Your so-called liberal media (cont.)

The New York Times receives well-deserved criticism for its peculiar news judgments.

Ya gotta feel sorry for the old man

I never cared much for the senior President Bush, but I can't help but feel sympathy for the old guy in light of the embarrassment his son has been to the family -- and the nation.

BooMan has got an interesting take on a piece in The New York Times that examines the personal angst of George Herbert Walker Bush.

Weekly World News, R.I.P.

Only today did I catch the announcement made last week that the Weekly World News, the wonderfully wacky supermarket tabloid, is shutting down its print edition.

This is terrible. We could all do just fine if, say, the Wall Street Journal went away (which actually would be preferable to its impending purchase by Rupert Murdoch), but the loss of the Weekly World News is a tragedy from which society may never recover.

By the way, The New York Times has a nice piece today on WWN columnist Ed Anger, whose right-wing nuttiness pre-dates (but accurately evokes) the rantings of Rush Limbaugh, among others.

Hair, schmair!

The John Edwards campaign is out with a good video response to all the foolish media attention paid to haircuts rather than more important matters.

(H/T to Talking Points Memo.)

Lou Dobbs gets his comeuppance

CNN's resident xenophobe apparently has been peddling some falsehoods about illegal immigrants, earning himself a smackdown from David Leonhardt of The New York Times.

One of Lou's distortions has to do with incarceration rates among undocumented immigrants, which was the subject of this post by The Rascal a few weeks ago.

Your Republican Party today

In a recent wide-ranging analysis of political polls, Susan Page of USA Today wrote: "The Republican Party now has a net negative rating of 9 percentage points: 42% viewed it favorably, 51% unfavorably. The Democratic Party has a net positive rating of 13 points, 55%-38%."

This is a reversal of the situation of only a few years ago, and it's a commentary on the damage George W. Bush has done to his party.

Even the Republican label can be a negative in the current climate. As pollster Scott Rasmussen puts it: "The Republican brand is a drag right now on their party's candidates."

Columnist Paul Krugman of The New York Times has an interesting take this morning on the GOP's bleak fortunes and on how none of the party's major presidential candidates seems likely to stray far from Bush's disastrous course.