Poverty

Chris Christie who? Rachel Swarns, who for years fawned over Barack and Michelle Obama for the New York Times, wrote an "open letter" column to actor Adam Baldwin in defense of a left-wing group which tied up traffic in mid-town Manhattan in the name of a $15-an-hour "living wage."

Washington Post music critic Chris Richards wrote up Saturday’s Earth Day festivities on the national Mall on the front of Monday’s Style section. The headline was “At Earth Day rally, it was the message that needed saving.” Richards liked the music, but didn’t like the talking. For example: “The event’s hosts, newscaster Soledad O’Brien and Black Eyed Peas bandleader Will.I.Am, appeared to have…

As yours truly noted on April 12, actress Gwyneth Paltrow made a bit of a splash earlier this month when she announced that she would add her name to the list of ignorant politicians, advocates and celebrities taking on the deceptively designed "Food Stamp Challenge." The idea is to "try to survive" eating for a week on the average benefit a Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)…

On Saturday, MSNBC’s Alex Witt hosted Washington Post reporter Elahe Izadi to blast a new Kansas law that would limit what items welfare recipients could purchase using their taxpayer benefits. Izadi asserted many call the law “mean spirited” and then touted how “some advocates feel like lawmakers are basically saying the poor can't be trusted to manage their own money."

Journalists' and leftists' (but I repeat myself) misguided love for Cuba goes back decades. Y'know, free healthcare (cough), yada-yada. Now that President Obama is unilaterally changing the relationship between the two nations, and as usual getting nothing in return, you'd think that they'd be happy. Heck no. It started several months ago when Fox News's Shepard Smith fretted about how a thaw in…

Well, this is awkward. Undermining most of what the business press has done to try to portray the post-recession U.S. economy as performing adequately under President Barack Obama, Bill Daley, Obama’s former chief of staff, told CNBC today that Hillary Clinton "can’t run as the third term of Barack Obama economically," because the recovery has been "uneven" and has only benefited "a small slice…

On Saturday, CNN hyped actress and self-appointed "lifestyle guru" Gwyneth Paltrow's participation in the "Food Stamp Challenge." This is the fundamentally dishonest campaign which has been working for at least eight years to convince Americans that benefits provided under the federal government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are inadequate. As usual, Paltrow has taken up the…

In a Sunday blog post on the New York Review of Books site, historian Wills, who’s written extensively about both the United States and Catholicism, rebuked conservative Catholics who’ve “suggested that [Pope Francis] is not truly Catholic,” asserting that such critics of the pope “are right to be in a panic. They are not used to having a pope who is a Christian. They call Francis a radical…

The Fiscal Times is a generally strong and informative online publication. That said, it has occasionally exhibits symptoms of what could be seen as either serious leftist bias, quite disappointing ignorance, or both. One such example arrived in my email box early this morning. It contained the following headline and opening tease for a story about the food stamp program:

Hardball host Chris Matthews used a panel discussion about President Obama's attorney-general nominee Loretta Lynch on his Wednesday program as a convenient opportunity to slander conservative Republicans as seeking to repress the vote of Democratic constituencies in major cities.

As President Barack Obama and Governor Jerry Brown continue to extol the wonders of the alleged economic recovery of nation and the Golden State, respectively, stories of significant growth in homelessness continue to rain on their parades. The latest example comes on the heels of reports on Seattle's burgeoning problem and the city's apparent willingness to allow officially sanctioned outdoor…

A week ago, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, a Democrat, called homelessness in his city and the rest of King County a "full-blown crisis." Based on the numbers presented in coverage of the area's situation, we can certainly add the Emerald City to the list of areas where homelessness has been on the rise. Odds are that many readers here didn't know that, because the national press hardly ever pays…

Ann Jones has doubts about allegations that America is “crazy,” but adds, “Some people who question me say that the U.S. is ‘paranoid,’ ‘backward,’ ‘behind the times,’ ‘vain,’ ‘greedy,’ ‘self-absorbed,’ or simply ‘dumb.’  Others, more charitably, imply that Americans are merely ‘ill-informed,’ ‘misguided,’ ‘misled,’ or ‘asleep,’ and could still recover sanity.  But wherever I travel, the…