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MTV has bumped up the smut and sleaze level on television with its new show “Skins” – a take off on a successful BBC series. The scripted show’s attempt to portray the real lives of high school students showcases casual sex among minors without consequences, a 16 year-old child purchasing four ounces of marijuana, an adult woman stripping for an underage peeping tom, parental verbal abuse, an…

If liberalism is more "academic" than conservatism, it's because it looks a lot better in a classroom (or a newsroom) than it does in real life. Just ask Harper's Magazine publisher John "Rick" MacArthur. In a recent article, New York magazine detailed an ongoing fight at Harper's between MacArthur and his recently-unionized staff. MacArthur fought hard against unionization, and is now trying…

From the files of clippings I've saved over the years, one of my favorite headlines -- "Prison populations, costs climbing: $40b a year spent on inmates despite falling crime rate," as published in The Boston Globe on July 28, 2003. Yes -- "despite". Not the only time I've seen a headline along these lines, though less often nowadays, its idiocy becoming too obvious to ignore. As if to…

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared on all three morning shows, Wednesday, but only Meredith Vieira on the Today show seemed to assume a second term for Clinton's boss, Barack Obama. After questioning how long she'd stay in the job, the NBC co-anchor wondered, "Do we expect any time soon that you are planning to retire like defense Secretary Gates?...How about the second term?" On…

On Tuesday's John King USA, CNN's John King issued a prompt on-air apology minutes after a guest on his program used the term "crosshairs" during a segment: "We're trying to get away from using that kind of language" (audio available here). This action stands in stark contrast to an incident over a year earlier where former anchor Rick Sanchez took four days to apologize for using a unconfirmed…

Fox News host Glenn Beck showed up on Wednesday's Today show to promote his new book The 7: Seven Wonders That Will Change Your Life, but it was NBC's Meredith Vieira's misperceptions of him and conservatives as a whole that Beck was forced to try to change. After an initial discussion about Beck overcoming his personal struggles, Vieira brought Beck into the debate over whether conservative…

Apparently the folks at WalMartFreeDC.org didn't get the memo from the liberal media about crosshairs being verboten in political speech. [Related story at TheBlaze.com has more information] The website for Wal-Mart Free DC prominently features the Wal-Mart smiley-face icon at the center of crosshairs in an advertisement for a "March on the Developer's House" in Northwest D.C. tomorrow at 7…

In a fine example of the new civility at MSNBC, Lawrence O'Donnell on Tuesday actually yelled at an Arizona Congressman who didn't agree with him about the need for gun control following the shootings in Tucson. The discussion on "The Last Word" really got heated after the host made the case to Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) that additional security at Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' (D-Ariz.) Congress…

Seriously. The congresswoman is the ever-entertaining Texas Democrat Sheila Jackson-Lee. The American Spectator has the story: Arguing that the Commerce Clause provides the constitutional basis for ObamaCare, Jackson Lee said repealing the law by passing Republicans' H.R. 2 violates both the Fifth Amendment's right to due process and the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause.

 Catching up on an item from the Tuesday, January 11, Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, MSNBC host O’Donnell blamed President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress of 2004 for some of the deaths in the Tucson shootings because they did not have the "basic human decency" to renew the assault weapons ban and require Jared Loughner to reload his weapon sooner. O’Donnell talked of learning…

Metaphors are only acceptable in the hands of trained New York Times journalists: “Republicans say they do not intend to change the name of the proposal, titled the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act. Some Democrats have suggested that the ‘job-killing’ language was particularly offensive after the shootings, but Republicans rejected that notion.” -- Congressional reporter Carl…

It's one thing for my favorite political podcaster, the National Review's John Derbyshire, to assert, as he is often wont to do, that multi-culturalism doesn't work.  But George Clooney? Yet that was the point the actor seemed to make, appearing on Morning Joe today to discuss the recent referendum in which the people of southern Sudan voted overwhelmingly to secede from the north. View…

Wednesday's Washington Post features a story from Richmond by reporter Rosalind Helderman on how the state's Democrats are going to introducing a bill trying to curb the powers of conservative Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to subpoena public universities for information. Taxpayer-funded universities should be  spared any public accountability? The topic here is controversial Climategate…

 On Saturday, both ABC and NBC ran stories fretting over the Crossroads of the West Gun Show that was held over the weekend in Tucson, Arizona. On ABC, at one point, correspondent David Wright seemed surprised that the large number of people showing up at the event were customers instead of protesters. After relaying that some members of Congress want more gun control laws and cautioning…