TVNewser's Mark Joyella spotlighted in a Wednesday post how MSNBC managing editor Ilyas Kirmanireacted with disgust to the reelection of the Sunshine State's attorney general, Republican Pam Bondi. Kirmani posted the word, "Gross," on a Facebook thread started by Miguel Fernandez, an executive producer at CBS's Miami affiliate, WFOR.
Regional Media
By Tom Blumer | November 2, 2014 | 11:52 PM EST
Doug Schorpp at the Quad City Times had a really bad day yesterday. The sad thing is that he still probably doesn't even know it.
His report (HT Gateway Pundit) on Michelle Obama's visit to Moline, Illinois had two whoppers. One of them was spoken by Mrs. Obama, while the other error was completely unforced. They have been present at the paper's web site since Saturday at 6 p.m., humiliating everyone associated with that publication.
By Tom Blumer | October 29, 2014 | 11:17 PM EDT
M.D. Kittle at Watchdog.org's Wisconsin Reporter scooped everyone covering the Badger State Governor's race on Tuesday when he reported that Democratic candidate Mary Burke's resumé is not what her campaign's web site says it is.
Burke's campaign bio claims that she "played a central role in Trek’s expansion as the Director of European Operations." Kittle found "multiple former Trek executives" who told him that, in Kittle's words, she "was fired by her own family following steep overseas financial losses and plummeting morale among Burke’s European sales staff." The real question to me is why it took until a week before Election Day to learn this.
Press Was All Over GOP Gov. Candidate's 'Sweetheart' Comment in Sept., Ignores Dem's Nikki Haley 'Whore' Comment
By Tom Blumer | October 27, 2014 | 8:45 PM EDT In late September, Charlie Baker, the Republican who is the party's gubernatorial candidate in Massachusetts, told female reporter Sharman Sacchetti, who had already asked him a series of questions: "OK, this is going to be the last one, sweetheart."
That was enough to send the press into a tizzy. Jack Coleman at NewsBusters noted how Rachel Maddow at MSNBC turned Baker's statement into proof that the GOP is engaged in a "war on women," even though Baker quickly apologized directly to the reporter and indicated that, as paraphrased by the Associated Press, "the comment was a mistake and doesn't represent his work attitudes." This would be the same Associated Press which has, based on searches, not had a single national or local story on South Carolina Democratic gubernatorial candidate Vincent Sheheen calling incumbent Republicn Nikki Haley a "whore" — even though Sheheen waited four days to (insincerely, in my view) apologize.
Arizona's Democratic Party Candidate For Governor: 14 Year-Old Shouldn't Need Parental Consent to Abort
By Tom Blumer | October 19, 2014 | 11:16 PM EDT To the relief of sex offenders throughout the state, Arizona Democratic gubernatorial candidate Fred DuVal, during a Tuesday forum at Redemption Church in Gilbert, said that, in the words of an unbylined Washington Free Beacon story, "he is opposed to mandating parental consent for a girl as young as 14 years old to get an abortion."
This is a non-story in the establishment press, which made it a mission to take out two GOP U.S. Senate candidates two years ago over abortion-related remarks with far less real-world impact. Based on a search on "DuVal parental consent" (not in quotes) at the Arizona Republic, the paper hasn't done a story specifically noting DuVal's outrageous position — even though it did manage to notice that DuVal, like Ed FitzGerald, the Democrat who is running for Governor in Ohio, has been known to drive without a valid driver's license, though far less often or brazenly.
By Tom Blumer | October 12, 2014 | 6:06 PM EDT
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey's told Marth Raddatz on ABC's "This Week" that ISIS fighters got to within 16 miles of Baghdad's airport in Iraq earlier this week. Framing that distance in a way those in the nation's out of touch Beltway political class will understand, that's the driving distance from the U.S. Capitol Building to Tysons Corner Mall in Northern Virginia. The U.S. had to call in Apache helicopters to prevent Iraqi forces from being overrun.
ABC's Benjamin Bell, in preparing his 12:50 p.m. report on the Dempsey interview, saved that startling piece of information for his fourth paragraph and kept it out of his headline. It's almost as if he was hoping that no one will want to watch the report's accompanying video, which is nowhere near as blasé about that news.
By Tom Blumer | October 12, 2014 | 1:41 PM EDT
Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis's "wheelchair" ad, her latest and most despicable attempt to smear her Republican opponent, Attorney General Greg Abbott, got favorable reviews in a Friday evening column by Jonathan Tilove at the Austin American-Statesman.
Tilove, the Statesman's chief political writer, wrote that the ad provoked "debate about whether it was an act of unseemly desperation or daring inspiration," and asserted that it "breathed new life" into Davis's flagging campaign. Cheerlead much, Jonathan? As seen in the excerpts which follow, Tilove also found a prominent University of Texas at Austin prof who characterized the Davis ad as "ballsy" (bolds and numbered tags are mine):
By Tom Blumer | September 29, 2014 | 3:07 PM EDT
Democratic State Representative Christina Ayala has been arrested and charged with 19 felony charges of voter fraud. Eight of the counts are for fraudulent voting. Other Ayala family members are under investigation, and criminal charges have been recommended but not made against one of them.
The press is letting Connecticut's Secretary of State claim that the Ayala prosecution proves that the Nutmeg State's elections system works, even though the charges go back to elections held as far back as five years. Why are we supposed to be impressed?
By Tom Blumer | September 29, 2014 | 10:16 AM EDT
As I noted Sunday evening, Fox News's Megyn Kelly, on her Friday show, characterized the beheading of Colleen Hufford at the hands of Alton Nolen, if true, as "the first American beheading on American soil reportedly in the name of jihad."
It turns out that someone allegedly tried to beat Nolen out for that distinction, and failed. Take a look at what the Oklahoman's Nolan Clay described as a "bizarre coincidence" in a Friday report (HT Ed Driscoll; excerpted nearly in full because of the story's importance and the paper's subscription wall; bolds and numbered tags are mine):
By Tom Blumer | September 27, 2014 | 9:31 AM EDT
The establishment press, and now apparently the FBI, have a problem on their hands: an alleged killer who converted to Islam; expressed sentiments favored by terrorists; killed a woman by employing terrorists' favored method, i.e., beheading; shouted Islamic slogans while carrying out his evil deed; and was trying to kill someone else when another armed person shot and wounded him.
Their problem is that political correctness demands that they try to convince the public that Alton Nolen's deeds weren't linked to terrorism, and that they weren't even terrorist in nature.
By Tom Blumer | September 26, 2014 | 11:30 PM EDT
Debbie has been caught doing it again.
Early this month, Democratic National Committe Chairmwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz went after Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, claiming that he "has given women the back of his hand," and that "Republican tea party extremists like Scott Walker are ... grabbing us by the hair and pulling us back." I wrote at the time that Wasserman-Schultz's supposed "walkback" was not genuine. The Washington Free Beacon has corroborated that suspicion, reporting, with video support seen after the jump, that the Badger State incident was not the first time she used the language of domestic violence to smear a Republican officeholder:
By Tom Blumer | September 22, 2014 | 7:08 PM EDT
Politico's Kenneth Vogel and Byron Tau filed a long Friday article moaning about how influential opposition research has become in the conduct of this year's political campaigns. My takeaway is that they really don't like it this time around — not because the money involved has increased, and not because supposedly lax campaign-finance laws have accommodated this increase. No, they're really upset because, according to Joe Pounder, a cofounder of the conservative American Rising, "so far, at least — Democrats had endured more such hits than Republicans."
So I guess the next step for the Politico pair inevitably had to be to minimize the importance of hits against Democrats. Here's their one-sentence evaluation of one of them: "[S]maller scoops have proliferated as well — an Ohio gubernatorial candidate caught driving without a license, for example." You've got to be kidding.