Tag: new york times

#rsrh Hi, David Brooks. Nice article.

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

NYT WILL NOT BUDGE on Issa’s golf course visibility!

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. Continue reading NYT WILL NOT BUDGE on Issa’s golf course visibility!

The New York Times’ Everyday Americans?

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):

Name Affiliation Noteworthy because?
Michael J Sandel Liberal Harvard Professor/HuffPo
Sharon Olds Liberal “Poet Rebuffs Laura Bush”
Andrew Weil Liberal Alt-med, likes Obamacare
Danny Meyer Liberal Obama supporter/restauranteur
James Q Wilson Conservative Professor/Academic
Jennifer Egan Liberal Author / Thinks Bush ‘criminal’
Str. Mary Walgenbach Liberal Antiwar loon
Geoffrey Canada Liberal All-right school activist
Patricia Ryan Madson Can’t tell Improv advocate
Stephen Hannock Kinda Fascist* Artist
James Dyson Liberal** Big-government industrialist
Neil deGrasse Tyson Liberal PETA-friendly astrophysicist
*Seriously, read his entry.
**By our standards (Brit).

Continue reading The New York Times’ Everyday Americans?

NYT – trusted?/ripped off?/betrayed by? – ThinkProgress over Darrell Issa?

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. Continue reading NYT – trusted?/ripped off?/betrayed by? – ThinkProgress over Darrell Issa?

#rsrh NYT: Second recession may mean proOHMYGODPANICPANICPANIC

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:

Continue reading #rsrh NYT: Second recession may mean proOHMYGODPANICPANICPANIC

The New York Times kills itself some dissidents.

Unintentionally.  I hope.

(Via Hot Air) All in the name of the scoop, of course. The title is bad enough (“U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors“), but the fools who wrote the article* gave names and procedures. They also explicitly used still-classified material to break this story:

The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.

Which is illegal. It was illegal when it happened to Bush, it’s illegal now, and it will be illegal in the next Republican administration. It’d also be a stupid idea even if it was legal. Why? Well, let me tell you a story from World War I. Supposedly, once the war started British troops in at least one section of the front had made a happy discovery: the Germans artillery apparently thought that the enemy was a bit farther back than they actually were, and were thus essentially overshooting the actual front lines. Great news… at least, that’s what the British media thought, so they wrote stories about the lucky break in the papers. And then the Germans read the newspapers – because that’s one thing that foreign agents do; they pass along relevant information from the newspapers – and proceeded to adjust their firing solutions so that they were actually hitting their targets. Continue reading The New York Times kills itself some dissidents.

#rsrh NYT’s cynical Union-busting post.

And it is cynical, in a fundamental way: the New York Times recognizes the need for getting public sector unions under control… in New York (where it will affect the New York Times).  Wisconsin can apparently take a short walk off a long pier, for all that the Old Grey Lady cares.  This is, by the way, a major reason why institutions of the Left are mistrusted by agents of the Right: the former goes out of the way to slander, libel, and dismiss the motivations and actions of the latter even when they agree with them.

And… that’s it, frankly.  Personally, I don’t see why New York gets to have its governor smack back an out-of-control public sector union crisis while Wisconsin can’t, but then I’m not precisely the audience demographic that the New York Times is trying to reach.  Which is a mistake on its part, but never mind that right now.

Moe Lane

(H/T: Instapundit)

So. It’s war, then?

Politico volleys; the New York Times counter-volleys; and then there was this guy with a trident…

What? Trust me, the actual dispute is inside-baseball even by my standards, and I read this stuff for fun. You don’t really need to know, or even really care. The point is that the NYT and Politico have found themselves in a position where they may actually decide to break out the family atomics…

NYT throws public sector unions under the bus.

It would seem that the New York Times has decided that this is indeed a time of shared sacrifice; and the New York Times has further decided to volunteer public sector union employees in Wisconsin to be the ones… ‘sharing.’  This article is fairly astounding: not because it is inaccurate in making a sharp distinction between public and private sector union employees, mostly to the former’s disadvantage.  And it’s not because the article makes it clear that suffering private sector union workers will not actually benefit from their public sector counterparts being able to keep their inflated privileges and perks.  Everybody sensible knew that already.

No, the article is astounding because it’s on today’s front page of the NYT, apparently.  This is pretty much an indication that public sector unions are now free to be thrown under the bus by the rest of the Democratic party. This is, of course, a regrettable necessity: but the needs of the larger party are at stake, and public sector unions are currently unpopular*.  In fact – and this is kind of shocking – public sector unions are even kind of unpopular among a certain type of liberal/progressive; the ones who actually takes all that nonsense about class warfare and struggle seriously.  Turns out some of those people were quietly unhappy that government employees got to get lumped in with real unions, and are now taking the time to actually articulate their objections on… on… on principle.

Who knew? Continue reading NYT throws public sector unions under the bus.

NYT: Tucson bias was in our very genes.

Ah, the New York Times.  Not only did their recent attempt to declare the Tucson shootings an episode of political violence spawned by right-wing rhetoric fail; it actually encouraged a minor episode of political violence spawned by left-wing rhetoric*.  This has made the paper look even worse than usual, so they need a good excuse to explain away the problem.  Said excuse?  It’s all the fault of the media’s genetic condition.

Seriously.

Jerry Ceppos, dean of the journalism school at the University of Nevada, Reno, said journalists’ impulse to quickly impose a frame on a story is “genetic.”

“Journalists developed automatic framing protocols generations ago because of the need to report quickly,” he said. “Today’s hyper-deadlines, requiring journalists to report all day long and all night long, made that genetic disposition even more dominant.”

Two things from this: Continue reading NYT: Tucson bias was in our very genes.