Government Agencies

At the New York Times, a Thursday report by Alan Blinder and Tamar Lewin, with assistance credited to two others, originally identified Rowan County clerk Kim Davis, the center of national attention who has been jailed over her refusal to issue marriage licenses containing her name to homosexual couples, as a Republican. (The press has been mighty quiet about acknowledging that Ms. Davis would be…

In the past week, several pundits and alleged "experts" have been on a mission to tell us rubes that Hillary Clinton's email and private-server controversy doesn't rise to the level of being a scandal. They have absurdly argued that even if she "technically" violated State Department protocols and even broke some pesky laws in handling her communications while she was Secretary of State, Mrs.…

The press's failure to tell the public how seriously the U.S. economy is struggling is not the most egregious exercise in reality avoidance we've seen during the past several months. The willful denial of Iran's intent to destroy Israel and its Western enemies, the refusal to acknowledge the inherent institutional ugliness of Planned Parenthood, and the failure to accurately characterize Hillary…

Silly me. I really thought that every state's lottery operation was walled off from the rest of its finances. They collect bets, pay out winnings and administrative costs, and turn over the profits to general fund. End of discussion. No muss, no fuss. Right? In Illinois, based on recent developments, we know that's obviously not the case — leading me to wonder how many other states potentially…

This is obviously sarcasm: Right behind all the positive racial healing we've seen during Barack Obama's presidency is the vast improvement in the degree of civility heard and seen in leftist discourse. Obviously, that's not so. Hillary Clinton calls GOP presidential candidates "terrorists" and invokes Nazi-era images of illegal immigrants being "loaded into boxcars." The press — which would…

In the course of evaluating a claim made by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a prolife group, PolitiFact Georgia's crack investigators learned from a spokesperson for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America that the organization "does not provide mammograms at any of its health centers." Since such facilities must be licensed by the Food and Drug Administration, no PPFA facility can legally…

Miami Herald sportwriter and columnist Greg Cote, whose career has entered or is about to enter its third decade, seems to have incorporated a sideline into his work: glib, ignorant political commentary. One such example surfaced at the end of his August 25 Random Evidence blog post. Apparently, Cote believes that anyone who has ever received any kind of government benefit or has made use of a…

One of the odder pieces appearing during the past week in connection with the Hillary Clinton email and private server scandal was David Ignatius's attempt to deny that it's a scandal at all in Thursday's Washington Post. Ignatius devoted four of his first five paragraphs to relaying the allegedly expert assessments of Jeffrey Smith, who Ignatius described as "a former CIA general counsel who’s…

Three weeks ago, concerning Associated Press coverage of investigations into Planned Parenthood's baby body parts business, I noted that "Bad news for Planned Parenthood gets only local coverage," while "Exculpatory news, even if artificially concocted, gets national exposure." Add the following to that observation: Obama administration attempts to punish states for attempts to defund Planned…

The establishment press is all over revelations by Fox News Friday morning that the investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails involves a "section of the Espionage Act is known as 18 US Code 793," and that "the focus includes a provision of the law pertaining to 'gathering, transmitting or losing defense information,'" according to "an intelligence source." ... Just kidding. The only reaction I'…

I'm sure we all feel better now that Hillary Clinton, as reported by the New York Times late Wednesday afternoon, "took responsibility" for "her decision to use only private email while she was secretary of state." Well, no — and Times reporter Maggie Haberman should (and probably does) know why that doesn't cut it. Mrs. Clinton still maintained on Wednesday that investigations currently in…

Over at the Associated Press this afternoon (later updated), Ken Dilanian, with the help of four other reporters, prepared a lengthy dispatch attempting to defend 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's email and private-server practices. Boiled down to its essence: Boiled down to its essence: "[D]iplomats routinely sent secret material on unsecured email during the past two…

Almost four years ago, solar energy manufacturer Solyndra filed for bankruptcy, leaving the federal government with a loan guarantee-related loss of up to $535 million. The Energy Department's inspector general released a report on the debacle today. At the Associated Press, reporter Kevin Freking made sure readers knew that the loan guarantee program began under President George W. Bush, but…

It doesn't seem likely that an oil company CEO would get the benefit of the doubt Apple CEO Tim Cook received from the press yesterday after he emailed well-known financial commentator and investment adviser Jim Cramer about his company's performance in China. In an email read over the air on CNBC, Cook reported that "we have continued to experience strong growth for our business in China…