Crime

On Friday morning at Jezebel, a Gawker-affiliated web site, Natasha Vargas-Cooper thought she had Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker by the — well, you know. In a post tellingly tagged "Conservative Werewolves," Vargas-Cooper was absolutely sure — so certain that she apparently felt no need to check any further — that Walker's proposed budget would allow its colleges to "to stop reporting sexual…

A couple of thousand protesters have showed up to rail against the Wisconsin Legislature's move to pass right to work legislation this week. That number is far smaller than what was seen four years ago, when Badger State Governor Scott Walker championed Act 10, a budget repair bill which limited — but please note, contrary to frequent press assertions, did not eliminate — most public-sector…

The Associated Press's headline at Alan Fram's coverage of the controversy over the existence of an Obama administration contingency plan if it loses the Halbig v. Burwell case pending at the Supreme Court may be among the most inchoherent ever: "GOP CLAIMS PAPER SHOWS FED AIDES' PREPS FOR HEALTH LAW LOSS." "Paper"? What is in question is an alleged 100-page contingency plan should the Court…

While it's performing a long overdue housecleaning, MSNBC should point its broom in Melissa Harris-Perry's direction and sweep her off the network for her anti-democratic, violence-advocating rant earlier this week at Cornell University. Among other things, Harris-Perry told her audience that George Zimmerman deserved whatever injuries he received at the hands of Trayvon Martin in the violent…

In an almost completely expected decision, the Department of Justice yesterday announced that it "found insufficient evidence to pursue federal criminal civil rights charges against George Zimmerman for the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin on Feb. 26, 2012." In reporting on the announcement, Jennifer Kay and Eric Tucker at the Associated Press were predictably selective in recounting the details…

Earlier today, Thaddeus Murphy was charged in U.S. District Court in Colorado in connection with an attempted January bombing in Colorado Springs. The targeted building houses that city's chapter of the NAACP, a barber shop — and, apparently at one time, a tax accountant's office. Quite a few people leaped to the conclusion that the bomb had to be meant for the NAACP, even though, as syndicated…

Former New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver was indicted on Thursday on charges of "honest services mail fraud, honest services wire fraud and extortion" involving almost $4 million in alleged bribes and kickbacks. It took Larry Neumeister and Jennifer Peltz at the Associated Press nine paragraphs to tag Silver as a Democrat. It also seems likely, based on this unbylined shorter WGY/AP…

Several outlets have looked over the Facebook posts of Craig Hicks, who was indicted Monday for the February 10 murders of three Muslims in North Carolina. Hicks's alleged murderous motivation appears to have had nothing directly to do with religion, but instead is said to have involved "a dispute over parking spaces at the condo community where Hicks and two of the victims lived." Whether we…

On Friday's NBC Nightly News, Richard Engel zeroed in on an ISIS atrocity that hasn't gotten enough media attention – its sexual enslavement of women from Iraqi minority groups, especially the Yazidis. Engel interviewed two Yazidi women who escaped from their Islamist captors, and spotlighted that "ISIS is reviving the barbaric tradition of the slave trade." He later bluntly added, "There's a…

Democrat John Kitzhaber announced his resignation as Governor of Oregon shortly after 3 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday (noon Pacific Time). By 3 a.m. Eastern time Saturday morning, as seen here, less than 12 hours after the announcement, the Associated Press's "Big Story" page, the collection of current stories the wire service considers especially important, had no stories on Kitzhaber. But there…

Late Friday afternoon, roughly two hours ("shortly after noon" Pacific Time) after the press release announcing Oregon Democratic Governor John Kitzhaber's resignation effective next Wednesday, Philip Bump at the Washington Post's "The Fix" blog tried to explain away the national press's nearly complete failure to cover Kitzhaber's mounting ethical and now potentially criminal problems for nearly…

In a sign that the walls are truly beginning to close in around him, the Associated Press's national site and the New York Times, both of which have largely ignored the growing ethical scandals surrounding Oregon Democratic Governor John Kitzhaber and his fiancee Cylvia Hayes for months, have gotten busy during the past 24 hours. The very belated national attention cannot possibly be helpful to…

The establishment press has obsessed over Republican Governor Chris Christie's non-scandals in New Jersey for 18 months. Anything appearing to be problematic during the past four years for Wisconsin GOP Governor Scott Walker, including a "John Doe" fishing expedition driven by a power-abusing Democratic prosecutor, has been national news. Meanwhile, the press appears to have lost interest in…

On Friday, Joe Nocera at the New York Times, in the words of a February 4 Times correction, premised his op-ed column "about the indictment of the longtime New York State Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver ... on several factual errors." The correction failed to correct yet another factual error, namely that Silver, who was arrested, as the Times itself reported, on January 22, has not yet been…