A federal appeals panel today ruled parts of a Washington, D.C. gun-regulation bill to be unconstitutional. One of the judges in the majority, Patricia Millett, is an Obama appointee who once clerked for a judge in the infamously left-leaning Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Yet that angle of the story was curiously absent from Washington Post reporter Spencer Hsu's coverage of the ruling, even as he noted it was a George W. Bush appointee who dissented from ruling.
When the American Civil Liberties Union sues the government for its right to defend the cleric that inspired the Fort Hood mass murder, couldn't the media describe them as radical, or even left-wing? Instead, the headline in the Washington Post Wednesday was "Treasury sued over edict on radical cleric Aulaqi: Rights groups say rule prevents challenge to effective death sentence."
The Post website is more direct: "Civil rights groups sue Treasury over targeting of terror suspects for killing."
Why aren't groups that oppose terrorists positively defined as "civil rights groups"? What about the "civil rights" of terrorist victims like the murdered at Fort Hood? Post reporter Spencer Hsu lets the ACLU's Anthony Romero claim that endangering the jihadist's rights endangers us all:
President Obama's handpicked intelligence czar blames officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice for failing to permit the gathering critical intelligence from Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called Underwear Bomber who attempted to down a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day 2009.
What's more, neither Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair nor FBI director Mueller or Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano were "consulted about the charging decision" for Abdulmutallab, a decision which may have resulted in the loss of a golden opportunity to collect intelligence from the would-be bomber before he was able to lawyer up.
Oh, and did I mention that the special task force that President Obama commissioned precisely for these situations isn't fully operational yet?
Yet in reporting this story on page A3 of today's Washington Post, the paper gave readers a bland headline and subheaders to sell readers on the story:
Monday's Washington Post runs one of those Leak Stories at the top of the front page, and the obvious question of Leak Stories is: Who benefits? Today's report by Spencer Hsu is clearly intended to absolve the Obama White House staff for the state-dinner fiasco with the Salahis: