Liberal bloggers are accusing Fox News of launching an Internet war against them in a campaign to selectively remove Fox clips from YouTube. On Wednesday, YouTube shut down the popular News1News channel, which featured news clips that many progressive bloggers and news sites would add to their stories. On the rare occasion, Raw Story also embedded News1News clips in stories having to do with media coverage. The channel provided clips from all news networks, but often focused on Fox's controversial commentators. The decision to shut down News1News came after Fox News issued 150 take-down notices to the channel, which they are entitled to do under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, reports Adrian Chen at Gawker. YouTube's policy is to shut down any accounts that receive three or more take-down notices, so News1News was immediately pulled offline. But Fox News' move appears to be limited to News1News, while other YouTube channels -- those viewed as having conservative leanings -- remain untouched.

Markos Moulitsas, founder of The Daily Kos, chastised the former GOP Congressman Tom Tancredo for not answering his call to duty. Tancredo having obtained 1-Y status in 1970, after his student deferments ran out, on the grounds that he had been "diagnosed with depression when he was 16 or 17 and received medication for five years for panic attacks and bouts of anxiety and depression." Tancredo was 24 at the time. Hats off to Moulitsas!

You will want to know about this new and upcoming Jewish Organization, J Street. The news of AIPAC's influence upon this organization could be disturbing, since J Street goals appear to be different than that of AIPAC. J Street certainly merits keeping a light on them and their activities.

Scarborough’s tired old fairly tale doesn’t hold water in the modern corporate media environment. Scarborough also ignored the bigger issue here. The question is not about FNC’s bias, that’s a given. What is different about Fox News is their engagement in political activity. Last week, Glenn Beck offered to hold a fundraiser for Michele Bachmann. FNC promoted both the tea parties, and the 9/12 protest. These aren’t activities that news networks should be engaged in. No other news network has moved into the political realm.

When President Barack Obama recently hailed the late Massachusetts Sen. Teddy Kennedy's 'brand of liberalism' as a noble thing, it was the first time in recent memory that 'liberal' had been used in such an august setting. At least positively. There have been plenty of times presidents and members of Congress have railed against 'liberals' and 'liberalism' from in the chambers of the Capitol. But upon Kennedy's death even one of those conservatives, his good friend Sen. Orin Hatch of Utah, called Kennedy one of the great 'liberal Democratic'' senators of all times. And he meant it in a good way. Are we to detect a subtle sea change here in which a political label that has been demonized for so long that it has come to be virtually meaningless? Is 'liberal' on its way toward rehabilitation as a credible political point of view?

Glenn Greenwald points to this Atlantic 50 listing, composed of: ... Seven of the top ten are Reichwing pundits, two liberal, and the last is Andrew Sullivan. Paul Krugman is 1st, but Glenn Greenwald is 22nd, Josh Marshall is 29th, and Bill Moyers 32nd. In contrast, Limbaugh, Will, Friedman, Brooks, Krauthammer and Beck are 2-7. Rove, Hannity, Broder and Noonan are 10-13. Rachel Maddow and Arianna Huffington are 14 and 15. And so on in each group of ten making up the top fifty. Unexplained is the weighting among ephemera such as Twitter hits and "performance" on popular social media sites, and substance or how frequently commentators are proven correct/incorrect. The "top 250" Washington insiders surely listed those to whom they owed allegiance, as self-referential a criteria as one could use. The list is overwhelmingly rightwing to in extremis. The Atlantic could have saved itself a lot of trouble and algorithms by calling these the Village Fifty. It's what they came up with. So much for "liberal" as a descriptor of today's media.

The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama. It kills as brutally and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under George W. Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to enrich the corporate elite as rapaciously. It will not give us universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy laws, end torture or “extraordinary rendition,” restore habeas corpus or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not push through significant environmental reform, regulate Wall Street or end our relationship with private contractors that provide mercenary armies to fight our imperial wars and produce useless and costly weapons systems.

Since some morons are saying that is the "Left of the Left" that are pushing for the public option and this supposed to be shocking news to be breathlessly reported on in the traditional media... As they continue their twisted and contorted takes on reality, let us look at who really supports the public option, OK? 67% of conservatives support having the choice between a public option and private insurance. 71% of Republicans support having the choice between a public option and private insurance. 77% of Americans support having the choice between a public option and private insurance.

"Emboldened by what they see as a kindred spirit in the White House, progressive and liberal Christians are stepping up their political activism in a big way. A religious coalition called the American Values Network spent nearly $200,000 placing the global warming ads. Some political analysts credit the campaign with boosting support for the Waxman-Markey climate bill, which narrowly passed the House last week. The coalition plans to spend an additional $150,000 in the coming months to enlist pastors in Nevada, Arizona and Colorado to rally support in the pews as climate-change legislation moves through the Senate. Another left-leaning religious coalition will begin airing scripture-citing radio ads in key congressional districts this weekend, calling for legislation to make health insurance more affordable. The coalition -- which includes Faith in Public Life, Sojourners and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good -- also is distributing an eight-page guide, full of Biblical quotes and health-care statistics, to encourage pastors to raise the issue in sermons. Democratic lawmakers representing conservative districts say such efforts help them make the case to skeptical constituents that they aren't simply toeing the party line -- or turning into bleeding-heart liberals -- when they support President Barack Obama's calls for health-care and climate-change legislation."

"In 2008, Ammerman implied that four presidential candidates should be "arrested, quickly tried and hanged" for not voting to designate English America's official language, and speculated that Barack Obama would be assassinated as a secret Muslim."

You voted and the results are in. It was a tight race, but BuzzFlash is ready to announce the first- and second-place winners in our Name Cheney's Memoir contest. Drum roll, please!

Last week, we opened up the proverbial phone lines at BuzzFlash HQ to get ideas from our loyal readers on this very pressing question: What should former Vice President Dick Cheney name his forthcoming memoirs? We've compiled our eight favorite entries here in an interactive poll. We invite our readers to vote for the best of the best over the next week. The poll will close next Wednesday, June 17 at 9 a.m.

There's a dustup in progress between liberal bloggers and liberal organizations. Here's the skinny: it seems that the big dog liberal blogs — you know, the folks who draw the rock star like traffic — are feeling unloved, or at least unnourished, by liberal organizations such as Americans United for Change (which has apparently now given in). They're also a little peeved at official Democratic Party committees.

"Many journalists and pundits have reached one very early verdict about the Obama White House: The new president has not lived up to his campaign rhetoric when it comes to reaching out to Republican lawmakers. The evidence? Not a single Republican voted in favor of the White House-backed economic stimulus bill. Given the concessions made to Republican critics, as well as the high-profile meetings Obama conducted with top Republicans, it's curious that the failure would be portrayed as Obama's. As Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne put it (2/2/09), "What should have been hailed as an administration victory was cast in large parts of the media as a kind of defeat: Obama had placed a heavy emphasis on bipartisanship, and he failed to achieve it." "

Harper is in the final stages of his leadership as Ignatieff gains the power to call an election.

"From the way the media have covered this week's stimulus package vote, you would think the goal of the legislation was to get Democrats and Republicans to sit together for lunch in the House cafeteria, rather than to turn around an economy in free fall. After the House passed the stimulus package by a comfortable margin, much of the media reacted not by examining the bill's contents and the likelihood that it would provide a much-needed boost to the economy, but by focusing on the fact that it passed without a single Republican vote. Why the GOP's unanimity in opposing the stimulus package should be surprising is anybody's guess; the last time we had a newly elected Democratic president, in 1993, congressional Republicans were unanimous in opposing his economic package, too. Then-Rep. John Kasich went so far as to promise that if Bill Clinton's plan worked, Kasich would switch parties. (It did; he didn't.) "

Yesterday on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly and Karl Rove went on a tirade against the media for hyping the struggling state of the economy. They claimed that it’s not as bad as reports are making it out to be, and journalists are overstating the case in order to help President-elect Barack Obama: O’REILLY: All right, so you are agreeing with me then that there is a conscious effort on the part of The New York Times and other liberal media to basically paint as drastic a picture as possible, so that when Barack Obama takes office that anything is better than what we have now? ROVE: Yes. Note: Tunes from the looney bin...

Great new Kansas political blog: Kansas Jackass!

This article discusses the possibility of a coalition government forming in Canada based on the upcoming budget.

Via Montreal Simon, I just learned that the worst possible thing could have happened, and one that will drive a stake through all hopes of a coalition faster than anything else: Iggy the Warmonger has staged his palace coup. Michael Ignatieff should have stayed at Hahvud; its ivory tower was a better fit for him and his out-of-step attitudes, and he did less damage there. The man couldn't get his ass elected democratically at last year's Liberal leadership convention. He was for the war on Iraq before he was against it (and it took the extreme unpopularity of that war, not the extreme stupidity of it, to make him change his mind.) His position on Afghanistan is still the same, whereas a clear majority of us want our army out of there, so even unpopularity isn't a reliable indicator of which way he'll swing. His "principled" stance is absurd and unbuyable. Plus, notwithstanding Iggy's misplaced "idealism", there's the inconvenient fact that Afghanistan will never morph back into anything even vaguely resembling what it was before the US and its "Grand Chessboard" strategies eated it. Facts? What are those to Iggy's so-called towering intellect (which is really just rank stupidity expressed in a nifty, shifty way) and his so-called idealism (which is just plain cock-eyed)?