Aubrey Vaughan's blog

The blogosphere has been abuzz this week with a video misleading viewers to believe that Rep. Michele Bachmann riles up a campaign crowd in Iowa with the line, "Who likes white people?"

The video was pirated from Robert Stacy McCain's blog, the Other McCain, after he covered a Bachmann appearance at a rainy August 5th Christian music festival, during which Bachmann shouted to the drenched crowd "Who likes wet people?" She followed the question with a statement to her Christian audience on God's power over the weather, which was cut from the edited version. The blogger took the video from McCain, added a caption to read "Who likes white people?" and the video instantly became viral thanks to Perez Hilton, CBS News, and Wonkette. Now the blogger who edited the stolen video has removed the video from YouTube and apologized to McCain, but has still damaged the reputation of Bachmann and could face legal repercussions from both her and McCain.

The New York Times's Eric Lichtblau published a front-page hit piece on the House oversight committee chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, on Monday, titled "Helping His District, and Himself." The piece opened with an attempt to paint a corporate image of the entrepreneurial congressman, saying, "Here on the third floor of a gleaming office building overlooking a golf course in the rugged foothills north of San Diego, Darrell Issa, the entrepreneur, oversees the hub of a growing financial empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars," going on to attempt to forge a connection between Issa's public service and private business. The errors began in the lede, as Issa's office is not located in a ritzy building near a golf course, and continued for the rest of the article.

Issa's office has called for a "front-page retraction of the story due to the inaccuracies that fully undermine the premise of the article," describing the piece as an "error-ridden front page story." Issa's director of communications, Frederick Hill, explained that the three central examples the Times used to justify their claims are "wildly inaccurate," citing 13 inaccuracies in the article that reflect incorrect information or baseless assertions. With only one exception, the Times has yet to correct or retract any of the errors in the article.

As reported by the Blaze earlier today, CBS News's online store is selling seven different Obama-related items, but complementary Republican merchandise is suspiciously absent. The online store includes paperback and hardback copies of Obama's memoir, "Dreams From My Father," and five memorabilia books and DVDs of his campaign and election.

When the Blaze looked into the matter, CBS News had even dedicated an entire tab of its store to the president. The category has since been removed, but searching "Obama" in the online store still returns all the merchandise. When the items are clicked on, though, shoppers are redirected to the online store's home page. Such activity raises the question of why seven different pro-Obama items were for sale alongside CBS News mugs, tote bags, and t-shirts, while not a single piece of Republican merchandise can be found in the store. 

Throughout July and early August, during the weeks of an impending budget crisis, Tea Partiers were repeatedly called vile names, from terrorists to delusional children to people strapped with dynamite in the middle of Times Square. The British rioters, who did inflict terror on London, who were typically delusional youth, and who burned down a number of buildings, were instead "disenchanted."

It seems as though the media mixed their labels on the two activist groups, sympathizing with the rioters while viciously attacking a mainstream and completely non-destructive conservative group. The same sympathy the media felt for the British youth was never applied to the Tea Party, which has always peacefully worked to enact political change.

Over the past few days, Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has been the subject of criticism due to his unusually high number of Twitter followers. Some say a large number of his followers were manufactured by a Twitter account generator to falsely boost his online clout. His campaign contends his follower count came from other means, explaining instead his early adoption of the social network and his personal engagement with his followers, in addition to having been featured as a suggested account for quite some time.

We won't take a position on whether or not Gingrich's followers are legit but it is worth noting that before he began his presidential run, Gingrich was the literally the only right-leaning political pundit to be recommended to Twitter users by the company. That stands in dramatic contrast to the many liberal pundits and media outlets which Twitter recommends to its users via a hand-picked list. Read on for the full details.

Monday night, to the surprise of many, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords returned to the Capitol to cast her first vote since being shot in the head by Jared Lee Loughner seven months ago. Her triumphant return brought cheers from everyone in the room, despite their contentious disagreements over the past few weeks.

Ironically, these disagreements have often turned to using the same violent rhetoric that was so widely blamed by the media as the reason for Loughner's violent shooting spree. In reality, martial rhetoric is virtually ubiquitous in our political system, but the same people who condemned it seven months ago are now hypocritically using the same language, having no problem calling Tea Partiers "terrorists," "kidnappers," or congressmen on a "suicide mission."

If there has been anything unifying the mainstream media coverage of the debt crisis, it has been attacking the Tea Party. Last night on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart joined the chorus, railing against the Tea Party's dislike of the debt deal, which he claimed they won through the plan's spending cuts, even though the cuts are in fact quite small.

According to Stewart, the Tea Party freshmen control less than half of the House, but they are the ones who caused the ruckus of forcing billions in spending cuts. He went on to say Tea Partiers don't want a government at all and likened them to bank robbers taking everyone hostage.

(Video after the break)

Most journalists would never correlate terrorism with Islam for fear of being criticized as Islamophobic, but now they are relishing in the opportunity to connect Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik to Christianity using a fairly weak link.

Breivik, who published a manifesto hours before his shooting spree, discussed his cultural connection to Christianity only as a vehicle by which he could accomplish his goal of a pure Nordic race. He even wrote, "I'm not going to pretend I'm a very religious person, as that would be a lie." Nevertheless, Breivik's supposedly radical Christian beliefs are making the headlines, instead of his truly radical belief of eliminating Muslims through modern eugenics.

First it was her migraines, then it was the cost of her hair and makeup, and now it's correlating her anti-gay views to bullying and suicides in a school district she represents. Rep. Michele Bachmann has in many ways become the new Sarah Palin as a prominent female target the media love to hate. Even when she responds to her critics, they don't seem to go away.

Bachmann suffers from migraines, like 30 million other Americans, but has proved through her career the migraines don't hinder her ability to serve. Nevertheless, she immediately released a statement from her doctor explaining her migraines are under control. In comparison, both former President Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama had health issues that could have turned into major problems during their presidencies, but neither released their medical records. Clinton had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and clogged coronary arteries, while Obama was a longtime smoker with a family history of cancer.

Over the past few days, media coverage has been dedicated almost entirely to the debt negotiations between President Obama and more outspoken members of Congress. As the Los Angeles Times pointed out, this let slide an interesting statement by the self-described democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, who said, "I think it would be good if President Obama faced some primary opposition."

For one of the most outspoken defenders of universal healthcare, same-sex marriage, and environmentalism to be challenging Obama signals major problems with what should be Obama's most ardent base of supporters, which is also confirmed by new polls from CBS, NBC, and ABC. The networks, however, are failing to report their own polls because they reflect poorly on the president.

In an interview, MSNBC president Phil Griffin made some rather strange characterizations of his network, insisting that it "come[s] from a progressive stance" while it is simultaneously "not ideologically driven."

Those two concepts would seem contradictory in the minds of most people--but not to Griffin, who seems to believe that his staff of "smart people" who "do their research" is up to the task.

British media mogul Rupert Murdoch has spent the past few weeks facing ethics inquiries as a result of his News of the World phone hacking scandal. Now British-government-owned media giant BBC is being questioned for its journalistic ethics in muzzling global warming skeptics in its taxpayer-funded broadcasts.

Because BBC believes skeptics' views "differ from mainline scientific opinion," the network plans to reduce airtime to the "minority" views. The Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank that serves to challenge the costly environmental policies countering a possibly fabricated problem, describes the attack on skeptics as "using the 'science-is-settled' mantra as a smokescreen to silence critics of climate taxes and green policies." Coming from a government-funded network, the political agenda the network is trying to push should be making the same headlines the News of the World scandal has created.

After Entertainment Weekly graciously gave grades of B+ to Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11' and A- to former Vice President Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth,' EW's John Young has bestowed a much different treatment on his review of the new Sarah Palin political documentary, 'The Undefeated.'

The conservative documentary, which successfully opened last weekend in limited release, was given a snarky review under the headline "Sarah Palin's 'The Undefeated': We saw it so you don't have to!".

For having made a shocking revelation that deeply undermined one the most repeated stories of Obama's 2008 campaign and 2009 health care debate, Janny Scott is staying extremely quiet. Scott's new book, 'A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother,' proved false Obama's claim that his mother was fighting with insurance companies from her death bed, one of Obama's favorite lines to use when campaigning and appealing for the passage of Obamacare.

Yesterday, the Washington Examiner's Byron York wrote of being turned down twice after trying to reach Scott for an interview, even though the New York Times landed an interview with her in between York's two requests. It seems likely that Scott, whose liberal bias has been exposed here at NewsBusters and at our sister site TimesWatch, is not thrilled that conservatives have used her book as a way of exposing the liberal president.

It's no secret that most campaigns are heavily funded by big checks from lobbyists, PACs, and rich donors, but President Obama's campaign team is turning away from that assertion, instead showcasing the claim that it is 98-percent-funded by grassroots support. Jim Messina, Obama's campaign manager, said "we did this from the bottom up," pushing the idea that the $86 million fundraising figure released on Wednesday was fueled almost entirely by grassroots organizers.

While 98 percent of the checks may have come from grassroots donors, it doesn't mean that 98 percent of the money did. Many media outlets are taking the bait and are ignoring the two percent of donors whose contributions may turn out to be a far greater portion of Obama's campaign funds than Messina is making them out to be.

For comparison, eight years ago when then-President George W. Bush was ramping up for his re-election campaign, the media magnified a small fraction of extremely wealthy donors to be the image of his campaign.

Despite the fact that the White House press corps is comprised mostly of members who are ardent liberal Democrats who want to see President Obama triumph over Republicans, it has grown increasingly clear that the feeling of respect is not mutual.

The White House made that apparent today by laying down a new rule for reporters covering Obama's news conferences there: No more shouting questions at the president.

Correction: The original post incorrectly stated that former Speaker Pelosi had "extravagant use of Air Force One on the taxpayer's dime." While Pelosi did charter military aircraft for cross-country flights at taxpayer expense, Air Force One is the call sign exclusively reserved for the president of the United States.

At a time when the government is facing billions of dollars in cuts to programs that many Republicans deem as wasteful, it seems that the only spending Democrats want to address is Rep. Paul Ryan's expensive taste in wine, even though they have past ignored a number of instances of wasteful Democratic spending on the taxpayer's dime.

Last Friday, Talking Points Memo published a piece criticizing Ryan for sipping a glass of wine from a $350 bottle of Pinot Noir. Onlooker Susan Feinberg, an associate business professor at Rutgers, took pictures of Ryan and his two economist friends sipping the wine before approaching Ryan and asking how he could live with himself for dropping hundreds of dollars on wine while arguing for cuts to programs benefitting the poor and elderly.

Hailed for his engagement with the online world and being cutting edge for hosting a Twitter town hall, President Barack Obama made quite the gaffe at his town hall yesterday, calling the internet, "internets," the same mistake for which former President George W. Bush was widely mocked following a 2004 presidential debate.

The flub, which Obama quickly corrected, came while he was discussing the importance of bringing the internet to classrooms, but the president has received little media flack for his slip-up.

Friday afternoon, the White House quietly released its annual report to Congress on White House staff salaries. Among the employees is the infamous director of progressive media and online response, Jesse Lee, who is paid $72,500 a year to provide White House sanctioned responses to any negative press it receives.

The position, which was previously part of the privately-funded DNC's rapid response team, is now a taxpayer-funded spin machine to thwart bad press against President Barack Obama. In effect, the position is a pulpit for the White House, through Lee, to ridicule critics and promote a liberal agenda. Lee frequently retweets liberal bloggers and media organizations, but also picks fights with a number of conservative bloggers.

Frustrated climate alarmists, who have failed to match global temperature trends to their dramatic global warming predictions for years, have come up with a counterintuitive study to explain the lack of global warming since 1998: China's excessive burning of coal during its rapid growth had a cooling effect on the earth's temperature.

The new study, based on Fox News global warming skepticism, contradicts much of the anti-coal sentiments held by environmentalists. While it explains that burning coal does emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it also releases heat-reflecting sulfur into the atmosphere, and the two work to cancel each other's effects out.

Over the past three years, the number of believers in anthropogenic global warming has been on a steady decline, while the number of believers in natural planetary warming and cooling cycle has been on a steady incline. The shrinking pool of people who still swear by Al Gore's Hollywood version of the climate trend is especially populated with journalists and politicians who refuse admit they were wrong and consider any science debunking manmade global warming.

As the numbers fail each year to match Gore's wild predictions, it is becoming increasingly difficult to form any logical support for Gore's gloom and doom global warming scenarios. To rectify the situation, the global warming community has quietly rebranded its cause as 'climate change,' which allows activists to push an environmental agenda without the threat of the earth's temperature not rising with it.

Rep. Michele Bachmann told potential voters on Wednesday that the media "want to see two girls come together and have a mud wrestling fight. And I’m not going to give it to ‘em," referring to the media's treatment of herself and her possible 2012 opponent, former Gov. Sarah Palin.

With Bachmann's entry into the race this week, there are already a number of comparisons being drawn between Bachmann's relationship with the press and Palin's historically rocky relationship with it. Much like the media have repeatedly pounced on Palin for misstatements while ignoring Obama's misstatements, they are repeating the same vicious tactics with Bachmann while continuing to ignore Obama's flubs.

ements, they are repeating the same vicious tactics with Bachmann while continuing to ignore Obama's flubs.

Having friends in Washington is one of the quickest and dirtiest paths to success, but when President Barack Obama is the one helping you out by discriminately favoring your company's products over others, very few in the media seem to care.

Flashback to the early 2000s during former President George Bush's first term. The mainstream media pounced on former Vice President Dick Cheney's association with Halliburton, an oil company for which Cheney once served as CEO. The Bush administration supposedly favored Halliburton by rewarding the company with a number of multi-million dollar oil contracts in the Middle East, purportedly only using a bidding process to make the game look fairer.

Today it's a different fuel and a different president, but Obama has an almost identical story: favoring the clean-technology companies of his financial supporters through rewards of federal money. This time around, though, the media is giving his shady dealings a free pass.

In attempting to make it sound like Planned Parenthood is the only choice in women's healthcare for Medicaid patients in Indiana, the Associated Press's Rick Callahan seems to have missed perhaps the most important point in his article on the defunding of Planned Parenthood in Indiana: Planned Parenthood lost its funding because they are the largest abortion provider in the country, and Indiana taxpayers refused to continue supporting it.

The article opens with a pity-inducing lede that acts as though patients have no healthcare options except Planned Parenthood. But all of the women's health services that Callahan rattles off in his lede - notably, abortion is not among them - are available in hundreds of other Medicaid-friendly clinics in Indiana. So no, Planned Parenthood patients were not "left fending for themselves," as he claims.