NBC News “special correspondent” Ted Koppel is once again sounding like Jimmy Carter’s former Secretary of State in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. The headline was “America's Chronic Overreaction to Terrorism: The country's capacity for self-inflicted damage must have astounded even Osama bin Laden.”

“Terrorism is designed to produce overreaction,” Koppel proclaimed with his trademark arrogance. Bill Clinton’s lack of response to terrorist attacks during his tenure in office was a mark of high intelligence, not fecklessness, unlike Bush launching that disastrous Iraq war:

Today another New York state court upheld an earlier decision in March that invalidated outgoing Mayor Mike Bloomberg's much-maligned "soda ban" which restricts many establishments in the Big Apple from selling soda cups larger than 16 ounces in capacity. As the media report on the court ruling, watch for a) the media to paint the ruling as a "blow" to an "ambitious," well-meaning effort by Bloomberg to save the city from corpulence and b) the ruling as a victory for Big Soda, even though the litigants in the case happen to be the New York Statewide Coalition of Hispanic Chambers of Commerce.

For two examples of this media narrative, I submit for your consideration two wildly different publications, Politico and, sadly, the Wall Street Journal. First Politico. Here's how Kyle Cheney opened his July 30 post, "Appeals court cans N.Y.C. soda ban" (emphasis mine):

"I think every president in the intense media environment we have now, certainly every two-term president, gets to a point where the American people stop listening, stop leaning forward hungrily for information. I think this president got there earlier than most presidents. And I think he's in that time now."

So said the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan on ABC's This Week Sunday.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial board is rock-ribbed conservative, but its news pages often feature biased reporting that fits with the rest of the liberal media's narratives about conservatives and the GOP. Take Patrick O'Connor's 20-paragraph July 23 article, "Think Tank Becomes a Handful for GOP."

"For four decades, the Heritage Foundation was a stately think tank that sought to define conservative thinking for Republicans," O'Connor noted, lamenting that "Now, in one of the more significant transformations in the capital's intellectual firmament, it has become an activist political operation trying to alter the course of conservative thinking." In doing so, "[i]t now challenges establishment Republican leaders as much as it informs them, making waves in the process," O'Connor complained, going on to cite Republican congressmen complaining about Heritage's tactics, but failing to find pro-Heritage conservative GOPers to defend the organization.

On ABC's This Week yesterday, former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer -- who resigned in 2008 when caught dead to rights illegally purchasing the services of prostitutes but was never prosecuted because, as announced two days after Election Day in 2008, the Department of Justice decided that "the public interest would not be further advanced by filing criminal charges" -- called the verdict in the George Zimmerman murder trial "a failure of justice."

Of course, Politico's Juana Summers provided none of the background yours truly just did while only referring to Spitzer as "the former Democratic governor of New York who's now a candidate for New York City comptroller." Another statement Spitzer made on the same program deserves further scrutiny, which will arrive after the jump: