By Tom Johnson | December 28, 2015 | 10:06 PM EST

In his new documentary, Where to Invade Next, Michael Moore jaunts around Europe showcasing what he deems enlightened social and economic policies, including Italy’s lengthy paid vacations, Norway’s treatment of prison inmates, and France’s school-lunch program. New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden observed that Moore’s “examples…are cherry-picked to make American audiences feel envious and guilty.”

On Monday, Salon ran an interview with Moore in which he talked about the movie as well as the U.S. presidential campaign. One of his comments: "I also think it’s a little gauche for Americans to point out to anybody in the world what their problems are at this point…I think we need a little time in the timeout room, you know what I’m saying? A little chill-down from running around the world: ‘You need democracy! Now you need democracy!’”

By Tom Johnson | December 26, 2015 | 12:12 AM EST

Bill Scher runs a website called Liberal Oasis, which makes it unsurprising that his Monday RealClearPolitics column celebrated President Obama’s avoidance (so far) of the “second-term curse” that supposedly afflicted George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and some of their predecessors in the White House.

Scher exults that Obama “has not been knocked off course by scandal” and lauds him for “master[ing] the art of scandal management, while his Republican opponents lost credibility by transparently politicizing every investigation…Instead of following the facts before drawing conclusions, [Republicans] proclaim the worst—and then fail to prove their allegations. That’s why the pursuits of wrongdoing in Fast and Furious, Solyndra, the IRS audits and Benghazi have all fizzled.”

By Tom Johnson | December 24, 2015 | 11:16 AM EST

By the late summer of 1977, Jimmy Carter had been president for only a few months, but if you knew which way the cultural and political winds were blowing, he seemed unlikely to win a second term. That’s because on May 25 of that year, Star Wars had opened, and its colossal success both foreshadowed and helped to revive a mindset that carried Ronald Reagan to the White House. That’s the word from Perlstein, who laid out his theory last Friday in The Washington Spectator.

By Tim Graham | December 21, 2015 | 1:51 PM EST

While The New York Times Book Review ignores books by conservatives from David Limbaugh to Mark Levin, they analyze conservatism by going to Sam Tanenhaus, who edited the Book Review from 2004 to 2013. One small problem: He wrote a book issued in 2009 predicting The Death of Conservatism. Tanenhaus proclaimed today's conservative movement was like "the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology." So how wise does he look?     

On Sunday, Tanenhaus reviewed two obscure books from the Left purporting to explain the origins of today’s conservatism. First, there was the book Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy by Edward H. Miller.

By Jeffrey Lord | December 19, 2015 | 3:55 PM EST

Amazing. Just amazing. The Washington Post Editorial Board has put out this editorial titled: "For Republicans, bigotry is the new normal." The editorial is an assault on, well, just about everybody in GOP-land. But just a few years ago, the Post rhapsodized over Franklin Roosevelt, with no admission of how bigotry was very normal for the Democrats of his time, and racial resentment still works for them.

By Tom Johnson | December 18, 2015 | 11:02 AM EST

Starting with the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, several mass shootings have brought about considerable debate regarding restrictions on access to firearms for the mentally ill. D.R. Tucker argued last Sunday that denying guns to “deranged individuals” should have been a special cause for conservatives long before -- specifically, since March 1981, when John Hinckley tried to assassinate President Reagan.

“You’d figure that the folks who worship Reagan like he’s a second Jesus would have been so shocked by the attempted murder of their hero that they would join progressives in calling for comprehensive gun reform, to make sure no deranged person could ever do something like this again,” wrote Tucker. “Of course, you’d figure wrong.”

By Tom Johnson | December 14, 2015 | 5:25 PM EST

Several weeks ago, there was an Internet meme about whether it would have been ethical to kill the infant Adolf Hitler. Michael Tomasky poses a (somewhat) less-weighty back-in-time question: Could the Republican party’s current Donald Trump problem have been avoided?

Tomasky suggests that it could have been, but instead, during Bill Clinton’s first term in the White House, GOPers “played footsie with the then-burgeoning far-right militia movements in the run-up to the [Oklahoma City] bombing…Fringe elements never properly denounced then are now, under Trump, becoming an in-broad-daylight part of the Republican coalition.” In part because of that long-ago malignant neglect, Tomasky argues, “The Republican Party of Trump is becoming a white-identity party, like the far-right parties of Europe."

By Dylan Gwinn | December 9, 2015 | 10:34 PM EST

The irony of a show based on sex appeal, damsels in distress, and sorority girls as the showcase for something called the “New, New Feminism” is beyond rich. But after watching an entire season of the bizarre collegiate horror series, that kind of irony is par for the course. Though, Tuesday night’s season finale dealt with more than just feminism.

By Tim Graham | November 27, 2015 | 2:46 PM EST

The New York Times has now editorialized that Woodrow Wilson had a "toxic legacy" as an "unapologetic racist" that the Left on the Princeton campus was right to repudiate.

James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal had a little fun with the same newspaper's endorsement in 1912, calling Toxic Woodrow "a man of high equipment for the office, worthy of the full confidence of the people.”

a man of high equipment for the office, worthy of the full confidence of the people.”

By Michael McKinney | November 25, 2015 | 1:10 PM EST

Tuesday Night on The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly and Bernie Goldberg discussed the ‘morality play’ created by NBC's Harry Smith on the Syrian refugee crisis, complete with Bible verses, as was previously documented on NewsBusters. Smith had tried to compare the Japanese internment with the refugee crisis. Bernie set fire to the idea when he said, “He [President Roosevelt] only interned Japanese Americans, and let's emphasize they were Americans, because they weren't white."

By Dylan Gwinn | November 24, 2015 | 9:50 AM EST

Fox’s Minority Report has lost its collective mind. On Monday night, in an episode called “Memento Mori,” MR attempted to blame the Church for thousands of years of scientific and medical darkness.

By Brent Baker | November 16, 2015 | 8:08 PM EST

Previewing last Monday’s episode of FX’s Fargo, set in 1979, I highlighted a promotional clip in which a man declared “I’m not shaking” Ronald Reagan’s hand because Reagan “made a movie with a monkey. It wouldn’t be dignified.” In fact, the November 9 episode presented Reagan as a charismatic figure whose “shining city on a hill” speech, at a campaign stop in Minnesota, moved the man to tears. And, when Reagan later approached the man, he eagerly shook Reagan’s hand.