NB Staff's blog

Saturday Sports Open Thread

What are today's biggest Big games and biggest upsets?

Open Thread

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: WHAT ELSE?

SENATE DEBATES HEALTHCARE REFORM

ON CSPAN 2 RIGHT NOW

Open Thread

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: Unemployment is higher among Dems and unaligned voters than among Republicans.

Data from Rasmussen Reports national telephone surveys shows that 15.0% of Democrats in the workforce are currently unemployed and looking for a job. Among adults not affiliated with either major party, that number is 15.6% while just 9.9% of Republicans are in the same situation.

Correlation or causation?

Open Thread

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: European lefties are slowly realizing that Obama is, well, American.

Barack Obama cast himself as a "citizen of the world" when he delivered his well-received campaign speech in Berlin in the summer of 2008. But the US president has now betrayed this claim. In his Berlin speech, he was dishonest with Europe. Since then, Obama has neglected the single most important issue for an American president who likes to imagine himself as a world citizen, namely, his country's addiction to fossil fuels and the risks of unchecked climate change...

Obama has proven himself to be unable to put an end to the lies that modern American society is based on.

An American president serving American interests? We're all doomed.

Notable Quotables Comedy Show Bonus Footage!

Take a look at some extra video footage from the latest episode of NewsBusters’ Notable Quotables comedy show.

CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric interviewing former Vice President Al Gore provided us with so much joke material we couldn’t fit it all in.

To see current and past episodes of the show check out the NQ Show channel on the Media Research Center’s video sharing website, Eyeblast.tv. There you can also view the show in full screen format.

FNC’s O’Reilly Cites CMI Palin Study

Fox News' Bill O'Reilly stated last night that "the left is now peddling Sarah Palin as a shallow demagogue who would lead us to tragic circumstances" during a "Talking Points" segment about the former Alaskan governor's continued assault from the left. He cited CMI's 2008 study, "How the TV Networks Have Portrayed Sarah Palin as Dunce or Demon" as evidence.

O'Reilly stated:

A study last year by the Culture and Media Institute, a conservative group, examined network news coverage of Mrs. Palin from September 29th to October 12th as she campaigned. It was 69 stories about the governor. 37 of them were negative, 30 neutral, just two, two positive. Twenty-one of the stories portrayed Sarah Palin as unintelligent or unqualified. Eight stories used clips from ‘Saturday Night Live' to ridicule her. ABC News was hardest on Mrs. Palin, closely followed by NBC.

Open Thread

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: fake stimulus jobs are a "small problem"?

"[Joe Biden] thinks it is a relatively small problem involving a small number of jobs that exist, but which were entered into Recovery.gov with the wrong coding and therefore the wrong address," Biden spokesman Jay Carney said in an email. "He expects the problem will be fixed quickly."

Small number of jobs?! David Freddoso and I determined there were some 75,000 bogus jobs -- over ten percent of the number of jobs the administration claims the stimulus created -- just from compiling the numbers in a very limited number of media reports. A proper accounting would probably find the number of jobs is much higher. The vice-president and supposed "stimulus sheriff" shouldn't be downplaying the problems in the stimulus reporting. It's insulting.

It makes you wonder how disastrous a problem would have to be to considered "large".

Open Thread

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: Federal bureaucrats say costs of mammograms outweigh benefits.

Women in their 40s should stop routinely having annual mammograms and older women should cut back to one scheduled exam every other year, an influential federal task force has concluded, challenging the use of one of the most common medical tests.

...the independent government-appointed panel recommended the changes, citing evidence that the potential harm to women having annual exams beginning at age 40 outweighs the benefit...

The new guidelines also recommend against teaching women to do regular self-exams and concluded that there is insufficient evidence to recommend that doctors do the exams or to continue routine mammograms beyond age 74.

A sign of things to come?

Open Thread

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: 47 world leaders, one bow.


So if bowing is "protocol," as the administration claims, why is Obama the only one doing it?

Sunday NFL Open Thread

What are today's big games and most surprising upsets?

Open Thread

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: "Going Rogue."

With her book coming out, and scheduled interviews with Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin will continue to be in the news this week.

Of course, this means she will continue to be trashed by all of her detractors in the media.

Question: has there ever been a political figure who wasn't a member of the White House that has received this kind of regular, constant trashing by the press? If so, who?

Saturday Sports Open Thread

Time for college football. Big weekend. What are the must-see games. Predict today's biggest upset!

Open Thread

This has been such a wild week with so many things available for discussion we're going to let you choose the topics to debate.

Open Thread

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: ACORN employee caught on tape saying the organization actively worked to elect Obama.

So the main thing what happened is  when Obama ran, we did a, we didn't never say who we were going to run for but it sort of undercover that we were going to put Obama in...

We never declared because we have to be non-partisan--our national organization. But it was sort of like under the grapevine we knew we were going to put in Obama.

Breitbart strikes again.

 

New Episode of Notable Quotables Comedy Show!

Here is the latest episode of NewsBusters’ Notables Quotables show, featuring the liberal media’s most outrageous sound bites.

In this week’s episode we have Chris Matthews wondering what’s wrong with a quick phone call to terrorists, Matt Lauer worried about America getting a big head, and Actor Scott Wolf revealing the inspiration behind his role as a sell-out journalist in a new TV series.

Enjoy the show and to see current and past episodes in a larger format, visit the ‘Notable Quotables Show’ channel on the Media Research Center’s video sharing website, Eyeblast.

 

 

Open Thread

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: Ft. Hood's implications for gun rights.

Last week’s shootings, which killed 13 people and wounded more than 30, demonstrated once again the folly of “gun-free zones,” which attract and assist people bent on mass murder instead of deterring them.

Judging from the comments of those who support this policy of victim disarmament, Smith’s desire for a gun was irrational. According to Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, “This latest tragedy, at a heavily fortified army base, ought to convince more Americans to reject the argument that the solution to gun violence is to arm more people with more guns in more places.”

Note how the reference to “a heavily fortified army base” obscures the crucial point that the people attacked by Hasan were unarmed as a matter of policy. Also note the breathtaking inanity of Helmke’s assurance that “more guns” are not “the solution to gun violence.” In this case, they assuredly were.

Where guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. Seems pretty straightforward, no?

Open Thread

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: confessions of an ObamaCare supporter.

[The New Yorker's John] Cassidy is more honest than the politicians whose dishonesty he supports. "The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment," he writes. "Let's not pretend that it isn't a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won't. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration ... is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind."

Why are they doing it? Because, according to Mr. Cassidy, ObamaCare serves the twin goals of "making the United States a more equitable country" and furthering the Democrats' "political calculus." In other words, the purpose is to further redistribute income by putting health care further under government control, and in the process making the middle class more dependent on government. As the party of government, Democrats will benefit over the long run.

Finally, some honesty.

Actor Jon Voight Speaks Out Against ObamaCare As Unconstitutional


You might not have known it from the lack of coverage on Thursday, but Tea Partiers rallying at Capitol Hill were joined by at least one celebrity ObamaCare critic, actor Jon Voight, who denounced the requirement forcing Americans to buy health insurance under penalty of law as unconstitutional.

Back during the George W. Bush era, the media often hyped the criticism of the Iraq War effort by liberals in Hollywood, playing up the political credibility of actors like Mike Farrell (best known for his role in the long-running TV series "M*A*S*H") who waxed philosophical on the justness or necessity of that war's effort.

Yet even though it's a rarity to find conservatives in Hollywood, much less politically vocal ones like Voight, the ones that are vocal critics of the Obama administration are all but ignored by the mainstream media.

Open Thread

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: Hasan tried to contact al Qaeda over two months ago.

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News...

It is not known whether the intelligence agencies informed the Army that one of its officers was seeking to connect with suspected al Qaeda figures, the officials said.

Someone dropped the ball on this one.

Sunday NFL Open Thread

What are today's big NFL games and big upsets? Anything else you want to talk about related to sports?