Oh Salon, is there any group, no matter how small, insignificant or just plain silly, that you won’t offer up as a misunderstood minority?
On Wednesday, Salon readers learned of Alanna Weissman. She hates your kids, and she’s not sorry. You hear that, your first reaction is to shrug bemusedly and walk away. Kids aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. But stop right there! Weissman’s a marginalized minority, damn it. And she will be heard.
On September 30, the New York Times ran a front-page story that smeared St. Junipero Serra. Repeated attempts to have the paper correct the record have failed. This is yellow journalism at its worst. When I submit paid ads to the Times, I am often asked to identify my sources. Yet it accepts hit jobs like Holson's. The fact is there is no list of historians who claim Fr. Serra tortured Indians, and the Times knows it.
An MRC study published yesterday was the subject of a piece in The Hollywood Reporter. The study analyzed the violence in the top 10 movies currently in theatres to showcase the hypocrisy of celebrities demanding gun control after the Roseburg shooting.
(For the record: 334 separate violent acts; 121 acts of gun violence; 39 dead out of 142 total victims.)
Tuesday's All Things Considered on NPR followed the lead of CNN earlier in the day in spotlighting a pro-euthanasia activist's reaction to California Governor Jerry Brown signing the "End of Life Option Act." Host Kelly McEvers allowed only a brief mention of opponents calling the governor's move "a dark day for California." McEvers then gave guest Christy O'Donnell, who has terminal lung cancer, the kid glove treatment. O'Donnell appeared on CNN's At This Hour earlier on Tuesday, where anchor Kate Bolduan thanked her for her "strength" and "courage."
Like clockwork, before anyone had time digest the horror of the latest mass shooting, the left started finger-pointing and demanding more gun control – whether it would have prevented the crime or not. From President Obama on down, they immediately began railing against the NRA and gun owners.
Not surprisingly, entertainment industry liberals were among the most vocal. That also made them among the most hypocritical. TV, movies and music videos thrive portraying – and often glamorizing – violence, and gun violence in particular. And while actors were demanding gun control, the top 10 movies in theaters this past weekend were awash in violence – 334 separate violent acts, 121 of them involving guns. The on-screen body count was 39 dead out of 142 victims.
As if we don’t get enough of Kanye West’s nonsensical comments (president Yeezus 2020 anyone?), the rapper recently made another “important” announcement.
According to a candid two-hour interview with SHOW studio, Mr. Kardashian is up in arms with the fashion industry for being discriminatory against him. This isn’t a “hands up don’t shoot,” #blacklivesmatter discrimination though. West complained the fashion industry discriminated against him because he isn’t gay. Oh the irony.
CNN wasn't interested in balance on Tuesday, as three straight programs brought on pro-euthanasia activists to tout California's new "End of Life Option Act," which was signed into law on Monday. All three also left out opponents of the legislation. CNN Newsroom featured a man whose wife was the subject of a HBO documentary titled How to Die in Oregon. On At This Hour, Kate Bolduan hyped the "groundbreaking move," and interviewed a "right to die advocate" with terminal cancer. Legal View turned to the widower of pro-euthanasia activist Brittany Maynard, who took her life in November 2014.
Last night Show Time aired the season premiere of The Affair, a show about extramarital relations that somehow managed to make it into a second season. That’s not the only thing that got some air time though. Within the first half of the show, viewers got a taste of blatant Hillary Clinton campaign propaganda.
Liberals and conservatives often differ over the concept of American exceptionalism, either on how to define it or whether there even is such a thing. Washington Monthly blogger Ed Kilgore recognizes a limited version of American exceptionalism, one which pretty much boils down to a mania for guns.
“America is mainly exceptional [italics in original] among advanced democratic nations not in our personal or economic liberty, but in our strange belief that letting everyone stockpile weapons is essential to the preservation of our freedom, and in the consequences of that strange belief,” wrote Kilgore in a Friday post that piggybacked on President Obama’s statement regarding the Oregon community-college shootings.
Amidst all the shows with a blatant liberal agenda, “Last Man Standing” is a lone conservative voice on ABC; a gem hidden away in the 8pm Friday night slot. The latest episode of the sitcom, "Free Range Parents," hits scaredy-cat overprotective parents, leftwing news, and even Hillary Clinton. Mike Baxter (Tim Allen) is trying to get his son-in-law, Ryan, to allow his grandson to walk 6 blocks home from school by himself, but liberal Ryan worries too much about everything, from diabetes to free range parenting, or as Mike calls it, “childhood.”
In recent years, some advocates of increased gun control have called for repeal or revision of the Second Amendment, but Adam Gopnik believes that either would be superfluous.
In a Friday article, Gopnik asserted that “the only amendment necessary for gun legislation…is the Second Amendment itself, properly understood, as it was for two hundred years in its plain original sense. This sense can be summed up in a sentence: if the Founders hadn’t wanted guns to be regulated, and thoroughly, they would not have put the phrase ‘well regulated’ in the amendment.”
As part of a piece on Friday’s CBS This Morning about the opening of the first freestanding Chick-fil-a in New York City, correspondent Vladimir Duthiers couldn’t help but harp on the company’s conservative Christian values and how they had to supposedly draw customers back “in 2012 when those values ran afoul of public sentiment” after “CEO Dan Cathy affirmed his support for tradition marriage.”