Author Archive | David Bernstein

Wallace has interviewed Ahmadinejad for Sixty Minutes. According to the Hollywood Reporter, “The 88-year-old Wallace, who has interviewed almost every notable person in his nearly 40 years on ’60 Minutes,’ said Wednesday that he wasn’t going to let a little matter such as retirement stop him from doing a story about one of the biggest […]

Kathleen Carroll, senior Vice President of AP: “I also know from 30 years of experience in this business that you can’t get competitive journalists [note that she doesn’t limit herself to AP photographers] to participate in the kind of (staging) experience that is being described.” Anderson Cooper of CNN, via The Corner: While on the […]

There is something a bit surreal about watching Ernie (Arik in Hebrew) singing “Rubber Ducky” and “If I knew your were coming I’d have baked a cake,” two of my all-tme favorite Sesame Street numbers, in Hebrew.

I’ve got to hand it to Howard Kurtz and CNN’s Reliable Sources. This weekly program has by far provided the best insight into press coverage of the Israel-Party of God conflict that I’ve seen (e.g., see this post). On this week’s program: (1) Party of God threatens to kill reporters. Richard Engel of NBC news […]

[Readers can find most of my previous posts on this issue, which contain lots of background information, here and here.] The Federalist Society’s Barwatch Bulletin reports from the ABA’s annual meeting in Honolulu: Recommendation 106B, concerning revisions to Standards 210-212 regarding diversity and legal education, generated considerable debate. Jose Garcia, representing the Section of Legal […]

Writing in the N.Y. Sun, AEI’s Ted Frank notes that of the eleven Vioxx trials so far, there is reason to at least suspect that plaintiffs were untruthful about their exposure to Vioxx in five of them. Fraudulent claims in mass tort litigation have ample precedent, as in the fen-phen settlement, and the silicosis litigation, […]

No, it’s not. Is there a plausible argument on the other side? This issue arises from an article about the feud between Joel Beinin and David Horowitz: [Horowitz] is incensed that in 2003 Beinin held a class lecture at a “teach-in” against the Iraq war in Stanford’s quad. The lecture that day on the Gulf […]

United States v. Maher, (1st Cir. July 6, 2006). A police officer testified based on his training and experience with numerous narcotics cases that a post-it note found in defendant’s van contained a list of customers’ orders; was a “[d]rug distributors’ way of being organized;” and that the number four written next to an individual’s […]

My father-in-law, who lives in Ramat Gan, Israel, is a leftist of longstanding. Over the years, he mostly has voted for Meretz (further to the left on foreign policy, in Israeli terms, than “McGovernites” are in American terms), sometimes for Labor. He hates Netanyahu, and perhaps his least favorite person in Israeli politics of all […]

By popular demand (lots of emails): Reuters has pulled a photo of Beirut doctored by one of its “photojournalists” to make damage from Israeli air strikes look worse than it was. This photographer was one of the photographers who took somne of the most dramatic of what appear to be staged photos in Qana. Kudos […]

Israel’s daring commando raid in Tyre Friday night, reportedly killing several Party of God missile experts in charge of firing on Hadera (near Tel Aviv) in their apartment raises a very interesting moral issue. According to at least one press report I saw, Israel said that it could have simply leveled the building with a […]

Remember the AP’s Kathleen Carroll’s response to questions regarding whether AP photos taken at Qana were staged? “I also know from 30 years of experience in this business that you can’t get competitive journalists to participate in the kind of (staging) experience that is being described.” Via EU Referendum, here is a group of these […]

A reader, sympathetic to Israel but troubled by its existence as “Jewish state,” asks: “Can you point me to any case in any example where you would say ‘[Country A] has the right to exist as a [Race B] OR [Religion C] state?’ I can think of numerous claims like this by societies in the […]

Early reports: Israel struck a four-story building in the early morning hours; or, according to CNN’s Ben Wedeman on July 30, the bomb hit “right next” to the building. Wedeman also reported that the building was supposed to have been the sturdiest in Qana, which is why the victims hid there! The next day, CNN’s […]

Cole, in the process of criticizing Mel Gibson for stating that “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”: As for the Iraq War, puh-lease. Opinion polling shows that in spring of 2003, some 75 percent of Americans wanted to go to war against Saddam’s regime. At the same time, only a […]