Labeling

The Daily Beast's Dean Obeidallah denied the existence of Islamism as an ideology during a segment on Monday's CNN Newsroom. Obeidallah, responding to conservative commentator Erick Erickson applauding Saturday Night Live's draw Mohammed skit as "a perfectly humorous way to point out the absurdity of radical Islam's refusal to let people draw Mohammed," wildly claimed that "the [SNL] writers'...…

Today, Bloomberg TV's Mark Halperin inadequately apologized for his conduct and line of questioning during an April 30 interview of GOP presidential candidate which came off as rude and racist to many who saw it — well, basically because it was. As Tim Graham at NewsBusters noted on Sunday, and as will be seen in the video following the jump, Halperin engaged in a "prove-you're-a-Cuban" line of…

Well, this takes the well-founded belief that the left only cares about blacks because of their votes to a new level. At the Washington Post's "Monkey Cage" blog yesterday (seriously, that's it's name), Dean Robinson, an "associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst" who is apparently not a regular contributor, explores "the political consequences of…

On Monday's New Day on CNN, the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza asserted that there was no wrongdoing in former President Bill Clinton helping his brother-in-law, Tony Rodham, get a job with former DNC head Terry McAuliffe (who's now the governor of Virginia): "Bill Clinton was not in office. It doesn't seem to conflict with her [Hillary Clinton's] job as secretary of state. If Bill Clinton helped out…

With Camden Yards set to hold its first fan-attended Baltimore Orioles game in over two weeks tonight, it's a good time to go back to a May 2 item by Meredith Shiner at Yahoo Politics. Readers may remember the Duke-"educated" Shiner as the person who was flabbergasted that GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz cited "God-given rights" when he announced his candidacy on March 23, tweeting in part…

Chuck Todd should have been ready for this, but he wasn't. Just a few days days ago, on the very network at which Todd toils, "Late Night" comedian Seth Meyers thought he would be cute and embarrass GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina over not registering the CarlyFiorina.org domain, thereby allowing a critic to take it and use it as a platform for criticizing her tenure as H-P's CEO.…

On Thursday, Jennifer Grayson, who fancies herself as an "environmental journalist," exposed herself as a truly annoying scold. Grayson wrote in a Washington Post column that those of us who show our appreciation for others by giving them flowers as part of our overall enjoyment of life are really showing that we are either ignorant of or don't "care about Mother Earth." Grayson concocts her…

The New York Times devoted valuable front-page, over-the-fold space and a banner photo to a story on Sen. Marco Rubio campaigning in Iowa, and came down hard on the GOP as an old, stodgy, white party: "Rubio's Immigrant Story, and an Aging Party in Search of a Spark."

MSNBC terrorism expert Evan Kohlmann insisted on tonight's Hardball program that Pam Geller was dangerously close to committing "hate crimes" with her "draw Muhammad" events. Kohlmann also compared the Jewish co-founder of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) to the Nazis by way of invoking the Reichstag fire that the Nazis set as in February 1933 as a pretext to seizing power. For his…

On Thursday, NBC's Hoda Kotb and CNN's Alisyn Camerota both hounded Nick Loeb, actress Sofia Vergara's ex-fiancé, for his lawsuit to gain custody of the two embryos he created with Vegara. Kotb played up that they "signed an agreement saying neither of you would bring this embryo to term without the other's consent. I mean, it sort of seems like a dead issue at this point. Is it?" Camerota…

In what is certainly not the most consequential development in presidential politics but nonetheless a fun moment, recently declared Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina decisively one-upped NBC Late Night host Seth Meyers, who seems to have thought he could inflict a bit of harm on the former tech CEO's credibility. In an era where dot-whatever domains have proliferated, Fiorina's…

Tuesday evening, I wrote that there appears to be a need for an intervention among the economics writers at the Associated Press. At the time, I was referring to how the wire service's Christopher Rugaber, in his dispatch on a trade group's upbeat business sentiment survey appearing about an hour after Martin Crutsinger's writeup on the horrible March trade imbalance, failed to report Crutsinger…

CNN's Chris Cuomo made an eyebrow-raising argument about the First Amendment in a Wednesday post on Twitter. Cuomo replied to a post that decried that "too many people are trying to say hate speech (isn't equal to) free speech," and claimed that "it doesn't. hate speech is excluded from protection. don't (sic) just say you love the constitution...read it."