Covert Liberal Activists

The straw man argument is a fundamentally dishonest fallback tactic employed by someone whose side is losing a debate: Make up a position the other side has never taken, and then shoot it down. The leftist fever swamp known as Vox, perhaps reacting to the utter implosion of Rolling Stone's University of Virginia fraternity gang-rape story and the potential impact it might have on keeping…

A week ago, New Orleans Saints tight end Benjamin Watson put up a Facebook post reacting to events in Ferguson, Missouri. It has generated an astonishing 825,000 likes and 458,000 shares as of 1 PM ET today. As will be seen later, CNN's print report on Watson's post by Steve Almasy treated the player's references to sin, Jesus Christ, and the Gospel as if they were potentially toxic.…

Lisa Bloom describes herself as a "Fighter for justice at my law firm, The Bloom Firm," and is "legal analyst for NBC News & Avvo." NBC and Avvo should seriously reconsider their relationships with Ms. Bloom. In a series of tweets on Tuesday, she seethed over the grand jury's failure to indict Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Since then, she's been…

To grievance-mongers in the fever swamp, Trayvon Martin will always be a cute little kid who had just bought Skittles and iced tea, and then got shot by a bloodthirsty racist on neighborhood watch. The truth — that Martin bought Skittles and AriZona Watermelon Fruit Juice Cocktail, two of the three key ingredients in a mind-altering, dangerous concoction known as "lean," and that Martin's autopsy…

The New York Times continued its annoying, Winston Smith-like habit of rewriting history in virtually real time yesterday. Helene Cooper's original Monday afternoon report on Chuck Hagel's sacking as Secretary of Defense is no longer available at the Times. However, since I anticipated that the paper would conduct a comprehensive cleanup yesterday when I posted on the paper's original coverage,…

While it is indeed nice that the Associated Press did a fact check on President Obama's Thursday night immigration address — an item P.J. Gladnick at NewsBusters covered on Saturday — it would have been even nicer if the wire service better described as the Administration's Press had fact-checked Julie Pace's and Josh Lederman's awful Friday evening backgrounder on the speech. The AP pair couldn…

Some liberals like to pass Josh Barro off as a conservative, but not long ago the New York Times correspondent debunked that notion himself, tweeting that he was most easily understood as a "moderate." But after his appearance on MSNBC today, another term might more aptly apply: elitist liberal.   Speaking with Alex Wagner, Barro crammed a carload of condescension into thirty seconds. Barro…

Well, if this doesn't beat all. Based on excuses provided by 63 people (35 percent) out of a "smallish sample" (I'll say) of 181 nonvoters, the Washington Post's Christopher Ingraham whined on Wednesday (HT Twitchy) about how "scheduling conflicts with work or school" kept people from voting last Tuesday. This alleged problem calls for solutions like "requiring employers to allow flexible…

The competition for dumbest quote I have been able to find by a leftist tonight just heated up. Earlier this evening, I noted that Washington Post columnist David Ignatius on Thursday called President Obama "perhaps the least political president in modern U.S. history." One might think that nothing could possibly top that. Actually, I have found two which belong in the running in one long…

Saturday morning, Erica Werner at the Associated Press, aka the Administratino's Press, channeled her inner Nancy Cordes to play "gotcha" with Republicans who won election to the House on Tuesday. Werner's report essentially regurgitated Cordes's petulance in the CBS reporter's question directed at House Speaker John Boehner on Thursday. Cordes identified supposedly stupid or ill-advised things…

That the folks at the Associated Press have had it in for Scott Walker for over 3-1/2 years has been quite obvious. The wire service's reporters, particularly Scott Bauer, have made their personal opposition quite clear, sometimes quite bitterly and often dishonestly, to Walker's Act 10 and other policies in their supposedly "objective" reports. So it wasn't any surprise, or really even a…

Participation in youth football is down. As economic ignoramus David Leonhardt of the New York Times explained yesterday at the paper's "The Upshot" blog, this is particularly pronounced in "the highly educated Democratic-leaning areas of major metropolitan areas." Yesterday, as he was interviewing Leonhardt about his post on NPR's "The Takeaway" program, John Hockenberry asked, "Are you…

New Jersey Governor Christie rebuked a heckler during his visit to the area affected by Superstorm Sandy on Wednesday. His rebuke is still a major headline item at ... the Weather Channel. The headline ("Gov Loses It During Speech") also makes a claim not supported by the circumstances, or Christie's history of dealng with such critics:

On Friday in a Facebook hangout, in a statement noted Saturday afternoon by Tim Graham at NewsBusters, MSNBC's Chuck Todd described himself as "stubbornly neutral." Sunday, Mr. "Stubbornly Neutral" attacked the NRA on "Meet the Press" for having the nerve to oppose President Obama's Surgeon General nominee, a man who is obsessed with gun control.