Tim Graham's blog

If you have a “nose for news,” wouldn’t you like the story of atheists and secular humanists trying to keep people from joining the Congressional Prayer Caucus?

Susan Jones at CNSNews.com reported that Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va) complained on Tuesday’s Fox & Friends that in an “unprecedented” move, “extremist groups” were trying to “shut down anything related to faith” in government. The Washington-based American Humanist Association is asking newly elected members of Congress “not to join” the prayer caucus. Where are the other networks? (Video below)

Lacey Rose at The Hollywood Reporter underlined that Showtime is lining up the top talents in Hollywood and some big names in the liberal media for a new documentary series titled "Years of Living Dangerously." The executive producers include "Titanic" director James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who delighted liberals on climate issues when he was governor of "Cully-fornia." The narrators will include Alec Baldwin, Don Cheadle, and Matt Damon.

Then there are the New York Times writers: Thomas Friedman, Nicholas Kristof, and even food writer Mark Bittman (who argued for giving up "industrial meat" to save the planet). If that wasn't enough socialist credentials for you, they're bringing along MSNBC host Chris Hayes -- who argued before the election you could either vote Democrat (for your fellow humans) or Republican (for homicidal storms.) Showtime exec David Nevins naturally explained superstorm Sandy makes this series relevant:

Kansas City sportswriter Jason Whitlock loves to stoke controversy. So after he blamed Jovan Belcher's murder-suicide on the "gun culture" -- inspiring NBC Sports lecturer Bob Costas --  in an interview with Roland Martin, he added fuel to the fire by claiming "the NRA is the new KKK."

Apparently, black youths are "armed" by the NRA, and they're also responsible for loading up black neighborhoods with drugs:

Reuters reports the Pope is entering the world of Twitter at "Pontifex." On Monday morning's Bill Press show, the former seminarian mocked the 85-year-old pontiff: "What do you think the chances are that the Pope has any idea how to access Twitter?" By the way, hip Bill Press is 72.

Press producer Peter Ogburn mocked the plan for the Pope to answer tweeted questions at #askpontifex. He read some favorites, which ranged from Jesus-and-microwaved-burrito questions to the assertion that the Catholic Church is causing "millions to die in the Third World" by opposing condoms: [ relevant video follows the article ]

David Brooks and E. J. Dionne actually disagreed on NPR Friday night about how the “fiscal cliff” talks are going. “We’re off to a really bad start,” Brooks declared about Obama’s pushing tax hikes for the rich and no movement on entitlements. The Obama team pushed the House GOP "back to Grover-ism," he complained.

Setting up the usual center vs. left debate, Dionne disagreed: “I think it's a good start. I think that we got so used to the idea in Washington that President Obama makes preemptive concessions before the other side puts anything concrete on the table, that we can't believe that he's just being a normal negotiator.” Then Brooks brought up the Lincoln movie, and Dionne compared Obama’s tax-hiking resolve to Lincoln’s resolve to ban slavery:

The German news magazine Der Spiegel is neutral on bestiality. German legislators have recently moved to ban the sexual perversion. At the blog Get Religion, they report the magazine turned for expertise to Michael Kiok, the chairman of the pressure group ZETA (Zoophile Engagement for Tolerance and Information).

Kiok argued the new law was unfair: “We see animals as partners and not as a means of gratification. We don’t force them to do anything.” Mr Kiok goes on to describe his relationship with an “Alsatian called Cessie” and argues that the animal butcher should be punished before the animal lover. Then the magazine wildly overestimated that perhaps five percent of Germans have this ahem, affinity:

On Friday night, NPR reporters couldn't say Susan Rice lied on television about the Benghazi attack, only that Senate Republicans make that accusation. In a report on Sen. Kelly Ayotte, reporter Don Gonyea could only manage "The trio accuses Rice of misleading the public in statements she made on television in the days following the attack."

But that wasn't half as shameless at NPR State Department correspondent Michele Kelemen, whose Friday night story lined up Rice supporters to suggest that opposition to Rice is sexist (even for Ayotte?), that Libya is actually a selling point for Rice, and that Republicans are damaging the country's image to oppose her: 

NPR's All Things Considered on Friday night repeatedly came to Susan Rice's defense -- and NPR journalists repeatedly played dumb, pretending to be confounded why critics would object to her lying about Benghazi on five Sunday talk shows.

While NPR's three full or partial features on the subject suggest Rice is having difficulty, the spin was all friendly. Anchor Robert Siegel asked NPR's pundits E. J. Dionne and David Brooks "Are the complaints against her serious, in your view?" Dionne said no, as if all Secretaries of State lie on national TV. Brooks thought Rice was "fine":

Saturday's Washington Post reported “For more than three decades, noncommercial station WPFW-FM  in Washington has been a feisty voice of sometimes radical leftist politics — relentlessly anti-war, anti-corporate and anti-Republican.” Sometimes radical?

The Pacifica network specializes in hard-left (even Marxist) diatribes that appeal to tiny audiences. Post reporter Paul Farhi relayed they’re going a bit “mainstream,” toward the NPR empire, dialing down “jazz and justice” and playing up liberal talk:

While Team Obama might want a surge of economic activity over the holidays, the leftists are too anti-capitalist for that. On his radio show Monday, Thom Hartmann likened Black Friday to “The Hunger Games” death matches and talked of shootings and other violence that took place at or near stores last weekend. “The wealthy elite look down on the spectacle before them with amusement and, most importantly, the knowledge that the entire spectacle is fattening their bank accounts.”

But of course, everything ugly about Black Friday is easily blamed on....”thirty years of Reaganomics.” I kid you not:

Penny Starr at CNSNews.com identified the latest ugly collision of Christmas kitsch: “A website that teaches visitors how to make crafts made of tampons includes a nativity scene with wise men, Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus made of tampons.”

Somehow it’s not awful enough that someone can’t resist dragging the holiest scene for Christians into the powder room. They have to make fun about a “bloody good Christmas”:

Yesterday, we noted how Howard Kurtz proclaimed that he was pleased to put Tom Ricks, his former Washington Post colleague, on his CNN show Reliable Sources to trash his fellow journalists on the Petraeus scandal. Ricks believed no one should care about the "personal life"  or "lovers' quarrels" of the sex-starved CIA director.

But in rereading this interview, here's what's quite remarkable. In 1400 words of transcript, the two former Posties trade insults about how awful the press behaved in this incident....and neither breathes a word about the biggest dupe in the entire scandal: Washington Post metropolitan editor Vernon Loeb, Paula Broadwell's co-author. Loeb wrote after the scandal broke that he never took the notion of an affair seriously:  "My wife says I'm the most clueless person in America."

At the Daily Download, former Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz interviewed former Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks about his shortened interview with Fox News after he said “I think that the emphasis on Benghazi has been extremely political, partly because Fox was operating as a wing of the Republican Party.” Claimed Ricks: “I was not picking a fight with Fox. I was answering their questions.”

The blog Inside Cable News says baloney: "Ricks absolutely was picking a fight with FNC the same way that John Ziegler tried to pick a fight with Contessa Brewer and got booted off MSNBC. If you attack a network you are appearing on with that kind of rhetoric, you should expect to get yanked off the air."

The Washington Post front-page story Wednesday on Susan Rice's fiasco of a meeting with three GOP senators carried this ridiculous sentence: "Rice came face to face with some of her harshest Republican critics, hoping to allay their concerns about whether she misled Americans regarding what precipitated the assault."

"About whether she misled?" Which sloppy copy editor would let this pass, as if there were any doubt Rice was spreading falsehoods all over television on 9-16? In paragraph eight, the Post surrenders to reality (sort of):

Popular conservative radio talker Laura Ingraham posted a note on her website Tuesday that she's going off the air temporarily, in search of a new radio syndicator:  "After more than 9 years with the distributor Talk Radio Network, I decided it was time to move on. After much thought and reflection, I have decided to pursue my first loves--modern dance and the xylophone. In the highly unlikely event that these efforts do not prove fruitful, I intend to return to radio."

She added: "Seriously--to the more than 300 stations that carry the Laura Ingraham Show and to all my loyal listeners, I feel the time is right to expand and retool my radio program and to explore other syndication options, which I am now actively pursuing." AP reports she's in discussions with other networks about her show.

In an interview with Jordan Zakarin at The Hollywood Reporter, liberal public-radio star Ira Glass – whose weekend show This American Life airs on more than 500 public radio stations – admitted the obvious: they don’t need the federal money to survive.

As they discussed the “silly Killing Big Bird thing,” Glass insisted “just a tiny, tiny portion of public radio’s money comes from the federal government. And when the Republicans say that public radio would survive without that money, the truth is, they’re right, it would survive.” But he wishes Mitt Romney had singled out his show in the first presidential debate:

Some surprising changes arrived in the Associated Press Stylebook online.

Politico’s Dylan Byers reported Monday that the online Stylebook now says that "-phobia," "an irrational, uncontrollable fear, often a form of mental illness," should not be used "in political or social contexts," including "homophobia" and "Islamophobia." AP Deputy Standards Editor Dave Minthorn told Politico, ""We want to be precise and accurate and neutral in our phrasing." But have they passed this neutrality test before? 

The Washington Post is once again kissing a Washington posterior. Two days after lauding liberal Sen. Patty Murray, the Post hailed Hillary Clinton with the dominant headline on Monday’s front page: “The secretary of 1,000 things.”

Like any other Hillary superfan, Post reporter Stephanie McCrummen could only wonder whether Mrs. Clinton would now prepare a 2016 presidential run or – perish the thought – “this might really be it for one of the most iconic figures in American political history.” Benghazi? That’s a small speed bump on the Road to Gush-gush:

Anyone who doesn’t think Politico is a left-wing rag hasn’t seen their latest gushing profile of Bill Press. Wide-eyed media reporter Mackenzie Weinger began like a fangirl: “Bill Press says there’s a simple difference between him and just about every other pundit in Washington.”

“They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about,” Press explains. Insert laugh track. But it continues:

On Tuesday’s edition of the Bill Press radio show, fill-in host John Fugelsang (another “star” of Current TV) celebrated being attacked on NewsBusters for five minutes. “It’s like crack and porn for the human id...It’s like your id gets crack and porn at the same time, and the darkest part of your nature can run free, thanks to NewsBusters.”

On Monday, NB’s Ken Shepherd reported that Fugelsang wanted some respect for democratically-elected terrorist groups who like to drop missiles on Israeli civilians: “Hamas for all of their flaws are the only organization they've got there in Palestine right now, until the next Gandhi comes from there.” Merely quoting Fugelsang accurately is apparently pornography on drugs, and Fugelsang inaccurately claimed Ken called him a terrorist: [ video below the page break ]

Saturday’s Washington Post devoted the left-hand corner of the front page to hailing liberal Sen. Patty Murray, the new chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. “In a Congress of hot tempers and sharp tongues, Murray doesn’t favor over-the-top rhetoric,” oozed Post reporter Rosalind Helderman. Sen. Harry Reid added: “Everyone takes Senator Murray seriously because she does not bluster.”

She doesn’t? While the Post noted Murray had the “luck” of "intemperate" Republican gaffes on abortion and rape in the last election cycle, nobody in the media wants to remember Murray’s 2002 whopper praising that humanitarian Osama bin Laden:

On Thursday, The Washington Post celebrated Thanksgiving as somehow secular, the perfect day to announce you're gay. Ned Martel's article began: "Word to the wise: Thanksgiving is the proper holiday to tell your family that you’re a homosexual. It’s arguably secular, so you’re confronting tradition, not faith. Even though National Coming Out Day is in October, this is the day when gays and lesbians, newly announced or otherwise, are really driving it all home."

He brought anecdotes to the party: "A few years ago, a friend of a friend told his sister that he was going to tell their parents his news at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Seated and fretful, he listened as she spoke up first. Before he even got his throat cleared, she came out ahead of him." Pass the potatoes? Martel later acknowledged the obvious, that this "secular" holiday has (threatening) Puritan pilgrim origins:

Some left-wingers don’t beat around the bush. Take this Daily Kos blog post, titled “The REAL Pro-Life Movement: Murderers, Rapists, Incest-Enablers, Pedophiles, and Liars.”

The blogger named “Bad Kitties” began: “The ‘pro-life’ movement is absolutely anything BUT ‘pro-life.’ This hypocritical and misleading nomenclature should be discontinued immediately. ‘Anti-choice’ is also far too tame.” They’re slut-shaming slimebuckets: 

One of the funniest headlines of Wednesday was the Huffington Post asking "Will MSNBC Hold Obama Accountable In Second Term?" The actual headline right now is “MSNBC Battles 'Pro-Obama' Label Heading Into President's Second Term.”

HuffPost media reporter Michael Calderone raised eyebrows for quoting radical-lefty Glenn Greenwald on MSNBC insisting that If  the DNC "were to own a network and produce news programming...would look exactly like what MSNBC has become." He even made Soviet analogies:

In a piece for The New York Times “Campaign Stops” blog, liberal political writer Thomas Edsall asked  “Is Rush Limbaugh’s Country Gone?” In other words, is Rush right in his post-election analysis that America is in danger of its producers being outnumbered and outvoted by the government dependents? Did we just prove the old George Bernard Shaw aphorism that “A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul”?

Leftists enthusiastically answer in the affirmative. Edsall quoted Robert Borosage in a fit of glee: “In our Gilded Age of extreme inequality, with a middle class that increasingly understands the rules are rigged against them, this was the first election in what is likely to be an era of growing class warfare.”