Political Groups

Well, this is a stunning reversal of fortune.  Remember when Organizing for Action – the so-called non-partisan 501(c)4 group aimed at disseminating and lobbying for Obama’s agenda – would release the names of its donors, especially the ones who give big to the organization.  Well, they’ve decided to nix that, not that the liberal media care to note the reversal. The Washington Free Beacon…

For the first time, I am wondering about the long-term viability of the Republican Party. I say this not as an advocate of its demise or restructuring but as an observer of troubling signs. The Republican Party is thought to be the institutional vehicle for the advancement of conservative policies, but for decades, the conservative movement has been frustrated with the party's deviation from…

A Marine Corps official accuses the Senate majority leader of "pure political posturing on the backs of these dead Marines" and the networks whistle right by it. There is no question what Harry Reid is implying during his disgraceful remarks on the Senate floor. He links the sequester to the deaths of seven Marines, and ABC, CBS, and NBC censor the story by giving it ZERO seconds of coverage…

At the Washington Post's Post Politics blog on Monday, Juliet Eilperin revealed that the White House has notified participants invited to the April 1 Easter Egg Roll that the event "is subject to cancellation due to funding uncertainty surrounding the Executive Office of the President and other federal agencies." Eilperin only considered the White House's latest obvious example of "no petty…

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its 2013 pity party -- er, annual report -- on the State of the News Media (home page; full overview). Two things struck me in my initial scan-through: First, the whining about newsroom cutbacks, which are largely related to pervasive bias and misplaced priorities; second, the characterization of newsmakers' improved…

We should give credit to the Associated Press's Calvin Woodward, with help from AP Polling Director Jennifer Agiesta and writer Alan Fram, for calling out politicians and other gun-grabbers who have been abusing a two decades-old gun-related statistic and passing it off as if it's still factual. That's nice, but Woodward could have saved many words, mountains of paper, and tons of bandwidth…

In an interview with former Bill Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos at ABC (transcript here), President Barack Obama claimed that “We don’t have an immediate crisis in terms of debt." Despite his claim, no one can know that for sure, but it's at least consistent with what he said during the 2012 presidential campaign ("we don't have to worry about it short term"). Obama's elaboration on…

In Monday's New York Times, in a report which appeared online late Sunday, reporters Richard W. Stevenson and John Harwood devoted considerable space to the idea that President Obama's latest "outreach" effort is primarily an attempt to "salvage a big deficit-reduction deal," and not a political ploy to show voters in the 2014 congressional elections that he's really interested in achieving a…

In a mild shock -- mild because it's mentioned before the elections, but probably won't be when it really matters after the polls close -- Frank Bajak and Jorge Rueda at the Associated Press, in a story about how the last opposition TV station in Venezuela is being sold to an insurance magnate who is reportedly "friendly with government," noted the extraordinary handicaps that Venezuela's…

It will be interesting to see how much national play this story gets. My guess is: "little." Following up on a matter on which I initially posted last month, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported yesterday that the prosecutor for Hamilton County, Ohio, where the county seat is Cincinnati, is bringing charges related to improper voting against three people – including a longtime poll worker and a…

In a New York Times op-ed which has been receiving deserved criticism from other quarters concerning other matters (e.g., here and here), Ta-Nehisi Coates ("The Good, Racist People") repeated one of those establishment press-induced "everybody knows" mantras which doesn't stand up to scrutiny after considering the available evidence: "New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the…

With all the talk of sequstration and its supposed "austerity on autopilot" (as characterized at Voice of America -- your tax dollars at work against you), it's useful to look at what has really been happening with federal spending over the past six years, something the establishment press is very reluctant to do. On Thursday, the Congressional Budget Office released its February Monthly…

This posts builds on another by Noel Sheppard which appeared earlier today at NewsBusters. At ShowBiz411.com, Roger Friedman, who worked at Fox News for a decade until he was fired in 2009 over alleged film piracy, claims that Brooke Shields is “Likely” to join “The View” as Joy Behar and Elisabeth Hasselbeck depart. "Likely"? Wow, Rog, way to put yourself on the line. Friedman went heavy on…

It's as if Associated Press reporter Paul Haven saw colleague Frank Bajak's pathetic obituary of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez earlier today (covered by Matthew Balan at NewsBusters) and said: "Oh yeah? I can outdo you." That he did, in an execrable report excerpted after the jump which should be saved to the hard drive and shown as evidence that anyone who calls the wire service "the…