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Lou Dobbs Tonight Hides Good News Behind Negative View of Free Market

Random thoughts:

1. Another sign the Washington Post REALLY wants Cindy Sheehan to succeed. See this headline from Sunday: "Refusal to See Sheehan Is Second-Guessed: A Decision Characteristic of Bush Has the Potential to Be a Consequential Act." And....it has the potential to be forgotten by almost everybody after a while.

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine cover story was one part ‘Mad Max’ mixed with one part poor economics. The 7,400 word piece by Peter Maass was a gusher of scaremongering end-of-world predictions and claimed that an oil “crisis” is imminent. Maass filled his story with comments and views from Matthew Simmons, author of a new book called “Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy.” The story did its best to paint a great scary oil conspiracy and an inevitable “crisis ahead” “whether in a year or 2 or 10.”

In an eyebrow-raiser, New York Times head editor Bill Keller writes a letter to his own paper, lambasting a recent Sunday Book Review by U.S. Court of Appeals judge and law professor Richard Posner, a catch-all review of several books positing media bias on both left and right (including a favorable nod to ''Weapons of Mass Distortion" by MRC President Brent Bozell).

Magazine story describes a Mad Max future based one the work of one author.

One wonders how The New York Times can fairly cover and opine on eminent domain issues when their new headquarters is being built on land legally stolen from one private party and bequeathed to The Times.

Jon Friedman says no apologies are warranted for Sheehan circus coverage.

Believing that America can't get enough of its Protest Mom, the news media cover every aspect of her story.

And how exactly is this different from the Americans that can't get enough of Natalee Holloway's mother pleading for her daughter?

Tell me if this surprises you. NPR is promoting the idea that rising oil prices will impact the midterm elections and, of course, will be the thing that turns the public against Republicans. If there was ever anyone at NPR who prayed to a higher being, this is what they would pray for.

How do they justify this hypothesis? Because in 1980, long gas lines "cost Carter his re-election".

1. Gas wasn't the only problem with Carter.

The Denver Post has finally broken its silence about the developing Air America story. Only, as with the New York Times and the Swift Boat Veterans, the first mention of it is a dismissal followed by a rebuttal. Dick Kreck addresses the scandal in his radio column in today's Entertainment section.

First, the setup:

NPR’s Nina Totenberg is repeatedly surprised by how conservative Supreme Court nominee John Roberts really is, apparently not cognizant of all of her earlier pronouncements about his conservatism. On Inside Washington over the weekend, she declared that after reviewing memos he wrote while working in the Reagan White House counsel’s office, “he is much more conservative than I ever would have guessed.

First it was nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.  Then he was AWOL.  After that came Plamegate.  So, what pray tell will be the next left-wing attack on our president? 

Potentially, the manner in which the Vioxx story was covered this weekend by the New York Times gives us some clues. 

To begin with, a front-page article Saturday by Alex Berenson reported the surprise verdict that gave the widow of a man who died after taking Merck’s painkiller an astounding $253.5 million award including $229 million in punitive damages.

Just in case people missed it, the Times ran another article by Mr. Berenson on Sunday -- again on the front-page -- that appears to move this story in a suspiciously political direction: