Reviewing Newsweek veteran Jon Meacham’s biography of former President George H.W. Bush, Thomas J. Duesterberg observed in The Weekly Standard that Meacham portrays the 41st President ‘s life through a liberal prism. For instance: “The policies of Ronald Reagan are viewed from a decidedly unsympathetic and formulaic viewpoint, which follows the consensus, left-of-center perspective.”
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By Brent Baker | January 3, 2016 | 10:24 AM EST
By Tom Blumer | January 2, 2016 | 11:58 PM EST
A time-honored tactic in political TV ads is to use contrasting degrees of photographic exposure, one bright and snappy for your candidate and a darker hue, sometimes even going to old-fashioned black-and-white, for your opponent.
On December 29, at the Washington Post's Wonkblog, Max Ehrenfreund cited a conveniently timed "study" which looked at 2008 ads produced by and on behalf of GOP presidential candidate John McCain, and concluded that the McCain campaign and its supporters, by using such a tactic, were engaging in racism:
By Tim Graham | January 2, 2016 | 11:14 PM EST
It was a new year, but the same lament from MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry. The leftist agenda to curtail gun rights has been frustrated. On Saturday morning, the weekend host and weekday professor treated guns (not people) as the killers as she pleaded for young blacks to have a “separate kind of legal construction to address the violence that they might perpetrate in the world because they're living under this kind of mental constant threat and belief of death. Not even primarily at the hands of police, but at the hands of guns generally.”
Guns don’t have hands. People have hands. From there, as Derek Draplin reported at the Daily Caller, Harris-Perry tried to explain to fellow professor Jon Shane that confiscating "perfectly legal" guns would mean less husbands shooting their wives:
By Tim Graham | January 2, 2016 | 8:19 PM EST
In December, major media outlets gushed over Barack and Michelle Obama “opening up like never before about all of their favorite things of 2015" to People magazine. A cynic could say their picks weren’t very shocking – they liked Bruno Mars and Kendrick Lamar, and movies like The Martian and Inside Out. They might have been honest picks....or they could be calculated to say “See? We’re just like you folks.”
People also questioned a pile of presidential candidates, too, but the laughs in her office were all with Hillary’s answers.
By Tim Graham | January 2, 2016 | 11:12 AM EST
Blame the PBS NewsHour staff for a bad headline? Online, Friday’s week-in-review pundit segment was titled “Shields and Gerson on the biggest political moments of 2015.” Nowhere in that 12-minute segment did Mark Shields and fill-in pseudoconservative Michael Gerson ever discuss Hillary Clintton. So apparently the very likely Democratic nominee didn’t have a noteworthy moment last year.
No e-mails to discuss? A new batch came out Friday. No Clinton Foundation scandals? Why no, PBS anchor Judy Woodruff had to apologize for donating to the Clinton Foundation. At least Mark Shields noted an NBC poll (that NBC ignored) on how voters want a change from Obama policies.
By Clay Waters | January 2, 2016 | 9:28 AM EST
The rich are "horrible people" -- at least those who lean to the right -- declares economist turned pompous New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in Friday’s “Privilege, Pathology and Power.” The text box: “Can we survive rule by self-centered billionaires?” (Liberal billionaire activist George Soros had no comment.) Krugman channeled opportunistic moralism, citing “science” to confirm his prejudices that rich people who disagree with him politically are bad, bad folks, though Krugman is no prince of humility and civility himself.
By Mark Finkelstein | January 2, 2016 | 8:55 AM EST
If two weeks ago I claimed it was raining when it was not, but today it does rain, does that make my original statement a prediction, one that was "right?" No, if you're honest about it. But maybe yes if you're ABC News, and instead of me talking about rain, it was Hillary Clinton talking about Donald Trump in ISIS recruitment videos.
On today's Good Morning America, co-host Dan Harris suggested Hillary Clinton "may actually have been right" about Donald Trump turning up in ISIS videos. And during the subsequent segment, reporter Mary Bruce said Hillary "predicted" Trump "would" be used in ISIS videos. There's only one hitch: Hillary hadn't "predicted" what ISIS "would" do. On December 19th, during a Dem debate, Hillary claimed that ISIS was already using Trump in recruitment videos. But no terror group used Trump in a video before today, when he turned up in a video not by ISIS but from an al Qaeda-affiliated group.
By Brent Bozell and Tim Graham | January 2, 2016 | 7:56 AM EST
As night fell on Christmas Eve, National Public Radio was in its usual holy-day mode, using your tax dollars to mock the traditional Christian creed. This time they promoted an activist movie called The Danish Girl, yet another alleged “true story” about artist Einar Wegener, a married man who wanted to be a woman named Lili. An earlier NPR commercial – sorry, “underwriting announcement” – said he was the first recipient of “gender confirmation surgery.”
Paging Mr. Orwell – it’s NPR on line 1. Focus Features – part of the Comcast “diversity and inclusion” empire of propaganda – is calling this maiming of the male body “gender confirmation surgery.”
By Tom Blumer | January 2, 2016 | 2:19 AM EST
On Wednesday, Nate Cohn at the New York Times, who by some accounts is being anointed the next Nate Silver of polling, made a clumsy and despicable attempt to inject race into his political "analysis" of the Donald Trump phenomenon.
Cohn's tediously long writeup, which made Page A3 in the New York version of the Old Gray Lady's print edition on Thursday, attempted to identify and characterize Donald Trump supporters. Apparently troubled by finding that Trump's support crosses into a number of groups with whom Republican presidential candidates have usually fared poorly, he felt the need to go far afield for evidence of something sinister. Thus, he attempted to correlate the level of current support for Trump's presidential candidacy to regional levels of racism as seen in Google searches. That's right, Google searches — 9-12 years ago.
By Tom Blumer | January 1, 2016 | 9:19 PM EST
The Wall Street Journal ran a blockbuster story Tuesday afternoon ("U.S. Spy Net on Israel Snares Congress") about how the Obama administration's National Security Agency's "targeting of Israeli leaders swept up the content of private conversations with U.S. lawmakers." In other words, the NSA spied on Congress. As talk-show host and commentator Erick Erickson drily observed: "Congress began impeachment proceedings on Richard Nixon for spying on the opposing political party."
Whether or not Congress has the nerve to defend itself and the Constitution's separation of powers, what the Journal reported is objectively a major story. Yet the Associated Press ignored it on Tuesday, and most of Wednesday. Finally, at 7:15 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, the AP ran a story by Erica Werner — about how Republicans are planning to investigate the matter.
By Tim Graham | January 1, 2016 | 8:18 PM EST
The Hollywood trade paper Variety wrapped up the year with its film critics, and it was surprising to read how several liberal-pleasing films were taken to ask for their artistic failings.
Perhaps the most eye-opening was Peter Debruge whapping Michael Moore. "An embarrassment to America, Michael Moore’s latest editorial cartoon of a documentary is as sloppy as its author’s appearance (easily twice his Bowling for Columbine heft). Unlike his earlier, urgent wake-up-call docs, Where to Invade Next cherry-picks aspects in which other countries can be made to appear more progressive than the States, while conveniently overlooking the limitations of each grass-is-greener locale. At the base, it’s a fine idea, implying the humility to ask what we can learn from others, though Moore is a boorish ambassador at best, and his disingenuous approach undermines his own argument."
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By Tim Graham | January 1, 2016 | 3:30 PM EST
On December 22, Kyle Drennen reported NBC’s Today devoted two full reports to President Obama appearing on Jerry Seinfeld’s web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Once again, Obama plays the part of comedian instead of chief executive, and the networks come running. On December 31 – the day the Seinfeld show was available online – all three networks aired gushy reports.
The longest on Thursday was on CBS This Morning, with Chip Reid reporting from Hawaii with the rest of the “working” White House press corps. It was almost four minutes.
By Sarah Stites | January 1, 2016 | 2:14 PM EST
During the darkest days of communism, Romanians had something to brighten their oppressed existence—illicit American movie parties.
Under Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship, the Eastern European country had very little contact with the West. But thanks to Teodor Zamfir who was willing to smuggle VHS tapes, and his translator Ilina Nistor who dubbed them, over 3000 movies made it over to Romania between 1985 and 1989. Millions of lives were changed and uplifted as a result.
By Clay Waters | January 1, 2016 | 10:41 AM EST
Donald Trump called out Hillary Clinton for hypocrisy in accusing the GOP of being anti-woman, yet relying on serial philanderer Bill Clinton’s help while running for president. But you wouldn’t have learned that until deep into the front-page story in Wednesday’s New York Times. Political reporter Amy Chozick spent the first several paragraphs piling up shallow evidence of the former friendship between Trump and Bill Clinton in order to accuse Trump of treachery, while dodging and ducking the serious sexual accusations long festering around the former president. As the headline demonstrated, Chozick shifted the focus from Clinton’s sexual past (which led to his impeachment) to Trump’s alleged betrayal of some grand friendship: “Ex-Ally Trump Now Heaps Scorn on Bill Clinton.”
By Cal Thomas | January 1, 2016 | 9:28 AM EST
Taking stock is a tradition observed by Jews at Yom Kippur and others who examine their lives at the end of a year and vow to improve in the new year.
One group needs to take stock perhaps more than any other: the mainstream media. They continue to lose readers and viewers, but close their eyes and ears to complaints from the public, guaranteeing continued decline in revenue, along with buyouts and layoffs. The conservative Media Reseach Center has compiled some of the more outrageous statements the media made in 2015.
