Crime

Chris Cuomo says there's no proof Mutallab will talk less as a lawyered-up criminal defendant than as an enemy combatant.  Suggestions to the contrary are just politics. George Stephanopolous manifests the same problem his old boss did: he doesn't know what the meaning of "is," is.  Steph claims Mutallab "is" singing.  But reports are that the would-be mass-murderer was singing—but isn't any more…

Sometimes being such fans of President Obama makes liberal media types tie themselves into knots.  As I documented earlier today, the New York Times went to great lengths to insist America's rising debt is not the administration's fault.MSNBC ranter Keith Olbermann decided to try his hand at the absurd apologetics Tuesday by concocting a wild vision of intelligence officials who care nothing…

Criminally-challenged Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon (D) today announced her resignation from office effective February 4. Nowhere in their 9-paragraph breaking news article filed at 3:44 p.m. EST today did Baltimore Sun reporters Liz F. Kay and Liz Bowie note Dixon is a Democrat, even though her party has a monopoly on the city's elected officials and has for decades. Dixon, you may recall, was…

Bill Kristol has set forth a stinging indictment of the Obama admin's handling of the war on terror. His two-minute monologue on today's Fox News Sunday delineated a devastating bill of particulars:It was a mistake to treat Abdul Mutallab as a criminal defendant rather than as an enemy combatant: "Mr. Brennan [Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser who appeared earlier] said to you that we're very…

Quite the culture war on Morning Joe today . . . The combatants were Pat Buchanan and Spencer Ackerman of the lefty Washington Independent. The topic was the treatment of Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab.  Buchanan wanted the budding terrorist classified as an enemy combatant in order to extract the maximum amount of information from him. Ackerman, in ACLU mode, favored having young Umar tried in…

On Thursday, the Treasury Department issued a press release, called "Update on Status of Support for Housing Programs." Its fourth paragraph reads as follows: At the time the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) placed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into conservatorship in September 2008, Treasury established Preferred Stock Purchase Agreements (PSPAs) to ensure that each firm maintained a positive…

It has been interesting watching the Associated Press reports on the attempted takedown of Flight 253 devolve in the past 12-plus hours. In its 8:56 a.m. report (likely dynamic and subject to change), it looks like the assemblage of AP writers who worked on the story have succeeded in: As Mark Finkelstein at NewsBusters noted earlier this morning in the case of the New York Times, ridding the…

Here are some examples of Executive Orders issued by President Obama that have received New York Times or Associated Press coverage: NYT, October 29 -- "Obama Order Strengthens Spy Oversight" (the browser window title is "Obama Moves to Roll Back Bush Changes to Intelligence Oversight Board"). NYT, October 2 -- "Obama Prohibits Federal Employees From Texting While Driving for Work." NYT,…

Longtime readers of Associated Press dispatches have long since learned that many of the most important facts of a story -- especially facts that put the government, bureaucrats, and leftists in a bad light -- are often found in its final paragraphs. This is a way for the wire service to boast that it really did report all important facts while usually ensuring that harried broadcasters and other…

Tackling "The Myth That Democrats Are Soft on Crime," Newsweek's Ben Adler took to the magazine's The Gaggle blog to critique New York Times columnist Ross Douthat for his latest column. Adler praised Douthat for saying that conservatives need to "take ownership of prison reform" to "correct the system they helped build" but took strong exception to his suggestion that, even so, Democrats "still…

Managing Editor's Note: The following is a reprint of Michael Moriarty's original December 14 post to Big Hollywood. Moriarty, you may recall, played a prosecutor in the first few seasons of the long-running NBC drama "Law and Order."Well, I think I’ve been fairly calm and forgiving of "Law and Order" for about fifteen years. Living outside of the U.S. has certainly helped in more ways than one.…

After Martha Coakley's win in the Massachusetts Democratic primary virtually assured she would fill the seat of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, Abby Goodnough's fawning profile in the New York Times lauded her for having “made a name for herself prosecuting child abuse cases -- most notably that of Louise Woodward, a British au pair convicted in 1997 of killing a baby boy in her care.”But there was no…

Hollywood liberalism has some strange priorities. During the last couple months, two high-profile criminals have been slated to face justice in American courts. The first drugged and raped a young girl in 1977. The second orchestrated the most deadly attack against American civilians in our nation's history.Decisions to try them in the United States were controversial, but a petition against the…

Well, you can't say they aren't consistent.Two brief AP dispatches from December 2 and December 3 about Michael Toole, a Pennsylvania judge who has agreed to plead guilty to corruption-related charges, fail to mention that Toole has at least been a contributor to the Democratic Party, and appears very likely to have been a party member.This see-no-party treatment parallels local media coverage…