Establishment press pundits often wring their hands over how supposedly far to the right the Republican Party and conservatives in general have moved since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, that flaming moderate, to the point of claiming that Reagan would never be accepted by today’s “wingnuts.” They seem to actually believe this amusing nonsense.

In a classic example demonstrating where the real ideological shifts have taken place, the New York Times Editorial Board on Saturday expressed its wish to impose a $15-an-hour minimum wage on the entire nation. That really isn’t a surprise to those who have seen so-called “progressives” move ever further to the left and out of the realm of common sense in recent times. But it might surprise many readers that the Times advocated a minimum wage of zero — that’s right, expressed as “$0.00″ for emphasis — in January 1987, during Reagan’s second term.

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From Ann Arbor, Michigan:

Dec 29, 2015 / 03:55 pm

An up-and-coming Catholic musician in Michigan aims to expose listeners to God in the same way she did during her school years – through beauty found in “truly good” forms of art.

“My desire with this music and this album is to reach anybody, anywhere and hopefully open their hearts to the reality that transfiguration and transformation is real,” singer/songwriter Alanna-Marie Boudreau told CNA.

Growing up, she said that her parents made it a point to expose their children to “the transcendental truth, goodness and beauty” through beautiful literature and art. Since they believed that was not available in the upstate New York schools where they lived, her mother decided to homeschool them.

Learning from a Catholic curriculum, Boudreau says excellent books and beautiful music were a regular part of her education.

“It was a very natural part of the fabric of our life and it was interwoven with a really sacramental understanding of life and of family,” she said.

“The faith, it always fit like a hand in the glove with our upbringing and with our education.” That integration of faith, beauty and truth is something the 24-year old woman says she hopes permeates her music, including her recent, full-length album, “Hints and Guesses” – a follow-up to her 2012 EP, “Hands in the Land.”

“And anybody – everybody – is affected by beauty, no matter what their life experience is, where they’re from, or what they’ve done, there’s something about beauty that bypasses those preconceived ideas and it just sets the heart in a very good position to hear God.”

But Boudreau doesn’t label her work as “Christian music” – not because it doesn’t deal with the faith, but because of the inclination of some to automatically be turned off by such a label or assume that it will sound a certain way without listening to it. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Just one week after CNN’s Don Lemon shut down a guest who dared to raise the issue, there is now an agreement across the ideological spectrum that if Hillary Clinton is going to use her husband Bill as a campaign surrogate and go after her opponents’ real or imagined sexism, then, as the headline at liberal Ruth Marcus’s Monday evening Washington Post column says, “Bill Clinton’s sordid sexual history is fair game.”

Meanwhile, a Wall Street Journal editorial, while citing Marcus’s column, agrees: “if Mrs. Clinton wants everyone to forget about Bill’s harassment of women, she ought to stop playing the sexism card, or drop Bill as surrogate, or both.”Marcus clearly struggles to remain intellectually honest before ultimately admitting what should be obvious (bolds are mine throughout this post):

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And her doctor agrees — From Halethorne, Maryland (video at link):

Dec 18, 2015, 1:59 PM ET

A Baltimore-area woman and her oncologist believe her search-and-rescue dog “sniffed out” and detected her lung cancer early enough to possibly save her life.

Her 9-year-old shepherd-Lab mix, Heidi, has helped save several people’s lives and find over 2,000 missing pets during her work as a search-and-rescue dog for over seven years, Anne Wills told ABC News today.

Wills and Heidi work for Wills’ nonprofit Dogs Finding Dogs, which has professionally trained dogs that can sniff out drugs and find missing pets and people.

But Wills never expected that Heidi would ever save her life, she said.

“Around February this year, every time I would sit down, Heidi would start barricading me and literally not let me get up,” Wills, 53, said. “She would scratch my arm, and she was very panic stricken and panting a lot.”

Heidi continued doing this for about a week when she suddenly became “more upset and insistent” and “started taking her nose and stuffing it in my chest and keeping it there and breathing in really deeply,” added Wills, who lives in Halethorne, Maryland.

She said Heidi continued the behavior for weeks.

Wills thought something was wrong with Heidi, so she took her to the veterinarian. But when the vet said Heidi was fine, Wills realized Heidi could be sensing something wrong in her, so she went to the doctor.

“I was sent for a CAT scan, and 9 a.m. the next morning, I get a call saying that I have three spots of cancer in my lungs and that I have to get it taken care of right away,” Wills said. “And so the journey begins.”

Had Heidi not been so persistent in trying to alert Wills, the cancer may have spread to other parts of the body, likely making it incurable, according to Dr. Enser Cole, Will’s oncologist and chief of medical oncology at Saint Agnes Hospital in Baltimore.

“When you meet Heidi, you feel like you’re in the presence of dog with a couple of PhDs,” Cole told ABC News today. “This dog diagnosed the cancer before the doctors did, and it’s justly something to marvel at.” …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Did you hear the story about the conservative city councilman who was so incensed at his private-citizen critics that he or she published their names and addresses and accused them of racism in the process?

Of course you didn’t. If it happened, press coverage of “right-wing intimidation” would be everywhere. Instead, “doxing,” the term given to such exposures, is a technique predominantly practiced by hardened leftists and even occasionally by their politicians, more often than not with little in the way of media or other repercussions. One such person who appears to be skating virtually scot-free is Minneapolis City Council member Alondra Cano.

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After serving as the virtual mouthpiece for the “there is no crisis!” crowd for at least a decade since George W. Bush’s attempt to partially privatize Social Security in 2005, someone at the New York Times has finally recognized that there is one — but still won’t level with readers about the system’s true condition.

Eduardo Porter “writes the Economic Scene column” for the Times. Before that, “he was a member of The Times’ editorial board, where he wrote about business, economics, and a mix of other matters.” As such, he may well have been the author of some of the Old Gray Lady’s opinion pieces opposing any kind of meaningful reform of out-of-control entitlement programs while its reporters gave favorable treatment to demagogues like Harry Reid.

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According to NewsBusters’ own Blonde Gator, Hillary Clinton has, in the 8-1/2 months since she declared her candidacy, committed 51 gaffes and goofs. That’s an average rate of six per month. Imagine how many there would be if Mrs. Clinton genuinely campaigned among the people instead of among preselected groupies.

One of her latest gaffes, which occurred last week at an elementary school in Iowa, was a humdinger. Predictably, the establishment press almost completely ignored it, while a couple of journalists who noticed the center-right’s reaction tried and failed to excuse it.

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As I noted in a pre-Christmas post, “The desperation is palpable at the Associated Press, aka the Administration’s Press, over how the Christmas shopping season is going.”

Desperation has clearly descended into outright deception at the wire service, where an unbylined story claims that spending is up 8 percent, but that the source involved “does not include spending by dollar amounts.” As will be shown shortly, this is a clear attempt to make this year’s Christmas shopping season look more than twice as good as it was expected to be.

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While the establishment press lies in wait for Republican and conservative candidates to make some kind of off-color or foolish statement — or one that can be twisted to become one, even if it originally wasn’t — it consistently ignores howlers made by leftists and liberals. The list of President Barack Obama’s gaffes alone, all totally or almost completely ignored by the press when they were made, is quite long.

The most telling gaffe is the kind made in all seriousness by its deliverer which betrays a level of cluelessness not thought humanly possible from a supposedly educated and informed adult. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders committed one such gaffe in a Saturday morning tweet.

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Must-read (Warning — Double-hanky alert):

POSTED ON DECEMBER 21, 2015

“May I buy your groceries?”

Rather than buy ourselves and our young adult children gifts this Christmas, we decided to walk the walk. You know. That walk where you stop indulging yourself with increasingly frivolous items and actually reach out to help others not as fortunate.

We bought several Walmart gift cards with funds we would have used to buy our gifts for one another and our kids. Then our daughter and daughter-in-law (who is pregnant with twins, our 10th and 11th grandchildren, so yes, we have more than enough blessings in our life), Mr. Wilkinson and I went to our local Walmart yesterday, a beautiful Sunday morning. Not quite knowing how to do what we wanted to do, just praying we’d get it right and not embarrass anyone or get arrested. Our girls decided on an approach, took the gift cards, and my husband and I stood at a distance, ready to help if needed.

The girls walked along and watched the check-out lines, and when they felt a tug at their kind hearts, they went up to people ready to check out and asked,

“May I buy your groceries?”

The initial responses were ones of shock and disbelief. No one was rude, or dismissive. They just wanted to know why. The girls answered that they were part of a family who decided this was the way they wanted to celebrate Christmas. Then a few asked if they were with a church or an organization. No, the girls said, we are just a regular family and this is our gift to you! No strings attached! From us!

Then the miracles came.

The first one, a young Mom, with a cart of food and just a couple of tiny presents for her little son, broke down in sobs, confiding that she “didn’t know how I could afford any of this”. Her hugs and her tears washed away all the nervousness our girls felt at first. They helped her bag her groceries and they all held one another for a long time, before this young woman left the store, trying hard not to sob.

The girls then quickly went to an obviously worn-out and defeated looking Dad, with 4 young sons. Beat down and broke, you can bet. In the check-out line, counting the bills in his wallet, nervously. “May I buy everything in your cart, sir?” they said. Again, the disbelief, the tears, the hugs, and the sincere, very heartfelt gratitude. That seismic shock you felt at 10:47 am yesterday? That was a huge crack opening in my cynical heart as I watched this.

Two elderly ladies, with one cart between them, barely full with just the most very basic things. A 2 pack of toilet paper. A small package of ham. A little pumpkin pie with red bow on top. Cans of cheap cat food. I doubt they had cats. They were the most unbelieving of all – they were literally paralyzed with shock. One had dementia and couldn’t really understand what was going on, but the other couldn’t believe “anyone cared about us” and “no one has been this kind to me in 75 years”.

There were people who smiled and merely told our girls, “No thank you! We are very blessed and in a good place, so please help someone who needs it!” Pay it forward without getting a thing. I like it. …

… I was one of those people who made fun of the “people of Walmart”. And I’m an idiot.

Go here for the full post.

Yesterday, I noted that Associated Press reporter Karl Ritter actually wrote, and AP actually published, a story about how complying with the Paris climate agreement would require greenhouse gas emissions “To Drop Below Zero.”

Perhaps Ritter, whose beat includes “cover(ing) climate change, from UN negotiations to Arctic melt,” looked around and realized that if he didn’t put out something distracting, no matter how absurd, he’d have to cover one or more of three other “climate change” developments during the past couple of weeks — none of them favorable to the warmists’ cause. An editorial on Thursday at Investor’s Business Daily, one of the key places readers need to regularly visit to get important news the establishment press won’t report, addressed them (links are in original; bolds are mine):

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