Category: Current Events

Wednesday, the Senate rejected several attempts at gun control, including expanded background checks, which received a majority 54 votes but not the 60 it needed to advance. The outrage from gun control advocates was swift. “This was a pretty shameful day for Washington,” said President Obama. “Shame on them,” said Gabrielle Giffords. Even the generally calm left-leaning economist Justin Wolfers got a little worked up: “How many kids have to be slain before Congress finally tries to prevent monsters from getting their hands on guns?(Apparently more than 20)”

Continue reading On Background Checks and Emotional Appeals

Conservatives are outraged at the lack of media coverage of Kermit Gosnell, the “doctor” who performed illegal, unsanitary, dangerous late-term abortions in Pennsylvania, using scissors to snip the necks of babies delivered alive – and that’s just the tip of the horrors to be found there. Most of you, like myself, probably only found about it this week, thanks mostly to Thursday’s scathing USAToday editorial by Kirsten Powers.

Of course, there are crazy conspiracists who talk of a deliberate “media blackout” to prevent discussing a story that makes abortion look bad. I tend to agree with Dave Weigel’s more natural explanation: “members of the MSM [mainstream media] are generally socially liberal, and less likely to notice/devote attention to a story about a rogue abortionist.” Pro-lifers like me tend to ignore stories of abortion clinic bombers; pro-choicers tend to ignore stories about abortionists killing patients with disease-ridden instruments.

But even that’s not good enough for the guardians of the mainstream media, who are shocked – shocked – to hear serious accusations that it might even be possible for there to be any sort of bias in their glorious reporting. After all, conservatives are always complaining about Liberal Media Bias, which often just means the non-Fox-News media isn’t reporting things exactly the way they want. Yet sometimes the bias is so totally obvious, so completely indefensible that the media’s desperate attempts to cover themselves just makes it all look even worse.

Continue reading The Totally Obvious, Completely Indefensible Media Bias In The Gosnell Murder Trial

Megan McArdle reports on a new study about red meat:

Continue reading Calculating Knowledge About Red Meat and Fat People

Many conservatives have long derided electric cars as an inefficient “green scheme” that doesn’t even help save a planet they don’t think needs saving anyway. But electric cars are getting better, and some conservatives are still trying to use the same old arguments against them.

The Wall Street Journal carries a recent hatchet job by Bjorn Lomborg, who cherry-picks from a study to make electric cars seem less green than they are:

Continue reading Why Do Conservatives Still Hate On Electric Cars?