On Sunday, Washington Post sports columnist Mike Wise protested the long-standing Baltimore Oriole fan habit of yelling “Oh!” for Orioles at the end of the National Anthem (at “OH say does that star-spangled banner yet wave….).

Wise is not a fan. He argued persuasively that the anthem is meant to unite Americans, not divide them among sports teams. But the ending was a bit harsh, with Wise suggesting he’d like to set the offending Oriole fans…on fire?

Now, I would not go as far the person who tweeted, “idiots who yell ‘O’ during the National Anthem should be beat about the head & neck with a crab cake.”

No, I would like to set them all afire and then put the flames out with golf shoes. At least then they would have a bona fide reason to yell, “OH!”

The mockery had a lighter tone earlier in the piece, when wishing "famine and pestilence" on them seemed tongue in cheek. But the ending lost the humor and just seemed drowned in ill will. Here's the meaty part that came before the ending:

Orioles fans are not alone in their desecration of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” of course. Many of their tainted gene pool have migrated to Verizon Center for Capitals games. Some of these louts actually yell “OH!” and “RED!” at different intervals — twice ruining the anthem. Their spawn can be found in Houston, too, where a small group called “The Red Rowdies” holler “ROCK-ETS RED GLARE!” during Rockets NBA games. And they wonder why Tracy McGrady never won a playoff series.

Here’s wishing famine and pestilence comes to all their tailgates.

Allow me one serious, high-horse moment: Look, you’re not unpatriotic if you yell “OH!” It doesn’t make you an awful American. But by claiming the lyrics, if only for a moment, you fundamentally undermine the idea that the song was written to unite instead of divide. A national anthemis a national anthem, not a convenient vehicle for one’s immense pride in his or her team.

On a communal level, it’s as annoying as Carl Lewis and Roseanne Barr botching the anthem badly or someone who gesticulates for effect and carries several notes of the song into the top of the eighth, like one of those apple-cheeked, irritating “Glee” kids. It’s making the song about you, not for who it’s supposed to be about: us.

Every time I hear “OH!” it makes me want to finagle my way into Camden Yards and pull a karaoke moment, in which every other word of the banner I yell, “SAY!” “SEE!” “DAWN’S!” “STAR!” “LIGHT!” — until [legendary Orioles pictcher] Jim Palmer comes down from the broadcast booth and beans me.

That's funny, and Wise should have ended right there.

Somehow, The Washington Post always picks Sundays for articles on how God makes mistakes. Screaming at the top of Sunday’s paper was a picture of a little girl getting her head buzzed with the headline “TRANSGENDER AT FIVE,” and “She first declared she was a boy when she was 2 years old. Her parents brushed it off by slowly concluded this wasn’t just a phase." This wasn't news. It was propaganda, and if you don't like it, they dare you to cancel your subscription.

The article, by liberal Post columnist (and former reporter) Petula Dvorak, naturally referred to how everyone has grown to know “transgenders” from Chaz Bono on “Dancing with the Stars.” It also repeatedly rejected scientific fact in referring to this troubled girl in male terms like “he” and “his” – including the “instructional” video the Post put online.

This sentence was especially odd and emblematic: “But in about five years, they will have to decide whether to put Tyler on puberty blockers to keep his body from maturing and menstruating.”

Dvorak began:

She began to argue vehemently — as only a tantrum-prone toddler can — that she was not a girl.

“I am a boy,” the child insisted, at just 2 years old.

And that made Jean uneasy. It was weird.

“I am a boy” became a constant theme in struggles over clothing, bathing, swimming, eating, playing, breathing.

Jean and Stephen gave up trying to force Kathryn to wear the frilly dresses that Grandma kept sending. Kathryn wanted nothing to do with her big sister Moyin’s glittery, sparkly pink approach to the world.

Dvorak then explained that Moyin attended school with her son, which is how she came to know this family, and then publicize them on the front page of the Sunday Washington Post – but hiding them behind a cloak of relative anonymity (using their middle names) “to protect their identity beyond their community”– since the world isn’t pro-transgender enough yet.

See? You’re a girl. You have girl parts,” Jean told her big-eyed daughter. “You’ve always been a girl.”

Kathryn looked up at her mom, incomprehension clouding her round face.

“When did you change me?” the child asked.

Clearly, this is a disorder. But the Post explained that the therapists are now organizing to remove the term “disorder” and replace it with “gender incongruence.” This was the first sentence after the jump off the front page, and the propaganda really kicked in:

Was something wrong with Kathryn?

Her little girl’s brain was different. Jean could tell. She had heard about transgender people, those who are one gender physically but the other gender mentally. Who hadn’t caught the transgendered Chaz Bono drama on “Dancing With the Stars”?

“But this young? In kids?” Jean wondered. She had grown up in a traditional family in the Midwest, with a mother who’d gone to medical school after having children. Jean considered herself open-minded, but this was clearly outside her realm of experience.

She went online to see if a book about transgender kids even existed. It did — “The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals.” Its summary read: “What do you do when your toddler daughter’s first sentence is that she’s a boy? What will happen when your preschool son insists on wearing a dress to school? Is this ever just a phase? How can you explain this to your neighbors and family?”

Bingo.

The specialists quoted were all supportive – and so was the Presbyterian church they attend. The “haters” come late in the story, and are painted as thuggish for not understanding the new societal trend. How dare they make the girl wear a leotard! The Post compares it to….a peanut allergy. This is really a very long editorial badly disguised as a news story. If you disagree with the "trans" trend, then you're compared to thugs:

Parents who ignore or deny these problems can make life miserable for their kids, who can become depressed or suicidal, psychiatrists say. Outside their homes, the transgendered are frequently marginalized and scorned, pushed into an underworld, outside of the mainstream. More often than the rest of the population, transgender teens and adults are harassed, assaulted and even killed. Remember that beating caught on video at a Baltimore County McDonald’s last year? Or the off-duty D.C. police officer who was accused of standing on the hood of a car and shooting a transgendered woman through the windshield?

The Washington Post can't allow this subject to be a debate. It has to be all told from the standpoint of "protective" parents who insist the whole society has to adopt this "disorder" as their own.

Rock legend Mick Jagger waded into presidential politics on NBC's Saturday Night Live this weekend singing a piece called "Tea Party."

The only candidate specifically mentioned by Jagger was Mitt Romney who he warned viewers, "Don't ever let him cut your hair" (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary, vulgarity warning):

Jagger introduced the song by telling the audience, "My roots are in blues music. I love the blues because in any era the blues talk about what’s on people’s minds. So here’s a blues that I wrote about the presidential election.”

With the legendary guitarist Jeff Beck assisting him, Jagger crooned, "If you want to sleep in the West Wing, yeah you got to strategize a bit. Yeah you want to sleep in the West Wing, you wanna keep that private boat and alley, you got to strategize a bit. Yeah you’re gonna have to raise about 100 million dollars, or you’re gonna end up so deep down in the s–t.”

The censors clearly missed that little vulgarity there.

Jagger continued, "Yeah, Mr. Romney, you know, he's a mensch, but he always plays it straight and fair. Yeah, Mr. Romney, he's a hard workin' man, and he always says his prayers. Yeah, but there's one little thing about him, don't ever let him cut your hair."

For those missing it, this was an obvious reference to the Washington Post's pathetic hit piece about Romney allegedly cutting the hair of a student when he was in prep school.

Pretty sad when bogus propaganda makes its way into pop music.

You really can't turn on the TV anymore without running into anti-conservative claptrap.

(HTs too numerous to mention, but thank you!)

Politico media reporter Dylan Byers is impatient with the media: “When will we talk about Mormonism?”

He means the negative stuff: “I’m talking about a national conversation about the Mormon faith, including its past practice of polygamy (which was renounced by the church in the 19th century) and its exclusion of African Americans from the priesthood (until 1978). That sort of thing.” Does he watch anything?

Byers touted CNN analyst (and major Obama suckup) Roland Martin said that if the GOP wanted to bring back the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy, they would be "putting Mormonism on the table… putting on the table how African Americans were treated by the Mormon religion." Byers did not note that Martin was an apologist for Rev. Wright right up until the point that he started embarrassing Obama in 2008. Incredibly, Roland's standard for Wright was he was fine when carefully edited by the liberal media, but a reckless, egotistical loose cannon to be captured live on C-SPAN (especially when he started babbling about AIDS being a racist government conspiracy).

This paragraph is a little sickening: 

Earlier this week, the Brookings Institution released a survey suggesting that Romney's faith may actually help his candidacy. Either way, the issue is bubbling up — slowly but surely. And as BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins — a Mormon — noted, the nation's Mormon education "will depend largely on the teachers: Namely, the news media."

If we know anything, we know the secular news media are quite terrible at teaching the fine points of theology. 

PS: Byers seems to be really impatient to start hurting Romney right in the favorable ratings. He also blogged enthusiastically about mocking Mitt Romney's 1983 Seamus-the dog-in-the-rooftop-kennel story.It was logged under "Photo of the day: Seamus art edition."

From the department of things Gail Collins wishes she had thought of, Seattle Channel's arts and culture reporter Nancy Guppy arrived at the Seattle International Film Festival's red carpet last night in a dog kennel on top of a car.

Three NATO protesters were in court Saturday facing terrorism charges for allegedly planning to bomb Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s house.

The Washington Post published an article about this Saturday and mysteriously waited until the third paragraph to inform readers the trio were Occupy activists:

As NATO protesters marched by the hundreds to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s house, three others were in court Saturday facing terrorism charges for allegedly planning to bomb the mayor’s residence, police stations and Obama’s campaign headquarters during the upcoming summit.

While the delegates from the treaty organization began to arrive and security tightened around the city for Sunday’s kickoff, three men who had been arrested in a raid Wednesday appeared before a Cook County judge, charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism, possession of an explosive device and providing material support for terrorism.

The men — Occupy activists Brian Church, 20, of Fort Lauderdale; Jared Chase, 24, of Keene, N.H.; and Brent Vincent Betterly, 24, of Oakland Park, Fla. — are being held on $1.5 million bond.

Prosecutors alleged they had made Molotov cocktails and had discussed using other weapons, including swords and knives.

Imagine for a moment these were Tea Party members facing terrorism charges.

Do you think the Post would have waited until the third paragraph to divulge their affiliation, or would that have not only been in the first sentence but also the headline?

Let's be honest. If these were Tea Party members, this would have led all the television newscasts, been addressed every hour on the hour by CNN and MSNBC, and would have been headlines in every newspaper in the country.

But because these are Occupy activists, not a chance.

I have to confess it's becoming harder and harder to be a media analyst these days.

What I witness on a daily basis from news outlets I used to admire sickens me to the point of violent nausea.

I continue to be amazed that this is happening in my beloved America, and that what I once revered as a "free press" are now totally in bed with forces they should be aggressively exposing rather than sheltering from scrutiny.

Potentially even worse, folks on the left who supposedly are for a "free press" are not only complicit, but have the gall to rage against news outlets reporting what they refuse to.

Does America even exist anymore?

(HT Tammy Bruce)

We all know that the radical left has no sense of humor, but does the Washington Post have to encourage them by devoting stories that legitimize their absurd petitions? The Saturday Post's Style front-page devoted 22 paragraphs to two Occupy D.C. protesters who ginned up a petition effort against, of all things, Fojol Brothers, a popular D.C. street food truck whose employees don turbans and wear fake mustaches as they serve up ethnic cuisine.

At time of the article's publication, the petition — which objected to an "Orientalist and racist appropriation of South Asian and East African cultures" — had a paltry 950-some signatures on Change.org, a left-wing petition site. What's more, Post staffer Tim Carman waited until paragraph 14 to disclose that petition author Arturo J. Viscarra's comrade-in-arms/roommate Drew Franklin "is the son of the Post’s Travel editor Zofia Smardz." 

For his part, the owner of the Fojol Brothers food truck expressed surprise at all the hullabaloo:

The charges of racism and cultural mockery have blindsided Fojol co-founder Justin Vitarello, who essentially pioneered the city’s modern food-truck movement when he rolled out his first Fojol Bros. vehicle during Barack Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009. The charges have impacted his young, ethnically diverse staff, says Vitarello, and they have proven a huge distraction as his ever-growing business gears up for the busy summer months on Washington’s streets.

“This is all just happening,” Vitarello says. “This is a proactive move to de-legitimize us. . . . We’re still trying to understand what the situation is.”

Vitarello may well be chagrined because as a business owner, he's doing his part to run a liberal city-friendly operation. As his company's website proudly notes, a cut of Fojol Bros. profits goes to support "at-risk youth programs" in the District and the company makes sure they use 100% recycled fiber napkins and "biodegradable & compostable" utensils and carry-out containers. 

But Vitarello is actually creating something of value that is enjoyed by his many customers. He's a capitalist who dares to make his money by taking ethnic dishes and selling them with flair out of a street truck for profit. Vitarello is a producer, a job creator, being hassled by a liberal paper amplifying an irrelevant petition from two disaffected Occupy D.C. veterans on a left-wing website.

It's a wonder why any entrepreneur worth his salt puts up with the hassle of opening a business in the District.

Despite winning three Pulitzer Prizes, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman bombed on Jeopardy! Friday.

By the end of the show, he had amassed a pitiful $1,000 placing him third behind CNN’s Anderson Cooper and NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Friedman must have been nervous for he missed his first two attempts.

With the category “21st Century Lingo,” the answer was, “In 2011, BusinessWeek said European government bonds were this ‘poisonous’ kind of debt.”

Friedman responded, “Sub-prime.” I guess he missed the clue in quotation marks “poisonous.”

The correct response of course was “toxic.”

In the same category moments later, the answer was, “It’s the ‘tiny’ term for a person who writes short posts about one’s personal life on Tumblr or Twitter.”

Once again, the word in quotations marks was the clue, and once again Friedman missed it.

“What is a tweeter?” he replied.

Of course, the answer was “micro-blogger.”

At the end of Double Jeopardy!, Cooper was in first with $15,600, Friedman in second with $8,400, and O’Donnell in third with $2,000.

The Final Jeopardy! category was Inventors, and the answer was, “The National Inventors Hall of Fame said his work ‘brought the south prosperity,’ but he was out of business within 5 years.”

Unfortunately, no one got the correct response of Eli Whitney, but as Friedman wagered $7,400, O’Donnell $500, and Cooper $1,201, the three time Pulitzer Prize winner came in last with only $1,000.

Nice job, Tom.

You want to see a perfect demonstration of almost unimaginable media hypocrisy?

On Friday, CBS Late Show host David Letterman mocked Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's wealth despite being worth $400 million (video follows with transcript and commentary, file photo):

DAVID LETTERMAN: I was talking to Mitt Romney earlier today, and he and his family got a big two day weekend planned. They’re going to hike to the top of his money.

Excuse me, but who the heck is Letterman to ridicule anyone for how much money they have?

According to our friends at Celebrity Net Worth, the Late Show host makes $50 million a year with an estate valued at $400 million.

As Forbes estimated Romney's net worth at $230 million Wednesday, Letterman's worth almost twice the target of his derision.

How's THAT for hypocrisy?

But Letterman wasn't done slamming the former Massachusetts governor:

LETTERMAN: When you're the nominee for a party, whether you're the incumbent or whether you're the opposition, like in Mitt Romney’s case, you have to always appear to be presidential. And I think that's what the first thing people look for is the man or woman presidential? So we've put together a segment for you that addresses that issue right on the money. It's called, "Mitt Romney: Thank You, Mr. President." See how this works.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MITT ROMNEY: I'm not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said whatever it was.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LETTERMAN: Thank you, Mr. President. Do we still have giggling Mitt Romney? Is giggling Mitt Romney with us? Do we still have it?

The same edited video Letterman aired Thursday of Romney laughing over and over again was played as the audience laughed.

I guess this is going to be a running gag now.

Anything to help the president he loves get reelected I guess.

"Sometimes you do wonder if [Republicans] are moles, Manchurian candidates for I don't know who, if their real job is to bring down America."

So said New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on MSNBC's Martin Bashir show Friday (video follows with transcript and commentary):

MARTIN BASHIR: What are your thoughts on Speaker Boehner announcing that he wants another fight over the debt ceiling? I mean, is this guy working to further undermine America’s standing given that the last time this happened America was downgraded?

PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES: Well there is this question a little bit. Sometimes you do wonder if these guys are moles, Manchurian candidates for I don't know who, if their real job is to bring down America because they're really are doing the best they can.

But no, this is a, look, this is the extremism of the current Republican Party. They've become a Party which is so determined to have its way that they never mind this usual business of the constitution or actually passing legislation.

"Never mind this usual business of the Constitution or actually passing legislation."

Krugman deceptively evades the fact that Democrats that control the Senate haven't proposed a budget since February 2009.

He also ignores that the President's own budget failed in the Senate last week 99 to zero actually not receiving one vote even from members of his own Party.

Much as last year, this entire debt ceiling debacle could be avoided if the President and his Party created a budget that they support.

At that point, they'd have tremendous leverage with the press behind them to possibly force enough Republicans to back it.

But because we're in an election year, they don't want to do that, and Krugman along with the rest of his colleagues rather than holding the White House and Democrats to account for their deplorable abdication of Constitutional responsibility blame it all on Republicans:

KRUGMAN: What they will do is threaten to destroy the economy unless they get what they want. And I think on this round President Obama finally has to say, "No. Look, you’re going to do blackmail, we're going to call your bluff. You’ve gotten an awful lot of money from the business community. You got an awful lot of money from Wall Street. These guys will be hurt even worse than the rest of us if the economy tanks because the U.S. government goes into a gratuitous default. Let's see them yank their chain."

But no, it’s incredible. This is, this economics, economics by hostage taking, and it’s not something that can be allowed to stand.

Hostage taking, indeed.

Sadly like many of the prisoners of war in the classic film "The Manchurian Candidate," Krugman doesn't know who the hostages or the captors are.

Color me very unsurprised.

(H/T Noah Rothman)

The Obama-loving media had quite a hissy fit this week when the President's America-hating Reverend Jeremiah Wright suddenly became a campaign issue despite all their efforts.

So opposed to the mere mention of Wright's name is NPR's Nina Totenberg that on PBS's Inside Washington Friday, she said he's irrelevant because the current White House resident – wait for it! – killed Osama bin Laden (video follows with transcript and commentary):

GORDON PETERSON, HOST: Why is Wright off limits?

NINA TOTENBERG, NPR: He’s not off limits, but why is he relevant anymore?

PETERSON: Oh, well okay. That’s another question.

TOTENBERG: Reverend Wright’s biggest sin was talking about 9/11 as if somehow, you know, the United States government was involved, and it was a reprehensible speech in many ways. But, you know, Barack Obama killed, ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden. How is this relevant?

Actually, I think Totenberg has a great point.

Maybe everything – the economy, the debt, gas prices, and Obama's entire record as president – is irrelevant because bin Laden's dead.

Let's cancel the upcoming elections, give Obama another four years, and call Democrats the victors in all races across the country because bin Laden's dead.

All those opposed say nay.

The nays have it despite every media member including Totenberg voting aye.