Culture/Society

Teasing an upcoming story on Monday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer fretted over "the emotional debate ignited by a Fox News anchor over Santa's true race," referring to FNC host Megyn Kelly saying that Santa Claus is white. Minutes later, news reader Natalie Morales promoted the same segment by proclaiming: "Why St. Nick has suddenly become the most controversial figure of the season." [Listen…

The man whose last controversial movie was "Bully" certainly knows how to behave like one.  Just ask New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, who dared to give a thumbs-down to Hollywood bigwig Harvey Weinstein's latest anti-Catholic attack film, "Philomena," carefully timed for release during the Christmas season. Weinstein took out an full-page color attack ad in The New York Times singling…

Joe Scarborough made a point of mentioning that until today, his MSNBC show hadn't discussed the Obama selfie at the memorial service for Nelson Mandela.  Morning Joe's way too highbrow for that kind of stuff, don't you know, particularly when it might reflect badly on Barack Obama. But when the crew finally got around to it today, opinion from Joe to Mika to Ed Rendell to Thomas Roberts was…

Time magazine's left-leaning reasons for choosing Pope Francis its 2013 Person of the Year were apparent in the cover story written by Howard Chua-Eoan and Elizabeth Dias. Chua-Eoan and Dias trumpeted how supposedly, "in a matter of months, Francis has elevated the healing mission of the church...above the doctrinal police work so important to his recent predecessors." The two later underlined…

On Monday, Terry Mattingly of GetReligion blog revealed a glaring error made by Time magazine in its online poll of readers about who should be their Person of the Year. The magazine had to issue the following correction regarding its one-sentence description of Pope Francis: "An earlier version of this post suggested that Pope Francis rejected some church dogma. He does not." Whoever made…

Saturday, Dec. 14 marks a year since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. In the run-up to that tragic anniversary, Americans can expect to hear demands for gun control from sanctimonious Hollywood stars, just as they did in the wake of the shooting. Their demands were hypocritical then, and they’re even more hypocritical now. The entertainment industry makes huge…

On Friday's CBS This Morning, former Time magazine managing editor Richard Stengel unexpectedly zeroed in on a part of Nelson Mandela's legacy that apparently wasn't sufficiently left wing. Moments after he lionized Mandela as "the George Washington of South Africa", Stengel asserted that "he [Mandela] had not been very progressive about HIV and AIDS when he was president". Veteran 60…

"If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace." -- John Lennon "Black Friday" was a metaphor beyond the merchants' bottom line. Headlines on last Friday's Drudge Report reflect a culture that is being trampled by the greed and me-only attitude of a growing number of us:

In June, libertine-left promoter-slash-reporter Lisa Leff of the Associated Press championed incorrect gender information on driver’s licenses on behalf of the “gender-fluid.” As November ended, Leff was the latest reporter to promote colleges that are dropping archaic pronouns like “he” and “she” for that same cause. The headline on Yahoo was “'Preferred' pronouns gain traction at US…

Real Clear Politics spotted a sentence in President Obama’s remarks at the DreamWorks animation studios in California on Tuesday that would have been a surefire gaffe if it came from a white Republican president -- even someone like George W. Bush, who supported amnesty proposals for illegal aliens. “As I was getting a tour of DreamWorks, I didn't ask, but just looking at faces, I could tell…

On Wednesday's CBS This Morning, Jan Crawford zeroed in how President Obama "has got another fight on his hands" over the Supreme Court case challenging the federal government's controversial ObamaCare abortifacients and contraceptive mandate, just as "his administration is trying to get that website up and running". Crawford pointed out that this "legal battle in the Supreme Court could…

There may be no more painful oxymoron than "feminist comedians." MTV flash-in-the-pan Sarah Silverman and "Daily Show" co-creator Lizz Winstead teamed up in New York City on November 18 for a telethon to fund abortions in Texas via NARAL Pro-Choice America. Think Jerry's kids, except instead of saving the children, the unborn are eliminated. They call that "reproductive justice."

Ed Schultz knows nothing about misdemeanor sentencing guidelines . . . Playing the race card over the arrest and conviction of Republican congressman Trey Radel for cocaine possession, Ed Schultz has claimed there is "no doubt" that an African-American who committed the same crime "would be facing jail time." Really? Radel's crime was a misdemeanor, and he was a first-time offender. It would…

Was someone holding Mika Brzezinski's shoe collection hostage?  Because something obviously forced the Morning Joe host, against her will, to devote two lengthy segments today, totalling more than 2.5 minutes, to the story of scandal-ridden Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. With Joe Scarborough away, Mika was in charge. After airing the second long segment she complained "I can't believe he's still in…