Obamacare will not be fully implemented for another three years, but the Internal Revenue Service is already requesting money for the legion of bureaucrats required to oversee its implementation. The IRS has requested funds for an additional 1,054 employees in 2012 alone, hirings that would cost taxpayers $359 million.
US News
By Alex Fitzsimmons | January 27, 2011 | 1:14 PM EST
As it turns out, mainstream media outlets that lauded President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech as "downright Reaganesque" might be on to something.
While ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC exalted the commander-in-chief, at least one observer charged the Democratic president with crafting a speech that was "tantamount to plagiarism."
In a column on the U.S. News site, presidential scholar Alvin Felzenberg accused Obama of borrowing lines and ideas from other speeches and claiming them as his own.
Ex-NYT’s Steve Roberts: Tea Party ‘Didn’t Win, You Only Won a Couple of Seats,’ No Liberal Media Bias
By Brad Wilmouth | December 27, 2010 | 1:01 PM EST Appearing as a guest on Sunday’s Reliable Sources on CNN, Steve Roberts - who has worked for both the New York Times and U.S. News and World Report - after conceding that the Tea Party movement is important, dismissively asserted that the movement "didn’t win. You only won a couple of seats." Roberts:
I think that they are an important part of the American landscape. Now I don't think they're as important as they think they are. I mean, you had people coming into Washington this week and saying, wait, we won. No, you didn't win. You won a couple of seats, and you got to deal with everybody else.
After host Howard Kurtz wondered "did the media kind of turn on" President Obama and claimed that the media had not spent enough time giving credit to Obama for his recent legislative successes, leading to guest Thomas Frank of Harper’s to bring up complaints against Obama by disaffected liberals, Roberts asserted that there is no liberal media bias:
By Lachlan Markay | September 30, 2010 | 1:33 PM EDT 
As part of its week-long special report on "Big Green," the Washington Examiner's Mark Tapscott wrote a piece detailing the cozy relationship - often brushing right up against unethical - between journalists, policymakers, and environmental advocacy groups.
As part of its week-long special report on "Big Green," the Washington Examiner's Mark Tapscott wrote a piece detailing the cozy relationship - often brushing right up against unethical - between journalists, policymakers, and environmental advocacy groups.The Examiner raises serious ethical concerns regarding a 2003 article in U.S. News and World Report that, according to Tapscott, continues to influence policy concerning the nation's fisheries.
The article, written by reporter Thomas Hayden, warns that "fish stocks are dangerously overexploited" and at risk due to commercial fishing. But nowhere in the article did Hayden disclose that he two of the primary sources for the had recently returned from a Carribean junket funded by a leading organization in the push for stricter environmental regulations, including on commercial fisheries. Nor did he mention that another 11 sources cited in the article received funding from that same organization.
By P.J. Gladnick | August 30, 2010 | 8:11 PM EDT
This is one story that U.S. News & World Report's Washington Whispers might want to keep to a low whisper or risk even more ridicule than what they are already receiving. Paul Bedard, writing in Washington Whispers, quotes Kennedy's biographer and former girlfriend who claim that Ted was really an innocent victim of the Chappaquiddick accident. Here is Kennedy biographer Burton Hersh making the case for Kennedy as merely a lousy driver:
Now, a year after Kennedy died, his lifelong biographer Burton Hersh, armed with fresh interviews with Kennedy's mistress at the time, tells Whispers that the whole July 1969 episode should have been handled as a simple crash, leaving the senator's legacy untainted. "It was a car accident," he says. "Ted was a terrible driver. He never paid much attention to where he was going."
"He took a tremendous blow on the head," says Hersh. In interviews following the crash, Kennedy displayed confusion and amnesia, he says.
By Ken Shepherd | August 11, 2010 | 5:51 PM EDT
Give the guy a break, he deserves it. That was Katie Couric's message a week ago in her Notebook blog entry about President Obama's 49th birthday (emphasis mine):
The job has aged him, as it did his predecessors. Dr. Michael Roizen at the Cleveland Clinic stated constant stress can age the Commander in Chief two years for every one year in office.
So I guess that means he's really turning 50.
President Obama has enough stress to last a lifetime... and as he blows out his birthday candles, war, recession and a giant oil spill won't magically disappear.
But I hope he's able to take a break tonight, forget his troubles and spend time doing something he loves.
But as Paul Bedard of USNews.com noted in an August 11 blog Washington Whispers blog post, Obama has not exactly been lacking in the R&R department:
By Candance Moore | July 14, 2010 | 11:19 PM EDT 
Days after Mort Zuckerman, the Editor-in-Chief of U.S. News and World Report, claimed to be close to President Obama's advisors, the national media have yet to express any interest.
Of the few outlets that mentioned it, the White House's denial was taken as gospel truth, and no more investigation was apparently warranted.
What a difference when the sitting president is a Democrat.
Under the Bush Administration, the media were obsessed with linking the White House to Fox News in an effort to accuse Republicans of spreading propaganda. Yet now that U.S. News is linked to Obama, suddenly such allegations are quickly dimissed.
For a taste of the double standard, observe two different reports from Politico. First is a post on Tuesday concerning Zuckerman:
By Ken Shepherd | June 4, 2010 | 4:22 PM EDT
Nearly two months ago, atheist feminist and PBS "To the Contrary" host Bonnie Erbe insisted that the pro-life movement is essentially a church pew-packing conspiracy:
What is the religious right doing by campaigning against abortion? First and foremost, its efforts seem aimed at trying to keep church pews filled by bringing more and more poor people into the world.
She's still at it. In her June 4 Thomas Jefferson Street blog entry at USNews.com. Erbe lamented the results of a new survey about teens and sex:
By Ken Shepherd | May 20, 2010 | 4:21 PM EDT
"What the hell is wrong you you people?!"
That's essentially what PBS "To the Contrary" host and US News & World Report contributor Bonnie Erbe wrote in her May 19 Thomas Jefferson Street blog post "Congress Handling the Gulf Oil Spill Crisis Better than Most Americans."
"Although the Gulf spill has lowered the percentage of Americans who support offshore oil drilling, a new Pew Forum poll finds a stunning 54 percent still support it," an incredulous Erbe wrote, adding, "So it will take more than a major, irreversible environmental disaster to persuade gas glugging Americans to trade in their pickups for hybrids. I see."
To Erbe, it can't possibly be that average Americans are more even-keeled than their hot-headed, grandstanding congressmen who would capitalize on a disaster for crass political gain. No, it's that oil-addicted American idiots across the fruited plain just aren't following the example of their betters on the Hill:
By P.J. Gladnick | May 8, 2010 | 1:06 PM EDT
It seems that the U.S. News & World Report is in some serious competition with the Associated Press over who can put the most positive spin on April's increase in unemployment. So the unemployment figure rose last month from 9.7% to 9.9%? Great news according to Rick Newman in his U.S. News blog titled, "Why a Rising Unemployment Rate is Good News." And why is it good news? Newman explains...sort of:
It sounds dreadful. After drifting down consistently since last fall, the unemployment rate has suddenly shot up again, from 9.7 percent in March to 9.9 percent in April. But don't despair: A rising unemployment rate is actually one of the best signs yet that the economy is bouncing back.
The unemployment rate rose for the right reason. Instead of shedding jobs, employers added 290,000 jobs in April, the strongest showing since 2007. The reason the unemployment rate went up is that a lot more people are suddenly looking for work. The government said that the labor force swelled by 805,000 people in April. That's more than three times the number of new jobs, so the proportion of people looking for a job but unable to find one went up. Still, that big increase in the labor force marks an important shift in sentiment among people on the fringes of the economy.
By Colleen Raezler | April 27, 2010 | 5:01 PM EDT Usually a man bemoaning the lack of positive role models for girls would receive feminist plaudits, but not from Bonnie Erbe and certainly not when he talks about the need of role models for young women who want a family and a career.
Usually a man bemoaning the lack of positive role models for girls would receive feminist plaudits, but not from Bonnie Erbe and certainly not when he talks about the need of role models for young women who want a family and a career. Daily Beast's Peter Beinart ticked off Erbe, a contributing editor at U.S. News and World Report, when he urged President Barack Obama in his recent column to nominate a mother to the Supreme Court because he thought that it would provide a good role model for women.
Nevermind the fact that Beinart argued his case partly because a woman nominee would help swing the Court further left or that the tenets of feminism teach that a woman can do anything she wants.
Nope, Beinart's opinion "annoys" Erbe and, according to her April 27 blog post, is "also dumb" and "offensive" because motherhood isn't a worthy option in her eyes.
By Ken Shepherd | April 16, 2010 | 12:17 PM EDT
Darn! She's on to us pro-lifers!
PBS "To the Contrary" host Bonnie Erbe has discovered the real eeeevil secret of the pro-life movement, which she unveiled in an April 15 post at the Thomas Jefferson Street blog on USNews.com (emphasis mine):
What is the religious right doing by campaigning against abortion? First and foremost, its efforts seem aimed at trying to keep church pews filled by bringing more and more poor people into the world. Second, it will just end up boosting the teen unwed pregnancy rate every time it guilt trips an unwed, pregnant teen into bringing to term a child she does not want and cannot afford to raise. Third, it will effectively subjugate women and girls in the same way women and girls in developing nations are consigned to a life of child-bearing and little else.
Erbe -- who argued last April that abortion was a good decision to make in a recession -- apparently felt compelled to lay out her conspiracy theory as a response to "Gov. Pawlenty's Offensive 'Abortion Recovery Month.'"