"Blonde airhead Media buffoon" David Gregory said to Elizabeth Edwards, that we should strip away Ms. Coulter's "inflammmatory rhetoric" and get to her real point which is that:

Bill Clinton "was a very good rapist"

and that:

Timothy McVeigh should have parked his truck in front of the New York Times, joked that a Supreme Court justice should be poisoned, and said that America should invade Muslim countries and kill their leaders.

and that John Edwards is a "faggot," has a bumper sticker that says "ask me about my dead son" and that he should be killed by terrorists.

But other than that, let's engage Coulter's substance - like her argument that McCarthyism was good because liberals are traitors.

Stripping away my joking inflammatory rhetoric about Gregory, my point is has David Gregory gone insane?

Via FDL, and just to prove there is some intelligent and wry life in the Media:

Silver Spring, Md.: I think Copernicus, Galileo and the modern astronomy community are all wrong about the sun-centered solar system. I don’t have any data, or any particular expertise in the field. All I know is that it bothers me to have people saying we orbit the sun, when I can clearly see it moving across the sky. Plus it is scaring the children to hear people talk about it. Could you tell me how to get an [o]p-ed piece published at The Post? I hear they have no standards for this anymore. Thank you!

Eugene Robinson: I think there must be a Bush administration science panel that has a spot for you!

Heh.

So was titled a piece by Time's John Cloud a few months ago:

. . . Coulter wants to make people laugh more than anything; she is, as I have argued here, a right-wing ironist and comedienne as much as she is a political commentator. . . . We don't read her body language the way we normally do because the words she is uttering are so peremptory and shocking. If we did, we would put her in the same league as Bill Maher or Jackie Mason, not the dry policy analysts who are sometimes pitted against her on cable-news shows.

Of course Coulter was Time's cover girl 2 years ago. Boehlert skewered:

April 19, 2005 | When Time magazine named Ann Coulter among its 100 "most influential people" last week, alongside such heavyweights as Ariel Sharon, Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, Kim Jong Il and the Dalai Lama, the choice produced guffaws online. Plugging the issue on Fox News last week, Time executive editor Priscilla Painton insisted it was Coulter's use of "humor" that made her so influential, stopping just short of suggesting that Coulter is the conservative Jon Stewart. . . . At least now we know where Time magazine was going with its choice. Turns out Coulter's inclusion was just a warm-up -- a justification -- for this week's fawning Time cover story, "Ms. Right." . . .

But Time's Joe Klein is concerned about the coarsening of the discourse by blogs:

Elizabeth Edwards called in to Hardball this afternoon to tell off the She-Pundit with Long Blond Hair.

Shorter version: Elizabeth rocked, the she-pundit did not.

Crooks and Liars (of course) and Think Progress have the video. From Think Progress:

During an hour-long interview with Coulter today on MSNBC, host Chris Matthews announced that Elizabeth Edwards was on the line. Edwards referenced the attacks above, saying, “I’m the mother of that boy who died. These young people behind you…you’re asking them to participate in a dialogue that is based on hatefulness and ugliness instead of on the issues, and I don’t think that’s serving them or this country very well.” The live audience cheered.

When her first two attempts to spin the situation faulted, Coulter then launched into another baseless, personal attack, accusing John Edwards of “bankrupting doctors by giving a shyster Las Vegas routine in front of juries…doing these psychic routines in front of illiterate juries to bankrupt doctors who now can’t deliver babies.”

Think Progress also has the transcript, reprinted here below the fold:

Nancy Grace, age 47, got married secretly in April and is expecting twins. She will make the announcement on her show today.

Grace married David Linch -an Atlanta investment banker she has known since they attended Mercer College together in the late 1970s.

"We've been in touch all these years and a lot of time we were separated by geography and time," she says. "It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to get married. I told my family only two days before [the wedding].

The photo shows her in her wedding dress and from the description of her vows, the music, the veil and her reading selection at the ceremony, it sure seems like it would have taken more than two days to put together. But, whatever.

Ever the good girl, Nancy says of her good fortune:

Emily Yoffe wants to be infantilized:

Usually we want to protect our children from awful events, adjusting the message to suit their age. Certainly we tried to do that after Sept. 11. But an essential part of the global warming awareness movement is the belief that scaring us to death is the best way to spur massive change.

Duck and cover Emily! Anyway, hopefully the adults in the country won't shy away from dealing with reality.

If you were the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, who would you like to have as a speaker at your conference? If you chose Bill O'Reilly, you hit the nail on the head. And O'Reilly provided his keen insight to the opinionmakers' convention and was right on point with them. He lectured on the news side of the operation:

O'Reilly contended that many newspapers are losing circulation because they've allowed the "liberal" ideology of their editorial pages to "bleed into news coverage" -- despite, he said, there being a greater number of "traditional conservatives" than liberals in the American population. The result? "Audiences are estranged from most major newspapers," O'Reilly told the columnist attendees. "They hate you. When someone hates you, they're not going to give you your money."

Honestly, any group that invites O'Reilly to speak at their gathering deserves what they get.

Greg Sargent gets a response from the Grey Lady:

We gave the Edwards camp ample opportunity to respond, and we quoted their full response in the article. The article focused on the activities of the Center for Promise and Opportunity, and how that benefited Mr. Edwards; it did not focus on the sister charity that provided the scholarship money. In fact, when it did mention that sister charity, it cast it in only a positive light, and noted how much it had given out in scholarships.

Greg notes that the egregious flaw of the article, the lede, remains unexplained:

It is amazing how dumb the Media can be. Jamison Foser details one of the dumbest pieces of work I have ever seen: a report by MSNBC that shows that 116 journalists in the United States made political contributions to Democrats as compared to a mere smatterng who made contributions to Republicans. Consider how stupid the premise is - what you write is not where the bias is demonstrated, it is who you gave to. There are other obvious problems as Foser relates:

For starters, MSNBC found fewer than 150 journalists who have made political contributions. There were more than 116,000 working journalists in America as of 2002. The 144 who made contributions not only constitute a tiny fraction of American journalists, they cannot be considered a representative sample of the whole. Indeed, we know that they are un-representative of all journalists: They made reported campaign contributions, and their colleagues did not. . . . Indeed, if you look at MSNBC's list, you won't find Tim Russert or Bob Woodward or Maureen Dowd. You won't see many contributions from reporters for CNN or The New York Times or The Washington Post or ABC News. But you will find sports copy editors for the New Hampshire Union Leader and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, a sports statistician for The Boston Globe, sports columnists for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and a sports editor for the San Jose Mercury News.

Seems an obvious point no?

Via Yglesias, this from LATimes:

Rejecting Moore's prescription on healthcare could alienate liberal activists, who will play a big role in choosing the party's next standard-bearer. However, his proposal — wiping out private health insurance and replacing it with a massive federal program — could be political poison with the larger electorate.

Michael Moore, Kingmaker? Where does the Media get this stuff? This is not Free Republic, but the news section of the LATimes! This is just pathetic. But if you think about it, it offers a great Sistah Souljah moment for all of the Dem candidates - they can say they stood up to Michael Moore!

In what should have been a good, hard hitting and relevant story about something John Edwards should explain, his employment of political operatives in his non-profit poverty organization, Leslie Wayne of the New York Times breaches the most important rule of journalism - report facts as facts, not the reporter's opinions as facts. Wayne's lede is simply intolerable:

John Edwards ended 2004 with a problem: how to keep alive his public profile without the benefit of a presidential campaign that could finance his travels and pay for his political staff. Mr. Edwards, who reported this year that he had assets of nearly $30 million, came up with a novel solution, creating a nonprofit organization with the stated mission of fighting poverty. . .

(Emphasis supplied.) That is Wayne's opinion, not a reported fact. Wayne does not have Edwards saying it nor any evidence to point to other than her own opinion of Edwards' motivations. This is simply unacceptable journalism. Instead of reporting the facts, which do require explanation, Wayne instead basically states AS A FACT that John Edwards committed a crime. Tax fraud.

It is appalling. And now the irresponsible work of Wayne should become a story, along with Edwards' practices. Shame on the New York Times, Leslie Wayne and the editor who let this through.

Media Matters notes that Politico virtually ignored the Rudy Bailed on the ISG story. Apparently the absence of a haircut made it "not news." And it appears that Mark Halperin will have to change his saying to "Politico rules our world," as Kevin Drum notes the paucity of coverage in the Media:

Remember that Newsday story from yesterday about Rudy Giuliani getting kicked off the Iraq Study Group because he couldn't find the time in his busy schedule to attend their meetings? You could be excused if you don't, since apparently no one in our press corps considered either the news itself or Giuliani's laughable explanation for his absences to be worth commenting on. . . . [I]s this seriously not considered news? A guy who's running for president based on his reputation as a hero of 9/11 was given a seat on the highest profile group ever created to investigate a way forward in Iraq, but he decided it wasn't worth his time? He blew off James Baker and Lee Hamilton so that he could give speeches in South Korea and attend fundraisers for Ralph Reed in Atlanta? And the consensus reaction is a big yawn?

It needs a haircut angle Kevin. Don't you know anything about journalism?