Salon

Pope Francis made waves on Wednesday when he said that atheists can do good; but some media headlines jumped on the chance to portray the new pontiff as bucking Church teaching. 

Preaching on Christ’s words that “Whoever is not against us is for us,” Pope Francis emphasized that Christ died to redeem all men, “even atheists,” and insisted we can’t assume non-believers cannot do good.  Such people can do good, he said, and “must,” because of “this commandment at heart: do good and avoid evil.”

Sometimes, the left simply can’t argue against hard facts. In a book excerpt warning of the “resurgent right” on Salon.com, leftist Lee Fang accused Brent Bozell of “gross exaggeration” in describing media apathy on Obama scandals.  

Fang reported that in a speech at the Council for National Policy in February 2009, Bozell claimed by the time the national networks ran "a single story on Reverend Wright, 42 states and the District of Columbia had voted." Dear Mr. Fang: please identify the exaggeration in that fact.

There are times when I’d really like to see a liberal brain next to a conservative brain to see if there really is a physiological difference.

Consider Salon’s Joan Walsh who on MSNBC’s The Cycle Wednesday actually said the reason former President George Bush’s poll numbers are up is because President Obama is doing such a good job (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Salon contributor and syndicated columnist David Sirota really seems to despise many of his fellow countrymen.

In a piece he published Sunday, Sirota actually asked regarding the Boston Marathon bombing, “Could it be that some Americans actually want to see the kind of bigoted, violent, civil-liberties-trampling reaction we tend to see when terrorism suspects end up being Muslim?”

Salon's David Sirota, who on Tuesday wrote a column called "Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American" and doubled down on Wednesday with "I still hope the bomber is a white American" (respectively noted by Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters here and here), has predictably continued his incoherent rants. In a subsequent column, he wrote about how the "Boston aftermath brings out America’s worst prejudices." In his latest offering, with no sense of irony, circus clown Sirota tells readers that "we can't let ourselves get swept up in the media circuses that follow" (I'm not going to link to either example of dreadful dreck; readers with strong stomachs can plug the items in quotes just noted into a web search).

Apparently attempting to poison the national discussion in multimedia fashion, Sirota tweeted his belief on Thursday that any conservative who sympathizes with and supports the people of Boston and Massachusetts during this difficult time must be a hypocrite (HT Twitchy.com):

As NewsBusters reported earlier, unabashedly liberal commentator David Sirota published an article at Salon Tuesday with the disgusting title, "Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American."

As a result of all the negative attention he's gotten due to this piece, rather than doing the right thing by apologizing, Sirota on Wednesday actually doubled down with a new article titled "I Still Hope the Bomber Is a White American."

We have seen some disgraceful reporting of the Boston Marathon bombing the past few days, but this headline at Salon Tuesday could be the worst.

One of the more bizarre memes propagated by the proabort left about the trial of Kermit Gosnell, who "faces 43 criminal counts, including eight counts of murder in the death of one patient, Karnamaya Monger, and seven newborn infants," is that Fox News has been almost as negligent in covering the story and the trial as the Big Three broadcast networks, and that conservative media in general have also mostly ignored the story.

Through Monday evening, April 8, the Media Research Center's Matt Philbin noted that Gosnell's trial "has received exactly zero seconds of airtime on the broadcast networks." In a pathetic attempt at a response on Friday, Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald and several others are trying to claim that "conservative" outlets have also virtually ignored the trial. Seitz-Wald's own text shows that his argument is weak, as seen in excerpts following the jump.

In a Wednesday Salon column which should be saved onto the hard drives of everyone in the pro-life movement as a reminder of the fundamental evil of their opposition, Mary Elizabeth Williams stated why, to her, it doesn't matter that abortion involves the taking of a human life: "I believe that life starts at conception. And it's never stopped me from being pro-choice."

The establishment press has consistently refused to apply the "pro-life" label to a movement which has always been not only about ending abortion, but about respecting and protecting human life from conception to natural death. I believe that refusal has occurred because many reporters share Ms. Williams's brutal, strongly held but rarely expressed beliefs articulated after the jump. The Salon staff writer proves that her side richly deserves to be called "anti-life" -- because that's what they are (bolds are mine throughout this post):

The list of words MSNBC's Chris Matthews believes are racist if uttered by a conservative got longer on Wednesday.

You can now add "urban" which offended Matthews when Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) said it during an interview Monday, but didn't bother the Hardball host in the slightest when Salon's Joan Walsh said it on his own program two days later (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Leave it to MSNBC to set the record straight, where a defense of conservativism is strictly forbidden.  With no one to dispute such claims, one would think the GOP's "war on women" has never been more overt or frightening -- especially after watching News Nation's host Tamron Hall discuss these issues of inequality with her openly liberal guests.

On the Oct. 17 edition of News Nation, Hall invited Salon's fiercely feminist staff writer Irin Carmon and Democratic strategist Keith Boykin on her show to 'fact check' everything Mitt Romney had said the previous night. Hardly a non-partisan duo, their agenda was clear from the beginning. Voting for Mitt Romney could potentially be dangerous for women everywhere. [ video below, MP3 audio available here ]

On the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the horrendously liberal website Salon published a piece with the truly absurd headline, "Fox News’ War on Muslims: Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity have stoked Islamophobia -- and encouraged right-wing ignorance."

The contents - excerpted from Nathan Lean's book “The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims” - were stocked with misinformation about America's leading cable news channel:

The left's war on traditional marriage took a truly disgraceful turn Monday.

The folks at Salon actually published a piece entitled "Gay Couples Have Happier Kids."

The sub-headline read, "Studies show that the traditional nuclear family is not better. It's a dying model -- and that's a good thing":

Satire or not satire? You be the judge.

When you read the title of Jonathan Bernstein's Salon article, "Joe Biden: The 'practically perfect' vice president," you figure he must be joking. However, when you begin reading his story you can see that Bernstein was serious...or was he? Your humble correspondent considers himself to be a good judge of the often fine dividing line between satire and seriousness but in this case I am not so sure. The following paragraph in defense of Biden seems to start out seriously but was Bernstein pulling our legs at the end?

A new reality TV show featuring C-list celebrities doing military training exercises to compete for charity was denounced as "empty jingoism" and a modern-day spin on "[a]dding a celebrity quotient to the military-industrial complex," kind of like when Bob Hope entertained the troops during World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

That's pretty much the reaction of Washington Post TV critic Hank Stuever to the new "Stars Earn Stripes" program, which debuts tonight at 8 p.m. EDT on NBC. "It also feels about five years too late, in both its reality-TV tropes and its message of pride," Stuever huffs. "It harks back to the 'Mission Accomplished!' era of attacks and setbacks in the Middle East":

Good liberals like Salon.com writer Joan Walsh don't believe in racial profiling. But political profiling, well, that's a different story.

In her August 8 article, "Spotting white supremacists," Walsh used the recent horrendous Sikh temple shooting as an occasion to dust off a widely-maligned 2009 Department of Homeland Security report that suggested that domestic terrorist incidents were likely to hail from extremists on the political right. She also used the occasion to slander conservative Matt Drudge by comparing his website to that of a white supremacist group called Stormfront [emphasis mine]:

On Monday, Joan Walsh continued her crusade against conservatives when she authored an article entitled "Mitt's loathsome lie" for Salon.com. This piece, which was supposed to focus on the Department of Justice lawsuit in Ohio to block a law which extends early voting privileges to active-duty military members, evolves from criticism to a bizarre claim that Catholic bishops are part of a "military group" and have become "become an unregistered arm of the GOP."

Walsh began by introducing the issue: a bill by the Ohio legislature (which she is quick to accuse of being "Republican-dominated") to limit early voters to active-duty military members who would be unable to vote on Election Day. Obviously, this is a ploy by the GOP, which "keeps finding sneakier ways to disenfranchise those Americans who might be inclined to vote for Democrats" to swing the Ohio vote using "GOP resentment machine logic."

Why does Salon.com hate the Olympics so? After Wednesday’s David Sirota piece decrying (a la Chris Hayes) how “infantile displays of hyper-patriotism” like chanting “USA” for the home team give him jingoistic hives about aiding the military-industrial complex, a Friday article asked “Did God help Gabrielle Douglas win? The gold medalist is a teenager of deep faith and gratitude -- and that can be a little unnerving.”

Writer Mary Elizabeth Williams found it creepy that any athlete would credit Jesus after a victory, and wrote of how she agreed with a colleague that “I would like her more if she were not so, so, so into Jesus.”

While millions of Americans are happily tuning in to cheer on their fellow countrymen and root for Team USA, some members of the liberal media are not smiling.  Salon.com writer David Sirota, author of a lengthy piece published on Wednesday, is among them, and finds himself "increasingly interrupted by pangs of discomfort" watching our nation's athletes compete on the world stage. "Not because," he claims, he is "ashamed of our country or our Olympians," but because of the way that "the relationship between American nationalism and the Olympics" has been "infused with...politicized meaning."

First, he launched into a tirade about the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics which he calls "a Cold War spectacle of hyper-patriotism deliberately orchestrated to give the big middle finger to the boycotting Soviets and their allies." Then, he called the 1992 Barcelona games an excuse to use the Olympics to "to spike the ball in the end zone — or, more accurately, 360 windmill dunk over the rest of the planet" and questions why "we have to rub our strength in" and "preen on the world stage in such cartoonish fashion."

The manufactured controversy over Chick-Fil-A won’t be dying down anytime soon, if media figures get their way.

Chick-Fil-A President Dan Cathy stated that he was “guilty as charged” when it came to supporting the traditional family, and commented on a radio show that “I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say: You know, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.’”

That’s tantamount to heresy in Hollywood and in New York and D.C. newsrooms. The media have proven themselves in the tank for same sex marriage, and Chick-Fil-A is learning what it means to cross them.

As NewsBusters reported Saturday, Politico has officially cut ties with White House correspondent Joe Williams for saying presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is more comfortable around "white folks."

Throwing caution to the wind, Salon editor at large Joan Walsh on Thursday doubled-down on these caustic comments writing, "It’s almost certainly a fact that Mitt Romney is more comfortable around white people":

Let's call a spade a spade: the arrogance, hypocrisy and racism of Salon's Joan Walsh knows no bounds.

On PBS's Tavis Smiley Show Monday, this so-called "editor at large" had the nerve to depict some Republicans as "a white, older base that doesn’t quite understand the way healthcare works" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The day before the Supreme Court ruled ObamaCare's individual mandate constitutional -- as a tax, not as an exercise of the commerce clause -- the mostly-liberal panel at the brand-new 3 p.m. program The Cycle explored the question of what, in the view of the panelists, that government should consider making Americans do against their will.

For her part, panelist Krystal Ball insisted that America should be more like Australia, which forces its citizens to vote in it federal elections or else to pay a fine. Unsurprisingly, Ball's fellow liberal panelists Toure Neblett, and Steve Kornacki were sympathetic to the proposal, with only conservative panelist S.E. Cupp denouncing it as antithetical to the notion of political liberty.

One of the biggest pet peeves of your humble correspondent is so-called journalists who continue to absurdly claim that there is no evidence that one of the purposes for gunwalking in Operation Fast and Furious was to advance a gun control agenda. Last week the culprit was Jillian Rayfield of Rolling Stone and now Steve Kornacki of Salon and MSNBC is the latest liberal to display his reality challenged assertion on this subject:

On Friday, NewsBusters reported Salon editor Joan Walsh saying on MSNBC's Hardball, "I didn’t think it was possible to get lower than Andrew Breitbart, but his spawn have."

In a piece marvelously titled "Is It Possible to Get Lower Than Joan Walsh?" Twitchy reported moments ago that this sparked a new hashtag on Twitter: