By JAY AMBROSE, Scripps Howard News Service

Here's what you do if you want an immediate demonstration of media bias in political coverage and to see trap doors open on the heads of leftists throughout the land as little birds step out singing, "Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo." You speak the name of Sarah Palin and let it be known she's traveling about the land saying stuff.

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas recently joined commentators Rush Limbaugh, Patrick Buchanan and others in using the word "socialist" to describe President Barack Obama and his policies, and we all know what's coming: a verbal bombardment.

Give Senator Mark Warner a star for enunciating some insightful thoughts. No, give him five stars, for he got it absolutely right the other day when he said the emphasis in the campaign to re-jigger health care has been wrongheaded and that the main thing was runaway spending.

Suppose Major Nidal Hassan had called a meeting of agents of the FBI and top officers of Fort Hood, and then said something like this:

Legalize drugs, advocates say, and you'll, decrease drug use, virtually empty our prisons, end the violence between cartels in Mexico and move toward a more humane society in which abuse is treated as an illness, not a crime.

Even though they may remind you immediately of the worst racists you have known, bigoted bashers of religion often get away with it no matter how shallow, uncomprehending, unfair, overly generalizing, nasty-minded or obviously hostile their attitudes are.

First read

President Barack Obama should pick a mentor, a model, someone whose example he can follow, and he should do it quickly, before things get worse. Here is who: Mitch Daniels, the conservative, Republican governor of Indiana. What Obama has been getting wrong, he has been getting right. Obama can learn from him.

So there is President Barack Obama, giving a speech to a bunch of Democrats, and he is saying "y'all" do this and "y'all" should consider that, and pretty soon I am asking myself, how did he become habituated to saying "y'all?" In his youth in Indonesia and Hawaii? From his Kansas grandparents? At Harvard Law School?

The Columbia Journalism School has just put out a report calling for more government help to resuscitate local reporting, and, with near perfect timing, the Obama administration has been showing why this is a terrible idea.

One way or another, the Obama administration is trying to shut up its critics, and if that requires plopping First Amendment free-speech guarantees into a six-foot grave and covering the principles up with mud, so be it.