Congress

Robert Reich must have nightmares about Fox News. Shoot, he must have triple locks on his doors and sleep under his bed out of fear that Roger Ailes will come and take him away. In a Monday column at Salon.com ("Is the President Panicking?"), Reich excoriated President Obama's proposed discretionary spending "freeze" -- a "freeze" that NewsBuster Julia Seymour noted fails to offset the spending…

Immediately following President Obama’s State of the Union address Wednesday night, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos got reaction from Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, who observed: “There were at least three moments where he expressed explicit humility. ‘I’m not – I know that people aren’t sure I can deliver this change. I take my share of the blame for not explaining health care.’”  At the same time,…

When the ACORN scandal broke, the New York Times dragged its feet for six days before issuing a story on the devastating footage from conservative activist and guerilla film-maker James O'Keefe, who caught on video the left-wing housing group giving advice to a "prostitute" and "pimp" on how to shelter illegal income from taxes. But following Tuesday afternoon reports of the Monday arrest of O'…

Previewing the State of the Union on Wednesday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith spoke with former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, who claimed the GOP “made a decision a year ago that they weren’t going to cooperate on anything.” Smith replied: “I don’t think you can say what you just said and look at what happened with health care, especially in the last month, and be honest…

On Monday’s Charlie Rose show on PBS, during a discussion of how the Obama administration might change course after the Democratic party’s loss of the Massachusetts Senate race, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham argued that President Obama has so far pursued “centrist” policies, even claiming that the bailouts could be described as “center right.” After the Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut argued that,…

A publicly-traded corporation, The Washington Post Company (NYSE: WPO) publishes a daily newspaper which includes daily editorials aimed at influencing public opinion inside the corridors of Congress, White House, and regulatory agencies, and ultimately over voter preferences at the polls. What's more, the Post Company's newspaper has demonstrated its willingness to devote virtually limitless…

Newsweek's Jerry Adler often waxes poetic on the magazine's The Gaggle blog in a feature called "newsverse." His most recent entry published yesterday evening deals with Tuesday's historic special election in Massachusetts, where Ted Kennedy's old seat went Republican for the first time in 58 years.But in the midst of his poorly-metered albeit rhymed verse, Adler set about labeling Scott Brown…

Move along folks, nothing to see here.Is that the impression you're getting from some in the media regarding the results of yesterday's special election in Massachusetts? That's definitely the one Newsweek's Daniel Stone wants to leave his readers.From his The Gaggle blog post "Does Most of America Even Care About the Mass. Election?":

A small group of liberal talking heads may be realizing that opposition to Obama is not, in fact, wholly irrational. Though it would be a bit too hasty to proclaim it a trend among the mainstream media, it has been a refreshing break from the smears usually hurled at the right by the nation's pundits. First was Chris Matthews, who stunningly turned right and voiced his concern about an…

I heard Rush reading from a newspaper column during his first hour, but missed the first couple of paragraphs. So I didn't know its origin. Given what I was hearing, I thought that El Rushbo was surely reading the latest from Maureen Dowd at the New York Times. Nope. It turns out that it was written by the Boston Globe's Brian McGrory (pictured at right; original is at this link). McGrory wants…

On Monday’s AC360, CNN’s Jessica Yellin spun the rise of Republican candidate Scott Brown as coming from “folks here in Massachusetts [who] are feeling angry and scared. They’re angry and scared about the economy, about jobs...and especially in this state, about health-care reform....[Brown] has tapped into that fear and sold himself essentially as a man of the people who will fight big…

The special election in Massachusetts is sure to be a close one. Should Republican Scott Brown prevail, however, the liberal media will have a host of ways to explain away the election as an anomaly and by no means a referendum on either the president or his legislative accomplishments (or lack thereof).Perhaps one of the most absurd instances of this thinking came on last night's "O'Reilly…

The Federal Reserve of Minneapolis has posted a series of charts (HT Ed Morrissey at Hot Air) comparing the current recession -- as defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research, not as normal people define it, a point I'll get to later in this post -- to previous recessions dating back to the end of World War II. The charts definitely show how utterly wrong reporters like the Associated…