Culture/Society

William Boot at The Daily Beast reported that before all the hacking and bomb threats, Sony CEO Michael Leynton showed a rough cut of their movie “The Interview” to U.S. officials before completing it. The State Department apparently agreed that the movie could help put an end to Kim Jong Un's reign over North Korea.

Former Islamist Maajid Nawas warned Westerners on Monday's Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN about the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Sydney, Australia. Nawas underlined that it was a "mistake" to label perpetrator Man Haron Monis a "lone wolf," as it "doesn't necessary describe the phenomenon correctly....what we're really dealing with here is fundamental inspiration. People are inspired by the…

Americans are currently faced with some hard questions: “How do we respond to Islamic terror?” “What do we think about the CIA ‘torture’ report?” “What can we make out of the Eric Garner case?” And of course, “Should pets be Americans too?” That last one “may sound crazy” until you’ve gone for a spin in the Voxplainmobile with Zach Beauchamp. Vox, of course, is the site where self-regarding…

On CNN's Reliable Sources on Sunday, University of Virginia student Alex Pinkleton revealed how Rolling Stone's Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who wrote the disputed Rolling Stone story on alleged rape at the college, acted more like an "advocate" than a reporter as she interviewed people for the article. Pinkleton, a friend of the woman who made the rape accusation, asserted that Erdely "did have an…

Thank Gaia for the ever-vigilant ACLU! Who else would have discerned the dire threat to civil liberty lurking in a California school’s effort to raise money for starving children in Africa?  A middle school in San Marcos, Cal., partnered with a local charity, Friends and Family Community Connection (FFCC), to raise money to send meals to children in Tanzania – innocent enough, right? Wrong. It…

One of the more amusing aspects of observing today's left-biased establishment media environment is seeing agenda-driven journalists directly or indirectly convey a clearly inflated sense of their outlets' self-importance. A recent example of this came Friday from Jacob Silverman at Politico Magazine. In his writeup on conservative firebrand Charles Johnson, Silverman employed the comparative…

If you were on Capitol Hill midday Thursday you probably saw something unusual; a donkey, two camels and a procession of people dressed in Biblical attire. The religious liberty advocacy group Faith and Action hosted their annual Christmas event in D.C. and N.Y.C. where actors and animals portray the Biblical figures of the original Christmas story. The N.Y.C. nativity scene was reported on by…

CBS Evening News's liberal bias was blatant on Friday, as their "young adults" panel discussing the issue of "the excessive use of force by police – especially against minorities" was made up entirely of people who have participated in the protests decrying the grand jury decisions in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases. Correspondent Elaine Quijano asked, "How many of you have been involved…

Friday's CBS This Morning and NBC's Today both spotlighted the walk-out protest on Thursday of a group of congressional staffers, who gave the "hands up, don't shoot" gesture of the groups protesting the grand jury's decision in the Michael Brown case. NBC's Tamron Hall trumpeted the "powerful statement without words" on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. CBS's Jeff Glor noted that the participants "…

Are one in five undergrad college-age women raped in the USA, as feminists, the media and even the White House says? Not so much.  A new report, ironically from the White House’s own Department of Justice, reveals that number is significantly lower than the media and the administration had reported previously. 

Carol Costello, who got a kick out of the assault on Bristol Palin, lamented on Thursday's CNN Newsroom that "the national conversation surrounding sexual assault on campus has taken kind of an ugly turn. It's become this he-said, she-said politically-tinged fight." Costello cited the attention on Lena Dunham's rape claim in her memoir as an example. The anchor also spotlighted how conservative…

St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Nick Pistor has quite an odd take on Dorian Johnson, the closest eyewitness to the killing of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson in early August. The occasion enabling Pistor to publicly purvey his perception was news on Monday that Johnson had taken a job with the City of St. Louis. Before getting to those details, let's look at…

Every December, the people at TIME magazine choose the “Person of the Year,” who is described as “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year.” Two of the candidates for the 2014 honor were: the Ferguson, Missouri, protesters, “who took to the streets ... following the fatal shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-…