In his "Talking Points" opening monologue Wednesday night, Fox News's Bill O'Reilly lit into the establishment press for allowing the notion that America is a "white supremacist nation" to go "largely unchallenged." He further accused the press of allowing itself to be "intimidated," leaving Fox as the only channel, in his view, "standing up for the truth."

I have been told that O'Reilly's monologue went about twice as long it usually does, but that's because he had a lot to say, and said it well.

Plenty wrong with the public schools in our country but they aren't to blame for Bill Maher not becoming multilingual. Shocking as it will sound to Maher, responsibility for this rests squarely with him. 

On his HBO show Friday night, Maher was chatting it up with angry liberal (yeah, it's redundant) comedian Lewis Black about their experiences performing stand-up in Europe.

As noted in my previous related post, one of the authors of a late-2014 study which made the nonsensical claim that “a single conversation (can) change minds on divisive social issues, such as same-sex marriage,” causing "a cascade of opinion change," issued a retraction last week, because the data supporting it was faked. Since it was published in Science Magazine — and because it conveniently fit a leftism-advancing agenda — numerous press outlets ran stories on the study's results.

Now they're all having to run retractions and corrections. Besides the obvious problem that the lies have gotten a long head start, let's look at how the seven original publishers identified by Retraction Watch, as well as the Associated Press, have handled the matter. All too often the answer has been: "Not very well."

In the early 1990s, politicians floated the term “peace dividend” regarding a hoped-for post-Cold War reduction in the U.S. defense budget, and Pentagon spending indeed fell somewhat in the mid- and late ‘90s. Sean McElwee, a research associate at the lefty think tank Demos, argues that America now needs a post-9/11, post-Afghanistan, post-Iraq peace dividend which would allow greatly increased spending on certain domestic programs.

“As violent deaths from war and terrorism decline,” wrote McElwee in a Sunday piece for Salon, “the greater threat to Americans is their failing infrastructure, costly healthcare system and incoherent environmental policy…In addition, [America’s] ability to lead by example is threatened by poverty, homeless[ness] and rampant inequality.”

McElwee concluded that “Americans need to realize that today, the larger threat they face is their own fear leading them to underinvest in vital services. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously warned, ‘the only thing we have to fear is… fear itself.’”

With Camden Yards set to hold its first fan-attended Baltimore Orioles game in over two weeks tonight, it's a good time to go back to a May 2 item by Meredith Shiner at Yahoo Politics.

Readers may remember the Duke-"educated" Shiner as the person who was flabbergasted that GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz cited "God-given rights" when he announced his candidacy on March 23, tweeting in part: "Bizarre to talk about how rights are God-made and not man-made ... When Constitution was man-made?" Few will be surprised that Shiner's interview of Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings is an income inequality-obsessed de facto puff piece which lets Cummings completely off the hook for worsening conditions in the district he has represented since 1996.