Dallas Morning News’s Wayne Slater become one of the first pundits after the shootings at the Holocaust Museum on Wednesday to hint that there was a connection to mainstream conservative activists. On CNN Newsroom, about two hours after the story broke, Slater linked this incident and the murder of abortionist George Tiller with “anti-tax secessionists in Texas,” his label for Tea Party protesters.

Anchor Rick Sanchez moderated a panel discussion on the Holocaust Museum shootings after the bottom of the 3 pm Eastern hour of the CNN program, in which Slater participated. Sanchez asked the Dallas Morning News political writer if criminals like this suspect are “motivated or do they need to be motivated?” He replied, not including the shooting of Tiller, but reaching back to include the Oklahoma City bombing perpetuated by Timothy McVeigh:

SLATER: They absolutely need to be motivated and are being motivated. Each of these episodes in recent weeks- whether it’s [the] killing of an abortion doctor- whether it was this Holocaust denier today, or whether it was others- whether you’re talking about Tim McVeigh or anti-tax secessionists in Texas- the interesting thing is they’re all separate, but they’re all hearing portions of the same echo chamber, a kind of dialogue- a toxic dialogue that’s subterranean in large parts. Remember, the man who was accused- who is accused of the most recent shooting of the abortion doctor, according to his ex-wife, had connections with the Montana Freemen, a kind of wild radical secessionist group. You hear not only these conversations about blacks and Jews, but about the government and about other hate-filled issues. It is- although they are separate- they are connected by a kind of dialogue of toxic ideology.

Dallas Morning News reporter Wayne Slater suggested conservatives in general and Fox News in particular are hypocrites for questioning why President Barack Obama failed to publicly observe the National Day of Prayer.

Slater wrote in his May 7 Religion Blog post:

Fox & Friends is on fire this morning stoking the controversy over President Obama not publicly observing the National Day of Prayer as predecessor George W. Bush did. Lots of graphics about how many churches are near the White House. Much gnashing of teeth over the president slighting godly expression. No mention of Matthew 6:5-6:

"And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret."

Based on Slater's timestamp and his note about the graphics, it appears his post was a response to the 7:08 AM EST discussion on "Fox & Friends" between co-hosts Steve Doocy, Gretchen Carlson and Brian Kilmeade:

From Editor & Publisher yesterday (bold is mine):

The Audit Bureau of Circulations released this morning the spring figures for the six months ending March 31, 2009, showing that the largest metros continue to shed daily and Sunday circulation -- now at a record rate.

According to ABC, for 395 newspapers reporting this spring, daily circulation fell 7% to 34,439,713 copies, compared with the same March period in 2008. On Sunday, for 557 newspapers, circulation was down 5.3% to 42,082,707. These averages do not include 84 newspapers with circulations below 50,000 due to a change in publishing frequency.

Below is a chart showing the specifics for the top 25, including percentage losses for the past four years and during the past year (current year source: Editor & Publisher):

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was honored Saturday night in Houston by America’s leading provider of abortions, with an award named for a woman who believed the population of inferior races should be trimmed, and Texas newspapers kept their headlines bland. "Clinton honored for support of women’s rights," said the Dallas Morning News over an AP dispatch. "Clinton champions women’s rights worldwide," cooed the Houston Chronicle. AP’s Juan Lozano offered few highlights (or lowlights) of the speech, but it was a bit shocking to see Mrs. Clinton equate anti-abortion advocacy and anti-democratic politics:

HOUSTON — Helping women’s reproductive and health rights flourish is an important part of U.S. efforts to develop democracy around the world and defeat extremism, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said during a speech Friday.

"A society that denies and demeans women’s rights and roles is a society that is more likely to engage in behavior that is negative, anti-democratic and leads to violence and extremism," Clinton said at Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s national conference in Houston.

Update (13 Feb. | Ken Shepherd): Tomaso responds here, dismissing the notion that he exhibited any liberal bias. Commenters to his blog post are divided.

Condescending secular elitism isn’t just for the coasts anymore. It can even come from red state Texas.

On The Dallas Morning News’s Religion blog Feb. 12, Bruce Tomaso wrote a post called “Alabama and Iran Have Something in Common.” It stemmed from a recent Gallup poll that asked people around the world, “How important is religion in your daily life?” The poll found, among many other things, that nearly the same percentage of the population of Iran (83 percent) and Alabama (82 percent) said that religion was important to them.

Tomaso thought this was a riot: “Since I've never been to Iran and haven't spent enough time in Alabama to have a well-formed opinion, I refrain from cleverly drawing further comparisons,” he wrote. “But that doesn't mean you wiseakers can't!”

A liberal Catholic blogger who last November inveighed against "extremist" and "Pharasaic" bishops who have said they will deny Communion to pro-choice politicians is cited today by Dallas Morning News religion blogger Bruce Tomaso as an "abortion foe" who, surprise, surprise, has unkind words for the March for Life:

Tomaso, you may recall, recently lamented that the pro-life CatholicVote.com group "exploited" Barack Obama's life story to make a pro-life point in a short televised ad.

As for his part as an "abortion foe," the liberal Winters certainly has shown a penchant for criticizing more strident foes of the slaughter of the unborn, such as bishops in his own church. From a November 19 blog post at America magazine's Web site (emphasis mine):

The main stream media is continuing a fervent assault on Sarah Palin, covering the mundane, the non-existent, and the factually devoid news stories of the day.  Problem being, when those dramatic news stories become less sensational due to the latest revelations, the media is not as excited to report the correction.

There's been no secret that the media has been salivating over the chance to link Palin to the Sherry Johnston drug arrest.  The latest opportunity came in the form of an e-mail from Kyle Young, an Alaskan drug investigator, in which he insinuates that the investigation and arrest of Johnston were stalled for political reasons.  Young wrote that the case ‘...was not allowed to progress in a normal fashion, the search warrant service WAS delayed because of the pending election.' 

And the media ran with it - to the tune of 417 articles on a Google news search of the terms ‘Kyle Young and Sarah Palin' this morning.  Coverage of this unsubstantiated allegation can be seen at MSNBC, CBS News, the New York Times, Newsday, the Washington Post, USA Today, and the Dallas Morning News, mostly via the tabloid liberal news agency known as the Associated Press.  And that is just to name a few. 

...who pulled President-elect Obama's books from a Catholic school library? "Hey, at least he didn't burn them!" goes the punchline.

Wocka, wocka, wocka!

That was Dallas Morning News religion blogger Bruce Tomaso's take on a Missouri Catholic priest's decision to yank Obama's tomes from the shelves of St. John LaLande Catholic School's library (see screencap at right).

Tomaso noted that Fr. Ron Elliott describes himself as "very pro-life" but that after reviewing the books in question "he didn't find anything objectionable" and will hence return the books to the shelves "in February or March" as Elliott noted, "after the dust kind of settles."

At that point Tomaso couldn't refuse the impulse to add an editorial quip:

Those who don't understand why paid circulation at major metro newspapers has been declining steeply for at least the past five years need look no further than yesterday's disgraceful reporting by Tawnell D. Hobbs in the Dallas Morning News (DMN).

The Dallas Independent School District (DISD) has been committing crimes that would cause private companies performing similar acts to be raided and/or shut down: issuing fake Social Security numbers to foreigner with visas and/or illegal immigrants to get them on the payroll.

This is serious stuff. Yet Hobbs and her paper did everything they could to minimize the impact of the story, as seen in these excerpts:

Rarely do the media put their institutional political bias on public display, but this past weekend, America's news industry titans left no doubt that they're fully behind one of the nation's most radical cultural and political movements. 

ABC, AP, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the corporate owners of USA Today, the Miami Herald, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Sacramento Bee, The Dallas Morning News and many other newspapers, all spent thousands of dollars sponsoring the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association convention in Washington, D.C.  Many journalists from these Big Media mainstays attended or spoke at the convention. 

In the name of "diversity," all the organizations listed above ran recruiting booths, as did NPR.  Thus, the nation's major news providers demonstrated that they have bought into the central proposition of homosexual activists: that people engaging in homosexuality or bisexuality, along with transsexuals, are a historically oppressed minority group deserving the same preferential treatment and legal protections that society provides to ethnic minorities and women.

The Obama campaign appears to have come up with a neat way to deflect criticism of the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee's failure to visit wounded American troops while visiting Germany last month: have wife Michelle sponsor a meeting with military families.

As CNN.com reported Monday (emphasis added): "Days after a television spot from John McCain’s campaign suggested Barack Obama did not hold enough respect for members of the military, the presumptive Democratic nominee’s campaign announced Monday that Michelle Obama will host a roundtable discussion with military spouses highlighting the launch of a military families advisory group."

UPDATE AT END OF POST: OBAMA MISSES THE FOLLOWING TOWN HALL MEETING FOR A VACATION AND FUNDRAISER IN HAWAII!

I guess the campaign felt this was a better idea than the junior senator from Illinois attending a presidential town hall meeting to be held next Monday in Fort Hood, Texas, the largest active-duty military installation in the country (photo courtesy NY Daily News). As the Dallas Morning News reported Monday, much like in July when he couldn't find the time to visit our wounded soldiers at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, Obama is also too busy to meet with families at Fort Hood (emphasis added):

Gas prices and an alleged recession have many in the media thinking the economy is going to the dogs.  Little do they know exactly how much is going to the dogs - and cats, hamsters, and goldfish.

The Dallas Morning News ran an interesting article on the perseverance of pet owners ‘despite an economic downturn.'  In fact, according to the article, owners are expected to spend a record $43 billion on their pets this year.

But how can this be?  Surely these owners can skip their doggy wellness exam and save for a tank or two of gas instead.

The NewsBusters staff noted yesterday that the increasingly good news in Iraq was not being covered by the US media. And it is good news. Contrary to the wishes of much, if not most, of the American media and their fellow believers in the Democratic Party, the United States and its allies are winning the war against Islamic aggression on the battlefields, although our courts and our media seem determined to do their utmost to turn this victory into defeat (see the New York Times coverage and the Supreme Court's decision in Boumediene). Most of the US media has placed its eggs into the basket of American defeat and support for the Islamic barbarians we are facing. So it is as welcome as it is rare to see that The Times of London today has a column that points our the indisputable fact that the West is winning.

As The Times reports on the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq, reporter Gerard Baker begins his story by quoting the famous statement by World War I Allied commander Marshal Foch,

Old Media business reporters have a definitionally-incorrect habit of labeling single industries or economic sectors as being "in recession," when the term, as defined here, can only describe national economies or the world economy. Two examples of this are New York Times reporter David Leonhardt's description of manufacturing as being in recession in February 2007 (laughably incorrect, in any event), and the Times's employment of the term "housing recession" 25 times since October 2006, as seen in this Times search (with the phrase in quotes).

But if I wanted to be consistent with this routine form of journalistic malpractice, I would characterize the newspaper business -- at least in terms of the top 25 in the industry's food chain -- not as being in recession, but instead as going through a deep, dark, painful, protracted depression.

Ken Shepherd of NewsBusters posted Tuesday on Editor and Publisher's March 11 article listing the four-year circulation changes at the nation's top 20 newspapers, concentrating on the 20% loss at the Los Angeles Times during that period.

What's also compelling is that the Top 20 really has three winners and 17 losers during that four-year time frame, as the chart that follows demonstrates:

Slip of the tongue, or was the man who gets a thrill up his leg from Barack Obama's rhetoric voicing his innermost apprehension at the prospect of Hillary Clinton regaining the upper hand?

On this afternoon's Hardball, host Chris Matthews was discussing the March 4th Texas primary with Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News, John Heilemann of New York magazine, and Norah O'Donnell. The MSNBCer made the point that under the arcane Texas rules in which the race is a hybrid of caucus and primary, it's possible for one candidate to win the popular vote and the other to walk off with more delegates.

That seemed to trigger Chris's anxiety reflex at the prospect of Hillary getting good publicity . . .

A new "Veggie Tales" movie is hitting the silver screen and, as may well be expected, the New York Times doesn't like it much.

That's not so surprising coming from the hallowed pages of the broadsheet bible of the secular left. But as Jeffrey Weiss of the Dallas Morning News's Religion Blog notes, it appears the hostile NYT reviewer is wholly unfamiliar with the Veggie Tales franchise and so may hardly have been the best reviewer for the assignment in the first place:

The New York Times has a bad review today of the new VeggieTales film, "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything." It's a bad review, in the sense that it slams the movie. But it's also a badly written review in that it seems to be written by someone who has never heard of or seen any of the VeggieTales previous cartoons or movies. Here's the top of the review, by Neil Genzlinger:

It is understandable, but not forgivable, that business reporters at Old Media newspapers might think that the economy is in bad shape. They first have to get past how poorly most of their employers are doing. The industry as a whole has not been doing well, and it's been that way for quite some time.

This table illustrates that point (September 30, 2007 figures are at this post, which originally came from this Editor & Publisher article, which will soon disappear behind its firewall; March 31, 2005 figures were estimated in reverse using annual percentage changes reported as of March 31, 2006, because older data I thought would remain available no longer is):

It appears that Editor & Publisher felt the need to get in front of some really bad news in the newspaper business. In fact, the sampling of numbers reported previews a report that will apparently be worse than others I have tracked (previous posts here, here, and here):

According to industry sources speaking to E&P, daily circulation for reporting papers in the six-month FAS-FAX period ending September is down about 2.5% while Sunday is expected to fall 3.5%. Those types of declines -- in the 2% and 3% range -- have been occurring as far back as the March 2005 period.

Major metropolitan newspapers generally gravitate towards bad news, and certainly have no incentive to preach the Good News. So it's a little odd that a Dallas preacher's anti-Mitt Romney sermon got picked up in the October 18 Dallas Morning News, especially since the sermon was a full 18 days old.

Erick Erickson at RedState argues it's no coincidence that Dallas Morning News reporter Gromer Jeffers' story ran the day before the October 19 "Values Voters" forum hosted by the socially conservative Family Research Council.:

That "Mormon Speech." Will Romney give it? You know the one. It's the one Bob Novak said weeks ago existed and is ready to go.