Rusty Weiss's blog

Earlier this month, FreedomWorks covered a suspect symposium being sponsored by a pro-Obamacare organization, designed to provide journalists with "specialized education in health care reporting”.

The anticipation of media bias was palpable.

The symposium, sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund, hosted by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW), held at Reuters headquarters in New York City, and with a featured student body of 17 mainstream reporters - including the Dallas Morning News, Reuters, and Money Magazine - has since come to pass, and the concerns of blatant media bias should be even more heightened in the aftermath.

Who knew that "a source familiar with Ambassador Steven's thinking" may have been Ambassador Stevens himself?

Citing an unnamed but mysteriously close source on Wednesday, CNN's Anderson Cooper reported that Christopher Stevens was concerned about security threats, Islamic extremism, and an al-Qaeda hit list in the months leading up to the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.

Two days later, Cooper admitted that some of the information from that report secretly came from Stevens own handwriting, in a seven-page personal journal that the network had found at the scene of the attack.

In Cooper's own words:

Mitt Romney recently took a trip to Louisiana to assess hurricane and flood ravaged areas, and to draw attention to the situation, possibly stirring people and organizations to help those in need.  During the course of his visit, Romney encountered a woman who had lost her home in the flooding.  Jodie Chiarello, according to a joint report from the Huffington Post and Associated Press, gave this account of her conversation with Romney:

"He just told me to, um, there's assistance out there," Chiarello said of her conversation with Romney. "He said, go home and call 211." That's a public service number offered in many states.

Chris Matthews was on Hardball tonight covering the Republican National Convention with guests Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post and John Heilemann of New York Magazine.  In what is seemingly the natural progression of things these days with Matthews, the subject of the 'otherization' of the President was being discussed.  Because, if you weren't aware already, Barack Obama is black, and any time a Republican chooses to discuss the failure that is his administration, the media will be there to quickly remind you that they only feel that way because of his skin color.

But tonight's episode of race-baiting with Chris Matthews was a bit odd in that the panelists somehow came to the conclusion that reminding people of the President's roots in Chicago politics is racist.  In fact, simply saying Chicago is racist.  (Video below).

Minnesota Democratic State Rep. Kerry Gauthier has had a rough go of it lately. Embroiled in a sex scandal that has attracted the attention of national media outlets, Gauthier has gone from waging a promising reelection bid for his seat, to being caught engaged in oral sex acts at a rest stop with a teenage boy, to pulling out of the race and facing possible expulsion from the Minnesota legislature.

Gauthier does have one place in which he can reliably look for cover on this story however – CNN.

Earlier today, the liberal website Gawker did a document dump including 950 pages worth of confidential documents affiliated with Bain Capital.

The idea was to expose Mitt Romney's alleged tax-dodging schemes with offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands.  Problem being, the parent corporation known as the Gawker Media Group has a little secret of their own.

Imagine for a moment, if you will, Sarah Palin attending an event at Ohio State University.  She casually greets college aged supporters, and a group of excited, young students decide to spell out the word “Ohio” using the old YMCA routine.  The group is in place, arms readied, fans surrounding them armed with their cameras and cellphones.  Then this happens…

An e-mail from Daily Kos Campaign Manager, Chris Bowers announces 'big news' regarding voter ID laws in Pennsylvania.  Bowers explains:

A huge coalition of 100+ labor and civil rights groups has come together to do the door knocking, phone banking and voter education necessary to make sure everyone in this must-win swing state can still cast a ballot.

At Daily Kos, we're helping out by running online ads in Pennsylvania to sign up more than 1,000 volunteers so that this coalition has the people power it needs. Please, click here to contribute $3 to Daily Kos so that we can sign up the thousands of volunteers needed to overcome Pennsylvania's voter ID law.

There was, understandably, plenty of outrage this week upon hearing MSNBC host Touré accuse Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney of what he called the "niggerization" of President Obama.  

On Thursday's The Cycle, Touré responded to Romney's charge that the President can "take [his] campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago” in the following unhinged manner:

The Boston Globe is reporting on a Massachusetts solar company that received state loans under Governor Romney, and is now filing for bankruptcy.  The Globe insists that this news means that Romney's attacks on the President's failed Solyndra investment have backfired, and are implying that it opens up the Republican presidential contender up to charges of hypocrisy. 

An excerpt:

What better example of media bias, than when a company you own has been alleged to have conducted fraudulent business practices, questionable lobbying tactics, and possible insider trading – and you report nothing about it.

The Washington Post recently published an article regarding a potential ‘debt bomb’ on the American economy – student loans.  But in this article, the Post continues to do little in the way of reporting on for-profit colleges, a prime sector for student loan defaults.  And it most certainly ignores a for-profit college which is the main source of its very own revenue – Kaplan University.

Kaplan over the last several years has accounted for the vast majority of revenue at the Washington Post company.  In 2009 for example, Kaplan accounted for 58% of the Post’s revenue, while newspaper and magazine publishing accounted for a mere 19%.  So it stands to reason that the Post’s lack of reporting may be due to their reliance on cash from the university. 

By ignoring the story however, the Post is avoiding the dark side of the Kaplan enterprise.  

And it gets much worse from there...

I almost hate to draw attention to this incredibly sad example of the intolerant left over at Rolling Stone, but quite frankly, Andrew Breitbart probably would have eaten this up, and tweeted it back out.  

Well, she’s certainly making a case for the title.

In a piece titled, When white people lack “bourgeois values”, the Salon Editor at Large manages a race and class-baiting exacta, covering an alleged economic disdain shown by Republicans towards African-Americans, and charging the GOP with promoting policies which “shackle women to the home”.

In attacking a Rick Santorum speech on family values, in which he correctly stated, “When the family breaks down, the economy breaks down,” Walsh had this to say:

The war on Christmas music has taken a strange turn, with the mainstream media finally up in arms at the overly PC handling of the holiday’s song lyrics.  But it isn’t the constant barrage from uber-sensitive atheists trying to eliminate every reference to Christmas from our schools and public places that has them fired up. 

No, it’s an elementary teacher in Michigan that has raised their ire. 

The flurry of controversy arose when the teacher, weary of hearing her students giggling every time they had to sing the words ‘gay apparel’ during their rendition of Deck The Halls, decided to replace the word ‘gay’ with ‘bright’.

The reception from the media, as you may have heard, was rather chilly.

Bill Randall is a candidate for Congress, running in North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District.  Mr. Randall also happens to be an African-American.  In early October, Randall had a campaign billboard vandalized with a spray-painted, vulgar phallic symbol, accompanied by the letters "KKK”. It was the kind of message that would normally launch the media into full-blown racial apoplexy. 

One small problem.  Bill Randall is a Tea Party Conservative Republican.

Despite filing a report with the Wake County Sheriff’s Department on October 9, holding a press conference regarding the incident, issuing a press release, and having a local news report linked at the Breitbart.tv website, nobody in major media outlets in Raleigh have covered the story.

The National Football League avoided a potential public relations nightmare, and more importantly, did what was widely considered to be the right thing, announcing Friday that players may wear special shoes and gloves that differ from official NFL equipment for Week 1 games.  The move came a day after Lance Briggs, six-time Pro Bowl linebacker for the Chicago Bears, sent out a picture of shoes and gloves provided by Reebok to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of 9/11.  He then tweeted:

“Reebok great job on these gloves and shoes… looks like I'm getting fined this week.  Lol!”

But the league, which normally enforces a very rigid uniform policy, said they do not “anticipate any issues”.  The AP reported that Greg Aiello, spokesman for the NFL, sent an e-mail stating that, “We have extensive plans for Sunday to respectfully recognize the significance of the day.”

He added that, “Lance Briggs and all players will participate.”

After finishing up practice on Friday, Briggs declined to comment.  He did issue a statement to me later in the evening which read:

Throughout his tenure, there have been several facets in which President Obama has been demonstrably weak on leadership, with the debt debate coming to the forefront in recent months.  Now however, lost in that news cycle has been another failure of leadership for the President – his own request to tone down violent rhetoric in this country.  For it was mere months ago that Obama stood in front of a crowd in Tucson that had anxiously sought leadership amidst the chaos of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting; a teachable moment that had The Guardian gushing about how the President had delivered “calm amid the toxic rhetoric.”

That moment of calm has long since dissipated.  Where once the President had denounced discourse that places “the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do”, we hear Republicans blamed for holding the American people hostage to their economic policies.  Where once we were urged to talk “with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds”, we now hear Tea Party members being denounced as terrorists.

Make no mistake, this ratcheting up of terrorism and hostage-taking discourse directly coincides with recent events in Norway.  The instant that Oslo terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik, was labeled as a ‘right-wing Christian’, liberals finally had their moment to seize upon - not just a chance to label conservatives as extreme ideologues but a chance to label them as violent ideologues.  This message has been a coordinated and vicious attack amongst the media, the Democrats, and most assuredly, the President.