links for 2009-12-23

He meant that he wanted people to pray that 92-year-old Robert Byrd would become ill or die so he couldn't vote. Which is exactly what people did – calling in to right wing radio shows and proudly exclaiming it.

My bookend quotes capture how the "liberal" Beltway press corps changed the rules to cover Gore at the beginning of the decade and Obama at the end of it. And how did the same press corps spend the years between Gore and Obama? Lying down for Bush, of course. Having developed rabbit ears for the right-wing taunt of "liberal media bias," reporters, editors, producers, and pundits seemed determined during the Bush years to prove how un-liberal they really were. In the process, the press abandoned its traditional watchdog role and morphed instead into lapdogs.