SandBoxBlogs: Right Scoop "Israeli ambassador reprimands New York Times: Netanyahu does not interfere in U.S. elections"

Barak Ravid:
"The duel between the New York Times and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisers continues. Israeli ambassador to Washington Michael Oren submitted a letter to the editor to the New York Times' editorial board, with a complaint regarding an article which was published several days ago about the close ties between Netanyahu and the likely Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

In the letter, which was published on Thursday, Oren rejected the allegations that Netanyahu is intervening in the presidential race in the United States....."  (Read more?  Click title)

"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."

SandBoxBlogs: Town Hall "President Obama Accuses Bill Clinton of “Thinly Veiled Social Darwinism”"

Daniel J. Mitchell:
"....But the proposal from the House Budget Committee Chairman only reduces the burden of federal spending to 20.25 percent of GDP by the year 2023.

Yet when Bill Clinton left office in 2001, following several years of spending restraint, the federal government was consuming 18.2 percent of economic output.

And by the President’s reasoning, this must make Clinton something worse than a Darwinist. Perhaps Marquis de Sade or Hannibal Lecter.

Here’s a blurb from the New York Times on Obama’s speech.

Mr. Obama’s attack, in a speech during a lunch with editors and reporters from The Associated Press, was part of a broader indictment of the Republican economic blueprint for the nation. The Republican budget, and the philosophy it represents, he said in remarks prepared for delivery, is “antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everyone who’s willing to work for it.” …“Disguised as a deficit reduction plan, it’s really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It’s nothing but thinly veiled social Darwinism,” Mr. Obama said. “By gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last — education and training, research and development — it’s a prescription for decline.”

I’m particularly amused by the President’s demagoguery that Ryan’s plan is “antithetical to our entire history” and “a radical vision.”...."  (Read more?  Click title)

"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."

SandBox Comments: Commentary Magazine "Contentions "NYTimes: War, Again?" "

Seth Mandel:
"The New York Times has a “news analysis”–usually code for “front-page, signed editorial”–lamenting the American public’s appetite for countering the Iranian regime’s attempts to build nuclear weapons. The conceit of the story is that this is a rerun of the war in Iraq, where the supposed existence of a nuclear weapons program spurred the West to form a coalition to depose Saddam Hussein.

“Echoes of the period leading up to the Iraq war in 2003 are unmistakable,” Scott Shane tells us, “igniting a familiar debate over whether journalists are overstating Iran’s progress toward a bomb.” And who is debating the veracity of reporters’ accounts? “Both the ombudsman of the Washington Post and the public editor of the New York Times in his online blog have scolded their newspapers since December for overstating the current evidence against Iran in particular headlines and stories.” So it is the New York Times accusing the New York Times of beating the drums of war. Let’s take a look at some of the other parallels.

“The intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, which was one of the Bush administration’s main rationales for the invasion, proved to be devastatingly wrong,” Shane writes. Not just wrong, but devastatingly wrong. I’ll leave it to others to check the Times style guide for the spectrum of wrongness, but “devastatingly wrong” must be among the wrongest you can be, in the Times’s opinion....

....In any event, the intelligence on Iran isn’t all that murky. What the Times is saying is that even when we can all agree on what the intelligence shows, we can’t trust it, because of Iraq. The Times is actually building a case here against military action even if Iran is about to achieve nuclear capability. As the article notes, however, that’s a view shared by some academics from Harvard and Columbia, but opposed by a majority of Americans...."
(Read more? Click title)


"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."

SandBox Comments: Red State "The Competitive Disadvantage of Principle "

Erick Erickson:
"If you have not read it, this is a fascinating article in the New York Times. The crux of the article is the title — even critics of the safety net increasingly depend on it.

The article profiles a number of people who take advantage of the federal social safety net and are increasingly resentful of it. The solutions on fixing it vary. The angry, for some, may or may not be misplaced. The article reads as a Rorschach test on your ideology — liberals will read it and find the people hypocritical. Conservatives will read it and find it all maddening.

The key paragraphs of the whole article comes toward the beginning:

"The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement. The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis published last year.

And as more middle-class families … land in the safety net …, anger at the government has increased alongside. Many people say they are angry because the government is wasting money and giving money to people who do not deserve it. But more than that, they say they want to reduce the role of government in their own lives. They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it. They say they want less help for themselves; less help in caring for relatives; less assistance when they reach old age. [Emphasis added]"

In other words, the United States is increasingly taxing the middle class to subsidize the middle class. All the talk about the poor and what the safety net is designed to do for the poor overlooks that the government has taken it upon itself to keep the middle class from falling into the poorer classes of society....."
(Read more?  Click title)

"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."

SandBox Comments: New York Times "A Florida Bush Stays Silent, and to Many, That Says a Lot"

Jeff Zeleny: 

"MIAMI — A steady stream of endorsements has been flowing to Mitt Romney, with his campaign promoting Republicans who are giving their blessing to his presidential candidacy. Yet on the eve of the Florida primary, he has been unable to land the biggest catch of all: Jeb Bush.

An unspoken question hovering over the Republican presidential race here is why Mr. Bush, the state’s popular former governor and heir to the nation’s aging political dynasty, has not added his voice to the party establishment’s support for Mr. Romney in his increasingly bitter duel with Newt Gingrich...."  (Click title to read more)

"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."