Political Groups

On Monday evening's NBC Nightly News, host Brian Williams used a perhaps revealing verb to describe a belief held by former Soviet foreign minister and Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze, who died on Monday at 86. It would be good to look back and learn how Shevardnadze came to say what he said a decade ago before getting to how Williams framed it. As reported in Doug Martin's obituary at…

Fox News contributor and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer made a very interesting and logical correlation Friday. The press has predictably failed to make the connection or even to relay Krauthammer's point, simply because it leads to the default assumption that conservatives were right on an important economic issue. To be clear, the point Krauthammer and National Review Online's…

Attempting to take historical revisionism to an absurd level, New York Times "Arts Beat" reporter Jennifer Schuessler claims that the removal of a long assumed to be present period at a critical point in the Declaration of Independence — smack dab after the identification of its three God-given rights — may radically change the document's meaning from its common understanding. Naturally, the…

On June 18, Catholic broadcaster Eternal Word Television Network suffered a serious religious freedom setback when "A federal judge in Alabama ... dismissed a Catholic broadcaster's legal claim that requiring employers to include contraception in their health care coverage is unconstitutional." The Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, felt that story was important enough to merit…

In an MSNBC interview today, Nina Totenberg, National Public Radio's longtime Supreme Court watcher, attempted to portray the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision as possibly wide-ranging, and even advised viewers that Anthony Kennedy's presence on the court may be the only thing preventing it from bringing in an era of sex and "foreign origin" discrimination by "hundreds and hundreds and…

USA Today reporter Richard Wolf's afternoon coverage of the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision this afternoon appeared to be completely ignorant of the dire financial consequences which would have been visited on the company had it lost today. He also allowed unscientific and objectively wrong arguments about conception to be advanced by those who wanted to see Hobby Lobby defeated.…

Hank Paulson, whose claim to fame in the public sector is panicking and browbeating the nation and its Washington politicians into accepting the Troubled Asset Relief Program in late September 2008, and who just two weeks later "put a (figurative) gun to the heads" of large-bank CEOs to "persuade" them to accept federal "investment" in their enterprises, has re-emerged to tell us, according to…

A staple of establishment press reporting is to attribute a contention to a limited group of people to either place the truth of a statement into doubt, or to make it appear that only the group involved holds that opinion. Examples taking this to the absolute extreme could include: "Conervatives say the sun rises in the east and sets in the west," and "Republicans believe that abortion takes a…

News reports indicate that Vincent A. "Buddy" Cianci, who was Mayor of Providence, Rhode Island from 1975 to 1984 and 1991 to 2002, is again running to be mayor of the Ocean State's capital city. The opening sentence at the Associated Press's Thursday morning story calls him a "twice-convicted felon who led Providence as mayor for 21 years," who is going "to run as an independent." Local web…

Wednesday afternoon, Huffington Post's Sam Stein, whose track record of fundamentally dishonest reporting and refusing to admit the obvious even when caught red-handed goes back at least six years, used a tweet to promote an excuse even a six year-old wouldn't dare try to use on his or her parents. Behold Stein's tweet, which, modified to defend the indefensible in the Obama administration,…

Halfway through the Wednesday edition of her eponymous program this evening, CNN's Erin Burnett turned to her colleague Joe Johns for breaking news regarding a fresh development in the IRS scandal: email evidence suggesting Lois Lerner may have pushed for an audit of Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley.  Immediately afterwards, in a panel discussion, CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin endorsed…

On the June 24 edition of Hardball With Chris Matthews, the MSNBC anchor invited Adam Brandon of the Tea Party organization FreedomWorks onto the show in an attempt to portray the Tea Party as targeting black voters in the Republican Mississippi primary run-off. Matthews claimed McDaniel’s supporters were citing a “Jim Crow-era law from 1942" to try to stifle votes by African-American voters…

On Tuesday, the Brookings Institution, with a David Leonhardt column at the New York Times serving as its de facto press release, published a study (full PDF here) entitled, "Is a Student Loan Crisis on the Horizon?" Unsurprisingly, their finding, in one word, was "No." Their more qualifed finding: "[I]n reality, the impact of student loans may not be as dire as many commentators fear." Their…

It is a line I have used to open speeches on the lecture circuit for years and it never fails to get a laugh: "I'm happy to be here tonight from Washington, D.C., where the only politicians with convictions are in prison." That's only partially true. Democrats have convictions. They know what to do with power when they get it and how to isolate, even punish, any member of their party who…