Matthew Sheffield's blog

Even though President Obama's remark that business entrepreneurs "didn't build" their own successes was made weeks ago, it is still continuing to harm him among voters. Now, it is also starting to harm other Democrats besides Obama:

Just as the campaign to ostracize Chick-fil-A seems to have blown up in leftists' faces, so too has the earlier left-wing censorship campaign to pressure advertisers of conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.

Limbaugh's ratings are higher than before the recent brouhaha over Sandra Fluke and the effort to remove him from the air is collapsing on itself. Now more bad news has come out for the Rush haters: Former Limbaugh advertiser Carbonite has now publicly stated that its decision to pull its ads from his show has been bad for the company's bottom line.

Charles Krauthammer received a rare apology yesterday from the Obama White House after the president’s press shop had called him out in a mistaken “fact check” of one of the syndicated writer’s recent columns.

In a posting on the official White House blog yesterday evening, Obama communications director Dan Pfeiffer blamed “internal confusion” for an earlier posting in which he denounced Krauthammer for spreading a “rumor that’s so patently false” that Obama had returned to the UK a bust of its former prime minister Winston Churchill upon assuming office.

There will be three presidential debates later this fall and one vice-presidential debate. How important do you think they'll be? Schedule is below the fold:

You can tell the President Obama’s speech wherein he claimed that successful business entrepreneurs “didn’t build that” has struck a nerve among the American public because liberal pundits are bending themselves out of shape trying to defend it.

Inc. columnist Bill Murphy Jr. asserts critics of Obama take his sentence out of context but then procedes to do the exact same thing.

He's not exactly a poster child but apparently rapper and heavy metal singer Tracy Marrow (stage name Ice-T) is a supporter of gun rights.

In an interview with a British television channel, Marrow stood up for the Second Amendment saying that the right to bear arms is "the last form of defense against tyranny" and not merely for hunting. Video and transcript below.

Despite the incessant focus on electoral politics that any presidential election year brings, it's important to step back occasionally and realize that campaigns and elections are actually only the tip of the iceberg of the political environment.

This insight is important because electoral wins and losses are less about the personal qualities of the candidates and more about how well they are able to express themselves. Sadly for the preservation of freedom's sake, too often statists better understand this compared to conservatives/libertarians. That is why when I learned about the new book Waking the Sleeping Giant: How Mainstream Americans Can Beat Liberals at Their Own Game, I was eager to interview one of its co-authors, Tim Daughtry.

Several NewsBusters readers have been reporting problems with the new social media sharing bar that appears at the side of the screen.

We have removed the feature in our site code. It will take a little while for the bar to go away, however. Apparently the issue was with people running lower-resolution displays on their computers.

President Obama's “you didn't build that” remark about business entrepreneurs touched a nerve on the Right, and sent liberal journalists and bloggers scrambling to explain away his gaffe by asserting that, “in context,” his statements weren't bad at all.

While it is true that Obama's remarks are frequently referred to in a short-hand manner, in their full form, his comments are just as insulting, if not more so. And no amount of media spin can make them otherwise.

You've probably noticed, but we've made the official transition over to our new, Disqus-powered comments on our blog postings. Please use this thread to ask any questions you still have about the switchover. I will be keeping an eye on it today and answering your inquiries.

Note: To make things easier, this blog post will allow for commenting by registered users of the old comment system.

Today's starter topic: Do you believe that President Obama has fulfilled his promise to "fundamentally transform America?" In a poll commissioned by The Hill newspaper, about two-thirds of Americans agree with that statement.  Among those who agree, a sizable majority, 56 percent to 35 percent, say Obama has changed America for worse rather than for better.

That's somewhat significant but what's more significant is that nearly 20 percent of sellf-identified Democrats say that Obama has brought more negative than positive change. Not everyone agrees with the notion that Obama has done anything that substantial, however.

Today's starter topic: The unemployment rate is continuing to hold steady as the economy seems to be stagnating. Just 80,000 jobs nationwide were created in June.

While headlines like this will make it onto conservative blogs, they aren't likely to create a big splash in big media outlets dominated by liberals. As NewsBusters has noted, the media were overwhelmingly negative about an unemployment rate of 5.4 percent when George W. Bush was president. A direct comparison of unemployment rates from Ronald Reagan's first term and Barack Obama's term has yielded similar liberal bias about joblessness.

If it weren't so distortive of the political system, liberal media bias would be downright hilarious, particularly when it's manifested in journalists' ability to turn on a dime and engage in rhetoric that they previously condemn when used by others. 

You can't help but smile after reading Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein's attempt to blame a few windstorms and hot weather on global warming (oops) climate change despite repeated proclamations during colder weather that "climate is not weather." None of that matters to Borenstein who procedes to write nearly 900 words of pure speculation as he warns us of the dangers of ManBearPig.

By now if you've been reading NB over the past few days, you've noticed the long-promised addition of Disqus comments. Now that we've had a couple of days to let you try it out, I wanted to give everyone the opportunity to ask questions about the setup here in this posting. I will answer them in this thread.

Deeply divided Supreme Court upholds individual mandate as a tax. What next?

Who is Karl Rove? Chances are if you are a regular reader of this site, you are well aware that Rove is a Republican political operative who worked for former president George W. Bush during his time in office and before. 

If you are a liberal protester showing up to protest against Karl Rove, the odds are not that great that you would know who Rove is as this great video below from The Blaze makes quite clear. In interviews with several anti-Rove demonstrators, many of them seem to have no idea who the man they supposedly hate enough to protest is:

It only takes a few minutes searching Google News to find a myriad of recent news stories referencing Common Cause as a "nonpartisan" group, a description that has long been obsolete when it comes to describing the liberal activist organization.

A few examples: Here's a Columbus, Georgia, newspaper editorial calling CC a "nonpartisan government watchdog group," and trying to pretend it is no more liberal than the Georgia Conservatives in Action and the Georgia Tea Party Patriots.

Freedom of speech is one of the core values of the American constitutional system. It continues to be so despite the far left's recent campaign to silence those who dared to question. Such censorship efforts have taken many forms, including selective law enforcement against advocates of the free market or traditional values, intimidation of private individuals who've donated money to politically incorrect causes, and outright attempts to use government force to compel groups of people to be silent before elections.

In a speech given last week at the American Enterprise Institute, Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell provided a summary of the recent history of the struggle to keep political speech free despite the efforts of leftists in the media and in government. He also explored why the left has become so interested in censorship of late. Please read below for the full text of McConnell's remarks:

Now that the White House has claimed executive privilege over a large number of documents, what happens next? Dick Cheney's former lawyer, Shannen Coffin, takes a look at the assertion and its likelihood of standing up in court should the House of Representatives sue to enforce a contempt citation:

A story that aired on PBS NewsHour Monday showcases the innate pro-bigger-government bias of that program, embedded in a discussion of mandatory motorcycle helmet laws and an increase in motorcycle accident fatalities.

Host Gwen Ifill introduced the segment as a look at "the correlation between motorcycle casualties and helmet laws," featuring a Judy Woodruff interview with Rick Schmidt, who was billed as a reporter for FairWarning.org.

As the science behind the global warming fear machine continues to disintigrate, the many enviro-activist hangers-on who have made hundreds of millions scaring their fellow humans are beginning to realize something: while many politicians like to pretend  in public that they are in favor of stopping the supposed crisis, almost none of them actually ever bother to do much of anything about it. The realization comes in conjunction with the "Rio+20" conference, yet another lavish conference to promote climate alarmism which this time is having trouble getting world leaders to attend:

Every president when running for reelection comes up with very specific metrics to tout his success. Barack Obama seems to be doing so in a very unusual fashion--completely ignoring the first one-third of his presidency and focusing only on the last two-thirds. Why? Byron York takes a look:

The double standards operating against outspoken conservatives are legion. Perhaps no one knows this better than talk radio host Rush Limbaugh who has been the target of the left's hatred for decades now. Watching the latest news in the business of sports, he's got to be shaking his head in dismay.

If you're a liberal like Bill Maher, a generous donor to a Super PAC support Barack Obama's re-election efforts, and you invest as much as $20 million to buy a part of the New York Mets, the New York Times gives you favorable coverage. Completely leaving out Maher's recent, and long-running, history of using vile and misogynistic terms to describe conservative women, both on his HBO show and his stand-up comedy shows, the NYT described Maher as "the most celebrated person — at least the only one with a TV show — known to have become a new partner in the team."