Ryan Reilly spent most of the day digging into Fox News’ national and local coverage of a purported investigation into the alleged terrorism ties of a wacky 46-year-old grandma in Indiana who converted to Islam and has a propensity for spouting anti-government rhetoric and friending suspected terrorists on Facebook. What Ryan found is best summed up by a spokesman for the Indiana State Police: “I think some of the information Fox reported was kind of taken out of context.”
“Ground Zero mosque” opponents launch boycott of Justin Bieber after falling for online satire in which “Bieber” comes out in favor of the mosque in an “interview” that reads in part:
Bieber went on to say that Muslims are “super cool,” Christians are “lame-o-rama,” and that the mosque will help “start a dialogue” with all religions about which Justin Bieber song is the most awesome.
Could have fooled anyone …
Rep. Michele Bachmann reveals what drove her to become a Republican: Gore Vidal.
While less senior Democratic senators are pushing for filibuster reform, Majority Leader Harry Reid is in talks with Mitch McConnell that could water down those reforms, Brian Beutler reports.
Her actual story is an object lesson in myth-making.
Christine O’Donnell: I blame Joe Biden’s FBI, George Soros and disgruntled former campaign workers for the federal criminal investigation of my campaign spending.
You have to figure there’s a problem when the state history text book says lots of blacks fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. And probably another problem when the author of the textbook begs off apologizing that well, she found someone who said that when she was researching the topic on the internet. Learn more about Virginia’s fun time with its own in-state only faux-fact-filled text books.
Let me start by saying that in my own life I’m a total Mac fanatic. I use Macs. I use their various gadgets. What’s more, TPM is actively developing not only optimized versions of the site for a series of mobile devices, we’re also getting to work on apps for iPhone and iPad. I’d said earlier that I didn’t think the people designing news app had a good sense of how to use mobile devices for news yet. But my opinion has changed about that over the last few weeks. (There are a series of new apps out there that I think point to the direction of future development of distributing news on mobile devices.)
In any case, there’s a different point I wanted to make. Because we get a lot of questions and requests about mobile devices. The companies that control the major mobile devices have a big interest in making people think that there’s a level of functionality that is possible using proprietary applications — an iPad app, an Android app, etc. that’s not available using open standards or ‘the web’. But that’s just not true. It might be true for the moment. And it might become a self-fulfilling prophecy if the big device manufacturers deepen their hold. But fundamentally it just ain’t true. Read More
Fox News dusts off the death panel meme and takes it for another spin.