Blogs

As part of its effort to "shore up" the backing of social conservatives, House Republicans today "issued a contract today to pay former Solicitor General Paul Clement $575 an hour, up to $500,000 to defend the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act," San Francisco Chronicle's Carolyn Lochhead insisted in the paper's Politics Blog. "Republicans claim they will take the money out of the Justice…

This past week's big story in Kosland was the midweek shift in tone in posts about President Obama. Before Wednesday's budget speech, Kossacks portrayed Obama as a wimp, a Reaganite, and worse. After the speech, he was their savvy, aggressive, progressive hero. Meanwhile, conservatives were presented as greedy racists. That's a tone that never shifts on Daily Kos. 

President Obama is "Mr. Prudent," a grown-up heralding "deficit sanity" in a Washington gone mad with "delusional" Republican plans for draconian budget cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy. That's the predictable leftist talking point-laden take that Time magazine's Joe Klein had after listening to President Obama's hectoring lecture yesterday at George Washington University (emphasis mine):

A freelance blogger on Tuesday filed a class action lawsuit against Arianna Huffington for $105 million. The suit alleges that the Huffington Post's legion of unpaid bloggers are entitled to one third of the revenue from the site's sale to AOL in February. Jonathan Tasini, who filed the lawsuit, compared Huffington to a "robber baron" in a blog post on Tuesday, and called her site a "blogger…

Clearly annoyed with conservative moves to cut the federal budget and, I suppose, with the success of conservative voters and the gun rights lobby, USA Today religion writer Cathy Lynn Grossman penned an odd entry entitled "Budget battles: Granny, get your gun," excerpted in full below:

On Friday afternoon, Time magazine religion reporter Amy Sullivan briefly blogged her complaint about what she sees as hypocrisy from conservatives who oppose federal monies for Planned Parenthood but support federal support for faith-based initiatives. "Money is Fungible," blared her April 8 Swampland headline. Well, "[o]bviously," she agreed, then carped that:

"Evangelical Liberty University received half a billion dollars in federal aid money: One conservative college got more government cash than NPR last year." That's the misleading headline for Alex Pareene's April 5 War Room blog post at Salon.com. Adding insult to inaccuracy, Pareene slandered the late Jerry Falwell -- without a link to corroborating evidence -- as an apartheid supporter…

Burning a copy of the Koran is morally equivalent to flying a plane into the World Trade Center and equally eternally damnable. That's essentially the fatwa of Time magazine's Joe Klein in an April 1 blog post at the magazine's Swampland blog. Klein was condemning Florida pastor Terry Jones's "trial" and subsequent burning of a Koran which allegedly have sparked a murderous rampage against…

The great thing about being a enviro-evangelist blogger in the United States is the moral high ground it gives you from which to condemn people who fall short of your ecological credentials. Take Bryan Walsh, the blogger behind Time magazine's Ecocentric blog. Walsh took GoDaddy.com CEO Bob Parsons for hunting down an elephant in Zimbabwe that was a threat to a village's crops. In an April…

A best-selling book recounting a four-year-old child's claims to have briefly visited Heaven while under anesthesia for an appendectomy has "On Faith" contributor Susan Jacoby on a tear. "There really is such a thing as American exceptionalism: we are more gullible than the public in the rest of the developed world," Jacoby groused in a March 30 "The Spirited Atheist" post, part of the "On…

Question: What happens when you put Joe Biden, Florida Senator Bill Nelson, and Orlando Sentinel Reporter Scott Powers together in the house of a rich Democratic donor? Answer: They don't stay together for long, as reported in a Drudge flash late this afternoon (also carried at the PJ Tatler, whose time stamp is about 45 minutes later after adjusting for its West Coast location):…

The leftist atheists at the Daily Kos really know how to write headlines. Take this one: Thank god for evolution!: Religion may become extinct. The blogger with the byline Rosieeriter was delighted on Tuesday with a BBC story that says religion may become extinct in nine European countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and…

Cindy at Fairly Conservative and Mary at FreedomEden broke this story yesterday. RedState, Gateway Pundit, and Doug Ross, among others, have helped promulgate it. I'd rate the odds of the establishment press doing anything with the information at nearly zero. I have a potential tidbit to add. FreedomEden's Mary writes: "Jake Sinderbrand, son of Judge Maryann Sumi, poses a bit of a problem…

As we've noted time and again, "On Faith" -- a Washington Post/Newsweek-run religion news and discussion website -- is biased against, if not outright hostile to traditional religious belief, particularly traditional Christian theology. This weekend's "Discussion" section topic provided more evidence of that. Examining the controversy over Michigan pastor Rob Bell's book "Love Wins: A Book…