Media Malpractice: Let Us Count the Ways the MSM Has Failed in Recent Weeks – Starting With Brett Kimberlin

It’s two days after perhaps the largest blogburst in internet history,  and there is still media silence on the Brett Kimberlin scandal.

In case you’re not up to speed, here’s a brief rundown of what should be a blockbuster story, brought to you via The Blaze:

• Drug dealer, alleged child molester, and convicted perjurer, forger and Indiana Speedway Bomber (who is also believed to have played a role in the assassination of a grandmother), Brett Kimberlin, spent 17 years in prison before his ultimate re-absorption into American society
• He started a non-profit dubbed “Justice Through Music (JTM)” that has, since at least 2005, been funded by George Soros’ Tides Foundation and Barbara Streisand among other leftists
• Along with his associate, Kimberlin also started an organization called “Velvet Revolution” that supports the Occupy movement
• JTM’s goal is to use music to foster “social justice” and fight Republican “voter fraud” (like the kind George Bush allegedly used to “steal” the Florida election)
• Any blogger — conservative and liberal alike — who has written the truth about Kimberlin has come under vicious attack by either Kimberlin or his minions, suffering death threats (veiled and unveiled), multiple lawsuits, loss of jobs and worse
• He has filed over 100 frivolous lawsuits against anything that isn’t nailed down and somehow is being allowed to continue unchecked
• This story has never been reported on in the mainstream media

One blogger was spooked out of his home by the creep, taking his family on the road,  blogging from undisclosed locations.

Another’s life was put in extreme danger when he was “swatted”.

Yet another blogger and his wife lost their jobs due to Kimberlin’s lawfare intimidation tactics.

The unrepentant terrorist’s non-profit apparently partners with the Obama  State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program.

None of this newsworthy? Hello? Bueller?

Media malpractice: Even with #BrettKimberlin trending, lapdog media remains silent

The conservative blogosphere and Twittersphere is standing up in support of those victimized by this radical Leftist political terrorist. Tweets, blogs, donations and other means are being employed to bring attention to this bone-chilling attack on speech, and to aid the targets of Brett Kimberlin’s terrorism.

Where is the media? Silent. Evidently, a shred of decency is too much to ask of the lapdog media, who instead choose to paint TEA parties as violent while ignoring actual nightmarish and potentially deadly terrorism from a Leftist.

Of course, this media failure is just the latest of a string of epic media failures to report significant news.

Last week, Doug Ross  posted a list of recent potentially blockbuster stories that are being ignored by legacy media because they don’t fit their chosen narratives; Old Media Is Bleeding Out Right Before Our Eyes:

Old media is literally committing suicide in front of our very eyes. In its desperate rush to see Barack Obama reelected, they are ignoring bigger and bigger stories. People have the Internet. They read The Drudge Report. They listen to talk radio. They read blogs. And in spite of all of these different access points, old media is ignoring blockbuster story after blockbuster story.

Consider the following panoply of stories — from the last few days alone — courtesy of the national treasure known as NewsBusters.

Outrage Over 72 Hours Of Network Silence On Catholic Lawsuit Spreads

Networks Censor News of Massive Democratic Protest Vote Against Obama

ABC, NBC Punt on Alleged Obama Administration Leak of Classified Information to Hollywood

Was Rev. Wright Offered Hush Money? Nobody In The Media Cares

I would add a couple more:

Media Works To Suppress Obama ‘Born in Kenya’ Bio

Alert the Media – Obama Campaign Disables Credit Card Verification…

The MSM never looked into the campaign finance issue, but in an update on their story, Powerline reported that a blog finally got the White House’s attention:

Over at the Election Law Blog, Professor Rick Hasen has posted a statement from the Obama campaign on the charge that it does not follow best practices to prevent fraudulent donations to the campaign.

Credit card contributions to Obama for America are, in fact, processed using AVS (Address Verification System).

If a billing address is verified via AVS, then the credit card contribution is processed without delay. Some transactions caught by AVS may initially appear to a donor to have been accepted even though this is not the case. Obama for America employs a manual process to review any transaction flagged by AVS, also taking into account other fraud risk factors, and using fraud detection services provided by our credit card processor.

As an example, the contribution discussed here http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/04/dubious-donations-illustrated-illegal-contributor-edition.php may have initially appeared to have gone through when the donor completed the transaction at 10:18 a.m. but it was rejected at 4:51 p.m. under our standard fraud detection procedures.

So any claims that Obama for America has disabled AVS are inaccurate; any question about this would have been answered–if the question had been asked.

A Powerline commenter made this obvious point:

The only plausible reason for disabling a fraud-protection system is to selectively enable fraud.

By over-riding the automated system, they can accept multiple illegal donations from domestic and foreign sources. They can screen out illegal donations that look like… well, like PowerLine readers testing the system. But if they recognize an illegal donations they were expecting, they can bank it with confidence.

Still no interest from the legacy media.

But in their defense, they’ve been kinda busy covering these important stories:

Washington Post: Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith tangles with a quirk of Arkansas history

Washington Post: Mitt Romney’s prep school classmates recall pranks, but also troubling incidents

USA TODAY: Pet’s crate ride atop car still dogging Romney

LA Times: Ann Romney and dressage: A pricey private world

ABC: Designer of Ann Romney’s $1K Shirt Says It’s Off The Rack

And my personal favorite because the tea party was born in Feb of ’09 precisely to protest Obama’s big spending, big government agenda:

Market Watch: Obama spending binge never happened

According to Rex Nutter, that trillion dollar stimulus I was protesting in a snow storm on Feb 28, 2009, was Bush’s spending. Or a figment of my imagination – I’m not sure which. Maybe it wasn’t snowing, either. I’m not sure what the truth is, anymore!

As bad as those examples of  bias are, the old media show their bias most in the stories they choose not to report.

UPDATE:

Getting the news out is up to new media guys like Peter Ingemi:

 DaTechGuy will be substitute hosting the WCRN Morning Show from 5 am till 9 a.m tomorrow on the 50,000 Watt WCRN AM 830 Worcester.

 He says, “as the MSM has decided to give the Patterico and Stacy McCain stories a pass I’m going to just have to do it for them on a 50,000 watt station for all New England.  Stacy will be joining me during the 6 a.m. hour to tell his story.”

You can listen live using TuneIn or at wcrnradio.com

They will also be talking about the missing Wikipedia entry for Brett Kimberlin.

UPDATE II:

BREAKING: Bogus Call Sends Police to Home of Kimberlin Critic Erick Erickson

Anyone else think CNN is going to talk about SWATting now?

UPDATE III:

Newsbusters: Brett Kimberlin and ‘SWATting’: Where Is the Establishment Press?

Linked by Michelle Malkin, and Doug Ross, thanks!

NBC to do ‘Internal Investigation’ on its Ham-Handed, Selectively Edited Zimmerman Segment

Via Erik Wemple in WaPo Opinions --Not sure why this story is relegated to an opinion page blog.  It’s a legitimate news story about MSNBC’s near-slanderous hatchet job on Zimmerman.

NBC told this blog today that it would investigate its handling of a piece on the “Today” show that ham-handedly abridged the conversation between George Zimmerman and a dispatcher in the moments before the death of Trayvon Martin. A statement from NBC:

“We have launched an internal investigation into the editorial process surrounding this particular story.”

Great news right there. As exposed by Fox News and media watchdog site NewsBusters, the “Today” segment took this approach to a key part of the dispatcher call:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.

Here’s how the actual conversation went down:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.

Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?

Zimmerman: He looks black.

Bozell appearing on Hannity, last week to discuss MSNBC’s selective editing, said what they did was  worse than just distorting the news – it was advancing “an all-out falsehood”..

I wonder if the person responsible for the Zimmerman selective editing is the same miscreant who selectively edited the famous gun-toting tea party members story back in August of 2009.

On Tuesday, MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer fretted over health care reform protesters legally carrying guns: “A man at a pro-health care reform rally…wore a semiautomatic assault rifle on his shoulder and a pistol on his hip….there are questions about whether this has racial overtones….white people showing up with guns.” Brewer failed to mention the man she described was black.

And they only showed him from the waste down in the clip.

It almost makes you think they have some kind of racialist agenda over there at NBC.

Hat tip: Charles B.

With Andrew Breitbart Leading the Charge – The Right-Wing Blogosphere Goes To War Against the Institutional Left

Alexa Shrugs reminds us of this affecting image of Breitbart from Ben Howe’s Tribute video, looking straight at the camera and simply saying, “War.”

Over the weekend, a funny thing happened in the right wing blogosphere. While at first, the faint-hearted were inclined to throw Rush under the bus for using over the top, inappropriate rhetoric to point out the absurdity of Sandra Fluke’s pathetic testimony before Congress. But over the weekend, the tide turned, and conservatives have gone to war, just as Breitbart would have liked it.

Alexa  is on the warpath:

This is war.  I am going to defend Limbaugh from the radical Leftists who want to take him off the air.  And I am going to call out our opponents by name.  Starting with Sandra Fluke, David Gregory and David Friend.

Sandra Fluke is a 30 year old woman who is president of Law Students for Reproductive Justice and went to Georgetown Law despite knowing that their insurance does not cover birth control – because they are a Catholic institution – and made it her mission to force them to change their policy.  Remember when I mentioned how feminazis lied and said a Congressional hearing on religious concerns about the Obamacare contraceptive mandate was only men?  They had wanted Sandra Fluke to testify – I guess Allison Dabbs Garrett and Dr. Laura Champion, the two women who DID testify at the “all-male” panel, just don’t count as women because they don’t toe the radical feminist line.

When Rush made his comments about Sandra Fluke, I thought he was going overboard in order to bring media attention to the farcical nature of her testimony. If that was his m/o, it backfired because the media firestorm that predictably ensued led to the DNC fund-raising off of it, and  Rush losing a number of sponsors. The Democrat Media Complex is doing what it does best – picking a (conservative) targeting it, freezing it, and doing its best to de-legitimize it. Never mind the fact that the left is so consistently  vile in its treatment of conservative women, it’s barely worth mentioning it when they call Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, or Laura Ingraham, and let’s not be sexist, here – even Rick Santorum – a vile name. Yes, thanks to the efforts of gay activist, Dan Savage, we’ve got a major candidate for President of the United States whose name, according to Google is defined in the most vile and depraved terms imaginable. And the MSM calls that “Santorum’s Google problem.” (yuk, yuk.) Because it’s HIS problem that left-wing activists have done this to him, and Google refuses to fix it.

Couldn’t it thus be said that Sandra Fluke has a “talk radio problem”. Because after all, it’s her own extreme views that led this to happen to her.

Ben Howe finds the excruciating double standard to be a bit much, and asks:  Carbonite Drops Ads from Rush Limbaugh but Not Ed Schultz?

You see, Carbonite is also the sponsor for a radio show you probably have not heard of, The Ed Schultz Show.  Ed Schultz made a similar remark to Rush’s although his was less a question about the usage of the word (as it was for Rush) and more him just screaming that Laura Ingraham is a “right wing slut.”

Now I wonder why Friend’s daughters don’t’ come to mind here?  Could this be a publicity stunt?  Could they just be dropping sponsorship of Rush in an effort to gain some exposure to help their company get new customers? Because let’s face it, they’ll get more exposure from dropping Rush then they’ll ever get from keeping Shultz.  And they could probably use it given that companies like DropBox have moved forward into advanced cloud backups and access while Carbonite seems hopelessly invested in remaining in the year 2006, but I digress.

I asked them on twitter and on FaceBook why the difference in treatment and so far haven’t gotten a reply.

In the twitter verse, fellow non-Carbonite user Amish Dude pointed me to one possible reason.

On the bright side, DaTechGuy believes the sponsors who have left Rush have chosen poorly:

Rush has been on the radio now since the late 80′s. People who were listening to him now have children who are listening to him. This is a vast and self-sustaining audience base and nothing he said or the media did will cause that base to abandon him. He will be drawing huge radio numbers long after Sandra fluke is a media footnote. There are many talk radio shows out there but there is only one Rush Limbaugh.

However for Sleep Number, Legal Zoom, Carbonate and pro-flowers and the rest, it’s a different story.

There are many alternatives to all of these companies and all of them are merely a click or two away.

For all the bluster of the left for all the tweets and facebook posts and MSM stories the real pressure these companies will feel is on their bottom line. It will come from the orders unplaced, the subscriptions unrenewed and the business that will flow to their competitors by Rush’s listeners looking for alternatives to the companies that dropped him.

These companies married the left in haste, they will repent at leisure, if they last that long.

Update: Both Legal Insurrection and Althouse blogged Rush, here is the key quote:acct with carbonite:

Keep reading.

Adrienne canceled her account with Carbonite My live chat with Carbonite…

since all the circuits to their 800 number are jammed.

Dana Loesch chided Republicans for falling for the manufactured controversy:

The Obama administration withered for several weeks under the intense criticism from Catholic leaders regarding the forced violation of religious liberty within the HHS mandate. In an effort to turn the tables, Democrats suggested that the GOP want to abridge women’s rights because Republicans expect women to obtain and pay for their own birth control. This afternoon John Boehner, Carly Fiorina, and Rick Santorum bravely provided cover for the President and the ridiculous narrative of “the war on women.”

Each of them utterly failed in this response, but unlike Santorum, Boehner and Fiorina aren’t running a presidential campaign with the hopes of becoming the nominee so they can battle the media in the general.

This reason right here is why Republicans defeat themselves: It doesn’t matter what Barack Obama’s record is if Republicans so willingly allow the media to reframe a debate about religious liberty as a fight over women’s rights.

More have admonished Limbaugh’s description of Sandra Fluke than admonished a 30 year-old woman embarrassing herself before congress by testifying that she simply cannot stop getting it on and her inability to control her urges constitutes infringing upon everyone else for a bailout.

And now this interesting tidbit comes out about the young coed, via The Other McCain: Sandra Fluke Argued for Mandatory Coverage for Sex-Change Surgery

Rather belatedly, we are becoming aware that this supposedly typical Georgetown coed is not very typical at all:

[B]irth control is not all that Ms. Fluke believes private health insurance must cover. She also, apparently, believes that it is discrimination deserving of legal action if “gender reassignment” surgeries are not covered by employer provided health insurance. She makes these views clear in an article she co-edited with Karen Hu in the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law.
The title of the article . . . is “Employment Discrimination Against LGBTQ Persons” and was published in the Journal’s 2011 Annual Review.

Remember, as Byron York previously reported, Fluke was rejected as a last-minute substitute witness at a Feb. 16 committee hearing because staffers for Chairman Issa were unable to discover Fluke’s claim to expertise relevant to the subject of the hearing.

UPDATE:

Yep, Carbonite chose poorly: Fire Andrea Mitchell reports Carbonite stock approaches 52-week low since dropping sponsorship of Rush Limbaugh show.

More people pushing back against the media narrative:

Legal Insurrection: Welcome to total political war

Dan Riehl: Stand With Rush, Or Lie Down And Die Alone

Ace: Me and My Wheelbarrow, Squeakin’ Around

Michelle Malkin: The anti-Rush revival revived — and Barack Obama’s petty presidency

Hot Air: Kirsten Powers on Rush and Sandra Fluke: Where’s the outrage at misogynistic liberal men?

Gateway Pundit: The Misogynist Left Mash-Up (Video)

Dan Riehl, Big Journalism:The Left’s eWar On Rush

Dana Loesch, Big Journalism:Left Petitions To Kick Rush Off Air

MRC: NBC Brings On Al Sharpton to Slam ‘Offensive and Misogynist’ Limbaugh; Ignores Reverend’s Offensive Past

Publius Forum: WARNING: If You Use Carbonite Computer Backup Service, Cancel it NOW

WHD: Obama Called Fluke but Said Nothing to Tornado Victims

Weasel Zippers: $9: Price For a Month’s Supply of Birth Control Pills With No Health Insurance At Target 3 Miles From Georgetown Law…

The Sundries Shack: What a Real War on Women Looks Like

Flopping Aces: The Evolution of a Phony Crisis

Radio Equalizer: TWIST AND SPOUT – Why No Consequences For Lefty Hate Talk?

Doug Ross: All You Need To Know About Sandra Fluke in 30 Seconds

DaTechGuy: The more you know about Sandra Fluke…Update (Hope Carbonite backed up their old business model)

The Weekly Standard: The Daily Grind: Chasing Andrew

Jeffrey Lord, The American Spectator: Rally For Rush

Lee Stranahan, Big Journalism: Is Sandra Fluke Coordinating with the White House?

Legal Insurrection: Announcing The Carbonite Accountability Project

Gateway Pundit: Hooray!… Missouri House to Honor Rush Limbaugh With His Bust in Capitol Rotunda

Questions And Observations: How To Manipulate Women Voters: An Obama Campaign Primer

Dan Riehl: Compare Limbaugh’s Class, To Imus’ Trash

Republican Policy Institute: Rep. Darrell Issa Counters False Narrative About HHS Mandate

Michelle Malkin: Capital One “drops” Rush, sticks with serial misogynist Alec Baldwin

Dan Riehl: Think Progress: The Stalinists Are Here

Linked by Michelle Malkin, thanks!

Will “Media-MattersGate” Bring Down the Obama White House?

This post by Jeffrey Lord at The American Spectator is long, but needs to be read in its entirety: Is Media Matters Obama’s Watergate?

I’ve been yawning at the Daily Caller stories chronicling the collusion between Media Matters and the White House because nothing about this administration surprises me, anymore, especially something like this. Oh really? Media Matters is the media arm of the Obama White House feeding all it’s propaganda to MSNBC? Uh….duh?

But when you see how the story lines up so perfectly with what brought down the Nixon administration, you tend to perk up, a little:

What are the striking similarities between Nixon’s Watergate and what might be called, inevitably, Obama’s Media Mattersgate?

• The use of private investigators to investigate the private lives of opponents: In the Nixon era, hiring a private investigator (Tony Ulasewicz) to investigate the private lives of opponents was the brainchild of John Ehrlichman. In the Obama era, hiring private investigators appears as a Media Matters recommendation in a memo by Karl Frisch.

• The involvement of White House aides: This is what the House Judiciary Committee’s liberal Democrat Congressman Sarbanes was referring to when he said Ehrlichman and Caulfield’s involvement meant “that activity [the hiring of private investigators] has the cloak of authority.” In the Obama Administration this “cloak of authority” appears, based on the Daily Caller stories, to attach itself to at minimum two separate episodes. One, the June 16, 2010 meeting between Valerie Jarrett and Media Matters, attended by the recently departed White House Communications Director Anita Dunn. And two, what the Daily Caller describes as “a weekly strategy call” between the White House and Media Matters, the latter the group recommending the employment of private investigators to investigate political opponents of President Obama. Note: The question arises as to whether there were other meetings or discussions between Ms. Jarrett or other White House staffers and Media Matters or a third party go-between that were either on the phone, in e-mail, or — most importantly — did not occur at the White House. Was, for example, Ms. Dunn a go-between for the White House and Media Matters? Both during and after her White House tenure. Again, White House Counsel John Ehrlichman flew to New York for his secret meeting with Tony Ulasewicz in a VIP lounge at LaGuardia Airport. It did not occur in the White House.

• The Nixon tapes and David Brock’s book: What finally ended the Nixon presidency was a unanimous Supreme Court decision forcing the Nixon White House to yield the secretly made tape recordings, whose existence was discovered in the middle of the Senate Watergate Hearings. Those tapes, specifically a tape of June 23, 1972, produced what became known as the “smoking gun”: there, in spite of repeated denials, was the voice of Richard Nixon, in Theodore White’s words, “directing the CIA to halt an FBI investigation which would be politically embarrassing to his re-election — an obstruction of justice.”

If Richard Nixon’s tapes did him in, so well may David Brock’s book do in not only Media Matters but, incredibly, the Obama White House itself. A congressional investigation would doubtless focus on any information in the book obtained through the use of private investigators. Investigators acting under Sarbanes’ rule of a White House “cloak of authority.” Investigators paid for by wealthy Obama contributors.

• Follow the money: For the Nixon White House, the man to see was Nixon lawyer Herbert Kalmbach. It was he who, receiving authorization from John Ehrlichman, (that “cloak of authority”) paid Tony Ulasewicz. Who is the Media Matters equivalent of Herb Kalmbach? Mr. Kalmbach, by the way, went to jail and lost his law license temporarily, it being restored three years after Nixon’s resignation.

Here are the differences, though – and they are monumental differences -

1. As Lord notes, in 1973, the Nixon White House stonewalled – “they made false statements to investigators, withheld evidence, counseled witnesses to lie, interfered with a Justice Department investigation”. I think it goes without saying that there will be no Justice Department investigation of Media Mattersgate in 2012.

2. In 1973, the liberal media was all over Watergate. Every reporter wanted to have a piece of the story. In Obamerica 2012, the MSM are partners in crime with this corrupt White House, and have every reason – including protecting their own reputations –   to ignore the story.

As The Daily Caller has exposed here and here, there have been direct ties between Media Matters and various mainstream media outlets. The Caller lists, among others, MSNBC, the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Huffington Post.

Again, I think it goes without saying that there will be no MSM firestorm over MediaMatters Gate, and there will be no Pulitzers in the offing for the bloggers who pursue this story.

And pursue it they should -  remember this “great idea” from from Media Matters’ Karl Frisch, which supposedly wasn’t acted upon?

“We should hire private investigators to look into the personal lives of Fox News anchors, hosts, reporters, prominent contributors, senior network and corporate staff.”

The question becomes, how did the reportedly mentally unstable Brock find dirt to “savage” Fox News employees with for his new book:

The “great idea” over at Media Matters surfaced in this line in the Frisch memo that recommended hiring, in effect, a bunch of left-wing Tony Ulasewicz’s. Said the memo:

“[W]e should write a book under David’s name that savages Fox News and Fox News employees. The market for this is likely huge.”

Just this book is bursting onto the scene this week under David Brock’s name: The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine.

Lord concludes that a full congressional investigation is in order

 Will Harry Reid do this? Of course not. So the ball bounces to the House. And what will they be looking for? As with Nixon in Watergate, these congressional investigators will be looking for one, very simple thing — a simple thing expressed in multiples of ways by multiples of people. That would be?

Abuse of power.

Well, just one more example of abuse of power out of many for this White House. Whether or not our jellyfish-spined Republicans will act on it, remains to be seen.

SEE ALSO:

Breitbart TV: Brock Breaks Silence:

From the Washington Times: “Media Matters for America founder David Brock finally responded to someone about The Daily Caller series regarding allegations that Washington D.C. based non-profit has a plan of attack against the Fox News Channel that would include investigations into the personal lives of employees who work for the cable news channel.“

Brock blamed Fox News saying that because the allegations made by the Caller have been reported on Fox, the coverage was in response to his book, “The Fox Effect,” that hit shelves today.

Related:

Breitbart dishes on Brock: The Ghost of Christmas Past: How The Founder of Media Matters Betrayed The Founder of the Huffington Post

Linked by Michelle Malkin, and Doug Ross, thanks!

Lib Media Outrageously Outraged By Dana Loesch’s Defense Of Marines

When I saw the video of US soldiers urinating on Taliban corpses, the other day, I was neither shocked, nor outraged. I did think it showed a certain lack of discipline, and I wondered why the soldiers would videotape themselves doing such a thing and then post it on YouTube. That turned out to be a very bad move.

It appears Media Matters is trying to stir up controversy over Dana Loesch‘s comments on her radio show defending the Marines:

Media Matters appears fixated on a mission to try and silence the free speech of Big Journalism editor Dana Loesch, while also engaging upon a campaign to somehow damage her with CNN. True to their Leftist origins, it never seems enough for them to disagree, or even take offense, at someone, or something, they invariably resort to attempting to silence them. Such thuggish tactics have no place in media, least of all in America.

Here’s what Dana said:

“Now we have a bunch of progressives that are talking smack about our military because there were marines caught urinating on corpses, Taliban corpses. Can someone explain to me if there’s supposed to be a scandal that someone pees on the corpse of a Taliban fighter? Someone who, as part of an organization, murdered over 3,000 Americans? I’d drop trou and do it too. That’s me though. I want a million cool points for these guys. Is that harsh to say? Come on people, this is a war. What do people think this is?”

Now, as John Nolte at Big Journalism reports, Politico Is Playing Media Matters’ Game to Censor Conservatives:

As a response, a number of left-wing media outlets, most notably Politico, have drummed up more phony indignation than they’ve ever been able to summon against anything the monstrous Taliban have done to our troops or to innocent Afghans.

Here’s Politico’s Dylan Byers doing his passive-aggressive best to pretend that what Dana said is some kind of scandal or story and get her fired at CNN:

CNN hired Loesch, a co-founder of the St. Louis Tea Party Coalition, to join the “Best Political Team on Television” in February of last year. “I’m excited to be working with CNN and am appreciative of their efforts to showcase diverse political thought on their airwaves,” Loesch said at the time. “I look forward to the discussions.”

CNN, which has looked to bring in voices from across the political spectrum, also prides itself on being positioned in the center of the more ideologically driven Fox and MSNBC networks.

But here is where Byers reveals his true agenda:

I’ve reached out to CNN to ask for their response to Loesch’s comments, andwhether or not it will have any impact on her role at CNN.

The emphasis there is mine but the subtext is all Byers, and how painfully obvious that subtext is. Byers is pushing to have Dana taken off the air or punished. But his true agenda is something bigger than that. What Byers and Politico really want is for Dana to be marginalized and her conservative voice silenced. This is obvious for two reasons. First off, what Dana said is completely defensible (especially in an era where Bill Maher, Whoopi Goldberg, and Michael Moore are cherished as MSM talking heads), and secondly, I know the Media Matters/Color of Change playbook when I see it.

The commie scolds at Media Matters have a history of defending the indefensible – like  GLSEN’s gut-wrenchingly perverted reading list for school children. Yet they are somehow outrageously outraged by a few honest but un-pc comments made by a right-wing radio host.

I, like most people, understand on a purely intellectual level that what the soldiers did was wrong, and think they should be punished for it. But on a more human -emotional level, I not only don’t fault these soldiers, like Dana, I sympathize. They deal with these savages on a day to day basis and have seen their comrades blown to pieces by them. War is hell, especially in a backwards and barbaric country like Afghanistan where there are much worse atrocities going on than corpses being peed on.

I save my outrage for stories like these:

Taliban hang 7-year-old boy accused of being a spy, suicide bomber kills 40 at Afghanistan wedding

Afghanistan: Rights body accuses Taliban of systematic attacks on civilians

Taliban Tricks 8 yr Old Girl Into Being Suicide Bomber 

Taliban kill head of Afghan girls‘ school 

Afghan girl killed by suspected Taliban gunmen for working for US …

Taliban Trick Children Into Becoming Suicide Bombers By Telling Them The Bombs Would Not Kill Them, Only The Americans…

Private Kristian Menchaca (left) of Houston and Private Thomas Tucker of Oregon were captured by terrorists in Iraq, hacked to death, their eyes gouged, their bodies defiled. 

Those stories make me cry.

Media outlets that have nothing to say about those atrocities, yet react to soldiers urinating on corpses like it’s one of the worst crimes against humanity ever witnessed, need to have their outrage meters recalibrated. Something is clearly wrong, there.

Representative Alan West (Fl) weighed in:

I have sat back and assessed the incident with the video of our Marines urinating on Taliban corpses. I do not recall any self-righteous indignation when our Delta snipers Shugart and Gordon had their bodies dragged through Mogadishu. Neither do I recall media outrage and condemnation of our Blackwater security contractors being killed, their bodies burned, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah.

All these over-emotional pundits and armchair quarterbacks need to chill. Does anyone remember the two Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division who were beheaded and gutted in Iraq?

The Marines were wrong. Give them a maximum punishment under field grade level Article 15 (non-judicial punishment), place a General Officer level letter of reprimand in their personnel file, and have them in full dress uniform stand before their Battalion, each personally apologize to God, Country, and Corps videotaped and conclude by singing the full US Marine Corps Hymn without a teleprompter.

As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell.

MORE:

Gateway Pundit feels the same way I do, only he’s pithier than I am: Today’s American Hero Spotlight Goes to Dana Loesch: “I’d Drop Trou and Do it Too”

Treacher at the Daily Caller:

You might be a liberal if…

• You think Bill Maher was a hero after 9/11 for saying terrorists are brave, and Dana Loesch is a villain for insulting them. (He agrees with her on this one, BTW.)
• You insist you don’t sympathize with terrorists, but you fly into a rage when somebody insults them.
• Your reply to criticism of Obama is “Oh yeah, well, who killed Bin Laden?”, but you become furious when Bin Laden’s pals are humiliated.

Let this be a lesson to everyone: If you want to pee on a dead terrorist, first wrap him in an American flag. Then Keith Olbermann, Eric Boehlert, and other leading lights of liberalism will cheer you on.

Dana Loesch: Correcting the Progressive Spin on My Defense of the Marines:

My entire point of the past two days was to highlight the absurd reaction from militant troop-bashers to these Marines. In my Twitter timeline yesterday progressives called our military “killers, kids, barbaric trash, murderers …” The only time soldiers are celebrated by the left is when they engage in protests like OWS. The rest of the time they’re demonized. They get the red carpet rolled out for them, too.

And let’s not forget how lefty bloggers like Markos Moulitsas feels about dead American military contractors. His excuse for his “screw them” comment? He was angry about soldiers getting killed. You know what? So am I. But I blame the people who are trying to kill them–not the people they are trying to protect. And I won’t condemn American soldiers on the battlefield.

This is nothing but an exercise in situational, exploitative outrage, and it completely proved the point I was making. The phrases “defile” and “desecration” popped up in my replies on Twitter every minute or so. If “desecration” is a concern for progressives, where was their outrage when the remains of over 200 Air Force members were dumped in a landfill? I’ve seen more outrage towards our troops over this incident than I have ever seen towards the Taliban themselves who’ve beheaded soldiers (American and Afghan), raped and tortured women, sent out suicide bombers, and carried out horrific attacks.

Doug Ross supplies a graphic: Just so I get this straight: defecating on police car is patriotic; peeing on terrorist murderers un-American

MORE:

Must listen:  FTR radio ANDREW BREITBART TALKS ABOUT ATTACKS ON DANA LOESCH - Nobody lays it all out better than Andrew.

Linked by Doug Ross in Larwyn’s Links, and Big Journalism, thanks!

GOP Should Just Say No To Biased Debates

Brent Bozell is in high dudgeon over these atrocious debates – as well he should be:

Sitting through the Republican debate on Saturday night with ABCs George Stephanopoulos was just painful, from beginning to end. Some of it was just political Ambien. But when it was finally over, there was just one question: Who in the GOP in his or her right mind invites a historically shameless Democratic spin controller like Stephanopoulos to “moderate” a primary debate like this — ever?

The only thing that can be said in defense of that horrible decision was turning to NBC the next morning and seeing “moderator” David Gregory be even more slanted in his questioning. ABC slanted the ideological questions in their debate by a ratio of 6 questions from the left to each 1 from the right. The NBC ratio was 8 to 1.

Why must the Republicans keep handing over their debate stage in the primary season to the people who desperately want them all to bumble, stumble and fall on their faces on national TV?

In the ABC debate — an event held for Republican voters presumably to decide who is reliably conservative enough to win the nomination — ABC asked three questions from the conservative perspective and 20 from the left (25 were ideologically neutral). Twelve of the 48 questions, or 25 percent of the night’s total, were devoted to promoting contraception and gay marriage, so trite and repetitive that finally the audience booed them down.

I’ve been wondering the same thing. It’s a Republican primary. Why would our candidates agree to hold their debates on hostile ground? Don’t they have a say in the matter? Why not say no to ABC, CNN, NBC, and CBS if they can’t hold a debate in a fair, unbiased manner? Perhaps they think that it would be spun that they are too afraid to answer tough questions. But the ideological questions weren’t tough – they were just stupid – contraception and gay marriage are not the top issues of the day. The questions were  designed to make Republicans look foolish, or outside the mainstream.

I was talking to a friend about the primary race, the other day, and asked her what she thought of Rick Santorum. She thought he was focused too much on social issues like contraception, when there are much more important issues to worry about.

Rick Santorum is not obsessed with contraception. Reporters are obsessed with asking him about contraception, which makes him look like he’s obsessed with contraception. And because of that – it’s become a campaign issue. Nice work, LSM.

And although support for gay marriage has increased over the years, opposing it is not outside the mainstream. 

Rasmussen polled voters to find out what the most important issues on their minds were going in to the 2012 election season. Keep in mind – these are all voters, not just Republican voters:

Economy	80%
Health Care	67%
Gov’t Ethics and Corruption	65%
Taxes	60%
Social Security	60%
Education	60%
Immigration	49%
National Security/War on Terror	48%
Afghanistan	24%
War in Iraq	19%

Yet 25 percent of  questions asked at the ABC debate were about contraception and gay marriage?

I’m with Don Surber, who concluded his post about ABC’s debate bias:

In the fall, Republicans should not allow anyone from ABC to moderate any debate because the network was unserious and insincere on Saturday night.

I would add NBC, as well.

Linked by Conservative Commune, thanks!

Video: Anderson Cooper Skewers MSNBC Blob, Schultz,

Every single second of this epic smack-down of  MSNBC dope, Ed Schultz is golden.

Via Newsbusters:

As NewsBusters previously reported, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz last week actually suggested that CNN’s Anderson Cooper might have had something to do with him being named to GQ’s “The 25 Least Influential People Alive” list.

On Friday’s Anderson Cooper 360, the host nicely put the pathetic Schultz in his proper place – The RidicuList (video follows with transcript and absolutely no additional commentary necessary):

Near perfection.

I especially loved Anderson’s catty, repeated use of ” a guy named Ed Schultz”…and, “Now, let me be honest. I don’t really know who Ed Schultz is. I think I met him once in passing years ago, but I have never actually seen his show. I’m told he yells a lot, and I know he works at MSNBC. And I know he’s moved around a lot in various time slots. That is it.”

LOL.

It’s enough to make me forgive him for his obscene teabagging joke in May of 2009, for which he did almost immediately apologize, unlike the classless MSNBC trolls who use the slurs to this day.

Bonus video:

While I was searching for the above video on Youtube, I found this….bizarre clip….of Cooper getting into a laughing jag watching Justin Bieber get shot?  What is so funny about this?

My goodness, what brought that on?

Hat tip: Dana Loesch, Big Journalism

The #OWS Hall Of Shame: Democrats Who Support/Supported The Occupy Wall Street Movement

On January 14 of this year, I wrote a piece about all of the craven liberal opportunists who shamelessly jumped on the ‘blame Sarah Palin and the Tea party’ bandwagon in the wake of the Tucson shooting that resulted in nineteen people being shot, including a still recovering Dem Rep Gabrielle Giffords. There were six fatalities in that awful attack.

In The Tucson Massacre’s Hall Of Shame: Liberals Who Used Tragedy To Smear The Right, I cataloged all of the shameless and foolhardy liberals who jumped at the chance to implicate an entire movement, and their leaders, (most notably Sarah Palin) as accessories to the crime. They did this before anything was even known about the assailant.

Ironically, many of  the shameless and foolhardy Dems who embraced the false narrative that uncivil Tea Party rhetoric inspired the Tucson shooter – are the same shameless and foolhardy Dems who embraced the truly violent and perverse #OWS movement. Back in January, the MSM did it’s best to push a fictional connection between the Tea Party and the Tucson violence, while in recent weeks, it did it’s best to protect the #Occupy movement from exposure with constant assurances that it was “largely peaceful” – that is – until the violence and moonbattery became too conspicuous to hide. In both cases the inevitable truth would eventually escape past the MSM gatekeepers to the masses.

graphic via Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama

John Nolte of Big Government sums up what finally happened with the #OWS movement, here:

Thanks to the rise of New Media and our unwillingness to let the MSM’s lies, bias, and cover ups stand for even one more day, Occupy is in its death throes and might take the President and Democratic party down with it. First and foremost, we uncovered the lie that Occupy was grassroots and then we exposed every Occupy rape, poop, death, overdose, old woman thrown down the stairs, attack on a police officer, and public act of masturbation. In the process, public opinion turned against the Occupiers and as a result these Leftists have started doing what the Left always does when they lose, have a tantrum.

Now that #OWS is in its death throes, and liberals are busy trying to disassociate themselves from it, I’m happy to do my part exposing those among them who enthusiastically endorsed the #Occupy Freak Show (especially the ones who are up for re-election.) Special derision and demerits goes to those who insultingly tried to compare #OWS to the Tea Party.

graphic via Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama

President Obama:

“The most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side, and that we want to set up a system in which hard work, responsibility, doing what you’re supposed to do, is rewarded,” Obama tells ABC News. “And that people who are irresponsible, who are reckless, who don’t feel a sense of obligation to their communities and their companies and their workers that those folks aren’t rewarded.”

Obama was one of the first to compare #OWS to the Tea Party:

“I understand the frustrations being expressed in those protests,” Obama told ABC News senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper in an exclusive interview from Jamestown, N.C.

“In some ways, they’re not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party. Both on the left and the right, I think people feel separated from their government. They feel that their institutions aren’t looking out for them,” he said.

Joe Biden:

“What is the core of that protest, and why is it increasing in terms of the people it’s attracting — the core is the bargain has been breeched with the American people,” Biden said. “The core is the American people do not think the system is fair or on the level…..That is the core of what you’re seeing on Wall Street. And that’s what started, by the way — there’s a lot in common with the Tea Party. The Tea Party started why? TARP. They thought it was unfair — we were bailing out the big guy.”

Except the Tea Party directed its protests not toward Wall Street, but toward Big Government.

Nancy Pelosi:

During a press conference Thursday afternoon, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi praised those participating in the “Occupy Wall Street” protests. “God bless them,” Pelosi said, “for their spontaneity. It’s independent … it’s young, it’s spontaneous, and it’s focused. And it’s going to be effective.”

DCCC:

Elizabeth Warren:

“I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do. I support what they do.” This quote, from Massachusetts Democratic senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren, can be found in this otherwise unremarkable (and poorly written) article by Daily Beast writer Samuel Jacobs.

Once the #occupy movement lost public support,  Warren refused to sign off on the Occupy Harvard petition.

Barney Frank:

Frank said he supports the movement “to the extent that they obey the law” and that he wishes “that kind of energy was around two years ago when we were voting on the financial reform bill. We’d have a tougher bill.”

He said this while in the process of taking more donations from those rich Wall Street “fat cats”.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz:

“We understand their frustration, we applaud their activism and hopefully they’re going to help get the Republicans in Washington’s attention so we shift the Republican’s focus from just Barack Obama’s job, to everyone’s job,” she said of the protesters.

Since the Occupy Wall Street protests started Democrats have been largely supportive of the protests which many lawmakers are using to paint Republicans as out of touch with the concerns of middle-class Americans.

Sherrod Brown:

“I think the energy coming out of the Wall Street protesters is always
a good thing. When people non-violently speak out and stand for something,
it’s good to challenge authority when they do that.”

Brown went all in for #OWS with this posting on his campaign website:

Reps. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) in a joint statement, said:

“We share the anger and frustration of so many Americans who have seen the enormous toll that an unchecked Wall Street has taken on the overwhelming majority of Americans while benefiting the super-wealthy,” Reps. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) said in a joint statement.

“We join the calls for corporate accountability and expanded middle-class opportunity.”

John Larson (D-Conn.):

“The silent masses aren’t so silent anymore. They are fighting to give voice to the struggles that everyday Americans are going through.”

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.):

“All of us should join that movement.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.):

“We have the crooks on Wall Street, and I use that word advisedly—don’t misquote me, the word is ‘crooks’—whose greed, whose recklessness, whose illegal behavior caused this terrible recession with so much suffering. We believe in this country; we love this country; and we will be damned if we’re going to see a handful of robber barons control the future of this country.”

Remarkably, considering the caution of so many elected officials with regard to the protests, Sanders actually called for a toughening of the movement’s anti–Wall Street message. “I applaud those protesters who are out there, who are focusing attention on Wall Street, but what we’ve got to do is put meat on that bone,” he said. “We’ve got to make demands on Wall Street [and] break those institutions up.”

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY):

Our junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, stated the obvious October 10 when she told The National memo she thinks Occupy Wall Street. “has become a vehicle for people to vent their frustration with the economy.”
“I share the frustration at how broken Washington has become in forging solutions,” Ms. Gillibrand said.

Harlem House rep Chuck Rangel:

“I was very surprised, but very pleased, that this group of people just came out. I don’t really think that they have to have any solutions for the problem. It reminds me of the movie “Network,” where the guy just yells out his window, ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio)  released a Web video praising the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters and calling on Americans to support their efforts:

“Your presence is making a difference. You’re exercising the right every American holds most dear, the right of freedom of expression, and with that expression you’re finally getting the attention of the nation,” said Kucinich in the video released Tuesday.

“Wall Street banks got billion dollar bailouts, yet the American people get austerity,” he added.

Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.):

“It’s time for all Americans to pay their fair share,” Slaughter, the ranking Democrat on the House Rules Committee, said in a statement. “And I’m so proud to see the Occupy Wall Street movement standing up to this rampant corporate greed and peacefully participating in our democracy.”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) visited the Occupy Providence camp in an effort rally support for his bill that cracks down on high credit card interest rates.

According to a report from the Associated Press, Whitehouse was impressed with the cleanliness and orderliness of the Occupy camp.

Despite Senator Whitehouse’s visit to the camp, Providence Mayor Angel Taveras and Public Safety Commissioner Pare are still determined to force the Occupy protesters – through legal action – out of Burnside Park.

“Public Safety officials have identified level 3 sex offenders among those occupying the park and the City of Providence has concern for the people staying at night due to this reason,” Lague told New England Post. “We are working to ensure the safety.

Senator Patty Murray statement:

Senator Murray understands the frustration that is driving these protests in Seattle and across the country. So many workers and middle class families have been devastated in this economic crisis, and most Americans agree that it’s only fair that big corporations and the wealthiest Americans pay their fair share and share in the sacrifice this moment requires.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) appeared on MSNBC’s Politics Nation to lend her voice to Occupy groups across the country:

“The Occupy Wall Street, and the Occupy movement, have made a real difference.”

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA):

When asked to comment Wednesday about the deaths and crimes that have occurred around Occupy protests being held across the country, Rep. Maxine Waters said “that’s life and it happens.”

“That’s a distraction from the goals of the protesters,” Waters, who says she supports the Occupy movement, told CNSNews.com after an event at the Capitol sponsored by the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

“Let me just say this: Anytime you have a gathering, homeless people are going to show up,” said Waters. “They will find some comfort in having some other people out on the streets with them. They’re looking for food. Often times, the criminal element will invade. That’s life and it happens, whether it’s with protesters or other efforts that go on in this country.

“So I’m not deterred in my support for them because of these negative kinds of things,” said Waters. “I just want them to work at doing the best job that they can do to bring attention to this economic crisis and the unfairness of the system at this time.”

Waters isn’t deterred because she knows the gatekeepers are hard at work characterizing anti-capitalist revolutionaries as frustrated but peaceful protesters.

graphic via Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama

As John Nolte of Big Government wrote:

One of the secret weapons the corrupt mainstream media uses in their never-ending quest to Palace Guard for the left is context. For example, when it came to the Tea Party, the MSM was notorious for amplifying a single incident (that was usually a lie) and using it to attempt to smear and define an entire movement. This is what you do when you want to quickly take out a political enemy.

The MSM’s contextual game changes, however, when their desire is to strengthen a movement and give it credibility and room to grow. By dutifully reporting individual incidents but not reporting on the growing scope and size of Occupy Wall Street lawlessness, the MSM is willfully covering up the violence, vandalism, and anti-Semitism that truly does define this movement.

See Nolte’s Rap Sheet, which now has over 300 #OWS violations listed, at the link.

graphic via Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama

The campaign to Defeat Barack Obama created this video to point out the Dems’ shamelessness:

Zombie’s report at PJ  Media; The 99%: Official list of Occupy Wall Street’s supporters, sponsors and sympathizers shows you the types of nefarious characters and groups that joined the Democrats in support of this decrepit movement. It’s a damning list that includes, Communist revolutionaries, Islamists, and Nazis. Basically the same bunch that supported Barack Obama for President.

graphic via Gateway Pundit

Finally, via The Jawa Report, a side by side comparison of Tea Party vs. #Occupy infractions. As you can see, there is no comparison, and those who tried to make one were trying to put lipstick on a pig.

Sorry, Dems. You own this:

UPDATE:

So dumb it hurts…

Hot Air: Democrats fundraise off OWS

UPDATE (Dec 3, 2011):

Unreal: Dem Congresswoman Donna Edwards Tells Occupy D.C. Goons, “It’s Time For Us to Occupy America”…

UPDATE (January 17, 2012):

Babalu:The Glare of Unmitigated Hypocrisy of The Unconscionable Pelosi Mind

Bless her blatantly shameless hypocritical forked tongue.

San Fran Nan now claims no democrat ‘connection’ with the growingly obvious agenda of the Occupy Movement and their very near future plans as she tries to distance herself, her party, and the administration from them … for some reason.

Tweet

Dear MSM: Stop Saying The Troublemakers At The #Occupy Protests Are “Fringe”

Denver October 16, El Marco: Anarchists, locking arms to lead the OccupyDenver March.

Why is the MSM playing the part of clueless dupe in its reporting of the Occupy protests? Why do reporters only reluctantly report any  unsavory news about the protests, and always with the caveat that the protests are “mostly peaceful”, when clearly the anarchists causing the trouble are a large part of the movement, and in many cases, organizers? That’s not a movement that is peaceful. That is a movement that is only pretending to be peaceful.

The spillover into violence that the liberal media so wanted to report about the truly peaceful tea parties never materialized, yet when the left protests in large numbers, angry mob violence  ensues. It’s entirely predictable that #OWS would become violent, and it’s entirely predictable that the MSM doesn’t want to report it. Instead they play it down. They ignore the people running around these protests with their faces covered with masks or bandanas.  They ignore the open drug use, rapes and robberies occurring every night at the encampments. They ignore the Marxist/anarchist/wacko signs.

It’s so annoying. Predictable, yes, but annoying:

Here’s Conn Carroll of The Washington Examiner noticing the same thing :

The New York Timeson down, every mainstream media outlet reporting on the Occupy Oakland Riots wants us to believe that the general strike was “orderly” and “peaceful” and that only a “belligerent fringe group” destroyed property and incited violence later in the night. But as The Oakland Tribune‘s live-blog of the protests shows this is just plain false:

Milani, a camper who did not want to give a last name, spoke against apologizing to businesses. She said it wasn’t just outsiders committing vandalism.

“The person I saw putting toilet paper up, they’re a facilitator at the general assembly. The person spray painting, they’re on the events committee.”

All of these mainstream outlets also failed to report that the night before the general strike, the Occupy Oakland General Assembly adopted a resolution in support of occupying abandoned/foreclosed buildings. The major violence Wednesday night didn’t start until protesters started doing just that.

Via Michelle Malkin, the San Fran Chronicle reported on the recent #OccupyOakland vandalism which is costing the city $25,000 to replace broken windows. Listen to the good Mayor make excuses for the Oakland protesters, who inhabit one of the most violent and depraved camps in the country.

Crews were boarding up broken windows at the Tully’s Coffee shop just steps from Occupy Oakland’s camp at Frank Ogawa Plaza outside City Hall. Graffiti was sprayed on the Rite Aid and Walgreens drugstores across from each other at 14th and Broadway. The city estimated it would cost up to $25,000 to replace broken windows at city buildings.

City Administrator Deanna Santana apologized to business owners for the “chaotic events” that enveloped the city. Mayor Jean Quan called the rioters “a small and isolated group.”

“It shouldn’t mar the overall impact of the demonstration and the fact that people in the 99 percent movement demonstrated peacefully and, for the most part, were productive and very peaceful,” Quan said.

Tagami disagreed, calling the Occupy Oakland encampment “basically concealment and cover for anarchists who are doing this to our city.”

“We’re very concerned that a group of people can be allowed to do this type of destruction to our town and to our image without any repercussions,” Tagami said. “They need to be held accountable.” He rejected assertions that the anarchists were a small minority, saying, “No, you can’t have it both ways.”

The  Oakland businessman interviewed by the Chronicle, Phil Tagami, had protected his building from the Occupy rioters, with a loaded shotgun.

Photojournalist, Zombie estimated that the protesters at OccupyOakland were 50% communist/socialist, 25% anarchist/anti-authoritarian, and 25% incoherent/confused/personal.  From what I’ve seen, that ratio probably describes most of the occupations going on across the country. If 25% of the protesters are anarchists, that is not an insignificant minority. In fact, I suspect the reason that their ideological opposites – the Socialists/Communists who make up the majority at these occupiers – put up with them, is because the anarchists are serving a purpose at these protests. While the “peaceful” occupiers avert their eyes, the anarchists pick fights with the police,  engage in vandalism, and cause general mayhem.  Then the “peaceful” occupiers apologize and say they don’t condone it. It’s a pattern that has played out over and over again at all of the occupations that have seen violence.

If the “peaceful occupiers” really didn’t condone it, the anarchists wouldn’t be allowed to be a part of their movement.  The troublemakers would be kicked out.

That’s how the peaceful tea party would handle it.

MORE:

An #OccupyOakland anarchist speaks via American Power:

 ”Open Letter From Anarchist Participant in Oakland Strike“:

After the successful national day of action and general strike in Oakland, naturally, we see the topic of violence and non-violence growing within our movement and within the voices of corporate media networks. Obviously this is a result of certain actions that individuals and groups within the movement decided to partake in. Unfortunately we are hearing a great deal of slander, and nonsense at the forefront of this discussion. As someone who has been with the occupation as much as possible, I feel it’s necessary to confront this.

Isolating people based on their willingness to engage in self-defense by actively protecting the spaces we’ve all worked so hard to build together, and the symbolic defiance of exploitative property by making absurd claims of them being “Outside agitators” as if it they are some how separate from the many people who have been actively involved in building these spaces of ‘direct-democracy’ and communal living should not only be considered an attack on solidarity, but an attack on movements of the people. What divides movements of the people, weakens movements of the people.

Many of us out there today and tonight were Anarchists, but many were also not. We are the ones who were in the streets, ready to provide support & solidarity with all of our brothers and sisters. We were ready to brave against the violence of the state arm and arm with you, to protect one another, and provide medic support to anyone who fell victim to the police assaults. We are the ones whom also involved themselves with serving food to the commune, providing sanitation, organizing actions and broadening the movement. We are not separate from the movement. We are not outside agitators. We are a part of the movement, we are involved with the struggle. We stood with the occupation before day one, we stood with the occupation tonight and will continue to do the same in the future. Don’t let age old divide and conquer tactics convince you otherwise, please…

These are not new sentiments. When Adbusters began agitating for the occupation of Wall Street, the publishers there were familiar with the anarchist roots of the movement. This is what “occupation” means. The movement is about exploiting the current “contradictions of capitalism” (foreclosures, recession, unemployment) to propel the revolutionary moment.

Breitbart TV: Oakland Police Union Slams Mayor; We Were Set Up For Failure

Three police officers were injured and one bitten, Wednesday night.

Politico Runs Hit Piece On Herman Cain Based On Vague Allegations Of Two Anonymous Sources

Four Politico reporters, *including Journolister, Ben Smith, have run a story  alleging that Herman Cain engaged in “inappropriate behavior” with two female employees while head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s. They have confirmed the identities of the two female restaurant association employees who complained about Cain but, for privacy concerns, are not publishing their names. Very sweet of them. As we know, private citizens deemed a threat to a presidential candidate *cough* “Joe the Plumber” *cough* can be savaged by the MSM in an effort to discredit them. So those privacy concerns are well founded. The MSM would totally leave no stone unturned in their efforts to smear these courageous whistleblowers whose stories could torpedo the campaign of the candidate most likely to beat Obama in the 2012 election.

Not.

John Hayward of Human events notes that not only has “sexual harassment” returned with a vengeance since its heyday in the nineties, it now doesn’t even have to be “overtly sexual.”

The sources — which include the recollections of close associates and other documentation — describe episodes that left the women upset and offended. These incidents include conversations allegedly filled with innuendo or personal questions of a sexually suggestive nature, taking place at hotels during conferences, at other officially sanctioned restaurant association events and at the association’s offices. There were also descriptions of physical gestures that were not overtly sexual but that made women who experienced or witnessed them uncomfortable and that they regarded as improper in a professional relationship.

Remember the Praetorian Guard behavior of the media ranks that closed around Bill Clinton – to the point of aggressively suppressing credible accusations of rape against him, and thereby launching the career of Matt Drudge – when you watch the swarms of reporters tearing into Herman Cain over this.  I wonder how many innuendo-laden conversations Clinton had with women who were not Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office.  Heck, I wonder how many he had last week.

All of Politico’s sources are perfectly anonymous.  Anonymous sources confirm the reports of anonymous sources, and anonymously relate things Herman Cain allegedly said to them years ago.  Everyone willing to go on the record either had no comment, or spoke well of Cain.

Read on.

RS McCain updates his post on the Politico Hit piece:

UPDATE II: A female Republican operative who worked on Herman Cain’s 2004 Georgia Senate campaign scoffs at the accusations against him. “I don’t believe story that Cain behaved inappropriately,” wrote the woman, who uses the Twitter handle @KarolNYC. “He never even bordered on inappropriate in the slightest,” she Tweeted, and added that she ”just can’t believe there’s anything to the charges.”

Time will tell if there is any substance to this story. As Hayward notes:

Cain is supposed to make a Fox News appearance at 11:15 this morning, and will also speak at the American Enterprise Institute today.  He should throw every card he has on the table, and relate every scrap of knowledge he personally possesses about whatever took place, subject to any legal obligations he might have to the National Restaurant Association.  If this story has even the tiniest bit of meat on its bones, a misleading report will become the story by the end of the week, and nobody in the press will care about how shoddy Politico’s rollout was.

Now, a word about the Politico and their shoddy use or disuse of anonymous sources however it suits them.

In 2008, the Politico was given a tip that would have shed light on the Obama/Ayers relationship, but was never followed up on in the fall of 2008 -   the Ayers babysitting story. It was quashed because, according to the rumors circulating at the time,  there was only one nervous, anonymous source, and Ben Smith needed at least two anonymous sources to run the story.

As I reported in July, 2010: Not That It Matters Anymore, But There WAS A Second Source For That 2008 Obama/Ayers Babysitting Story:

Hillbuzz recently took note of the fact that The Politico’s Ben Smith was a member of the Obama-supporting Journolist cabal: Our experience with Journolist member (and committed Obama operative) Ben Smith during the 2008 general election:

The McCain campaign approached us with a story they had on Obama, which needed a second source to confirm.  They had found a young woman in Hyde Park who had played with the older Obama girl on occasion, and knew about babysitting William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn did for the Obama girls.  The young woman was the daughter of a McCain supporter in Hyde Park (probably the only McCain supporter in Hyde Park), and was barely a teenager.  The McCain camp went to Ben Smith with this story, but he refused to look into it because the only witness to the Ayers/Dohrn babysitting operation was a teenaged girl who happened to be the daughter of a McCain supporter.

We were charged with finding someone else who could verify that Ayers/Dohrn babysat the Obama girls.  We brought their old swimming instructor up, and Ben Smith shot that person (now a respected advertising executive) down because she, too, was a Republican and a McCain supporter.  So, Ben Smith refused to do a write-up on the Ayers/Dorhn babysitting…despite getting two different people who didn’t know each other to verify that this happened on more than one occasion.

When you look at a map of the Hyde Park area, you see Louis Farrakhan, the Obama/Rezko Mansion, and the William Ayers residence in very close proximity to one another…about as close to each other as The Gap, Banana Republic, and Express are to each other in a typical suburban mall.  Walking distance.  So close, young children could easily walk between the houses without parents worrying about them.

That story was one of many that could have deep-sixed the Obama campaign, but thanks to Journolister, Ben Smith, it was the story that was deep sixed.

When it comes to “Praetorian Guard behavior from the media ranks”, none hold a candle to The Politico.

UPDATE:

Fox News: Happening Now Exclusive: Herman Cain Says He Never Sexually Harassed Anyone, But Was Accused of Harassment While at National Restaurant Association:

Cain stressed, “I have never sexually harassed anyone.” He did admit that he was accused of harassment while at the National Restaurant Association, saying, “Yes, I was falsely accused while I was at the National Restaurant Association. And, I say falsely because it turned out, after the investigation, to be baseless.”

MORE: 

The Weekly Standard: Cain’s Former Secretary: This Is Not the Herman Cain I Know:

Past employees of Cain, including his long-time female executive assistant, have told THE WEEKLY STANDARD that the charges are unbelievable.

“It’s just not Herman,” says Sibby Wolfson, who was Cain’s executive assistant from 1997 through his first campaign for office in 2004, in a phone interview. “He’s got a lovely wife, a lovely family.”

Did Wolfson ever see Cain act in a way that could be construed as sexual harassment? “No, God, no,” she says. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. In fact, I think Herman was careful to act in the opposite way.”

If Herman Cain was a  sexual harasser, (a la Bill Clinton), more women will be coming out of the woodwork in the coming weeks. But, somehow, I doubt it. Just like Anita Hill was the only woman Clarence Thomas was ever known to allegedly harass, these two anonymous victims of harassment will probably turn out to be isolated incidents, as well.

UPDATE:

Ace (who’s a Perry supporter) says he’s been hearing rumors:

Here’s a big question: “Are we going to hear about other allegations in the future?”

He says, “Absolutely not.” But immediately says: “If more allegations come, people will [sic] simply make them up.”

I say this is a big question because I heard about this stuff a month ago, and I didn’t hear about two incidences. I heard about many more.

I did not have detailed information, certainly nothing publishable. But I heard there was a long and numerous history here.

If he has this flaw in his character, there will be other instances of harassment, and those stories will come out eventually. Better now, then in the general election.

But it’s hard to believe it’s true when so many women who have worked for him are willing to go on the record saying they have never seen that in his character.

See also:

The Other McCain’s exclusive coverage of Herman Cain At The National Press Club.

Dana Loesch at Big Journalism:Politico’s Jonathan Martin Won’t Divulge Details Of Cain Story

John Guardiano: Politico’s High-Tech Lynching of Herman Cain:

The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution says explicitly that the accused has a right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him.”

True, the court of public opinion is not the same as a court of law. Still, the same basic principles of fairness and decency ought to apply in both venues. The media must not character assassinate people with anonymous accusations which, if true, could destroy reputations and end careers.

In short, name names or shut the hell up.

*Correction: My report originally listed Ben Smith as one of the writers of the Politico hit piece. I was confusing him with Jonathan Martin.

Hat tip: Charles B.

Linked by Michelle Malkin, and The Other McCain, thanks!.

Texas Dems Come To Perry’s Defense – “If he were an n-bomb dropping cracker, we’d all know.”

This is a pleasant surprise. I wasn’t expecting Texas Democrats to come to Perry’s defense on the WaPo racist rock story.

Via Hot Air, Allahpunditposes the obvious question: “How did Perry manage 10 years as governor of Texas without the story about his family’s hunting camp coming out?:

The apparent answer: Few people back home seriously believe he’s a racist, including the opposition, so maybe no one thought it mattered.

Even some of Perry’s fiercest Texas critics say they do not believe he is racist. They point to his record of appointments as evidence: He appointed the state’s first African-American state supreme court justice, Wallace Jefferson, and later made him chief justice. (Jefferson’s great grandfather was a slave, “sold like a horse,” Perry once said with disgust.) Perry’s former general counsel and former chief of staff, Brian Newby, is black; so is Albert Hawkins, the former Health and Human Services Commissioner who Perry handpicked to lead the massive agency in 2002.

“He doesn’t have a racist bone in his body,” said former Democratic state Rep. Ron Wilson, who is black and served with Perry in his early years in the Legislature. “He didn’t then, and he doesn’t now.”

Added Dallas Democratic Sen. Royce West, who is also black: “I don’t agree with him on policy issues, but you can point to many things he has done that were sensitive to ethnic minorities.”…

“He appointed a black man chief justice of the state Supreme Court, for crying out loud, one of the many high-profile positions he’s given to minorities during his time as governor,” Jason Stanford, a Democratic opposition researcher and author of an upcoming book on Perry, wrote in a weekend blog post. “… If he were an n-bomb dropping cracker, we’d all know.”

See Also:

Gateway Pundit, who posts audio of Mark Levin telling his audience yesterday that “the Obama New Black Panther story completely destroys the ‘Perry Rock’ story.”

As does Fast and Furious, Green Energy-Gate, the Gibson Guitar raid, Obama’s disastrous stewardship of the economy, etc. etc. I don’t have time to go through all the Obama administration’s  scandals – (but I do cringe when I hear MSM idiots saying , “Will [insert latest scandal, here] tarnish he President’s squeaky clean image?) What a joke.

Has anyone even seen this rock? Can we get a picture? We have to take the WaPo’s anonymous sources’ words for their allegation that the N-word was still visible under the white paint for years? They haven’t even been able to find the rock, but no matter. They run a story smearing a man’s character in the worst possible way on the flimsiest of evidence, but ignore actual photos of the President marching with radical, anti-Semitic, racist, militant Islamist nut-jobs in 2007. No curiosity at all about Malik Zulu Shabazz’s name showing up on White House logs before the New Black Panther voter intimidation case was thrown out by the DOJ.

No, the scoop of the year is the rock with a bad word on it that Perry had painted over nearly thirty years ago.

REMINDER:

Rumor has it, (well, no – actually, recent events show) that the race card is going to be a major part of Obama’s 2012 campaign strategy.

…..”his people are going to raise the issue of race to a level this country hasn’t seen since the Civil Rights movement.  White guilt got Barack Obama the nomination.  White guilt got Barack Obama into the White House.”

RELATED:

Hot Air: Wow: Cain ties Perry for 2nd in new WaPo/ABC poll

Herman Cain Walks Back Perry Ranch Condemnation – “They painted over it. End of story!”

Via The Hill: Cain’s press office tweeted a picture of him in front of Trump Tower

Via Katrina Trinko of NRO:

Speaking outside Trump Tower today, Herman Cain dismissed the idea that he was trying to paint Rick Perry as a racist by having called Perry “insensitive” yesterday when asked about the “[N-word]head” rock on property Perry had leased.

“All I said was the mere fact that that word was there was ‘insensitive.’” Cain responded. “That’s not playing the race card. I am not attacking Gov. Perry. Some people in the media want to attack him. I’m done with that issue!”

The Perry campaign says that the rock was painted over years ago.

Cain asked reporters to focus on “what’s important to the American people” rather than “beat this distraction to death about a word that appeared on a rock.”

“I really don’t care about that word,” Cain added. “They painted over it. End of story! I accept Gov. Perry’s response on that.”

After meeting with Donald Trump, Cain come out and talked to the media again, saying he had “very much enjoyed” the conversation he had had with Trump. They did not discuss a possible endorsement according to Cain.

Mr. Cain has been taking  heat in the conservative blogosphere for making the comments condemning Perry without qualifying whether or not the WaPo story was entirely true.

Hopefully these remarks will cool things off a bit.

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Obama Fantasies

During the 2008 campaign, Bill Clinton, in a rare moment of honest candor, described Obama’s candidacy as ” the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen”. He was roundly lambasted for that raaaaacist comment, but of course he was 100% correct.  That fairytale, or  “fantasy” as I like to call it,  didn’t develop without a whole lot of assistance from the MSM. Assistance that continues to this day, I should add..

In the past few months, we’ve seen Obama, characterized as our “scandal-free” “adult in the room” President who  is “finally going to get tough with his opponents”, and has “no time to feel sorry for himself”.

Please.

The “scandal-free” narrative tried to gain traction,  a week or so ago:

Mark it on your calendars: if President Obama has just 20 days to go — October 6! — in order to claim the record as the most scandal-free president since 1977.

Then the Solyndra scandal broke in a big way, smashing the meme to smithereens. But the idea that the Obama administration was “scandal free” was a complete fantasy before Solyndra.

Here’s an incomplete list of Obama scandals to date:

Dealergate, DOJ Black Panther whitewash, the Obamafication of NEA art, the Sestak affair, the politically expedient IG Gerald Walpin firing, misspent Porkulous funds,  the DOJ’s secret astroturf propaganda unit, the Shorebank scandal, oilgate, Blagojevich Rezko Obama corruption, his  unaccountable Communist czars, Fast and Furious, The Gibson Guitar Raid, and now Solyndra and LightSquared.

Scandal-free, my a$$.

The Obami tried to position Obama as the “adult in the room” during budget negotiations with Republicans,

To strengthen his credibility as the “adult in the room,” President Obama repeatedly asserted his willingness to stand up to liberal activist groups in pursuit of a grand bargain. “I’m prepared to take on significant heat from my party to get something done,” he said, “and I expect the other side should be willing to do the same thing if they mean what they say.”

Yet it is he is who has been the irresponsible spendthrift, procrastinating action on the debt crisis until he could come up with a transparently political plan that won’t work.

It’s hard to keep track of all the tax hikes that President Obama is proposing, but it’s very simple to recognize his main target – the evil, nasty, awful people known as the rich.

Or, as Obama identifies them, the “millionaires and billionaires” who happen to have yearly incomes of more than $200,000.

Whether the President is talking about higher income tax rates, higher payroll tax rates, an expanded alternative minimum tax, a renewed death tax, a higher capital gains tax, more double taxation of dividends, or some other way of extracting money, the goal is to have these people foot the bill for a never-ending expansion of the welfare state.

This sounds like a pretty good scam, at least if you’re a vote-buying politician, but there is one little detail that sometimes gets forgotten. Raising the tax burden is not the same as raising revenue.

That may not matter if you’re trying to win an election by stoking resentment with the politics of hate and envy. But it is a problem if you actually want to collect more money to finance a growing welfare state

At various times throughout his presidency, the MSM has celebrated Obama’s “new, more combative” tone in fighting those intransigent Republicans. Because we all know, Obama’s been such a meek and mild shrinking violet until now.

Riiiight. Michelle Malkin burst that particular fantasy some time ago:

“We don’t mind the Republicans joining us,” Obama taunted a few weeks ago. “They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.”

“They’re counting on young people staying home and union members staying home and black folks staying home,” the fear-mongering agent of hope and change jeered on the campaign trail last month.

“You would think they’d be saying thank you,” he sneered last April, when millions turned out for the nationwide Tax Day tea party protests.

“I want them just to get out of the way” and “don’t do a lot of talking,” he scoffed in response to prescient critics of the federal trillion-dollar stimulus boondoggle.

In addition to labeling GOP opponents of his open-borders policies “enemies” who needed to be “punished” by Latino voters, Obama accused them — that is, us — of lacking patriotism. “Those aren’t the kinds of folks who represent our core American values,” he told viewers of the Spanish-language network Univision.

Now, in full 2012 campaign mode, Obama tries to rally the dubious CBC, by saying, “I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain.” He also told the CBC to “take off your bedroom slippers” and “put on your marching shoes.” And he scolded them to “stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying.”

Obama doesn’t have time to feel sorry for himself?!

As Commentary’s Peter Wehner says:

If there has been a president in my lifetime who has felt more sorry for himself – who has laid the blame for his failures on more people (George W. Bush, the Congressional GOP, the Tea Party, conservative talk radio hosts, millionaires and billionaires) and more things (ATMs, Japanese tsunamis, the Arab Spring, Fox News, Wall Street, et cetera) – I can’t think of who that might be. As the wheels on the Obama presidency come off, as his record of ineptness becomes more indisputable, Obama is becoming more intemperate, more aggrieved, more prickly, and more detached from reality.

What we are seeing is a president attempt to create, almost out of whole cloth, his own character, his own narrative, his own truth. That might work in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel; it works less well in an American presidential campaign.

Well, it may work if enough of his sycophants in the MSM help keep the fantasies alive.

Charles Krauthammer On Solyndra: A “Toxic Combination Of Lenin Socialism and Crony Capitalism”

Charles Krauthammer and other guests on Hannity, Friday night,  discussed the bankruptcy of Solyndra along with some other scandals and corrupt practices within the Obama administration. Krauthammer soberly explained the problems with the Obama administrations approach, calling it a classic example of the toxic combination of Lenin Socialism and crony capitalism -”the Socialist idea of experts over the markets made even worse when it involves cronyism, favors and corruption.”

“You destroy an economy when you think a politician in a centralized state knows where the capital should be allocated,” he said.

Later on in the show, Pat Cadell and Bill Cunningham joined him. Cadell’s disgust and contempt for what’s been going on in the Obama administration was palpable, and he slams the media for failing to cover plethora of scandals adequately:

One reason Obama has been able to get away with as much as he has, is because the media has been giving him a pass since the beginning of his term. When they don’t cover cover the corrupt practices of this administration, (and there have been too many to count), the scandal gets flushed down the memory hole. We’ve reached a point, however, where the scandals are too big, and too plentiful to ignore.

Earlier this week, James Carville said Obama should start firing people, including Eric Holder.

Holder would be a great start.

Perry Calls Obama Administration’s Policies Socialist

It’s not the first time, either. Back in November of 2009, Perry told a Republican group in Texas that the Obama administration was “hell bent on taking America towards a socialist country.”

In a recent interview with TIME, he did it, again:

Now that you’ve been in the race for while, do you feel pressure to temper some of your rhetoric, like calling the Obama administration socialist?

No, I still believe they are socialist. Their policies prove that almost daily. Look, when all the answers emanate from Washington D.C., one size fits all, whether it’s education policy or whether it’s healthcare policy, that is, on its face, socialism.

The NY Times helpfully points out what Republican “rivals” think:

This year, as he faces charges from his rivals for the Republican nomination that his positions are too extreme to win the general election, Mr. Perry said he will not change the way he speaks to appeal to the nation as a whole.

Of course, Republican rivals always say their opponents are “too extreme”. I daresay the electorate has finally found out what happens when they listen to what Republican rivals say, and now they’re suffering from “extreme” voters’ remorse because of it.

Of course, Perry is absolutely correct. Obama is a Socialist, and so is the Democrat left flank in Congress. There’s nothing “extreme” about stating the obvious. Although the left will never openly admit what they are, (they can only achieve their goals through stealth), it should be common knowledge, by now. It would have been nice if people had heeded the warnings of conservative bloggers waving red flags (no pun intended) in 2008. But nobody outside of the conservative blogosphere seemed to be listening, including Republican campaign staffs.

Dr. John Drew, who knew  Marxist, Obama, back when he was going to Occidental College, recounts his frustration in trying to warn the public about Obama back in 2008:

The Obama I knew was nothing like the lifelong pragmatic centrist that he was pretending to be in the 2008 presidential campaign.  When I talked politics with the young Obama, he expressed a profound commitment to bringing about a socialist economic system in the U.S. — completely divorced from the profit motive — which would occur, in his lifetime, through a potentially violent, Communist-style revolution.  In this context, I saw my report on young Obama as a key piece of evidence suggesting a profound continuity in his belief system.

Although I was surprised by Barack Obama’s insistence on his mainstream ideological credentials, I was shocked that my attempts to spread the news about young Obama’s Marxism failed to gain any media traction with reporters, activists, or campaign staffs during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Once I saw the significance of my face-to-face observations on the young Obama, I went out of my way to get my story on record with the Orange County Register.  I tried to contact, among others, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, the folks behind the Swiftboat ads, and the McCain campaign.

I thought I would get a phone call back from Fox News — someone, somewhere — and I still do not understand why no one seemed to catch on to the urgency of the situation.  I understand that I did not have audio tape of young Obama.  I did not have any photos or home movies.  Nevertheless, I was extremely active in the leftist politics and counter-cultural milieu of Occidental College in the 1970s.

***

What shocked me about my experience in the summer of 2008 is that I thought my experience as a Williams College political science professor, my small business owner status, and my visibility in the Orange County community would allow my message to immediately go to the very top of the McCain campaign.  I thought my story would be welcomed by Fox News.

Since then, things have slowly gotten better.  My story on the young Marxist Obama has appeared in Michael Savage’s Trickle-Up Poverty, Paul Kengor’s Dupes, Stanley Kurtz’s Radical-In-Chief, and Jack Cashill’s Deconstructing Obama.

Nevertheless, I think there is something broken in our media and campaign system.  I do not think most independents or conservatives understand, or fully appreciate, the tremendous advantages the left derives from having the mainstream media serve as the fully paid, completely sympathetic, Dan Rather-level opposition research team of the Democratic Party.  It is a system that methodically ignores damaging information about flawed candidates like Sen. John Edwards and Rep. Anthony Weiner, while elevating minor errors among Republicans to the status of Watergate investigations.

Believe me, those of us who were blogging in 2008 understand the dilemma, well. What we always knew was a problem, before, came sharply into focus, when story after damaging story on Obama was routinely ignored by the media. Not helpful was a clueless public that could have demanded better coverage, but were satisfied with the “hope and change” pablum they were being fed.

Dr. Drew has has a prescription for Republicans in the next go-around:

If Republicans are going to win in 2012, I think they need to make some changes so that they are more friendly to the whistle-blowers bringing them bad news about the Obama administration.  Personally, I would like to see Republicans create new ways to collect negative news stories on liberals by 1) including web pages requesting opposition research from leakers; 2) establishing guidelines for leakers that help them give campaign decision-makers the confidence to pursue appropriate leads; and 3) instituting feedback mechanisms so leakers have some minimal assurance that they have been heard by top campaign managers and that their information has been discarded for technical or strategic reasons and not simply because it was overlooked by a careless staff member.

I’m not sure, but I think with the help of Twitter, conservatives are doing a better job getting their voices heard. When The Obama Campaign launched its noxious “snitch on conservatives” website, “Attack Watch”, it was impossible for the MSM to ignore the massive blow-back, most of it happening on Twitter. Now, there’s a death watch for Attack Watch.

But if it survives, Republicans need to have a serious counterpart. There is already an Attack Watch Watch, but it seems to be mostly about mocking Attack Watch and selling anti-Attack Watch merchandize. Worthy endeavors, certainly. But there needs to be a serious response to Obama’s agitprop.

In 2008, we could have used a counterpart to Obama’s “Fight the Smears” hogwash, too. Instead, various blogs handled the caseloads of b.s. piecemeal. One stop shopping is the way to go. I’d like to see a website that does nothing but offers serious rebuttals to Attack Watch’s propaganda. For instance,  their attack on Rick Perry for saying that Obama’s created 0 jobs.

“We say pants on fire,” reports Politifact.com. The site refers to four independent analyses by the Congressional Budget Office and three private assessments of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act to determine that anywhere between 1.3 million and 3.6 million jobs were created or saved by the stimulus—“but certainly more than zero.”

Operative words, “or saved”. Because Perry didn’t say anything about “saved”. He said, “created”: President Obama “had $800 billion worth of stimulus” and “created zero jobs.”

He has, in fact, lost a net of 3.5 million jobs since he became President. Perry was wrong because Obama has created less than 0 jobs.

The lowest number of jobs per the establishment data over the past 32 months occurred in January of 2010 when the BLS reported non-farm employment of 129.5 million.  When one compares that month to the August 2011 report a gain of 1.6 million jobs is recorded.  So by pulling out of the 32 months he has been in office only those months (19) beneficial to him, Barack Obama can claim he has created nearly 2 million jobs; never mind that a net of 3.5 million jobs have been lost since he became President.

On that basis any President can make himself appear to be a success as a job creator as at some point in a four year term jobs growth will occur just by the natural growth in population and business cycles.  As no President before him has been so devious, Obama has taken deception to a new level by this and his many ongoing attempts to fool the American people for political gain.

Lee Doren also corrects the “jobs created or saved” deception, here.

We need a website that fact checks Obama’s “fact checks”.

Another thing that’s changed since 2008 is the MSM, like most of America has fallen out of love with “The Light-bringer”. I’m seeing more and more stories appearing that don’t help his highness. CBS has done a great job covering Fast and Furious, and too many news outlets to count are covering the Solyndra scandal. A new crony capitalism scandal, LightSquared, is being scrutinized by The Washington Post, among others.

Now there’s talk that Dem. party elders may take Obama aside, and strongly suggest that he do the right thing, (quit.)

 Andrew Breitbart wrote on Tuesday that the Democrat rank and file are finally awakening to the fact that their party has been hijacked.

    I predict a tectonic shift among American Jews and within the Democratic Party if Obama doesn’t quietly retire. All the spinning in the world can’t spin away the trend of Scott Brown, the Tea Party victory of November 2010, and now the Turner earthquake.

Many Democrats are awakening to the reality that their party has been hijacked by a radicalism completely unfamiliar to their parents’ and grandparents’ Democratic Party.

Admitting the truth about what Obama is, (and what their party has become) is the first step toward healing. Either the radicals need to be kicked to the curb,  or it’s time to switch parties.

America’s survival depends on it.

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RELATED:

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Obama reaching Pariah status –

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Gateway Pundit: Dem Weprin Blames Obama After Stunning NY-9 Loss: “The Election Turned Into Referendum on Obama & I Was the Unfortunate Consequence”

James Carville: Obama Not Going to Win Reelection on Course He’s On Right Now (Video)

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UPDATE:

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This is reassuring. I really don’t want our eventual nominee facing the more popular (God only knows why, there’s not a dimes difference between them) Hillary in November 2012.

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Weasel Zippers: Obama: I Hope My “Next Inauguration Is Warmer” Than First One…

Democrats are second-guessing him privately (and sometimes publicly).

But rest assured, Barack Obama is confident he’s got five-and-a-half more years in the White House.

“Here’s one thing I know for certain,” Obama told Democratic donors last night in Washington. “The odds of me being re-elected are much higher than the odds of me being elected in the first place.”