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In the annals of infotainment, few moments match the sight of George Bush leaping from the cockpit of a fighter jet and striding across the deck of a carrier at sea. Top Gun: The Pseudo Event enchanted the public, horrified liberals, and galvanized the press. Suddenly media mavens noticed that Bush's handlers have elevated the photo-op to pure cinema. So what else is new? Actually there was something novel about this occasion, but it passed utterly below the radar. Discretion prevented anyone from mentioning that Bush's outfit gave him a very vivid basket. This was the first a time a...

The New York Times ran a front-page apology Sunday for a reporter who filed deceptive stories. It is unusual for a news source to admit a mistake and the Times is to be commended. But read the opening paragraph and ask if it should be applied to a much broader group of journalists: "A staff reporter for the New York Times committed frequent acts of journalistic fraud while covering significant news events in recent months, an investigation by Times journalists has found." Wouldn't it be refreshing if Fox News, CNBC, CBS and others were to make the same apology for...

<p>COULD SOMEBODY please tell George W. Bush that he is not commander in chief of the judiciary? No matter how ''hot'' he looked in his flight suit, black robes require a cooler demeanor. The administration seems to think that the president has the right to appoint judges the way he can appoint overseers to Iraq. It has forgotten that the Senate is supposed to advise and consent -- and sometimes dissent.</p>

France says it is victim of smear campaign Bush administration disputes charge From Andrea Koppel and John King CNN Washington Bureau Thursday, May 15, 2003 Posted: 12:45 PM EDT (1645 GMT) French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte said the United States is spreading misinformation about the French government. WASHINGTON (CNN) -- France says it is the victim of a smear campaign by the Bush administration, charging some U.S. officials are leaking false stories about alleged French complicity with the Iraqi regime. The Bush administration dismissed the charge. The French government lays out its claim in a letter written by the French ambassador...

Sidney Blumenthal's "The Clinton Wars" has been serialized by Salon. Here are ten reasons why you should watch Salon's "commercial" and then read the installments. All of them (one, two, three, four, five). 1. He related a conversation he had had with Senator Alan Simpson, the Republican from Wyoming, who was retiring. "You know there's nothing wrong that Hillary and I did in Whitewater," Clinton told him. "Of course," Simpson replied. "We all know there's nothing there. It was just politics. And it just got out of hand." 2. Chief Justice Rehnquist...had been chilly and inexpressive toward the president throughout...

NewsMax.com   Wednesday, May 14, 2003 12:07 p.m. EDTStephanopoulos: Candidate Not Wrong to Say Bush Stole Election In a radio interview Wednesday morning, ABC's "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos defended a claim by one of the Democratic Party presidential candidates that President Bush stole the 2000 election, saying it was "a reasonable inference" based on the evidence. Stephanopoulos was asked to respond to a comment by former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, who told Sen. Joe Lieberman during the party's May 3 presidential debate: "We need to pursue opportunities for individuals to vote, instead of making it a high hurdle...

<p>LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The federal government should protect parents' rights not to testify against their children, former White House intern and reality TV host Monica Lewinsky wrote in an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times.</p> <p>In the op-ed article printed in Sunday's newspaper, Lewinsky said it seemed appropriate on Mother's Day urge Congress to grant that right.</p>

On Feb. 12, 1998, my mother appeared before a grand jury at the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C. She was not subpoenaed to testify about a robbery she witnessed, or to describe some aspect of a securities fraud, but to be questioned about me -- her only daughter. I was horrified and sickened. Not unlike many young women, I had confided in my mom -- to a certain extent -- and expected our conversations to remain between us. In a million years I could never have fathomed a situation where we would find our bond -- a deep, important and...

<p>Jim nuked this poster, but I decided to put this thread back up for illustrative purposes as to just how patient (and deranged) some of our political opponents are.</p> <p>It's also sickening how obvious some people's biases are. It seems that anytime someone reports something that even remotely casts Israelis in a less-than-favourable light, they immediately branded as anti-Semitic. It must be nice to always use the same retort to try to shut everyone up.</p>

From George Looney "It's the head guys who really tick me off. You dumb down at the top, so what does that do to the bottom? Who's going to stand up for us now? I just want someone smart to stand up and shout, 'Bullshit!' They tell us we're going to war and no one's saying 'Bullshit' loud enough. And the language! Listen to the language! 'Evil.' 'Evil'? 'Nexus of evil'? 'Evil-doer'? That's my favourite, 'evil-doer'! What's wrong with their vocabulary: couldn't they come up with 'schmuck'?" "What did Bush do on 9/11? He ran away and hid. Even Reagan...

There are some cultural crimes that transcend mere human concerns like life, liberty and the pursuit of oil. Today, we mourn a loss that beggars the imagination. A hundred generations from now, our heirs will curse us for what happened in Baghdad on April 11-12, 2003. The origins of the war in Iraq may have really been the cruelty of the Saddam Hussein regime; they may have been simple revenge or pure capitalist greed. It doesn't matter. The fact is, Saddam did not start this war — we did, and that fact imposed certain responsibilities on us. We took the...

It's getting creepy out there. Paranoia is rampant. The thought police are on patrol, shining their flashlights into the corners of your garages, looking to root out and crush anything resembling dissent. Ken Griffey Jr. was in the dugout last weekend in Cincinnati, and because we all saw him writhe in agony a couple of weeks ago, his dislocated shoulder isn't exactly a state secret. Yet when someone asked how his rehabilitation was going, Junior went all CIA on us. "I'm not allowed to talk about it," he said mysteriously. "I can't say anything." Someone has gotten to Kevin Appier,...

PORCINE provocateur Michael Moore is using sophisticated wave-form analysis technology to argue that CNN amplified the booing in its re-broadcast of his George Bush-bashing Oscar speech. According to a posting on Moore's Web site, "CNN and CNN Headline News aired a significantly different audio response to Moore's speech than was originally broadcast on ABC. It seems that someone has manipulated the audio to give the impression there was constant loud ‘booing' throughout Moore's speech, when in reality, there was only marginal booing often overridden with cheers and applause. This needs to be fully investigated . . . [H]ere we have...

<p>Baghdad's jubilation got the cold shoulder from some journalists yesterday.</p> <p>The press did not question the raising of the American flag over Iwo Jima back in 1945.</p> <p>But only minutes after President Saddam Hussein's statue toppled before overjoyed Iraqis, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell asked Central Command spokesman U.S. Navy Capt. Frank Thorpe whether it was appropriate for Marine Cpl. Edward Chin to briefly cover the statue's face with a U.S. flag. The act implied the United States already had assumed control of the regime, Miss O'Donnell said.</p>

FLASH: NEW MSNBC SKED, SAY SOURCES... 7 PM - HARDBALL W/MATTHEWS 8 PM - JESSE VENTURA 9 PM - SAM DONALDSON 10 PM - JOE SCARBOROUGH