Left-Wing Non-Profits Paying Big Grants to Newspapers for ‘News Gathering’

-By Warner Todd Huston

Several newspapers have recently announced that far left leaning, non-profit foundations such as The Ford Foundation have given them hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover “the news.” Many wonder if this “coverage” is being programmed by these left-wing moneymen. Others note that the tax-exempt, left-wing foundations are essentially lending U.S. government subsidies once remove to both newspapers and NPR. Is this all merely a way to “save” the news gathering industry, or are left-wing organizations just buying the news and pushing their far left narrative through stealth?

NPR’s On The Media recently talked to several members of the Old Media about the huge grants that The Ford Foundation and others have given traditional media outlets such as the Washington Post, the L.A. Times and NPR and positing the questions above. Naturally the Old Media representatives pooh poohed any thought that the left-wing organizations are buying news coverage and claimed that newsrooms and editorial boards are insulated from any influence by their funders.

This grant-making to news agencies is nothing new, of course. As far back as 1993 the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation had been granting large amounts to fund “journalism.” In 2009 the Knight Foundation awarded $5 million to 21 “civic organizations” to report the news. More recently, this sort of grant giving has continued with a $1.8 million grant to National Public Radio from left-wing, anti-American philanthropist George Soros and the Ford Foundation gave $500,000 to the Post and a whopping $1 million to the L.A. Times.
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Left-Wing Non-Profits Paying Big Grants to Newspapers for ‘News Gathering’”


Barack Obama: Hey Media, Stop Reporting What The Other Side Says!

-By Warner Todd Huston

According to The New York Times, President Obama is a “voracious consumer of news.” But he’s not at all happy with a media that has been apparently engaged this whole time in a one-sided love affair with The One. He has harsh words for the media establishment.

Times writer Amy Chozick herself seemed quite star struck by the prez giving us paragraph after paragraph filled with evidence of how impressed she is with Obama’s reading habits and media interaction. But for the President, the feeling isn’t mutual.

You see he’s mad that the press keeps giving the other side so much coverage.

While Mr. Obama frequently criticizes the heated speech of cable news, he sees what he views as deeper problems in news outlets that strive for objectivity. In private meetings with columnists, he has talked about the concept of “false balance” — that reporters should not give equal weight to both sides of an argument when one side is factually incorrect. He frequently cites the coverage of health care and the stimulus package as examples, according to aides familiar with the meetings.

See? The Me-Myself-and-I President says that the press should just stop giving that “factually incorrect” side all that darn coverage. Only he is the right one, so that is all the press needs to report. There is no “other side” to an issue. Just Obama’s.
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Barack Obama: Hey Media, Stop Reporting What The Other Side Says!”


USA Today’s Olympic Fantasy of an All Female Country

-By Warner Todd Huston

The Olympics is usually a time of a country to express pride in its athletes, all its athletes. But not for USA Today. No, USA Today thought it would be interesting to imagine if our female athletes were “their own country.”

In its post Olympics coverage, USA Today wasn’t happy enough that America’s female Olympians were big winners in London. For USA Today, Kelly Whiteside went to fantasy land.

U.S. female athletes have done more than their fair share, winning 27 of the team’s 41 gold medals so far. To put that accomplishment in perspective: If the U.S. women were their own nation, they would be third in the gold medal count.

“I’ve been thrilled to see how well U.S. women have done,” said Kayla Harrison, a gold medalist in judo. “It feels amazing to be a part of something so much bigger than myself; I definitely feel connected. To be able to say I’m a strong confident young woman and an Olympic champion is amazing, and I hope we have a million young girls inspired right now.”

The same holds true for China, as women have won 20 of that country’s 37 gold medals.

We are in such a politically correct era that a major newspaper can’t be happy that a nation’s athletes, both its male and female athletes, did well at an international sporting event without separating the sexes.
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USA Today’s Olympic Fantasy of an All Female Country”


Abandoned Newspaper Buildings Mirrors Decline in Industry

-By Warner Todd Huston

For the Minneapolis Post, columnist John Reinan has a very interesting piece noting that many once powerful city newspapers are being forced by industry loses to abandon their palatial, decades old headquarters buildings.

Many of these buildings are grand, often classically built, downtown mainstays that once told a city that the newspaper contained within was a vital part of a city’s life, but newspapers just can’t afford to run these huge places anymore. This, Reinan feels, is another symptom of an industry shrinking away to nothing.

Reinan looked around the country and found that many once big time daily newspapers have been forced to move to digs definitely less high-end. Among the many downscalers, he found the Oakland Tribune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Philly Inquirer, the Philly Daily News, the Des Moines Register, the Indianapolis Star, and many more have left the buildings that were once known as centers of power and prestige only to seek refuge in lower rent buildings in a possible last ditch effort to remain viable.
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Abandoned Newspaper Buildings Mirrors Decline in Industry”


NYTimes Food Reporter Rejoices at Chick-Fil-A VP’s Heart Attack, Apologizes

-By Warner Todd Huston

Mark Bittman, a New York Times food critic, admits he used an “inappropriate phrase” in an August 3 blog posting about Chick-Fil-A. In fact, it was down right Bitter, man, because he seemed to be rejoicing that a vice president of the fast food company had died of a heart attack back in July.

Bittman apologized to his readers for the giddiness he displayed about the death of Chick-Fil-A’s Vice President of Public Relations, Don Perry, who passed away on July 27.

Said the bitter foodie,

In a recent blog post, I used an inappropriate phrase to refer to the late VP of PR for Chick-fil-A. My choice of words did not rise to either my own standards or to The Times’s, and the phrase has been removed from the post. I regret this lapse.

What he said on August 3 deserved to be excised, too. It was pretty vile. Here is what was removed from the post:
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NYTimes Food Reporter Rejoices at Chick-Fil-A VP’s Heart Attack, Apologizes”


One Newspaper Owner is Betting on Print

-By Warner Todd Huston

The new owner of the Orange County Register is telling his new employees that he wants to hire “more of them.” He also intends to actually expand the paper whereas the rest of the industry seems to be contracting.

New owner Aaron Kushner told a gathering of his new employees that he is, “interested in beefing up the print edition and satisfying and adding to the nearly 163,000 subscribers who pay for the newspaper daily and the 287,000 on Sunday.”

How he intends to do this when most other papers are losing subscribers in droves he did not reveal.
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One Newspaper Owner is Betting on Print”


NYTimes Looks for ‘Golden Lining’… in Genocide?

-By Warner Todd Huston

By some accounts, since the coming to power of Zimbabwe’s terror-inducing Robert Mugabe, up to 480,000 people have lost their lives. Of those not killed outright or starved to death, tens of thousands of people had their property stolen and their livelihoods ended, they were beaten, raped, and left for dead. As these outrages were occurring the nation’s economy was devastated, a one-time economic bright spot in Africa reduced to ruins. And in all this violation of human rights the New York Times sees a “golden lining”?

How could there be a “golden lining” in all this murder — even genocide — and destruction? Well, apparently out of the ashes of a country, the genocide of hundreds of thousands, and the human rights violations of millions more, the fact that a few thousand small farmers have risen up to some modest success raising tobacco is somehow a great success.

In a Friday, July 20 piece, Lydia Polgreen is all excited over this year’s tobacco crop haul of 330 million pounds of the golden leaf (hence the “golden” lining).

Of course, this is down from the 522 million pounds that was realized in the year 2000, but it’s better than nothing, one supposes.

Polgreen goes on to laud all the progress that this handful of black small farmers have had this year and that success, she and other Mugabe apologists think, might signal that Mugabe’s genocidal “land reforms” might be a howling success. But even her own announcement of success is prefaced by the horrors.
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NYTimes Looks for ‘Golden Lining’… in Genocide?”


Washington Post Falsely Claims Rush Limbaugh Said Batman Movie Bad Guy is ‘Liberal Attack’ on Romney

-By Warner Todd Huston

It’s another case of newspaper columnists claiming someone they’ve never listened to in their lives is talking trash against them. This time it is Paul Farhi for the Washington Post who on July 17 claimed that Rush Limbaugh said that the super villain in the new Batman movie is a “liberal attack on Romney.”

Farhi’s headline reads, “Rush Limbaugh claims ‘Dark Knight’ movie is liberal attack on Romney,” but the truth is, of course, that Rush, did not say that the terrorist character Bane in the soon-to-debut Batman movie is meant as an underhanded slap at Mitt Romney. He just didn’t.

My guess is that Farhi only briefly scanned the transcript of Rush’s comments about the Batman movie made during his July 17 show because tone is telling when you actually hear the Rush’s comments as I did when the show was going on. Rush was not saying that the movie was planned as an attack on Mitt but that some pundits were making such a claim that day. He was also ambivalent on the whole thing, not claiming to have fully accepted the idea himself.
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Washington Post Falsely Claims Rush Limbaugh Said Batman Movie Bad Guy is ‘Liberal Attack’ on Romney”


Boston Globe Lifts Bad Info From Other Sources on Romney’s Bain Tenure

-By Warner Todd Huston

The Boston Globe wanted readers to think it had a scoop on its Bain Capitol story on July 12. But in the story claiming Romney is lying about leaving Bain in 1999, the Boston Globe not only used the work of other publications and did so without attribution (we call that plagiarism) but, on top of that, the sources used are simply wrong in the claim that Romney stayed at Bain three years after he said he left. It’s all around newspaper fail.

The Boston Globe was excited to push its story (subscription required), a tale of gotcha journalism where the GOP candidate was “proven” to have lied about saying he left Bain Capitol in 1999. The Globe claims they “found” evidence that he was actually there, actively managing the company until as late as 2002. If this were true, Romney wouldn’t just be a liar but he’d also be in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Says the Boston Globe,

Mitt Romney has repeatedly sought to distance himself from some business dealings at Bain Capital by asserting that he left the firm in February 1999, but a review of public records shows that his authority lingered for three more years as Bain repeatedly listed him on government filings as the man in charge. Until 2002, when Romney and Bain Capital finalized a severance agreement, he remained the firm’s “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer and president,” according to SEC documents. The description was applied even to the creation of five new Bain partnerships a full three years after Romney has said he relinquished all control.

If this were all true, it would be a pretty bad thing for the candidate. Fortunately for Mitt and unfortunately for the screaming headline of the Boston Globe, it isn’t true. Mitt really did stop managing Bain Capitol in 1999 when he left the company to take over the struggling Winter Olympics.

Even FactCheck.org, no friend to Republicans, has debunked claims that Romney was actively controlling Bain after 1999. The Obama campaign has repeatedly claimed that Obama managed Bain after 1999, but FactCheck says Obama is all wet.
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Boston Globe Lifts Bad Info From Other Sources on Romney’s Bain Tenure”


Miami Herald: Hey, We Journalists are Heroes, Ya Know?

-By Warner Todd Huston

Tooting one’s own horn has always been considered a social faux pas, an example of arrogance, and just plain ignorant. But it seems that someone forgot to teach these social niceties to Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald because this week Pitts has decided to tell us all that real journalists shouldn’t be scoffed at. Why? Because they are selfless, danger-defying, super action heroes, or something. Yes, Pitts is sure that journalists are just purer, better, smarter, and more intelligent than you just-a-bloggers out there.

Now, I’ve always tried to live by the maxim that my own status as a hero or villain is for others to determine, not me to invent and tout. But Pitts isn’t going to just sit around while his precious fellow journalists are verbally maligned by someone as low as Sarah Palin, any old Breitbart writer or — the horrors — just a blogger.

Apparently someone mentioned to Mr. Pitts that Governor Palin, who Pitts thinks is a “silly” person, mentioned his profession at this year’s Right Online event, sponsored by Americans for Prosperity. During her remarks at the weekend planned in part to celebrate the life and work of conservative Internet giant Andrew Breitbart, Palin said, “Every citizen can be a reporter.”

This struck Mr. Pitts as an outrage. Why, only real reporters, he feels, can properly report the news. Pitts proves to us how great these professional reporters can be with his very article, too. I mean, where else can we get such timely “news” reports on events that happened two weeks ago but from a professional journalist like Leonard Pitts. Jr.?
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Miami Herald: Hey, We Journalists are Heroes, Ya Know?”


Blogger Gets Ripped Off by Newspaper, Gets Satisfaction on Video

-By Warner Todd Huston

Duane Lester of AllAmericanBlogger recently wrote an excellent expose about some financial troubles in the Holt County, Missouri Sheriff’s office. It was so well received that the Oregon Observer, a small paper in Missouri, wanted to cover the story, too. So, what did the paper do…?

Why the paper stole Duane’s entire post and printed it in its paper, grammatical errors and all. Worse, they never bothered to mention where the article came from or who wrote it.

That’s right, the Oregon Observer just stole the whole thing neither paying Duane for his work nor even giving him a proper byline.

So, Duane took his video camera in and asked them what’s the deal with that…

I love it. Got paid, too! Excellent work, Duane.
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Blogger Gets Ripped Off by Newspaper, Gets Satisfaction on Video”


Birmingham News Drops the Ball on Black-on-white Crime

-By Selwyn Duke

Recently I reported on the stabbing of white truck driver Nick Stokes by members of a black motorcycle gang called the Outcasts of Alabama. It’s not merely a scary story but also an unusual one, mostly because of the behavior of law enforcement. The Adamsville, AL police department not only failed to question or detain any of the gangsters, but, outrageously, also told Stokes that they “don’t mess” with the Outcasts.

What isn’t at all unusual about the story is the mainstream media’s reluctance to cover a case of black-on-white crime. In particular, I cited the Birmingham News (BN), whose crime-beat reporter, Carol Robinson, had brusquely dismissed the incident as not newsworthy. After my article was published in American Thinker, however, she finally treated it – no doubt as a result of pressure – but in a manner so incomplete that it reflects a grudging attitude. More on that in a moment.

The BN’s dereliction of duty didn’t escape its readers, some of whom savaged the paper in the comments section under Robinson’s piece. One wrote, “Wow. Birmingham News finally prints this story. Only after being shamed into it by the American Thinker….” Another quipped, “Hey Birmingham news, if you don’t watch out someone is gonna start a newspaper around here.” We can only hope.
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Birmingham News Drops the Ball on Black-on-white Crime”


Washington Post Columnist: You Know, My Racist Dog Is Pretty Republican

-By Warner Todd Huston

Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten wants us all to know that he’s “fallen in love” with a racist, sexist, female that presents “awkward truths that people tend to deny.” His dog, you see, is a racist Republican. And in the end the whole column is just an excuse to slam Mitt Romney.

I guess it’s supposed to be a “humor” column, but when this “humorist” thinks it’s funny that Republicans are racists, and any manner of creeps, well, perhaps we red staters might be forgiven if laughter isn’t our first reaction.

Weingarten begins by confessing that at 60 years of age he’s “fallen in love with a Republican.” Apparently, it’s Murphy, his dog of five years.

Then Weingarten goes on a terror rolling out all the anti-Republican tropes. Republicans are racist, they are prudes, they are buttinskis, they are rigid, they hate the disabled, they’re against alternate energy, they hate the environment, and are gun-loving rednecks. In short, Republicans are all ignorant creeps that embarrass smart fellows like Weingarten.
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Washington Post Columnist: You Know, My Racist Dog Is Pretty Republican”


Berkeley Storm Troopers: Don’t Write What The Police Don’t Like or Else

-By Warner Todd Huston

If police chiefs send armed officers to a journalist’s door because he didn’t like what was written abut him, would you feel just a tad uncomfortable as an American at the audacity? This is no academic discussion because it really happened. Not in what liberals may claim is the dangerous, intolerant south but instead in the heart of liberal land itself, Berkeley, California.

Worse, one of the reasons this whole situation arose is because police were too distracted by an Occupy Berkeley protest to respond to an incident that ended up in the murder of a 67-year-old resident.

But first, on Friday, Feb. 9, Berkeley Police Chief Michael Meehan sent an armed officer to the door of Bay Area News Group reporter Doug Oakley at nearly one in the morning to demand that he publish a correction about something the reporter had written about the Berkeley police department.
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Berkeley Storm Troopers: Don’t Write What The Police Don’t Like or Else”


Albany Police Chief Slams ‘Occupy’-Supporting Councilmen

-By Warner Todd Huston

Albany Police Chief Steven Krokoff came in for heavy criticism by fans of the Occupy “movement” after he ordered the clearing of their downtown encampment pursuant to a court order. The arguments over the actions by police have raged since the December 23 conflagration with Chief Krokoff getting savaged repeatedly by the media and some city councilmen alike. But this week Krokoff confronted his critics and he wasn’t gentle about it!

The big criticism arose when officers used pepper spray when the Occupiers became violent. Since then several Councilmen, such as Anton Konev, have criticized the police saying that their actions were unnecessary. Konev, for instance, has announced that he has no confidence in the Chief and is angling to have him fired. Naturally, Konev has been an open agitator for and supporter of Occupy Albany.

But on January 6, Chief Krokoff came before the city council with a strong defense of his and his officers’ actions delivering a withering blast to some of the councilmen that have come to the defense of the lawless Occupiers.
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Albany Police Chief Slams ‘Occupy’-Supporting Councilmen”


The Top 50 Examples of Liberal Media Bias

-By Warner Todd Huston

Let’s face it, liberal media bias has been around since there have been liberals to do the “reporting” of the news. But this fact should surprise no one. After all, the news media has always been filled with bias of one type or another. In fact, there was a time when American customers of the news knew exactly which newspapers sported which point of view. It was taken for granted that one newspaper supported one side and another newspaper a different side.

But in the late 1950s and early 1960s that all changed. Suddenly the folks in the news media began to present themselves as unbiased pursuers of “the truth.” Gone was the out-in-front bias and instead the media cloaked itself in a new air of detachment, a new just-the-facts mien.

This new era in media conceit coincided with the advent of a liberal mindset that took on the weight of the world, a new era in which liberals felt that their ideals rose above God, tradition and country….

Read the rest at The Western Center for Journalism.


Frank Rich: Obama’s Just Like JFK Because JFK Was Killed With Hate, or Something

-By Warner Todd Huston

It’s hard to believe but Frank Rich’s latest exercise in the fantasist’s art comparing JFK to Obama is a wonder to behold. It really is. One might think it satire if Rich had never been presented as a serious essayist by the New York intelligentsia. If this were to be his first public writing, one might think him the new Jonathan Swift for its central premise is simply amazing for its utter deviation from reality. Rich, it seems, thinks that Obama is just like John Kennedy because Kennedy was somehow killed by the “hate that ended his presidency,” or something.

The part that is so fantastic is that Rich devolves to a long ago discredited theory that Kennedy was killed that dark November day in 1963 somehow because of right-wing hate for him. What is so absurd about Rich’s fantastic claim is that he wholly discounts the fact that Kennedy’s killer was a communist. In fact, Rich never even mentions that Lee Harvey Oswald was an avowed communist. He hints at it obliquely but does so in a way that dismisses the ideology as in any way important.

It has been a long time since I’ve read a piece on a public figure that is one part hero worship, one part discounting of that same figure, one part pure fantasy, and one part baseless comparison to the life of a whole other public figure that is also worshiped as a hero without a legitimate reason. But Frank Rich has done it here in a way that brings to mind J.R.R. Tolkein’s intricate and complicated plotting.

There’s so much wrong in this one piece that it’s hard to figure out where to start first, but Rich’s central premise is that JFK was killed because of a climate of “hate” engendered by the blindness of Kennedy’s detractors on the right. This, Rich seems to think, is somehow just like Obama. Well, except that Obama is still alive and no one has even made a single attempt to kill him (God forbid), of course.

Interestingly, Rich does seem to notice that John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s presidency did not live up to its hype. Rich notes that historians have basically rated JFK’s short tenure in the White House as a wash, neither good nor horribly bad. But even with that admission, Rich writes glowingly of Kennedy. It is still all “Camelots” and “brief shinning moments” with little justification for any other reason than mere hero worship. With that, though, Rich succumbs to the worship like so many starry-eyed members of his deluded generation.

But for all his glorious filler — one wonders if Rich has ever had an editor — here is his raison d’être for bothering us with his hagiographic blather:
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Frank Rich: Obama’s Just Like JFK Because JFK Was Killed With Hate, or Something”


Alter: Obama is ‘Honest’ and ‘Free of Scandal’

-By Warner Todd Huston

When does a columnist write something so utterly absurd that his credibility is forever damaged? I am not sure how to answer that in general terms, but I think at least one journalist answered the question for his own, now thoroughly destroyed veracity. Jonathan Alter of Bloomberg has written one of the most ridiculous, least reality-based assessments yet of the short White House tenure of Barack Obama.

Alter put on his strongest rose-colored glasses and penned an uproarious piece headlined, “The Obama Miracle, a White House Free of Scandal.”

In his Bloomberg piece Alter claimed that Obama is “honest” and falsely asserted that his White House has been “free of scandal.” In fact, some of the incidents that Alter himself notes, and immediately dismisses, carry at least a whiff of scandal — if not untruthfulness.

Naturally, Alter ignores far more than he reports on Obama scandals but he also misses the biggest reason why Obama seems to him to have a scandal free presidency. The Media refuses to call anything Obama does a scandal!
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Alter: Obama is ‘Honest’ and ‘Free of Scandal’”


NYTimes Sunday Review Again Pushes Lie that Billionaires Run Tea Party

-By Warner Todd Huston

It is a lie that serves as the left’s basic narrative for the birth of the Tea Party movement and this weekend it was The New York Times’s turn to push that lie claiming that the Tea Party is “led by veteran conservative activists and bankrolled by billionaires.” This bull hockey (yes, I said bull hockey) can’t be debunked enough, because to undermine the legitimacy of the Tea Party movement, extremists and left-wingers that pretend to be journalists push this lie for all its worth.

Left-wing Georgetown Professor Michael Kazin, who masquerades as a history professor by day, penned this latest piece for the Times pushing the left’s favorite false narrative about the Tea Party movement. The piece, lamenting the loss of the spirit of activism and protest in the American left, revealed a professor paid for by our tax dollars longing for the days of the violent, anarchist protests of the early 20th century.

Kazin cries that the left has lost its umpf and wails that “the Tea Party rebellion” has instead come to the fore.
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NYTimes Sunday Review Again Pushes Lie that Billionaires Run Tea Party”


USA Today Hit Piece on Christian Defense Attorney, Jay Sekulow

-By Warner Todd Huston

USA Today published a story recently by Bob Smietana of the Nashville newspaper The Tennessean attacking the integrity and work of well-known Christian First Amendment defense attorney Jay Sekulow that is shocking for what is left out.

Sekulow is the head man of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a Washington D.C.-based organization that takes on attackers of Christian’s First Amendment rights to free exercise of religion, a tempting target in some corners of America’s political establishment.

In fact, writer Smietana didn’t just write one piece attacking Sekulow and the ACLJ but in the space of only a few days wrote two. In one piece Smietana accuses Sekulow and his family of making too much money from the charities they represent and in the second he claims that the ACLJ might be improperly pursuing cases not in its tax exempt charter.

In both cases Smietana employs the “some say” style of indictment by writing innuendoes backed up by little actual evidence, but the piece in USA Today is by far the worst example of the tactic.
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USA Today Hit Piece on Christian Defense Attorney, Jay Sekulow”


Union Astroturf Pretends Like Tea Partiers to Attack GOP

-By Warner Todd Huston

The Hill has an interesting, if not a bit slanted, report about the faux grassroots efforts of unions and left-wing advocates to pretend they are somehow just like the Tea Party by attacking the town hall meetings of various GOP congressman across the country this Summer.

The Hill dutifully reports without complaint the union’s claims that they are organizing just like the Tea Partiers and forcing GOP congressmen to face “angry protests at home” this month in a “replication” of the Tea Party backlash that “bit” Democrats in 2009.

“Liberal groups have been planning these protests for months,” trumpets The Hill, “One organizer told The Hill in February that the campaign would ‘build to a crescendo’ in August.”

These protests have been organized by Obama’s supporters in government unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the AFL-CIO as well as far left NGOs such as MoveOn.org, Campaign for America’s Future and others.
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Union Astroturf Pretends Like Tea Partiers to Attack GOP”


CNN/Krugman: A Space Alien Attack Will Save Us (Disses FDR, Wants a Fake War?)

-By Warner Todd Huston

CNNs Fareed Zakaria and The New York Times’ Paul Krugman have solved our economic problems. They’ve decided that a space alien attack will save us. Aside from the guffaw factor of space aliens, there was so much wrong with this CNN segment that we must lay them out for discussion.

First on the clip is some pinhead from Harvard claiming that “infrastructure spending, that’s great.” He says he’d even borrow money for such programs. This guy thinks that if we had another giant stimulus (like a WWII Works program), why we’d be doing just “great.”

He is, of course, a Keynesian fool. Stimulus does not work. Stimulus has never worked. Further, “stimulus” itself is a misnomer. Take Illinois, for instance. It got millions upon millions of dollars in so-called stimulus money from Obama. Do you know what Illinois did with that money? It paid existing debt, it paid current bills. It “stimulated” nothing with all those millions. This happened all across the country in every state. The “stimulus” did not stimulate anything but instead went to pay exiting bills and created nothing new, supported no new projects. It was a sham.

Amusingly, this guy tried to qualify his support of infrastructure spending saying “as long as it isn’t Big Dig” sort of over spending. The “Big Dig” is a reference to the underground Central Artery/Tunnel Project undertaken by the Boston Metro Highway System that is famous for being a total boondoggle that has gone billions over budget, not to mention having so many structural and engineering failures that the whole thing is a death trap waiting to happen.

Problem is, every state project becomes a version of the Big Dig at some level. At the very least they always, always, always go over budget, at worst they become a pit of political failure and corruption. So, while this Harvard pinhead tried to qualify his position, he did so on a bed of quicksand.
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CNN/Krugman: A Space Alien Attack Will Save Us (Disses FDR, Wants a Fake War?)”


New York Times Blames American Conservatives for Norway Massacre

-By Warner Todd Huston

The New York Times is never one to let a good tragedy go to waste when it can turn that sad incident into a bludgeon with which to bash American conservatives, even if the incident doesn’t have a thing to do with conservatives, D.C. politics, or even the U.S.A., for that matter. And so, not to disappoint, the Gray Lady incongruously used the terrorist incident in Norway to attack conservatives in America.

Anders Behring Breivik, the killer in Norway, released a manifesto of sorts explaining his actions and in that document he quoted several American bloggers and national security activists such as Islam terror expert Robert Spencer. This, the Times decided, was enough to blame American conservatives for the incident.

Of course, the Times was practically silent about the influence of radical Islam on Major Nidal Hassan who killed 13 U.S. soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009. The Times also did its best to ignore radical Islam in its reports about the Fort Dix six that planned a major terror attack in New Jersey. More recently the Times neglected to mention the radical Islam influence of the pair of homegrown terrorist wannabes arrested in Seattle in June. This is a pattern seen at The New York Times, too. Whenever radical Islam is at the root of a terror attack, the Times routinely fails to note the fact.
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New York Times Blames American Conservatives for Norway Massacre”


Jose Antonio Vargas: From Journalist to Illegal Immigrant and Political Activist

-By Warner Todd Huston

The newly publicized life-story of award winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas seems to be one of those revelatory stories that tends to confirm some of the worst charges against liberals and the Old Media. The media sees no reason not to break the law, it employs people with political agendas, and all the while refuses to inform customers of the “news” that this is the case. As it happens, Vargas is an illegal immigrant in this country and has been for decades.

Vargas won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2007 coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings, he also made tongues wag recently with an exclusive interview with the reclusive founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. But his chief journalistic interest has been as a political reporter for the Washington Post.

But even as he has for more than a decade been given the role of an arbiter of sorts of political news, Vargas has been an illegal resident of the very country he has been reporting on.
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Jose Antonio Vargas: From Journalist to Illegal Immigrant and Political Activist”


New York Times Columnist Kristof’s Foolishness

-By Warner Todd Huston

The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof is a simpleton. There is really no other way to say it, no gentler phrasing possible, to explain how childish and uncluttered his tiny little mind really is. The latest example of his utter inability to think clearly can be seen in Kristof’s screed against Americans that love America. Kristof thinks that conservatives and Republicans should look with longing at the troubled nation of Pakistan and see it as a model state. He says that they are no better than Muslim extremists that employ oppression, murder, and terrorism as a tool of the state. No, he’s serious.

How does he justify this simple-minded, hyperbolic, partisan hate-speech? Not very well, I’ll tell you that much.

He makes all sorts of idiotic charges against Republicans, but the best way to understand how unthinkingly childish his screed is, is to simply imagine that everything he says conservatives support he must imagine that liberals are against. After all, the only way to see his calumnies as such is to imagine he thinks that he stands on the opposite side of the ideas of which he accuses conservatives of being in favor.

Let’s take his points and then imagine what the opposite is and you’ll see what I mean.
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New York Times Columnist Kristof’s Foolishness”


L.A. Times Tim Rutten, Historical Idiot

-By Warner Todd Huston

Tim Rutten is a left-wing, hack writer from L.A. He is always good for contemporary left wing trope but the other day we discovered that he is also good for the sort of uninformed blathering that leftists of his ilk pretend is American history. Chiefly that of America’s religious history and the so-called “wall of separation between church and state.”

In a June 1 piece about Mitt Romney, Rutten regaled us with his “reading” of Mitt’s current political reality. Rutten proposed that any question about Mitt’s Mormonism was somehow a threat to the United States.

Before I get to Rutten’s warped take on U.S. history, let’s take this business about the attacks on Mitt’s Mormonism.
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L.A. Times Tim Rutten, Historical Idiot”


Obama White House Bans Newspaper For Printing a Mitt Romney Op Ed

-By Warner Todd Huston

Apparently the Obama White House is not so fond of the Boston Herald. Well, maybe “not so fond” is too mild. More like furious. So mad, in fact, that the paper was banned by the White House from covering local visits by Obama and crew. The Boston Herald said “pretty please” and Big Brother O’s crew said, “not allowed!” And Orwell would be saying, “I told ya so.”

As Politico explained, the White House designates local pool reporters to augment the traveling pool of reporters covering events on the road. Usually a request is all it takes to get added to the pool. But when the Herald contacted the White House to get its reporters added to the pool the paper was denied access.

Apparently the water in Obama’s pool is too warm for the Boston Herald!
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Obama White House Bans Newspaper For Printing a Mitt Romney Op Ed”


Wash Post’s Cohen: GOP Should Compromise… Like They Did With Slavery?

-By Warner Todd Huston

Richard Cohen is what passes for an opinion editorialist in the Washington Post — not a learned one, just a bloviating one. Cohen’s latest, “The Myth of American Exceptionalism,” is at the same time as self-loathing as it is historically stupid. Not only does this nonsense Cohen ladled out upon us all serve an example that you don’t have to actually know anything to be in our modern Old Media establishment, but it is evidence that the profession of editor is long dead.

In his ten paragraphs Cohen indulges every left-wing trope that one can find. Whites are all racist, we don’t do enough for “the poor” in America, Christianity is the root of all evil, and it all started in the 1850s when the Republican Party was born. Most ridiculously, Cohen a-historically seems to think that the art of compromise died in American politics when the GOP was born. This last bit alone is guffaw worthy to say the least.
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Wash Post’s Cohen: GOP Should Compromise… Like They Did With Slavery?”


Telling Us Who They Fear: Left-Wing Journo Attacks Rep. Allen West

-By Warner Todd Huston

Brandon K. Thorp, a gay activist from the alternative weekly Broward-Palm Beach New Times newspaper, is only the latest left-winger to launch into a verbal assault on Lt. Col. Allen West, now a Representative from Florida’s 22nd District. Like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman, Rep. West is one of the many conservatives that leftists fear the most. We know this because the left’s constant, fevered, overwrought attacks tell us so.

This time Thorp, who also has worked for CNN, is all hot-n-bothered by West’s April 19 use of an historical reference to rally conservative and Republican women to the cause. In an address to a *Women Impacting the Nation meeting in Boca, West urged conservative women to raise strong men by relating to them the example of the Spartan women of ancient Greece.

“When you understood what made the Spartan men strong it was the Spartan women,” West told those gathered. Thorp thought this whole meme was not only “ungraceful,” but proved West is “hateful and stupid.” Further Thorp’s poison pen informs us that he thinks West is “not nearly smart enough to give coherent extemporaneous speeches.”

Thorp’s first offbase criticism is over whether West should have been addressing his comments to mothers or fathers.
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Telling Us Who They Fear: Left-Wing Journo Attacks Rep. Allen West”


Obama’s Bribes to the Wash. Post and CBS

-By Warner Todd Huston

In a blow to the autonomy of the media it has been discovered that employees of two Old Media outlets are the happy beneficiaries of hundreds of thousands of federal dollars from an Obamacare slush fund. CBS and the Washington Post have both taken large payments from Obama’s Early Retiree Reinsurance Program (ERRP), with the Post getting $573,217 while CBS has received a whopping $722,388.

Matthew Boyle reported that the news of the media giants taking federal cash was revealed at a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week.

The question here becomes one of disclosure. Will CBS and the Washington Post put disclaimers on any story they relate about Obamacare? After all, if we see a positive story about Obamacare from the Washington Post or CBS might we assume the stories are so positive because employees of those media organizations know they could be the beneficiaries of thousands of dollars in federal cash? Might we assume that these Old Media employees might fear that any negative story might put that largess at risk?
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Obama’s Bribes to the Wash. Post and CBS”