where you least expect it

this youtube clip of a 700 club story on the democratic senate primary in connecticut is astonishing...who'd have thought that the 700 club would have a political story that's better reported than anything seen on network news (including cnn and fox) in a while.



you may rightly take issue with their using the aclu's freedom scorecard (and that they called it a "liberal rating"), but the aclu's measure is a broad measure of basic civil liberties issues. you may rightly take issue with their using john kerry to define the liberal wing of the democratic party, but he did tack more and more left (moving from super-mainstream to milquetoast pseudo-progressive) as the 2004 presidential campaign went along.

the bottom line is, that was an astonishingly well reported story, the points above notwithstanding (there are far worse distortions and half truths woven into mainstream media news). it presented the overall case, tried to explain both sides, and analyzed some of the major reasons (the kiss, the standing o) for which progressives take issue with lieberman (mainly that he's become bush's lapdog).

pat robertson's coda, of course, was half-assed, calling out the dems specifically but letting the GOP off lightly for the same sins of hyper-partisanship (and also not distinguishing between the kind of partisanship necessary for competing parties to stake out policy decisions and the kind of ugly partisanship promulgated by the likes of delay and boehner). not that i'm about to start watching the 700 club, but the reporter who filed this should go for a gig with the majors, hopefully not losing his reporter's soul in the process. at the very least it would be interesting to see what he'd do without the constraints of working for an avowedly biased news organization.