I've come to never be surprised over anything I see on CNN these days. Despite the fact that over half the people who watch the cable news network call themselves liberals, the powers that be on what used to be the most trusted name in news continue to push neocon bullshit down our throats at every opportunity.

Why? Because they know it doesn't matter how many of us watch their crappy channel, just as long as the top 0.5% of wealthy folks out there keep buying ads.

But tonight was too much. Tonight I just wanted to punch John King in the throat before coming after Suzanne Malveaux with a heavy rock.

Seriously, I'm not a violent guy, but there comes a point where any peacenik is forced to go all Billy Jack in the face of jackbooted fascism.

Haven't seen a sign of this anywhere on dKos, so perhaps it's been flying under the radar, but this should be massive news with an election nearing... Mitt Romney's Bain Capital LLC is making a run at Clearchannel Communications with another private equity company that has had dealings with The Carlyle Group.

Clear Channel Communications Inc.'s directors accepted a revised $19.5 billion buyout offer from two private equity firms after two big shareholders indicated support for the bid.

The offer from Thomas H. Lee Partners LP and Bain Capital LLC of $39.20 a share, 20 cents higher than a previously rejected bid, was unanimously approved by Clear Channel's board, the San Antonio-based company said Friday.

Why does this matter? Let's rewind back to 1999, when George W. Bush was making a run at the Presidency.

In the blogosphere, we’re often accused by the journalism industry as being untrustworthy, partisan, biased, unsourced, and of working in our bathrobes. Of course, such allegations are easy to make, especially if you’re one of those journalists who like to make such allegations without any actual examples of bloggers being guilty of any of the above.

In short, those alleging these crimes by bloggers are perpetrating the exact same crimes they speak of, AS they speak of them.

Sadly, that’s exactly WHY the mainstream media is suddenly feeling under attack - because they don’t do what we do - fact-check, source information, and keep an even unbiased keel in relation to facts.

Well I’m about to demonstrate two types of journalism for you. The first, which we’ll call the Katie Couric Brand of Journalism, is as follows:

It's pretty much a given that America's media landscape is a wasteland right now. Having watched the incredible PBS doco series News War last night (guest-starring none other than Markos Moulitsas), and seen how the owners of the LA Times feel that "the Iraq War doesn't need a full time journalist covering it" and that people in LA "want style, fashion, Hollywood, celerbity," it's easy to feel like things are going to get worse before they ever get better.

In Canada, they already are.

Today, in the Canwest Global-owned Vancouver Province newspaper, the following editorial ran:

Sometimes you see a story in the press and you have to check the sources, just to be sure it isn't a hoax. This is one such story, and by god, it'll make you fume.

As previously diaried a few weeks back on dKos, Julie Amero was a substitute teacher who found herself in a pickle while teaching a class of 12-year-old boys.

The school computer in her classroom, which she had been told not to turn off under any circumstances, and which had no virus protection, spyware protection, and was running a 9-year-old operating system, started popping up porn ads. Not just one or two, but loads.

When Julie tried to click them off by hitting the little X on the top corner, more popped up. And more.

With the kids clamoring for a look, Julie tried to block the screen from them, but there were too many, so she ran out to the teachers' lounge and asked for help.

Let's face it, precious few of us last night, in the deep dark recesses of our mind, didn't expect some last minute turnaround in the vote that saved Republicans in tight races.

With Burns closing in on Tester, you thought there'd suddenly be a big shift to the red man, didn't you? You thought Allen would suddenly 'find' 10,000 votes, didn't you?

I know I did.

I know, after 2000 and 2004, I expected any close race to suddenly and unexpectedly swing red, and I expected we'd take weeks going through individual county returns, finding irregularities everywhere.

But that never happened. Why? Here's my take.

So the Reverend Jerry Falwell went on national (cable) TV last night and, according to Crooks and Liars, denied ever having met the now disgraced former leader of the largest evangelical movement in the world, Ted Haggard.

Reverend Jerry Falwell appeared on the Situation Room last night to talk about the midterm elections and the evangelical vote. When Paula Zahn asked him about the allegations surrounding Ted Haggard , Falwell said "I don't know him...I haven't met him" and played down his influence in the evangelical movement as negligible.

For video evidence of this, Crooks and Liars has the details.

So why should you care if Falwell and Haggard have never met? Oh, maybe because they have. Maybe because they met a lot... in the Oval Office, no less.

Wolf Blitzer has been serving up a little fightback to Lynne Cheney today on CNN, after she chose to use his interview last Friday to question his patriotism for daring suggest her husband approved of torture.

Even though he, in black and white, did.

Of course, this is what happens when you spend five years cupping the balls of every Republican on national TV - eventually they figure they can do whatever they want to you, and what are you gonna do, fight back?

So without further ado, I give you Leslie "Wolf" Blitzer's career epitaph:

I run an editorial services company in Vancouver BC - a company called Unreel Media. It's not a bad company, as far as company's go. Makes a little profit, keeps thirty writers in rent and food, but it has an added benefit to dozens - perhaps hundreds - of other people, all over the world... a benefit that few companies I know of could boast.

See, my company is also a money lender. No, we're not loan sharks, and we're not a payday loan outfit. Rather, we give loans to people in places like the Sudan and Tanzania, Samoa and Cambodia, Honduars and Bulgaria, in the form of business loans for entrepreneurs who wish to get themselves and their families out of poverty forever.

Was just sitting watching South Park when I noticed a couple of emails had hit my inbox. I knew they were there, because the new mail icon was up, but they took some finding because they were misdated.

Anyway, what's interesting about these emails is they seem to be concerted efforts to get Air America listeners to downlaod a trojan.

I've often thought to myself, if I were born in Nicaragua or Zambia or Bangladesh, how exactly would I have ever been able to 'pull myself up by the bootstraps' (as Conservatives often claim poor people should) and get ahead in this world. I mean, you can be a hard-working guy in a country like Tanzania, but without an economy around you to take advantage of, you're basically limited to providing for your family - if that.

Get a second job? There are no second jobs. Save a little money for the future? There are no banks to save in. Get an education? In many third world countries, education is the biggest single expense for a family, so much so that most have no chance to get one.

Long time Kos readers may have already seen mention of an organization called Kiva previously on this site, and it's with the above dilemma in mind that I shine a little more light on this great organization today.

Never heard of it? Well you should, because Kiva makes it possible for you, sitting at home in your La-Z-Boy, to become a virtual venture capitalist for small businessmen and women in the developing world.

I know we're all very pent up with rage and annoyance and we can't believe the United States has become a fascist state, and the judiciary is screwed, and the Democrats are weak, and the media is bought and paid for, and....

Well heck, it just goes on and on. So I wanted to change speed a little and tell folks about a blog movement that has set out to make some positive change in the lives of a few kids this year - and it's a blog owned by Markos, which makes it all the more worthwhile to discuss.

As you may or may not know, Markos runs an outfit called Sportsblog Nation, a collective of sports blogs in the mold of dKos, and the premier SB Nation baseball blog is a site called Athletics Nation, dedicated to the Oakland A's ball team.

Why do you care? Because the Athletics Nation kids were bored during the off-season this year and got it in their heads to throw some spare change together to buy a couple of season tickets and donate them to a local underprivileged children's charity.

As much as he damages the fabric of America on a daily basis, I really do love the comedy of Bill O'Reilly. It's not necessarily intentional comedy, but it's hilarious nonetheless, because he's just SUCH a fool. And anyone who knows comedy understands that a fool that point blank refuses to learn his lessons, is the grandest comedy of all.

Today's chapter in the Why Bill O'Reilly is a Clown (to borrow a David Brooks phrase) is his boycott of the state of Vermont.

On the O'Reilly factor website (which is, incidentally, the #1 spot on any Google search for 'terrorist sympathizer'), he's running a poll right now:

Background follows:

So today I broke my long time boycott of CNN because I wanted to see if the press was talking about Rep. Slaughter's news that day traders have been working out of Bill Frist and Tom DeLay's offices. They haven't.

But the half hour period that I watched gave me a chance to stare goggle-eyed at the staggering inanity and witless braindead mass of wasted organic matter that is Kyra Phillips.

Really, how does someone this dumb get on TV? Here's a sample of the wit and weeniedom of Kyra Phillips from today (I don't have a transcript, so I'm paraphrasing):

REPOSTED FROM HOLLYWOODBITCHSLAP.COM, BECAUSE PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW (and I wrote it, so I give myself full permission to reprint it in its entirety here):

HYPERBOLE FOR SALE: HOW EARL DITTMAN AND THE HOLLYWOOD STUDIOS HAVE DESTROYED FILM CRITICISM AND DEFRAUDED THE AMERICAN PUBLIC

While the population has been focused on the `War on Terror' over the last few years, another war has been taking place on the streets and in the moviehouses of North America. This war, while featuring far fewer casualties, has hurt Americans terribly, and moviegoers in particular, as it has taken the number one leisure activity of the western world and turned it into a boulevard of whores, frauds, shysters and criminals. I am speaking, of course, about the War on Film Criticism. And the Osama Bin Laden of the War on Film Criticism is Earl Dittman.

So it turns out I'm on the 'call to action' email list of the American Family Association.

This brings me no end of amusement as I daily open my email inbox to find Don "Satan's Little Helper" Wildmon telling me what products and people I should be boycotting today, and providing me with a handy little link to a form with which to email advertisers, TV affiliates, journalists, etc.

It makes me queazy, but at the same time it riles me up enough to do battle - and the thing about Wildmon's handy mass-email form is this: it comes in real handy for emailing SUPPORT to the people he wants us to boycott.

Today's target? NBC, for daring to put out a TV show called The Book of Daniel, which deals with a priest just struggling to get by in this crazy mixed up world. They've already convinced one weak-kneed affiliate to ditch the show (or so they claim - we know from the Ford episode recently that the AFA can't be trusted to tell the truth), so we're starting this counter-action from behind the 8-ball.

Below you'll find Wildmon's call to arms, and a link. Your mission, friends, is to use that link, for good, not evil.

It's been a good year for me. I got married this year, had a child, bought a home, and my family is healthy, happy, employed and united. Despite the doom and gloom around us, we prospered, and thus as the Christmas season loomed, we realized we had much to be thankful for.

We also realized that your standard, everyday, commercial Christmas Day was not the way to celebrate the fact.

So my family made a decision this year. Myself, my wife, my brother-in-law and parents-in-law all determined that, this year, since the Neocons have determined that there should be a War on Christmas, that we would accept their challenge and commit to the anti-Christmas cause.

We decided that, in the absence of any discernable anti-Christmas forces out there to win this war, we would be marytyrs for the cause and attack Christmas in every way, shape and form we possibly could. Here's what we did:

So last night I was pissed. There I was, reading a diary about a physical attack on a Kansas University college professor, Paul Mirecki, who had committed the grievous sin (in some eyes) of deciding to teach a class that debunked Intelligent Design as mythology.

Mirecki survived the attack, and emerged from hospital seemingly unrattled, despite being peppered with blows from the fists of two assailants, and being clunked on the head with something "metallic." I was glad to hear the prof would be okay, but I was in no way prepared to just get angry for a day, and then slowly let it all fade into memory.

I wanted to do something that didn't just fight back, but showed the assailants that their actions worked AGAINST their cause. And so I put together a diary that asked for donations to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, a group at the forefront of the defense of those teaching evolution in schools.