New York Times

Liberal New York Times reporter, now far-left Times columnist Timothy Egan ludicrously diagnoses a national squelching of debate on gun control in Thursday's post, "The Great Gun Gag." Along the way he claimed that "Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin "are to reasoned argument what salt is to a slug."

New York Times climate reporter John Broder went all the way to Doha, Qatar to reveal that the United Nation's climate talks went nowhere, in Sunday's "Climate Talks Yield Commitment to Ambitious, but Unclear, Actions." Online Broder showed his respect for dissenting opinions: "Few would compare a United Nations climate change conference to a garden party, but a pair of skeptical skunks showed up on Thursday in the persons of Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, and Christopher Monckton, the Viscount Monckton of Benchley."

Broder, whose climate reporting is full of liberal assumptions that "global warming" or "climate change" is caused by man and endangers the planet, in his Sunday print story again quoted scientists who assumed the worst, with rising temperatures inevitable.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd didn't hide her contempt for the GOP, or her pleasure in predicting its eternal demise, in Sunday's "A Lost Civilization."

The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys.

Dictatorship and double standards invade the New York Times once again. Check the headline over Dennis Lim's Sunday Arts & Leisure profileof the director of "Barbara," set in Communist East Germany in 1980: "Summoning Halcyon Days Of Failed Ideals." "Failed Ideals"? Can one imagine the paper running a headline that suggested a fascist society like Nazi Germany was built on "failed ideals"?

Born in 1960 to parents who had just emigrated from East to West Germany, the director Christian Petzold spent his first few months at a refugee camp near Düsseldorf. He has lived in the West all his life, but when he started making films in the ’90s he found himself drawn to unfamiliar environments, which often meant the former East.

New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor graced Sunday's front page with a "will she or won't she run for president" profile of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, "Clinton’s Countless Choices Hinge on One: 2016." Kantor talks of Clinton as "a widely respected figure" of "historic potential" without mentioning the scandal of the Clinton White House, like Travelgate.

Kantor is author of a sympathetic biography of the Obamas, but she has also spent plenty of hagiography on Hillary over the years. During the 2008 campaign she opined in a news story that "Mrs. Clinton seemed to channel the lives of regular women, who often saw her as an avenging angel." This Sunday Kantor speculated on the political future of Hillary, who "may appear to be a figure of nearly limitless possibility."

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman took a lot of heat from conservatives on ABC's This Week Sunday.

Shortly after Republican strategist Mary Matalin derogatorily asked him if he was an economist or a polemicist, George Will said, "I have yet to encounter someone who disagrees with you who you don't think is a knave or corrupt or a corrupt knave" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Republican strategist Mary Matalin on Sunday asked New York Times columnist Paul Krugman an absolutely marvelous question.

As Krugman spewed typical Democrat talking points about the fiscal cliff negotiations on ABC's This Week, Matalin interjected, "Are you an economist or a polemicist? Just make up your mind" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

This one comes straight from the "There are none so blind as those who refuse to see" Department. On Wednesday, in an interview with talk show host Hugh Hewitt (HT Daily Caller), New York Times Cairo Bureau Chief David D. Kilpatrick characterized Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood as "not violent by nature," and as "a moderate, conservative but religious, but moderate, regular old political force." (Quick aside: There is nothing "conservative" about sharia law, persecution of Christians, and the subjugation of women, yet the press won't stop using that dishonest tag to describe radical Islamists.)

Just a few days later, in a pair of dispatches, one of which appeared in today's Times print edition, Kilpatrick reported that "the government of President Mohamed Morsi has approved legislation reimposing martial law," and that Morsi "is leaning more closely than ever on his Islamist allies in the Muslim Brotherhood." Imagine that. Excerpts from the Hewitt interview and each of Kirkpatrick's Friday reports follow the jump.

On Friday's front page, New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer relayed the shock retirement of leading conservative Sen. Jim Demint of South Carolina, "Tea Party Hero Leaving Senate For New Pulpit." Steinhauer used her full allotment of "conservative" labels.

Meanwhile, another Steinhauer story bolstered Republican House leader John Boehner against those childish conservatives in his caucus: "....many House Republicans appear to view Mr. Boehner with the same sort of respect that adult children award their parents for the sage counsel they ignored in their younger days." For good measure she called South Carolina "a very conservative state."

On Friday, New York Times reporters Steven Yaccino and Monica Davey sourly greeted landmark conservative right-to-work legislation from Michigan in "Bills Placing Limits on Unions Advance in Michigan Legislature," The paper ran four paragraphs of quotes from the losing side, compared to three from the winners.

By comparison, the introduction of two liberal laws in Washington State, on gay marriage and marijuana legalization, were welcomed under the headline: "Two Laws Are Welcomed After Midnight in Seattle," with a single paragraph of dissent at the end. Legal reporter Charlie Savage did file a separate story on the Obama administration weighing legal action against Washington State and Colorado, but the issues there were technical and the sparse quotes were legalistic and neutral.

When he was director general of the BBC, controversial new New York Times Co. chief executive Mark Thompson "launched a scathing attack on Rupert Murdoch's media empire, warning that BSkyB [Murdoch's British Sky Broadcasting Group]" was too powerful and threatened to "dwarf" the BBC. He also accused Sarah Palin of misleading the American public by using the phrase "death panel" when discussing Obama-care.

(Thompson is facing questions concerning what he knew about the Jimmy Savile sex-abuse coverup at the BBC that occurred under his watch. A BBC report, including questioning of Thompson, is expected in mid-December. Times Watch is keeping watch on the ongoing controversy over what Thompson knew about the cancellation of a BBC investigative program into the multiple allegations against Savile, eccentric icon of the BBC.)

You know there's something afoot when the New York Times portrays former President George W. Bush as a fount of wisdom. Julia Preston, the paper's most slanted-immigration reporter, reported from D.C. on Wednesday, "Praising Immigrants, Bush Leads Conservative Appeal for G.O.P. to Soften Tone."

Preston, who is unabashedly pro-amnesty, doesn't actually name these "conservatives" supporting amnesty, though the ever-reliable Richard Land makes his usual appearance in this standard-issue Times article, as a stand in for all "religious conservatives breaking away from the GOP on amnesty."

The New York Times's alarmist environmental reporter Justin Gillis made the front of Business Day Wednesday with a left-wing protest movement at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, which is apparently "at the vanguard of a national movement": "The Divestment Brigade."

A group of Swarthmore College students is asking the school administration to take a seemingly simple step to combat pollution and climate change: sell off the endowment’s holdings in large fossil fuel companies. For months, they have been getting a simple answer: no.

As they consider how to ratchet up their campaign, the students suddenly find themselves at the vanguard of a national movement.

Nobel prize winning liberal economist Paul Krugman, who has often argued that President Obama’s $831 billion stimulus was too small, has now decided he knows what’s good for everyone’s health (besides government-controlled healthcare). His health advice? “Don’t spend much time watching CNBC” because it is “bad for your financial and intellectual health.”

On MSNBC's The Ed Show Monday night, New York Times sports columnist William Rhoden defended NBC sportscaster Bob Costas's controversial comments, made during halftime of an NFL game Sunday night, on the murder-suicide committed by Kansas City Chief player Jovan Belcher, even agreeing to the idea that the NFL commissioner try to ban players from owning guns.

Costas had quoted an anti-gun screed by sports columnist Jason Whitlock, in part: "Our current gun culture ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy, and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead. Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it." (Video below.)

New York Times's Sheryl Gay Stolberg profiled White House chief of staff and "fiscal cliff" negotiator Jacob Lew (who may be the next Treasury secretary) on Sunday's front page, calling liberal Lew "a policy nerd" who "morphs into a warrior" when it comes to helping the poor. Yet he's also a "pragmatist," just like his boss Barack Obama, and also makes "a mean potato kugel."

New York Times environmental reporters Justin Gillis and John Broder teamed up on Monday to unload some hot warming bias: "With Carbon Dioxide Emissions at Record high, Worries on How to Slow Warming." Gillis (pictured) in particular has a history of apocalypse-now! style climate reporting that has been ridiculed by actual scientists in the field. He and Broder certainly didn't hedge, taking as fact the theory that temperatures are rising inexorably because of man and will result in "higher seas and greater coastal flooding, more intense weather disasters like droughts and heat waves."

Jim Axelrod filed a completely one-sided report on Tuesday's CBS This Morning linking the Jovan Belcher murder-suicide to a lack of gun control inside the NFL  – and in the country in general. Axelrod turned to only pro-gun control advocates as talking heads – Brady Center flack Marcellus Wiley, NBC's Bob Costas, and New York Times sportswriter William Rhoden.

Rhoden blamed the widespread availability of guns in the U.S. for sportsmen getting involved in violent incidents: "Why do athletes love guns? Well, the reality is that this is a gun culture. Lots of people - and lots of people with money - own guns." The correspondent also outlined that liberal newspaper journalist "says the issue of guns and athletes is about youth, money, and perceived power." [audio clips available here; video below the jump]

New York Times Washington bureau chief David Leonhardt appeared on The Diane Rehm Show on NPR Friday and purveyed Washington's conventional wisdom about how Republicans were losing the battle of the "fiscal cliff." Leonhardt also foresaw "the end of the great era of American tax cutting."

After Laura Meckler of the Wall Street Journal brought up Republican Rep. Tom Cole taking Obama's position, Leonhardt responded: "And that is a very big deal because while the fiscal cliff talks at most have been happening behind the scenes, what President Obama has talked about the most in public is pushing Congress to vote on this extension of the Bush-era tax rates for, he says, 98 percent of the American people. The fact that Tom Cole is a powerful Republican in the House, has said, yeah, let's go ahead with that and then deal with the top 2 percent later. It would be a big victory for President Obama and something that I think many Democrats and outside observers did not expect him to get quite as easily is it looks like it might be on the verge of happening."

Patrick Goodenough of CNSNews reported Monday morning on new developments in the Mark Thompson controversy, concerning what the New York Times Co.'s new chief exeuctive knew about accusations against BBC star entertainer Jimmy Savile, when Thompson was head of the BBC: "Emails Raise New Questions About When NY Times CEO Learned of BBC Child Sex Scandal."

The New York Times continued to push for amnesty for illegal immigrants, this time on Saturday's front page, courtesy of its most reliable pro-amnesty reporter, Julia Preston, reporting from New Haven, "Young Immigrants Say It's Obama's Time to Act." For the umpteenth time the paper boasted of illegals emerging "from the shadows" (although for a such a frightened group, they sure do get their pictures in the Times a lot).

Friday's enormous A1 New York Times story by economics reporters Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff tried to soften Americans up for tax hikes under a misleading headline: "Complaints Aside, Most Face Lower Tax Burden Than in the Reagan ’80s." They write:

But in fact, most Americans in 2010 paid far less in total taxes -- federal, state and local -- than they would have paid 30 years ago. According to an analysis by The New York Times, the combination of all income taxes, sales taxes and property taxes took a smaller share of their income than it took from households with the same inflation-adjusted income in 1980.

Tonight's fun facts relate to the strike by the group a Reuters report describes as "500 clerical workers at the ports, members of the relatively small Office of Clerical Union Workers" at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The strikers' picket lines have been honored by "some 10,000 members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union."

These fun facts are rarely mentioned, but readers will want to learn them, and the rest of the country also should be quite interested. Though they could conceivably be elsewhere, I only found them mentioned in one Associated Press item from two days ago currently carried at Google News. It's a good thing it's there, because it appears to be gone from the AP's national web site. In fact, a search there at 11 p.m. ET on "Los Angeles ports" (not in quotes) came up empty. The fun fact is not in the aforementioned Reuters story, a very long AP story from November 28 found at the San Jose Mercury News, or a related November 30 New York Times story. The fun facts, and a link to the AP story, are after the jump:

The annual winter conference of the Democracy Alliance is getting almost no press attention. The alliance "was created to build progressive infrastructure," and promotes a "collaborative giving strategy." Membership is invitation-only. Its board includes Mary Kay Henry, who "serves as International President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)." The meeting is in essence a planning session for the funding of "progressive" candidates, their supposedly unrelated Super-PACs, and other causes.

This morning, Matthew Continetti at the Washington Free Beacon called out the press hypocrisy in virtually ignoring this event. A 10 a.m. ET Google News search on "Democracy Alliance" (in quotes) returned only a half-dozen post-Thanksgiving items. Among major outlets, only the Politico, as seen at NJ.com (written by Kenneth Vogel, but not noted there), has given the meeting any attention. Continetti noted that coverage, and the complete lack of any other attention which accompanied it (HT Instapundit; bolds are mine):

The New York Times has aggressively covered lurid scandals involving its perceived ideological opponents, from questioning what Pope Benedict XVI knew about the sex abuse and coverup in the Catholic Church, to the phone-hacking committed in Rupert Murdoch's tabloid empire. But when it comes to a pedophilia scandal and coverup that has been brought into the New York Times Co.'s own backyard, the coverage is muted and tamed.

Mark Thompson, new chief executive for the NYT Co., was director general of the BBC from 2004 until 2011, and was in charge when the decision was made by higherups in 2011 to abandon a 'Newsnight' story investigating accusations of pedophilia against long-time BBC star Jimmy Savile.

A search at the Associated Press's national website on Warren Buffett's last name at about 5 p.m. ET returned two recent items which are still present there. Each item (here and here) mentions the Obama Fan of Omaha's idea to "impose a minimum tax of 30 percent on income between $1 million and $10 million, and a 35 percent rate for income above that." Neither mentions the pathetically small amount such a tax would raise while seriously impacting the ability of high income earners who own or run businesses to expand them -- or in some cases causing them to shrink.

It's the same at other establishment press outlets. Two recent New York Times items found in a search on Buffett's full name (here and here, the latter item being Buffett's own op-ed on Sunday) fail to note how little money Buffett's proposed tax hikes would raise. So how little is "little"?

Wednesday's lead New York Times story from California-based Adam Nagourney strongly suggested that tax hikes promoted by Gov. Jerry Brown (and Nagourney himself) were paying off in economic resurgence in the already tax-high state: "California Finds Economic Gloom Starting To Lift."

After nearly five years of brutal economic decline, government retrenchment and a widespread loss of confidence in its future, California is showing the first signs of a rebound. There is evidence of job growth, economic stability, a resurgent housing market and rising spirits in a state that was among the worst hit by the recession.

In a story the New York Times appears not to have touched, Hunter Walker at Observer.com's Politicker ("about" page is here) reported on Tuesday that Thomas Lopez-Pierre, a black Harlem activist, "circulated an email" Monday night "in an attempt to plan a 'private meeting' to 'discuss the potential damage to the political empowerment of the Black and Hispanic community if Mark Levine, a White/Jewish candidate was elected to the 7th Council District in 2013.'" So we see that black Chicagoland establishment officials trying to ensure that the successor to the recently resigned Jesse Jackson Jr.  in Illinois' 2nd Congressional District are not alone in seeing a political office as somehow "belonging" to them.

The Wall Street Journal (subscription may be required) has also picked up the story ("Race, Religion Used as Basis For an Attack"). Verbiage from the Politicker report, along with separate comments from James Taranto at the WSJ's Best of the Web, follow the jump (internal links are in originals; bolds are mine throughout this post):

Wednesday's New York Times front page featured Susan Rice's failed attempt to assuage concerns of three Senate Republicans on her false statements about the Benghazi massacre in "Rice Concedes Error on Libya: G.O.P. Digs In." Inside was an unflattering photo of a peeved-looking Sen. John McCain. Posing Republican senator and Rice critic McCain as the bad guy, an on-line text box accompanying the article highlighted a reader comment from "Them or Us": "If you think these three Senators walked in with open minds and no agenda, I'd like to sell you a bridge that crosses the East River into Brooklyn. McCain's little kangaroo court is about as transparent as his anger." Meanwhile, on the back pages, two liberal Times columnists disagreed on Benghazi's significance.

In the front-page story, reporters Mark Landler and Jeremy Peters minimized the import of the policy scandal by focusing on the personal, portraying Rice, who may be nominated by President Obama to the post of UN ambassador, as offering an olive branch that "hostile Senate Republicans" rejected.

Cash for Clunkers, the failed Obama scheme to try to save the auto industry, is still wreaking havoc. This time on a an American pastime: demolition derby. Many in the news media applauded the clunker of a program, including The Washington Post which repeatedly praised this program in 2009, trumpeting and increase in consumer spending. But many of those stories also ignored the problems of the program.

Surprisingly, in the Nov. 21 edition of The Washington Post magazine, reporter David Montgomery wrote an article about the possible demise of demolition derby, a popular pastime in rural areas where competitors rebuild old cars in order to see which lasts the longest after they smash into one another. A number of problems are facing derby participants, including a shortage of old cars strong enough to be able to compete.