Marion Barry

Fredricka Whitfield put on the kid gloves for Marion Barry on Sunday's CNN Newsroom, and acclaimed the former D.C. mayor as a "visionary." Whitfield skirted mentioning every single controversy Barry has been involved in through his long career save one – his "infamous drug bust in 1990." She also spotlighted the Democrat's conspiracy theory that the FBI set up the sting to take him down for…

CNN's Fredricka Whitfield was incredibly generous to former Democratic D.C. Mayor Marion Barry on Saturday over his past drug arrest and jail time. Barry was convicted on drug charges and served six months in jail in the 1990s, in between his two terms as D.C. Mayor. Yet Whitfield first praised his "incredible tenure." Then she brought up his arrest but framed him as a victim of his past: "…

Imagine if you will that an ex-con/former crack cocaine user, Republican ex-mayor of a major American city recently: denounced Asian-American store owners in his city for running "dirty" shops, insulted Filipina immigrant nurses, saying they were taking away jobs from Americans, and, most recently, wound up using a racial slur against another ethnic group during an event intended to mend fences…

Imagine if you will a Republican city councilman anywhere in the United States railing against Asian-American small businesses and Filipino immigrants who work as nurses in local hospitals. The national media would swoop in with critical attention to the matter and demand Republican politicians all the way up to apparent presidential nominee Mitt Romney to renounce the racist politician. But…

Yesterday I noted that the Washington Post covered a September 8 anti-Obama, pro-school voucher protest in its D.C. Wire blog. Demonstrators participating in the protest complained about how the president and congressional Democrats have scuttled the voucher program and in doing so dashed the hopes of 216 kids who were scheduled to be granted vouchers for private schools this school year.Yet the…

Today as President Barack Obama was preparing to deliver a speech to America's students, some school voucher-supporting Democrats in the District of Columbia were gearing up to protest the president's decision to scuttle the city's federal voucher program by blocking the doors to the federal Department of Education building in Washington. Nikita Stewart of the Washington Post's D.C. Wire blog…

It's a few steps shy of proclaiming, "Gun Ban an Abject Failure at Curbing Crime," but today's Washington Post Metro did trumpet on the front of its November 13 Metro section that the 31-year old D.C. handgun ban has not proven to be a crime deterrent. With his somewhat subdued headline, "Crime Data Underscore Limits of D.C. Gun Ban's Effectiveness," staff writer Paul Duggan unearthed the…