Salon

Salon's Joan Walsh stooped to an even further low Monday when she said on MSNBC's pre-debate show, "Newt is the face of the politics of resentment and racism and angry white male rage."

Yes, she was talking about Republican presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Well, she’s certainly making a case for the title.

In a piece titled, When white people lack “bourgeois values”, the Salon Editor at Large manages a race and class-baiting exacta, covering an alleged economic disdain shown by Republicans towards African-Americans, and charging the GOP with promoting policies which “shackle women to the home”.

In attacking a Rick Santorum speech on family values, in which he correctly stated, “When the family breaks down, the economy breaks down,” Walsh had this to say:

Associated Press reporter Christina Hoag drew special praise for "fair coverage" from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) for a story on bullying. "Fair coverage" in GLAAD-speak is completely one-sided "news" with no space for conservative points of view.

"Kids, even as young as middle school age, feel more emboldened to openly express their sexual or gender orientation," Hoag wrote, "but many are not prepared for a possible backlash, gay-rights advocates say." The voices of "backlash" are too evil to quote, apparently.  The 1100-word story was slanted enough to be posted on the leftist website Salon. These were the six people Hoag quoted for AP, as she described them:

In October 25, 2007, a U.S. Army specialist in Afghanistan braved enemy fire in an attempt to save a fellow soldier who had been wounded in an ambush. An insurgent bullet struck his armored chest plate, knocking him down. He got up and rushed back into enemy fire to retrieve his fallen comrade. He threw several hand grenades toward the enemy, and was able to grab his colleague and immediately begin first aid. Though the man he'd risked his life for later died from the wounds, his heroic actions didn't go unnoticed. Army Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, received the medal of honor on November 16, 2010 from the White House for his valiant actions in attempting to save his fellow soldier.

If you noticed something different on Wednesday's "Morning Joe," it was shamed MSNBC contributor Mark Halperin back from roughly a one month suspension after he called the President a D-word back on June 30.

Not everyone was happy about this judging from Alex Pareene's piece at the Obama-loving Salon:

Ever creative in finding things for which to blame the "right wing," Salon magazine is criticizing conservatives in a headline ("Planned Parenthood Firebombed, Right Wing Silent") about an apparent incident in McKinney, Texas last Tuesday in which an unknown person allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at a Planned Parenthood establishment.

No one with even superficial understanding of conservatives and a sound mind could conclude the conservative movement supports throwing Molotov cocktails at business establishments, even left-wing ones. That we did not comment on an incident that received almost no press attention and at which no one was injured is more logically attributed to the fact that we, like almost everyone else on the planet, had no idea it took place.

As NewsBusters previously reported, Chris Matthews on Wednesday lied about Ronald Reagan's position on taxes in a "Hardball" segment insinuating the late President would oppose the current Republican stance on the debt ceiling.

When Salon editor Joan Walsh said Obama "is actually the Reagan figure here," former RNC chairman Michael Steele bust out laughing (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh doesn't like to comment about MSNBC because he fears it will help their dismal ratings.

However, he made an exception on Thursday's program saying amongst other things, "That whole network is a loony bin filled with people who are overflowing with uncontrollable rage, anger, unhappiness, and misery, by design" (video courtesy Right Scoop follows with transcript and commentary):

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):

To a liberal media member, politics means never having to say you were wrong.

On Tuesday's "The Ed Show," Salon's Joan Walsh said she looked "kind of stupid" for defending Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) last week, then went right on defending him (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Pro-abortion ideologues have been known to blame "recall bias" on stories or studies that don't go their way.

But here I believe we have an actual case of pro-abortion recall bias.

Recall that on May 26 liberal online journal Salon published the first person account, "Abortion saved my life," by writer Mikki Kendall. Kendall claimed she almost hemorrhaged to death because a hospital doctor "didn’t do abortions. At all. Ever."

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:

On my blog last week I posted an excerpt from the Salon piece, “Abortion saved my life.”

The writer, a blogger named Mikki Kendall, was relaying her first person account of supposedly nearly hemorrhaging to death because a hospital doctor refused to perform the one procedure that would save her life, an abortion. Here was the quote I pulled:

Mild-mannered Minnesotan Tim Pawlenty may have his own Rev. Wright, Salon.com's Justin Elliott sensationally alerted readers of the War Room blog Thursday morning.

The reason, Elliott argues: the former Minnesota governor's preacher believes in manmade global warming and wants a liberal immigration reform policy enacted into law:

NBC's David Gregory started a Newt Gingrich is racist trend Sunday that liberal media members across the fruited plain quickly embraced.

After the "Meet the Press" host accused the former House Speaker of racism for having the nerve to call Barack Obama "The most successful food stamp president in American history," Salon's Joan Walsh out in San Francisco jumped on the bandwagon as did Chicago film critic Roger Ebert:

CNN's Howard Kurtz is either astonishingly naive or so strongly in the tank for Barack Obama that he's willing to ignore the totally obvious to assist the President's reelection efforts.

On Sunday's "Reliable Sources," Kurtz actually discussed with far-left guests Joan Walsh of Salon and John Aravosis of Americablog.com - without ever disclosing the painfully inconvenient truth! - why the "so-called liberal media" don't report divisions within the Democrat Party especially left-wing disappointment with the current White House resident (video follows with transcript and lots of commentary):

"Evangelical Liberty University received half a billion dollars in federal aid money: One conservative college got more government cash than NPR last year."

That's the misleading headline for Alex Pareene's April 5 War Room blog post at Salon.com.

Adding insult to inaccuracy, Pareene slandered the late Jerry Falwell -- without a link to corroborating evidence -- as an apartheid supporter and bigot (h/t Matt Cover):

On Wednesday's AC360 on CNN, ABC's Ashleigh Banfield punted on Nir Rosen's offensive Tweets against CBS's Lara Logan and tried to explain them away: "We're using a lot of electronics to get information out as fast as we can nowadays before we can really digest the ramifications of what we say...And so, I'm certainly not going to cast aspersions on Mr. Rosen. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

Anchor Anderson Cooper turned to Banfield and Salon.com's Joan Walsh immediately after playing his taped interview with Rosen during the 10 pm Eastern hour. Cooper first asked Walsh for her take on the controversy, and she promptly criticized the disgraced journalist: "I thought it was horrible, Anderson, and I assumed that he was making light of a sexual assault...So, I'm not going to call him a liar. Only he knows what he knew. But it was incredibly insensitive, and even...aside from the sexual assault aspect, to be mocking someone that you don't like who has been injured and mistreated, I would rather think that we don't have those responses...Maybe that's naive of me."

Most Americans are probably unaware that Jews were the victims of more than eight times as many anti-religion hate crimes last year as were Muslims. And the reason is simple: anti-Muslim crimes receive far more media attention.

Case in point: the media has been all but silent on a slew of anti-Semitic acts of vandalism at Indiana University, coinciding with the beginning of the celebration of Hanukkah (h/t Stephen Richer):

In the wake of a huge GOP midterm victory, pro-abortion women actively took to the social website Twitter to reject the incoming wave of pro-life candidates. Those who have had abortions spoke out on Twitter, proudly tweeting “#ihadanabortion.” From the Chicago Sun-Times, to The Washington Post, the media obliged these women and their left-wing social agenda by complaining conservatives wish to “scrub the ‘a-word’ of stigma and shame” and compare pro-abortion women to those fighting for civil rights.

When a “hashtag” (a pound sign) followed by a series of words is used on Twitter (for example - #ihadanabortion) an online community is created for those who are discussing a similar topic. According to the Post, on Nov. 5 the #ihadanabortion topic was among the top 10 most popular or “trending” topics on Twitter.

A former advisor to George W. Bush smacked down Salon's Joan Walsh Monday for questioning the 43rd President's psychological compass.

Appearing on MSNBC's "Hardball," GOP strategist Ron Christie also gave Chris Matthews a much-needed education on why going into Iraq was a successful part of Bush's strategy to prevent America from a follow-up attack after 9/11 (video follows with transcript and commentary):

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell admitted on national television Friday that he's a socialist.

In the middle of a heated debate with Salon's Glenn Greenwald on "Morning Joe," O'Donnell said, "I am a socialist. I live to the extreme left, the extreme left of you mere liberals" (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):

UPDATE AT END OF POST: Walsh responds, claims this isn't what she said!

Joan Walsh on Sunday said former USDA official Shirley Sherrod is allowed to say anything she wants about racism -- including calling Fox News and Andrew Breitbart racist -- because her father was killed by a white man.

Discussing last week's controversy on CNN's "Reliable Sources," Salon's Editor-in-Chief actually claimed, "The woman's father was murdered by a white farmer, and there were witnesses, and the white justice system never found the murderer guilty." 

"She's entitled to talk about race any way she wants to."

When Matt Lewis of Politics Daily asked incredulously, "Any way she wants to," the sparks began to fly (video follows with transcript and commentary): 

If you're going to write an article blasting the opposition for distorting facts, it absolutely behooves one to double check all of their own statements for accuracy.

Such is the case of Joan Walsh, Editor-in-Chief of Salon, who recently penned a piece titled, The Shame of Right-Wing "Journalism".  The article includes the sub-heading, "Andrew Breitbart and Tucker Carlson distort facts to smear liberals, and it works. What liberals should learn."

Apparently, it didn't take long for liberals to learn at all, as Walsh was quickly called out by Chris Hayes of The Nation, feeling it necessary to make ‘a factual correction' in the piece.

Oh, sweet irony.

Walsh updates her piece with Hayes' response at the end, and admitting to the error, but it remains an amusing endeavor to combat alleged distorted facts with actual distorted facts.

The problem, as Hayes explains it to Walsh (emphasis mine throughout):

What does Salon think American TV needs more of? Abortion, and lots of it.

In a July 20 "Broadsheet" article, Salon writer Mary Elizabeth Williams addressed Fox's decision to release the highly controversial "Family Guy" abortion episode as a stand-alone DVD feature this September. Williams crassly compared the comedy show's efforts to make money off a "Banned From TV" episode to "having an abortion and getting your baby too."

The episode's controversy revolved around character Lois Griffin questioning whether to go through with a pregnancy as a surrogate mother for a couple who died in a car crash. Williams used the network's move as a springboard for her real complaint: the lack of abortion on American airwaves.

Williams called TV a "timid" medium for "barely" discussing abortion, saying it was "insane" that TV could introduce viewers to the Dharma Initiative in "Lost" but couldn't confront the "legally acceptable procedure" of abortion.

Did you know that calling attention to an area where a Supreme Court justice nominee is from, which happens to be a well-known bastion of liberalism, is bigoted? 

If you didn't, you want to take a look at the wisdom of Salon.com's Joan Walsh. In her June 28 post "It's not even coded bigotry anymore," Walsh argued that references to SCOTUS nominee Elena Kagan's Upper West Side of Manhattan roots are bigoted -since the neighborhood has Jewish features, references to it are anti-Semitic and as she puts it, "not even coded."

"That said, Republicans on the Senate Judicial Committee are trying to make the case she's outside the mainstream of American jurisprudence, by attacking her clerking for (and admiring) legal giant Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court justice, while singling her out as a denizen of ‘Manhattan's Upper West Side' - you know, the neighborhood known for Zabar's and bagels and, well, Jews," Walsh wrote.

Walsh wasn't clear about what she thinks these Senate Republicans are trying to accomplish. Conventional wisdom suggests Kagan will be easily confirmed, but pointing out the neighborhood she is from, with documented evidence of having an ideological liberal leaning, is going to accomplish what?