New york times

Recently, money was extracted from the taxpayers at gunpoint to create a PBS puff piece about Nancy Pelosi. Called "Pelosi's Power," the documentary is more or less what you'd expect: Pelosi comes off as a strong if sphinxlike figure surrounded by idiot men who can't seem to stop slipping on banana peels and starting riots. Her infamous 2009 lies about waterboarding, her bizarre slandering of her own hair stylist — all of it gets overlooked in favor of the usual "you go, girl!" narrative reductionism. Yet there is one thing about the piece that holds up well: its title. Whatever else can be said about Nancy Pelosi, she knows how to wield power. And little wonder, given that she grew up in Baltimore's Little Italy neighborhood where her father was a political broker.

Authorities have finally done something about the aggressive, rabid critters that lurk around our nation’s capital and slink from their dens on the Hill to assault honest people for no good reason. Cockburn has encountered all sorts of such creatures on various Capitol Hill pub crawls, but the type the police just decided to address was neither a blundering elephant nor an indignant jackass. Neither was it a Blue Dog, one of those endangered porcupines that rarely appear in the Swamp, nor even a squawking chicken hawk. It was a red fox. A cute little lady fox with a majestically bushy tail, black-tipped ears and feet, white markings on her chest and muzzle, and shining black eyes. People first started posting images of the fox on Monday.

Take Cockburn's hand and let him whisk you back to the halcyon days of fall 2020. The presidential campaign was in full swing and the New York Post had just gotten its hands on a scoop: Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, had left his laptop at a repair shop in Delaware. On its hard drive was a treasure trove of damning emails and pictures, including one that appeared to show Hunter passed out in bed with a crack pipe in his mouth. The Post published its story, the Biden campaign yelped, and the establishment duly lost its mind. The Post's Twitter account was suspended. And perhaps most damningly, fifty-one intelligence "experts" signed a letter warning that the laptop story could be Russian disinformation.

While President Trump was in office, White House staff periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet and came to believe the president had personally flushed documents. So reports the New York Times' Maggie Haberman, based on anonymous sources. Why should a literate media consumer think the story is garbage? Read it like an intelligence officer. Start by applying some of the same tests intelligence officers do to help them evaluate their own sources. Thinking backwards from the information to who could be the source is a good start when evaluating credibility. For example, is a source in a position to know what they say they know, what intelligence officers call spotting?

The die against conservatives opposed to the Iraq war was cast by David Frum in a now-infamous essay for National Review back in 2003. Not only were the right's antiwar sorts unpatriotic, Frum charged, they were defeatist and conspiratorialist appeasers. “They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe,” he wrote. As one can imagine, this made it quite difficult for this small but active faction of the conservative movement (which included the American Conservative magazine and libertarians like Texas Congressman Ron Paul) to penetrate the mainstream, or build trust with their compatriots across the aisle.

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin is taking the New York Times Company (NYT) to trial in February for alleged defamation. Palin, according to her lawsuit, filed suit in order “to hold…NYT accountable for defaming her by falsely asserting what they knew to be false: that Governor Palin was clearly and directly responsible for inciting a mass shooting at a political event in January 2011.” Palin is alleging that NYT “falsely stated as a matter of fact to millions of people that Gov. Palin incited Jared Loughner’s January 8, 2011, mass shooting at a political event in Tucson, Arizona, during which he shot thirteen people, severely wounding United States congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and killing six others.

Lies come in all shapes and sizes, colors, odors, textures and tastes. Some are only little white lies, but more often the accompanying adjective suggests something unpleasant. Damnable lies used to be the most condemned, but today the foulest of all perfidious, incarnadine, silken and sulfurous lies are Big Lies. Thus when New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wants to reassure progressive voters that they can ignore the story about a ninth-grade girl who was raped (i.e. forcibly sodomized) in a girl’s restroom in a Loudoun County, Virginia school, she serves up her diversion under the title “The Right’s Big Lie About a Sexual Assault in Virginia.

The long-serving New York Times opinion writer Nick Kristof apparently now wants to be governor of Oregon. The 62-year-old media superstar seems to be a rather changeable sort of chap. It might almost seem he’s one of the many New York-area residents to have had their identities stolen. Perhaps it was an old platinum credit card, carelessly tossed in a Midtown trash can, which allowed the criminals to strike, or perhaps the purchase over the phone of a first-class air ticket to one of the exotic locales his business frequently takes him. Whatever it was, it’s difficult to reconcile the superbly cerebral, crusading double Pulitzer Prize-winner and regular CNN contributor with the self-styled ‘Oregon farmboy’ with his finger firmly on the Beaver State’s troubled pulse.

One of my favorite pastimes is reading those alternate-lifestyle essays that the left-wing media loves to publish unironically. You know the sort: Why I quit my job at a high-powered social media firm to become a minimum-wage pansexual. Or: How my open relationship with three maple trees and a rhinoceros helped me find inner peace. The august New York Times rarely indulges such deviancy, if only because the cardinal rule of that paper's op-ed page is to never let down one's guard lest one accidentally say something interesting. Yet recently the Times did make a modest exception. Last week it ran an essay by Lara Bazelon titled 'Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love’.

'Can We Drop a Dog Walker for Her Political Opinions?' asks a letter-writer to this week’s edition of the New York Times’s ethicist column. The writer laments that they have hired a 'reliable, responsible, and kind' person to walk the family dog. The problem? Beneath the visage of humanity, the dog walker is actually a monstrous Trump voter. Rather than stop and ponder the implications of a Trump voter being, in fact, a rather decent human being, the writer gets right to the meat of the matter: Should they fire the dog walker immediately? Kwame Anthony Appiah, the NYT’s ethicist, was relatively measured in his response. 'A manager who penalizes a regular employee for her political views is exercising workplace tyranny,' Kwame writes.