Time

Last week the Obama administration worked itself up into high dudgeon over a decision by the Israeli government to green light a housing project in an east Jerusalem neighberhood. While its true the decision came down at an indelicate time -- right in the middle of Vice President Joe Biden's visit -- the actual substance of the decision was perfectly legal and in contravention of no prior agreement with the United States related to the peace process.

But that makes no difference to Time's Joe Klein (shown in file photo above), whom NewsBusters has repeatedly documented for his harsh treatment of Israel and considerably softer treatment of Iran.

Last night on the magazine's Swampland blog, Klein counseled the Obama administration that an apology issued by Prime Minister Netanyahu regarding the timing of the decision was "unacceptable."

Klein -- who last March insisted that President Obama should take to the bully pulpit to lecture Israel on its 'moral standing' -- concluded his post by subtly questioning the patriotism of American members of the pro-Israel group AIPAC:

On Sunday’s syndicated Chris Matthews Show, as the panel discussed whether President Obama would move to the center for the 2010 elections, after the BBC’s Katty Kay argued that he may need to please the Democratic party base for this year's elections, Time magazine columnist Joe Klein referred to the conservative base of the Republican party as "maniacs" as he claimed that the GOP base is more dominated by conservatives than the Democratic base is by liberals. Klein:

Nancy Pelosi is her own worst enemy and Time's Amy Sullivan hopes to get that message across in her March 4 Swampland blog post, "Is This An Abortion Whip Count?"

Sullivan did some number crunching and found that, due to concerns about a lack of a restriction on abortion spending in the Senate bill, Pelosi may end up being a few votes shy of the threshold to pass the legislation.

Sullivan's advice to the Speaker? She just needs to moderate her testy tone to dupe enough pro-life Democrats to voting for a bill that lacks the Stupak amendment which was passed in the House version of the bill (emphasis mine):

"As the House prepares for its final push on health care, there are Democratic members, particularly those from conservative districts, who are facing a hard truth: This is the kind of vote that can end a career," Time magazine's Karen Tumulty lamented in a March 3 Swampland blog post entitled "When A Hard Vote Ends A Political Career."

Eh, suck it up, the veteran journalist practically counseled House Democrats wary of voting for the Democratic health care legislation, after all, there is life after politics. Just look at Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinski, who lost her seat in the 1994 midterm election which swept Republicans into control of Congress.

Margolies-Mezvinski doomed herself with a vote to hike taxes, Tumulty noted, but brought readers up to speed on the former congresswoman's life after politics to lay out the case that Mezvinski thinks her vote was worth it in the long run.

Tumulty concluded with a hint that Democrats in endangered seats need to consider leaving a "legacy" by passing ObamaCare (emphasis mine):

"Jim Bunning is doing all of us a favor," Time's Joe Klein tells his Swampland blog readers in a post published last night.

Gee, Joe, is that because his stand is exposing the hypocrisy of Democrats who often preach the virtue of pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) budget rules? 

Of course not. Instead, Klein sees a potential anti-GOP blowback as Republicans show themselves to be positively out of touch with the times, even indecent "reactionary" anti-government radicals:

"Are we on seven-second delay?"--Mark Halperin on Morning Joe, prefacing his criticism of Pres. Obama's performance at the health-care summit.

Halperin was surely being facetious, but the point about MSNBC's pro-Obama predilection was made.

The Time editor went on to rather comprehensively pan PBO's petulant performance. His comments were preceded by a clip of Pres. Obama rudely reminding Sen. John McCain of just who had won the presidential election.

The liberal press is determined, it seems, to tie Joe Stack's apparent suicide in Austin today to the Tea Party movement. NewsBusters has reported on three such attempts, and now New York Magazine has thrown its hat in the ring.

Like Time Magazine, MSNBC, and the Washington Post, New York Magazine cherry-picked portions of Stack's apparent suicide note, which he posted online, in order to support the contention that he was acting out of a radical hatred of the IRS and the federal government in general.

Also like the those three bastions of media liberalism, NY Magazine did not include the final two lines of Stack's note. They are perhaps the most politically consequential lines in the entire note, yet they were suspiciously absent from the piece. They should also put to rest any notion that this man was in any way affiliated with the Tea Party movement.

In an article about Thursday's apparent suicide by a pilot in Austin, Texas, the folks at Time.com made two seemingly intentional links to the Tea Party movement.

First, the piece began:

The long, rambling rant posted on a website eerily reflected the angry populist sentiments that have swept the country in the past year. In it, a Joe Stack inveighed against intrusive Big Brother government, corrupt corporate giants, irrational taxes, as well as the "puppet" George Bush.

Then, after the third paragraph which concluded, "Toward the end of what appears to be his final note, Stack wrote, 'Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let's try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well,'" the folks at time advertised the following article by the magazine with a hyperlink highlighted in yellow:

It wasn't enough (as Brent Baker noted) for Time magazine to run down Sarah Palin's "anti-intellectual drivel" and twitterpate for the umpteenth time over Obama's "gloriously American mongrel ethnicity." They had to run down the tea-party movement by highlighting the media's favorite Republican strategist -- David Frum. Placed at the top of their "Must Reads" section at Time.com, Frum rounded out their trashing of the Tea Party convention by getting in the first Time digs at CPAC:

Ann Coulter made news at the 2007 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) by calling John Edwards a vulgar term for a homosexual. At CPAC 2009, Rush Limbaugh urged conservatives to "stamp out" those in their movement who thought the era of Ronald Reagan had ended.

Bottom scraped? Not quite. Next week, Glenn Beck will headline the 2010 CPAC.

Would it surprise Time editors that Frum is misquoting Limbaugh? He didn't say "stamp out" the moderates. He said "stamp out" the tendency to throw the Reagan voters overboard:

Those who celebrate Sarah Palin's lack of knowledge as a form of “authenticity” superior to Barack Obama's gloriously American mongrel ethnicity and self-made intellectuality are representatives of a long-standing American theme – the celebration of sameness, and mediocrity, in a country that has succeeded brilliantly because of its diversity and restlessly eccentric genius. Happily, it has almost always been a losing theme. And, indeed, in the truest sense, it can be called anti-American.

Whenever I think of actress Lily Tomlin now, I think of her animal-rights plea in 2008: "The word, ‘zoo,’ is sort of elephant-speak for Guantanamo. They’re really, they are suffering and being tortured."

When Time looked into "Lily Tomlin’s Short List," readers found endorsements of hard-left radio hosts and authors:

Stephanie Miller as commentator-comic Mama and her irreverent two-man band of merrymaking mischief monkeys get me laughing every morning. Then I get deeply serious with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!

Miller calls herself "Mama" – ironically, since she’s not a mother. Her authors are also radical:

UPDATE: The New York Times joined the fray as well with a similar article. 

Must be a slow news week. Both Time and the Washington Post reported yesterday on a rehashed two-year-old study about rising teen pregnancy rates.

"Pregnancy rates among U.S. teenagers," wrote Time's Belinda Luscombe, "which had been dropping since 1990, took an upturn in 2006, according to newly released data."

This "newly released data," however, is far from breaking news. The original study was actually published over two years ago by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and it got plenty of attention back then, including from the Washington Post. The study has since been given a little facelift by the liberal, anti-abstinence organization the Guttmacher Institute and has been re-released as shocking new data. So why did the Post and the Time even consider this newsworthy? The Post's Rob Stein unknowingly sandwiched the answer to that question in the middle of his article.

But there's another reason according to HLN host and "The View" panelist Joy Behar. In the usual fashion of citing no statistics and making sweeping generalizations, Behar blamed the collapse of liberal talk radio outlet Air America on a gender gap in listeners on her Jan. 25 HLN broadcast.

"Ok, but can I say that men listen to talk radio more than women and men are more conservative, generally speaking," Behar said, proposing a reason for Air America's bankruptcy.

Poor Joe Klein wishes he could give a lecture to average Americans -- the "Too Dumb to Thrive" who probably don't read his magazine's Swampland blog anyway -- on the virtues of Obamanomics.

Of course, they'd probably be too stupid to understand the enlightened Mr. Anonymous, especially Fox News viewers.

Indeed, at least in Klein's mind, these alleged ignorant boobs are practically an existential threat to democracy itself (emphasis mine):

Time writer Richard Corliss lamented the decline and fall of Air America radio Thursday, and the decline of the Democrats: "It died a year and a day after Barack Obama's Inauguration, and two days after Obama's Democrats all but officially became a minority party in the U.S. Senate." Despite that pessimistic note, Corliss insisted that Air America’s failure said absolutely nothing about the appeal of liberalism in America:

So why is poli-talk radio so dominated by Limbaugh, when the country is not? Because, even for people who don't agree with him, he can be monstrously entertaining; he makes great radio. He and his clones may dominate as a radio format, and energize the conservative base and annoy liberal politicians, but their success is not a reflection of the mood of the country at large. And in the ratings, the whole contingent of the Radio Right is outpointed by NPR's "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered." That's where the liberal listeners so desired by Air America went for their news and (covert) commentary.

Some of us told anyone who would listen in 2004 that Air America would have serious trouble succeeding in commercial radio when liberals already had a station in most American cities in their NPR news and talk station. But it’s funny that Corliss would use supposedly balanced, taxpayer-funded NPR to be the ideological opposite of conservative talk radio.

While the broadcast and cable news media have paid plenty of attention to Martha Coakley's embarrassing Curt Schilling gaffe, much less attention has been paid to more serious matters that exemplify Coakley's hard-left campaigning tactics, such as her insulting devout Catholics as unfit for working in emergency rooms or insisting that Scott Brown wants to "turn away" rape victims from hospitals. [image at right via William Jacobson's Legal Insurrection blog]

It's that sort of insane, false hyperbole that has even Democrat-friendly media outlets like Time magazine reeling, even if the broadcast networks are asleep at the switch.

Take for example Michael Scherer's January 17 blog post at the magazine's Swampland blog (emphasis mine):

On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Mark Halperin of Time and formerly with ABC News, hailed President Barack Obama: “He's done, I think, an extraordinary job running the government...under difficult circumstances. He managed the economic crisis and kept the world from going into a depression...” The co-author of the new book, ‘Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime,’ however, didn’t see everything as rosy: “The problem has been is he's not inspired the country to feel a sense of optimism and renewal and to be unified in a bipartisan way.”

During the same roundtable, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward rejected the notion Obama is any kind of a “European socialist,” taking on Charles Krauthammer’s characterization: 

There was a column The Washington Post Friday in which Charles Krauthammer tried to essentially say he is a European-style socialist because of health care and he's trying to do these other things. Now, I'm trying to do a book on President Obama, and calling him a European socialist is just not even in the ballpark...

Actually, Krauthammer never used the term “socialist” as he contended Obama wishes “to introduce a powerful social democratic stream into America's deeply and historically individualist polity” and the 2008 election “was not an endorsement of European-style social democracy. “

"Radical cleric" is a term many news outlets, including the Associated Press, have used to describe Islamic clerics who encourage and/or train radical Muslims for jihad against civilians in the West. Case in point: Anwar al Awlaki, who reportedly inspired Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan's shooting spree.

But a commenter on Time magazine's Swampland blog seems to have convinced writer Karen Tumulty that the term is appropriate to apply to Pat Robertson, given his loopy pronouncement that a long-ago "pact with the devil" made by Haiti has cursed the Caribbean nation and resulted in yesterday's devastating earthquake:

If you're educated, you'll vote for gay politicians. That was the underlying message of the Time's article "Europe's Gay Leaders: Out at the Top" by William Lee Adams. Adams based his premise on the worn out stereotype that conservatives lack forward-thinking skills - or perhaps any thinking skills whatsoever - and need to be educated by progressive liberals such as himself. (And since we're dwelling on stereotypes, note that the first sentence above used only eight words to summarize what Adams, like a typical pontificating liberal, took 1,867 words to say.)

Adams argued in his article that Iceland, which elected Johanna Sigurdardottir last year - the world's first gay leader, was an "extremely homophobic" country until its citizens were given an "education."

While he conceded that liberal labor unions, particularly "reactionary" teachers unions have had a role in California's fiscal mess, Time columnist and blogger Joe Klein placed the lion's share of the Golden State's woes on conservatives who have pushed for lower taxes.

Upset that conservative writer George Will had chalked up "all that is wrong in California at liberalism's doorstep," Klein used a January 10 Swampland blog post to slam the columnist for failing to assign any blame on the 1978 property tax-limiting Proposition 13 and the resulting "public pathology that we've inherited from the Reagan Era" whereby "the public wants a modified welfare state, excellent schools, a clean environment, low college tuitions...but it's not willing to pay for them."

But the problem with Klein's argument is that reliably blue-state Californians -- or rather the ones who haven't moved out in disgust -- are all too willing to shoulder a high tax burden, as data from the Tax Foundation shows:

Time TV writer James Poniewozik wrote on his blog Tuned In on Wednesday that he was impressed that Brit Hume wasn’t backing down on his Tiger Woods remarks, but he really wasn’t accepting Hume’s claim that talking about Jesus is much more controversial than talking about Buddha:

If you believe your religion is superior and want to stand by the argument, fine. But crying anti-Christian persecution when you're criticized for making that case on a news show? Get off the cross.

Did Hume literally suggest he was being crucified? No. Poniewozik was responding to an interview Hume granted to D.C. all-news radio station WTOP, in which he suggested "Jesus Christ" could be the two most controversial words in the English language (at the very end of the interview).

Back in 2006, Brad Pitt announced during an interview with Esquire magazine that he will only tie the knot with his (perhaps, still) girlfriend Angelina Jolie when "everyone else in the country who wants to be married is legally able." (It's assumed he was talking about gays and not, say, first cousins or fathers and daughters - although he did leave it rather open-ended.)

Well, best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert isn't that dedicated, because she just got married to her boyfriend of many years (after swearing "never, ever, under any circumstances" to marry again after her first, bitter divorce), but she did throw out her two-cents during an interview with Time magazine on Nov. 4.

"A lot of heterosexual couples are reluctant to get married," asserted the woman who penned "Eat, Pray, Love" and the new "Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage."  "There's a sense of, Why should I have access to this when my friends who have been together just as long as me don't?"

Conveniently tucked away at the end of a column about liberal bloggers was an admission from Time magazine's Joe Klein that the Senate's healthcare bill would transfer wealth from upper class Americans to the working poor.

Apparently Klein didn't get the memo about denying the presence of socialism in the Democrats' plan.

In a piece published last Wednesday called "The Left's Idiocy on Health Reform," Klein expressed concern that the far left, angry at the bill for not being socialist enough, would stop supporting it. The goal of the column was to convince ardent liberals to embrace the Senate bill as a matter of loyalty to their party.

President Obama's radical ambitions cannot survive without money and organizing from the nutroots, which prompted Klein to launch a massive guilt bomb in an effort to win them back. He slipped into full-blown talking point mode as he made his case, sounding more like a Democrat strategist than a columnist:

Whenever Time magazine praises a Republican, you can almost always be sure it is because of an ulterior motive. And, sure enough, the motive for Time magazine to praise Florida Republican governor Charlie Crist is to slam his much more conservative senate primary opponent, former state House speaker Marco Rubio. Note the sympathy for Crist in this Time story by Tim Padgett coupled with criticism of Rubio:

Ever since a conservative tent revival began sweeping America last summer, sparked by angry misgivings about health care reform and other harbingers of big government, Republican purists have targeted Crist's moderate, bipartisan style. Seizing on his embrace of President Obama's $787 billion economic-stimulus plan, they've treated him as a whipping boy...

...Along the way they've anointed Rubio, a 38-year-old Cuban American, as the right wing's new boy wonder, a genuinely conservative David who can slay Crist's Goliath RINO (Republican in Name Only) in the primary next August.

Saturday’s Fox News Watch gave attention to a couple of entries in the MRC’s "Best Notable Quotables of 2009: The 22nd Annual Awards for the Year’s Worst Reporting." Returning from a commercial break, a clip of CBS’s Katie Couric began the segment as Couric was shown expressing awe at President Obama’s confidence as she interviewed him last July. Couric: "You’re so confident, Mr. President, and so focused. Is your confidence ever shaken? Do you ever wake up and say, ‘Damn, this is hard’?"

FNC host Jon Scott then jumped in to credit the MRC:

That’s Katie Couric earlier this year with President Obama. Her performance there garnered the Media Research Center’s "Let Us Fluff Your Pillow Award for Obsequious Obama Interviews." The MRC acknowledging more achievements in its annual awards for the year’s worst reporting. The "Master of His Domain Award for Obama Puffery" goes to Time’s Joe Klein for his May 4 cover story on Barack Obama’s first 100 days as President.

Even liberal panel member Ellis Henican of Newsday thought Couric’s words were "icky," and contended that "I wouldn’t want to be caught on tape saying either one of those things."

It looks like the PC Police will have to put out an APB for Time Magazine's Bobby Ghosh, his layers of editors, and his managers.

First, Ghosh had the unmitigated gall to write an item called "Domestic Terror Incidents Hit a Peak in 2009." In it, he notes that the "2009 saw an unprecedented surge in terror 'events' on U.S. soil." Clearly Ghosh doesn't understand that we're in a new era where the rest of the world reflexively loves us, thanks to our ever-apologetic president.

Ghosh compounded his error by saying that the November killings at a U.S. military base were t-t-t- .... terror-related: