Elizabeth Flock

This Thanksgiving, a record high of 42.2 million Americans will use food stamps to curtail the cost of a big meal. At a whopping expense of $72 billion to the taxpayer per year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has grown by 70 percent since 2007, an increase of over 15 million more people.

Despite acknowledging all of this, Elizabeth Flock of US News & World Report declared "More Americans will use food stamps to buy their Thanksgiving dinner this year than ever before," and implied these government handouts aren't as sufficient as they could be.

The Washington Post's treatment of two different cases of journalistic malpractice make clear how the paper's editors view slandering Republicans. It's not a fireable offense. But plagiarism is.

Here are the basics: Washington Post reporter Elizabeth Flock wrote a web post last year falsely accusing Mitt Romney of using a Ku Klux Klan slogan in his campaign speech. This was not a case of a mistake -- it was clear from the get-go that Romney did not use the KKK slogan, as the video of the speech incontrovertibly showed -- but Flock wrote a web article saying he did. It was a lie, intended to paint Romney as a racist. In doing so, she violated about half a dozen of the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics.

GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has been roundly excoriated in the media for the "toxic" suggestion that Occupy Wall Street protesters need to stop freeloading, take a bath, and get a job. Yet in a sympathetic Style section photo essay today entitled "The March: Occupy protesters trek 231 miles from New York to the White House," Washington Post editors highlighted as the march's poster boy one "Dylan Bozlee of Hilo, Hawaii."

Bozlee is a self-described anarchist and University of Hawaii dropout who, the Post notes, "said he'd rather travel across American than get a job." "Do I want to work? Only if I wanted a home, wife, kids and a dog. If not, I think you're ruining your life," Bozlee told the Post.

Here we go again. A Christian college is revising its code of conduct for faculty members, expecting a commitment to personal conduct that's in line with biblical ethics, including on matters of sexual behavior.

But, of course, all the liberal media will focus on is a new "ban" on gay or lesbian faculty members at Shorter University, a Baptist institution with campuses in Atlanta and Rome, Georgia.

But Washington Post blogger Elizabeth Flock went even further, quoting a student at Shorter who compared the school's move to Nazi persecution:

The Obama administration and the Obama campaign aren't the only ones who should be embarrassed by the AttackWatch.com snitch site Obama for America recently created. As demonstrated last night in a series of Associated Press searches (not in quotes) which resulted in nothing relevant and still don't (here on "attackwatch.com"; here on "Attack Watch"; here on "Obama campaign"; and here on "Obama for America"), the establishment press has mostly ignored Attack Watch and its authoritarian aroma.

When not ignoring it, the press has mischaracterized those who are ridiculing it. A particularly embarrassing case in point occurred yesterday at the Washington Post's "Blogpost" blog. After posting an item by Elizabeth Flock headlined "Attack Watch, new Obama campaign site to ‘fight smears,’ becomes laughing stock of the Internet," the Post replaced the headline's last two words with "conservatives" -- quite inaccurately, it turns out.