Political Groups

It's bad enough when items which should so obviously be leading the news aren't. It's worse when you realize that one of the reasons for the deliberate avoidance is that the press is allowing itself to be coopted into treating insignificant orchestrated political stunts to chew up scarce time and resources. Readers who are wondering why outfits like CNN (covered yesterday by Matt Hadro at…

Those imagining Mika Brzezinski as a straight-down-the-line liberal will be surprised by her comments on today's Morning Joe. Brzezinski didn't demur after Joe Scarborough described her as a Catholic who is "more conservative than many" on social issues.  To the contrary, she proceeded to prove Scarborough's point by defending Rick Santorum's stance on contraception.  The show had played two…

Today, President Obama visited Master Lock, a company he cited in his State of the Union speech on January 24 using the following words: "But right now, it's getting more expensive to do business in places like China. Meanwhile, America is more productive. A few weeks ago, the CEO of Master Lock told me that it now makes business sense for him to bring jobs back home. Today, for the first time…

There was a surprisingly positive consensus on Rick Santorum on today's Morning Joe.  Most remarkable was the observation by Obama fan Mika Brzezinski, who said "I don't agree with anything he says, but I like the guy." H/t  to NewsBusters reader D.B. for audio assistance. Joe Scarborough and Willie Geist were also upbeat on Santorum, Scarborough astutely observing that "90% of Americans don…

One web site devoted to "fighting the smears" (i.e., pretending that what is true really isn't) apparently isn't enough for Barack Obama's reelection campaign. There are now three, plus so-called "truth teams" of activists whose mission it will be to serve as rapid-response purveyors of what will likely heaping helpings of fabricated refutations. This news is now officially 24 hours old; its…

Maybe there's some unwritten guideline in the press relating to when a politician who is no longer holding office doesn't have to have his party label applied if he gets into some kind of trouble -- even if that trouble is related to when he was in office. The suspicion here is that the rule only applies to past Democratic Party officeholders, and that the guideline period is unduly short. A…

On Friday, the Daily Caller reported that Occupy movement protesters at CPAC were being paid $60 a day to be there. (Here I thought the left was really motivated these days. Guess not.) At the self-described Essential Global News Network known as the Associated Press, this fact and other inconvenient items about the movement's pathetic efforts at and around CPAC are being ignored. Before…

The press was eager to jump on initial remarks by U.S. bishops that President Obama's announcement yesterday of what the Wall Street Journal aptly described in an editorial this morning as the "Immaculate Contraception" -- namely, the idea that insurance companies would somehow pay out of their own pockets for costs relating to "contraceptive services" to which the bishops objected to having…

Yesterday's announcement by President Obama (headlined at the White House's website as "Remarks by the President on Preventive Care") of planned revisions to an ObamaCare-driven rule which, in the President's words, "if a woman’s employer is a charity or a hospital that has a religious objection to providing contraceptive services as part of their health plan, the insurance company -– not the…

A "breaking" email I received from USA Today this morning is a definite sign of establishment press scrambling to give deceptive cover to an Obama administration mandate whose unpopularity continues to grow as more people become aware of it. It also shows the lengths to which the press will go to keep the relatively disengaged, which would include those who only primarily informed via email and…

Sometimes you read the most interesting things in those supposedly boring trade publications. One such item of interest comes from an article in Manufacturing News (HT to an emailer) written by Richard A. McCormack which is primarily about the Mainland China's designs on the worldwide auto parts industry, including the U.S. Some of the larger American unions are demanding that the…

On Monday (appearing in the print edition on Tuesday, New York Times op-ed columnist Joe Nocera gave President Barack Obama a pass for rejecting the Keystone Pipeline. In the process, he also complained about "the way our poisoned politics damages the country," and, in a revelation which shouldn't but did surprise him, learned that far-left environmentalists want to stop all tar sands…

Media critic Mollie Hemingway, a contributor to GetReligion.org, has an excellent post up today at CNN's Belief Blog about how the liberal media did a horrible job when it came to objectively reporting the implications of the recent Komen for the Cure/Planned Parenthood row. In fact, the media have shown themselves "effective partisans" by telling only "half the story," the half spoon-fed by…

On Saturday I noted how Washington Post staffer Laura Vozzella front-loaded her February 4 Metro-section front-pager with overheated rhetoric from liberal Democrats suggesting that voter ID bills pushed by Republicans were the second-coming of Jim Crow. As I wrote my critique, I wondered what sort of news editor would allow such extremely biased dreck to go to publication. Today's Washington…