Slate

Liberal Writer: Forgive Weiner, 'Do It For His Wife'
By Matt Vespa | April 14, 2013 | 2:30 PM EDT

Give Anthony Weiner another chance! Slate’s William Saletan fawned over the genius political rehab strategy deployed by former disgraced Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), as he’s mulling whether to run in New York’s mayoral election this year. Saletan’s  April 10 piece, laughably headlined " I'll Be His Weiner Wife, " observed how the recent Weiner expose -- sorry, I mean feature -- in a recent New York Times Magazine “doesn’t look like a strategy. It’s so deeply embedded in the narrative that you can’t see it."

"Weiner has made this a story not about himself, but about his wife and their future together. You have to forgive him because she has forgiven him, and if you hold a grudge against him, she’s the one you’re really punishing," Saletan argued. Cut Weiner out of politics for life and you hurt Huma as well. Heck, you're probably hurting America too! Isn't that patronizing at best and misogynistic at worst?

Slate Features Duck Genitals Scientist Defending Her Study
By Matt Vespa | April 4, 2013 | 2:12 PM EDT

Most Americans would agree that a federal study -- burning through hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars by the way -- on duck penises is not exactly a high priority when we need to get our fiscal house in order. But Patricia Brennan would disagree with you, and she took to the liberal online journal Slate to do so last Tuesday.

Wait, did I mention that Brennan has a vested interest in defending the study of duck dongs? She's a research professor at University of Massachusetts, Amherst receiving federal money for the study?

Aside from insinuating that conservatives "miss the point of basic science" and whining about the “fierce” competition within the scientific community for federal funding, she explained why we should pick up the bill -- sorry I could resist -- for her study:

Slate Seeks to Help Obama Shame Us on Gun Control
By Matt Vespa | March 29, 2013 | 3:43 PM EDT

The liberal website Slate has taken post-Newtown commentary to a new low by tracking the amount of deaths via firearm that have occurred since December. It’s purely an emotional ploy to show how awful America, our right to bear arms, and gun owners really are, and how the perpetuate carnage.  Hence, we must act, and pass ineffectual policies like an assault weapons ban.  What’s odd is that this interactive map was posted yesterday, when President Obama testily chastised the country for Congress's failure thus far to enact his anti-gun agenda.  

Furthermore, its seems Chris Kirk and Dan Kois, the two men compiling this butcher’s bill, are lusting for more macabre news, urging readers to help them "draw a more complete picture of gun violence in America" by tweeting "@GunDeaths with a citation" of "gun death[s] in your community" that "[aren't] represented here."

CBS Political Director Now: Obama Shouldn't Agitate GOP; Back in January: 'Go For The Throat,' Mr. President
By Matt Vespa | March 22, 2013 | 1:47 PM EDT

Has Slate’s John Dickerson been replaced with a pod person?  If not, the CBS Political Director is exuding signs of schizophrenia – or sheer forgetfulness. While in January Dickerson counseled the president to "go for the throat" of the Republican Party, in today's piece at the online opinion journal he's calling for Obama to court Republicans on a "grand bargain" to avert the looming debt crisis.

Today, Mr. Dickinson used anecdotes and Sun Tzu axioms to convey the point that Obama should not be such an agitator if he wants a deal to solve our fiscal woes.

Slate Writer: Global Warming Moving Fast, Despite Global Temperatures Remaining Stagnant for Sixteen Years
By Matt Vespa | March 13, 2013 | 6:31 PM EDT

So, Slate’s Bad Astronomy blog posted today that the Earth is warming at an alarming rate.  In fact, it’s rising “faster than it has been in 11,000 years.”  Of course, this is rubbish.  Global temperatures have stagnated for the past sixteen years, and 1936 saw warmer temperatures than 2012.  The blog’s author, Phil Plait, has cited Think Progress and another so-called media watchdog group, which shall not be named, in his posts – so you know it has a left-wing tilt.

Slate Slams Obama On Transparency, Credits Fox News, Wash. Times For Fast and Furious Reporting
By Matt Vespa | March 13, 2013 | 10:11 AM EDT

Some in the media have reported on the Obama administration reneging on its promise to be transparent and open.  The president’s drone policy is a testament to its commitment to secrecy.  The creation of a secret kill list is also another instance where Obama has betrayed a campaign promise to his liberal base.  So, why aren’t watchdog groups vociferously protesting the president’s 180-degree flip on this position?

Paul Thacker wrote on the left-leaning Slate website yesterday that Obama is no different from Bush in stonewalling FOIA requests, and skirting civil liberties – but gets away with it because of his party affiliation:

Slate Brings Back Hitchens To Trash Pope's 'Stench of Evil'
By Bill Donohue | February 13, 2013 | 11:33 AM EST

Christopher Hitchens has been brought back from the dead by Slate, but it won’t do them any good. Yesterday, they republished a hit piece by the atheist from 2010 that was vintage Hitchens: the man was a great polemicist but a third-class scholar. Facts never mattered to him. ("The Pope's entire career has the stench of evil about it.")

Hitchens said the scandal “has only just begun.” Wrong. It began in the mid-60s and ended in the mid-80s. Current reports are almost all about old cases.

On CBS, John Dickerson Defends His 'Destroy the GOP' Column
By Matthew Balan | January 23, 2013 | 1:24 PM EST

On Wednesday's CBS This Morning, John Dickerson stood by his Friday column for Slate where he concluded that President Obama "can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP." Dickerson answered conservative critics of his piece by claiming that he "wasn't trying to give advice. I was trying to highlight, in a very stark way, what seems like an impossible-to-avoid conclusion about this second term."

The liberal CBS News political director also repeated many of the points he made in a follow-up column for Slate on Tuesday [audio clips available here; video below the jump]:

Bozell Column: Obama 'Cements His Legacy'
By Brent Bozell | January 22, 2013 | 10:40 PM EST

Newsweek stopped its print edition at the end of 2012, but they still tried to scandalize the country by producing a fake cover honoring Obama’s second inauguration as “The Second Coming.” This absurd attempt at myth-making is a natural progression. The “cover” story was written by Evan Thomas, who proclaimed on MSNBC a few years ago that Obama was “sort of like God” in being above the gritty political fray.

It was just as absurd when Newsweek writer David Frum, the formerly conservative Bush speechwriter, tweeted this piece of media-elite nonsense: “First term Obama: punchee, 2nd term Obama, puncher.”

CBS Political Director John Dickerson Calls on Obama to 'Declare War on the Republican Party'
By Tom Blumer | January 21, 2013 | 12:06 PM EST

Decades ago, to demonstrate the leftist biases of most establishment press reporters, one needed to study their body of work over time. Many of them didn't make their political beliefs totally obvious until they retired or went elsewhere (e.g., Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw).

These days, we usually don't have to wait too long for reporters' biases to show. Over the weekend at Slate, CBS Political Director John Dickerson, whose leftist advocacy disguised as journalism has been evident for at least nine years, mapped out a strategy for his beloved President Obama, writing a 2,000-word battle plan disguised as a column begging the president to "declare war on the Republican Party'" (Slate's current headline tease on its "Most Popular" list is "Why Obama Should Seek To Destroy the Republican Party"; bolds are mine):

CBS News Political Director: 'Obama Can Only Cement His Legacy If He Destroys the GOP'
By Noel Sheppard | January 19, 2013 | 12:17 PM EST

"The president who came into office speaking in lofty terms about bipartisanship and cooperation can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP. If he wants to transform American politics, he must go for the throat."

So astonishingly wrote CBS News political director John Dickerson at Slate Friday evening in a piece astonishingly titled "Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party."

Imagine That: World Population Projected to Peak in 60 Years
By Tom Blumer | January 12, 2013 | 6:39 PM EST

Paul "The Population Bomb" Ehrlich, call your office. Oh, never mind. You've never cared about the truth anyway, or the fact that your predictions of worldwide calamity have been far off the mark, but you sure have received a lot of attention from the establishment press over the past several decades.

According to Jeff Wise at Slate.com on Wednesday, "researchers at Austria’s International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis foresee the global population maxing out at 9 billion some time around 2070." After that (and before that in certain countries, pretty soon in Japan, much of Europe, Russia, and China,and not all that far away in the U.S.), the problem will be worldwide depopulation. Wise points out why the math points to peak population, and how that reality upsets the usual media reporting apple cart (HT Instapundit; bolds are mine):