Clay Waters of MRC’s Times Watch project noticed this week that the The New York Times was just as guilty as The Washington Post of jumping on the unsubstantiated adultery charges against female GOP gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley in South Carolina:

[Reporter Shaila] Dewan used the sex scandal of former South Carolina Republican Gov. Mark Sanford as an excuse to suggest, without substance like emails or phone messages, that the claims by blogger Will Folks fit a pattern of sexual bad behavior in the Palmetto State:  “Scandal Rattles Politics In South Carolina, Again.” The text box to Wednesday’s print story worked in the party identification: “A blogger says he had an affair with a G.O.P. candidate for governor.”

The treatment of a fairly obscure Republican politician stands in sharp contrast to the paper’s blackout of the amply documented affair of former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards. The Times totally ignored the Edwards affair until the candidate himself confessed on ABC News, then, when its own public editor criticized the paper’s lack of coverage, editors made hypocritical excuses.

Dewan certainly didn’t do much hedging around the claims of blogger Will Folks, relaying the accusation with a tone of near-giddiness:

Virginia may be for lovers, but sultry South Carolina is beginning to earn a reputation as the state for extramarital madness.

This state was just starting to shake off the embarrassing spectacle of Gov. Mark Sanford, who is limping out of office after admitting to an affair last year, giving late-night hosts a new laugh line with his initial cover-up: that he had been hiking on the Appalachian Trail.

But now, one of Mr. Sanford’s political allies — who is a top contender to succeed him — finds herself embroiled in a possible sex scandal of her own.

Only two weeks before a highly competitive Republican primary for governor, the candidate, State Representative Nikki Haley, has been hit by charges, leveled by one of her supporters, that she had an “inappropriate physical relationship” with him three years ago.

On Tuesday the supporter, Will Folks, a blogger and political consultant, promised to document claims that he had had a relationship with Ms. Haley.

Ms. Haley, who leapt to frontrunner status last week, days after an endorsement by Sarah Palin, issued a strong denial, saying, “I have been 100 percent faithful to my husband throughout our 13 years of marriage.”

A rather startling thing happened on Sunday’s "Meet the Press": David Gregory asked White House Energy Adviser Carol Browner if in response to the Gulf Coast oil spill, America should start drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

After a lengthy discussion about what went wrong in the Gulf to cause the current crisis, Gregory asked his guest, "Is the problem that we’re drilling in water that’s just too deep?" 

He continued, "Should you even rethink your own approach to the environment to say, ‘Maybe in the Arctic Wildlife Reserve [Refuge], we ought to be drilling there. We ought to be going into shallower waters so that this can be done more safely?’" (video follows with transcript and commentary): 

DAVID GREGORY, HOST: Is part of the problem here–you go back to the Clinton administration where there was thought to be more emphasis on environmental protection then there was on exploration of sources of energy. In the Bush administration, the criticism was far too much concentration on energy production, not enough on the environment. And here you are now working for President Obama, saying, "Yes, we ought to do additional drilling." Is the problem that we’re drilling in water that’s just too deep? Should you even rethink your own approach to the environment to say, "Maybe in the Arctic Wildlife Reserve, we ought to be drilling there. We ought to be going into shallower waters so that this can be done more safely"?

CAROL BROWNER, WHITE HOUSE ENERGY ADVISER: There’s a lot of–I think on the shallow waters, the distinction is you can get to the wellhead if something goes wrong in shallow water, and you can–there’s mechanisms to shut that down. You are asking all the right questions on deep water. We have to answer those questions before we proceed. That is why all of those operations have been shut down. In the Arctic, they’ve been shut down; in the Gulf of Mexico, they’ve been shut down, including 33 rigs that were out there drilling right now, which, you know, we understand it’s going to be hard on those people.

GREGORY: But as an environmentalist, I’m asking you, have you rethought your position on this? 

Wow!

What got into Gregory?

Maybe we should drill in ANWR and in shallower waters?

Was this an odd moment for the "Meet the Press" host, or has this crisis woken him up to the idea that there are far safer places for America to drill its own oil than fifty miles from the coast a mile under the ocean?

More importantly, are other liberal media members reaching this same conclusion?

Regardless, great question, David! Bravo!

With the Gulf Coast oil spill appearing to spin out of control, the Obama-loving media are now working overtime to shelter the President from any possible blame.

Exhibit A: New York Times columnist Frank Rich’s pathetic piece published Sunday.

Almost incomprehensibly, "Obama’s Katrina? Maybe Worse" is more of hit piece on the Bush administration than a serious analysis of the failings of the current White House to do anything to prevent the environmental disaster slamming the Gulf Coast after that oil well exploded almost six weeks ago.

But that’s just the beginning, for Rich actually ends up pointing fingers at Dick Cheney, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and Rand Paul:

Whatever Obama’s failings, he is infinitely more competent at coping with catastrophe than his predecessor. President Bush’s top disaster managers – the Homeland Security secretary, Michael Chertoff, as well as the notorious "Brownie" – professed ignorance of New Orleans’s humanitarian crisis a full day after the nation had started watching it live in real time on television. When Bush finally appeared, he shunned the city entirely and instead made a jocular show of vowing to rebuild the coastal home of his party’s former Senate leader, Trent Lott. He never did take charge.

The Obama administration has been engaged with the oil spill from the start – however haltingly and inarticulately at times.

You got that?

No matter WHAT happens, regardless of how much damage is eventually done to the Gulf Coast, Obama is "infinitely more competent at coping with catastrophe than" Bush, and has been "engaged with the oil spill from the start."

Makes you wonder what the color of the sky is in Rich’s world.

Alas, he was just getting warmed up:

When Katrina hit, Bush was in his second term and his bumbling was not a shock to a country that had witnessed two-plus years of his grievous mismanagement of the Iraq war. His laissez-faire response to the hurricane was also consistent with his political DNA as a small-government conservative in thrall to big business. [...]

Long before Obama took office, the public was plenty skeptical that government could do anything right. Eight years of epic Bush ineptitude and waste only added to Washington’s odor.

From there, Rich even started blaming the Tea Party, Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, and Glenn Beck:

Now Obama is stuck between a rock and a Tea Party. [...]

Paul rightly described his victory as "a message from the Tea Party" that it was on the march "to take our government back." And if he doesn’t represent the G.O.P., who does if not his most powerful supporters and ideological fellow travelers, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin? [...]

The Tea Party is meanwhile busy rewriting America’s early history under Beck’s tutelage by enforcing a vision of the Constitution tantamount to the Creationists’ view of Genesis. We must obey the words of the founding fathers literally – or what the Tea Partiers think those words to be.

So you see, we’re now at a point when media elites like Rich are going to blame every bad thing that happens in this country, regardless of who is in the White House and what Party controls Congress, on George W. Bush and conservatives.

Exit question: will this ever end, or could Bush/Beck/Palin/Tea Party/Conservative Derangement Syndrome continue for the foreseeable future?

Conservatives were rolling their eyes during the pundit segment of NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday, watching "conservative" representative David Brooks of The New York Times argue with James Carville’s assertion that Obama was failing to be active enough on the oil spill in the gulf, and mourning this turn in the "really heroic presidency" of Obama:  

You know, if you think government is the center of national life, government can do everything, then you’re disappointed. But for those of us who don’t expect that of government, who know there are limits to government power, then we’re–you know, we–people say, "Oh, he should do something. He should do something." James Carville says that. But what exactly should he do? He doesn’t have a degree in underwater engineering. I don’t expect government to do everything, and I don’t expect they will be able to do everything. And so we’re going to have to live with this, live with the awareness that there are limits to what government can do.

I do think this is a big moment, though, the failure of the top kill. I do think it’s a big moment because we could be facing really weeks or months of that image. And that image of the oil spewing out will become the central image of the year. And for President Obama, who’s had a really heroic presidency for the first year, now he’s entering a period of a limited presidency–limits to his power, limits to money. It’s a different type of presidency, and that image will be the core image of the year.

Did David Brooks have this same spin with Hurricane Katrina, that we cannot expect George W. Bush to be responsible, or expect competence from the federal government? No.

Check Meet the Press from September 25, 2005. Bush was a failure, not a hero, and there’s no hint of "we’re going to have to live with this" accomodation:

What 9/11 exposed was a desire to have authority, some authorities we could trust. Since 9/11, we’ve had a whole series of cascading authority failures: the WMD failures, the Iraq failures, the church failures, the accounting failures, now the Katrina failures, which wasn’t just the failure of Bush. It was a failure up and down government.

There are agencies in Louisiana and New Orleans that were built to respond to a hurricane. This was the most anticipated natural disaster in American history and we failed on every single level. So what we’ve had is a whole series of institutional failures, starting with the president, but going up and down. So to me, I think there’s a huge moment. I think things really–people are impatient and want to reject the president and get to something different, but I wouldn’t say it’s left-right. I’d say what they want is order and authority, and if I were thinking of a candidate in ‘08, those would be the words I’d want my candidate to project.

It should be said in that week, Brooks wrote a harsh column on the Democrats running on Bush hatred more than the issues, which the late Tim Russert noted, and he repeated: "But most Democrats seem to be acting as if the main problem with the country is that the country doesn’t hate George Bush enough. And if we only shout louder, they’ll hate him more like tourists in Paris who think they’ll understand us if we scream a little louder. And to me, it’s led to the brain death of the Democratic Party."

Nevertheless, Brooks thumped much harder on the idea that Bush was incompetent. He sounded more like today’s Carville back then:

Because we’re at a moment in this country where we had a debate for 20 years about: What’s the cause of poverty? Is it joblessness, which the liberals were saying? Is it family breakdown, which is what a lot of conservatives were saying? Now, we’re at a point where the experts really are seeing the interplay between these two forces. And I saw a hint of it with Bush when he talked in New Orleans the other week. And he understands it, too, and really wants to do something pro-active. And as I say that, you always got to go back to competence. And sometimes in my dark moments, I think he’s "The Manchurian Candidate" designed to discredit all the ideas I believe in. And so he has to follow through on that. That’s the crucial thing for the next two years for him.

Conservatives did not expect their side to be represented by a slavishly pro-Bush spokesman. But Brooks was harsher on Bush then than he is on Obama now. Why would NBC (or PBS or NPR, which both employ him as a right-leaning regular) plausibly suggest he plausibly or effectively represents the conservative side?

In his Washington Post Magazine humor column on Sunday, Gene Weingarten worked in his anti-Sarah Palin bias. The subject was his concept of the "Googlenope," phrases that return no hits when Googled between quotation marks. He could find Google results for "I want my daughter to be like the puddingcup girl" or "I want my daughter to be like Page Fiedorowicz," but no one had written "I want my daughter to be like Sarah Palin."

That’s not in Google, between quotation marks. But guess what? Neither is "I want my daughter to be like Hillary Clinton."  Neither is "I want my daughter to be like Michelle Obama."

Weingarten’s implied humor contained other subtly misleading cues. He was amused to find a Google result for the term "Obama is an evil race-enslaving robot." But that’s not a hard-breathing right-winger. It’s the leftist website Salon.com mocking conservative writer Amity Shlaes.

A Michigan lawmaker wants journalists to be licensed.

"Senator Bruce Patterson is introducing legislation that will regulate reporters much like the state does with hairdressers, auto mechanics and plumbers," reported FoxNews.com Friday.

"Patterson, who also practices constitutional law, says that the general public is being overwhelmed by an increasing number of media outlets–traditional, online and citizen generated–and an even greater amount misinformation."

According to the bill, folks wanting to be considered as reporters would have to provide proof of:

–"Good moral character” and demonstrate they have industry “ethics standards acceptable to the board.”

–Possession of a degree in journalism or other degree substantially equivalent.

–Not less than 3 years experience as a reporter or any other relevant background information.

–Awards or recognition related to being a reporter.

–Three or more writing samples.

Well, the "good moral character" clause certainly eliminates most of the usual suspects.

That said, interested parties are already lining up against the bill: 

Critics say the proposed law will stem press freedoms and is bound to be politicized with disgruntles politicians going after reporters who don’t paint them in a positive light. They say that adding members of the so-called fourth estate to the list of government regulated occupations would likely be found unconstitutional.

“It’s misguided and it’s never going to fly,” said Kelly McBride, media ethics expert, the Poynter Institute.  She is currently involved in a project examining the transformation of the journalism profession. 

In response to the proposed legislation, Glenn Reynolds opined Sunday:

How about requiring that all sitting legislators pass a test on the constitution? And maybe an IQ test, too . . . .

Now THAT’S a bill I could get behind.  

The federal government saw its tax collections fall by almost 20% in fiscal 2009 compared to fiscal 2008. Through the first seven months of the current fiscal year, year-over-year collections were down by another 4.5%.

New York Senator Charles Schumer (pictured at right; obtained from wbng.com) is desperately searching for another way to fleece taxpayers (because cutting spending is of course out of the question), and has come up with a "brilliant" idea. An unbylined Associated Press story gives Schumer’s idea undeserved cover by going back to seven year-old information about industry job losses that doesn’t reflect current conditions.

Here are the first five paragraphs from the AP story, followed by a later paragraph containing the outdated information:

Schumer wants to slow exodus of US call centers

In an effort to slow the exodus of U.S. telephone work to overseas services, Sen. Charles Schumer is introducing legislation that would impose an excise tax on companies that transfer calls with American area codes to foreign call centers.

The measure would also require telling U.S. customers that the call is being transferred and to which country.

Companies use call centers to give customers technical product support, answer billing questions or provide other information. They often use several operators.

The fee would be 25 cents for calls transferred to foreign countries. There would be no fee for a domestic call center. Companies would have to report quarterly their total customer service calls received and the number relayed overseas.

"If we want to put a stop to the outsourcing of American jobs, then we need to provide incentives for American companies to keep American jobs here," Schumer said last week. The New York Democrat said the excise tax would "also provide a reason for companies that have already outsourced jobs to bring them back."

… From 2001 to 2003, the United States lost 250,000 call center jobs to India and the Philippines, according to Technology Marketing Corp., a Norwalk, Conn.-based company specializing in call centers and telemarketing.

If AP’s alleged journalists had done research that took yours truly all of about 10 minutes, it could have informed readers that the "exodus" to which Schumer refers hasn’t been happening for at least five years.

Three executive summaries available at the National Association of Call Centers (NACC) inform us that U.S. call center employment has generally grown, even through the severe nationwide recession.

First, here’s a bit of the Fourth Quarter 2008 Executive Summary (bolds are mine throughout; links are to small PDF files):

In the fourth quarter of 2008 more call center jobs were lost in the United States than were gained for the first time since the data was collected going back to 2005. This loss of jobs in the call center industry was tied directly to the recession within the United States economy.

In case the AP needs to buy a clue, the excerpted paragraph tells us that the industry gained jobs for three or more years until its job growth finally succumbed to the recession.

Next, there’s the following from the Second Quarter of 2009:

In the second quarter of 2009 more call center jobs were added in the United States than were lost suggesting a continued recovery from the recession low of fourth (4th) quarter 2008.

So despite the fact that the economy as a whole lost hundreds of thousands of jobs a month during the first six months of 2009, call centers showed net employment gains.

Finally, this is from the Fourth Quarter 2009 Executive Summary:

In the fourth quarter of 2009 more call center jobs were gained in the United States than were lost creating a three quarter long job recovery from the recession low of fourth (4th) quarter 2008.

The NAAC only makes its Executive Summaries available to the public, generally providing specific employment numbers only to members. But I suspect the organization would have been glad to give AP reporters some details if only someone had called them. Maybe the wire service should set up an outbound call center that will do the follow-up work its reporters seem incapable of doing.

The bottom line is this: Exodus, schmexodus. Senator Schumer’s interest in a foreign call center tax has almost nothing to do with jobs. His primary interest is to create yet another ongoing money pot for a government that will not control itself.

Shame on the insufferably lazy AP for giving the New York senator argumentative cover.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

Liberal action hero Ed Schultz does have his standards, albeit flexible ones.

Here’s Schultz chatting with barely coherent fellow left-wing radio host Bill Press on Wednesday about Press’s new book, "Toxic Talk: How the Radical Right Has Poisoned America’s Airwaves" (audio here) –

SCHULTZ: What did the Wall Street Journal say about your book?

PRESS: Wall Street Journal said … OK, he’s got some things right, some things, there is a little, there is a lot of hate talk on the left, but listen on the left, I mean, on the right rather, but listen on the left and you get it, you get it just as bad. Which is simply …

SCHULTZ: Just as bad?

PRESS:  Yeah, which is simply not true.

SCHULTZ: Just as bad? 

PRESS: Yeah, right.

SCHULTZ:  No, I don’t think I called Bush a Nazi. I don’t think I did that.

… As if this is a line Schultz never crosses — unless it comes to comparing Rush Limbaugh to Adolf Hitler, based on Limbaugh’s animated remarks before a feisty CPAC gathering last year. (lively speech, enthusiastic audience … the parallels are eerie …)

Gee, where would anyone get the idea that Schultz is "just as bad" — worse, even — as the most vitriolic voices in conservative media? How about here, from this stew of Schultz toxicity compiled by NewsBusters managing editor Ken Shepherd and EyeBlast.tv video producer Bob Parks last month after Schultz claimed he had not said anything "hateful" on his MSNBC show in its first year.

Then there was Schultz’s insistent description of Sen. John McCain as a "warmonger" during the 2008 campaign, which was over the top even for Obama, then running against McCain for president.

But my favorite example of a Schultz haz-mat spill came months later after McCain’s pick of Palin for running mate brought out Schultz’s inner Neanderthal. Here is Schultz melting down in response to the third female caller to his radio show that day taking him to task for demeaning Palin. (audio here)

There is a rally going on in Tempe, Arizona, Saturday evening to show support for that state’s new immigration law.

Those interested can watch a UStream broadcast of the event live (live stream follows h/t Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey):

Free TV Show from Ustream

Ken Cuccinelli, the conservative Attorney General of Virginia, came under attack on Friday night’s All Things Considered on National Public Radio. This is one angle of Climategate the national media have noticed. But they pitch the battle as Cuccinelli vs. Science or Cuccinelli vs. Academic Freedom.

What’s most infuriating is the notion that it’s Cuccinelli who’s "politicizing" science, and not Michael Mann’s openly politicized e-mails explaining his data manipulations and plotting to censor his political opponents. Somehow, the Union of Concerned Scientists is painted as non-political. 

Host Michele Norris began: "The University of Virginia says it will fight a demand from the state’s attorney general. He wants the school to turn over private e-mails and documents related to a former professor’s climate research. The case has sparked a national debate over academic freedom."

Sandy Hausman, a reporter at the Charlottesville NPR station WVTF, ran a quote of Cuccinelli, but he did not grant an interview, and neither did Michael Mann, the scientist-slash-political activist at the center of this controversy. But the academic-freedom template was well-established, as Hausman explained that while Cuccinelli and Mann weren’t talking, "other scientists were anxious to talk."

ANN HAMRIC: We believe this is a very chilling message from our state government.

HAUSMAN: That’s Ann Hamric, a professor of nursing and chair of UVA’s faculty senate, which sent a letter to Cuccinelli urging him to reconsider.

HAMRIC: Scientific debate is very well established and very important but it’s not done through this kind of process. The way science has grown, it’s very specialized and complicated. And we rely on peer review of people who understand what these things mean.

HAUSMAN: The case has sparked protest from scientists nationwide. And the Union of Concerned Scientists weighed in with a letter signed by more than 800 academics from Virginia. Francesca Grifo is the group’s Director of Scientific Integrity.

Dr. FRANCESCA GRIFO: It seemed clear to us right away that this was an attempt to harass a good scientist for political reasons.

HAUSMAN: Grifo says the public may have doubted Mann but the scientific community has since expressed confidence in his work.

Dr. GRIFO: He’s been cleared by the National Academy of Sciences, by Penn State, by the British House of Commons. How many times do we need to clear him before we can move on?

HAUSMAN: At least once more, says Chris Horner, a critic of global warming science and senior fellow at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute.

While most climate-change stories completely exclude the viewpoint of global-warming skeptics, at least Hausman grants the floor to Chris Horner. But notice that not only is Horner painted as forcing Mann into Cuccinelli’s pointless exercise, his group is described as "libertarian."

That’s not inaccurate, but why on Earth is there no label for the Union of Concerned Scientists, which is fiercely and ideologically devoted to global-warming panic, just as it used to fiercely and ideologically devoted to nuclear-war panic and pressing disarmament on the United States? In forcing America to accept energy restrictions that booming Third World economies would not observe, they’re still for a form of unilateral disarmament of the United States.

Horner’s point was more political than scientific, or about how science should be publicly funded:

CHRIS HORNER: I just don’t know how we can selectively say, well, the attorney general doesn’t have my training, he probably ought not look into this, but that other fellow over there, well, he’s subject to the law. If Dr. Mann’s field is so complex that civil enforcement and compliance mechanisms simply don’t apply or can’t be applied credibly, then he’s in the wrong field in choosing to rely on the taxpayer for revenue.

HAUSMAN: The university has gone to court asking that the attorney general’s order be set aside to protect academic freedom.UVA law Professor Richard Shragger is pleased that his employer plans to fight.

RICHARD SHRAGGER: We don’t want government politicizing the production of knowledge in the university or at any level of education. Once they start to do that, through threats of prosecution or threats of civil liability, they can start to dictate what goes on in the university.

HAUSMAN: He believes the university will prevail since a Supreme Court ruling from the ’50s, Sweezy versus New Hampshire, extends special protection to academia. For NPR News, I’m Sandy Hausman in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Hausman did not explain that the "Sweezy" in that decision was Paul Sweezy, a co-founder of the Marxist journal Monthly Review. That 1957 case was about whether Sweezy was teaching Marxism, so it’s not an exact match for the scientific manipulations in this case.

Sweezy strangely felt that freedom of expression was necessary to advocate the dictatorship of the proletariat, a "necessary tool for their analysis of the worldwide struggle against imperialism, exploitation, and the other ills of capitalism, and for their advocacy of social justice."