Obama Can Now Claim Executive Privilege to Keep Rice From Testifying
June 5th, 2013 10:33 PM
A Google News search on ["Susan Rice" "executive privilege"] (typed exactly as indicated between brackets) returns two stories. The main one is at Fox News, where K.T. McFarland pointed out that President Obama, now that he has appointed Susan Rice to be his National Security Adviser, can invoke executive privilege to keep her from testifying before Congress. The second is at Mediate, and notes…
Not Yet National News: Fla. Dem Congressman's Chief of Staff Resigns A
June 2nd, 2013 2:54 PM
This has to be an imaginary story, right? Most Democrats and others on the left continue to insist that voter fraud is not a problem, even in the face of examples like Minnesota U.S. Senator Al Franken, whose 312-vote "victory" margin in 2008 may have entirely consisted (and then some) of illegal votes by felons in just one county.
More recently, it seems that the claim is under revision. A…
As Stockholm Riots Move Into Fifth Day, Press's Aversion to the M-Word
May 24th, 2013 11:09 PM
A Google News search on "Sweden riots" done tonight at 10 PM ET (not in quotes, sorted by date, with duplicates) returned 314 items. Adding the word "Muslim" to the search reduced the number of results to nine. Fewer than a handful are from establishment press outlets, and one of those only appeared in the search results because a commenter and not the story's writer used the M-word.
That…
WSJ Reports 'Obama's Counsel Was Told of IRS Audit Findings Weeks Ago
May 20th, 2013 2:14 PM
Saturday, David Espo at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, engaged in an execrable exercise in advocacy journalism entitled "Obama Agenda Marches on Despite Controversies."
Yesterday (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I took apart Espo's claim that there is a "lack of evidence to date of wrongdoing close to the Oval Office" by showing that in at least five situations -- Fast…
Boston Mayor and U.S. Establishment Press Ignoring Marathon Bombing 'S
April 21st, 2013 12:21 PM
An unbylined Associated Press report (graphic saved here) appearing at ABC News (time-stamped 9:51 a.m. at the AP's main national site; graphic saved here) reports that Boston Mayor Tom Menino appeared on ABC's "This Week" and said, in the AP's words, that "the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing acted alone."
The brief AP report's third paragraph then has Menino saying, again in AP's…
Report: Yahoo CEO (and Her Former Employer Google) Insist That New Hir
March 26th, 2013 7:58 PM
Sometimes one learns interesting things perusing stories at tech web sites.
A report by Michelle Maisto at Eweek about Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has one nugget of information which has been out there for a while, and another which I believe hasn't been and still isn't widely known about both Mayer and her former employer Google. Both items indicate to me that Mayer as a woman and the two tech…
WaPo Fact-Checker Twice Calls Out Obama Over Non-existent Sequester-Re
March 6th, 2013 4:07 PM
President Obama's sequester-related press briefing on March 1 contained the usual fibs. Examples include but are certainly not limited to the following: "We've already cut $2.5 trillion in our deficit," when the entire amount involved is something which might happen in the future; his claim that his State of the Union laundry list "is the agenda that the American people voted for," when many of…
Not News: Projected Growth in Unpaid Bills Shows State of Illinois on
February 28th, 2013 7:26 AM
On Monday, the Insitute for Illinois' Fiscal Sustainability (IIFS), an outfit associated with the Civic Federation, a "nonpartisan" organization which appears to have leftist instincts and funding, warned that the state government's $8 billion stack of unpaid bills will grow to $22 billion in five years. IIFS correctly blames out of control pension costs, and recommends several reforms which…
Former Striking Hostess Workers' Eligibility For Govt. 'Trade Adjustme
February 21st, 2013 9:36 AM
Yesterday, the Department of Labor announced that it had certified "more than 18,000 former Hostess workers around the country as eligible to apply for Trade Adjustment Assistance." I'll save excerpts from DOL's inane announcement for after the jump.
The story has garnered some local coverage in areas affected by Hostess plant closures late last year, including a couple of regional Associated…
Not News in U.S.: 60,000 on NHS's 'Liverpool Care Pathway' (to Death
January 12th, 2013 12:52 PM
A search this morning at Google News on "Liverpool Pathway" (not in quotes) returned 69 items (Google's initial indication was over 800, but it was really only 69). Roughly 60 of them related to the National Health Service's "palliative care" protocols known as the "Liverpool Care Pathway" employed in the UK's government-run health care system to place hospital patients on a path to death. The…
Not News: Chemical Spill in China Poisons Water Supply for Millions
January 10th, 2013 12:50 PM
In 2008, as reported by Tim Graham at NewsBusters at the time, Thomas Friedman at the New York Times wrote that America ought to become "China for a day," so that Friedman's dream, in Graham's words "of a green revolution -- all those allegedly planet-saving taxes and regulations and product bans -- can be permanently enacted."
The mainland's totalitarian regime isn't merely not "green" in…
So the Fiscal Cliff Bill Protects 'the 99 Percent' From Income-Tax Hik
January 5th, 2013 10:46 AM
On Wednesday, as President Obama signed -- er, auto-penned -- the legislation preventing the onset of the "fiscal cliff" passed by Congress the previous day, the establishment press was busy understating its impact. A Friday evening Wall Street Journal editorial (note: not a regular news report) in today's print edition lays out the gory details.
But first, I will cite four examples of…
'Bad' News From Politico: 'Gun Control (as a Media Meme) Doesn't Survi
January 4th, 2013 1:14 PM
I'm almost surprised that the Politico's web site background isn't all black because of news delivered by its "On Media" reporter Dylan Byers on Tuesday.
The "bad" news is that "gun control" as a media obsession appears to have largely disappeared, especially when you consider that some of the primary remaining stories on the topic are about David Gregory's illegal but unprosecuted (as of yet…
Searching for Christmas 2012: To a Record Extent, the Press Said It Wa
December 31st, 2012 5:32 PM
This is the eighth year I have done shopping and layoff-related searches on how often the words "Christmas" and "holiday" are used.
As has been the case since the enterprise began in 2005, news reports are far more likely to refer to the commercial time frame between Thanksgiving and Christmas as the "holiday shopping season." Meanwhile, compared to shopping references, news reports are…