On Wednesday, the late-night comedy show hosts gave their thoughts on the previous evening’s Republican debate and, naturally, the jokes skewed to the left. Most prominent, Late Show host Stephen Colbert trashed conservative donor Sheldon Adelson as a “part-time Kuato” (a reference to the alien in the movie Total Recall) and Late Night host Seth Meyers joked that each of the nine major candidates “had definitely been radicalized by ISIS.”
Labeling
By Tom Blumer | December 16, 2015 | 11:51 PM EST
Reuters and reporter Lucia Mutikani went way overboard today in reacting to today's residential construction news from the Census Bureau.
Mutikani's headline contended that today's "housing data signals economic strength," while a section title claimed that there are "strong housing fundamentals." That can only possibly be true if one believes the world began in 2007.
By Matthew Balan | December 16, 2015 | 1:26 PM EST
CNN's Chris Cuomo made a gaffe regarding the religious faith of ISIS and other similar groups on Wednesday's New Day. When Senator Lindsey Graham accused Donald Trump of "playing into ISIL's hands," Cuomo replied, "Sixty percent of your party agrees with him. They think all jihadis are Muslim." Since jihad is a concept from the Islamic faith, a jihadi, by definition, would indeed be a Muslim waging a religious-based war for Islam.
Chicago Teachers Authorize Another Strike; Press Mostly Fails to Report Current Pay or Union's Demands
By Tom Blumer | December 15, 2015 | 10:44 PM EST The Chicago Public Schools system, from which came Arne Duncan, perhaps the nation's most execrable Education Secretary, is in serious financial trouble. So is the State of Illinois. Having already borrowed against next year's property tax collections, CPS somehow expects the state to bail out its underfunded pensions to the tune of $500 million. Though it has subsequently been narrowed, MRC-TV, in covering the district CEO's resignation over a federal no-bid contract investigation, reported in June that the district was facing "a $1 billion budget deficit" for fiscal 2016.
In the midst of all of this, the district's teachers union has overwhelmingly authorized a strike. In searching several current articles on the topic, the hardest things to find were answers to two questions any reasonable person would ask: 1) How much do teachers currently make? and 2) What are their contract demands?
By Matthew Balan | December 15, 2015 | 4:05 PM EST
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough blasted Marco Rubio in a series of posts on Twitter on Tuesday. Scarborough linked to Rubio's latest TV ad and contended that "Marco goes full-on nativist. Says he feels out of place in his own country. It's such a crass play. It's offensive." The Republican senator led the ad by stating, "This election is about the essence of America -- about all of us who feel out of place in our own country." The anchor claimed that "the second most nativist statement according to pollsters is 'these days, I feel like a stranger in my own country.'"
By Tom Blumer | December 15, 2015 | 3:00 PM EST
The year isn't even over, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Time's 2015 Person of the Year, has begun to act against the primary reason why the magazine chose her.
To refresh from a NewsBusters post last week, Time's Nancy Gibbs cited three reasons for the choice. The clearly most important one, from their perspective, was Merkel's virtually unilateral decision that Germany "would welcome refugees as casualties of radical Islamist savagery, not carriers of it" without apparent restriction. Now Merkel has, as described by a writer at Time Inc. sister publication Fortune, "backpedaled" from that stance.
By Matthew Balan | December 14, 2015 | 6:33 PM EST
MSNBC's Tony Dokoupil acted more like a left-wing environmentalist than a journalist on Saturday's Weekends With Alex Witt, as he reported on the Paris climate change talks. Dokoupil trumpeted how "it's really like a Mars lander kind of moment — a NASA moonshot moment." The correspondent later touted how "history will be made" if the talks conclude successfully, and added, "I can't wait to see how it turns out, because there's going to be celebration if it's successful; and there could really be rioting in the streets here if it fails."
By Tom Blumer | December 14, 2015 | 2:42 PM EST
Imagine a Republican or conservative governor boasting of his or her use of "the coercive power of government" to accomplish center-right policy goals. The political and media backlash would be furious — and justified.
Such statist rhetoric is becoming ever more commonplace on the left, and is rising to ever higher political levels. The establishment press is mostly ignoring this development, and usually omits related inflammatory assertions from its coverage. Statements relating to "climate change" have especially been reinforcing David Horowitz's old adage that "Inside every liberal is a totalitarian screaming to get out" for several months. Last week in Paris, California Governor Jerry Brown let his inner totalitarian out several times. A video of one such example follows the jump.
By Tom Blumer | December 14, 2015 | 1:40 AM EST
Apparently a generation of "journalists" has been raised to believe that the matter of human-caused global warming is "settled science," and that anyone who doubts the agenda-driven, redistributionist "climate change" movement is an enemy of civilization. Additionally, these people clearly don't understand the orchestrated, false-drama nature of diplomatic gatherings such as the one in Paris which just concluded with yet another "breakthrough" but non-binding "agreement" to reduce carbon emissions.
Thus, it's disconcerting, but not at all hard to believe, that these ignorant, gullible children disguised as discerning adults wildly cheered the announcement of the aforementioned agreement as if an athlete on one of their favorite teams just delivered a last-second victory:
By Tom Blumer | December 13, 2015 | 11:24 PM EST
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Thursday that Joshua Williams "was sentenced ... to eight years in prison for starting a fire at a QuikTrip in Berkeley (a St. Louis suburb) after an officer-involved shooting there." The Dispatch apparently didn't think it important to tell readers that the crime spree which occurred after that shooting took place despite the fact that the suspect had pulled a gun on that officer.
I noted in a NewsBusters post a year ago that Williams' arrest on charges of "1st degree arson, 2nd degree burglary and misdemeanor theft," and his confession "to setting fires at the store in a videotaped interview" constituted a major establishment press embarrassment. You see, until then, outfits like the New York Times, MSNBC and others had, in the words of Ryan Lovelace at National Review, "depicted him as a hero of the summer protests" in Ferguson, Missouri.
By Curtis Houck | December 13, 2015 | 1:19 PM EST
Discussing a focus group of Trump supporters convened by Frank Luntz that aired on Sunday’s Face the Nation, CBS News political analyst Jamelle Bouie promptly trashed them as representing the belief among social scientists (i.e. fellow liberals) that there’s been “a distinct rise in racial resentment and anti-black attitudes” in America resulting as a fact of the Obama presidency.
By Tom Blumer | December 12, 2015 | 10:47 AM EST
The callousness towards human life at Planned Parenthood is such that it believes that the remains of preborn babies killed during abortions are just like any other "medical waste," and that sending them to landfills — or, perhaps even incinerators — is therefore "humane."
That's what one must conclude from reading an Associated Press report Friday evening which strived mightily to play defense for the beleaguered group. The wire service's headline only described State Attorney General Mike DeWine as an "official." The opening sentence from Andrew Welsh-Huggins only conceded that DeWine "criticized" the practices at Ohio's Planned Parenthood's locations, when his press release clearly contends that it has been violating state regulations (bolds are mine):