Heartland Institute: The ‘Gate’ Scandal That Never Was

-By Warner Todd Huston

Global warmists finally have an email “gate” of their own that they can turn against “deniers” and they are taking full advantage of it. The Warmists are excited that the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based state policy group, has been “outed” for attempting to undermine the religiously held tenets of global warming. Emails to that effect are claimed to have been leaked from this group and the warmists as well as their handmaidens in the Old Media are touting this scandal as proof of… well, it’s a bit hard to discern what it is proof of. In fact, it isn’t “proof” of much of anything, really.

For one thing the documents are fakes, but even if they weren’t… so what?

For quite some time, for instance, Chicago’s Heartland Institute has been holding events, debates, and seminars on the hoax of global warming. The Heartland Institute has an entire section of its website dedicated to debunking global warming and it has produced books and pamphlets attacking the false “consensus” of man-made global warming. Without question, global warming (a quasi religious belief I personally call globabloney) has been a major focus at Heartland for a long time, to be sure.

That being understood — not only understood but glaringly obvious — leaked emails that purport to show that Heartland has a plan to influence lawmakers, scientists, members of the media, and even schools against global warming is a bit of a “well, duh!” Any ten seconds of time spent on the Institute’s website would tend to make it clear that they are against claims of man-made global warming. At some point, even if the documents were real it should not come as any sort of shocking revelation.
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Heartland Institute: The ‘Gate’ Scandal That Never Was”


Guilt By Association Used by Old Media Only to Hurt Republicans

-By Warner Todd Huston

Last week two political operatives were arrested in separate incidents, one Democrat and one Republican. It certainly isn’t news that political operatives sometimes break the law, but how the different incidents were reported is typical of how the Old Media establishment uses guilt by association to tar Republicans but rarely does the same thing to take swipes at Democrats.

The similarity in the two stories is that both of the accused are former staffers of high profile politicians. The Democrat was an Obama campaign staffer while the Republican was a staffer of the Republican Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker. Neither currently works for those high profile pols, but only the Republican was linked to his former boss. The Democrat’s link to Obama was mostly ignored by the media.

Story One: Some Guy Arrested

We’ll begin with the tale of Iowa Democrat operative Zachary Edwards who tried to steal the identity of a rival Republican in order to use that identity to get the Republican in trouble.

Edwards tried to use the identity of Iowa Secretary of State, Republican Matt Schulz (and/or Schultz’s brother) to illegally obtain some sort of state benefits so that he could then claim that the Republicans were illegally obtaining state benefits. This Edwards fellow hoped he could smear the GOP Sec. of State as engaging in some sort of unethical behavior. (The Iowa Republican blog has more on the fight between Schultz and Iowa Democrats)

Now, as it happens Edwards is not only a member of a politically connected Democrat consulting firm, Link Strategies — a company with long-standing ties to powerful Iowa Democrat Senator Tom Harkin — but Edwards was also a member of Obama’s Iowa team in 2007/08. Edwards’ bio has since been scrubbed from the Link Strategies page but read in part, “In September 2007, Zach joined the Obama New Media department as co-director of the Nevada New Media team and then moved on to direct New Media operations in five other primary states (New Mexico, Texas, North Carolina, and South Dakota).”

For a screen shot of Edwards memory-holed bio from the Link Strategy site, see the Iowa Grounds blog.

So, how was Edwards’ arrest reported? For one thing, it was hard to find Edwards’ Democrat affiliation and his past role as a top Obama campaign staffer in stories of this incident.
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Guilt By Association Used by Old Media Only to Hurt Republicans”


Media Forgets to Mention S. C. Immigration Law-Blocking Judge is Obama Appointee

-By Warner Todd Huston

One of the Old Media’s favorite ways of attempting to hide the ideological track of a story is to somehow forget to mention to which party someone in the news hails or owes fealty to. In this case it is what they don’t report that misleads. This week we find a classic what-they-don’t-say story concerning the judge that blocked sections of South Carolina’s new immigration law.

For those unaware, U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel temporarily blocked segments of South Carolina’s new immigration laws because he claimed that some of its provisions impinged on federal prerogatives, things over which the state has no jurisdiction.

The South Carolina law was opposed in court by Obama’s left-wing, activist Department of Justice headed by Eric “Fast And Furious” Holder and a gaggle of civil rights groups and Judge Gergel agreed with these attackers issuing an injunction to stop implementation of the provisions in question.

The Old Media reported a lot of details in the story, of course. We learned all about who opposed the provisions, who scoffed at the injunction, in what District Judge Gergel hailed, and in some of the reports we even get to hear what Republican South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley had to say about it all. But one thing few of these news outlets seemed to report might help readers understand the decision better.

Judge Richard Mark Gergel is an Obama appointee.
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Media Forgets to Mention S. C. Immigration Law-Blocking Judge is Obama Appointee”


NYTimes: Guess What? Tea Party is Just Like KKK

-By Warner Todd Huston

Tis the season for buying books for your loved ones and as always the The New York Times Sunday Book Review is here to help. And as always the Sunday Book Review is there to help us understand that anything from the right side of the aisle, especially the Tea Party, is to be put in the worst possible light at all times.

So, what is it this time? Book reviewer Kevin Boyle lets us all know that he thinks that the folks of the Tea Party movement are somehow just like the Ku Klux Klan. Nice, huh? That’ll get the holiday season started right.

In his Sunday book review Boyle reviews a pair of books actually on the KKK — meaning that for the first time bringing up the KKK in a New York Times article isn’t wholly gratuitous. So he has that going for him, which is nice.

But what was totally gratuitous was the way Boyle opened his review, slamming by inference the whole of the Tea Party and making of it a the modern day KKK.
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NYTimes: Guess What? Tea Party is Just Like KKK”


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”


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”


New York Times Columnist Attacks Perry With Twitter, Gives Biden/ Demos A Pass

-By Warner Todd Huston

As if we needed another example of the utter hypocrisy of the Old Media, we get New York Times screed-maker Binyamin Appelbaum who used his Twitter feed to smear Gov. Rick Perry over his Bernanke comments while giving V.P. Joe “Tea Partiers are Terrorists” Biden a complete pass.

Once again, Twitter catches the unhinged left revealing itself as the hypocrites they are. On Aug. 16, Appelbaum was all a twitter on Twitter over Rick Perry’s slap at Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Benrnanke.

If you missed the story that caused Appelbaum’s heart to skip a beat, on Aug. 15 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa Texas Governor Rick Perry said that in Texas Chairman Bernanke wouldn’t be given the wide latitude to muck up the economy as Obama has allowed him to do in Washington D.C.
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New York Times Columnist Attacks Perry With Twitter, Gives Biden/ Demos A Pass”


Another Example of How the NYTimes Warps Truth

-By Warner Todd Huston

This weekend The New York Times, the fishwrap of record, had yet another one of its left-wing excuses for political analysis, this one about rumors of how Team Obama intends to carry on its continuing re-election campaign on matters economic. The piece is so chock full of bias that you don’t even have to get past the first paragraph to see it.

Apparently it took two writers to stuff this thing full of left-wing bias and falsehoods as it is given the by-line of Binyamin Appelbaum and Helene Cooper.

Check out this first paragraph:

As the economy worsens, President Obama and his senior aides are considering whether to adopt a more combative approach on economic issues, seeking to highlight substantive differences with Republicans in Congress and on the campaign trail rather than continuing to pursue elusive compromises, advisers to the president say.

Now just look at the tenor of this paragraph. It is presented as if the President is not responsible for the economic downturn because he hasn’t done enough left-wing interfering with the economy. And it ends with the blatantly false claim that Obama is the one has been seeking “compromises” with the Republicans.

None of these contentions are true.
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Another Example of How the NYTimes Warps Truth”


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?)”


Lake County Tea Party Condemns New York Times for Column Tea Party NOT Terrorists

From the Lake County Tea Party…

(Round Lake, IL – August 2, 2011) Lake County Tea Party takes strong issue with today’s column in the New York Times, “Tea Party’s War on America.” Columnist Joe Nocera characterizes the Tea Party as “terrorists” who have “waged jihad,” who wear “suicide vests” and who have “gleeful willingness to destroy America’s full faith and credit.”

Lake County Tea party member Bonnie Quirke noted, “Last winter when Congresswoman Gabriella Gifford was shot, there were widespread accusations in the media blaming conservatives such as Sarah Palin for the attack. President Obama soon urged that politics in America adopt a more civil tone. Where’s the civil tone now?”
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Lake County Tea Party Condemns New York Times for Column Tea Party NOT Terrorists”


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”


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”


Even As Arizona Shooting Story Unfolds, Some Media Already Blaming Tea Party/Sarah Palin

-By Warner Todd Huston

Even as the early, sketchy details of the shooting incident in Arizona were still emerging some members of the left-leaning media were already trying to tie the killer to Tea Party activism in general and Sarah Palin in particular.

Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic.com was early to attempt to link lunatic killer Jared Loughner to the Tea Party, but he wasn’t the only one. The Washington Post’s Sandhya Somashekhar immediately attempted to color the story as an example of the “militant rhetoric” of the Tea Party movement and Sarah Palin.

Liberals on Saturday blamed the tea party movement’s sometimes militant rhetoric — for example, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s advice to her supporters via Twitter, “Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD,” or Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle (R) advocating “second-amendment remedies” for some of the nation’s problems. Palin had also posted a U.S. map depicting crosshairs over the states where she hoped to oust Democratic incumbents. That map no longer appears on the Web site of her political action committee.

Additionally, within minutes of the attack, hard left-winger Paul Krugman of the New York Times asserted that the reason Giffords was shot was because her seat was not turned over to Republicans. Despite that no political motive was at all known, Krugman immediately asserted that it was the fault of the Tea Party and Sarah Palin.
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Even As Arizona Shooting Story Unfolds, Some Media Already Blaming Tea Party/Sarah Palin”


The Business Cycle: Krugman vs. Austrian Economic Theory

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The Keynesian black-box doesn’t work, because the reality of independent actions by millions of individuals is ignored in order to achieve a simplistic representation of the economy in computer models.

Keynesian economics, as expounded by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, is essentially a black box theory. Stand on the outside of the economic box and dump into it endless baskets of inflationary fiat money, and things supposedly just happen automatically inside the black box to produce permanent prosperity and near zero unemployment.

Read David Gordon’s commentary on THE HANGOVER THEORY by Paul Krugman.
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The Business Cycle: Krugman vs. Austrian Economic Theory”


Another Obama White House Lie About Islam

-By Warner Todd Huston

Remember that iftar dinner the president sponsored? The dinner that got him in trouble because he came out in strong support of the mega-mosque at Ground Zero, support from which he backed away the very next day? Well, it turns out he delivered another blatant lie at that dinner, one that slipped under the radar because his support of the Ground Zero Mosque was so controversial.

In his remarks at the iftar observance, Obama claimed that the “first” iftar dinner in the White House was hosted by Thomas Jefferson.

Tonight, we are reminded that Ramadan is a celebration of a faith known for great diversity. And Ramadan is a reminder that Islam has always been part of America. The first Muslim ambassador to the United States, from Tunisia, was hosted by President Jefferson, who arranged a sunset dinner for his guest because it was Ramadan—making it the first known iftar at the White House, more than 200 years ago.

In this way, Obama tried to make it seem as if the United States has respected Islam since the early Republic and has observed its celebrations for two hundred years. But this is a major stretching of the truth. Thomas Jefferson did not hold an “iftar” dinner, unless you might call the dinner Obama references “iftar by default.”
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Another Obama White House Lie About Islam”


New York Times : Afraid of Gun Crazed, ‘Motley Carnivals of the Tea Party Movement’

-By Warner Todd Huston

The New York Times sent Mattathias Schwartz to find out what was going on at Jack Dailey’s firearms training camps across the country and what he found apparently made the writer fear that America was going to the lily white, revolutionary, tea party dogs.

Schwartz went to learn about Jack Dailey’s Appleseed Project firearms marksmanship training camps and what he found were folks of “uniformly white skin” whose ideas were influenced by those “motley carnivals of the Tea Party movement.” And apparently Schwartz fears that they all want to institute a violent revolution in America. Yes, it’s all about those scary “militias” despite that the Appleseed Project has no connection to any.

“Determining whether this revolutionary talk constitutes a threat comes down to finding the fine line between expressing anger and inciting the angry to action,” Schwartz writes, “a distinction that is clear as a matter of law but less so in cultural practice.” Then right away Schwartz invokes the Timothy McVeigh incident as if every American that wants to observe his Second Amendment rights is an Oklahoma bomber in waiting.
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New York Times : Afraid of Gun Crazed, ‘Motley Carnivals of the Tea Party Movement’”


Top Ten most Left-Biased American Journalists – #3: Paul Krugman, The New York Times

-By Warner Todd Huston

Number three on our list almost violates the criteria that I set up in the first piece I wrote for this series. I said then that denizens of the Old Media that are too much a “cartoon of journalism” would not be included on my list. Yet despite my dismissal of such Old Media clowns, in the number four slot on the list you’ll find Paul Krugman of The New York Times.

Given this week’s revelations about the JournoList, we now know Krugman either participated in a media conspiracy to get Obama elected or at least witnessed it first hand and did nothing to stop it. Consider this fact merely the latest insight into a man who’s done more consistently left-biased journalism than nearly anyone in America.
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Top Ten most Left-Biased American Journalists – #3: Paul Krugman, The New York Times


‘You’re the top! You’re the Coliseum’

-By John Armor

I’ve seen the movie, De-Lovely, at least six times now. Cole Porter’s personal life was a wreck, But with words and music he had no peer. Not even in two people at once, like Gilbert and Sullivan, or Rodgers and Hammerstein, for instance. I begin this column with a Porter quote from ‘You’re the Top,” and the subject is Paul Krugman.

As my wife says of people who take themselves with far too seriously, “He sends his shirts out to be stuffed.” By all that’s right and holy, Krugman should be one of the great men of our generation. He graduated from Yale, and other top drawer universities. He has taught there, and is now at Princeton. He won a Nobel Prize in Economics. And his twaddle (excuse me, his philosophy) appears regularly in his New York Times column.

My education includes Yale and various other reputable institutions. My knowledge of economics and world history are not exactly chopped liver. Frequently, I can recognize exactly where and how Krugman goes off the rails and concludes the exact opposite of what is happening in the real world, where real people live and work.
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‘You’re the top! You’re the Coliseum’”