Latest Blogs

A few weeks ago, just before GM's initial public offering went to the market (at the Washington Examiner; at BizzyBlog), I noted that Multi-Government/General Motors had spent the past several months shipping more cars than its dealers were selling, to the point where dealer stocks represented an unusually high number of days of dealers' sales. GM's December 1 press release made that trend…

Which is crazier: believing President Obama was not born in the United States or is actually a Muslim, or believing in total state control of the economy? If you answered the latter, you are probably not a journalist. The mainstream press went absolutely nuts over an August Pew poll showing that 18 percent of Americans believed that Obama was a Muslim. There was also considerable media…

"If the GOP Senate Minority Leader were to grab a Senate page and threaten to kill the innocent victim if the Democrats refused to capitulate to the party’s demands on tax cuts, we would all quickly arrive at the conclusion that the Minority Leader had lost his mind and gone too far. We simply, under no circumstances, will not tolerate threatening someone’s life in order to get what you want…

The Today show cast, on Tuesday, previewed a guest appearance by reality show star Kate Gosselin on Sarah Palin's TLC show, and after showing a clip of the former Alaska Governor frightening the celebrity mother of eight kids by firing off a gun, Vieira revealed she shared Gosselin's fears as she yelped: "You're with a woman with a gun. The whole thing makes me nervous, you know?" The…

Good Morning America's Jake Tapper on Tuesday spun Barack Obama's reaction to a tax deal with Republicans this way: "The devil made him do it..." The devil, apparently, being GOP representatives. Picking an easy target as an example, Tapper asserted that, as a result of tax rates staying the same, the "family of the average Wall Street banker [who] paid more than $300,000 last year, will keep…

Even with Monday’s deal between President Obama and top Republicans, no American’s income tax rates will actually decline on January 1 (although, if the deal passes, workers will notice a modest reduction in their payroll taxes in 2011). Yet throughout this debate, the broadcast networks have insisted on framing the debate as about “tax cuts” and “tax breaks,” not about forestalling a tax…

Al Sharpton on Monday said that he's going to be meeting with representatives of the FCC next week about revoking conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh's license. On a special 9PM edition of the "Ed Show," the Reverend didn't mince words (video follows with transcript and commentary):

A hacker who styles him "th3 j35t3r" -- The Jester in plain English -- has made quite a name for himself disabling jihadist websites and, more recently, the U.S. national security-threatening site WikiLeaks. While his methods are technically illegal, The Jester's motivations are patriotic, aimed at saving American lives on the battlefield. Yet in telling his story, MSNBC's Red Tape…

Invited on Tuesday's Today show to discuss the tax cut compromise in Congress, CNBC's Erin Burnett initially whined that "We can't afford it" but then went on to tell viewers that if Congress were to forego tax cuts we could afford "universal pre-school for free and provide free college tuition for half of the college students."  When asked by Today co-host Meredith Vieira about the "price…

Author William McGowan and New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus had a revealing email exchange recently over the prospects of the New York Times reviewing McGowan’s new book “Gray Lady Down – What the Decline and Fall of The New York Times Means for America,” an exchange that McGowan's publisher, Roger Kimball of Encounter Books, describes as a prime example of Tanenhaus "in weasel…

Today marks the anniversary of "a day that will live in infamy," as President Franklin Roosevelt famously dubbed it. The attack on Pearl Harbor sparked U.S. involvement in World War II, and led to a brutal American campaign against Japan that ended with the only use of an atomic weapon in history. But today we remember the 2,459 Americans who were killed in the attack on December 7, 1941.…

Tuesday's Washington Post Style section carried this front-page headline "Pesky ant video refuses to die." But the only new developments on the National Portrait Gallery story were security officers removing two (left-wing) protesters on Saturday and the laments of  a radical curator on Monday. No one in Jacqueline Trescott's article spoke for the conservatives. An award for unintentional…

This Christmas, give the gift of...secret diplomatic cables? There were several surprisingly slanted articles in the Holiday edition of “T,” the New York Times style magazine published 15 Sundays a year and put together by writers and reporters from outside the paper. Most newsworthy (if almost as shallow as the other pieces) was British writer Misha Glenny’s profile of Wikileaks founder…

Brian Williams adopted a liberal framework as he opened Monday's NBC Nightly News by declaring “it’s a fair question to ask and for a while now Americans have been wondering how lawmakers in Washington could possibly extend tax breaks for wealthy Americans while allowing benefits for jobless Americans to be cut off.” Then, after Chuck Todd outlined the Obama-GOP compromise to maintain income…