The Pittsburgh Tribune Review Editorial Board. Again.

I think they're just playing with my head this time. This is just too easy.

Take a look at today's "Sunday Pops." It ends with this:

Rocco Landesman, president of the taxpayer teat-suckling National Endowment for the Arts, says "Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar." Given that the president handpicked Mr. Landesman, can a revival of the term "bootlicker" be far behind?

First let's start off saying that they're spinning the quote into something it isn't. Here's a far more reliable source (Fox "News") with the fuller quotation:

Putting the president in the pantheon with such pencil-pushing powerhouses as the man who was, literally, the Czar of all Czars, Landesman said that since Obama "actually writes his own books," he's the most powerful man to be a true writer in the 2,000 years since Caesar strode the narrow earth.

"That has to be good for American artists," he said.

See that? Landesman wasn't saying Obama was the most powerful writer (or indeed any sort of "powerful writer") since Julius Caesar but that he was the most powerful leader since Julius Caesar who writes his own books.

See the difference? Fox "News" doesn't and neither does Richard Mellon Scaife's brain trust.

But that's also besides the point. Notice the charge the brain trust is making: the "bootlickingness" of Obama appointing the NEA head who then "praises" the man who appointed him.

If it were as Fox describes, it would be at the very least distasteful. That being said, take a look at another one of the "Pops":

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's "Are you serious?" when asked if a federal mandate requiring uninsured Americans to buy health insurance (or be fined for not buying it) is constitutional should tell you all you need to know about our Constitution-defying "leaders." As even the Congressional Budget Office notes, it would be an unprecedented federal mandate to buy a good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States. And that, folks, is anathema to the Framers, the Founders and the Constitution itself. How long can it be before your neighborhood hardware stores start stocking tar and feathers?

Now you know where I'm going with this one, don't you?

Where did the story come from?

That's right: The CNSNews service:

When CNSNews.com asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday where the Constitution authorized Congress to order Americans to buy health insurance--a mandate included in both the House and Senate versions of the health care bill--Pelosi dismissed the question by saying: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

I guess we gotta do this again. CNSNews is run by Brent Bozell and the good folks at the Media Research Center.

Yes, the same Media Research Center that received $200,000 in 2006, $325,000 in 2007, and $325,000 in 2008 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation - a foundation run by Richard Mellon Scaife who owns the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the paper that ran that editorial.

Scaife's journalistic circle jerk continues.