Atlas Juggs the New York Times is doing a fabulous job letting Joe Lieberman tell them what their journalistic responsibilities are:

[T]he F.E.C. does not require the campaign to release such a report to journalists or the public, only show it to the commission on request. And since the Lamont campaign has filed a complaint with the F.E.C., that could happen.

Which will no doubt happen, if at all, only after the election.  Which would make most journalists take seriously the responsibility to get to the bottom of things now, but no, not the World's Worst Blog (evidently a slush fund larger than Nixon used for the White House Plumbers doesn't merit an article in the Times itself):

The Lieberman campaign did not dispute that the amount was unusually large, but called the accusations baseless, and said there was no evidence of wrongdoing, and therefore no reason to release the journal to reporters.

Meanwhile, the Times' effort to spread Lieberman propaganda continues unabated.  After what they claim was an "exhaustive" search, they leap to Joe's defense with this conclusion:

Never, in the statements reviewed, did Mr. Lieberman utter the words 'stay the course.' 

Which is, of course, the new Republican lie du jour -- George W. Bush has been making the rounds with the same claim.  Fortunately, there is Media Matters, who finds this LieberQuote from Fox News Sunday:

We can do better. I will do better. I will make it international. I will stay the course, and I'll create a stable, democratizing, modernizing Iraq, which would be a tremendous step forward in the Middle East and the Islamic world and in our war against terrorism.

And then there's this, from the Hartford Courant:

"I thought the president gave the strongest case that I can remember him giving about why we went in and why we have to stay the course," Lieberman said.

Fox News & Friends:

"We want to not only stay the course; we want to achieve victory."

Hannity & Colmes:

LIEBERMAN: Well, let's put it this way. What I'm most happy about is that he said that he will stay the course in Iraq until we finish the job, and the Iraqis are in control of their own destiny.

CNN's American Morning:

LIEBERMAN: Well, I agree to the extent that we have to stay the course of the policy we chose in overthrowing Saddam and helping the Iraqi people become free, which will really make us a lot more secure and set the terrorists back. But not to stay the same policy that we followed after Saddam was overthrown, because it didn't work.

When Ned Lamont had lunch with the reporters from the Washington bureau of the Times, they teed him up by asking a question regarding Joe Lieberman's statements about Bill Clinton in 1998.  The next day, Joe just happened to have an email written by Ned to him at the time, which the Times then mis-characterized to Joe's benefit (shocking).

I'm a partisan and I write from a partisan perspective, but I try to do it honestly and I admit where I'm coming from.  I don't think there is any way these people can say the same.

Update:  QOTD:  "Maybe Bush can show them how to use 'the Google.'" (Don Waller)