Before the LinkSwarm itself, an observation: On the drive home from Houston to Austin this weekend, I saw a Prius with a “Repeal ObamaCare” sticker. Truly the tide has turned…
Posts Tagged ‘Washington Post’
LinkSwarm for March 31, 2014
Monday, March 31st, 2014LinkSwarm for August 6, 2013
Tuesday, August 6th, 2013Still catching up, so enjoy your complimentary LinkSwarm and beverage (minus the beverage):
After being taken out by the forces of evil on Friday, I said to myself "What would Jesus do?" And so now it's Sunday and I'm back. #Bam!
— Todd Kincannon (@ToddKincannon) August 4, 2013
Newsweek To Start Pining for the Fjords
Thursday, October 18th, 2012Today Newsweek announced that they were ceasing print publication and going all digital. For a national general-interest weekly news-magazine, that’s tantamount to saying that you’re dead but you don’t feel like lying down just yet.
Back in 2009, you may remember Newsweek‘s decision to remake itself as a liberal opinion weekly, an odd financial choice in a country where conservatives outnumber liberals nearly 2-to-1. Since then Newsweek has managed the amazing feat of hemorrhaging readers faster than other print publications. Then the Washington Post company decided to sell the venerable newsweekly to Sidney Harman for $1, screwing its shareholders but keeping the magazine’s money-losing liberal slant under Tina Brown’s editorship. Hired to steer the ship around the iceberg, Brown instead decided to teach the iceberg who’s boss by ramming it a few more times.
Vast swathes of legacy print media are in trouble in the Internet-era, but Newsweek‘s demise is more like an assisted suicide than a graceful decline. It’s like a Type II diabetic who had already lost three toes deciding to immediately go on a diet consisting entirely of ice cream.
Newsweek had a choice between being profitable and being liberal, and they chose liberal.
Romney-Obama Debate Roundup Part 2
Thursday, October 4th, 2012More Romney-Obama debate reactions:
The Washington Post Discovers Ted Cruz
Friday, June 17th, 2011Washington Post writer Aaron Blake pays serious attention to Ted Cruz, and his role as Tea Party favorite. It’s a decent write-up for an out-of-state MSM outlet playing catch-up, but there are several statements about which I have at least some minor quibbles.
For example, take this sentence
That’s because he’s emerging as a potential top-tier candidate in the Lone Star state race, posing a real tea party threat to better-funded candidates in what should be one of the most expensive primary races in the country.
There’s two things wrong with that sentence:
- Cruz isn’t “a potential top-tier candidate,” he’s arguably already the frontrunner.
- Saying that he’s “posing a real tea party threat to better-funded candidates” suggests that there are, in fact, better-funded candidates. Leppert only has more money on hand thanks to a $1.6 million loan (discounting loans, in Q1 Leppert pulled in slightly over $1 million, and Cruz pulled in slightly under $1 million), and even then the rest of Leppert’s fundraising relied heavily on max contributions from a limited number of Dallas-area donors. So Cruz is about as well-funded as anyone in the race right now. (Would Lt. Governor David Dewhurst change that if he jumped into the race? If he really wanted to commit a substantial portion of his personal fortune (consistently rumored, without verifiable attribution, to be around $200 million), yes it would.)
Likewise his suggestion that Leppert is one of the “big boys” (outside of Dallas, his profile is no bigger than Cruz’s) seems misguided.
Then there’s this:
Dewhurst is the prohibitive favorite if he gets in, and Leppert has made a big splash early with his fundraising. But many conservatives aren’t waiting for Dewhurst—choosing instead to rally around Cruz.
I think “prohibitive favorite” overstates the case a bit (I would use “formidable”), but the idea that conservatives have ever “waited” on Dewhurst is off-base.
As so many other Republican politicians do, Dewhurst occupies that vast gray area between a RINO (think Arlen Specter before he went The Full Benedict) and a real movement conservative. The phrase “a self-described ‘George Bush Republican'” appears, unsourced, in his Wikipedia entry (and thus is automatically suspect), and sums up the feelings of many conservatives towards Dewhurst. He ran as a conservative, and mostly governed as a conservative, but every now and then he would go off on Big Government tangents that would infuriate proponents of limited government. Despite this, outside the state, Dewhurst is regarded as something of an “arch-conservative” for shepherding through the (constitutionally-required) 2003 redistricting.
I wouldn’t go so far as to compare him to Charlie Crist (as some have), but there’s been real dissatisfaction with Dewhurst among movement conservatives, and it came to the fore with this year’s legislative sessions, where, despite having controlling majorities in both House and Senate, conservative Republicans found their agenda being thwarted in many ways great and small by Dewhurst in the Senate and Speaker Joe Straus in the House. Hence state senator (and possible U.S. Senate candidate) Dan Patrick’s lashing out at Dewhurst for thwarting his anti-TSA goping bill. Dewhurst managed to get the big things done (i.e., getting a budget passed without a tax hike), but there’s a sense among conservatives that he could have gotten a lot more conservative bills passed if he really wanted to, and that he “left money on the table” in the game of legislative poker by compromising when he didn’t have to
So it’s not at all surprising that Dewhurst is viewed as a stanch conservative when viewed from inside the Beltway; by Washington, D.C. standards he is. But there’s a widespread sense among Texas conservatives that they should be able to elect a full-bore movement conservative to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison, and that David Dewhurst isn’t that guy. There was a good deal of debate over whether Ted Cruz or Michael Williams was the preferred choice; with Williams getting out of the race to run for a House seat, the issue has been resolved in Cruz’s favor, as indicated by his impressive array of endorsements.
Still, those quibbles aside, the WaPo piece is a pretty solid look at Cruz, and is well worth reading for those following the Texas Senate Race.
(In the future, Brooks might want to run this sort of piece by Jennifer Rubin, who has a lot better grasp of the nuances of conservative politics than most MSM observers.)
Dwight Goes to Town Fisking Those WaPo Gun Pieces
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010I’ve already put in my two cents worth on the first installment of that Washington Post series on guns used in area crimes and the gun shops where they were originally bought.
But Dwight Brown at Whipped Cream Difficulties digs into the issue like a dachshund pursuing a badger, fisking each piece for a host of questionable assertions, gaps, omissions, and unasked questions. Not once, but twice, with more promised. But would you expect any less of a man with a “FRONT TOWARD ENEMY” t-shirt?
His pimp hand is strong.
If you’re interested in the issue at all, you should give it a read.
Edited to add: And here’s part 3.
Washington Post Gun Article Followup
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010Yesterday I mentioned what I thought was the largest problem in that David S. Fallis Washington Post article on Realco: The failure to mention that the shop is the one nearest the District of Columbia and located in an overwhelmingly black (and high crime) area.
However, reading through that article, I couldn’t help be struck by all the other information Fallis and the Post seemed uninterested in pursuing because they thought of this as a gun story rather than a crime story. Instead of spending all that time pouring through 35,000 gun traces, they could have taken the same 18-year period they traced 86 guns (i.e. roughly 4.8 guns a year involved in homicide) back to Realco, and looked at all (by my count) 4,911 homicides in the District of Columbia. They could have looked at each convicted offender (certainly less than the 4,911 number) and tried to find out:
- Which had already committed felonies
- Which already had a warrant out for their arrest at the time they murdered someone
- Which were on probation at the time they murdered someone
- What level of education they had obtained before committing their crime (how many were high school dropouts)
- Which came from single-parent homes
- Which came from homes where the primary source of income was government welfare
- How many were involved in the illegal drug trade
- The race of the murderer
- The race of the victim
- Sex of the murderer (almost certainly overwhelmingly male)
- Sex of the victim (ditto, though I suspect less overwhelmingly)
- If the murderer already knew their victim
- Etc.
A comprehensive look at all those variables would have provided a valuable, multifaceted look at inner city crime in the DC area, and could have generated real insights into the problems and possible solutions to them.
Sadly, I suspect such a project would have seemed far less sexy to Washington Post editors than yet another “Guns are bad, mmmkay?” article to pander to their core liberal readership.
How the Washington Post Lies About Guns And Crime Through Omission
Monday, October 25th, 2010Like many liberal publications, the Washington Post has a long history of promoting gun control. Today they published a lengthy, reasonably well researched article by David S. Fallis asserting that Realco, a gun shop in Forestville, Maryland, sold more “crime guns” (i.e., guns used in crimes) than any other dealer.
The relevant paragraphs:
86 guns sold by Realco [have] been linked to homicide cases during the past 18 years, far outstripping the total from any other store in the region, a Washington Post investigation has found. Over that period, police have recovered more than 2,500 guns sold by the shop, including over 300 used in non-fatal shootings, assaults and robberies.
In Maryland, Realco towers over the other 350 handgun dealers in the state as a source of guns confiscated in the District and Prince George’s County, the most violent jurisdictions in the area. Nearly one out of three guns The Post traced to Maryland dealers came from Realco. The rest were spread among other shops across the state.
Let us for the moment take these figures at face value. However, to my mind the biggest and most obvious problem with the story wasn’t what was in it, but what was missing, the elephant in the room Mr. Fellis failed to mention even once: race.
Not once do the words “African American” appear in the article, nor does the word “black” appear in reference to race.
But it is well know to anyone with even passing familiarity with Washington, D.C. that the whites in the District live overwhelmingly in the northwest “white pipeline” that runs from roughly Capitol Hill all the way up through Georgetown to the Virginia border, while blacks predominate in the rest of the city, but especially in the southeast.
Take a look at this map depicting the ethnic demography of the Washington, DC area created by Eric Fischer:
In Fisher’s map, white people are red dots, black people are blue, Hispanics are orange, and Asians are green.
Now take a look at Realco’s location in comparison to Washington DC:
Realco is not only the closest gun shop to D.C., it is smack dab in the middle of the most overwhelmingly black neighborhood in the greater D.C. area. Also, if I’m reading this map correctly, no less than three Metro bus lines (J11, J12, and J13) run right past the store at 6108 Marlboro Pike.
The reason this matters is that blacks in the United States commit a disproportionate share of violent crimes compared to the total population. Look at Table 43 of the FBI’s U.S. crime statistics for 2009. 49.3% of those arrested for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter were black, despite blacks making up only 12.4% of the U.S. population. (The reasons black crime rates are so high is are a source of endless debate (see nature vs. nurture, just for starters) and beyond the scope of this essay.)
So all other things being equal, Realco being the source of so many guns eventually used in crime makes sense, since it is the nearest gun store to the district, as well as the gun store situated most closely to a demographic group that suffers from demonstrably higher levels of violent crime than other demographic groups. Thus Occam’s Razor suggests that we look no further than the obvious for the real facts surrounding Realco.
It’s a pity David S. Fallis didn’t feel the need to share this most basic demographic context for crime with his readers.
I have to go off and walk my dog, but I’ll probably post another piece on this subject tomorrow to touch on some angles I don’t have time to address just right now.
(And if anyone has a better source for comprehensive crime statistics broken down by race specifically for D.C. and Prince George’s County, I’d love to take a look at them.)
Edited to add: Here’s my followup to this piece.
Washington Post Editors Are So Afraid of Islamists…
Monday, October 11th, 2010That they’re refusing to run a cartoon that doesn’t show Mohammed.
Evidently the right for Muslims not to be offended now trumps all other considerations in the minds of the MSM.
See also:
News Flash: It’s a Bad Idea to Hire Liberals to Cover the Conservative Movement
Friday, June 25th, 2010Too bad it took The Washington Post so long to figure that out.
I’m also amazed that anyone, anywhere (even Dave Weigel) would think something they wrote on an email mailing list wouldn’t come back to haunt them. (Especially since emails from Journolist had already made it out into the wild.) Attention people: You have to assume than anything you email, post, or say in a public place is being recorded at all times. That’s simply the world we live in. Deal with it.