Time’s Belinda Luscombe offered a somewhat tough “10 Questions” with the rapper Ice Cube for the June 23 issue. She asked how he could rap about being poor – “I’m squeezing the penny so hard a booger came out of Lincoln’s nose” – when he is very wealthy. She asked how much his young kids curse after listening to his music.

But the most interesting part was asking him how the Obama presidency is going. “Mr. Cube,” as she called him, was still totally down with Obama, and busting on whites not wanting to “play” with him in Washington:

As the circulation of weekly newsmagazines continues to decline, their editors and staffs hope to draw in new readers -- as well as the people they've lost over the past few decades -- with covers that focus on controversial topics.

The latest example of this ploy is the new issue of Time magazine, which depicts transgender African-American actress and “sexual diversity advocate” Laverne Cox on its cover next to the title “The Transgender Tipping Point: America's Next Civil Rights Frontier.”

Over at what's left of Time Magazine's Time.com, Jon Friedman claims that Hall of Fame baseball player Hank Aaron "Would Have Faced Worse Racism Today" than he did in 1973 and 1974 as he edged ever closer to and then broke Babe Ruth's once thought unapproachable career record of 714 home runs. There is no doubt that Aaron faced significant adversity as he neared that record. In that pre-Internet, pre-social media era, he got his death threats the old fashioned way: via snail mail. The Lords of Baseball are said to have employed extra plainclothes security details behind home plate at Atlanta Braves home and away games in 1973.

If Friedman had written that anonymous death threats can be more easily deliverable these days, he might have had a point. But he didn't go there, instead writing as if it's an indisputable fact that "The home-run king is lucky he didn't have to contend with the ubiquitous bigots and haters on today's social media." If that were so obvious, you would think the the Time writer would have come up with better "proof" than the completely irrelevant examples he cited (HT Hot Air Headlines):

The national press devoted a great deal of attention to gun registration in Connecticut at the end of 2013. The Associated Press's Susan Haigh had a December 29 story which was picked up by, among many others, PBS, CBS's New York City affiliate, the Huffington Post, and the UK Guardian. Time.com was also on the story.

That attention makes the press's virtual inattention outside of the Nutmeg State itself to what has since been learned all the more difficult to justify. It turns out that there are now three types of so-called "assault weapon" owners in Connecticut: those who registered by the deadline, those whose registrations came in after the deadline, and those who defied the state's registration demand. As J.D. Tuccille at Reason.com reported on Tuesday, the second group is on track to having their guns confiscated, and the number of people in the third group dwarfs those in the first two — a situation which has greatly upset the political establishment, particularly the editorial board at the state's largest newspaper (HT Instapundit; bolds are mine):

In perhaps the most nauseating way to put a positive light on the poor ObamaCare enrollment numbers, Time’s Kate Pickert claimed that a “huge surge in Obamacare enrollment” occurred at the close of last year. In what could have been described as an Obama press release, the Time “Swampland” blog spun so hard for the president’s health care law, Press Secretary Jay Carney couldn't do any better. 

Pickert began her “article” by cheering on the Obama administration, proclaiming that “As federal officials predicted, the flood of Americans trying to sign up for health insurance by the end of 2013 ended in a tidal wave.”