Blogs

If her gig at Time magazine doesn't work out, Jay Newton Small could always try working in Harry Reid's press shop.

She certainly knows how to butter up the Senate majority leader. Witness Newton Small's latest Swampland blog post at Time.com where she denounces House Republican debt ceiling plans as "histrionics" while forecasting a resolution to the debt ceiling deadlock that has Reid saving the day (emphasis mine):

With a post entitled "When Christianity becomes lethal," liberal theologian and Center for American Progress senior fellow Susan Brooks Thislethwaite took to the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog yesterday to indict conservative Christian theology as a catalyst for the terror espoused by Norwegian bomber/shooter Anders Behring Breivik:

One more data point demonstrating the leftward tilt of the purportedly non-partisan Politico:

In his Playbook of today, Politico's chief White House correspondent Mike Allen depicts a "grand bargain" on the credit ceiling, which inevitably would include huge tax increases, as an "historic achievement" for which President Obama and House speaker John Boehner would "rightly get credit."

In contrast, Allen suggests that Republican leaders Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy are refusing a grand bargain out of petty political ambition.

Read more after the jump.

It really is a "plan," and don't you forget it.

Never mind, as the Washington Examiner's Conn Carroll inconveniently points out, that the document produced by the "Gang of Six" -- Republican Senators Coburn, Chambliss, and Crapo, along with Democratic Senators Conrad, Warner, and Durbin -- is all of five pages. If you take out the white space, it's about 3-1/2.

Early this evening, the Associated Press's Stephen Ohlemacher called the output of the Gang of Six a "plan" no fewer than 12 times -- and his report's headline was "Bipartisan tax plan trims mortgage deduction." Okay, Steve, even though you (and the Gang) are obviously wrong, we get it.

"Does atheism need a pitch man?" is the latest "panel debate" at "On Faith," the Washington Post religion news-and-views blog.

Yes, a discussion question on a religion blog about whether atheists need a Moses to lead them to the Promised Land.

Leave it to the mainstream media!:

Per Reuters blogger James Pethokoukis, Goldman Sachs, demonstrating Democratic-friendly timing similar to that seen at the New York Times a month or so ago, published an extraordinarily gloomy economic forecast last night.

Here are some of the details he quotes:

"Following another week of weak economic data, we have cut our estimates for real GDP growth in the second and third quarter of 2011 to 1.5% and 2.5%, respectively, from 2% and 3.25%. Our forecasts for Q4 and 2012 are under review, but even excluding any further changes we now expect the unemployment rate to come down only modestly to 8¾% at the end of 2012."

I've been trying to resist taking satisfaction in David Cay Johnston's utter humiliation on his first assignment at Reuters. Y'know, there but for the grace of God, etc. I do wish him well, though I question whether the feeling is mutual. More important, I hope he recognizes the need to go into journalistic rehab. My guess is that he doesn't.

The former New York Times journalist/reporter (whatever, David) and yours truly had an extended online dustup four years ago when I demonstrated Johnston's in my view sloppy, foundation-limited, and biased reporting at the Old Gray Lady (graphic of first few paragraphs as originally presented; current link) in an item about what had happened to Americans' incomes between 2000 and 2005 (errors summarized here in "Top Six Errors Committed by David Cay Johnston and/or the New York Times in Their Income Growth Report"; I noted a seventh later).

Let's go through the development and destruction of Johnston's maiden effort at Reuters.

MSNBC "NewsNation" anchor and Texas native Tamron Hall was delighted to find that four Lone Star cities made it to Forbes.com's list of "The Next Big Boom Towns in the U.S."

"Forbes [magazine] says many of the cities on the list have some of the best job creation records in the nation," Hall noted as she introduced contributor Joel Kotkin, who authored the July 6 piece.

Kotkin identified the nation's new 10 boom towns, five of which are in states without a personal income tax (Florida and Texas) and one, Nashville, Tenn., where the state levies person taxes only on dividend and interest, but not salary or wage, income.

[video follows page break]

Vyan at Daily Kos is getting giddy in a post headlined “Could we soon see a world without Fox News?” It's apparently all over for FNC: "In less than a week the News of the World Wiretapping and Bribery Scandal has quickly metastasized into a Multi-Headed Dragon of Death for Murdoch Empire and simply lopping off one head, doesn't seem to be enough - the infection has already spread."

Now that Fox-hating liberal interest groups, bloggers,  and Democrat politicians are vowing to investigate, the Kosmonauts think Murdoch's "criminal enterprise" is about to collapse:

In a feature entitled "Don’t Know Much About History: Epically Wrong Politician Accounts of Yesteryear," Time magazine's Swampland blog crew promised to break down "nine egregious examples of the type of revisionist flub you can expect in 2012," starting with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) arguing John Quincy Adams was a Founding Father.

Time made sure to toss in President Obama and Vice President Biden in the mix, the list was predominantly comprised of Republican 2012 presidential hopefuls. On some counts, Time was spot on, but in others the magazine was either inaccurate, patently unfair in its criticism, or both.

Deriding Sarah Palin for her inartfully-put account of Paul Revere's midnight ride, Time.com echoed MSNBC's Chris Matthews by snarking that she was shoehorning a pro-gun rights talking point into her later explanation of the historical event:

Last week my colleague Eric Ames addressed the bias and some misstatements of fact in Richard Stengel's recent attack on the Constitution/defense of ObamaCare here.

Today, Aaron Worthing over at Patterico's Pontification's ticked off 13 factual errors in the Time magazine editor's piece and systematically addressed each one.

It's an excellent piece. Here's an excerpt that I think addresses some of Stengel's biggest errors:

It's not just conservatives who are sick and tired of Jon Stewart hiding behind his "I'm a comedian" excuse when called out for his dead-serious liberal pontifications.

Even liberals like Salon.com's Will Bunch are tired of the "Daily Show" host's faux sanctimony, even as he cheers Stewart's liberalism and calls on the comedian to embrace it.

From a June 21 War Room blog post (emphases mine):

As the New York state legislature debates authorizing same-sex marriage, some Republican legislators want to ensure that Empire State business owners in the hospitality industry, such as caterers and florists, could refuse to lend their services to a same-sex couple hoping to hire them without being wrung out to dry in court for discrimination.

In response to this development, USA Today's religion blogger Cathy Lynn Grossman yesterday snarked that it reminded her of the "Soup Nazi" episode of Seinfeld.

Perhaps peeved that her weekend was wasted on the nothing-burger that was the release of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin's official e-mail correspondence, Time magazine's Katy Steinmetz yesterday directed her ire at current Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell (R) for dumping the e-mails on reporters in cumbersome printed form rather than in electronic files:

A Baptist preacher calling a sinner to repent and trust in Jesus Christ for salvation is hardly news. Except, perhaps, when it's done via Twitter.

USA Today religion blogger Cathy Lynn Grossman yesterday took seminary president and Twitter user Albert Mohler to task for this tweet sent on Saturday:

How tone-deaf do you have to be to a) compare Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) to Martin Luther King, Jr. b) say the women who got Weiner's lewd photos were "hardly traumatized" and c) call on Weiner's wife Huma Abedin to call a press conference to belittle the media for attacking her hubby?

You might want to ask Daily Beast contributor Lee Siegel, who did just that (emphases mine) in a June 10 post entitled "C'Mon, America, Nobody's Perfect":

On Friday morning, the Daily Kos blogger with the byline Seneca Doane tried to have fun with the mass defection away from Newt Gingrich, satirically offering Newt his services in defeating the other GOP candidates. He was especially vicious with Herman Cain: "I'll admit it right up front -- Cain scares me.  I don't mean as an opponent; I mean as a human being." Cain, he says is the perfect racist:

Cain poses a problem, though.  Cain can get away with saying more racist things than you can, because white (i.e., almost all) Republicans think that because he's Black, he can't be racist, even if he's trotting out every vicious anti-Black stereotype in the book to the delight of white onlookers.  (And he will.  You should let people know that he'll be your choice for HUD Secretary.  The more pissed off he gets at it and denies that he'd take the job, the better.  You'll tell him that you know that he wants a job and will give it his all.)

Whether it's deliberate obfuscation or just plain laziness is up for debate, but the media have a penchant for misleading news consumers with the meme that Blue Dog Democrats are politically "conservative." While the Blue Dog caucus is decidedly more moderate than Democrats as a whole -- you could individual members are "conservative for a Democrat" -- they rarely if ever qualify as conservatives when you look at the entirety of their voting records.

The mainstream media have largely ignored or casually dismissed businessman and radio host Herman Cain's bid for the 2012 Republican nomination.

Not so Time's Alex Altman, who has a generally decent piece today on the magazine's Swampland blog:

In an interview with Andrew Breitbart on Tuesday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer suggested the conservative blogger should not have broken news of the scandal involving Congressman Anthony Weiner: "Did you worry that – you know, as a conservative, you don't want government in people's bedrooms. And so did you stop and have a debate with yourself about that?"

Moments earlier, Breitbart had noted feeling some sympathy for Weiner during Monday's press conference: "I felt so unbelievably sad for this guy." Lauer responded by wondering why that sympathy didn't keep the BigGovernment.com creator from re-posting Weiner's racy tweet on the web site last week: "But if you're sad for the guy then, did you not consider that at some point you might be sad for him when you first posted that photo ten days ago?"

On Friday, Cass Sunstein, the White House's 56 year-old Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (pictured at right), attempted to disavow a 42-page paper he wrote called "Lives, Life-Years, and Willingness to Pay," which recommended that the government reduce resources directed at benefitting the elderly in favor of increasing what goes to young people, because young people have more years of life ahead of them. His statement, as carried at CNS News:

“I’m a lot older now than the author with my name was, and I’m not sure what I think about what that young man wrote,” he said. “Things written as an academic are not a legitimate part of what we do as a government official. So I am not focusing on sentences that a young Cass Sunstein wrote years ago.

So, dear readers, before you go to the rest of this post, guess how "young" Sunstein was when he engaged in his de facto "death panels" advocacy.

... Ready? Okay, here goes:

"I am fairly certain that when Paul Ryan first decided to publicly share his admiration of Ayn Rand, he could not have imagined it would lead to him speed-walking to his SUV to avoid a young Catholic trying to give him a Bible and telling him to pay more attention to the Gospel of Luke," Time's Amy Sullivan snarked in a June 3 Swampland blog post.