[guest post by Dana]

Poor Hillary! can’t catch a break. The cover of the new TIME magazine mischievously shows her with devil horns. Accidental? Intentional? Subliminal messaging from editors already tired of the Hillary! circus and would rather see Warren run? Not only is she with horns, but she appears to be looking down while wearing a long, shapeless coat. Is she depressed? Is she fretting over that “old car smell” she is so desperate to eliminate? Or is she perhaps trying to contain the odor of yet one more scandal of her own making under that big coat?

Contrast it with TIME Magazine’s cover of then-contender Barrack Obama that depicted a confident, youthful new car smell candidate for the presidency:

Halo imagery:

(H/T The Corner)

–Dana

[guest post by Dana]

Early this morning, during what is being described as a “peaceful protest”, two police officers in Ferguson were shot and seriously injured near the Ferguson Police Department. According to the chief of St. Louis County Police John Belmar, this was an ambush and ironically, comes on the heels of the Ferguson police chief announcing his resignation after a scathing report from the Justice Dept. was released. The report found that the police force in Ferguson was both “predatory” and “racially biased”.

St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said one officer was shot in the face, just below his right eye, with the bullet lodging behind his ear. The other officer was hit in the shoulder, and the bullet came out his back.

Both men were expected to recover without suffering any long-term damage, Belmar said, but the wounds could easily have been mortal.

“We could have buried two police officers next week over this,” he said.

The 32-year-old officer who was shot in the face was from nearby Webster Groves. The second officer, 41, came from St. Louis County.

…

Belmar said that three or four shots were fired from across the street from where about 75 protesters and 40 police officers were gathered. He said that the shots did not come from the group of protesters who were gathered near the police station.

“These police officers were standing there and they were shot,” Belmar said at an earlier news conference Thursday morning. “Just because they were police officers.”

Officers did not return fire.

Sadly, protesters blamed the police for the ambush:

“Acknowledging (of racism) nine months ago would have prevented the shooting!”

Further, Attorney General Eric Holder released a statement and instead of just condemning the shooters who ambushed the officers, he also made sure to speak on behalf of non-violent protesters as well:

“This heinous assault on two brave law enforcement officers was inexcusable and repugnant. I condemn violence against any public safety officials in the strongest terms, and the Department of Justice will never accept any threats or violence directed at those who serve and protect our communities—from this cowardly action, to the killing of an officer in Philadelphia last week while he was buying a game for his son, to the tragic loss of a Deputy U.S. Marshal in the line of duty in Louisiana earlier this week. Such senseless acts of violence threaten the very reforms that nonviolent protesters in Ferguson and around the country have been working towards for the past several months. We wish these injured officers a full and speedy recovery. We stand ready to offer any possible aid to an investigation into this incident, including the department’s full range of investigative resources. And we will continue to stand unequivocally against all acts of violence against cops whenever and wherever they occur.”

Meanwhile, police officers focused their search on a brick house four blocks west of the police department. They were seen leading two men out of the house in handcuffs.

–Dana

ADDED: Al Sharpton discussed the ambush on the Morning Joe show:

“[Y]ou know, just hours before the attorney for the family of Michael Brown, Benjamin Crump, was on ‘PoliticsNation’ with me in Chicago,” Sharpton said. “And we were saying how the protests helped to lead to a climate where the Justice Department would come in in the first place. There wouldn’t have been an investigation. And we were commending a lot of those who had continued those protests, nonviolently. And then this happens. Now, we don’t know whether — we will find out later. Let’s be real clear. We’re not saying the protesters did anything with the shooting or not. We don’t know. But absolutely, unequivocally, no one I know involved in the protests or the Brown family would condone shooting at police, shooting police, and hopefully these two policemen … or any other violence.”

It’s interesting that in this instance, Sharpton cautions against making any assumptions about who the shooters. And, how interesting that he also conveniently ignores the violence of protesters in Ferguson…

Today I am introducing the Patterico Fact-Checker™: a new feature in which I fact-check claims of public figures that have been dealt with poorly by Big Media Fact-Checkers. Today we analyze Ted Cruz’s claim that the IRS tax code has more words than the Bible.

Claim:

“On tax reform, we, right now, have more words in the IRS code than there are in the Bible — not a one of them as good.”

–Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), speech at International Association of Fire Fighters legislative conference, March 10, 2015

The Facts

The literally translated King James Version of the Bible contains just over 800,000 words. There are as many as 3.7 million individual words in the IRS tax code. The claim, therefore, is:

True.

That’s how you do a fact-check, Big Media.

Instead, the Washington Post Fact-Checker just did a check of Ted Cruz’s claim, and after setting forth the two facts noted above, using the exact same words (which I copied above), refused to label it true. The “fact-checkers” instead engaged in a long disquisition about whether Ted Cruz’s admittedly “technically correct” fact had any meaning. Conclusion: it doesn’t, in their opinion because derp derp derp.

Frankly, the arguments of the piece doesn’t deserve any more scrutiny than that. If you want to stop reading the post here, therefore, I won’t blame you. It is enough to note that the “derp derp” part is not the realm of a fact-checker.

But I will address some of the piece’s silly arguments in the extended entry, because they are symptomatic of what is wrong with this country and with Big Media in general.

(more…)