NB Extra

Nearly forgotten article from GQ, late '80s, its subject lost to memory but one detail that stuck -- the writer mentioned that he took part in a weekly touch football game in Central Park and Geraldo Rivera was another player.

Rivera, he claimed, was the type of competitor who jumped to catch a pass when it wasn't necessary. You know that guy, right? Anthony Weiner, to cite an obvious example. Decades later, Rivera is still engaging in this type of thing, most often over the airwaves. (Audio clip after page break)

In the health-care insurance debate, one of the mantras of the left is to condemn those evil, greedy insurance companies that would charge higher rates to people with "pre-existing conditions."

But in a commercial aired on last night's Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, there was "Progressive Insurance," whose chairman Peter Lewis is a huge donor to liberal causes including Moveon.org, condemning as "rate suckers" people with bad driving records who drive up good drivers' rates!  View the video after the jump.

As NewsBusters colleague Kyle Drennan reported today, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie asked if President Obama was following the Gosnell case, or NBC’s reporting of it.   He dodged the question, but at least NBC acknowledges that a case is actually going on in Philadelphia. The president answered:

Well, I'm familiar with it. I can't comment on it because it's an active trial. What I can say is this. I think President Clinton said it pretty well when he said abortion should be safe, legal and rare. If an individual carrying out an abortion, operating a clinic or doing anything else, is violating medical ethics, violating the law, then they should be prosecuted.

Guthrie failed to ask any follow ups on this, but a sharp reporter might have shot back that “safe, legal, and rare” was language that was actually excised from the Democratic Party platform in Charlotte last year. The platform committee was, of course, stacked with Obama acolytes and included Nancy Kennan, President of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

What's more, the committee’s size was very small, numbering about fifteen members, helping to ensure that the message was tightly controlled. Suffice it to say, no pro-life Democrats were on the committee and their recommendations were all summarily ignored.

As we've noted, the liberal media generally and the Big Three broadcast networks in particular have studiously avoided paying attention to the Kermit Gosnell murder trial. The Philadelphia abortionist is charged with murdering newborns who survived abortion attempts and were born alive.

But aside from the criminal aspect of the case, there's other angle in the Gosnell matter that is of interest to political observers of the 2014 election cycle, particularly the Pennsylvania governor's race. One of the Democrats vying for the nomination to challenge Gov. Tom Corbett (R) is Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-Pa.), who operated an abortion clinic from 1975-1988. J.D. Mullane of the Bucks County Courier News has some great, incisive questions for Schwartz connected to the Gosnell matter, particularly whether Schwartz ever referred any patients to Gosnell.  Her clinic stopped performing abortions in 1984, but continued with issuing referrals to other clinics.  Schwartz has been curiously silent on the issue, and larger media outlets seem to be silent as well, failing to ask her if she ever referred women to Gosnell, for example.

In a comparatively rare feat, a conservative writer has won a Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious award in journalism. Bret Stephens, who writes a column for the Wall Street Journal primarily about world affairs is the first conservative to win the award in more than a decade.

Congratulations are certainly in order to Stephens for pulling off the win, especially since the very liberal Columbia University is in charge of the award.

Politico's Kevin Robillard published a short piece this morning about former president George W. Bush and how he "is glad his paintings are confounding his critics." You may recall that last month when Bush family email accounts were hacked and private correspondence was published online, it was discovered that the 43rd chief executive of the United State has taken to painting and that, for an amateur who's just started at it, he's actually pretty good.

Citing an interview that Bush gave the Dallas Morning News, Robillard noted that the former president says he takes "great delight in bursting stereotypes" and snarked that "people are surprised" that he took up painting but then again, "some people are surprised I can even read." That was, of course, a swipe at hard-left critics who revel in mocking Bush's intelligence, but Politico editors decided to go the juvenile route and use it as a headline.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) had some harsh words Sunday for Jay-Z and Beyoncé's recent trip to Cuba.

Appearing on CNN's State of the Union, Rubio said, "I think it’s hypocritical of the people who took that trip because they didn't go down there and meet with some of the people that are actually in trouble today" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

When music superstars Jay-Z -- whose real name is Shawn Carter -- and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter celebrated their fifth anniversary with a vacation to Cuba, the couple was criticized on Twitter by Stacey Dash, who asked: “Do you care that The Jay Z"s have taken the capital you have given them and funded a communist oppressive regime?”

The African-American actress's question drew many angry responses, ranging from suggestions that she “go die” to calling her “a modern day slave girl whore 4 white men.”

Last November I noted an excellent post by Trevin Wax of the Gospel Coalition entitled "10 Questions a Pro-choice Candidate Is Never Asked by the Media." Well, Wax has hit the nail on the head again with an incisive April 12 post "8 Reasons for the Media Blackout on Kermit Gosnell."

"To put the Kermit Gosnell trial in perspective, consider other famous cases of child-killing. From Susan Smith to Andrea Yates, and most recently the horror of Newtown, we are accustomed to 24/7 news coverage of these types of tragedies," Wax noted in his April 12 post, , yet, "[n]ot so with Dr. Gosnell." You can read the full list here, but I thought reasons 5,6, 7 and 8, which I've excerpted below, are particularly spot on, especially as pertains to MSNBC, which was the leading standard bearer in the "war on women" meme and which is constantly playing the race card against conservatives: