By early afternoon, however, the editors apparently changed their minds about the news and reversed their presentation. The big bold headline over the same article in the online edition declared: Democrats make slight gains in poll and the Republican gains were relegated to th sub-head: Republicans still hold strong edge. And the text of the online article drops the sub-head altogether.

All in all, it seems the Democrats indeed did make gains on Tuesday … at least on the front page of the Washington Post.

Exhibit A:

And Exhibit B:

Here’s how a recent article begins about a “curious disparity” that, until now, you probably haven’t worried about very much. Is this an example of what the Times regards as news that’s fit to print, or is it an Onion parody?

Baseball’s Praised Diversity Is Stranded at First Base

About 40 percent of the players in Major League Baseball are black, Hispanic or Asian, and the sport is seen as a leading example of diversity, yet a curious disparity has emerged in a corner of the game.

Among baseball’s 30 teams, only 23 percent of the third-base coaches are members of minorities, compared with 67 percent of its first-base coaches. The disparity has existed for decades but it is now about twice as large as it was in 1990, based on an analysis by….

You guessed The Onion, right? I mean, who else would write in apparent seriousness (as the article in question does a few paragraphs later) that “diversity among the third-base coaching ranks has been in decline for the past five years, from a peak of 12 in 2005 to 7 this season, and the racial disparity between first- and third-base coaches has increased,” an underrepresentation deemed so dire that it was accompanied by a sidebar with a graph showing “A Gap in the Coaching Boxes” of 43 percentage points and noting that “[t]he  disparity between the percentage of minority first-base coaches and minority third-base coaches in Major League Baseball is greater than ever.”

Who else would write that “the bench coach position… is fairly diverse”? Since a position can’t be diverse, this must be parody. In fact, who but The Onion could publish a long article about the lack of diversity among third base coaches without once giving any reason why diversity among third base coaches is important. Are their distinctive black and Hispanic ways of giving, say, run or hold signs?

Well, if you guessed The Onion, you’re wrong. This lamentation of the large and growing third base coaching gap is from the New York Times.

Now you can rightly complain that I cheated a little. If I’d quote a bit more of this long article it would have been easier for you to spot the distinctive Times faux-reasonable, unnamed source, unnamed expert-quoting style.

Current and former minority coaches and managers said they had noticed the disparity for years, but none attributed it to racism. Instead, some of the former coaches, along with diversity experts, questioned whether race may be playing a more subtle role, with minorities routinely funneled into a job at first base that is less demanding than the one at third.

“It’s very easy for them to put the minority at first base, to say we have a minority and we hire minorities,” said Al Bumbry, a black former player who was a first-base coach for the Boston Red Sox and the Cleveland Indians.

The Times, of course, would never slant an article to argue or imply that owners or managers of anything are racist. No, the Times is much more restrained and reasonable, pointing out that none of its sources attributed this large and growing “disparity” to racism while favorably quoting a named source who blamed “them” for routinely funneling minorities into a less demanding position that “gets less respect” and then patting themselves on the back for hiring minorities.

And then there’s the always reliable “some,” as in:

Some in baseball said managers, consciously or not, often select third-base coaches with whom they have a similar background because they believe they can work effectively with them, particularly at crucial moments.

The Times would never accuse any organization of racism, but “some” do.

The Times also famously likes academic experts, quoting one of them,“Roberto González Echevarría, a professor at Yale who has written about baseball,” who claims:

When minorities were first given coaching jobs in the 1960s, they often ended up as first-base coaches. They didn’t want to put them at third base to give the signs…

Diversity experts said although 42 percent of base coaches were minorities, the proportion of minorities to whites should be constant at each level of an organization and reflect the overall makeup of its workforce.…

This must be The Onion after all, since the Times, of course, doesn’t believe in quotas, and its editors would never allow its reporters to endorse the opinions of unnamed “diversity experts” who demand proportional representation, even in baseball.

You can’t make this stuff up.  But the New York Times certainly can.

Her bias appears right away:

CHARLOTTE COURT HOUSE, VA. — The crowds that have been showing up for Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello’s town halls have been smaller and more polite than the angry throngs he saw during last August’s raucous congressional recess.

Catcalls about socialism and death panels have given way to substantive and pointed questions — about the intricacies of the new health-care law and financial regulations, finding alternative energy sources, and that most perennial of Virginia problems, traffic.

Gale-force outrage — both the real kind and the kind manufactured for television — has faded this August. There is still the occasional outburst: On Saturday, the Lynchburg Tea Party Patriots hastily called a rally outside a Perriello town hall in Fork Union to demand that he vote against $26 billion in aid to state and local governments when the House reconvenes briefly this week.

But when the shouting dies down, it becomes possible to hear something else, something Democrats know is an even greater threat to them this fall.

With polls consistently showing that dissatisfaction with Washington is at or near record levels, another word for what voters are feeling right now might be “frustration,” or “despair,” or “disgust.”

Tumulty — who was recently identified as a member of the infamous JournoList — argues, in short, that crazed, irrational anger has given way to polite expressions of frustration, an argument that marries bias to bad reporting. Democrats and mainstream media editorial writers (is there a difference?) are of course free to regard the angry opposition to Obamacare and massive deficits that was expressed in town halls across the district and nation last August as akin to the baying of mad dogs frothing at the mouth, but such anathema to tea partiers should at least be restrained in news articles.

I attended a couple of those town halls in the 5th District last summer. Many of those who attended were certainly angry, but to dismiss them as “angry throngs” capable only of “catcalls” is to ignore their very well informed questions of a Congressman who had clearly made a choice to be an ambassador from Nancy Pelosi to the 5th District rather than vice versa.

Tumulty, a former writer for Time Magazine, does allow that not all of the “gale-force outrage” of last August was paranoid bile; some of it, she asserts, was simply political play-acting, “the kind manufactured for television.” Where, however, is her evidence that any of the anger expressed last summer was “manufactured”?

Tumulty believes the “outrage” has faded, but that’s because she’s only looking where the light’s good — in Perriello’s town hall meetings this summer, not where she might actually find it. Why should the “angry throngs” continue to attend his meetings when they can instead spend their time supporting his opponent in an election only a few months away?

And note how she describes an example of what she argues is residual and fading anger as an “occasional outburst” — a rally “hastily called” by the Lynchburg Tea Party “to demand that [Perriello] vote against $26 billion in aid to state and local governments when the House reconvenes briefly this week.” But why is expressed opposition to piling on more deficits to prop up more public employee union members an “outburst”? If a number of people showed up (she could have told us how many were there, but didn’t) even though the rally was “hastily called,” doesn’t that suggest that the tide of angry voters has not really receded very much?

Perhaps the mood of voters who still care enough about what Perriello has to say to attend his meetings “might be ‘frustration,’ or ‘despair,’ or ‘disgust,’” but if Tumulty had attended some of the rallies or meetings with voters of state senator Robert Hurt, Perriello’s Republican opponent, she would have seen that last summer’s anger has not “faded” at all.

David Broder, sage of the center, has long (very long) been the quintessential middle of the roader, Mr. Moderate, the Dean of Conventional Wisdom, David Gergen without the unctuous smarm. But now that the Democrats under Obama have veered sharply left, Broder’s position just to the right of them no longer seems so moderate, or sensible.

Broder mentions with evident approval that “there’s more talk these days in White House circles about measures that might attract bipartisan support” and quotes a White House “insider” (it takes one to know one) who says, “If you asked the president what he would really like for Christmas, it would be a smart loyal opposition.” Then comes the moderate, sensible, centrist Broderism:

Of course, Obama’s definition of what would constitute wise, farsighted Republican policy may bear no resemblance to what John Boehner or Mitch McConnell, the GOP leaders in Congress, have in mind. But he’s probably not expecting the kind of relationship that Lyndon Johnson enjoyed with Everett Dirksen, the Senate Republican leader who provided the votes that allowed passage of the great civil rights statutes of the 1960s.

Obama would be well pleased if he could have someone resembling Bob Dole or Howard Baker, Republican Senate leaders who mostly opposed Democratic presidents but made common cause with them on certain national and international issues.

Note the implicit — or perhaps it is so evident as to be explicit — criticism of current Republican leaders (and by implication, their followers) for being narrowly partisan political pygmies, dwarfed by the towering bipartisanship of now long departed and much lamented responsible leaders of old such as Dirksen, Dole, and Baker.

The assumption here, of course — and again, it is so evident as to be more of an overt argument than an assumption — is that Obama’s policies are as deserving of bipartisan support as were the Democratic polices that Dirksen, Dole, and Baker so magnanimously supported. Democrats and their media mouthpieces obviously believe that to be the case, but reasonable people can disagree about that.

The trouble with Broder and those like him is that he clearly doesn’t believe a refusal to go along with Obama, at least to some degree, is reasonable. In his opinion, bipartisanship should prevail, no matter what policies the majority party attempts to impose and no matter how unpopular those policies may be with ordinary voters.

Another trouble resulting from the necessity to veer left to stay “moderate,” at least for Broder, is that the distance from the Republicans produces not only contempt but, increasingly, unfamiliarity and downright factual obtuseness. For example (and it is a good one), Broder writes that he doubts the coming December report of the bipartisan commission on debt and deficits will receive enough Republican support for a consensus. “But,” and here is the full-throated Broderism:

… at minimum, its majority report is expected to point to a plausible formula for budgetary discipline and, with pressure from the president, force congressional Republicans to come up with their own plan — not just say no.

Exactly who “expects” the majority report to be “plausible”? Not the Republicans who oppose it, but there they will no doubt go again, Broder implicitly argues, rejecting even the “plausible” in favor of the narrowly partisan, “just say no” approach that defines them (to Broder et al.) today.

That all Republicans do is “just say no” is, of course, nothing more than pure Democratic partisanship, something Broder obliviously repeats as though he’s simply reporting the obvious. It is especially odd for him to repeat the Democratic “just say no” slander, since he is very much aware that it is the Democrats in Congress who have just said no to creating  a budget.

In his July 8 column, for example, Broder indicates that he is even aware of  Rep. Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, since he quotes him on the Democratic failure:

This is not a budget. The measure fails to meet the most basic, commonly understood objectives of any budget. It does not set congressional priorities; it does not align overall spending, tax, deficit and debt levels; and it does nothing to address the runaway spending of federal entitlement programs.

Chances are that Broder is even familiar with Rep. Ryan’s comprehensive “road map” plan for eliminating the deficit, dramatically reducing the cost of health care, etc. (if for no other reason than that he no doubt reads Politico, which just discussed a respectful if skeptical hearing Ryan’s plan received at Brookings), but if all one knew of today’s Republicans came from Broder’s column on What the GOP can do for Obama, one would view them, as Broder obviously does, as narrow-minded political grinches putting their own partisan interests above the nation’s and doing nothing but just saying no.

My point here is not that Broder is wrong (although I think he is), but that because his view has become so partisan and one-sided his centrist, moderate platform has crumbled under his feet, making him just one more opinionated opinion journalist, albeit an unwitting one. He might not have been a member of JournoList, but based on this column he might as well have been.

According to the Post-partisan Robinson, Arizona’s embattled S.B. 1070 “amounts to a prescription for racial profiling on a scale not seen in this country since the days of Jim Crow laws in the South.”  It is “anti-Latino” and “patently unconstitutional.” Those who support it are “xenophobes” and “demagogues … who delight in turning truth, justice and the American way into political liabilities.”

It appears as though the vituperative Mr. Robinson hasn’t gotten the message — stated by pre-presidential Obama on the Rick Warren show in 2008, repeated (with increasing shrillness, as it has turned out) ad nauseum during the campaign, and just recycled on “The View” this week — that “we can disagree without being disagreeable.”

As one can clearly see, there is never any shortage of political invective in Eugene Robinson columns, but there frequently is a severe fact shortage. In the column under review (“Immigration Helps Dems Long Term,” July 30), for example, he asserted that:

[a]side from Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio — a grandstanding publicity hound who already stages immigration raids for the television cameras — virtually all prominent law enforcement officials in the state opposed the law.

Really? Presumably, just to pick one example, the Arizona Police Association, which “represents nearly 9,000 federal, state and local law enforcement officers in the state of Arizona” and strongly supports S.B. 1070, contains no “prominent law enforcement officials.” I guess not, since there couldn’t be any “prominent law enforcement officials” among its members, including:

• Arizona Corrections Association
• Arizona Highway Patrol Association
• Arizona Police Officers Association
• Avondale Police Association
• Buckeye Police Association
• Chandler Law Enforcement Association
• City of Peoria Police Supervisors
• Copper Corridor Police Association
• Deputies Law Enforcement Association
• Gilbert Police Leadership Association
• Glendale Police Officers Association
• Goodyear Police Officers Association
• Mesa Police Association
• Peoria Police Officers Association
• Peoria Police Officers Association
• Phoenix Law Enforcement Association
• Surprise Police Employees Association
• Tempe Officers Association
• University and College Law Enforcement Association.

Even Time and the New York Times recognize that many, perhaps most, law enforcement officials in Arizona support the law. As the Times noted,

…some of the largest rank-and-file police groups have come out strongly in favor of the bill.

The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, the city police department’s largest union, has promoted the bill as a “common sense proactive step in the right direction in the continuing battle on illegal immigration.”

The Fraternal Order of Police, which represents 6,500 officers statewide, endorsed the bill but said it had reservations over the potential costs to departments and the lack of training for local officers to identify who might be in the country illegally.

Bryan Soller, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said if officers ended up arresting large numbers of illegal immigrants, that could add to already crowded jails and costs. Mr. Soller also said departments were worried about the expense of defending any lawsuits by people contending that the law was not being enforced.

But he said he thought many concerns were overblown. His group initially opposed the bill but endorsed it after language was included that he and sponsors believe give officers discretion to use it, in part to ward off federal civil rights claims.

Mr. Robinson, like so many of the post-/Post-partisan Obamanauts, seems congenitally incapable of recognizing that many — perhaps most — smart, decent, reasonable people disagree with him and his Dear Leader. Perhaps he should learn to disagree without being so disagreeable.

On Sunday the Washington Post ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, issued an interesting apology for his paper’s failure to write about the Department of Justice’s handling of the Philadelphia New Black Panther Party case.

After summarizing the case and the controversy over it, Alexander admitted,

The Post didn’t cover it. Indeed, until Thursday’s story, The Post had written no news stories about the controversy this year. In 2009, there were passing references to it in only three stories.

That’s prompted many readers to accuse The Post of a double standard. Royal S. Dellinger of Olney [Maryland] said that if the controversy had involved Bush administration Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, “Lord, there’d have been editorials and stories, and it would go on for months.”

“To be sure,” Alexander said, “ideology and party politics are at play,” although he seemed to be referring only to liberal bloggers, “Fox News and right-wing bloggers,” “Congressional Republicans,” Sarah Palin, etc. No admission, that is, of ideology or party politics at the Post.

To his credit, Alexander chastises the Post for not covering the controversy and concludes by telling his colleagues, “Better late than never. There’s plenty left to explore.” He even suggests some topics:

… coverage is justified because it’s a controversy that screams for clarity that The Post should provide. If Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and his department are not colorblind in enforcing civil rights laws, they should be nailed. If the Commission on Civil Rights’ investigation is purely partisan, that should be revealed. If [former DOJ lawyer and now whistleblower J. Christian] Adams is pursuing a right-wing agenda, he should be exposed.

But is the Post really capable of providing neutral, objective “clarity” when it, or at least its ombudsman, seems so confused about colorblindness, the principle, that is so central to this controversy?

Eric Holder has been Attorney General for a year and a half, and “his department” has not been “colorblind in enforcing civil rights laws” for one day of that time. The Obama administration has nominated two Supreme Court justices and a slew of lower court judges all of whom oppose colorblindness, some of them vehemently. Indeed, one of them, Ninth Circuit nominee Goodwin Liu, even asserted once in a Los Angeles Times editorial that nothing in Brown v. Board of Education “establishes or suggests colorblindness as a legal principle.”

Obama made it clear before he was president that he opposes state initiatives, modeled on California’s 1996 Proposition 209, that would prohibit preferential treatment based on race, and his Dept. of Justice recently filed a brief in Texas supporting racial preferences not only in college admissions but in schools systems in general.

If the Washington Post has ever “nailed” the Obama administration in general or its Department of Justice in particular for their flagrant flouting of colorblindness, it must have used a super-quiet hammer and an invisible nail.

Do you know — and more important, do your Representatives and Senators know — that the just-passed Dodd-Frank financial reform bill will unleash a tsunami or racial quotas on financial regulatory agencies and, inevitably, on the financial industry itself?  Not if you rely on the New York Times, the Washington Post, and their network news equivalents.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute, a veritable one-woman truth squad on this issue, raised the alarm here, here, and here, and her warning was discussed by Andy McCarthy of National Review, Carl Horowitz on Townhall.com, and on several blogs — Hot Air, Professor Bainbridge, and my own Discriminations. But aside from an excellent editorial in the Wall Street Journal last month, not a peep from the mainstream press.

How odd, since this bill has been sold as necessary to prevent another financial meltdown and yet, insofar as that meltdown was precipitated by a burst housing bubble produced at least in part by the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie and Freddie, et al. forcing lenders to offer mortgages to borrowers who couldn’t afford them, the new legislation threatens to institutionalize and magnify those very abuses. As Ms. Furchtgoff-Roth explained, Section 342 of the bill creates at least 20 “Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion” to ensure that “race and gender employment ratios must be observed by all government agencies that regulate the financial sector, as well as private financial institutions that do business with the government.”

These distributed diversity czars will monitor

• The 10 Departmental Offices of the Department of the Treasury;

• The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.;

• The Federal Housing Finance Agency;

• The 12 Federal Reserve regional banks;

• The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve;

• The National Credit Union Administration;

• The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency;

• The Securities and Exchange Commission; and

• The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

They are instructed, according to Subsection (b), to “develop standards” for “equal employment opportunity and the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity” of the agency’s employees and management, as well as “increased participation of minority-owned and women-owned businesses in the programs and contracts of the agency.” Emphasis added. That “and” reveals that for contemporary liberals non-discriminatory, colorblind equal opportunity is insufficient; it must be supplemented with— which in practice means replaced by — “racial, ethnic, and gender diversity.”

Subsection (c) requires the diversity police to “develop and implement standards and procedures to ensure, to the maximum extent possible, the fair inclusion and utilization of minorities, women, and minority-owned and women-owned businesses in all business and activities of the agency at all levels.”

This quota tsunami was the brainchild of California Rep. Maxine Waters. As she proclaimed in a July 1 press release,

“I wrote this legislation to make sure that federal financial regulatory agencies ensure diversity in their hiring and promotion, as well as in their contracting, so that competent and qualified minorities and women and minority-, women- and small-businesses have a seat at the table” and to increase the participation of minority-owned and women-owned businesses in the programs and contracts of each agency.

One expects this sort of race mongering from Maxine Waters and her Democratic colleagues, but Scott Brown, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins should be ashamed of themselves for supporting it.

As the Wall Street Journal noted in its editorial,

Having recently lived through a financial mania and panic caused in part by political pressure for “affordable housing,” Congress will now order regulators to allocate credit by race and gender. Isn’t the point of this financial reform supposed to be to make regulators better judges of systemic risks, which means focusing on financial safety and soundness? If the Waters provision passes, federal regulators will have to put racial and gender lending at the top of their watch list when they do their checks on the banks and hedge funds they are regulating.

Either the watchdogs in the mainstream press haven’t read the bill, or they don’t think the creation of a massive new government bureaucracy to impose “diversity” on financial institutions and transactions is newsworthy. Perhaps that’s because they think imposed “diversity” has worked so well everywhere else.

Perhaps if the mainstream media has bothered to report these nuances of the legislation instead of leaving it the new media, we could have avoided the passage of this bill in the first place.