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While Sarah Palin hides from and John McCain whines about the press -- which is really a way to show how "tough" you are -- Barack Obama walks in and sits down with anti-progressive Bill O'Reilly, who hardly could be considered a friendly personality.

Barack Obama has been in debates, town halls, interviews, small group meetings for 18 months now. You can't accuse him of hiding.

Come out of your shell, Sarah Palin! Let us see past the PR! What are you afraid of?

This is really just so stupid.

"I was just thinking, this Gustav is proof that there is a God in heaven," the Oscar-winning director of "Fahrenheit 911" said. "To just have it planned at the same time, that it would actually be on its way to New Orleans for Day One of the Republican convention, up in the Twin Cities, at the top of the Mississippi River."

That's right up there in mean-spirited sentiments with the utterances of Jerry Falwell and James Dobson, who has set a pretty "high" standard of horribleness.

I don't care how partisan you are -- and I'm pretty damned partisan, mind you -- you don't sing praises of disasters that seem to play in the media game against your political opponents.

This does not surprise me at all.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.

You read it right: tougher on the Democrat.

During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative.

Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative, according to the Washington-based media center.

And yet the media have been wringing their hands over John McCain's whining about all the attention Barack Obama is getting.

Yes, John McCain's friend and campaign advisor Phil Gramm was right: This is a "nation of whiners" -- except the whiners are the McCain campaign and their supporters.

When John McCain draws 200,000 (voluntary) listeners -- that's three football stadiums' worth of people -- I would expect him to get some camera time.

But I would also like to see the news media wake up to how they've been giving John McCain a free pass on a number of issues. Where is the critical view of McCain's qualifications? Does flying in a plane and getting shot down really qualify him to be President? Or even give him the advantage on strategic foreign policy? When McCain claims "I know how to win wars," on what basis?

Instead, they keep giving him uncritical time while he slings some of the wildest charges, including the claim that Barack Obama is a traitor who would deliberately lose a war for political gain.

I guess it's to be expected, considering that -- as Sam Donaldson says -- journalists aren't interested in the truth.

[T]he reason political reporters are there is not to speak truth to power. Today's truth is tomorrow's falsity. But to make those who say we have the truth-- the politicians--explain it.

That isn't journalism, it's stenography. No wonder we ended up in Iraq. The media didn't have to check facts, they just had to make sure the microphone was on.

Have an opinion? So does everybody. In America, we take having an opinion a fact and expressing that opinion a right.

Except John McCain.

Now we’ve got the cables. We’ve got talk radio. We’ve got the bloggers. I hate the bloggers. We’ve got all kinds of sources of information.

And apparently he doesn't like it when us little people -- you know, those of us who haven't been entrenched in Washington D.C. power for decades, those of us who aren't married to multi-millionaires, those of us who dare question John McCain's qualifications -- speak out.

Okay, I exaggerated. John McCain hates only 26% of Americans.

Okay, maybe McCain misspoke again. How many passes does he need? Because as we've seen, the mainstream media just love to give John McCain passes. Witness how they hyperventilated in defending McCain against any question that McCain's Vietnam experience "flying in a plane" does not in itself qualify him to be president. (Note that the phrase was made by CBSs sputtering Bob Schieffer when challenging Wesley Clark.) McCain loves the press for loving him.

Bloggers are less likely to give John McCain, or any presidential candidate, a free pass. Maybe that's why McCain hates us so much?

"Theft"? When it will require a Superdelegate coup to win -- mathematically it's her only chance -- that amounts to a theft, in my book.

I wouldn't be so antagonistic towards Hillary, but she has been the chameleon this entire campaign. In fact, at least since 2004. The only thing clear about Hillary is her ambition.

The Democratic destruction continues. Congratulations to the DLC.