Second place looms large and it is quite an honorable — or maybe onerous — award on our top ten most left-biased working American journalists list. Amusingly our number two guy even graduated from a school that foretold his future work. From the bowels of New York’s exclusive Hackley School comes our number two most left-biased journo, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein.

Klein is another one of those far left writers that imagines himself to be unconventional in his politics when the truth is he is a left-winger all the way down the line without a scoshe of non-conventional thinking.

For instance, in his book, The Natural, of his politics Klein wrote, “… the conventions of journalism prevent me from fitting too neatly into one political niche (although as a columnist for the New Yorker and Newsweek my predilections are obvious).” Far from not “fitting too neatly” into the left’s “niche,” that niche fits him like a glove. For the better part of thirty years, Klein has been revealing his ill-fitting niche to the reading public and we couldn’t be more grateful for his niche-like, nichieness.

So let’s start by finding an example of Klein supposedly being nicheless, shall we? How about in 2007 when Klein attacked the left-wing blogosphere as being too vitriolic. Did that piece show that he was able to criticize his own? Did it show he isn’t just a knee-jerk leftist? (more…)

The Orlando Sentinel recently reported that President Obama wants to nix NASA’s moon missions and instead intends to spend funding for space ventures beyond earth’s orbit. Perhaps to Avatar’s beautiful planet Pandora?

Now what would make the president stray so far from JFK’s vision of lunar supremacy? Perhaps he wasn’t that thrilled to learn what I just did about what occurred on the first moon landing. My friend Eric Metaxas wrote a great book, Everything You Alwayhs Wanted to Know About God (But Were Afraid To Ask), and in it he recalled that Buzz Aldrin confirmed to him that he took communion on the Moon.

Nobody knew.  The live broadcast was blacked out at the time.  Here are Aldrin’s own words, as quoted by Metaxas: (more…)

While audiences in America flock to the escapist eye candy known as Avatar, it’s sobering to realize that in the real world, far away from James Cameron’s utopian dreamscape and the cozy cocoons of our multiplex theaters, another film’s message of defiance is helping to fuel revolution against a repressive regime.

The Stoning of Soraya M., from writer-director Cyrus Nowrasteh and Mpower Pictures, tells the true story of a woman in a remote Iranian village in the wake of the fundamentalist revolution of 1979, who is falsely accused of adultery and then stoned to death by a mob desperate to cleanse themselves of this rumored affront to their collective honor and to their religion. It’s not only a gripping story in its own right, but it also focuses a harsh spotlight on the shocking reality that stoning still exists in the Iranian penal code. The movie has been reviewed and written about manytimes on Big Hollywood, as well as listed among the site’s 10 best movies of 2009. (Look for it on DVD from Lion’s Gate in March) (more…)

For years, the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich have played the same journalistic card trick:  Take the hot button issue of the week, cross it with the latest pop culture reference and – voila! – Times readers are treated to columns that give the appearance of having some kind of deep-seated cultural insight.

The problem, however, is that their “insights” won’t stand up to any kind of serious analysis, and quickly reveal themselves to be shallow, glib, sophomoric, and perhaps worst of all, predictable.

(Several weeks ago, for example, Rich struggled to make the claim that the George Clooney film Up in the Air is the Grapes of Wrath for our times – which sounds pretty good, until one thinks about it for a moment:  The film is about a guy who travels the country racking up frequent flier miles as he fires people; Steinbeck’s masterpiece is about the struggles of the Joads as they’ve lost their farm and their livelihoods, and set out for California, penniless.  But such is what passes for insight at the Times – where the upper westsider who’s been forced to fire a maid is seen as the tragic victim in need of sympathy, rather than the out-of-work maid.) (more…)