I hope the media gives this the legs it deserves. It may be early in Hillary's career, but it gives a clear picture to the roots of her character and its quite disturbing stuff.
Jerry Zeifman, the man who served as chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings, comes out calling Hillary a career liar and says she wanted to deny Nixon the basic right to counsel!
Here's something you never hear from a Democrat: of all the cable networks, Fox News is doing the fairest job covering an issue.
Yet, that's exactly what Gov. Ed Rendell (D-Penn.), an outspoken Hillary Clinton supporter, said on "Fox & Friends" Monday.
I kid you not.
Speaking with host Steve Doocy, Rendell said the following (h/t TVNewser via NBer Thomas Stewart):
Wall Street saw a 391-point rally on the Dow today, the first day of the second quarter. ABCNews.com saw the development worthy of a "Breaking News" tag towards the top of its Web page and put the story in the top headlines rotation.
But it appears that ABCNews.com was alone among its competitors in trumpeting the news. I checked numerous Web sites shortly after 5:30 and found ABC's to be the only one to give the rally top billing. [see the screencaps below the page break]
Update: Reaction from document examiner Emily Will added at bottom of post (April 3 | 13:02 EDT)
Mary Mapes (file photo at right), the former CBS producer behind the Bush National Guard memo scandal that eventually felled Dan Rather's career has a post up at the liberal Nation magazine's Web site insisting that comparisons between Memogate and the L.A. Times falling for fake documents about Tupac Shakur's murder are "simplistic, unfounded and unfair." (h/t Patterico)
Apparently, there's a profound difference between trying to sway a presidential election with questionable documentary evidence and messing with Tupac.
Mapes defended her work in Memogate before turning, predictably, to fire on the Bush administration. Of course in doing so, Mapes, who had just finished defending her reliability as a journalist, laid out at least two commonly-repeated falsehoods propagated by the Left about the Iraq war. First, Mapes insisted that:
The greatest fraud perpetrated in modern journalistic history was the Bush Administration's linking of Iraq to September 11.
But the Bush administration never argued such a thing in the lead-up to the war. As the BBC, hardly a Bush cheerleader, rightly noted in September 2003:
About once a year, Congress brings in oil executives, with the media piling on, and blames oil company profits for high gas prices.
Across the dial, all three network morning shows on April 1 - ABC's "Good Morning America," NBC's "Today," and CBS's "The Early Show" - characterized "big oil" as the culprit behind an increase in gas prices.
On ABC's April 1 "Good Morning America," which headlined one of its segments "April Fuel's Day," Chris Cuomo questioned why oil companies aren't taxed more while they're posting higher profits.
"Congress is calling all the oil companies on the carpet today," Cuomo said. "Lawmakers want to know why big oil needs billions in tax breaks while posting record profits of $123 billion. Consumers want answers too. Gas now runs $3.29 a gallon, up three cents from last week and 58 percent higher than last year. Oil executives argue they need tax breaks to expand production."
ABC reporter David Wright used a segment on Monday's "Nightline" to once again fawn over Barack Obama and also take a swipe at Hillary Clinton. Discussing the New York senator's fund-raising woes, Wright mentioned Clinton's unpaid campaign debts and snidely observed that they included "a debt of $292,000 for health insurance premiums for her campaign staff. Ironic for a candidate promising health care for everyone."
Wright, who spent the day with Obama while he campaigned in Pennsylvania, asked the candidate no tough questions and, after mentioning the Democratic presidential contender's now-famous bowling excursion, even skipped over the fact that the senator bowled a lowly 37. (Although there was video of Obama rolling a gutter ball.)
Phil Donahue looked across the film landscape littered with numerous anti-Iraq war box-office failures and decided he needed to add one more to the list and the "Today" show was more than happy to help him promote it. The liberal talk show host appeared on Tuesday's "Today" show with anti-Iraq war veteran/activist Tomas Young to plug what NBC's Ann Curry hailed as "a documentary that Sean Penn has called...part 'Coming Home,' part 'Born on the Fourth of July.'" Co-anchor Meredith Vieira, who conducted the interview, called the film "powerful."
The following is the Curry teaser followed by the full segment as it occurred on the April 1, "Today" show:
The Institute for Supply Management issued its March Manufacturing Report on Business today:
PMI at 48.6%
Economic activity in the manufacturing sector failed to grow in March, while the overall economy grew for the 77th consecutive month, say the nation's supply executives in the latest Manufacturing ISM Report On Business®.
The report was issued today by Norbert J. Ore, C.P.M., chair of the Institute for Supply Management™ Manufacturing Business Survey Committee. "The manufacturing sector failed to grow in March as the PMI fell below 50 percent for the second consecutive month.
Just because the ISM says the economy has grown won't necessarily make it so when Uncle Sam's Bureau of Economic Analysis releases the first quarter 2008 GDP report late this month, but it beats the alternative.
The real fun comes in looking over the reporting on the ISM results. Were they better or worse than "expected"? Well, it depends on who you ask.
Tuesday's New York Times obituary on the life and work of American director Jules Dassin, "filmaker on blacklist," shows that anti-anti-Communism will never die. Times writer Richard Severo unfurls the usual flag in paragraph nine:
By the time he wrote and directed "Never on Sunday," a comedy about a good-hearted prostitute (Ms. Mercouri), the anti-Communist witch hunt in the United States had been discredited, and he had been accepted again.
This "witch hunt" language is offered despite the first paragraph acknowleged Dassin's membership in the Communist Party in the 1930s, as filmmaker Edward Dmytryk testified to Congress. The "witch hunt" found witches, but it was still "discredited."
Clearly, to the liberal media elite, Communist Party members are in no way witchy or evil. They may have bigger hearts and deeper consciences. As Dassin explained his Communist period:
New York Times reporter Katie Thomas embraced radical chic near the end of her front-page story Tuesday on the prospect for political protests at the 2008 Olympics, hosted by China.
Perhaps the best-known examples are the American sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith, who at the 1968 Games in Mexico City raised their clenched fists on the medal podium during the playing of the national anthem in a salute to black power. The action enraged the Olympic organizers, and Mr. Carlos and Mr. Smith were soon ushered out of the country. Now, 40 years later, their action is celebrated as heroic.
Raising a "Black Power" fist in defiance of the national anthem qualifies as heroic in the mind of the Times?
Radical Pan-African activist Stokely Carmichael, who coined the phrase, said of his movement:
When you talk of black power, you talk of building a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created.
For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: It's official -- the Brits think we're in a Depression:
We knew things were bad on Wall Street, but on Main Street it may be worse. Startling official statistics show that as a new economic recession stalks the United States, a record number of Americans will shortly be depending on food stamps just to feed themselves and their families. Dismal projections by the Congressional Budget Office in Washington suggest that in the fiscal year starting in October, 28 million people in the US will be using government food stamps to buy essential groceries, the highest level since the food assistance programme was introduced in the 1960s.
Astounding. My airport was packed on Sunday. Vegas is absolutely jammed with tourists. Went to Cirque du Soleil's "O" on Sunday -- $165/ticket, totally sold out. And people are talking Depression. Anybody see the absurdity, or is it just folks like me that travel a lot and see what's actually going on outside of the media's small prism?
Ah, Earf Day. The day when all the Chicken Littles and the occasional boy who cried wolf can get their fifteen minutes of attention. Don't we just love the warm and fuzzies of claiming the mantle of God and "saving" the Earf from global warming? Well, The Washington Times Fishwrap blog reports that Google has joined the fray to save the Earf and they are going to do it by helping Kathleen Rogers of Earth Day Network to shut down the phone switchboard at the Capitol in Washington D.C. with the calls from "concerned citizens" who think that calling Washington on the phone can somehow stop global warming.
A group of environmental activists has enlisted Google to help flood the congressional switchboard with one million phone calls on Earth Day urging lawmakers to enact eco-friendly measures.
I'm tingling with excitement already. If I thought I could alter the solar activities really responsible for global climate change just by making a phone call... well, imagine the power? Maybe I could use my house phone to stop a hurricane or tornado, or better yet, use my cell phone influence the scores of the next few Superbowls. Well, I'd just be in heaven.
On Sunday, NewsBusters asked readers, "Will NBC Succeed in Making Olbermann Mainstream?"
70 percent of respondents said, "No, he's too crazy."
Well, Nielsen ratings of his "Countdown" program aired Sunday evening on NBC validate this position, and wonderfully depict Olbermann as clearly not being ready for primetime (h/t Thomas Stewart):
Chicago Tribune columnist/ blogger Eric Zorn is a liberal, but from what I'm familiar of his writing, he's not a cartoonishly goofy one. So at first I thought his post today -- Coming out of the dark on Earth Hour -- was a bit of an April Fool's joke. But reading and re-reading it, it became clear to me Zorn was being serious, even as he invoked quasi-religious language to describe his joy in observing the sanctimonious green gimmick (emphasis mine):
Earth Hour was so cool.
I was surprised.
During the buildup, it all sounded a bit earnest to me — reproachful and grim.
[...]
But I went along, open-minded guy that I am.
On Tuesday's "Today" show, co-anchor Ann Curry traveled with Barack Obama on the campaign trail and mostly threw softball questions to the presidential candidate, questions like who did he prefer: "Beatles or the Rolling Stones?" Curry also tried to broker an Obama-Clinton ticket as she pressed: "They want this. The Democrats want this."
The toughest Curry ever got with the Illinois senator was when she pointed out Obama's lack of business experience as it pertained to his ability to address the economy. However, Curry never hit Obama with a single question on Jeremiah Wright or Tony Rezko but she did find time to show Obama "flirting" with voters. [Audio available here.]
The following is the full interview as it occurred on the April 1, "Today" show:
To refresh from what I posted on earlier this morning (NewsBusters; BizzyBlog [third item at post] -- here's the admission from New York Times reporter Qais Mizher, in his report from Basra in yesterday's Times:
Early last week, when the assault started, I happened to be in Diwaniya, another southern city, as part of my work as a reporter and translator for The New York Times.
Calling on my experience as a captain in the Iraqi Army before the 2003 invasion and essentially a war correspondent since then, I headed to Basra to see if I could make my way into the city and see what was happening there.
Yesterday, Richard Miniter at Pajamas Media pointed out that Mizher's self-professed "experience" means that he "was an officer in Saddam’s army."
The following was adapted from the Media Research Center's April Fools Day Media "Reality" Check. The quotes are all fabrications written by the imaginative News Analysts at the MRC.
Panicked by the success of Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" — urging conservatives to vote for Hillary Clinton in upcoming primaries to keep the Democrats in disarray — liberal reporters are becoming even more outspoken in praising the man they regard as the all-but-certain Democratic nominee, Barack Obama.
CBS's Harry Smith sounded like a teenage groupie on the April 1 Early Show: "Obama's rock star status is reaching historic levels. His rallies attract more fans than a Hannah Montana concert and seats are impossible to get. Believe me I've tried." Over on ABC's Good Morning America, correspondent Claire Shipman didn't want either liberal to lose: "Think of the race as a pro wrestling match between Martin Luther King and Eleanor Roosevelt. Whoever loses, it will be America that winds up feeling bruised."
This is not an April Fool's gag.
Richard Miniter at Pajamas Media caught the jaw-dropping significance of these two paragraphs in a New York Times report by Qais Mizher out of Basra (HT Instapundit; bolds are mine):
Early last week, when the assault started, I happened to be in Diwaniya, another southern city, as part of my work as a reporter and translator for The New York Times.
Calling on my experience as a captain in the Iraqi Army before the 2003 invasion and essentially a war correspondent since then, I headed to Basra to see if I could make my way into the city and see what was happening there.
Miniter, while also noting how vapid and misleading Mizher’s reporting is, emphasizes the jaw-drop:
