In an announcement which deservedly carries far less weight than it has in the past, Time Magazine (1997 circulation, 4.2 million; current circuation, 3.3 million) has named German chancellor Angela Merkel its 2015 Person of the Year.

The stated reason for her selection: "Not once or twice but three times this year there has been reason to wonder whether Europe could continue to exist, not culturally or geographically but as a historic experiment in ambitious statecraft." Time believes that Merkel saved the day each time. It seems highly unlikely that she would have risen to the top of the pack without the third item the magazine's Nancy Gibbs cited, namely Merkel's open-borders acceptance of migrants erroneously described as "refugees" dozens of times in its various supporting articles.

There are plenty of problems with the government's "no-fly list," and especially the plans by some congressmen and senators to abuse it. That said, it appears, almost three years later, to have gotten one name right.

In late 2012 and early 2013, leftists like Chris Hayes at MSNBC, Glenn Greenwald and Kevin Drum at Mother Jones were upset that Saadiq Long, a U.S. Air Force veteran who was living in Qatar, had been put on the no-fly list. After making a stink, Long's name was apparently removed so he could fly into Oklahoma to see his ailing mother, only to see his no-fly listing reinstated so he couldn't leave. He returned to Qatar, but only after taking a bus down to Mexico City and flying from there. End of story? Hardly, as PJ Media's Patrick Poole reports:

Michael Weiss and Justin Miller at the Daily Beast are apparently really proud of themselves. They're claiming that because a passport found on one of the terrorists involved in last Friday's terrorist murder spree was a fake, it "means the (U.S.) governors’ freakout over refugees was based, at least in part, on a lie." Based on their headline ("GOP Guvs Rely on ISIS Lies to Reject Syrian Refugees"), their attack was only directed at Republican governors.

There are at least four problems with their assertion. The funniest one is that these two apparently have no business ever being trusted around a calclulator or a spreadsheet. It's either that, or Weiss and Miller really believe that 475 million Syrian refugess are spreading themselves throughout Europe and much of the rest of the world.

Is the Associated Press playing a numbers game in its reporting on a massacre in Iraq?

Stories about ISIS massacring 300 Yazidi captives have appeared in several places. Leftists and Obama administration's apologists who want to believe that the number involved is just a figment of the imaginations of UK tabloid troublemakers and U.S. right-wing bloggers can't use that copout to explain away a report from their venerable BBC:

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.