Based on a map presented during a recent MSNBC broadcast, I'm left wondring why there's all this hand-wringing over a "two state solution" in the Middle East.
After all, according to that MSNBC map and the host of the program involved, "Palestine" has been around for almost 70 years, existing since 1946 (HT Sooper Mexican at the Right Scoop):
Even conservatives not inclined toward Trump might rally to the Donald's defense after seeing this sneering condescension from the New York Times .
On this evening's With All Due Respect, the Times' Jonathan Martin was asked, after viewing a clip of Ivanka Trump, how her more active involvement would affect the campaign. Responded Martin: "the comments that you heard right there are so stark to me, because they are a departure from the Trump brand that we know. I mean, she sounds like a really sort of poised, smart, capable person." So Donald's flustered, stupid and incompetent, Jonathan?
The last thing the press wants low-information voters to learn is that there has been far more interest in the contest for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination than there has been in the Democrats'.
That disparity has naturally carried over into the size of the audience watching the respective parties' debates. Despite months of buildup to the first left-side debate of the season and relentless hype all week long in the establishment press, last night's Democratic debate drew an audience of only 15.3 million compared to 25 million and 23 million in the first two Republican debates. Naturally, CNNMoney's morning email had no interest in communicating that disappointing (to the left) reality:
No sooner than President Obama jumped the gun (no pun intended) and literally said he was politicizing the mass shooting in Oregon, John Oliver took to his Comedy Central show on Sunday and accused GOP presidential candidates as using mental illness as a “means of steering the conversation away from gun control.”
Poor Gary Legum at Salon.com. How dare supporters of the right to keep and bear arms as clearly defined in the Constitution's Second Amendment push back against the gun control movement's cynical exploitation of Thursday's Roseburg, Oregon massacre?
Legum is outraged that "The right tells us (again) to ignore the elephant in the room." He must mean the fact that the area in question at Umpqua Community College was a "posted" gun-free zone with only unarmed security guards, right? Of course not. Legum is upset over Americans' "irrational attachment ... to weaponry" — so upset that he descended into profanity and name-calling that would likely end his career forever if he were a right-wing commentator.
A few months ago Bruce Jenner shocked the world with his infamous "Call Me Caitlyn" Vanity Fair cover and article. Now on the Keeping Up with the Kardashians episode "Vanity Unfair," we see it from the perspective of the Kardashian girls - and things aren't as rosy as they were made out to be. The family is still adjusting to Jenner's new life and find some of the quotes in the article painful.
In the season finale of Fear the Walking Dead, the U.S military finally decides to cut its losses and leave LA to the undead walkers. And honestly, I can't really blame them. For starters, the finale’s catastrophe is precipitated by the show’s protagonists’ own actions. In their desperate, and selfish, attempts to “save themselves” they release thousands of infected walkers from a nearby coliseum to wreak havoc on the military base and their own neighbors.
Word on the street is that ESPN is planning to lay off "200 to 300" employees in the coming months.
The go-to euphemism surrounding the impending layoffs, according to Variety's Brian Steinberg, is "the changing media landscape," primarily the "cord-cutting" phenomenon. In July, the Big Lead blog, in discussing Keith Olbermann's expected departure from ESPN, explained that "millennials are eschewing expensive cable TV bills and streaming everything online." While that might explain flat viewership or even a modest decline, cord-cutting is only a minor part of the problem. Someone needs to explain why ESPN's ratings have fallen by a stunning 30 percent in the past 12 months.
To Steve Benen, Obamacare is a high-quality dress shirt that Republicans treat like a greasy rag. Benen, a producer for MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, wrote in a Friday post on the TRMS blog that even though “every GOP prediction about the Affordable Care Act has been discredited,” conservatives keep trying to use it to tarnish other measures they oppose, including the Iran nuclear deal.
“If there is a compelling parallel between ‘Obamacare’ and the international nuclear agreement,” contended Benen, “it’s this: Republicans abandoned rational thought in their contempt for the idea, and despite pleas for an alternative solution to an important pressing problem, they offered nothing but slogans and cheap talking points.”
On Megyn Kelly's Fox News show on Wednesday, Andrew Napolitano sharply criticized the city of Baltimore's agreement to pay $6.4 million to the family of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old black man who died in police custody there in April.
The Associated Press and most of the rest of the establishment press are describing the city's payout, which was approved on Thursday, as a "settlement" — an odd and inappropriate term, given that Gray's family had not yet filed a lawsuit, i.e., there was not yet a court case to "settle."
Comedy Central's Larry Wilmore vomited up the oft-used leftist insults of social conservatives on Tuesday's Nightly Show in a rant about Kentucky clerk Kim Davis. Wilmore hinted that her supporters were akin to the Ku Klux Klan, and mocked her Christian prayer gesture as a Nazi salute. The "comedian" later likened Davis to notorious segregationist George Wallace, and hyped that "going to jail for what you believe in does not necessarily put you on par with Martin Luther King. Jeffrey Dahmer was in jail because he believes in eating people."
This is obviously sarcasm: Right behind all the positive racial healing we've seen during Barack Obama's presidency is the vast improvement in the degree of civility heard and seen in leftist discourse.
Obviously, that's not so. Hillary Clinton calls GOP presidential candidates "terrorists" and invokes Nazi-era images of illegal immigrants being "loaded into boxcars." The press — which would treat either utterance as front-page news if said by a Republican or conservative — gives her a pass, and some of its members are virtually cheering her on. Barack Obama calls his opponents "crazies," arguably even including some Democrats on matters on the Iran "deal," aka the "orchestrated surrender to Iran's nuclear ambitions." Former Bill Clinton administration and current Hillary Clinton insider Paul Begala joined the parade today as he attacked Dick Cheney: