Culture/Society

On April 18, a new Washington Post/ABC News poll that showed 51% of Americans feel that guns in the home make it safer, compared to 29% who think otherwise. More telling is that fact that 51% of white middle class women agree with the sentiment about firearms making homes safer.  Additionally, a Nexis search detailed that ABC News has yet to report this poll, and, with the exception of the Fix blog online, the Post's print edition avoided the “guns make a home safer” findings.

So, will there a correction to Jill Filipovic, Amanda Marcotte, and Co. for trying to smear the NRA as the “domestic abuse lobby? The article by New York Times’ Michael Luo that set off this meretricious commentary on guns looks like to have been a smear too far.  After all, it wasn’t “intense pressure” the gun lobby that killed Obama’s anti-gun agenda.  It was white middle-class women, who liked their Second Amendment rights to be left untouched by big government.

"There's a strong consensus he was pretty normal." That's how Slate's Emily Bazelon described surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who seems to have been discovered by the police. You cannot make this stuff up. The Slate writer interviewed two family friends, who attended Tsarnaev's high school who said of him:

"He was really nice,” Sam Greenberg [Bazelon’s family friend], now a junior at Harvard, told me over the phone. Sam played junior varsity soccer with Tsarnaev for a year and also hung out with him occasionally in the athletic area after school. “He was pretty quiet. Didn’t have a ton to say but was very normal, seemed like a nice kid.”

With the monumental collapse of the president’s anti-gun agenda, many are wondering if both sides will “go back into their corners” on gun control.  Every single measure in this new bill failed, which elicited the wrath of the president yesterday in the Rose Garden.  During the April 17 broadcast of the PBS NewsHour, Gwen Ifill asked why these measures failed to pass, mentioned the popularity of background checks, and failed to press Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) on past statements about how this bill really wouldn’t have prevented Sandy Hook ergo more mass shootings.

In fairness, Ifill also had Lawrence Keane of the National Shooting Sports Foundation and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Democrat from Conneticut, on the program to discuss the failed bill.  While he said his organization supported some of the amendments in the bill, they couldn’t back it due to the background check provision, noting it would have harmed gun sellers who rely heavily on weekend sales, when most customers come to their stores [emphasis mine]:

Our taxpayer dollars seem to be at work finding the culprit of the Boston terror attack last Monday. But on taxpayer-funded NPR, counterterrorism reporter Dina Temple-Raston was already guessing this was domestic not foreign.  “The thinking, as we've been reporting, is that this is a domestic or extremist attack,” Temple-Raston declared on the April 16 All Things Considered.

So, besides the pressure cooker bomb, whose directions on building it can be found on the Internet, what evidence shows that this is probably domestic terrorism?  Where’s the manifesto?  Who’s claimed responsibility?  All are question marks at this point, so what’s with the incessant speculation by some in the media.  Yes, it could be a crazy right-winger, or an al-Qaeda operative, but what ever happened to a simple narrative of there was a bombing, it’s awful, people died, and federal authorities are investigating the matter? But Temple-Raston heavily implied this matches with past acts of right wing – and domestic – terror:

Do I dare say it? Did The New York Times actually write a responsible article concerning the investigation of the Boston Terror Attack? The April 17 piece by Katharine Q. Seeyle, Scott Shane, and Michael S. Schmidt had no mentions of right-wing extremists –and the meretricious links to Patriots/Tax Day.  Additionally, the word “extremist” is only associated with a brief bit about “terrorist cookbooks,” which are available online.  By contrast, when you look at National Journal’s highly speculative story on Boston, the culprits are either al-Qaeda or right-wing domestic terror groups.  This development comes after initial reports that the trail has tragically grown cold.

Sadly, before the bodies were even cold the media were suggesting that conservatives or “right-wing extremists” could be behind the bombing.  Terabytes of digital data are still being combed through by investigators, and there's no proof solidly linking the so-called “right wing” of America -- those type of hate groups, by the way, are roundly repudiated by true conservatives -- was responsible for this senseless attack.  But that doesn't seem to matter to James Kitfield of the National Journal, who wrote yesterday morning:

CBS finally ended their on-air coverage blackout of the Kermit Gosnell murder trial on Monday's CBS This Morning, airing two segments on the story a month after opening arguments began. Jan Crawford acknowledged that the Gosnell case "has received little national news coverage". Meanwhile, ABC and NBC's morning and evening newscasts continued to ignore the ongoing legal proceedings against the abortionist.

Crawford pointed out how conservatives "accused the media of ignoring the story because what it called a bias in favor of abortion rights", and how those "charges went viral on Twitter". She even played a sound bite from a former attorney for the murder suspect who questioned the national news media's lack of coverage of the trial: "A case involving a medical doctor charged with eight counts of murder would seem to me that just that fact pattern would make national news" [audio available here; video below the jump].

Viewers who tuned in to the Fox TV musical dramedy “Glee” on Thursday night saw students run for cover after they heard two gunshots fired near their choir room in William McKinley High School. The incident forced the frightened teenagers to face their mortality and record final messages for friends and family in case they didn't get out alive.

After many people watched the episode, which was entitled “Shooting Star,” they posted notes on Twitter claiming it was “too soon” after the December 14 tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newport, Conn., for this television program to deal with that topic, “if ever.”

One would expect that everyone associated with an outlet which characterizes itself as the be-all, end-all of online encyclopedias would be on board to make sure there is space for an entry on the person who may, when all is said and done, be shown to have been among the worst, if not the worst, mass murderers in U.S. history -- and maybe, if ABC's Terry Moran is correct, "the most successful serial killer in the history of the world."

Nope. It appears that earlier this week, an editor at Wikipedia proposed deleting an already-existing entry on Kermit Gosnell because, according to the relevant "Articles for deletion" page at the site, "His case has not received national attention. It is a local multiple-murder story in Pennsylvania, nothing more." As outrageous as this suggestion was, it should be noted that all but one of several dozen responses to the suggestion advocated keeping the entry. Excerpts from the Daily Caller's coverage follow the jump.

Give Anthony Weiner another chance! Slate’s William Saletan fawned over the genius political rehab strategy deployed by former disgraced Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), as he’s mulling whether to run in New York’s mayoral election this year. Saletan’s  April 10 piece, laughably headlined " I'll Be His Weiner Wife, " observed how the recent Weiner expose -- sorry, I mean feature -- in a recent New York Times Magazine “doesn’t look like a strategy. It’s so deeply embedded in the narrative that you can’t see it."

"Weiner has made this a story not about himself, but about his wife and their future together. You have to forgive him because she has forgiven him, and if you hold a grudge against him, she’s the one you’re really punishing," Saletan argued. Cut Weiner out of politics for life and you hurt Huma as well. Heck, you're probably hurting America too! Isn't that patronizing at best and misogynistic at worst?

When the grand jury report in the Kermit Gosnell trial was released yesterday, one would think that the media would have as the primary takeaway the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's documentation of the numerous atrocities committed in this house of horrors.  Yet, for the Associated Press, the real victims seemed to be Gosnell's employees, those poor folks who had no job prospects than infanticide.

Of the eight co-workers charged in the aftermath of Gosnell’s arrest, three have pleaded guilty to third-degree murder.  Nonetheless, they all say that they were just doing what they were instructed to do, simply following orders.  Ed Morrissey at Hot Air posted yesterday about MaryClaire Dale of AP, and her April 12 story that lamented how these workers had “few options” for employment:

Do you oppose President Obama's gun control proposals?  Well then, you must not be against gun violence.  So suggested a guest this morning on the new MSNBC show, Up With Steve Kornacki.

Leah Gunn Barrett [insert wisecrack on middle name here], of "New Yorkers Against Gun Violence," was trying to explain away why Second Amendment advocates do so well politically.  According to her, gun "enthusiasts" are single-issue voters with good grassroots organization. In contrast, "people who are against gun violence" aren't as well organized.  View the video after the jump.

Country music star Brad Paisley is either an idiot or a genius. If he wrote the song "Accidental Racist" to stir a whirlwind of (mostly bad) publicity, he's a genius. But the negative cultural consensus strongly suggests he should have never been dumb enough to try to write a racial-harmony song.

Paisley performed the song as a dialogue with rapper LL Cool J, now a star on the CBS drama "NCIS: LA." He says he wrote the song when he felt he had to defend wearing a T-shirt celebrating the country band Alabama, a shirt with the Confederate flag on it. In the song, he tries to suggest to a black man he met that the flag just says he's a fan of the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd.

The media's censoring of the Kermit Gosnell murder trial is appalling.  But why, exactly, are reporters failing to cover the Philadelphia abortionist's trial? Mollie Hemingway of the Patheos blog Get Religion thought she'd ask Washington Post staff writer Sarah Kliff, who responded via Twitter that she isn’t writing about it because she “cover[s] policy for the Washington Post, not local crime."

That, of course, is a patently ludicrous excuse.  In an April 12 blog post, Hemingway aptly noted that local crimes are often used to give context to a larger issue in public policy.  The Trayvon Martin shooting sparked a debate about Stand Your Ground Laws.  The murder of Matthew Shepard launched a debate around hate crimes, and awareness of bigotry against gays.  And as for the most recent case of a local crime story gone national, a day after the Newtown shooting, Kliff penned a piece asking, “What would ‘meaningful action’ on gun control look like?” The bottom line is that the Gosnell trial illustrates just how poorly regulated many inner-city abortion clinics are and how that lack of regulation can allow horror stories like Gosnell to happen.

President Obama’s budget is finally out -- a mere 65 days late -- and it’s loaded with tax increases. 

At yesterday’s press briefing, White House flack-in-chief Jay Carney admitted that middle class tax increases were coming.  But if a tree falls in the woods, does anyone hear it? Major media outlets like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and sadly even the Wall Street Journal failed to mention this aspect in their coverage of the budget’s unveiling today. Here's the relevant exchange from the April 9 briefing (emphasis mine):

President Obama exploited the dead in Connecticut this morning in a last ditch effort to shame Congress into supporting his anti-gun agenda.  He had some help too. As my NewsBusters colleague Scott Whitlock posted today, all three networks – ABC, NBC, and CBS – fawned over the president’s gun control agenda, with ABC News’ Jon Karl describing it as a “moral imperative.”  Yet, it seems that none of the networks took notice of a recent survey in which 15,000 law enforcement officers said they oppose more gun control, even as they portray the president having the vast majority of police officers behind him on the matter.

The poll, conducted by the law-enforcement site PoliceOne, asked 15,000 police officers thirty questions on measures related to the Obama administration’s push for more control.  In all, the survey found that:

Comedy Central’s The Daily Show usually skewers Republicans and conservatives, but last night, regardless of where you stand on the underlying issue of same-sex marriage, the program went beyond the pale with a joke about Republican acceptance of same-sex marriage that involved Sen. Mark Kirk's (R-Ill.) stroke

Monday's CBS This Morning played up the domestic critics of Margaret Thatcher as they covered the breaking news of her death. Mark Phillips, reporting from London, spotlighted how Thatcher was once called "Plunder-woman" by a British union leader, and how she was "contentious here, famous for breaking the back of the very strong labor movement in Britain." Phillips also noted how the former prime minister was "a figure both reviled and revered."

During a retrospective on the "Iron Lady", correspondent Elizabeth Palmer ballyhooed how Thatcher's "trademark helmet hair, cut-glass accent, and bullying style became a staple of British satire".

Now that it’s almost departure time for Julius Genachowski, Obama’s first chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, The Hill newspaper has noted one important sign of his priorities. In his four years at the helm, the FCC hasn’t issued one fine to Hollywood for indecent content on broadcast television. Now there’s a legacy.

Hollywood sends its gratitude, Mr. Chairman, for an absolutely perfect record of inaction. Who says that in Obama’s America, your campaign contributions can’t buy regulatory paralysis in Washington when needed?

Robin Kelly, the Democratic nominee in the special election to replace disgraced Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) is a staunch anti-gun zealot, who apparently also doesn't keep up with the news.  In video obtained by our friends at Breitbart, Kelly described James Holmes, the Aurora, Colorado, theater shooter, as a “gentleman,” and noted how the occupants inside the theater failed to draw their weapons to stop him.  In short, it’s the victims’ fault, and concealed carry permits did not prevent the tragedy.

This is what she said yesterday:

"in the movie [theater], they have conceal and carry, but nobody pulled out their guns to kill the gentleman that did all the damage that he did." [emphasis added]

On Friday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer accused American society of being intolerant of gay athletes: "There are no openly gay players, but there are lots of gay athletes in major sports, and the fact that they still feel as if they'll be ostracized if they come out is – says something about the times we're living in." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Lauer made the comment in reaction to a story about the son of former basketball star Magic Johnson coming out as gay. In that report, Willie Geist proclaimed: "Magic has been a champion of causes within the gay and lesbian community for decades....with the support of such a beloved icon, there is renewed hope that this will help break the taboo of open sexuality in the sports world....There remain no openly gay players in any of the major professional team sports. But Magic said in that interview yesterday he expects that to change and soon."

ABC, CBS, and NBC's Friday morning shows all devoted air time to President Obama labeling California Attorney General Kamala Harris "the best-looking attorney general in the country" at a fundraiser on Thursday. Unsurprisingly, a panel on NBC's Today tried to explain away the remark. Willie Geist asserted, "I think he [Obama] was making a joke." CBS This Morning's Norah O'Donnell was tougher on the President: "Maybe, [it] was not the right thing to say."

However, the Big Three newscasts didn't report that Mrs. Obama also got caught in a verbal misstep on Thursday. ABCNews.com's Arlette Saenz devoted a Friday morning item to how Michelle Obama mistakenly referred to herself as a "single mother" during an interview with WCAX, a CBS affiliate in Vermont.

Should federal prosecutors be allowed to pack heat?  It’s a good question given the recent assassinations of a District Attorney and his assistant in Kaufman County, Texas.  While not federal prosecutors, the recent assassinations illustrate that prosecutors have become a target for violence, particularly in federal cases where drug cartels – or terrorists – may be involved.

Recently, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) sent a letter to Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, seeking clarification on federal policy about the ability of federal prosecutors carrying firearms on federal property. The Washington Post covered this development in Friday's paper, but buried the item on page A10. What's more, within the story itself, reporter Ed O'Keefe buried in the next-to-last paragraph the fact that the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys, which represent federal prosecutors, are supportive of the initiative that would permit their clients to carry firearms.

On Thursday, Mollie Hemingway of the GetReligion blog pointed out CBS's "major mistake" on the March 31, 2013 edition of Sunday Morning. On the Easter Sunday broadcast, Martha Teichner confused two biblical figures with the same name when she stated that "only one of the Gospels places Mary at the crucifixion, alongside the so-called 'beloved disciple' – possibly John the Baptist." Actually, the prophet was beheaded many months before Jesus' arrest.

During her report, Teichner also spotlighted the Broadway adaptation of Irish author Colm Toibin's novella "The Testament of Mary," which perverts the biblical Mary of Nazareth into an angry woman bitter over her son Jesus' execution and openly disdainful of His followers. [audio available here; video below the jump]

Most Americans would agree that a federal study -- burning through hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars by the way -- on duck penises is not exactly a high priority when we need to get our fiscal house in order. But Patricia Brennan would disagree with you, and she took to the liberal online journal Slate to do so last Tuesday.

Wait, did I mention that Brennan has a vested interest in defending the study of duck dongs? She's a research professor at University of Massachusetts, Amherst receiving federal money for the study?

Aside from insinuating that conservatives "miss the point of basic science" and whining about the “fierce” competition within the scientific community for federal funding, she explained why we should pick up the bill -- sorry I could resist -- for her study:

Yesterday, Juliet Eilperin wrote for the Washington Post that “the public interest in climate change is waning.”  Posted to Chris Cillizza’s Fix blog, it’s odd that Eilperin didn’t use any hard numbers in this piece.  Citing Pew, she did say that support has dropped six points since last October, but what, pray tell, was the support at that time?  Ten percent? Twenty-five?

Maybe she omitted the hard numbers for the simple reason that Americans have NEVER viewed this as a high priority issue.  Let’s go back to January when President Obama – and the media – were pushing hardest for gun control policies. Aa Washington Post/ABC Poll found that 18 percent of all adults viewed addressing global warming as a high priority.  Concerning the partisan breakdown, only 26% of Democrats and 7% of Republicans thought that stopping the polar ice caps was of the highest national urgency.

Yesterday, the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler decided to not to be a lapdog for the Obama administration with his Pinocchio test concerning background checks for firearm purchases. On April 2, he awarded President Obama’s claim that 40 percent of gun sales don’t require a background check, which earned him three -- out of four possible -- Pinocchios from Kessler. 

Kessler explained that " there are two key problems with the president’s use of this statistic: