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AP Purposely Confuses Readers About Warren's False Cherokee Heritage

Sun, 27 May 2012 09:01:00 -0700

The Associated Press had a blockbuster quote about Elizabeth Warren, the embattled Democrat running for senate in Massachusetts who has not been able to prove her Native American ancestry despite having claimed it throughout her past, presumably to gain a professional advantage.

"I'm proud of my heritage," Warren told the Associated Press, whose stories get picked up by all national and regional outlets and is thus instrumental in setting the narrative. When the wire service asked her "how she knew it included Native Americans,” Warren said, "Because my mother told me so."

AP could have used this quote, which the article is built around, to build a case, as Breitbart News has been doing for three weeks, that “because my mother told me so” is nowhere near sufficient enough for Warren to be able to claim Native American ancestry on official documents and forms and professional directories.

Instead, for the national audience which may not be familiar with the Warren case because the mainstream media has ignored and obfuscated the issue to protect their liberal darling, the AP decided, even with this mockable quote, to run even more interference for Warren.

Before introducing the nearly self-incriminating quote from Warren, the AP reporter conditions the reader to give Warren the benefit of the doubt.

“What, exactly, makes someone American Indian?” the AP writer asks. “Even Indians themselves don't agree as they debate the case of Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, whose disputed claim of Native American identity is shining a rare spotlight on the malleable nature of Indian heritage and the long history of murky claims to such ancestry.”

This is not true.

Soon after stories emerged about Warren’s genealogy, Twila Barnes, a Cherokee, who is also a Cherokee genealogist, wrote a blistering post that denounced Warren:

You see, Ms. Warren, some of us have independently done our own research and we know you have no documentation supporting your claim of Cherokee ancestry.* We wonder why you believe you have the right to claim Cherokee ancestry and to call yourself a Native American when you have no evidence to support your claim.

And yet, the AP writes, in the article, “among Native Americans, the varying opinions demonstrate that Indian identity is subjective even among Indians themselves.”

Further, the AP quotes an essay in which the writer says, "An Indian identity is something someone claims for oneself; it is a matter of choice” and then adds “there are 566 federally recognized Native American tribes, each with its own rules for membership” and “some tribes require a ‘blood quantum’ measurement of as much as one-half or one-quarter Indian ancestry; others require a certain place of birth or residence.”

Then the AP quotes a professor who is married to a Najavo; the professor is quoted as saying, “I've asked them what defines a Navajo ... One said you have to speak the language. Another said you have to live within our sacred mountains. Another said no, you have to take part in ceremonial life. All this in one family!”

Except Warren claimed she was a member of the Cherokee Nation, not the Najavo Nation. But the AP writer is hoping his readers forget that convenient fact in trying to conflate what may be requirements for being a Najavo with those for being considered a Cherokee.

Confused, yet?

The article then does even more to befuddle the reader.

The reporter writes that though “Warren does not claim official Cherokee membership,” “many people have legitimate Cherokee ancestry but are not eligible for membership because their ancestors were not among those counted.”

The writer then quotes someone who says "some people falsely claim Native heritage simply out of ignorance ... They've been told for years that they had a great-grandmother (or something similar) who was a Cherokee princess and assume that it's true."

This quote serves to defend Warren’s statement that she is Native American because her mother told her so and her previous statements that she could also be Native American because her grandparents, as her Aunt Bea told her, had “high cheekbones" as all other Indians do.

Then the AP writer says, “even President Barack Obama has an Indian story, about his maternal grandmother, who was nicknamed ‘Toot.’”

Except, as Breitbart News reported, the president notoriously known and mocked for having creating fictional, composite characters, has also never shown prof that he has Native American heritage.

The AP then, if its readers were not confused enough already, then quotes people saying that even if someone were not an official member of a Native American tribe, they could become de-facto members if they give back to the Native American community. The quote serves to point out that Warren, as Breitbart News also reported, never did any work on behalf of Native American communities but it also, snidely, has a dual purpose of further confusing the reader as to what qualities can be used by someone to claim Native American status.

The purportedly objective AP could have written a story that objectively laid out all of the holes in Warren’s story about her Native American ancestry and used Warren’s quote about how she was a Native American “because my mother told me so” as another piece of evidence to cast doubt on her claims.

Instead, it just served to cast doubt on what properly is a Native American, leaving its readers enough reason to give Warren the benefit of the doubt she in no way deserves on this story.

Is Youtube Stifling Conservative Speech?

Sat, 26 May 2012 16:15:00 -0700

Sixteen-year-old Madeleine McAulay recently made a video wherein she politely discussed her thoughts on same sex marriage from the perspective of her Christian faith. The video received over 22,000 hits and landed her on Fox and Friends one morning last week due to the threats she received as a result of posting it. Progressives continued to attack her, called her video "hate speech," and Youtube finally pulled it.

Says Youtube, according to Ms. McAulay:

Thank you for submitting your video appeal to YouTube.

After further review of the content, we've determined that your video does violate our Community Guidelines and have upheld our original decision. We appreciate your understanding.

Sincerely,

— The YouTube Team

They hope McAulay understands that her respectful presentation of diverse opinion must be banned, but videos made in response to hers in which she's called a "whore" and a "pig" (among other gems) is allowed.

Youtube has a history of such decisions.

Unlike the left, conservatives fully support a private company's decision to operate how it sees fit. If Youtube wants to teach kids about free speech by banning the respectful videos of teenage girls while allowing men to savage them in misogynistic attacks in still-standing videos, that's their choice.

Daily Beast: Warren Story a 'Foolish Witch Hunt'

Sat, 26 May 2012 15:02:00 -0700

Elizabeth Warren—the Democratic contender challenging Republican Scott Brown for his Massachusetts U.S. Senate seat—was apparently proud of her so-called Cherokee heritage when she started teaching law at Harvard back in the early 1990s. In fact, she was so proud that she allowed the university to list her as a "minority professor" because she believed she was 1/32 Cherokee.

Well, if that doesn’t seem ridiculous, here’s something even better—Warren’s sympathizers in the mainstream media would like to convince the American public that it’s a “foolish witch-hunt” to question her sincerity for having labeled herself a minority with 1/32 Native American heritage.

That’s what Michael Tomasky (pictured above), a Newsweek and Daily Beast correspondent contends. In fact, he’s even stated that the story is the “biggest media manufactured story since the Lewinsky scandal nearly brought down a president.”

First of all, let’s get something straight.

I was an intern in the Clinton White House at the same time Monica Lewinsky was during the Spring of 1996, and although I felt the story cruelly and unjustifiably vilified Ms. Lewinsky, the facts about the President of the United States having an affair with an intern inside the Oval Office turned out to be true.

That story wasn’t manufactured—and guess what? This story isn’t either. It turned out that the purported 1894 marriage license application that Warren’s supporters were depending on to prove her Native American heritage status doesn’t exist.

Despite Mr. Tomasky’s pleas for the American public to write Professor Warren a hall pass on this one, she most likely was the one to list herself as a minority with Harvard, and now it’s a perfectly legitimate story because it goes to the very heart of her honesty as a candidate for a major political office.

There are three very important questions the media should consider here:

(1) Why did Warren think that having 1/32 heritage of any group qualified her to list herself as a minority?

(2) Is it true that she’s a Cherokee in the first place?

(3) Did Warren get any hiring preferences or special advantages by listing herself as a minority?

Tomasky dismisses the first question because, apparently, the Cherokee rules dictate that if you’re 1/32 Cherokee they consider you a a member of the tribe. That may be the case, but that doesn’t necessarily qualify her as a “minority” when it comes to her legal status. After all, she’s still 31/32 white. It would be interesting to know how Warren listed herself on applications for her voter registration, driver’s license, and U.S. income tax returns.

It’s an important issue because voters have the right to know if Warren exploited this sliver of her (supposed) heritage to get special consideration or attention, and that goes to the heart of her morality and her judgment—which leads us to the second question.

Tomasky dismisses the issue of Warren proving her Native American heritage because, “You have to go back five generations to get to 1/32. It’s entirely possible such a thing can’t even be proven.”

That’s a good point.

If it was that long ago and it’s probably not provable, why was it relevant for then-Professor Warren to list it in the first place? What made her so confident in this family lore that, for years, she would use it to obtain real-world advantages which could and would have gone to educators with verifiable minority status? To quote Mr. Braddock from the film "The Graduate," “This whole idea sounds pretty half-baked.”

Finally, there’s the issue of whether or not Warren received any kind of special hiring preference or advantage when she got hired by Harvard in 1992 amidst public pressure for greater faculty diversity. As Warren’s opponent Scott Brown said, “Only she and Harvard can answer any of these questions.”

And, sure enough, in a 1999 Affirmative Action Plan for an EEOC report, Harvard boasted having one female Native American professor on their law school staff. Guess who?

This is important because it goes to the heart of everything we Americans keep complaining about when it comes to electing politicians who take advantage and exploit the system.

After all, the idea is to “throw the rascals out,” not push more of them in. If Ms. Warren used this 1/32 so-called minority status to get hiring preference over someone potentially more qualified or even to help Harvard bolster its minority staff statistics, that says a lot about her honesty—and it doesn’t say anything good.

Today, the Los Angeles Times joined the Warren defense effort, criticizing those who have asked questions about this issue despite the fact that they admit no documentation turned up to prove her 1/32 Cherokee claim.

Like Tomasky, however, their position is wrong. The Fourth Estate has every right to investigate Elizabeth Warren’s claim and expose the truth about it, and they should do just that. The truth of this story will be found with more information, not less.

Associated Press Rebukes Politifact (Indirectly)

Sat, 26 May 2012 07:00:00 -0700

After getting caught with its pants down with a wholly dishonest fact-check backing up and attempting to legitimize the absurd claim that Obama is some sort of thrifty spender of historic proportions, Politifact's public humiliation is now complete. Though the Associated Press doesn't mention Politifact directly, it does completely and effectively undermine Politifact's "mostly true" rating:

The White House is aggressively pushing the idea that, contrary to widespread belief, President Barack Obama is tightfisted with taxpayer dollars. To back it up, the administration cites a media report that claims federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since the Eisenhower years.

"Federal spending since I took office has risen at the slowest pace of any president in almost 60 years," Obama said at a campaign rally Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa.

The problem with that rosy claim is that the Wall Street bailout is part of the calculation. The bailout ballooned the 2009 budget just before Obama took office, making Obama's 2010 results look smaller in comparison. And as almost $150 billion of the bailout was paid back during Obama's watch, the analysis counted them as government spending cuts.

It also assumes Obama had less of a role setting the budget for 2009 than he really did.

When left-wing AP and Washington Post fact-checkers, who have shown a willingness to shill for Obama more than once, can't carry this water, you know Obama's Palace Guards at Politifact have really stepped in it.

A site that has the gall to call itself Politifact has been caught red-handed in one of the most egregious and shameless pieces of agenda-driven media bias we've seen in a long time. This act should forever define and undermine its credibility as starkly as RatherGate defines and undermines Dan Rather.

Please join me in never allowing Poitifact to live this down.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC

Boston Globe Takes Credit for Breitbart Scoop

Fri, 25 May 2012 18:00:00 -0700

Today the Boston Globe has a front-page, below-the-fold story titled "Filings raise more questions on Warren's ethnic claims." It's a well-written take on documents and information first brought to light here at Breitbart News two weeks ago. Unfortunately, it's presented as a scoop with no link or reference to the fact that the information has appeared previously in another publication.

Indeed, today's Globe story, authored by Mary Carmichael (pictured above), explicitly claims this is a brand new scoop: "The documents suggest for the first time that either Warren or a Harvard administrator classified her repeatedly as Native American in papers prepared for the government."

As you'll see, that's simply not true. The key information in the Globe story was reported first by Breitbart News. The easiest way to see this would be to read the two stories back to back, but to simplify things I'll highlight some passages that are strikingly similar. Here's the key support the Globe offers for its headline, which appears on page three of their story:

In 1999, Harvard started publishing its full affirmative action plan on its website in the belief that it might be considered a public document.

The report from that year lists one Native American senior professor at the entire university. A section devoted specifically to the law school also lists a single Native American senior professor, presumably the same one. Both entries specify that the professor is female.

Two weeks ago I opened my story here at Breitbart News like this:

A newly revealed document taken from a 1999 Affirmative Action Plan Book published by Harvard University indicates that Elizabeth Warren was officially listed as a Native American by Harvard Law School. Though Warren is not mentioned by name, the report shows just one Native American member of the law school.

Later in the story I included a link to the same document on the Internet Archive which the Globe linked today. This is the key similarity, because without this document, there is no story.

In my report, I made much of the fact that this Affirmative Action information is self-reported, i.e. that it would likely have come from Warren herself. To prove this point, I quoted at length from an obscure Dept. of Labor FAQ for employers which I found several layers deep on their website. It reads in part: "If self-identification is not feasible, post-employment records or visual observation may be used to obtain this information." Notice the bit which I've italicized. In today's Globe story, Ms. Carmichael apparently quotes the same obscure Dept. of Labor FAQ without explaining where it came from:

The US Department of Labor requires large employers to collect diversity statistics annually and suggests they be based on employees’ classification of themselves. In cases in which employees do not self-identify, federal regulations allow some administrators to make judgment calls on the correct categories using “employment records or observer identification.’’

There's more. On the last page of today's Globe story is a mention of a 1998 letter which a Harvard spokesmen sent to the New York Times. As it happens, Breitbart News was the first to report on that document more than two weeks ago. The same story also connected Harvard's concern for its minority hiring record to the protest led by Derrick Bell a few years earlier. This is one of the themes of today's Globe story as well.

There's no doubt that the Globe story adds some additional information on this topic. For instance, the authors directly contact the person responsible for maintaining Harvard's diversity statistics during the '90s. They also publish links to identical documents from the years 2000-2004. I had access to all of these at the time I wrote my story but chose to focus on 1999, as it was the earliest example. However, there's no doubt that the core of today's Globe story is the material published here at Breitbart two weeks ago.

Even if Ms. Carmichael came to all the above information through her own sources (a generous assumption), the Globe still can not claim, as they do today, "The documents suggest for the first time..." Any Google search of these topics during the last two weeks would have revealed that Breitbart News had already brought these same key documents to light, making the same exact points on the same exact topic. Frankly, it's very hard to believe Ms. Carmichael and her editors missed it, but I am contacting the Globe about this oversight and hope the situation will be resolved soon.

Boston Globe Whitewashes, Rewrites Its Own Critical Story on Elizabeth Warren

Fri, 25 May 2012 16:41:00 -0700

Hours after The Boston Globe ran a critical story on Elizabeth Warren and her dubious claims of Native American ancestry, the old media newspaper decided to, without any notice, completely change the story -- and the headline -- into one that criticized Sen. Scott Brown instead.

Today, as Breitbart News ran another exclusive that revealed Warren was identified as a "woman of color" in a 1993 Harvard Law Journal, The Boston Globe finally ran a story that put heat on Warren, opening with a quote from Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) calling on Harvard to correct the record after falsely reporting that Warren was a minority, presumably based on a Breitbart News exclusive from two weeks ago.

But when Cornell Law Professor William Jacobson of the Legal Insurrection blog, who has been on the frontline debunking myths about Warren the mainstream press has floated in her defense, clicked on that same link in the afternoon, he was shocked by what came on his screen.

"But when I went to the link this afternoon just before 4 p.m., the url directed to a post in which Boston Mayor Tom Menino was defending Warren!," Jacobson writes.

The original headline for the story was "Scott Brown accuses Harvard of falsely reporting that Elizabeth Warren is Native American."

The new article has a completely different headline and introductory paragraphs:

Mayor Menino criticizes focus on Elizabeth Warren’s heritage

On a day when Senator Scott Brown sought to fan further questions about Elizabeth Warren’s Native American heritage, Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who has not been shy about praising Brown, made clear he is fed up with the issue.

“I think she has come clean but nobody has let her off the hook,” Menino said. “It’s not relevant at all in the campaign. Let’s talk about the real issues: education, housing, crime. Those are the real issues we should be talking about. This is one of the issues that you [use to] try to divert as a candidate because you can’t deal with the real issues.”

Breitbart News has led the way the last three weeks debunking everything the mainstream media has peddled to defend Elizabeth Warren’s supposed 1/32 Cherokee heritage and reasons she was classified as a “woman of color” and “minority” in numerous professional listings. Michael Patrick Leahy, along with other new media writers like Jacobson, discovered everything from faulty genealogy reports to Warren's plagiarized submissions to a "Pow Wow Chow" Native American cookbook. John Sexton of Breitbart News discovered that a Harvard EEOC report included a lone female "Native American" faculty member, which, by all indications, was a reference to Warren.

As Jacobson writes, “the Globe went from a widely circulated post hammering Warren, to a post in which Warren vigorously was defended and Brown derided for raising a non-issue — without any notice to readers of what had happened.”

Reason 11,927 CNN Is Tanking: Brooke Baldwin Sandbags Tony Perkins

Fri, 25 May 2012 14:30:00 -0700

The evolution of CNN's ongoing collapse can be found here, here, and here. Even during an election year, the "most trusted name in news" is imploding and as I've mentioned numerous times before, the reason for this is obvious. CNN insults their audience -- left, right, and middle -- on a daily basis with their superior and utterly false pose that it is an objective outlet for news. Meanwhile, Soledad O'Brien, Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, Piers Morgan, and John King belie that claim almost daily.

But CNN's most well-known anchors are not alone. The JV team is also in on the hustle. Please watch the video embedded below. The CNN anchor is Brooke Baldwin but the approach is pure MSNBC.

No, really, you need to watch that clip.

CNN's existential problem isn't bias or even being out-of-touch, it's that it's corrupt in presenting itself as objective, professional, and fair -- even as they sandbag guests like Tony Perkins. And this is something we've seen from CNN time and again. Soledad O'Brien and Piers Morgan have done it, and let us never forget CNN's unforgivable cannonball into Obama's war of racial division with this appalling episode.

All of my examples have occurred over the past couple of months.

What CNN did to Tony Perkins in that segment was sandbag him, pure and simple. That's what we would expect to see happen to Perkins on MSNBC, which might be a fever swamp of unhinged leftism but at least MSNBC doesn't pretend to be anything else.

But dishonest, left-wing CNN and Brooke Baldwin beclown themselves from behind their phony shield of objectivity when, among other things, Tony Perkins is asked, ~~when did you stop beating your wife?~~ "Why do homosexuals bother you so much?" And then CNN acts all surprised as their brand swirls the drain.

Like 31 out of 31 states (including California) and Barack Obama less than a couple of weeks ago, Perkins opposes same-sex marriage, and these charlatans posing as an unbiased news outlet treat him like he's the Grand Wizard of the KKK.

Actually, CNN was always nice to Democrat Senator Robert Byrd.

Politics aside, let's just talk about selling your brand. How off-putting is Baldwin in that segment? Whether you agree with her agenda or not, nobody finds smug, superior and sanctimonious attractive -- and nobody likes to be played for a jerk , which is exactly what baldwin and her network do 24/7 with this "middle-of-the-road" lie.

What's bad for CNN is good for America and democracy.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC

The Hill, Politico Give Wildly Different Stories on Progress of Holder Contempt Charges

Fri, 25 May 2012 12:32:00 -0700

The media can’t decide if Congressman Darrell Issa has enough votes within the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to bring contempt charges against Attorney General Eric Holder. The Hill claims Rep Issa doesn’t have the votes, but Politico says the “GOP is closer to going after Holder.”

Which one is it?

It’s hard to answer that question, because neither publication cites any sources. Instead, these reporters choose to assume and voice their opinions without substantiation.

In The Hill, Jordy Yager writes, “[T]he silence, lack of outspoken support an desire by these eight GOP caucus members to avoid the issue could be a problem for Issa.” But there are seven committee members, not eight. Second, only one of the seven said anything. Rep Justin Amash (R-Mich) told The Hill he would wait until the final version of the contempt citation is released. Rep Frank Guinta’s office declines to comment, and the other 5 haven’t responded.

But instead of leaving it there Yager, decides to give us a bit of mind reading interpretation: “But their hesitance might also be due to Issa’s outspoken nature,” he writes--not passing up an opportunity to cast aspersions on Rep. Issa, naturally. Yager even says the Republican leadership is hesitant to support the contempt measure. Then why did Speaker John Boehner tell the press that all options are on the table?

The article at Politico contradicts The Hill. There is no mention of Chairman Issa lacking votes or internal conflict within the Oversight Committee. Instead, it’s about how, as the title says, the GOP is closer to going after Holder. It talks about how the letter sent from the GOP leadership to Holder gave the DOJ one last chance to comply with the subpoena before they take action. It’s incredibly positive and makes the reader think that there is nothing standing in the way of Chairman Issa if the DOJ doesn’t comply with the subpoena.

While the article is in favor of Chairman Issa and the investigation, I don’t know if I can believe it. Up until now Politico has not been on top of this story. Their change started after May 10. Politico published an article about the GOP going slow on the contempt vote. In it, they claimed the GOP leadership were going to slow it down but didn’t add sources. And later that day, Speaker Boehner came out in full support of Chairman Issa, which ultimately proved their entire article wrong. With egg on their face, are they trying to make up for their mistake?

Neither article fully substantiates its claims, so those following this story closely should not jump to any conclusions until more information comes out. We don't want articles affecting public perception if they’re not well-documented and confirmed, even if they are in favor of Chairman Issa and the investigation.

The Unbearable Ingratitude of Meghan McCain

Fri, 25 May 2012 11:17:00 -0700

In the basement of his home the day after Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, the late Andrew Breitbart launched his Big empire with Big Hollywood, and one of the first people he invited to join our merry little team as a contributor was Meghan McCain. I know this for a fact because I traded emails with Ms. McCain so she could join our live-blog of that year's Academy Awards -- which she did. This reality doesn’t quite compute with her inference last night on MSNBC that hateful extremists like Andrew Breitbart are part of the reason she feels unwelcome in the Republican party.

Andrew not only welcomed Ms. McCain; he admired the fact that she was a young, engaged right-of-center person who "got" popular culture. This is why he tried to bring her into the Big Hollywood fold from the start. Not only that, but it's important to remember that this invitation came in the wake of John McCain's 2008 loss, before his daughter's status in the media was amplified by her perches at the Daily Beast and MSNBC.

Is Ms. McCain seriously suggesting that this Andrew Breitbart would marginalize anyone over same-sex marriage?

Moreover, because Andrew loathed in-fighting (unless he was attacked), and while many other conservatives hit back at Ms. McCain for her regular undermining insults directed towards the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, and conservatives in general -- the Bigs pretty much left her alone. It was important to Andrew that we keep, as he put it, the waters warm for all right-of-center types. That's the opposite of exclusionary and intolerant.

Maybe Ms. McCain forgot this. Maybe she didn't but was looking for a hot talking point to shout out on MSNBC. Either way, she owes Andrew, and by extension, his family, an apology.

On a personal note, I don't dislike Meghan McCain because of her politics, I simply choose to dislike her back. There's a difference between the two, and I trust I'm not alone. She's the one who fired the first shots at her own on the pages of the Daily Beast and on MSNBC, often in the most selfish way imaginable. She fed and encouraged the media's dishonest narratives about the right -- especially when it came to Sarah Palin and a burgeoning Tea Party.

As she did last night, Ms. McCain can cry on MSNBC's shoulders about being a martyr to moderate Republicanism all she wants, even as she ignores the fact that there are plenty of moderate Republicans secure in the fold -- including the presumptive presidential nominee of our party, Mitt Romney.

Like many conservatives, I have plenty of affection for people who share Ms. McCain's politics and even those who are to the left of her.

Ms. McCain's problem isn't her politics or her stance on same-sex marriage; her problem is that she's not a very nice person.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC

Elizabeth Warren Is Losing the Media

Fri, 25 May 2012 10:00:00 -0700

What has mainly been a New Media story up till now, especially in the realm of being curious enough to vet someone who could become a United States Senator (what a concept!), has finally burst to life in old media. Thanks mainly to yesterday's media moment created by a tenacious reporter who could no longer ignore the issue and an ever-mounting pile of facts accumulated by Breitbart News' Michael Patrick Leahy -- two high-profile left-wing news outlets have just turned on "Fauxahontas" U.S. Senate Candidate, Elizabeth Warren:

Politico:

An exasperated Elizabeth Warren told reporters Thursday that she’s certain about her Native American roots “because my mother told me so.”

Surrounded by a group of reporters, the Democratic Massachusetts Senate candidate was repeatedly questioned about why she hasn’t produced documentation to prove that she is part Native American. After several minutes of grilling, Warren said, “I am proud of my family and I am proud of my heritage.” …

Warren, who is facing a tough battle against incumbent Sen.Brown, has been pummeled by her opponent as well as the press after it was first reported that she had previously identified herself as an ethnic minority. According to the Harvard law professor, she is 1/32nd Native American, and her campaign has maintained that Warren never leveraged her ethnic status to gain professional advantages.

The Boston Globe not only picked the story up today, but actually connected the dots all the way back to Harvard Professor Derrick Bell:

In the years before Warren first came to Harvard Law, the school was under intense pressure to diversify its faculty. In 1990, Derrick Bell, a prominent black law professor, went on a one-man strike, taking an unpaid leave of absence to protest the fact that the law school had not yet brought a black female academic permanently on board. He was dismissed from the faculty.

The same year, the Department of Labor audited Harvard’s diversity practices based on its affirmative action plan, the thick census and policy document all major employers are required to compile each year and make available to the department on request. Also in 1990, 12 students sued the law school, alleging it discriminated against academic job applicants on the basis of race and gender.

The suit was ultimately dismissed when a judge ruled the students had not demonstrated that they were “persons aggrieved.’’ Harvard agreed to remedy 10 violations the Labor Department identified, bringing the audit to an end. But the controversy over diversity at Harvard Law did not cease.

Warren arrived as a visiting professor in 1992, but left a year later. By then, she had been listing herself for seven years as a minority in a legal directory often used by law recruiters to make diversity-friendly hires. She continued to list herself in the book until 1995, the year she took a permanent position at Harvard.

Naturally, the Globe refused to connect that extra dot that leads to Barack Obama, but that's why God invented New Media.

Both of these stories establish a turning point for Warren, and maybe a fatal one -- especially with her powerhouse local paper, the Boston Globe. Once the media digs their teeth into something like this, out of sheer pride and the universal disgust we all share in the face of being deceived, the media can be reluctant to let go, even if it goes against their own partisan interests.

The media also knows that Warren could be fatally hurt by this scandal and that the sooner she comes clean, the better her chances are against Scott Brown. So their motives here aren't entirely pure.

The thin corrupt line between Democrats and electoral defeat is almost always the mainstream media. Republicans can with the media against them and usually have to, but without the corrupt media on their side, Democrats lose elections at something close to a 100% rate. The media knows this, Democrats know this, and this is why New Media has to work so damn hard to push legitimate stories into the MSM's narrative.

But push we must -- on the pages of sites like this one, the pages of Facebook, and our Twitter accounts.

Go to work.

ADDED: When you've lost your local NPR station...

Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren continues to dodge questions about why Harvard University once called her a minority professor. Warren was asked repeatedly about the matter at a campaign event in Brookline on Thursday, her first in nearly two weeks at which the press was allowed, as she has struggled to regain control of her campaign message.

For 12 days, Warren held campaign events, but no press was there to cover them because her campaign did not want reporters there to ask questions. Finally, Thursday, reporters were invited to cover an event at a pub in Brookline where Warren was meeting supporters. The place was packed with people eager to volunteer for Warren and to raise money for her. When talking to reporters, Warren tried to focus on a subject that matters to her.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC

Washington Post Rebukes Politifact (Indirectly)

Fri, 25 May 2012 08:10:00 -0700

If Rex Nutting wants to embarrass himself shilling for the White House with the absurd claim "Obama's spending binge never happened," that's a problem between him and Market Watch. It becomes a very serious problem, though, when left-wing mainstream media enablers like Politifact use shameless deceit to validate these lies in order to give the media the cover it needs to turn fiction into fact -- which is exactly what has happened. With Politifact as cover, both the White House and parts of the media have begun an Orwellian crusade to trumpet Obama's spend-thrift ways. Today, however, the Washington Post cried foul.

For the record, I detest all media fact checking, and that includes Glenn Kessler's work at the Post. For anyone, especially the media, to puff themselves up as arbiters of truth is the very antithesis of what journalism should be about. In fact, whenever someone on our side cites a media fact-checker in their own defense, I die a little inside knowing the short-term gain isn't worth the long-term cost that comes with the validating of such irresponsible partisan hackery.

If, however, these politically craven fact-checkers want to go at one another, I am more than happy to take a side.

Kessler didn't hit Politifact directly. The media policing the media simply isn't done. Ultimately, they’re all on the same side. But by extension, the three out of four Pinocchios Kessler awarded to White House spokesman Jay Carney also landed right in the lap of Politifact:

Nutting basically takes much of 2009 out of Obama’s column, saying it was the “the last [year] of George W. Bush’s presidency.” Of course, with the recession crashing down, that’s when federal spending ramped up. The federal fiscal year starts on Oct. 1, so the 2009 fiscal year accounts for about four months of Bush’s presidency and eight of Obama’s.

In theory, one could claim that the budget was already locked in when Obama took office, but that’s not really the case. Most of the appropriations bills had not been passed, and certainly the stimulus bill was only signed into law after Obama took office.

And finally, Kessler adds:

Politifact might do better next time than cite an article Politifact plucked off the Web, no matter how much it might advance Politifact's political interests. The data in the article are flawed, and the analysis lacks context — context that could easily could be found in the budget documents released by the White House.

Okay, you caught me, I added "Politifact" to the paragraph above in exchange for references directed at Carney. But in the end, the rebuke is exactly the same.

Anything that undermines and marginalizes Politifact is a service to America and democracy -- even if it is the work of another dishonest MSM "fact" checker.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC

Boston Globe Makes the Bell Connection

Fri, 25 May 2012 06:39:00 -0700

Elizabeth Warren's tenured appointment at Harvard Law School during a time when she claimed to be a Native American "woman of color" was directly connected to protests for "faculty diversity" led in the 1980s and early 1990s by the late Critical Race Theory professor Derrick Bell, according to the Boston Globe today. Breitbart News reported in March that Barack Obama, then president of the Harvard Law Review, had joined protestors, urging students in April 1990 to "open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell."

The Globe's Mary Carmichael reports that Harvard University filed diversity reports with the federal government for six straight years that claimed that one of its law professors was Native American--and that the information was likely provided by Elizabeth Warren herself. Warren is now a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, challenging incumbent Republican Scott Brown.

Carmichael's article picks up on reporting at Breitbart News, the Legal Insurrection blog, the Boston Herald, and elsewhere that has established that Warren likely used an undocumented claim of membership in the Cherokee Nation to advance her career. She also makes the connection between Warren's tenure and Bell's stand--though she does not mention Obama's role in the protests:

In the years before Warren first came to Harvard Law, the school was under intense pressure to diversify its faculty. In 1990, Derrick Bell, a prominent black law professor, went on a one-man strike, taking an unpaid leave of absence to protest the fact that the law school had not yet brought a black female academic permanently on board. He was dismissed from the faculty.

The same year, the Department of Labor audited Harvard’s diversity practices based on its affirmative action plan, the thick census and policy document all major employers are required to compile each year and make available to the department on request. Also in 1990, 12 students sued the law school, alleging it discriminated against academic job applicants on the basis of race and gender.

The suit was ultimately dismissed when a judge ruled the students had not demonstrated that they were “persons aggrieved.’’ Harvard agreed to remedy 10 violations the Labor Department identified, bringing the audit to an end. But the controversy over diversity at Harvard Law did not cease.

Michael Patrick Leahy, writing at Breitbart News this morning, described the unusual role played by then-Dean Robert C. Clark, who coordinated with student protestors holding a vigil outside the faculty meeting that offered Warren her coveted, tenured post:

In addition to the likely communication between Warren and the editors of the 1993 Harvard Women’s Law Journal, who publicly reported her claimed “woman of color” status, and the highly volatile political situation at the time, there is what appears to be an unusual degree of cooperation between then-Dean Robert C. Clark and a group of Harvard Law School students protesting for more hiring diversity at Harvard.

Former Harvard Law School Dean Arthur C. Clark

On February 6, 1993, the Harvard Crimson reported:

The Law School faculty voted yesterday to offer a tenured position to Visiting Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, a member of the Appointments Committee said last night.

Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence Charles Fried said Warren received strong support from the faculty, including a unanimous endorsement from the Appointments Committee.

The vote marks an advance in the student and faculty effort to improve faculty diversity, according to several of the approximately 65 students participating in a silent vigil outside the faculty meeting in Pound Hall yesterday….

"Everyone at CCR [Coalition for Civil Rights] is totally elated that Professor Warren received tenure," said third-year law student Lucy H. Koh. "CCR just wants to see some gender diversity on the faculty." … Yesterday's vigil was prompted by a tip from [Dean Robert C.]Clark, some students said.

"The rumor is that [Clark] asked a member of CCR to organize the vigil and that the dean told her they are voting on a woman today," said third year student Elizabeth G. Moreno.

"If the rumor is true, I'm surprised that Dean Clark would suggest a vigil," Moreno said.

Clark's apparent use of student protestors was not only politically savvy, but deeply ironic, since he had been the target of student protest in the 1980s and early 1990s. As reported by PJ Media's J. Christian Adams, law students occupied Dean Clark's office in 1988. (As an interesting aside, Adams notes that one of the apparent occupiers was Michelle Robinson, later Michelle Obama.)

From attempting to ignore the impact of Derrick Bell and Critical Race Theory on Barack Obama and his administration, the mainstream media has now come full circle, forced to begin acknowledging the link through the Elizabeth Warren fiasco. The fact is that Obama and a cohort of legal activists from the same era--including Warren and Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan--were deeply influenced by Bell's ideas and his example of protest, and that many of the members of that cohort are now serving in powerful positions today.

The pull of identity politics was so strong that Warren--and Obama--sought not only to re-shape the world, but to re-shape their personal identities to fit the political needs--and practical opportunities--of the moment.

Exclusive Audio: 'Progressive' Meghan McCain, January 2010: 'Tea Party Fringe' will Fizzle

Fri, 25 May 2012 04:18:00 -0700

Meghan McCain went on MSNBC's "Politics Nation" with Al Sharpton to whine about how Republicans don't like her because she's a "moderate Republican." "Many people in the Republican party treat me like I'm a freak... mutant," she lamented. She claimed that an extremist, hateful far-right excludes her because of all of her hip, young, moderate views. She shared Sharpton's view that she represents a new voting block of young women who won't be interested in the "scary" party that has developed. But Meghan McCain hasn't always been a "moderate" Republican. In January 2010, she was a "progressive" one.

On January 27th, 2010 Meghan McCain gave a speech at the University of Florida talking about the need for reform in the Republican party, and promoting her book "Dirty, Sexy Politics." At that time, McCain was a "progressive Republican." And yes, she came up with that term all by herself (so she claimed). Breitbart News has the exclusive audio of her explaining an "all by myself" progressive Republican:

"As some of you may be aware, ever since the Presidential election, I have become a target of the far-right myself. This is because I have the temerity to consider myself a progressive Republican. I'm a Republican who just doesn't agree with all the facets of our party line. But why am I not allowed to challenge this? Why am I not allowed to wonder and dream of how I might build a better tomorrow for all of us and be vocal about it? Where the hell did the notion of free speech go, even in the confines of the Republican party? I actually had to come up with the term 'progressive Republican' all by myself -- but not because there aren't others out there like me. No, I know there are lots of us around because I read your thoughts, your tweets and your feedback at my day job at The Daily Beast."

Although McCain has evolved into a "moderate Republican," her views on gay marriage haven't evolved into anything else--and she still manages to mention that in almost every painful segment she's assigned on MSNBC. What's ironic about McCain's views is how she classifies those who don't agree with her on things like gay marriage. At that same speech McCain said "...there are some people, especially in religion, who just can't deal with it." Later, when an attendee said that she was going to register Republican but didn't agree with her conservative family on some issues, McCain interrupted and asked if they were social issues. "Pretty much," the attendee replied. "It's such a generational thing, I find," McCain responded. "[People who are] literally growing up having gay friends, which I did, like, totally changes the way you look at the situation."

You see, gay people were invented in the 80s.

McCain makes most of her living whining about why people don't like her. She often claims that Republicans don't take her seriously because she's young, swears, has big boobs, and wears pants bigger than a size six. The problem with Meghan McCain is that she claims to speak for a youthful generation of Republicans and women (like me) and with that constant refrain she approaches issues, like the one above, with the intellectual depth of a teaspoon.

McCain claims that people who agree with her do it for superficial reasons, and yet she freely puts those who disagree with her in the same boxes. They're old and just don't know any gay people, like she does. Or they just "can't deal with it" because of their religion. What's even more hilarious is in the the same speech where she asked "what the hell happened to free speech," she said that Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Laura Ingraham needed to be "piped down a notch."

It's apparently never occurred to McCain that someone could have an intellectual basis for disagreeing with her and besides, it's much easier to blame old people. By Meghan McCain's brilliant analysis, it looks like a fierce block of old religious people were mobilized in California to vote down Prop. 8.

The brilliant analysis that MSNBC pays for doesn't end there. McCain also predicted the future of the "Tea Party fringe" in January of 2010.

McCain told the students at the University of Florida that the "Tea Party fringe" didn't really "impress" her. "My bet is... that these people are not as relavant as they say they are." Explaining the power of the the conservative movement she said "my father would be President right now if they were really that powerful."

Yeah, that Tea Party fringe-thing just kinda fizzled out in 2010.

It's no surprise that with the type of insider political knowledge McCain has demonstrated over the past two years that she was dumbfounded when asked to present analysis (you know, like she's paid to do) when Sharpton asked about the Republican party supposedly making a shift to the far-right. "I wish I knew more where it came from," she said. "Because I don't understand the popularity of people like Michelle Malkin and Andrew Breitbart and people that sort of exacerbate on people's fears."

Remember, McCain is talking about "hate politics" and "people that... exacerbate on people's fears" to Al Sharpton. The number of people murdered because of Andrew Breitbart and Michelle Malkin speeches = zero. The number of people brutally hunted down and killed because of Al Sharpton's "exacerbations" = greater than zero.

McCain spent an entire segment on speaking to the "hate politics" that exists on the "extreme" right without addressing one of the most hateful people ever to exist in politics (who has a violent track record) sitting across the table from her.

McCain did have one good insight in her Sharpton interview: She concluded that she "works for [MSNBC] for a reason."

Politifact: Obama Presided Over Slowest Federal Spending Growth of Any Recent President

Thu, 24 May 2012 11:00:00 -0700

Politifact is quite proud of its contextually-challenged fabrication built to ensure that whenever presumptive nominee Mitt Romney hits one of President Obama's primary weak spots -- his unprecedented, reckless, and failed federal spending binge -- that the White House Palace Guards in the media can cry in unison: "Romney's lying." So proud is Politifact of this shill-o-rama, that it currently sits proudly in a feature spot at the top of their Web page:

The Facebook post said that Romney is wrong to claim that spending under Obama has "accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history," because it's actually risen "slower than at any time in nearly 60 years."

We found that Obama has indeed presided over the slowest growth in spending of any president using raw dollars, and the growth on his watch was the second-slowest if you adjust for inflation. The math simultaneously backs up Nutting’s calculations and demolishes Romney’s contention. The only significant shortcoming of the graphic was that it failed to note that some of the restraint in spending was fueled by demands from congressional Republicans. On balance, we rated the claim Mostly True. …

Brace yourselves: [emphasis added]

So, using inflation-adjusted dollars, Obama had the second-lowest increase -- in fact, he actually presided over a decrease once inflation is taken into account.

Before I get to the facts, it's important to understand why Politifact is so willing to embarrass themselves like this.

As I mentioned late last week in my call to Twitter arms, Politifact (along with every other MSM fact-checking outlet) was conceived after the media watched in horror in 2004 as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth used facts to undermine John Kerry's claims of war heroism; a crucial trait to have during an election based on national security:

The media cried "Never again!" and, as a result, birthed an unholy set of twins to back that cry up: Media Matters and a number of corrupt truth squads and fact checkers, like Politifact.

Both of these entities are what I call Inconvenient Narrative Zappers. Their job is to spot emerging and potential narratives damaging to the Left and, before they make their way into the mainstream media, to use lies, half-truths, rationalizations, shameless spin, and anything else they can think of to discredit those narratives and ensure they gain no traction. This allows the MSM to either completely ignore stories it doesn't want to amplify or to simply report on "an already discredited story" bubbling online. …

We all laughed in 2009 when Politifact fact-checked an "SNL" sketch critical of Obama, but there was a method to their madness. Leftists like those at Politifact understand the power of satire to define someone. Thus, in order to protect Obama, Politifact was willing to make of fools of themselves to undermine any traction the "SNL" sketch about Obama's broken promises might have received.

Obama's astounding deficits are a major liability for the President, especially since they have yielded anemic GDP and job growth. The crisis Obama inherited was not an either/or situation -- either spend us into oblivion or face a depression. Obama had many options, including the decisions President Reagan made during his inherited crisis. Instead, Obama chose a path that in the opinion of many likely did more harm than if he had simply done nothing. But no one in their right mind believes Obama's results have been worth the trillions upon trillions wasted.

So how do you go about upsetting and undermining commonly known facts that damage your candidate? Well, if you're Politifact, you brazenly and matter-of-factly report lies as truth -- as a nifty talking point that will now go out into the media and be repeated ad nauseum until it sticks. You know, in the same way the corrupt media turned presidential perjury into "it's only about sex."

Now to the facts, which I will turn over to the Enterprise Blog's indispensible Jim Pethokoukis. It should be noted that Pethokoukis is not taking on Politifact but rather the nonsense that Politifact laughably proclaimed as mostly true: [emphasis added]

Nutting arrives at that 1.4% number by assigning 2009—when spending surged nearly 20%—to George W. Bush: “The 2009 fiscal year, which Republicans count as part of Obama’s legacy, began four months before Obama moved into the White House. The major spending decisions in the 2009 fiscal year were made by George W. Bush and the previous Congress. Like a relief pitcher who comes into the game with the bases loaded, Obama came in with a budget in place that called for spending to increase by hundreds of billions of dollars in response to the worst economic and financial calamity in generations.”

Let me complete the metaphor for Nutting: “Then as those runners scored, Obama kept putting more on base.”

Obama chose not to reverse that elevated level of spending; thus he, along with congressional Democrats, are responsible for it. Only by establishing 2009 as the new baseline, something Republican budget hawks like Paul Ryan feared would happen, does Obama come off looking like a tightwad. Obama has turned a one-off surge in spending due to the Great Recession into his permanent New Normal through 2016 and beyond.

Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere, NOWHERE is this pertinent piece of context included anywhere in Politifact's 1300 word analysis.

Back to Pethokoukis (a mandatory follow on Twitter):

As I point out in my original post, if Obama wins another term, spending—according to his own budget—would never drop below 22.3% of GDP. If that forecast is right, spending during Obama’s eight years in office would average 23.6% of GDP. That average is higher than any single previous non-war year in American history. …

Did we also forget about the $2 trillion in Obamacare spending that doesn’t kick in until 2014? …

Bottom line: Obama has been president for the past 3 1/2 years, two of those years with huge Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. Instead of cutting spending or putting Washington on a long-term, sustainable fiscal path, he’s seen the burst of spending around the Great Recession as an opportunity to make those levels a floor rather than a ceiling.

And let's not forget this from April of 2009:

The broad outlines of President Obama's budget moved through Congress on Thursday even as Republicans warned that Democrats are "leading the country off a leftward cliff" and Bay Area liberals insisted that Obama is not going far enough.

But for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the $3.5 trillion budget is the beginning of a new Democratic era. …

The budget marks a decisive shift from the Bush era, dramatically raising social spending and federal investments in green energy and education. It lays the groundwork for a major overhaul of the U.S. health-care system and for climate-change legislation.

Something else Politifact chooses to exclude from its shark-jumping is the fact that then-Senator Obama voted in favor of the very same 2009 budget he supposedly is in no way responsible for:

After all, on March 14, 2008, then Sen. Obama voted in favor of the 2009 budget which authorized $3.1 trillion in federal outlays along with a projected $400 billion deficit. The 51-44 vote that morning was strongly along party lines with only two Republicans saying "Yes."

Obama also praised the budget:

The budget passed by the Senate tonight makes significant progress in getting our nation's priorities back on track. After years of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, this year's budget helps restore fiscal responsibility in Washington, and provides tax relief for the middle class and low-income families who need help most. It includes an expansion in the Child Tax Credit that I have fought for and makes marriage penalty relief permanent. And it rejects the President's drastic cuts in important domestic programs.

Politifact has never had any credibility with me. Their agenda and partisan crusade has been obvious, at least to me, since day one.

This bit of partisan and journalistic hackery, however, is a new low. Intentionally and dishonestly, Politifact only reports on the context that backs up the pro-Obama sleight-of-hand while the only context that matters is completely ignored. What we have here is nothing short of lying through a deliberate act of omission. This from the same outlet that buried us in context to avoiding claiming as "true" the fact that Obama ate a dog.

This act of malpractice should forever-after define Politifact as a completely dishonest broker of all things involving "facts." Their shilling is now clownish and worthy only of contempt and derision.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC

Obama’s Latino Support Down, NBC News Says He ‘Leads Big’

Thu, 24 May 2012 08:14:00 -0700

The new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Telemundo poll shows that President Obama’s support in the Latino community is down from 2008. He’s beating Mitt Romney 61 percent to 27 percent. That’s down significantly from the 67 percent that Obama won against John McCain in 2008. And the poll gets worse for Obama – only 46 percent say that what they’ve read and heard “makes them feel more optimistic about the economy,” as opposed to 42 percent who feel pessimistic. Only 68 percent of Latino voters say they’re really interested in the election, as opposed to 81 percent of Americans more generally.

So how does NBC News report this? They report it with this headline: “Obama leads big with Latinos.” Of course he does. But the real story here is that enthusiasm is down for Obama, and that bodes ill for his re-election chances, particularly this early in the election cycle.

Obama Campaign Ad Controversy, 2000: 'This Guy Says One Thing About You in Your Presence, and Then...'

Thu, 24 May 2012 05:46:00 -0700

All week, Democrats have been disagreeing publicly with President Barack Obama’s attacks on Bain Capital, with Newark Mayor Cory Booker describing the ad campaign as “nauseating.” It is not the first time that Democrats have attacked Obama for running dishonest campaign ads. Breitbart News has unearthed a long-overlooked report of an off-air argument between Obama and Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) during a break in a debate on a Chicago radio station during Obama’s ill-fated primary challenge in 2000.

Curtis Lawrence, reporting at the time for the Chicago Sun-Times, covered the debate between then-state Senator Obama, Rush, and State Senator Donne E. Trotter, held on WVON-AM 1690 on Feb. 18, 2000. Lawrence described the exchanges as polite, and that the three candidates “agreed most of the time” on the issues. “But during breaks--which included an Obama commercial accusing Rush of being insensitive to seniors' concerns about prescription drugs--the tension rose,” Lawrence reported on Feb. 20.

As Lawrence had noted in an earlier, Feb. 19 report on the radio debate, the Obama attack ad set off a fierce fight, and the candidates went from “behaving like perfect gentlemen on the airwaves” to “letting the venom fly when the microphones were off.”

We know what that commercial probably sounded like, thanks to Andrew Kaczynski at Buzzfeed, who unearthed Obama’s radio ads from that campaign, including this one:

Woman: ...And I suppose you’re voting for Bobby Rush again?

Man: I guess so. Didn’t you vote for Rush last time?

Woman: Not this time. Rush gets on TV a lot, but I can’t think of anything important he’s done in Washington. I just found out that Rush has the worst attendance record of any Illinois congressman. He missed over three hundred votes!

Man: Bad news! So who’re you for?

Woman: State Senator Barack Obama. I’ve seen him speak a couple of times, and he’s really got a lot on the ball. Civil rights attorney. Law professor! Obama’s got specific plans to cut prescription drug prices and to stop racial profiling. And Obama can help bring jobs back to the South Side...

Rush felt ambushed by the attack, which aired as the three candidates sat in studio, and confronted Obama directly, challenging the accuracy of the ad--and Obama’s credibility:

"I've been untruthfully attacked in radio commercials by my opponents," Rush said. After the program, he produced a copy of a May 1999 congressional report he had commissioned on the high cost of prescription drugs for seniors.

Rush also accused Obama of unfairly portraying him as being inaccessible.

"I don't think that it is a distortion of the record for me to say that generally constituents don't have much access or ideas of what the congressman is doing," Obama said.

"Maybe you haven't been around the 1st Congressional District long enough to really see what's going on," Rush retorted.

"One of the things that really galls me about this guy," Rush said, "is that he says one thing about you in your presence and then. . . ."

The break was over and it was time for more polite discourse.

But Rush was glad to finish his thoughts on Obama after the program.

"It's a lie, a fabrication," Rush said of Obama's commercial. "It's the worst form of campaign advertising I've been privy to."

Rush’s outburst was largely ignored by the rest of the media, but Lawrence’s report was circulated by an African-American listserv, whose members were following the race.

The negative tone of the Obama re-election effort in 2012 is not unprecedented, nor is the controversy. As Slate’s Dave Weigel noted May 22, the idea that Barack Obama ran a positive campaign in 2008--which Republicans have recently bought into--is a myth:

The myth that Obama ran a Different Kind of Campaign is based on a few bold bets--like rejecting an early summer gas tax holiday--that paid off. But we're also talking about a campaign that completely fabricated an anti-NAFTA position, and a campaign that tipped off Ben Smith to the haircut that destroyed John Edwards.* We're talking about a campaign that outspent John McCain by as much as a 3-1 ratio in the final stretch, and devoted most of that money to negative ads. The "hope and change" campaign was the happy cover on a dogged, overwhelming attack campaign. It used to benefit Democrats to obscure this; now, it benefits Republicans.

*In every way. It was the ugly haircut story that inspired Rachel "Bunny" Mellon to start cutting checks to help out her friend with big expenses.

Viewed in the context of Obama’s career, unity, hope and change are the exception. Bringing a gun to a knife-fight, in Obama’s words, may be a more apt metaphor.

Forty Percent Now Say Trayvon Martin Shot in Self-Defense

Wed, 23 May 2012 22:10:00 -0700

The tables are turning in George Zimmerman's favor, according to new survey results released yesterday from Rasmussen Reports.

As evidence continues to emerge from the shooting death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, Americans are becoming more convinced that his killer acted in self-defense and that the legal system will come to that conclusion.

Forty percent (40%) now think George Zimmerman, who has been charged with second degree murder in the Martin shooting, acted in self-defense. Twenty-four percent surveyed say Zimmerman committed murder, a 6% drop from the previous poll in March (30%) and 9% drop from April (33%) survey results. One-thousand adults were surveyed nationwide with a +/- 3 sampling error. Blogger Ann Althouse offers a deeper look at the trending.

Unsurprisingly, the opinion among black people is different, but it's not that different: 47% say murder, but the number is going down. 55% said murder in March. And 40% of black adults now say self-defense — exactly the same as percentage for adults Americans generally. Note that this means that black people are much less likely to be undecided or uncertain.

CNN Hits 20-Year Ratings Low

Wed, 23 May 2012 14:00:00 -0700

When you think of all the work CNN put into hyping Anderson Cooper, this has to be, especially during an election year, a huge disappointment.

As far as Piers Morgan, somewhere Larry King is feeling awfully smug.

THR:

Final numbers give the network's Monday-Friday showing, between 8 and 11 p.m., its smallest take among total viewers in two decades. CNN's ratings woes continue to get worse.

Following last week's news of a 15-year primetime low during Piers Morgan, final Nielsen ratings give the network its lowest-rated weekday primetime showing among total viewers in more than 20 years.

The network averaged just 395,000 viewers in P2+ during the 8-11 p.m. block between May 14 and May 18, dipping below the previous low (over the 2010 Christmas holiday) by nearly 20,000 viewers. Programming in that block, Anderson Cooper’s AC360 and Piers Morgan Tonight, didn't fare much better among the targeted adults 25-54.

TV By the Numbers add more context:

More CNN ratings milestones last week (or millstones, as the case may be) (these rankings since 3/31/97):

4th lowest weekday average for the news target adults 25-54 demo (111,000)

3rd lowest full week (Mon-Sun) primetime viewership (385,000)

4th lowest full week adults 25-54 demo (104,000)

Those of us who love our country and understand that biased media outlets disguising themselves as objective in order to push a left-wing agenda are a threat to democracy, have every right to celebrate every victory that undermines their impact and credibility.

CNN's John King commented on the ratings, proving he doesn't get it:

[MSNBC's Chris] Matthews argued that seasoned opinion journalism is proper while King said CNN is trying to “be in the middle and have all sides.” He then said that Matthews and MSNBC are “left, and far left,” prompting Matthews to say, “that is not true.” King responded, “how is it not true?” It ended up with King taking a shot at “advocacy” journalism versus CNN’s “more objective style,” though he conceded that MSNBC’s is a good business model.

MSNBC is far left, but at least the network doesn't insult their audience by trying to hide it. CNN, however, hides their left-wing agenda behind an intelligence-insulting, somewhat smug and always maddening veil of middle-of-the-road. We have options now and no longer have to put up with being lied to, so we don't.

This is an election year, a very important election year, and the less muscle CNN enjoys the better.

As I've said before, inevitably, every single one of these dishonest media outlets will face the same choice: go out of business or do the job honestly.

I couldn't care less which choice they make. I'm too busy enjoying a reckoning I've waited two decades for.

ADDED: Someone asked me how CNN can stay in business with such bad ratings. Well, in the exact same way a lot of low-rated cable stations stay in business: the evil that is bundled cable. You may not watch CNN, but if the outlet's available on your cable package, chances are you are helping to keep them in business. Most cable stations, and I would guess CNN is among them, receive money based on how many subscribers purchase packages that include their network.

Bundled cable is one of the greatest rackets in the history of entertainment. Hopefully, the miracle of streaming will end this con as people leave cable and as a result stop supplementing outlets like CNN that would be in a lot more trouble surviving on advertising alone.

Hustler Photoshops Phallus in S.E. Cupp's Mouth

Wed, 23 May 2012 13:43:00 -0700

Hustler, a magazine known for its good taste and stolid prose (no, not really), has decided to turn its sights on conservative author and commentator S.E. Cupp. The magazine just published a Photoshopped image of Cupp performing oral sex along with the following justification:

S.E. Cupp is a lovely young lady who read too much Ayn Rand in high school and ended up joining the dark side. Cupp, an author and media commentator who often shows up on Fox News programs, is undeniably cute. But her hotness is diminished when she espouses dumb ideas like defunding Planned Parenthood. Perhaps the method pictured here is Ms. Cupp’s suggestion for avoiding an unwanted pregnancy.

Cupp has degrees in art from Cornell and New York University and is a classically trained ballet dancer. She's what you might call a cultured individual. Unfortunately for her, she's also attractive and conservative. As many, many conservative women could testify, this is all it takes to be a target for misogynistic attacks by the tolerant, anti-bullying, anti-misogyny left.

Larry Flynt has responded to outrage over the photo, stating, "That’s satire. I’m able to publish this because of the Supreme Court case I won in 1984 [sic], Flynt v. Falwell.” Naturally, Mr. Flynt would only think of whether he is legally capable of publishing the image.

There are lots of angles we could explore here. The hypocrisy of a party which turned a single use of the word "slut" into a war on women while lionizing Larry Flynt as a hero. The use of sexual imagery as a weapon against any woman the left wants to ridicule for thought crimes. The idea that you're a humorless prude if you don't go along with their bullying.

But really, the lesson here is the same one we keep seeing month after month. The left will say and do absolutely anything to anyone who opposes their agenda. So while the President talks about civility in public when is serves his interests, you can bet the White House will be quiet as a church mouse as another frequent Democratic donor does his dirty work.

Politico Publishes False Headline About Rush Ratings

Wed, 23 May 2012 13:30:00 -0700

Monday, Politico's "media analyst" Dylan Byers's posted what at first glance looked like bad news for radio talk show giant Rush Limbaugh, who has been the target of a boycott after apologizing for comments he made about about pay-for-my-birth-control crusader Sandra Fluke. Byer's headline reads: "Limbaugh takes post-Fluke ratings hit." According to Paul Bond's reporting at the Hollywood Reporter, there's only one problem with Byers' headline: it isn't true.

Byers:

Rush Limbaugh took a significant ratings hit in some key radio markets last month in the wake of the Sandra Fluke controversy.

The conservative radio host's ratings fell 27 percent in the key 25-54 demo in New York City, 31 percent in Houston-Galveston, 40 percent in Seattle-Tacoma, and 35 percent in Jacksonville, according to a selection of the March 29-April 25 Arbitron ratings provided by an industry source.

Limbaugh's detractors attribute the losses to a rejection of the show following his controversial comments about the Georgetown law student.

"Clearly Sandra Fluke isn't the only one who didn't like Rush calling her a 'slut' given how many viewers that comment incinerated," one radio insider said.

Then, finally, Byers includes this as a possibility:

But defenders say that what looks like a decline actually represents a leveling out following increased attention from the controversy

Well, that possibility is indeed fact, according to Paul Bond:

Reports of Rush Limbaugh Ratings Plunge Exaggerated

The Internet was abuzz Tuesday with leaked Arbitron numbers suggesting the radio talker lost up to 40 percent of his audience in some markets -- but only if the numbers are properly massaged.

Reports circulating online Tuesday indicating a massive drop in Rush Limbaugh’s audience – as much as 40 percent in some markets – might be premature. …

Limbaugh’s audience numbers are registered across several demographics, and where it appears he fared the worst was in the 25-54 age range, which is what most bloggers and journalists were focusing on Tuesday. Of interest to many media outlets was a 40 percent drop in that demo during April in the Seattle market, though many are reporting the decline without noting it came after a 55 percent surge during March in that same demo.

The Seattle data can be particularly misleading when other demographics are considered, because not only did Limbaugh’s audience surge in March in all demographics, but in the broader 12-plus category (and most other demos, including 35-plus, which is particularly important in talk radio) he actually improved on those gains the following month, even as the 25-54 demo dropped significantly.

“It looks like whoever picked this data chose the demographic where Limbaugh was weakest,” one radio insider noted.

Four months ago, Breitbart News exposed a troubling relationship between Politico, a left-wing news outlet that poses as objective, and the anti-Semitic, Soros-funded, tax exempt Media Matters. One of Media Matters primary allies at Politico has always been Byers, a left-wing operative who takes a special pride in attempting to -- like Media Matters -- silence conservatives like Red State's Erick Erickson and our own Dana Loesch.

Though he doesn’t mention Media Matters in his piece, Byers' premature and misleading reporting will undoubtedly help the organization in their never-ending fund-raising efforts. With a headline on the pages of Politico that falsely declares a complete failure of a boycott a success, what more could Media Matters ask for?

I'm sure that's just a coincidence, though, and that any minute now Byers will update the story with the false headline with the facts.

Moreover, this is all about perception in the ongoing intimidation crusade Byers and his Media Matters pals have launched against the right. If this failed boycott looks in any way successful, future advertisers will think twice about jumping on board conservative talk radio for fear of boycotts and all the unnecessary headaches that go along with them. The media is doing the same thing now with super PACs.

Bullies, the whole lot of them.

ADDED: A friend in talk radio emailed and suggested there were better pull quotes from the THR piece regarding demographics, so I've switched them out.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC

Media Downplays Biden Insulting Working Class

Wed, 23 May 2012 12:00:00 -0700

Yesterday, Vice President Joe Biden insulted the working class in front of a crowd in New Hampshire with this absurd declaration:

Your job as president is to promote the common good. That doesn’t mean the private equity guys are bad guys. They are not,” Biden said. “But that no more qualifies you to be president than being a plumber.

And, by the way, there are a lot of awful smart plumbers.”

Oh, and by the way, Mr. Vice President, you're an arrogant, out of touch elitist who backed a teleprompter-addicted community organizer with zero experience -- so you’re less qualified to speak about experience than President Obama is qualified to speak about avoiding launching your political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.

Can you imagine the uproar if the exact same thing was said but during a campaign speech made by a Vice President with an "R" after his name? Say, someone with the last name Palin or Quayle? The narrative of an incumbent out-of-touch with everyday Americans as they struggle in a failed economy would probably last a full week and be repeated ad nauseum straight through to election day.

In the case of Politico, as you can see with the link provided above, that unofficial web-branch of MSNBC, simply tossed it over to Joe the Plumber and then wrote a large feature piece this morning that's meant to merely warn the Obama campaign to get a leash on this guy.

Since the day Obama chose Slow Joe as his running mate, the media has chose only to dutifully report his gaffes as opposed to allowing those gaffes to define him. Alternately, this is the same media that used the smallest of reasons to unfairly peg Palin, Quayle, and George W. Bush as idiots the moment the spotlight hit them.

And let us never forget Politico's Jonathan Martin's attempt to smear Texas Governor Rick Perry as 'Dumb" on day one.

What I would like to know -- and maybe the media could ask -- is who exactly does the Vice President considered qualified for the presidency. If it's not a self-made millionaire with private sector experience and a full term as governor, or a member of the working class who keeps our world turning -- who then? Lemme guess: Radical community organizers with no private sector experience, no executive experience, a twenty-year mentoring relationship with a creepy racialist preacher, and a failed record as president.

Good answer, Slow Joe. You come up with that yourself?

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC

To Explain Obama's KY, AR Humiliation, Dems Declare Their Own Racist

Wed, 23 May 2012 11:00:00 -0700

Last night was more of the same for President Obama. In Arkansas, he lost over 40% of the vote and a full 36 countries to a relatively unknown attorney who lives in Tennessee. In Kentucky, Obama lost over 42% of the vote and a full 67 counties to "uncommitted." Rather than blame the President's failed economic policies, his racial and class divisiveness, his war on the coal industry, or the decision to stop lying about his position on same-sex marriage -- Democrats prefer to describe their very own as racist:

Those headlines have drawn a collective eyeroll from Democrats — and many others who closely follow national politics — who ascribe the underperformance by the incumbent to a very simple thing: racism.

They argue that conservative white Democrats — particularly those in the South and Appalachia — don’t want to vote for an African American for president and, therefore, are willing to cast a ballot for almost anyone else up to and including an incarcerated felon. …

"Race, resentment [and] fear,” explained Donna Brazile, a Louisiana native and Democratic strategist when asked about Obama’s underperformance. “Democrats have not had any messaging in those states for more than a decade. It’s hard to get voters to like you or even know you when all they hear is negative stuff.”

Hey, maybe these bitterly clinging Democrats don't like Obama because they're tired of Obama's minions in the media and the party calling them racist.

Just a thought.

As I mentioned earlier today, the real story the corrupt media doesn’t want to tell is that Obama's having serious issues with his base. Thus far, it's not just the rural white working class breaking away in coal country. Overall…

In the 16 states in which voters were given an alternative to Obama on the Democratic primary ballot — whether it be an actual candidate, a write-in or simply “uncommitted” — Obama averaged 84.6 percent of the vote.

In the five states where there was a named opponent, though, Obama’s share of the vote was 72.7 percent.

Furthermore, in 2008 Obama won both North Carolina and New Hampshire and has been embarrassed with his showings in both this year. Maybe a smarter place to look for Obama's base problems would be his flat-footed and failed attack on Bain Capital, where the three most prominent Democrats who publicly defied the President -- Cory Booker, Harold Ford Jr., and Artur Davis -- are all black.

Riddle me that, racial demagogues.

Naturally, the anti-Mormon bigots at the Washington Post give this racism charge some serious consideration, which is a-okay by me. Nothing like a circular firing squad of ignorance to make last night's primaries all the sweeter.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC

Jesse Jackson Confirms NYT Launched 'Pre-Emptive Strike' On Anti-Obama Super PAC

Wed, 23 May 2012 10:00:00 -0700

Late last week, in two separate Breitbart News' pieces (here and here), I openly accused the New York Times and its many mainstream media toadies of launching a coordinated attack of intimidation against Joe Ricketts, a wealthy Chicago businessman and private citizen whose super PAC had received a proposal to wage a multi-million dollar advertising campaign linking President Obama to his 20 year mentor/pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Today, in the pages of the Chicago Sun-Times, Jesse Jackson has confirmed my allegations: [emphasis added]

Jackson said he met privately with the Cubs chairman after a New York Times story about the anti-Obama campaign prompted Mayor Rahm Emanuel to ignore an apologetic phone call from Tom Ricketts.

“He is on a very different page from his father. His father is an avowed right-winger. He has a different disposition,” Jackson Sr. said.

“I believe his father was very much involved in it and did condone it. The New York Times did a pre-emptive strike. But, I’m not holding it against his son. Tom has been fair and open. Ever since he’s owned the Cubs, he’s been reaching out.”

You're damn right it was a "pre-emptive strike," and not one launched from the Obama campaign or the DNC, but from a supposed news organization and the whole of the MSM that in a coordinated crusade, locked arms and blew this up story in order to successfully pressure a private citizen and Mitt Romney into repudiating the vetting of Obama's relationship with Jeremiah Wright.

Yes, Virginia, there is still a JournOlist and the proof is this effective piece of journOlism.

How else to explain dozens of disparate newsrooms and hundreds of so-called journalists jumping on the exact same bandwagon at the exact same time to lead with the exact same story with the use of the exact same narrative?

While with one hand the media launches these campaigns to intimidate private citizens into not criticizing Their Precious One and on the other hand the same media savages Mormonism, reads Romney's "homophobic" high school mind from a half-century ago, and vets Ann Romney's horses -- the media is also working and plotting and planning together in obvious coordination with the Obama campaign to protect Barack Obama from free political speech that might harm his reelection chances.

The attack on Joe Ricketts was thuggery, pure this:

That's a nice business you got there. Would be a shame if anything happened to it.

And in today's story featuring Jesse Jackson's Freudian slip, we learn that this media/Obama coordinated bullying has extended all the way to Ricketts' son:

Cubs Chairman Tom Ricketts is reaching out to black politicians and community leaders to try and control the political damage caused by his father’s involvement in a conservative super PAC that considered attacking President Barack Obama by using the fiery sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Ricketts’ explanation to the City Council’s 19 black aldermen and to the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. is similar to what the Cubs chairman told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Neither he nor any member of the Ricketts family would condone “racially-insensitive” attack ads against Obama. And the proposed ad campaign — since disavowed by family patriarch Joe Ricketts — should not stand in the way of an elusive, $300 million plan to renovate Wrigley Field.

The bigger picture is the message Obama's Media Palace Guards are sending out the entire super PAC world: What happened to Ricketts can happen to you.

Obama's media sycophants like those at BuzzFeed Politics and Politico, keep telling us that Wright can only hurt Romney in 2008, and yet these very same sycophants couldn't wait to join the editorial collective to "thug" Mr. Ricketts into submission.

The media is terrified of these super PACs and furious that a Supreme Court decision upended their monopoly on The Narrative. No longer is the corrupt media the only corporate-backed entity allowed to use unlimited resources to get their candidate elected. Today, every corporation enjoys the same free speech rights as NBC News, The New York Times, and the rest.

The media is desperate to reelect Barack Obama and until the Supreme Court upset their plans by deciding in favor of the First Amendment of the Constitution, they were certain that all they had to do was to rerun the 2008 playbook where they would dominate The Narrative to win Obama his second term. Fortunately for America and those of us interested in truth, super PACs will now compete for The Narrative with super PACs and the corrupt media is left only with un-American, neo-fascist campaigns like the Ricketts' assault to stop them.

But this isn’t going to work every time. The only reason the Times was able to launch this pre-emptive strike was due to the Wright proposal being leaked to them.

The media will, however, grow only more desperate, especially now that we know the Obama super PACs are lagging well behind the Romney ones in fundraising.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC

Hurt: Unlike MSM, Breitbart Covers The News

Wed, 23 May 2012 07:37:00 -0700

At the Washington Times today, Charles Hurt contrasts the mainstream media's fixation on obscure and irrelevant "news"--such as Ann Romney's enthusiasm for horses--with the Breitbart News's team's focus on actual facts:

So, not only does Mrs. Romney love horses, but she doesn’t like lawyers? And she wants to be first lady? Why … this American voters simply will not stand!

Nothing is so un-American as riding horses and being a teenager.

But wait … did you hear about the latest crazy “Birther” claim from right-wing crazies placing Mr. Obama’s birth in his father’s homeland of Kenya?

These right-wing “Birthers” over at the Breitbart news empire actually published a promotional booklet written by Mr. Obama’s literary agent touting the young author as having been “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

Problem is that the folks over at Breitbart are not and never have been so-called “Birthers” who believe Mr. Obama was born outside the U.S. But they are news people, and they know news when they see it and they run it.

Read the whole article here.

Photo - from Politico, documenting then-president-elect Obama's visit to the Washington Post in 2009.

Media Mum on Obama's Primary Malaise

Wed, 23 May 2012 06:30:00 -0700

When you have a failed president on your hands and a re-election just a little over five months away, it's easy to panic and rationalize and do everything you can to convince yourself the problem isn't your candidate but rather anything and everyone else. After a Texas inmate took close to 42% of the primary vote against Obama in West Virginia a couple weeks ago, desperate Democrats screamed racism at their own. Last night, Obama was humiliated by similar numbers in both Arkansas and Kentucky, a trend so troubling that even the Washington Post is looking beyond race -- but not at the President's real problem: a lack of enthusiasm in his own party:

And seasoned political observers who have studied the politics of these areas say race may be less of a problem for Obama than the broader cultural disconnect that many of these voters feel with the Democratic Party.

“Race is definitely a factor for some Texans but not the majority,” said former congressman Charles W. Stenholm (D-Tex.). “The most significant factor is the perception/reality that the Obama administration has leaned toward the ultra-left viewpoint on almost all issues.”

In Appalachia, many people are angry at the Environmental Protection Agency’s approach to mining, arguing that the Obama administration has made it more difficult for people in coal country to make ends meet.

The Post deserves credit, however, for not covering up the fact that Obama's woes go beyond coal mining country:

In the 16 states in which voters were given an alternative to Obama on the Democratic primary ballot — whether it be an actual candidate, a write-in or simply “uncommitted” — Obama averaged 84.6 percent of the vote.

In the five states where there was a named opponent, though, Obama’s share of the vote was 72.7 percent.

This includes New Hampshire and North Carolina, two states Obama won in 2008 but where he lost 18 and 20% of the 2012 Democrat primary vote respectively. In NH Obama lost these votes to name candidates, in NC he lost one in five votes to "uncommitted."

The Post's coverage mirrors much of the coverage I've seen surrounding last night's results. Essentially, there are two words the media is strenuously avoiding: "enthusiasm" and "gap."

When you look at the banner year Republicans had in the 2010 midterms, that was all about turnout. Republicans came out, Democrats (bless 'em) didn't. That's how we won -- an enthusiasm gap. Obama's campaign is obviously very concerned about turnout, which is why the President has spent weeks now doing everything in his power to condescend to his base: the gay community, students, and single women. It's also why he intentionally enflamed racial divisions in the crucial swing state of Florida (though a new poll shows that pretty much failed).

To the point, I'm old enough to remember the weeks-long narrative the media created around Pat Buchanan's 37% showing in New Hampshire against then-President George H.W. Bush in 1992. The media used this result to tag Bush as a loser, an incumbent in trouble and unable to hold on to his base. This was all part of a bigger narrative the media was crafting to peg Bush as out-of-touch. Perot eventually won the election for Bill Clinton, but this certainly didn’t help.

Though today's media won't admit it, the difference between 1992 and 2012 is a big one and not good news for Obama. Buchanan was a legitimate insurgent candidate; after years as a columnist and television commenter, Buchanan was a known quantity with a serious campaign platform and access to all kinds of media coverage. Meanwhile, Obama is losing a larger percentage of the vote to inmates and relatively unknown attorneys. Moreover, Obama is losing nearly one in five votes to the likes of "uncommitted."

In 1992, many Republicans voted for Buchanan. In 2012, a whole lot of Democrats are voting against Barack Obama. The closest the Post comes to acknowledging Obama's troubles is with this:

Regardless of the reasoning, it’s clear that there is a bloc of Democratic voters in every state who want to register their opposition to Obama. … even a minor abandonment of Obama by self-identified Democrats could make a difference this time around.

It's pretty obvious that the media is desperate to avoid narratives surrounding Obama's glaring problems with his base. After all, with the economy going in the wrong direction and all of the very public Bain Capital rebellion (the centerpiece of Obama's re-election strategy), Obama has enough problems.

But the media covering up this narrative doesn't mean it's not playing out in real time in the real world. Obama's sole focus has been on securing his base for weeks now, and a large number of self-identified Democrats are obviously eager to register their unhappiness with their candidate. The media ignoring how serious this all is doesn’t mean it's not serious. And if Obama had an "R" after his name, you can bet these primary showings would create the narrative of his candidacy, at least throughout the summer.

The media might not be able to dismiss reality forever though. Should unknowns and "uncommitted" continue to do well in the upcoming primaries, the media might find it has no choice but to start talking about a sitting President who's looking like a loser.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC

ABC's 'This Week' Leaves Fast & Furious Questions on Cutting Room Floor

Tue, 22 May 2012 10:26:00 -0700

I was looking forward to watching "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos for his heavily promoted interview with House Speaker John Boehner. I was particularly excited to hear Stephanopolous ask about Operation Fast & Furious, as promotional spots for the show said he would.

Alas, it was too good to be true. Despite the promotions and even a blog by Mr. Stephanopoulos dedicated to the topic of Fast & Furious, the segment was cut out of the interview. You can watch the interview on the website.

Mr. Stephanopoulos did ask Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi if Attorney General Eric Holder was in contempt of court. Of course she said no, although she had no problem holding President Bush’s Attorney General Alberto Gonzales accountable for actions in his Department of Justice.

More people within ABC News besides Jake Tapper know about Fast & Furious. They are intentionally ignoring the issue, however. And that makes them look just as biased as they are.

LA Times Vets Ann Romney's Horses

Tue, 22 May 2012 08:30:00 -0700

The Los Angeles Times refuses to disclose the contents of a video tape in its possession that reportedly shows Barack Obama lavishing praise on his friend Rashid Khalidi, a close associate of Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat, at a 2003 Chicago dinner party sponsored by the Arab American Action Network and attended by Bill Ayers. The Times does, however, have all kinds of time to vet Ann Romney, going so far as to dig into a lawsuit she was part of involving a horse:

It was the end of a long day in a stuffy Simi Valley office building. Ann Romney had been under oath for more than four hours, testifying in a sometimes contentious deposition about a pricey horse she sold that may or may not have been afflicted with a condition that made him unrideable.

In the airless room, Romney was getting annoyed.

"That really is — that really is irritating," she said when the opposing attorney implied she didn't know who looked after her horse in Moorpark when she was at her home in Boston. "Of course I know who was looking after my horse. You're just trying to irritate me."

It was a rare moment of pique for Ann Romney, not meant for public consumption, and one that opened a window onto the private world of the would-be first lady.

Though Romney was dropped from the case after 18 months of litigation, the deposition reveals her passionate engagement in a rarefied sport that she believes helps her deal with a debilitating chronic illness. It also displays her fear of privacy loss, and a depth of feeling for a handful of extraordinarily expensive horses that she compares to maternal love.

At over the 1300 words -- which is 1300 more than The Times has given the explosive allegation that the Obama campaign bribed Reverend Wright in 2008 -- the piece purports to be a profile of a woman suffering from MS who finds what the headline calls, the "pricey private world" of dressage, therapeutic. But the language of the article is pure sneering smear and an obvious attempt to aid and abet the Obama campaign's crusade to define the Romneys as out of touch elitists who can't possibly understand the problems of the average American -- you know, like a community organizer turned failed president can.

Here are the lowlights in the class envy department, but the worst comes after:

It was a rare moment of pique for Ann Romney, not meant for public consumption, and one that opened a window onto the private world of the would-be first lady. …

It also displays her fear of privacy loss, and a depth of feeling for a handful of extraordinarily expensive horses that she compares to maternal love. …

She soon fell in love with dressage, a fussy Olympic sport that is also called "horse ballet." …

Starting in 2003, coinciding with her purchase of Super Hit for about $105,000, Romney said she would frequently visit Moorpark from her Boston home, staying either in hotels or in a guesthouse on the ranch. When she is at her La Jolla beach house, she takes the train up from Del Mar. …

Dressage is not for the faint of wallet; it requires healthy outlays of cash for upkeep, training, transportation and veterinary care. It attracts some of the world's richest people — the daughter of billionaire New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg competes. …

A spokeswoman for the Romney campaign would not discuss the costs associated with Ann Romney's horses. "We are not required to disclose this information," said Amanda Henneberg in an emailed statement.

I guess we're supposed to be more outraged by what Ann Romney does with her own money as opposed to the lavishing vacationing Michelle Obama has enjoyed as First Lady with our money.

The reporter, Robin Abcarian, closes the piece in an obvious attempt to turn the lawsuit into Dressage-Gate, the kind of ginned up scandal the media can use to haunt Mrs. Romney with throughout the campaign:

Romney maintained that the horse was sound when she sold him in February 2008. She was reluctant to part with him but was certain she'd found the right buyer in Norris, a former physical therapist who aspired to ride the animal in upper-level dressage competitions.

"I wanted him to go to a happy home," Romney testified. "She was so happy with the horse."

But Norris claimed she'd been misled about the horse's condition, and on April 28, 2010, sued Romney for fraud. She also sued the Ebelings, who took a commission from the sale, and the veterinarian who gave the horse a clean bill of health. The case settled last September.

The horse, now 15, was moved to a barn in San Marcos after surgery and other costly medical therapy. "He is to be permanently retired to pasture," Norris asserted in the court record. "He cannot be ridden and obviously has no future as a dressage horse."

The Romney campaign would not allow interviews with Romney, the Ebelings or Romney's attorney. Super Hit's owner could not be reached.

Romney's lawyers wanted to keep the case out of the public eye. In December 2010, one of her attorneys sent a letter to Robyn Ranke, the attorney for Norris, expressing dismay that Ranke refused to sign a confidentiality agreement.

"You can be assured we are not going to give any records … to the L.A. Times," replied Ranke, "and are at a loss as to why you would even suggest such a thing."

Looks to me like this election could be 2008 on steroids. We all remember how Obama's Media Palace Guards infested Alaska with their presence to dig into all things Sarah Palin as the man who would be president skipped along as though throwing his past associates under a bus was good enough.

Now it looks as through the track is being laid to put more attention on the would-be First Lady as opposed to the man who is president.

And it's only May.

John Nolte is the editor of Big Hollywood. Follow him on Twitter @NolteNC.

NYT Columnist Blow Condescends to Michelle Malkin

Tue, 22 May 2012 07:21:00 -0700

This morning, New York Times columnist Charles Blow announced on Twitter that he was “considering dramatic reduction in my social media presence.” Blow, an ultra-liberal, none-too-coherent commentator on events who once suggested that Mitt Romney “stick it in his magic underwear” and called the Tea Partiers “teaklanners,” said that he wanted to get back to writing rather than Tweeting.

Michelle Malkin immediately tweeted back: “DLTDHYOTWO!” Which is the acronym for “Don’t Let The Door Hit You On The Way Out!”

And Blow responded:

This would be hilarious were it not so typical of the elitist media, which sees all non-liberals as irrelevant. Malkin has almost six times as many Twitter followers as Blow. She has several bestselling books, and she’s a regular presence on TV. Blow, meanwhile, has a column in the Times that intelligent people use as a punchline in regular conversation.

So long as New York Times columnists can dismiss their betters with a few words, simply because they’re Times columnists, the Times will lose readers faster than Blow loses arguments.

Liberal Press Keeps Liberals Uninformed

Tue, 22 May 2012 06:36:00 -0700

As we at Breitbart News have noted before, the main function of the left-leaning mainstream media is to tell its audience what attitude to adopt towards the news, rather than the news itself. The case of the "born in Kenya" booklet produced by President Barack Obama's then-literary agency is a prime example.

Whether on HBO or at the Washington Post or at the New York Times (below), the media tells its consumers that Breitbart News encouraged the "Birther" movement--without telling them what we actually reported.

As NewsBusters reported, the Times' Michael Shear used the booklet issue to launch accusations of racism against conservatives, while obscuring what we had actually written about it:

Nevertheless, Shear advanced a racial argument against the GOP, while leaving out details of another scoop, from Joel Pollak of Breitbart, who dug up a 1991 booklet from a literary agent claiming that Obama was "Born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii." He also likened the Drudge Report and Breitbart.com to "some extreme quarters of the American electorate" for the crime of reporting news the liberal media overlooked.

But the issues of race and religion never go completely away, at least in some extreme quarters of the American electorate.

On Thursday, the Drudge Report posted a link on its Web site to a report that sought to revive the long-discredited assertion that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States. And as election season heats up, so does publication of books promoting various conspiracies and theories, including a new one seeking to focus new attention on Mr. Obama’s dealings with Mr. Wright.

Shear didn't bother to give details about the Drudge link, which presumably was this Breitbart scoop from last week, about a 1991 booklet from a literary agency listing Obama's birthplace as Kenya.

Shear ignored conservatives who aren't in fact questioning Obama's birthplace, but instead are asking why such details like the booklet were overlooked by the media during the race of 2008. They are also questioning whether Obama submitted his own biography, as was customary at that agency, or if not, why he failed to correct the erroneous bio (which remained uncorrected until 2007).

Washington Post's Tumulty Proves Breitbart News' Point About Clueless Mainstream Media

Tue, 22 May 2012 06:28:00 -0700

Even after the liberal Washington Post writer and “Journolist” member Karen Tumulty was ridiculed on Twitter for calling Breitbart News’ exclusive story about a publishing booklet that President Barack Obama’s then-literary agent used for over a decade to market Obama as someone who was born in Kenya, she decided to double down on silliness by writing a column on the subject, appropriately titled, “The Birthers Are Back! The Birthers Are Back!”

In her naive column, Tumulty, in mocking fashion, quotes the “obscure publication known as The New York Times” to try to make her ill-advised point that Obama had been thoroughly vetted:

Never mind that Obama was not exactly an unknown at that point. A year before, an obscure publication known as the New York Times had written about his election as head of the Harvard Law Review, and noted, “His late father, Barack Obama, was a finance minister in Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham, is an American anthropologist now doing fieldwork in Indonesia. Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii.”

Except the passage that she quotes directly proves Breitbart News’ point about how the mainstream media failed to vet Obama properly and how Obama or those around him perpetuated myths about his background. In the passage that Tumulty quotes, Obama’s father is described as a “finance minister in Kenya.” But his father was not a “finance minister in Kenya.” Rather, his father was an economist who worked for the Finance Ministry.

Tumulty, who like most of the mainstream media probably did not do her homework on this matter because she relies on a mainstream media publication that serves as nothing more than a newsletter for the D.C.-New York-Boston axis, then glibly dismisses the booklet by writing, “What apparently did happen is something that is not exactly unheard-of in the media business: A junior staffer made a mistake.”

Except, as Breitbart News reported, the mistake that “a junior staffer” made did not get corrected for 16 years.

In introducing the Obama booklet, Breitbart News wrote what the vetting project is all about:

...Yet Andrew also believed that the complicit mainstream media had refused to examine President Obama's ideological past, or the carefully crafted persona he and his advisers had constructed for him. ...

...It is for that reason that we launched "The Vetting," an ongoing series in which we explore the ideological background of President Obama (and other presidential candidates)--not to re-litigate 2008, but because ideas and actions have consequences.

...It is also in that spirit that we discovered, and now present, the booklet described below--one that includes a marketing pitch for a forthcoming book by a then-young, otherwise unknown former president of the Harvard Law Review. ...

...It is evidence--not of the President's foreign origin, but that Barack Obama's public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.

Tumulty’s silly article made Breitbart News’ points not only about how “Obama’s public persona has perhaps been presented differently at times” but also that the “complicit mainstream media had refused to examine President Obama's ideological past, or the carefully crafted persona he and his advisers had constructed for him.” Breitbart News has repeatedly said the publishing booklet had nothing to do with “birtherism” and everything to do with the failure of the mainstream media to vet Obama. Tumulty’s article just adds to the mounting evidence of mainstream media failures.

Below is a screenshot of Tumulty’s article (in case she decides to read new media outlets, realizes her errors, and makes changes), which is included because The Washington Post is notorious for surreptitiously making significant changes to their articles without notifying their readers.

Former ABC/CNN Executive Harasses Gay Couple with Dog Feces

Tue, 22 May 2012 06:04:00 -0700

Led by the corrupt Washington Post, somehow all of the equally corrupt media was able to read the mind of a teen-aged Mitt Romney nearly a half-century ago and deduce that a stunt he pulled on a fellow high school student was driven by homophobia. Last weekend, however, a member of the media's very own elite, Bob Furnad, was caught on video shoving a plastic bag filled with dog feces into a mailbox owned by Benjamin Dameron and Ralph Miller, an openly gay couple who have no idea why Furnad would do such a thing:

A neighborhood argument ended with a stinky stunt that left one man facing a $180 fine.

The prankster admitted to police that he shoved a plastic bag filled with dog feces into his neighbor's mailbox. But he's not just any neighbor - he was once an instructor at the University of Georgia and he was also a high-ranking executive at CNN.

Bob Furnad walked his dog right past his neighbor's driveway last weekend and that's when he placed a plastic bag full of dog feces inside his neighbor's mailbox. But Furnad didn't count on getting caught red-handed on surveillance video.

"What's the argument about?" asked CBS Atlanta News reporter Steve Kiggins to Benjamin Dameron, Furnad's neighbor.

"I have no idea, no clue," replied Dameron.

Those in the media that have bothered to report the story -- which, as you can imagine, isn't many -- haven't even bothered to do the digging this Citizen journalist has to uncover Furnad's possible motive, probably because the media is worried they might learn one of their own is harassing a gay couple.

Apparently, the only punishment Furnad will face is a measly $180 fine even though, as CBS Atlanta points out, fines and jail time are both a possibility when the United States postal inspector gets involved in the crime of mailbox vandalism.

Oh, and as David Stein at Republican Party Animals reports, Furnad hates Republicans:

On Facebook, he’s a big fan of the anti-Republican page “LOLGOP,” and he’s a big booster of Democrat politicians, including Barack Obama.

Once again we see the power of New Media, where everyday American citizens tell the truth and present the full context of a story old media either covers up or doesn't want to dig into for fear that what they find will upset the narrative.

Surrogate Lies About Elizabeth Warren's Phony Cherokee Ancestry on MSNBC

Tue, 22 May 2012 05:55:00 -0700

Yesterday on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, Elizabeth Warren’s surrogate, Democratic Massachusetts State Senator Katherine Clark, told a bald-faced lie about Ms. Warren’s heritage (emphasis added):

Elizabeth Warren has been very clear: This is what she was taught from the time she was a small girl that she has Native American relatives and it’s been demonstrated by some of the research that’s been done that, in fact, there are records that support that claim.

As has been well documented here at Breitbart News, there are no records to support Ms. Warren’s claim of Cherokee ancestry, a fact known to Senator Clark. The Warren campaign has offered only two pieces of phony evidence:

A discredited 2006 family newsletter written and published in England
The 1984 Pow Wow Chow cookbook, edited by Ms. Warren’s cousin, to which Ms. Warren contributed three plagiarized recipes. (The campaign offered the contributions of Ms. Warren’s cousin to the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, Oklahoma as evidence of Ms. Warren’s Native American ancestry. The cookbook was her cousin’s most significant contribution to the museum.)

Mr. Schultz failed to challenge Senator Clark’s lie, and did not ask her whether she considered either the discredited 2006 family newsletter or the 1984 Pow Wow Chow cookbook to be a “record.”

You can read more about the story at the Washington Free Beacon, and watch the video here:

Senator Clark’s audacious lie is but the most recent step in the Warren campaign’s strategy to double down on her false claims of Native American ancestry, which the candidate herself did last Monday on CNN.

While Senator Clark was lying on her behalf to MSNBC, Ms. Warren was thought to be partying in Hollywood with actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who have organized a fundraiser for her. This past week, the Warren campaign spent millions of dollars on television advertising in Massachusetts, a tactic designed to limit the damage arising from press reports documenting her false claims of Native American ancestry.

Michael Patrick Leahy is a Breitbart News contributor, Editor of Broadside Books’ Voices of the Tea Party e-book series, and author of Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement.

Media Demands Hands Off Rev. Wright While Launching Assault On Mormonism

Mon, 21 May 2012 14:00:00 -0700

Last week, the whole of the mainstream media launched a full frontal assault to intimidate a super PAC into laying off Barack Obama's relationship with his creepy, racialist mentor/preacher of 20 years, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The media also successfully pressured Mitt Romney into repudiating the super PAC plan. But while the corrupt media was putting Republicans and Romney on defense over what should be a political liability for Barack Obama, that very same media was and is beating Romney senseless with his Mormonism.

Guy Benson:

Here's why David Axelrod can piously assure journalists that Mitt Romney's Mormonism is "off the table" for the Obama campaign this year: He knows the media and low level surrogates will cheerfully carry that toxic water on Team Obama's behalf. The New York Times in particular seems to have an obsession with Romney's faith, having printed a steady stream of news stories, juvenile tweets and sneering columns on the subject. Over the weekend, the Times published a 2,600 word examination of how Romney's beliefs have shaped his personal and public life. Much of the story is straightforward and fair -- even crossing into sympathetic territory at points, but it also includes passages that are sure to terrify the Times' core audience of urbane secular leftists[.]

Ed Morrissey:

Go to the New York Times website and do a 12-month search for “Romney Mormon,” and see how many hits come back. I’ll end the suspense — “about 12,000 results,” according to the search I conducted earlier today. Now, do a search on “Obama Jeremiah” in the same time frame, and you’ll get 4,190 hits, which is more than I expected but only about a third of the Romney-Mormon search results. Actually, the same search only turns up 4,330 hits since 1851, which means that before mid-2011 the Times only had less than 200 hits for that search item.

Breitbart News:

The 1300 word story is by Sandhya Somashekhar and goes into great detail to not only discuss the infamous 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, where a wagon train of Arkansas settlers were butchered at the hands of a Mormon militia, but also to talk about how Arkansas evangelicals and Christians in general might hold Romney's faith against him.

This is a helluva scam the media has going here. While one hand it works in tandem with the Obama campaign to ensure a full vetting of Rev. Wright never happens, you know, because religion is off the table -- with the other hand, the very same media is screaming scary, freaky, racist, polygamous Mormon! at the top of its lungs.

Moreover, the media's not only bullying private citizens into ignoring Wright, the media is also ignoring Wright's recent allegations that he was offered a bribe by the Obama campaign.

Media Pressures Obama Camp to Repudiate Maher Mormon Slam

Mon, 21 May 2012 13:30:00 -0700

Last week the Obama camp and its media allies pressured Mitt Romney into publicly repudiating a plan submitted to a super PAC that proposed spending millions on an advertising campaign that would tie President Obama to his pastor/mentor of 20 years, racial demagogue Jeremiah Wright. Today, Bill Maher, a famous supporter of Obama's and a donor of $1 million to a pro-Obama super PAC, tweeted this out:

Why even listen to #MittRomney on foreign policy? His entire [foreign policy] experience is 2 yrs trying to brow-beat Frenchmen into joining his cult[.]

In response, two media outlets are pressuring the Obama campaign to follow its own rules and repudiate their own big super PAC backer.

BuzzFeed Politics:

[I]t comes at a time when the Obama campaign is trying to assert moral superiority on the subject of political attacks on religion. After it was revealed last week that some Republicans were planning to resurface Obama's old minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as a campaign issue, David Axelrod called for civility. Declaring Mormonism "off-limits" to the Democrat's campaign, he called on Romney to follow their lead. ...

The Obama campaign did not respond to an e-mail from BuzzFeed asking whether they would repudiate Maher's remarks.

Washington Post:

But Maher gave a hefty $1 million to Priorities USA Action, the super PAC backing Obama, and that connection has caused the president’s campaign some consternation.

Republicans pressured Obama earlier this year to reject Maher’s support given his offensive jokes about women. During that dust-up, Axelrod canceled a planned appearance on Maher’s show.

The Obama campaign did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

What we're seeing here isn't some sudden fit of integrity from these two outlets (and any others who might climb aboard).

What they want is religion completely off the table.

A comments like this from a prominent Obama supporter only hurts Obama, and a serious, well-funded media campaign vetting Obama's relationship with Rev. Wright only hurts Obama.

It's still about protecting Obama, but that doesn't mean a circular firing squad involving Obama and Maher isn't a beautiful thing to watch.

'Othering' Mitt Romney: Washington Post Reminds Christians to Hate Mormonism

Mon, 21 May 2012 12:00:00 -0700

The same corrupt Washington Post that in 2008 only wrote two in-depth examinations of Barack Obama's background, both of them hagiographies, and then spent the better part of a week earlier this month using bad journalism to vet Romney's high school days a full half-century ago, has now run this headline:

Mitt Romney’s Mormon Faith Tangles With a Quirk of Arkansas History

The 1300 word story is by Sandhya Somashekhar and goes into great detail to not only discuss the infamous 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, where a wagon train of Arkansas settlers were butchered at the hands of a Mormon militia, but also to talk about how Arkansas evangelicals and Christians in general might hold Romney's faith against him.

As far as its newsworthiness, the piece is as worthless as it is pointless. The Post's agenda, however, is obvious and grotesque: to remind evangelicals of why they shouldn't vote for Mitt Romney. The bigoted Post is attempting to play on the perceived bigotry of Christians in the hopes it will suppress turnout come November.

The "othering" of Mitt Romney is in full bloom.

The Post's real contempt for evangelicals can be found in this revolting sentence:

Some here also are skeptical of the president’s faith, believing their choice this fall is between a Mormon and a Muslim (Obama has repeatedly affirmed his Christian faith).

Naturally, if the President's faith makes you skeptical of him, it can only have to do with the fact that you believe he's a Muslim and not the fact that he spent 20 years at the knee of a racist demagogue who used his pulpit to scream a request that God damn America.

The Post is now so ridiculous and desperate that they will vet Romney's religion all the way back to 1857, but only dismiss the possibility that a sitting President of the United States might have gone full-Elizabeth Warren on his biography as recently as 2007 or that his campaign allegedly bribed Rev. Wright to keep his mouth shut.

New Biography: Walter Cronkite Biased, Unethical

Mon, 21 May 2012 11:34:00 -0700

A thorough new biography of Walter Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley reveals that he was not the unbiased journalist his supporters have always claimed him to be. In fact, he was a liberal who used his position as America's top anchor to promote the left and damage the right. And that's the way it is.

All of this apparently comes as a surprise to Howard Kurtz, who grew up idolizing Cronkite and can't quite shake off the worship of his false idol even when confronted with the facts. Still, there is an interesting admission early on in Kurtz's piece about how the media landscape has changed:

Had Cronkite engaged in some of the same questionable conduct today—he secretly bugged a committee room at the 1952 GOP convention—he would have been bashed by the blogs, pilloried by the pundits, and quite possibly ousted by his employer. That he endured and prospered, essentially unscathed, until his death in 2009 reminded me of how impervious the monopoly media were in those days, largely shielded from the scrutiny they inflicted on everyone else.

Indeed, he would have been. Kurtz might have spent more time discussing the new media landscape and how it benefits the country by allowing alternative points of view to penetrate the public's awareness. Instead, he mostly cops out.

Cronkite's idea of ethical behavior seems to have been pretty broad. Kurtz opens his account of the new book with the fact that Cronkite had a secret deal with Pan Am which flew his family around the world to vacation spots like the South Pacific for free. The President of the CBS News Division knew about the arrangement but did nothing about it.

Cronkite's behavior wasn't just personally unethical, it was also professionally unethical. It was Cronkite who persuaded Robert Kennedy--during a private meeting in his office--to run for President in 1968. Cronkite wanted someone to run to the left of LBJ in opposition to the Vietnam War. Cronkite then interviewed Kennedy about the possibility of running just three days before he announced his candidacy. No doubt Kennedy believed having the support of America's most trusted anchor would be an asset to his campaign. Indeed, it might have been if Kennedy hadn't been killed in June of 1968 by Sirhan Sirhan.

Despite overwhelming evidence that Cronkite never deserved the reputation he was given, Kurtz suggests that perhaps we shouldn't judge a 1960s icon by modern standards. But the basic ideas of journalistic ethics, i.e. remain neutral when covering partisan politics, haven't changed in 50 years. What Cronkite did was just as unethical then as it would be now. The difference is that now a wider swath of the American public would know about it. Liberal journalists who attempt to hide their personal bias behind a claim of professional ethics can't get away with it as easily as they used to. But that doesn't excuse Cronkite's unethical, biased behavior simply because he could get away with it.

Their Rules, Not Ours: Time to Vet Private Lives of Journalists?

Mon, 21 May 2012 10:30:00 -0700

We now have three instances of three individual Politico writers digging up and publishing political oppo-research about the private lives of private citizens who don't support Obama, and the motive behind these attacks can only be for two reasons:

1. To change the narrative of effective criticism of Obama to the less flattering moments of the private lives of these individuals.

2. To intimidate and frighten others who might consider supporting a candidate not named Obama.

So desperate is the media to Palace Guard for their Precious One that everyday Americans who dare ask Obama a question he flubs, appear in a Romney campaign ad, or donate to a pro-Romney super PAC, are now considered fair game.

But if this is the new MSM standard, what are those of us in New Media to do? In a perfect world we wouldn’t be faced with this question because in a perfect world the media has integrity and would never even consider attacking and intimidating private citizens.

But the world isn't perfect and Politico's lack of human and journalistic integrity begs a question…

If the media says the private lives of private citizens are now fair game, aren't journalists private citizens?

Actually, journalists, in my opinion, are not private citizens. In fact, I believe they hold a public position of power, trust, and responsibility more important to our democracy than some private citizen who asks Obama a perfectly fair question, appears in a Romney ad, or donates to a super PAC.

Right now Politico is telling us that the private lives of private citizens should be investigated and any dirt discovered is worth reporting. Since those who write for, edit, run, and own Politico are in true positions of power and responsibility, doesn’t that make their private lives fair game along with the lives of all journalists?

What do we know about those who abuse the power entrusted to them by shilling for the left behind a phony and cowardly shield of objectivity? What should we know about their personal lives, their finances, their personal mistakes, their traffic violations, and any run-ins with the law?

According to the media itself, quite a lot.

After all, if the public has a "right to know" about an unemployed plumber, doesn’t the public have a "right to know" about those with the power to expose that unemployed plumber?

I'm willing to let Jonathan Martin, Maggie Haberman, Abby Phillip (pictured above), and the rest of our journalist class set the rules.

But are they willing to live under those rules?

Flashback: Jeremiah Wright Praised CNN's Roland Martin As 'Long-Term Friend'

Mon, 21 May 2012 10:28:00 -0700

In an article on CNN.com today, CNN contributor Roland Martin lashes out at Republicans for any attempt--real or potential--to make Barack Obama's incendiary former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, an issue in the 2012 elections. Martin fails to disclose that he is a "long-term friend" of Wright, according to a "shout-out" Wright gave Martin during a speech to the NAACP in 2008--long after Wright had become a notorious household name.

Here's Wright on Martin (video below):

...An additional, special thank you is offered to Soledad O'Brien, for CNN's outstanding Black in America, and my long-term friend Roland Martin. I believe that a change is going to come...

Here's Martin on Wright today:

To all of you who love and adore the Republican Party, I'll play your political priest and absolve you of all of your sins -- said and unsaid -- on this issue.

Making Wright a central campaign theme would have done nothing to keep Obama from beating McCain.

And while Republicans like Sarah Palin and countless mouthpieces on the right swear that Obama wasn't properly vetted, just deal with the reality that your party lost in 2008.

Trying to dredge up Wright in 2012 simply won't do it. It's silly, childish, and frankly, shows a sign of desperation.

The fact that Martin and his colleagues are "long-term friends" of racist demagogues like Wright, and political admirers of Obama, has much to do with the way Wright's beliefs were covered up for so long, and that the mainstream media declared that Obama's fraudulent "race speech" had resolved the issue.

And the fact that Martin fails to acknowledge his friendship with Wright is evidence of the continued importance of vetting the media as well as the president.

By the way--is Martin still a "long-term friend" of Wright? And if so--why?

Mark Steyn on Obama's 'Born in Kenya' Bio: 'Composite Chicks Dig It'

Mon, 21 May 2012 09:10:00 -0700

Mark Steyn’s column over the weekend discussed Breitbart News’ release of a 1991 booklet from Acton & Dystel, Barack Obama’s literary agency, which contained a bio of Obama labeling him “born in Kenya.” Steyn analyzes the story:

When it comes to conspiracies, I'm an Occam's Razor man. The more obvious explanation of the variable first line in the eternally shifting sands of Obama's biography is that, rather than pretending to have been born in Hawaii, he's spent much of his life pretending to have been born in Kenya.

After all, if your first book is an exploration of racial identity and has the working title "Journeys In Black And White," being born in Hawaii doesn't really help. It's entirely irrelevant to the twin pillars of contemporary black grievance – American slavery and European imperialism. To 99.99 percent of people, Hawaii is a luxury vacation destination and nothing else.

Whereas Kenya puts you at the heart of what, in an otherwise notably orderly decolonization process by the British, was a bitter and violent struggle against the white man's rule. Cool! The composite chicks dig it, and the literary agents.

Steyn goes on to compare Obama’s apparent biography-inflation to Elizabeth Warren’s:

Everybody does it – at least in the circles in which Obama hangs. At Harvard Law School, where young Barack was "the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review," there's no end of famous firsts: As The Fordham Law Review reported, "Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995." There is no evidence that Mrs. Warren, now the Democrats' Senate candidate, is anything other than 100 percent white. She walks like a white, quacks like a white, looks whiter than white. She's the whitest white since Frosty the Snowman fell in a vat of Wite-Out. But she "self-identified" as Cherokee, so that makes her a "woman of color."

The column is certainly worth reading in its entirety.

Politico Continues Attacks on Private Citizens Supporting Romney

Mon, 21 May 2012 08:30:00 -0700

MSNBC's unofficial web-branch, known as Politico, couldn't move fast enough to dismiss our story about the possibility that as a grown adult, President Obama, or those around him, might have had faked his biography Elizabeth Warren-style. To Politico, of course, that's not news. The backgrounds of private citizens supporting Governor Romney, however, elicits all kinds of time, attention, manpower, and publicity from Politico's wretched left-wingers.

Back in 2008, Politico's Jonathan Martin did oppo-research on a private citizen Barack Obama approached for a photo-op. The man who would become 'Joe the Plumber' was just minding his own business when then-candidate Obama engaged him on-camera. Joe asked a perfectly fair question that the now-teleprompter addicted Obama flubbed miserably (but only by telling the truth). The McCain camp pounced, Joe became a YouTube sensation, and journalistic-thug Martin figured he could take the heat off Obama by making a private citizen's tax liens a story.

In the bullying tradition of her colleague Martin, last week, Politico's Maggie Haberman did oppo-research on a private citizen who appeared in a Romney campaign ad.

Moreover, this is the same Politico which last week wrote a 1200 word feature piece about the return of Jeremiah Wright in the news but covered up one of the primary reasons Wright is back in the news: his tale of allegedly being bribed by the Obama campaign in 2008.

You sensing a pattern here?

Obviously, Politico is far from done vetting everyone but our sitting president or sending its threatening message that any kind of support for Mitt Romney will come with a heavy price.

Late yesterday, Politico's pal Abby Phillip (pictured above) sunk her teeth into another private citizen whose only sin is not supporting Obama -- Romney supporter John Kleinheinz -- who is now paying for his million dollar donation with a big Politico spread exposing his once being wanted for "criminal mischief."

The corrupt media is not only attacking private citizens who support candidates other than Their Precious One, but as we saw last week with this full-bore media intimidation campaign, the media is obviously furious that the (free speech known as) super PACs now have the ability to compete with them for the narrative. As a result, the media is targeting them and their donors, one by one, in an effort to intimidate them into silence.

Here's my question: If the private lives of private citizens are now fair game, why not the private lives of the journalists who expose and threaten to expose those private citizens?

Their rules, not mine.

Maher Slams 'The Vetting,' Proves Breitbart's Point

Mon, 21 May 2012 05:24:00 -0700

On the most recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, the host ripped into Andrew Breitbart and "The Vetting" project, claiming that Barack Obama had already been examined by the press in 2008, and that Breitbart's website had published Birther "bullsh*t." He then went on to prove Andrew's point by failing to tell his audience what Breitbart's so-called "Birther" article actually said--that it was Obama's own literary agent who had circulated information that he had been "born in Kenya" as he tried to promote his first book.

Maher introduced his panel discussion with the following:

Obama has not been vetted--this drove me crazy this week. Apparently he just skated in 2008 just because he was running for president, and that does not draw a lot media scrutiny, especially when you have the first black one. Is there any truth to this, that Obama has not been vetted?...the "Birther" stuff, it seems to be back. But there's a twist to it, which is that everybody who's claiming Birther nonsense starts with, "But I'm not a 'Birther'...Andrew Breitbart's website prints the bullshit about the Birthers--"but I'm not a Birther."

True to media form, Maher hurled the "Birther" accusation--and suggestions of racism--as a means to hide what Breitbart News actually said. In the same way, the mainstream media kept information about then-Sen. Barack Obama hidden from view during the 2008 election, treating criticism of Obama as evidence of racism, following the Obama campaign's insistence that even accurate reports about his past could be lumped together with "smears."

Neither Maher's guests nor his audience seemed to know how to respond to the topic, as he had given them no facts to discuss, and in fact pointed them towards false conclusions that pre-empted debate or even humor.

At least, with Maher, viewers know what they are getting--in-kind contributions to the Obama re-election effort that complement the $1 million that Maher has donated to Obama's Super PAC. When the mainstream media does the same--casting aspersions on Obama's critics without reporting the substance of their criticism--it is less honest, if somewhat more decorous.

Mainstream Media Still Ignoring Fast and Furious

Sun, 20 May 2012 16:15:00 -0700

There were some pretty big developments in the Fast & Furious story last week. Speaker John Boehner threw his full support behind the Oversight Committee’s investigation. The entire GOP Leadership in the House sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asking him to comply with the subpoena. Where was the Old Media? Deflecting or ignoring as usual.

I did a search on the New York Times webpage and couldn’t find anything on these developments. I’m starting to think they’ve given up on this. They won’t answer my emails or phone calls.

The Washington Post reprinted the AP article, which was absolutely dreadful (more on that below).

I didn’t see anything on MSNBC TV or their website. But then again their website is a maze. They did talk a lot about gay marriage though!

CNN’s article on the developments was very good. Deirdre Walsh even mentioned that six freshmen representatives pressured the GOP Leadership to move ahead with the contempt charges against Attorney General Eric Holder.

I’m shocked Politico reported it and did a decent job. However, it might be because on May 11 they published an article that morning about GOP Leadership wanting to move slow regarding any action against Mr. Holder. Unfortunately for them Speaker Boehner later that same day came out in full support of the Oversight investigation. Whoops!

It shouldn’t come to anyone’s surprise when I say Diane Sawyer and Brian Williams didn’t report on these developments. Apparently the eclipse we’re going to have is more important than any developments in a case that involves the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans and Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

Once again the Associated Press was caught with their heads in the sand when it comes to Operation Fast & Furious developments. In this case they should have kept their heads in the sand. They didn’t even put forth half an effort--ot’s almost as if they threw something together so when asked about it, they can point to something.

The AP completely ignored the fact that Speaker John Boehner threw his full support behind the investigation.

Speaker Boehner made those remarks on May 11. They sent the letter on May 18. The article they published the same day is titled, “Boehner: All options on table in gun-running probe.” That’s basically all they say in the first two very short paragraphs, despite that statement happening a week before. Instead, the story that actually happened on the date of publication received a one-sentence paragraph stating the leadership had sent a letter to Mr. Holder. The last paragraph said Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said Mr. Holder isn’t in contempt.

Give us all a break, AP. But then again, their Fast & Furious coverage has been awful since the beginning, so it may be a little too much to ask them to start acting like a proper news organization and report the story as it happens.

It’s also amazing how the AP doesn’t think this is a big deal. I hate having to remind them that there are victims attached to this operation. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and hundreds of Mexicans have lost their lives. That should be mentioned in every article in order to remind everyone why this case is serious.

I know the mainstream media won’t give Fast & Furious the proper coverage, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop calling them out!

Gawker Shifts Narrative Again: Trayvon 'Beaten' By Zimmerman

Sun, 20 May 2012 15:50:00 -0700

As every single thread of the Left's narrative that "George Zimmerman was a racist white man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin in cold blood" disintegrates as more facts in the case emerge, its defenders are forced to come up with new and even more bizarre defenses. Take the loathsome online gossip rag Gawker and especially loathsome writer "Mobutu Sese Seko," who has now expanded the narrative to a new wrinkle--the claim that Zimmerman "beat" Trayvon.

In an article 'Stand Your Ground’: Ladies, You Have No Ground to Stand on where he compares the case of George Zimmerman to Marissa Alexander, an African American woman who has become something of a cause célèbre on the left, Seko says:

The two cases beg for comparison. Martin, an African American teen, was chased, beaten and shot by a self-appointed neighborhood watchman named George Zimmerman.

Trayvon was beaten by Zimmerman? This is a bizarre fable to start spinning given the new evidence that Zimmerman suffered a broken nose and black eyes while Trayvon suffered a laceration on his knuckle and the new description by a witness that Martin attacked Zimmerman "MMA style." Is Gawker suggesting that Zimmerman is an expert in some bizarre martial arts discipline that involves laying on the ground while your opponent straddles you and then repeatedly beating them in the fists with your eyes?

Gawker is desperate to neuter Zimmerman's self-defense claim by turning him into the attacker. Seko says later in the article (emphasis added):

The (Marissa Alexander) ruling is galling in light of the Martin killing, when you consider that George Zimmerman ignored a 911 dispatcher's comment that they did not need him to exit his car and pursue Trayon Martin, that he then hunted Martin through a neighborhood, fought him and shot him. Zimmerman walked free on the basis of a Stand Your Ground self-defense, despite not driving away in his safe and locked SUV, tracking and confronting the imminent Skittles-snacking threat to his life and engaging him in a fight.

What Gawker and their ilk in the Zimmerman lynch mob want to do is to take away even the most basic form of self defense: being aware of strangers in your neighborhood. They aren't just anti-Stand Your Ground, they aren't just anti-gun; they are anti-Ask Who Are You And What Are You Doing Here. Even thinking about questioning the presence of someone is racist racial profiling if that someone happens to be black.

Gawker has to ignore the facts in the Martin shooting in order to spin this tale, but by taking the extra step of actually making up a new charge against Zimmerman, they have moved into even more dangerous territory.

Breitbart Awards Honor Andrew's Legacy In Journalism, Blogging & Citizen Activism

Sun, 20 May 2012 15:36:00 -0700

Although Andrew Breitbart was an irreplacable fighter for conservative values, his tragic passing has led to a passing of the torch for battle he believed in so passionately. The latest honor to keep Andrew's name and work alive is an awards dinner from The Heritage Foundation and The Franklin Center.

Rob Bluey of The Heritage Foundation told me:

"The Heritage Foundation and The Franklin Center want to recognize Andrew's contribution to journalism, blogging and activism and we're excited to be able to launch The Breitbart Awards at the Future of Journalism conference in June."

The honors will be given in three categories that are well thought out to honor three main areas of Andrew's legacy: full-time professional journalism; the new media frontier; and bold citizen action by conservatives. Nominations for these awards are currently being accepted at BreitbartAwards.com and must be submitted by May 25th.

As the website explains the awards:

Full-time Reporter: In a media environment that tells reporters to go along to get along, a few still consider it a sacred trust to keep the people informed. A few still recognize the awesome responsibility in belonging to the only profession to be enshrined in the Bill of Rights. We’ll present one Breitbart Award to a full-time news reporter to honor courage and honesty in telling the real stories that matter to people’s lives.

Blogger: When the legacy media fails to do its job, we are fortunate to have an army waiting on the Internet to hold the institutions of power accountable. We’ll honor a blogger for intrepid reporting that goes over the heads of the legacy media to communicate directly to the people.

Citizen: The fight for freedom requires a constant stream of new recruits willing to make time in their lives to serve as watchdogs in their local communities. We’ll honor an information activist committed to digging up the truth.

NY Times Ignored Obama's Wright, Focuses on Romney's Mormon Faith

Sun, 20 May 2012 11:32:00 -0700

The New York Times, which steadfastly refused to tell its readers about the effect that Jeremiah Wright's hateful preaching might have had on Barack Obama's faith, has devoted considerable space to exploring "How the Mormon Church Shaped Mitt Romney." It's a legitimate topic--as is Obama's religious background--but the Times carefully sets a trap for Romney: either he is a devotee of a faith that remains strange to many Americans, or else he is a religious hypocrite for abandoning his strict ideals in the political realm.

Behold Romney, religious nut:

Mr. Romney has also asked for divine sustenance during his political runs. The night before he declared his candidacy for governor, he and his family prayed at home with Gloria White-Hammond and Ray Hammond, friends and pastors of a Boston-area African Methodist Episcopal church.

His earlier failed run for United States Senate had all been part of God’s plan, Mrs. Romney told Ms. White-Hammond around that time. Mr. Romney had lost, but “just because God says for you to do something doesn’t mean the outcome is going to be what you want it to be,” Ms. White-Hammond remembered Mrs. Romney saying.

And behold the "chasm" between Romney's success as a politician and the humble demands of his church:

But many also see a gap between his religious ideals — in Sunday school, he urged his students to act with the highest standards of kindness and integrity — and his political tactics. The chasm has been hard to reconcile, even though people close to him say he is serious about trying to do so.

Needless to say, the Times has never held Obama to anything like the same standard. It ignored the racist teachings of Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ--of which Obama was well aware, despite protestations to the contrary--and fails to hold him to account when his actions violate the tenets of that bizarre, radicalized and racialized congregation. (Wright himself has not been shy in attributing Obama's perceived compromises to political expediency--as well as to "the Jews.")

At times, the Times article does strike a sympathetic tone towards both Romney and his faith. But the glaring double-standard remains:

Just as Ronald Reagan deployed acting skills on the trail and Barack Obama relied on the language of community organizing, Mitt Romney bears the marks of the theology and culture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Obama remains shielded by the abstract "language of community organizing" from the fiery anti-American, antisemitic and racist language of Trinity United, which shaped him--by his own admission!--into the man he is today.

Former Obama Official: Ann Romney Has 'No Empathy For People'

Sun, 20 May 2012 08:43:00 -0700

This morning on Up With Chris Hayes on MSNBC, former Obama administration economic official Betsey Stevenson attacked Ann Romney. This makes her the third Obama-connected individual to attack Mitt Romney’s wife, after Hilary Rosen, who stated that Ann hadn’t worked “a day in her life,” and Michelle Goldberg, who said that Ann’s support of motherhood was Hitlerian and Stalinesque.

Stevenson said this morning:

“You’ve got his wife saying I don’t feel rich, even though I’m richer than 99.99% of Americans. I mean, they come across as really having no empathy for people.”

Obama’s surrogates continue to attack Ann Romney, even as the Obama campaign itself pretends that Ann is off limits so that Michelle Obama, a far more controversial figure, remains off-limits.

Media Ignores Warren Plagiarism Story; Went Nuts for Claims Against Scott Brown

Sat, 19 May 2012 22:47:00 -0700

Michael Patrick Leahy detailed yet another twist to Elizabeth "Faux-Cahontis" Warren's tale of fake American Indian claims. Apparently, in 1984 Warren supplied several "old family recipes" to the "Pow Wow Chow cookbook" edited by her cousin. Turns out these "family recipes" were allegedly lifted from various cookbooks and newspaper articles of the era. She appears to have plagiarized them.

Will the media note that Warren seemingly plagiarized recipes from other cookbooks, claimed they were "family recipes," and then signed them "Elizabeth Warren - Cherokee"? Probably not, but the Old Media were quite interested to report the story when they thought her opponent, Senator Scott Brown, plagiarized something.

For Warren's part, Leahy notes that several of her "family recipes" were copied word-for-word from a New York Times News service piece published in 1979. Boston-based talk show host Howie Carr also found that several of her recipes appear to have been plagiarized. (Here, here, and here)

But recall the flap in October of 2011 when it was discovered that Brown's website seemed to have a passage about ideals he was raised with that mirrored a similar passage from ex-Senator Elizabeth Dole's website.

The explanation from Brown's office was that they took the infrastructure of Dole's website and plugged into it their own info when they created Brown's site, but the section in question was merely transferred without undergoing any rewrite. It was an error by staffers, not plagiarism per se, they said.

Still, the old media went wild to report Brown's apparent plagiarism. To name just a few, The Atlantic covered it, as did National Journal, the Associated Press, and all the networks and cablers. Online reporters also pumped the story. There were stories from Yahoo News and Huffington Post. Naturally, all the far-left websites such as Firedoglake and Daily Kos gleefully reported the story, too.

Thus far, Warren has offered no explanations at all for her word-for-word similarity to other recipes in her cousin's cookbook project. Not surprisingly, the Old Media is silent about Warren's newest shenanigans. I guess charges of plagiarism from a well-connected liberal aren't as interesting as a mistake on a website made by a Republican's staffers.

Obama Campaign Responds to Breitbart 'Kenya' Booklet Story

Sat, 19 May 2012 10:30:00 -0700

Though it quickly became an Internet punchline, Attack Watch should not be dismissed. Attack Watch is paid for and an extension of Obama for America, which is part of BarackObama.com, the online campaign hub for the White House. That means that the Obama campaign itself has decided to comment on the Breitbart News' exclusive surrounding a 1991 booklet published by President Obama's literary agency that falsely claimed the President was born in Kenya. It's also worth noting that this claim extended to the lit agency's website until 2007, two months after Obama announced his candidacy for president.

What's fascinating about the Obama campaign's response is the many questions it leaves unanswered:

Fact: The Breitbart bloggers chose to ignore the very clear facts that belie their claim.

The literary agent who put together the 1991 pamphlet in question noted that, “there was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii.” The mistake in the pamphlet was the result of “nothing more than a fact checking error” by the agent.

Despite the Breitbart bloggers’ claim that the booklet was an attempt to manipulate some carefully crafted persona, numerous news outlets had already reported the President as Hawaiian-born. A year before the pamphlet’s release in 1991, a New York Times article on Barack Obama’s election to head the Harvard Law Review reported correctly, “Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii.”

As far as that first bullet point, what the Obama camp won't tell you is that Breitbart News made numerous attempts to contact the literary agency without any kind of response. Once the agency finally released a statement, we published it.

But it's the combination of both bullet points that's most revealing. We've since learned that the agency in question, Dystel & Goderich, asks writers to submit their own bios and if our President had an "R" after his name, this is the thread that would be pulled to launch a thousand mainstream media questions, the most obvious among them being: Did Obama submit his own bio? If so, what did it say? How in the in the world does someone mistakenly assume an American citizen was born in Africa? This may well be a "fact checking error," but it's an awfully bizarre one with an origin that deserves an explanation. Moreover, did Obama ever see the 16 year-long error and request it be fixed? Was he ever asked to proof the bio?

There's no mistaking the fact that there's a legitimate narrative surrounding Obama that involves the way in which both he and those around him engage in myth-making. Even Obama protectors like Politico admitted as much as recently as just a few weeks ago:

Yet, make no mistake, [the upcoming David Maraniss biography] is a dangerous book for Obama, and White House staffers have been fretting about it in a low-grade way for a long, long time — in part because it could redefine the self-portrait Obama skillfully created for himself in 1995 with “Dreams from My Father.”

And yet, the literary agency that handled this "skillfully created self-portrait" known as "Dreams from My Father" is the same literary agency that falsely claimed Barack Obama was born in Kenya. This potential new piece of a puzzle, though, has only been met with dismissiveness from Politico (along with the rest of the media).

After what we've learned and are still learning about Elizabeth Warren, the number of questions worth asking about the "skillfully created self-portrait" of Barack Obama only grows. The media has made clear that what Mitt Romney did a half-century ago as a teenager is fair game. Barack Obama is a sitting United States president and was a grown man in 1991 (and in 2007). If either he or those around him were intentionally primping his biography, we have a right to know.

NYT Revives 'Zimmerman Is Racist' Meme with Unverifiable Anecdote

Fri, 18 May 2012 14:02:00 -0700

In an otherwise unremarkable and inconclusive New York Times report on the latest released findings in the Trayvon Martin shooting incident, the liberal rag decides to drop an unverified, practically un-sourced bomb on George Zimmerman.

When police officers arrived on the scene of the shooting of Trayvon Martin on the rainy night of Feb. 26, they tried frantically to revive the 17-year-old, who had been shot in the chest and was lying motionless behind a row of town houses in a gated community in Sanford, Fla.

Authors Serge F. Kovaleski and Campell Robertson conclude a rambling "he said, she said" nothingburger with this:

The reports may give rise to other mysteries as well, including the identity of a woman who called another investigator, less than two full days after the shooting.

The woman refused to identify herself or give any callback numbers, but told the investigator that Mr. Zimmerman “has racist ideologies and that he is fully capable of instigating a confrontation that could have escalated to the point of Zimmerman having to use deadly force.”

The police were never able to track her down.

Anyone can pick up a phone and say anything to the police, as this apparent non-person did. It's nothing more than an un-sourced quote lacking corroboration, let alone substantiation. Why put it out there? If there were anything to it, why didn't the two reporters here do some legwork so that they might offer some substance to back up such an incendiary claim?

Kovaleski and Robertson did nothing akin to serious reporting, as opposed to simply reading a document to regurgitate whatever bits of it they desired. Then, they dug out one of the most potentially damaging yet fully unsubstantiated elements to leave for readers to ponder. Not only that, but it's perfect for know-nothings convinced they already know what happened that night, making Zimmerman guilty in their eyes. It's also a plum for any who want to cast Zimmerman as a racist and will now attempt to cement hearsay as fact by repeating it without explaining its utter lack of substantiation.

It's not serious journalism, but it's perfect for provocateurs, race baiters and propagandists, which is what the New York Times itself seems to be these days. That's why so many intelligent, unbiased fact-seeking news readers simply ignore the tittering old "grey lady" when it comes to reading solid reporting and allied editorial content found in new media. Most reputable bloggers operate with better judgment and more honestly disclosed biases, political and otherwise, than does the Times today.

Politico Covers Up Obama Campaign's Alleged Attempt to Bribe Rev. Wright

Fri, 18 May 2012 14:00:00 -0700

In a 1200 word feature piece titled "Race Issues Return with Rev. Wright," written by Jonathan Martin and James Hohamann, MSNBC's unofficial web-partners at Politico go into excruciating detail charting the return of Obama's former pastor and 20-year mentor. Naturally, the article is all about race-race-race and racism-racism-racism, and how by some unholy act of MSM witchcraft Wright is a bigger problem for Romney than for the man who spent two decades at his knee.

What Politico glaringly chose to leave out of its in-depth and oh-so detailed reporting, though, is the primary reason Reverend Wright is back in the news, but one inconvenient to President Obama's re-election chances:

According to Edward Klein in today’s New York Post, then-Senator Barack Obama’s political campaign tried, through back channels, to bribe Rev. Jeremiah Wright not to speak during the 2008 election cycle. The price: $150,000.

The bribery story broke just this week but, per the usual, not in the mainstream media -- even though John Edwards is currently on trial for a similar allegation that was uncovered by outlets other than a corrupt MSM that refused to report on a story that might have hurt the election chances of another presidential candidate with a "D" after his name.

You sensing a pattern here?

Not only is the media covering up Wright's claim he was offered a bribe by the Obama campaign, there is no indication that anyone in the MSM is in any way following up on the story. The person who allegedly offered Wright the bribe is Eric Whitaker, a close friend of the President's, whose Urban Health Initiative (UHI) at the University of Chicago Medical Center was recently awarded a $5.9 million grant from the Department of Health and Human Services.

There is so much "there" in this bribery story, so many unanswered questions, that the media is obviously scared to even pull a little on the thread for fear of how quickly it might all unravel. It's the same with the story Breitbart News broke just yesterday regarding a lit agent's bio that falsely claimed Obama was born in Kenya. You would think that after Elizabeth Warren's "exotic" resume-enhancing we'd see some curiosity here.

But then again, it was New Media that exposed Warren while the corrupt media just stood there and felt the warmth creep into their cheeks.

Or maybe they're just too busy looking into how Mitt Romney traveled with his dog a half-century while he was freaky Mormon capitalist in high school.