Newsweek

Newsweek has clearly sided against the social conservatives on the gay agenda. When he published a cover on "The Religious Case for Gay Marriage" last December, editor Jon Meacham dared conservatives to protest, since it was useless: "History and demographics are on the side of those who favor inclusion over exclusion."

Nevertheless, Newsweek is still pushing the gay agenda on its website, touting a link to how an "Evangelical Explains Why He’s for Gay Rights."

Brent Childers, executive director of a group called Faith in America founded by gay furniture magnate Mitchell Gold, was the author. Strangely for a group with this name, their mission statement proclaims: "Our organization is not a religious organization. It does not take a theologian or religious background to understand that religion-based bigotry and prejudice brings condemnation, discrimination and violence to bear on its victims."

Childers wrote for Newsweek that he was marching in Washington this weekend at the "National Equality March" to proclaim his version of Christianity, where "Christ’s voice" is found urging acceptance of the gay lifestyle:

Newsweek has a blog called “The Gaggle.”  I’ll skip the tired jokes about how I didn’t know either, and just get to the main point: Ben Adler and Daniel Stone, writers for this blog, are defending the Nobel Prize Committee’s choice of President Barack Obama as the 2009 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

As you can see, not much is needed in the way of extra humor.

Here are the reasons they give for President Obama’s worthiness:

Proving yet again how out of touch the publication can be, the October 12 issue of Newsweek seriously asked the question: "Was Russia Better Off Red?" The "Back Story" page of the magazine featured a graphic comparing life under communism to now and bizarrely asserted: "Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has seen an increase in oligarchs and Louis Vuitton outlets. But by many other measures, Russians are worse off."

Yes, despite the fact that 20 million people were murdered in Soviet Russia, this unsigned feature in Newsweek contrasted the crime rate under communism, the number of hospitals and the total number of cinemas (among other factors) to those in the country today. Sadly, there are only 1,510 movie theaters today. Under the brutal repression of communism, however, there were 2,337.

(JPG image, via a scan, that matches the full size of the Newsweek page and so is readable.)

It goes without saying the Obama-loving media will be in full damage control mode this weekend trying to spin Friday's announcement that Chicago will not be the host of the 2016 Olympics, but this one has to take the cake:

Losing the Olympics Bid Is Good for Obama

Such was the headline of an article posted at Newsweek's "The Gaggle" blog Friday.

The author, Katie Connolly, is a political correspondent for Newsweek, and she actually elaborated on this premise (h/t Hot Air):

Is Newsweek even pretending to be a news magazine (or news site) any more? On their Gaggle blog, political writer Katie Connolly decried Sen. Orrin Hatch for reinstating federal funding for abstinence-only sex education: "I've been trying to think of a measured way to riff on this, but instead I'll be frank. It's an absolute waste of money." Newsweek doesn't favor a "measured" take these days. But Connolly’s conclusion about “pointless moralizing” really cranks up the editorializing:

Let's face it. Teenagers are going to have sex. They always have, they always will. Sure there will be a decent number of teens who choose to abstain and they should feel supported in that decision, but there will still be a large chunk of teenagers doing the dirty. Making them stop is a fools errand. It's about as likely a seeing the Pope in a speedo. It's like asking the Queen to declare her hatred for corgis. It's not going to happen. Sex education policies should take into account this basic reality and tailor programs that broadly educate teens about their choices, abstinence included. Policies should be set up to work. Anything else is just pointless moralizing.

There's a side of America that scares Frenchmen, French Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand was quoted by Time magazine Paris-based writer Bruce Crumley, and it's the side of American determination that doesn't let a 32-year-old rape case die, even if the perpetrator is an elderly survivor of the Holocaust.

Seeking to explain the "cultural divide" that's as "wide as the Atlantic" between America and Europe, Crumley noted that Europeans are "shocked and dismayed that an internationally acclaimed artist" such as Roman Polanski "could be jailed for such an old offense."

Of course, at no point did Crumley cite any public opinion polls with empirical data to back up his argument about the U.S.-European cultural divide on pursuing fugitives who jump bail after drugging and anally raping 13-year-old girls.

No, instead, Crumley turned to an American author (and journalist) living in France to bolster his argument about European sentiment on Polanski:

How do you know when an extraordinarily liberal politician is failing badly?

When extraordinarily liberal journalists like Newsweek's Howard Fineman not only notice, but are willing to write about it AND get their critiques published.

Adding insult to injury, in Fineman's most recent column, he expressed concern that "[u]nless Obama learns to rely less on charm, rhetoric, and good intentions and more on picking his spots and winning in political combat, he's not going to be reelected."

Ouch. But there was much more in Fineman's, "The Limits of Charisma: Mr. President, Please Stay Off TV":

Wondering if she's peering into the "Heart of Darkness," Newsweek's Dahlia Lithwick takes a look at the new Supreme Court term opening in October and laments how the general public generally approves of the Court's job.

Don't be fooled, average Joe American, Lithwick pleads in her October 5 printe edition column (published on the Web site on September 24), for the Roberts court is a right-wing ally of big business and enemy of the Earth (emphasis mine):

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. That's how American business could describe media coverage of their efforts, or alleged lack thereof, to "go green."

Witness Newsweek's Weston Kosova gripe about businesses that couch cost-curbing measures as "green" or Earth-friendly.

In his September 21 "Web exclusive," Kosova slams the hotel industry for dishonesty for encouraging some conservationist behavior that environmentalists have long urged. It seems Kosova is seeing red over the profit-friendly aspects of supposed corporate eco-consciousness (emphasis mine):

Exulting in the "awesome train wreck" that was former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's (Texas) first appearance on ABC's "Dancing with the Stars," (DWTS) Newsweek's Holly Bailey spewed vials of venom in her September 22 post at the magazine's The Gaggle blog.

Her invective seems more befitting the pen keyboard of a leftist blogger than an ostensibly balanced journalist:

Famed news photographer David Hume Kennerly took to the New York Times' “Lens” blog last week, with an update on Monday in which he denounced Newsweek's “skewed imagery to advance its editorial agenda,” to excoriate the magazine for “photo fakery” in how it cropped a picture he took of former Vice President Dick Cheney to imply “something sinister, macabre, or even evil was going on.” Kennerly proposed: “The Sept. 14th Newsweek cover line -- 'Is Your Baby Racist?' -- should have included a sub-head, 'Is Dick Cheney a Butcher?'”

Newsweek used the cropped photo from Getty Images for its “The Take” section with this caption: “'I am.' Dick Cheney on Fox News Sunday, in response to the question, 'So even these cases where [CIA interrogators] went beyond the specific legal authorization, you're OK with it?'” Kennerly explained:

Featured inside the magazine was a full-page, stand-alone picture of former Vice President Dick Cheney, knife in hand, leaning over a bloody carving board. Newsweek used it to illustrate a quote that he made about C.I.A. interrogators. By linking that photo with Mr. Cheney’s comment and giving it such prominence, they implied something sinister, macabre, or even evil was going on there. [Original, un-cropped, photo below the jump]

Media cries of racism every time someone criticizes Barack Obama are becoming quite commonplace now, but this one from Newsweek's Raina Kelley takes the cake:

Let me say this clearly so there are no misunderstandings: some of the protests against President Obama are howls of rage at the fact that we have an African-American head of state. I'm sick of all the code words used when this subject comes up, so be assured that I am saying exactly what I mean.

Got that? 

Well, in case you're at all confused, Kelley made things crystal clear in her article published Saturday amazingly titled, "Play the Race Card" (h/t Tim Graham):

"All socialism does is spread misery equally," Rush Limbaugh has oft asserted. Newsweek's T.R. Reid found a Canadian health care enthusiast who would proudly agree.

In a September 21 print edition piece entitled "No Country for Sick Men," -- subtitled "To judge the content of a nation's character, look no further than its health-care system" --  Reid turned to Marcus Davies of the Saskatchewan Medical Society, who insisted he was perfectly happy with the Canadian health care system's long waiting lines.

After all, it's Canada's way of rationing care and he and his fellow countrymen are happy with it, so long as the misery is spread equally across income levels:

Two days after her magazine published Evan Thomas's "Case for Killing Granny" -- see related NewsBusters post here -- Newsweek staffer Jesse Ellison lamented that her "grandmother lived a full life and sought a quiet death" but "America's health-care system had a different idea of what was best."

In a September 14 Newsweek Web exclusive, Ellison laid out a story of zealous coverage aimed at prolonging her late grandmother's life, complaining that her grandmother's wish to die peacefully was disregarded as she was "treated like a problem to be solved, not as an elderly woman who had had enough."

Although Ellis's grandmother "had great insurance" plus "enough savings to pay for anything that Medicare and her insurance company would not," the writer found cause for complaint in the health care system having a bias to save and extend life, as well as the high costs that that approach incurred:

A prudent gerontologist may opt to remove the September 21 edition of Newsweek from his waiting room.

Newsweek.com today has a cheeky frontpage headline in "The Case for Killing Granny," with a subheader promising an explanation as to "Why curbing excessive end-of-life care is good for America."

For good measure the magazine also promises readers to explain "Why We Should Insure Illegals" and how "Health Reform Could Combat Crime" in related articles linked on the front page. More illegal immigration, fewer criminals and old people. What a deal!

The "Killing Granny" link takes readers to a September 21 print edition article by Evan Thomas which is more measured in tone than the sensational headline suggests, but one that nonetheless laments how Medicare, presently structured, has a built-in bias towards heavy per-patient spending with too little government bureaucrat oversight (emphasis mine):

With the eight year anniversary of 9/11 mere hours away, the Associated Press has written a very moving, very emotional piece, focusing on victims who fear leaving the house on that day, victims who will never view that day as routine, victims who get a sick feeling in their stomach when the anniversary arrives each year - Muslims. 

While nobody is promoting discrimination against any group of people based on the actions of a maniacal few, one has to question if the alleged terror experienced by Muslims on this anniversary warrants a focal point?  On a day in which Americans take time to remember the devastation and the loss of life on 9/11, we are encouraged by the AP to feel sorry for those who might receive strange stares, or may 'feel' less safe on this day because they are Muslim. 

Yet there is little mention of Americans themselves who feel a little less safe on 9/11, because we remember being attacked on that day, we remember watching over 3,000 of our friends and family dying that day, we remember the screams of the heroes on Flight 93, the screams of women and men, mothers and fathers, wives and husbands, who desperately made an attempt to take back a plane scheduled for a suicide mission which surely would have killed many more. 

A quote from Sarah Sayeed attempts to capture the anxiety of the day as she wonders, ‘should I go anywhere?'  An appropriate question, but perhaps more so for Americans who asked themselves the same question weeks, months, and even years after the tragedy.  There is no attempt to capture the anxiety of those who still give a quick glance up to the sky each time the sound of an airplane fills their ears.

As President Obama prepares to deliver his 29th speech on health care, this time before a joint session of Congress, it recalls Bill Clinton’s September 22, 1993 speech to Congress on the same topic. Back then, media liberals hit some of the exact same points journalists are making today: “reform” would end the “shame” of America being the only industrialized nation without universal coverage; that a bigger role for government would cost nothing or even save money in the long run, and that government bureaucrats were preferable to insurance companies.

After a year of media cheerleading, however, Congress finally scrapped Clinton’s health care ideas. But the unpopularity of Clinton’s government-based solutions contributed to the election of the first Republican-led House of Representatives in more than four decades. That’s not to say history will play out the same way this time, but the media spin on behalf of ObamaCare certainly echoes the language of the 1990s. A review:

"[I am] against this most monstrous of all meddling on the part of authority: the meddling with the subsistence of its people. . . . [One must] manfully . . . resist the very first idea, speculative or practical, that it is within the competence of government . . . to supply the poor with necessaries. . . . To provide for us in our necessities is not in the power of government. It would be a vain presumption in statesmen to think they can do it." -- Edmund Burke, 'Thoughts and Details on Scarcity', 1795.

Jon Meacham strikes me as a knowledgeable man. Surely the author of a well-regarded biography of Andrew Jackson knows his history.  Ignorance thus cannot explain how the Newsweek editor could with a straight face describe Barack Obama as "the real Burkean in American politics right now."  Yet on today's Morning Joe, Meacham effectively depicted Obama as the bearer of the torch of the man often described as the father of modern conservatism . . .

"Rationing is already here," done by insurance companies, so why not "start rationing useless interventions right out of medical practice?" asks Newsweek's Sharon Begley in a September 2 "Web exclusive" entitled "Health-Care Rationing: Bring It On."

Begley made clear that her complaint is with how patients under the current health care structure can easily order up expensive tests (MRIs, CAT scans, etc.) that she argues are often times wasteful or unnecessarily adminstered (emphasis mine):

[L]et's figure out what treatments and diagnostic tests make a difference to people's health and longevity, and which are insanely overused to no good end. The latter is what we need to ration, restricting their use to the patients and conditions where they can make a difference or abandoning them altogether.

Begley continued with criticism that practically hinted that a government middleman would be better able to "ration" health care efficiently (emphasis mine):

Outraged by Sen. Charles Grassley’s worries that Democratic health care proposals would "pull the plug on Grandma," Newsweek columnist Jacob Weisberg (who also worked as a reporter for Newsweek early in his career) turns the tables and suggests the Republicans are urging the deaths of the elderly in a myriad of ways:

It's not preposterous to imagine laws that would try to save money by encouraging the inconvenient elderly to make an early exit. After all, that's been the Republican policy for years.

It was Grassley himself who devised the "Throw Mama From the Train" provision of the GOP's 2001 tax cut. The estate-tax revision he championed will reduce the estate tax to zero next year. But when it expires at year's end, the tax will jump back up to its previous level of 55 percent. Grassley's exploding tax break has an entirely foreseeable, if unintended, consequence: it incentivizes ailing, elderly rich people to end their lives—paging Dr. Kevorkian—before midnight on Dec. 31, 2010. It also gives their children an incentive to sign DNR orders and switch off respirators in time for the deadline. This would be a great plot for a P. D. James novel if it weren't an actual piece of legislation.

Mark Hemingway at the Corner followed up on an item at Jules Crittenden's blog late last night.

What perked Hemingway's interest was Mr. Crittenden's relay of the following yesterday concerning an exchange during NPR's Diane Rehm Show:

Newsweek’s Ed Klein (told interviewer) Katty Kay about Kennedy’s love of humor. How the late senator loved to hear and tell Chappaquiddick jokes, and was always eager to know if anyone had heard any new ones. Not that Kennedy lacked remorse, Klein quickly added, seeming to intuit that my jaw and perhaps those of other listeners had just hit the floorboards. I gather it was a self-deprecating maneuver on Kennedy’s part, exercised with the famous Kennedy charm, though it sounds like one of those “I guess you had to have been there” things. 

Hemingway went and listened. There is a 1:40 YouTube posted of what he heard.

Here is the transcript of that clip, without wrap-up niceties:

"Edward Kennedy, perhaps more than any United States senator in the past half century, cared about the poor and dispossessed. Though he was relentlessly mocked by the right as a tax-and-spend liberal, he kept the faith." 

Thus wrote Newsweek's Evan Thomas of the late Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy today in an obituary that acknowledged and in places excused the late senator's sins even as it remembered him as a saint of secular liberalism.:

Kennedy became known on Capitol Hill for his antics. In a Washington Monthly essay titled "Kennedy's Woman Problem, Women's Kennedy Problem," author Suzannah Lessard accused Kennedy of "a severe case of arrested development, a kind of narcissistic intemperance, a huge babyish ego that must be constantly fed." More like it, a huge sadness that needed to be blotted out by sex and alcohol.

Thomas did acknowledge Kennedy's actions in the Chappaquiddick incident and how his delay in alerting police may have cost Mary Jo Kopechne her life, but then ridiculously added:

Early in Saturday’s CBS Evening News, anchor Jeff Glor reported: "Tonight there are new allegations of torture by the CIA. Newsweek magazine is reporting that a secret 2004 report reveals that interrogators used mock executions to intimidate prisoners."

Glor went on to talk to Newsweek reporter Mark Hosenball, who claimed: "And in the case of one detainee that we know about, somebody named Abdel-Rahman al Nashiri, who was an alleged architect of the USS Cole bombing, this report alleges that at some point CIA interrogators, whether contractors or CIA staff officers, brandished a gun in front of this guy in an effort to frighten him and also took a power drill in front of him and turn turned it on and went ‘bzzz,’ implying therefore that they were going to use it on him."

Meanwhile, neither the Saturday nor Friday Evening News programs made any mention of reports that ACLU attorneys defending Guantanamo detainees illegally showed terror suspects photos of CIA personnel in an effort to implicate interrogators in acts of torture. On Friday, the Washington Post reported: "The Justice Department recently questioned military defense attorneys at Guantanamo Bay about whether photographs of CIA personnel, including covert officers, were unlawfully provided to detainees charged with organizing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to sources familiar with the investigation."

A shoddy and slanted profile of late-term abortionist Dr. LeRoy Carhart by Sarah Kliff in Newsweek magazine contains misrepresentation of the practice of late-term abortion. It also omits a serious episode in the career of Dr. Carhart that resulted in the tragic death of a 19-year-old woman.

In writing about the grisly practice of late-term abortion, Kliff falsely claims, "Past viability, no doctor will terminate a pregnancy without a compelling reason." This has been proven completely false in recent testimony by Dr. Paul McHugh, one of the leading psychiatrists in the country, who examined the medical records of patients seen by deceased late-term abortionist Dr. George Tiller.

Last year, the Harvard-educated McHugh relayed that some women stated that their reasons for wanting a late-term abortion included "not being able to go to a rock concert." According to Dr. McHugh, Dr. Tiller performed late-term abortions for "mostly social reasons."

While some in the media have been dusting off their love beads, bell-bottoms and broomstick skirts in an effort to wax nostalgic about Woodstock, the VFW has reminded its members that the world did not stop for those four days in August 1969.

In fact, for 109 American soldiers, the world ended that weekend.

VFW Magazine honored those soldiers in the August 2009 cover story, "While Woodstock Rocked, GIs Died."

Much has been made over the "half a million strong" that flocked to a dairy farm in rural New York to celebrate music and peace. Richard K. Kolb instead compared the coverage Newsweek and Time gave to the festival while shortchanging American efforts in Vietnam.

According to Newsweek, polyamory is here to stay and “the traditionalists had better get used to it.”

Polyamory, reporter Jessica Bennett explained in her July 29 article, is the act of “engaging in loving, intimate relationships with more than one person – based upon the knowledge and consent of everyone involved.”

While Bennett acknowledged that keeping track of multiple partners’ (and their partners) needs and wants isn’t for everybody, she concluded, “perhaps the practice is more natural than we think: a response to the challenges of monogamous relationships, whose shortcomings – in a culture where divorce has become a commonplace – are clear.”

Bennett offered Terisa Greenan’s arrangement as an example of a successful polyamory situation. Terisa, who is married to Larry, is also the girlfriend of Matt and Scott. Matt is married to Vera, who is dating Larry, Terisa’s husband. Matt and Vera have a child together. Terisa, Larry and Scott live together in a house in Seattle, which Matt, Vera and their child visit during weekends.

Sound creepy? Not to Bennett. And she reassured critics in both the conservative and gay movements who expressed fear of polyamorists seeking government benefits and harming their respective causes. “The majority of them don’t seem particularly interested in pressing a political agenda; the joke in the community is that the complexities of their relationships leave little time for activism.”

Newsweek magazine had yesterday a web exclusive entitled "What Green Jobs?" 

Subtitled:  "Washington is spending $60 billion to create the careers of the future, but not a single green job yet exists. Obama's 'green czar' explains."

The Leftist publication deserves some plaudits for exploring this $60 billion gaping hole in the $787 billion "stimulus" package President Barack Obama signed into law in February.  But there are many points in the article where they could have done better. 

It would have been nice, for instance, if Newsweek had exhibited some of the scrutiny they show here in advance of the massive plan's passage. They begin with an interesting realization:

With the revelation that Newsweek Washington bureau reporter Daren Briscoe will start a new job on Monday as Deputy Associate Director of Public Affairs for the Office of National Drug Control Policy (earlier NB item), my list of journalists who have jumped to the Obama administration -- plus one who traveled through the revolving door from helping the Obama campaign into a news media slot -- is up to a dozen:

Three each revolved through CNN and the Washington Post; two through ABC News; and one each via the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and Time magazine.

Complete list below.

For the second weekday in a row, Katie Couric teased the CBS Evening News on Monday night by delivering President Obama's aggressive retorts to critics of his health plan as reporter Chip Reid pitched in to help, discrediting critics by disparaging their perspectives as “harsh” and “incendiary” attacks -- all before Couric caught up with ABC and NBC from the night before and promoted Ted Kennedy's “We're Almost There” Newsweek cover story.

Couric teased: “The President takes on critics of his health care reform plan. He vows to move forward and says trying to fix a system that's breaking American families.” (Friday night she touted “a warning from the President,” leading into Obama's claim: “If we don't get health care reform done now, then no one's health insurance is going to be secure.”)

Reid declared that “in some of his harshest comments yet, Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele said the President's plan for a public insurance option is socialism.” But this is all Steele said in the clip Reid played: “This reckless approach is an ill-conceived attempt to push through an experiment and all of us should be scared to death.” Reid continued: “In one of the most incendiary comments, Republican Senator Jim DeMint, in a conference call with conservative activists, recently said:” Viewers then heard audio of DeMint making a tactical political point: “If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”

While the big liberal media usually find it hard to skip any news related to the Kennedy family, ABC, CBS and NBC breathed not a word about Saturday’s 40th anniversary of Chappaquiddick. On the night of July 18, 1969, Senator Edward Kennedy left a party with 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne and later drove off a bridge. Kennedy left the scene with Kopechne still in the submerged vehicle; he did not call the police until the following morning.

The Saturday and Sunday New York Times and Washington Post also had nothing about Chappaquiddick. Several newspapers did carry a brief, if inadvertent, mention, since on Saturday the Associated Press made it the day’s “Highlight in History” in their re-cap of big news events that happened on a July 18, beating out the start of the Great Fire of Rome in A.D. 64 and the death of naval hero John Paul Jones in 1792.