Double Standards

On Tuesday morning at 8:30 a.m. ET, the Commerce Department reported that seasonally adjusted U.S. retail sales in April rose by 0.1%. In an 11:12 a.m. report via the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, carried at the Detroit News ("U.S. consumers hold back retail sales, even as gas prices fall"), Martin Crutsinger was appropriately not impressed: "Lower gas prices in April weren'…

As an ever-shrinking number of newspaper readers can attest, most major U.S. papers skew liberal. But its not every day the head of a union representing journalists lays out a list of goals that might have been written by MoveOn.org, and displays a contempt for democracy more at home on the editorial pages of state-run organs in third-world dictatorships. But there was Larry Cohen, AFL-CIO…

In which the NY Times reveals itself, yet again, to be a simple, partisan rag... In 2005, the Republicans in the United States Senate were frustrated by the Democrats' use of the filibuster to thwart Presidential nominations to the Federal judiciary, and were particularly concerned with the threat of a filibuster on Supreme Court nominees, which had never previously happened. Because of this…

James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal reports that Newsweek's Paul Begala, the perennially trash-talking Clinton political operative, "has a tiresome paean to Dick Lugar, the defeated GOP senator who felt his opponent wouldn’t do enough to reach across the aisle." If this man didn't have double standards, he would have no standards at all. This is the same Begala that wrote in January 2010…

Here we go again. The State of California's budget is again in crisis, facing a budget deficit of $16 billion, which is $6.8 billion higher than projected mere months ago. Governor Jerry Brown is browbeating residents to pass tax initiatives in November which include "a quarter-cent increase in the state sales tax for four years and a seven-year hike on incomes of $250,000 or more that will…

Searches on "Government Accountability Office" (not in quotes), "shale," and "mittal" at the Associated Press's national site return nothing relevant to the energy-related story which will follow. A Google News search on "Anu Mittal," the person from the GAO who on Thursday testified before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology`s Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, appears…

The headline at the Associated Press's Sunday morning story primarily about GOP presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney's commencement address at Liberty University ("Romney urges grads to honor family commitments") was at least acceptable. It went downhill from there, betraying what appear to be deeply-held biases held by writers Kasie Hunt and Rachel Zoll against Republicans,…

Let's grant that Associated Press reporter Mitch Weiss, in his dispatch Saturday on the headache Democratic National Convention host state North Carolina has become for the left, acknowledged by quoting someone else that "Nobody can sugarcoat the fact that we got problems here." That said, the AP reporter applied quite a bit of sweetener with generous pinches of distortion in several instances…

President Barack Obama's allegedly "historic" support for same-sex "marriage" apparently has "prehistoric" roots -- at least as "history" is seen by the establishment press, which has acted as if all relevant history relating to Barack Obama began with his 2004 Democratic convention speech. A Friday Los Angeles Times puff piece ("President Obama's influence on gay marriage will be tested") on…

This morning (saved here at host for future reference), Philip Elliott and Kasie Hunt at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, demonstrated how apparatchik propagandists work. In their recast of reality, it's Mitt Romney whose presidential campaign has been focused on gay rights, not Barack Obama, his administration, his campaign, and the lapdog establishment press which have…

If the people who run the Washington Post Company need an archetypal example of why their newspaper publishing segment is in so much financial trouble (as found here: a $22.6 million first-quarter 2012 loss following on the heels of an $18.2 million loss for all of 2011) and is bleeding customers (per the Audit Board of Circulations, the paper's daily and Sunday circulation dropped by 7.8% and…

As Zero Hedge wrote this morning in response to today's initial unemployment claims report and the related press write-ups: "Same Trick Different Week." As has been so typical in analogous instances for the year or so I have been following the weekly claims numbers closely, the Associated Press (aka the Administration's Press), Reuters, and Bloomberg headlined a "dip," a "fall," and a "drop" in…

New York Times reporter Monica Davey was in Indianapolis to cover the Tea Party toppling of the moderate, establishment Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana: "G.O.P. Voters Topple Lugar After 6 Terms." Davey barely concealed her regretful tone: Richard G. Lugar, one of the Senate’s longest-serving members, a collegial moderate who personified a gentler political era, was turned out of…

New York Times "global health correspondent" Donald McNeil Jr. made a rare trip to Cuba and filed a report praising the Communist island's handling of the AIDS epidemic for Tuesday's "A Regime's Tight Grip on AIDS – In Cuba, rigorous testing, education, and free condoms help keep the epidemic in check." Conspiciously absent from that headline, especially for a newspaper that prides itself on…