Remember those free health care clinics MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow played up back in October after Olbermann's hour-long "Special Comment," about Republican opposition to ObamaCare and/or PelosiCare?

Well, now it's time for their brand of AstroTurf to be put into action. On MSNBC's Nov. 13 "Countdown," fill-in host Lawrence O'Donnell raised the issue about the potential opposition Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., might have over the current health care legislation being debated in the U.S. Senate. And, Landrieu so happens to represent Louisiana, the site of one of Olbermann's politicized free health care clinics.

"Republicans, in a new ad, are targeting conservative Democrat Mary Landrieu of Louisiana for indicating she might, might, allow health care to come up for up or down vote on the Senate floor," O'Donnell said.

Back in June, liberal columnists at the New York Times lined up to link conservative talkers Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh to James von Brunn, the 88-year-old man who killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum, and the murder by Scott Roeder of abortionist George Tiller.

Columnists Paul Krugman and Judith Warner both weighed in on June 12.

Krugman’s “The Big Hate” blamed Fox host Bill O’Reilly’s rhetoric (“Tiller the baby killer”) for the Tiller murder, as well as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, for contributing to the dangerously toxic atmosphere.

Warner’s online entry, “The Wages of Hate,” read: “You can't accuse Beck or Limbaugh of inciting violence. But they almost certainly do stoke the flames.”

Frank Rich also blamed O’Reilly for the Tiller murder in his Sunday column, "The Obama Hater's Silent Enablers," two days later.

On last night's "Rachel Maddow Show", the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh commended President Obama for taking the reins in Afghanistan. Hersh stated that Presidents must decide their own war strategies. But in the early stages of the war in Iraq, Hersh was a leading critic of similar actions by the Bush administration. Hersh's hypocrisy suggests he is more concerned with the political implications of military policy than strategic ones.

"Lincoln did not let McClellan write a report on how to win a war against the South," Hersh told Maddow, in reference to Gen. George McClellan, initially the top general for the Union during the Civil War. Hersh was offering a historical perspective on why Presidents should not rely on military commanders to form strategy--McClellan was a disastrous general, after all (video embedded below the fold).

Former President Bill Clinton was in Chicago yesterday, speaking at a fundraiser on the subject of the current health insurance overhaul.

Somehow, some way, Clinton wound up talking about ethnic diversity, the Fort Hood murders, and – most bizarrely – the AMC network’s “Mad Men.”

Clinton began his descent with the following, quoted from Lynn Sweet’s Chicago Sun-Times blog:

Leave it to that bastion of grace and class that waxes poetically on a nightly basis about the wrongdoings of Republicans or conservatives ad nauseum known as MSNBC host Keith Olbermann to do Lou Dobbs resignation from CNN up just right.

Olbermann on his Nov. 11 "Countdown" broadcast honored Dobbs 30-year CNN career by naming him his "third worst person in the world."

"The bronze to Lou Dobbs, who tonight, as of tonight, has just quit his CNN show," Olbermann said.

Although it isn't quite clear why Olbermann decided to bestow that honor upon Dobbs, if for no other reason than for his decision to resign, Olbermann cherry-picked portions of Dobbs resignation speech from the Nov. 11 broadcast of "Lou Dobbs Tonight" and even ad-libbed in his comments (actual transcript of Dobbs here).

Imagine if you will, that during the prior presidential administration two EPA employees put up a video on YouTube that criticized environmental and energy policies supported by Republicans in Congress and President Bush, only to be told by EPA officials that they need to take down the video.

Given the media's consternation about the Bush administration's alleged efforts to squelch proponents of the theory of manmade global warming, such a story would likely be front page news in many newspapers, including the Washington Post.

But in this instance, the administration in question is Obama's, and the EPA employees are going at the president from his left flank, arguing the so called "cap-and-trade" plan would "lock in climate degradation."

Despite this, the Washington Post placed David Fahrenthold's November 11 story, "EPA tells workers to tone down YouTube clip about climate bill" on page A8:

New York Times reporter Peter Baker questioned whether President Obama’s soaring rhetoric ("the most gifted orator of his generation") was still getting through in his Sunday Week in Review piece "The Words That Once Soared," and even let Obama aides suggest the president's Cairo speech "was responsible for Iranians taking to the streets of Tehran to protest a disputed election."

As the most gifted orator of his generation, President Obama finds speechmaking perhaps his most potent political tool. It propelled him to national prominence in 2004 and to the White House in 2008. And whenever he needs to calm economic fears or revive stalled health care legislation, he takes to the lectern.

The Times finds the Democratic party to be a veritable symposium of “gifted orators.” Obama’s already been called that three times before in the Times, the first instance coming all the way back on March 19, 2006 in a story by Anne Kornblut, before he was even running for president.

It's time once again for our favorite media parlor game, "Name That Party!"

The theft trial of Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon (D) began yesterday, but in covering the story, the Baltimore Sun failed to note Dixon's Democratic party affiliation.

The Washington Post, syndicating the story, also failed to note Dixon's affiliation in their caption to an Associated Press photo of the mayor which reads, "Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon is accused of buying personal items using gift cards donated to her office."

The unsigned story by the Sun notes that Dixon is alleged to have practically stolen from her city's poorest residents for her own personal gain:

Some of the mainstream media intelligentsia following the Fort Hood, Texas massacre have cautioned people to reserve judgment about the suspect Major Nidal Malik Hasan and have bypassed many key details in order to live up to what could be construed as a politically correct standard. CNN's Lou Dobbs isn't one of them.

Dobbs, on his Nov. 10 radio program, didn't reserve judgment and criticized President Barack Obama for telling people to do so in a speech following the tragic event. Dobbs played a clip from the speech Obama gave last week in which he warned, "We don't know all the answers yet and I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts."

"Isn't that remarkable, telling the American people not to jump to any conclusions?" Dobbs said. "Not to speculate, not to be curious about what is happening to our men and women, who should be the center of all of our attention and concern and care. Let's compare that statement by our president to what he said at the end of a press conference about health care shortly after the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates, his good friend."

The New York Times’s November 5 “Political Points” podcast recited a full 30-second excerpt from Gail Collins’s Wednesday column blaming not Obama, but bad Democratic candidates, for the party’s huge losses in governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey.

The paper’s chief political reporter Adam Nagourney agreed that New Jersey and Virginia weren’t necessarily predictive. Four minutes in, Adam Nagourney emulated Collins by also throwing the two losing Democrats under the bus, while repeatedly warning people not to overstate the results:

Remember that we’re talking about here are two states, not a lot of voters, one congressional district in upstate New York. Micro-wise, one thing we do want to pay attention to here is, and again, don’t overstate this -- independent voters who backed President Obama in Virginia and New Jersey last time went to the Republican gubernatorial candidates this time. Now, does that mean that they didn’t, that they’ll vote for, you know, whoever votes against Obama in 2012, or for Democrats, or Republicans congressional, for Republicans next year? No. I don’t think so.

Sometimes – no, scratch that, many times –  it is difficult to imagine a caricature of the media.

Tom Brokaw made an appearance on this morning's edition of Morning Joe this morning, plugging his interview with the former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev.  Brokaw was, of course, reporting from the historic Brandenburg Gate this morning to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Brew Crew were gathered in their studio with national security expert Dr. Richard Haas, discussing such weighty subjects as the American response to the fall of communism, the geopolitical advantages and disadvantages of that event, and so on.  And which of these subjects did Brokaw use to segue into the subject of his interview?

None.  Instead, Brokaw, the constantly prostrate Gorbachev apologist, chose to highlight Mikhail Gorbachev's approval of President Barack Obama - and his receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize:

Leave to a brilliant mind like Keith Olbermann, who finally decided to show his face on live TV after Nov. 3's Democratic defeat, to throw a temper tantrum about the public display of opposition to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's that occurred on the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol on Nov.5.

After Olbermann and Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson all but declared Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., organizer of the "House Call" event, an enemy of the state, they predictably came to the conclusion the event was racist. However to overcome that hurdle, Olbermann suggested organizers "pay" minorities to show up to make the cause look more diverse.

"On an associated point with this, how do the organizers of this not realize, ‘You know what, we had better get somehow, even if we have to pay them to show up, some black faces, some brown faces, some Asian people or somebody in this crowd other than the crowd we were seeing?'" Olbermann said. "Every piece of videotape I looked at looks exactly the same. This is otherwise going to look like a pro-Apartheid rally in South Africa 35 or 40 years ago."

An openly gay city council candidate is targeted by malicious campaign literature suggesting he may be a pedophile and subsequently loses his bid for alderman.

It's the type of story highlighting bigotry and homophobia that the mainstream media would love to trumpet and it happened just days ago in the 2009 city elections in Annapolis, Md.

Unfortunately for Scott Bowling, he's a Republican in the liberal capital city of Maryland.

Aside from coverage in the Annapolis Capital and the Baltimore Sun's Maryland Politics blog, a Google News search and Nexis searches of the AP wire, major newspapers, and network transcripts revealed no coverage of the story in the mainstream media:

Here's news you can virtually guarantee won't get noticed by what remains of the establishment media.

Whole Foods (WFMI) announced its financial results for the quarter ended September 30 yesterday. The quarter closed about 50 days after outraged leftists called for a boycott of the grocery chain to retaliate for a Wall Street Journal op-ed written by CEO John Mackey. In that column, Mackey identified "Eight things we can do to improve health care without adding to the deficit," asserting that:

The last thing our country needs is a massive new health care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction — toward less government control and more individual empowerment.

Well, if there's so much support out there for statist health care, you would think that the Whole Foods boycott dedicated to punishing an opponent would have had a significant impact on the company's most recent quarterly results.

You would be wrong:

The Democratic mayor of Oakland, CA and his wife recently admitted to failing to pay $239,000 in taxes since 2005. The San Francisco Chronicle covered the story, but made no mention of the mayor's party, in striking contrast to coverage of recent ethics violations by Republicans in the state.

"We owe taxes," Mayor Ron Dellums, pictured right, bluntly said in a statement on Tuesday. "The matter is being dealt with and will be resolved in short order." The IRS imposed a tax lien on the couple's $1.4 million home in the Foxhall Crescent neighborhood in Washington, DC, and 3,200 square foot house in Oakland Hills.

There is no party identification in the story, however, only a statement in the second-to-last paragraph that Dellums is a "stalwart of progressive ideals." It seems the Chronicle could not bring itself to state the he is a Democrat.

This afternoon, the Washington Post's Web site offers readers two looks at how the Democrats and the GOP will proceed following the 2009 elections, but, surprise, surprise, the paper only forsees internecine squabbles for the GOP.

"Republicans revel in wins but ideological fissures loom," the headline to Washington Post staffer Philip Rucker and Perry Bacon's news piece filed at 2:30 p.m. EST today. On the other side of the coin, the Post offered an "analysis" piece from Dan Balz published shortly after 10 a.m. today that posits that the "Contests serve as warning to Democrats: It's not 2008 anymore."

Even before delving into the content of the articles, it's clear by the  labeling that the Post sees the GOP's pending "ideological fissures" as a matter of objective news reporting, while the Democratic postmortem is a matter of informed "analysis," not hard news.

For their part, Rucker and Bacon aimed, like others in the mainstream media -- click here, here, and here --  to gin up an ominous narrative for the GOP party-wide from the New York 23rd congressional district saga:

The G.O.P. had two big victories yesterday in off-year elections, winning the race for governor in New Jersey and Virginia for the first time since 1997. The New York Times's coverage was dominated by three themes used to explain away the success of Republicans:

The Republicans won by appearing moderate.

The congressional race in upstate New York revealed deep divisions within the G.O.P.

These off-year elections don't mean much anyway (except when Democrats win).

1) Republicans Won by Moderating:

Even after wins by two conservative Republicans, the Times spin was that moderation had prevailed, arguing that both New Jersey Governor-elect Chris Christie and Virginia Governor-elect Bob McDonnell won by trimming their social conservative stands.

In a Tuesday web post before returns were in, the paper's chief political reporter Adam Nagourney said that even a win by Virginia conservative McDonnell would be a victory for moderation:

After Joe Scarborough’s intra-squad snarking of Keith Olbermann yesterday morning, one might have expected a better-behaved Brew Crew today.

No such luck for Chris Matthews – Pat Buchanan had different plans.

In a discussion of the polling data in Virginia’s gubernatorial race, Joe asked Lawrence O’Donnell why the Democrat was doing so poorly in a state that President Obama won by a large margin last year:

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Why [crosstalk] Democrats doing better in Virginia a year after Obama’s historic victory?

The technical term for the following video is “busting his chops.”

Joe Scarborough provided a wonderful satire of Keith Olbermann’s 2008 election-night bias on this morning’s edition of Morning Joe.  A partial transcript follows the video, which really must be watched for the full effect.

Attaboy, Joe. 

This sort of thing makes up for your left-of-center moments.

In deciding which Sunday talk shows to focus on, I typically tap into Politico's Sunday talk show tip sheet, which provides a helpful round-up of the Sunday line-up.

Scrolling there today, I came upon the photo you see here.  Of all the innumerable images of the three men, these are the pictures Politico chose to announce the appearance of Joe Lieberman, Rush Limbaugh and David Plouffe on Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday and Meet the Press, respectively.

You don't suppose Politico's pic picks might reflect its biases, do you? Let's break it down . . .