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Ayaan Hirsi Ali has risked her life to promote women’s rights in and outside of Islam. She was born in Somalia, where she survived female genital mutilation at the hands of her grandmother. She grew up to serve as a Member of Parliament in the Netherlands, wrote a script for a film that dared to criticize Islamic treatment of women, and when the death threats became too much for even the…

It’s fair to say most conservatives aren’t big fans of Jon Stewart, but according to TV critic Sonia Saraiya, Trevor Noah, Stewart’s successor as host of The Daily Show, is in for an even nastier response from the right, much of it having to do with his skin color. Apropos of Comedy Central’s Monday announcement that Noah, a biracial South African comedian, will take over for Stewart sometime…

If then-Senator John F. Kennedy could have looked into the future and seen his youngest brother's career in the world's greatest deliberative body, he'd have named Sen. Ted Kennedy as among the best to have ever graced its hallowed halls, insisted Hardball host Chris Matthews in his effusive Let Me Finish commentary on the March 30 program, pegged to the opening of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute…

UPDATE, March 31: This morning in an email, the AP's Lederman pointed me to a Saturday afternoon "Big Story" item time-stamped the day before the report to which this blog post below links. For whatever reason, that earlier "Big Story" item has more detail than what appears, despite the Sunday time stamp, to be Lederman's original report posted at the AP's national site. In that "Big Story" item…

Maybe the left needs to rethink their oft-present and deep-seated hatred of all things associated with Comcast, other cable companies, and the satellite TV providers. It turns out that those "evil" entities have done quite a bit to cushion left-leaning CNN and MSNBC from what would otherwise be a harsh financial reality. The Associated Press's David Bauder, in an item which somehow was deemed to…

On Monday, Comedy Central announced that South African comedian Trevor Noah would be replacing Jon Stewart as host of The Daily Show. To get a feel for Noah's brand of humor, one could simply watch his debut on the fake news show in December of 2014, when he jokingly declared that present-day America had worse race relations than Apartheid South Africa.

Former Red Eye co-host Bill Schulz has a piece today at The Daily Beast where he jokingly (?) compares the Tea Party political movement to the Scientology cult.

On Monday, the Washington Post's Sandhya Somashekhar zeroed in on the "unabashed approach" of Carafem, Washington, DC's latest abortion center, which, in her words, "reflects a new push to destigmatize the nation's most controversial medical procedure by talking about it openly and unapologetically." Somashekhar, the liberal newspaper's "social change" reporter, spotlighted how the upstart "aims…

Tim Russert used to say “If it’s Sunday, it’s Meet the Press.” Of David Brooks, we might joke, “If it’s Friday, Brooks is bashing Ted Cruz.” On both NPR and PBS Friday, the purported conservative-leaning balance to public broadcasting’s natural socialist impulses insisted the problem was that Cruz was just too smart. On NPR’s All Things Considered, the headline for the week-in-politics segment…

A new digital short is blasting Indiana as a state full of bigots. In the style of a tourism ad, the parody shows images of all things Indiana is famous for, from it’s “world class cities” to its NFL team to the Indianapolis 500. The narrator’s voice croons, “That hoosier hospitality makes everyone welcome --especially, bigots! Whether you’re a family of bigots, a couple of bigots or just an…

Ever since Colorado legalized in 2014, CBS This Morning has obsessed over all things pot, showcasing the best places to get high. On Monday, reporter Mark Strassmann touted a new app called High There. Strassmann gushed, "Think of it as Facebook or Tinder for stoners where nearby cannabis users can connect." 

Early on Monday's NBC Today, fill-in co-host Willie Geist hyped "the growing debate over a controversial law that critics call anti-gay....[who] say it permits businesses, among other things, to refuse service to same-sex couples on religious grounds." Correspondent Gabe Gutierrez followed: "This morning a huge backlash against Indiana's new Religious Freedom Restoration Act and Governor Mike…

At the Washington Post on March 18, fact-checker Glenn Kessler gave Secretary of State John Kerry "four Pinocchios" for his resume-puffing "whopper" that he helped organize "the first hearings in the Senate" on global warming in 1988. In the process, Kessler inadvertently perpetuated a related myth and got called out for it. He admirably corrected himself this morning. Additionally, while…

A new play aims to tell what the media didn’t: what really happened in Ferguson August 9, 2014.  As the first dramatization of the Michael Brown shooting, Ferguson draws from grand-jury witness testimony to reveal the truth about the Ferguson, Mo. police shooting. The play hits the stage April 26 through 29 at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles – and asks the audience to play jury.