By Tom Blumer | May 31, 2015 | 8:06 PM EDT

In case you missed it, the City of Baltimore and the State of Maryland have requested disaster relief assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to recover costs incurred during that city's April riots. You read that right.

Yvonne Wenger at the Baltimore Sun predictably buried the lede in her May 26 story's third paragraph, giving uninitiated readers the impression that applying for FEMA assistance after a riot is something that is routinely done. (Perhaps, given the quality of today's journalists, she really believes that herself.) More critically, she forgot to remind readers that the city arguably deserves no help at all from any outside source, because the vast majority of the rioting's damage would have been prevented if Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake had done her job.

By Bryan Ballas | April 13, 2015 | 1:43 PM EDT

While President Obama’s announcement that he would work with the states to ban “conversion therapy” was met with applause from the sexual revolutionaries on the Left, gay MSNBC anchor/activist Thomas Roberts was noticeably irritated on his Thursday afternoon show. He wanted a federal law to ban it across the nation and repeatedly advocated for it in an interview with top White House aide Valerie Jarrett.

Roberts began by recounting what he called the “huge symbolic move out of the White House” in response to a petition that circulated the net, following the suicide of 17-year-old Leelah Alcorn [born Joshua Alcorn].

By Tom Blumer | November 9, 2014 | 11:53 PM EST

The competition for dumbest quote I have been able to find by a leftist tonight just heated up.

Earlier this evening, I noted that Washington Post columnist David Ignatius on Thursday called President Obama "perhaps the least political president in modern U.S. history." One might think that nothing could possibly top that. Actually, I have found two which belong in the running in one long writeup at NewRepublic.com (HT to emailer "Just the Tip HQ") about Obama's chief adviser, Valerie Jarrett.

By Tom Blumer | July 14, 2014 | 4:33 PM EDT

In the early 1970s, the press obsessed about President Nixon's alleged "isolation," especially as the Watergate scandal, which in an objective lookback has to be seen as relative child's play compared to what we're seeing now, unfolded. Proof that Nixon's "isolation" had been a constant media theme in previous months is found in an NBC Nightly News report on May 10, 1973, when a White House staff reorganization was characterized by reporter Richard Valeriani as "Nixon moving to end President('s) isolation."

On Fox News's "The Five" on Friday, Democrat Bob Beckel relayed what he said was an anonymous comment by a person in a position to know about how cut off from external advice President Barack Obama is. It seems arguably creepier than any degree of isolation Nixon may have ever had, for reasons which I will explain below. Let's see what Beckel had to say following co-host Andrea Tantaros's comment that Obama has a "Stepford staff just sort of nodding at whatever he says," and Greg Gutfeld's assertion that Obama "doesn't have anybody in his circle" with the nerve or access to intervene (bolds are mine):

By Cheri Jacobus | July 9, 2014 | 7:35 PM EDT

So just who is in charge in Barack Obama's White House?
 
ABC's Jonathan Karl on Tuesday asked White House press secretary why the letter from the White House to Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) inviting him to a meeting with President Obama regarding the Texas border crisis was from Valerie Jarrett.  While it's routine for staff to draft such letters for elected officials, matters of such magnitude and to other elected officials of stature are almost always in the name of the principle.  The president's spokesman, when asked why the letter was from Jarrett rather than the President, said  "Valerie spends a lot of time maintaining relationships with governors around the country" on behalf of the President. (Video below)

By Jeffrey Meyer | June 29, 2014 | 1:21 PM EDT

NBC’s Cynthia McFadden did what she does best during an interview with Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor to President Obama, lobby for Hillary Clinton to run for president. 

Appearing during a taped interview that aired on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, June 29, McFadden hyped how “There's no question that the person who is poised at this moment to break that ultimate glass ceiling is Hillary Clinton.” [See video below.] 

By Paul Bremmer | May 1, 2014 | 11:48 AM EDT

Kenneth P. Vogel called attention to an important issue in a Wednesday Politico article – namely, the inherent hypocrisy of super-rich liberal donors who give big bucks to a Democratic party that repeatedly slams wealthy conservative donors like the Koch brothers.

Vogel’s article focused on this week’s annual spring meeting in Chicago of the Democracy Alliance, a club of wealthy Democratic donors. The political journalist apparently tried to ask several attendees about the irony of the Democrats’ position on campaign finance, but he was mostly stonewalled. Here's how Vogel opened his April 30 story:

By Mark Finkelstein | April 9, 2014 | 8:06 AM EDT

Looks like the left might be getting some of that old-time religion.  Old-time, as in circa 2007-8, when Barack Obama was being hailed as The One and some sort of messiah.

On today's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski described yesterday's White House equal-pay-for-women event which she attended, sitting next to Valerie Jarrett. Brzezinski said  "it was sort of like a church revival. I'm telling you, every time the president made a comment about why women should be paid equally to men. Equal pay for equal work, talking about the same jobs. You'd hear like "okay." Clapping, and almost like "praise Jesus." It was fun." View the video after the jump.

By Tom Blumer | November 3, 2013 | 9:46 AM EST

Even when it occasionally does credible work, Politifact, the website which pretends to be the ultimate arbiter of the truth or falsehood of claims made by politicians and public figures, continues to beclown itself. On Monday, Matt Hadro at NewsBusters noted the absurdity of Politifact's unchanged "Half True" assessment of President Obama's June 2012 claim — a claim made with minor variations more than 20 times over a four-year period — that "If you're one of the more than 250 million Americans who already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance."

Two days after Matt's post, Politifact rated a Valerie Jarrett tweet — "FACT: Nothing in #Obamacare forces people out of their health plans" — as "False," but made no revision to its "Half True" rating of Obama's core claim.

By Matthew Balan | October 30, 2013 | 4:16 PM EDT

John Dickerson didn't mince words about the "bad launch" of ObamaCare in his Tuesday item for Slate.com. The CBS News political director invoked one of deceased tyrant Kim Jong il's most infamous saber-rattling tactics: "Healthcare.gov launched with the fanfare and success of a North Korean missile."

Dickerson also rephrased his recent contention that "the administration could get into, sort of, a credibility death spiral" on the issue of ObamaCare. He stated that "when the website doesn't work and the promises of 2009 and 2010 are revised, questions of credibility infect everything the administration says. This can lead to a death spiral as administration officials make bold assertions to distract from the current challenges."

By Tom Blumer | October 29, 2013 | 12:43 AM EDT

On Monday, as Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters noted, Lisa Myers and Hannah Rappleye at NBC News reported that the Obama administration knew three years ago that "more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them." This of course directly contradicts President Obama's repeated promises that "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."

I will get to the gambit the administration used to convince people that it wouldn't do what it originally intended to do in the runup to Obamacare's passage, a strategy which may have resulted from objections raised in a July 2009 Investor's Business Daily editorial, later in the post. But first, we have to look at tweets sent out tonight by three Obama administration officials in response to the NBC report, all of which dodge NBC's substantive point that the Obama administration knew policy terminations would occur, and claim that "the ACA" (the Affordable Care Act) is not to blame:

By Matthew Balan | March 4, 2013 | 3:41 PM EST

On Monday, CBS This Morning launched a week-long set of interviews for Women's History Month, but the majority of the women they picked for their list of "Eye Opening Women" are dedicated liberals, particularly on social issues. The morning newscast first conducted a fawning interview of former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who was part of the Supreme Court plurality that upheld the Roe v. Wade decision in 1992's Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Five out of the eight remaining women featured for the series of interviews are all notables on the left side of the political spectrum. On Tuesday, anchors Charlie Rose and Norah O'Donnell will interview The Daily Beast's Tina Brown and Arianna Huffington, founder of far-left website The Huffington Post. Brown has a history of attacking conservatives. During a 2011 appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe program, she likened tax hike opponents to terrorists: