Barack Obama wanted 15 minutes of air time on Sunday night, the most heavily watched night of the week, to speak to the nation about the San Bernardino shooting. It was appropriate for the president to request it, and for the networks to grant it, but everyone knew he would say nothing new of substance because on the matter of Islamic terrorism, he never does.
And he didn’t. And in so not doing, he wowed the press again. The stenographers underlined his good intentions.
An editorial in Tuesday’s print edition of Investor’s Business Daily firmly took President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the rest of the Democratic Party to task for their “deadly denial” of radical Islam and the prominent role it’s played in the war on terrorism and terrorist attacks from 9/11 to Fort Hood to Paris.
Add what follows to the long list of items we should be reading about in wire service reports but instead must find in the editorial sections of the nation's two leading business newspapers.
An Islamist organization tied to the Muslim Brotherhood is involved in the screening potential Syrian refugees allegedly receive before being allowed to come to the United States. Investor's Business Daily revealed this information, which is in stark contrast what U.S. government officials are telling the nation, in a Tuesday evening editorial (bolds are mine):
The folks at Investor's Business Daily are more than a little tired of seeing their IBD/TIPP (TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics) polls smeared by establishment press publications and pundits.
No similar torrent of criticism has been directed at other polls which have been horribly inaccurate predictors of actual election outcomes. A large majority of them seriously and oh-so-predictably underestimated support for conservative and center-right candidates and causes in 2014 and 2015.
A story by Seth Borenstein at the Associated Press ("AP ANALYSIS: VW EVASION LIKELY LED TO DOZENS OF DEATHS"), originally published on Saturday but currently carrying a Monday morning time stamp, claimed that "Volkswagen's pollution-control chicanery" has been responsible for "killing between five and 20 people in the United States annually in recent years." Those results, based on an AP "statistical and computer analysis," "cleverly" recast the effort's raw results of "somewhere between 16 and 94 deaths over seven years."
Given how poorly supposedly sacrosanct computer models have done in predicting "global warming" trends, and how gullible journalists, especially Borenstein, have been all these years about them, it seemed quite wise to treat his VW "analysis" with caution. In an op-ed at Investor's Business Daily yesterday, Michael Fumento demonstrated that such skepticism was warranted.
If the establishment press was treating Hillary Clinton's private server/email and other controversies as the genuine scandals and the national security nightmares that they really are, we'd be getting daily or near-daily updates on the latest developments.
It really isn't too much to ask. After all, outlets like the Associated Press frequently capsulized the latest Watergate developments during 1973 and 1974. It is fortunate, since the AP and others traditional hard-news outlets won't do their jobs, that an Investor's Business Daily editorial presented a readily understandable Hillary scandal summary on Wednesday.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency committed an act which would have likely become instant national news if a private entity had done the same thing.
On Friday, John Merline at Investors' Business Daily succinctly noted that the EPA "dumped a million gallons of mine waste into Animas River in Colorado, turning it into what looked like Tang, forcing the sheriff's office to close the river to recreational users." Oh, and it "also failed to warn officials in downstream New Mexico about the spill." Yet here we are four days later, and the story has gotten very little visibility outside of center-right blogs and outlets. That's largely explained by how the wire services have handled the story. After the jump, readers will see headlines and descriptions of the stories which have appeared thus far at the web site of the New York Times:
Though the Associated Press is now basically admitting it, we all knew it. Obamacare's 30-hours-per-week definition of a "full-time employee" for employer health insurance coverage purposes has been responsible for one of the fundamentally negative changes in the American workforce — a noticeable move away from full-time to part-time employment.
In a report with a current Saturday morning time stamp at the AP's national web site which originally went up on Friday, the wire service's Christopher Rugaber and Josh Boak covered the "new normal" in the job market. This writeup will receive yours truly's fuller attention later. But for now, I must note that the pair's report largely abandoned the AP's and the establishment press's years of near denial (bolds are mine throughout this post):
On Thursday night, the major broadcast networks ignored a new development in the IRS scandal that the agency erased 422 backup tapes and in turn destroyed 24,000 e-mails of embattled former official Lois Lerner. With ABC, CBS, and NBC on the sidelines, the Fox News Channel’s Special Report offered a full report on Thursday’s House Oversight Committee hearing concerning the multi-year scandal. Bret Baier informed viewers that there was “new information about thousands more e-mails in the IRS targeting scandal destroyed during the investigation.”
In case you missed it, the City of Baltimore and the State of Maryland have requested disaster relief assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to recover costs incurred during that city's April riots. You read that right.
Yvonne Wenger at the Baltimore Sun predictably buried the lede in her May 26 story's third paragraph, giving uninitiated readers the impression that applying for FEMA assistance after a riot is something that is routinely done. (Perhaps, given the quality of today's journalists, she really believes that herself.) More critically, she forgot to remind readers that the city arguably deserves no help at all from any outside source, because the vast majority of the rioting's damage would have been prevented if Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake had done her job.
On Monday, as has been their habit going back at least to the Clinton administration, Investor's Business Daily's editorialists once again broke a story the establishment press likely could have reported years ago.
IBD revealed that the Obama administration "was secretly negotiating the Taliban Five's release without (Bowe) Bergdahl." IBD reasonably believes that coming up with any reason to get the five out of Guantanamo Bay was important to the administration, as it would set a precedent for releasing others from the facility, and eventually emptying and closing it against the will of the majority of Congress, the U.S. military, intelligence officials, and the American people.
Several conservative economic thinkers including CNBC's Larry Kudlow and media magnate Steve Forbes recently formed the Committee to Unleash American Prosperity in an effort to persuade aspiring presidents to focus on “the paramount challenge facing our country: slow growth and stagnant incomes.”
Three economists in the group explained their goals in a March 3, Investor's Business Daily op-ed.