Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal ran a blockbuster story Tuesday afternoon ("U.S. Spy Net on Israel Snares Congress") about how the Obama administration's National Security Agency's "targeting of Israeli leaders swept up the content of private conversations with U.S. lawmakers." In other words, the NSA spied on Congress. As talk-show host and commentator Erick Erickson drily observed: "Congress began…

Just one week after CNN's Don Lemon shut down a guest who dared to raise the issue, there is now an agreement across the ideological spectrum that if Hillary Clinton is going to use her husband Bill as a campaign surrogate and go after her opponents' real or imagined sexism, then, as the headline at liberal Ruth Marcus's Monday evening Washington Post column says, "Bill Clinton's sordid sexual…

One of the more tiresome cliches of political coverage is the “secret weapon.” Twenty years ago, Hillary Clinton was promoted as her husband’s “secret weapon.” Now it’s the reverse. Peter Nicholas of  The Wall Street Journal wrote a story aping the Clinton spin, headlined “Hillary Clinton’s ‘Secret Weapon’ Could Escalate Campaign Rhetoric.” Bill has been described by reporters as a secret weapon…

Joe Flint at The Wall Street Journal reports that among the top 10 cable networks in terms of prime-time viewers, only Fox News Channel, HGTV and Discovery Channel are on track to finish 2015 on an upswing. According to Nielsen, Fox News averaged 1.8 million viewers in prime time through Dec. 15, a 4 percent increase compared with the same period a year ago. “The GOP debates and the emergence of…

In an announcement which deservedly carries far less weight than it has in the past, Time Magazine (1997 circulation, 4.2 million; current circuation, 3.3 million) has named German chancellor Angela Merkel its 2015 Person of the Year. The stated reason for her selection: "Not once or twice but three times this year there has been reason to wonder whether Europe could continue to exist, not…

The New York Times has now editorialized that Woodrow Wilson had a "toxic legacy" as an "unapologetic racist" that the Left on the Princeton campus was right to repudiate. James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal had a little fun with the same newspaper's endorsement in 1912, calling Toxic Woodrow "a man of high equipment for the office, worthy of the full confidence of the people.” a man of…

Gosh, this gets tiresome. Once again, with one noteworthy exception, the business press's virtually blind acceptance of seasonally adjusted economic data, and its accompanying refusal to look at the underlying raw data, led it to paint a deceptive picture of an important element of the economy. This time, it was existing home sales for October. The seasonally adjusted annual rate for October…

After being pushed by The Des Moines Register’s Kathie Obradovich during Saturday’s Democratic debate about his flip-flopping on Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal, socialist Bernie Sanders denied the idea that he had backtracked from his “damn e-mails” comment in the October 13 debate. Instead, Sanders attacked the notion as “media stuff” and emphasized that he’s “still sick and tired of Hillary…

The political definition of Cronyism is: government policy that favors one or more specific beneficiaries - at the expense of everyone else.  To wit: $80 billion of the 2009 “Stimulus” was wasted on “green energy” companies - 80% of whom were Barack Obama donors.  Amongst the parade of horribles contained therein: the government took money from energy companies - to fund competitors to their…

House Republicans concerned about the politicization of climate science recently subpoenaed emails from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). According to the Wall Street Journal, Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, Chairman of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee, sought emails related to a May 2015 study revised temperatures and eliminated a roughly 15 year “pause” in…

Many of the state cooperative health insurers, or "co-ops," set up under the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, have gotten into serious financial trouble quite quickly. Almost half have cracked up completely. Specifically, as noted at Forbes.com on Thursday morning, "[O]f the 24 Obamacare co-ops funded with federal tax dollars, one (Vermont’s) never got approval to sell…

In case you didn't get enough of the Hillary-boosting after the "marathon" Thursday Benghazi committee hearing, other conservative media experts have rounded up their own samples of liberal-media wagon-circling. There's "something rotten" in the Washington media, agreed James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal and Noah Rothman at Commentary.

Even though Barack Obama is more than four-fifths of the way through his presidency, a large part of his popularity among liberals still rests on what they view as his exceptional talent for speechmaking -- a reputation which dates to his 2004 Democratic convention keynote address. Now Alter, one of Obama’s biggest fans in the media, wants the POTUS to use his skill as a performer in a different…

Tuesday afternoon, Alan Fram laughably headlined his coverage of Planned Parenthood head Cecile Richards' appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee at the Associated Press as follows: "FACING CONGRESS, PLANNED PARENTHOOD CHIEF REBUTS VIDEOS." She did no such thing. Most notably, Fram quoted Richards making the following statement to the committee: "The outrageous…