Guns

It seems that if you're a New York Times reporter on a mission to prove something you think must be obvious and your research leads to the exact opposite result from what you smugly expected, you forge ahead and try to pretend that you proved your point anyway. At least that how it seems to have worked out for Times reporter Michael Luo in a report appearing in Tuesday's print edition which…

Former New York City police commissioner Bill Bratton brought his pro-gun control agenda into a segment about the FBI's latest crime statistics on Tuesday's Early Show on CBS, blaming the "the insanity of the lack of gun control laws in this country" for an increase in police deaths during 2011. Anchor Erica Hill introduced Bratton as the "chairman of Kroll, a worldwide investigative company…

Editor's Note on reposting (December 15, 2015): Today is the 224th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, so I thought I'd repost this item from December 12, 2011. I checked the website in question at USCourts.gov, and the quiz and its offending question have since been removed. A screen capture of the original can be seen in the blog post.

Paging Tonya Reiman! She is the Fox News Channel body language expert who frequently appears on The O'Reilly Factor. Reiman would have a field day analyzing  the bizarre body, facial, and hand twitchings of Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich who sat behind Attorney General Eric Holder as he was being grilled by Representative Sandy Adams about personal emails that Holder might have sent…

Washington Post TV columnist Lisa de Moraes couldn't resist inserting a poke at conservatives in a sarcastic Thursday piece on a recent cannonball incident involving the Discovery Channel hit Mythbusters. De Moraes emphasized how the popular series is a "darling of conservative Republicans" and overreached to connect right-leaning politics to the wayward projectile that crashed into a house…

I admit that I haven't kept up with trends in establishment press local crime coverage. But an item at Toledo-area blogger Maggie Thurber's place about a robbery-related story in Monday's Toledo Blade caught my attention. I hope the perspective Maggie saw on display is an outlier. I'm concerned that it may not be. You see, someone robbing a convenience store in the Glass City was killed…

Brand new MSNBC host and Second Amendment critic Alex Wagner devoted a segment of her November 15 Now with Alex Wagner program to express her exasperation at the fact that she's far left of the American public on the issue of gun control. Wagner prefaced a panel discussion with footage of an ABC News interview with Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was critically injured in a January shooting. "…

In January 2011 after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, MSNBC's Richard Lui wondered, "Is it time to rethink the Second Amendment?" His new colleague Alex Wagner doesn't even think there's a question about it. "I'm going to be pilloried for this," the Now with Alex Wagner host told Bill Maher on the November 4 edition of HBO's Real Time, explaining that she thinks the Constitution should be…

Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder was grilled by Republicans on Capitol Hill Tuesday about the Justice Department’s botched sting Operation Fast and Furious, which allowed guns to flow untracked into the U.S. and Mexico, putting thousands of illegally purchased firearms on the street, one of which led to the death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in the Arizona desert.…

H.R. Haldeman. If you are familiar with that name, the first thing to pop into your mind would probably be Watergate.  And, indeed, the very first sentence of Haldeman's Wikipedia entry mentions that scandal. Lanny Breuer. For the folks who now know the name of the Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ Criminal Division, Operation Fast & Furious would come to mind right away. However…

For today's "Gut Check" segment on MSNBC's 2 p.m. Eastern NewsNation program, substitute host Craig Melvin interviewed a South Carolina sheriff who is urging women in his county to carry a concealed handgun for protection against would-be rapists. During his Skype interview with Chuck Wright, Melvin worried about the poor dead would-be rapists being checked into the Spartanburg County morgue…

On October 9, an unbylined Associated Press story reported that Congressmen Darrell Issa "could send subpoenas to the Obama administration as soon as this week over weapons lost amid the Mexican drug war." On Wednesday, October 12, Issa did just that. Mike Vanderboegh's Sipsey Street Irregulars blog has a succinct summary (HT Ed Driscoll) of the establishment press's coverage of Issa's…

CBS's Sharyl Attkisson, the only Big Three network reporter who's been regularly covering the "Fast and Furious" controversy, appeared on Thursday's O'Reilly Factor, throwing cold water on an earlier report that she was "unavailable" for further interviews on the story. Attkisson emphasized that there was a lot more to the issue than what has already reported, but "we need to get more…

Mark Hemingway of The Weekly Standard reported on Wednesday afternoon that he had attempted to interview CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson about her dogged coverage of the ongoing "Fast and Furious" controversy, but was told that she was "unavailable." Attkisson has been the sole journalist on the Big Three networks regularly covering the story, particular during the past several weeks…