We can forgive Pittsburgh Steelers for avoiding the mention of the name of a certain quarterback who plays for the Denver Broncos in the coming days.

Related forgiveness does not extend to Jesse J. Holland at the Associated Press concerning his coverage of the Supreme Court’s u-u-u-unanimous ruling today that religious workers cannot sue for job discrimination. As seen here at a Weekly Standard excerpt, the unanimity of the ruling was in the first sentence of the wire service’s initial report. Now look how deep it’s buried in the 4:10 p.m. version of Holland’s report, and how the AP writer attempted to water down the ruling’s significance in the interim (bolds are mine):

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The 8:52 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. national headlines page at the Associated Press’s main site this morning teased a story about how twenty — wow, a whole twenty — Occupy Wall Street protesters spent the night at Zuccotti Park after barricades which had been up for almost two months were removed. Not only that, but the related brief story (saved here as a graphic for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes), has an accompanying series of four photos (most stories usually have just one).

Here’s the story as of 8:57 a.m.:

There were more than 20 people in thousands of McDonald’s locations this morning, and that’s not news (as it shouldn’t be). So why is this a national item?

Note how the story’s writers describe last November’s police action as a “raid.” It could easily have been written to say that “Police evicted protesters on November 15.” But that would have been fair and balanced. Can’t have that.

This saturation coverage of OWS couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that the AP’s labor union, the News Media Guild, has been open and vocal about its support for the Occupy movement since the beginning, could it? No, I’m sure that the process used to determine this story’s importance was completely objective and had no underlying agenda (/sarc).

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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BizzyBlog Update, 11:50 a.m.: Well, at least it’s at the bottom of the top ten stories now. At the time of the post, it was third.

The former Commerce Secretary and Chicago machine politician has never been sufficiently leftist as far as Beltway Democrats are concerned, so the fact that he has been in essence forced out of his White House chief of staff position sooner than expected should surprise no one.

Here are two paragraphs from a late-2009 op-ed in the Washington Post that gets to the essence of the problem:

All that is required for the Democratic Party to recover its political footing is to acknowledge that the agenda of the party’s most liberal supporters has not won the support of a majority of Americans — and, based on that recognition, to steer a more moderate course on the key issues of the day, from health care to the economy to the environment to Afghanistan.

For liberals to accept that inescapable reality is not to concede permanent defeat. Rather, let them take it as a sign that they must continue the hard work of slowly and steadily persuading their fellow citizens to embrace their perspective. In the meantime, liberals — and, indeed, all of us — should have the humility to recognize that there is no monopoly on good ideas, as well as the long-term perspective to know that intraparty warfare will only relegate the Democrats to minority status, which would be disastrous for the very constituents they seek to represent.

Bill didn’t understand — maybe he does now — that the left doesn’t give a damn about “the hard work of slowly and steadily persuading” anyone. Instead of persuasion, their goal is to impose their will on the rest of us. They do this by serially misrepresenting themselves and what they really believe while packing the courts with sympaticos and engaging in ruthless regulation and litigation. When all of that fails, as Barack Obama has shown since the first of the year, they go to Constitution-violating executive fiat.

No wonder he was so out of place.

Rules are here. Possible comment fodder may follow later. Other topics are also fair game.

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From Ontario, California:

January 5, 2012

Len Shafe thought he was just tired.

Shafe was 48 and healthy, with a third-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do.

He didn’t smoke and had no prior medical problems — not even allergies.

And he was having a stroke.

It was 5 a.m. on May 16, 2011 when Shafe told his wife, Tammy, he just needed to sleep a little more.

Tammy, though, noticed something was wrong. She shouted for their eldest son, Justin, 25, who was in the next room.

“My eyes were going from side to side and my speech was pretty slurred,” Shafe recalled.

His brain cells were dying, yet he insisted he merely needed more sleep.

Using his smartphone, Justin found stroke symptoms on the Internet. Sudden slurred speech was among them.

“We have to call an ambulance,” he said. They called 911.

Shafe, drooling, began going in and out of consciousness and eventually couldn’t speak.

Justin and his brother Josh, 23, carried their father to the first floor.

Shafe said he knew paramedics were talking to him, but “I had no control” and couldn’t reply.

He compared it to watching a movie and reaching “the end of an old reel.” Images flashed through his mind, punctuated by moments of blackness.

Tammy joined him in the ambulance. They were soon “crashing through the doors” of Belleville General Hospital.

And because the family had called 911, the medical team was ready.

“From the moment I came through the doors this procedure kicked in,” said Shafe.

That procedure is Code Stroke, a protocol introduced at BGH in December 2010. It’s a strict set of rules for treating stroke victims.

It can change and even save lives — but there is a limited time in which it can be used.

Registered nurse Charlene Quinn recalled Shafe wasn’t moving.

“Because he was so young it was so devastating to us,” she said.

A nursing shortage at QHC last year meant many long hours and low morale. But all that gets forgotten when a case like Shafe’s occurs, she said.

“That renews my faith in nursing and explains the reasons why we do what we do,” said Quinn. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Violent animal-rights radicals are claiming responsibility for an early Sunday morning fire at a California beef processing plant, and have described how they did it to prove they were really responsible.

A brief unbylined Associated Press report describes the perpetrators as "activists" — twice:

Geez, what does someone have to do at least be called a group of “militants”?

Even Janet Napolitano would call them "domestic terrorists."

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.