Published in Journalism

Ridiculing the New York Times for liberal bias would prove a full time job, so I generally only venture into that fertile field when the example is particularly egregious. One of those occasions occurred today. The Times published a full page ad from the Freedom From Religion Foundation which viciously slurs the Catholic Church and openly calls for Catholics to leave the Church.

The hysterical ad at times sounds more like satire: "Why are you aiding and abetting a church that has repeatedly engaged in a crusade to ban contraception, abortion and sterilization...?"  But the intent is genuine. Catholic League president Bill Donohue is a war hawk on these matters and declares of the present ad:

Never has there been a more vicious anti-Catholic advertisement in a prominent American newspaper than the one in today's New York Times by Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). 

FFRF is a vitriolic, militant and litigious atheist group with very little tolerance and even less good taste or class. They are of no real interest in this matter, of course - it's not difficult to find a small coterie of hate-filled vermin under any given rock. The issue is that the Times has handed them a microphone. Try to imagine a similar ad aimed at Muslims - or attacking atheists - and imagine the reaction of the New York Times - and the liberal disciples of tolerance who are suspiciously quiet in the wake of this obvious expression of hate and intolerance.

Click to enlarge.

We misheard Rush on the 30 year-old law student demanding free contraception, via Obamacare mandate.

UPDATE: Now he apologizes.

The cover of Newsweek:

The Seals: How Obama Learned to Use His Secret Weapon.

Shouldn't that be "America's Secret Weapon"?

Poking the left-wing mainstream media is a hobby of many conservatives - myself included - though it's so easy to find examples of liberal bias that the effort could easily become a full time job. PJ Media has done us all a service by assembling a top ten list of 2011's most extreme examples of major media malfeasance.

Beyond the list itself, PJ Media provides context and rationale for 2011's increasing "malfeasance" as compared to 2010.

In 2011 ... the leftist legacy media seemed to almost completely abandon any pretense of objectivity or fairness left over from its disgraceful collective performance in 2010.

Why did this happen? Beyond the normal factors, 2011 saw White House thuggery directed at a press corps already inclined to reflexively parrot its positions reach previously unseen heights.

To name just three examples:

• In March, Orlando Sentinel reporter Scott Powers, sent to cover a fundraiser involving Vice President Joe Biden and Florida Senator Bill Nelson, was confined in a closet "to keep him from mingling with high-powered guests." Sentinel editors "dropped the story."
• In April, the White House banished San Francisco Chronicle reporter Carla Marinucci "for using a video camera to capture an event." The paper was "threatened with more punishment if they reported on it." Chronicle Editor at Large Phil Bronstein called the White House's subsequent attempt to deny it all "a pants-on-fire moment." Press coverage elsewhere was scant.
• In May, the White House Press Office "refused to give the Boston Herald full access to President Obama's Boston fund-raiser" because it objected "to the newspaper's front page placement of a Mitt Romney op-ed." The shutout was virtually ignored.

In a mid-May editorial, Investor's Business Daily called out the press for failing to stand up for it own, and correctly characterized the White House's actions as baby steps "toward state control of the media, using the carrot of access against the stick of exile."

Nothing has changed. In December, a Washington Post item noted that "when a reporter gets something wrong or is perceived as being too aggressive, the pushback is often swift and sometimes at top volume" (including heavy doses of profanity). What do you guys expect when you just sit there and take it -- something you would never do under a conservative or Republican administration?

The list is a walk down memory lane for conservatives - and likely an eye-opening revelation for anyone depending upon MSNBC and the like for information. And, in case you're thinking it can't get any worse, the prognostication is grim.

As bad as this past year was, there's every reason to believe that 2012 will be worse. The press has to figure out a way to drag a president who is very unpopular despite their best efforts to date across the November finish line while the White House continues its "oversight."

David Frum last summer:

In this debt-ceiling fight, I'm having horrible flashbacks to the Republican debacle over health care.

Then as now, what could have been a negotiated deal turned into all-out political war.

Then as now, Republicans rejected all concessions by the president as pathetically inadequate.

Then as now, Republicans refused any concessions of their own, instead demanding that the president yield totally to their way of thinking.

Then as now, Republicans convinced themselves that they had the clout to force the president to yield.

With health care, Republicans calculated spectacularly wrong.

Peggy Noonan last weekend:

Once again the president thought he was playing a shrewd game: The collapse of the super committee would serve his political purposes. Once again he misjudged.

What has occurred is an exact repeat of the summer's debt ceiling fiasco. Then the president summoned a crisis, thinking people would blame it on the Republicans. Instead they blamed Washington, which is to say him, because he owns Washington. Immediately his numbers fell. As they did again this week.

Today's quotes of the day are from Paul Krugman, and provided to us by James Taranto.  From Krugman's Economics:

"There's obviously a relationship between tax rates and revenue. That relationship is not, however, one-for-one. In general, doubling the excise tax rate on a good or service won't double the amount of revenue collected, because the tax increase will reduce the quantity of the good or service transacted. And the relationship between the level of the tax and the amount of revenue collected may not even be positive: in some cases raising the tax rate actually reduces the amount of revenue the government collects."

Contrast that with a recent Krugman column:

In Democrat-world, up is up and down is down. Raising taxes increases revenue. . . . But in Republican-world, down is up. The way to increase revenue is to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

More evidence, as if any were necessary, that Krugman does not regard his column as an intellectually serious endeavor. His job as a columnist is to dish our red meat to the Lefty horde/ use his well deserves credentials in economics to suport his prefered policy presceiptions with whatever means he can find at hand.

Czech news noticed a faux-pas in CNN's coverage of Occupy Wall Street. Reporting that OWS has "spread across the world as a call to action against unequal distribution of wealth," CNN includes a photo of the "Old Town" square in Prague. Yet the Prague protest, while political in nature, had nothing to do with OWS. CNN wrongly assumes that every political protest supports OWS, just as OWS wrongly assumes that 99% of Americans support OWS.

The WSJ replaced its weekend interview with an article by Neal Freeman (a 38-year board member at National Review) which imagines a series of interviews between the late William F. Buckley and the conservative movement. It celebrates the 60th anniversary of "God and Man at Yale."

The personal anecdotes of Buckley's life and reflections on the conservative movement's "scrawny" ranks at Yale in those early days (not that those ranks have been greatly increased in academic settings since Buckley's days) make the article an amusing read. And Freeman's assessment of Buckley's would-be judgement on the GOP field, as well as conservative scholars and writers, is noteworthy.

Freeman blinks at the last moment and refuses to throw Buckley's weight behind a single candidate. But we are reminded of the ever-relevant Buckley Rule: Conservatives should support for election the rightward-most viable candidate. 2012 is no exception to the rule.

How the New York Times's new Edatrix operates:

She planned to apply in the newsroom some of the "positive training" that she lavished on Scout. She and her husband, she writes in her book, used "encouragement, not punishment" to train Scout, rewarding her for good behavior with a piece of kibble. "In one's relationship with dogs and with a newsroom, a generous amount of praise and encouragement goes much better than criticism," she says.

On this one occasion, a Left Turn is permitted on NLT. Tim Groseclose is the author of Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind. Scott Johnson contends that "it may be the book of the year."

Professor Groseclose measures media bias with social-scientific methods and concludes that: (i) all mainstream media outlets have a liberal bias, and (ii) while some supposedly conservative outlets--such as the Washington Times or Fox News Special Report--do lean right, their conservative bias is less than the liberal bias of most mainstream outlets.

None of this is new, of course, but Groseclose provides fresh evidence and methodology to support the obvious conclusion. Peter Robinson interviews the author here.

As I mentioned earlier, I have limited access to cable news here in Asia and am presently reduced to watching CNN as I attend to domestic chores. I am reminded why I long ago dismissed the channel as an actual news source.

CNN's Fareed Zakaria, who has been in overdrive over the past few days demonizing the Tea Party and cheerleading for Obama's policies (I use the word liberally), is presently going one better on those who called the murderer in Norway a Christian by defining him specifically as a follower of the Knights Templar. That was just before he explained that the Knights Templar were the medieval equivalent of Al Qaeda. Of course, Zakaria quickly insulated Islam from criticism by stating that Islamic terror accounts for less than 1% of terrorism in Europe. Home-grown terrorists (i.e., right-wing, conservative nationalists), Zakaria assures us, are the real enemy.

I would have thought it difficult to fit so much ridiculous absurdity within so short a duration. His prejudice against Christianity and the Crusades is egregious, but expected. The 1% assertion regarding Islamic terror seems specious - I suspect the definition of "terror" equates mass murder by Islamic terrorists with harsh letter writing by disaffected separatist groups.  

Perhaps Zakaria, of whom I'd never taken heed before, is simply a leftist pundit of little intellectual merit or personal integrity - but I expect he faithfully represents the attitudes and prejudices of CNN as a whole. America is poorly served by these international broadcast ambassadors of the American media.

Paul Rahe reacts to Jonathan Chait's discussion of the feud between Paul Krugman and David Brooks. 

One of the unwritten laws of journalism is that columnists at The New York Times do not attack one another. If they really, really disagree, they have to be oblique, and [Jonathan] Chait caught both Krugman and Brooks hurling barbs purportedly at others that were, in fact, aimed at one another.

[Krugman]: Last week, President Obama offered a spirited defense of his party's values -- in effect, of the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society. Immediately thereafter, as always happens when Democrats take a stand, the civility police came out in force. The president, we were told, was being too partisan; he needs to treat his opponents with respect; he should have lunch with them, and work out a consensus.

. . . [Brooks]  Very few people have the luxury of being freely obnoxious. Most people have to watch what they say for fear of offending their bosses and colleagues. Others resist saying anything that might make them unpopular.

But, in every society, there are a few rare souls who rise above subservience, insecurity and concern. Each morning they take their own abrasive urges out for parade. They are so impressed by their achievements, so often reminded of their own obvious rightness, that every stray thought and synaptic ripple comes bursting out of their mouth fortified by impregnable certitude. When they have achieved this status they have entered the realm of Upper Blowhardia.

Rahe comments on the players.

I know Krugman and Brooks only from reading them, but that is, I suspect, in this case enough. When I read the former, I nearly always find myself thinking of a kid I knew in third grade. Every time the teacher left the room, he was up in front of the class, clowning around. He wanted attention; he desperately craved applause; and he was willing to abase himself in their pursuit. Krugman is a man of great intelligence and considerable ability as an economist, and he has been honored as few men could ever hope to be. But, out of partisan instincts and a degrading desire to be fiercely loved and admired, he is willing to sacrifice the genuine respect that he earned for his acumen. Once upon a time, he really did think "in rigorously empirical terms." Now he writes simply and solely as a partisan. When he agreed to write for the Times, he checked at the door the thoughtfulness that once distinguished him.

When I read Brooks - who is no less intelligent and would be pleasant company, I am sure - I am frequently driven to hold my head in my hands. He very much wants to fit in, and when Pinch Sulzberger hired him, for once in his life he knew what he was about. Brooks is what passes as a respectable conservative in left-liberal circles. He is weak and accommodating; above all else, he does not want to rock the boat  . . .

Brooks has a boss and colleagues, and he will never write a column likely to be thought by them "obnoxious." He really does have disdain for the "few rare souls who rise above subservience, insecurity and concern," and he is prepared to believe that all that is really going on is that they are taking "their own abrasive urges out for parade." In this posture, there is something obviously self-serving. For, if Brooks sticks to it - if, when the chips are down, he is always ready to come to the defense of the Barack Obamas of the world - he will keep his comfortable perch, he will be liked (if not respected) by those like him, and he will fit right in.

Listen to Representative Mo Brooks' response to a question from MSNBC's Contessa Brewer.  Then think about the real significance of her question, which reflects the Progressive belief that one must be an "expert" to hold valid opinions.    

NBC covered the US Open today and edited the words "under God" from a children's recital of the Pledge of Allegiance at the commencement of the game. Following severe criticism, they've issued a bland and intentionally unconvincing apology.

It's not surprising from leftist media such as NBC, but another reminder of their true colors. Imagine the kind of people in journalism who decide to conduct this sort of ridiculous censorship. Imagine the breathless, hysterical reaction of these same people at NBC if Fox News edited and censored coverage of a national event so as to exclude mention of homosexuals, racial minorities or any other progressively-favored sub-group.

It would be a tiresome, full time job to document all of the hypocrisy committed by the left-wing media (or just NBC, for that matter), but from time to time it's good to remind ourselves of the kind of unprincipled, radical and loathsome people who deliver much of our news.

I previously wrote at AOL's Political Machine - I was actually a founding member. When that site transformed into Politics Daily, my profile and blogs were transferred to the new site. As I mentioned previously, AOL purchased the Huffington Post in February for $315 million. I feared what the tea leaves portended:

[Political Machine's] producers, Coates Bateman and Michael Kraskin, as well as lead editors such as David Knowles, strove to keep the site above mere partisan ranting and struggled to retain ideological balance. All of the fine bloggers with whom I wrote (with the exception of the odious Cenk Uyger) delightfully played their parts in the agreed upon larger drama. But reports indicate that the blog may soon be folded into HuffPost - and with it, I fear, any semblance of ideological balance or journalistic integrity.

Politics Daily has now been subsumed into the Huffington Post. Hence, my former blog-home is now the Huffington Post.

I feel dirty.

Another "evolution" in journalism - a moderate site and a hard-left site merge into a hard-left site. And another predictable result - after only a few months, the merger is a disaster.  

After Google, Drudge Report accounts for the highest percentage of referrals to news websites.

With no video, no search optimization, no slide shows, and a design that is right out of mid-'90s manual on HTML, The Drudge Report provides 7 percent of the inbound referrals to the top news sites in the country.

The site also generates 12-14 million unique visitors / month.

How does Matt Drudge do it (all these years after the Lewinski scandal that propelled him to fame)? Simple. He does one thing (wire editing) very well and he doesn't let anything else pollute the simplicity. The site generates 12-14 million unique visitors / month.

And, adding further insult to injury for the MSM, Matt Drudge is a conservative. While he links broadly and needn't stoop to pandering, the tilt of his headlines and organization are often unflattering toward liberals. But the news itself untouched by Drudge - he just offers an assortment of links and leaves it to the reader to judge the truth. Imagine that as a concept of journalism - no wonder the MSM hate him. 

Ross Douthat writes:

Asking a population that's increasingly brown and beige to accept punishing tax rates while white seniors receive roughly $3 in Medicare benefits for every dollar they paid in (the projected ratio in the 2030s) promises to polarize the country along racial as well as generational lines.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say, they will receive "roughly $3 in Medicare benefits for every dollar they have paid to benefit those who have retired before them"?

NY Times trash talks the Wall Street Journal:  "The [Pulitzer] awards this year included other notable firsts. The Wall Street Journal won its only Pulitzer since Rupert Murdoch bought the paper in 2007."  The WSJ won this year for its Obamacare editorials, written by 28-year old Joseph Rago.

Murdoch lives to destroy the NY Times, and it knows it.  The WSJ is now clearly the daily paper of intelligent readers.

Among other prizewinners, the LA Times won an award for its investigation of the Bell, California city government salary scandal, and Ron Chernow won for his bio of George Washington.  In a setback to Lincoln scholarship, Eric Foner won for his book on Lincoln and slavery.

Ben Boychuk had this interview, last November, with Chernow.

Discover the bright future of conservatism in the latest edition of Counterpoint, the University of Chicago undergrad-edited journal.  See Josh Lerner's account of Progressivism, which reconsiders its European origins.  Also of note is the thoughtful, social-science focused exchange on same-sex marriage in the letters section.  The case against gay marriage has rarely been made more incisively.

The spring issue will contain a symposium on movies, with contributions by conservatives young and old.

Chuck Shumer caught on tape telling his fellow Democrats to cry wolf: "I always use the word extreme," Mr. Schumer said. "That is what the caucus instructed me to use this week."

Crying extremism in defense of Liberalism is not a vice!

The New York Times runs a symposium on the question: "Why are some Americans upset with attempts to encourage more energy efficiency in their homes?"

For starters, the federal government is not merely encouraging us to make our homes more energy efficient; they are forcing us to use a particular type of light bulb, among other things.

We migth add that the trade-off is not merely between the quality of the light and using less energy.  There is also a trade-off between energy efficiency and safety.  The new eco-friendly bulbs contain mercury, and are, therefore, hazardous when broken.

NPR's CEO and president Vivian Schiller has resigned. NPR expressed "deep [and] genuine regret" over the resignation and professed "great respect" for Schiller's leadership - sentiments noticeably absent when Schiller had Juan Williams fired over the phone for expressing a mildly conservative opinion. Also absent was any regret for the actual scandal prompting the resignation - not a single word regarding the racial, elitist, degrading rant of NPR executives against Jews, conservatives, Republicans and "middle-America." There is no hint of contrition or an intent to reform. Rather, NPR laments this "traumatic period for NPR and the larger public radio community." Apparently, NPR is the victim.

All of this would just be repetition on a theme for conservatives if NPR were not a federally subsidized organization. Such funding forces the government to sponsor and patronize a particular viewpoint. Unlike the funding of faith-based charities, for example, which compete against secular institutions to provide for non-political social needs (which the government would otherwise perform less efficiently), public radio is not a government obligation and is inherently susceptible to political bias. When the bias is obvious, the taint upon government is so much more offensive.

A clean break would demonstrate a principled stance of non-partisanship on the part of government, and would cause only an insignificant financial loss to NPR (as they conceded on film). NPR may then join the deep ranks of liberal media outlets with abandon, untainted by unjust tax-payer subsidies.

UPDATE: Dana Davis Rehm, NPR's senior vice president of marketing, communications and external relations, has now stated: "We are appalled by the comments made by Ron Schiller in the video, which are contrary to what NPR stands for."  

Oh, what James O'Keefe has wrought.

Many years ago , blogs became the cutting edge of alternative news. The Drudge Report and others broke news to a conservative audience which would have otherwise been swept under the rug by the liberal MSM. Monica Lewinsky, of course, is the prime example. Power Line later exposed the fraudulent CBS documents relied upon by Dan Rather to smear George W. Bush's military service.

The use of camera phones has made citizen reporters a front line source of news. Whether posted on-line or picked up by the MSM, they provide behind the scenes images of stories beyond the lens of an MSM camera. Also, as in the case of Rep. Cleaver's claim that Tea Partiers had hurled racial vulgarities at him, cell phone videos revealed the absence of a claimed story.

Now, undercover sting operations have begun to revolutionize news. It began with ACORN, moved to Planned Parenthood and has now landed at NPR. Two actors pretending to be donors from the Muslim Brotherhood intent on spreading sharia law across America sit down for lunch with two senior NPR executives who reveal the sort of ideology pervading government-funded radio.

Just one example: "The current Republican Party, particularly the Tea Party, is fanatically involved in people's personal lives and very fundamental Christian - I wouldn't even call it Christian. It's this weird evangelical kind of move.... [They aren't] just Islamaphobic, but really xenophobic, I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it's scary. They're seriously racist, racist people."

And there's plenty more on the media-controlling Jews Zionists, anti-intellectual conservatives, the Muslim Brotherhood in America, etc. I'm sure this wasn't the sort of hate-filled, bigoted rhetoric the left had in mind when they called for a new civility - nor which NPR had in mind when they "proudly" fired Juan Williams for "expressing his opinion."

Arianna Huffington has sold the Huffington Post (and herself) to AOL for $315 million. Arianna will control all of AOL's on-line material. AOL spent 40% of its cash reserves in the acquisition, which it hopes will reverse last year's 26% revenue loss.

AOL is following the MSNBC model, driving to the left in hopes that a liberal niche or name recognition, however infamous or notorious, will save them from insolvency. The most amusing coverage of the merger has been questions of whether HuffPost will abandon its far left ideology now that it is part of the "MSM." The obvious answer is that it doesn't need to move right - the MSM has already moved far enough leftward to meet HuffPost just where it is.

I previously worked for AOL's politics blog Political Machine (now Politics Daily). PM's producers, Coates Bateman and Michael Kraskin, as well as lead editors such as David Knowles, strove to keep the site above mere partisan ranting and struggled to retain ideological balance. All of the fine bloggers with whom I wrote (with the exception of the odious Cenk Uyger) delightfully played their parts in the agreed upon larger drama. But reports indicate that the blog may soon be folded into HuffPost - and with it, I fear, any semblance of ideological balance or journalistic integrity.

Watch AOL follow in the footsteps of MSNBC toward the echo-chamber of liberal lunacy.

Then again, if anyone is looking to buy up No Left Turns for a 9-digit sum . . .

It's always a toss-up deciding whether it's worth the time to correct the New York Times - even if you limit yourself to the most egregious absurdities, it's still a full time job. Today's editorial page offers a truly clueless indictment of Justices Scalia and Thomas. The Times has championed the living Constitution and judicial activism as the basis for liberal decisions undermining the democratic process for decades. It's beyond ridiculously hypocritical that the same paper is using the very charge of judicial activism against textual interpretations of the Constitution now that liberals do not hold an unassailable majority on the bench.

The truth is that liberals are furious that they cannot faithfully rely on the Supreme Court to implement any political policy which they fail to pass in the democratic process. Abortion, contraception, privacy, unlimited federal spending and regulatory power, homosexual matters, gender issues, etc., etc., etc. On every issue which the public demurred, the Court has been there to ensure the liberal agenda was secure.

But now the dynamic has changed and some cases are ruled in accordance with the Constitution, rather than the social-psychological formulas and auguries known only to progressive judges. Liberals can't simply rage that they've lost their trump card on unfavorable turns of democracy, so they've taken the shameless approach of charging any unfavorable ruling with the very corruption they've practiced for so long.

I continue to hold out hope that the editors of the New York Times are simply unprincipled partisans - it would be a true scandal if they were really dumb enough to believe the things they write.

Keith Olbermann, among the most hateful and vicious liberals polluting the air waves, has parted ways with NBC, effective immediately. Speculation swirls as to the reason for the parting (Olbermann had two years remaining on his contract). One thing you can be sure of is NBC did not suddenly adopt character, ethics or taste - and they have no intention of toning down the rhetoric. Olbermann long ago rounded the bend on left-wing lunacy, and is being replaced by the equally odious Lawrence O'Donnell (the latter being replaced by Ed Schultz). Rachel Maddow also continues her thoughtlessly partisan NBC broadcast.

Here's a better idea on the motivation for canning Olbermann:

NEWS RACE
THURS. JAN. 20, 2011

FOXNEWS O'REILLY 2,918,000
FOXNEWS HANNITY 2,079,000
FOXNEWS BAIER 1,940,000
FOXNEWS SHEP 1,786,000
FOXNEWS BECK 1,780,000
FOXNEWS GRETA 1,460,000
MSNBC OLBERMANN 1,106,000
CNN PIERS 1,025,000
MSNBC MADDOW 976,000
MSNBC O'DONNELL 855,000
MSNBC SCHULTZ 760,000
CNN COOPER 740,000
MSNBC HARDBALL 700,000

I quote Francis Preston Blair: "From the bottom of our hearts we are disposed to exclaim 'Good riddance to bad rubbish!'"

"If Jared Loughner is crazy, then so are we."

- Richard Cohen, The Washington Post, 11 January 2011

The New York Times is not to be outdone. No doubts mortified that the Washington Post beat them to the punch in laying the Arizona disaster at the feet of conservatives, the Times now features a column to the same effect by the reliably far-left Paul Krugman.

Krugman blames Palin, Beck, Limbaugh and "the whole Tea Party" as he conjures images of the Oklahoma City bombing and warns that "violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate." In case you're wondering who he's talking about, Krugman lectures, "it's long past time for the GOP's leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers." It will no doubt always elude Krugman that he is the creature he so despises.

Verum Serum graciously responds to Krugman (so the rest of us needn't do so). I'd simply add two observations: First, the gunman in Arizona has been described as a liberal by a friend, which, coupled with his obvious insanity, should quiet speculation that the tragedy is part of a vast right wing conspiracy. Second, readers should remember the trove of hateful malice spewed by the left toward President Bush - to pretend that the left has not potentially incited violence through aggressive language against Bush, Republicans, conservatives, Tea Partiers, etc. and that the right has a monopoly on invective is beyond silly, it is intentionally deceitful.

Folks of good will on both sides of the aisle have suppressed the urge to politicize the assassination attempt on Rep Giffords - this despite evidence in youtube videos that the gunman held radical views which could be exploited by either the left or right.

Leave it to the Washington Post to break the silence and launch the first political salvo. Here's the WaPo's most recent headline:

Breaking News: Gunman who shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords purchased gun legally

I haven't words to describe the shallow, despicable, groveling character exhibited by the Post in attempting to capitalize on an attempted murder mere hours after the fact in order to push a liberal anti-gun message. Is this the most important detail of the crime? Is this more relevant than his anti-establishment rants and invocations of Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto? If the paper were looking to inform, there are far juicier bits of info out there than his owning a gun (a given, since he is called a "gunman"). But, of course, the intended message is that legal gun sales cause assassinations - not crazy, commie-NAZI-sympathizers.

As is customary, the Washington Post exceeds expectations for liberal extremism and ethical bankruptcy.

Big Journalism lists "The 10 Most Underreported Stories for 2010," a collection of damning stories which should have caused heads to roll - except that they uniformly looked bad for liberal Democrats and were thus suppressed by the MSM.

You won't see the stories below in the pages of the NYT or on the screens of NBC. You won't hear them discussed at the water cooler. They're the stories that show without any doubt the cards held by those who wish to enslave the masses to the god of government. A theocracy, to be sure, but one that holds up the state above all else.

Powerline suggests an 11th story: "the exposure of the 'Tea party protesters scream 'nigger' at black congressmen' story as a vicious con job." Powerline chronicled the cover-up in an 18-part series entitled, "Don't leave it to Cleaver".

I would add several matters of Obama's foreign policy to the list: the Cairo-speech and subsequent apology tour of the Mid-East, the decline of Obama's popularity abroad following his betrayals of Poland, Czech, Israel, etc., the alignment of the U.S. with regional dictators in an attempted coup of Honduras and the abdication of U.S. support for democratic reform in places such as Iran and Lebanon.

Jonah Goldberg has made a highly qualified case for bourgeois homosexuals (Hobos) and hence for same-sex marriage.   In the lively new University of Chicago journal, Counterpoint, "Carl Roberts" anticipated why Jonah's argument fails.  Unlike the Robby George-inspired recent natural law essay "What is Marriage?"  Roberts bases his argument on social science. 

Roberts maintains that legalizing same-sex marriage would change the cultural underpinnings of marriage from procreation to companionship.  This profound shift undermines marriage in general (here he uses the Chicago lingo of "incentives").  It subsequently encourages single motherhood, which clearly is the major source of urban poverty. 

The conservative journal (edited by Chicago undergrads) boasts a series of thoughtful articles on Martin Diamond, Jane Austen, gun rights, Lady Gaga, and many other topics of enduring and contemporary interest.  May it be blessed with a Rockefeller!

The EEOC is suing the Washington Post's Kaplan business for using credit histories in vetting job candidates.  Why?  Because in the judgment of the lawyers at the EEOC, ""This practice has an unlawful discriminatory impact because of race and is neither job-related nor justified by business necessity."

Perhaps I'm wrong, but my guess is that the Washington Post has been a big supporter of disparate impact lawsuits in the past.

From Matt Miller in today's Washington Post:

If we keep taxes low on America's high earners, the terrorists win.

Politicians always complain about their press coverage, but over at Real Clear there's video of Senator Jay Rockefeller from West Virginia saying that it would be a lot easier for Congress to do its job if the FCC would just ban "the Left and the Right" from the airwaves (specifically, MSNBC and FOX).

While we're at it, maybe the FCC can muzzle politicians who are bad for "political discourse", or at least the ones who hate the Constitution.

When is that guy up for re-election?

After the election, Naomi Klein commented:  "What Obama refuses to get: There is no escape from furious enemies."

No less true in international affairs than in domestic politics.

Cancel your regular Sunday paper subscription and read the Wall Street Journal Friday and Saturday editions instead.  Its books and culture sections are far superior to anything in the NY Times and WaPo, for example.  Theater criticTerry Teachout is the most instructive writer on the performing arts in America.  (See Peter's notes on Teachout's Pops.)  It's too bad past movie critic Martha Bayles is no longer with them, having moved upward to the Claremont Review of Books. Such splendor comes of owner Rupert Murdoch's laudable ambition to destroy the NY Times. 

With the WSJ, CRB, and the Weekly Standard's often ingenious book review section, thoughtful readers will find a generous store of books and reviewers to pick from.  But first the political season.