Tim Graham's blog

Dylan Byers of Politico reports “Sharyl Attkisson, the Emmy-award winning CBS News investigative reporter, says that her personal and work computers have been compromised and are under investigation.”

"I can confirm that an intrusion of my computers has been under some investigation on my end for some months. But I'm not prepared to make an allegation against a specific entity today as I've been patient and methodical about this matter," Attkisson told Politico on Tuesday. She suggested it could be related to the probe of Fox reporter James Rosen:

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes is getting credit from liberals for having an explicit racial-quota system of guest selection. That quota mentality extended to the Hayes show’s website, where producer Collier Meyerson complained that the percentage of minorities in the media is declining, which means “it appears that journalism may be creating for itself GOP-style problems.”

An overrepresentation of whiteness equals racial insensitivity in the coming diversity of America:

MSNBC ads on liberal websites like Salon.com are pushing to increase interest and ratings in the badly named show "All In," when it could be titled "A Few In." Or, to quote Dana Carvey's George Bush, "Still Gaining Acceptance." The ad says “Click here to get to know Chris Hayes.” This takes you to the “All In With Chris Hayes” Facebook page.

What you get there is a great sense of just how energetically Hayes is trying to avoid the Obama scandals. Instead, the scandal is the alleged starvation of the public sector:

As MSNBC and Chuck Todd recycle the hidebound liberal argument that perhaps the new black GOP nominee for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia is "out of the mainstream" on abortion, no one expects the Maddow Network to do the same for the Democrats.

State. Sen Ralph Northam, one of the two LG candidates who will be on the primary ballot on June 11, is so proud to be associated with the abortion-on-demand industry of Planned Parenthood that he posted a picture of himself with Planned Parenthood boss Cecile Richards at the top of his "Issues" page, insisting the latest laws "embarrass the Commonwealth" by mandating an ultrasound before an abortion and imposing hospital standards on abortion clinics:

Obama-loving leftists really can’t stand anyone questioning Obama. On Sunday morning on the Democratic Underground, they were circulating a new Change.org petition to “Fire Jon Karl” of ABC News.

“DOJ could look at Jonathan Karl’s phone records,” cracked one DU poster. The petition expresses the peculiar thought that anti-Obama journalism is too ideological to deserve First Amendment protection: 

The Washington Post on Monday reported that Obama’s Department of Justice was investigating journalists before they started wiretapping the Associated Press – for one, Fox News correspondent James Rosen in 2010. Their headline wasn't "Obama Team Also Spied on Fox News." Fox wasn't in the headline, on A-1 or on A-12, where the story continued.

Newly obtained court documents “reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist — and raise the question of how often journalists have been investigated as closely as Rosen was in 2010.” Reporter Ann Marimow began:

“Marketplace” is a popular nightly public-radio business newscast distributed on hundreds of NPR stations by Public Radio International. But the anchor, Kai Ryssdal, wasn’t about to interview former Bush defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld without demanding apologies for the "Bush wars" in a book interview for “Rumsfeld’s Rules.”

Forget the business-show rules. It was Bush-bashing time. Ryssdal began: “Let’s start with this one. It’s easier to get into something, you say, than get out. And I can’t help but wonder where we would be in this country today if you guys had been thinking of this one ten years ago.”

The Washington Post made a fool of its corporate self by starting a website called “On Faith” and putting at its head the secularist Sally Quinn. Oh, she claims to be interested by religion – just as King Herod thought Christ’s miracles sounded amusing, like he was a hippie magician like Doug Henning.

In Saturday’s paper, Quinn turned dead serious about sexual assault in the military, even asserting that “sexual assault is part of the military culture.” Naturally, Quinn puts a huge part of the blame on Christians, and the infection of their organizing groups in the military:

CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson did several interviews last week that discussed her investigative work on CBS, especially the Benghazi scandal. On C-SPAN’s Washington Journal on Monday, Attkison said the Obama administration has "perfected" delaying public release of information, and reported the White House has "quit talking" to her altogether.

In an interview with David Brody of CBN News, Attkisson admitted that's not her only roadblock: “there hasn’t been an appetite for the stories I’ve offered on Benghazi” to the CBS morning and evening newscasts.

I've sometimes found Washington Post humorist Alexandra Petri a bit of a liberal jerk, like when she discussed what the 2012 presidential contenders should have given up for Lent, as in Rick Santorum needed to give up talking and Newt Gingrich needed to just give up. In another entry, she compared Herman Cain to American Idol joke-contenders Sanjaya and William Hung.

But she switched targets on Saturday to mock the IRS punishing conservative groups with intense audits. (You can judge the humor, I'm only noticing her bipartisanship in targets.) So this is what she joked groups with "Tea Party" in their name or the Constitution in their mission would face on an IRS form:

By Friday, as the Obama promoters within the network news divisions started spreading the president's word that three growing scandals are just a blip, they might point to Gallup's daily job-approval ratings for Obama, which remained at 49 percent approve, 45 percent disapprove.

This result might also reflect that Gallup found that a slim majority of Americans are either "very" or "somewhat" following news of the IRS and Benghazi scandals, "comparatively low based on historical measures of other news stories over the last two decades."  Low-information voters could still obsess about Angelina Jolie's surgeries or whether Beyonce is pregnant again:

When ultraliberal Henry Waxman ran the House Government Reform Committee, The Washington Post didn't often  suggest he was a fierce partisan or ideologue. Instead, former Washington Post managing editor Robert Kaiser praised him in a book review headlined "Moustache of Justice." (The Waxman lovers even have a mug.)

Kaiser cooed, “Henry Waxman is to Congress what Ted Williams was to baseball -- a natural....Waxman has been one of the most effective members of Congress for 35 years....This is the voice of David, whose career has featured the slaying of one Goliath after another.” This is not how the Post is treating Waxman’s "feverish" successor Darrell Issa.

Paul Bond at The Hollywood Reporter described what happened at the annual Comcast shareholders meeting in Philadelphia when Tea Party conservatives stood up to ask about the dramatic left-wing slant of MSNBC.

On the webcast of the meeting, Tom Borelli asked Comcast CEO Brian Roberts "Why would a conservative person in any state want their money to go pay for Al Sharpton’s salary?"

NPR legal correspondent Carrie Johnson reported on the IRS scandal on Tuesday’s Morning Edition displaying an urgent need to spread some Bush administration into the story. First she mentioned a 2004 FBI probe that improperly acquired phone records from New York Times and Washington Post reporters without going through proper channels.

Then she concluded with how the last secret subpoena for a reporter’s phone records came in 2001. But it involved Clinton-appointed U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White – who just became Obama’s appointee to head the Securities and Exchange Commission:

NPR political director Ron Elving wrote a wistful blog post on Tuesday night headlined “Goodbye, Again, To Obama's Most Audacious Hope.”

“The sudden eruption of second-term scandals in his administration will have many costs for President Obama, but surely the most grievous will be the lost opportunity to transcend the partisan wars of Washington,” Elving mourned. “That aspiration was his fondest dream for his second term, much as it was for his first. Now it seems destined to be dashed once again.”

When the Obama scandals pile up and Obama's image of integrity starts to enter the shredder, what do the most partisan reporters do to fend off the bad publicity? Try to portray the conservatives as "nutso" impeachers. At The Daily Beast, there was this headline Monday: "The Coming Attempt to Impeach Obama: The idea of impeaching Obama is industrial-strength insane. Republicans will probably try anyway, predicts Michael Tomasky."

Tomasky portrays conservatives as "crazy" and Obama as the most clueless of presidents: he knew absolutely nothing about the Benghazi talking points? Then who elected him expecting a competent executive? Tomasky leads with his heart, with his fervent Obama-loving hope that history does not record these scandals as significant:

On Monday, NPR Morning Edition anchor Steve Inskeep expressed -- in the face of all the evidence of Fast and Furious, Solyndra, MF Global, and so on -- that the first term of Obama's presidency was "remarkably scandal-free." When I challenged him on the factual inaccuracy of this, he tweeted in reply , "Hm, did I say it was scandal-free or that it 'has been described' as such?"

However passively Inskeep expressed it, he certainly agreed with it. Inskeep asked Cokie Roberts, "This administration has been described -- I don't even know how many times- - as remarkably scandal-free. But when you get into the second term of an administration, there's often some dirty laundry that comes out. Is that what's happening now?" Roberts agreed:

How enthusiastic can NPR be in avoiding the emerging Obama scandals? Try this: So-called “All Things Considered” aired no features on Benghazi or the IRS on Saturday or Sunday. (This excludes on-the-hour news updates.) But they found time for six minutes on the trade in rhino horns.

It was more ridiculous on “Weekend Edition” Saturday and Sunday – they also skipped both. NPR correspondent Michele Kelemen reported on Secretary of State John Kerry for 4 minutes and 22 seconds without a single word about Libya. Somehow the State Department’s Benghazi fiasco wasn’t listed as a “thorny issue” in the Middle East:

Both NPR and PBS skipped over the Obama-IRS scandal on Friday night’s “week in review” segments. Both led instead by wondering about whether conservatives would ruin immigration “reform” and then briefly touched on Benghazi.

 On the PBS Newshour, all the outrage was saved for the end, as Mark Shields railed against Congressman-elect Mark Sanford as an unforgivable “jerk” for having his mistress with him at his special-election victory party next to his sons, and then trashed the GOP voters who elected him:

On the supermarket stands, InTouch magazine touts the possibility of an “$8 Million Tell-All” book for former Today show co-host Ann Curry. “An insider tells In Touch that Ann Curry...is being courted by top publishers to pen a tell-all book.”

“The publishing industry is just dying to get their hands on Ann’s side of the story, and the figures being batted around are enormous,” claimed the source. But an NBC representative insisted Curry “is not writing any book.” New York Times TV writer Brian Stelter told the magazine this NBC Curry debacle is still hot a year later because “it was so mismanaged. There are so many unanswered questions.”

ABC and the Washington Post are happy to join the war on the Boy Scouts, pushing every church in America that sponsors a Scout troop to alter their Bibles for the gay agenda. The Post headline on Saturday was "Poll: Most Americans support lifting ban on gay Boy Scouts."

The pollsters did not ask if Americans would also like ending the "bans" in other American social organizations and faith groups. Why can't avid barbecuers join PETA? Freedom of association -- whoever said that was an American principle?

The new Natalie Maines record is continuing to spur music writers to slam the "cowardice" of the country-music industry and the stuffiness of the country-music audience in the aftermath of Maines trashing President Bush at a London concert on the eve of the Iraq war. 

On the NPR show "Fresh Air" on Wednesday, music critic Ken Tucker insisted Maines was just ahead of where the majority would arrive on Bush's wrong-headedness:

Today’s proof that National Public Radio is your taxpayer-funded rip-and-read press-release service for the Left: a Morning Edition story summarized as “College Divestment Campaigns Creating Passionate Environmentalists.”

Reporter Elizabeth Shogren compared Brown University's anti-coal campaign to anti-apartheid campaigns of the 1980s: “Students at more than 300 colleges in the United States are asking their school's endowment fund to distance themselves from any coal-producing companies.” NPR’s chasing after Rolling Stone and The Nation magazine in promoting the fight to stop "climate change" from baking Earth: