Magazines

Jay Carney, meet Jay Carney. In 2001, the then-Time magazine reporter wrote a snarky piece criticizing President George W. Bush's month-long vacation that was billed as a "Home to the Heartland" tour. But almost exactly 10 years later Carney, now the Obama White House's press secretary, is defending President Barack Obama's Midwest job-creation tour and vacation at Martha's Vineyard. "I don…

"I don't know what's worse," Tina Brown's selection of the wild-eyed Michele Bachmann cover photo for Newsweek or her "bold-faced lie" defending the choice, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told Fox News's Sean Hannity on his program last night. "There's not a person in the face of this Earth that looks at that picture and says, 'she looks more presidential,' which is what Tina Brown"…

Probably in response to a firestorm of criticism over their cover photo of Rep. Michele Bachmann, Newsweek today released a slideshow of "outtakes" that they say show that, in essence, the Minnesota Republican is unphotogenic and didn't give them much to work with in terms of a flattering photo. For his part, left-leaning Mediaite.com reporter Tommy Christopher isn't buying it, calling "bulls…

To Michael Tomasky, Barack Obama's problem is not lack of leadership or a rigid fixation to liberal ideology. No, it's just that the president is too darn decent a guy, a veritable Mr. Smith who's gone to Washington, but perhaps in this case without the Capraesque happy ending:

In an otherwise typically dismal column about President Barack Obama which is one part pity party and another part an attempt at building him a he-man reputation (not kidding), New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd describes an upcoming movie featuring the exploits of Navy SEAL Team 6 in the operation which killed Osama Bin Laden on May 1. Dowd celebrates the fact that the movie's currently…

While the liberal media scoffed at George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" in 1999 and 2000 as gimmicky and insufficient compared to traditional big government social welfare spending binges, they're starting to miss it now. Just ask Time's Amy Sullivan:

This afternoon's report at Time.com's misnamed Curious Capitalist blog by Roya Wolverson ("GDP Report: What It Tells Us About the Debt") is an embarrassing hash of omissions, errors, and gratuitous political points. Ms. Wolverson's most obvious omission is her failure to mention the government's breathtaking downward revision to first quarter gross domestic product growth from the annualized…

Halfway through the July 21 edition of "NewsNation," MSNBC anchor Tamron Hall brought on Time magazine assistant managing editor Rana Foroohar to diss a Boy Scout cited by John Thune (R-S.D.) on the Senate floor. After Hall aired a clip of Thune reading the Boy Scout's letter admonishing senators to spend only what the government can afford, she and Foroohar set about to dismiss his concern…

After Entertainment Weekly graciously gave grades of B+ to Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11' and A- to former Vice President Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth,' EW's John Young has bestowed a much different treatment on his review of the new Sarah Palin political documentary, 'The Undefeated.' The conservative documentary, which successfully opened last weekend in limited release, was given a…

Conservative Republicans are divorced from reality while Democrats are governed by the facts. That's the take Time's Alex Altman has on how the two congressional parties are addressing the looming debt ceiling deadline in his July 19 Swampland blog post, "The Fact Gap: Can Republicans Overcome Their Alternate Reality to Strike A Debt Deal?":

Barf. “We sometimes forget just how in the tank much of the press is for Obama,” the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto observed last week in catching an effusive, to put it mildly, love letter to Barack Obama published in the August edition of Hearst’s Esquire magazine. “2011 is the summer of Obama,” gushed Stephen Marche, genuflecting “‘I am large, I contain multitudes,’ Walt Whitman…

MSNBC "NewsNation" anchor and Texas native Tamron Hall was delighted to find that four Lone Star cities made it to Forbes.com's list of "The Next Big Boom Towns in the U.S." "Forbes [magazine] says many of the cities on the list have some of the best job creation records in the nation," Hall noted as she introduced contributor Joel Kotkin, who authored the July 6 piece. Kotkin identified…

He said it, he meant it, and there's no denying it. On Monday, in a statement carried at the Washington Post, the Associated Press, the New York Times (Page A8 of Tuesday's print edition), and elsewhere, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told U.S. troops at Camp Victory in Baghdad: "The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked. And 3,000 Americans — 3,000 not…

Via TV Newser, we learn that MSNBC has "suspended indefinitely" its senior political analyst Mark Halperin for stating on Morning Joe that President Obama was "kind of a [male appendage]." This is not exactly what the "No Labels" crowd at Morning Joe were expecting. The official MSNBC statement: Mark Halperin’s comments this morning were completely inappropriate and unacceptable. We apologize…