Of Ratings and Rantings

"President Bill Clinton's angry defense of his administration's efforts to eliminate Osama bin Laden has set off a new round of charges about whether Democrats or Republicans are to blame for allowing the Al Qaeda leader to remain a national security threat for more than a decade.

"Just five weeks before congressional elections, Democrats have seized on the former president's angry retort, during a television interview Sunday, to accuse the Bush administration of dropping the ball that Clinton handed over , while the GOP insists Clinton's defensiveness on the air proves its contention that he was asleep at the switch."

And speaking of the aforementioned Bill O'Reilly , "I don't get invited to parties," he tells Newsweek.

" If you had to spend an afternoon with Keith Olbermann, Al Franken or Frank Rich, whom would you pick? "I wouldn't choose any of them. There is nothing on earth that could make me engage any of those people."

More controversy for Nancy Grace, courtesy of Daily News columnists Rush & Molloy :

"Last year, Hyperion published Grace's book 'Objection! How High-Priced Defense Attorneys, Celebrity Defendants, and a 24/7 Media Have Hijacked Our Criminal Justice System.'

"Grace was happy to hype the book, which spent five weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. She was less eager to draw attention to the fact that she'd lifted huge, verbatim passages in the book from that newspaper . . .

"Sources say Hyperion president Robert S. Miller was willing to accept Grace's claim that it was an "inadvertent" error. But he insisted that Grace alert The Times in a letter that promised the 'error' would be fixed in future printings.

"Word is, Grace refused to write that letter -- provoking Hyperion's lawyers to remind her that, under her contract, she was responsible to hold the publisher harmless if The Times sued over copyright infringement."

Will the Tribune Co., which has been demanding big cutbacks at papers like the L.A. Times, go private? For that, we turn to its namesake newspaper, the Chicago Tribune :

"Sources with knowledge of the company's thinking say management's favored solution would be to spin off many of Tribune's roughly two dozen television stations in a tax-advantaged transaction, unload several of the smaller papers and take the rest of the company private in a leveraged buyout."

Yesterday I mentioned Tom Edsall's critique of liberal media bias in an interview with Hugh Hewitt. Here's the transcript if you want to check out the whole thing.