By Tom Blumer | November 16, 2015 | 11:58 PM EST

In a Facebook post on Sunday, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz pushed back against a "ridiculous" Politifact post which labeled his true claim that the Democratic Party is shrinking as "mostly false."

Politifact's Emma Hinchliffe had to go back 11 years to a now-irrelevant time period to unsuccessfully attempt to refute Cruz's inconvenient truth, citing Gallup poll figures from 2004. Nobody cares about 2004, Emma. What Cruz said is that the party "is shrinking," and it has been for the past 6-7 years, falling from 38 percent to 29 percent as Americans have seen how a Democratic President and his party have governed and behaved when in power.

By Tom Blumer | November 16, 2015 | 10:15 PM EST

The Dartmouth calls itself "the student newspaper of Dartmouth College and the campus’s only daily," and, begun in 1799, is America's oldest college newspaper. It also appears to be a great training ground for journalists who write stories which bury and downplay the lede and cover up key facts when correctly prioritizing and presenting a story would make favored groups look bad.

The Dartmouth Review, whose website has been extraordinarily overloaded today, was founded in 1980 "to question stale academic orthodoxy and to preserve Dartmouth College’s unique liberal arts character." Its alums include several current conservative luminaries. After a Thursday Black Lives Matter rally disrupting the quiet of Dartmouth's Baker-Berry Library, The Dartmouth Review told its readers what actually happened. The Dartmouth's Briana Tang buried multiple paragraphs of pablum which danced around what had obviously taken place towards the end of her insufferably long story.

By Tom Blumer | November 16, 2015 | 4:22 PM EST

The obvious pull quote of the day from President Obama's contentious press conference in Antalya, Turkey is this statement: "What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning or whatever other slogans they come up with ..." Obama then claimed that any ideas coming from those who believe in such a notion have "no relationship to what is actually going to work to protect the American people and to protect the people in the region."

Ed Driscoll at PJ Media believes that these words are "the president’s equivalent of Carter’s malaise speech" in the 1970s. Just in case he's right, related stories at the Associated Press and the New York Times have not mentioned Obama's statement, a clear indicator of his lack of genuine resolve, in their coverage.

By Tom Blumer | November 16, 2015 | 12:35 AM EST

Japan's two-decade romance with Keynesian economics has led to another betrayal — and yet the press and all the supposedly smart economists and analysts seem to believe that just one more fling might bring about a different result.

The Land of the Rising Sun, aka the Land of the Two-Decade Zombie Economy, has just reported an annualized contraction of 0.8 percent in the third quarter. The decline, following a revised 0.7 percent second-quarter downturn, means that the country is once again in a recession — its second in three years (Update: And fifth since 2008). Oh, but don't worry. It's no big deal. The Associated Press insists that it's only a "technical" recession, and more Keynesian "stimulus" could set things right — even though such measures, in place to varying degrees since the 1990s, have consistently failed to bring about sustained, meaningful recoveries:

By Tom Blumer | November 15, 2015 | 10:03 PM EST

Shortly after the Charlie Hebdo Islamic terrorist murders in Paris in January, the establishment press attacked those who dared to state something quite obvious about "no-go zones" in parts of Europe, i.e., that they exist. The media summarily and unilaterally declared that "no-go zones" were a myth propagated by the likes of Fox News, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, longtime terror expert Steven Emerson, and others — despite several direct references to them in media accounts, including the New York Times, going back as far as 2002.

Well, a not very funny thing has happened during the attempt to hunt down those involved in planning Friday's coordinated terrorist bloodbath in Paris.

By Tom Blumer | November 15, 2015 | 11:44 AM EST

As of early this morning, Matt Drudge was carrying a link to a story headlining how President Obama is "under fire for saying ISIS 'contained' just hours before Paris attack."

Well, Obama is under some fire, but Drudge's link is to coverage at the UK Daily Mail. That's unfortunately unsurprising, because there is little to no mention of Obama's naive, foolish and callous statement in the U.S. establishment press. So Obama may be "under fire" from people who are paying attention, but low-information news consumers (and voters) who didn't happen to see the original Thursday interview will likely remain unaware of it. In one such example of convenient oversight, the Associated Press published a Thursday evening story on that interview, and decided that its only newsworthy element was Obama's immigration-related criticism of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.

By Tim Graham | November 14, 2015 | 10:46 AM EST

Canadian conservative Ezra Levant took to Twitter after the Paris attacks to remind the world that the state-run Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has a policy of not employing the words “terrorism” or “terrorist” since “the use of the word can be highly politicized and therefore it is preferable that there be a consistent practice to be as specific as possible in describing an event without labelling it.”

But on October 1 of this year, the same staffers and the ombudsman defended the use of the terms “xenophobes” and “haters” by longtime CBC journalist Michael Enright on the program The Sunday Edition to describe those resisting any plan to accept thousands of Syrian refugees. That's not "highly politicized"?

By Tom Blumer | November 14, 2015 | 12:34 AM EST

As of 11 p.m. ET on Friday, according to CNN, the death toll was "at least 153" (since updated to "at least 128") who have been "killed in gunfire and blasts" in Paris in "coordinated attacks." CNN claims that "It is still not clear who is responsible." (Update: Early Saturday morning Eastern Time, ISIS claimed responsibility.)

Two days ago, leftist Democrat Hillary Clinton laughed at the idea of Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina being strangled. Today, we've learned that wealthy "liberal funders" are considering bankrolling the Black Lives Matter movement, whose followers have frequently been seen and heard targeting police with language like, "Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon" and "What do we want? Dead cops!" But Salon's Chauncey DeVega wants everyone to know that, after Paris, it's the right in the U.S. which needs "to tone down their incessant violent rhetoric."

By Matthew Balan | November 13, 2015 | 7:41 PM EST

Doug Saunders, a leftist international-affairs columnist for Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail, attacked the many people on Twitter who were calling for prayers for the citizens of Paris in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the French capital on Friday evening.

By Tom Blumer | November 13, 2015 | 6:02 PM EST

The federal government kicked off fiscal 2016 yesterday by reporting that its October deficit was $136.5 billion, 12 percent higher than the $121.7 billion shortfall seen in October 2014.

Single-month comparisons can be tricky because of timing differences, but the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger noted that analyzing the results from this October and last October is an apples-to-apples proposition when he wrote that "In both years, Nov. 1 fell on a weekend, which required the government to mail out November benefit checks in October." But instead of diving into and comparing the two Octobers, the AP reporter devoted the vast majority of his writeup to virtual cut-and-paste regurgitations of previously published news about the 2015 fiscal year and projections for the next two years. He wrote just one sentence directly comparing any of the details in two October statements, and buried it at the end of his report.

By Bill Donohue | November 13, 2015 | 3:30 PM EST

The cover story of the December edition of Cosmopolitan is titled, "Sex Wish List." The article contains 24 sexual suggestions, all of which exploit the Christian and Jewish holidays. Most conspicuously, it includes a "Sex-Vent Calendar," a rip-off of the Advent calendar prized by Christians.

By Tom Blumer | November 12, 2015 | 11:55 PM EST

The "fact-checking" press has become a parody of itself during the past several years.

It's not only because of their irritating penchant for putting statements by Republicans and conservatives under a twisted microscope while ignoring drop-dead obvious falsehoods delivered by Democrats and leftists. It's because, among other things, the fact-checkers often admit that a statement is true, but then proceed to essentially say, "So what?" They also take policy goals articulated by candidates, which may or may not come to pass, render an opinion that it can't be done, and then pretend that they've actually proven something. An example of each annoying habit was found in Tuesday evening's Associated Press "fact check" of statements made by Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush during the most recent Republican presidential candidates' debate.