The senior editor of the liberal online publication Mediaite asked an astonishingly absurd question in a headline Tuesday:

"Does The BP Oil Spill Mark The Death Of The Tea Party Movement?"

Glynnis MacNicol's premise in her piece by that name: "The call for less government intervention into the lives of ‘regular' citizens that was so prevalent throughout last summer, and fall, and winter has gone nearly silent in the face of the Gulf disaster."

MacNicol's supporting evidence of the Tea Party's demise:

On Wednesday's Rick's List, CNN's Drew Griffin pressed former Clinton administration official Robert Reich on his call for a federal takeover of BP and its efforts against the Gulf oil leak. Griffin first questioned Reich if his proposal was serious, and later stated that the Democrat's idea "sounds not only highly illegal...but seems to me to smack of something that we might see in Venezuela" [audio clips available here].

The CNN personality, who was filling in for anchor Rick Sanchez, brought on the current University of California, Berkeley professor to discuss his proposal, which he first made in a May 31 column (as noted by Jeff Poor at MRC's Business and Media Institute). After summarizing Reich's position, that it was "time for the government to seize control of BP and take over the company's oil spill recovery efforts in the Gulf," Griffin bluntly asked the former labor secretary, "I've got to tell you, I have always considered you a very serious person, but this doesn't sound serious to me at all. Are you serious about this, or was this some kind of a joke to get things going?"

Progressives are so good at weeding out racists in our midst, they feel obligated to share with us the words used. However, should liberals be called out when they use racial slurs, they lose their minds.

Case in point: Sarah Silverman used a slur and was called on it. She continues to smear conservatives as racists and the fact SHE was criticized for use of racial slurs is something poor Sarah just won't let go of.

h/t Jeff Poor

At a pro-Gaza protest in Los Angeles on Memorial Day a lone counter-protester showed up to voice his support for Israel. While doing nothing more than walking around with an Israeli flag, the counter-protester was chased and the police had to protect him from the angry crowd.

Make sure you visit this post at the Eyeblast Blog to get more details on what happened and to discuss why things like this only happen at far left protests.

On the Wednesday edition of “Morning Joe,” host Joe Scarborough attacked Republican political strategist Karl Rove for his critique of the Obama administration’s delayed response to the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Scarborough was irate at the “hypocrisy” of the statement because during his time in New Orleans in the middle of Katrina, he recalled, “a lot of people keeping their mouths shut because they didn't want to criticize President Bush.” [MP3 audio available here; WMV video for download here]

This outburst was in response to Karl Rove’s statement on Fox News that, “The president and his people are in charge of this under the Oil Spill Liability Act and they don’t have a plan.” Scarborough then hastily asserted, “Just keep your mouth shut. I'm not saying don't criticize the president, but if you were involved in Katrina, keep your mouth shut.”

Of course, during a post-Katrina interview with “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams, Scarborough felt no compulsion to keep his mouth shut in deference to the president. At the time, Scarborough asked if Williams found it an "ironic choice" to report “from a major American city where young children died of dehydration out on sidewalks, and now you've got the President of the United States delivering a speech to the nation from Jackson Square, an area largely untouched by Katrina's devastation.”

The subject of the Gaza-bound "Freedom Flotilla" organized by pro-Palestinian activists that attacked Israel Defense Forces as they boarded a cargo boat, was the subject of Charlie Rose's talk show Tuesday night.

Rose's roundtable included Ethan Bronner, Jerusalem bureau chief of the Times, who accused Israel of acting with "disproportionate force" and for causing "increasing disillusionment in the world." As if using superior force is somehow unfair to those who are attacking you.

Here's Bronner, 17 minutes into the show:

I think what's been very interesting over the last sort of six or eight years is that Israel has taken the view that military activity works and diplomacy has not actually worked all that well. And in the short term, you could argue that it has. It has stopped terrorism from the West Bank, it has stopped rockets from Gaza, stopped rockets from Hezbollah in Lebanon and so on. But the problem is, that every time it acts with this disproportionate force in order to carry out a military and security goal, what it gets is increasing disillusionment in the world. And the question is, where does the advantage of one stop and the disadvantage of the other grow so that it overwhelms it. And I think that what may be happening is that we are at that tipping point, even from an Israeli perspective.

It was bound to happen and no one can really blame them for doing so, but someone eventually had to determine who the political winners and losers are for the tragic circumstances surrounding the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Looking forward to the upcoming election cycle, MSNBC "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough determined the time was right to take a stab at it, although reluctantly on his June 2 broadcast.

"[W]e will stay with BP for one second but talk about presidential politics and I know this will be offensive to some people but it's just a reality that there is somebody in the White House, somebody in the Democratic Party, somebody in the Republican Party that's trying to figure out the political impact of this environmental tragedy. And we were talking with Chuck Todd last hour about how it ramps up when the oil starts washing on Florida shores, Chris. That makes this a much bigger political event in terms of presidential politics, like it or not."

Yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute's Enterprise Blog, Steven Hayward had a great post about the history of electric cars, and the press's unrequited love affair with electric vehicles (picture at right is of the $108,000 2010 Zedomax. Yum.

But first I'll start with a bit of my own research. On May 7, 1994, Paul Feldman at the Los Angeles Times led with the following two paragraphs about a company that would begin producing electric vehicles:

Electric Cars Touted as Plant Opens

Environmentalists and businessmen used the dedication Friday of a Carson-area electric vehicle assembly plant to tout the fledgling industry the week before the California Air Resources Board votes on moving forward with its mandate for mass-produced electric cars beginning in 1998.

The opening of the U.S. Electricar plant, which can convert up to 60 cars a month, demonstrates that adequate technology is available for major manufacturers to build the mandated 20,000 to 25,000 emission-free cars yearly.

A visit to this web page at the "U.S. Electricar Store" informs us of U.S. Electricar's status (bolds are mine):

Hell-bent to speed down its dead-end road to irrelevance, Newsweek's editors stubbornly cling to the self-delusion that their magazine is not a partisan rag. But any cursory look at the June 7 dead tree edition proves otherwise.

[No, I didn't get inspired to write this following a dentist's visit. Sadly, we still have a subscription here at the office.]

Take, for example The Index feature in the Scope section. Assigning a number score from zero (awful) to 100 (awesome), Newsweek writers snarked that Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal [score of 15] has often "[railed] against big government" but is now complaining "big government isn't doing enough to protect his shorelines." Writers also smacked around conservative J.D. Hayworth, former Rep. Vito Fossella and failed Idaho congressional candidate Vaughn Ward while praising author Joe McGinniss [score of 74] for moving next door to Sarah Palin's Wasilla, Alaska, residence. No Democrats were ridiculed by name.

A quick flip to the Back Story on the last page asks "How Queer Is That?" with a look at how it's "[f]unny how prominent conservatives with antigay records are so often caught in gay sex scandals." For that feature, three former and one current Republican politician were featured, as were former evangelical pastor Ted Haggard and minister George Rekers.

Good Morning America's Claire Shipman on Wednesday continued to tout the "storybook" nature of Al and Tipper Gore's failed marriage, reminiscing, "Al and Tipper. Tipper and Al. Their very togetherness, always part of the appeal."

Recounting the news of their separation after 40 years, the journalist seemed to wonder if any marriage could survive: "Of course, storybook endings aren't easy to come by. But this twist makes them all seem that much more out of reach." [Audio available here.] In a follow-up piece, ABC's Cokie Roberts contributed an odd aside about how political wives tend to not sing the praises of their husbands enough.

She opined, "And [a politician's] wife knows he puts on his pants one leg at a time. You know? And she's there reminding him of the mortgage payments and of the fact that he's just a regular person, not a god. And you know, who needs that? It's much more fun to be a god than a regular person."

After blaming the 2000 election for the breakup of the Gore marriage on Tuesday’s CBS Evening News, Sally Quinn of The Washington Post returned to CBS Wednesday morning for an interview with The Early Show, where she repeated the blame-Bush line, in a milder way: "You know one of the hard things is when you lose, this was their home. You can’t live here anymore." But mostly, Quinn suggested that if the Gores couldn’t make it, then maybe no one could:

And the interesting thing is that usually when something like this happens you get a sense of glee, people sort of saying, "I told you so, or I knew it," or whatever. I have only encountered sadness, and as you can imagine I’ve been on the phone with friends ever since I heard it yesterday and everyone feels as though somehow their own marriages have split up. You know watching the Gores is sort of looking at the possibilities of what a good marriage could be and when it doesn’t work for them you sort of think "oh my God, maybe it’s not possible."

People at CBS aren’t willing to consider that maybe someone’s selfishness is ruining the marriage. Quinn laid it on thick about how wonderful the Gores were in raising their children, and how talented they were:

PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler on Tueday addressed Tavis Smiley's claim that Christian terrorists commit far more violence than Muslim ones. Smiley also issued a statement that defended his comments, though it misrepresented what those comments actually were.

"I don't think he made his case, or even came close," Getler said. He rightfully noted that the 2000 Columbine massacre, Smiley's only example of supposed Christian terrorism, "had nothing to do with Christianity." In fact, as Brent Bozell noted in his column today, the shooters even "mocked students who cried out for God to save them."

Though Getler should be applauded for noting Smiley's total failure to offer a convincing argument, he seems to suggest that a convincing case could be made, but simply wasn't in this instance. "One would think," Getler states, "that Smiley would have been better prepared to make what was certain to be a controversial case."

The Los Angeles Times gave free press to artists who are against the Arizona immigration law on June 2. In “Arizona Law Spurs Backlash Among Artists,” author Reed Johnson documented what lefty artists are doing to help overturn the law, without presenting a single quote dissenting from the liberal artists’ positions.

Johnson inaccurately characterized the public as “deeply deeply divided over the Arizona law…” He must not have seen the Pew poll that found 59 percent of Americans approve of the law or the Wall Street Journal and NBC poll that discovered that 64 percent surveyed approve of the law. In an election, either number would constitute a landslide.

Leave it to the liberals at Newsweek to find a way to whine when another terrorist gets his just deserts.

"Does Killing Terrorists Actually Prevent Terrorism?" Ben Adler's June 1 The Gaggle blog headline asked. With the death of al Qaeda's #3 leader Mustafa Abu al-Yazid aka Sheik Saeed al-Masri, "[t]he U.S. has killed another terrorist, but there are more terrorist plots than ever," lamented the subheadline.

Adler went on to suggest that it may be time to start negotiating with al Qaeda and/or the Taliban rather than simply attempting to eradicate them:

On Wednesday’s The View on ABC, co-host Joy Behar defended author Joe McGinniss’s decision to purchase a home right next door to Sarah Palin as he plans to write an unauthorized biography of her, and his recent comments on NBC's Today show comparing her criticism of him to the behavior of Nazi troopers of the Third Reich. Behar found no agreement from the other co-hosts, and faced stiff resistance from Elisabeth Hasselbeck, in particular. Behar: "He's not saying she's a Nazi. He's saying the tactic was Nazi-like. ... This is the inference Ms. Palin put on her Facebook: ‘Wonder what kind of material he'll gather while overlooking Piper's bedroom?’ ... so now she writes something like that, she unleashes hatred among the Palinites who are very dittohead-ish and carry guns..."

Hasselbeck objected to being called a "dittohead," prompting Behar bring up Rush Limbaugh embrace of the term as a description of audience members, but also mocked Hasselbeck by calling him and Palin her "idols."

It seems that the vast majority of journalists who bemoan unaccountable, unabashedly opinionated digital reporting are the same ones who have, without challenge, pushed a liberal perspective through their own reporting.

The latest such journalist, Newsweek's Howard Fineman, is concerned that "nobody is cross-examining" the "position papers" that supposedly comprise a critical mass of new media journalism. Of course without new media, Fineman's position papers would be virtually immune from meaningful cross examination.

His position is common among the media's old guard: accountability for thee, but not for me. This view stems both from a sort of meta-double standard: Fineman and his ilk extrapolate a few bad apples among the new media crowd into a larger trend of malfeasance, while treating instances of journalistic malpractice among old media reporters as isolated incidents that have no real bearing on Old Media's accountability (or lack thereof).

Today's Chicago Tribune reports "Ex-lawmaker waives tuition for supporter's family: Molaro OKs $94,000 despite children not meeting requirements."  It begins:

Year after year, state Rep. Robert Molaro doled out publicly funded scholarships to the family of a longtime political supporter, ultimately giving the four children more than $94,000 in tuition.

The valuable scholarships came with just one legal requirement: that the students lived in Molaro's Southwest Side district.

The siblings signed notarized documents stating they did, while other public records indicate they lived with their mother in Oak Lawn, outside Molaro's district. Their father didn't live in the district either.

The article, which runs about three-dozen paragraphs, doesn't mention that Molaro is - hang on to your hat here - a Democrat.

As documented repeatedly on NewsBusters, party affiliation is often overlooked in news stories reporting improprieties by Democrats.  Quite a coincidence, isn't it?   

While the broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC have all failed to remind viewers that Israel allows regular aid shipments into Gaza over land from its side of the border, on Tuesday’s CBS Evening News correspondent Richard Roth highlighted complaints about the effect of the blockade on Gaza residents, used a soundbite of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to argue that "even [Israel’s] friends question the effect," and even noted that Egypt was opening its border with Gaza for humanitarian aid – all while still not informing viewers that the Israelis regularly screen aid shipments and allow them into Gaza.

RICHARD ROTH: The U.N. says 70 percent of its million and a half people live on less than a dollar a day. Smuggling through tunnels to Egypt provides much of what Gazans need but at prices not many can afford. Israel says the aim of the blockade is to control terrorism, but even its friends question the effect.

HILLARY CLINTON, SECRETARY OF STATE: The situation in Gaza is unsustainable and unacceptable.

ROTH: Wary of sharing blame, Egypt's now opened its own border with Gaza – for humanitarian reasons, said Cairo – but probably not for long.

On the same day’s The Early Show, CBS anchor Betty Nguyen also noted Egypt’s actions: "This morning, Egypt has temporarily opened its border with Gaza to let in aid shipments after Israel's raid that killed nine people on a humanitarian flotilla."

Similarly, during the war in Gaza from late December 2008 to January 2009, CBS was the network most likely to air complaints about the blockade’s effect on the people of Gaza, and the least likely to report that humanitarian aid was being transported into the Gaza Strip.

Popular radio host (and friend of NB) Mark Levin plans on asking the IRS to investigate the union's finances. He thinks taxpayer dollars may be going to supporting Democratic candidates for political office.

Mark also wants you to pick up a free "I Don't Believe the Liberal Media" bumper sticker. But what of this plan? Will anything come of it?

On Tuesday’s Special Report with Bret Baier, FNC correspondent Dana Lewis filed a report in which he noted some of those on board the Gaza-bound ships that were boarded by Israel were from a Yemeni group that has "murky links to al-Qaeda," and others from an extreme group in Turkey believed by Israelis to have terrorist links: "But among the hundreds, these three parliamentarians from Yemen's Islah Party, a group known to have murky links to al-Qaeda, and others from Turkey's IHH organization. The Israeli government says they're extremists with documented connections to terrorist organizations." The report also recounted that anti-Semitic attacks were chanted by those who attacked Israeli commandos: "In an interview with Fox News, Israel's ambassador to the U.S. said those on the ship were chanting, ‘Death to Jews.’"

On the same day’s Fox and Friends, FNC’s Peter Johnson, Jr., recounted that the Israelis allow much humanitarian aid into Gaza on a regular basis, and that they had also offered to screen and deliver aid from the flotilla of ships before the confrontation: "We know that 15,000 tons of humanitarian aid goes to Gaza every week that's sanctioned by Israel. They do check it for explosive materials, they check it for concrete that's being used to build tunnels. But if the real purpose of the mission was to bring humanitarian aid to the folks in Gaza, Israel said, ‘Listen, bring these six ships to this port in Israel, we will inspect it, unload it, and we will bring the permitted materials to the people of Gaza.’ If the real goal was humanitarian aid, then why was it necessary to state before these horrible deaths that we intended to run this gauntlet no matter what the costs?"

The broadcast networks ABC and NBC have only given brief attention to the flotilla’s links to terrorist groups, while CBS has ignored such connections.

Time's Mark Halperin just wrote about bitter right-wing extremism costing the Republicans in the fall. But then he went on MSNBC's Hardball and explored his "inner Dennis Kucinich." He declared that Obama cannot trust BP because it's a for-profit business. Earth to Halperin: Isn't Time magazine (not to mention MSNBC) a for-profit business...or are profits in liberal media companies some sort of happy accident?

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Gentlemen, last question, should the President be exploring as President of the United States alternatives to relying on BP? Should he be shopping with MIT, with the other oil companies around the world? Should he be going to the smartest people in the country in terms of engineering? Not eggheads with, with Nobel prizes, but people who know how to fix engineering challenges, Red Adair types? Should he be going off looking for those people or just relying on BP? You first, Mark.

MARK HALPERIN: My inner Dennis Kucinich says absolutely. He cannot trust BP, which is a for profit company, to do stuff in the public interest.

There's no other way to put it: in an MSNBC promo for an upcoming Chris Matthews special on "The Rise of The New Right," Matthews juxtaposes words and images to imply that the Tea Party seeks the violent overthrow of the government.

As images roll of camo-clad men shooting automatic weapons, Matthews proclaims in the voice-over: "the Tea Party is determined to take power." [screencap after the jump]

It's clear that abortionists think of themselves as saviors of women, but would anyone really dare to suggest that infamous late-term abortionist George Tiller was like.... a crucified Jesus Christ?

Yes. There it was on Daily Kos on Tuesday (albeit republished from the blog RH Reality Check), plainly headlined "Dr. Tiller's Crucifixion and Resurrection," a brazen rant on how Tiller was assassinated by the State because he was too "destabilizing to the oppressive status quo." The author simply uses the pseudonym "Trusting Women." Even as you read it, you can't believe it:

I am drinking my morning coffee. Shortly, I will head to morning service at the Unitarian Church.  I wonder what Dr. Tiller's Sunday morning was like, that Sunday one year ago when he was gunned down in his church. 

A couple months ago, I had honor of addressing a group of abortion providers. The topic was "Resurrecting Our Moral Center."  I do not think it was coincidental that less than a year after Tiller's murder, we were talking about resurrection. God, how much we miss him.

No one has ever accused Keith Olbermann of having one iota of class, and what he publicly did Tuesday evening to someone he once worked with should finally explain to anyone that actually still admires this pompous buffoon exactly why!

During his "Worst Persons in the World" segment, the "Countdown" host absolutely tore apart CNN's Campbell Brown.

Adding insult to injury, Olbermann did this public evisceration on the 30th anniversary of the day the cable news network went on the air.

Readers are advised to have a bucket nearby, for whatever you might think of Brown, this pathetic and inexcusable display by MSNBC's leading anchor is sure to make you nauseous (video follows with transcript and commentary):