According to David Roberts, activist conservatives are “bending the political system to their will” not by scoring policy victories but by taking their cues from “fever dreams” (i.e., conspiracy theories).

In a Thursday article, Roberts suggested two reasons why conservatives generally are more inclined than liberals to buy into CTs. One is that for conservatives, not trusting “the political system [is] built into the ideology.” The other is that even though right-wingers are “politically engaged and intense,” their sources of information tend to be, in Roberts’s estimation, unreliable.

For a change, Martin Crutsinger's coverage at the Associated Press of the federal government's November Monthly Treasury Statement wasn't completely full of rose-colored baloney.

Crutsinger managed to note how auto-pilot entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare are bankrupting the country (not in those words, of course). That said, he somehow thought that highlighting a rare and small increase in year-over-year defense spending was worthwhile, while ignoring several other larger percentage increases in other areas. Most importantly, he failed to note that the national debt has increased by far more than Uncle Sam's reported deficits. Excerpts follow the jump (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

In tonight’s episode of 2 Broke Girls, “And the Inside Outside Situation,” their take on a gay bakery boycott has an Obama swipe, a "gender fluid" customer, a Trump hair joke, and, to end it all, the bashing of a family values organization. A little something for everyone!

NPR Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep is a big fan of President Obama, and when he interviews him, he helpfully sets him up. In a recent interview on race relations, Inskeep added little prompts instead of questions. That’s not what Ted Cruz received on Wednesday’s show. Inskeep was blunt when discussing the new Trump idea of banning Muslims from entering America: "Which Muslims do you want to keep out of the United States?"

NPR posted the full transcript online. What that demonstrated was that NPR and Inskeep routinely sliced out (for time and surely, for political convenience) Cruz whacking away at Democrats and explaining what's wrong with Islamism.

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.