I turned on MSNBC this morning in the admittedly masochistic hope of seeing Melissa Harris-Perry, only to find Harry Smith--of all people--hosting continuing coverage of the Paris attacks and related issues.

After running clips of Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee questioning the admittance into the US of Syrian refugees, Smith immediately displayed on screen and read the passage of Matthew 25 that begins "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat . . . I was a stranger and you invited me in," etc.  Smith then turned to the Rev. Jacqui Lewis, pastor of the hyper-liberal Middle Collegiate Church in NYC's East Village, and asked this hyper-leading question: "is this as important a piece of the New Testament as exists?" Surprise! Lewis agreed that it "absolutely" is.

Several times in the past, we've heard President Barack Obama, and occasionally his press secretary, tell America that the nation's commander-in-chief learned about certain events the same way many of the rest of us did: by seeing them on TV or reading newspaper accounts. A Republican or conservative president hauling out this excuse even once would face endless outrage and ridicule, respectively, from the news and entertainment divisions of the establishment press's networks.

Former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson, who is now an independent investigative journalist, has revealed one reason why Obama's level of claimed ignorance has been so high. It's because he won't look at information he doesn't like, or which doesn't conform to his preconceived notions — even in very serious matters relating to national security. It seems highly unlikely that Attkisson is the only reporter in the nation who has learned this.

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.

We'll have to live without Chad Henderson's tweets for the time being. Once again, Henderson, as he did in 2013, has taken his Twitter account private, limiting it to "confirmed followers." This time he likely did so in reaction to a NewsBusters post earlier this afternoon by P.J. Gladnick.

Henderson first gained notoriety during the initial Obamacare sign-up process in late 2013 when he claimed to have "enrolled" himself and his father when virtually no one else could even access the HealthCare.gov web site. The press unskeptically lapped up the Organizing for Action volunteer's story until Reason.com's Peter Suderman shredded it. It turned out that Henderson had only set up a profile for himself and had not purchased any health care plan. Henderson resurfaced on Twitter after the Paris terrorist attacks yesterday, asking: "Do Trump, Rubio, and Carson have the experience and knowledge to prevent and react to a similar Paris attack? Not at all, folks."

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.