Newsweek

In the November 22 issue of Newsweek magazine, Daniel Stone defended the Obama administration by blaming the institution of the presidency for failures rather than the chief executive himself: "The issue is not Obama, it’s the office....Can any single person fully meet the demands of the 21st-century presidency?" The same argument was used to excuse an overwhelmed Jimmy Carter 30 years earlier.

The sub-headline for the piece read: "The presidency has grown, and grown and grown, into the most powerful, most impossible job in the world." At one point, Stone explained: "Among a handful of presidential historians Newsweek contacted for this story, there was a general consensus that the modern presidency may have become too bloated." A January 13, 1980 Washington Post article made a similar conclusion about the beleaguered Carter administration: "Voters have lowered their expectations of what any president can accomplish; they have accepted the notion that this country may never again have heroic, larger-than-life leadership in the White House."

On her website, The Daily Beast, on Thursday, editor-in-chief Tina Brown joyously announced the "wedding" of the left-leaning blog with the equally liberal Newsweek magazine: "Some weddings take longer to plan than others. The union of The Daily Beast and Newsweek magazine finally took place with a coffee-mug toast between all parties."

Brown touted how she would now serve as editor-in-chief for both publications. She expressed her desire to oversee the "great magazine's revival" and praised it for being "lively" and "well-informed." Brown should fit in well as head of the liberal magazine given her own history of left-wing advocacy.

Appearing on the "Tonight Show with Jay Leno" last night, comedian Dennis Miller blasted the beleaguered Newsweek magazine for ranking the United States the 11th "best country in the world," behind left-of-center nations like Finland, Switzerland, and Sweden.

Performing on Veterans Day for an audience comprised of American military personnel, Miller showed his patriotic stripes: "Hey, Newsweek, go fjord yourself okay. Finland is the s--- little plastic village you set up under the Christmas tree every year."

An impassioned Miller quipped: "The best thing about living in Finland is they don't get Newsweek magazine."

[Video embedded after the page break.]

According to Newsweek's Allison Samuels, American TV audiences are not "ready for 'super-negros' on the small screen."

Samuels made her complaint in light of NBC's cancellation of it's ratings-plagued spy series, "Undercovers," which featured a black actor and actress in the lead roles as glamorous and deadly CIA agents:

In an interview with Gov. Rick Perry published today, Newsweek's Andrew Romano falsely claimed that "Many Tea Partiers want to repeal the 14th Amendment, which provides for birthright citizenship." Romano then asked the recently-reelected Texas Republican, "Do you agree with them?"

Perry answered that while he believed a constitutional prohibition on birthright citizenship was "probably not" needed, he didn't address the fundamental error in Romano's premise.

While there have been suggestions by some conservatives at looking at amending the Fourteenth Amendment to ensure that children of illegal immigrants do not automatically gain American citizenship, the notion that Tea Party activists favor a full repeal of the post-Civil War amendment is a faulty liberal media meme.

One day before Election Day, the MRC has a fresh new edition of Notable Quotables posted over at MRC.org. Topics this week include: the liberal media’s pre-election meltdown, with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann frothing that the election of “unqualified, unstable” Tea Party Republicans “would destroy America from within,” and Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter engaging in open electioneering: “The GOP’s agenda has to be stopped.”

To read it online, posted with five videos with matching MP3 audio, plus a sixth quote with a matching audio clip, go to www.MRC.org.

For NewsBuster’s readers, here are some of the choicer quotes from the last couple of weeks, reflecting liberals’ increasing desperation as the election clock ticks down:

NPR's Nina Totenberg said Friday that she's very afraid of the upcoming elections.

Newsweek's Evan Thomas, her co-panelist on "Inside Washington," said historians might look upon November 2, 2010 "as kind of a joke...obviously the political system’s a mess" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

“We’re so eager to promote ourselves with the smartest take on how President Obama and the Democrats got themselves in this pickle that we haven’t done a good job explaining the stakes,” Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter despaired in a piece in the latest issue of the magazine in which he didn’t even pretend to be a journalist and delivered a political activist’s screed, “Why the Midterms Matter: The GOP's agenda has to be stopped.”

Alter, author of the sycophantic book earlier this year, The Promise: President Obama, Year One, feared a dire fate if Republicans gain more power: “The Tea Party will transform itself from an insurgency into the driving force within the GOP” and “extremist Senators like Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn will move from being irritants on the fringe to players at the center of our politics.” He concluded by scolding those who won’t come out to vote for Democrats:

A right-wing Republican takeover of Congress and state capitals isn’t something to accept with indifference. Midterms matter, and voters tempted to skip this election should have their heads examined.

Update (15:20 EDT): Fargo, N.D.-based radio host  friend of NewsBusters Rob Port takes on this Newsweek item on his Say Anything blog today and eviscerates David Graham's article as error-laden and grossly misleading.

Newsweek -- the floundering weekly news magazine that was recently sold for the princely sum of $1.00 -- apparently assigns a pretty low value on the intelligence of its readers. Take yesterday's online article by David Graham on the reelection campaign of the at-large congressman for North Dakota: "Meet Earl Pomeroy, the Moderate Democrat Touting His Health-Reform Vote."

"Can one Blue Dog’s unorthodox ad strategy localize his election and head off the demise of another incumbent?" asked the subheadline.

Of course, both the moderate and Blue Dog tags bring to mind a Democrat that perhaps agrees with the liberal leadership of his party about half of the time, but is fairly independent and conservative-minded on a whole host of issues. Trouble is, this is precisely what Pomeroy is not, according to both the liberal Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and the American Conservative Union (ACU).

For Eleanor Clift, the dream will never die. At least not until after all the polls close on November 2.

The uber-liberal Newsweek contributor presses Democrats to "Keep Dreaming" in an October 25 post at the magazine's website.

Clift insists that it is possible that Democrats can get their base motivated enough to keep Republicans from taking the House:

The Democrats'  "localized approach to the midterms is understandable, defensible—and wrong. The best way to keep control would have been a national message targeted at independents," Newsweek's Jonathan Alter complained yesterday in an article at the magazine's website.

And what exactly should the Democrats have touted in a national campaign strategy for the midterms? Why, shovel-ready infrastructure jobs, of course:

Exploring the question, "Why Are Democrats Down in Pennsylvania?" Newsweek's Ben Adler determined the answer was fairly simple: not enough stimulus spending to benefit the rural areas of the Keystone State, which he says is "sometimes called 'Pennsyltucky'" by virtue of its being largely "white, rural, blue-collar, and poor":

After getting spanked in the November 2 election, Christine O'Donnell needs to find herself a good Christian man to submit to. Or she could open a Wiccan supply store. 

Those are just two of the six mocking suggestions that Newsweek's David Graham came up with yesterday on the magazine's The Gaggle blog for the Delaware Republican Senate nominee's future.

Graham's list is just more evidence that O'Donnell seems to have inherited Sarah Palin's mantle as the conservative female politician liberal journalists most love to write arguably misogynistic screeds against (emphasis mine):

Appearing as a guest on Wednesday’s The Ed Show on MSNBC, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter applauded President Obama for bringing "poetry" back into the campaign as he cited former New York Democratic Governor Mario Cuomo’s famous saying about campaigning "in poetry" and governing "in prose." Alter: "Look, he (Obama) overlearned Mario Cuomo's famous lesson. Cuomo said you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. And he took that too much to heart. He's been governing too much in prose. Finally, he's beginning to bring some of the poetry back, the poetry that moves people and inspires people. And it's about time."

The Newsweek columnist went on to credit President Obama with preventing another Great Depression after host Ed Schultz lamented that Obama is not receiving credit for recent gains in the stock market. Alter: "He saved them. He saved their fortunes. We were headed for a depression. We were losing 750,000 jobs a month when he took over. If we'd stayed on pace, we would have had another Great Depression in late 2009. He saved them."

Apparently the political death panel at Newsweek is resigned to the fact that the Democratic Congress is DOA come November 2.

Thus braced for the impact of a possible Republican congressional takeover, uber-liberal Newsweek writer Eleanor Clift donned her political strategist cap to openly advise Obama that how, "Just as Clinton did in ’94," he'll need to "reaffirm his relevance and return to his core principles."

But haven't Obama's core liberal principles been the problem that's brought about this impending midterm doom?

Liberal media people have been amusing themselves endlessly with clips of Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell's video clip from 1996 saying the Bible says masturbation is wrong. Newsweek's Sharon Begley is taking this to a whole new realm with a silly article with a link titled "Why Masturbation Helps Procreation." This is the same "scientific" writer who diagnosed from afar that George W. Bush had a dangerous alcoholic's "pathological certainty" in sticking to the war in Iraq; and the same writer who saw psychological problems in ObamaCare opponents. Begley began by responding to fellow liberals who might insist you can't hold this poor woman to an intellectual standard:

Since Christine “I’m Not a Witch” O’Donnell is campaigning for the U.S. Senate and not the directorship of the Kinsey Institute, maybe we should give her a pass when it comes to her views on sex and, specifically, masturbation. But that would be a mistake: the stakes are simply too high, going all the way up the very survival of our species....

Evidence from elephants to rodents to humans shows that masturbating is—counterintuitively—an excellent way to make healthy babies, and lots of them. No one who believes in the “family” part of family values can let her claims stand.

Newsweek's list of arguments against O'Donnell is simply too bizarre to believe:

With congressional Democrats divided on how to approach the soon-expiring Bush tax cuts, reliably liberal Newsweek has taken upon itself the task of defending tax hikes, particularly those on the "rich."

In back-to-back posts today, Ben Adler sought to dismiss the stimulative effect of tax cuts while Nancy Cook profiled some rich liberals who are allegedly looking forward to their taxes going up. [click image above for full-size screen cap]

"Republicans, moderate Democrats, and even members of President Obama’s economic advisory board say raising taxes on the rich will slow the economic recovery," Adler noted in the subheadline of his story. "But that’s only if you don’t do something smarter with the money," he added.

The "something smarter"? You guessed it, shovel-ready stimulus jobs!:

"The State Department has issued a "travel alert" for Europe—underscoring the effect Muslim-bashing politicians have had on the terror threat on the continent," reads the subheadline to an October 4 Newsweek story by Christopher Dickey and Sami Yousafzai.

In "Turn On the Red Light," Dickey and Yousafzai went so far as to suggest that anti-Islamist politicians like the Netherlands' Geert Wilders actually wanted to goad radical Islamists into violent acts (emphasis mine):

Don’t read Newsweek magazine while drinking a beverage. A spit take is the obvious first reaction to a column by Julia Baird headlined “The Shame of Family Films.” On the Internet, this article is coded as “Why family films are so sexist.”

Baird's denunciation of Hollywood's fraction of decent entertainment began: “They have all been smash hits: ‘Finding Nemo,’ ‘Madagascar,’ ‘Ice Age,’ ‘Toy Story.’ Fish, penguins, rats, stuffed animals, talking toys. All good innocent family fun, right? Sure, except there are few female characters in those films. There are certainly few doing anything meaningful or heroic – and no, Bo Peep doesn't count.”

So what does feminist bean-counting have to do with whether a movie is “good innocent family fun”? Did any young girl come away from “Finding Nemo” feeling like the memory-challenged Ellen DeGeneres fish character didn’t represent female empowerment effectively? Were they offended by the oppressively archaic stereotype of Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl during “Toy Story 2"? Families can’t enjoy these films without expecting them to pass some politically correct quota exam?

In their "Pledge to America," House Republicans have promised to "require each bill moving through Congress to include a clause citing the specific constitutional authority upon which the bill is justified."

On September 22, Newsweek's Ben Adler denounced that simple pledge as "dangerous even as a mere suggestion," complaining that it intrudes on the constitutional prerogative of the courts to decide the constitutionality of federal law.

Now that he's been called out by NRO's Ramesh Ponnuru on his ludicrous complaint, Adler doubled down on his argument in a Newsweek Gaggle blog post yesterday, suggesting that the policy could endanger national security after a devastating terrorist attack:

There’s little pretense of media fairness as the 2010 elections approach. Last Thursday, ABC’s World News ran as “news” a video produced by the Obama White House. Diane Sawyer excitedly touted how “we got to listen in on a phone call today,” as viewers saw a brief clip of President Obama talking to a cancer patient who thanked him for the government takeover of health care.

Then on Monday, NBC Universal donated a 30-minute commercial-free interview to Obama, shown not just on NBC’s Today, but on the corporation’s other networks (including USA, SyFy and Bravo). Matt Lauer informed the President how other Democrats (including Bill Clinton) don’t think he’s been “rigorous enough in pushing back against some of the Republican attacks.” Lauer implored: “Do you intend to change your tone or your emotion in terms of your pushing back?”

On this the 24th and final day of his Election Road Trip, Time's Joe Klein availed himself of the opportunity to attack center-left blogger Mickey Kaus and conservative writer Jonah Goldberg for "distort[ing] a striking point" made by a liberal Democrat vineyard owner from California that Klein quoted in a September 27 Swampland blog post.

Klein vented most of his spleen at Kaus, a blogger for rival magazine Newsweek.

Wealthy attorney and Iron Horse Vineyards founding partner Barry Sterling had simply argued that "the current, post-Reagan tax fetishism of the Republican party is foolish," Klein insisted.  "He made the point with a creative overstatement of the case--that he'd survived 70% marginal tax rates; indeed, the high rates caused him to work harder to make more money. I am absolutely certain that Sterling was not advocating a return to 70% rates, as Mickey well knows," Klein protested.  The Time reporter went on a few sentences later to label Kaus as a "feckless, puerile jerk at times."

For the last several weeks there has been a debate raging over whether the grounds surrounding where the 9/11 attacks in Lower Manhattan are sacred and if it would be an appropriate place for an Islamic place of worship to be built. But if it isn’t appropriate, would it be an appropriate place for a Tea Party rally to be held? Possibly not.

But whether that’s the case or not, Newsweek’s David A. Graham would have you believe there will be a so-called “Election Day Tea Party rally” held at Ground Zero, led by former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, as an effort to shore up support for a 2012 presidential bid.

“And now, TPM's Jillian Rayfield reports, he's preparing for an Election Day Tea Party rally at Ground Zero,” Graham wrote in a Newsweek Sept. 22 post. “As she says, that could be the machinations of a man interested in mounting a White House run.”

Screen Shot Below Fold

Newsweek's Ben Adler is decidedly cool to the newly-unveiled Republican "Pledge with America." No surprise there, coming from a liberal journalist. But among his criticisms, perhaps he's most off-base in his complaint about Republicans' promise to ensure that legislation must be constitutional before it is passed along to the president for his signature (emphasis mine):

Not so harmless, however, is the promise to require every bill to be certified as constitutional before it is voted on. We have a mechanism for assessing the constitutionality of legislation, which is the independent judiciary. An extraconstitutional attempt to limit the powers of Congress is dangerous even as a mere suggestion, and it constitutes an encroachment on the judiciary. 

In those three sentences, Adler betrays both his ignorance of the U.S. Constitution and its imperative on all members of all three branches of government to uphold the Constitution's limits on federal power.

First off, let's look at the pertinent language of the Pledge itself, which Adler failed to provide a link to anywhere in his 7-paragraph September 22 blog post. From page 9 of the 48-page PDF version of the Pledge to America:

Are you one of the many Americans who can't stand Newsweek Magazine's unending tripe of liberal condescension? Good news: you may not have to put up with it much longer - at least not in its print form.

Outgoing Newsweek columnist Howard Fineman, who recently announced he would exit the sinking ship for the Huffington Post, gave the magazine's print edition five years. "My guess is that there will be several years of a fond embrace of the traditional magazine," he said. "But that stuff is going because the economics are too difficult." Pressed for a specific time frame, Fineman gave his five-year prediction.

Since it was sold for a dollar to media mogul Sidney Harman, Newsweek has shed some of its most prominent names. The Business Insider reported that "of the roughly two dozen Newsweek journalists who have run for the door in recent months, some of the most high-profile names have joined news outlets without dead-tree versions."

"To survive in a hostile world, guys need to embrace girly jobs and dirty diapers," argued the Newsweek writers Andrew Romano and Tony Dokoupil in the subheadline of their September 20 article "Men's Lib."

The writers set out to explain "[w]hy it’s time to reimagine masculinity at work and at home."

If American men want to be competitive in a global economy, they argued, they need to suck it up and get comfortable with the idea of working traditionally "girly jobs" and/or being stay at home dads:

It’s possible to imagine protectionist trade and immigration policies boosting blue-collar employment at the margins. But the U.S. can’t stop globalization. If male morale—and the American economy—are ever going to recover, the truth is that the next generation of Homer Simpsons will have to stop searching for outsourced manufacturing jobs and start working toward teaching, nursing, or social-service positions instead.

Fair enough. But Romano and Dokoupil also cast their gaze across the Atlantic, arguing America needs public policies that emulate European countries on paid parental leave, particularly paid paternal leave (emphasis mine):

"The justices have not struck down a major piece of legislation, let alone a president's signature initiative, as beyond Congress's power to regulate commerce in some 75 years."

That's how Newsweek's Stuart Taylor Jr. today all but argued that, political ideology of the Supreme Court's majority aside, a Supreme Court decision declaring unconstitutional the "individual mandate" of ObamaCare is quite unlikely.

But while Taylor may be right  that no signature presidential initiative post-New Deal has been declared unconstitutional by the Court on the grounds that it violated the interstate commerce clause, he neglected to mention there are two key cases in the past 15 years where the Supreme Court did set outer limits to Congress's exploitation of the commerce clause as a fountain of federal power.

He currently works for one of the most liberal magazines in America while contributing to without a doubt the most liberal news network on television.

As such, it only seems fitting that as many of Newsweek's employees flee the transitioning ship, Howard Fineman would go to the unashamedly far-left leaning Huffington Post.  

Makes you wonder if he'll still feign any air of objectivity in his new position reported by the New York Times Sunday: 

Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have announced dueling D.C. rallies on October 30 aimed at satirizing the August 28 "Restoring Honor" rally held by rival network Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck.

Newsweek's Daniel Stone is apparently stoked about it, predicting that the gimmick will "absolutely" be a success (emphasis mine):

You’ve got to hand it to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, social critics that they are, for keeping us attuned to the absurdity in our political discourse these days....