Moe Lane

The New York Times (H/T: Hot Air Headlines) is in full waltzing-bear mode about the need to have Robert Menendez stop being Senate Foreign Relations chairman:

Senator Robert Menendez was never a distinguished choice for chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the position he ascended to this month by virtue of seniority. Concerns about that quality gap have sharply escalated amid new disclosures about Mr. Menendez’s use of his position to advance the financial interests of a friend and big donor. Instead of trying to protect Mr. Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, needs to remove his gavel, at least pending credible resolution by the Senate Ethics Committee of the swirling accusations of misconduct.

Which is to say that for what it is, it’s actually not too bad. A couple of points, though: (more…)

Well, you know what they say: it’s a recession when a Righty loses his job, a depression when a Lefty loses his – and a Delayed Mayan Apocalypse when it happens to a member of the Media.

(pause)

Well.  No, they actually don’t say that.  But they’re probably thinking that, which is really the important thing.

Moe Lane

PS: If they would like their readership back (which is how they would get their revenues back), the New York Times might try considering a strategy that does not assume that half of the country consists of Yahoos with the franchise.

Background: President Obama apparently has time for daily talk shows.  Fellow heads of state?  Not so much.  And the fool that gave this quote to the New ork Times apparently thought that he was explaining things:

Mr. Obama was scheduled to attend a reception for world leaders at the United Nations on Monday night. But a campaign adviser acknowledged privately that in this election year, campaigning trumped meetings with world leaders. “Look, if he met with one leader, he would have to meet with 10,” the aide said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Then the President should meet with 10.  Or 20.  Or however many are there, and not called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Because that is his job.  I pay Barack Obama to meet with world leaders.  I do not pay Barack Obama to go on The View.

Sheesh, but these people have no gravitas.

Moe Lane

There.  I fixed the title of this New Yorker piece for them; for some bizarre reason the people over there thought that the real news to be gleaned from the NYT’s unfortunate fiscal situation is that “[a]t the company’s big three papers — the Times, International Herald Tribune, and Boston Globe — print and digital ad dollars dipped 6.6 percent to $220 million, while circulation revenue was up 8.3 percent to $233 million.”  Heck, the New York Times itself was more objective about the situation that they’re in*.

Not to be unkind, but it’s not good news when a company’s traditional revenue source has fallen through the floor sufficiently that the second best revenue generator catches up with it.  And there’s a limit to… oh, what’s the use? The NYT wants to be the propaganda arm for the Democratic party intelligentsia, despite the fact that such a goal is clearly not profitable on its own.  It’s not going to change any time soon; indeed, as long as its current ownership is willing to eat the costs, it’s not going to change at all.

Moe Lane

*The NYT Co. used to make a profit, you know.  At least in the short term.

It must be physically painful sometimes to be a NYT columnist: you have to apparently hold in so many things.  Case in point: Chris Wallace asked Jeff Zeleny whether President Obama’s re-election campaign “stumbled out of the gate” (spoiler warning: YES, they did).  Here is Zeleny’s response:

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It’s all because of racism, of course:

But the main quarrels Democratic voters [in Jefferson County, Ohio] have with Mr. Obama have nothing to do with race. They include his rejection of one proposed route for the Keystone pipeline, a stance they say will harm this area, whose backbone, the Ohio River, is lined with metal mills and coal mines.

Oh, I’m sorry, but that was paragraph fifteen.  Presumably the NYT decided that its readers weren’t going to read past paragraphs three and four: (more…)

The New York Times, discussing the alleged politicization of the IRS in an election year:

Jay Sekulow, a conservative lawyer known more for his stands on religious freedom than for his tax work, said he is representing 16 Tea Party groups that are claiming harassment by the I.R.S., and the number is growing. He said he intended to demand an explanation from the Treasury Department on Wednesday for what he called “McCarthyism” tactics and that he would contact Republican lawmakers this week.

“This is obviously a coordinated effort by the I.R.S. to stifle these Tea Party and Tea Party-affiliated groups, and to stifle free speech activities,” Mr. Sekulow said. “It’s as onerous as what they did to the N.A.A.C.P. in the 1950s, and I plan to make that point.”

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However, it failed.  Nobody in a (hypothetical) Perry administration will still ever return your calls, for (justified) fear of their jobs.  The (hypothetical) Perry White House will visibly despise Washingtonian cocktail circuit insiders from the first day to the last; and you’re on their (hypothetical) PNG lists.  Right at the top.  How bad is it?  Let me put it this way: I will have a better shot than you at getting information out of the (hypothetical) Perry White House, and I’m a stay-at-home dad who just sort of… fell… into this political blogging stuff, and wonders sometimes just how that happened.

Have a nice day.

Moe Lane

It is adamant that you can see a golf course from the Representative’s San Diego office!  Adamant!  The Time has a third-party ad and everything!  So there!  But what about the allegations that Rep. Issa used his influence and position to make significant profits on both a mutual fund purchase and a real estate sale?  Which is to say, two of three allegations* that the New York Times used as the framework for its hit piece on Representative Issa?

Yeah.  About that. (more…)

If you saw this “If I were President” article in the NYT that purported to offer up helpful suggestions from non-pundits and political/media types on how to fix the country, you probably rolled your eyes.  Certainly FrankJ and Jon Henke did on Twitter (H/T), and for good reason: as ideas go, said ideas were… ah, largely lacking.  And kind of provincial.  Gimmicky, even.  Certainly mostly a narrow focus.

But that’s not the point of this post.  No, the point of this post is to introduce you to who the New York Times consider to be “a range of Americans who don’t labor in politics or the media” – largely because if people just let the New York Times get away with claiming nonsense with a straight face then they’ll never stop doing that.

So: let us look at these twelve supposedly representative Americans (one of which, by the way, is probably actually a Brit):

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Let me just executive summary this ThinkProgress/New York Times trainwreck, because Powerline has a very good detailed takedown of it already:

• ThinkProgress wrote some sloppy, badly researched hit pieces on House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa (R);
• Eric Litchblau of the New York Times apparently turned them – without attribution – into a extremely sloppy, badly researched hit article on House Oversight Chair Darrell Issa (R);
• and Issa’s office spent a leisurely afternoon blowing large holes in the Times’ story.

Among other things, apparently Litchblau misstated prices of buildings purchased, got business relationships wrong, woefully overestimated profits, and generally demonstrated why math is hard.  At least, it’s hard for New York Times reporters – and the left-wing shills that they apparently rip off.

By the way, the ThinkProgress author himself thinks that the NYT article plagiarized him, although I agree with John over at Powerline: this is one time that you don’t want to be associated with a major newspaper. (more…)

I’m going to summarize this NYT article, only with some subtext added:

We’re on the verge of a second recession.  The problem is that the first recession – which got triggered after the Democrats lied and smeared their way into control of Congress in 2006, and then proceeded to show a talent for sober fiscal governance comparable to those of crack-smoking meerkats – was thoroughly mucked up by said addicted meerkats, not least because they had the bad luck after 2008 to have as their figurehead a Democratic community organizer who can’t even do demagoguery properly (it’s surprisingly hard to ritually summon a Mob via Teleprompter).  Couple that with a charmingly naive Cargo Cultist mentality when it comes to Keynesian economic theory, add the amusing detail that the government has run out of solutions to spectacularly mess up, and you end up with an official government economic policy that can be summed up as follows:

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