Los Angeles Times

Last week, film writer extraordinaire Christian Toto fell under the delusion that yours truly was interesting enough to interview, and if you're under the same delusion you can read the two-parter here and here. Among other things, Toto asked me about the clout critics wield and the most common mistakes they make. Here's a combination of my answers:Critics aren't dumb, they know the public doesn'…

This is a historic year for the largest government program: Social Security, which turns 75 in just a few days. The program is also running a deficit for the first time since 1983, and ahead of estimates. Initially, Social Security was created to provide supplemental income to elderly and disabled people who could not work, and was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt Aug.…

What follows was eminently predictable, but noting it is nonetheless necessary. Shirley Sherrod, and to a lesser extent her husband Charles, were media celebrities for a while in late July. Readers might have noticed their near absence from establishment media news reports during the past seven days. It would be easy to think that this has occurred because the story played itself out, with…

Wouldn't you say that an important part of any election story would be the numbers involved, especially in the case of landslides? Perhaps someone should give a heads up on this to Los Angeles Times writer Noam N. Levey of the Times' Tribune Washington bureau. Although he does report that Missouri voters, whom he labels as "Republican voters," voted to approve Proposition C yesterday which…

In nine short paragraphs, Los Angeles Times staffer Nicholas Riccardi offered readers a slanted look at how "Immigration demonstrations kick[ed] off in Arizona" yesterday, when the state's new anti-illegal immigration law went into effect [except for the portions ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge]. Reporting from Phoenix, Riccardi jumped straight away into loaded language (emphasis mine):…

Fox Business is reporting that the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill that President Obama signed recently includes a provision that exempts the Securities and Exchange Commission from responding to Freedom of Information Act requests. Fox wrote: The law, signed last week by President Obama, exempts the SEC from disclosing records or information derived from "surveillance, risk assessments, or…

This is almost too obvious. Many readers may already be familiar with recent exposure of the treasury plunderers disguised as public officials serving up hefty salaries to themselves while allegedly serving their constituents in the LA suburb of Bell, California. Here's some of the latest from the Associated Press, carried at the Los Angeles Times, which broke the original story, for those who…

If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, liberal Hollywood directors must be utterly certifiable. How else does one explain Hollywood's penchant for de-Americanizing thoroughly patriotic superhero and/or comic book icons? Take Joe Johnston. The cinematic genius who gave the world "Jurassic Park 3" is directing a "Captain America"…

The Los Angeles Times on Thursday published a blockbuster report concerning California welfare recipients using state-issued debit cards at casino ATMs to be able to instantly gamble with taxpayer dollars."The cards, provided by the Department of Social Services to help recipients feed and clothe their families, work in automated teller machines at 32 of 58 tribal casinos and 47 of 90 state-…

“8: The Mormon Proposition,” is a documentary detailing the large role the Mormon Church played in passing California’s Proposition 8 in 2008.That ballot initiative added an amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman. While the media has naturally been praising the documentary, the movie is so biased that even some reviewers couldn’t avoid…

Yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute's Enterprise Blog, Steven Hayward had a great post about the history of electric cars, and the press's unrequited love affair with electric vehicles (picture at right is of the $108,000 2010 Zedomax). Yum. But first I'll start with a bit of my own research. On May 7, 1994, Paul Feldman at the Los Angeles Times led with the following two paragraphs…

The Los Angeles Times gave free press to artists who are against the Arizona immigration law on June 2. In “Arizona Law Spurs Backlash Among Artists,” author Reed Johnson documented what lefty artists are doing to help overturn the law, without presenting a single quote dissenting from the liberal artists’ positions.Johnson inaccurately characterized the public as “deeply deeply divided over the…

The movie "Prince of Persia" hit theaters this week.  And although it's based on a decades-old video game and set in the sixth century, reviewers across the nation have identified a very contemporary link: The Tea Party.McClatchy Newspapers's Connie Ogle writes that Alfred Molina, in the role of Amar, "plays a sort of cross between Han Solo with dental-hygiene issues and a Tea Party supporter." …

In his column in the Los Angeles Times, Jonah Goldberg covered a free-speech front that our politically correct news media do not want to touch: when "free expression" supporting a new Holocaust of the Jews in Israel is granted respect on campus. Goldberg was shocked by how one campus circled the wagons when David Horowitz spoke at an event on May 10 sponsored by Young Americans for Freedom:…