Jayson Blair, who resigned from the New York Times in 2003 after he was caught plagiarizing and fabricating elements of his stories, was the featured speaker at Washington and Lee University’s 48th Journalism Ethics Institute this afternoon. That got him on NPR this morning, and Fox News Sunday this weekend. I’ve not found what he said in the speech but, from the story on NPR, his could be construed...

Get ready for another apology. GOP House bigwig Rep. Cantor has criticized conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh and says the party needs more inclusive rhetoric. (”He must be a RINO!!”). Quick: calll your bookie and make your bets on when Cantor will apologize now: Eric Cantor, the second-ranking Republican in the U.S. House, said his party needs to be inclusive and criticized some comments...

I’ve given President Barack Obama a long leash in his efforts at governing and now must concede his biggest mistake in changing how Washington works is his staff’s petty feud with Fox News. This running story has legs and they must be chopped off at the knees. This dog must sit, lie down, whacked on the behind with a rolled newspaper and attend obedience school. The latest bark from the White House...

The TV screen today looks like the vision of a demented performance artist. You can click from images of wildly cheering crowds in a Manhattan canyon celebrating what 25 young man did on a baseball field to talking heads and replays of a massacre of other young people in Texas and then suddenly to an Orlando, Florida office building for the familiar confusion in the first moments after another shooting spree. This...

Milan prosecutor Armando Spataro has done something no one else has: He has obtained the first convictions involving the CIA practice of ‘rendition.’ For those interested in reading the Italian coverage of yesterday’s first ever convictions for the U.S. government’s practice of ‘renditioning,’ this is the write-thru from the Corriere Della Sera, which includes a number of...

Photo Credit: Ben Sklar/Getty Images Investigators and journalists are now slowly fleshing out some details about yesterday’s Fort Hood military-base massacre that left 13 people dead and dozens wounded — and about accused shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. The big question is “why” — a question increasingly asked as more tidbits slowly emerge. The detail that is and will get the...

This MSNBC.com headline certainly won’t help the feeling that many Americans have that the wealthy get taken care of and the rest are left to hang: Amid shortage, big NYC firms get swine vaccine Rules allow company docs to request vaccine, distribute to high-risk groups NEW YORK – Some of New York City’s largest employers – including Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs and big universities...

“An Uncommon Love,” sung by Carole King and K.D. Lang

Pro-regime demonstrators lampoon President Obama at the site of the former U.S. Embassy in Tehran on the 30th anniversary of the storming of the facility. Continuing with our coverage of the 30th anniversary of the storming of the American Embassy in Tehran, this editorial from the state-run Web site of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting responds to the question of why it occurred. Laying out it’s position...

In the annals of sexual politics and odd couples, none could ever match the possibilities of mating Maureen Dowd and Rush Limbaugh, a power pairing that would have made Mary Matalin and James Carville look like America’s Sweethearts. The image comes to mind from Dowd’s column yesterday, recounting a four-hour dinner at Manhattan’s 21 Club back when she was “a reportette” and El...

“V” for Vilification: Liberal Paradise, Obama Nightmare by Rick Moran Want to piss off the left? Everybody watch every single episode of the new ABC mini-series “V.” Drive the ratings through the roof. Make the show the hottest cultural happening since Seinfeld. Copy the hairstyles. Ape the fashion. Start bidding up the action dolls on Ebay. And most especially, actually...

Two of the 53 American Embassy workers being held hostage with the approval of the Iranian regime, after the facility was stormed on November 4, 1979. Thirty years ago today, the American Embassy in Tehran was stormed by followers of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It is a day that the current regime commemorates every year as a celebration of victory over what the leaders of the country like to call...

Yesterday, I received a note (on my Facebook page) from Vanessa Grigoriadis, author of the Nancy Pelosi profile in New York Magazine that I critiqued here. The note says:

Eric Roux, a ‘legal representative’ of the Church of Scientology in France, seems relieved after the Criminal Court of Paris returned a verdict of fraud against the church – without imposing dissolution. Days ago, a long-awaited verdict was handed down in the French criminal trial of the Church of Scientology. In the opinion of German columnist Dietrich Alexander of the newspaper Die Welt,...

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. — Tuesday’s elections were a rebuke to the right wing and a warning to Democrats. They were also a timely reminder that President Obama needs to tune up his celebrated political organization and find a way to make Americans feel hopeful again. The night’s biggest loser was the national conservative political machine — the wealthy tax-cutters at the Club...

Coming from a state-controlled mouthpiece of Muammar Gaddafi’s despotic regime, some may scoff at this article calling for President Bush to be brought before the International Criminal Court and charged with war crimes. The unfortunate truth, however, is that the sentiments expressed by OEA Libya’s Ali Mar’i al-Ahad are by no means out of the norm in the Muslim world and beyond. For OEA...

The Syracuse Post-Standard talks to Dede Scozzafava:

Tell your friends you read it here first. Don’t bother watching the wall-to-wall cable television coverage of today’s handful of odd-year elections. Robert McDonnell, the Republican candidate, will be elected governor of Virginia. Barring a minor miracle, incumbent New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine will lose to Republican Chris Christie. Douglas Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate, will trounce Democrat...

Imagine for a moment that a segment of the Southern Baptist Church was supporting the idea of parents killing their teenage daughters for going out on dates. The public reaction would be swift and severe (and properly so). Media figures like Bill Maher would go ballistic, labeling the entire Christian Church with such behavior. And yet when this exact thing is happening within the Muslim community the reaction...

Can Russia break the strongman habit? Is Russia ready for Western-Style democracy – which includes true pluralism and checks on the executive? It’s a debate that’s been going on since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This article from Izvestia - once the official mouthpiece of the Soviet government – openly, unapologetically and arrestingly admits that the answer is no. Nor does it wish to...

According to Fox News’ fair and balanced journalist, Chris Wallace. Oh.

Actually, most of this 7-screen profile is not this openly vicious. Vanessa Grigoriadis generally prefers to kill with a thousand paper cuts rather than take a butcher knife to her target of choice. If you’re looking to learn something substantive about Pelosi’s political thinking and/or the professional and personal factors that formed her values and who she is as a person, you will be disappointed....

William Ayers, the former member of the Weather Underground, and Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Pres. Obama’s former pastor, did not visit the White House at any time during the nine months Obama has been in office.

Sen. Joe Lieberman told Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation today that Democrats are sabotaging health care reform by insisting on a public option. Schieffer, however, got Lieberman to admit that he would prefer no health care reform bill at all to a health care reform bill that included a public option (emphasis in original):

Frank Rich’s column today is about — as he puts it — the “GOP Stalinist invasion of upstate New York” — and it’s superb: