Dana Milbank gets spanked, sorta....

Washington Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell responds today to the appearance of one of the WaPo News Reporters on MSNBC in a hunting costume.

Actually, Howell explains that washingtonpost.com is under "different management" and under the online auspices, Milbank is an "opinion writer."

Got that? So Milbank wears two hats, an orange one for opinion ["clockwork orange" which is cockney for 'crazy' comes to mind] and perhaps a fedora for his news mode?

Like Captain's Quarters, I find Milbank amusing from time to time, although ninety-five on the ADA rating scale.

At least he has a day job, unlike another MSNBC denizen, David Gregory, who can't write down his thoughts [and has a limited range of thinking, from his on-air antics over the Cheney accident].

The seepage of editorial opinion into straight news reporting is even more prevalent in the UK, according to Trevor Butterworth in an FT Weekend piece on blogging. But the bias in the NYT and WaPo against G.W.Bush exceeds any level against any sitting President, except for Richard Nixon, in my memory.

Demonizing the opposition is the Democrats' way of obscuring the sad fact that they themselves lack any policy initiatives of their own, and are simply against the status quo. Nancy Pelosi seems to think that the news media will waft the Democrats into a majority in the House and Senate in the fall of this year.

That might happen, but the US national press is becoming a bit like the Middle East press I used to read in Lebanon, where various parties owned papers and various countries like Libya and Syria owned other papers and the truth had to by and large be squeezed out of the foreign press.

But at the moment, the U.S. mainstream media reflects the conurbations on the East and Left Coasts, by and large, and the "flyover" red states aren't going to change much if they are ignored or condescended to.