Jay Newton-Small

Yesterday I rebuked Time's Jay Newton-Small for falsely characterizing a bill before South Dakota's state legislature that would make it legal to use lethal force against a person attempting to kill an unborn child in the commission of a crime.

"South Dakota is apparently considering legalizing the murder of doctors who perform abortions," Newton-Small complained.

Later yesterday afternoon, Time magazine staffer Amy Sullivan corrected her colleague about the purpose and scope of the legislation, but feared that extremist violence might be encouraged by the state's relatively restrictive abortion laws:

Time magazine's Swampland blog bills itself as a "blog about politics and policy."

All too often, however, it's more or less a blog about furthering liberal talking points.

Take today's misleading one-sentence blog post by Jay Newton-Small in which she links to the liberal blog Talking Points Memo:

South Dakota is apparently considering legalizing the murder of doctors who perform abortions.

"So Much For Thou Shalt Not Kill," reads the headline for Newton-Small's Tuesday afternoon blog post (see screen cap below page break):

On Thursday (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I noted that Us Weekly's web site briefly posted a satirical item as legitimate news.

The satire item was about Sarah Palin criticizing Christine Aguilera's infamous National Anthem botch at last week's Super Bowl on Sean Hannity's Monday radio show. Palin didn't even appear on Hannity's show on Monday. Once caught by gossipcop.com, Us Weekly pulled the item.

The same cannot be said of Time.com. Time was also apparently fooled, but seems to be pretending that it knew the item was satire all along. Readers can judge for themselves from the graphics which follow.

While the mainstream media have been in a frenzy to denounce Christine O'Donnell as a kook for her socially conservative statements on abstinence from the 1990s, the cable news networks had a perfect opportunity this afternoon to let her speak for herself.

Collectively they gave her less than five minutes.

The Republican Delaware Senate nominee gave a speech at the Values Voters Summit in Washington, D.C. this afternoon from about 3:25 to 3:45 p.m. EDT. Of the three major cable news networks, Fox News showed none of the speech while MSNBC's Chris Jansing gave viewers just under a minute of O'Donnell audio before interviewing Time magazine's Jay Newton-Small about concerns some GOP operatives have about O'Donnell being a weaker matchup against the Democratic nominee than Rep. Mike Castle (R) would have been.

Only CNN's Rick Sanchez gave O'Donnell a substantial chunk of time: 3 minutes and 33 seconds. When Sanchez cut away from O'Donnell, he noted that she's "getting her first taste of the national spotlight" since clinching the nomination and promised that CNN would "continue to follow as the midterms in November draws near."

The general election campaign for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania between Republican Pat Toomey and Democrat Joe Sestak has started "ugly," according to Jay Newton-Small. In her May 20 Swampland blog post, the Time magazine staffer offered as evidence the former's press conference yesterday in which:

[H]e spent much of the speech blasting Sestak. In his 7-minute opening remarks he said “I” or “me” 52 times – including the thank yous – and “Joe or “he” 43 times.

Newton-Small did go on to note that "the beginning of a general election is all about defining your opponent" and added that:

On the Swampland blog, Time's Jay Newton-Small reports congressional Democrats are peeved at Newsweek pundit Jonathan Alter's Obama-polishing book on his first year, especially how he seems to give the president most of the credit for passing ObamaCare. Alter defended himself with more Barack-boosting:

Even though he did not draft the bill, it has come to be known as “Obamacare” and will be – for better or for worst – one of the crowning achievements that history will remember of Obama's first term. “On the idea of winning- it's always messy,” Alter tells me. “He has joined  [Franklin] Roosevelt and [Lyndon] Johnson as a President of great domestic accomplishment. He gets the credit, even though he may have screwed up here or there, but in the final analysis he won and if he'd lost nobody would've given him credit for good intentions.”

Saturday's vote to pass ObamaCare out of the House of Representatives was a nail-biter, passing with two votes to spare over the bare-minimum majority of 218. The final vote, 220-215, had 39 Democrats join all but one Republican in voting no.

Yet while a solid 15 percent of the Democratic caucus bucked the party leadership with their no votes, the media have latched on to the sole Republican defector: pro-life, social conservative Catholic Rep. Joseph Cao (R-La.), who has a tenuous hold in a solidly liberal Democratic district once held by the corrupt William Jefferson.

Time's Jay Newton-Small made much of the solitary Republican defection in Swampland blog post on Saturday, painting it as an abject failure of House GOP Whip Eric Cantor's "promise" to keep the opposition unified. Newton-Small had to add an update later clarifying Cantor made no such explicit promise:

Over on the magazine's Web site, Time's Jay Newton-Small published a brief phone interview she conducted on August 14 with Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska), a full 15 days before being chosen by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) as his running mate.

The agenda of questions were overall devoid of a political slant and did include one softball about how her youth and gender affect her approach.

But Newton-Small did pose one loaded question:

Writing on "Michelle Obama's Savvy Sacrifice," Time magazine's Jay Newton-Small sought to bring out what the Illinois senator's spouse "is less likely to talk about" when she addresses the Democratic National Convention tonight. No, not her Princeton thesis or her being proud of America for the first time in her adult lifetime but rather:

that this tough, razor smart Chicago native had to sacrifice many of her own career ambitions along the way.

Newton-Small went on to portray, in a positive light, Mrs. Obama's role in supporting her husband's political ambitions, before closing on this note (emphasis mine):

Time brought the hammer, nails, and lumber to build on Barack Obama’s demand that conservatives "lay off my wife." The June 2 edition of the "news" magazine included a two-page spread on "The War Over Michelle." Reporters Nancy Gibbs and Jay Newton-Small (both females) suggested she’s now "a favorite target of conservatives, who attack her with an exuberance that suggests there are no taboos anymore." They cited Hugh Hewitt, National Review, and an anonymous blog commenter as the villains of the piece.

The Time duo attempted the spin that this is puzzling since Mrs. Obama is so conservative:

In the early going, Michelle Obama was not an obvious conservative target, since in some obvious ways she's so conservative herself.