Howard Kurtz got a double shot off against John Kerry today. On page A6, he has a Washington Post Ad Watch column that criticizes a claim Kerry makes in a recent TV commercial and then, right below it, he has a news article saying the same thing.

Geez, wasn’t one slam enough?

Maybe his wife said to run it twice or he would sleep on the coach.

Sometimes the right-wing is its own worse enemy. Just two days after Jack Wheeler self-destructs in a Washington Times column that called Hillary Clinton a bi-sexual and said that women who bought Bill Clinton’s new book were prostitutes, we have Krauthammer’s defense of Cheney’s obscenity. He suggests he would say the same to Al Gore.

The hypocrisy of the right is often stunning.

E.J. Dionne’s column in today’s Washington Post ponders the consequence of an extremely partisan Congress likely after the elections, no matter who wins. Of course, Bush has the better prospects in that it’s unlikely that the House would be in Democratic control, even if Kerry wins.

Other pundits have questioned whether Kerry’s options would be so constrained by the deficits Bush would leave behind that a new administration could do little more than ask Americans to swallow the castor oil admixture of spending restraints and higher taxes.

As we look post-Nov. 2, no matter who wins, the most intriguing question is what happens to the energy created by the dump-Bush movement. Will the unprecedented contributions by small donors and the activism by the fresh grassroots result in a movement that could impact either administration?

I sense a near revolt if Bush wins. He’ll likely ignore it, but will it be strong enough to form a coalition of moderate Republicans, as Dionne suggests, to rein in a lame duck Bush-Cheney juggernaut? Even if moderate Senate Republicans hunker down, nothing will stop the executive branch of a second Bush administration from running amok. What kind of civil protest would be required to stop it? And is the energy there?

Even if Kerry wins, will the grassroots, many of whom consider Kerry too cautious and moderate in his proposals, have the legs to lead a transformation of the country? Will we really see health care become a right, not a privilege of the rich? Will the economic disparity between rich and poor be addressed in a meaningful way?

There is a palpable fear of what a second Bush reign would bring. Even among the upper middle class people gathered for the MoveOn town hall meeting in Fairfax, Va., that I attended earlier this week, there was a deep mistrust of Bush. One guy said he was convinced that if the election were close — and by every indication it will be – he was convinced the Bushies would “steal” the election through some legalistic maneuver or electronic skullduggery. Many folks nodded their heads

When that kind of fear and mistrust spreads, who knows what revolt may result if Bush wins. But if he loses, will newly activated Democrats think Bush in Crawford is good enough? I hope not. There’s much work to be done – and undone.

Travelling. If you like, talk among yourselves via Comments.

Fahrenheit 9/11” has received overwhelmingly positive reviews. But to read Howard Kurtz online this morning, you wouldn’t know it. He allows critics of the film more than 2,000 words on his Washington Post blog to bash the film.

OK, you say, that’s fine to hear the other side, as minuscule as it might be in terms of critics. But read Kurtz regularly and you detect a conservative bias in his columns, both online and in print, and in his weekly online chats.

Does his wife make him do it?

But before we look at why, let’s look at just the recent record.

Calling his piece this morning “Moore: Genius or Liar?”, Kurtz makes it sound as if most critics are panning the movie.

What’s most fascinating about the Michael Moore coverage is that while conservatives are shredding his film, even many liberals say that it’s a heavy-handed piece of propaganda filled with exaggerations, if not outright falsehoods.

The other day on his online chat he was asked to comment about possible bias against Bush in the Iraq War coverage.

Well, [reporters] certainly deserve respect. That doesn’t mean their coverage should be above criticism. It’s certainly true that the murders, bombings and attacks have gotten a huge amount of coverage, understandably, and that this has overshadowed some of the quieter signs of progress, such as building schools or extending electricity. It’s hard to strike the right balance when people are being killed every day and when journalists themselves have become targets.

In other words, he suggests that reporters are covering the violence only because they are subject to it.

In his column Monday, he devoted one of the items to a media group that is trying to prove there is a liberal bias and quotes from the group’s web site, citing “[c]omplaints that some journalists were too hard on Ronald Reagan, too easy on Bill Clinton and too critical of Ken Starr.” Too easy on Clinton? That’s laughable enough to question the seriousness of the group.

The very next piece is designed to cast doubt on the credibility and objectivity of Jackie Bensen, a reporter for the local NBC affiliate in Washington who lives with a police officer. You can tell the agenda of the reporter when at the top of the piece he writes, “She sees no problem with the fact that she lives with an assistant D.C. police chief, Peter Newsham, who oversees ethics investigations and disciplinary reviews as head of the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility.”

Meaning, of course, that he does see a problem with it.

“It’s ironic that Kurtz would suggest a conflict of interest between a couple. Kurtz is married to Sheri Annis, who is a GOP public relations strategist supporting the re-election of George W. Bush. Annis also was part of Arnold Schwartzneggar’s brain trust in his recall election. She also worked on a California voter proposition that would force immigrant children to speak English in school. She appears regularly on Chris Matthews’s “Hardball” program as a conservative pundit and writes for the National Review. She also worked on a campaign to stop “living wage” laws. She even calls her company Fourth Estate Strategies.

Not a bad idea, of course, when your husband is a prominent member of the Fourth Estate as a Washington Post columnist whose work is seen daily and, in another bit of irony, hosts CNN’s Reliable Sources, which is a program that is supposed to look critically at the media, his Post being one of the 800 lbs. gorillas of the industry.

I wonder if Kurtz minds if I infer that he “sees no problem with” that.

Editors’s Note: This article was edited for punctuation and grammar after it was originally posted.

And now for today’s sports news, we turn to Biff Brokaw, reporting for ESPN:

[Vice President Dick] Cheney, who visited both clubhouses after batting practice [at the Yankees game last night], watched part of the game from the box of Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and part from a first-row seat next to the Yankees dugout, where he sat between New York Gov. George Pataki and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Cheney was booed when he was shown on the right-field videoboard during the seventh-inning stretch.

Sources tell us that Cheney wanted to say “Go fuck yourself,” but the Secret Service said they couldn’t protect him if the Yankees fans attacked – and they were not sure they wanted to.

A deep rift in the Republican Party has left Congress unable to pass a budget this year, raising the probability that, for the third time in three decades, lawmakers will not agree on a detailed blueprint for government spending and tax policy.

The budget meltdown was triggered by a feud between conservative Republicans who favor continuing to cut taxes in the face of record budget deficits and GOP moderates who are pushing for curbs on tax cuts and are reluctant to slash spending. Even a face-saving effort in the House to impose federal spending curbs blew up just after midnight Friday when 72 Republicans joined a united Democratic Party to torpedo the leadership-backed bill.

Substitute “Assembly” for “Congress” and this could be a lead in the Richmond Times Dispatch last March. It seems what happened in the this past session of the Commonwealth’s General Assembly is being replayed at the national level, where moderate Republicans are pushing back against the rabid tax-cutters who have hijacked the party. The Washington Post reports.

Both conservative and moderate Republicans say the fight is over the future of their party. Neither side has given an inch. So, two months after the House and Senate passed budget blueprints for the fiscal year that begins in October, Republican negotiators have hit a brick wall in trying to reconcile the two plans.

… At issue is the future of tax cutting in the face of budget deficits that will swell well above $400 billion this year. Senate Democrats, joined by Republicans John McCain (Ariz.), Olympia J. Snowe (Maine), Susan Collins (Maine) and Lincoln D. Chafee (R.I.), secured an amendment to the Senate budget that would force any future tax cuts to be offset by equivalent spending cuts or tax increases. House Republicans, pushed hard by the White House, refused to go along, demanding instead that such rules apply only to spending increases for Medicare, Medicaid and other entitlements.

If it continues, the fight could eventually have significant practical implications. Since President Bush came to office, Congress has passed tax cuts worth $1.7 trillion over 10 years, but all will expire by 2011, many before then. If the Senate’s “pay-as-you-go” — or “paygo” — budget rules are in place then, lawmakers will be faced with allowing tax levels to abruptly return to the higher levels of Bill Clinton’s presidency or cutting federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars a year to preserve the Bush tax cuts.

Congress is different than the Virginia House of Delegates, of course. (Hell, Congress is often different from a lot, including reality.) At the federal level, there can be budget deficits; Virginia must pass a balanced budget.

Just like in Virginia, however, conservative Congressional Republicans have managed to be their own worst enemies.

Without a budget, the Senate will lack parliamentary language that would allow senators to extend three expiring tax cuts with a simple majority vote in the 100-member body. Instead, Senate leaders will have to gather at least 60 votes to ensure that taxes do not rise at the end of the year.

House Republican leaders had also hoped to use the budget to quietly raise the $7.4 trillion federal debt limit, which the government could hit before the end of the summer. Without a budget, that limit may have to be raised by a separate vote on the House floor, which is political castor oil for Republicans in an election year.

And just like in Virginia, the national GOP leaders live in la-la land.

There are limits to the effectiveness of spending cuts. Even if Congress had eliminated every penny of the $438 billion in domestic discretionary spending this year, every education and health program, every homeland security effort, national park, interstate highway and federal prison, the government would still find itself in the red.

When House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) called the budget fiasco “Republican Budget Failure Redux,” he might have been referring to this year’s Virginia General Assembly.

You might want to drop an email, especially if you’re a Republican, thanking Snowe, McCain, Chaffee and Collins for standing up for prudent, responsible budgeting.

Thanks to Alan Bennett for point us to the interview between Michael Moore and CBS’s Hanna Storm. The link is here. (Scroll down and a little to the right for the video link.)

The interview brushes upon some issues of what journalists should be doing. Certainly, there’s no question that even the mainstream media was cheerleading during the invasion and did little to question beforehand the administration’s arguments for the war. The New York Times editors and the ombudsman for The Washington Post have issued mea culpas, as have some columnists.

Storm makes the point that journalists try to present both sides of the issue. That is lazy journalism, and it’s practiced by those supposedly at the top of their profession. Regurgitating a lie is not fair, balanced or objective journalism. Fair doesn’t means misrepresenting or stretching a truth to conform to one’s ideology. Fair means being fair to the viewer or reader that the journalist is presenting an accurate portrayal of the facts. Balanced means presenting both sides of the truth, as best as can be determined. It isn’t balanced to present the truth on one side and outright falsehoods from the other. And objective means an objective review of the facts. It doesn’t mean allowing one side to misrepresent the truth.

Moore admits Fahrenheit 9/11 isn’t a news story; it’s an opinion column for the eyes and ears. Storm’s demanding F 9/11 conform to breaking news standards isn’t just disingenuous, but given the performance of CBS News during the invasion, it’s hypocritical.

Now that Fahrenheit 9/11 is a box office hit — it has garnered greater receipts this weekend than originally estimated — its DVD release is uncertain. Is it before the election or after?

Meanwhile, the quote by Richard Roeper, of Ebert & Roeper, “Everyone in the Country should see this film!” is being banned in movie ads by the MPAA because it encourages underage kids to see the movie.

By the time they become of age, they’ll be drafted.

And in the consider the source department, it’s being reported that “[t]he Carlyle Group, one company that is the subject of intense scrutiny in Michael Moore’s anti-Bush documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11″ is one of three investment firms that now own movie theater chain Loews Cineplex Entertainment.”

Maybe the doubling of theatres showing the film that was scheduled for this week won’t happen after all.

I went to a local “meet-up” (though it wasn’t organized through Meet-Up but rather by MoveOn.org) in central Fairfax, Va. Good group of folks who generally sounded the “angry” theme. We get criticized for that by conservatives who suggest its evidence of a psychological failing. I feel that not getting angry is really screwed up.

There to discuss Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” and hear Moore and Move-On folks talk about how to turn anger into action, the group of 25-20 people represented the spectrum from dogged, experienced organizers to the neophytes. One of the latter is an acquaintance of mine who said she was very aware of the issues but not sure what she could do to help.

I suspect there are a lot of folks like that who don’t realize that winning elections is less about understanding the issues and more about dragging someone by the collar to the voting booth. Sure enough, Moore, who shared some of the reactions he’s gotten from movie goers, also offered advice.

First, take off election day. Not a bad idea. We need help Nov. 2 seeing that people who should and probably do care make it to the polls.

Another of Moore’s suggestions was to adopt five non-voters and convince them to vote for Kerry, then bring them to the polls and party hardy afterwards. Hey, the party alone has me sold.

MoveOn had its own suggestions. One was to organize a phone bank on July 11 to register new voters. One or two folks at the Fairfax meeting offered to host one and about half the crowd said they’d show up and make the calls.

Commonwealth Commonsense will be happy to post information about this effort for Virginians. I’ll be out of the country July 11 but can probably post until then.

At our meeting was one vocal Republican, brought there at the urging of a friend. He took umbrage at a wisecrack, saying that we shouldn’t paint all Republicans as right wing nuts. And he’s absolutely right. Even I on this blog am guilty of imprecise monikers. Many Republicans are moderates who are as appalled as Democrats about the direction Bush is taking us. Indeed, if we can each convince one Republican to vote for Kerry, the race is a done deal. That’s more likely to happen if we don’t accuse them all of being wingers.

Most of the folks in the F9/11 theatres are in the choir. But not all. If each of us can get even one moderate Republican to take a look at Fahrenheit 9/11, we may have a chance to defeat Bush. And that’s what the meetings last night – more than 4,000 of them with 55,000 people attending according to MoveOn – was all about.