Ken Shepherd's blog

Our friends at MRCTV have a great new video that goes through a short history of the liberal media's penchant for hastily laying the blame for spree shootings and other violent attacks on conservatives. Yet time after time, when all the facts came out, we learned that it was anything but conservatives behind each and every incident. Of course, by the time all the facts came out, the media spin and speculation had already sowed the seeds of misinformation. As is to be expected, some of the worst offenders were MSNBC talent like Keith Olbermann and Ed Schultz.

My personal favorite of the ones that narrator Dan Joseph recounts is the media's rush in 2009 to speculate that suicidal U.S. Census worker Bill Sparkman was murdered by some anti-government extremists -- whipped up no doubt by the Tea Party movement -- when in fact it turns out Sparkman staged the scene of his hanging to look that way. You can watch the full video in the embed that follows the page break.

The federal Consumer Product Safety Commission  (CPSC) is taking a company to court to make it stop producing their popular Buckyballs magnetic desk toy, even though the company markets the product to adults and includes warnings that the toy is unsafe around children.

That's right, it's a desk toy marketed to adults, the vast majority of whom will keep them at their desk at work -- a generally kid-free environment -- and yet the Obama administration is trying to shut production down. Reporting the story, the Washington Post's Dina El Boghdady began today's article with a dry recitation of the lawsuit and waited until halfway through her story to get to the company's strong reaction (emphasis mine):

*Corrected from earlier | WRAL, the CBS affiliate in Raleigh, N.C., recently published a searchable database of concealed carry licensees within the "WRAL viewing area, including Chatham, Cumberland, Durham, Edgecombe, Franklin, Granville, Halifax, Harnett, Hoke, Johnston, Lee, Moore, Orange, Nash, Northampton, Person, Sampson, Vance, Warren, Wayne, Wilson and Wake counties." Searches do not turn up names or street numbers, but they do give a number of permits issued to residents on that street.

The search form for the database appears within a story filed July 12 (updated July 20 -- the day of the Aurora, Colo., shooting), entitled "Rural areas lead in concealed weapons permit rates." Numerous conservative blogs have been taking WRAL to task for the decision, including native North Carolinian Sister Toldjah (emphasis hers):

Updated below: Kelly replies via Twitter.

Washington Post Metro columnist John Kelly usually avoids controversial political subjects and often does "answer man" features about local D.C.-area history, making his feature overall an enjoyable read. But from time to time Kelly works in his liberal bias, just as when he bashed conservative talk show hosts as "right-wing nutjobs" and when he weighed in against the so-called Tebow bill that would allow homeschoolers to join local high school sports teams.

Today, Kelly offered an idea of his for a gun control measure but concluded by grousing that it probably would never get passed into law because those pesky "Second Amendment absolutists" would get in the way and so, "we'll just continue to accept that the price for having a well-regulated militia is that homicidal maniacs will be able to buy guns as easily as buying tickets to a movie."

Updated (see bottom of post) | Today's Letters to the Editor section of the Washington Post contains five letters on the topic of gun control, three oriented towards more gun control and two expressing a pro-gun rights/enforce-the-laws-on-the-books position.

But one letter in particular is egregious as it contains a huge factual error that Post editors failed to correct: that President Obama signed legislation in 2009 that allows concealed carry in all National Parks.

Americans trust guns more than they do, God, Washington Post "On Faith" contributor Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite insists in her July 22 post. The liberal theologian preaches for the need to correct the idolatry by, you guessed it, more gun control, just as she did back during Holy Week.

Brooks Thistlethwaite, a senior fellow for the liberal Center for American Progress, returned to her shtick of twisting Christian Scripture to insist upon liberal policy prescriptions, in this case, the disarming of law-abiding civilians (emphasis mine):

Michael Grunwald is doubling down on what many liberals in the media are only hinting at. "[T]here is nothing wrong with politicizing tragedy," the Time senior national correspondent wrote this morning, reacting to the Aurora movie theater shooting. "If advocates or experts or even politicians think their policy ideas can prevent the next Aurora—by preventing potential killers from obtaining guns, by making sure potential victims can carry guns, or by some other method—then by all means, now is the time to spread the word."

Grunwald's callousness on this count has generated criticism, and not just from conservatives. Noah Rothman of Mediaite complained:

Our friends at Twitchy have an astounding roundup of tweets from liberals who are blaming Rush Limbaugh for the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado.

None of the folks they featured are liberal celebrities or members of the media, but given how the media have blamed conservative talk radio for mass shootings before, it would not be surprising if liberal journalists and pundits today pick up this thread and tug on it.

Liberal CNN host Piers Morgan took to Twitter this morning after learning about the horrific mass shooting overnight at a screening of the new Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado.

As you can see from the screen capture below, Morgan has tweeted his calls for more gun control laws, but, as of 9:55 a.m. Eastern, has not tweeted any apolitical expression of condolences for the victims and their families.

One week ago, the Obama/Sebelius Health & Human Services issued a memo that, for all intents and purposes, eviscerates the central provision of the historic 1996 welfare reform bill: work requirements for welfare recipients.

"The new policy guts the federal work requirements that were the foundation of the reform law. The Obama directive bludgeons the letter and intent of the actual reform legislation," Heritage Foundation senior fellow Robert Rector argued in a July 12 Foundry blog post. Four days later, Heritage legal experts Todd Gaziano and Robert Alt added that the administration's changes are, in their judgment, illegal (emphases mine):

On today's edition of MSNBC Live, anchor Thomas Roberts talked with Michael Barbaro of the New York Times discussing the so-called Young Guns who are on the short list to be Mitt Romney's running mate: Sen. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.), Gov. Bobby Jindal (La.), and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.).

But when the MSNBC graphics team showed photos of the Young Guns, they accidentally used a photo of Rep. Ron Paul, the septuagenarian former Republican presidential candidate with strong libertarian convictions, in lieu of Paul Ryan. See our video below:

Does MSNBC hype the bogeyman of racist "voter suppression" in a cynical ploy to alarm its liberal voter base? Only on days that end in "y."

Once again, network anchor Andrea Mitchell discarded any pretense of journalistic objective and played a game of softball with a liberal activist today, helping the Urban League's Marc Morial to denounce "voter suppression" laws -- that is voter ID laws -- that have passed in numerous states in recent years.

Back in May, a handful of Senate Democrats attempting to open a new offensive front against Republicans in the "War on Women" introduced The Paycheck Fairness Act (PFA). "Democrats cited statistics showing that women today are still paid 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, or $10,784 less a year on average. That’s the equivalent of 183 tanks of gas or 92 bags of groceries," Politico's  Matt Wong helpfully noted in a May 23 story.

One day later, the conservative-leaning Washington Free Beacon, published an article which exposed how the very same Senate Democrats out in front on the PFA were egregious violators when it came to a pay gap among members of their own congressional staffs. Reported Andrew Stiles:

This year, as always, Florida is a crucial swing state. Because of that, the liberal media is doing all it can to gin up Democratic base voters, attempting to energize them for the November election by bashing Florida's conservative Republican governor Rick Scott and his attempt to clean up voter rolls of noncitizens, who by definition are not allowed to cast votes. The liberal media, particularly hyper-partisan MSNBC, has also attacked efforts in other states to require voter ID. Florida has had a photo ID law since 2002.

The tragic February shooting death of Trayvon Martin also led the Left to work up attacks on the Sunshine State's Stand Your Ground laws. But new polling shows that the media's attacks are just not working. Sure, Gov. Scott himself is personally unpopular, but the policies he's pursuing are, reports Steve Bousquet of the Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times (emphasis mine):

As we noted previously and to its credit, the Washington Post has been critical of misleading Barack Obama attack ads on Republican candidate Mitt Romney. Now Time magazine has taken to fact-checking an Obama ad which hits Mitt Romney on a hot-button social issue: abortion.

Time magazine's Michael Scherer -- no Romney backer he -- slammed the Obama spot as "centered on a clear untruth," and delved into the comments the ad took wildly out of context in order to appeal to women voters on the basis of a "scary falsehood" (emphases mine):

As I noted yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) yesterday refused to call a vote on extending the Bush tax cuts, even though President Barack Obama days earlier urged passage of such tax cuts as soon as possible. Predictably, however, the July 11 editions of the network evening newscasts  -- ABC's World News, the CBS Evening News, and NBC's Nightly News -- all ignored the development. Ditto with the network morning shows today.

Each evening newscast did, however, note the House vote to repeal ObamaCare, the first such vote after the Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate as a tax.

"Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Wednesday rejected a Republican request to vote on President Obama’s income tax plan amid defections within his caucus on tax policy," Alexander Bolton of The Hill newspaper reported just before 10:30 a.m. today. "Reid appeared exasperated by the Republican request to vote on extending the Bush-era tax rates when Democrats would prefer to focus this week on a small-business tax package estimated to create 1 million jobs," Bolton added.

You may recall that on Monday, President Obama renewed his call to extend the Bush tax cuts for every income bracket except that covering income earners making $250,000/year and more, blasting a "stalemate" in Washington and urging Congress to "come together and get this done" without delay because (emphasis mine):

Yesterday in an appearance at the NAACP's annual convention, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder lashed out against voter ID requirements as a form of "poll tax" that threatens to disenfranchise black voters. He insisted that the Obama administration would "not allow political pretexts to disenfranchise American citizens of their most precious right."

He was, of course, warmly and enthusiastically received. But in order for journalists to exercise their "most precious" First Amendment rights to cover the speech, they, you guessed it, had to have valid, government-issued photo ID on top of their press credentials, reported Townhall.com News Editor Katie Pavlich yesterday:

She's a seven-term Democrat representing Las Vegas in the U.S. House of Representatives and she's running in a U.S. Senate race which "observers believe could be a pickup for Democrats." But yesterday, Rep. Shelley Berkley (Nev.) received "a blow to her candidacy" when "[t]he House Ethics Committee... voted unanimously to launch a formal investigation into allegations" that the congresswoman "used her position to benefit the financial interests of her husband," Washington Post reporter Ed O'Keefe reported in a page A4 article in today's paper. Yes, that unanimous vote means that fellow Democrats want a formal investigation into Berkley.

But alas, O'Keefe was given no favors by Post editors who punished the reporter with a snoozer of a headline certain to interest hardly anyone beyond hard-core political junkies: "Nevada Rep. Berkley faces ethics investigation."

Update (July 10, 2:57 p.m. EDT): Lui responds via Twitter (see bottom of post for full update).

MSNBC continued this morning to misrepresent the implications of Texas’s voter ID laws, which don’t permit college or university student IDs as valid photo identification for voting in the Lone Star State. During his appearance on MSNBC Live in the 11 a.m. Eastern hour, Ryan Haygood of the NAACP Legal and Educational Fund insisted to substitute host Richard Lui that his organization represents black students “who attend Prairie View A&M and Texas Southern University, who previously used the only form of photo ID that they had, student ID” to vote.

Since those IDs are no longer allowed, “Texas’s laws are discriminatory,” Haygood argued.  For his part, Lui failed to bring on a guest to defend Texas’s law nor did he challenge any of Haygood’s assertions. But a little bit of skepticism and a few minutes of Web searching would have shown Lui that Haygood’s assertion was malarkey, because to get a student ID at the colleges Haygood mentioned, a student needs to have a photo ID in the first place.

Herman Cain's new "Cain TV" project, which he announced in a promo video on his Facebook page, will feature not only "critical commentary on issues of the day" but "pearls of wisdom from Herman himself," MSNBC's Alex Wagner snarked in a segment on today's Now with Alex entitled onscreen "This Just Happened."

But the "pearl of wisdom" Wagner showed was a clip of Cain's video taken out of context that sounded completely bizarre in and of itself. What's more, liberal members of Wagner's panel reacted to the out-of-context comment to denounce Cain as "scary."

Last Wednesday, vandals smashed windows and spray-painted the home of Colorado pro-life activist Keith Mason, Newsweek/Daily Beast's Abigail Pesta noted in a July 2 post.

Mason, a leader of the Personhood Movement which seeks to change the legal definition of human personhood to begin at conception, was profiled in a June 25 story at the magazine's website. From Pesta's July 2 story (emphases mine):

Washington Post reporter Sudarsan Raghavan filed a 12-paragraph story today, published on page A9 about "coordinated assaults... in the town of Garissa" Kenya on Sunday morning in which "[m]asked gunmen sprayed bullets and hurled grenades at two churches... killing at least 15 people and injuring several."

"It was the latest in a series of attacks in this East African nation suspected of being carried out by al-Qaeda-linked militants from neighboring Somalia or their sympathizers," Raghavan noted. Yet nowhere in his story did he describe the group suspected as responsible, al-Shabab, as a terrorist entity, but merely as an "Islamist... militia." The United States government considers al-Shabab a terrorist entity. From the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) website:

July 1 is traditionally the day when many new state laws take effect, and every year on or about that date, the Washington Post makes sure to inform its readers of some new laws hitting the books in Maryland and Virginia. This year, Marylanders are seeing tax increases, with residents of Montgomery County -- a significant portion of the Post's subscriber base -- disproportionately affected.

Yet in reporting on "A slew of new laws for Md., Va.," Post staffers Laura Vozzella and John Wagner buried infomation about the Old Line State's tax hikes. The first mention came in paragraph 4 out of the article's 34 paragraphs. What's more, Vozzella and Wagner dealt with Virginia's new laws first, meaning that more in-depth explanation of Maryland's tax increases only came 24 paragraphs into the article.

The day after Barack Obama won a major victory for his signature health care overhaul legislation -- which he and his allies insist will ultimately LOWER health care costs for Americans -- the president is threatening to veto a defense authorization bill in part because Congress is not acting to RAISE health care costs for American servicemen.

The Washington Free Beacon has the story here, and I've also excerpted it below the page break. It remains to be seen to what extent the Obama-boosting liberal media will acknowledge the president's hypocrisy:

All the attention focused on today's ObamaCare ruling was bound to have some effect in drowning out this news development, but on its own merits, it's certainly one the media would rather ignore anyway. Yesterday, a federal judge -- a Clinton appointee no less -- refused to issue an injunction that would halt Florida's effort to clean up its voter rolls of noncitizens. The Obama/Holder Department of Justice is suing Florida in an attempt to thwart the state's voter roll cleanup effort.

"The decision by U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle applies to Washington's request for a temporary halt and is not a final ruling in the case," the Reuters news wire reported. Today's Washington Post placed the story at the bottom of page A4 with the headline, "Request to keep Florida from purging voter rolls is denied."

It seems facts are an inconvenient nuisance to anchors at MSNBC, especially when they get in the way of their favored narratives. A perfect case in point is morning anchor Thomas Roberts who treated his 11 a.m. Eastern MSNBC Live audience to an error-laden report on the GOP's supposed concerted effort to "block the vote" in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Roberts began by noting a GOP legislator Mike Turzai (R) from the neighboring state of Pennsylvania, whose "recent comment" has "revived debate over what many say is a concerted Republican effort to block key votes in battleground states."

Yesterday I noted that Fox News reported that the Obama administration was ending its program that deputizes local and state law enforcement officers so that they can arrest illegal immigrants. "By Monday afternoon, the Department of Homeland Security had pulled back on a program known as 287(g), which allows the feds to deputize local officials to make immigration-based arrests," Fox reported, adding that "The move means that even if local police step up immigration checks, they'll have to rely on federal officials to make the arrests."

While it's clearly a sign that the Obama administration is intent on doing all it can to not aggressively enforce the nation's immigration laws, the liberal broadcast media greeted the news with a yawn. Neither ABC's Good Morning America, CBS's This Morning, nor NBC's Today noted the Obama administration's decision to kill the 287(g) program.