Blogs

In today’s L.A. Times director Oliver Stone discusses his upcoming documentary “South of the Border,” about the “warmhearted” Hugo Chavez. [emphasis added]: Oliver Stone is shown warmly embracing Hugo Chávez, nibbling coca leaves with Evo Morales and gently teasing Cristina Elizabeth Fernández de Kirchner about how many pairs of shoes she owns. … “I think he’s an extremely dynamic and charismatic…

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been out of office over a month and there are still those working at major media outlets that just can't get over their obsessions with dissecting everything the former GOP vice-presidential nominee does. Case and point - Mark Silva, a blogger for the Chicago Tribune's "The Swamp," in an Aug. 26 post took it upon himself to try to rationalize why Palin would…

Gabriel Malor at Ace of Spades HQ has a great "name that party" catch today. Malor noted that at least three major news outlets all failed to note the high-powered Democratic Party ties of one Hassan Nemazee, a businessman arrested this morning on a charge of bank fraud against Citigroup:Do you know what's not in the CNN article?* Or this Reuters one? Or this AP one?A crucial detail from Nemazee'…

When George W. Bush was in the White House, one of the leading anti-war voices in the nation was the ultra-liberal website Daily Kos.Now that Barack Obama is President, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are mysteriously no longer of such great concern to the Netroots.I guess the anti-war movement was much more about getting Bush out of office than getting our troops out of harm's way. Such was…

"As Castro Turns 83, Cuba Caught Between Past, Future," announces an August 13 headline for the CBSNews.com World Watch blog. The 10-paragraph entry by Havana-based news producer Portia Siegelbaum amounted to an electronic birthday card for the Communist dictator. No Castro critics, domestic or foreign, were cited in the story, although Siegelbaum made sure to note how a "U.S.-based religious…

Remember when the children of public figures were off-limits in the day-to-day hand-to-hand combat of political warfare? It's a rule that didn't just applied to the underage children of politicians, but the adult children. Witness the 2008 suspension of MSNBC's David Shuster for suggesting then-presidential contender Hillary Clinton's 28-year-old daughter Chelsea Clinton was being "pimped out"…

Topside Update, 2:15 p.m.: Imagine that -- Roxana Mayer was also an Organizing For America "host" during the Texas primary last year. Anyone visiting here even semi-regularly knows that the establishment media consistently fails to determine the legitimacy of people who "say the right things." Further, when someone else, often a blogger, digs and finds the truth, the reporters and publications…

The media is so dramatically conservative in Washington, D.C. that Grover Norquist outranks former Democrat presidents, vice presidents, and presidential candidates in the booking order. So claimed the Daily Kos blogger known as "Dengre" in a post on "The bias we fight." Be amazed: And as we fight we need to know that we start every round of every battle at a disadvantage. If you are a liberal or…

Don't think of it as another tax. Think of it as tough love from Uncle Sam.That's how Melissa Healy tried to sell Los Angeles Times readers on the notion of junk food sin taxes in her July 27 entry -- "Tough love for fat people: Tax their food to pay for healthcare" -- at the paper's Booster Shots blog:When historians look back to identify the pivotal moments in the nation's struggle against…

So what's the biggest obstacle to Mideast peace? Hamas terrorists who refuse to accept Israel has a right to exist? Perhaps the Iranian government that finances anti-Israel terror operations? Neither, according to Time's Joe Klein (shown at right in file photo), who insists in a July 20 Swampland blog post the fault lies with Israel:Benjamin Netanyahu's phony flexibility on a two-state solution…

At least one media outlet is bucking the field's bleak economic outlook: The left-wing blog Talking Points Memo. On Monday, Noam Cohen reported in the New York Times that TPM has received funding from outside investors that will result in a doubling of staff, and may include some veteran mainstream journalists. The political news Web site Talking Points Memo this weekend completed a round of…