Matthew Sheffield's blog

Is the Obama Administration inappropriately disclosing classified data to movie producers in the hopes of getting a film about the killing of terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden released before the 2012 election? That is the question that Congressman Peter King (R-NY) is asking after word got out that the White House is giving inside information about the military raid that killed bin Laden earlier this year to the creators of the Oscar-winning film "Hurt Locker."

"This alleged collaboration belies a desire of transparency in favor of a cinematographic view of history," King wrote in a letter addressed to officials at the CIA and the Department of Defense which asked for full details on the government's involvement with the film. The Defense Department acknowledged the collaboration in an interview with the Wall Street Journal:

Today marks the sixth birthday of NewsBusters. We've worked to uncover major scandals like ClimateGate, continually highlighted the liberal nonsense to come from the mouths of Chris Matthews, Ed Schultz, and Keith Olbermann, and have always enjoyed sharing the community with you for the past six years.

As has been expected, despite the recently reached debt deal, America's debt got downgraded tonight by credit ratings agency Standard and Poor's.

In an analysis posted on its website, S&P explicitly stated that it "takes no position on the mix of spending and revenue measures," however that is a fact that will likely be glossed over by the self-described mainstream media.

There is much more in the analysis, but since you won't likely see this info in the big media outlets, I am reproducing portions of the report which repeatedly mention excessive spending as a problem:

The nation's elite journalists are forever denying that they have a liberal bias. Of course, the evidence in their reporting proves that claim false every day. One other thing belies their claims--the revolving door between the self-described "mainstream media" and Democrats. There simply is nothing like it for conservatives and Republicans looking to get into elite journalism.  

The latest example of this phenomenon comes from Beltway insider publication Politico where the revolving door spun both directions on the same day with one reporter leaving the paper to work for Democrats in Arizona and another coming into the paper fresh from a gig working with Senate Democrats.

Amid all of the spurious talk about "tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires" (defined incongruously by the left as anyone with income of over $200,000), the Obama administration and its media lackeys are trying to raise support for an increase in taxes on corporate jets.

It's well-known that the amount of money that potentially would be raised by closing this loophole is miniscule, it'd take 5,000 years for it to equal the new debt added just last year, but since we're talking about tax cuts for the wealthy, it's worth noting that the Hollywood Left actually has managed to get a significant number of tax deductions to promote television and movie production. Magically, however, we aren't seeing much discussion about closing these tax loopholes from the elite media.

After letting it wither on the vine for a while, CNN has canceled the nightly television program hosted by disgraced former New York governor Eliot Spitzer.

The show, known as "In the Arena," had initially paired Spitzer with moderate conservative Kathleen Parker who proved no match for her much more vociferous liberal counterpart. AP reports on the lineup shuffle:

You don’t have to believe in karma to find the irony in the fact that the Web giant Google is finding itself in the cross hairs of the same pressure groups that it funded back when it was pushing heavily for “network neutrality.”

The latest cause célèbre among this crowd is “search neutrality,” the idea that somehow the government needs to get into the business of Internet search engines.

You may have noticed it already but in case you haven't, push reload on your browser. We've implemented some long requested changes to NewsBusters tonight including the much-requested "wide screen" format that expands the left side of the page to fit your browser window width.

Also included in the fixes:

He may have a lot of talent as a musician but when it comes to radical Islam, Prince isn't particularly original in politically correct Hollywood. In an interview with a British newspaper, he said that women living in countries where they are forced to wear the body-covering burqa garment enjoy doing so.

"It's fun being in Islamic countries, to know there's only one religion. There's order. You wear a burqa. There's no choice. People are happy with that," he told the Guardian.

Liberals in and out of the media are constantly telling us that President Barack Obama is a really smart guy. He's a "genius" in the words of his chief sycophant Chris Matthews. And yet, for such a supposedly smart guy, Obama seems to be ill-informed about many things, like the fact that we have 50 states in this country or that the word corpsman isn't pronounced like a dead body.

The latest Obama gaffe came yesterday in a speech he gave to the Army's 10th Mountain Division in which he mistakenly identified a fallen member of that division as another soldier in a completely different Army unit who is alive.

The sub-prime mortgage bust has been the topic of much discussion in the media since late 2008. Unfortunately, given the left-leaning composition of most of America's elite newsrooms, very little of that discussion has focused on the federal government-backed mortgage bundlers Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Update: 14:30: Weiner made it official moments ago with these words:

"I had hoped to be able to continue the work that the citizens of my district elected me to do, to fight for the middle class and those struggling to make it. Unfortunately, the distraction that I have created has made that impossible."

Video and earlier post follows...

Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart has had his share of tussles with the media. He’s certainly known for that among liberal journalists who, in the words of the New York Times “hold their noses at the mere mention of his name.” That mistrust has been borne out in the media’s general lack of interest in the stories pushed out by such Breitbart franchises as Big Government or Big Hollywood and the completely absurd explanations Breitbart haters cooked up in their efforts to deny the story he most recently pushed, the exposure of the illicit online activities of New York Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner.

Lesser-known than his very public tussles with the media is Breitbart’s dissatisfaction with many within the conservative movement, many of whom he sees as unwilling to sufficiently stand up for their principles, largely because they’ve become infatuated with polling and trying to make nice with the media left—an effort that is as doomed to fail as it is craven.

Our friends and colleagues at CNSNews.com are unveiling a new regular feature devoted to showcasing ridiculous government spending projects called the "Golden Hookah Award." We'll be helping to spread the word to help everyone on the web try to get a handle on what our government officials are smoking.

The first recipient of the Golden Hookah is a project funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse which gave hard drugs like PCP, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines to monkeys and then measured the drugs' effect on them.

Watch the video report below the break. Also see full report by CNSNews.com's Christopher Neefus:

Media critics, decidedly un-conservative for the most part, are piling on Arianna-OL in the wake of  what is increasingly being seen as a disastrous merger. Don't blame the right, this is coming from Poynter, MediaBistro, Business Insider and elsewhere, Forbes being perhaps the only "conservative" outlet.

Four months ago, when AOL chairman Tim Armstrong needed something to revitalize his news department, he found what he thought was his savior in the Huffington Post. The popular news site already had three things that AOL hadn’t been able to previously accomplish: a clear editorial voice, continued and growing traffic growth, and deep engagement from its users. Although AOL had executed a series of bad mergers and new product launches in recent years, Armstrong pushed forward, forking over $300 million dollars into the coffers of the far left Arianna Huffington and her initial investors.

You might think that given the abysmal box office record of left-wing movies about the Iraq war that "Fair Game," a highly distorted version of the tired controversy surrounding former CIA non-agent Valerie Plame Wilson, would never have been made.

Of course, since Hollywood is dominated by leftists, economic sanity did not prevail. Economic reality did prevail, though, as "Fair Game" ended up being a total bomb. It grossed just $9.5 million domestically. Add in the international ticket sales and the fiction flick just barely managed to recoup its production budget of $22 million.

My source for those numbers of the St. Petersburg Times which still seems to believe the utter fiction that the Plame "disclosure" was the work of the nefarious Bush White House:

Earlier today, my Examiner colleague Mark Tapscott wrote on the left's tendency to create political bogeymen and then accuse them of just about everything under the sun. There's a bit more that needs to be added in the context of the left's newest bogeymen, the newly infamous Charles and David Koch. Just like they did previously in their attacks on the likes of Kenneth Starr and Richard Scaife, lefties are once again playing fast-and-loose with the facts regarding the Kochs.

Fortunately, lawyer John Hinderaker over at the Power Line blog has engaged in some industrial-strength deconstruction to debunk two hit-pieces against the Kochs and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker put out by Think Progress blogger Lee Fang. He goes through each piece point-by-point and demonstrates that when it comes to the Koch Industries and the environment (and everything else), there is no truth to the leftist smears. Both pieces (1 and 2) are must-reading.

Here's just a taste of the debunking (Fang quotes or summaries are in bold):

Nir Rosen, one of the more rabidly left-wing foreign policy commentators out there has finally gotten some just desserts after he ridiculed CBS News correspondent Lara Logan after she was assaulted by a mob in Egypt. After learning the news of the attack on Logan, Rosen took to Twitter to ridicule her and in the process revealed his deep anti-Iraq war bias.

"Lara Logan had to outdo Anderson. Where was her buddy McCrystal," he wrote, apparently wishing that former U.S. general Stanley McCrystal and CNN anchor Anderson Cooper had been also sexually assaulted by a mob.

Rosen's disgusting comments got worse from there, even as the fellow at New York University’s Center on Law and Security attempted to rationalize his hatred. "Yes yes its wrong what happened to her. Of course. I don't support that. But, it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson too."

Fred Phelps, crazed leader of the Westboro Baptist Church cult, has become infamous for blaming any bad event on the evils of homosexuality. Earthquake in Haiti? Blame the gays. Combat troop deaths in Iraq? Ditto.

Phelps's logic works thusly: God literally hates people who engage in homosexual conduct and unless societies take the steps to ban and punish such action, God is going to destroy them. Any natural disaster or mass murder is, accordingly, the will of God being carried out on the "sinners" who refuse to listen.

If that type of "logic" sounds familiar, it should be. It's exactly the same as the explanations the far left is resorting to in its efforts to pin the recent Tucson, Arizona shooting onto conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, John Boehner, Glenn Beck, and the right generally.

Funny:

Milling around the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rally today, I couldn't quite figure out the point. The acoustics were so bad also that you could barely hear anything unless you were right by the stage. Straining here and there, I was able to catch a smattering of dialogue but Colbert and Stewart really could not be heard during most of the time in the various locations I was at. Not being able to hear anything didn't seem to bother most of the attendees however, most of whom were wandering around looking at many of the funny (and attempted funny) signs.

Not all of the signs were trying to be funny, however. Most of the ire of the angry demonstrators seemed to be directed against Glenn Beck and Fox News. There were also a few anti-Republican signs as well, including at least one of Republican politicians Sarah Palin, John Boehner, and Eric Cantor with Adolph Hitler mustaches alongside conservative talk show hosts Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.