Events

Thanks, Reverend Al. Really.  Sure, we know that the left is all about the redistribution of wealth rather than its generation.  Still, it's instructive to hear a leading lefty say it in such stark terms.  As clear a statement of the manifesto since candidate Obama told Joe The Plumber that "spread the wealth around" is the way to go.  

On his MSNBC show this evening, Sharpton declared that his view of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that it should be about "really, how we distribute the wealth in this country." View video after the jump.
 

Leftist media critics resent that newspapers have a "Business" section or that PBS used to show "Wall Street Week," as if reporting on business automatically means you're pro-business. The Washington Post on Sunday seemed to be working overtime to publish an Anti-Business section, with two columns endorsing the "Occupy Wall Street" protests, an enormous article by liberal Post wunderkind Ezra Klein on how the Obama "stimulus" was too tiny, and a whole page devoted to the Bloomberg expose of the Koch brothers' shenanigans in Iran.

Steven Pearlstein wrote a column on how "Obama can learn from Wall St. protest." Michelle Singletary's column was titled "Rage, rage against Wall St." and compared the protesters to Rosa Parks fighting racism on the bus.

In a report filed at the Los Angeles Times's Politics Now blog earlier today, Washington Bureau reporter James Oliphant relayed a number of whoppers delivered by Vice President Joe Biden without anything resembling a challenge. In Part 1, I noted how Biden, who in August described Tea Party sympathizers as "terrorists" and in September as "barbarians," today spoke in complimentary terms of how much the Occupy Wall Street crowd has in common with them.

This part will deal with Biden's hit at Bank of America and its $5 monthly fee for debit-card use. The relevant excerpt from Oliphant's writeup follows the jump (bolds are mine throughout):

In a report filed at the Los Angeles Times's Politics Now blog earlier today, Washington Bureau reporter James Oliphant relayed a number of whoppers delivered by Vice President Joe Biden without anything resembling a challenge.

Breaking Biden's bilge into three sections, they involve his claim about the historical origins of the Tea Party, which Biden characterized as a collection of "barbarians" only a month ago (and as "terrorists" two month ago); his hit at Bank of America and its $5 monthly fee for debit-card use; and the nature of the "bailouts" which followed the passage of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in the fall of 2008. In this first part, I will go after what Biden said about the Tea Party. An excerpt from Oliphant's writeup follows the jump (bolds are mine throughout):

Disgraced ex-anchor Dan Rather wrote for The Huffington Post last Friday about how Americans are in danger of losing their grip on our history, touting his HDNet special on 9/11. So if Rather cares about history, what would he say about his boss Mark Cuban and the HDNet folks putting on truther-conspiracy documentaries on his network in prime time on September 11, 2011?

Ace of Spades had the scoop. HDNet tweeted: "LOOSE CHANGE, a controversial look at the conspiracy theory that September 11th was an inside job is up next at 9:15pm ET." That would be right after "Dan Rather Remembers 9/11" at 8 pm Eastern. Dan Rather seems to have found the right location for his loose and imaginative career in anti-conservative journalism. He wrote for the HuffPost with his grandpa lecture about how he loved Ed Murrow broadcasts in World War II, then boasted:

A month before the 9/11 attacks, American missionaries Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry were captured and imprisoned by the Taliban.

Their detention and subsequent rescue by American troops in November 2001 received extensive media coverage at the time, including criticism by "Dateline" correspondent John Larson about their proselytizing in a Muslim country.

So far, however, it seems no mainstream media outlet has caught up with Mercer or Curry for a ten-year anniversary retrospective.

Are your kids learning the right lessons about 9/11? Ten years after Osama bin Laden's henchmen murdered thousands of innocents on American soil, too many children have been spoon-fed the thin gruel of progressive political correctness over the stiff antidote of truth.

"Know your enemy, name your enemy" is a 9/11 message that has gone unheeded. Our immigration and homeland security policies refuse to profile jihadi adherents at foreign consular offices and at our borders. Our military leaders refuse to expunge them from uniformed ranks until it's too late (see: Fort Hood massacre). The j-word is discouraged in Obama intelligence circles, and the term "Islamic extremism" was removed from the U.S. national security strategy document last year.

Like most newspaper readers, I like a good break from news coverage -- and the usual liberal biases therein -- by escaping to the comics pages. Yesterday reading through the Washington Post's comics section, I was struck by how many of the syndicated artists ran appropriate, even touching tributes to the victims and heroes of September 11 from strips like "Blondie," "Beetle Bailey" and "Hagar the Horrible."

Stan Lee's "The Amazing Spider-Man" strip was among the best tributes, with Spidey praising the "real heroes" who "gave their own lives" on 9/11 who make his "little problems seem like nothing."

"Dennis the Menace" even managed to melt the stony heart of old Mr. Wilson with his tribute to the heroes of 9/11.

And then, unfortunately, there was Darrin Bell's  "Candorville."

A skirmish broke out on Morning Joe today as PBS host Tavis Smiley claimed President George W. Bush "lied" the USA into the war in Iraq. Joe Scarborough and--surprisingly--Jon Meacham forcefully refuted Smiley's slur.

Scarborough unwittingly provoked the incident when, commenting on yesterday's 9-11 observances, he called for a Kumbaya moment in which Americans would put aside politics and thank presidents Bush and Obama for keeping the country safe.  That set Smiley off: "the reality is that one of those guys lied to the American people"--and the fight was on. View video after the jump.

Having read E.J. Dionne's Wednesday column in the Washington Post (HT Jim Taranto at the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web), I am sooooo comforted -- not. Dionne assures his readers that "Al-Qaeda is a dangerous enemy. But our country and the world were never threatened by the caliphate of its mad fantasies." Thus, the last 10 years of the "war on terrorism" (lowercase letters and quote marks are his) have apparently largely been a waste of time and treasure, which is why, on the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, Dionne asserts that "we need to leave the day behind," and relegate it to "a simple day of remembrance."

Dionne is of course entitled to his opinions but not his facts. In addition to dangerously underestimating global jihad's devastating potential, Dionne overestimated what he must believe is a "lost decade" media meme, and completely misinterpreted the meaning of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. What follows are excerptes from Dionne's column (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

Pat Buchanan regularly serves as Morning Joe's lone conservative in the show's self-described 10:1 ratio sea of lib to conservative guests.  But Buchanan this morning demonstrated that he is anything but a Republican partisan.  

Sounding more like Barney Frank after a bad night's sleep, Buchanan blasted President George W. Bush, claiming 43 "broke the Republican party and frankly he broke the United States as a superpower."  View the video after the jump.

He said it, he meant it, and there's no denying it.

On Monday, in a statement carried at the Washington Post, the Associated Press, the New York Times (Page A8 of Tuesday's print edition), and elsewhere, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told U.S. troops at Camp Victory in Baghdad: "The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked. And 3,000 Americans — 3,000 not just Americans, 3,000 human beings, innocent human beings — got killed because of al-Qaeda. And we’ve been fighting as a result of that."

That sound you hear is a Democratic Party meme shattering into teeny tiny pieces. The attempts to put Humpty Dumpty together again, both by Panetta himself and the establishment press contingent following him, have been pathetic and ineffectual, which is what happens when one is up against succinctly stated truths.

At Big Government yesterday, Kristinn Taylor and Andrea Shea King compiled overwhelming evidence refuting one key element of a cease-and-desist letter sent to Fox News by lawyers for former Obama administration "green jobs" czar Van Jones. In doing so, they referenced and credited a video I posted in September 2009 of an anti-American rally in Oakland, California on September 12, 2001 where Jones spoke. They pair did a great job, and I appreciate the credit.

I would like to give Taylor's and King's work greater visibility, and extend it just a bit, especially because you can virtually bank on the fact that the establishment press won't touch it -- or if they do, they won't accurately report it.

Just barely a year after it derided the establishment media's obsession over oil-affected birds in the Gulf of Mexico while virtually ignoring the loss human life in awful floods in Tennessee (noted at the time at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), Investors Business Daily's editorialists are calling out the press for oversaturating us with Obama-OBL victory lap coverage at the expense of informing the nation about the severity of this year's horrible Mississippi River flooding.

IBD makes great points in the following excerpts (bolds are mine):

Just when you consider cutting the Associated Press a break for doing something right, they pull this.

Most people know that in the interest of "not spiking the football," the Obama administration has decided that it will not release photos of Osama bin Laden's dead body.

Shortly after the decision was announced, AP filed a Freedom of Information Act request for said photos. According to John Hudson at the Atlantic (HT to Jim Taranto at the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web), the AP's Michael Oreskes claims that "This information is important for the historical record" and "It's our job as journalists to seek this material." So far, so good.

But you just knew they'd figure out a way to potentially ruin it. Here's Oreskes as quoted by Hudson:

President Barack Obama's Ground Zero visit yesterday was "pitch perfect," according to former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, despite reports that the commander-in-chief was rude and dismissive toward at least one American who lost a family member on Sept. 11, 2001.

On the May 6 edition of "Morning Joe," MSNBC anchor Willie Geist asked Meacham to characterize the significance of Obama's visit to the site where more than 3,000 people were slaughtered in an attack planned by deceased al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

"I thought it was pitch perfect in the sense of it was not about him," intoned Meacham, who now occasionally writes for Time magazine. "It was not the grand speech; it was him doing a kind of human interaction with the folks."

The New York Times's supposedly momentous decision to omit "Mr." from references to Osama bin Laden in its Monday obituary is apparently working to distract critics from the item's other problems.

Along with Michael T. Kaufman, Kate Zernike, whose primary vocation seems to be finding racism in the Tea Party movement where none exists and otherwise smearing its participants, comes off as almost critical of how bin Laden was "elevated to the realm of evil in the American imagination once reserved for dictators like Hitler and Stalin."

Imagination ("the faculty ... of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses")? Babe, I don't know about you, but we didn't imagine September 11. We saw it. Others directly experienced it. Many died. Do you remember?

The obit's topper for me is the (in my opinion) deliberate historical revisionism in the following passage (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Update (17:38 EDT on May 4): Rush Limbaugh mentioned this post on his May 3 program. You can listen to that by clicking here.

Well, this should be interesting.

The AP is reporting (preserved here in case the report devolves, as such things very often do) that "secret prisons" and "harsh interrogation techniques" were involved in getting the "first strands of information" that ultimately led to Sunday operation which killed 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden.

It's only a three-paragrapher, so it follows in full (for fair use and discussion purposes). Get a load of the final paragraph:

Not waiting for history to play out, a New Times caption writer, below a picture of celebrants of Obama Bin Laden's demise outside the White House, has written: "As crowds gathered outside the White House, there was little question that Mr. Obama's presidency had forever been changed."

The pic and caption follow the jump.

They may not be officially celebrating "Green Week," but CNN was fully in the spirit of the week Wednesday morning. Anchor Carol Costello expressed her dismay that Congress has not acted in the last year to prevent another disaster like the BP oil spill, and seemed to want more safety regulations and laws for oil companies to follow in a disaster.

"Congress doesn't seem to be in charge," Costello lamented, on the one-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster that began the massive oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico.

When CNN correspondent Brianna Keilar reported that House committees have been moving legislation to speed up drilling permits and open up new offshore drilling areas, Costello was troubled.
 

Last Friday, in what one would think would be a bombshell story headlined "Foreign Banks Tapped Fed’s Secret Lifeline Most at Crisis Peak," Bloomberg's Bradley Keoun and Craig Torres reported that foreign banks secretly and routinely tapping the Federal Reserve's "discount window" lending program, primarily in 2008 and 2009. Some specifics:

• "(The) loans protected a lender to local governments in Belgium, a Japanese fishing-cooperative financier and a company part-owned by the Central Bank of Libya."
• Dexia SA (DEXB), based in Brussels and Paris, borrowed as much as $33.5 billion through its New York branch ..."
• "Dublin-based Depfa Bank Plc, taken over in 2007 by a German real-estate lender later seized by the German government, drew $24.5 billion."
• "...foreign banks ... (accounted) for at least 70 percent of the $110.7 billion borrowed during the week in October 2008 when use of the program surged to a record."

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke fought for two years to keep the information secret after Bloomberg filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2009. The Bloomberg report quotes Bernanke as claiming in April 2009 that disclosure "might lead market participants to infer weakness."

In the Bloomberg report, Congressman Ron Paul is quoted making a prediction that has sadly been way off the mark:

Once again, despite almost two months of national coverage Wisconsin's collective bargaining law and the protests and bad behavior which have accompanied it, the Associated Press is deciding that the nation's news consumers outside of the Badger State don't need to read, hear, or see news relating to unions and leftists acting illegally.

In a post on Saturday (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I noted that the wire service treated the arrest of Katherine Windels for issuing death threats to all but one of the GOP's state senators as a local story. Later on Saturday, NB's Noel Sheppard noted the virtual absence of media coverage of Windels' arrest on any broadcast network newscast or cable new show (except Fox's O'Reilly Factor).

The AP apparently believes that unions attempting to intimidate businesses into supporting their agenda -- or else -- isn't something that anyone outside of Wisconsin should care about. Even then, there is a palpable reluctance by the wire service to provide much in the way of accurate detail.

Here are some those details, as reported at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's online blog (bold is mine):

A consistent media meme in the past few months has been that Republicans are asking for Draconian cuts to the federal budget.

On Friday's "Inside Washington," Charles Krauthammer didn't let the host get away with furthering this nonsense (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The headline and sub-head:

Libyan rebel commander admits his fighters have al-Qaeda links
Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, the Libyan rebel leader, has said jihadists who fought against allied troops in Iraq are on the front lines of the battle against Muammar Gaddafi's regime.

So how will the U.S. press deal with this hot potato?

Here are excerpts from the UK Telegraph story:

On Thursday at Reuters, Andrew Quinn, with the help of Caren Bohan, cobbled together a pathetic "analysis" full of sympathy for a "struggling" Barack Obama and recognition of the need to keep oil flowing from Saudi Arabia. It also contained a false jab at George W. Bush and the War in Iraq.

First, let's look at Quinn's Bush jab:

Obama is committed to partnering with other countries rather than going it alone as did his predecessor George W. Bush, which both broadens and complicates the decision-making process.

This got the attention of Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic (HT Instapundit), who linked to the identical but unbylined Reuters item at the New York Times. Goldberg's response:

Cindy at Fairly Conservative and Mary at FreedomEden broke this story yesterday. RedState, Gateway Pundit, and Doug Ross, among others, have helped promulgate it. I'd rate the odds of the establishment press doing anything with the information at nearly zero.

I have a potential tidbit to add.

FreedomEden's Mary writes: "Jake Sinderbrand, son of Judge Maryann Sumi, poses a bit of a problem for his mother." Sumi is the county judge who on Friday temporarily blocked implementation of the collective bargaining-related law passed by the Wisconsin legislature and signed by Governor Scott Walker.

Why that matters is after the jump.

In the week since Wisconsin lawmakers passed collective bargaining-related legislation, much noise has been made about efforts to recall GOP Senators who supported the measure.

A Google News search on "Wisconsin recall" returns items that are overwhelmingly oriented towards Democrat efforts to recall Republicans. The final sentence of a March 13 Associated Press report by Sam Hananel indicates that "Union officials are also helping mobilize demonstrations in state capitols and spending money on recall campaigns against GOP officials who support efforts to curb union rights," with no mention anywhere of GOP efforts against "Fleebagging" Dems.

It would be understandable if conservatives and Tea Party sympathizers believe that the Badger State recall momentum is on the Democratic side.

But an email correspondent in Wisconsin who follows matters there closely (Update, 9:00 p.m.: That would be Steve at No Runny Eggs, who has now put up a related post with a polling update) indicates that the split is closer to 50-50 in terms of genuine vulnerability. Specifically, Steve writes (bolds indicating that an atmosphere of leftist intimidation remains quite evident are mine):

You knew, based on his track record of biased and inaccurate reporting during the Badger state standoff that Scott Bauer's Thursday attempt to explain the state's situation and events occurring up to that point ("Key questions surrounding Wisconsin union fight") wouldn't exactly be fair and balanced.

But it's Bauer's answer to one of his own crafted questions that revealed as much as anything I've seen in the past few weeks about where he's really been coming from.

The question is:

So when the Democrats come back to the Capitol, what's to stop the Republicans from passing almost anything they want?"

What do you think Bauer's answer was? The answer, and a link to the AP item, are after the jump. No fair Googling or search for an answer.