im Graham of the Media Research Center has compiled some examples of veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas's liberal bias. In March, Graham writes, Thomas said that George W. Bush and John McCain "are about as far right as you could get without dropping off the edge." In earlier years, she said that Ronald Reagan had "left an uncaring society" and "lacked soul." Here's a question she asked President Clinton last year: "How can you justify chipping away at the ABM treaty which helped keep the peace during the Cold War and pour billions and billions into a Star Wars defense against the possibility that starving North Korea may fire a missile at us?"

None of this amounts to bias in Thomas's eyes, of course. Graham also relays this quote from her on CSPAN's "Journalists' Roundtable" in 1993: "A liberal bias? I don't know what a liberal bias is. Do you mean we care about the poor, the sick, and the maimed? Do we care whether people are being shot every day on the streets of America? If that's liberal, so be it. I think it's everything that's good in life, that we do care."

Thomas has been in the news because she just quit as UPI's White House reporter, apparently because she didn't want to work for News World Communications, which just bought UPI. It's not clear whether she's leaving because she doesn't want to work with conservatives or because she doesn't want to work with members of the Unification Church.

Big Spenders Club
Stephen Moore, head of the Club for Growth (and an NR contributing editor), tells us that this Congress is likely to be the biggest spending Congress since the 1960s, based on the percentage increase in real spending.