Events

Snatching the proverbial low-hanging fruit off the branch, Arianna Huffington compared the vast majority of Americans who oppose the construction of a mosque close to Ground Zero to the thirty members of a Florida church who plan to burn copies of the Koran on 9/11. Appearing on ABC's "Good Morning America" today, the liberal publisher criticized the president for not echoing her logical fallacy…

For the record, here are the first and fourth sentences from the Federal Reserve's Beige Book released earlier this afternoon: Reports from the twelve Federal Reserve Districts suggested continued growth in national economic activity during the reporting period of mid-July through the end of August, but with widespread signs of a deceleration compared with preceding periods. ... However, the…

UK Telegraph columnist Janet Daley blasted the BBC on Tuesday for treating the tea party movement "as if it were a cross between the Klu [sic] Klux Klan and the German neo-fascist brigade."While Daley's piece is a stirring and hard-hitting indictment of the BBC's coverage, she seems to believe that its disdainful approach to the tea party movement stems from a failure to understand the American…

One failure of logic is to generalize from the anecdotal to the whole. Conservatives, who know rules of logic -- we have Thomas Sowell after all (see what I did there?) -- understand this. So, when it comes to rhetorical arguments or situations where some weirdo commits some random badness, they tend to blame...well, the perpetrator. It's also just fundamental fairness.The left, in contrast, has…

NBC's Richard Engel has done some good reporting from Iraq.  But scratch the reporter's surface, and you find a political partisan eager to echo the anti-Bush party line.   Witness his exchange with Ari Fleischer on Morning Joe today.  Engel twisted the former Bush press secretary's words, accusing him of alleging an Osama Bin Laden connection with Iraq.  Fleischer had palpably said no such…

Could Scott Pelley possibly be this naive, or was he willingly playing the role of MSM cheerleader for the developer of the Ground Zero Mosque?In the course of a chummy interview of GZM developer Sharif El-Gamal aired on Sunday's 60 Minutes, Pelley produced a pearl.  Instead of asking a probing question, the CBS "reporter" served as an advocate for El-Gamal's position when it came to the siting…

Five years ago on Sunday, Hurricane Katrina smashed into the Gulf coast, devastating much of the region, and most memorably New Orleans. Yesterday was an occasion to look back at what went wrong in the city, and hope that the same mistakes are not made again.One of the most notorious failures surrounding Katrina was the media's coverage of the situation in New Orleans. One "well-known [television…

This past weekend, intrepid journalists at the New York Post and NorthJersey.com released information they unearthed about proposed Ground Zero Mosque "organizer" Sharif El-Gamal and frontman Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, respectively, that the wire services, the New York Times and the national TV networks would likely have run with by now had the items related to a major church or synagogue. But…

An interesting character made an appearance in a Saturday evening Associated Press report by Cristian Salazar on Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf: It's not a one-time accident. The same paragraph carried at Google's version of the story has the same extra character: The question mark is actually well-placed, as the following paragraphs from Salazar's report demonstrate (bolds are mine throughout this…

A reporter for the St. Louis paper the Riverfront Times has a message for all the members of the Tea Party movement he smeared with false accusations of political violence: "I have no regrets."Chad Garrison penned a blog post last week speculating that a member of the Tea Party had firebombed the office of Rep. Russ Carnahan, D-Mo. "Given what we know of [the perpatrator] - 50, white, angry - he…

"Protesters use 'sharia' as a slur and rallying cry against Islam," reads the dismissive print edition headline for Michelle Boorstein's page A5 August 27 story. The Washington Post's online edition used different wording: "For critics of Islam, 'sharia' a loaded word." Boorstein cited "controversial" conservative scholar Daniel Pipes warning that pro-sharia Muslims "want to implement sharia in…

"This is one of those ever more obnoxious teaching moments that we're getting from the left-wing press," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell complained on last night's "Hannity" after watching a clip of MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell lament that Americans need to be more sensitive to minorities, not for the "burden" to be on Imam Feisal Rauf to assauge concerns about the planned Ground Zero mosque.Noting…

Picking up where she left off last week, MSNBC "Morning Joe" co-host Mika Brzezinski on Tuesday and Wednesday cast opponents of the Ground Zero mosque as a "destructive" force, "demonizing" Muslims and "promoting ignorance." Yet Brzezinski advocated Wednesday for a compromise between the two sides to be spearheaded by President Obama. When Joe Scarborough opined that President Obama, along with…