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Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 06, 2017 35 Comments
A misleading video clip of Donald Trump supposedly being passed over for a handshake by the First Lady of Poland is sweeping the internet. In fact, there was a handshake a couple of seconds later, but the clip is cut so tightly that it appears that this was a sign of disrespect. If it were just another misleading internet meme, it would be bad enough. But it is being pushed by the Washington Post on Twitter and on its website, as well as by other major media. Here is WaPo's tweet:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 16, 2017 45 Comments
Well that was quick. I can't recall as substantial an assassination attempt against one political party as took place Wednesday morning, June 14, 2017. Certainly there have been individual assassinations and shots fired, such as by Puerto Rican nationalists in 1954, but this was a well planned attempt at mass murder directed against one party. Our prayers are with all the victims, particularly Steve Scalise, who remains in critical condition. But for the chance that Capitol Police officers were assigned to protect Scalise because of his House leadership position, we might be burying dozens of people.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 15, 2017 79 Comments
The Washington Post ran a story late this afternoon claiming Donald Trump, in his meeting with Russian Foreign Minister and Ambassador, disclosed highly classified information, including information that could reveal sources and methods. Despite the length of the story, the allegations of substance are all in this single paragraph:

Posted by Mary Chastain on April 27, 2017 24 Comments
The Washington Post and ABC ran a poll that asked people about the information that comes from President Donald Trump and the media. Unfortunately for the media, the poll shows how little trust the public has in the media. From WaPo:
The media says President Trump makes claims that aren’t true. Trump says the media produces fake news. And in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, at least half of Americans say both Trump and the media “regularly” disseminate false information. Nobody looks good in this survey.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 31, 2017 21 Comments
The Washington Post ran a story last night continuing the media effort to brand everyone in the Trump administration to be incompetent at best, and creepy to boot. This time the target was Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. In the article, based entirely on supposed anonymous sources, WaPo asserted that Tillerson is so weird he doesn't even let career diplomats make eye contact with him, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson spends his first weeks isolated from an anxious bureaucracy (emphasis added):

Posted by Mary Chastain on March 02, 2017 24 Comments
The witch hunt against President Donald Trump and his administration continues in the mainstream media. Last night, The Washington Post reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke to the Russian ambassador twice during the campaign, which he did not mention during his confirmation hearing. Thing is, the article disproves the newspaper's thesis. Sen. Patrick Leahy (VT) asked Sessions if he had been in contact with any Russian government officials about the 2016 election. Sessions said no.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 31, 2016 15 Comments
For crying out loud. More fake news by the media. First outlets claim that Russia hacked the election and now they say that Russian hackers penetrated a Vermont power grid. Look at this Washington Post headline:
Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security, officials say.
NO. That is NOT what happened. The fact that the Post did not even bother contacting Burlington Electric makes this even worse.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on December 18, 2016 27 Comments
While the Washington Post didn't seem very concerned about the eight years of disinformation oozing from the Obama White House and its online surrogates, they are so obsessed with President-elect Trump that they've created a Google Chrome browser extension to fact check Trump's tweets. WaPo writes:
We made a tool that slips a bit more context into Trump's tweets. It's still in the early stages, but our goal is to provide additional context where needed for Trump's tweets moving forward (and a few golden oldies).

Posted by David Gerstman on September 12, 2016 4 Comments
In two editorials last week, The Washington Post inadvertently made the case for Donald Trump to be president. To be sure the Post still believes that Trump is a "unique" threat to our republic, but the two editorials highlighted the dangers of President Hillary Clinton. On Tuesday, an editorial opposing the impeachment of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen asserted that the behavior at the center of the controversy, "was more about bureaucratic obliviousness than purposeful anti-conservative activity." Later the editorial asserted that the whole incident was a "non-scandal," which mostly took place under Koskinen's predecessor Lois Lerner. Absent from the editorial was any acknowledgement that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled last month that the targeting of conservative group is ongoing and that the IRS could not be trusted to stop the practice on its own.

Posted by David Gerstman on February 10, 2016 2 Comments
While President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have assured us that the nuclear deal with Iran has delayed war, Tony Badran in a devastating critique of the administration's foreign policy last week wrote, "Middle Easterners are not so lucky: They get to fight their wars with Iran right now." Back in 2014, Badran noted, President Obama said of the turmoil in the Middle East, "A lot of it has to do with changes that are taking place in the Middle East in which an old order that had been in place for 50 years, 60 years, 100 years was unsustainable, and was going to break up at some point. And now, what we are seeing is the old order not working, but the new order not being born yet -- and it is a rocky road through that process, and a dangerous time through that process." But a few months earlier, Obama, in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, made very clear that his intent was to make Iran an agent of changing the orders. When Goldberg asked him why the Sunni states seem to fear him so much Obama answered, "I think that there are shifts that are taking place in the region that have caught a lot of them off guard. I think change is always scary. I think there was a comfort with a United States that was comfortable with an existing order and the existing alignments, and was an implacable foe of Iran, even if most of that was rhetorical and didn't actually translate into stopping the nuclear program. But the rhetoric was good. What I've been saying to our partners in the region is, 'We've got to respond and adapt to change.'"

Posted by David Gerstman on January 07, 2016 23 Comments
At a time when tensions in the Middle East are rising, it is perhaps a time to once again review President Barack Obama's qualifications for office. To be sure his qualifications were fabricated, or at least oversold. This wasn't just the doing of the Obama campaign. Campaigns are supposed to do present their candidates in the best possible light. The problem  was that America's supposedly independent media boosted the first terms senator's prospects with little or no skepticism. This was certainly the case in reporting where most reporters bought into the historical aspect of Obama's candidacy as well was the rebuke to Republicans for the failings of the Bush presidency. (If not the failings, then the aspects that the liberal media disagreed with.) For the purpose of this exercise let's look at parts of The Washington Post's 2008 endorsement of Obama. I am using the Post as an example of what we saw so frequetly because even though the Post is a liberal paper, its editorial position regarding foreign policy is generally responsible. However in the Post's enthusiasm for Obama, all caution was disregarded and they promoted a man who did not really exist.

Posted by Mike LaChance on January 05, 2015 35 Comments
For the last several weeks, we've been living in a sort of Twilight Zone episode where many people on the left including Obama and the media haven't realized how big the midterms were for Republicans. Until now. Reid Wilson of the Washington Post has just begun to notice:
Republicans in state governments plan juggernaut of conservative legislation Legislators in the 24 states where Republicans now hold total control plan to push a series of aggressive policy initiatives in the coming year aimed at limiting the power of the federal government and rekindling the culture wars. The unprecedented breadth of the Republican majority — the party now controls 31 governorships and 68 of 98 partisan legislative chambers — all but guarantees a new tide of conservative laws. Republicans plan to launch a fresh assault on the Common Core education standards, press abortion regulations, cut personal and corporate income taxes and take up dozens of measures challenging the power of labor unions and the Environmental Protection Agency. Before Election Day, the GOP controlled 59 partisan legislative chambers across the country. The increase to 68 gives Republicans six more chambers than their previous record in the modern era, set after special elections in 2011 and 2012. Republicans also reduced the number of states where Democrats control both the governor’s office and the legislatures from 13 to seven.
Was the election yesterday? Is this new information about how many Republicans won?

Posted by Mike LaChance on October 26, 2014 80 Comments
Non-citizens, who should not be voting, wield significant influence in American elections according to a new report from the Washington Post. Can you guess which party they typically vote for? Jesse Richman and David Earnest reported, here are some highlights:
Could non-citizens decide the November election? In a forthcoming article in the journal Electoral Studies, we bring real data from big social science survey datasets to bear on the question of whether, to what extent, and for whom non-citizens vote in U.S. elections. Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races... Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.
That's kind of a big deal, isn't it? Oh, and then there's this:

Posted by Mike LaChance on August 30, 2014 23 Comments
A new editorial from the Washington Post takes an unusually sober look at President Obama's foreign policy chops and his non-reaction to the world that's burning around him:
President Obama needs to focus on how the United States can meet global challenges PRESIDENT OBAMA’S acknowledgment that “we don’t have a strategy yet” in Syria understandably attracted the most attention after his perplexing meeting with reporters Thursday. But his restatement of the obvious was not the most dismaying aspect of his remarks. The president’s goal, to the extent he had one, seemed to be to tamp down all the assessments of gathering dangers that his own team had been issuing over the previous days. This argument with his own administration is alarming on three levels. The first has to do with simple competence. One can only imagine the whiplash that foreign leaders must be suffering. They heard U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power denounce Russia as “today . . . they open a new front . . . Russia’s force along the border is the largest it has been . . . the mask is coming off.” An hour later, Mr. Obama implicitly contradicted her: “I consider the actions that we’ve seen in the last week a continuation of what’s been taking place for months now . . . it’s not really a shift.”
If you read on from there, you'll notice that the editors use the word "disturbing" twice to describe Obama's response to the situation in Ukraine and the rise of ISIS. This is quite a departure from the Post's endorsement of Obama in 2012.

Posted by David Gerstman on July 11, 2014 10 Comments
Last month the Editorial Board of The Washington Post endorsed the Obama administration's support of the unity deal between Hamas and Fatah. After reading, Restore trust to douse the fire in Gaza, the Post's take on Operation Protective Edge, it's clear that the editors are still stuck in an intellectual rut. One paragraph in the editorial stuck out as hopelessly uninformed and illogical (emphasis added):
Those goals hardly seem worth the bloodshed — nearly 50 people reportedly had been killed in Gaza by late Wednesday, including civilians — or the economic losses to both Palestinians and Israelis. In fact, neither side wanted war. Hamas had just agreed to back a united Palestinian government with the West Bank-based Fatah movement, while Israel quietly offered a truce before the escalation of hostilities on Sunday. As so often happens in the Middle East, acts by extremists forced these events: the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers allegedly by Hamas militants apparently acting on their own; the revenge murder of a Palestinian by Israeli thugs; the initial firing of rockets from Gaza by small militant groups challenging Hamas’s authority.
First of all how is Hamas's participation in the unity government a sign that "it didn't want war?" In a similar vein former Washington Post blogger, Max Fisher, now at Vox.com, wrote earlier this month:

Posted by New Neo on May 10, 2014 10 Comments
Fact-checker Glenn Kessler at the WaPo says that Obama's gone and lied again:
In addressing a dinner of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Los Angeles, President Obama made a rather striking claim — that Senate Republicans have filibustered “500 pieces of legislation that would help the middle class.”... ...[W]hen you go through the numbers, there have just been 133 successful filibusters — meaning a final vote could not take place — since 2007. But, even if you accept the way Senate Democrats like to frame the issue, the president is still wrong. He referred to “legislation” — and most of these cloture motions concerned judicial and executive branch nominations. In the 113th Congress, for instance, 83 of the 136 cloture motions so far have concerned nominations, not legislation. Even then, while Obama referred to “500 pieces of legislation,” the same bill can be subject to as many as three cloture motions, further inflating the numbers...So far in the 113th Congress, 36 pieces of legislation were subject to a cloture motion — and 12 were actually filibustered... Obama’s count also includes at least a half-dozen instances when Republicans were blocked by Democrats through use of the filibuster.
But that's not all, although it would be enough to earn as many Pinocchios as the WaPo allows. In what Kessler refers to as "the biggest oddity":
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