UPDATE:  Later in the show, Scarborough quoted from this item on the air. Wallace sarcastically commented "Finkelstein likes me a lot." Video clip at foot.

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If Nicolle Wallace wants to attack Donald Trump, there's nothing wrong with that.  And the way she "pre-tweeted" Trump's counter-attack on her, saying she was too stupid to keep her job at The View, was actually rather witty.

But on today's Morning Joe, Wallace made a bad mistake. Rather than focusing her fire on Trump, she attacked the millions of decent Americans who support him.  According to Wallace, Trump is "tapping into the most sinister sentiments in the country."  Joe Scarborough pushed back, pointing out that Wallace's own father is an avid Trump fan. "My father is listening to his dark angels," replied Wallace.

From time to time over the past nine years, I have written about "globaloney," a shorthand term for the pseudo-science behind “climate change,” and “globalarmism” to describe the enviro-hysteria over "global warming" and the misguided public-policy prescriptions arising from that hysteria. Since the Paris climate talks have just begun, the press hysteria has reached a fever pitch.

At the Associated Press on Sunday, Seth Borenstein, swept up in that hysteria, wrote up a perfect example of "news" coverage embodying the essence of each term. We should be forever grateful that longtime skeptic Christopher Monckton, at the Watts Up With That blog, picked Borenstein apart, utterly destroying the AP reporter's work, piece by piece.

In predictably disingenuous fashion, the Associated Press claimed in a November 18 story that "Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has shined new light on the breakdown of a potentially history-altering round of 2008 peace talks." Abbas acknowledged that Israel offered Palestinians 93.5 percent of the West Bank and other significant concessions.

The "light" isn't "new" at all. The wire service had the news almost seven years ago, and, according to former AP reporters, refused to publish it. An AP reporter who "discovered the Israeli peace offer in early 2009, got it confirmed on the record and brought it" to the AP in Jerusalem has substantiated the assertion that it "suppressed a world-changing story for no acceptable reason." It is perhaps the most damming validation yet that prudent people should never trust establishment press reports out of the Middle East — particularly in regards to Israel — because of their "pattern ... of accepting the Palestinian narrative as truth and branding the Israelis as oppressors."

Twenty years of economic growth averaging less than 1 percent have failed to convince Japan's leaders — and apparently its citizens — that Keynesian-style government spending and handouts are not the answer to turning that long-suffering nation's economy around.

So the Shinzo Abe government, fresh from learning that the country is in yet another recession — its fifth since 2008 — is doing more of the same, while counting on press shills around the world like the Associated Press's Elaine Kurtenbach to be gentle in their coverage. Kurtenbach cooperated as expected early Friday morning (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

Call it the triumph of the "new normal."

At Reuters today, after today's first revision of third-quarter gross domestic product showed that the economy grew by an annualized 2.1 percent, up from the late-October estimate of 1.5 percent, reporter Lucia Mutikani and Editor Paul Simao demonstrated that they have completely given in to the artificially lowered expectations of past seven miserable years. Despite the fact that annual growth in the U.S. economy averaged 3.4 percent from 1946-2007 — a period which included ten recessions — and that it has seen four-year spurts averaging over 4 percent several times in the past three decades, the Reuters pair claims that its "long-run potential" is now only 2 percent, thus making today's 2.1 percent result "respectable."