Ben Maller skewered Filipino boxing champion Manny Pacquiao as a "homophobic boxing superstar" and a "bigoted boxer" in a Wednesday post on ThePostgame.com, an online magazine of Yahoo! Sports. Pacquiao had criticized the redefinition of marriage in a Friday interview: "It [marriage] should not be of the same sex so as to adulterate the altar of matrimony, like in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah of old."
Maller, who is also a talk radio host for Fox Sports Radio, also trumpeted that the boxer, "long a darling of Madison Avenue, figures to lose a number of endorsements and fans over his intolerant, bullheaded position."
On September 11, 2001, thousands of Americans died in an attack that was planned and trained for in Taliban controlled Afghanistan. The same Taliban that sheltered Al Qaeda governed Afghanistan as a 7th Century theocracy where women were hidden under burqas and homosexuals were executed by having stone walls toppled on them. They were removed and kept from power at the cost of thousands of U.S. and NATO lives. Americans are still dying there while the Taliban burn down schools for girls and splash acid in the faces of women who don’t cover them.
But boy, can those guys compose a couplet! In June, an anthology of poems written by Taliban soldiers will be published and available for sale in America.
As previously noted here at NewsBusters, while the predominantly liberal hosts of The View did generally coddle and flatter President Obama during his appearance on their show yesterday, they do deserve some credit for questioning at least one ridiculous thing he said when he claimed that he might lose the election due to his untraditional name.
In his appearance, Obama suggested that prejudice among some voters will make it more difficult for him to be re-elected. When asked how close he expected the November presidential election to be, Obama said: "When your name is Barack Obama, it's always tight." After one of the hosts noted that Obama's full name was "Barack Hussein Obama," the president repeated his full name twice, stressing his middle name and implying that it caused voters to vote against him.
Brian Stelter's media reporting for the New York Times slants to the left, but even he seemed to acknowledge that the mainstream press is strongly supportive of gay marriage in a May 10 blog post:
For years, conservative media critics have asserted that many mainstream journalists favor gay marriage and tilt their coverage of the topic accordingly. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Thursday, Mark Halperin of Time magazine seemed to agree. “The media is as divided on this issue as the Obama family -- which is to say not at all,” he said. “And so he’s never going to get negative coverage for this.”
The voters have spoken! NewsBusters' parent company The Media Research Center asked its Facebook fans ("like" their page here), grassroots members and staff to vote on the name for the MRC's mascot—the truth-loving bulldog trained to sniff out liberal media bias.
More than 2,000 of you cast a vote and the clear winner was Gipper with over 50 percent of the vote.
Charlie Rose desperately tried to find confirmation from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Wednesday's CBS This Morning on whether President Obama is a good commander-in-chief: "You can answer this question as well as anyone I know....do you give President Obama high marks in the national security arena?" Gates exposed Rose's pro-Obama tactic when he laughingly replied, "If I don't, I'm sort of giving myself a flunking grade."
The veteran national security official did his best to nuance his eventual answer, but still ended up giving his former boss the grade that the anchor was looking for: "He [Obama] was as aggressive, if not more so, in going after terrorists and al Qaeda. I think that the relationship with China has been managed pretty well. So, yeah, I think they've done a pretty good job."
60 Minutes journalist Lesley Stahl is apparently concerned about how such "out of the mainstream" Republicans ran in the 2012 presidential primaries, given what a "centrist" country America is.
Stahl moderated a New York Historical Society discussion on the state of the race. Time journalist Joe Klein appeared at the May 3 event to smear conservative groups as racist. After noting that he attended a Tea Party rally in Arkansas, Klein mocked the organization's fears at this: "And there are Mexican Americans all over the place and their grandchildren are marrying out of their race or becoming gay. The President of the United States doesn't have the good sense to be either black or white and his middle name is Hussein."
The CBS News-New York Times poll is often one of the most favorable surveys for Democrats, so it was amusing to see Obama spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter complaining to Chuck Todd on MSNBC’s Daily Rundown on Tuesday.
Todd wasn’t focusing on the vanishing gender gap or Romney’s lead, but on the vast majority that agreed that the president’s proclamation in favor of gay “marriage” was made for political reasons, not because it was the right thing to do -- 67 percent said it was political, 24 percent right thing. Todd said you can't complain your way out of that canyon. Cutter sputtered on the point: (Video via MRC’s Joe Schoffstall and transcript below)
Jeff Schweitzer wants to help us “rediscover our inherent good, and act accordingly, individually and collectively,” according to a summary of his book, “A New Moral Code.” Unfortunately, that’s going to be difficult in this “new age of McCarthyism” in which the “Fox hydra” is “tearing apart the fabric of our society with vitriol and venom, lies and half-truths.”
Yes, a news network that doesn’t report as he thinks it should is ruining our nation, and presumably interfering with important consideration of our “own biological destiny” that another of Schweitzer’s encourages.
Our friend John Nolte at Big Journalism points out that Politico is back to its old tricks, defending Barack Obama from criticism by digging up dirt on a private citizen who supports his Republican opponent. In 2008, it was Joe the Plumber who was vetted by the Politico. This time around, it's an Iowa man who appears in a Romney Web ad.
"Right now Politico is doing oppo-research on private citizens to aid Obama. Seems to me that makes journalist's private lives fair game, no?" Nolte asked this morning in a tweet, noting in another tweet that "Politico's Maggie Haberman is a public figure in a position of power. Why is her private life any less newsworthy than a private citizen?"
In a particularly sleazy allegation, David Letterman on Tuesday night alleged former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney “went soft” on finding Osama bin Laden “because they were worried about upsetting their Saudi Arabian royalty buddies.” Talk about a lack of civility and respect for elected officials.
Letterman’s impugning of the former administration came during a sit-down with NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, just after Letterman charged “we invaded Iraq because Cheney wanted to help out his buddies at Brown and Root and Halliburton.”
Edward Klein’s unauthorized biography of Barack Obama, "The Amateur," was released yesterday.
While I appreciate that Klein devoted a chapter of his book, albeit only three pages, to Obama’s opposition as state senator to the Illinois Born Alive Infant Protection Act, he got it pretty much all wrong. You can read the chapter at the link above, but here is the relevant section:
It probably wasn't his decision (one hopes not) but the latest update to the White House website is really quite embarrassing: It appears that people have gone into the site's biographies of the past 9 presidents and inserted electioneering material touting President Obama into them. As chronicled by IBD's Andrew Malcom:
Is absolutely nothing sacred to liberal media members anymore?
On NBC's Tonight Show Tuesday, comedienne Wanda Sykes said Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is such a pandering politician that if he were speaking to the National Organization for Women, he would say, "I like women. You know, my wife has a vagina. I like that" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
New York Times columnist (and former White House correspondent for the paper) Frank Bruni gets nasty and personal again in his Tuesday column "The Right's Righteous Fraud," picking on 21-year-old Bristol Palin, daughter of Sarah, for blogging about gay marriage, even throwing out a date rape reference. Judging by the time stamps at Bristol's blog, Bruni has stirred up another round of hateful lefty comments to Palin's original May 10 blog post, some of them simply regurgitating Bruni's bile.
In March, Bruni devoted a column to a former classmate providing a pat liberal morality lesson that seemed a lot like an invasion of doctor-patient privacy, then attacked Newt Gingrich and insulted Gingrich's wife. Today Bruni, who is openly gay, goes after Palin's oldest daughter for hypocrisy and being a bad mother, after Bristol had the audacity to blog her opinion on gay marriage (she's against it):
Appearing as a guest on Tuesday's Conan show on TBS, HBO comedian Bill Maher absurdly suggested that recent allegations that Mitt Romney engaged in "bullying" in high school are worse than being molested by Michael Jackson, and asserted that he would be willing trade being beat up in grade school for being "gently masturbated by a pop star."
Maher also again attacked Mormonism and religion generally, using uncensored vulgarity, and seemed to hold Romney responsible for the polygamy of his grandfather.
The Real Time host brought up Michael Jackson to suggest that Romney had behaved worse than a child molester:
As NewsBusters reported, MSNBC's Chris Matthews totally struck out on Jeopardy! Monday night after repeatedly mocking former Alaska governor Sarah Palin for how she would do if she ever went on the show.
For your entertainment pleasure, the following is a video of conservative talk radio host Glenn Beck and his sidekicks excoriating the Hardball host for his delicious bout with instant karma:
On Tuesday morning at 8:30 a.m. ET, the Commerce Department reported that seasonally adjusted U.S. retail sales in April rose by 0.1%. In an 11:12 a.m. report via the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, carried at the Detroit News ("U.S. consumers hold back retail sales, even as gas prices fall"), Martin Crutsinger was appropriately not impressed: "Lower gas prices in April weren't enough to embolden U.S. consumers to spend much more elsewhere. The Commerce Department said retail sales rose only 0.1 percent last month."
Look how things changed in a late afternoon AP report currently carried at its national site co-authored by Crutsinger and Christopher Rugaber, reworked in time to go into most newspapers' print editions Wednesday morning:
When it comes to opposition research, there is often only one difference between a candidate’s vicious negative ad and an “investigative” news report: the undeserved patina of media “objectivity” and respectability.
Take the Washington Post’s Jason Horowitz 5,400-word “expose” on how Mitt Romney may have pinned a boy down and cut his hair, in 1965. 1965. That’s almost a half-century ago. Even if every detail were accurate – and they weren’t – a journalist could pull a muscle in the hyper-aggressive attempt to make it somehow relevant to the present moment, or even the recent past.
On Monday afternoon, CNN anchor Ashleigh Banfield asked Newsweek director of editorial operations Mark Miller about Newsweek’s “First Gay President” cover. He denied it when Banfield asked if they were trying to “notch it up a bit” after Time’s provocative breast-feeding cover came out.
She also asked if dumb Newsweek readers would actually believe Obama was revealed as homosexual. It turns out the cover was meant to capture the kind of tears-of-joy emotional intensity that writer Andrew Sullivan was feeling as an affirmed gay man. How any of this psychotherapy in print relates to the magazine formerly matching the name “Newsweek” is anyone’s guess:
