“ABC” on The Daily Caller

Sen. John McCain joined ABC’s “Good Morning America” Thursday to discuss the crisis in Egypt, refusing to critique the administration’s response to the situation. (more)

Republicans say a proliferation of sympathetic media outlets will make it easier for them to get their message across in the debate over health care and entitlement reform. (more)

1.) FCIC dissenters defend bailing out Wall Street — Two reports will come out of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission today. The one written by the panel’s liberal majority will blame lax regulation and the banking industry for the collapse of the housing industry. The other, written by commissioners Bill Thomas, a former Republican congressman from California, Keith Hennessey, former chairman of the White House National Economic Council under President George W. Bush, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, spreads the blame more broadly among “investors, creditors, regulators, homebuyers, and politicians,” all of whom must take “personal responsibility.” The dissenters also defended bailing out Wall Street: “For a policymaker, the calculus is simple: if you bail out AIG and you’re wrong, you will have wasted taxpayer money and provoked public outrage,” the paper reads. “If you don’t bail out AIG and you’re wrong, the global financial system collapses. It should be easy to see why policymakers favored action–there was a chance of being wrong either way, and the costs of being wrong without action were far greater than the costs of being wrong with action.” Thank goodness we didn’t destabilize the global financial system, which might have led to really scary stuff, like high unemployment. (more)

So Mean Girls 2 premiered on ABC Family last night, and as Gretchen Wieners might say, it was so not fetch. The flick tells the story of a pretty outsider who transfers to North Shore High, befriends an unpopular artist, and conspires to bring down the Plastics, a group of three snotty, cruel classmates: a devious queen bee, a dumb, promiscuous blonde, and a high-strung brunette. Soon enough, the protagonist gets a makeover and becomes a member of the ruling class herself. It’s only after a major crisis turns the entire school against her that our girl can get back on track and finally rid the school of Plastics once and for all. (more)

For about twenty minutes on Jan. 8, astronaut Mark Kelly thought his wife Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords had died. (more)

1.) Remember: The five worst reactions to the Loughner shooting — Washington never fails to disappoint. While normal people cry in response to tragedy, the buttinskys on Capitol Hill are attempting to legislate away the pain. The Daily Caller’s Chris Moody rounds up the dumbest of the dumb, from a plan to “encase the entire House and Senate floor with Plexiglass so the tourists can’t throw things at members of Congress,” to a Republican-proposed law that would make it illegal to carry a firearm within 1/5 of a mile “of any ‘high-profile’ public official.” In a lapse of judgment that will go unpublished by his base, Democratic Rep. James Clyburn argued that the FCC–on which his daughter is a commissioner–should bring back the Fairness Doctrine. “You cannot yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater and call it free speech and some of what I hear, and is being called free speech, is worse than that.” And people say Congress doesn’t listen… (more)

We all breathed a sigh of relief when the ball fell in New York’s Times Square and the holiday season this year ended without another terror attack — or attempted attack — on our homeland. You’ll recall that on Christmas Day 2009, the notorious “underwear bomber” tried to blow up his jet over Detroit. Young Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian citizen, wanted to take down his Northwest Airlines flight right over Detroit’s airport. Had he succeeded in detonating his BVDs, his victims would not only have been the 288 passengers and crew he was flying with, but doubtless hundreds or thousands on the ground. (more)

Every year, it seems a new, high-profile Federal Communications Commission case ends up in court. (more)

Remember when Wired’s debut issue for the iPad sold more than 100,000 times in June? It looks like it will be a while before that type of performance is seen again. Digital sales dropped toward the end of 2010 for all the magazines that make those figures available to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. (more)

1.) Unethical Google alumnus leaves White House one day after FCC passes net neutrality — Andrew McLaughlin should have left the White House in March, when he was found to be using his personal gmail account while at work, or even in May, when internal memos revealed McLaughlin was coordinating PR with Google’s U.S. public policy director. Instead, the nation’s deputy CTO waited until the FCC passed its net neutrality bill to bid adieu to government life. According to WaPo, “McLaughlin, who previously worked as a Google executive, oversaw many of the White House’s Internet policy initiatives including Internet access regulations, the expansion of broadband connections and global cybersecurity.” Not mentioned in WaPo’s writeup is Google’s ardent support for net neutrality regulations. McLaughlin will dive back into the startup world, creating products for state and local governments. He “also said he will return to teaching law, which he did at Harvard University’s Berkman Center seven years ago.” Interesting factoid: The Berkman center is the far-left think thank that the FCC commissioned to produce objective reports on the apparent need for net neutrality regulations. (more)

Last night on Barbara’s Walters’ annually insipid “10 Most Fascinating People” special, America was shown such a textbook example of media bias, hypocrisy and incompetence that it bordered on parody. Unfortunately, almost no one knows the full magnitude of what I am referring to because numerous important truths have been conveniently omitted from the narrative surrounding the story. (more)

Diane Sawyer has been berating her “ABC World News” producers for repeatedly sending her to the wrong continent for breaking news, a network source said. (more)

Despite frequently low scores from the show’s judges, Bristol Palin was chosen by voters to advance to the final round of ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” as pop singer Brandy was eliminated. (more)

Tea Party leaders in both the House and Senate have come out strong after Mitch McConnell’s call to ban all earmarks with Sen. Jim DeMint calling it the beginning a cultural change in Washington. (more)

LOS ANGELES — Late last week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was still coming to terms with that most deeply confounding of European filmmakers, Jean-Luc Godard. (more)

Update: MONDAY 11:35 a.m. (more)

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez said Sunday that Democrats are open to temporarily extending the Bush-era tax cuts for Americans earning more than $250,000 per year, which are set to expire at the end of this year. (more)

Media Research Center, a watchdog group, documented bias of evening newscasts on ABC, NBC and CBS from September 1 through October 25, and released a new report Wednesday highlighting its findings. (more)

In an environment in which Democrats all over the country are fighting for their political survival, approval ratings are low and the party is at risk of losing its grip on Congress, two high-profile Democrats are thriving – Bill and Hillary Clinton. (more)

Christine O’Donnell said she would close the gap in the Delaware Senate race if national Republicans would give her additional support, but that type of help is not going to come, according to NRSC Chairman John Cornyn. (more)