I was at the Media Research Center's 20th Anniversary Dinner last night, where the media watchdog group gave out its less-than-coveted Dishonors Awards for the year's worst moments in liberal reporting.

The night was a laugh riot, as it always is, and a celebration of the fact that now, 20 years after MRC's founding, there are many more people in the media criticism game and many more ways to make conservative voices heard above the leftist din of the MSM.

Katie and I had some audio difficulties with my part of the video, so I made a bit of a highlight reel for you from the dinner featuring Michael Steele (running again, by the way!), Pat Sajak, Herman Cain, Mary Matalin, El Rushbo, and of course the heavy hitters of journalism-- Katie Couric and Rosie O'Donnell.

Update:  "It is finished."

Sorry to be gone so long. I was in and out of the office all day yesterday, running around, and attended the Media Research Center's Dishonors Awards ceremony until late in the night last night.

I'll have a video up shortly.

On her wedding day, Hart wore a knee-length white skirt, a white blazer and strappy white shoes. The 21-year-old carried a mixed bouquet and clutched her father's arm as she walked into a room at the National Guard armory in Inver Grove Heights. She continued to hold his arm during the ceremony, as her witness stood to her left, and about a dozen family members and friends sat and watched.

She watched Rhode's image on the video screen. He stood in his combat uniform, with his best man at his side and his hands clasped in front of him. Every now and then he broke into a huge grin.

"Abe and Mandy, I don't know if you could've imagined your day could be quite like this," joked Lt. Col. Joel Severson, the National Guard chaplain who performed the service.

Hart said the wedding wasn't the fairy tale ceremony she had imagined, but she was glad the National Guard helped make it happen. The couple plans an in-person ceremony in Florida next summer, and they'll live in Shakopee, Minn., once Rhode returns from Iraq.

Or, that's what it sounded like to me. Nonetheless, he's right. We deserved better from Republicans, but the Dems are far, far worse. Unfortunately, as we saw in '06, that's not exactly a rallying cry:

The victor of California 50--the guy who was never supposed to get back to Congress because Republicans were deader than dead due to Duke Cunningham's dereliction of duty. Brian Bilbray, who is incidentally laid back, wry, and pretty entertaining, talks about what went wrong in '06, irresponsible Dems, and pork finding its way into budgets through various secret pathways:

I'm over at a Bloggers' Row event at the Capitol today, listening to the Republicans talk mostly about budgets, the Dem-proposed biggest tax cut increase in American history, and the Iraq supplemental bill. I'm shooting some small-time video that I'm gonna post for y'all.

More in just a sec...

Update: Here's Paul Ryan, who authored the Republican alternative to the Democratic budget, which preserves the tax reforms of the last six years while reforming entitlements and starting to pay off debts.

Reid was just talking, and says they have cloture in the morning tomorrow, noting that there are more than 100 amendments to be dealt with.

The basics:

Senate Democrats struggled Tuesday to line up support for a non-binding timeline for a troop withdrawal from Iraq, confronting strong opposition from Republican lawmakers and a renewed veto threat from the Bush administration...

Similar legislation drew only 48 votes in the Senate earlier this month, but Democratic leaders hoped that changes made since then would be enough to persuade holdout Sens. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mark Pryor of Arkansas to swing behind the proposal and ensure its survival.

Alternatively, they courted Republican Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a vocal critic of the war, hoping he would cast a decisive vote.

Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., led the drive to scuttle the provision.

The Cochran amendment is the one that was just defeated. Red State reports on the Nelson cave-in-progress:

Senator Nelson is leaning towards caving on the Supplemental bill, arguing that because his benchmark language was included in the Supplemental bill, he’d vote for the Supplemental, including the surrender) language that he’d opposed just two weeks previously.   That’s an odd position to take, since the benchmark language was simply tossed on top of the bill without consequence or any affect whatsoever.   It’s purely there to provide cover for Nelson to sign onto the Moveon.org strategy.
 
Senator Pryor is still on the fence.

McConnell will not try to filibuster the bill, instead sending it straight to the veto pen.

"Our goal is to pass it quickly," said McConnell, R-Ky. "Our troops need the money."

Andy Roth on Lou Dobbs taking his turn Gore-style-testifyin' this week on the dangers of letting people make voluntary deals and trades all over the world, willy-nilly.

Is it the lemony-fresh scent of Randy "Duke" Cunningham's fall from grace? Or, the sparkle of fresh negative advertising popping up earlier than ever? Perhaps it's the squeaky-clean sound of fundraising records being broken? My, oh my, how things have changed since McCain-Feingold was enacted, eh?

Um, no. Politics is still politics five years later. And, the bill that was supposed to get the money, corruption, and negativity out of politics has succeeded in dealing a blow only to our access to free political speech and John McCain's popularity among conservatives, both of which have dropped dramatically.

Sadly for the politicians who put this brilliant cure-all elixir for politics into place, hurting the First Amendment and the senior senator from Arizona were not the stated goals of the legislation, as Ryan Sager notes this week in his N.Y. Sun column.

Ouch. (Read the whole thing.)

Last but not least — and here we get to the real nub of campaign-finance regulation — McCain-Feingold supporters promised that the bill would curb the scourge of "negative" and "dirty" advertising. "It is about slowing political advertising," Ms. Cantwell said during the debate. "Making sure the flow of negative ads by outside interest groups does not continue to permeate the airwaves."

Of course, curbing and "slowing" speech critical of politicians by "outside interest groups" (a.k.a. "citizens") is in no way a permissible goal under the First Amendment. But, ultimately, the politicians may have failed in this most nefarious goal. And it's not just the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who showed the way around it.

While the Supreme Court has so far upheld the patently anti-Constitutional ban on advertising by citizens' groups 30 days before a primary and 60 days before a general election, the rise of Internet politics may eventually supercede this atrocity. Witness the anti-Hillary Clinton "1984" ad that caused such a stir on YouTube just last week. Such ads, cheaper than dirt (it costs money to distribute dirt, YouTube's free), will only be more important with every election cycle.

For this reason, look for Congress to start taking an interest in "unregulated" Internet speech any day now. Money has never been the issue. Cleansing our speech of impure thoughts about politicians is the real agenda.

Yep, not only was McCain-Feingold an assault on free political speech; it was a sure, snotty nose under the tent for the good "reformers" to reform all the other kinds of speech they found distasteful, as we saw with the assault on 527s (colluded in by a lot of people who should have known better. coughBushcough.).

The five-year anniversary is a time for BCRA-supporters to congratulate themselves on whatever perceived victories they can find and sound the call for more regulation! "We've made progress, but not enough," they say.

Think I'm wrong? Check out this typical press release from a pro-McCain-Feingold group in North Carolina:

This is the way it will go for all time until that law's done away with because that's the way it always goes with people who rely on government regulation to control markets that want to be free. It never works in the first place and, somehow, the solution is always more of the same. A few more laws, a few more regulations, a few more fines and fees and massive appropriations bills, and we'll have this free speech thing under control, with nary a nasty word for incumbent politicians forevermore.

Happy anniversary, McCain-Feingold!

In light of the Webb staff's firearm oopsie at the Capitol yesterday, Confederate Yankee is hoping Sen. Webb will be all in favor of knocking down the D.C. gun ban.

Let me see if I understand this:

Congressmen and Senators can bring firearms into heavily-protectedfederal buildings guarded by permanent on-duty police officers, butresidents of Washington, DC are not allowed to have weapons to defendthemselves or their families in their homes.

It goes without saying-- but I'll say it, anyway, because it's fun-- that a Republican senator would be getting the tongue-lashing of his life from the national press and fellow members of Congress if this had happened on the other side of the aisle.

This time, in his liver. After having his entire colon removed in 2005, doctors found a suspicious growth six months ago, which was removed Monday and determined to be malignant.

Doctors determined that it was cancerous, and found during the surgery, which was exploratory, that his cancer had metastasized, or spread, to his liver, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

She said Snow is comfortable and feeling fine after his surgery and has pledged to aggressively fight the disease with an as-yet-to-be-determined chemotherapy treatment course. He will be inthe hospital recovering from the surgery, a major procedure, for about a week.

"He said he's going to beat it again," Perino said in an emotional morning briefing with White House reporters. "When I talked to him, he was in very good spirits."

Perino said Snow also gave her some instructions to pass on to reporters: "Tell them not to bug me." He also thanked reporters and others for the outpouring of good wishes he has received.

Update: The President's statement:

THE PRESIDENT:  This morning I got a phone call from Tony Snow.  He called me from the hospital.  He told me that when they went in and operated on him they found cancer.  It's a recurrence of the cancer that he thought that he had successfully dealt with in the past.  His attitude is, one, that he is not going to let this whip him, and he's upbeat.  My attitude is, is that we need to pray for him, and for his family. 

 

Obviously, a lot of folks here in the White House worry a lot about their friend, as do Laura and I.  And so my message to Tony is, stay strong; a lot of people love you and care for you and will pray for you.  And we're hoping for all the best.  I'm looking forward to the day that he comes back to the White House and briefs the press corps on the decisions that I'm making and why I'm making them.  In the meantime, I hope our fellow citizens offer a prayer to he and his family. 

 

Thank you. 

Update: The courageous HuffPo 'Deathwatch for Freedom' continues. How could such a liar not have cancer?