It seems like only yesterday Newsweek was sold to the highest bidder for $1.00. Of course a sweetheart deal like that had to have a catch, in this case the buyer’s assumption of the liabilities on Newsweek’s balance sheet. In 2009 alone, Newsweek lost $30 million, most likely due to “journalistic” efforts like this one:

Obama’s critics have gone from being racists to being just plain reckless. They see us as a gang of hayseed, Bible-thumping hicks clinging to their guns and religion while the most brilliant man ever to occupy the White House proceeds to turn America into a European-style democratic socialist state. Sullivan believes Obama is so smart he may just outfox everyone:

The right calls him a socialist, the left says he sucks up to Wall Street, and independents think he’s a wimp. Andrew Sullivan on how the president may just end up outsmarting them all.

For those who are unfamiliar with Andrew Sullivan, he is the Editor of The Daily Beast and contributor to Newsweek. He is most recently notorious for being a Trig-Truther and the class-act that spun-off a piece about Sarah Palin’s presidential campaign negatives using Steve Job’s death:

I know which one will get the bigger headlines tomorrow. And there is some comfort in knowing it will pain her.

Sullivan’s list of journalistic indiscretions and mind-numbing bloviating is so long and undistinguished that even just publishing the headlines causes irreversible loss of gray matter. I, your humble corespondent, have saved you from that fate.

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Newsweek magazine has brought the subject of media bias to the forefront with this week’s cover photo and headline.  It features a photo of Republican congresswoman and presidential candidate Michele Bachmann with a crazed look behind the intentionally nasty headline, “Queen of Rage.” Even the most naïve reader could not believe the article would be anything close to an evenhanded look at who Ms. Bachmann is and what she stands for.

This might surprise some journalists, but readers/viewers are much smarter than most of them think they are. They can spot media bias a mile off even when members of the media think they are getting away with it. Here are seven transparent ways media bias is detected by readers/viewers and what journalists can do about it.

Context: A journalist might edit down a 25-word comment into five-words to make someone they don’t like look foolish.  What to do about it: Be honest and keep quotes and themes in context.

Facts: Recently MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow played a quote by radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh which she said was “made earlier this week.”  It wasn’t. It was made over a year earlier, and it is highly likely the host knew it when she played it. What to do about it: Report the facts even if they are not as you want them to be.

Freaks and fringers: Media bias is spotted immediately when a journalist seeks out the most ridiculous representation of a subject or group they are covering. It happened many times with the media coverage of the tea party rallies as well as the Wisconsin state legislature’s battle over union issues earlier this year. What to do about it: Get your information from serious representatives and not freaks and fringers. (more…)

In 2008, there were people all over the blogosphere and in the conservative movement that said Barack Obama was not up to the job.  His experience as a legislator at the state level and then for two short years at the federal level, had not produced enough evidence that he was capable of managing the responsibilities of Commander in Chief.

While this perspective could of course be viewed as subjective, it was at the very least a legitimate narrative, worthy of consideration by the press.  They were more than happy to play that narrative out with Governor Palin after all.

But ultimately, these concerns were squashed by the press who, following his media assisted election, were so ecstatic that they got thrills up their legs and compared him to God Himself.

As president, he’s been afforded the same luxury for the majority of his time in office.  The media, it seems, would go to any lengths to prop him up and forgive his mistakes and incompetence, without even asking tough questions from the White House Press Corps. (more…)

This past Newsweek cover of Presidential candidate, Michele Bachmann, shows the unfair portrayals of female politicians in the media. While Publisher of Newsmax, Christopher Ruddy, reasonably displays Bachmann as a lady of office, Newsweek Editor-in-Chief, Tina Brown’s choice of an unflattering picture depicts Bachmann as an insane politician. As if the photo isn’t weird enough, the article entitled “Queen of Rage,” presents a propagated notion of instability and lunacy, whereas “Heartland Warrior” better describes her candidacy.

Bachmann’s Newsweek scandal is only the most recent of sexist subjections. Rooted in what seems to be the Madonna verses whore syndrome, society continues to allow the media to degrade women without concern. Thankfully, the National Organization of Women declared the cover misogynistic, but where are the rest of the feminists?

The list of unfair projections is growing with every women who steps into the political arena. As soon as a powerful, strong, intelligent woman surfaces as a leader, the media immediately attempts to destroy her reputation. From the 1st Vice Presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro, who was thought to have mafia relations, Hillary Clinton, who was portrayed as an unattractive obscene Presidential contender, and Nancy Pelosi, who’s facial features have been criticized, to Sarah Palin, who’s intellect and family life was demoralized, Christine O’Donnell, who was characterized as a promiscuous witch, Meg Whitman, who was unjustifiably called a “whore” by political opponent, Jerry Brown, Jan Brewer, who was  labeled a racist for wanting to protect her state from illegal immigration, and Nikki Haley, who was accused of extramarital affairs during her 2010 campaign – these women have been torn apart on matters unrelated to the real issues they were fighting to solve.

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I don’t know about you, but when I want articles on women that read like bitter Summer’s Eve scripts, I turn to Newsweek. Under the editorial control of Tina Brown, the rice paper magazine barely struggles against its bias towards conservative women to view them with anything other than contempt.

Check out Newsweek’s latest cover, which they happily Tweeted out minutes ago:

When your premise is an unflattering photo (and if you don’t have them you’re a liar or Miranda Kerr) to sell your bias, you just might be a chauvinist.

So because Brown thinks bad images are fair game, let’s have fun with an image of her, taken from MSNBC. Bragging rights, kudos, and hopenchange to the pithiest commenter who can best CAPTION THIS:

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Ever since Tina Brown took the helm at Newsweek she has been courting controversy. The magazine, acquired for a dollar last year, has been shrinking in physical size, circulation and relevance since Brown took over. If there’s one thing she knows how to do it’s run a publication into the ground (Remember Talk magazine?) In recent months Brown’s desperation for attention has grown and manifested itself in Photoshopped and sensationalized cover stories hoping to boost circulation. Her Princess Diana and Mitt Romney covers were the most blatant examples … until now.

Newsweek has hit a new low with this week’s cover story on the crumbling sexual assault case against former International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Under the headline “The Maid’s Tale,” they interview the accuser, 32 year old Nafissatou Diallo and present her in a very sympathetic light.

Newsweek makes passing reference to the fact that the case against DSK has obviously has catastrophic flaws and the ever-growing suspicious background of Diallo, but the bulk of the story friendly to Diallo. How a news magazine can so casually gloss over shady characters in Diallo’s life and the implausible aspects of her story can only be ascribed to the tabloid culture that has become all too prevalent in today’s media.

The fact that DSK is not going to win any awards for being a good husband is clear, he’s admitted affairs in the past, but that does not make him a rapist. Newsweek knows full-well the case is falling apart and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance is on the verge of dropping the charges, so this piece, and the piece on The Daily Beast, are essentially another in the chorus of left-wing voices advancing the idea that this case should go forward without regard to evidence. They believe a “victim’s right to confront the accused” is more important than the facts is common among the Left, and a dangerous trend.

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Forbes Executive Editor for business news Dan Bigman told Big Journalism that Forbes stands by an online article accusing Sarah Palin of possibly breaking the law. He said Forbes was just “raising the question” of whether Palin broke Federal Trade Commission Rules regarding product placement.

Bigman stood by the article that went after Palin for wearing a hoodie emblazoned with the logo of a hometown Alaska gym for Palin’s cover photo on the current issue of Newsweek. “We believe the issue of product placement is … worthy of investigation”, Bigman said.

The Forbes article, entitled Did Sarah Palin Use Newsweek for Product Placement?, is based on little more than a cover photo, a bogus Wonkette article, a writer’s speculation — “It seems probable, therefore, that she’s getting something for her enthusiastic endorsements — perhaps free personal training?” and that the Wasilla gym, Edge Fitness, was seen in the “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” travel documentary series on The Learning Channel last year.

The Forbes article is reminiscent of the Arctic Cat jacket ethics complaint, one of the myriad dismissed moonbat ethics complaints filed against Palin when she was Alaska governor. Like a moonbat, Bercovici repeats as fact the false Wonkette story that Palin had a secret Facebook page — “(Edge Fitness) also received a plug on a Facebook page Palin apparently created under an alias and used for posting pseudonymous comments.” Sarah Palin issued a statement denying having a secret Facebook page.

Also like a moonbat, Bercovici accuses Palin of having a “taste for the perquisites of Hollywood-style fame” based on a March 4, 2010 Associated Press hit piece that paints Palin as a greedy celeb scarfing up freebies at a Hollywood ‘gift suite’. The article buries the fact that the event was for charity and that Palin made a “sizable contribution” to Red Cross Haiti relief. Bercovici of course failed to note the “sizable” donation Palin made in exchange for the gifts.

As part of his indictment of Palin’s character, Bercovici includes an unsourced accusation that Palin “has been known to seek payment from magazines in exchange for her participation in stories.”

The Arctic Cat ethics complaint was about Palin wearing an Arctic Cat logo jacket at the start and finish of the race. Arctic Cat was the sponsor of her husband Todd’s snow machine entry in the Iron Dog race.

The ethics investigation was dismissed with a finding that there was no agreement between Palin and Arctic Cat to wear the jacket. The Associated Press reported June 4, 2009 on the dismissal:

Biegel had alleged that Palin improperly used her position as governor and state resources for her personal financial interests by being “a walking billboard for Arctic Cat.”

The personnel board’s independent investigator, attorney Thomas Daniel, said there was no evidence Palin used her position for personal gain. He said there was no sign that Palin or her husband received anything of value in exchange for the governor wearing the jacket at the start and finish of the race.

The Arctic Cat sponsorship was valued at $7,500 in 2007, according to Palin’s financial disclosure for that year. Daniel said the value of the 2008 sponsorship is not yet available, but added it’s irrelevant because Palin had no agreement with Arctic Cat to wear the clothing.

“If the deal was, ‘You’ve got to wear this jacket acting as governor as a condition of the discount or the sponsorship,’ then yeah, it might have been a violation of the Ethics Act, but that’s not the case here,” he told The Associated Press.

Jackets worn by many Alaskans have company names or logos on them, Daniel noted in a report to the board Tuesday dismissing the complaint.

“So the fact that a person wears a jacket with a company logo on it is not evidence that the person is receiving a financial benefit as a result,” he wrote. “To the contrary, it is the company that is receiving the benefit in the form of free advertising.”

The Forbes article begins:

Sarah Palin is no fan of the “lamestream media” — except when she’s using it to serve her ends. Is she using Newsweek to get free personal training? And, if so, is that entirely legal?

The article notes that Newsweek responded to an inquiry about Palin’s cover attire by saying Palin had no stylist for the photo shoot and chose her own clothes. Palin, SarahPac and Edge Fitness did not return queries seeking comment. So, based on a bogus Wonkette article and a cover photo, Forbes and Bercovici smeared Palin as a likely lawbreaker.

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This is the kind of childish speculation you expect to see at some lowly, left-wing hit site like the Soros’-owned, tax-exempt Media Matters — not at a brand publication like Forbes. Based ONLY on a sweatshirt logo, Jeff Bercovici, who writes at the Forbes’ Mixed Media site, created a 400+ word piece of wild speculation in order to disguise yet another tired Palin=celebrity article as “news” and, most importantly…

…to create the following anti-Palin headline:

Did Sarah Palin Use Newsweek for Product Placement?

Huh?

Whuh?

Where in the world did that come from? Well, it looks as though Forbes has some sort of editorial policy that allows their “journalists” to think and mull and speculate out loud. Because if you read the actual piece, there’s no beef there other than the subtext of a writer desperate to trash Governor Palin … just cuz.

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Our buddy Kyle Smith points out that the Daily Beast has made a laughably pathetic attempt to gin up some controversy over a line from the movie “Horrible Bosses,” which is in theaters today. From NewsBeast’s Ramin Setoode:

In the new comedy Horrible Bosses, Jennifer Aniston plays an overbearing dentist named Julia who tortures her assistant Dale (Charlie Day) by sexually harassing him. She’s one of three managers (along with Colin Farrell and Kevin Spacey) meant to be so detestable that their underlings plot to murder them. She constantly corners Dale, asking him to perform lewd sexual acts. In one scene, Aniston’s character calls him into her office, wearing nothing but a white lab coat. When he expresses discomfort, she taunts him like a high-school bully. “You’re starting to sound like a little faggot there, Dale,” she says.

[...]

The Old Media is still acting shocked, SHOCKED I tell you, that the Obama administration treats them like a redheaded stepchild. Newsweek’s The Daily Beast, for instance, is incredulous at the “reprehensible” actions of the Obama White House for having the temerity to call NBC to scold the cable outlet over Mark Halperin’s “dick” comment.

You’ll all certainly recall the incident in question. Back on June 30, MSNBC news analyst Mark Halperin unleashed the “d” word on President Obama in an appearance on the cable station’s “Morning Joe” talk show. Halperin was asked how he thought Obama did in his June 29 press conference and in reply Halperin joked that Obama had been “a dick.”

From there Halperin’s world went topsy turvy to the point where everyone was apologizing on the set of the TV show and only hours later MSNBC was suspending its analyst “indefinitely.”

But one other little part of this story is what brought the ire of Newsweek’s Douglas Schoen and Judith Miller and for good reason, too. The White House called NBC to complain about Halperin’s language. How is it possible, Newsweek wondered, that the White House was so bold as to attempt to intimidate NBC? Worse, why did NBC buckle under that pressure?

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Conservatives Tried to Tempt Weiner

Two days after Rep. Anthony Weiner resigned from his seat in Congress following his Twitter sex scandal, a conservative group that operates under the alias #bornfreecrew that had been monitoring Weiner’s online behavior for months admitted they knew about people creating fake names and Twitter handles to gather more information on the politician.

And concerning a certain adult actress, we would like to add that this girl did nothing wrong. If you actually read her blog it is about politics and chronic illness. My husband and I read it together with our daughter. Again, ask yourself what your own personal prejudices and hangups are before you make accusations. [my emphasis]

So, no problem with the “Look at all the f*cks I give” comedic image here? Or, perhaps mom thought Ginger Lee’s school girl outfit, complete with knee socks and hands covering her breasts on her profanity-laced blog regularly announcing her stripping gigs was just the kind of fashion tip and info needed by her teenage daughter? That Christopher overlooked those and other obvious alarm bells in a rush to try and exonerate Weiner, while piling on the Born Free Crew, tells us more about him and his alleged professionalism as a journalist, than it does his bogus sources.

The Under-Aged Participants That Add Clarity And Exoneration

Betty’s mother (we’ll call her Mrs. Betty) says that she and her husband monitor all of Betty’s internet usage, and were incensed by this group’s behavior. Rep. Weiner, she confirms, never contacted Betty privately, with the exception of a Direct Message welcoming her to his Twitter stream, a message Mrs. Betty assumed was automatically generated.

Finally, Christopher’s trumped up sources did not support the purportedly conservative group that was on to Weiner, instead, it attacked them in the harshest of terms in a failed attempt to change the subject and clear Weiner. Consequently, The Daily Beast’s assertion that it was the same purported group of conservatives who manufactured the false identities that humiliated Christopher, his editor, Colby Hall, and Dan Abrams’ Mediaite by association, is illogical and patently absurd. But then, that is what most have come to routinely expect from the Daily Beast.

This young girl is troubled and she was hounded by a couple of members of that pack of harassing grown men and women until one of them got her to agree to follow him so they could send each other direct messages.

From there, this man questioned this young girl and was gleeful over anything that he could find to incriminate Rep Weiner. He goes by the name goatsred. He also tried to contact my daughter and she locked her account when this happened. After she locked her account he continued to send requests to follow her, she refused to allow him to follow her.

I have always wondered who made Howard Kurtz the arbiter of Reliable Sources, but in Weinergate, we are reminded that Kurtz’s ability to discern them is very much in question.  For that matter, so is CNN’s.  It has never been a secret that the supposedly even-handed journalism maven is in reality almost too liberal to function, but if he can’t get his head screwed on straight, he might have to fork over the name of his show to someone else altogether.  Hopefully Kurtz will have the decency to straighten out some of his Weinergate missteps soon and reconsider who really are “reliable sources.”

Kurtz’s history of judging Reliable Sources is staggeringly one sided and ideological.  For one thing, I have frequently seen him go out of his way to profess his respect for the reliability of Keith Olbermann, of all people, not to mention the rest of the guttersnipes at MSNBC:

Now, I don’t put Keith Olbermann in the same category as Beck at all. His MSNBC show, agree with it, disagree with it, was a very well-researched program.

Sure it was, Howard.  Also have a look at how incensed he got when Hugh Hewitt insulted Olbermann on Reliable Sources.  Kurtz and his publication The Daily Beast also seem to regard the Daily Kos, where Olbermann once blogged, as a very legitimate publication.  The most recent example comes during Weinergate.  The Daily Beast didn’t respond when I inquired who writes the captions for their “Cheat Sheet,” but have a look at this caption.  This is The Daily Beast’s own writing, not a quote from the linked story:

Not even a hint of suspicion about the reliability of the post by an anonymous blogger “stef” at a radically partisan website with absolutely no editorial oversight.  The Daily Beast simply reported it as fact. Not long after this story was posted, Kurtz gave it his blessing on twitter, boasting how his “wait[ing] for the facts” had just been validated:

The bottom line is that Kurtz actually believes “the facts” come from anonymous, unaccountable bloggers at one of the murkiest breeding grounds for partisan trolls there is.  Once “stef” weighed in, Kurtz could finally comment on Weinergate without even bothering to check.  “The facts” had arrived. (more…)

I’m not sure where it comes from, but there seems to be an innate human need to blame natural disasters on human failings. This receives much deserved ridicule when religious fanatics blame earthquakes on a preponderance of cleavage. The non-religious crowd, however, needs a different type of moral turpitude on which to lay the blame. The obvious culprit of choice is your lifestyle of consumption which causes global warming…err climate change.  Both sides try to make political hay from human suffering and both cases are pretty despicable.

This time around, Newsweek wants you to know that the tragic destruction in Joplin, Missouri is the fault of the Bush administration and its corporate task masters.

“Even those who deny the existence of global climate change are having trouble dismissing the evidence of the last year. In the U.S. alone, nearly 1,000 tornadoes have ripped across the heartland, killing more than 500 people and inflicting $9 billion in damage.”

Yes, it was a bad year for tornadoes. The visuals coming out of the areas affected have been heart wrenching. The most that can be said is that it’s an above average year. That’s what happens. Some years have more extreme weather, some less. It’s called climate and it always changes. That’s how nature works.

“From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone. Which means you haven’t seen anything yet.” (more…)

**UPDATE: I missed this earlier, but in another tweet, Kurtz offered the Clinton sex scandal–the one Kurtz’s Newsweek attempted to kill–as an example of unbiased media coverage of a Democrat sex scandal!  The hubris is breathtaking.  Kurtz also suggests that the old media handled the Spitzer and Edwards scandals admirably.  More here.

***

From the NewsBeast/CNN news guy:

According to another tweet, he meant tweeps, not twerps.

A quick response to the guy who defended the HuffPo Breitbart front-page ban and got the Sherrod story wrong:  Even if the infamous Weinergate image was “faked,” that means someone hacked into a sitting congressman’s verified twitter account and posted porn. THAT’S STILL NEWS!  Why not report it as a developing story, just like we have here at the Bigs? If Kurtz truly believes Rep. Weiner is the victim of a hack-attack, why wouldn’t he cover the story for that reason?

Kurtz later walked back this statement by tweeting, “of course reporters should have looked into Weiner hacking controversy.”  To paraphrase Kurtz, sometimes it pays to think a second time.

I know Tina Brown took over Newsweek last year, but if this is the way their top-tier journalists are treating potential Democrat sex scandals (real or “faked”), this invites the question: has anything really changed?  You may recall it was Newsweek which killed Michael Isikoff’s Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton affair scoop over a decade ago.  The Drudge Report picked it up, and conservative new media was born.  So, we who make our livings in the new media all owe a debt of gratitude to Newsweek employees and their rich history of protecting Democrats, but America deserves better.

In an argument (usually a political debate), a concern troll is someone who is on one side of the discussion, but pretends to be a supporter of the other side with “concerns”. The idea behind this is that your opponents will take your arguments more seriously if they think you’re an ally. – Urban Dictionary

Before she’s even announced her decision as to whether or not to run for president, according to a new Gallup poll, Governor Sarah Palin currently sits in second place among 11 announced and/or potential GOP candidates. Gee, how did that happen? After all, the MSM told me Palin was irrelevant (usually in 1200 word articles obsessing over one of her tweets or the tweets of one of her staffers).

Ezra Klein’s sinister Journolist might be dismantled (though I suspect it lives on elsewhere), but “journ-o-lism” has always been alive and well and lately, when it comes to their unrelenting  and somewhat perverse need to demolish a mother of five, the corrupt path of Obama’s MSM Palace Guards has gone a little something like this: After pulling a minding-her-own-business Sarah Palin out of her Wasilla home in order to beat her about the neck and shoulders for causing that terrible crime in Tucson,  led by this rocket scientist, it was decided the time had come to ignore Palin and write her political obituary.

Indulge my backing up just a bit here …

You have to keep in mind that journ-o-lism is just another term to describe how dishonest journ-o-lists conspire to create corrupt narratives. Have you ever noticed how the MSM almost never competes for stories? What I mean is that nine times out of ten they all cover the exact same things with the exact same emphasis. Why is that?  You would think that in order to stand out from the herd, ABC News would sell a Whopper to compete with NBC’s Big Mac. Or that the Washington Post would come up with Pepsi to the New York Times’ Coke.  Don’t even get me started on Mountain Dew.

The reason for this is that the MSM isn’t about The News, it’s about The Agenda, and what they do is no different than what they accuse Big Business of doing. Only instead of conspiring through a secret monopoly with other companies to fix prices, they conspire through a secret monopoly of other media outlets to create a version of the truth –which we call The Narrative.  The word goes out and suddenly….

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So, this past weekend Sarah Palin visited Israel. Obviously this couldn’t pass unmentioned in the hallowed halls of the MSM. All of it dripping with digs on Mrs. Palin, Israel, and right-wing American Jews.

For instance, Dan Ephron, of Newsweek, writing for the Daily Beast starts with this classic:

Wearing a large Star of David around her neck, Palin prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, then spent two hours with guides in the Western Wall tunnel, an archeological site whose excavation in 1996 caused Palestinians to riot.

Palin in Israel

While that last bit has absolutely nothing to do with the story, it is also provably false.  The riots, also called the Second Intifada were well planned in advance. There was a great deal of build up and incitement leading up to the “spontaneous outbreak” of violence, as well as promises from heads of Palestinian security that nothing would happen.

Ephron goes on to mention that the trip is also Palin trying to make amends for her use of the phrase “blood libel” after the shooting of Rep. Giffords, when the entire institutional left lied about her and the entire right’s culpability in the actions of a mad man. Except that Palin is on the record standing by her comments.

And then, in the end, it always comes down to money. The real reason Palin went to Israel was to tap into the deep pockets of a few wealthy Jews. Of course, it’s not enough to mention them by name, but as “casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson or the bingo billionaire Irving Moskowitz.” When George Soros gets identified as war profiteer or Pyramid schemer Norman Hsu I’ll have less of an issue with the such mentions. (more…)

Newsweek has published another one of those aren’t-Americans-Stupid articles wherein we find that few Americans know anything about either our history or our political system. People have no idea who our current vice president is, they don’t know when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, and they haven’t a clue who takes the office of president if the prez and the VP are incapacitated. But what is more interesting in Newsweek’s article is the reason the news magazine thinks that we are so stupid. Absurdly Newsweek thinks it’s because government doesn’t spend enough money on education.

First of all, I have to agree that Americans are as ignorant as can be on our history and our system of government. You can see it just about everywhere. In fact, you can see it in voting patterns. Illinois is a perfect example. The corruption has been endemic in the Democrat Party in Illinois for decades, yet voters repeatedly pull that donkey lever. It is clear they are ignorant of why things are so bad in the Land of Lincoln and they send the same crooks back to the state house over and over again.

Certainly it is impossible to dispute Newsweek’s central claim that Americans display an appallingly high level of civic ignorance. But Newsweek doesn’t just report its findings, it goes on to opine on just why we as a nation are so ignorant of our civics and history.

Newsweek thinks it’s because we don’t spend enough money on education: (my bold)

It doesn’t help that the United States has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the developed world, with the top 400 households raking in more money than the bottom 60 percent combined. As Dalton Conley, an NYU sociologist, explains, “it’s like comparing apples and oranges. Unlike Denmark, we have a lot of very poor people without access to good education, and a huge immigrant population that doesn’t even speak English.” When surveys focus on well-off, native-born respondents, the U.S. actually holds its own against Europe.

Newsweek’s claim here is as appallingly ignorant of the facts as someone who doesn’t know that the law of the land is the Constitution of the United States!

Even the left-wing New York Times realizes that the U.S. spends more on education that almost every other nation on earth. For instance, recently the Times published a piece that contained the following:

In an interview, Mr. Schleicher said the point was not that the United States spends too little on public education — only Luxembourg among the O.E.C.D. countries spends more per elementary student — but rather that American schools spend disproportionately on other areas, like bus transportation and sports facilities.

Spending isn’t the problem. The problem is that Democrats and left-wingers have taken over our education and devastated its effectiveness. The left has dumbed down our education from the lowest grades to the halls of our institutes of higher learning until what passes for education is merely a joke.

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Yawn.

The new cover features United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the magazine’s special edition, “150 Women Who Shake the World.”

Brown, who previously captained Vanity Fair and the New Yorker magazines, took over the flailing news-weekly in November when it merged with her website, The Daily Beast, which launched in October 2008. Brown is now the editor in chief of both the Daily Beast website and the new Newsweek.

[...]

Although Brown is one of the most highly respected magazine editors in the world, her legendary 35-year career has not been without the occasional disappointment, such as the much-heralded but short-lived Talk magazine – which also featured Hillary Clinton on the front cover of its first issue.

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There’s no mincing of words in this. Considering the public isn’t buying the spin and a recent study shows how Americans find Sarah Palin more believable and sincere after her Tucson remarks, this (forgive the “violent rhetoric”) backfired on the left.

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And I really like Jane Lynch, too. I’ve yet to see a role in which she wasn’t great. The interview in which she and Dan Savage participate about being gay and bullying and gay bullying is pure comedic awesomeness in that as they say “F-ck McCain” and Lynch silently sits while Savage calls Antonin Scalia a “c–ksucker,” she and Savage switch and discuss how bullying, what they just did, is bad. Irony is funny!

Savage: F–k John McCain—put that in NEWSWEEK.

Lynch: Yeah, I say it too, to the second power.

Savage: Really, when it comes to gay rights, there’s two wars going on. The first war is political. But the culture war is over. Between Glee and Ellen and how integrated and accepted LGBT adults are, that’s done. So it’s very frustrating to be steeped in how culturally accepted we are and know that there’s all these legislative things that we just can’t seem to make any progress on.

How long until there’s an openly gay president or Supreme Court justice?

Savage: Scalia isn’t gay?!? I always think the biggest homophobe in the room is clearly a c–ksucker!

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