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In his opening remarks on Fox News Sunday this morning, Bill Kristol set forth a stinging indictment of the Obama admin's handling of the war on terror. His two-minute monologue amounted to a devastating bill of particulars: * It was a mistake to treat Abul Mutallab as a criminal defendant rather than as an enemy combatant: "Mr. Brennan [Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser who appeared earlier] said to you that we're very worried that there're other Abdul Mutallabs out there. This Abdul Mutallab was out there for four months. He might know who the others are. He might know their names....

If you bother to read Joanna Weiss' column in today's Boston Globe, expect to get a sense of deja . . . lu. Like untold screeds that have preceded it, "Hollywood’s burden on aging women" stamps its feet over the unequal treatment of aging in men and women. You know: male stars are allowed to age gracefully, but women must struggle ever-harder to conform to a youthful stereotype of sex-appeal. Unfair! The feminist response is to blame the culture, in this case embodied by Hollywood, for promoting shallow, sexist values. But the fault, dear Joanna, is not in our stars...

"We will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable." -- Pres. Obama, discussing NWA 253, December 28, 2009. Photo: Pres. Obama waves to the crowd after his game of golf in Hawaii, Dec. 31, 2009. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Diabetic or not, you might want to have a dose of insulin handy while watching this morning's video clip. The Early Show's review of the past year this morning was one sicky-sweet adoration--in overtly religious terms--of Barack Obama. Harry Smith set the tone with his opening comments: "Politics, and patriotism and the presidency: it is the place where the secular and the religious merge. One of the sacraments of our national religion is the inauguration. So it was that as many as two million pilgrims made their way to Washington and the Mall to witness this most sacred event." Back...

Not a surprise, but still noteworthy: a heavy MSM hitter is now strongly suggesting that, post-NWA 253, a senior Obama admin official will be walking the plank. Say what we will of her, but Andrea Mitchell has her sources. So when the NBC correspondent declared on Morning Joe today that she suspects "somebody is either going to be resigning or forced to resign," we can pretty much take it to the [Federal Reserve?] bank. View video here.

Like a football coach trying to explain away the trouncing his team just took by building up the opponent, Janet Napolitano is seeking to diminish the Obama administration's NWA 253 failure by exaggerating the cunning of the Christmas Day plot. The hapless Homeland Security head has a 679-word piece in today's USA Today basically promising to do better. She begins with this line [emphasis added]: Friday's attempted terrorist attack against Northwest Flight 253 near Detroit is a powerful illustration that terrorists will go to great lengths to try to defeat the security measures that have been put in place since...

Trying to blame someone—anyone—other than his man Barack Obama for the security meltdown surrounding NWA 253, Ed Schultz ran head-first without a helmet into American history tonight. Seeking to shift the onus onto England for not having alerted us about having denied young Umar entry into its country, Ed entertainingly claimed that the UK has probably been "our best ally since the country started." Um, Ed: "since the country started"? You mean, like, when we started the country in 1776? When we declared our independence from, and fought a war against, uh, you know. That same country that—more than a...

MSNBC reported this afternoon that Max Baucus is "blasting right-wing websites like Drudge and NewsBusters" for suggesting he was drunk on the Senate floor during the health care debate. See P.J. Gladnick's Bizarre Baucus Behavior on Senate Floor Ignored by MSM. But MSNBC did the Montana senator no favors: 1. it used his name in the same sentence with a variation on the word "blasted," and 2. what's worse, it played a clip from the Baucus', um, tired and emotional floor speech. View the video and judge for yourself.

Wow: David Shuster really lets it all hang out on Twitter . . . In current tweets, the MSNBCer accuses Karl Rove of "hypocrisy," calls conservatives "wingnuts," claims Baucus wasn't wasted, and denounces Drudge as "repulsive" for supposedly suggesting otherwise. Excerpts from Shuster's current Twitter feed [screencap after the jump]: * Thank you Wingnuts! By mentioning my tweets, you are bringing more attention to @karlrove hypocrisy * Wingnuts, just because you want to believe something is true does not make it so. Obama wasn't born in Kenya. Baucus wasn't inebriated. * Baucus speech was at 430pm in the afternoon. He...

Quite the culture war on Morning Joe today . . . The combatants were Pat Buchanan and Spencer Ackerman of the lefty Washington Independent. The topic was the treatment of Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab. Buchanan wanted the budding terrorist classified as an enemy combatant in order to extract the maximum amount of information from him. Ackerman, in ACLU mode, favored having young Umar tried in federal court and given all rights extended to US criminal defendants. My antennae went up when at the end of their debate, Buchanan saw Ackerman off by wishing him "Merry Christmas." A bit of Googling...

It took a tough question from Matt Lauer, but after having laughably claimed that "the system worked," Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano has now conceded the obvious: that the security system that permitted Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board NWA 253 with explosives "failed miserably." On Today and in other interviews this morning, Napolitano attempted to use her own ignorance as a shield. Each time she was hit with a hard question, her response was to the effect "yeah, we're wondering about that ourselves." She also continued to point the finger back at the Bush administration, repeatedly mentioning that the security procedures...

Interview with Chicago Fire Chief Alden Brown two days after the Great Chicago Fire: ALDEN BROWN: One thing I'd like to point out is that the system worked. Everybody played an important role here: the local citizens took appropriate action. Within literally an hour to 90 minutes of the incident occurring, all 128 towns and villages in the Chicago area had been notified to take some special measures in light of what had occurred in Chicago. We instituted new measures on the ground, both in central Chicago and at Mrs. O'Leary's barn, where the fire originated. So the whole process...

Pres. Obama should find time in his busy vacation schedule to drop a palm-trees-and-sandy-beaches thank you postcard to NBC. On this morning's Today, successive network staffers defended the administration's [mis]handling of the Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab matter. First, terrorism expert Roger Cressey [who usually plays it straight], claimed there wasn't enough information to "connect the dots" and move young Umar from the "watch list" to the "no-fly" list. Really? The guy's father, a respected international banker, was so concerned about his son's extremist Islamist views that he took the unusual measure of personally contacting the US embassy with a warning....

There I was, watching the perfectly harmless Meineke Car Care Bowl, when a truly creepy Government Motors commercial for the Chevy Silverado pickup broke out . . . GM spokesman, and former NFL player, Howie Long is not-so-subtly comparing the merits of the Silverado with an intimidated, younger, Ford F150 owner. View video here.

Imagine that there had been a series of three incidents in which members of a [invented for present purposes] fanatical Jewish sect had attempted to bring down airliners from Arab countries. In reporting on the latest attempt and describing the previous ones, do you think the New York Times might have mentioned the religion of the perpetrators? So do I. But with the ledgermain required to describe a spiral staircase without using one's hands, the Gray Lady has managed in its article today to report yesterday's attempt to bring down a NWA airliner, and the earlier attempts by Richard Reid...

Does Keith Olbermann have some special appeal to bad mothers? The question arises in light of a TV ad for something called FloTV that aired this morning. A mother is giving dinner to her kids when she glances at the clock, notices it's shortly before 6 PM, and proceeds to dump the kids plates and toys, pour a bag of flour on the table and . . . throw a glass of milk in her son's face [see still shot after jump]. Cut to shocked coming-home-from-work hubby at the door. Mom informs him "I just need an hour." Cut to...

Like an overmatched offensive lineman haplessly striving to stave off the onslaughts of a Pro Bowl defensive end, Ed Schultz's heroic but unsuccessful struggles with the English language continue. A couple weeks ago, fellow NewsBuster Jack Coleman hilariously documented the way in which Schultz has a penchant for calling others "stupid"—but regularly makes a mash of our mother tongue. On his MSNBC show this evening, Schultz once again fought the good linguistic fight but was in way over his head. This time, his indomitable opponent was the word "emanate." The rascally verb turned up in a HuffPo blog Ed was...

Bear this one in mind next time you hear a liberal bemoaning that conservatives show insufficient respect for Pres. Obama and VP Biden . . . On this evening's Hardball, Chris Matthews called Dick Cheney "the bath-tub ring of the Bush administration." Chris' calumny came in reaction to the news that the estimable Human Events magazine has named the former VP 'Conservative of the Year'. View video here.

Will ObamaCare cover memory loss? Howard Dean better hope so. On today's Meet the Press he seemed to suffer a serious memory lapse, claiming he had said he would "vigorously" support Pres. Obama's re-election [H/t reader Melody]. Problem is, we have the video of Dean on Morning Joe of December 17th saying just the opposite: that he would "not vigorously" support PBO's 2012 re-election bid. So noteworthy was Dean's "not vigorously" declaration at the time that it caused a gleeful Joe Scarborough to burst into laughter and repeat it. Not a decibel out of Dean to dispute what Joe had...

Looks like traditions of comity are coming apart . . First Al Franken refuses to give Joe Lieberman another minute on the Senate floor. Now Ed Schultz invites a guest on his show for the express purpose of taking shots at fellow MSNBCer Chris Matthews! On yesterday's Hardball, Matthews criticized the netroots who are trashing the watered-down ObamaCare bill. "I don't consider them Democrats," said Matthews, dismissing them as "troublemakers." Concluded Chris: "they get their giggles sitting in the back seat and bitching." On his show this evening, Schultz invited netroot-in-chief Markos Moulitsas on to fire back at Matthews. Not...

Check out the video. After his brief, listless and cliché-ridden speech in Copenhagen ["time for action, not words," "we should live in the future, not the past"] that aired live on Morning Joe today, Pres. Obama makes the hand-shaking rounds on the podium. He continues the glad-handing off the podium, until he spots someone and breaks into . . . a bow [screen cap after the jump]. With all the mulling around, it's hard to determine exactly what's going on. It looks like he might have been exchanging bows with a man in the scrum surrounding him. But PBO's bow...

Pour some more butter on the popcorn . . . Yesterday, Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs took shots at Howard Dean and his opposition to ObamaCare, suggesting the good doctor didn't know what he was talking about. It was payback time this morning, as Dean announced that he would support Pres. Obama's re-election bid "not vigorously." View video here.

Maybe Leavenworth has a TV studio he could use . . . Keith Olbermann has vowed to break the law and go to jail if ObamaCare requires him to buy health care insurance. Keith made his macho boast in the course of his melodramatic Special Comment this evening. View video here.

Surely no one would be foolish enough to defend Harry Reid's statement analogizing ObamaCare opponents to those who resisted the abolition of slavery, right? Um, may I introduce you to Donny Deutsch? On Morning Joe today, the ad man suggested to RNC Chairman Michael Steele that there was nothing wrong with Reid's analogy. When Steele didn't deign to dignify Deutsch's absurdity with a response, a nasty little stand-off ensued . . . View video here.

gyp Slang vb gyps, gypping, gypped, gips gipping, gipped (tr) to swindle, cheat, or defraud n 1. an act of cheating 2. a person who gyps [back formation from Gypsy] Someone call the PC police. At a town hall in Allentown, PA today, Pres. Obama said he is seeking to regulate health insurance companies to make sure that people don't get "gypped." Perhaps PBO thought the term would appeal to the crowd. This was Pennsylvania, after all, the state PBO imagines to be filled with bitter people clinging to "antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment." View...

Norah O'Donnell just can't stop condescending to supporters of Sarah Palin. Appearing on Morning Joe today, the MSNBC correspondent rehashed a line she has used before: that fans of Sarah Palin are just too darn busy to know what's happening in the world. According to O'Donnell, Sarah supporters don't have "30 minutes to an hour to read the newspaper." As I reported here, O'Donnell sounded the same theme a couple weeks ago, when interviewing Palin fans waiting on line at a book-signing in Michigan. By coincidence, Jackie Seals, a high school senior and Palin supporter whom Norah had ambushed with...

Fake but accurate rides again! The same lame defense Dan Rather used in Memogate has been trotted out on ClimateGate by Columbia Univ. Prof. Jeffrey Sachs. Appearing on Morning Joe today, the author of Common Wealth [note play on words: your money is our money] alleged that the real victims in this scandal are . . . the number-fudging scientists. People are attempting to "Swiftboat" those poor CRU guys, sighed Sachs. For good measure, the good professor asserted that "what happened is not a very big deal." View video here.

Want to understand the liberal mind? Check out Daily Kos creator Markos Moulitsas on this evening's Schultz show . . Why does Kos say he hates the Taliban? Because they aided and abetted Osama Bin Laden in the murder of thousands of Americans? Nope. That they are actively involved in killing American troops in Afghanistan? Guess again. No, the Taliban's real crime is that . . . they're not PC. Not feminist. Not gay-friendly. Hell, they might even be opposed to stem cell research. Oh, and for good measure, Kos calls conservative Republicans like Michelle Bachmann "the American Taliban." What...

In one tidy cover story—The Decade From Hell And Why The Next One Will Be Better—Time sums up the last decade and the one to come. Things were "hell" under George W. Bush, but will be better under Barack Obama. Class dismissed: that's really all you need to know. But just to drive home the Manichean message, Time editor Rick Stengel and Andy Serwer [of Time stable-mate Fortune], who wrote the cover story, appeared on Morning Joe today. Of course there's the inconvenient detail about Barack Obama having been elected in this decade. But not to worry. Serwer explains "you...

Tina Brown is the very avatar of elite MSM opinion. So when the Daily Beast creator, late of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, derides Sarah Palin as ignorant, it's safe to assume she's expressing a view harbored in many a liberal media breast. On today's Morning Joe, while admitting a grudging regard for her appeal, Brown claimed Palin's confidence is based on "total ignorance." Hosts Joe Scarborough [who last week took his own shot at Sarah's smarts] and Mika Brzezinski, if not precisely leaping to Palin's defense, did respond with some skepticism. View video here.

On today's Morning Joe, Larry O'Donnell called the Roman Catholic bishop who barred Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.) from taking communion a "political hack." Interestingly, Mika Brzezinski had a totally different take, arguing the controversy was not about the Church but about Kennedy publicizing the matter in a play to his base. Though Bishop Thomas Tobin sent his letter to Kennedy more than two years ago, its contents didn't come to light until Kennedy recently revealed them to a Rhode Island newspaper. View video here.

Have a close look at the screencap. Notice what Norah O'Donnell's holding in her left hand? Those are notes, with factoids from the 2008 presidential campaign. She's reading from them to challenge a Sarah Palin supporter who was waiting in line at the book signing yesterday in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We all remember how back during the '08 campaign, MSM reporters would challenge people attending Obama rallies with uncomfortable truths about their candidate, along the lines "would you still support him if you knew he had the most liberal voting record in the Senate?" Or not. I certainly can't remember...

Joe Scarborough was surely right about one thing . . . when he warned that his pronouncement would "enrage conservatives." The Morning Joe host today proclaimed that comparing Sarah Palin to Howard Dean was an insult . . . to Dean's intelligence. Joe's jab came in response to an analogy Time's Mark Halperin drew between the excitement Palin creates and that drummed up by Dean's presidential campaign in 2004. MARK HALPERIN: Think about it compared to Howard Dean in 2004. He was exciting too, and he had these huge crowds, and people said, this guy's going win the Democratic nomination...

If Hillary Clinton had been any less supportive of the Obama admin's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Manhattan, she might have had to quit her Secretary of State job . . . Clinton damned the decision with faint praise during her Meet The Press appearance today. Asked by host David Gregory where should stood on the matter, her response was the ultra-tepid: "I'm not going to second-guess any decision the Attorney General made." And a bit later: "If the Attorney General and veteran prosecutors think this is the best way to achieve [the desired] outcome, then I think...

On Friday, this NewsBuster [FReeper governsleastgovernsbest] noted how Pres. Obama, questioned at a news conference in Japan, twice refused to say whether he thought the United States' dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was "the right decision." Yesterday on Fox News Watch, Jim Pinkerton noted the NewsBusters nugget. The Fox News contributor and New America Foundation fellow observed that PBO's failure had huge implications for America's nuclear deterrent. View video here.

Defending the decision of the United States to drop nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII is not a comfortable thing to do when you're in Japan. But if you're President of the United States, you must do it. Diplomatically, yes. With sympathy for the civilian victims, yes. But you must do it. But when it came time today for Barack Obama to do so, he failed in that fundamental duty. The very first reporter [from Fuji TV] called on at the joint press conference with PBO and Japanese PM Hatayama in Tokyo today put the question to Pres....

Of all the things that might give you comfort in the wake of Nidal Malik Hasan's murderous rampage, where would you rate the news that the military's commitment to "diversity" endures? Down there, dare I guess? Ah, but you're probably not part of the MSM elite. Chrystia Freeland is. And on today's Morning Joe, the Financial Times editor did indeed announce that she was "comforted" by that very fact of the military's unflagging devotion to diversity. Joe Scarborough countered Chrystia with a tough question. And--sacré bleu!--Mike Barnicle, not normally an NB fave, made some very blunt and on-target observations ....

Disclaimer: we're talking politics here, not personal stuff . . . If there's a bigger sourpuss in Congress than Barney Frank, I wouldn't want to meet him. On MSNBC this evening, the dyspeptic Member from Massachusetts got into it with, of all people, Ed Schultz. You might think the two libs would make beautiful progressive music together, but what made this spat especially entertaining was that Barney found himself being attacked . . . from the left. The topic was the billions in bonuses awarded by Wall Street firms that had received TARP money. Schultz's beef was that Congress blew...

Check out the headline from on the front page of the hard-copy New York City edition of today's New York Times: After Years of Growing Tension, 7 Minutes of Bloodshed The article reports that Nidal Malik Hasan began feeling disgruntled with the Army as far back as 2004. Let's see, there are 525,948 minutes in a year. If Hasan's been feeling "tension" for about five years, that makes about 2,629,740 tension-filled minutes. And during that entire period, he only engaged in a homicidal rampage for seven minutes. I mean, come on, he was only a murderer for some tiny, tiny...

Who is Nancy LeaMond? That's what I wanted to know after watching AARP's Exec. VP defending her organization's endorsement of ObamaCare to Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe today. Click, Wikipedia, click: whaddayaknow? Turns out that before coming to AARP, LeaMond was a senior Clinton administration appointee and a top Dem congressional staffer. Surprise, surprise! View video here.

Keith Olbermann scares easily . . The Countdown host says he found folks peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights to petition the government for redress of grievances "terrifying." For good measure, he slurred the people protesting ObamaCare at the Capitol today as looking like "a pro-apartheid rally in South Africa." The timorous Olbermann confessed his fright to WaPo columnist Gene Robinson. Click to view video.

Does the National Journal's Hotline inhabit the same universe as the rest of us? Republicans went two-for-three in last night's big races. But in declaring Winners and Losers among non-candidates involved with the campaigns, the only Losers Hotline saw were . . . Republicans and conservatives, with nary a Dem in sight! Chris Matthews was only too happy to seize on the Hotline hitlist during his Sideshow segment on this evening's Hardball. Here were Hotline's three Losers: * Sarah Palin: for jumping into Hoffman's losing cause, whereas McDonell and Christie didn't invite her in and won. * Pete Sessions: the...

When you're an MSMer, you're an MSMer all the way--even when faced with facts that might make you like, well, ridiculous . . . Mike Allen, appearing on Morning Joe, has declared the NY-23rd race a "real toss-up" despite a new poll from a respected organization showing Doug Hoffman with a 17-point lead. The claim by Allen, Politico's chief political correspondent's, was so absurd that, on the spot, host Joe Scarborough offered 3:1 odds to Allen and anyone else wanting to place a few kopeks on Dem Bill Owens. View video here.

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 think Politico's pic picks might be revealing its biases, do you? Let's break it down . . .

Hillary Clinton has flatly said she’ll never run for president again. She’s even mused about retirement. But can a woman who fought so hard and came so close to bagging the big enchilada last time around suddenly flip off the ambition switch? Ask yourself: particularly in light of her trip to Pakistan, who’s sounding more like a Commander-in-Chief these days: Hillary Clinton or that hope-’n-change fella back in DC? This morning’s Today show ran part of Andrea Mitchell’s interview of Hillary in Pakistan. You can question the wisdom of Clinton having scolded the Pakistanis for providing al Qaeda a “safe...

If you were a cable TV host whose audience size is obliterated by O'Reilly's, buried by Beck's, hammered by Hannity's and slam-dunked by Susteren's, would you really go around mocking someone else's ratings? Appparently yes, if you're Ed Schultz. The host of the miniscule MSNBC program went out of his way this evening to belittle the ratings of Dennis Miller's radio show . . . View video here.

Golf, too? If there was one sport you'd think might be immune from the liberal slant that has invaded too much of sports reporting, it's golf. The fairways-and-greens guys are known for generally being Republicans. But out of the blue [green?] on a Golf Channel show this afternoon, host Brandel Chamblee took a cheap shot at Dick Cheney with a rather nasty hunting reference. Chamblee, who before retiring from the PGA Tour had one win in 370 career starts, was discussing with co-host Rich Lerner the putting woes of the affable Jason Gore . . . View video here.

FReeper governsleastgovernsbest, AKA Mark Finkelstein, is scheduled to appear on Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski's radio show today at 10:35 AM. Listen live at the link!

So much for politics ending at the water's edge . . . Hillary Clinton has gone to Pakistan and bragged of having opposed Pres. Bush during her entire Senate career. Clinton also depicted the difference between Barack Obama and George W. Bush as being "like daylight and dark." For good measure, Clinton played the moral equivalency game, declaring "we cannot let a minority of people in both countries determine our relationship." The Pakistani minority she had in mind is presumably composed of al Qaeda and its sympathizers. Clinton didn't specify which Americans she would apparently equate with them.

If her Evening News gig doesn't work out, maybe Katie Couric will seek work as a Republican strategerist . . . Couric dabbled in her possible new profession in her Notebook segment yesterday, offering some carefully considered advice to the GOP. According to Katie, Republicans should get the focus off Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. They're nothing but "fringe" elements, "sideshows" that drive people out of the Republican Big Tent. View video here.