.

There has been yet another revelation about contacts between Democratic President Barack Obama's U.S. Senate successor, Democrat Roland Burris and former Illinois Democratic governor Rod Blagojevich over Blago's pre-Senate appointment, uh, deliberations. A released FBI audio recording reveals that Burris offered to make a campaign contribution to Blago as he lobbied to be selected.

This news has brought on yet another wave of stories that fail to tell us what party Blago and Burris belong to.

The Washington Post is the only publication that identified the party of both men in the course of reporting their story. The Post's Peter Slevin and Perry Bacon Jr. also identified the Democratic Party affiliation of the Senate Ethics Committee's Barbara Boxer:

As you can see from the 94 results returned in this Google News archive search on "Reagan declassified" (not entered in quotes) for 2008 and 2009, there is no shortage of establishment media interest in previously undisclosed historical information that is made public for the first time.

That makes it odd, to say the least, that only a couple of Catholic publications have picked up on a remarkable disclosure contained in information released early last week that in late 1980, Pope John Paul II personally intervened to save the life of a South Korean political dissident sentenced to death by a government military tribunal.

The person spared, Thomas More Kim Dae-Jung, became that country's president almost two decades later. He credits the late pontiff with saving his life.

Here is a portion of the report from Catholic News Agency (CNA):

Protesting a critic's claim of bias, MSNBC's Contessa Brewer insisted earlier today in a tweet that she "criticize[s] anyone who I think isn't making sense."

"You're just focusing on one side," Brewer added in her reply to a Twitter user who complained that Brewer trashes Republicans "but [has] nothing else to talk about."

The same Twitter user, Carol Reed, urged Brewer to "[w]atch a tape of yourself & you will see it."

Good advice, as our archive of Brewer bias shows plenty of doozies, like:

If the cheers of Columbia University's Class of 2009 are any indication, the future of journalism will be looking for a federal bailout.

Washington Times correspondent Christina Bellantoni live-tweeted today's event, noting the remarks from university president Lee Bollinger appealing for more government-owned media outlets. Bollinger also received "big cheers" for his call for increased spending on public broadcasting.

Here are the relevant tweets from Bellantoni's feed in reverse chronological order (emphasis mine):

Nortin Hadler, M.D. is a "professor of medicine and microbiology/immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an attending rheumatologist at University of North Carolina Hospitals."

He also thinks that a number of procedures commonly thought of as beneficial have no or very minimal benefit.

The fact that ABC is carrying Hadler's exhortations may be a clue that the network is in the tank for anything that would appear to promote government intervention in the medical system. That appears to be where Hader is ultimately going.

Judge for yourself when you see the list of procedures Hadler believes are either not beneficial, or are very minimally so:

UPDATE at end of post: Dowd's employing the famous "I heard it from a friend" defense.

On a regular basis, NewsBusters has warned readers of the infiltration into traditional media outlets content written by left-wing bloggers.

On Sunday, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was accused of plagiarizing a piece posted a few days prior by Josh Marshall of the liberal website Talking Points Memo.

Dowd has now admitted her mistake.

As Marshall wrote Thursday (h/t Hot Air):