Libertarians

A movie dramatization of the Stanford prison experiment opened this weekend, but if you believe Andrew O’Hehir, that’s not the first time the 1971 psychological study has been restaged in some manner. O’Hehir asserted in a Saturday piece that over the past few decades, “the Republican Party has been the subject, willing or otherwise, of a version” of the Stanford experiment, with the result that…

Of all the media memes ever attempted, the one blaming Republicans for the fact that now-resigned Office of Personnel Management Director Katherine Aruchleta was confirmed is high on the list of the most ridiculous ever. A reasonably close runnerup is the idea that Congress failed "to adequately fund OPM." Matt Balan at NewsBusters covered CNN's ridiculous tweeted claim that "Republicans…

Salon has never met a political subject that they couldn’t twist into a race issue. That trend continued in their latest hit piece, this one on right-leaning libertarians. Author Conor Lynch suggested that libertarians owe their political positions to their desire to protect white male dominance.

CNN's Chris Cuomo pressed Pam Geller on Thursday's New Day over her leadership of "a group that does take shots at Islam on a regular basis." Cuomo underlined that "you can show the cartoon. People have the equal right to criticize your showing the cartoon as an overt provocation of a religion." He also wondered,  "Why go slight for slight with the Muslims?" The anchor later asserted, "It just…

Two U.S. Senators -- one Republican, the other a socialist who votes with the Democrats -- are outside candidates for president. Both were profiled in Monday's New York Times, but with quite different results. While Rand Paul's anti-surveillance crusade was caricatured as cynical "sloganeering," socialist Bernie Sanders' modest Iowa crowds (100 people instead of 50?) were hailed as a liberal…

Not the endorsement someone heading into the Republican primaries would normally want, but it's the one Rand Paul got.  On today's This Week [hosted by Jonathan Karl in the absence of Stephanopoulos], far-left Rep. Keith Ellison declared that on a variety of issues he is "proud to stand" with Rand Paul. Roll the video and watch Bill Kristol look on beningly as Ellison praises Paul.  Let's read…

Libertarian-leaning Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has announced for president, and the media is locked and loaded, with Jeremy Peters reporting that "Paul Gets the TV Spotlight and Turns It on Interviewers in Testy Encounters." Peters, who recently used the vaccine issue to smear conservatives as opposed to "modern science" on the Times' front page, made it clear that going after his…

A Sunday Associated Press item carried at its national news site informs readers that the town of Westminster in north central Massachusetts is seriously considering a ban on tobacco products. The Boston Globe covered the story in a lengthy report on October 28, and the Washington Post carried a brief item at its GovBeat blog that same day. None of those three items addressed an obvious question…

On Monday's Morning Joe, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough prompted hippie icon Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills, and Nash fame to promote his new song about the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Nash wildly contended that "what happened with...almost, the execution of Michael Brown, we had to say something." He also took a shot at a regular boogeyman for MSNBC: the Koch brothers.

D.R. Tucker alleges that Christie’s opposition to cap-and-trade shows he’s a "slave" of the Koch brothers and “no longer a man in any real sense of the word.” What set Tucker off was Christie’s opposition to New Jersey’s rejoining a regional cap-and-trade program, supposedly because Christie doesn’t want to displease righty anti-cap-and-trade groups such as the Koch-backed Americans for…

As regular readers of NewsBusters are well aware, the Washington Post's Style section has a habit of frequently ginning up puffy human-interest stories about all kinds of liberal politicians and celebrities. It's rare that they do a positive profile of a conservative or libertarian. So it's worth pointing out when they do just that. In a 26-paragraph profile, Post staff writer Megan McDonough…

In one fell swoop, Howard Dean has managed to expose his ignorance of libertarianism while making a stale and insulting joke about New Jerseyites. Discussing on today's Morning Joe the dust-up between Rand Paul and Chris Christie and the broader issue of the philosophical rifts within the GOP, Dean declared that "Rand Paul is not a libertarian" because he is pro-life.  Dean is apparently…

Pretty much all you need to know about the current negligent media culture in Washington is summed up in two items involving the Politico's home page this morning -- one which is there, and one which isn't. The featured story at top of the home page by Byron Tau is about infighting between "Big Marijuana" -- it seems like "Big Pot" would be a more succinct nickname -- and those who want to…

On Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR's Rachel Martin helped Daily Beast editor Reza Aslan promote his new biography of Jesus, who posited that there is a "chasm between the historical Jesus and the Jesus...taught about in church." As proof of this supposed gap, Aslan claimed that "there is actually no statement of messianic identity from Jesus" in the Gospel of Mark. Aslan has it wrong. Jesus…