Media
September 22, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Having spent $78 on lunch at the Newark Airport, New York Times columnist David Brooks seized the opportunity to present himself as a man of the people in the Xeet below. Like Bill Clinton, he has felt their pain. Before he got burned in Newark, however, he apparently couldn’t understand the economic plight of Bidenomics. The X community has added a note that gives Brooks’s complaint a little “context.” This
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September 22, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for the Washington Times. He is a veteran reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor for the New York Times and other publications. Cliff’s most recent column is “Martyrs — and newsmen — for freedom” (at FDD, where it is posted with links). Cliff has kindly given us his permission to post his column
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September 21, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Dave Portnoy is the founder of Barstool Sports, a popular sports blog. For some reason the Washington Post decided to do a hit piece on Portnoy and assigned one of its totally biased young hack “reporters,” Emily Heil, to do the piece. Portnoy got wind of the story in the works from one of his advertisers that Heil contacted, and decided to pre-empt the story by calling Heil on the
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September 19, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Michael Tomasky, nowadays the editor of The New Republic (a former magazine), attempts to explain why the awesome Joe Biden isn’t getting sufficient credit from the American people for all his awesome achievements, and his general all-around awesomeness. The main culprit is—right-wing domination of the news media! I. Am. Not. Making. This. Up. In fact, the right-wing media might finally be bigger [than mainstream media]. Mainstream media audiences and newsrooms
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September 18, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The Minneapolis police force has evanesced in size from around 900 officers at the time of George Floyd’s death in 2020 to 585 today. The Star Tribune arrives late to the story in “Minneapolis police staffing levels reach historic lows amid struggle for recruitment, retention.” Subhead: “With 585 sworn officers, the city holds one of the lowest ratios of officers to citizens among many major American cities.” The story includes
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September 14, 2023 — Scott Johnson
What is proof? In common parlance, “proof” is evidence. Evidence may be direct or circumstantial. The shiftless Adam Schiff to the contrary notwithstanding, there is no in between. Evidence consists of testimony or exhibits that tend to make the existence or nonexistence of a relevant fact more likely than not. I took up the law of evidence (focusing on hearsay) here in connection with the House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing
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September 13, 2023 — Scott Johnson
David Ignatius is the Washington Post’s twice weekly foreign affairs columnist. He is easily one of the most repulsive pundits in the world of the prestige press. I haven’t written about Ignatius for a long time, but see (for example) my 2014 post “The case of David Ignatius, cont’d.” Ignatius was of course one of the many prominent media voices promulgating the Russia hoax in the early days of the
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September 12, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer
As with every political party, there exists a broad spectrum in terms of extremity among Democrats, whose members range from the sane, such as Bill Maher and George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, to the rabid, such as Fox News’ token liberal Juan Williams and the New York Times’ Frank Bruni. Obviously, I am a creature of the Right, and perhaps I’ve become intolerant with age, but I can
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September 12, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Dan McLaughlin’s New York Post column on President Biden’s most recent public ruminations is headlined “Senile Joe Biden rambles about pony soldiers, Vietnam and lies about 9/11.” The Washington Times observes that KJP “cut Biden off Sunday as he spoke at a Hanoi press conference in Vietnam and shuffled off the stage, award-show style, as jazz music played in the background.” It is an episode that appears to come straight
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September 5, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Wall Street Journal editorial writer Barton Swaim contrasts the “fealty” of leading party members and media organs to President Trump, on the one hand, and President Biden, on the other. When it comes to Biden, Swaim observes: The deficiencies of Mr. Trump are different from those of Mr. Biden, but the latter’s personal culpabilities and political liabilities are what any normal, uninvested person would call grave. Mr. Biden’s cringe-making decline
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September 2, 2023 — Scott Johnson
James Taranto observed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal apropos of the Dem/media assault on Justice Thomas that “[o]ne reason Americans don’t trust the media is that politically biased reporters routinely adulterate the news with tendentious language and prepackaged opinions. The result is crude propaganda—lousy opinion writing and unreliable information rolled into one and deceptively packaged as straight news.” Take the case of the Washington Post and Post “national columnist” Philip
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August 28, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I think it is an open secret in Washington that President Biden is a few elements short of a compound. Indeed, word has somehow gotten out to the rest of us in flyover land: “Seventy-seven percent of Americans say President Biden would be too old to be effective if he were reelected in 2024, according to a new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs poll” (I’m quoting Brittany Bernstein/NRO)(footnote: “Meanwhile,
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August 27, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Matt Taibbi has posted “The COVID lie that started it all” for subscribers to his Racket News site. It is accompanied by a Matt Orfalea video documenting “the COVID lie.” Here is a passage from Taibbi’s post that struck a chord with me personally: As Orf shows above via his inimitable Newspeak-smashing style, the early apocalyptic predictions that so freaked out the population were eventually walked back by the same
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August 23, 2023 — Steven Hayward
The late Tom Bethell used to point out in his American Spectator columns how denizens of Washington DC—people we now regard as the shock troops of the administrative state—regarded elections as a nuisance, because the results could interfere with their plans to extend expert control over everyone and everything, especially if those icky Republicans won (though usually not for long). Well, the New York Times has sort of come around
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August 23, 2023 — John Hinderaker
The Washington Post can’t understand why Republicans won’t get with the global warming program: Nearly 150 million Americans were under heat alerts Tuesday, after July marked the planet’s hottest month on record. Devastating downpours dumped two months of rain on Vermont in two days. Smoke from Canadian wildfires choked East Coast skies, causing the worst air quality on record for some locations. And Hawaii is reeling from the deadliest U.S.
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August 21, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Tristan Leavitt is president of Empower America and an attorney representing the whistleblowers in the matter of Hunter Biden. He commented on the leaked emails and resulting stories in Politico and the New York Times over the weekend in a long Twitter thread which I have embedded below. The thread is unrolled and posted for easy reading in the Thread Reader app here. Leavitt explains in his first two tweets:
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August 19, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Glenn Reynolds takes up the news of Joe Biden’s alias Robert L. Peters email account in the New York Post column “Joe Biden’s email aliases reveal truth behind aw-shucks facade.” Glenn hypothesizes that the alias email account may reveal Biden to be a shrewd crook and his senility to be an act. Glenn asks whether Biden is putting us on with his public displays of oblivion. I can’t tell if
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