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So-called reform conservatives such as David Frum, Michael Gerson, and Ramesh Ponnuru often get relatively favorable attention from liberal journalists -- relative, that is, to Tea Party types, which in turn reinforces the Tea Party's belief that the reformers aren't really conservatives.   Two lefty pundits recently examined the state of reform conservatism. Washington Post columnist E.J.…

Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard dismantled liberal PBS host Tavis Smiley on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos.  Appearing as a guest on Sunday, June 1, Kristol left Smiley speechless surrounding how to solve the VA scandal when he asked his fellow panelist: “If they got a generous voucher to use to purchase the health insurance they need or the…

On Saturday, May 31, both the CBS Evening News and ABC World News with David Muir failed to report that President Obama may have violated U.S. law by failing to notify Congress prior to the release of five terrorists from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for a U.S. soldier held captive by the Taliban.  While CBS and ABC ignored the controversy in their coverage of the release of Sergeant Bowe…

The United States negotiated the release of five Afghan prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in exchange for the Taliban freeing an American sergeant from captivity yet President Obama may have violated U.S. law by failing to notify Congress of his actions.  Despite the potential legal problems with releasing prisoners without notifying Congress, NBC Nightly News was the only evening news program on…

Even critic Alessandra Stanley at The New York Times criticized NBC anchor Brian Williams for his servile interview with massive-leaker Edward Snowden in Russia. “I miss Barbara Walters already,” she wrote, as if Barbara was the epitome of hardball interviews. “Brian Williams of NBC News did a good job of letting Edward J. Snowden say what he wanted to say. Someone a little nosier would…

President Obama's West Point speech was panned by consensus as hard to follow, which was even acknowledged in media-elite salons like Washington Week on PBS. But on Wednesday's edition of The Diane Rehm Show on NPR, some journalists were trashing Bush instead. After Katrina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation credited Obama for "always looking out for a younger generation" that's more peaceful,…

Reaction wasn’t very good to the redesign of the Boston Globe’s Boston.com site. Acknowledging that with some humor, the site created a video with cute kids reading aloud actual complaints they received. I saw the “Boston.com Beta Release Complaint Department” video highlighted last week on JimRomenesko.com. It’s at least mildly amusing with a few lines sure to prompt a chuckle or two.

An item which appears to be overlooked in the Department of Veterans Affairs scandal is the press's and presumably the public's blind acceptance of the department's goal to reduce its average wait times to 14 days as supposedly "aggressive." My reaction is that the goal doesn't seem "aggressive" at all, or even borderline acceptable, based on both personal experience and some admittedly…

Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday’s sudden feminist fascination this week with Santa Barbara murderer Elliot Rodger is not her usual modus operandi. A little searching shows Hornaday had nothing to say about other recent mass shooters like Jared Loughner (Tucson), Aaron Alexis (D.C. Navy Yard), Adam Lanza (Newtown) and certainly not Malik Nidal Hasan  (Fort Hood) or Ivan Lopez (Fort Hood…

After investing so much emotional energy in the idea that the weather-impaired contracting U.S. economy of the first quarter is going to give way to a super-duper awesome second quarter and strong rest of the year, it was foolish to think that Martin Crutsinger at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, would backtrack after just one contradictory report on consumer spending,…

I guess the PC sports press was hoping for a high-tech lyching of sorts, wherein Donald Sterling, the owner in limbo who is soon to be former owner of the National Basketall Association's Los Angeles Clippers, would be frog-marched out of his office and dumped onto Skid Row, never to be heard from again, for his undeniably racist remarks to his now ex-girlfriend about how he didn't want her…

Oh those clever, clever liberals. In the recent YouTube release of her documentary, “Smear Campaign”, Lizz Winstead tells pro-lifers to go f*ck themselves if they oppose Planned Parenthood. Comedy gold! In response to the shift of taxpayers dollars away from Planned Parenthood in 2011, Winstead embarked on a comedy + abortion activism tour across the major cities in America, attempting to…

As a historian, Rick Perlstein has produced two books about Republicans (Before the Storm and Nixonland) in which narrative almost always takes precedence over the author's lefty politics. As a blogger for The Nation's website, however, Perlstein treats the right far more harshly. On Thursday, for example, he posted an item called "There Are No More Honest Conservatives, So Stop Looking For One…

Julie Pace at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, is used to carrying water for the Obama administration. Last year, she proudly reveled in how she and her wire service sat on information it had about secret U.S.-Iran negotiations for eight months. My immediate take was that "They didn't report it until the Obama administration said it would be okay to report it." The AP…