Always at war with Eastasia

Sounds like a pretty firm denial on the homepage there, Reagan's Favorite Newspaper! I wonder what the inside hed looks like.

Wow! The Big Guy must have really been giving it to the Fake News, huh?

... The White House was not commenting on the medical bill story, which was first reported in The Washington Post on Thursday, although the U.S. government has long had a policy of not paying ransom demands for American hostages.

Oh.

Who wants to bet that Axis Sarah can make things look even worse?

“We do not comment on hostage negotiations, which is why they have been so successful during this administration,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in statement.

It has to be rough out there in the party press these days, huh?

Pesky alliteration

Hey, kids! Did the lead story at the Fair 'n' Balanced homepage on Saturday look familiar?

As a self-described Democratic socialist, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has been outspoken about economic inequality.

During his 2016 presidential campaign and beyond, he declared that wealth inequality is “the great moral issue of our time.”

Now that he’s running for president again, the 77-year-old continues to advocate for the poor and middle class, including appealing for a $15-an-hour minimum wage and tuition-free colleges and universities.

And yet, his own net worth is unknown.

Perhaps that's because it was teased under another Sanders story on Tuesday?

Yes, there's an AOC story downpage; your regularly scheduled The Week In AOC will resume shortly. But there are other Democrats to worry about! For example, your lead story on Thursday:

Presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren released her 2018 tax returns on Wednesday, showing she and her husband earned nearly $1 million last year.

The Democrat from Massachusetts used the release to once again highlight a bill she’s pushing that would mandate that the Internal Revenue Service publicly release the tax returns of the president, vice president, presidential candidates and federal officeholders.

Didn't it seem only yesterday that it was good for presidents to have lots of money?

Elongated yellow fruit flies like a banana

Isn't that just the thing about stylebooks? They'll demand that you inflect "alumnus" all the way through for gender and number, but they won't tell you to lay off of the elongated yellow fruit.

And a tip of the fur-lined headgear, as always, to the Bremner Center for  Popular Orange Vegetables.

This heart of stone

A couple of clinical points about the headline:

1) If the surgery is scheduled for Friday, no. Nobody is waiting to see if time is on their side. 
2)  If you don't already know whose side the surgeon is on, you might want to reconsider your options. Especially if the surgeon seems to be a man of wealth and taste. 

If you needed a Stones title for your hed (and you didn't), why stop with one that doesn't work? Did the buyout claim everyone old enough to remember "This Heart of Stone"? OK, "Let it Bleed" would be a little tacky, but let's see some effort out there.

But wait, there's more:

3) If "news stories from around the globe" are indeed reporting this news, would you mind just running one of those?
4) Singular "they" is sunshine on a cloudy day for the AP Stylebook, but this is still American English, and "band" still takes an "it."
5) "From Jagger needing stents to open an artery or a heart valve replacement" isn't even a false range, let alone a real range.
6) If you don't know, what's the point of guessing?

This one doesn't seem to have taken much time (and certainly not much effort), but however little it was, couldn't it have been spent on something else?