Hillary Clinton is not a weatherman, but she knows, or at least believes, that the wind is blowing in favor of liberalism, according to The Atlantic’s Beinart.
“I watched Hillary Clinton’s presidential announcement video alongside the one she issued in 2007, and the speech she gave declaring her senate candidacy in New York in 2000,” wrote Beinart in a Monday post. “The upshot: America, as seen by Hillary and the people advising her, is a lot further left than it was a decade or two ago.”
Andrea R. Jain bemoaned how a "growing number of individuals and institutions oppose yoga, and actively encourage fear of it" in a Thursday item on Quartz, an online magazine from the parent company of The Atlantic. Despite passing mentions of opposition from evangelical Christians, such as Southern Baptist leader Albert Mohler, the Indiana University-Perdue University Indianapolis professor devoted the bulk of her attention on high-profile "yogaphobia" in the Catholic Church.
Despite decisively winning reelection, NBC Nightly News sustained its badgering and excoriating of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the fourth straight newscast with Thursday’s show including an interview Netanyahu gave to Andrea Mitchell that featured numerous, obnoxious questions, ranging from chastising him for promising that he would be opposed to Palestinian state to wondering “[w]hy President Obama should trust you.” Mitchell made no effort to pin the strain of the U.S-Israel relationship on the President.
Things got chippy on Morning Joe today after Amy Holmes of The Blaze pointed out that President Obama has personalized and publicized his conflict with Benjamin Netanyahu in a way he hasn't done even with despots like Kim Jong Un or the Castro brothers.
When Holmes added that "only Benjamin Netanyahu seems to be the focal point of this president's ire," former Obama spokesman Gibbs called Holmes' statement "the silliest thing I've probably heard in a long time."
Although the usual suspects eagerly slurped up the stale Clinton Kool-Aid as a rather unconvincing signal to the public that all is now well in the wake of Hillary's press conference on the email scandal, other liberal sources less interested in blindly flacking for her are much more skeptical. Among the latter is The Atlantic. The skepticism is evident in the very title of an article by David Graham, Hillary: Just Trust Me on This One.
Bush seems not to share what Ed Kilgore calls the “vengeful rage about the alleged persecution of good conservative Christian folk” and what Peter Beinart describes as “the sense of Christian victimhood and superiority that lurks just below the surface in today’s GOP.”
Anderson Cooper spotlighted The Atlantic's Graeme Wood's thorough article on ISIS on his Wednesday program. Cooper wondered, "President Obama...said we're at war with people who have perverted Islam. The question, though, is: is that really true?" The anchor asked Wood about Mr. Obama's statement, and he gave a blunt reply: "Well, you know, he doesn't really have the authority to say that. I don't think any non-Muslim, really, has the authority to say that, or to convince others that that's the case."
Joe Scarborough says he doesn't want to be "torn to shreds online" for analogizing the threat of radical Christianity to that of radical Islam. Simple solution: stop analogizing the threat of radical Christianity to that of radical Islam.
On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough twice suggested such parallels, analogizing radical Islamists to "ultrafundamentalist Christians who believe every single word of the Bible has to be interpreted in the exact ways which could also lead to some violence." A bit later, Scarborough circled back, saying "it doesn't matter what faith you're in," that a literal reading of scripture attracts the outcasts of society, for better or "for much worse."
With Christmas three days away, one liberal atheist took to the far-left website Salon to dismiss the existence of a “war on Christmas” spotlighted annually by conservatives and news pundits, led by the Fox News Channel’s (FNC) Bill O’Reilly. At the same time, however, the author seemed perfectly fine attacking Christmas himself, claiming that Jesus Christ never existed and wondered if “anyone” would “truly mourn the holiday if we did without it.”
In a piece entitled “Let’s Make Bill O’Reilly’s Head Explode: We Desperately Need a War on Christmas Lies,” Atlantic magazine contributing editor Jeffrey Tayler began by summarizing one of O’Reilly’s latest segments regarding the “war on Christmas” that discussed into a series of billboards being sponsored by the American Atheists.
Appearing on MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports on Monday, Molly Ball of The Atlantic argued that the reason ObamaCare critics were seizing on the comments from Jonathan Gruber was because things were going so well for the law: "...part of the reason this controversy has become such a focal point is that there isn't a lot of other bad news about ObamaCare. The website is operating....The people who have care are pretty happy with it. Most Republicans, even the leadership, admit that they're not going to do a wholesale repeal."
Far be it from me to talk a leftist columnist out of an ignorant, self-satisfied position which might, if anything, cause his fellow travelers to hit the accelerator a little less aggressively in future political campaigns.
At the Atlantic on Monday afternoon, Richard Reeves, policy director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, claimed that the left shouldn't be so glum after Tuesday's election results, because "progressive policies are working." His very first graph makes a mockery of his claim:
Kevin Drum and other pundits take the press to task for misleading Iowa voters by, in Drum's words, pushing a “charade” that Republican Senate contender Joni Ernst is a “pragmatic centrist.”