- Donald Trump to self: You’re fired.

- Chris Moody says that Trump sent him a critique of his piece, linked above:

If this is really his, and Moody has a great poker face, Donald Trump really puts a circle as the dot for his exclamation points? Call him a trainwreck all you want to, but I love that he did this (if he did. I want to so badly believe).

- Ace of Spades chews up the author of “My Tim Tebow Problem“:

… while this guy is coming from the Jewish perspective, he is more crucially coming from a liberal perspective, and he’s been taught, as many liberals have been, that Hatred is a powerful and useful weapon, and can be righteously wielded against the Unworthy.

[...]

… the idea of a new age of pogrom based upon the Tim Tebow throwing a football seems to be a reactionary one, conceived in hatred, executed in bitterness.

- MSNBC is looking to add more progressives to their echo chamber.

- Whoa: Russian blogger harnessing opposition to Putin is emerging as the opposition leader. Ew: He has a dark side. How dark? Think Russian nationalism and neo-Nazism.

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- Obama implores black American media members: Carry my water for me:

President Obama spoke to a White House forum, titled “Open for Questions with InteractiveOne,” which featured various administration officials discussing how the administration’s polices have affected and will affect the black community, taking questions from NewsOne.com and its sister sites in the InteractiveOne network, TheGrio.com, TheUrbanDaily.com, HelloBeautiful.com, and BlackPlanet.com.

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Thursday night, the Illinois Supreme Court reinstated Oswald Cobblepot’s name on the ballot to be Mayor of Chicago in time for the February 22nd election. You may be familiar with him by his other name: Rahm Emanuel.

You may remember Oswald Cobblepot, A.K.A. “The Penguin,” from the “Batman” films of Tim Burton. He was a wretched little man who was beloved by the City of Gotham and well on his way to being elected Mayor – that is until the heroic Batman played a looped recording of Oswald saying “You gotta admit, I’ve played this stinking city like a harp from Hell.” That is what I’ve envisioned Emanuel saying in my head over and over again since he began his campaign for Mayor of Chicago.

Except that Rahm Emanuel isn’t the only one who has played Chicago. The MSM have too.

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I disagree with the staff at Automotive News and their selection of the Toyota recall story as the top automobile-related news story of 2010. The story that deserves at least as much attention has to do with how members of the state-run media ignored recall issues at GM (a.k.a., “Government Motors”) at Toyota’s expense.

I covered the Toyota recall story thoroughly in three early-February posts:

• In my first post Feb. 5, I examined the number of campaign contributions made by Toyota executives to Barack Obama since Jan. 1, 2007, and found that only two of 151 executives listed on the Toyota web site gave a combined total of $2,500 to Obama for America;

• In my second post Feb. 5, I speculated about the possible reasons why the Obama Administration would want to bully Toyota; and, finally,

• In a Feb. 8 post, I wondered why the federal government had not yet issued a recall for the Chevrolet Cobalt despite the fact that, according to a Feb. 2 Los Angeles Times report, 905,000 2005-’09 copies of the “Bow-Tie” vehicle, including the Cobalt SS, were the subject of a new investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration due to complaints of electric power steering failure.

It was in the latter post that I revealed the disturbing results of some simple math calculations.

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From the Associated Press:

Tribune Co. CEO Randy Michaels resigned Friday, pressured by tales of raunchy behavior that likened him to the ringleader of a college fraternity house.

Michaels’ decision to leave comes at a pivotal time for the troubled media company. After nearly two years operating under bankruptcy protection, Tribune Co. is drawing up a reorganization plan that it hopes to get approved by a federal judge before the end of the year.

A four-man executive committee will fill the void created by Michaels’ departure. The new bosses are Don Liebentritt, Tribune Co.’s chief restructuring officer; Nils Larsen, chief investment officer; Tony Hunter, publisher of the Chicago Tribune; and Eddy Hartenstein, publisher of the Los Angeles Times.

The Tribune and the Times are the largest newspapers owned by the company, whose holdings also include more than 20 television and radio stations. (more…)

The Chicago Tribune, a publication normally as dedicated to championing women’s issues as anyone in the MSM, tossed Muslim women under the bus in the other day. A feature story by Patty Pensa, running under the headline “Many faces under the hijab; photographer aims to educate about those who wear Muslim headscarf,” managed to ignore all of the abuses that Muslim women suffer throughout the world while living under Sharia law, focusing instead on the relative freedom that some Muslim women living in the United States enjoy.

CAIR had to be thrilled with the publication of such misleading propaganda in a once-great American newspaper. For the rest of us, and especially for the millions of abused Muslim women living abroad, this latest example of creeping-Sharia in the United States should be very disturbing.

Pensa’s story championed a book recently published by Muslim photographer Sadaf Syed entitled: “iCover: A Day in the Life of a Muslim-American COVERed Girl.” In it, Syed shows successful American Muslim women who enjoy happy and free lives while living in this country, and who also choose to wear the hijab. For Syed, the hijab isn’t a symbol of oppression at all, it’s rather a celebration of her religion, at least as far as she understands her religion (and she obviously doesn’t understand it very well).

That’s great – for Syed and the women she profiles – but nowhere in the Trib’s story does Pensa even hint at the possibility that Syed’s experience and her views about the hijab don’t come close to representing Islam’s official views about women in theory or in practice. (more…)

The Chicago media covers Illinois political corruption like crime reporters. They show up at the scene, gather for the perp walk, snap a photo, and cover the trial.  In short, they wait for the story to happen and then accept official explanations with minimum scrutiny.  Consequently, when the Machine gets caught, it’s generally not the media that breaks the story. And it’s been that way in Chicago for a very long time.

Here’s one example of a story gone missing: the strange saga of an FBI mole who interacted with several Chicagoland players, including Barack Obama, associated with the rise-and-fall of Antoin “Tony” Rezko and former Illinois Governor Milorad R. “Rod” Blagojevich.

It starts in the late 1990’s in New York where Bernard Barton, Jr. made “wrong decisions” while running his billboard leasing company. One wrong decision was selling space on billboards he neither owned nor controlled.

According to an FBI affidavit, those “wrong decisions” included Thomas’ drawing more than $350,000 from his customers’ credit cards while he was running a billboard leasing business in Manhattan in the late 1990s. He also charged more than $140,000 to an American Express business account he obtained using his father’s Social Security number.

To mitigate jail time, Barton volunteered to help New York federal prosecutors make a case against organized crime families that were trying to penetrate the billboard business. His offer worked. His sentencing has been delayed… for seven years now. (more…)

You would think that a conference that features some of the world’s leading scientists talking about a hot-button issue like global warming would attract a bit of old media attention. The Heartland Institute’s Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, currently being held in Chicago, features distinguished scientists like the University of Colorado’s Dr. William Gray, Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon, MIT atmospheric physicist Dr. Richard Lindzen, former astronaut and United States Senator Dr. Harrison Schmitt and the guy who broke the hockey stick, Steve McIntyre. But, while there are a number of bloggers here, while Pajamas Media is here, while the European press is here – including the BBC – and while I’m here, the MSM is nowhere to be found.

What are they so afraid of – that they might learn something? It’s not like everyone is singing in chorus. For example, on Sunday night Steve McIntyre told the fascinating story of how and why Michael Mann and his cohorts “hid the decline,” complete with the relevant e-mails and published charts that irrefutably show how Mann, Jones and the rest of the climategate gang consciously discarded relevant data and then tried to cover their actions up.

The mainstream media meme, with regards to hiding the decline, is that while that this revelation was regrettable, it does nothing to disprove the theory that mankind is responsible for global warming. Guess what? McIntyre agrees. In fact, he went out of his way to say that he’s not your “go to” guy with respect to carbon dioxide’s effect on the climate. There are others who have that particular expertise. But, anyone who listens to McIntyre recount this story of scientific malpractice could not help but be deeply troubled and wonder: what else have they been hiding? (more…)

Global warming skeptics like me are often asked how the mainstream media could have been so wrong about the “climate change” issue for so long. The answer is that the MSM’s fascination with global warming alarmism is nothing out the ordinary; it’s part of a decades-old pattern. The old media has been consistently, often laughably, wrong when it comes to covering environmental topics because they invariably stick to the green narrative: anyone associated with industry is ill-informed at best, or –- more often –-  just plain lying. On the other hand, the environmental movement is, in their world, the only reliable source of information.

An example of this phenomenon came to my attention recently. In a March 21 story the Chicago Tribune and the paper’s chief industry hit-man, environmental reporter Michael Hawthorne, slammed a small business located in a poor Chicago suburb over supposed ecological transgressions that make the plant sound like the second-coming of Chernobyl. For the benefit of those of you who are not fellow technological weenies, I’ll limit this summation to a couple of the broad themes. But, should you be a fellow propeller-head, a few scientific details will follow as well.

Hawthorne attacked Geneva Energy, a small power plant located in Ford Heights, which is, as he admits, “one of the poorest suburbs in the U.S.” The plant burns old tires and, while recovering energy from worn-out rubber might seem like a pretty good idea to you and me, it represents a grave threat to the citizens of Ford Heights and mother earth as far as Hawthorne and the environmental groups he champions are concerned. The supposed “problems” fit into two broad categories: (more…)

The irony would be amusing, were the stakes not so serious. The very day that the United States Congress passed sweeping legislation that will undermine the economy, increase debt and send tax rates soaring, a leading liberal media outlet criticized the elected officials who have been in charge of the president’s home state for repeatedly passing legislation that has: undermined Illinois’ economy, increased Illinois’ debt and sent Illinois tax rates soaring, thus poisoning the business environment and employment prospects in the state. It appears that government’s mission isn’t to tax and spend. Who knew?

It will be hard to believe, but when Illinois Democrats passed all of the legislation that got Illinois into this cesspool of a fiscal crisis, both they and the MSM assured voters that the there was nothing to worry about. These great new programs, they said, will actually make the state more prosperous and, if you disagreed with that proposition, then you were obviously a crabby conservative trying make political hay at the expense of what was obviously the best thing for the people of the state of Illinois. Sound familiar? (more…)

The Obama Administration’s definition of “bipartisanship” is: “do it our way or else,” which is why — as the sham of the “healthcare summit” plays itself out on national televion — John Kass’s explanation of the Chicago Way is such a timely piece of journalism.  Here’s a sample:

The Republicans wanted to dance. Now they’ll have to step lightly. They were foolish to get trapped in his so-called summit on national health care. Or did they actually think they could outperform the skinny fellow from Chicago?

Obama will be in his element, talking and lecturing, the law professor framing the debate. He’ll spend hours being seen as reasonable. The Republicans will balk and the president will shrug. He’ll sigh and say he tried to reason with them but they refused.

Then once the cameras are turned off, he’ll take out the baseball bat and explain how things get done The Chicago Way.

Obama understands the first rule of “compromise” — once you get your opponent off his bedrock principles and starting to meet you halfway, the game is already over and all that’s left is to run the table at your leisure.

So as you watch the president, with his saturnine scowl betraying his faux-Bobby Bonilla smile every step of the way, and listen to Schemer Schumer — the reincarnation of Dutch Schultz’s legendary mouthpiece, Dixie Davis, whose every word is a lie, whose every gesture of good fellowship is feigned and whose every offer of reasonable compromise is a poisoned pill — try to keep in mind Kass’s analysis: (more…)

Chicago Tribune reporter John Kass is an old school journalist. He’s one among a cadre of Windy City reporters, most from the Sun Times and the Tribune, who routinely expose the hooligans and shenanigans of the Chicago Political Machine.

Kass says the national MSM ignored the political environment that gave birth to Barack Obama.

While Kass calls Obama “a Chicago political guy,” he knows the Machine is multi-layered. While the hub is Chicago, spokes extend throughout Cook County, and reach deep inside the state capital at Springfield.

Because the MSM ignored the Machine from which Obama emerged, the electorate didn’t realize that voting for Obama meant endorsing politics the Chicago way. Consequently, those outside Illinois knew little about the Machine, how it cleans up its messes, and how the clean-ups can impact individual lives. For example: (more…)

Like father like son. Chicago Alderman Isaac “Ike” Carothers has pleaded guilty to corruption and faces 28 months in jail.  His father, former Alderman William Carothers, was convicted of attempted extortion in 1983.

Here’s how Chicago’s WGN TV News announced the 31^st Chicago City Council Alderman since 1973 – but, hey, who’s counting – to be convicted of crimes that include paying a bribe, taking a bribe, extortion, attempted extortion, tax fraud, tax evasion, racketeering, and ghost-payrolling schemes.

Ike was formally charged with fraud and bribery last May by U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the legal beagle who has former Governor Rod Blagojevich facing trial this summer.  That is, unless Blago does enough talking to turn a plea deal. And that’s a potential factor that makes the Carothers’ case particularly interesting.

You can catch up on the details of Ike’s misdeeds in the Chicago print media here, here and here.

Let’s piece together lines from two of those articles. First, the Chicago Sun Times piece: (more…)

If you live in Chicago and your only source of news is the venerable Chicago Tribune, it would take you a while to figure out that something happened in Massachusetts Tuesday night. One would think that an editor might place a story with the following lead – oh, I don’t know – front page, top of the fold, maybe?

In a stunning blow to Democrats, Republican Scott Brown ended the party’s half-century grip on the Senate seat once held by Edward M. Kennedy, coming from nowhere to give the GOP the crucial 41st vote needed to thwart President Obama and his agenda, possibly starting with healthcare.

It ended up on page fourteen.

Allow me to repeat: page fourteen. An election that stunned both parties, sent a thundering message to the President and his party, threatens the very existence of the signature piece of legislation that this administration – and the Chicago Tribune – believe is vital to the health and welfare of Americans is a story that, in the judgment of what used to be the beacon of Midwestern values, less important than finding Asian carp DNA in Lake Michigan yet again. (more…)

Is this the Boston Globe’s “Dewey Defeats Truman” moment?  (See Big Journalism’s header, above, for the memorable Chicago Tribune goof.)

The Hub’s ultra-liberal broadsheet today “inadvertently” posted an interactive election-results dummy on its website, boston.com — which, amazingly, forecast a Coakley victory.

Queried by the Boston Phoenix, the city’s alternative newspaper, a spokesman for the Globe replied:

AP was testing an election data feed to its Massachusetts clients. During corresponding tests at our end, the feed of AP’s hypothetical test data was inadvertently posted for a few minutes on a single subsection page within our site. As soon as the error was discovered, it was removed. We regret the mishap.

Take a look at the “mishap” for yourself from these screen shots. (more…)

As a scientist, I have long been troubled by the way the mainstream media covers science in general and the environment in particular. Long before “global warming” became a watchword and Al Gore started burning tens of thousands of gallons in aviation fuel to lecture people around the world about their profligate energy use, journalists routinely butchered scientifically-focused stories so badly that it would make a high school physics teacher cringe. While many people have been shocked to learn how close the ties between leading global warming alarmists and some environmental reporters are, the only surprise for many of us in the scientific community is that it has taken this long to reveal those connections. For the truth is that global warming coverage in the mainstream media is merely a symptom of a larger disease.

The latest boil to burst forth upon the body of environmental journalism began to fester on Thursday, January 7, when the USEPA announced that it was proposing the latest, greatest and most-badly- needed-ever smog standard. (Officially the pollutant is “ground-level ozone”, but we’ll stick with “smog” for convenience). Mainstream media outlets everywhere fell over themselves to heap praise on the EPA for imposing a standard that administrator Lisa Jackson described as “long overdue.” This lead, from the Chicago Tribune’s lead environmental reporter/head Sierra Club cheerleader Michael Hawthorne’s January 8 story, was typical:

“Chicago and other urban areas across the U.S. would need to clamp down harder on air pollution under tough smog limits proposed Thursday by the Obama administration, which scrapped a George W. Bush-era rule that ignored the latest scientific advice.”

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