Category Archives: Washington Post

I’ve had $100,000 burning in my pocket for the last three months and I’d really like to spend it on a worthy cause. So how about this: in the interests of journalistic transparency, and to offer the American public a unique insight in the workings of the Democrat-Media Complex, I’m offering $100,000 for the full “JournoList” archive, source fully protected. Now there’s an offer somebody can’t refuse.

Yes, the mainstream media that came together to play up the false allegations that the “N-Word” was hurled 15 times by Tea Party participants at the Congressional Black Caucus outside the Capitol the day before the “Obamacare” vote, is the same MSM that colluded to make sure the American public accepted the smear, and refused to show the exculpatory videos that disproved the incendiary charges of Tea Party racism.

Ezra Klein’s “JournoList 400” is the epitome of progressive and liberal collusion that conservatives, Tea Partiers, moderates and many independents have long suspected and feared exists at the heart of contemporary American political journalism. Now that collusion has been exposed when one of the weakest links in that cabal, Dave Weigel, was outed. Weigel was, in all likelihood, exposed because – to whoever the rat was who leaked his emails — he wasn’t liberal enough.

When the “N-word” controversy turned out to be an almost certain falsehood, Weigel had the professional courage to come out against 399 of his “JournoList” peers when he wrote:

I think we’ve seen a paradigm shift, and that the March 20 story will be remembered by conservatives as evidence of how the media accepts attacks on conservatives without due diligence.

Weigel also had the courage to issue a correction and a mea culpa when his reporting was used as a weapon by the unscrupulous Max Blumenthal to falsely smear James O’Keefe as a “racist organizer” of a white nationalist conference. Weigel eventually stepped up and set the record straight when he found out he was falsely named as a witness to the story.

Why was he chosen for outing among 400 “JournoList” participants? I can think of few liberal journalists who have been more fair than Weigel. And if I think that, imagine what true partisans on the left feel about his erratic and ideologically unpredictable output?

Weigel’s career at the Washington Post was assassinated for his crimes against conformity. Try as he might, as a left-leaning journalist he didn’t conform enough. When conservatives jumped on his exposure, he cited defending me as a mitigating alibi. Defending me publicly is a hangable offense in them thar liberal hills!

But Dave Weigel is not the story. The “JournoList” is the story: who was on it and which positions of journalistic power and authority do they hold? Now that the nature and the scope of the list has been exposed, I think the public has a right to know who shapes the big media narratives and how.

Dave Weigel is a portal into the dark world of hardcore liberal bias in the media. This opening gives us a deeper insight into the insidious relationship between liberal think tanks, academics and their mouthpieces in the media.

As we already uncovered in our expose on the “Cry Wolf” project, members of academia and think tanks are actively working to form the narrative used by the press to thwart conservative messages. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy, the reporters on the listserv mimicked the talking points invented and agreed upon by the intellectuals who were invited to the virtual cocktail party that was Klein’s “JournoList.”

And let us not forget the participation of Media Matters in the larger picture of intimidation and mockery for any reporter, like Weigel, who dares stray from the one acceptable liberal narrative in the media. Flying its false flag as a “media watchdog,” the $10 million-or-so per year agitprop command center creates and promotes a system of conformity in which it relentlessly attacks anyone who strays from the Soros-funded party orthodoxy.

The deluge of intimidation showered upon the occasional heretic by Media Matters represent another distinct layer in the media infrastructure that ensures true believer liberals are overrepresented and conservatives had better watch their step.

The fact that 400 journalists did not recognize how wrong their collusion, however informal, was shows an enormous ethical blind spot toward the pretense of impartiality. As journalists actively participated in an online brainstorming session on how best to spin stories in favor of one party against another, they continued to cash their paychecks from their employers under the impression that they would report, not spin the agreed-upon “news” on behalf of their “JournoList” peers.

The American people, at least half of whom are the objects of scorn of this group of 400, deserve to know who was colluding against them so that in the future they can better understand how the once-objective media has come to be so corrupted and despised.

We want the list of journalists that comprised the 400 members of the “JournoList” and we want the contents of the listserv. Why should Weigel be the only person exposed and humiliated?

I therefore offer the sum of $100,000 to the person who provides the full “JournoList” archive. We will protect that person’s privacy and identity forever. No one will ever know who became $100,000 richer – and did the right thing, morally and ethically — by shining the light of truth on this seamy underworld of the media.

$100,000 is not a lot to spend on the Holy Grail of media bias when there is a country to save.

Since I've been accused of leading "something of a crusade" against former Post blogger Dave Weigel, how could I resist this announcement? Weigel, who left the Post amidst a controversy where he bashed tons of conservatives, has joined the leftwing convention at MSNBC (video right).

According to a Tweet from "Countdown" host Keith Olbermann, Weigel has come on board as a contributor. "And confirming, @DaveWeigel is now MSNBC contributor @DaveWeigel Welcome aboard and my condolences, uh, congratulations!" wrote Olbermann.

Now Weigel has joined the team of Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz. This from the guy who just today told the world of his wonderful career saga that started out as editor of a campus conservative paper at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. "Was I really that conservative? Yes," he wrote, somehow expecting readers to believe him. While he admitted some of his troubles came from "hubris," much of what he wrote most already knew, that he was no friend to the right. "At Reason, I'd become a little less favorable to Republicans, and I'd never been shy about the fact that I was pro-gay marriage and pro-open borders."

Throw in Weigel's parade of assault on conservatives, prominent figures on the right from Rush Limbaugh to Matt Drudge and Newt Gingrich and the bigger question becomes, does he agree with the right on anything? The answer is: it doesn't matter anymore. He's gone from an organization fighting to keep its credibility to one fighting to lose what little it has.

Weigel, who had blocked me on Twitter, responded to my comments about the move with this: "Folks of every ideology are ‘contributors.' Pat Buchanan and Ezra Klein, for example." Weigel, who had been rumored to be heading to Huffington Post, managed to land even more in left field.

This is a good place to remind everyone this issue has never been about Weigel. This was about the Post which claimed to be a neutral and respectable news organization and then filled its website with lefties like Ezra Klein and Weigel. That's fine if they balance that out and they didn't. They revel in the left and bash the right, making themselves more blatantly liberal and tossing out the window their claims of objectivity.

There isn't a news outlet around that has figured out the web effectively. They shouldn't let that confusion turn into a cheap excuse to rationalize filling their staff with open lefties and those who bash the right. Hopefully, the Post learned its lesson here.

One emerging narrative from the tale of Dave Weigel's resignation is the extent to which the journalistic left is insulated from opposing views. The two institutions involved, JournoList and the Washington Post, are exemplars of liberal epistemic closure.

Ezra Klein's now-defunct email list provided a forum for journalists to collaborate, as long as they were, in his words, "nonpartisan to liberal, center to left." No conservatives allowed. The Washington Post, meanwhile, hired Weigel, perhaps two notches left of center, to cover the right, while relying on Klein, a full eight notches left, to cover the liberal movement.

The scarcity of conservative views both on JournoList and in the Post demonstrate the insularity of political conversation among legacy media players. They apply intense scrutiny to conservatives, and fail in the most basic measures of introspection.

That is one element of the whole situation that Weigel's defenders seem to be missing: the issue is not his personal political views, per se, but rather the Post's failure to provide balance in its blog-based political coverage.

There is nothing inherently wrong with assigning someone hostile to certain views to cover a movement espousing those views. Indeed, that can be a very healthy way to challenge preconceived notions and political orthodoxy where it otherwise would be taken for granted.

As Byron York wrote at the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog,

There's little doubt that the most interesting coverage of events on the left and right generally comes from journalists on the other side. Much of the time, the right sees things happening on the left, and connects them, in a way that the left doesn't see, and the left sees things happening on the right, and connects them, in a way that the right doesn't see. In opinion journalism, it's a good thing to have each side examining the other.

The Post doesn't seem to understand that, even though it has jumped into opinion journalism with both feet. The paper hired a bunch of people from the left-wing blogosphere -- Ezra Klein, Greg Sargent, Garance Franke-Ruta, and, for a short time, Weigel -- who often write about the right, even though Weigel was the only one specifically assigned to it. But they haven't hired any conservative to write about the left. It's the worst kind of one-sidedness.

Sure, Weigel could arguably serve a valuable journalistic function by scrutinizing the right more, perhaps, than a conservative would. But the Post did not do the same for the left. Klein is a rank and file liberal.

So if the rationale for Weigel's employment was that it is healthy to assign political reporters to cover movements they do not agree with or belong to, perhaps the Post should re-hire Weigel, fire Klein, and replace the latter with someone who is demonstrably hostile to, or at the very least openly skeptical of, the political left.

Klein himself seems not to realize just how insular his own political conversations are. In his post-Weigel-resignation piece on his WaPo blog (linked above), he wrote that JournoList was meant to be

An insulated space where the lure of a smart, ongoing conversation would encourage journalists, policy experts and assorted other observers to share their insights with one another. The eventual irony of the list was that it came to be viewed as a secretive conspiracy, when in fact it was always a fractious and freewheeling conversation meant to open the closed relationship between a reporter and his source to a wider audience.

Klein extrapolates a "secretive conspiracy" from what is really just a secretive conversation among the center-left. No one is claiming a conspiracy - the use of the term is probably meant to discredit those skeptical of a forum where liberal journalists collaborate on the latest stories.

That Klein calls JournoList "a fractious and freewheeling conversation" demonstrates his epistemic closure. He considers "fractious and freewheeling" a conversation that necessarily included nobody that openly espoused a conservative position as his or her own. Klein openly discusses his decision to exclude conservatives from the list, precisely so it would not devolve into a "debate society."

Could there have been significant disagreement among even the liberal members of JournoList? Undoubtedly there was. But Klein made a concerted effort to exclude conservative voices. How can such a list possibly claim to be adequately informing its members on the political goings on of the nation while excluding and entire school of American political thought?

Media liberals seems to be trotting happily down this path of epistemic closure. Reporters continue to cover the right, as NewsBusters contributor Dan Gainor put it in discussing Weigel, as if they were "visiting a zoo." Or, as New York Times editor Bill Kellor put it, "We wanted to understand them."

Yes, who are these strange creatures who call themselves conservatives?

Former Washington Post writer David Weigel has attempted to explain away his Journolist e-mails attacking conservatives by claiming he was a trash-talking thoughtless jerk. If you think that self-damnation was bad, at least it was much better than admitting something even closer to the truth which would be that he deviously allowed people to think of him as a conservative. In fact, he is still lamely making that conservative claim in his Big Journalism article but first the jerk confession:

...I treated the list like a dive bar, swaggering in and popping off about what was “really” happening out there, and snarking at conservatives. Why did I want these people to like me so much? Why did I assume that I needed to crack wise and rant about people who, usually for no more than five minutes were getting on my nerves? Because I was stupid and arrogant, and needlessly mean...

Unfortunately, Weigel proved that he still remains a jerk by continuing to claim that he was somehow conservative:

I interned at the libertarian Center for Individual Rights in the summer of 2001. I supported the Iraq War and crashed an anti-war protest on my campus. I voted in Republican primaries in 2002 and 2004. (Since I was in Illinois, I voted in 2004 for Jack Ryan to get the GOP’s nomination for Senate, to oppose Barack Obama. I’m better off than one of those guys.)

Weigel still tries to convince us of his one-time conservative credentials despite the fact that in the three presidential elections since 2000 he voted for Nader, Kerry, and Obama. Gee! What a "conservative!"

Despite his pretend conservatism, Weigel just can't seem to understand why people think he has misrepresented himself:

Still, this was hubris. It was the hubris of someone who rose — objectively speaking — a bit too fast, and someone who misunderstood a few things about his trade. It was also the hubris of someone who thought the best way to be annoyed about something was to do it publicly. This is the reason I’m surprised at commentary accusing me of misrepresenting myself.

Except that liberal Journolist was supposed to be private and Weigel wrote there in the expectation that it would remain so. Dave's misrepresentation mode continues. 

In the midst of this week's Gen. Stanley McChrystal controversy, a possibility concerning statements allegedly made by him and his staff has largely gone overlooked: might they have been speaking off the record when they were around Rolling Stone's Michael Hastings?

This certainly would explain some of the bizarre comments allegedly made by military members knowing full well how the chain of command works and that the President is clearly at the top.

With this in mind, the Washington Post explored this possibility in a front page piece Saturday entitled, "Gen. McChrystal Allies, Rolling Stone Disagree Over Article's Ground Rules":

On Friday, however, officials close to McChrystal began trying to salvage his reputation by asserting that the author, Michael Hastings, quoted the general and his staff in conversations that he was allowed to witness but not report. The officials also challenged a statement by Rolling Stone's executive editor that the magazine had thoroughly reviewed the story with McChrystal's staff ahead of publication. [...]

A senior military official insisted that "many of the sessions were off-the-record and intended to give [Hastings] a sense" of how the team operated. The command's own review of events, said the official, who was unwilling to speak on the record, found "no evidence to suggest" that any of the "salacious political quotes" in the article were made in situations in which ground rules permitted Hastings to use the material in his story.

The Post elaborated:

A member of McChrystal's team who was present for a celebration of McChrystal's 33rd wedding anniversary at a Paris bar said it was "clearly off the record." Aides "made it very clear to Michael: 'This is private time. These are guys who don't get to see their wives a lot. This is us together. If you stay, you have to understand this is off the record,' " according to this source. In the story, the team members are portrayed as drinking heavily. [...]

A U.S. military spokesman in Kabul, Air Force Lt. Col. Edward T. Sholtis, acknowledged that Hastings, like other reporters who have interviewed McChrystal over the past year, was not required to sign written ground rules. "We typically manage ground rules on a verbal basis," Sholtis said. "We trust in the professionalism of the people we're working with."

So, you've got husbands and wives in a Paris bar celebrating McChrystal's 33rd wedding anniversary, and comments made during the event -- which were supposed to all be off the record -- became part of Hastings' piece.

Is that Kosher?

Obviously, Rolling Stone thinks it is:

The executive editor, Eric Bates, denied that Hastings violated any ground rules when he wrote about the four weeks he spent, on and off, with McChrystal and his team. "A lot of things were said off the record that we didn't use," Bates said in an interview. "We abided by all the ground rules in every instance."

But this isn't the only beef McChrystal supporters have with this piece:

Officials also questioned Rolling Stone's fact-checking process, as described by Bates in an interview this week with Politico. "We ran everything by them in a fact-checking process as we always do," Bates said. "They had a sense of what was coming, and it was all on the record, and they spent a lot of time with our reporter, so I think they knew that they had said it."

In an interview Friday, the managing editor, Will Dana, said the reporter's notes and factual matters were exhaustively reviewed.

But 30 questions that a Rolling Stone fact-checker posed in a memo e-mailed last week to then-McChrystal media adviser Duncan Boothby contained no hint of what became the controversial portions of the story. Boothby resigned Tuesday.

In the e-mail, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post by a military official sympathetic to McChrystal, Boothby is asked to confirm the makeup of McChrystal's traveling staff on the Paris trip and the communications equipment they brought with them on an earlier visit to London. "They don't come close to revealing what ended up in the final article," the official said.

This all raises an interesting question that seemed to elude mainstream media as they quickly attacked the General probably forcing Obama to relieve him of his command: did the Rolling Stone break some journalism rules with this report?

As NewsBusters' Tim Graham pointed out Thursday, this is a FAR-LEFT magazine with strong anti-war convictions.  

Is it indeed possible that much of the truly damning comments were made to Hastings off the record, and that he and his editors in their zeal to tear down McChrystal just didn't care?

Is it also possible that the magazine didn't go through proper fact-checking procedures before it published the piece?

If the answer to both questions is "Yes," then maybe media quickly overreacted to this article before weighing and investigating such possibilities thereby making them complicit in ruining the General's career while also conceivably endangering the mission in Afghanistan.

This is certainly not to say that any of these comments were appropriate irrespective of whether or not those making them believed they were speaking off the record.

Regardless of the setting, the General commanding our troops in Afghanistan certainly shouldn't have been party to such statements assuming he was aware they were being made.

But that doesn't exempt Hastings from adhering to the off-the-record status of such commentary if indeed there was a request for that to be the case.  

As the Post has now let this cat out of the bag, it will indeed be interesting to see how this matter is handled on the Sunday talk shows tomorrow as well as in the coming days.

Stay tuned. 

To refresh, as posted at NewsBusters and Eyeblast.tv, Pennsylvania Congressman Paul Kanjorski said the following on Wednesday while he was defending what Investors Business Daily has called "Financial Deform":

We’re giving relief to people that I deal with in my office every day now unfortunately. But because of the longevity of this recession, these are people — and they’re not minorities and they’re not defective and they’re not all the things you’d like to insinuate that these programs are about — these are average, good American people.

This isn't too tough to decipher, no matter how many House Democrats try to give him defensive cover -- If the people Kanjorski "deal(s) with in my office everyday" are "average, good American people" because "they're not minorities and they're not defective," then those who are minorities and "defective" in some way are not "average, good American people." Kanjorski uttered an objectively racist (embodying "the belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others") statement.

According to this report, Kanjorski is not apologizing. Therefore, one must conclude that the congressman is comfortable with his objectively racist statement.

So how is the press handling this?

The mostly Democrat-defending establishment press that generally sets the narrative for radio and TV news mostly understands the aforementioned elementary exercise in logic. This explains why Kanjorski's statement, while occasionally being framed with the usual "Republicans attack poor misunderstood Democrat" approach, is mostly getting ignored.

A search at the Associated Press's main web site on the Congressman's last name comes up with one seemingly relevant item, an article headlined "McMahon: Wrestling was soap opera." Yeah, you read that right. But the article is really a collection of four short items and two "Quick Hits." AP writer Philip Elliott (or perhaps his editors) thought that Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon's description of her Word Wrestling Entertainment enterprise was more important than Kanjorski's racist remark, the coverage of which came second.

Naturally, Elliott's item used the "Republicans attack" technique:

Republicans criticized Rep. Paul Kanjorski for what they said were remarks suggesting minorities are not "average, good American people."

The 13-term Pennsylvania Democrat vigorously denied the charge, saying Republicans were taking his words out of context to score political points.

... A Kanjorski spokeswoman said the congressman was defending people who get government help from those who unfairly criticize them.

Sure he was. But in the process, he uttered an objectively racist remark. Alleged "context" is irrelevant.

Well, at least the AP has covered it in its own quirky way. The New York Times hasn't.

The Washington Post restricted coverage of Kanjorski's statement to its "44" blog, and has apparently kept the matter out of its print edition. Matt DeLong's post is funny, in a reality-denying, sickening sort of way (bolds are mine):

A Democratic congressman has found himself the target of conservative criticism after an inartful description of who will be helped by the financial reform bill currently working its way through Congress.

The conservative website Human Events reported that Rep. Paul Kanjorski's (D-Pa.) appeared to say during Wednesday's financial reform conference committee meeting that the financial overhaul will help "average, good American people" -- but not minorities or "the defective."

It's amazing how often the word "inartful" -- which isn't even a recognized word in the dictionary (here or here) -- has appeared since candidate Barack Obama and others frequently employed it in 2008 to defend him and others after verbal gaffes and worse utterances.

As to DeLong's use of "appeared" -- Matt, stop insulting our intelligence.

Finally, it's also quite predictable to see DeLong tag Human Events (accurately) as "conservative," while, as Tim Graham at NewsBusters noted earlier this week, magazines like Rolling Stone almost never get the "liberal" or "radical left" tag from the establishment press.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

On Thursday, a new unemployment bill died in Congress as Senator Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) joined Republicans on the grounds that government spending can't go on forever.

Instead of reporting both sides, the media couldn't seem to hide their anger.

The bill was called a "jobless aid" package that "governors were counting on" to help "the poor" across the nation. Almost all news reports began from the Democrat perspective and waited several paragraphs before weakly defending Republicans.

Worse yet, a consensus with far more damaging impact began to grow: the loss will cause the nation's economy to fall into a double dip recession, and it will be entirely the Republicans' fault.

Never mind last year's stimulus bill worth $700 billion, or the bank bailout of 2008, both of which have failed to live up to promises of recovery. No, our economy is suffering because fiscal conservatives won't spend even more.

The Seattle Times was quick on the draw Thursday night with a clearly disappointed report headlined "Republicans Continue Blockade of Federal Aid Bill." What followed was an obviously biased effort to paint Republicans in a bad light:

Senate Republicans on Thursday once again blocked legislation to reinstate long-term unemployment benefits for people who have exhausted their aid.

With the Senate apparently paralyzed by partisan gridlock, the fate of the aid, as well as tax breaks for businesses and $16 billion in aid for cash-strapped states, remains unclear. Dozens of states, including Washington, are hoping for federal aid to help balance their budgets.

Republican lawmakers - joined by Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska - maintained a unified front to sustain a filibuster of the $110 billion bill. The vote was 57-41, three short of the 60 needed to cut off debate and bring the bill to a final vote.

Democrats said they would give no further ground and put the onus on Republicans to make concessions.

Those who have "exhausted their aid" are the long-term unemployed who received financial assistance for up to 99 weeks already. Republicans seem to have this crazy notion that receiving government assistance that long might be long enough, and perhaps it's time to start asking if Keynesian economics is working.

But according to the Seattle Times, that kind of talk is just "partisan gridlock." The article quoted one Republican against three Democrats and never got any deeper than vague concerns about the national debt.

Toward the end, the Times went to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to imply that Republicans were sabotaging the economy:

In a statement, the White House vowed to keep pushing for the bill. "The president has been clear: Americans should not fall victim to Republican obstruction at a time of great economic challenge for our nation's families," spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

By Friday morning, this became the battle cry for reporters around the country. Reuters published an article that advanced the point in plainer terms:

The bill, which also would have provided more aid to cash-strapped states for the Medicaid health program for the poor, fell a few votes short of the 60 needed to advance in the 100-member Senate. One Democrat, Ben Nelson, joined 40 Republicans to block the measure.

Democrats argued that the bill would have helped shore up the fragile U.S. economic recovery, a priority for President Barack Obama's administration.

Yes, saving the economy has been one of President Obama's priorities for some time now, mostly because nothing he does seems to save it. But Reuters didn't have time to mention an inconvenient thing like that. Readers were expected to believe the premise that one more spending bill would have shored up the economy if not for those meddling Republicans.

A few hours later, the Associated Press got involved with an even sharper accusation aimed directly at Republicans:

The rejected bill would have provided $16 billion in new aid to states, preserving the jobs of thousands of state and local government workers and providing what White House officials called an insurance policy against a double-dip recession. It also included dozens of tax breaks sought by business lobbyists and tax increases on domestically produced oil and on investment fund managers.

"This is a bill that would remedy serious challenges that American families face as a result of this Great Recession," said Max Baucus, D-Mont., the chief author of the bill. "This is a bill that works to build a stronger economy. This is a bill to put Americans back to work."

How strange that quote didn't show up in the early dispatches Thursday night. It's almost as if the media spent Friday collectively drifting toward a good narrative.

By 4:00 Friday, the economy-sabotage angle was official. The Washington Post's Greg Sargent used the Plum Line blog for the announcement:

A number of bloggers today have been up in arms about the apparent failure of the jobs bill in the Senate, now that it looks like no Republicans will help Dems break the GOP filibuster.

This could have terrible consequences, and Senator Debbie Stabenow, in particular, is furious. Today she argued that Republicans want the economy to tank in order to help themselves in the midterms

Thus in less than 24 hours, it went from Republicans worrying about the national debt to Republicans purposely tanking the economy just to embarrass Democrats.

Not to be left out, Bloomberg's Shobhana Chandra also cut right to the bone in an article on Friday:

The Senate's failure to pass legislation extending unemployment benefits will slow the pace of the U.S. recovery, said economist David Resler.

The bill's demise will trim economic growth by 0.2 percentage point this quarter and by 0.4 point in the period from July through September, estimated Resler, chief economist at Nomura Securities International Inc. in New York.

So you see, economic growth apparently comes only by way of government spending, and this time there's a real expert to say so!

But all is not lost. While working hard to opine on the terrible news, Chandra inadvertently let something slip:

Resler estimated that the unemployment rate, 9.7 percent in May, may decline by as much as one percentage point as some workers drop out of the labor force and others accept jobs they might have rejected earlier.

Wait...when people finally realize they can't live on government assistance forever, they might buckle down and accept a tough job? This nugget appeared exactly 11 paragraphs down from the headline and was quickly glossed over.

So maybe, just maybe, Republicans are trying to enact market-based principles by urging people to go back to work. Maybe it has nothing to do with sabotaging the economy after all.

Don't count on that particular narrative to grow any legs, though. An hour after the Washington Post hit piece, the Associated Press was back for more:

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said Friday that Senate Republicans could be prolonging the recession by opposing a spending bill that would have extended unemployment benefits.

Solis, talking to a group of Latino government officials in Denver, said Republicans were wrong to oppose to a broader jobs bill that would have extended jobless benefits for about 200,000 people a week. She warned of dire consequences if benefits are shut off.

"This will be devastating and could take us back to a deeper recession," Solis said

Oh yeah, urging healthy workers to accept less glamorous jobs is really the "devastating" consequence of a diabolical Republican strategy.

Good to know we have professional, independent, unbiased journalists hard on the trail of Republican masterminds. 

*****Updated by Noel Sheppard: Did media get this talking point from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) (h/t Twitter's @ndgc12dx)?

The morning after the Senate failed to advance a bill that responded to the recession, Sen. Harry Reid laid into Republicans who blocked it en masse.

Clearly sore after falling three votes short Thursday night of the 60 needed to overcome a Republican filibuster, the Senate majority leader from Nevada charged in a Senate speech that GOP senators "are betting on our country to fail."

Rather than help Americans, he said, Republicans are more interested in bringing down President Barack Obama.

"The Republicans in the Senate have made the decision to do everything they can to turn the country upside down, to do everything they can to stop economic recovery because they think it may help some of their people running for the Senate around the country.

"They figure as bad as they can make the economy, the better off they will be," Reid said. "That is a pretty difficult view for people who are United States senators."

"As we learned from the health care debate, (Republicans) want everything that Obama wants to be his Waterloo."

The inside-the-beltway media world was turned on its head with leaked e-mails that revealed Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel had some disparaging things to say about prominent conservative figures, including Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge and Byron York.

This ultimately resulted in Weigel's resignation. However, some of Weigel's antics have been previously raised by his critics, including Media Research Center Vice President Dan Gainor, who offered remarks to Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander.

Alexander included them in a June 25 post on his blog:

With bloggers such as Weigel, "I think The Post needs to decide what it wants to be online," said Dan Gainor, a vice president at the conservative Media Research Center. "Does it want to be opinion? Or, does it want to be news? The problem here was that it was never clear."
"If it's going to be opinion, it ought to have somebody on the conservative side -- something Dave Weigel never was," he said.
If The Post wants to assign a "good neutral reporter" to cover conservatives, "we'd be thrilled," said Gainor. But quickly added, Weigel "wasn't one. He looked at the conservative movement as if he was visiting a zoo. We're more than that."
Gainor raises valid points. Klein's blog posts clearly pass through a liberal prism. For that reason, liberals have a comfort level with what he writes, and conservatives know where he's coming from, even if they disagree. In contrast, Weigel's blog seemed to confuse many conservatives who contacted me. Was he supposed to be a neutral reporter, some wondered?

Also picking up Gainor's reaction to the Weigel incident was Fox News Channel's June 25 "Special Report." During the "Political Grapevine" segment, "Special Report" host Bret Baier offered viewers Gainor's reaction.

"A Washington Post blogger assigned to cover the conservative beat has resigned after e-mails he wrote surfaced that included disparaging comments about the very conservatives he was supposed to cover," Baier said. "David Weigel's e-mails to  JournoList, a listserv for liberal journalists were leaked Thursday. In them he wrote it would be a better world if Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report would quote, "Set himself on fire." Weigel also wished for the death of Rush Limbaugh and accused pundits and Republicans of racism. Weigel did apologize on his blog before calling it quits."

"Ben Smith at the Politico blames the paper for hiring what he calls, quote, ‘A liberal blogger under the false impression that he's a conservative.' Dan Gainor of the Media Research Center goes further calling the incident ‘a disaster for the Post,' writing, quote, ‘the Post brought in someone who tried to tear down conservatives and look at the right as if he were visiting a zoo.'"

UPDATE | Lachlan Markay - 6/25, 3:00 PM: A roundup of reactions from all over the blogosphere and twitterverse below the fold.

Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel resigned today after a host of offensive e-mails surfaced revealing his disdain for much of the right - the beat he was charged with covering. Fishbowl DC, which published a number of those emails yesterday, confirmed the resignation with the Post just after noon.

Yesterday I reported on leaked emails from Weigel to a listserve of liberal journalists bashing conservatives and conservatism - you know, the people Weigel is supposed to be covering. As bad as those email were, a plethora of messages from Weigel published in the Daily Caller take the conservative-bashing to a whole new level.

The new emails also demonstrated that yesterday's quasi-apology from Weigel was really not as sincere as he claimed. He said that he made some of his most offensive remarks at the end of a bad day. But these new emails show that there was really nothing unique about them, and that offensive remarks about conservatives really were nothing new or uncommon.

Many of the misguided statements were clearly made in jest - "I hope he fails," Weigel said of Rush Limbaugh after the radio host was hospitalized with chest pains, a reference to Limbaugh's hope that Obama's agenda would fail. But other bouts of name calling - ragging on the "outbursts of racism" from "amoral blowhard" Newt Gingrich, for instance - were obviously not jokes.

The Daily Caller revealed some quite stunning statements from the JournoList in its piece today:

“Honestly, it’s been tough to find fresh angles sometimes–how many times can I report that these [tea party] activists are joyfully signing up with the agenda of discredited right-winger X and discredited right-wing group Y?” Weigel lamented in one February email.

In other posts, Weigel describes conservatives as using the media to “violently, angrily divide America.” According to Weigel, their motives include “racism” and protecting “white privilege,” and for some of the top conservatives in D.C., a nihilistic thirst for power.

“There’s also the fact that neither the pundits, nor possibly the Republicans, will be punished for their crazy outbursts of racism. Newt Gingrich is an amoral blowhard who resigned in disgrace, and Pat Buchanan is an anti-Semite who was drummed out of the movement by William F. Buckley. Both are now polluting my inbox and TV with their bellowing and minority-bashing. They’re never going to go away or be deprived of their soapboxes,” Weigel wrote.

Of Matt Drudge, Weigel remarked,  “It’s really a disgrace that an amoral shut-in like Drudge maintains the influence he does on the news cycle while gay-baiting, lying, and flubbing facts to this degree.”…

Republicans? “Ratf--king [Obama] on every bill.” Palin? Tried to “ratf--k” a moderate Republican in a contentious primary in New York. Limbaugh? Used “ratf--king tactics” in urging Republican activists to vote for Hillary Clinton in open primaries after Obama had all but beat her for the Democratic nomination.

Weigel continued to defend these outbursts, as he did when contacted by the Daily Caller. "My reporting, I think, stands for itself," he said. “I’ve always been of the belief that you could have opinions and could report anyway… people aren’t usually asked to stand or fall on everything they’ve said in private.”

First, there's the issue of whether anything said on a 400-member email list can really be considered "private." "There’s no such thing as off-the-record with 400 people," Nation columnist Eric Alterman told Politico.

But the real issues are, first, whether such mean-spirited jabs demonstrate a disdain for many conservatives that precludes Weigel from covering them fairly (he did label gay marriage opponents "bigots," after all), and second, whether the Post feels it is appropriate to have someone hostile to the right covering conservatism, while a through-and-through liberal in Ezra Klein covers the left.

The Post signaled that it did not consider Weigel's comments to be a serious problem. It seems that attitude has changed.

Managing Editor Raju Narisetti told Politico that "Dave’s apology to readers reflects he understands, in calmer hindsight, the need to exercise good judgment at all times and of not throwing stones, especially when operating from inside an echo-filled glass house that is modern-day digital journalism." He added that it was "time to move on."

The Post decliend comment on Weigel's resignation. 

*****UPDATE

Below is a roundup of reations from prominent online commentators since Weigel's resignation.

Politico's Ben Smith paints Weigel as an unfortunate casualty of the collapsing facade of objectivity in the Post's online efforts.

The current flap over Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel has its roots in a fact that suprised me when I learned of it earlier this year: The Post appears to have hired Weigel, a liberal blogger, under the false impression that he's a conservative. The new controversy over the revelation that he's liberal is primarily the Post's fault, not his, except to the degree that he allowed the paper's brass to put him in an unsustainable position.

Ed Morrissey seems to share this sentiment:

Having an anthropological study of conservatives, such as Dave provides, would work if the Post had a similar anthropological look at liberals from someone on the outside to balance it.  As it stands, however, Post readers get a Conservatives In The Mist approach that seems to predicate itself on the belief that they can’t figure conservatives and conservatism out for themselves.  That’s not a reflection on Dave, but a criticism of the editorial decision to pursue a one-sided strategy of critical analysis at the Post.

And indeed, one of the most interesting elements of the reaction to Weigel's resignation seems to be the admission, or at least the acknowledgment, that he is, in fact, a liberal. The "libertarian" label seemed to stick.

But today,  Weigel's liberalism was treated as a given. Even Keith Olbermann, on whose show Weigel is a regular guest, tweeted his agreement: "If the WaPost didn't know @DaveWeigel  wasn't a conservative blogger, it's time for the Post to FOLD. My full support is yours, David."

At the Atlantic, Jefferey Goldberg made that observation almost in passing. Goldberg went on to make what has been (somewhat surprisingly) a sparsely invoked argument in the hours since Weigel's resignation: that the crudity of his comments itself was enough to sully his reporting.

Media consultant Josh Treviño claimed on Twitter that "nearly all journalists mock their subjects. Maybe not the ones covering elementary schools. But all the others." But Goldberg disagrees:

"How could we destroy our standards by hiring a guy stupid enough to write about people that way in a public forum?" one of my friends at the Post asked me when we spoke earlier today. "I'm not suggesting that many people on the paper don't lean left, but there's leaning left, and then there's behaving like an idiot."

I gave my friend the answer he already knew: The sad truth is that the Washington Post, in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training. This little episode today is proof of this. But it is also proof that some people at the Post (where I worked, briefly, 20 years ago) still know the difference between acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior, and that maybe this episode will lead to the reimposition of some level of standards.

Others, such as NewsBusters contributor Dan Gainor and National Review's Jim Geraghty, attributed Weigel's decline not so much to the language he used as to his style of reporting; his tenancy to seek out the fringe elements of the movement, and focus on them, rather than on mainstream conservatism.

As Gainor said in a statement today,

Weigel’s rapid meltdown showed the incredible danger for traditional media to play fast and loose mixing news and opinion. The Post was either unwilling or unable to find a neutral reporter to cover conservatives. Nor did it hire an actual advocate as it has done for the left with Ezra Klein. Instead, the Post brought in someone who tried to tear down conservatives and look at the right as if he were visiting a zoo. This disaster should be proof enough that their method was a failure.

Geraghty echoed Gainor's comments in a blog post, saying

Dave only fits the loosest definition of conservative; I think he’s best defined as a left-leaning, idiosyncratic libertarian. He is also a political junkie with a voluminous appetite for news and a dogged reporter. From where I sit, he spends too much time writing about fringe figures and trends that are largely irrelevant to national politics (Orly Taitz, Birthers, etc.) but perhaps that’s his genuine fascination and/or what his employers wanted. Righties suspected Dave wanted to spotlight the freakiest and least appealing self-proclaimed “conservatives”; I suspect that at least part of Dave’s mentality was simply, “You have got to hear what this lunatic is saying.”

The Washington Post’s really should consider renaming Anthony Stevens-Arroyo’s column in its “On Faith” blog. “Catholic America” should be “Liberal Democrat Catholic America,” just for the sake of truth in advertising.

On June 23, left-wing hack Stevens-Arroyo again injected his politics into the ostensibly religious column. In “Common good v corp. profits,” he actually wrote that Catholics should “embrace a redistribution of wealth.”

The column sought to explain how Catholics and others should view Judge Martin Feldman’s ruling overturning the Obama moratorium on off-shore drilling. Why, the reader may ask, should this event have Catholic significance, beyond the fact that a liberal writer whose column has “Catholic” in the title was upset about it?

It doesn’t. But Stevens-Arroyo gamely offered that, “There may not be a ‘Catholic’ position about the immediate politics of off-shore drilling, but there is an on-going Catholic approach to resolving the competing interests.” Not surprisingly, that approach vindicates the left.

To Stevens-Arroyo, the issue came down to “common good,” which led him to make this puzzling statement: “While we have considerable freedom about our personal political choices in the application of principles, Catholics in America are bound to embrace a redistribution of wealth, even if it goes contrary to ranting from groups like the Tea Party or Wall Street.”

He never explained where exactly it states Catholics are bound to encourage the government to confiscate legally earned private property to give it to whomever it deems more worthy. Catholics are bound to assist others through charity, not compulsory redistribution.

This isn’t the first time Stevens-Arroyo has conflated socialism with faith. Last year he declared that “the most Catholic” part of Ted Kennedy’s funeral was the senator’s grandchildren pleading for nationalized health care.

But, not content being an arbiter of what is Catholic and what isn’t, Stevens-Arroyo set himself up as a law scholar, hypothesizing that the “Reagan-appointed judge” Feldman’s ruling could be seen as the work of an “activist court.”

He ranted that, “a judge is supposed to be limited to matters of constitutionality -- and not to impose his jobs’ policy. There can be no doubt that a presidential moratorium falls within the powers of the White House, so stopping this legitimate executive order on questions about its consequences constitutes activism.”

Even the Associated Press explained that the moratorium was overturned because the “Interior Department failed to provide adequate reasoning for the moratorium.”

Stevens-Arroyo has a history of being unable to hide his liberal viewpoints. Just last March he claimed that Fox New’s Glenn Beck was using “the same strategy of the Hitler Youth and the Polish Communist Party … ” In December he also attempted to compare Ft. Hood shooter Hidal Hassan to World War 1 hero Alvin York and General Patton.

I in no way condone acts of violence or threats of violence toward Census workers, or anyone else, but this article over the weekend really got to me. An unexpected result for some census takers: the wrath of irate Americans Since they began making follow-up house calls in early May, census takers [...]

It seems no section of the newspaper is free of bias and/or political cheap shots.

Take today's Local Living section of the Washington Post, whose "on gardening" feature writer Adrian Higgins blasted "Sarah Palin's... wrong to the landscape"* in the form of the 14-foot-tall wooden fence she erected between her Wasilla, Alaska, property and an adjacent lot rented by author Joe McGinniss:

Do bad neighbors make bad fences? I've seen a few fences in my time, but none quite as defiantly ugly as the one now shielding Sarah Palin and her family from what she suggests are the prying eyes of her new neighbor, an author named Joe McGinniss. 

[...]

As a prop in the theater of contemporary politics, the screen is a masterstroke. This billboard of a fence looks like the heroic, makeshift response of a woman protecting her besieged family from a loathsome spy. Writes Palin on her Facebook page: "Wonder what kind of material he'll gather while overlooking Piper's bedroom, my little garden, and the family's swimming hole?" This, in turn, spawned ugly and threatening responses against McGinniss. "She's pushed a button, and unleashed the hounds of hell," McGinniss told NBC's Matt Lauer.

However genuine the motives behind the fence, from a design, horticultural and sheer aesthetic standpoint, it looks like a disaster.

Higgins did eventually get back to his area of expertise, explaining why overly tall fences are bad for backyard gardens. And Higgins did crack a joke at the expense of D.C.-area local government bureaucrats who disapprove of tall fences.

All the same, Higgins's swipe at the Palins was gratuitous, a needless intrusion of politics into a generally apolitical section of the paper.

*"Sarah Palin's fence didn't have to be so ugly," was the online article's headline.

The above photo by Mark Thiessen of the Associated Press was included with the Higgins article along witha caption reading, "You betcha, a two-tone and 14-foot-high fence is a bad idea."

Many conservatives, including a number of NewsBusters contributors, have been skeptical of Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel since he was hired in March to cover the right. Time and again, those concerns have been vindicated as Weigel has ridiculed a number of conservatives and conservative positions.

It seems that the Washington Post has little interest in an objective blog-based approach to the news -- something this humble blogger has noted previously. Likewise, Weigel seems to have little interest in covering the right with an even hand; he has consistently shown his disdain for the movement and its members.

The website Fishbowl DC today published a number of excerpts of emails from Weigel to an email list created by fellow Post blogger Ezra Klein ridiculing various conservatives. He says he hopes Matt Drudge will "set himself on fire" and dubbed Tea Party protesters "Paultard[s]," a crude reference to Ron Paul.

Weigel also apparently does not appreciate being made fun of. After the Washington Examiner's gossip blog Yeas and Neas published a piece taunting his dance moves, Weigel called on members of the email list to refrain from linking to any Examiner content.

Weigel took heat in May for calling gay marriage opponents "bigots" and for stating on his Twitter account, "I hear there's video out there of Matt Drudge diddling an 8-year-old boy. Shocking."

NewsBusters contributor Dan Gainor called Weigel out on his inappropriate statements, noting that his new employment at the Post required a heightened degree of professionalism that he may not have been used to. Apparently that message was lost on Weigel.

As a reporter for an organization as prominent as the Post, Weigel should not be surprised when he catches flack for making unprofessional and inappropriate statements.

Weigel has taken to his blog to apologize for and defend the most recent comments. But his excuses really do not make any difference. The comments he is trying to defend demonstrate his hostility towards conservatives and conservatism. A journalist who reverts to name-calling and derisive criticism of those who is charged with covering cannot seriously claim to be covering them fairly.

"I feel [Weigel's] column often looks for ways that make conservatives look bad," wrote Gainor in March, "while his opposite number, the Post's Ezra Klein, is an open liberal and spends his time making the left look good."

Who knows, maybe that was the point all along.

President Obama's weekly radio address on Saturday devoted the entire hour to a hyper-partisan, long-winded, meandering speech about his Republican critics being too -- wait for it! -- partisan.

Fortunately for him, a compliant national media would simply forward the attack on their own pages and never pause long enough to smell the irony.

In the middle of alleged job offers, controversial nominations, and unpopular bills shoved through Congress along party lines, President Obama complained about "dreary and familiar politics" from the opposition, and the media immediately took his side.

Up first was the Washington Post's Scott Wilson who used the 44 blog on Saturday to cover the speech:

A frustrated President Obama assailed congressional Republicans on Saturday for holding up legislation he said is important to the country's economic recovery, and he called for up-or-down votes on the measure and on scores of his nominees in the Senate as soon as possible.

"I was disappointed this week to see a dreary and familiar politics get in the way of our ability to move forward on a series of critical issues that have a direct impact on people's lives," Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address.

Obama has often sprinkled criticism of Washington's partisan culture - a target of his 2008 campaign - throughout his weekly addresses. But he has rarely devoted the entire speech to the subject, and his doing so Saturday was a sign of his exasperation and concern that a failure to push through measures to benefit the staggering economy could hurt his party in the November elections.

Wilson was correct about one thing: President Obama does often complain about partisan games. It seems that all of his problems can be traced back to incompetent Republicans or partisan critics, and he will gladly give a partisan speech to tell you about it.

Yet it never occurred to Wilson to mention any of that. In fact, Wilson went on to quote President Obama further:

In his address, Obama said, "The political season is upon us in Washington, but gridlock as a political strategy is destructive to the country."

"Whether we are Democrats or Republicans, we've got an obligation that goes beyond caring about the next election," he said. "We have an obligation to care for the next generation. So I hope that when Congress returns next week, they do so with a greater spirit of compromise and cooperation. America will be watching."

Sadly, other news outlets took the same tack of ignoring Obama's glaring hypocrisy.

Politico covered the address in a short report that mentioned nothing of the past. The New York Times used the occasion to repeat guilt-stricken quotes about "unemployed Americans" and families who can't afford to buy a home. Worst of all was the Associated Press, which spoke directly in its headline about "making life harder for the jobless" - never bothering to wonder if such partisan blame-games from the president could be partially responsible for things being harder.

It was just a few years ago that partisan arguments from the president were seen as divisive and polarizing. Of course, that was when a Republican was in the White House, and liberal Democrats were the ones stalling. Back then, the media were quite annoyed by sitting presidents who criticized the other party.

On November 5, 2004, Salon published a rant from an enraged Cass Sunstein who encouraged fellow progressives to keep fighting after Bush's reelection victory:

After this intensely fought election, both President Bush and Sen. John Kerry are speaking of the need to heal our divisions and come together as a single, united nation. They're wrong. Critics of the Bush presidency do not need to heal our divisions but to insist on them. President Bush has presided over an extraordinarily divisive and polarizing administration. The suggestion that we should now "heal our divisions" is really a suggestion not for unity but for capitulation...

This is not a time to yield to a radical agenda for our nation's future or its Constitution. Nor is it time to heal our divisions. It is time to shout them from the rooftops.

The media's response to that strategy was something less than outrage. In fact, this view of politics was acceptable fare back then.

A few months later, NBC's David Gregory curtly reported that "bipartisanship appears to be out" thanks to President Bush refusing to work with liberal Democrats. He accused Bush of "barreling ahead" with unpopular agendas and "not talking about compromise."

In 2005, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne had this to say about Bush:

Recent months, and especially the past two weeks, have brought home to a steadily growing majority of Americans the truth that President Bush's government doesn't work. His policies are failing, his approach to leadership is detached and self-indulgent, his way of politics has produced a divided, angry and dysfunctional public square. We dare not go on like this.

In 2007, the NY Times called Bush "a polarizing president like no other" who had "given little ground" to Democrats. When Bush fought a plan in Congress to expand federal funding for children's health insurance, the Times quoted Rahm Emanuel saying, "I'm at a loss over what is driving him with this strategy."

That was how a Republican president was treated for refusing to give in to the opposition. It had nothing to do with obstructionist liberals who refused to let the nation heal, even though they had stated that very thing as their goal. Bush refused to lie down for liberal agendas, so obviously he was the cause of all the friction.

How convenient that liberal Democrats are now in charge of Washington, and suddenly the president is excused for being partisan.

It would appear that, according to our media, the definition of compromise is when conservatives give up. 

In a recent interview, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said that the Bush tax cuts that affect the middle class should not be considered "totally sacrosanct."

The number two Democrat in the House of Representatives "acknowledg[ed] that it would be difficult to reduce long-term deficits without breaking President Obama's pledge to protect families earning less than $250,000 a year," reported Lori Montgomery in the June 22 Washington Post.

That certainly sounds worthy of front-page placement, especially in the midst of a contentious midterm election year, but Post editors instead parked the 9-paragraph story below the fold on page A13 of the print edition and gave it a snoozer of a headline: "Hoyer: Tax cuts need to be examined."

"Middle-class benefit may not be affordable long-term, he says," the subheader dryly noted.

The online version headline gave a similarly bland headline, "Rep. Steny Hoyer says middle-class tax breaks may not be affordable long-term."

At no point in her article did Montgomery raise the question of whether an increased tax burden would be "affordable" to middle class earners weathering a rough and uncertain economy.

Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, was The Washington Post’s “On Faith” guest columnist on June 21. Predictably, she used the opportunity to bash the Catholic Church’s abortion policy. In “Should Church control access to health care?” Northup charged that the Catholic Church wields too much influence over policy decisions dealing with abortion.

Northup complained, “This year at home, we saw the U.S. government give the Conference on Catholic Bishops veto power over the health-care reform bill, and in the end, millions of American women were left with a policy that restricts insurance coverage for abortion services even for those who pay for their insurance with their own hard-earned dollars.”

She also sympathized with Sister Margaret McBride, who was demoted and excommunicated when she gave permission for an ill woman to have an abortion at a hospital. Northup questioned why more people didn’t wonder about her “secular punishment.”

And the problem, Northup suggested, was world-wide.

She wrote in other countries, “we repeatedly confront the tragic consequences of the Catholic Church’s sustained hostility to reproductive health service when it imposes its theology on public policy and the provision of health services to the public.”

In Kenya, she wrote, Catholic leaders are considering halting a new constitution because of a clause that would allow abortions in some circumstances. She stated, “But the Church would prefer to preserve the narrower exception on the books today, which criminalize abortion except to save the woman’s life.”

She warned that unplanned pregnancies bring “poverty, a dearth of sexuality education, and sexual violence,” but never mentioned the consequences or risks associated with aborting a fetus.

Northup made it seem as though abortion was only risky if only done illegally. When women attempt abortions themselves or get them illegally, she wrote, “tens of thousands die or suffer debilitating damage to their health.”

But abortions done legally carry plenty of risks for the mother, including death.

Northup also disliked the Catholic Church’s influence in the Philippines, where contraception is frowned upon. She wrote, “the policy banning modern methods of contraception causes irreparable damage.”  She also worried that in Europe that Church’s influence has caused, “backsliding on access to reproductive health services.”

At first blush, it seems as if this item might be one to file under "It Takes One to Know One." That would be wrong; the circumstances are too different.

Carly Fiorina took what she thought was a private swipe (which might not even have been a swipe at all, as noted at the end of this post) at Barbara "Don't Call Me Ma'am" Boxer's hairdo as being "so yesterday." The comment was captured by a live microphone.

The Washington Post's Robin Givhan writes widely-read columns on fashion, and has all the time in the world to consider the temperance, or lack thereof, of her critiques before they are published.

Given Givhan's situation and history, the WaPo fashion editor's characterization of Fiorina as a "style bully" (HT to Ann Althouse) is especially galling. If anyone has a track record of style bullying, it's Givhan, whose targets unsurprisingly are often conservatives and Republicans.

Sticking to the hair-raising subject at hand, the Media Research Center documented Givhan's given tendencies in an April 15, 2005 item:

Givhan ... today attacked UN Ambassador designate John Bolton: “His attire was not merely bland but careless. His hair was so poorly cut, it bordered on rude.” She wisecracked that Bolton’s locks looked like he had “shaken his hair dry in the manner of an Afghan hound.” His mustache looked ”like it should be attached to geek glasses and a rubber nose.”

... go back to a July 9, 2004 Post article on candidate hair, and you start wondering how much her critiques are tilted by her politics.

• George W. Bush “has enough hair to fully cover his head, but it is a dull gray thatch that is unremarkable and never seems to glisten even when he is standing in direct sunlight.”
• Dick Cheney “has thinning white hair, and the few strands that are there are so lacking in body and bounce that in the presidential hair wars, they don't even register as wisps.”
• John Kerry’s “hair may have turned silver, but he has arrived at age 60 seemingly without having lost a strand. What man wouldn't gloat, just a little?”
• John Edwards makes Givhan’s heart pitter-patter, writing in one ardent passage that his “hair has regularly been referred to as a mop, but that suggests that it is messy or unkempt. Nothing could be further from the truth. He has a precise haircut with artfully clipped layers. His hair is a beautiful shade of chocolate brown with honey-colored highlights. It is not particularly long, but it is smooth and shiny. It is boyish hair not because of the style but because it looks so healthy and buoyant and practically cries out to be tousled the same way a well-groomed golden retriever demands to be nuzzled.”

Robin's rendition of the Breck Girl's allegedly magnificent mane is more than enough to make one's hair stand on end.

Givhan infamously went after then Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris in 2000 during Al Gore's and the Democratic Party's attempt to steal the 2000 presidential election, even attempting a connection between her appearance and her political temperament (text was obtained from library database; bolds are mine):

Her lips were overdrawn with berry- red lipstick--the creamy sort that smears all over a coffee cup and leaves smudges on shirt collars. Her skin had been plastered and powdered to the texture of pre-war walls in need of a skim coat. And her eyes, rimmed in liner and frosted with blue shadow, bore the telltale homogenous spikes of false eyelashes. Caterpillars seemed to rise and fall with every bat of her eyelid, with every downward glance to double-check--before reading--her most recent "determination."

Hers were not the delicate individual lashes that can be used to fill out sparse hairs and give the eyes a lush canopy. Instead, they were the lashes of Tammy Faye Bakker Messner or Peggy Moffitt, the '60s model famed for her mod style and huge lashes. They were cartoon lashes. Lashes destined for a "Saturday Night Live" skit.

The cruel took to calling her the dragon lady, and it quickly became clear that her 15 minutes of fame would be spent as the butt of jokes from late-night comics, morning talk show hosts and the Internet millions.

By the time folks finished deriding her makeup, they couldn't stop the momentum. They went on to the clothes. Hate the suit. Hate the buttons. Hate you.

... One of the reasons Harris is so easy to mock is because she, to be honest, seems to have applied her makeup with a trowel. At this moment that so desperately needs diplomacy, understatement and calm, one wonders how this Republican woman, who can't even use restraint when she's wielding a mascara wand, will manage to use it and make sound decisions in this game of partisan one-upmanship.

Besides, she looks bad--not by the hand of God but by her own. She took fashion--which speaks in riddles, hyperbole and half-truths--at its word, imbibing all of those references to the '70s and '80s, taking styling cues from Versace ads in which models are made up as if by a mortician's assistant, believing the magazines when they said that blue eye shadow was back. She failed to think for herself. Why should anyone trust her?

If Givhan has ever similarly gone after a shabbily attired or poorly put-together Democratic or liberal woman to the point of alleging that it affects the wisdom of her decision-making, I'm not aware of it.

Althouse's take on the Fiorina incident ultimately but silently accuses Givhan of insensitivity directed at cancer survivors:

It's a bit hard to tell unless you look for it (in the video at the link--Ed.), but I'm looking after hearing a friend, a cancer survivor who lost her own hair, insist that what we are seeing is a cancer survivor's humorous attitude about hair.

I now think that Fiorina stopped in the middle of an anecdote when someone off camera signaled for her to shut up, but that if she had gone on, she would have made a self-effacing/sarcastic wisecrack about her own hair along the lines of: Oh, yes, because my hair is so today, if by "today," you mean not utterly bald.

The gesture she makes at her own hair, just before she clams up, is not, I think, a mean girl's I'm-so-gorgeous primp. It's comic business that would have fit amusingly with the wisecrack that was never cracked. My friend, a woman who, like Fiorina, has recently regrown hair, feels sure she has the ability to recognize a shared dark humor about hair that women who have not gone through the experience don't pick up on. Hair is a big deal to women, and our ears perk up when we hear talk about other women's hair. Givhan explores that with good sensibility, but I think she, like many others, is judging Fiorina without a full understanding of the context.

Nice and insightful observations, Ann. Bully for you.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

Howard Kurtz on Sunday said most mainstream media outlets "really blew it this week" in how they reported North Carolina Congressman Bob Etheridge's attack on students.

"Most treated it as intriguing footage or a good gossip item, but the guy went bonkers when approached by two young men with a video camera," Kurtz said near the end of CNN's "Reliable Sources."

After playing the video of the incident, Kurtz surprisingly asked, "Remember how the media went nuts over that tape of Republican Senator George Allen using the word 'Macaca?'"

He continued, "By minimizing this footage of a Democratic congressman, most news organizations have enabled their critics to charge once again that they have a double standard" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

HOWARD KURTZ, HOST: Finally, I think most mainstream media outlets really blew it this week when faced with a stunning videotape involving North Carolina Congressman Bob Etheridge. Most treated it as intriguing footage or a good gossip item, but the guy went bonkers when approached by two young men with a video camera.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're just here for a project.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Please let go of my hand.

REP. BOB ETHERIDGE (D), NORTH CAROLINA: Tell me who you are.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm just a student, sir.

ETHERIDGE: From?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're just students. That's all we are.

ETHERIDGE: I have a right to know who you are.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All we are is students.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sir, we're in a public place.

ETHERIDGE: So am I.

Who are you? Who are you?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Please let go of my arm, sir.

ETHERIDGE: Who are you?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sir -- sir, please.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Congressman, please let go of me.

ETHERIDGE: Who are you? KURTZ (voice-over): Etheridge has apologized. And we still don't know whether the young men were political agitators.

Andrew Breitbart, the conservative who publicized the ACORN sting, was the first to put up the Etheridge video, which got a big ride on Sean Hannity's show.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KURTZ: But it really doesn't matter. Remember how the media went nuts over that tape of Republican Senator George Allen using the word "Macaca"? By minimizing this footage of a Democratic congressman, most news organizations have enabled their critics to charge once again that they have a double standard.

Yes it has, Howard.  

That said, Kurtz could have used his own paper as an example of this double standard.

According to LexisNexis, the Post's only report on Etheridge's attack came at the end of a June 15 Style section article about an upcoming series on Bravo called "The Real Housewives of D.C."  

Tucked at the conclusion of this piece was the following (from LexisNexis, no link available):

A very candid camera reaction

So, what really happened when Rep. Bob Etheridge ran into a couple of self-described "students" on the streets of D.C. last week? The video confrontation between the obscure seven-term North Carolina Dem and two camera-wielding young men ("Who are you?" he demands. "Tell me who you are," as he grabs the wrist of one) went viral Monday and left more questions than answers.

Who are the videographers? Lots of theories about GOP operatives, but no one has come forward to take credit, reports our colleague David Weigel. The reason for stopping Etheridge outside a fundraiser for Nancy Pelosi? "A project," one of the men said on the video. Anything happen that's not on the tape? Unclear, since no other version of the encounter has emerged. The National Journalism Center and the Leadership Institute, two Virginia organizations that train conservative journalists (the latter boasts ACORN sting artist James O'Keefe), flatly denied the men worked for them, as did the National Republican Congressional Committee.

"I apologize for my actions," Etheridge said during a news conference Monday afternoon. "They were unacceptable." He declined to say if parts of the exchange were edited out or speculate if conservatives had staged the clash for . . . well, a viral video. "I'm not going there," he said.

And that was ALL the coverage Kurtz's own paper gave to this matter -- in the STYLE section no less!

As the Post mercilessly pounded the Macaca out of George Allen in the summer and fall of 2006 leading to his defeat in that November's midterm elections, it is indeed a FINE example of the double standard Kurtz spoke of Sunday.

Too bad he didn't mention that in his admonishment of how the media "really blew" its reporting of the Etheridge attack. 

Howard Kurtz on Sunday said most mainstream media outlets "really blew it this week" in how they reported North Carolina Congressman Bob Etheridge's attack on students.

"Most treated it as intriguing footage or a good gossip item, but the guy went bonkers when approached by two young men with a video camera," Kurtz said near the end of CNN's "Reliable Sources."

After playing the video of the incident, Kurtz surprisingly asked, "Remember how the media went nuts over that tape of Republican Senator George Allen using the word 'Macaca?'"

He continued, "By minimizing this footage of a Democratic congressman, most news organizations have enabled their critics to charge once again that they have a double standard" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

HOWARD KURTZ, HOST: Finally, I think most mainstream media outlets really blew it this week when faced with a stunning videotape involving North Carolina Congressman Bob Etheridge. Most treated it as intriguing footage or a good gossip item, but the guy went bonkers when approached by two young men with a video camera.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're just here for a project.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Please let go of my hand.

REP. BOB ETHERIDGE (D), NORTH CAROLINA: Tell me who you are.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm just a student, sir.

ETHERIDGE: From?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're just students. That's all we are.

ETHERIDGE: I have a right to know who you are.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All we are is students.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sir, we're in a public place.

ETHERIDGE: So am I.

Who are you? Who are you?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Please let go of my arm, sir.

ETHERIDGE: Who are you?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sir -- sir, please.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Congressman, please let go of me.

ETHERIDGE: Who are you? KURTZ (voice-over): Etheridge has apologized. And we still don't know whether the young men were political agitators.

Andrew Breitbart, the conservative who publicized the ACORN sting, was the first to put up the Etheridge video, which got a big ride on Sean Hannity's show.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KURTZ: But it really doesn't matter. Remember how the media went nuts over that tape of Republican Senator George Allen using the word "Macaca"? By minimizing this footage of a Democratic congressman, most news organizations have enabled their critics to charge once again that they have a double standard.

Yes it has, Howard.  

That said, Kurtz could have used his own paper as an example of this double standard.

According to LexisNexis, the Post's only report on Etheridge's attack came at the end of a June 15 Style section article about an upcoming series on Bravo called "The Real Housewives of D.C."  

Tucked at the conclusion of this piece was the following (from LexisNexis, no link available):

A very candid camera reaction

So, what really happened when Rep. Bob Etheridge ran into a couple of self-described "students" on the streets of D.C. last week? The video confrontation between the obscure seven-term North Carolina Dem and two camera-wielding young men ("Who are you?" he demands. "Tell me who you are," as he grabs the wrist of one) went viral Monday and left more questions than answers.

Who are the videographers? Lots of theories about GOP operatives, but no one has come forward to take credit, reports our colleague David Weigel. The reason for stopping Etheridge outside a fundraiser for Nancy Pelosi? "A project," one of the men said on the video. Anything happen that's not on the tape? Unclear, since no other version of the encounter has emerged. The National Journalism Center and the Leadership Institute, two Virginia organizations that train conservative journalists (the latter boasts ACORN sting artist James O'Keefe), flatly denied the men worked for them, as did the National Republican Congressional Committee.

"I apologize for my actions," Etheridge said during a news conference Monday afternoon. "They were unacceptable." He declined to say if parts of the exchange were edited out or speculate if conservatives had staged the clash for . . . well, a viral video. "I'm not going there," he said.

And that was ALL the coverage Kurtz's own paper gave to this matter -- in the STYLE section no less!

As the Post mercilessly pounded the Macaca out of George Allen in the summer and fall of 2006 leading to his defeat in that November's midterm elections, it is indeed a FINE example of the double standard Kurtz spoke of Sunday.

Too bad he didn't mention that in his admonishment of how the media "really blew" its reporting of the Etheridge attack. 

It's one thing for a so-called journalist to claim media members in 2008 were all taken with the historical notion of electing the country's first black President, but it's quite another to say they were right in doing so.

Despite the seeming absurdity, this is exactly what the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the New Yorker magazine told the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz Sunday.

During the "Reliable Sources" interview of David Remnick, Kurtz noted that in his new biography about Barack Obama, Remnick wrote, "[D]uring the campaign...Obama received generally adoring press coverage."

After giving a few examples, Kurtz asked, "What came over the press in 2007 and 2008 when it came to Barack Obama?"

Readers are likely to find some of Remnick's answer quite disturbing (video follows with transcript and commentary): 

HOWARD KURTZ, HOST: You write that during the campaign, which is sort of where your book ends, that Obama received generally adoring press coverage. And you had a couple examples I hadn't seen.

Meredith Vieira -- this is when she was on "The View" -- said he would be a huge force in this country for the better. And Barbara Walters compared him at one point to Nelson Mandela.

DAVID REMNICK, EDITOR THE NEW YORKER: Yes.

KURTZ: What came over the press in 2007 and 2008 when it came to Barack Obama?

REMNICK: Well, first of all, he was new. We hadn't been over this story 700 times.

And let's face it, Barack Obama was a part of a narrative of the most painful and prolonged history that we have in our country, which is the epic story and extremely painful story of race in America. And the business of him being a serious candidate for the presidency, not just a symbolic run, not one that's doomed to failure, but one that could quite possibly reach the end and be elected president, well, I think we were all taken up with that, and I think legitimately so. I think the notion of an African-American running successfully for president --

So if Obama was a white junior senator from Illinois with the exact same credentials, speech patterns, and mannerisms, the media would have been LESS taken with him? And that's LEGITIMATE?

Even Kurtz seemed surprised with this: 

KURTZ: Legitimately so, except that you have another candidate for president. And a lot of people concluded, fairly or unfairly, that the media, or parts of the media, were in the tank for the Democratic candidate.

REMNICK: Well, I'm only responsible for "The New Yorker" and for myself, and I thought we were fair to Hillary Clinton and I think we were fair all around.

Were we taken up with the extra story of race? Absolutely. And I think we should have been.

Did Remnick understand what he was saying here? 

After all, it's one thing to ADMIT he and his fellow press members were in the tank for Obama because he was black. But to after the fact say they were right in doing so undermines ANY credibility for himself and his similarly guilty colleagues in the future?

Think about it: why should anyone trust his reporting on any subject if it can be impacted by the color of someone's skin?

That folks like Remnick don't understand the ramifications of this on themselves and their industry is almost as shocking as they're behavior in 2007 and 2008. 

Unfortunately, Kurtz didn't press him on this, and instead moved to another subject.

Too bad, for it would have been interesting if Remnick was forced to explain his position and answer how he could possibly be perceived as an impartial journalist ever again. 

It's one thing for a so-called journalist to claim media members in 2008 were all taken with the historical notion of electing the country's first black President, but it's quite another to say they were right in doing so.

Despite the seeming absurdity, this is exactly what the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the New Yorker magazine told the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz Sunday.

During the "Reliable Sources" interview of David Remnick, Kurtz noted that in his new biography about Barack Obama, Remnick wrote, "[D]uring the campaign...Obama received generally adoring press coverage."

After giving a few examples, Kurtz asked, "What came over the press in 2007 and 2008 when it came to Barack Obama?"

Readers are likely to find some of Remnick's answer quite disturbing (video follows with transcript and commentary): 

HOWARD KURTZ, HOST: You write that during the campaign, which is sort of where your book ends, that Obama received generally adoring press coverage. And you had a couple examples I hadn't seen.

Meredith Vieira -- this is when she was on "The View" -- said he would be a huge force in this country for the better. And Barbara Walters compared him at one point to Nelson Mandela.

DAVID REMNICK, EDITOR THE NEW YORKER: Yes.

KURTZ: What came over the press in 2007 and 2008 when it came to Barack Obama?

REMNICK: Well, first of all, he was new. We hadn't been over this story 700 times.

And let's face it, Barack Obama was a part of a narrative of the most painful and prolonged history that we have in our country, which is the epic story and extremely painful story of race in America. And the business of him being a serious candidate for the presidency, not just a symbolic run, not one that's doomed to failure, but one that could quite possibly reach the end and be elected president, well, I think we were all taken up with that, and I think legitimately so. I think the notion of an African-American running successfully for president --

So if Obama was a white junior senator from Illinois with the exact same credentials, speech patterns, and mannerisms, the media would have been LESS taken with him? And that's LEGITIMATE?

Even Kurtz seemed surprised with this: 

KURTZ: Legitimately so, except that you have another candidate for president. And a lot of people concluded, fairly or unfairly, that the media, or parts of the media, were in the tank for the Democratic candidate.

REMNICK: Well, I'm only responsible for "The New Yorker" and for myself, and I thought we were fair to Hillary Clinton and I think we were fair all around.

Were we taken up with the extra story of race? Absolutely. And I think we should have been.

Did Remnick understand what he was saying here? 

After all, it's one thing to ADMIT he and his fellow press members were in the tank for Obama because he was black. But to after the fact say they were right in doing so undermines ANY credibility for himself and his similarly guilty colleagues in the future?

Think about it: why should anyone trust his reporting on any subject if it can be impacted by the color of someone's skin?

That folks like Remnick don't understand the ramifications of this on themselves and their industry is almost as shocking as they're behavior in 2007 and 2008. 

Unfortunately, Kurtz didn't press him on this, and instead moved to another subject.

Too bad, for it would have been interesting if Remnick was forced to explain his position and answer how he could possibly be perceived as an impartial journalist ever again. 

The Washington Post’s Colbert I. King is a regular TV commentator, a Pulitzer prize winner and the deputy editor of the paper’s influential editorial page. But the column he churned out for this morning’s paper is one of the laziest ad hominem attacks on conservatives I’ve ever seen.

Dressed up as a Father’s Day column, King argues that Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh should not criticize President Obama on policy matters because Obama is a good family man and they are not — and then churns out paragraph after paragraph reciting the personal laundry of these conservatives and, in the case of Palin, their non-relatives.

In other words: Shut up about Obama’s left-wing big government policies or I’ll embarrass you.

It’s a shameful column, hardly worthy of a college newspaper, let alone a Pulitzer prize winner. Here’s how it starts off:

Family, marriage and the contribution of fathers come together as topics for reflection on Father's Day. So I'd like to know why Barack Obama, a husband and a father in a family structure that encompasses bonds deemed essential to our society, is constantly and savagely attacked by conservative leaders whose personal circumstances undermine the family values they espouse?

Consider Obama: Raised by a single mother in a middle-class family where hard work and education were watchwords, Obama graduated from two of the top schools in the country, Columbia University and Harvard Law School. His legal scholarship was recognized when he became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. He married and, equally important, has stayed married to Michelle Robinson, a Princeton graduate and Harvard Law alumna. He lives with his wife, two children and his mother-in-law. Obama: constitutional law professor, civil rights lawyer, state legislator, U.S. senator, 44th U.S. president, family man.

Now let's turn to Obama's foremost critics: Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, Newton Leroy Gingrich and Sarah Palin.

Limbaugh and Gingrich have said too many negative things about Obama to count. "I want him to fail" (Limbaugh) and "secular socialist" (Gingrich) are just two of their attacks. Yet two of the nation's loudest proponents of family-values issues are serial husbands. Between them, the two men have had seven wives.

King then rattles through Limbaugh’s previous marriages, culminating with this snotty aside: “Two weeks ago, Limbaugh married a Florida party planner. He's still wedded to her as far as I can tell.”

When he gets to Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor is tarred with the wrongdoings of her sister-in-law, her daughter’s ex-boyfriend’s mother, and even the shenanigans of Levi Johnston himself, as if Palin blessed his every move:

And the whereabouts of 19-year-old Levi on this Father's Day weekend?...Levi can be found on the cover of Playgirl magazine, his nude body blocked from full exposure by his strategically placed arm.

And to think, as we prepare to celebrate this day of men and family, Limbaugh, Gingrich and Palin have the unmitigated gall to look down their noses at our president.

How committed is the Washington Post to its crusade to see Congress abridge free speech under the guise of "campaign finance reform"? So much that it's willing to be a political bedfellow with the National Rifle Association, a group it detests for its persistent advocacy of Americans' Second Amendment liberties.

In a June 17 editorial, the Post voiced its support behind a bill that Democrats and some liberal Republicans have been cobbling together since the Supreme Court struck down a portion of the McCain-Feingold bill earlier this year. But the bill itself contains language that was tailor-made to carve out an exemption for the National Rifle Association. That exemption was included, it seems, to get the NRA to back down from opposing the bill and hence to prevent it from throwing the ire of its grassroots backers into the mix.

While there are both leftists and conservatives angry about this unholy alliance for wildly different reasons, the Post defended its support of the bill with its typical sanctimonious language about battling "shadowy" interests:

As the price of not opposing the measure, which would have doomed it, the NRA won an exemption from the proposal's donor disclosure requirements. Most nonprofit groups that conduct more than $10,000 of campaign-related activities would have to disclose the identities of donors; the groups can set up separate political accounts so that only supporters contributing to the political advertising would be listed. The NRA amendment would exempt any group that (a) is at least 10 years old, (b) has 1 million annual dues-paying members, (c) has operations in all 50 states and (d) receives less than 15 percent of its funding from corporations or labor unions. Guess how many groups would qualify? The NRA and perhaps the Humane Society and the AARP. Smaller nonprofit groups would have to play by the new disclosure rules.

It's bad policy to treat reasonably similar groups so differently. Why exempt the NRA but require the Sierra Club or the NAACP to report their donors for campaign-related causes? There is no good answer except for the matter of political muscle. But it's also true that well-established, member-supported organizations are not likely to be conduits for the kind of secret special-interest funding, whether from corporations, labor unions or wealthy individuals, that the new disclosure rules are designed to root out.

The question facing House members is whether some disclosure of political spending -- a good deal more disclosure, in fact -- is better than none. We think it is. Under existing rules, those who want to spend money to influence campaigns without revealing their identities can operate through nonprofit organizations or trade associations. The House measure would require these groups to reveal their donors, just as so-called 527 organizations were called on to report contributors after they emerged as important, but shadowy, political players. For those who believe that disclosure is the best defense against corrupting the political process, this new reporting is crucial. Exempting the NRA is obnoxious, but the alternative is even worse.

To its credit, the Post also included on the June 17 op-ed page a scathing condemnation of the NRA's craven move by NRA board of director member Cleta Mitchell. Mitchell capably pointed out that the "cynical decision" by House Democrats to accept the NRA Amendment to so-called DISCLOSE Act (H.R. 5175) just showed that the real purpose of the bill is to curb and practically "license" political speech rather than preventing corruption of public policy-making:

In Citizens United, the court held that the First Amendment doesn't permit Congress to treat different corporations differently; that the protections afforded political speech arise from the Constitution, not Congress. Otherwise, it would be tantamount to a congressional power to license the speech of some while denying it to others.

The NRA carve-out is a clear example of a congressional speech license.

The ostensible purpose of the legislation is benign "disclosure," upheld in Citizens United as permissible under the First Amendment. Even conservative Justice Antonin Scalia has expressed skepticism about the constitutional infirmity of disclosure requirements in another case argued this term; Scalia intoned in oral argument that "running a democracy takes a certain amount of civic courage."

That's true. Indeed, the law upheld in Citizens United requires all donors to candidate-related expenditures to be publicly disclosed to the FEC in a timely manner.

But the Disclose Act isn't really intended to elicit information not currently required by law. The act serves notice on certain speakers that their involvement in the political process will exact a high price of regulation, penalty and notoriety, using disclosure and reporting as a subterfuge to chill their political speech and association.

It is only disclosure, say the authors. And box-cutters are only handy household tools . . . until they are used by terrorists to crash airplanes.

This is not just "disclosure." It is a scheme hatched by political insiders to eradicate disfavored speech. There is no room under the First Amendment for Congress to make deals on political speech, whether with the NRA or anyone else.

President Obama met with a group of prominent liberal commentators on Thursday to discuss the Gulf oil spill and the administration's response. The meeting came in the midst of a rare firestorm of criticism from the left over the president's response to the spill.

It was surely not coincidence that the journalists seen leaving the White House that afternoon--the New York Times's Gail Collins, the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, and the Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib--were some of the more prominent critics of the president's Oval Office address on Tuesday.

The meeting demonstrates two facts: the White House is trying furiously to spin media coverage of the federal response to the spill in the administration's favor, and the old White House double standard towards the news media persists.

Though hardly shocking, the Obama administration continues to employ a vicious double standard that dubs any news organization that criticizes the president something short of legitimate.

Lest anyone has forgotten, two top White House officials--chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and political advisor David Axelrod--both rhetorically negated Fox's credentials as a legitimate news organization. Thursday's meeting suggests another layer of partisanship that, though hardly surprising, is still quite telling.

While Fox is demonized, some of the left's most partisan commentators are not only granted the White House's seal of legitimacy, but are even give privileged access to the president.

The meeting also suggests that Obama is devoting more effort to spinning his administration's policies concerning the gulf spill than he is with actually devising more effective policies. His meeting with these lefty journalists was, after all, roughly three times as long as his meeting with BP CEO Tony Hayward.

Sally Quinn really wants to be helpful to both President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. However, the result of her laughable suggestion that Hillary and Vice-President Biden switch jobs is that it would only highlight the desperate political situation that the current administration has gotten itself into. Here is Sally trying to be helpful with her bizarre recommendation:

Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden should switch jobs.

Really.

Really? Of course this job switch, a first in history for a vice president to switch places with a cabinet member, would be one more indication of Obama trying to pull himself out of the political abyss he finds himself in. That thought seems not to have entered Sally's mind as she happily chirps on about this scenario which includes a big plug for Hillary:

It makes sense for the Democrats, actually. Clinton has done an incredible job as secretary of state. First of all, she has worked harder than anyone should ever be expected to. She has managed to do the impossible: She is the ambassador of the United States to the world, maintaining her credibility while playing the bad guy to President Obama's good guy, such as with North Korea, Iran and Israel, and still looking good. She has been a true team player. If Clinton is dissatisfied with her role, you would never know it. She has been loyal and supportive to the president and has maintained a good relationship with him and with others in the White House. If she is being left out of the policymaking, or being sent on trips to keep her out of town, she has not shown it. She is cheerful, thoughtful, serious and diligent. There are no horror stories about her coming out of the State Department. Most notable, though, is that Bill Clinton has not been the problem that so many anticipated. He has been supportive of her and of Obama, and he has stayed out of the limelight and been discreet about his own life. 

Sally sounds more like she is promoting Hillary for sainthood than for the vice-presidency. In fact, Sally believes that the Hillary "magic" would be enough to ward off the "evil" Sarah Palin spell:

She is tireless and relentless. Given the combination of votes that she and Obama got in the 2008 primary campaign, they would be a near-unbeatable team. Clinton also appeals to independents, but importantly, she would neutralize the effect of Sarah Palin. Whatever Palin came up with, Hillary could best her -- and the Tea Party crowd as well. The Republicans would lose their "year of the woman" argument. And based on experience alone, Hillary is far more qualified to be president than any of the Republicans being considered today, including Mitt Romney, Bobby Jindal, Tim Pawlenty and Palin. 

And what of Joe Biden? How would he handle what is essentially a demotion? According to Sally, he would happily swallow his pride because he secretly wants to become Secretary of State:

True, Joe Biden has been rehabilitated. A recent profile in The Post portrayed him as a successful and intelligent man whose foreign policy advice is valued by the president. The gaffe-prone former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee seems to have worked out the kinks. Clearly, he is aware that he is no longer an independent voice but, rather, a representative of the president. But Biden has no intention of running for president in six years. His passion is foreign policy. He would have been an ideal choice for secretary of state had he not been Obama's running mate. And those who know him have said that secretary of state is his dream job. 

So welcome to Sally's World in which a simple job switch would cause the "evil" Republicans to melt away make everything right again for the liberal agenda.

Sally saved her best laugh line about this job switch suggestion for the final sentence:

Take it seriously. 

Oh yes, Sally, we  certainly will... BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

On the morning of June 16, 2010, the Washington Post published a well reasoned editorial opposing federal mandated forced unionism on state and local public employees; specifically, first responders such as police officers and fire fighters.  Could this moment of clarity by Washington Post editors have reassured investors, resulting in its stock doubling in one second as noted in the Drudge Report?

Probably not, but that’s no reason not to welcome the Post, even if momentarily, back to the real world. And, welcome its opposition to another Obama-Reid-Pelosi payback to Big Labor that attacks states rights and limits police officers’ and fire fighters’ freedom at work.    Even, the Post rejects this power grab:

ALL ACROSS America, state and local governments are struggling with recession-induced budget crises … Many public employees have been promised pay, pensions and health benefits that tax bases cannot sustain even in good times. As a result, voters and political leaders of both parties are rethinking the costs and benefits of public-sector unionism.

Except in Congress, it seems. Senate Majority Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) is pushing to federalize labor relations between state and local governments and some public-sector unions. … the bill is supported not only by Mr. Reid but also by Republicans, including the soon-to-retire Sen. Judd Gregg (N.H.). It has a good chance of passing if the Senate can fit it on its busy calendar.

Advertised as vital to the dignity, health and safety of our nation’s first responders … But there’s no clear connection between public-safety employee unions and public safety. Indeed, Virginia’s violent crime rate is less than half that of next-door Maryland, where collective bargaining for police prevails.

What this bill would do is impose a permanent, one-size-fits-all federal solution in an area — public-sector labor relations — that has traditionally been left to the states, and …Colorado’s “fire protection districts,” special units of government dedicated to providing that service, would face costly collective bargaining even where firefighters and management are working harmoniously without it.

This bill is a bad idea whose time, we hope, has still not come.

So, this time I agree with the Washington Post and recommend that everyone contact their congressional representatives today demand that they vote no on Harry Reid’s Police Fire Forced Unionism Bill (S 1611 & S 3194 /HR 413).  The U.S. House is preparing to vote on this Bill within in the next week, possibly as early as today.  Click here to take action and contact your elected officials.

On his radio show, Glenn Beck responded to Washington Post book critic Steven Levingston’s audacious claim that Beck’s new novel The Overton Window may be a terrorist’s inspirational handbook. Beck objected to the idea that it’s ridiculous that Tea Party protesters would be nonviolent. "Show me the violent Tea Party, Washington Post. Show them to me."

Levingston wrote: "Molly and her crowd assert their Second Amendment right to bear arms and are well stocked with weapons. They even make their own ammunition. Their insistence on nonviolence appears as disingenuous as anything out of the mouth of their nemesis, the insidious manipulator of reality Arthur Gardner."

In response to Beck on his Political Bookworm blog, Levingston weirdly claimed Beck had taken his review out of context:

Most serious among his off-the-cuff language this morning was: "The Washington Post writes as future fact that [the book] will be found in a bag of ammunition at some point after a violent shooting." Please read the review again, Mr. Beck.

Here's what I actually wrote, as a conditional statement -- not as a future fact: "If the book is found tucked into the ammo boxes of self-proclaimed patriots and recited at "tea party" assemblies, then Beck will have achieved his goal." And where is the mention of a violent shooting?

This complaint is more disingenuous than Beck’s fictional characters. Levingston’s entire review implies repeatedly, from the "ammo boxes" line forward, that Beck’s "goal" is a violent uprising. (See previous sentence about "disingenuous" nonviolence while making their own ammo.)

Levingston’s somehow overlooking that he concluded the review by mentioning a violent terrorist bombing:

"The Overton Window" risks falling into the tradition of other anti-government novels such as "The Turner Diaries" by William L. Pierce, which became a handbook of extremists and inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Levington cannot be sincerely outraged that he was misinterpreted, that he didn't insist that it's likely (and intended) that Beck's book will lead to dead people.

PS: Time book reviewer Alex Altman also panned the Beck book, but contained his conservative-bashing within more civil boundaries:

For Beck's millions of acolytes, however, the one-dimensional characters and half-baked plot will be less important than his message, which will channel their anxieties about perceived assaults on our freedom.

"Perceived" assaults on our freedom? As if conservatives are merely imagining massive government spending increases, the federal takeover of auto companies, the top-down reorganization of the health sector, and other allegedly fictional happenings.

The same weekend “Sex and the City 2” hit theatres, the email copied below (which was leaked to Big Hollywood), titled: Is Sex & the City 2 Bad For America’s Brand?,‏ made the...

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Poor Barack Obama. Being president can take a lot out of him. That's why he needs  to relax on the links, and relieve some stress into his golf game. No problem, says the Washington Post, the Gulf Spill can wait. This is the same Washington Post that berated President Bush for golfing while an armed conflict was taking place…in Israel.

Not that suicide bombings in Israel are an unserious matter, but doesn't the disaster in the Gulf require at least as much attention (far more, in my mind) from the President? The Post doesn't seem to think so.

So while the paper decried Bush's "golf cart diplomacy" and devoted over 600 words to suggesting that Bush's golf game was distracting from his work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Post found no such grounds to criticize Obama. As a reporter for one of the paper's blogs put it, "who cares?" Obviously not the Post (h/t Jim Hoft).

Wrote Stephen Stromberg at the PostPartisan blog,

Surely even the president deserves — and probably needs — some downtime, even now. Weeks spent clearing brush back at the ranch in Hyde Park might be pushing it. But an afternoon on the back nine doesn’t bother me. And whenever Obama does take a few hours off, there will always be enough going on in the world against which to juxtapose his leisure to enable the Jim Hofts of the Internet to take their cheap shots. It was unfair when Michael Moore did this to George W. Bush. And it’s unfair for Hoft to do it to Barack Obama.

Was it unfair when the Post criticized Bush's balancing of work and leisure (on his vacation, by the way)? Stromberg doesn't say. As he notes, chief executives are always faced with a litany of difficult problems. So why are President Obama's golf habits off limit, while his predecessors' are fair game?

In fact, while Hoft simply posed the snark-laden word "leadership" at the bottom of his piece, the Post devoted a full-length article on page A2 to Bush's golf course distraction. The headline: "Before Golf, Bush Decries Latest Deaths In Mideast." Oh, snap.

The Post's Mike Allen wrote in 2002:

Bush, wearing khakis and a knit shirt, was holding a driver in his gloved left hand. The rest of his foursome, including his father, former president George H.W. Bush, was waiting. However incongruous the setting, the president plunged ahead. "There are a few killers who want to stop the peace process that we have started, and we must not let them," he said. "I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers."

His business out of the way, Bush barely paused for breath before saying, "Thank you. Now watch this drive."

The abrupt segue illustrates the dilemma Bush will face over the next month as he relaxes and works at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., at a time of global political volatility. On Tuesday, Bush will leave Washington behind until Labor Day. That is likely to mean a return to the golf-cart diplomacy of last summer, when Bush talked Middle East peace between playing holes, at one point dripping sweat as he said Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat "can do a lot more to be convincing the people on the street to stop these acts of terrorism."

Golf was apparently worthy of being the central theme of this story; the President was golfing while suicide bombers were blowing themselves up in Israel. But President Obama's attempt to get away from it all and enjoy 18 holes, on the other hand, is not worthy of any coverage. For those who suggest otherwise, the Post has two words: "Who cares?"

This one was one that you just couldn't let go - that libertarian champion and former Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul, Texas, doesn't have a basic understanding of economics.

That was the claim made by CNBC senior analyst and commentator Ron Insana on the June 14 broadcast of "Closing Bell." At issue was a June 14 Washington Post article by Robert O'Hara and Dan Keating that suggested there was a conflict of interest in Paul's investments and his policy stances, as in he is a proponent of the gold standard and other uses for the precious metal.

"Rep. Ron Paul is captivated by gold," O'Hara and Keating wrote. "Over the past two decades, he has written books about the virtues of gold-backed currency. He has made uncounted speeches about the precious metal. He even took a leadership post on the House subcommittee that oversees the nation's monetary policy, mints and gold medals."

O'Hara and Keating detailed just how extensive Paul's investments are - valued at $1.7 million.

"But his focus on gold goes beyond the theoretical," they wrote. "In recent years, Paul (R-Tex.) has poured hundreds of thousands of his own dollars into stocks of some of the world's largest gold-mining operations, according to a review of his financial disclosure forms by The Washington Post. In 2008, while advocating for the United States to reinstate a gold standard, he reported owning up to $1.5 million in shares of at least nine gold-production companies. In addition, he disclosed up to $200,000 in silver stocks. In all, those holdings represented close to half of his assets."

But according to Insana, who has had an on-again-off-again career at CNBC after a failed attempt to try his hand at running a hedge fund, took a shot at Paul's investment strategy, claiming the Texas congressman was some sort of investing simpleton.

"Listen, the Ron Paul stuff, you know, if it weren't part of a conflict story would be funny because Ron Paul is one of the many elected representatives who we have that doesn't even have a basic understanding of fundamental economics, let alone more complex issues and better ways to hedge against inflation than buying gold," Insana said. "Gold is a complex instrument. You know, it speaks to a bigger point. He doesn't even know what he's doing."

As unsophisticated as Insana's claim that Paul's investment in gold is, assuming Paul had held this commodity going back to late 2008, he would be up over 50 percent with his investment, while the S&P 500 is down nearly 13 percent in the same time period.

Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz wrote Monday that Helen Thomas could have spared herself an embarrassing quick retirement if her media colleagues had “gently suggested” it was time to go. He said the press corps saw her as an “eccentric aunt,” but he claimed most of the country never saw her as cranky and ideological:

But that's not how she was seen by much of the country, which still viewed her as the groundbreaking correspondent she once was, not the cranky columnist she had become. So when Aunt Helen snapped that Israelis should "get the hell out of Palestine" -- and go back to Germany, among other places -- many onlookers were stunned.

Any onlooker who was stunned wasn't in the habit of watching White House briefings – or reading how media watchdog groups (ahem) routinely recounted Helen's rants. Kurtz noted that journalists went soft on a colleague because they usually stay together in a pack, but didn't quite note that journalists shared the vigorously anti-Bush/Cheney viewpoint Thomas offered:

Journalists, especially those who spend a great deal of time together, don't usually turn on each other. If Thomas was spewing bias and bile, the reasoning went, what was the harm?

Kurtz acknowledged the reality that few journalists actually read her Hearst column, and she was never known as a great writer or notable breaker of scoops. But her columnist phase seemed to cloud her earlier reputation from her "choice bit of real estate" in the front row seat at the White House:

There was something to admire in Thomas's determination to ask uncomfortable questions. But when she declared George W. Bush the "worst president ever" in 2003, she shed any pretense of fair-mindedness. As time went on, her questions turned into speeches, as in this 2007 challenge to Bush over Iraq:

"Mr. President, you started this war. It's a war of your choosing. You can end it, alone. Today. At this point bring in peacekeepers, U.N. peacekeepers. Two million Iraqis have fled the country as refugees. Two million more are displaced. Thousands and thousands are dead. Don't you understand? We brought the al-Qaeda into Iraq." One might agree or disagree with those sentiments, but she was performing as an activist, not a journalist.

Former CNN correspondent Jamie McIntyre wrote last week that "there's a big difference between asking tough questions and getting answers to tough questions. Anyone can ASK tough questions. But figuring out how to hold government officials accountable, by posing questions in such a way that they can't avoid answering them, is a much harder, and far more valuable journalistic exercise than just venting from a padded front seat in the White House briefing room. Helen Thomas' questions were not designed to probe weaknesses in the president's policies. They were just meant to provoke him."

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum said on his blog that "calling on Helen Thomas was a notorious method for a hard-pressed White House press secretary to EVADE tough questions from the rest of the press corps. A zany, out-of-left-field protest from Thomas would disrupt a flow of unwelcome queries, maybe spark a tension-breaking laugh, maybe change the subject altogether."

Frum is right that Helen's rants were not designed to elicit meaningful answers. But it would be wrong to suggest that an Ari Fleischer would have welcomed the chance to call on Helen to disrupt a flow of questions or change the subject. There were occasions -- as when I was in the briefing room in 2001 and 2002 -- when other reporters (ABC's Terry Moran comes to mind, working for "pro-Palestinian" anchor Peter Jennings) would support a Helen question, insist she had a point, and asked Fleischer to elaborate on his answer.

I would also beg to differ with Frum on the notion that Helen's questions could spark a "tension-breaking laugh." They were often tension-builders, not tension-breakers. There was rarely giggling when Helen asked a question. By contrast, when conservative Les Kinsolving would begin reading one of his long questions from his notebook, often citing a report in The Washington Times, the chortling was an everyday affair, and it would start almost immediately, even if the question was good.

PS: Kurtz ended his Media Notes column by relaying Sarah Palin's interview with Greta van Susteren on "Boobgate" and other controversies. The Post had a picture of Palin with the snarky caption: "REFUTING THE RUMOR: 'Nooo, I have not had implants,' Sarah Palin told the intrepid Greta van Susteren."

Jon Ward of the Daily Caller, until recently a White House reporter for the Washington Times, wrote a piece for Sunday's Washington Post titled “Why we'll miss Helen Thomas.” But Ward also interviewed some White House press colleagues who suggested Thomas had ventured across a line into explicit advocacy and argument:

"Helen had always been a tough, no-nonsense interrogator of presidents and press secretaries," said Ann Compton, who has reported on the past six presidents for ABC News. "About a decade ago, when she shed her role as reporter and began a career at Hearst as an opinion columnist, Helen's questions began to cross the line into advocacy."

Ward wrote that as “zany and obvious” her advocacy had become, he wondered if other reporters couldn't learn something about being a little bit tougher on press secretary Robert Gibbs. Fox reporter Major Garrett admitted to Ward “that until the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico became a major story, the White House press corps (himself included) had often failed to adequately hold Gibbs's feet to the fire.” He explained:

"There had long been an unnecessary deference and sort of delicacy and decorum about waiting to be called upon, and rigidly adhering to what is essentially a manufactured process that Robert sought to achieve at the very beginning," Garrett said. He added that the dynamic of the press room works best when reporters are free to follow up and really push the press secretary, but "that has been extremely rare, for whatever reason."

Ward offered a few examples he felt showed excessive deference:

A couple of incidents come to mind. At a briefing just one week after Obama's inauguration, for example, only two reporters pressed Gibbs for details about the president's knowledge of a drone strike in Pakistan -- the first military action of the new administration -- and they received no backing from colleagues in the room when he refused to discuss it. And more recently, in the June 3 briefing, Gibbs faced only a few scattered questions on the announcement by Colorado Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff that a top White House official had dangled three job possibilities in front of him should he drop his challenge to the incumbent Democrat, Michael Bennet.

Ward didn't explore the idea that the bosses of these White House reporters weren't truly interested in pressing Gibbs. Even as several reporters asked for answers on job offers to Romanoff and Pennsylvania's Joe Sestak, the networks never put the non-answers of Gibbs on the air to create pressure for more disclosure. Persistent questions by reporters alone doesn't move the news needle. Their bosses also have to find it essential to get answers out of Gibbs.

When’s the last time a journalist referred to Barack Obama as a former “small-time agitator?” That’s exactly how the Washington Post described Republican Nikki Haley in a profile piece on Saturday. A headline for the article by political reporter Philip Rucker critiqued, “Nikki Haley goes from small-time agitator to credible candidate for S.C. governor.”  

The piece on the conservative politician also offered this back-handed compliment: “Haley is friendly, and funny in a generic way; yet she keeps her politics from becoming too personal.”

When describing the state legislator’s  crusade to force elected officials to publicly disclose their votes, Rucker skeptically explained:

There may have been more than an element of calculation in her effort. She traveled all over the state slamming fellow Republicans for their lack of transparency, and drawing plenty of attention to herself along the way.

To be fair, the Post piece does offer some positive, humanizing details about Haley. Readers learn:

She puts big decisions on hold for 24 hours, she said, "to take the emotion out of it." Her inner circle includes only two campaign advisers and her husband, Michael, a full-time National Guardsman. She still handles many of the details of her schedule, sleeps just a few hours a night and clicks out torrents of e-mail on her BlackBerry at all hours.

However, a Nexis search of Washington Post stories featuring Barack Obama and the phrase “small-time agitator” finds no matches. Perhaps if Haley had been a “community organizer,” she wouldn’t have received such cynical treatment.

In contrast, as the MRC’s Ken Shepherd reported on Thursday, Rucker and Ann Gerhart offered a fawning 60 paragraph piece on liberal Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. The Post co-writers enthused, “She made her life the law and became consumed by it -- and happily so, by all accounts.” The article also highlighted Kagan’s love for poker and the opera.

For more examples of the biased coverage Nikki Haley has recieved, see these NewBusters accounts.

Rucker can be reached on Twitter here. 

A month ago, The Washington Post editorial page was dropping rhetorical bombs on conservative Republican Ken Cuccinelli for investigating ClimateGate. The headline at the top of the paper's May 7 editorial page (now scrubbed online) was "Mr. Cuccinelli's witch hunt: Virginia's attorney general declares war on academic freedom and climate reality." It began:

WE KNEW Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R) had declared war on reality. Now he has declared war on the freedom of academic inquiry as well. We hope that Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) and the University of Virginia have the spine to repudiate Mr. Cuccinelli's abuse of the legal code. If they do not, the quality of Virginia's universities will suffer for years to come.

That's an unsigned staff editorial, not some fulminating columnist with a byline. But these very same Washington Post editorial page staffers offered space on Friday to alleged conservative Michael Smerconish to trash cable news bookers at Fox News and CNN for wrecking America with "polarized politics."  

The producer asked whether CNN could identify me as a conservative. "Well, if someone who supports harsh interrogation, thinks we should be out of Iraq but in Pakistan, doesn't care much if two guys hook up, and believes we should legalize pot and prostitution is conservative, fine," I replied.

More silence…

Another time, a Fox News producer invited me to appear on a program to discuss then-candidate Barack Obama. I was told they were "looking for someone who would say he's cocky and that his cockiness will hurt him, if not in the primary, definitely in the general election against McCain." I declined. A few hours later, the same producer made a new pitch: "What about a debate off the top of the show on whether or not Hillary is trustworthy? We have someone who says she is and we're looking for someone who says she isn't."

The message of both episodes is clear: There is no room for nuance. Either you offer a consistent (possibly artificial) ideological view or you often don't get a say....

All of which leaves more elected officials beholden to the fringe elements of their parties, which in turn means less gets done. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it is robbing our televisions and radios of the substantive dialogue the country desperately needs, while leaving our politics a petty and unproductive mess.

Other than favoring the legalized pot and prostitutes, Smerconish is often a supporter of cringing moderation, so cringing and opportunistic that you switch parties when your polls look bad. Recall Smerconish in April helping NBC proclaim a devastated Republican Party when Arlen Specter swapped parties: "The Republican Party in the aftermath of the presidential race should have come to him and tried to clone him. They need more Arlen Specters." It's Specter right now who looks like he's leaving politics as a petty and unproductive mess.

Thursday's Washington Post Express tabloid carried the headline "Health Activists Eye World Cup." When the world "health" breaks in before "activist," sadly, you can often define that as a sly euphemism you could replace more accurately with "sex." Post reporter Liz Clarke offered an interesting definition of the tournament's most essential accessory, which isn't cleats or Gatorade or even sunscreen: 

Slathered in face paint, toting samba drums and waving national flags, the world's most ardent soccer fans are streaming into South Africa for the 2010 World Cup. And they're being met by a host of reminders not to forget the tournament's most essential accessory: a condom.

She forwarded how AIDS activists pressured FIFA, the World Cup organizers, of being "half-hearted" in condom promotion, and noted Cape Town hoteliers are offering condoms with the slogan "Play It Safe in Cape Town." Then Clarke offered an  update. FIFA bowed to the sexual entitlement mentality: free condoms have now been offered in eight-packs for women (do they each have a day of the week inscribed?)

Cases of condoms (bundled in packets of eight) were prominently displayed and free for the taking in the women's restrooms at Soccer Stadium for Friday's World Cup stadium, evidence of FIFA's awareness of and commitment to the need to confront the epidemic of HIV/AIDS in the host nation.

The "Choice" brand condoms were provided by South Africa's Department of Health, and the packaging included a toll-free number for the AIDS Hotline, as well as a six-panel illustration of proper use and disposal.

Related: Brent Bozell on FIFA's half-hearted response to massive influx of prostitutes for World Cup

It's probably safe to assume that a lot of reporters in the mainstream media lean to the left side of the ideological spectrum. And it was seen throughout the health care debate over the past year and a half - that somehow we need to raise the rhetoric beyond hyperbole like death panels, etc.

One of those reporters was The Washington Post's health care reporter Ceci Connolly, who last summer appeared on MSNBC and made such a plea. And since then, she made other gestures to show she was in line with the Obama administration on this issue. Well, lo and behold, according to a story by Jeremy Peters posted on the New York Times Media Decoder blog, Connolly canceled an appearance at a party for the book, "Landmark: The Inside Story of America's New Health Care Law and What it Means for All of Us," which according to her Web site Connolly and her book are labeled as "one of the main authors of the first definitive book on the 2010 health care law."

"[T]he Post found itself in another potentially embarrassing and ethically compromised position on Wednesday after one of its most senior reporters abruptly canceled an appearance at her own book party, which was being sponsored by a public relations firm with strong ties to the Democratic Party," Peters wrote.

That communications firm was Blue Line Strategic Communications, a public relations firm run by Michael Meehan and David DiMartino. Peters reported Meehan, a Democratic communications strategist, has had some very close ties to several Democrat campaigns.

"Mr. Meehan was most recently an adviser to Martha Coakley, the Massachusetts attorney general who lost to Senator Scott Brown, the insurgent Republican candidate who captured Edward M. Kennedy's former seat," Peters wrote. "He was also a senior staff member in the Senate for years, working for some of the most powerful members, including John Kerry, Tom Daschle and Barbara Boxer."

Connolly's questionable association with Blue Line Strategic Communications comes on the heels of abandoned plans by the Post's publisher Katharine Weymouth to charge lobbyists and trade groups thousands of dollars for access "to top congressional and administration officials for $25,000 a plate" at a dinner party at her home.

According to Peters, the book party went on with Connolly. However it does further beg the question if the Post's reporting throughout the ObamaCare debate was really "objective."

It's probably safe to assume that a lot of reporters in the mainstream media lean to the left side of the ideological spectrum. And it was seen throughout the health care debate over the past year and a half - that somehow we need to raise the rhetoric beyond hyperbole like death panels, etc.

One of those reporters was The Washington Post's health care reporter Ceci Connolly, who last summer appeared on MSNBC and made such a plea. And since then, she made other gestures to show she was in line with the Obama administration on this issue. Well, lo and behold, according to a story by Jeremy Peters posted on the New York Times Media Decoder blog, Connolly canceled an appearance at a party for the book, "Landmark: The Inside Story of America's New Health Care Law and What it Means for All of Us," which according to her Web site Connolly and her book are labeled as "one of the main authors of the first definitive book on the 2010 health care law."

"[T]he Post found itself in another potentially embarrassing and ethically compromised position on Wednesday after one of its most senior reporters abruptly canceled an appearance at her own book party, which was being sponsored by a public relations firm with strong ties to the Democratic Party," Peters wrote.

That communications firm was Blue Line Strategic Communications, a public relations firm run by Michael Meehan and David DiMartino. Peters reported Meehan, a Democratic communications strategist, has had some very close ties to several Democrat campaigns.

"Mr. Meehan was most recently an adviser to Martha Coakley, the Massachusetts attorney general who lost to Senator Scott Brown, the insurgent Republican candidate who captured Edward M. Kennedy's former seat," Peters wrote. "He was also a senior staff member in the Senate for years, working for some of the most powerful members, including John Kerry, Tom Daschle and Barbara Boxer."

Connolly's questionable association with Blue Line Strategic Communications comes on the heels of abandoned plans by the Post's publisher Katharine Weymouth to charge lobbyists and trade groups thousands of dollars for access "to top congressional and administration officials for $25,000 a plate" at a dinner party at her home.

According to Peters, the book party went on with Connolly. However it does further beg the question if the Post's reporting throughout the ObamaCare debate was really "objective."

Borrowing a line from one of her Harvard colleagues, the Washington Post entitled its June 10 front-page profile of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, "Her work is her life is her work."*

But the 60-paragraph story by staff writers Ann Gerhart and Philip Rucker shed barely any light on the judicial philosophy that Kagan's life work demonstrates. Instead, Gerhart and Rucker presented a gauzy profile that rehashed the usual trivia -- Kagan loves poker and the opera -- while painting Kagan as a workaholic who still has time to lend an ear or a shoulder to cry on to friends in distress:

She has arrived at the age of 50 in a blaze of accomplishment. But her achievements can obscure how relatively narrow her world has been. 

[...]

She made her life the law and became consumed by it -- and happily so, by all accounts. Her parents are no longer living, and she sees her brothers, Marc and Irving, Yale University graduates who teach public school in New York City, usually at holidays.

Most of the people in Kagan's life are important people, bound to her in tightly drawn concentric circles. Her friends are elite lawyers of a certain set or Democratic operatives with staying power. She cultivates their company, holds their confidences, gives them the best presents and solicits their ideas, said several friends among the four dozen people interviewed for this article.

[...]

Many high-energy super-achievers strive for a sanctuary of home or hobby or nature away from the relentless pressures of the workplace, even as they bang away on their BlackBerry and brag how little sleep they require. Kagan seems to be the rare person who has moved fluidly up and through the corridors of power with no apparent need for this separate sphere.

"Her work is her life is her work," says Charles Fried, a Harvard Law professor.

He credits her with grafting a sense of community onto the school's prickly and insular culture in her six years as dean. 

"To call her a bloodless organization person running her organization would be a terrible mistake," Fried says of Kagan's ceaseless entertaining, dinner-going and speech-giving while dean. "She did those things with real affection, not just for the institution but for the people."

Yet the friendship her intimates describe seems curiously one-sided; it is one in which Kagan gives freely of her support but seeks none in return.

"I went through a very contentious divorce," says Laurence Tribe, another Harvard Law professor who has known Kagan for more than 20 years, "and she was one of the very few people I could talk to about it. It's because you could trust her. She made me feel that I would get through it.

"She's a great listener, and I think that will endear her to her fellow justices," says Tribe, who is on leave from Harvard while working at the Justice Department. "She's likely to make them feel that she cares what they think."

That's great, but Kagan is not up for a marriage counselor gig, she's nominated to the highest court of law in the land.

It's not wholly illegitimate for the media to devote some resources to exploring the personal and social dimensions of a Supreme Court nominee's life, but ultimately these details are of little or no consequence to the job itself.

Yet today, Post editors gave their front-page readers what essentially amounts to a Style section profile in lieu of a meatier profile that might examine the liberal leanings discernible in Kagan's work product.

*the headline for the online version reads, "Kagan has many achievements, but her world has been relatively narrow."

As other media outlets have given Helen Thomas the kid glove treatment in light of her "trailblazing" career, media consumers may be forgiven for assuming that Helen Thomas's anti-Israel, arguably anti-Semitic comments were an aberration in an otherwise unblemished career of assertive but fair journalism.

To his credit, Washington Post's media reporter Howard Kurtz made note of other incidents, such as the time Thomas blamed Israel for inspiring "99 percent" of terrorism and the time in 2002 when she exclaimed "Thank God for Hezbollah," the Iran-backed terror group that murdered 241 U.S. servicement in 1983 and has plagued Israel for decades.

As the excerpt below shows, it's not just conservatives who have had complaints about Thomas (emphases mine):

"She asked questions no hard-news reporter would ask, that carried an agenda and reflected her point of view, and there were some reporters who felt that was inappropriate," said CBS correspondent Mark Knoller. "As a columnist she felt totally unbound from any of the normal policies of objectivity that every other reporter in the room felt compelled to abide by, and sometimes her questions were embarrassing to other reporters."

But few called her out for such conduct -- until Nesenoff, who heads a Long Island synagogue, posted the video on his site RabbiLIVE.com. Commentators on the right and left quickly eviscerated Thomas.

"She's always said crazy stuff," said National Review Online columnist Jonah Goldberg. "One reason she gets a pass is that there's an entrenched system of deference to seniority in the White House press corps. . . . This newfound horror and dismay that people are expressing about Helen Thomas are beyond a day late and a dollar short."

Jeffrey Goldberg, an Atlantic reporter who specializes in the Middle East, said: "Helen Thomas offered the official Hamas position, as far as I can tell. There's a level of insensitivity that's almost comical in what she said, to tell Jews to go back to Germany, where things worked out so well for them."

[...]

In 2002, Thomas asked Fleischer: "Does the president think that the Palestinians have a right to resist 35 years of brutal military occupation and suppression?"

Four years later, Thomas told Fleischer's successor, Tony Snow, that the United States "could have stopped the bombardment of Lebanon" by Israel, but instead had "gone for collective punishment against all of Lebanon and Palestine." Snow tartly thanked her for "the Hezbollah view."

Mark Rabin, a former freelance cameraman for CNN, said that in a 2002 conversation at the White House, Thomas said "thank God for Hezbollah" for driving Israel out of Lebanon, adding that "Israel is the cause for 99 percent of all this terrorism."

The Daily Caller Web site noted that during a 2004 speech to the Al-Hewar Center, a Washington-based Arab organization, Thomas likened Palestinian protesters resisting the "tyrannical occupation" by Israel to "those who resisted the Nazi occupation."

A handful of journalists questioned her role over the years. In a 2006 New Republic piece, Jonathan Chait accused Thomas of "unhinged rants," noting that she had asked such questions as: "Why are we killing people in Iraq? Men, women, and children are being killed there. . . . It's outrageous."

"Why are we killing people in Iraq?" may be a question that warms the hearts of Code Pinkers, but it's hardly the caliber of question one would expect from a seasoned journalistic veteran. 

Remember, we're talking about a woman with a half-century of experience in Washington journalism, certainly someone who knows quite a bit about how policy is made and how Washington works, yet her questions were incredibly simplistic, even Manichean in their outlook on all manner of policy matters. 

It's amazing how much adulation the media are giving a woman who practically phoned it in the last nine years of her career.

Kudos to Howard Kurtz for highlighting critical voices, and not just conservative ones.

(UPDATE: It will be really interesting seeing how the press handles Helen's retirement announcement.)

It isn't particularly surprising that the establishment press is for the most part attempting to give Helen Thomas's hateful remarks and her dubious apology a very light once-over -- if they're covering her outrageous statements (that citizens of the Jewish state of Israel should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” to Germany, Poland, and elsewhere) at all.

That said, the Associated Press has engaged in a few eyebrow-raisers already. The following is the only search result I found at the Associated Press's main web site at 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time:

That's a classic "Don't read this, it's boring" headline. It also confirms that the AP hasn't considered the Thomas situation newsworthy until very recently). Yes, as seen in the related video, the question from RabbiLive was about "Israel." But at the barest minimum, Thomas's remarks were "anti-Israel," and at bottom they were anti-Semitic. Any doubt about that characterization goes way when one observes Thomas's sickening sense of self-satisfaction after delivering her opening "get out" answer.

But it got more interesting when I clicked on the AP search result's link.

Apparently for a brief time (no longer the case), the AP had the following story up, of which I was able to graphically capture the first four paragraphs:

Flap? FLAP?

The double standard is so obvious that it wouldn't be worth bothering with except for the fact that the establishment press and its apologists continue to deny it. When Don Imus made his remarks about the women's basketball team at Rutgers three years ago, the AP, as shown here, didn't hesitate to whip out the word "racist" in both its headline and content. But no one dares call Thomas's remarks what they are.

Beyond that, the AP's eagerness to shift the focus of the story from Thomas to the White House accomplishes what any Ministry of Propganda would be proud of. It makes the Obama administration look good for condemning something that's obviously condemnation-worthy, even as its foreign policy moves continues to stab Israel in the back.

Well, at least the AP is covering the story now. At Pajamas Media, Richard Pollock notes that another pillar of journalism has also finally gotten around to it:

... over at the Washington Post, there is near silence. As of the this writing, searching “Helen Thomas site:washingtonpost.com” on Google brings up two articles on Thomas being dropped as a commencement speaker at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, a Howard Kurtz piece mentioning her remarks, and a post debating if Hearst will drop Thomas as a journalist.

Otherwise, the Post, which prides itself since the days of Watergate as being the “political” paper of record, is dark. There’s no initial report on Thomas’ remarks, which given her stature as a near household name, particularly inside the Beltway, are certainly newsworthy.

I can confirm having done the same search at the Post early Saturday morning, and that I found absolutely nothing relating to Helen's hate-filled remarks.

Over at the New York Times, an advance search on "Helen Thomas" (in quotes) done at about 12:15 p.m. came back with only the two AP items discussed earlier, plus a 10:55 a.m. Media Decoder Blog post.

The Times also obviously ignored the story for three days, as did most of the rest of the establishment press.

They'll probably figure out a way to ignore this little gem from the MSMDC blog as well:

Schakowsky: Helen Thomas ‘is awesome’

Normally it’s White House correspondent Helen Thomas who asks all the questions. But the seasoned reporter traded places on Friday with Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) at the lawmaker’s annual Ultimate Women’s Power Lunch in Chicago, where Thomas was the guest of honor.

Schakowsky, who chairs the Congressional Women's Caucus, interviewed Thomas before a crowd of more than 1,500 supporters. The lawmaker told ITK that the correspondent, who turns 90 later this year, "outlasted" her all day. Luckily, Thomas shared her secret.

"I asked her how she does it, what keeps her going every day,” Schakowsky said, “and she had the best answer: She told me, ‘Being angry keeps me strong.'"

When Rush Limbaugh tells his audience that liberal and leftists are consumed by anger, he knows whereof he speaks. From time to time, in "safe" venues, they say it themselves.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

Managing Editor's Note: The following was originally published today at the Washington Post/Newsweek "On Faith" page. Mr. Bozell was asked to contribute this "Guest Voice" column to explain his complaints about Comedy Central's planned "JC" cartoon.

Comedians often pride themselves on being irreverent, and in today's popular culture a favorite thing to ridicule is religion. The network Comedy Central has made laughing at religion its bread and butter. Their irreverence has limits, however, and it has nothing to do with taste. When radical Muslims wrote ominously online that the creators of "South Park" could end up like Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh - shot eight times on the street - mockery of Muhammed was formally and publicly censored.

Within weeks of that very public retreat, Comedy Central announced plans to work up a series laughing at Jesus Christ called "JC," a half-hour animated show about Jesus trying to live a normal life in New York City to escape the "enormous shadow" of his "powerful but apathetic father." God the Father is preoccupied with playing video games while Christ is the "ultimate fish out of water."

Beyond the glaring double standard there is this question: Where is the market demand for an entire television series dedicated to attacks on Jesus Christ? What did Jesus Christ do to Comedy Central that they must relentlessly mock Him by portraying him defecating and talking about his "yummy, yummy crap" on "South Park" and roast him on specials titled "Merry F--ing Christmas"? Why the visuals of Jesus Christ being stabbed to death? Of the Blessed Virgin Mary menstruating? To call these attacks "juvenile" is an insult to juveniles.

Enough is enough. Citizens Against Religious Bigotry, a coalition of some 20 organizations and leaders, some Christian, some Jewish and some secular, in all representing millions of Americans, has come together to demand that the advertising community withhold their sponsorship dollars from this show, based on Comedy Central's documented history of anti-Christian bigotry. To sponsor this show is to support that anti-Christian bigotry. In reply, network spokesman Tony Fox declared that this show is only a vague idea and perhaps our group "should save their energy for the moment if and when this series ever makes air." But if "JC" is too vague to deserve comment, why did Comedy Central announce it with flagrant God-bashing fanfare?

It's amazing that the Comedy Central folks consider this putrid material to be "art" and wrap themselves with the blanket of artistic freedom of expression. Said programming head Kent Alterman: "The beauty of working at a place like Comedy Central is you can empower people to actualize their vision in a really unfiltered way."

Unless, of course, the "vision" is an attack on Muhammed, in which case there will be immediate self-imposed censorship.

Comedy Central loves the idea that irreverence is the highest value that inspires the biggest laughs. Christians are called to love the opposite idea: that reverence to God is the highest value. We are called to take up the cross of Jesus daily, and that as a result people will "utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account."

We will not be silent. This anti-Christian bigotry must stop.

The Associated Press apparently thinks its readers are either too young or too stupid to remember something that happened thirteen years ago.

On Friday, the Clinton Presidential Library released formerly private documents from the '90s that revolved around Elena Kagan's stint as an advisor to President Clinton. Of particular interest was her encouraging Clinton to veto a ban on partial birth abortions for late-term babies.

When Clinton used his veto pen to stop the ban in 1997, it was intensely controversial. Media archives from that year show it was described as a "bitter battle" over something full of "public revulsion." 

How things change in thirteen years. Now with a pro-choice Supreme Court nominee to get through confirmation hearings, the AP blatantly ignored history to portray Kagan's advice as common sense pragmatism.

Writer Julie Hirschfeld Davis penned a dispatch obviously designed to be as friendly as possible, even if that left a few facts out of the story (h/t LiveAction):

As an aide to former President Bill Clinton, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan helped defend her boss' veto of a measure that would have banned late-term abortions with few exceptions, according to files handed over to Congress Friday.

Kagan's memos and notes - part of a 46,500-page batch of records released by the William J. Clinton Presidential Library - reveal her role as the administration was playing defense against a Republican Congress that was trying to impose new limits on abortion rights.

Ah, those evil Republicans were trying to limit the rights of women by banning late-term abortions, and Clinton's veto had to be defended.

Too bad that's not what the veto was for. This handy little piece, pulled from CNN's archives of 1998, tells a very different story:

Had the measure become law, it would have banned a medical procedure -- described by its critics as a "partial birth abortion" -- except when needed to save the pregnant woman's life. The procedure involves the partial, feet-first delivery of a fetus and the draining of its skull contents.

Banning partial birth procedures would by default save more late-term pregnancies since the technique was invented specifically for older babies. NPR explained in 2006 that the older the baby was - harder bones, longer limbs, more wiggling - the higher the chance of the womb getting damaged, so it was easier to peacefully pull the baby out and then kill it.

Partial-birth supporters knew that banning the practice would significantly lessen doctors' willingness to abort older babies, so they spun it as a de facto ban on late-term abortion. The AP accepted that angle and insisted on portraying the issue as Republicans wanting to limit women's rights. 

The article went on to praise Kagan's "pragmatic streak" that helped her stay a "middle course" when negotiating cultural issues. It then quoted former Domestic Policy Council Director Bruce Reed who was quick to insist that Kagan was "not an ideological person - she's practical."

Nothing in the article, not one single word, mentioned partial birth methods. Readers were led to believe the veto protected women from a blanket ban aimed at late-term abortions.

Just in case readers might wonder that perhaps the Kagan documents referred to some other veto and not the partial birth one, the Washington Post provided slightly more honest coverage on Saturday:

The documents showed Kagan's pragmatic side as well. She agreed with Clinton's decision to veto a bill banning "partial-birth" abortions because it did not include an exception for protecting a woman's health. But she helped write his response to a disappointed Catholic bishop, saying he knew the procedure was used in some cases where the woman's health was not at issue: "I do not support such uses, I do not defend them and I would sign appropriate legislation banning them," Kagan proposed in a handwritten draft for Clinton.

Kagan was on the pragmatic side of that issue? Gallup records that in 1998, some 60% of Americans were opposed to partial birth abortion, and the Los Angeles Times reported in 1997 that Congress was struggling to find the "slim middle ground" on such a hot issue.

For a taste of how the Clinton veto was anything but pragmatic, observe this relic from the New York Times on October 21, 1997:

Recognizing that turnabout, President Clinton waited until a time when few people were watching -- late on a recent Friday, at the start of the holiest Jewish holiday -- to veto legislation that would prohibit the form of late term abortion. Instead of announcing it in person, Mr. Clinton issued a written statement.

A deeply unpopular veto done quietly away from the spotlight to appease hard-line abortion supporters. That's the brand of pragmatism Elena Kagan is being praised for now.

If the AP wants to imply she made a good decision in 1997, that is a fair discussion to have - but only if readers are told the truth about what that decision was.

The Associated Press apparently thinks its readers are either too young or too stupid to remember something that happened thirteen years ago.

On Friday, the Clinton Presidential Library released formerly private documents from the '90s that revolved around Elena Kagan's stint as an advisor to President Clinton. Of particular interest was her encouraging Clinton to veto a ban on partial birth abortions for late-term babies.

When Clinton used his veto pen to stop the ban in 1997, it was intensely controversial. Media archives from that year show it was described as a "bitter battle" over something full of "public revulsion." 

How things change in thirteen years. Now with a pro-choice Supreme Court nominee to get through confirmation hearings, the AP blatantly ignored history to portray Kagan's advice as common sense pragmatism.

Writer Julie Hirschfeld Davis penned a dispatch obviously designed to be as friendly as possible, even if that left a few facts out of the story (h/t LiveAction):

As an aide to former President Bill Clinton, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan helped defend her boss' veto of a measure that would have banned late-term abortions with few exceptions, according to files handed over to Congress Friday.

Kagan's memos and notes - part of a 46,500-page batch of records released by the William J. Clinton Presidential Library - reveal her role as the administration was playing defense against a Republican Congress that was trying to impose new limits on abortion rights.

Ah, those evil Republicans were trying to limit the rights of women by banning late-term abortions, and Clinton's veto had to be defended.

Too bad that's not what the veto was for. This handy little piece, pulled from CNN's archives of 1998, tells a very different story:

Had the measure become law, it would have banned a medical procedure -- described by its critics as a "partial birth abortion" -- except when needed to save the pregnant woman's life. The procedure involves the partial, feet-first delivery of a fetus and the draining of its skull contents.

Banning partial birth procedures would by default save more late-term pregnancies since the technique was invented specifically for older babies. NPR explained in 2006 that the older the baby was - harder bones, longer limbs, more wiggling - the higher the chance of the womb getting damaged, so it was easier to peacefully pull the baby out and then kill it.

Partial-birth supporters knew that banning the practice would significantly lessen doctors' willingness to abort older babies, so they spun it as a de facto ban on late-term abortion. The AP accepted that angle and insisted on portraying the issue as Republicans wanting to limit women's rights. 

The article went on to praise Kagan's "pragmatic streak" that helped her stay a "middle course" when negotiating cultural issues. It then quoted former Domestic Policy Council Director Bruce Reed who was quick to insist that Kagan was "not an ideological person - she's practical."

Nothing in the article, not one single word, mentioned partial birth methods. Readers were led to believe the veto protected women from a blanket ban aimed at late-term abortions.

Just in case readers might wonder that perhaps the Kagan documents referred to some other veto and not the partial birth one, the Washington Post provided slightly more honest coverage on Saturday:

The documents showed Kagan's pragmatic side as well. She agreed with Clinton's decision to veto a bill banning "partial-birth" abortions because it did not include an exception for protecting a woman's health. But she helped write his response to a disappointed Catholic bishop, saying he knew the procedure was used in some cases where the woman's health was not at issue: "I do not support such uses, I do not defend them and I would sign appropriate legislation banning them," Kagan proposed in a handwritten draft for Clinton.

Kagan was on the pragmatic side of that issue? Gallup records that in 1998, some 60% of Americans were opposed to partial birth abortion, and the Los Angeles Times reported in 1997 that Congress was struggling to find the "slim middle ground" on such a hot issue.

For a taste of how the Clinton veto was anything but pragmatic, observe this relic from the New York Times on October 21, 1997:

Recognizing that turnabout, President Clinton waited until a time when few people were watching -- late on a recent Friday, at the start of the holiest Jewish holiday -- to veto legislation that would prohibit the form of late term abortion. Instead of announcing it in person, Mr. Clinton issued a written statement.

A deeply unpopular veto done quietly away from the spotlight to appease hard-line abortion supporters. That's the brand of pragmatism Elena Kagan is being praised for now.

If the AP wants to imply she made a good decision in 1997, that is a fair discussion to have - but only if readers are told the truth about what that decision was.

Saturday's Washington Post carried a story by reporter Krissah Thompson on constitution classes in Springfield, Missouri on its front page. The headline was anodyne: “For answers to today's problems, Fathers know best: Conservative group's course on Constitution touts founders' wisdom.” But Thompson is traveling halfway across the country to identify the fringes of the right wing, a Glenn Beck-endorsed Constitution teacher named Earl Taylor with a “far right” inspiration. This sentence stands out:

Since the nation's earliest years, some Americans have revered the Constitution as a bulwark against government expansion.

It's hardly strange for “some Americans” to believe a document written to define limits to the national government's powers would still be seen as a “bulwark against government expansion.” That would seem to indicate you've read it -- and not treated it like Eric Holder treats the Arizona immigration law.

It might seem less bizarre if Thompson explained that “some other Americans” believe in ignoring the plain meaning in the document's text and expanding the national government to meet any perceived need. Thompson continued her exploration of history:

In George Washington's Cabinet, the debate played out between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. In the mid-1960s, conservatives pushed for a return to limited government and a literal interpretation of the Constitution amid Barry Goldwater's failed run for president.

Today, reverence for the Constitution and the Founding Fathers is an important part of the militia movement. Taylor's work has been embraced, for instance, by members of Oath Keepers, a group of current and former police and military personnel who renew their oaths to the Constitution, and call themselves "guardians of the republic."

That paragraph implies that anyone who reveres the original meaning of the Constitution most likely believes in black-helicopter conspiracies and plots in the woods to resist the armed invasion of Michigan. There are actual fringe types at this Missouri event:

Nich Taylor and Schuyler Blue sat in the front row. Later, they passed out DVDs and CDs warning of a "new world order" to destroy the United States and mysteries behind the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that assert that the government played a role in them.

Thompson was sitting in on Taylor, the teacher endorsed by Glenn Beck, noticing his class was nearly all-white, and included no Democrats:

Taylor walked them through a 131-page, fill-in-the-blank workbook that frames the nation's founding in a religious context and portrays the size and scope of the modern federal government as a form of tyranny.

His course became popular in part because of an emotional endorsement last year from Beck, who has praised the late W. Cleon Skousen, who wrote the course's curriculum. He was a far-right anti-Communist Mormon fundamentalist and professor of religious studies at Brigham Young University whose historical work has been criticized by academics as ill-conceived and inaccurate.

This class may have some intellectual issues. Thompson did find actual experts on conservatism – Kevin Gutzman (identified as a “libertarian) and Michael Kimmage, but she also slipped in leftist Sean Wilentz without any ideological label. She makes a point that this education is fringy because it's unaccredited.

But the Post has suggested it's outrageous to question the teachings of global warming scientist/lobbyist Michael Mann as “ill-conceived and inaccurate.” It's a sordid violation of his academic freedom for Virginia's attorney general to question his methods and extremism. That's not the Post approach to conservatives.

Saturday's Washington Post carried a story by reporter Krissah Thompson on constitution classes in Springfield, Missouri on its front page. The headline was anodyne: “For answers to today's problems, Fathers know best: Conservative group's course on Constitution touts founders' wisdom.” But Thompson is traveling halfway across the country to identify the fringes of the right wing, a Glenn Beck-endorsed Constitution teacher named Earl Taylor with a “far right” inspiration. This sentence stands out:

Since the nation's earliest years, some Americans have revered the Constitution as a bulwark against government expansion.

It's hardly strange for “some Americans” to believe a document written to define limits to the national government's powers would still be seen as a “bulwark against government expansion.” That would seem to indicate you've read it -- and not treated it like Eric Holder treats the Arizona immigration law.

It might seem less bizarre if Thompson explained that “some other Americans” believe in ignoring the plain meaning in the document's text and expanding the national government to meet any perceived need. Thompson continued her exploration of history:

In George Washington's Cabinet, the debate played out between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. In the mid-1960s, conservatives pushed for a return to limited government and a literal interpretation of the Constitution amid Barry Goldwater's failed run for president.

Today, reverence for the Constitution and the Founding Fathers is an important part of the militia movement. Taylor's work has been embraced, for instance, by members of Oath Keepers, a group of current and former police and military personnel who renew their oaths to the Constitution, and call themselves "guardians of the republic."

That paragraph implies that anyone who reveres the original meaning of the Constitution most likely believes in black-helicopter conspiracies and plots in the woods to resist the armed invasion of Michigan. There are actual fringe types at this Missouri event:

Nich Taylor and Schuyler Blue sat in the front row. Later, they passed out DVDs and CDs warning of a "new world order" to destroy the United States and mysteries behind the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that assert that the government played a role in them.

Thompson was sitting in on Taylor, the teacher endorsed by Glenn Beck, noticing it was nearly all-white, and included no Democrats:

Taylor walked them through a 131-page, fill-in-the-blank workbook that frames the nation's founding in a religious context and portrays the size and scope of the modern federal government as a form of tyranny.

His course became popular in part because of an emotional endorsement last year from Beck, who has praised the late W. Cleon Skousen, who wrote the course's curriculum. He was a far-right anti-Communist Mormon fundamentalist and professor of religious studies at Brigham Young University whose historical work has been criticized by academics as ill-conceived and inaccurate.

This class may have some intellectual issues. Thompson did find actual experts on conservatism – Kevin Gutzman (identified as a “libertarian) and Michael Kimmage, but she also slipped in leftist Sean Wilentz without any ideological label. She makes a point that this education is fringy because it's unaccredited.

But the Post has suggested it's outrageous to question the teachings of global warming scientist/lobbyist Michael Mann as “ill-conceived and inaccurate.” It's a sordid violation of his academic freedom for Virginia's attorney general to question his methods and extremism. That's not the Post approach to conservatives.

It seems when John Lennon sang "Imagine" (aka. The Worst Song of All Time) he was talking about ... Denmark. That must be the point of a curious piece on The Washington Post's ever-more ironically named "On Faith" blog.

In an article titled "One nation Under God and a lot of stress," Alyce M. McKenzie, professor of homiletics at the Perkins School of Theology, was quite taken with her son's description of life in Copenhagen, where he'd studied for a semester. She furnished a laundry list of admirable aspects of Danish society - mostly the usual stuff American liberals cite to illustrate Europe's superiority:

...riding a bike or walking just about everywhere, having lights that go on and off automatically, recycling all glass bottles, drinking tap water, being able to let your baby in its stroller bask in the sun a bit while you go in and pick up a few groceries for tonight's meal, beautiful public spaces, green parks where people enjoy leisure time, high-speed and clean trains [what is with the liberal obsession with trains?], not being obsessed with work to the point that family and leisure are devalued, and, by all accounts, a happiness factor that exceeds ours.

And -- big bonus for a liberal trapped by "the convenience oriented, car-driven culture in suburban Texas" -- Denmark even has an exotic word that captures a concept we dull Americans couldn't have originated (think "feng shui"). "[H]ygge, which translates [as] ‘coziness,' or, more accurately, ‘tranquility,' is a complete absence of anything annoying, irritating, or emotionally overwhelming, and the presence of and pleasure from comforting, gentle and soothing things."

That's cat nip to liberals who dream of being swathed in bubble wrap and bike helmets by the nanny state. And for McKenzie, "This started me wondering why, in the Bible belt, my own life doesn't have as much hygge as the Danes." Her answer: the Danes aren't burdened with all that God baggage.

She quoted approvingly from a 2008 book by Phil Zuckerman called "Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Tell us about Contentment." Zuckerman, McKenzie wrote, "seeks to account for the fact that Denmark and Sweden have such high contentment quotients in light of the fact that worship of God and church attendance are minimal." The book is also a slap at conservatives "who swear that a society without God is hell on earth."

Zuckerman found that in marginalizing religion, as most of the rest of Europe has, the Danes have essentially sidelined the existential questions of life and death. "His basic findings," wrote McKenzie, "are that Danes seem to focus on gratitude for the pleasures and gifts of life right now: family, work, and the beauties of the natural world. They are more interested in their family, home, bikes, careers, weather, and favorite British or Brazilian soccer players than questions of the meaning of life and the existence of heaven and hell."

So the secular paradise Lennon sang about -- "Imagine there's no heaven ... No hell below us ... Imagine all the people Living for today" -- turns out to have been blonde, blue-eyed and rather more prosaic than the song's whispy, dope-addled strains hint at.

On the other hand, it does go with the song's plodding lifelessness. Marxism (and make no mistake, "Imagine" is an ode to the old dialectic materialism) is predicated on a denial of human nature. Nothing is more human than inquiring into the meaning of life and death, of man's relationship to the universe - all the Big Questions that sound clichéd because they have been central to human existence for as long as there've been humans. It's wonderful that the Danes love their families and friends and take time to hug the earth and sort their garbage. But McKenzie never questions whether, in banishing the questions that religion always has helped humans answer, they're not a little less ... human.

McKenzie wrote of herself that, "I spend just about all my time thinking about the meaning of life and the significance of the Bible and better ways to share the good news of Jesus Christ. I derive meaning, joy and purpose from my faith." Therefore, it's odd that she's untroubled by the notion of an entire society that has willfully gone deaf to the good news she loves so much.

But there's a simple answer. As a Christian whose profession is homiletics, McKenzie has, perhaps out of habit, dragged God into otherwise standard-issue liberal griping about modern American society; too big, too hectic, too competitive, too individualistic. That's it. Not spiritual, not even particularly thoughtful.

Her son, she wrote, just three days home from Denmark, complained, "I feel more stressed since I've gotten back." Tough life, kid. But not to worry, Mom has hope for you. And you may say she's a dreamer, but she's not the only one.

"Denmark has had an impact on my son," McKenzie wrote. "I predict that he will seek a life that is more communal and relational than the life of individual-achievement-at-all-costs that is a popular version (or perversion) of the American Dream." ["Imagine all the people Sharing all the world"] "I don't think he's going to lose his initiative, but I think he is going to seek a life that is more about experiencing hygge and less about being harried."

No word on whether his hygge has to come at the expense of his religion.

 

The Washington Post played up Barack Obama’s war-on-terror credentials at the top of Friday’s front page. (Or to use Team Obama lingo, their war on "man-caused disasters.") The Post used to be upset by secret terror attacks, but now they like them, if they help Obama look strong to voters. "U.S. ‘secret war’ expands globally," boasted the Post headline, "Terror groups are targets."

News that doesn’t make Team Obama look good is harder to find. Take this Jeff Stein story from Wednesday, deep inside on A-13: "The FBI appears to be ready for a chemical, biological or radiological terrorist attack, but the rest of the Justice Department is ‘not prepared,’ according to a blistering audit released Tuesday."

The Obama the Secret Warrior story by Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe is most biased in how it asserts from the first paragraph that Obama is "much more" aggressive than the national-security slacker named George W. Bush:

Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups, according to senior military and administration officials.

Secrecy is now a good thing, not offensive to journalists as it used to be:

One advantage of using "secret" forces for such missions is that they rarely discuss their operations in public. For a Democratic president such as Obama, who is criticized from either side of the political spectrum for too much or too little aggression, the unacknowledged CIA drone attacks in Pakistan, along with unilateral U.S. raids in Somalia and joint operations in Yemen, provide politically useful tools.

Obama, one senior military official said, has allowed "things that the previous administration did not."

Special Operations commanders have also become a far more regular presence at the White House than they were under George W. Bush's administration, when most briefings on potential future operations were run through the Pentagon chain of command and were conducted by the defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"We have a lot more access," a second military official said. "They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly."

The White House, he said, is "asking for ideas and plans . . . calling us in and saying, 'Tell me what you can do. Tell me how you do these things.' "

...But Obama has made such forces a far more integrated part of his global security strategy. He has asked for a 5.7 percent increase in the Special Operations budget for fiscal 2011, for a total of $6.3 billion, plus an additional $3.5 billion in 2010 contingency funding.

Criticism of Obama’s approach doesn’t enter the story until paragraph 22. The left-wing critique of Obama is represented only by a weak recitation of objections from the United Nations, and a Bush official doesn’t comment until the third-to-last paragraph:

Former Bush officials, still smarting from accusations that their administration overextended the president's authority to conduct lethal activities around the world at will, have asked similar questions. "While they seem to be expanding their operations both in terms of extraterritoriality and aggressiveness, they are contracting the legal authority upon which those expanding actions are based," said John B. Bellinger III, a senior legal adviser in both of Bush's administrations.

The Obama administration has rejected the constitutional executive authority claimed by Bush and has based its lethal operations on the authority Congress gave the president in 2001 to use "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons" he determines "planned, authorized, committed, or aided" the Sept. 11 attacks.

Many of those currently being targeted, Bellinger said, "particularly in places outside Afghanistan," had nothing to do with the 2001 attacks.

[Image from Moonbattery]

British Petroleum's (BP) reputation has been marred by the April oil rig explosion and subsequent oil spill which is still gushing more than 40 days later. But according to The Washington Post, the reputation of some left-wing environmental groups has also been polluted by the incident.

"[T]he Nature Conservancy lists BP as one of its business partners. The Conservancy also has given BP a seat on its International Leadership Council and has accepted nearly $10 million in cash and land contributions from BP and affiliated corporations over the years," Joe Stephens wrote for the Post May 24.

It's not just Nature Conservancy either, the Post found $2 million in donations to Conservation International and relationships between BP and other lefty activist groups Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), Sierra Club and Audubon.

"The crude emanating from BP's well threatens to befoul a number of alliances between energy conglomerates and environmental nonprofits. At least one group, Conservation International, acknowledges that it is reassessing its ties to the oil company, with an eye toward protecting its reputation," the Post said.

This was front page news at The Post on May 24, but received only silence from other mainstream media outlets including the three broadcast networks. Even after the oil spill, when the networks interviewed experts from two of the groups that had partnered with BP, reporters failed to make the connection. In the past, the research of conservative organizations has been undermined by reporters for such corporate contributions.

NBC's "Today" consulted "scientists" from the Nature Conservancy on May 8 as many coastal communities feared damage from the spreading oil spill. Reporter Mike Taibbi examined artificial reefs off the Gulf coast and spoke with the group who said, "All we're trying to do is restore some of the injustices we have done to it in the last few decades."

Taibbi didn't mention the BP/Nature Conservancy partnership in his report.

Sierra Club's ties to BP also escaped the notice of CBS "Morning News" on April 29, when the network interviewed the group's director of land protection, Athan Manuel, about the oil spill in the Gulf.

Manuel told CBS, "We've always said that oil and gas drilling is a dirty and dangerous business, both in terms of pollution, but also in terms of what damage can be done to workers and to the environment."

"NBC Nightly News" also interviewed Manuel on March 31 (before the oil spill). Manuel expressed opposition to Obama's call for "expansion of drilling" as "too aggressive." "[D]rilling is just a dirty and dangerous business that we think is incompatible with our coastlines and our beaches," Manuel claimed.

Yet in 2007, the Sierra Club joined forces with many liberal environmental groups and companies including BP Wind Energy to create the American Wind & Wildlife Institute.

Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy and many other eco-groups like it have been uncritically treated as experts for years by the mainstream news media. The networks brought their spokesmen on to discuss a range of issues - from global warming, to land preservation. In contrast, conservative groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and scientists including Patrick Michaels have been undercut by network reporters.

"Public awareness [about global warming] lagged behind, partly because of a disinformation campaign funded by the fossil-fuel industry," ABC's Bill Blakemore said on "World News" Sept. 23, 2007. During his statement, Blakemore aired video footage of a CEI commercial, insinuating that it was "disinformation."

Liberal Anger at Green Groups Mostly Ignored

The revelation that BP was heavily tied to eco-groups like Conservation International and Nature Conservancy angered many of their supporters, yet the networks and other major papers have so far failed to report the relationships between green groups and BP.

The Post quoted Reagan De Leon of Hawaii who had called for a boycott of "everything BP has their hands in," before finding out that the oil company had its hands in the Nature Conservancy. "Oh, wow," De Leon reacted, "That's kind of disturbing."

According to the Washington City Paper's blog, there was a "deluge" of angry comments from members of Nature Conservancy including Cindy D. who "accused the organization of censoring comments to its blog." One commenter on City Paper called Nature Conservancy a "whore."

City Paper pointed out that BP spent "hundreds of millions of dollars" to "transform its image from that of a dirty old oil company into ‘Beyond Petroleum' - a company so environmentally friendly it had transcended oil drilling (and spilling) for happy, sunny and clean technologies such as wind and solar."

They also noted that the environmental groups "trumpeted their ties to corporations, arguing that these partnerships lead to better corporate environmental policies and less damage to the planet."

That's exactly how the relationship between BP and Conservation International was framed by ABC's "Nightline" back in 2002.

Fill-in anchor Chris Bury introduced the segment calling it an "exception" from the stories about rich and famous people doing "trivial" things. This was different, "rich and powerful and famous people trying to create something of lasting value."

Bury was talking about the "highly aggressive environmental organization" Conservation International partnering with a number of prominent businesspeople, actors, athletes and others to purchase and protect millions of acreage around the world.

"[T]ogether, with other environmental groups, they have launched an extraordinary, planet-sized experiment," correspondent Robert Krulwich said. That alliance included the head of British Petroleum, according to ABC.

Media Hypocrisy: Conservative Groups Blasted for Ties to Exxon

In news reports, eco-groups (like all the ones tied to BP) were rarely labeled negatively. Words like "naturalists," "conservationists," and occasionally "auto-industry watchdog" have all been used to describe the groups' liberal missions. On the other side, CEI and Cato Institute fellow Patrick Michaels have been labeled with disparaging terms like "denier" and statements about funding were used to undermine them.

In 2007, ABC's Bill Blakemore alleged that CEI was behind a "disinformation campaign" that had prevented more people from understanding the threat of global warming.

"Public awareness [about global warming] lagged behind, partly because of a disinformation campaign funded by the fossil-fuel industry," Blakemore said on Sept. 23, 2010, while airing footage of a pro-carbon dioxide commercial from CEI.

Blakemore, a longtime advocate of global warming alarmism, didn't include anyone from CEI or the fossil-fuel industry to respond. According to MSNBC.com, ExxonMobil stopped funding CEI in 2006.

NBC's primary global warming alarmist Anne Thompson also undercut CEI on Aug. 15, 2007. After presenting the argument that "science" showed man has a role in global warming, Thompson said, "Getting to that point involved fighting interest groups fueled by powerful companies, including oil giant ExxonMobil."

"The Union of Concerned Scientists says ExxonMobil, gave almost $16 million over seven years to denier groups, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute," Thompson continued. The Business & Media Institute's parent organization, the Media Research Center, was also listed by the Union of Concerned Scientists among the groups receiving funds from ExxonMobil.

In addition to using the pejorative term "denier," to label CEI, Thompson failed to mention that Exxon had stopped funding the non-profit organization.

A similar media contradiction happened when the news media labeled the grassroots Tea Party movement as corporate-sponsored "Astroturf" or fake grassroots. At the same time, the media have all but ignored the issue of corporate sponsorship of the left-wing green movement.

And one has to look no further than Earth Day 2010 to see the corporate fingerprint on so-called green activist efforts. Major U.S. corporations like Proctor & Gamble, Siemens, Wells Fargo, AT&T, UPS, Philips and Ford all had a major presence at the so-called Earth Day "Climate Rally" on the National Mall back on April 25. That's in addition to a sponsorship from NASA, a federal government entity and media outlets, including The Washington Post and Gannett's USA Today.

Even though that fits the left's own definition of "Astroturf," the news media refused to apply the term to those efforts.

 

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Yeah.  And Tiger Woods wasn't committed to chasing women . . .

Chris Matthews got off one of the all-time whoppers on this evening's Hardball.  Seeking to explain why the Clintons have managed to stay together while the Gores haven't, Matthews claimed that Bill and Hillary are "committed to the core not to making money but to public life itself."  H/t NB reader Ray R.

Is Chris simply clueless, or was he intentionally propagating a misperception of the lucre-hound Clintons, who as of more than two years ago had already raked in more than . .  $100 million?  Can't believe the number?  Don't believe me.  Believe . . . NPR.

As video rolled of the Clintons and Gores from their famous 1992 post-convention bus trip that propelled them to victory, John Harris of Politico opined . . .

JOHN HARRIS: Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton always did have a shared project which was the Clinton brand and their ambitions on the national stage. Even at the most difficult periods between them they had that shared bond. I think in the Gores case, both of them had some degree of ambivalence about public life. And I definitely think that was true of Tipper, who sometimes did wilt under the public spotlight. I have seen her --

CHRIS MATTHEWS: You're so smart, Harris. That is so smart. Bill and Hillary are committed to public policy as their primary aim in life. They are good at it. They're good at the politics; they're good at the policy, they're wonks to the core. And they're committed to the core, not to making money but public life itself.

If Only You Knew Al Like Lois Knows Al:  Lois Romano of the Washington Post kept alive the proud MSM tradition of claiming that even the biggest Dem bores are really laff riots behind the scenes: "privately he was a different man.  Funny but rigid." Funny but rigid?  Kind of like Andrew Dice Clay?

Most Americans believe the concepts of fidelity and marriage go hand in hand. However, with the help of a former president, one married couple has set out to prove otherwise.

"It was Bill Clinton who first got Christopher Ryan thinking about monogamy," Washington Post Staff Writer Ellen McCarthy said of Ryan's new book "Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality."

Ryan was a doctoral student during the scandal surrounding Clinton's sexual affair with an intern, Monica Lewinsky, according to McCarthy. It made him wonder: "How is it that the most powerful man in the world is getting publicly humiliated for having a casual sexual relationship with someone?"

The book suggests that "we reevaluate the idea that monogamy comes naturally to men and women-and look at whether it should even be something we require of our spouses." Ryan wrote the book with his wife, psychiatrist Cacilda Jethá.

McCarthy wrote that idea that a person should find happiness and fulfillment with one sexual partner for a lifetime is a "myth," according to Ryan.

Ryan and Jethá claim to be advocates for marriage, because it provides "an emotionally and economically stable environment for a kid to grow up in." But, they say, a husband or wife should not expect fidelity from their spouse because they place "a lot suffering - and what I would say is unnecessary suffering - between couples who have unnecessary expectations of what life is going to be like."

The authors suggest that an act of sex outside marriage "doesn't necessarily diminish the love one has for a spouse," according to the Post. Sex is "just sex," they say.

According to McCarthy, Ryan and Jethá trace many of our modern ideas about matrimony and monogamy back to Darwin and a Victorian understanding of sexuality.

Ryan's and Jethá's views differ greatly from the majority of Americans. According to Gallup, 92 percent of Americans view extramarital affairs as "morally wrong." A higher percentage viewed extramarital affairs as wrong than opposed polygamy, human cloning, suicide, or abortion.

Ryan and Jethá are hardly the first to attempt to normalize extramarital sex in American culture. A 2008 report by the Parents Television Council found that prime time broadcasting across five networks depicted or implied sex between non-married partners four times as often as it did so with married partners.

As the Joe Sestak job-offer scandal took a weird turn on Friday -- Bill Clinton offered me an unpaid, obscure presidential advisory panel placement to dissuade me from a Senate run? -- The Washington Post found in the new story a chance to hail Bill Clinton. At the very end of a Saturday report headlined "Bill Clinton has evolved into Obama's Mr. Fix It," reporters Philip Rucker and Paul Kane slipped into fanboy mode:  

Sestak said Clinton briefly brought up Emanuel's suggestion that if Sestak dropped out he might end up on a presidential advisory board for the Pentagon or the intelligence community. Sestak flatly turned him down.

"I knew you'd say that," Clinton replied. Even the master can't fix everything.

Left unsaid: if Clinton is "the master," why is Obama president instead of his wife? (Or do you just repeat "Even the master...") On the front page, the Post seemed to be buying this square-peg-for-round-hole tale about this weird, very unpersuasive offer no one would accept. Reporter Michael Shear tried playing cute and light in his opening, that Obama "resisted acknowledging what the top West Wing lawyer finally admitted on Friday: This administration plays politics. And not always effectively."

You'd have to turn inside the paper and wait until paragraph 12 for  any Republican response, where Shear wrote RNC Chairman Michael Steele "tried to hit Obama where it hurts." (Steele said Obama's team wasn't transparent, accountable, or ethical.)

Shear then quickly turned to how "the Washington legal community -- which loves a good public inquiry -- seemed unimpressed." 

Rucker and Kane found "Clinton was considered the natural person to turn to. Sestak had worked for Clinton's National Security Council and still considers him a political hero." It sounds the same for the Post reporters.

Washington Post writer Hank Stuever has strong opinions about the new HBO movie on Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in Friday's paper: "Dennis Quaid is truly awful in the role of President Bill Clinton, the other half of The Special Relationship's special relationship. It's so bad that I insist everyone inside the Beltway watch it at least twice."

It must be hard to play Bill Clinton when everyone is so familiar with him, and so many media liberals still consider him a hero, despite the well, itty-bitty flaws. But Stuever really, really hates Quaid's work:

There are museum animatronics doing better presidential imitations than Quaid. If I had been in director Richard Loncraine's shoes, a couple of days into filming, I would have gone on eBay and purchased one of those cardboard, life-size Bill Clinton cutouts and had Quaid carry that around in front of him while the cameras continued to roll and I frantically waited for "Saturday Night Live's" Darrell Hammond to return my phone calls.

Stuever's review suggests HBO did not cut the scene of Bill telling Hillary he had carnal knowledge of an intern (or maybe the reviewer's copy still had it, but regular viewers won't see it):

Fortunately, in the same breath, there is some good news: Hope Davis as Hillary Clinton. Wearing a set of buckteeth and displaying a masterful command of that quintessential Hillary people repellent, Davis shows a capability that surpasses Quaid's surprising ineptitude. This creates an eerie parallel to what the world has longed perceived as the prime dynamic in the Clintons' marriage, as the two must act out one of the decade's grisliest moments in public/private shame: the night Bill confesses to Hillary that he did, in fact, have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.

The rage with which Davis glowers at Quaid! Is it acting, or is she really peeved at Quaid, thinking to herself, Here I am nailing the part of Hillary and you're over there doing what -- Foghorn Leghorn?

[Italics his.]

Washington Post writer Hank Stuever has strong opinions about the new HBO movie on Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in Friday's paper: "Dennis Quaid is truly awful in the role of President Bill Clinton, the other half of The Special Relationship's special relationship. It's so bad that I insist everyone inside the Beltway watch it at least twice."

It must be hard to play Bill Clinton when everyone is so familiar with him, and so many media liberals still consider him a hero, despite the well, itty-bitty flaws. But Stuever really, really hates Quaid's work:

There are museum animatronics doing better presidential imitations than Quaid. If I had been in director Richard Loncraine's shoes, a couple of days into filming, I would have gone on eBay and purchased one of those cardboard, life-size Bill Clinton cutouts and had Quaid carry that around in front of him while the cameras continued to roll and I frantically waited for "Saturday Night Live's" Darrell Hammond to return my phone calls.

Stuever's review suggests HBO did not cut the scene of Bill telling Hillary he had carnal knowledge of an intern (or maybe the reviewer's copy still had it, but regular viewers won't see it):

Fortunately, in the same breath, there is some good news: Hope Davis as Hillary Clinton. Wearing a set of buckteeth and displaying a masterful command of that quintessential Hillary people repellent, Davis shows a capability that surpasses Quaid's surprising ineptitude. This creates an eerie parallel to what the world has longed perceived as the prime dynamic in the Clintons' marriage, as the two must act out one of the decade's grisliest moments in public/private shame: the night Bill confesses to Hillary that he did, in fact, have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.

The rage with which Davis glowers at Quaid! Is it acting, or is she really peeved at Quaid, thinking to herself, Here I am nailing the part of Hillary and you're over there doing what -- Foghorn Leghorn?

[Italics his.]

Sarah Palin won’t be singing that familiar Mister Rogers Neighborhood tune to author Joe McGinniss anytime soon. Palin’s reaction to her newest neighbor has provided the latest fodder for Washington Post “Right Now” blogger David Weigel, adding to his collection of blog posts and tweets against prominent conservatives.

Weigel’s May 26 post, “Sarah Palin’s strange, unprofessional and paranoid grudge” labeled Palin’s Facebook note “immature” and “sounding angry and mocking.” Weigel defended the right of journalists like McGinniss to write and research stories “as long as they’re within the bounds of the law,” criticizing Palin for thinking she has veto power over who writes about her.

Palin’s Facebook post described her surprise after noticing McGinniss observing her family from his newly rented, next-door house. McGinniss, who is working on an un-authorized biography on Palin, moved from his Massachusetts home to be closer to the subject of his book.

Weigel argued that Palin’s description of McGinniss “overlooking my children’s play area" didn’t just suggest that McGinniss was too close for comfort. He called it “despicable.” “It’s incredibly irresponsible for them [politicians] to sic their fans on journalists they don’t like,” Weigel complained.

Weigel also claimed the Facebook note is the “ultimate example of the way Palin manipulates the press,” making reporters look like stalkers and Republican politicians like saints. He further attributed Glenn Beck’s threat of boycotting Random House over McGinniss’ actions to Palin’s “manipulative” behavior, ending his nasty blog post with the pointed statement that “no one in the media should reward Palin for this irresponsible and pathetic bullying.”

But some in media have different opinions about Weigel’s treatment of Palin’s post. Politico’s Ben Smith wrote that he disagrees with Weigel’s statement that reporters should be immune from criticism, defending Palin’s unhappiness about “an unauthorized biographer”s porch overlooking her backyard.” Smith contended that the American way gives McGinniss the right to “intrude where he can” and, conversely, Palin the right to “rally her followers against his publisher.”

Smith also questioned the motives behind McGinniss’ cross-country move, pointing out McGinniss’ claim that, if he finds the information, he would write a “salacious book about Sarah Palin's sex life.”

Weigel, who started the Post’s “Right Now” blog after moving from the left-wing Washington Independent last April, has been criticized by conservatives for his treatment of major proponents of conservative principles, such as traditional marriage, all while covering the Post’s ‘conservative’ beat.

Despite Weigel’s claim to be sympathetic to conservatism, many conservatives have expressedconcern over his role, claiming that open biases violate Washington Post guidelines against unfair reporting. These concerns proved to be legitimate, as Weigel tweeted that same-sex-marriage opponents were “bigots” and then later apologized for his actions.

That wasn’t all. On May 1 Weigel tweeted about Drudge Report founder Matt Drudge. He wrote, “I hear there’s video out there of Matt Drudge diddling an 8-year-old boy. Shocking.”  Weigel later claimed it “was a joke about Matt Drudge linking, for more than 24 hours, to a National Enquirer story about President Obama having an affair.”

There are some review snippets that likely won’t end up as movie poster taglines:

“an affront to Muslims” – USA Today

“breathtaking cultural insensitivity” – Washington Post

“cinematic Viagra for Western cultural imperialists”- Salon.com

Of all the criticisms that could likely be launched against Warner Bros.’ new “Sex and the City 2” movie, the media have latched onto the film’s reported depictions of misogynist policies in Muslim nations.

It was USA Today that called the movie “an affront to Muslims.” Reviewer Claudia Puig wrote that director Michael Patrick King “is out of his league attempting to comment on the inequitable treatment of Muslim women. He ends up mocking religious beliefs and making Carrie and her friends appear insensitive.”

Many reviews are quick to defend Muslim culture, or at least Abu Dhabi, which does seem a less-than-compelling example of a society out-of-touch with modern notions of gender equality. (Some reviews do take on the other questionable material including the sleaze and rampant materialism, but the media loved the first big-screen adaptation of the HBO series.)

The criticisms of “Sex and the City 2” as “blatantly anti-Muslim,” as The Hollywood Reporter described it, may be perfectly valid. But where were these defenders of the faith when moviemakers attacked other religions?

At the risk of appearing to compare “Sex and the City 2” with a comedic masterpiece, take the 2004 DVD release of Monty Python’s 1979 “Life of Brian,” a vicious satire of the Gospel stories.

The Washington Post found it “hard to believe that it was such a controversial film when it first came out.” Reviewer Ann Hornaday, the same person who accused “Sex and the City 2” of “cultural insensitivity” couldn’t understand how Christians would find it offensive to feature a Christ-figure, joined by a chorus of the crucified, singing, “Always look on the bright side of life.”

Or how about “Saved!,” a less-beloved anti-Christian movie released in 2004? The film, which depicts the lives of several Christian-school students as they deal – poorly – with an unplanned pregnancy, was far from offensive to Salon.com. The review complained that it was “conspicuously lacking both guts and well-sharpened teeth.”

The media double standard for entertainment is clear. Satirize – or just flat-out attack – Christianity and receive a resounding “encore!” or, at worst, a “try harder next time. Depict Muslim culture in a negative light in a film ostensibly about feminism and female empowerment, and prepare for two big thumbs down.

It’s a good thing “Sex and the City 2” director King didn’t try to depict Muhammad.

 

David Frum has responded on his own site Frum Forum to the NewsBusters post on his nasty Limbaugh book review in The Washington Post. For starters, he claimed that he focused on Limbaugh’s ornate digs because this is "really the only news" in the Zev Chafets book.

To claim there’s no news in here is to admit you skimmed it. I wish Frum had plopped in the Post this snippet from pages 139 and 140 and pondered what it says about the Left:

Some, like Professor Todd Gitlin of the Columbia School of Journalism, think the government should take Rush off the air. "Limbaugh is a liar and a demagogue, a brander of enemies, a mobilizer, and a rabble rouser," Gitlin told me. He conceded this would constitute a government limitation of free speech. "The corner that right-wing radio has on the medium is a warping factor in our politics," he says. "Limbaugh is truck-driver radio. His voice is the voice of resentment, or in Nietzche’s sense, ressentiment – it sounds better, more venomous, in French…

On reflection, and after consulting the Media Matters archive, Gitlin contacted me and asked to amend "liar" to "[BS] artist." In the commentary business, [BS] is what you call the opinions of those with whom you disagree.

Or for a surprising liberal endorsement, NPR host Ira Glass, just a few pages after the glitzy-mansion paragraphs, on page 125:

"Rush is just an amazing radio performer," says Ira Glass, the host of This American Life. "Years ago, I used to listen in the car on my way to reporting gigs, and I’d notice that I disagreed with everything he was saying, yet I not only wanted to keep listening, I actually liked him. That is some chops. You can count on two hands the number of public figures in America who can pull that off."

Glass compares Limbaugh to another exception free-form radio monologist, Howard Stern. "A lot of people dismisse them both as pandering and proselytizing and playing to the lowest common denominator, but I think that misses everything important about their shows," he told me. "They both think through their ideas in real time on the air; they both have a lot more warmth than they’re generally given credit for; they both created an entire radio aesthetic.

"Like everyone, I’m a sucker for the smart-ass outsider, which he plays with such glee. That’s what’s great about him at his best: it’s such a happy show! And the idea that he’d just sit there, not take calls, not have guests…is as radical an invention as Howard Stern’s format. Rush is a lone figure. Talking to us in that peculiar way you can over the radio – where he’s our buddy, leaning in for a joke, tugging on our sleeve as he tells us something nobody else knows, but he’s also a preacher, delivering good news to the masses. When I first heard him, I was surprised to hear this tone work in the middle of the day. I’d always thought of that solitary sort of radio as something that works better in the dark, late at night. Something about Rush’s upbeat, triumphal, braggy joy – the happiness of the show– is what make it play when the sun is still up."

Here is Frum’s response to my post in full:

Some replies:

1) Hate, jealousy, etc. are strong words. They are visibly not substantiated by the extract Graham quotes, most of which in turn is quoted by Chafets. My advice to Tim: stick to the facts, omit the mind-reading.

2) It is not I who "cannot seem to distinguish between intellectual leaders and political leaders." The claim that Limbaugh has displaced Reagan is made by Limbaugh’s enthusiastic biographer, by Zev Chafets, right up there in black and white.

3) Tim Graham describes Limbaugh as a "great popularizer" and asks why I "can’t appreciate him for what he is"? The answer to that question comes from Limbaugh himself, in words quoted in my review but not in Graham’s blogpost. Limbaugh no longer sees himself as a popularizer. He sees himself – in his own words!" as the "intellectual engine" of the conservative movement. Limbaugh sees himself as the successor and replacement to William Buckley and Irving Kristol. If Graham does not agree – and he indicates that he does not – then his problem is with Limbaugh, not me.

4) Why did my review focus on Limbaugh’s ornate tastes in home decoration? For this reason: because that’s what Chafets’ book focused on! The question any reviewer would ask of a newly published biography is: what does it tell us that we did not know before? In the case of An Army of One, it is precisely these personal details that are the news, really the only news. Limbaugh liked Chafets and gave him access to his house and life. Chafets described what he saw in awe-struck detail. At the same time, Chafets captured in multiple quotations Limbaugh’s intense resentments and his avidity for social status. These are not mind-readings, like Graham’s attempt to analyze me above. They are Limbaugh’s own words. And they make for a jarring juxtaposition – and the most arresting thing in a book that otherwise repackages very familiar material.

Some replies to the replies:

On the mind-reading: Frum challenges the idea that he is a Limbaugh-hater. Let’s go back to the Newsweek cover story for a refresher:

With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence—exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating!

And:

There’s the perfect culmination of the outlook Rush Limbaugh has taught his fans and followers: we want to transform the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan into a party of unanimous dittoheads—and we don’t care how much the party has to shrink to do it. That’s not the language of politics. It’s the language of a cult.

On Frum’s jealousy that he isn’t the intellectual leader of the Republicans, that may be mind-reading, but his mind is as clear as a glass window with the smell of fresh Windex.

On the popularizer, points 2 and 3: It does not require us to accept Rush Limbaugh’s self-designation (or the author’s alleged endorsement of same) as the "intellectual engine" of the conservative movement for us to appreciate his role as a popularizer.

But a closer look at the chapter titled "Intellectual Engine" makes it plain when the author explains "Limbaugh is not an original thinker. He belongs to a profession that toils somewhere between Plato’s cave and Santa’s workshop, hammering perceived Truths into interesting new shapes, wrapping them in shiny paper, and delivering them to the public."

In other words, Limbaugh is not an intellectual leader, he is a popularizer.  

David Frum has responded on his own site Frum Forum to the NewsBusters post on his nasty Limbaugh book review in The Washington Post. For starters, he claimed that he focused on Limbaugh’s ornate digs because this is "really the only news" in the Zev Chafets book.

To claim there’s no news in here is to admit you skimmed it. I wish Frum had plopped in the Post this snippet from pages 139 and 140 and pondered what it says about the Left:

Some, like Professor Todd Gitlin of the Columbia School of Journalism, think the government should take Rush off the air. "Limbaugh is a liar and a demagogue, a brander of enemies, a mobilizer, and a rabble rouser," Gitlin told me. He conceded this would constitute a government limitation of free speech. "The corner that right-wing radio has on the medium is a warping factor in our politics," he says. "Limbaugh is truck-driver radio. His voice is the voice of resentment, or in Nietzche’s sense, ressentiment – it sounds better, more venomous, in French…

On reflection, and after consulting the Media Matters archive, Gitlin contacted me and asked to amend "liar" to "[BS] artist." In the commentary business, [BS] is what you call the opinions of those with whom you disagree.

Or for a surprising liberal endorsement, NPR host Ira Glass, just a few pages after the glitzy-mansion paragraphs, on page 125:

"Rush is just an amazing radio performer," says Ira Glass, the host of This American Life. "Years ago, I used to listen in the car on my way to reporting gigs, and I’d notice that I disagreed with everything he was saying, yet I not only wanted to keep listening, I actually liked him. That is some chops. You can count on two hands the number of public figures in America who can pull that off."

Glass compares Limbaugh to another exception free-form radio monologist, Howard Stern. "A lot of people dismisse them both as pandering and proselytizing and playing to the lowest common denominator, but I think that misses everything important about their shows," he told me. "They both think through their ideas in real time on the air; they both have a lot more warmth than they’re generally given credit for; they both created an entire radio aesthetic.

"Like everyone, I’m a sucker for the smart-ass outsider, which he plays with such glee. That’s what’s great about him at his best: it’s such a happy show! And the idea that he’d just sit there, not take calls, not have guests…is as radical an invention as Howard Stern’s format. Rush is a lone figure. Talking to us in that peculiar way you can over the radio – where he’s our buddy, leaning in for a joke, tugging on our sleeve as he tells us something nobody else knows, but he’s also a preacher, delivering good news to the masses. When I first heard him, I was surprised to hear this tone work in the middle of the day. I’d always thought of that solitary sort of radio as something that works better in the dark, late at night. Something about Rush’s upbeat, triumphal, braggy joy – the happiness of the show– is what make it play when the sun is still up."

Here is Frum’s response to my post in full:

Some replies:

1) Hate, jealousy, etc. are strong words. They are visibly not substantiated by the extract Graham quotes, most of which in turn is quoted by Chafets. My advice to Tim: stick to the facts, omit the mind-reading.

2) It is not I who "cannot seem to distinguish between intellectual leaders and political leaders." The claim that Limbaugh has displaced Reagan is made by Limbaugh’s enthusiastic biographer, by Zev Chafets, right up there in black and white.

3) Tim Graham describes Limbaugh as a "great popularizer" and asks why I "can’t appreciate him for what he is"? The answer to that question comes from Limbaugh himself, in words quoted in my review but not in Graham’s blogpost. Limbaugh no longer sees himself as a popularizer. He sees himself – in his own words!" as the "intellectual engine" of the conservative movement. Limbaugh sees himself as the successor and replacement to William Buckley and Irving Kristol. If Graham does not agree – and he indicates that he does not – then his problem is with Limbaugh, not me.

4) Why did my review focus on Limbaugh’s ornate tastes in home decoration? For this reason: because that’s what Chafets’ book focused on! The question any reviewer would ask of a newly published biography is: what does it tell us that we did not know before? In the case of An Army of One, it is precisely these personal details that are the news, really the only news. Limbaugh liked Chafets and gave him access to his house and life. Chafets described what he saw in awe-struck detail. At the same time, Chafets captured in multiple quotations Limbaugh’s intense resentments and his avidity for social status. These are not mind-readings, like Graham’s attempt to analyze me above. They are Limbaugh’s own words. And they make for a jarring juxtaposition – and the most arresting thing in a book that otherwise repackages very familiar material.

Some replies to the replies:

On the mind-reading: Frum challenges the idea that he is a Limbaugh-hater. Let’s go back to the Newsweek cover story for a refresher:

With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence—exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating!

And:

There’s the perfect culmination of the outlook Rush Limbaugh has taught his fans and followers: we want to transform the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan into a party of unanimous dittoheads—and we don’t care how much the party has to shrink to do it. That’s not the language of politics. It’s the language of a cult.

On Frum’s jealousy that he isn’t the intellectual leader of the Republicans, that may be mind-reading, but his mind is as clear as a glass window with the smell of fresh Windex.

On the popularizer, points 2 and 3: It does not require us to accept Rush Limbaugh’s self-designation (or the author’s alleged endorsement of same) as the "intellectual engine" of the conservative movement for us to appreciate his role as a popularizer.

But a closer look at the chapter titled "Intellectual Engine" makes it plain when the author explains "Limbaugh is not an original thinker. He belongs to a profession that toils somewhere between Plato’s cave and Santa’s workshop, hammering perceived Truths into interesting new shapes, wrapping them in shiny paper, and delivering them to the public."

In other words, Limbaugh is not an intellectual leader, he is a popularizer.  

The Washington Post this week published a pair of articles promoting and praising the Washington, D.C., government for increasing the cost of its “free” condom program and making it easier for kids to get the prophylactics.

The city is reportedly upgrading from Durex brand condoms to the more widely advertised Trojan brand. The decision was based on name recognition, not evidence that Trojans are better at preventing pregnancy or protecting against sexually transmitted diseases. The city will also start offering Trojan’s larger size condom, dubbed Magnum.

The brand switch will cost the city “an extra few thousand dollars” in addition to the $165,000 the program cost in 2009, according to the May 21 report. Reporter Tim Craig wrote that the city is “grappling over how to make government-issued condoms more appealing.”

An expansion of the program also makes it easier for school children to obtain condoms – not from their parents or guardians, but from the “cool teachers.”

Neither Craig’s report nor columnist Courtland Milloy’s May 26 op-ed cited abstinence advocates or even hinted at criticism of the city’s efforts to make condoms and risky sex more appealing and accessible to the city’s residents, including kids.

Instead, Milloy called the expansion a “victory” for Trojan and the city. He praised the Magnum XL, which is billed as 30 percent bigger than regular condoms. “Who knows whether dispensing a condom that plays on the urban masculine mystique will result in safer sex?” Milloy said. “It’s worth the effort.”

A better question might be: “Who’s going to tell the self-assured youngsters to be sure they’re built for the XL before grabbing it to show-off?” Trojan’s own website notes that some men “may experience slippage with this extra large condom,” rendering it essentially useless.

To his credit, Milloy encouraged parents to be more involved in their children’s sex education. “At least encourage sons to use a condom and let daughters know that they will be hurt the most by not insisting on it,” he wrote.

But the school system’s end-run around parental authority is justified, according to Milloy, who asked, “should young people have to suffer unnecessarily because their parents are uninformed or morally paralyzed?”

It’s not the first time the Post has promoted condoms instead of abstinence. A 2008 editorial praised condom distribution programs on the same day it published an op-ed noting the failure of “safe sex” programs in HIV/AIDS ravaged Africa. 

 

The Washington Post this week published a pair of articles promoting and praising the Washington, D.C., government for increasing the cost of its “free” condom program and making it easier for kids to get the prophylactics.

The city is reportedly upgrading from Durex brand condoms to the more widely advertised Trojan brand. The decision was based on name recognition, not evidence that Trojans are better at preventing pregnancy or protecting against sexually transmitted diseases. The city will also start offering Trojan’s larger size condom, dubbed Magnum.

The brand switch will cost the city “an extra few thousand dollars” in addition to the $165,000 the program cost in 2009, according to the May 21 report. Reporter Tim Craig wrote that the city is “grappling over how to make government-issued condoms more appealing.”

An expansion of the program also makes it easier for school children to obtain condoms – not from their parents or guardians, but from the “cool teachers.”

Neither Craig’s report nor columnist Courtland Milloy’s May 26 op-ed cited abstinence advocates or even hinted at criticism of the city’s efforts to make condoms and risky sex more appealing and accessible to the city’s residents, including kids.

Instead, Milloy called the expansion a “victory” for Trojan and the city. He praised the Magnum XL, which is billed as 30 percent bigger than regular condoms. “Who knows whether dispensing a condom that plays on the urban masculine mystique will result in safer sex?” Milloy said. “It’s worth the effort.”

A better question might be: “Who’s going to tell the self-assured youngsters to be sure they’re built for the XL before grabbing it to show-off?” Trojan’s own website notes that some men “may experience slippage with this extra large condom,” rendering it essentially useless.

To his credit, Milloy encouraged parents to be more involved in their children’s sex education. “At least encourage sons to use a condom and let daughters know that they will be hurt the most by not insisting on it,” he wrote.

But the school system’s end-run around parental authority is justified, according to Milloy, who asked, “should young people have to suffer unnecessarily because their parents are uninformed or morally paralyzed?”

It’s not the first time the Post has promoted condoms instead of abstinence. A 2008 editorial praised condom distribution programs on the same day it published an op-ed noting the failure of “safe sex” programs in HIV/AIDS ravaged Africa. 

 

Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander responded online to yesterday’s NewsBusters post on Frum’s Tuesday Style section review of the new book Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One. Alexander wondered "Was Frum too biased to review book on Rush Limbaugh?"

He suggested the problem wasn’t Frum’s anti-Limbaugh bias, but that the Post should have disclosed something to readers about Frum’s record of lamenting Limbaugh -- such as suggesting he's "kryptonite" for Republicans. The book review editor claimed she was somehow unaware of their corporate cousin Newsweek’s "Why Rush Is Wrong" cover story last year:

Post Book World Editor Rachel Shea said she was unaware that Frum had written last year's critical Newsweek piece, which was headlined: "Why Rush is Wrong." But she said she was aware of debate Frum had stirred over how the GOP could best position itself with voters. And she said The Post chose Frum precisely because "it's no surprise where he was coming from."

"There was no way we could find someone who didn't have an opinion" about Limbaugh, she said. "In the absence of finding someone who is completely dispassionate, we decided to go with somebody who people know."

But should Frum's review have noted his past pointed criticism of Limbaugh, for those readers who were unaware? "I suppose we should have," Shea said. "

I agree. Limbaugh is a fascinating figure to many readers, regardless of their ideological orientation. Not everyone is aware of the feuds within the conservative movement. In this case, transparency is important for those coming to the review without prior knowledge of the Frum-Limbaugh clash.

There is certainly nothing wrong with finding a "biased" book reviewer on Limbaugh, but handing the assignment to Frum is less about a simple "bias" and more about offering a rhetorical baseball bat to a sworn enemy. Shea readily admitted she knew when she picked Frum exactly "where he was coming from."

Frum has been luckier as an author on the other side of Post book reviews. On January 4, 2004, on his book The End of Evil with Richard Perle, reviewer Lawrence Kaplan offers more disclosure than the Post did with Limbaugh: "(full disclosure: Perle sits on the trustee board of the Hudson Institute, where I have just begun a part-time fellowship)." On January 19, 2003, his book The Right Man was reviewed without rancor by conservative James Pinkerton. Perhaps the Post should ask Limbaugh to review Frum’s next opus for balance.

It could be argued that Zev Chafets should be happy that his book was noticed by Post book reviewers. The Post never reviewed Mark Levin’s million-selling Liberty and Tyranny and has also skipped Sean Hannity’s best-selling new book Conservative Victory. They ignored Laura Ingraham’s Power to the People in 2007.

PS: The last time the Post turned to Frum for an article was in the last gasps of the 2008 campaign in the Sunday Outlook section, when Frum typically suggested "Palinizing" the Republican base was a disaster for the GOP:

After months and months of wan enthusiasm among Republicans, these last weeks have at last energized the core of the party. But there's a downside: The very same campaign strategy that has belatedly mobilized the Republican core has alienated and offended the great national middle, which was the only place where the 2008 election could have been won.

I could pile up the poll numbers here, but frankly . . . it's too depressing. You have to go back to the Watergate era to see numbers quite so horrible for the GOP.

McCain's awful campaign is having awful consequences down the ballot. I spoke a little while ago to a senior Republican House member. "There is not a safe Republican seat in the country," he warned. "I don't mean that we're going to lose all of them. But we could lose any of them."

In the Senate, things look, if possible, even worse.

Would Frum really blame the losses of Gordon Smith or John Sununu or Liddy Dole on Palin?

Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander responded online to yesterday’s NewsBusters post on Frum’s Tuesday Style section review of the new book Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One. Alexander wondered "Was Frum too biased to review book on Rush Limbaugh?"

He suggested the problem wasn’t Frum’s anti-Limbaugh bias, but that the Post should have disclosed something to readers about Frum’s record of lamenting Limbaugh -- such as suggesting he's "kryptonite" for Republicans. The book review editor claimed she was somehow unaware of their corporate cousin Newsweek’s "Why Rush Is Wrong" cover story last year:

Post Book World Editor Rachel Shea said she was unaware that Frum had written last year's critical Newsweek piece, which was headlined: "Why Rush is Wrong." But she said she was aware of debate Frum had stirred over how the GOP could best position itself with voters. And she said The Post chose Frum precisely because "it's no surprise where he was coming from."

"There was no way we could find someone who didn't have an opinion" about Limbaugh, she said. "In the absence of finding someone who is completely dispassionate, we decided to go with somebody who people know."

But should Frum's review have noted his past pointed criticism of Limbaugh, for those readers who were unaware? "I suppose we should have," Shea said. "

I agree. Limbaugh is a fascinating figure to many readers, regardless of their ideological orientation. Not everyone is aware of the feuds within the conservative movement. In this case, transparency is important for those coming to the review without prior knowledge of the Frum-Limbaugh clash.

There is certainly nothing wrong with finding a "biased" book reviewer on Limbaugh, but handing the assignment to Frum is less about a simple "bias" and more about offering a rhetorical baseball bat to a sworn enemy. Shea readily admitted she knew when she picked Frum exactly "where he was coming from."

Frum has been luckier as an author on the other side of Post book reviews. On January 4, 2004, on his book The End of Evil with Richard Perle, reviewer Lawrence Kaplan offers more disclosure than the Post did with Limbaugh: "(full disclosure: Perle sits on the trustee board of the Hudson Institute, where I have just begun a part-time fellowship)." On January 19, 2003, his book The Right Man was reviewed without rancor by conservative James Pinkerton. Perhaps the Post should ask Limbaugh to review Frum’s next opus for balance.

It could be argued that Zev Chafets should be happy that his book was noticed by Post book reviewers. The Post never reviewed Mark Levin’s million-selling Liberty and Tyranny and has also skipped Sean Hannity’s best-selling new book Conservative Victory. They ignored Laura Ingraham’s Power to the People in 2007.

PS: The last time the Post turned to Frum for an article was in the last gasps of the 2008 campaign in the Sunday Outlook section, when Frum typically suggested "Palinizing" the Republican base was a disaster for the GOP:

After months and months of wan enthusiasm among Republicans, these last weeks have at last energized the core of the party. But there's a downside: The very same campaign strategy that has belatedly mobilized the Republican core has alienated and offended the great national middle, which was the only place where the 2008 election could have been won.

I could pile up the poll numbers here, but frankly . . . it's too depressing. You have to go back to the Watergate era to see numbers quite so horrible for the GOP.

McCain's awful campaign is having awful consequences down the ballot. I spoke a little while ago to a senior Republican House member. "There is not a safe Republican seat in the country," he warned. "I don't mean that we're going to lose all of them. But we could lose any of them."

In the Senate, things look, if possible, even worse.

Would Frum really blame the losses of Gordon Smith or John Sununu or Liddy Dole on Palin?

The New York Times's former Middle East Bureau Chief thinks violent revolt is a laudable response to economic woes, and that murder is at least acceptable in pursuit of a far-left agenda. The media so concerned with the potential for violence from conservative groups are completely silent.

"Here’s to the Greeks," wrote Chris Hedges at Truthdig.com. "They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country." Riot, by Hedges's account, is the correct response. That the riots in Greece have so far killed three innocent people doesn't seem to bother him.

Oh but it's not violence borne of a frustration with an unsustainable welfare state that finally reached the inevitable conclusion of skyrocketing public benefits coupled with a fast-shrinking population. No, the riots are "a struggle for liberation" against the oppressive bourgeoisie (capitalists). Hedges is advocating in no vague terms mass political violence. The response from the media: crickets.

Greeks, Hedges writes,

know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it.

Language really does not get much more violent and incendiary than that. Hedges is a rhetorical bomb-thrower, but by the mainstream media's standards, he might as well be an actual bomb-thrower.

Journalists have condemned language for less, after all. For months, we have heard that heated rhetoric at tea party rallies could dangerously provoke protesters -- despite the total absence of violence at those rallies. Now we have actual violence taking place across the Atlantic, and an American journalist advocating its importation -- all at a time when populist tensions are dangerously high in the United States.

Hedges isn't holding a sign demanding that we "water the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants." The utterance of that Thomas Jefferson quote at a tea party was enough to send media liberals into hysterics. He is condoning the murder of innocent Greeks, and suggesting that Americans whip up some populist violence of their own.

Along the way, Hedges manages to regurgitate every leftist cliche concerning capitalism, globalization, conservatism, and the evil corporations devised since 1960. His opinions are his, and the piece at Truthdig is commentary. He is wrong in virtually all these areas, but it is not the job of the news media to debunk every wackjob conspiracy theory and accusation of white collar crime uttered by the liberal intelligentsia.

It is the media's self-appointed duty, however, to report fairly and accurately, regardless of political considerations. Yet even after condemning rhetoric on the right for supposedly inciting violence, major media outlets -- beyond Hedges's former employer -- have not only been completely silent on his advocacy of violence, but have even given him a platform to voice his radical views.

As Reason's Matt Welch points out,

Hedeges' recent apocalyptic tear (which has resonance for at least some libertarians, not to mention Pagans) includes urging on sabotage two months ago, and calling corporations "little Eichmanns" last week. And this is no fringe character here–Hedges continues to receive respectful hearings in the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Vancouver Sun, et al, and just last week he was named a finalist for the L.A. Press Club's Online Journalist of the Year. You will search in vain for any mention of Hedges by the scores of journalistic commenters who have been warning for more than a year now (inaccurately, in my opinion) about impending political violence, inciteful right-wing rhetoric, and borderline sedition.

In short, memebers of the the journalistic establishment continue not only to give Hedges's opinions fair hearings, but even to lend their respective megaphones and give awards to a man who believes that fatal political violence is commendable, and should be replicated on the home front.

One of the most enjoyable parts of both “Iron Man” and “Iron Man 2” is the hero at the core of the two films. Played by a charismatic Robert Downey Jr., Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) is both egotistical...

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One of the most enjoyable parts of both “Iron Man” and “Iron Man 2” is the hero at the core of the two films. Played by a charismatic Robert Downey Jr., Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) is both egotistical...

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Investors Business Daily called attention to an alarming story that goes back to Sunday, May 16 in a Monday evening editorial.

A protest noticed by the target's next-door neighbor who happened to be home at the time, namely journalist Nina Easton (who also took the photo at right), occurred in a Metro DC suburb in Maryland marked the next round of a national labor union's attempt at persuasion through intimidation.

IBD concisely describes what happens, and why it should cause so much concern:

Mob Rule From SEIU

On May 16, Washington, D.C., police escorted 14 busloads full of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) members at least part of the way to storm the Chevy Chase, Md., home of Bank of America's deputy legal counsel, Greg Baer.

Some 500 protestors affiliated with SEIU and their allies in the community organizing group National Political Action (NPA) trampled his lawn, blocked his doorway to his home and screamed "greed." Legally, it was burglary, trespassing and, possibly, assault.

But Maryland cops didn't enforce the law. And Baer had to brave the insult-hurling mob alone to rescue his 14-year old son who, home alone, had locked himself in the bathroom in fear.

But there was one thing these thugs didn't count on — a credible journalist next door who reported what happened.

Fortune Magazine's Nina Easton wrote about what happened and asked SEIU spokesman Stephen Lerner to explain.

His response was chilling: "People in powerful corporations seem to think they can insulate themselves from the damage they are doing," Lerner said, implying that physical intimidation was indeed the intent.

... What's important here is that these mobs act with near impunity and lash out at critics like Easton. What Stern calls "the persuasion of power" is identical to the violent means of maintaining political order in Cuba and Venezuela.

It's going full blast in the U.S. now as the party in power loses popularity. That's a bad sign that democracy itself is under attack.

Other reports at BigJournalism.com and BigGovernment.com indicate that a Huffington Post blogger was on hand to chronicle the goings-on and that a police escort was provided by Metro DC Police (there is dispute as to whether the escort stopped at the DC-Maryland border or was also present at Baer's home.

Establishment media silence has been, to use a word employed by Archy Cary at BigJournalism.com, "deafening":

• Searches on "Baer" and "Easton" at the Associated Press's main site return nothing relevant and nothing relevant, respectively.
• Searches on "Baer" and "Easton" at the New York Times return nothing relevant and nothing relevant, respectively.
• Cary at BigJournalism.com used "deafening" to describe the Washington Post's silence on the mob just before 7 PM Pacific Time. That's an appropriate descriptor, given that there is also nothing relevant at the post in searches on "Baer" and "Easton."

Mob rule and tyranny advance when the people who supposedly pride themselves on speaking truth to power stay silent. In effect even if not by intent, this makes them co-conspirators.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

The Washington Post knows how to thrust two middle fingers in Rush Limbaugh's face. They decided to put a book review of the new Zev Chavets book on Limbaugh on the front page of Tuesday's Style section, reviewed by....David Frum, the Republican establishment's leading Rush-hater.

This is a little like assigning a Bill Clinton book review to Jim Clyburn, so he can call him a racist again for 1,000 words. There's more hate than light. Frum gnashes his teeth hardest late in the review, jealous that he, the wise and humble Frum, is not acknowledged by all as the country's leading conservative intellectual:

Chafets acknowledges that Limbaugh has no conception of fairness or objectivity, that he is not an original thinker, and that he is prone to "hyperbole, sarcasm, and ridicule, none of which is meant to be taken literally."

He's unnerved by Limbaugh's "Magic Negro" racial insensitivities and his indifference to real politics. " 'There are no books written about great moderates,' he sometimes says. 'Great people take stands on principle, not moderation.' That's not true of course -- the founding fathers Limbaugh venerates compromised their way into a Constitution, and even Ronaldus Maximus [Reagan] knew when to bend. Politics is the art of compromise. But, of course, Limbaugh is not a politician or even a political strategist. He is a polemicist."

It might seem ominous for an intellectual movement to be led by a man who does not think creatively, who does not respect the other side of the argument and who frequently says things that are not intended as truth. But neither Limbaugh nor Chafets is troubled: "Over the years, [Limbaugh] has endeavored to carry forward the banner of Ronaldus Maximus, which he always credits as 'Reaganism.' But as time moves on the memory of Reagan fades. It is Limbaugh's voice conservatives now identify with. For millions, conservatism is now Limbaughism."

That is Limbaugh's achievement. It is Chafets's story line. And it is American conservatism's problem.

Frum cannot seem to distinguish between intellectual leaders and political leaders. Most people think of Ronald Reagan as a political leader, not as an intellectual leader, and the same is true of Limbaugh. Conservatives in the 1980s weren't going to elect William F. Buckley or Irving Kristol, but that didn't mean they weren't intellectual leaders.

Limbaugh is a great popularizer of conservatism, a very accessible professor of "advanced conservative studies." He mints new conservatives, and moralizes the troops, old warriors and new recrutis alike, when they get demoralized. Why can't Frum appreciate him for what he is?

Instead, he relayed how Chafets reports without irony on Limbaugh's ornate tastes in home decorating and mocks Rush as a faux populist.  

Also: Frum writes on CNN.com that "ultralibertarian" fringes (as represented by Rep. Paul Ryan's budget) are a political disaster waiting to happen.

Earlier: Time highlights Frum as he misquotes Limbaugh about stamping out GOP moderates

Frum to Chris Matthews: Rush has a race problem

Washington Post humorist Gene Weingarten is working in his hatred for conservatives in his Sunday Post Magazine column. The column is mostly a whimsical review of a George Bernard Shaw play and how Britain in Victorian times had a very uptight morality, and characters like pimps could only be portrayed as "loathsome deviants who would roast in Hell." Then he veered into this digression:

This sort of unwritten literary convention may seem quaint today, but such subtle rules are still practiced. For example, American journalists know they can write about the Tea Party, but only if it is presented as a serious ideological movement instead of as a posse of ignoramuses carrying signs such as the one in the second photo on this page [above].

But I digress!

The column is written as a letter to Akiva Fox at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, who apparently has brought in outside experts to review plays for the company newsletter. Weingarten predictably joked that the moral guardians of the Victorian age were "persons with names like Sir Percival Wussingham, Lady Plushbotham-Harrumphton and Geoffrey Stammerblush, second Earl of Priggington."

Washington Post humorist Gene Weingarten is working in his hatred for conservatives in his Sunday Post Magazine column. The column is mostly a whimsical review of a George Bernard Shaw play and how Britain in Victorian times had a very uptight morality, and characters like pimps could only be portrayed as "loathsome deviants who would roast in Hell." Then he veered into this digression:

This sort of unwritten literary convention may seem quaint today, but such subtle rules are still practiced. For example, American journalists know they can write about the Tea Party, but only if it is presented as a serious ideological movement instead of as a posse of ignoramuses carrying signs such as the one in the second photo on this page [above].

But I digress!

The column is written as a letter to Akiva Fox at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, who apparently has brought in outside experts to review plays for the company newsletter. Weingarten predictably joked that the moral guardians of the Victorian age were "persons with names like Sir Percival Wussingham, Lady Plushbotham-Harrumphton and Geoffrey Stammerblush, second Earl of Priggington."

Perhaps Washington Post reporter Michael Birnbaum needs to brush up his reading comprehension skills. Either that or his bias is coloring what should be straightforward reporting.

Here's how Birnbaum opened his page A16 article in the May 22 paper:

The Texas state school board gave final approval Friday to controversial social studies standards that minimize the separation of church and state and say that America is not a democracy but a "constitutional republic." 

Really? The second point is ludicrous to describe as "controversial." The U.S. system of government is not direct democracy but a representative republic regulated by a constitution, hence a "constitutional republic."  As to the first allegation in Birnbaum's lead paragraph, this writer did some homework and found the actual text of the newly-approved standard in question, which applies to government courses:

Examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America and guaranteed its free exercise by saying that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, and compare and contrast this to the phrase “separation of church and state.” 

The notion that that standard "minimize[s]" the notion of "separation of church and state" must be read into the text of the actual newly-approved standard, it certainly isn't logically concluded from it.

Later in the article, Birnbaum insisted that "the new standards... draw an equivalency between Jefferson Davis's and Abraham Lincoln's inaugural addresses." Here's the actual language of the newly devised standard:

Analyze Abraham Lincoln’s ideas about liberty, equality, union and government as contained in his first and second inaugural addresses and the Gettysburg Address and contrast them with the ideas contained in Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address.

That standard is for U.S. history classes taught to 8th graders, who are certainly old enough to learn about and critically evaluate the political philosophies undergirding the civilian leadership of both the Union and the Confederacy. 

What's more, although Birnbaum left it out of his story, the Board of Education also passed a new learning standard that called on students in sociology courses to "[e]xplain instances of institutional racism in American society." That hardly sounds like a conservative "whitewashing" of American history to me.

Indeed, for all the heated debate over history standards, the Board approved by a 14-0 vote new standards on the high school economics curriculum. That fact also went unmentioned by Birnbaum, although he noted that "references to capitalism" in the social studies curriculum were "replaced... with the term 'free-enterprise system.'"

So here's your homework assignment, dear reader: What grade would you give Birnbaum were you his editor? Leave your remarks in the comments field.

In February, Congressman Joe Sestak, D-Pa., alleged that the White House had offered him a "high-ranking" job in exchange for him refraining from challenging Sen. Arlen Specter in that state's primaries. Since Sestak defeated Specter on Tuesday, a number of media outlets have profiled him

The White House denies that it ever made such an offer, which means either the Obama administration or Sestak is lying. Either would be a huge story. Yet a number of major media players, including the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and the Associated Press, have ignored the potential controversy.

The Washington Post devoted 16 paragraphs to a glowing profile of Sestak. But at no point did the paper mention his allegations. The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes noted on Twitter that the piece in the Post "was about Sestak being difficult for estab/WH Dems. How do you leave out public charges he made about WH and job?" He also asserted that "If players/parties were different, it wld be at the top of the coverage."

NPR claims to be "Filling in the Blanks" on Sestak's candidacy, yet the biggest blank of all -- whether he was offered a bribe by White House officials -- goes conspicuously unfilled. NPR even goes so far as to note that "the White House had, indeed, encouraged him not to run against the incumbent senator," yet somehow cannot bring itself to mention the alleged bribe.

The Associated Press ran a much shorter story on Democrats and union leaders who "have begun lining up behind the party nominee [Sestak] whom they had fought to defeat in Pennsylvania's U.S. Senate primary." Yet the most prominent and damning measure undertaken to prevent Sestak from winning the nomination escaped mention in the AP report.

By itself, the potential controversy should remain at least in the first couple paragraphs of any report on this race. But compounding the story's relevance are prominent Republicans who are demanding a formal investigation into the charges or noting that such an investigation would be welcome.

Rep. Darryl Issa, R-Calif., ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said that Sestak has a "moral imperative" to inform the public on any malfeasance by the administration, something he has thus far refused to do.

Issa said in a release on Wednesday,

Could the reason why Congressman Joe Sestak refuses to name names is because the very people who tried to bribe him are now his benefactors?  For months, Sestak has repeatedly said without equivocation that the White House illegally offered him a federal job in exchange for dropping out of the race.  Was Joe Sestak embellishing what really happened or does he have first-hand knowledge of the White House breaking the law?  If what he said is the truth, Joe Sestak has a moral imperative to come forward and expose who within the Obama Administration tried to bribe him.

Some news outlets, including Fox News and CNN, have reported on the story to the greatest extent possible. In fact, Issa named Rick Sanchez, CNN anchor and friend of NB, an "honorary watchdog" for his willingness to ask questions of the White House -- questions on which White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said he had "nothing to add."

The question is why other news outlets have not done the same.

Eight former Federal Elections Commissioners today blasted proponents of a Senate bill that would "blunt" the Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court decision, which allowed unions and corporations to spend freely on political advertisements.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, the Commissioners called the bill "unnecessary, partially duplicative of existing law, and severely burdensome to the right to engage in political speech and advocacy." They also accused Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-NY, and Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. -- sponsors of the Senate and House legislation, respectively -- of "partisan motives" designed to satiate the Democratic Party's labor union backers.

While some prominent news organizations, including the Washington Post, have raised serious concerns about the  legislation, other ostensibly (or at least presumably) pro-free speech news outlets are either silent or, in the case of the New York Times, simply parrot Democratic talking points and give critics of the bill a mention, though not a voice, and make sure to dub them "the business lobby."

The op-ed is the most scathing attack on Democrats' attempts to stifle political speech by overturning a decision allowing corporations and unions to spend money on political advertisements within 60 days of a general election or within 30 days of a primary. The Court handed down its decision in January.

The Commissioners, who together "served on the FEC at all times from its inception in 1975 through August 2008," offer a number of objections to the DISCLOSE Act (a very misleading acronym, as the bill "goes beyond disclosure," according to the Post).

First, the bill would only make campaign finance laws more complex and harder to comply with. Complex regulations favor larger businesses that can afford to pay the increased overhead. Smaller businesses, however, can silenced by regulations that place overly-onerous burdens on them. As the Commissioners note,

regulatory burdens often fall hardest not on large-scale players in the political world but on spontaneous grass-roots movements, upstart, low-budget campaigns, and unwitting volunteers…

The Disclose Act also creates new disclosure requirements for nonprofit advocacy groups that speak out. These groups already have to disclose their sponsorship, but Disclose requires them to go further and provide the government with a membership list. This infringes on the First Amendment rights of private associations recognized by the Supreme Court in NAACP v. Alabama. Groups can avoid this only by creating a new type of political action committee called a "campaign related activities account."

The result of these overly complex and unnecessary provisions is to force nonprofits to choose between two options that have each been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court: Either disclose their members to the government or restrict their political spending to the campaign related activities account. This runs contrary to the explicit holding in Citizens United that corporations (and unions) may engage in political speech using their general treasuries.

These requirements will be especially burdensome to small businesses and grass-roots organizations, which typically lack the resources for compliance. So the end effect of all of this "enhanced disclosure" will be to ensure that only large corporations, unions and advocacy groups can make political expenditures—the exact opposite of what the sponsors claim to desire...

Additionally, the law would require any business or organization making political expenditures to create and maintain an extensive, highly sophisticated website with advanced search features to track its political activities.

As a result, small businesses, grass-roots organizations, and union locals that maintain only basic websites would be discouraged from making any expenditures for political advocacy, because doing so would require them to spend thousands of dollars to upgrade their websites and purchase software to report information that is already readily available to the public from the FEC. Large companies and unions could probably meet this requirement, so once again the bill benefits large, institutional players over small businesses and grass-roots organizations.

The op-ed also notes the rank partisanship in the Disclose Act in that it seeks to reimpose the regulations cast aside by the Supreme Court on corporations, but not on labor unions. In doing so, the Commissioners write, the bill

abandons the longstanding policy of treating unions and businesses equally, suggesting partisan motives that undermine respect for campaign finance laws…

The FEC must constantly fight to overcome the perception that the law is merely a partisan tool of dominant political interests. Failure to maintain an evenhanded approach towards unions and corporations threatens public confidence in the integrity of the electoral system.

For example, while the Disclose Act prohibits any corporation with a federal contact of $50,000 or more from making independent expenditures or electioneering communications, no such prohibition applies to unions. This $50,000 trigger is so low it would exclude thousands of corporations from engaging in constitutionally protected political speech, the very core of the First Amendment. Yet public employee unions negotiate directly with the government for benefits many times the value of contracts that would trigger the corporate ban.

This prohibition is supposedly needed to address concerns that government contractors might use the political process to steer contracts their way; but unions have exactly the same conflict of interest. So do other recipients of federal funds, such as nonprofit organizations that receive federal grants and earmarks. Yet there is no ban on their independent political expenditures.

The Commissioner's most basic and effective charge, however, is simply that the law is un-American. Restricting any form of speech is dangerous; but political speech must be guarded more jealously than any other type.

Violating the law by engaging in forbidden political speech can land you in a federal prison, a very un-American notion. The Disclose Act exacerbates many of these problems and is a blatant attempt by its sponsors to do indirectly, through excessively onerous regulatory requirements, what the Supreme Court told Congress it cannot do directly—restrict political speech.

You would think that in the midst of the liberal media's fight to rip Arizona's Immigration Law, that the phrase ‘illegal immigrant' would be fairly easy to use in an appropriate manner.  Yet that is seemingly only the case when the phrase is used to cast common-sense immigration enforcement as discriminatory.  But when it comes to a story that could shed light on why enforcement is a necessity for the safety and security of a nation and its people, then the phrase - no matter how accurate - is quickly forgotten. 

One high profile case, the murder of Chandra Levy, highlights this fact.  It has been quite some time (over a year) since Ingmar Guandique was charged with Levy's murder, and much longer since he was identified as being an illegal immigrant from El Salvador. 

And while Guandique's illegal status isn't necessarily news to those having actually followed the case, you would think it was still an unproven fact based on media reports past and present. 

As a recent update reveals, attorney's working on behalf of Guandique argued that he would not get a fair trial in Washington, though a judge has now determined that the trial will indeed stay in DC.  Coinciding with this news, is the recent release of a book covering the case entitled, Finding Chandra. With these updates, one has to wonder how far the media has come in their willingness to report the truth.  How far have they come since Michelle Malkin noted a perfect record of going 115 for 115 in reports failing to mention the suspect's illegal status back in 2002?  As it turns out, not far at all...

• The Associated Press failed to cite Guandique's status at all in their brief report.
• As did NBC Washington.
• MSNBC used both the AP, and the NBC Washington report in their coverage.
• In a retrospective slideshow of the Levy case, the Washington Post refers to the suspect as a Salvadoran immigrant. A timeline states nothing of his immigration status. The Post does however note his illegal status in a little blurb in the Local Digest.
• Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, and Washington Post book reviews also fail to use the word illegal, referring to Guandique each time as simply a Salvadoran immigrant.
• A Fresno Bee article uses a McClatchy report that actually refers to him as an illegal alien, but omits the paragraph that states:

(Public Defender) Sonenberg wants to ask questions of potential jurors about issues like attitudes toward gangs and illegal immigration. A native of El Salvador, Guandique is an illegal immigrant and festooned with gang tattoos.

A Google search of the words ‘Guandique and illegal' yields a staggering two results.  One of the results then leads the viewer to an additional ‘295 articles,' which in reality only yields another 9 articles, a majority of which are highlighted above.

As Malkin stated nearly eight years ago:

"The glaring omission of Guandique's immigration status from the mainstream media's no-stone-unturned Levy coverage is a newsworthy act of negligence as the nation grapples with lax borders and national (in)security."

How appropriate, even today.

While some might view his immigration status as irrelevant to this trial, the mention, or rather the omission, of Guandique's status does indeed become relevant when covering the reality of failing to enforce immigration laws. 

A reality our media is all too willing to overlook.

Send comments or tips to rustyweiss@verizon.net.  Please join me on Facebook.

Photo Credit:  AP

"Palin pushes abortion foes to form 'conservative, feminist identity,'" reads the headline to a page A16 Amy Gardner story in Saturday's Washington Post.

While the 10-paragraph article in itself didn't raise any bias alarm bells, I was disappointed but hardly surprised that the Post buried the story on the last page of its A-section.

Gardner's article focused on how Palin, "[s]peaking to a breakfast gathering of the Susan B. Anthony List in downtown Washington on Friday" observed that liberal pro-choice feminists are hypocrites for on the one hand insisting that women can hold fulfilling careers while being mothers but at the same time those same feminists hold out abortion for young women who might feel their unwanted pregnancies are an inconvenience obstacle to career or educational goals. 

That observation led Post staffer Jonathan Capehart, no Palin acolyte he, to concede Palin makes a "very interesting point":

[W]hen the spotlight turns to pro-life issues, Palin shines bright. Abortion is a wrenching and emotional debate that's waged as much with the heart as with the head. And Palin speaks from deeply held convictions rooted in personal experience.

I went to see her speak at the "Celebration of Life Breakfast" fundraiser for the Susan B. Anthony List. My colleagues Amy Gardner and David Weigel
do a good job detailing what went down, particularly Palin's comments on her decision to give birth to her son, Trig, who has Down Syndrome.

But what fascinated me was Palin's thought-provoking slam against women's rights groups. She began by reminding the audience that suffragist Alice Paul once said that abortion is "the ultimate exploitation of women." Palin then referred to recent polls that show more young women agreeing with "their feminist foremothers" on the issue, thus "empowering women by offering them a real choice." And then came this:

"The pro-woman sisterhood is telling these young women they are strong enough and smart enough. They are capable to be able to handle an unintended pregnancy and still be able to, in less than ideal circumstances, no doubt, to handle that. Still be able to give that child life, in addition to pursuing a career and pursuing an education, pursuing avocations. Though society wants to tell these young women otherwise. Even these feminist groups want to try to tell women, send this message that, "Nope, you're not capable of doing both. You can't give your child life and still pursue career and education. You're not strong enough. You're not capable. So it's very hypocritical of those... pro-women's rights groups out there."

While I don't agree with her ultimate stance on abortion, I understand where she was coming from and think she makes a very interesting point. Am I wrong?

MSNBC's Alex Witt on Friday featured a rabidly anti-Sarah Palin journalist to explain why the former governor spoke at a National Rifle Association conference. Asked to comment, Cathy Areu, a Washington Post magazine editor, derided, "Oh, my God! She is such a fear-monger and really just appeals to this group of people who likes to hear all of these crazy comments."

Areu first drew fawning attention from fellow reporters when she appeared on CNN Headline News on April 14 and smeared, "Sarah Palin could do no wrong for so many people. I mean, she is a female Larry the Cable Guy minus the class and intelligence."

Witt made no mention of Areu's venomous attitude towards the former Republican vice presidential candidate. Instead she tossed softballs that allowed the Post editor to sully the motives of Palin: "I don't think she'll ever run for anything. She will just say she is going to run for something and will keep putting out books, which is what she's doing. She left the office in Alaska to sell books."

Witt played along to the attacks. Responding to Areu's contention that Palin won't run for office again because she doesn't like to deal with tough questions, the MSNBC anchor asserted, "And this way, she is able to speak freely at this point because she doesn't have to be held accountable to an elected public."

This isn't the first appeance for Areu on MSNBC. On April 16, she stopped by News Live to be complimented for her Larry the Cable Guy barb. Host Peter Alexander applauded, "It's a good line."

A transcript of the News Live segment, which aired at 3:07pm EDT, follows:

ALEX WITT: Well, the National Rifle Association is holding its fourth annual Celebration of American Values Leadership Forum today in Charlotte, North Carolina. Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is the featured speaker and just a few moments ago she ripped into Hollywood celebrities for speaking out for gun control.

SARAH PALIN: If Hollywood celebrities really were so worried about violent crime, perhaps they should look at their own industry. They hate guns and yet, you know, they have no problem starring in shoot them up action films with bullets flying and blood splattering and dainty little starlets carrying their AK-47s and big old machine guns And American gun owners and hunters, we're not the ones that are glorifying violence and abuse. Hollywood should look to its own business and clean it up and then they can tell us how to live our lives.

WITT: Hmm. Cathy Areu is the owner and publisher of Catalina magazine and is a contributing editor for the Washington Post magazine. Good day to you.

CATHY AREU (Catalina magazine): I just want to take issue with something. Do you know of any dainty little celebrities that carry around their AK-47s? I heard that and went, "Really? I'm not sure I'm familiar with that."

AREU: Oh, my God! She is such a fear-monger and really just appeals to this group of people who likes to hear all of these crazy comments. I don't know where she gets it from. Maybe somebody in Hollywood is writing a script for her.

WITT: Okay. Sarah Palin being the featured speaker, to be expected? And what do you think she is trying to do?

AREU: She's trying to sell books. I think she waived her speaker's fee because she knows that 70,000 people are going to be there this weekend. Their all her crowd, people who enjoy what she has to say and a lot of it is "We're losing our country. We have to be true patriots. Obama is going to take away your guns." Buy my books.

WITT: Oh, well you have a point there. Right there.

AREU: Wink wink.

WITT: But is she doing it for anything further than selling her books? I mean, is there a political agenda here?

AREU: I don't think so. I think she's the perpetual candidate. I don't think she'll ever run for anything. She will just say she is going to run for something and will keep putting out books, which is what she's doing. She left the office in Alaska to sell books.

WITT: Okay. Would you suggest that she is a populist appeal [sic]? I mean, does she-

AREU: Well-

WITT: And if so is there a Democrat out there that can match her on that level?

AREU: Well, I think Nader appealed to a certain group of people the minority of a minority the green party and she is the tea party so you have this thorn in the Democrats' side when it comes to Nader. She is like the thorn in the Republicans' side.

WITT: But, can Sarah Palin get votes?

AREU: No, I don't think so. I mean, she didn't win. She didn't get the votes. She lost. A lot of people have forgotten that. She lost.

WITT: She lost. But, you don't think she is gearing up for anything down the road? Why? Because she would have to answer to journalists for everything she said at that point?

AREU: Absolutely.

WITT: And this way, she is able to speak freely at this point because she doesn't have to be held accountable to an elected public.

AREU: Absolutely. She doesn't even have a communications director. She really doesn't like talking to journalists. A lot of people think she is out there talking to all of us. She is not talking to the journalists. We can't get to her. That's the way she likes it. She likes tweeting and using her Facebook. She is not talking to journalists. And if you run, you have to talk to us.

Liberal newspapers think alike. In Friday's Washington Post, film critic Michael O'Sullivan seconded the emotion of New York Times critic A.O. Scott that there were "tea party" elements in the new Russell Crowe version of "Robin Hood." O'Sullivan also lamented there was "precious little of the socialist stuff" that's usually associated with the Hood legend's rob-and-redistribute routine. O'Sullivan began:  

Dark and polemic, Ridley Scott's "Robin Hood" is less about a band of merry men than a whole country of really angry ones. At times, it feels like a political attack ad paid for by the tea party movement, circa 1199. Set in an England that has been bankrupted by years of war in the Middle East -- in this case, the Crusades -- it's the story of a people who are being taxed to death by a corrupt government, under an upstart ruler who's running the country into the ground. It asks: What's a man of principle to do?

If you said, "Steal from the rich, and give to the poor," you must be thinking of the old Robin Hood. The correct answer here is: "Don't retreat, reload." There are more arrows flying every which way than you've ever seen -- through the face, the neck, the chest, the back. It's a pincushion of a movie.

There is, however, precious little of the socialist stuff that we normally associate with the man in tights in this new, politicized version, which ends precisely where most tellings of the legend begin: with Robin Hood being declared an outlaw and moving to a camp in the woods with Maid Marion, Little John, Friar Tuck and the rest of them.

It's funny that O'Sullivan would find precious little socialism and then call the new version "politicized," as if "the socialist stuff" isn't a politicized scenario.

So a friend asked me to explain the whole mess in Greece, and I tried to make it simple. You know those people who keep spending money, even though they don’t have any? They have tons of crap,...

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Yesterday the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released a poll finding "Broad Approval For New Arizona Immigration Law."

While Republicans were the most supportive, a full 45 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of independents polled supported the law. When broken down to the particulars of the bill, there was even broader support. For example, 65 percent of Democrats and and 73 percent of independents favored "requiring people to produce documents verifying legal status," the portion of the bill that has been derided as allowing the police to demand, "your papers please!"

These poll numbers are absolutely astounding, especially considering the media's non-stop campaign to denounce the law and paint it in an unfavorable light. Yet true to form, the media continue to downplay the results. A search this morning of the Web pages for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today found no links to articles about the poll numbers.

The LA Times and the Washington Post did yield Arizona-related stories, but in the latter, it linked to a "discussion" page where the question was posed, "Is Ariz. the new mainstream or the lunatic fringe?" [see screencap above]

The L.A. Times main Web site linked to a story on law professor Kris Kobach, who helped write the new Arizona law, as well as a story on how the Los Angeles city council has banned "official travel" and "contracts with Arizona." The Pew poll results was mentioned in the profile of Kobach, but in passing and with no detailed analysis:

In the last few weeks, Kobach has been contacted by legislators from around the country seeking his advice and has been interviewed on local and national radio and television programs more than 50 times. A national survey released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 59% of adults polled supported the Arizona law.

For absurdly spinning Elena Kagan to the right, consider Washington Post editorial writer Eva Rodriguez, who asked in Tuesday's newspaper: “Is Kagan a bleeding heart or right-wing Bushie?” Specifically, Rodriguez argued Kagan took positions “loathed by the left” that would deny the broadest menu of civil liberties to terrorist suspects:

So which Kagan are we getting: the warm and fuzzy defender of Obama's "little guy" or the hard-right ideologue who would have fit right in as a "loyal Bushie"? The truth: Maybe both, maybe neither. We don't know. At least not yet.

The president -- a constitutional scholar -- made the mistake (or perhaps the political calculation) to attribute personally to Kagan the viewpoints of her government client in a few, select cases. Yet few lawyers are ever perfectly in sync with those they represent.

Rodriguez suggested Kagan was a moderate who would draw outrage from liberals if she were a Bush nominee:

Conservatives will likely jump all over Kagan for her Citizens United arguments and others that could be interpreted as left-leaning. Even though many liberals are disturbed by the right-of-center national security positions, they are unlikely to make a big fuss for fear of damaging the president politically. But can you imagine the furor if Kagan had been nominated by a Republican president and had taken these positions in court? The shouts would be deafening.

If that's the case, then shouldn't the media suggest that the Democrats look insincere or don't really believe that these "right-of-center" positions are morally offensive when argued pragmatically by Democrats? But these media outlets also don't want to "make a big fuss for fear of damaging the president politically."

The front of Wednesday's Health & Science section of The Washington Post seemed more like the editorial page. In huge letters was the headline "How the new health-care law might make your doctor better informed, more efficient, more responsive, and, maybe happier". According to Post reporter (and doctor) David Brown -- in an excerpt from the new Post-authored book "Landmark -- some resent Obama's "evolutionary change" and others find it "liberating."

But one thing is clear: There are a lot of unhappy people practicing medicine right now.

A survey of physicians in 119 clinics in New York and the Midwest published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2009 found that 48 percent reported working in "chaotic" environments. Thirty percent said they needed at least half again as much time for appointments as they were given. Only a quarter said their practices strongly emphasized quality. Nearly a third said they were likely to leave their jobs in the next two years.

If the new types of practice envisioned by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act take hold, much of that could change for the better.

"It appears that when a doctor happens to be in a place that moves to a 'medical home' model, they can turn their frustration into excitement again. That is huge," said J. Fred Ralston Jr., president of the American College of Physicians. "We are getting reports that patients are happy, physicians are happy and that, in at least some cases, [these new sorts of practices] are saving money."

But will doctors truly love the new system? Or will they run away from it? Some doubts might enter in by article's end, where Brown starts whispering about the mandates and the rationing:

Doctors already have incentives to report quality-related measures to Medicare. The new law will penalize doctors who don't make such reports, starting in 2015. In the future, physicians participating in the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative will receive reports about how their performance compares to others'.

There is also money for the creation and dissemination of "patient decision aids" -- handouts, videos, computer programs, etc. -- that will help patients understand their treatment options. That is part of the law's general intent to make medical care more patient-centered.

In one of its more controversial parts, the law establishes a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to underwrite and direct "comparative-effectiveness research" seeking to determine the best and most economical treatment for common diseases. While the law specifically says that comparative-effectiveness findings can't become mandates that tell doctors how to practice, many champions of reform think that such research is essential to improving care.

When Brown's article jumped to an inside page, there was a large picture of Speaker Pelosi (with her oversized gavel) and other Democrats marching across the street to pass ObamaCare. The caption read "Democratic congressional leaders joined hands in March on their way to approving landmark changes in the nation's health-care system. The new law promotes 'comparative-effectiveness research' seeking to determing thebest most economical treatment for common diseases."

Most people do spring cleaning to get rid of unwanted items and to perhaps start fresh. The Washington Post recently compiled a spring cleaning list of “Twelve Things the World Should Toss Out.” But instead of suggesting getting rid of old clothes or unused exercise equipment, blogger Jessica Valenti actually advocated that virginity should be headed for the dump.

Valenti, who is the author of “The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women,” first complained that there is no set definition of “virginity.” She went on to criticize efforts to remain abstinent until marriage, writing, “Promise rings, virginity pledges and other efforts to enforce chastity aren't just backward -- they're a failure, and they may even endanger teenagers.”

She complained that teenagers who sign abstinence pledges are more likely to engage in unprotected sex, as well as anal and oral sex. Yet, according in to the National Abstinence Education Association, just 33 percent of young adults who take the pledge initiate sexual intercourse. This is compared to 42.4 percent of young adults who don’t take the pledge.

But Valenti disregarded the statistics and made it appear that teenagers simply aren’t capable of waiting to have sexual intercourse. She pushed against abstinence education and wrote, “These are the predictable results of telling teenagers that sex is wrong and that the only pure thing to do is wait. A teenager who takes these messages to heart won't in good conscience keep condoms -- much better to get ‘carried away’ than to plan for an impure act. He or she may, however, look for loopholes, often dangerous ones.”

What Valenti failed to note is that more teenagers are actually waiting to have sex. According to the Family Research Council, in 1991, 51 percent of teenagers had sex. But by 2003, the number had dropped to 47 percent.

That’s not necessarily a welcome development to Valenti, given her views on adolescent sexuality. She wrote, “It's fine to have some way of demarcating sexual initiation, but old-school definitions of purity aren't it; they're more about inflicting shame than celebrating rites of passage. It's time we talked about sex as something healthy and natural. Losing ‘virginity’ is one step in that direction.”

This isn’t the first time Valenti has appeared in the media to advocate losing virginity. In April of 2009 she appeared on “The Today Show” to promote her idea that there “is no such things as virginity.”  Earlier that year she appeared on VH1 to tout sexual education and not abstinence.

Today the chairman of the FCC is announcing the agency will move to regulate the Internet, despite the fact that it doesn't really have the authority.

As Americans for Prosperity's Phil Kerpen has explained, the FCC intention - to classify the Internet like an old-fashioned telephone system so it can regulate - requires twisting history. It marks a major policy shift that could affect all Americans.

Strangely, just three days ago, The Washington Post reported (using mostly unnamed sources) that the FCC was going in the opposite direction. Tech reporter Cecilia Kang wrote:

       "The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has indicated he wants  
       to keep broadband services deregulated, according to sources, even as a federal court
       decision has exposed weaknesses in the agency's ability to be a strong watchdog over
       the companies that provide access to the Web."

This sentence alone betrays Kang's bias about the FCC. She calls the fact that the FCC is not allowed to regulate a "weakness" and implies the agency needs the "ability to be a strong watchdog" over Internet service providers.

The only named source in that May 3 story was from Public Knowledge, one of the left-wing "public interest" groups pushing for Internet regulation that she frequently quotes.  

Either her sources were or the Post story was way off base, considering today's bombshell news (which leaked yesterday).

So far, Americans haven't exactly been up in arms demanding regulation of the Internet. In fact, it has been a tremendous free-market success story. Now it looks like it will be the next big government takeover. More than 41,000 AFP activists filed comments with the FCC recently opposing regulation. For more information, check out Phil Kerpen's filing with the FCC.

 

 

"[F]or all its satanic fanfare and heretical rejiggering, 'The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ' is -- God forbid -- kind of inspiring," Washington Post book reviewer Ron Charles proclaimed in today's review of the latest novel by avowed atheist Philip Pullman.

Charles began by suggesting that Pullman's publication was a veritable act of courage -- "if you fiddle with Jesus, people begin collecting dry sticks" the book review quipped. That may have gotten chuckles in the newsroom, but it's not all that amusing when you consider that it's radical Muslims, not devout Catholics or evangelical Protestants, who have threatened edgy taboo-shattering atheists like the creators of South Park.

Of course, attacking orthodox Christianity is always in season among the secular literary elite as well as their friends in the mainstream media. Charles himself cheered on Pullman's fictional take on Christ by equating it somewhat agreeably with the strain of liberal Christianity that has for centuries attacked such central elements of orthodoxy as Jesus's divinity and virgin birth, his miraculous earthly ministry, and his bodily resurrection from the tomb:

So what does Pullman do with the greatest story ever told? Essentially, he condenses the four Gospels, following the basic outline they provide of Jesus's life. Indeed, some of the text here -- such as his simple, beautifully rendered Sermon on the Mount -- will strike Christians as very familiar. Again and again, he displays a marvelous sense of the elemental power of Jesus's instructions and parables. Even when he transforms the canonical stories to match his atheist perspective, he emphasizes the basic Christian theme of universal love.

To a certain extent, he's dramatizing a view of the Gospels promoted by the Jesus Seminar, a group of liberal theologians and scholars who attracted considerable attention (and controversy) in the 1990s by stripping away what they considered layers of superstition and dogma to reveal "the historical Jesus." For instance, in Pullman's retelling of the story of the loaves and fishes, Jesus doesn't miraculously multiply the available food; instead, he inspires the multitude to overcome their avarice and share what they've squirreled away. In a similar manner, Pullman reworks the parable of the wise and foolish virgins to make it sound, frankly, a whole lot more Christian than the unforgiving parable we find in the Book of Matthew.

Before we throw down the palm leaves, though, let's admit that Pullman also takes some obnoxious liberties with the foundational story of Christian faith and relentlessly flogs the church. Trouble starts right off with the Annunciation, when Mary learns she's going to conceive a child. Like the late feminist scholar Mary Daly, Pullman recasts this moment as a kind of date rape. And it won't come as a revelation to hear that he pours cold water on the Resurrection, too. (But, heck, dozens of vicars in Britain don't believe in that climax either.)

Charles then explains the central conceit of Pullman's novel:

His most radical alteration, though, begins in the Bethlehem manger: His Mary gives birth to twins, Jesus and Christ. A distinction between the human and the divine nature of Jesus is not alien to some branches of Christian thought, but Pullman has imagined something entirely his own: two wholly human boys, bound together in a tragedy of historic proportions. Jesus is a charismatic (not miraculous) teacher, who preaches boundless compassion, lashes out at religious hypocrisy and awaits the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God. Meanwhile, his devoted brother, Christ (who isn't really a "scoundrel"), is shy and intellectual, constantly worried about his brother's safety and determined to promote his message.

It's that desire to institutionalize Jesus's word that Pullman sees as the snake in the garden. According to the Gospels, Jesus wrote only once -- in the dust -- but in Pullman's version, Christ is a writer, a careful, thoughtful scribe, who wants "to let the truth irradiate the history." And he repeats that phrase a couple of times in case, having ears, ye hear not. What's more, Christ is periodically encouraged by a mysterious, vaguely satanic stranger who explains that Jesus's statements "need to be edited, the meanings clarified, the complexities unraveled for the simple-of-understanding."

Of course, this is just a clever lame -- I mean, really, an evil twin plot device?! -- novelized way of making the same liberal arguments that enemies of orthodoxy from within the Christian church have been making for years.

The crucified, buried, risen-and-soon-returning Lord Jesus of orthodox confession is eschewed by Pullman in favor of a silly fable about Jesus's brother "Christ" -- which every Sunday school dropout knows is a title, not a proper name -- but somehow Charles predicts that readers of Pullman's novel will come away with a thirst for the Jesus of Scripture.

Yet even in making that argument at the close of his review, Charles worked in a gratuitous swipe at a more biblically faithful treatment of Jesus that hit movie theaters six years ago:

Fortunately, not all of "Good Man Jesus" is consumed with this strident anti-ecclesiastical argument. Pullman is at least as interested in the moral value of the Gospels. Without any of the snuff-film eroticism that enlivened Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ," the action moves toward a conclusion that's inevitable but still startling and moving. Yes, some Christians will be offended by this book -- "No one has the right to spend their life without being offended," Pullman recently told an audience in Oxford -- but any honest reader will find here a brisk and bracing story of profound implications. And it's bound to send some readers back to the Bible, looking more closely at Jesus's words and especially at all those other words crowded around Him. 

"Tea party groups battling allegations of racism," reads a May 5 page A3 Washington Post print headline. The online version header softened the word choice a tiny bit, substituting the word "perceptions" in for "allegations."

The underlying poll data which prompted the story tells us more about the Post's prism through which it views the Tea Parties than how the public at large does.

After three paragraphs pounding readers with the meme that "the [Tea Party] movement is struggling to overcome accusations of racism," the Post's Amy Gardner and Krissah Thompson quickly dispatched with the fact that most Americans see Tea Parties fueld by distrust of big government and opposition to the Obama/congressional Democratic agenda before highlighting how a minority of poll respondents think race is a motivating factor:

In a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, most Americans see the movement as motivated by distrust of government, opposition to the policies of Obama and the Democratic Party, and broad concern about the economy. But nearly three in 10 see racial prejudice as underlying the tea party. 

Of course, in the very next paragraph we learn that:

About 61 percent of tea party opponents say racism has a lot to do with the movement, a view held by just 7 percent of tea party supporters. 

That disparity seems to show that liberal Democrats and liberal independents who despise the Tea Party movement are, shall we say, prejudicial in their view of Tea Party activists. 

But instead of calling into question how liberal voters unfairly tarnish their fellow Americans of a conservative persuasion as racist, the Post puts the conservatives and Tea Parties on the defensive. 

Gardner and Thompson closed their article by citing Nigel Coleman, a black TEA Party Patriots leader from Danville, Virginia complaining that

"As long as people who oppose us can frame the debate that way, then they can get people to stop listening to us," Coleman said. "The charge of racism is one that can be thrown out there, and it really doesn't have to be proven. But it has such a negative connotations that it can pretty much halt the debate." 

The way that the Post is reporting its own poll data shows that the Post is part of the mainstream media chorus amplifying the racism charges that liberals have "thrown out there."

The Washington Post is making the transition from a powerhouse liberal newspaper to a network of powerhouse liberal blogs. While the paper's Old Guard is worried that the move will tarnish the Post's supposed reputation for political neutrality, it should be seen more as a embrace of the agenda the Post has evinced for years.

"Traditionalists," wrote Politico today, "worry that the Post is sacrificing a hard-won brand and hallowed news values." One such "traditionalist," Rem Rieder of the American Journalism Review, said a more openly-liberal approach to reporting, mostly done online in the form of various blogs, would be "a danger to the brand."

To the extent that the Post still pretends to be objective -- and to the extent that its readers believe that claim -- then yes, an opinion blog-centric approach is tarnishing the brand. But for those who acknowledge the Post' consistently liberal approach to the news, the only change is the way that that news is delivered.

And that element is changing quite dramatically. Politico reported:

The once-cautious Washington Post has begun to invest heavily in the liberal blogosphere, transforming its online presence – through a combination of accident and design – into a competitor of the Huffington Post and TalkingPointsMemo as much as the New York Times.

The Post’s foray into the new media world received some unfavorable attention last weekend when its latest hire, Dave Weigel, who covers conservatives, referred to gay marriage foes as “bigots.” But the resulting controversy brought into relief a larger shift: The Post now hosts three of the strongest liberal blogs on the Internet, and draws a disproportionate share of its traffic and buzz from them, a significant change for a traditional newspaper that has struggled to remake itself.

Besides Weigel, who came from the liberal Washington Independent, the Post also has Ezra Klein, hired last May from the American Prospect to bring his brand of deliberately wonky policy writing to its website; and Greg Sargent, who the paper said Tuesday will soon move to the Post itself after coming from TPM to run a political blog for the Post-owned website, WhoRunsGov.com, as well as two editors recently hired from the Huffington Post to handle online aggregation and social networking.

The Post retains a number of lefties on its blogging staff -- Sargent and Klein being the most prominent -- but Politico spends a significant portion of its piece trying to decipher Weigel's political views. He seems to defy a clear label. Weigel is a registered Republican, calls himself a libertarian and claims he voted for Ron Paul in the 2008 Republican primaries. But he also says he has voted for the Democrat in every presidential election.

As Hugh Hewitt writes,

If the Post wants to regularly attract center-right readers, it will have to steal away one of the brightest young stars of the conservative firmament…

Weigel is very interesting and a good edition [sic] to their virtual masthead.  He's just not a conservative.

This begs the question: why would the Post hire a single blogger with at best ambiguously conservative views, while it hires bloggers with stellar liberal credentials to cover the political left?

The answer, of course, is that even in the new media world, the Post looks to retain its liberal slant.

There is nothing inherently wrong with reporting the news via commentary. But the Post needs to stop pretending it has a "smorgasbord" of views, as National Editor Kevin Merida told Politico. It just has a smorgasbord of liberal views.

The Post's apparent desire to pursue the more openly-liberal approach to reporting aligns with similar moves by other center-left news organizations, most prominently MSNBC. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune over the weekend, MSNBC President Phil Griffin said the cable network would be pursuing a more opinion-centric approach to the news in an effort to replicate the success of Fox News.

Politico reported that the Post's new strategy seems to "have less to do with ideology than the impulse of every media company to try new things in a changing environment, in which it is widely viewed as having lost a step to online publications – including POLITICO. Filling analytical and ideological space that POLITICO and others do not could be a way of jumping ahead."

Yes, the Post has ascertained -- correctly, in this blogger's view -- that commentary is a way to keep the paper afloat. But Politico is wrong in claiming the new strategy is not ideological. The Post is trying to carve out lefty brand loyalty by offering liberals commentary that supports their views. It has everything to do with ideology. In fairness, it is not clear whether the Post is intentionally catering exclusively to liberals, or is simply so addled with liberal bias that it cannot even comprehend how to attract conservatives.

Griffin offered financial viability as a reason for MSNBC's new opinion-centric approach to the news. The Post is doing the same. It is virtually impossible for cable channels and newspapers to compete on the hard-news playing field with the tremendous convenience, accessibility, and customizability of new media. A possible answer is to report the news through the lens of commentary.

The Post can retain its "objective" label even while giving bloggers a larger role in reporting. But that would require the paper actually hire a conservative blogger (maybe even more than one). The paper touts the importance and value of its bloggers, but what it really seems to value is their liberal politics.

One Post reporter, Alec MacGillis, told Politico that "the rest of us could take some lessons from [Klein’s] success in realizing how much readers value the voice of earned, fully reported authority, beyond the usual 'he said-she said.’ ” How, exactly, is Klein an "earned, fully reported authority"? He is not an academic, his political experience consists of a job on the Howard Dean campaign, and he has written for the American Prospect and the Post. He is a talented liberal writer, and that seems to satisfy the Post's standards.

Ed Driscoll reminds us that just after the 2008 election, the late Deborah Howell, then the Post's Ombudsman, guessed that

most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don't even want to be quoted by name in a memo…

Are there ways to tackle [the perception of liberal bias]? More conservatives in newsrooms and rigorous editing would be two…

The Post and other news media can work harder on eliminating even the perception of bias while never giving up the willingness to follow stories that will inevitably tick off some readers.

Howell's advice apparently fell on deaf ears. In shifting its focus from its liberal newspaper to its liberal blogs, the Post is changing the way it delivers news, but the same politics will still pervade its blogs. The staff that the paper has hired to populate its website demonstrate that the Post has no interest in moderating its liberal approach to the news.

The Washington Post is making the transition from a powerhouse liberal newspaper to a network of powerhouse liberal blogs. While the paper's Old Guard is worried that the move will tarnish the Post's supposed reputation for political neutrality, it should be seen more as a embrace of the agenda the Post has evinced for years.

"Traditionalists," wrote Politico today, "worry that the Post is sacrificing a hard-won brand and hallowed news values." One such "traditionalist," Rem Rieder of the American Journalism Review, said a more openly-liberal approach to reporting, mostly done online in the form of various blogs, would be "a danger to the brand."

To the extent that the Post still pretends to be objective -- and to the extent that its readers believe that claim -- then yes, an opinion blog-centric approach is tarnishing the brand. But for those who acknowledge the Post' consistently liberal approach to the news, the only change is the way that that news is delivered.

And that element is changing quite dramatically. Politico reported:

The once-cautious Washington Post has begun to invest heavily in the liberal blogosphere, transforming its online presence – through a combination of accident and design – into a competitor of the Huffington Post and TalkingPointsMemo as much as the New York Times.

The Post’s foray into the new media world received some unfavorable attention last weekend when its latest hire, Dave Weigel, who covers conservatives, referred to gay marriage foes as “bigots.” But the resulting controversy brought into relief a larger shift: The Post now hosts three of the strongest liberal blogs on the Internet, and draws a disproportionate share of its traffic and buzz from them, a significant change for a traditional newspaper that has struggled to remake itself.

Besides Weigel, who came from the liberal Washington Independent, the Post also has Ezra Klein, hired last May from the American Prospect to bring his brand of deliberately wonky policy writing to its website; and Greg Sargent, who the paper said Tuesday will soon move to the Post itself after coming from TPM to run a political blog for the Post-owned website, WhoRunsGov.com, as well as two editors recently hired from the Huffington Post to handle online aggregation and social networking.

The Post retains a number of lefties on its blogging staff -- Sargent and Klein being the most prominent -- but Politico spends a significant portion of its piece trying to decipher Weigel's political views. He seems to defy a clear label. Weigel is a registered Republican, calls himself a libertarian and claims he voted for Ron Paul in the 2008 Republican primaries. But he also says he has voted for the Democrat in every presidential election.

As Hugh Hewitt writes,

If the Post wants to regularly attract center-right readers, it will have to steal away one of the brightest young stars of the conservative firmament…

Weigel is very interesting and a good edition [sic] to their virtual masthead.  He's just not a conservative.

This begs the question: why would the Post hire a single blogger with at best ambiguously conservative views, while it hires bloggers with stellar liberal credentials to cover the political left?

The answer, of course, is that even in the new media world, the Post looks to retain its liberal slant.

There is nothing inherently wrong with reporting the news via commentary. But the Post needs to stop pretending it has a "smorgasbord" of views, as National Editor Kevin Merida told Politico. It just has a smorgasbord of liberal views.

The Post's apparent desire to pursue the more openly-liberal approach to reporting aligns with similar moves by other center-left news organizations, most prominently MSNBC. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune over the weekend, MSNBC President Phil Griffin said the cable network would be pursuing a more opinion-centric approach to the news in an effort to replicate the success of Fox News.

Politico reported that the Post's new strategy seems to "have less to do with ideology than the impulse of every media company to try new things in a changing environment, in which it is widely viewed as having lost a step to online publications – including POLITICO. Filling analytical and ideological space that POLITICO and others do not could be a way of jumping ahead."

Yes, the Post has ascertained -- correctly, in this blogger's view -- that commentary is a way to keep the paper afloat. But Politico is wrong in claiming the new strategy is not ideological. The Post is trying to carve out lefty brand loyalty by offering liberals commentary that supports their views. It has everything to do with ideology. In fairness, it is not clear whether the Post is intentionally catering exclusively to liberals, or is simply so addled with liberal bias that it cannot even comprehend how to attract conservatives.

Griffin offered financial viability as a reason for MSNBC's new opinion-centric approach to the news. The Post is doing the same. It is virtually impossible for cable channels and newspapers to compete on the hard-news playing field with the tremendous convenience, accessibility, and customizability of new media. A possible answer is to report the news through the lens of commentary.

The Post can retain its "objective" label even while giving bloggers a larger role in reporting. But that would require the paper actually hire a conservative blogger (maybe even more than one). The paper touts the importance and value of its bloggers, but what it really seems to value is their liberal politics.

One Post reporter, Alec MacGillis, told Politico that "the rest of us could take some lessons from [Klein’s] success in realizing how much readers value the voice of earned, fully reported authority, beyond the usual 'he said-she said.’ ” How, exactly, is Klein an "earned, fully reported authority"? He is not an academic, his political experience consists of a job on the Howard Dean campaign, and he has written for the American Prospect and the Post. He is a talented liberal writer, and that seems to satisfy the Post's standards.

Ed Driscoll reminds us that just after the 2008 election, the late Deborah Howell, then the Post's Ombudsman, guessed that

most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don't even want to be quoted by name in a memo…

Are there ways to tackle [the perception of liberal bias]? More conservatives in newsrooms and rigorous editing would be two…

The Post and other news media can work harder on eliminating even the perception of bias while never giving up the willingness to follow stories that will inevitably tick off some readers.

Howell's advice apparently fell on deaf ears. In shifting its focus from its liberal newspaper to its liberal blogs, the Post is changing the way it delivers news, but the same politics will still pervade its blogs. The staff that the paper has hired to populate its website demonstrate that the Post has no interest in moderating its liberal approach to the news.

Apparently all those loyal subscribers from dentist offices all over the fruited plain just isn't cutting it anymore.

Andrew Vanacore of the Associated Press has the story:

NEW YORK—The Washington Post Co. is putting Newsweek up for sale in hopes that another owner can figure out how to stem losses at the 77-year-old weekly magazine.

While magazines in general have struggled with steep declines in advertising revenue because of the recession, news magazines such as Newsweek face the added pressures from up-to-the-second online news. Once handy digests of the week's events, they have been assailed by competitors on the Web that pump out a constant stream of news and commentary.

Despite staff cuts, Newsweek has remained a drag on its parent company, which is also struggling with ad declines at its namesake newspaper.

The Post Co. said Wednesday that it has retained the investment bank Allen & Co. to help find a buyer for the magazine. 

Washington Post “Right Now” blogger David Weigel once again has shown that he’s a peculiar choice to report on conservatism, after he bashed both traditional marriage proponents and Matt Drudge. On May 1 he tweeted, “I can empathize with everyone I cover except for the anti-gay marriage bigots. In 20 years no one will admit they were part of that.” Weigel attempted to defend his tweet in a May 3 article, “Covering Same-Sex Marriage,” but by then other members of the media had pointed out Weigel’s obvious bias on Twitter.

Weigel seems to be slow to learn from his mistakes, as this is the second time in under a week that his Twitter activity landed him in hot water. The previous incident included a “joke” accusing Drudge of child rape.

In his column about same-sex marriage, Weigel explained that he originally tweeted in response to an e-mail from a group of Minnesotans who were happy about the same-sex marriage ban. Although he did apologize for calling opponents of same-sex marriage “bigots” in his column, Weigel proclaimed himself merely a “bystander in the same-sex marriage debate.”

It hardly seems possible that a blogger for a major newspaper doesn’t understand the public nature of Twitter, and that he can’t take a position there and disavow it on his blog.

Weigel also complained that, unlike other movements, he doesn’t “see the direct impact on [same-sex marriage opponents] lives.” He wrote that he understands other conservative moments – even birthers. He closed his column with, “That’s my bias, for now. I’ll happily entertain arguments for the contrary.”

Politics Daily’s Matt Lewis countered, “Perhaps Weigel will turn out two decades from now to have been prescient, but ‘bigot’ is awfully strong language for a person who is making the case for tolerance – and this comment simply reinforced a longstanding view among social conservatives that The Washington Post and most of the rest of the mainstream media are not only implacably opposed to their policy agenda, but personally hostile to them as well.”

Politico’s Ben Smith called Weigel one of the “openly left-leaning bloggers.” He responded to Weigel’s apology by writing that he, “apologized for the choice of words but didn't back down from the position that opposition to gay marriage is fundamental incoherent and incomprehensible.”

Smith pointed out Weigel’s column was, “more or less the right way to be transparent about your biases, if that's the approach you're taking.” That, however, is not the paper’s approach with liberal blogger Ezra Klein, whose material has run in the Post with no such transparency.

But perhaps that is the approach Weigel is taking, because this is the second tweet in less than a week that’s drawn public criticism. On May 1 Weigel tweeted about the Drudge Report’s founder Matt Drudge. He wrote, “I hear there’s video out there of Matt Drudge diddling an 8-year-old boy. Shocking.”  Weigel later claimed it “was a joke about Matt Drudge linking, for more than 24 hours, to a National Enquirer story about President Obama having an affair.”

Responding to a Media Research Center inquiry, The Washington Post’s Spokeswoman Kris Coratti said, “ … we expect our staff to exercise the same good judgment on social media as they do in their journalism on The Post. Dave understands that recognizes that he made a mistake.”

Using Twitter, Lewis asked Weigel about the ethics of tweeting on conservative issues. Weigel tweeted, “I like (and largely agree with) pro-lifers. But I do not understand or respect the motivation of anti-gay marriage campaigners.”

Perhaps Weigel simply isn’t familiar with the new Washington Post Twitter guidelines. In September of 2009 ombudsman Andrew Alexander wrote a column about how a top editor, Raju Narisetti, stopped using Twitter after posting comments that exposed his opinions. At the same time of the incidence, new guidelines were released on the proper use of social networking sites.

A section of the guideline states: “When using these networks, nothing we do must call into question the impartiality of our news judgment. We never abandon the guidelines that govern the separation of news from opinion, the importance of fact and objectivity, the appropriate use of language and tone, and other hallmarks of our brand of journalism.”

Blogger Matt Lewis took Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel to task in a post at AOL's Politics Daily site today.

Lewis noted our early skepticism here at NewsBusters as well as reaction from NewsBusters contributor and Business & Media Institute Vice President Dan Gainor:

This is how the Post covers the conservative movement: Find someone who doesn't even understand the traditional values that made our nation great and then assign him to report on the right. Throw in the fact that Weigel loves to bash conservatives and he's the ideal Postie. At the same time, the paper hired a hard-core lefty in Ezra Klein to advocate for the left. It's a ridiculous double standard. The Post should be both embarrassed and ashamed.

For his part, Lewis, a conservative writer, lamented that Weigel, whom he considers generally "accurate and fair," has taken to his Twitter feed to bash average Americans as "bigots" for working to protect traditional marriage in state law:

Last September, the Post issued a self-imposed policy on Twitter. The guidelines stated, "Post journalists must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything -- including photographs or video -- that could be perceived as reflecting political, racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility."

Weigel seems to have violated both the spirit and the letter of this policy concerning bias, and to have gone even further by stating flatly that he cannot be "empathetic" when covering those who oppose gay marriage.

Were Weigel merely a blogger -- or an opinion writer (such as myself) -- this Tweet would be of little concern. But Weigel is now a credentialed Washington Post reporter with a press pass, specifically tasked with covering the conservative movement/Republican Party beat.

This is not to say Weigel's position on gay marriage is right or wrong, but I do question his ability to effectively, let alone fairly, report on social conservatives. As Penny Nance told me, "I, for one, will never talk to him."

How can he now go to the Family Research Council's "Value Voters Summit" and objectively report on it? How can his coverage of a Rick Santorum speech, for example, be trusted? Some have wondered why the Post would hire a non-conservative to cover the conservative movement. One obvious inference in light of this development is that conservatives are not welcome at that paper. Before joining The Washington Post, Weigel previously wrote for the libertarian "Reason" and the liberal Washington Independent. He frequently appears on such programs as NPR's "Fresh Air" and MSNBC offerings, like Keith Olbermann and The Rachel Maddow Show.

In 2006, when conservative blogger Ben Domenech joined The Washington Post to cover this beat, his tenure was short-lived. Liberal bloggers quickly leveled plagiarism allegations, and Domenech resigned within days of his hiring. I wondered as I hit my deadline for this piece if Weigel would in any way be chastised for violating the Post's own self-imposed Twitter policy. A partial answer was revealed a little while later, when Weigel expressed remorse for his choice of words in a posting on the Washington Post Web site. Conceding he'd been "disrespectful," Weigel issued a mea culpa that included the following passage: "First, I apologize for calling same-sex marriage opponents 'bigots.' I was specifically referring to people who spend their working hours opposing gay marriage, not just people who vote to ban it. But those people aren't bigots, either."

At the top-left corner of the Washington Post's front page today is a celebration of pot smoking in the nation's capital. "As D.C. votes on marijuana, seeds already firmly planted: Council weighs medical use of 'pervasive, accepted' drug."

Reporters Paul Schwartzman and Annys Shin fill 28 paragraphs with copy from pot smokers and pot lobbyists and pot dealers, and nowhere in those 28 paragraphs of mostly anonymous weed enthusiasts is there a single critic of marijuana, or of the fraudulent nature of "medical use" with the pretense of "trouble sleeping" or how media outlets in Los Angeles now report more pot dispensaries than Starbucks locations.  

Instead, the Post suggests the the Council isn't poised to display once again the District's social liberalism on drugs, it's merely acknowledging current realities:

The D.C. Council is set to vote Tuesday on legalizing medical marijuana, thereby allowing the chronically ill -- including those with HIV, glaucoma or cancer -- to buy pot from dispensaries in Washington.

Yet marijuana is already ubiquitous in many parts of the city, as demonstrated by federal surveys showing that Washingtonians' fondness for weed is among the strongest in the country -- and growing.

The popular image of the nation's capital leans toward the straight and narrow, a town of over-achieving, button-down bureaucrats, lawyers and lobbyists. But meander through any neighborhood from Congress Heights to Friendship Heights, and Washingtonians across race and class lines can be found lighting up.

"It's absolutely pervasive and accepted," said a 44-year-old sales manager who lives with his wife and three children in the city's Chevy Chase section. He estimates he spends $3,000 a year on pot. After a recent pickup hockey game, he found himself sharing a joint with a beer distributor and the vice president of a technology company.

This story should almost come with a disclaimer that the reporters Paul Pot and Annys Cannabis didn't get baked in the making of this report.

Previously: Pot-friendly Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins absolves bong-hitting swimmer Michael Phelps

President Obama's Correspondents' Dinner joke about using a predator drone to kill the Jonas Brothers if they touched his daughters has inflamed some liberals, so much so the Washington Post is running an online poll about the matter.

"The Jonas Brothers are here, they're out there somewhere," the President said Saturday evening (video right).

"Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys, don't get any ideas. Two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming. You think I'm joking?" 

As the Post's "44" blog noted, Adam Serwer at the liberal American Prospect was none too pleased about this as he expressed in a piece he wrote Monday:

The Obama administration has spent a great deal of time on outreach to Muslims worldwide, and on dialing down the volume and rhetoric of the prior administration in order to defuse al-Qaeda's narrative of a clash of civilizations between Muslims and non-Muslims. So you have to wonder why in the world the president's speech writers would think it was a good idea to throw a joke about predator drones into the president's speech during the White House Correspondent's Dinner, given that an estimated one-third of drone casualties, or between 289 and 378, have been civilians. It evinces a callous disregard for human life that is really inappropriate for a world leader, especially a president who is waging war against an enemy that deliberately targets civilians. It also helps undermine that outreach by making it look insincere. It's already hard enough to convince Muslims that the U.S. isn't indifferent to civilian casualties without having the president joke about it. 

Philadelphia Daily News's Will Bunch tweeted Sunday, "Let's be honest, fellow progressives, we'd be all over Bush if he made the same 'predator drone' joke Obama told last night."

The Post then actually compared Obama's joke to -- dare I say it? -- something Bush said in his first term:

President Bush was pilloried for making light of the lack of WMDs in Iraq at the 2004 White House Correspondents' Dinner. Does Obama deserve similar treatment? 

This led the author Rachel Weiner to ask readers, "Was President Obama's joke about killing the Jonas Brothers with predator drones offensive?"

With over 36,000 votes in at roughly 1AM EDT, 67 percent of respondents amazingly said "Yes."

On a related note, this wasn't the first piece the post published Monday with a negative view of Obama's Dinner performance.

As Hot Air's Allahpundit reported, the Post's Paul Farhi took exception to how the President ridiculed his political opponents Saturday evening. 

Imagine that: a liberal paper on Monday published TWO pieces critical of Obama's comedy stylings.

What's that old saying about a broken clock? 

UPDATE: Weigel has officialy responded and claimed it "was a joke about Matt Drudge linking, for more than 24 hours, to a National Enquirer story about President Obama having an affair. "For more details, read after the jump.

***

Even if it's a joke, it's shocking to have an employee of The Washington Post claiming a prominent conservative had sex with an 8-year-old boy. But that's what new Washington Post "Right Now" blogger Tweeted during Saturday's White House Correspondents' Dinner about The Drudge Report's founder Matt Drudge.

Fairly late in the evening, Weigel wrote this on his Twitter account: "I hear there's video out there of Matt Drudge diddling an 8-year-old boy. Shocking."

The post that followed it was a message to another blogger about what the National Enquirer claimed was an Obama sex scandal, so it appeared to be in that context. At least five people on Twitter repeated Weigel's comment about Drudge. There appeared to be no follow-up comment, explanation or apology.

Weigel, who started his "Right Now" blog at the Post a little more than a month ago, is known for sarcastic and sometimes funny comments on Twitter. Earlier in the evening, he had commented about having too much to drink. "Very cool. I either need to stop drunktweeting or do MUCH MORE drunktweeting." And the rest of his comments during the evening were in a similar sarcastic or goofy vein including photos of MSNBC host Rachel Maddow as a bartended at the dinner and a picture of himself in a tux where he commented, "I am ready to either party or wait your table. Or both!"

I have criticized Weigel before because I feel his column often looks for ways that make conservatives look bad while his opposite number, the Post's Ezra Klein, is an open liberal and spends his time making the left look good.

First Weigel continued to Tweet about this even when one poster challenged him about it. His latest comment: "I said I 'hear' there's a tape. I didn't say there definitely is one! Drudge can clear up the rumor if he likes."

Then he posted a formal response:

Apparently, the Weigel thinks making jokes about child molestation or rape is professional journalism. Weigel's claim is that his original comment about a video showing Matt Drudge having sex with a young boy was a joke. "I hear there's video out there of Matt Drudge diddling an 8-year-old boy. Shocking."

Now Weigel's latest, including attacks on me for pointing out Weigel's mess, even though I gave him the benefit of the doubt and said it might be a joke. He claimed the original post "was a joke about Matt Drudge linking, for more than 24 hours, to a National Enquirer story about President Obama having an affair."

Weigel tried to turn his offensive behavior into a personal attack on me, calling me on Twitter a "humorless little creep." And then detailing a lengthy explanation of why he linked Matt Drudge to molesting a little boy. "Let's just slow this down so Dan can understand." Of course, then again, I wasn't the one making rape jokes.

To quote Weigel: "If Gainor thinks jokes like that about public figures are out of bounds, he's even stupider than I thought." Apparently, Weigel is still learning his new role as someone who works for a company that actually has an image, albeit a lefty one. The question isn't just making inappropriate comments and bashing conservatives, which he does with regularity. The question is one of unprofessional conduct.

But hey, let Weigel speak for himself: http://daveweigel.com/?p=2330

Since Weigel's response also obsessed about my references to time, let's correct one of his misstatements calling me "mid-level Media Research Center staffer Dan Gainor." For the record, that title Vice President usually means more than "mid-level."

 

The last time a major disaster threatened the U.S. Gulf Coast, journalists dropped any pretense of objectivity and openly scorned what they saw as the ineffective response of the Bush administration to Hurricane Katrina. And top media writers found it just wonderful that the press was taking a side, with New York Times’ critic Alessandra Stanley saluting “a rare sense of righteous indignation by a news media that is usually on the defensive.”

Now, there are gentle suggestions that the Obama administration dropped the ball in the days after the oil rig explosion that triggered a 5,000 barrel per day leak that threatens to eclipse the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill as the worst in U.S. history. Today’s lead story in the New York Times determined that “a review of the response suggests it may be too simplistic to place all the blame for the unfolding environmental catastrophe on the oil company. The federal government also had opportunities to move more quickly, but did not do so while it waited for a resolution to the spreading spill from BP,” a theme echoed in an editorial, as Noel Sheppard notes below.

Not exactly “righteous indignation,” but the story isn’t over, yet.

In contrast, here’s some of what the critics had to say about the media’s adversarial approach when George W. Bush was in the White House:

Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post, September 5, 2005:

Journalism seems to have recovered its reason for being....For once, reporters were acting like concerned citizens, not passive observers. And they were letting their emotions show, whether it was ABC's Robin Roberts choking up while recalling a visit to her mother on the Gulf Coast or CNN's Jeanne Meserve crying as she described the dead and injured she had seen.

Maybe, just maybe, journalism needs to bring more passion to the table....

Alessandra Stanely in the New York Times, September 5, 2005:

The last time reporters and anchors were so personally and passionately involved in a story was early in the Iraq war, when journalists who accompanied troops for weeks at a time became bullish supporters of the soldiers and their mission.

Hurricane Katrina has had a similar but opposite effect: after spending time with the storm refugees in the Superdome and the convention center in New Orleans, normally poised, placid TV reporters now openly deplore the government's failure to help the victims adequately. And their outrage, illustrated with hauntingly edited montages of weeping mothers, sickly children and dead bodies rotting on the street, traveled up the news division chain of command, from camera operators to anchors and across the spectrum from CNN to Fox....

It's the kind of combative coverage that Richard M. Nixon faced during Watergate, that Bill Clinton faced during his impeachment trial and that most presidents have endured sometime in their tenures. But ever since the Sept. 11 attacks, this president had been spared the harshest questioning -- even with troops bogged down in Iraq, his White House news conferences have been so tame they are parodied by "Saturday Night Live" and Jon Stewart....

The switch mirrors public outrage, but it is buoyed by a rare sense of righteous indignation by a news media that is usually on the defensive.

On Friday's Rick's List, CNN's Rick Sanchez revisited a story he did on Tuesday where he forwarded Islamic group CAIR's publicity stunt about a Virginia license plate that apparently contained racist messages. The Washington Post, as well, updated their story on Friday, pointing to the driver's apparent Facebook page, which contained white supremacist messages, but CNN was unable to confirm their report.

Both news agencies initially jumped on CAIR's admitted speculation about the pickup truck's license plate numbers, which they claimed represented a slogan from a deceased white supremacist leader, and numbers which translated as "Heil Hitler." Brigid Schulte of the Post broke the controversy in her April 22 story, which only presented the Islamic advocacy group's side of the story (possibly because of privacy rules in Virginia). Sanchez did the same in his Tuesday segment.

Schulte followed through with an article on Thursday, after the owner of the truck, Douglas Story, contacted The Washington Post to claim that the numbers actually represented his favorite NASCAR drivers, Tony Stewart and Dale Earnhardt, Jr., who race under those respective numbers. Story was forced to get a new license plate after the Virginia DMV recalled his plate.

The following afternoon, the CNN anchor devoted a five-minute segment to the controversy (CNN.com has the full transcript here), which began 43 minutes into the 3 pm Eastern hour. He brought on correspondent Brooke Baldwin, who had actually talked to Mr. Story, and also gave additional details which the Post's Schulte reported online earlier in the day about the truck driver's apparent Facebook page.

SANCHEZ: You know, it's kind of like a ping-pong match- this story.

BALDWIN: Back and forth.

SANCHEZ: When I told it the other day- well, part of it is, too- you know- look, I don't know enough about- you know, NASCAR, to have recognized those two numbers and questioned it at the time that we did the story....We reported what CAIR had alleged....about the story. Now, he's coming back and saying- no, CAIR is wrong. But now, you're here to tell us The Washington Post has been diligently reporting on this. We've tried to do some independent reporting. We've spoken to him. What is his name?

BALDWIN: Douglas Story- and you're right, Rick. I mean, it's kind of ping-pong. There's all kinds of bits and pieces. Let me try to sit here and put them all together for you.

SANCHEZ: Okay.

BALDWIN: But right, so you sat here a couple of days ago. You told this guy's story. You showed the back of his car....So, Mr. Story, out of Chantilly, Virginia, has since come forward....He said, hang on a second. This has nothing to do with the Nazis, and everything, as you pointed out- has everything to do with NASCAR....

The Washington Post is now running with the story, saying they have done some digging, and they have said- hey, we found his Facebook page. There are white supremacy messages. We followed up, did our due diligence- you know, talked to him. He said, absolutely not- I have nothing to do with social media- never had a Facebook page. So, he is denying what The Washington Post is reporting....

SANCHEZ: Ok, fine. So we've got- so essentially, we've got a stalemate there.

BALDWIN: Total stalemate.

SANCHEZ: We stop- fine. Now, let's go to the other part, the Facebook page, which apparently, there are references to white supremacist groups.

BALDWIN: 'I'm 100 percent Aryan race- 100 percent white.' But, again, he is saying, 'I don't know what you're talking about, Washington Post. I do not and have never had a Facebook page.'

SANCHEZ: The Washington Post, though, is, in fact, declaratively stating that, in fact, that is his Facebook page, correct?

BALDWIN: Correct.

SANCHEZ: They're a pretty reputable organization, right?

BALDWIN: They are.

SANCHEZ: But he's coming back. Now, we had him on the phone, and I understand he called Janelle, one of our staffers-

BALDWIN: Right.

SANCHEZ: One of our bookers, and abruptly canceled the interview that he was going to do with you and I.

BALDWIN: I was bummed out. He totally canceled. In fact, I talked to Janelle earlier. He hung up on her, and we had repeatedly followed up and called him back. And finally, we got a hold of him today to ask him about what The Washington Post was reporting- and so we did at least talk to him today- and that, again, is when he said, 'I don't know what they're talking about.'

In her online article on Friday, Schulte ran several quotes from Mr. Story where he described himself as an admirer of former Klan member David Duke and as a "white nationalist" (CAIR itself highlighted the Post story in an e-mail on Friday). When the Washington Post writer asked him about the apparent Facebook page, "he continued to maintain that his license plate message had nothing to with racism. He stuck by his NASCAR story. 'Southern white men. Southern white sport. What else needs to be said?' he said." This doesn't square completely, to say the least, with CNN's interview of the truck driver, where he denied ever having a Facebook page in the first place.

Given the conflicting accounts all around between CNN, The Washington Post, CAIR, and Mr. Story, there are only a few things that are clear. Story once had a license plate that had the numbers "14" and "88" on it, which was recalled by the Commonwealth of Virginia. His pickup truck has a Confederate flag on it, and up until recently, had the message, "Everything I ever needed to know about Islam I learned on 9/11," on the tailgate. And CAIR conducted a publicity stunt where they used stereotypes about pickup truck owners to go after Story and his anti-Islamic message, which both CNN and the Washington Post latched on to initially without obtaining Story's side of the controversy.

With immigration reform back on the front page thanks to Arizona's new controversial law, it's going to be very interesting to see how the Obama-loving press report what he did concerning this issue when he was a junior senator from Illinois in 2007.

For instance, David Broder's "How Congress Botched Immigration Reform" published in Thursday's Washington Post didn't even mention Barack Obama's name.

This seems particularly odd given this paragraph (h/t Jennifer Rubin):

But once the bill hit the floor, it was attacked from both flanks. The most conservative Republicans -- Jim DeMint of South Carolina, David Vitter of Louisiana and Jeff Sessions of Alabama -- led the assault. They were joined by some civil libertarians and allies of organized labor who were dissatisfied with the bill's protections for guest workers. Democrat Byron Dorgan of North Dakota repeatedly tried to gut the guest-worker program before finally succeeding by one vote on his third effort. 

Broder curiously chose to ignore the fact that Barack Obama was, for all intents and purposes, the fateful deciding vote as reported by the late Robert Novak in June 2007:

Democrat Byron Dorgan, who seldom has tasted legislative success during 15 years in the Senate, scored a dubious victory last week. He was able to insert a poison pill in the immigration reform bill that aimed at emasculating the essential guest worker program. The 49 to 48 vote that passed Dorgan's amendment included surprising support from two prominent first-term senators: Jim DeMint, a conservative Republican from South Carolina, and Barack Obama. [...]

The Dorgan amendment is a classic poison pill: designed to kill, not improve, the bill. Its passage makes resurrection of immigration reform all the more difficult. Decisive votes by DeMint and Obama were not appreciated by the bipartisan group that had crafted the bargain intended to secure America's borders while permitting an orderly flow of temporary workers. [...]

Obama's vote for the poison pill was unexpected because he had participated, uninvited, one time in the bipartisan negotiating process. He had demanded and won a provision permitting immigrants to stay on the job after being designated "not employable" by the government under the new system until their appeals were exhausted. Obama's support for the Dorgan amendment then infuriated Republicans in the negotiating group who had opposed the concession to the presidential candidate. 

In case you're thinking the conservative Novak was being a tad partisan with his piece, here's what the Associated Press wrote on June 7 that year:

A proposed immigration overhaul narrowly survived several strong Senate challenges Wednesday, but it suffered a potentially deal-breaking setback early Thursday.

Shortly after midnight, the Senate voted 49-48 to end a new temporary worker program after five years. The vote reversed the one-vote outcome on the same amendment offered both times by Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D. two weeks ago. Six senators switched their votes, reflecting the issue's political volatility.

Earlier that day, the AP reported (via LexisNexis, no link available, emphasis added):

June 7, 2007 Thursday 1:51 PM GMT

How they voted: Senate vote by party on immigration amendment

BYLINE: By The Associated Press

SECTION: WASHINGTON DATELINE

LENGTH: 327 words

The 49-48 roll call by which the Senate passed an amendment to the proposed immigration overhaul that would end a temporary worker program after five years.

On this vote, a "yes" vote was a vote to end the program after five years and a "no" vote was a vote against adding this time limit to the program.

Voting "yes" were 37 Democrats, 11 Republicans and one independent.

Voting "no" were 10 Democrats, 37 Republicans and one independent.

Democrats Yes

Baucus, Mont.; Bayh, Ind.; Biden, Del.; Bingaman, N.M.; Boxer, Calif.; Brown, Ohio; Byrd, W.Va.; Cardin, Md.; Casey, Pa.; Clinton, N.Y.; Conrad, N.D.; Dorgan, N.D.; Durbin, Ill.; Feingold, Wis.; Harkin, Iowa; Inouye, Hawaii; Klobuchar, Minn.; Kohl, Wis.; Landrieu, La.; Lautenberg, N.J.; Leahy, Vt.; Levin, Mich.; McCaskill, Mo.; Menendez, N.J.; Mikulski, Md.; Murray, Wash.; Nelson, Fla.; Nelson, Neb.; Obama, Ill.; Reed, R.I.; Reid, Nev.; Rockefeller, W.Va.; Schumer, N.Y.; Stabenow, Mich.; Tester, Mont.; Webb, Va.; Wyden, Ore.

The following year, as the presidential campaign was in full-swing, the Christian Science Monitor reported on April 17, 2008:

Obama was part of the bipartisan group of senators who began meeting in 2005 on comprehensive immigration reform. But last summer, with the presidential nominating race well under way, Obama backed 11th-hour amendments - supported by labor, immigrant rights, and clergy groups - that Republicans saw as imperiling the fragile compromise.

None of those measures passed. But Obama was part of a 49-to-48 majority that voted to end after five years a temporary worker program that had been a cornerstone of the immigration deal. The vote, backed by labor, was seen as a major setback to bipartisan negotiations.

Given all this, one has to wonder why Broder recognized the significance of the Dorgan amendment, but totally ignored Obama's role in getting it passed.

More importantly, as immigration takes center stage in the coming weeks, will everyone in the media forget what Sen. Barack Obama did to prevent reform three years ago?

Stay tuned. 

On April 22 and 27, CNN and The Washington Post both helped forward Islamic advocacy group CAIR's publicity stunt which demeaned an anonymous Virginia motorist as a racist. The Post finally found the driver on Thursday – and apparently, both news outlets jumped the gun, as the owner claimed that the numbers on his license plate were a tribute to his favorite NASCAR drivers, not secret code for “Heil Hitler.”

Anchor Rick Sanchez devoted a brief on his Rick's List program on Tuesday to presenting CAIR's side of the story on the controversy. After showing a picture of the pickup truck and the plate in question, as well as the anti-Islamic message on the truck's tailgate, Sanchez explained that "CAIR...also noticed the vanity license plate. It reads '14CV88.' CAIR says that is a coded hate message. We're told the number eight is for the eighth letter in the alphabet, 'H.' Two eights equals 'H.H.' for 'Heil Hitler.' Fourteen represents imprisoned white supremacist David Lane's motto about securing the future for white children." The anchor didn’t mention the owner’s side of the story.

Did anyone at CNN or the Washington Post consider the possibility that the story was underbaked until they communicated with the driver? Did they consider someone might find the driver and his truck and be spurred to angry talk and/or violence based on the media’s incomplete accounts? The Washington Post, at least, printed an update on Thursday to their initial article from the 22nd (the ball, obviously, is also in Sanchez's court now, as well, especially since he went after NewsBusters for not calling him before we took the "cheap shot" at him). The Post's Brigid Schulte returned to the scene of her incomplete story and provided the driver’s perspective in her Thursday article, "Virginia driver denies license plate had coded racist message."

Douglas Story, a Chantilly dump truck driver for the Virginia Department of Transportation, says he wanted to grab people's attention when he paid $224.90 to have a mural of the burning World Trade Center detailed onto the tailgate of his Ford F-150 along with a sticker that reads: "Everything I ever needed to know about Islam I learned on 9/11."

But he got more than he bargained for when a photo of his pickup went viral on the Web last week. Motorists and Muslim groups complained that his Virginia vanity license plate -- 14CV88 -- was really code for neo-Nazi, white supremacist sentiments. The state Department of Motor Vehicles voted last week to recall Story's plates and force him to buy new ones.

"There is absolutely no way I'd have anything to do with Hitler or Nazis," Story said Wednesday. He contacted The Washington Post after an article about his plate appeared last week; the state, citing privacy rules, had declined to release the identity of the plate's owner. "My sister-in-law and my niece are Jewish. I went to my niece's bat mitzvah when she turned 13 three years ago. Does that sound like something an anti-Semite would do?"

Story says the numbers 14 and 88 on his plate were not references to a white power slogan or "Heil Hitler," as the Council on American-Islamic Relations theorized, but an homage to his favorite NASCAR drivers: Tony Stewart, who drives car No. 14, and Dale Earnhardt Jr., who drives No. 88.

Story applied for the vanity plate in March 2009, shortly after Earnhardt changed his car number from 8 to 88 and Stewart changed his from 20 to 14.

CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said his group looked into the meaning of the numbers 14 and 88 after receiving complaints about Story's license plates....Hooper said he doesn't buy Story's version "given the overt anti-Muslim bigotry displayed on the truck and the Confederate flags and their historic connotation of racism....

Story received a certified letter last week from the DMV ordering him to get new plates. And his boss told him that he could no longer park on VDOT property with the anti-Islam mural. So Story spent an afternoon getting new randomized plates and peeling the mural off by hand.
                
"I feel naked," he said.

Story's account does seems to square away. Both Stewart and Earnhardt Jr. did indeed change their numbers in the middle of 2008. Also, Schulte's Washington Post article from April 22nd, which quoted Hooper, gave the impression that the CAIR spokesman profiled the Virginia man (Schulte also only provided the advocacy group's side of the story in this initial article).

Hooper at first thought the picture [of Story's truck] was a Photoshopped hoax. But when he called the DMV and discovered the plate was registered in 2005 to a Ford F-150 pickup truck, Hooper started to worry.

"If the license plate had been on a VW Beetle with nothing else on it, or a Volvo station wagon, no one would probably have noticed," said Hooper. "But when the Confederate flag is thrown in...it shows the convergence of anti-government and anti-Islamic sentiments that unfortunately seem to be growing."

Neither the Washington Post nor CNN made the effort when they ran their initial stories to provide Story's side of the controversy. They could have been thwarted by the privacy rules, but they unquestioningly ran with CAIR's take on the license plate.

David Ignatius, an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post, thinks a value-added tax (VAT) may be just the ticket to get the United States out of its deficit mess.

That's what he argued in a column on April 29:

"President Obama could champion the cause of deficit reduction. He could insist that the new bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform that began work this week consider a VAT and other aggressive measures to keep our debt from reaching crippling levels by the end of the decade," Ignatius wrote.

He made it clear that VAT is the "right" answer, but was worried that politicians "vaporized its political prospects" earlier this month when the Senate voted 85 to 13 that the VAT was a "massive tax increase that will cripple families on fixed income."

Ignatius warned that politicians are "afraid of being right too soon," and suggested that VAT is an example of that maxim.

Ignatius is on the same page as many liberals, and even the president's top economic adviser Paul Volcker. Volcker said on April 6 that the VAT "was not as toxic an idea" as it used to be. He also said taxes should be increased, if necessary.

But a number of conservative economists disagree. They argue that the VAT is a dangerous and hidden tax that, if added to all the other taxes Americans pay, would cripple the economy.

Dan Mitchell, a CATO senior fellow and Business & Media Institute adviser, said in a recent op-ed that a VAT would be "an economy-killer."

"Don't get me wrong: The VAT - on top of all the other taxes Washington imposes - is a terrible idea. Imposing it would pretty well finish the transformation of our country into a European-style slow-growth nation. The right way to close Uncle Sam's gaping deficits is to reverse the continued explosion of federal spending," Mitchell wrote.

Brian Wesbury, chief economist at First Trust Advisors, explained in a column for Forbes that the hidden nature of a VAT also leads to more taxes and more spending.

"Under a VAT the extra cost of the tax will be embedded in the prices we pay as consumers, which obscures the price we as individuals are forking over to support government." Wesbury wrote. "And what happens in every country with a VAT is that the hidden nature of the tax means it consistently moves higher."

Despite these complaints, some, like Ignatius, have supported the possibility of a value-added tax. Reuter's columnist Christopher Swann, Fortune's Shawn Tully and CNN.com's Dody Tsiantar all promoted VAT taxes earlier in the year.

Photo of Ignatius via Tavis Smiley's Web page at PBS.org.

It's no secret that the late Sen. Ted Kennedy was a major obstacle to a proposed wind farm in Nantucket Sound, but Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin at least buried that fact in today's 18-paragraph page A6 story on the Obama administration approving the first offshore wind farm in the United States.

In the lead paragraph, Eilperin hailed the announcement by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar as "a move that could pave the way for significant offshore wind development elsewhere in the nation."

Yet Eilperin waited until the 14th paragraph to note that the project, "split the Democratic Party" when it was proposed in 2001 because Kennedy, "whose family compound overlooks the sound, fought it, with criticism of its aesthetics and its effects on fishing and boating."

Of course Eilperin devoted a significant part of her article to relaying the objections of other opponents of the Cape Wind project, liberal activists who tossed out the predictable boilerplate liberal invective against Big Business...:

"We will not stand by and allow our treasured public lands to be marred forever by a corporate giveaway to private industrial energy developers," said Audra Parker, president of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound. 

...or appealed to a perceived threat to wildlife...:

Michael Fry, conservation advocacy director for the American Bird Conservancy, said that the project could "reduce prime offshore sea-duck foraging habitat" and that data suggest "that loons will likely abandon the area for years to come, and there may be significant impacts to endangered roseate terns, which breed in nearby Buzzards Bay and feed in Nantucket Sound." 

...or staked their opposition on ephemeral considerations such as "historical and cultural significance" of the Sound:

"No amount of mitigation will change the fact that this is a site of great historical and cultural significance for our tribe, and is inappropriate for this project," Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Chairman Cedric Cromwell said in a statement. 

That sounds like a "hard line" from "special interests" to me. Just don't hold your breath for the liberal media to ever paint liberal activists in that manner.

The lengths liberal media outlets will go to assist the politicians they support is oftentimes sick-making.

Consider the following paragraphs in the Washington Post's "Poll Finds Americans in an Anti-incumbent Mood as Midterm Elections Near":

Still, for President Obama and his party, there are some positive signs in the poll. The public trusts Democrats more than Republicans to handle the major problems facing the country by a double-digit margin, giving Democrats a bigger lead than they held two months ago, when Congress was engaged in the long endgame over divisive health-care legislation. A majority continues to see Obama as "just about right" ideologically, despite repeated GOP efforts to define the president as outside the mainstream.

Those polled also say they trust Obama over Republicans in Congress to deal with the economy, health care and, by a large margin, financial regulatory reform. And the president continues to get positive marks on his overall job performance, with, for the first time since the fall, a majority of independents approving.

As Hot Air's Ed Morrissey pointed out Tuesday, those involved with this poll cooked the books:

Why did Obama and the Democrats still manage to hold more trust over their GOP opponents?  The pollster talked to more of them, that's how - and more of them than they did in the last poll, relative to Republicans.  In the March 26th poll, the WaPo/ABC sample had a D/R/I split of 34/24/38, giving Democrats a partisan advantage of 10 points in the poll.  This time, the sample's split went 34/23/38, and even the independents split in favor of the Democrats, 19/17, up from 17/17 last month.  Just to give some perspective, the partisan gap from their November 2008 poll just before the election was nine points - and 26% of the sample was Republicans, compared to 23% now.

Given the expanding partisan gap shown in this poll, small wonder that Obama winds up with more trust than Republicans among respondents. It's also no mystery why the WaPo/ABC poll shows Obama adding to his job approval rating, 54/44, when every other pollster has Obama sinking. That ten-point swing in the sample makes quite a difference. 

You bet it does.

In fact, this large an oversampling of Democrats flies in the face of numerous polls in the past six months showing public support for the Donkeys plummeting.

With this in mind, if your D/R sample was 35/26 in November 2008 when Republicans were tremendously out of favor, this gap should narrow with the public's current negative view of Democrats.

Instead, as Morrissey pointed out, the folks responsible for this WaPo/ABC News poll EXPANDED this differential.

I wonder why. 

“A warming planet is just the tip of the iceberg, the warning light on the dashboard,” according to the Washington Post’s On Faith Guest Voices, Katharine Hayhoe. In her April 27 article, “Not Red, Not Blue, Just Green,” Hayhoe fretted about supposed climate change and attempted to use religion as a means to take action against global warming.

Hayhoe, a professor at Texas Tech and climate scientist, continued to sound the alarm and warned that global warming is only a “relatively small warning.” She described how, “Climate change is already altering the character of the places we know and love. It will continue to change in the future from what we have already done.”

But it didn’t just stop there. She resorted to a typical liberal claim and stated, “Climate change threatens our notions of stability and security. Things we did in the past, we can no longer do; but we are uncertain how to proceed into the future. To many of us, this makes us afraid.”

What exactly was done in the past, but we can’t do now, was unclear.

Perhaps Hayhoe, however, has been too busy worrying about climate change to realize there have been recent disputes surrounding it. The ClimateGate scandal, for example, erupted when e-mails from scientists at the University of East Anglica’s Climatic Research Unit emerged that actually doubted global warming.

On the same day as Hayhoe’s column, ClimateDepot’s Marc Morano appeared on Fox News to discuss how scientist Michael Mann, famous for the “hockey stick graph,” did not release data from tree rings that showed temperatures are falling. Morano stated, “But what he failed to do, he compared apples and oranges.”

Despite long-running criticism of environmentalism as a secular religion, Hayhoe also attempted to tie in actual religion as a call for action. She quoted Corinthians 10:23, in which the Apostle Paul stated, “Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial.” Using that verse, she warned there are “serious risks” if we do not change our actions.

 Hayhoe also pointed out that we are supposed to, “love our neighbors as ourselves.” To her, that means, “Today, many of our global neighbors are already facing the reality of climate change.” We should therefore “express God’s love to our neighbors in crisis by recognizing our common spiritual and physical heritage.”

Even though Hayhoe wrote, “we can take an honest look at the facts” she clearly failed to do so.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don't make me say the R-word. (h/t Gawker via Mary Katharine Ham)