LAT's Oliphant Lets Joe Biden Babble Away, Part 1 of 3: On the Origins
In a report filed at the Los Angeles Times's Politics Now blog earlier today, Washington Bureau reporter James Oliphant relayed a number of whoppers delivered by Vice President Joe Biden without anything resembling a challenge.
Breaking Biden's bilge into three sections, they involve his claim about the historical origins of the Tea Party, which Biden characterized as a collection of "…
CSM's 'Decoder' Twists MSNBC Criticism of Cain Strategy Into 'Leaving
This afternoon, Jack Coleman at NewsBusters noted how MSNBC's Rachel Maddow took a shot at GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain for supposedly "taking a month off the campaign trail -- taking a month off -- to go on a book tour."
The original source for this "claim" is a very poorly written and quite deceptively headlined October 3 item at the Christian Science Monitor by David Grant. The…
CBS: Attkisson 'Unavailable' For Further Interviews on 'Fast & Furious
Mark Hemingway of The Weekly Standard reported on Wednesday afternoon that he had attempted to interview CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson about her dogged coverage of the ongoing "Fast and Furious" controversy, but was told that she was "unavailable." Attkisson has been the sole journalist on the Big Three networks regularly covering the story, particular during the past several weeks…
Politico Lets Bill Clinton Whine for More Credit For Welfare Reform, B
At the Politico, James Hohmann's biography page indicates that he is "an Honors graduate of Stanford University" who "studied American political history." I hope he skipped class during the time his profs covered the 1990s, because if not, he and many other classmates have been badly misled.
Hohmann covered Bill Clinton's commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of his presidential…
NC Governor Perdue: 'Suspend Elections to Congress for Two Years'; Ral
Apparently there's no audio or video of North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue's Tuesday humdinger, namely that "I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won't hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover." -- yet.
If none surfaces, that will be too bad, because the guess here is that the…
Labor Department's Negative 2010 Consumer Spending Report: AP Misses
What if I told you that the government put out a report today which would lead one to infer that the economy might barely have grown last year, and that it even may have contracted -- and that the reporter who appears to have been the only one who covered it didn't grasp its potential significance (or, conceivably, chose to ignore it)?
Today the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor…
AP Delays Dedicating a Story to Cain's Fla. Victory Until 'Today' Puts
Herman Cain's victory in Saturday's GOP straw poll in Florida didn't become headline news at the Associated Press until after the candidate's Monday morning "Today Show" interview. Earlier today at NewsBusters, Kyle Drennen noted how "Today's" Ann Curry tried to frame the result as some kind of "protest vote."
Having delayed dedicating a story to Cain's victory for roughly 36 hours, the…
Abbas UN 'Ethnic Cleansing' Accusation, Refusal to Recognize Israel Ab
Friday at the UN (text here), Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of engaging in "ethnic cleansing."
Earlier, in a speech to 200 supposed "senior representatives of the Palestinian community in the U.S." (would that include Gaza flotilla organizers and Barack Obama pals Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn? Just askin'), Abbas declared, as relayed by Ynetnews.com, that "…
As Its Execs Say They'll Take the Fifth, AP Calls Solyndra an 'Embarra
Let's note the likely reason why what Julia Seymour observed earlier today is the case -- namely, that network news reports have taken to calling the Solyndra situation an "embarrassment."
The use of that term probably dates back to September 16, which is as far as I can tell the first time the Associated Press filed a beyond-perfunctory report about now-bankrupt Solyndra, the beneficiary of…
At AP, It's 'LightWhat
So I figure that I need to catch up on the LightSquared saga. This is the company which, as Fox News reported on Thursday (the URL date is September 15, though the time stamp is the next day) is building "a nationwide, next-generation, 4G phone network."
The problem is, as Fox further noted, that there are concerns that "many, including (General William) Shelton, think (the network) would…
WaPo 'Lunchline' Email: 'Abortion Rights Supporters... Dealt a Major B
Update (15:30 EDT): Yates notes our criticism on Facebook (see screen capture at bottom of post)
In today's "Lunchline" -- a free Washington Post e-mail newsletter with teasers and links to stories in the day's paper and on the website -- staffer Clinton Yates linked to Anita Kumar's story on Virginia's Board of Health adopting new regulations on the state's abortion clinics.
Yates's tease…
Brooke Shields, Kelo, and Left-Wing Chauvinism
This was going to be a relatively quick post about the good news, as announced by the Castle Coalition in a Tuesday press release after being teased a few days earlier by "Little Pink House" author Jeff Benedict, that a Lifetime Channel movie is going to be made about the Kelo vs. New London eminent domain drama.
Then along came "culture blogger" Alyssa Rosenberg over at the hard-left…
Yahoo's Headline Implies GOP Debate Audience Wanted Uninsured to Die
Rachel Rose Hartman's Tuesday item for Yahoo! News's "The Ticket" blog carried a misleading headline ("Audience at tea party debate cheers leaving uninsured to die") implying that the majority, if not all, of the audience at Monday's GOP presidential debate thought that the critically injured who are uninsured should be left to die. In reality, only a handful cheered and/or laughed in response…
Conservative Woman-hating Tina Brown Launches 'Women in the World Foun
Daily Beast/Newsweek editor-in-chief Tina Brown today announced the launch of the new Women in the World Foundation, which holds itself out as "a powerful, new initiative dedicated to highlighting and driving solutions for advancing women and girls" that "will serve as a resource to all who seek to learn about and engage on the issues facing women and girls."
Sounds like a worthwhile venture…
