The world's smallest violin this week goes to Politico labor reporter Mike Elk.
Elk, who has bragged about unionizing workplaces where he has previously toiled, is working on doing the same thing at the alleged news site, which is really a Democratic Party stenography machine posing as one. His major complaint, seen in an item by Erik Wemple at his Washington Post blog, follows the jump (bolds are mine):
Democrat Big Brother has gotten so bold that he is now following reporters into the bathroom. Politico reports on how staffers at a Democrat retreat in Philadelphia attempted to keep such a tight lid on reporters that they followed them into the final realm of privacy.
Noah Rothman at Hot Air called out Politico for badly mangling remarks by potential presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. On Wednesay morning, they tweeted out this attention-grabbing headline: "Mike Huckabee complains of 'trashy' women at Fox News." But he said no such thing in an interview with Des Moines radio host Jan Mickelson.
It would seem that the conversation at Politico went something like this: "Hey, we need to hit the Obama administration for the havoc its policies have wreaked on the middle class. But we can't go after them too hard, because that might burn some bridges, and we'll lose our stenographer — er, journalistic — access. So we need to use someone sympathetic to Democrats who will know how not to go over the line."
They chose contributing editor Zachary Karabell, who during most of his writeup did a presentable job of being not too critical while posing as an objective observer — that is, until his final four paragraphs.
Well, they're nothing if not consistent.
When the Obama administration lost a court ruling against its ban on Gulf of Mexico drilling after the BP oil spill, it simply issued another ban. When it lost at the Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby case, it just issued a new rule which hardly differed from the one the Court nullified. Now, when it becomes clear that the administration won't get the nominee it wants, the strategy is to hire him or her anyway as a "counselor." Ben White at the Politico didn't address substantive objections to this latest tactic until the final four paragraphs of his 22-paragraph report (bolds are mine):
In an item time-stamped 4:11 p.m. ET at his "On Media" blog at the Politico, Dylan Byers wrapped up a post primarily about the Associated Press removing its "Piss Christ" photo from its image library by claiming, in reference to the Charlie Hebdo Magazine murders in Paris, that "Though there (sic) identity is as yet unknown, the masked gunmen are believed to be Islamic terrorists."
Here's most of Byers' post about the outrageous hypocrisy at AP, which shortly affter the massacre had publicly announced that it would not show any Charlie Hebdo Islamic cartoon images:
Politico published a story stating as a "fact" that Steve Scalise spoke at a white supremacist event in 2002. However, this "fact" only stands up if the real facts are ignored which is what Politico shamefully did.
Chris Megerian at the Los Angeles Times, in a report first published online on Tuesday, had a difficult time trying to downplay the fact that Democrat and leftist mega-donors outspent their Republican and conservative couterparts by an overwhelming margin during the past election cycle.
But Megerian made the best of it, giving readers the impression that David Koch, of the supposedly evil Koch brothers, was the fourth-largest such donor. Times editors did their part to keep the news as quiet as possible by publishing the obviously national story in the California secion of its Wednesday print edition.
The old saying — "To err is human, but to really screw things up, you need a computer" — needs an update. In this case, it's "To err is human, but to wreck an entire industry, you need to have the federal government try to force it to computerize."
I'm referring to the government's attempt to coerce doctors into using its mandated, "clunky, time-sucking" electronic health records system. Somehow, it's barely news, with a story by Politico Magazine's Arthur Allen constituting a rare exception, that over a quarter-million doctors, i.e., half of all who are eligible, face fines next year for "failing to use the systems in the way the government required."
Former Time magazine correspondent Michael Grunwald tried going for the sunniest kind of optimism in a Politico Magazine article headlined "Everything Is Awesome! Well, not everything. But America’s looking much better than you think." Grunwald declared that people who voted in the Republicans over economic fears were simply wrong.
President Barack Obama, soon to be former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, former Congressman Barney Frank, and many other prominent Democrats and leftists have over the past several years declared that their ultimate goal is turn the U.S. healthcare system into a "single-payer," i.e., completely government-controlled, enterprise.
That likely explains why the reaction to Vermont's abandonment of its attempt to set up single-payer has been quite muted in the establishment press, as many of its members have ardently supported the idea for decades.
Just how liberal is fake conservative Stephen Colbert? Politico’s Hadas Gold reports the Democrats are raising money off his retirement from Comedy Central.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is asking people to sign a 'Thank you' card. "After nine great years, the Colbert Report is going off the air," the email reads. "Thank you Stephen Colbert for an amazing ride!"