Political Groups

Democratic mayor Robert Levy, accused of being a phony soldier of sorts, went AWOL on September 26, failing to report to work on behalf of the citizens of Atlantic City, New Jersey. Reported the AP in an October 9 article:

Levy has been mired in scandal for nearly a year.

Last fall, the Press of Atlantic City reported that the Vietnam veteran's claims that he was a member of the Green Berets were untrue. He apologized.

But federal authorities have been looking into whether the 64-year-old Levy made that claim to increase his veteran's benefit payments.

Hmm, no party label? Even though this is not just resume embellishment but a possible case of veterans benefits fraud?

Republicans facing what is sure to be a liberally-skewed forum moderated by former Democratic partisan Chris Matthews need to take a cue from the host of Comedy Central's "Daily Show," a conservative opinion journalist argues:

Matthews is an over-the-top liberal, a brazen cheerleader for Clinton. He can also be a bully. Remember the incident about two years ago when he reduced Michelle Malkin nearly to tears? And how Zell Miller gained instant hero status for asking Matthews if he wanted to take that discussion outside?

To beat Chris Matthews the candidates don’t need to punch him in the nose. But they need to do two things. First, they need to follow Jon Stewart’s example.

In what left Matthews squealing that it was his worst interview ever, The Daily Show’s hyperactive (but not hyperliberal) Jon Stewart’s interview of Matthews on his new book not-so-gently poked fun at Matthews’ outlook on life. If -- with humor -- any of the candidates can take a few shots at Matthews and the premise of his questions, they can come out as the winner.

Writing the day before the October 9 MSNBC Republican presidential debate, Human Events editor Jed Babbin added that taking on Matthews specifically and media bias geerally is a sure-fire way to electrify the GOP voting base and awaken the general public to what they instinctively know. The media are biased to the left and actively engaged in furthering a left-wing agenda:

MSNBC, an increasingly left-leaning network, has bought out online news site Newsvine.com, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Web site reported Sunday evening.:

MSNBC Interactive News, a Microsoft and NBC Universal joint venture with 27.3 million Web visitors in August, announced Sunday night that it has purchased Newsvine in a deal of undisclosed size. It is the first acquisition in MSNBC.com's 11-year history, one that President Charlie Tillinghast hopes will lead to additional news-sharing features on MSNBC and tap an audience of highly engaged news readers.

Newsvine will continue to operate as a separate business unit and brand under the direction of Davidson, with the team remaining in its Seattle offices.

Update appended at bottom of post (Oct. 5)

A day after slamming the president with a biased report on SCHIP, AP White House reporter Jennifer Loven worked her "Bush is a failure" meme into an "analysis" piece that chalked up every real or perceived failure of the Bush administration to the President and his team, and none to the persistent opposition of liberal critics in Congress:

WASHINGTON -- Over and over, President Bush confidently promised to "solve problems, not pass them on to future presidents and future generations." As the clock runs out on his eight-year presidency, a tall stack of troubles remain and Bush's words ring hollow.

Iraq, budget deficits, the looming insolvency of Social Security and Medicare, high health and energy costs, a national immigration mess - the next president will inherit these problems in January 2009. With Bush's popularity at an all time low and relations with the Democratic-led Congress acrimonious, he has little or no chance of pulling off a surprise victory in his time left.

Viacom-owned MTV has recently rolled out "Think MTV," a new community interaction site oriented toward student activism. Imagine "Facebook" with a social-activist theme. Exploring the site quickly reveals that MTV's notion of social activism has a decided liberal tint.

The home page lists a dozen major areas for potential activism. Click on "Politics" and -- what do you know! -- the first photo that pops up is one of John Edwards looking pensively toward the future. Three videos on political themes are displayed. The only one from a named author is by . . . Kanye West [the rapper who during the 2004 election famously claimed that "Bush doesn't care about black people."] Other celebrities involved with Think MTV: Bono, Jay-Z, Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Chris Rock. Do you detect a trend?

The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday that Telemundo reporter and mayoral mistress Mirthala Salinas is heading back at work after a two-month suspension, albeit demoted to a less prominent job within the network:

Television newscaster Mirthala Salinas, who was suspended without pay for two months in August after her affair with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa became public, is scheduled to return to work Monday. But she won't be taking up her old job as a fill-in anchor on evening newscasts for KVEA-TV Channel 52.

Instead, executives with the Spanish-language Telemundo network confirmed Monday that Salinas would be sent to the station's Inland Empire bureau in Riverside as a general assignment reporter, a notable fall for a one-time rising star who has become one of the most recognizable faces in local Spanish-language television.

When liberal journalists put on their political pundit hats to ostensibly handicap the policy stances of Republican politicians, you can rest assured that conservative or center-right stances will almost always be panned as political/electoral suicide.

Time magazine's Karen Tumulty is no exception in her recent Swampland blog post, "SCHIP: A Really Dumb Fight for Bush to Pick." in which the veteran reporter took President Bush to task for his veto threat for Democratic legislation that seeks to expand the size and mandate of the federally-backed State Children's Health Insurance Plans (SCHIP).

In the September 20 presidential press conference, CNN correspondent Suzanne Malveaux sought to blame President Bush and the GOP for a perceived nationwide deterioration in race relations. In doing so, Malveaux raised the plight of the so-called Jena Six, a group of black Louisiana teenagers charged in the beating of a white student.

Video (1:56): Real (1.41 MB) and Windows (1.18 MB), plus MP3 audio (904 kB).

Media outlets covering the controversy have generally skirted around reporting on the victim of the "Jena Six" assault, focusing more on the political dimensions of the controversy, particularly Thursday's Al Sharpton-led protests in the small Louisiana town. For example, in a separate post, NewsBusters contributor Matthew Balan notes how news outlets like CNN.com and USAToday are burying or ignoring details about victim of the Dec. 4, 2006 beating, Justin Barker.

Below are the questions Malveaux asked, as well as a separate "Jena Six" question posed by Michael Fletcher of The Washington Post, who the president referred to as "Fletch":

The blogs and MSM sure paid a lot of attention to Senator Craig, his wide stance, and restroom etiquette.  I wonder why they are not paying as much attention to the ACLU chief getting seven years for child porn?

I wonder, especially, when it involves sexual torture of infants and toddlers....why isn't this getting any coverage?

In this week's Weekly Standard, writer Noemie Emery gives an excellent look into the mindset of the fearful left, so angry at President Bush for "scaring" the public into Iraq and yet so eager to be scared itself:

"It Can Happen Here," says Joe Conason, in his book of the same name, and in fact it already has started: George W. Bush and his coterie are the very picture of the pious and scheming homegrown fascisti that Sinclair Lewis described in his 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here." Similarities abound. In Lewis's novel, "Buzz Windrip" (Bush), an illiterate dweeb with sleazy charm and low animal cunning, backed by Lee Sarason (Karl Rove), a smooth and duplicitous political mastermind, becomes president, cooks up a fake war to extend his own power, cows Congress, corrupts the courts, bankrupts the country, and all but destroys the free press. The core of his power is a sinister nexus of theocrats joined at the hip to corporate interests, and you can tell how evil they are by their proclaimed love of country, and their incessant talk about God. In their endeavors, they are backed by the Hearst newspaper empire (Fox News), the only one left after all other outlets have been shut down.

Update below (11:26): ThinkProgress responds.

(h/t Ace)

NonPartyPolitics has picked up on how the liberal ThinkProgress blog smells something fishy in presidential daughter Jenna Bush's engagement to beau Henry Hager. Basically the lefty blog suggests that first lady Laura Bush lied to the press -- in 2005.

That's right, there's got to be something sinister and mendacious in Laura Bush's 2005 prediction that Jenna and Henry were "not serious." I mean, it's not like true love can blossom in a courtship in two years. Not for someone that close to President Bush!

It seems that some folks at the Seattle Times got a bit giddy when they heard news of Karl Rove's resignation.

The paper's David Postman clarified in an August 14 "Postman on Politics" blog post that while it "sounds like a conservative's parody of how a news meeting would be run... It was only a couple of people who cheered [Rove's resignation] and they, thankfully, are not among the people who get a say in news play."

Nevertheless, Postman noted that executive editor David Boardman has issued a warning to Seattle Times staff:

As we head into a major political year, now's a good time to remember: Please keep your personal politics to yourself.

Kudos to Boardman for reminding his staffers to check their politics at the door.

See also Editor & Publisher's story and NewsBusters contributor Mithridate Ombud for a related post.

Not surprising, but the Time magazine contributor and "Swampland" blogger slapped around President Bush for moving to empower the federal government to freeze assets held by the terrorist-sponsoring Revolutionary Guard Corps of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Yet two weeks ago, Joe Klein slammed President Bush for not confronting U.S. ally Pervez Musharraf about terrorist sympathizers that work covertly against U.S. interests from within the Pakistani military.

Here's Klein's August 15 post, after which I add more commentary:

On August 1, I wrote about how Time.com's "Swampland" blog was soliciting suggestions for guest bloggers on its 39-member Facebook group home page. I gave NewsBusters readers the address and sure enough some of you left suggestions in the topic thread.

[For NewsBusters' home on Facebook, check here.]

As of publication of this blog post, there were but a few liberal suggestions (such as strategist James Carville) from members of the "Swampland" Facebook group, but the vast majority of suggestions leaned rightward and included such names as Ace, Mary Katharine Ham of TownHall, independent Iraq-based journalist Michael Yon, Patterico, and libertarian writer P.J. O'Rourke.

So given two weeks to digest input from Facebook, who have the editors at Time.com chosen as a guest blogger? None other than liberal activist Ralph Neas of the People for the American Way (PFAW), who is guesting on the site from August 13-17.

I saw this yesterday but didn't work up anything on it. Basically it's a lame Style section front-pager from Sunday that fixates on how dull/boring/lame/stupid-sounding the name "Fred" is, and what that means for presumptive GOP presidential candidate Fred Thompson.

Fortunately Myra Langerhas of "Snarking Dawg" worked up a snarky blog post and so I thought I'd share that with you. Below is the relevant excerpt from Myra's August 12 entry "What's in a name?"

Myra began by quoting the first seven grafs of staff writer Monica Hesse's August 12 article and then laid out swipe at the author's biases and decidedly liberal cosmopolitan tastes, like joining a bunch of lesbians in "crashing" a "straight bar.":

A recurring feature on her "Couric & Co." blog is the "10 Questions" interview, usually posed to a think tank official or politician on a major political issue. In the past, I've blogged about how the interviews have generally skewed leftward, but I was pleasantly surprised with the CBS anchor's mostly neutral agenda of questions in her August 9 interview with Robert Moffitt of the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Generally speaking, the questions sought to elicit Moffitt's perspective on tackling health care without pressing him with loaded questions. I was annoyed at question #4, but Moffitt immediately pointed out that foreigners seeking treatment in America are fleeing inefficient, shoddy socialized medicine in their home countries.

Here are Couric's questions. For Moffitt's answers, check here.:

On August 3, NewsBusters contributor Scott Whitlock noticed the network morning shows largely ignored Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill.) dovish blanket assertion that he would rule out the use of nuclear weapons in "any circumstances" in dealing with terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. At the time, Sen. Hillary Clinton called the pronouncement unwise. But according to the Associated Press, it appears Clinton is contradicting a statement she made in April 2006 that aligns with Obama's stance.

On August 2, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) took the opportunity to disagree with Obama's dovish stance. As the Washington Post reported in the August 3 paper:

On Tuesday’s "Good Morning America," reporter Jake Tapper used the story that Rudy Giuliani’s daughter had joined a pro-Barack Obama Facebook group as a segue to recount the travails of other presidential children. Somehow, his list of wayward youths included only the offspring of famous Republican politicians, while ignoring Democratic embarrassments, such as the recent drug arrest of Al Gore III.

Additionally, GMA anchor Diane Sawyer closed the segment by discussing parent/child relationships with guest host George Stephanopoulos. Sawyer mentioned how she fought with her father, a Republican judge, over politics:

Diane Sawyer: "...I remember what a hard time I gave my father about politics."

George Stephanopoulos: "About his votes?"

Sawyer: "Yeah."

The Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas reported in the August 6 paper about worries in the Yearly Kos crowd that the liberal blogosphere is too white and too male. Critiquing that August 6 article, Jack Turner of "Jack & Jill Politics" disagreed with Vargas' assessment that every attendee at YearlyKos was wringing his or her hands about how to "diversify" the attendance.:

The Los Angeles Times reports in the August 3 paper that "Los Angeles television newscaster Mirthala Salinas was suspended without pay for two months — but not dismissed — Thursday from KVEA-TV Channel 52 for covering Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa while they were romantically involved, a relationship that journalism experts said damaged the station's credibility."

But wait, there's more. The Telemundo reporter (pictured at right with Villaraigosa*) apparently has a history of dating Southern California Democratic politicians:

Her affair with Villaraigosa was an open secret in KVEA's Burbank newsroom and in the mayor's office at City Hall. Salinas also had dated Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez (D-Los Angeles) when he was divorced — and before he remarried his wife — as well as former Los Angeles City Council President Alex Padilla, now a state senator.

• 100% from Planned Parenthood
• 100% from NARAL
• 0% from the Illinois Association for Right to Life
• 0% from Americans for Tax Reform
• 100% from the NAACP
• 8% from the American Conservative Union
• 100% from the NEA [teachers union]
• 100% from Children's Defense Fund [Hillary's old group]
• 100% from NOW
• 88% from the American Immigration Lawyers Association
• 0% from the Federation for American Immigration Reform
• 100% from the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees
• 100% from Americans for Democratic Action [gold-standard of old lefty groups]
• 0% from NRA
• 'A' from Illinois Citizens for Handgun Control

Again, what would you call such a candidate? Well, if he's Barack Obama, and you're Richard Wolffe, you'd call him a "centrist."

View video here.

ACORN (The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) has been busted again (video is available at the link; HT Michelle Malkin):

(AP) King County prosecutors filed felony charges Thursday against seven people in what a top official described as the worst case of voter-registration fraud in state history, while the organization they worked for agreed to keep a better eye on its employees and pay $25,000 to defray costs of the investigation.

The seven submitted about 1,800 registration cards last fall on behalf of the liberal Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which had hired them at $8 an hour to sign people up to vote, according to charging documents filed in Superior Court.

The video buys into the whitewash that only low-level employees were involved. The national track record of ACORN would indicate otherwise.

Other than the AP article excerpted, there has been almost no national coverage of this story. A New York Times search on "Washington ACORN" shows nothing recent. The same keyword search at the Washington Post? Only the AP story, with no indication that it made the Post's print edition. This Google News search on the same keywords shows that the AP story received relatively little play, especially outside of Washington State.

Wait a minute ..... wasn't the Evergreen State the site of a hotly contested gubernatorial election with serious allegations of vote fraud in 2004?

Well, sports fans, the tale of the threatening global warming e-mail message took an interesting turn Friday morning when a representative from the American Council on Renewable Energy sent a message to yours truly containing a response from ACORE President Michael T. Eckhart.

As NewsBusters reported here and here, Eckhart sent the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Dr. Marlo Lewis an e-mail message on July 13 threatening to ruin his career as a result of their differences over whether man is responsible for warming the planet.

On July 15, Eckhart posted an explanation for his actions at ACORE's blog, and ACORE representative Tom Weirich has asked me to present its contents for your review.

As it turns out, Lewis had already published a response to Eckhart at CEI's blog on July 24. This included the text of an e-mail message from Eckhart to CEI President Fred Smith in which Eckhart admitted saying to Smith, "I [will] give you 90 days to show that CEI is reversing its position on [global warming], or I will take every action I can think of to shut you down."

Before we get there, here are some of the key points made by Eckhart (emphasis added throughout):

The Washington Post 2008 campaign blog "The Trail" has an update on Cleavage-gate, a minor row that seems to have caught the paper's fashion critic Robin Givhan with a dear-in-the-headlights look while giving New York's junior senator a change to perk up her campaign's finances. [Update: Tim Graham has an excellent take on the matter, coming at it from a different angle than I did here. It's a good read. Check it out.]

As the Post's Howard Kurtz and Anne E. Kornblut note, Givhan protests that she:

...would never say the column was about a body part... It was about a style of dress. People have gone down the road of saying, 'I can't believe you're writing about her breasts.' I wasn't writing about her breasts. I was writing about her neckline.

No matter. Kurtz and Kornblut note that Hillary's acolytes are using Givhan's July 20 article to push-up fundraising:

Do you ever wonder how "a single mother of two from Atlanta" who earns the minimum wage has the dough to plunk down for travel to Washington, D.C., lodging, and child care to attend a left-wing rally? I sure do. But then, it can't be that difficult when you're a professional victim for a left-wing group.

Washington Post reporter Xinyun Yang quoted one Irene Cole of Atlanta, Ga., at the close of his July 25 article "Democrats Cheer Wage Hike." "From $5.15 to $5.85 -- that's... a big raise, and we do thank you," Yang quoted Cole, who attended yesterday's "rally of union and activist groups on Capitol Hill."

Haven't I heard Cole's name before? Oh yeah, I have. It cropped up in January when I wrote about ABC's biased treatment of the minimum wage for the MRC's Business & Media Institute. Reporter Dean Reynolds cited Cole in his report on the January 10 "World News."

After reviewing that story, I realized two things. First, Cole misled the Post's Yang. She earns at least $6-an-hour (when she's working for private employers), and secondly, Cole is no stranger to whipping up crowds at liberal activist rallies (no word how much she's paid or compensated for expenses for her activist work):

Over at Time's "Swampland" blog yesterday, journalist Joe Klein all but suggested the GOP candidates might be hoping to chicken out of the upcoming YouTube debate on September 17, given the leftward slant of the YouTube questions.

Given the generally irreverent and, well, liberal tone of the questions last night--and the general skew of the YouTube audience leeward, do you think it's possible that some of the Republican candidates are having second thoughts about participating in their version of the CNN/YouTube debate on September 17?

And might there be an Ailes gremlin whispering to the candidates: The Dems stiffed us at Fox. You can stiff CNN.

I'm glad Klein agrees with us that the agenda of questions on Monday skewed heavily left-of-center, but where he's off-base is suggesting that Republicans should also be pushed from the left in the debate format.

The Chicago Tribune's Frank James thinks the Democrats really need to stop this insistence on retreat... from the word liberal. In short, James wrote at the paper's "The Swamp" blog today, if Democrats don't hunker down and fight Republicans on the dreaded L-word, the GOP will keep moving on and make "progressive" an epithet as well.

Here's James' argument, portions in bold are my emphasis:

Filling in on July 17 for Keith Olbermann, MSNBC's Alison Stewart devoted a "Countdown" segment to criticizing the dress Wendy Vitter wore during a July 16 news conference in which her husband, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), admitted to an affair with a prostitute.

With "Fashion Ho-Pas?" emblazoned on-screen (pictured at right), Stewart interviewed Radar Online's Jeff Bercovici, who snarked that Vitter's sartorial choice could mark "a complete reversal of the laws of skankery." [Video (1:37): Real (2.54 MB) and Windows (2.90MB), plus MP3 audio (753 kB)]

Olbermann returned to his program's hosting duties the next day and also hosted the July 19 program before turning over the helm yet again to Stewart for his July 20 show*, despite having had three days to become aware of the "ho-pas" segment, take disciplinary action against Stewart, and make her issue an apology. Olbermann either saw the light or felt the heat over the weekend, apparently, as he issued an apology about one-third of the way through his July 23 program (h/t Ian Schwartz):

He's a "burly man" with "rhetorical punch" from Catholic, blue collar roots in Baltimore who trekked a "remarkable rise" to become "one of Maryland's most powerful public officials." But today former state senator Thomas Bromwell (D-Md.) finds himself facing a judge and entering a guilty plea in a federal racketeering case that's been years in the marking. Reporting the story, the Washington Post's Philip Rucker calls Bromwell's saga "one of the state's largest public corruption investigations in years." Yet nowhere in Rucker's Metro section front pager "Bromwell Says He Accepts His Fate," is any mention of the politician's party affiliation, Democratic.

Just a moment ago, radio host Rush Limbaugh was blasting the mainstream media's notion that the YouTube debates represent a revolution in American presidential debates.

Not so, says Limbaugh, at least in terms of the content of the questions asked. They're still as inane and moronic, or brilliant (in rare circumstances) as they've always been because they're the same inance, moronic, or brilliant (rare circumstances) people asking them.

Instead, Limbaugh insists, we are seeing a revolution in media technology being confused for a nascent political revolution.

Now couple that, the notion that "new voices" are being heard in the YouTube debates ,with the wild left-wing skew we've documented at NewsBusters, and you see the media's liberal bias at work in staging the 2008 election in terms of liberal issue battlegrounds.