Matt Vespa's blog

On June 11, Slate editor Emily Bazelon whipped out the Nazi card against Congressman Trent Franks.  The media site, which is an affiliate of the Washington Post, unsurprisingly went after the Republican legislator for his remarks about rape on Wednesday concerning a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks into a pregnancy.

Of course, liberals tried to tie these remarks to Todd Akin, who made scientifically inaccurate statements about sexual assault and pregnancy last year. Yet, even some notables on the left are saying Franks is no Akin.

Apparently ABC's news division is not content with reporting the news and spinning it to promote a liberal agenda. It now devotes a whole program to manufacturing fake scenarios in the hopes of pushing a liberal agenda.

Take the program, “What Would You Do?,” (WWYD) which began years ago as an occasional segment on the Primetime newsmagazine program and used actors in hidden camera situations to see how bystanders would react.  Just in time for Gay Pride month, for the June 7 edition, WWYD set up a fake situation involving a basketball player  coming out to his teammates and coach. Of course, the team and the coach were all actors playing out a skit whereby they bashed their now out-of-the-closet teammate before unsuspecting spectators.

Time magazine's Zeke Miller, late of that august political journal BuzzFeed, has a brief article up on his magazine's site today heralding Hillary Clinton's joining the social media/microblogging service Twitter. The former First Lady and Secretary of State’s account was verified in less than an hour, and nabbed nearly 23,000 followers in two hours.  Feminist sites, like Feministing, have called it a de facto 2016 declaration.

Of course, Mrs. Clinton dipping her toes in the Twitter waters comes on the heels of new revelations of 'endemic' corruption at the State Department during her watch.  You wouldn't know, however, from Miller's brief item, which enthused that:

Jon Stewart is taking the summer off to film Rosewater, a story about the detention and torture of Iranian Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari, but “Senior British Correspondent” John Oliver has the helm until Labor Day.  While the Daily Show is known for it’s political satire, its hosts have been known to cross the line concerning their antipathy towards conservatives, specifically Oliver’s desire to shoot and kill Tim Tebow.   The reason: he’s open about his Christian faith.

Here's Oliver from a comedy routine in 2010:

Another week, another scandal, as we learn of more malfeasance at the State Department when Hillary was at the helm, but while CBS is all over the story today, their rivals at ABC and NBC censored the story.  In fact, ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today decided to skip the story entirely.

The contents of the documents obtained by CBS outline lurid details of prostitution and sexual assault committed by State Department officials.  Additionally, an underground drug ring in Iraq supplied State Department security contractors with narcotics:

So Slate’s Justin Peters had a nice “squirrel” piece yesterday about gun “accidents," wherein he sought to use a rash of recent gun accidents involving young children as a news peg to push for more stringent gun control on the state level.

With five scandals plaguing the Obama administration, you would think that a Washington Post affiliated site would be drilling down on Eric Holder’s possible perjury about the seizure of phone records and emails of journalists.  That’s a story that hits close to home for any journalist. Yet, Peters decided to apply the defibrillator paddles to the gun meme. In a way you have to admire the left-wing media's persistence.

While the Associated Press may get something wrong – and omit things on occasion – they’ve admitted one thing that the big three has yet to confirm: Obamacare will cost Americans their health care coverage.  In a story by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar that was published on May 29, he noted that Americans might find themselves stripped of coverage this fall since their current plans don’t meet the requirements dictated by the president.  Hence, they have to find a new plan, and small businesses are in the same situation.  The result could be confusion on a biblical level.

It seems Obama is reneging his promise of allowing Americans to keep their coverage if they like it. As a result, unions have begun to have buyer’s remorse over this bill; Sen. Max Baucus (D-Montana) has said he feels like a “train wreck” is coming, and the Society of Actuaries has reported that individual premiums will rise 32% under Obamacare.  As small businesses are firing more than they’re hiring, it’s added to the anxiety over the impact of this law through the various tax increases that are on the horizon.  Yet, most in the media have omitted these developments, and with the AP, IRS, and Benghazi scandals engulfing this presidency – the effects of the Affordable Car Act are bound to blindside the country.

Does L.A. Times reporter Michael Hiltzik read the news?  Apparently not, since he penned one of the most lapdog press-worthy articles praising the IRS to bubble to the surface in the wake of the news that it targeted conservative Americans.  Hiltzik’s column published in the May 25 Business section labeled the targeting as “supposed,” noted that for a small budget – the IRS does a pretty “good job.”

“Showing some love after the ‘witch-hunt,” Hiltzik insinuates that the current fiasco is rather peripheral since the IRS has done such a great job collecting revenue throughout its history.  He noted that the changes made back in the Clinton administration, which shifted the agency from enforcement to a greater focus on treating the taxpayers like customers, is the epicenter of the trouble caused two administrations later. Hiltzik also lamented a that the shift away from enforcement led to a “brain drain” within the agency, and that real criminals, tax evaders, were left to operate freely. As for the bipartisan outrage over the scandal, Hiltzik wrote:

In real life it's near impossible to find anyone who pities the IRS. That's what the New York Times is for. In a Business Day section front-pager for Thursday's paper, the Times's Michael Shear lamented that the CEO of Apple received relatively kind treatment from a Senate panel this week while IRS officials have been grilled.

"One thing became clear this week on Capitol Hill: It is better to be a tax dodger than a tax collector," whined Shear in the opening paragraph of "Torches and Pitchforks for I.R.S. but Cheers for Apple." "Plenty of good will for iPhones but only disdain for the tax collector," lamented a pull quote on the jump page which appeared underneath a picture of Apple's chief Tim Cook. Apparently Shear, and his editors at the Times, are perplexed that congressmen hold a government agency that abused its power to target Americans for their political beliefs in lower regard than a company which employs thousands of Americans and produces products loved the world over, by people of every political stripe, including those lovable hippies of the Occupy Movement.

As the media, by and large, ignores the train wreck that is on the horizon with ObamaCare, yet another union has jumped ship on the president’s health care overhaul.  Back in April, you may recall, the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers, and Allied Workers officially said thanks but no thanks to the president’s plan.

Well, now, a major labor union in the grocery industry is balking at the policy. According to The Hill:

You just knew this was bound to happen. Some on the left are trying to blame George W. Bush for Obama's IRS fiasco.  Take for example Mediaite's resident Obama apologist Tommy Christopher, who wrote a much ado about nothing post on May 16 insinuating that this egregious abuse of government power stems from former Bush appointed IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman – and that credit for clearing this whole thing up will go to Obama. 

Christopher penned this piece using Martin Bashir’s May 16 broadcast, which featured Joy Reid of the Grio and Republican strategist Ron Christie.  During the exchange, Christie was forced to admit the Shulman was a Bush appointee, but so what? This scandal happened under Obama. The IRS executed this plan in 2010, and Shulman –and his successor Steve Miller– knew about it since the spring of 2012.  There is no doubt the agency lied about their knowledge of their employees’ malfeasance, and it happened under the Obama administration. Nevertheless, Christopher dutifully wove his spin, concluding:

The IRS scandal is an absolute fiasco, and we're already witnessing the media doing their level best to downplay its significance. Unfortunately, part of that concerted effort will include the attempt to shoehorn racial, religious, and ethnic victimology narratives into the mix.

Submitted for your consideration is a May 15 post on CNN's Global Public Square (GPS) blog by Sahar Aziz headlined "Muslims to Tea Party: Welcome to our world":

“President Obama has called for creation of a government wide strategy ‘to address any gender pay gap in the Federal workforce.'" Eric Yoder of the Washington Post noted in a May 14 article. That's all well and good, but nowhere in Yoder's story did he consider that there's a pay disparity problem in the White House and in Senate Democratic offices, according to investigations by the Washington Free Beacon.

Michael James at our sister site CNS News.com reported  March 15 that:

As the Obama administration’s Benghazi narrative begins to crumble, they’ve decided to recycle old talking points in the hope that the news media won't fact-check them.

On May 13, during a press conference, President Obama said, “The day after it [Benghazi] happened, I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism.” The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler – in this instance – should be commended for calling Obama’s statement for what it is: a lie.  Kessler listed three instances after the attack where Obama failed to call it a terrorist attack: