Blogs

A Politico reporter has suggested that racism was behind Neil Munro's questioning of President Obama at the White House yesterday.  Saying "it's very, very difficult to place race outside of this context," the Politico's Joe Williams claimed racially-motivated direspect of PBO is part of a pattern among conservatives, citing Rep. Joe Wilson, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, and the Tea Party.

Williams made his remarks in the course of responding to a question from Michael Eric Dyson, subbing for Ed Schultz on MSNBC last night.  View the video after the jump.

Sister Margaret Farley probably would have had Sally Quinn's respect when she endorsed same-sex marriage in her 2006 book Just Love, which has recently been denounced by the Vatican as unsuitable for use in Catholic theological or moral instruction due to its various departures from Church teaching.

But by golly, it's the Church's rebuke of Farley's defense of masturbation that Quinn thinks is her ticket to convincing her audience that the Church has lost its mind. From her June 7 On Faith blog post "Fifty Shades of Catholicism" (emphases mine):

Friday evening, Madison, Wisconsin blogger Ann Althouse reported receiving (HT Instapundit) an "Incredibly creepy mail today from the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund." She has a put up an image of what she received with names and addresses redacted (except for her name). It's a list which includes Althouse and many of her neighbors indicating who has and hasn't voted in the last two elections.

Unsurprisingly, the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund is the political fundraising arm of the Greater Wisconsin Committee, both of which lean very left. Both support the effort to recall Badger State Governor Scott Walker. Both appear likely to get a virtually free pass from the establishment press. Althouse's reaction follows the jump:

"Some religious leaders are struggling with President Obama’s support for gay marriage but not the Rev. Jesse Jackson," gushed frequent MSNBC contributor Toure noted in the opening line of his May 17 Time.com "Ideas" blog post as he introduced how he "spoke to the Reverend [Jesse Jackson] about the impact of Obama’s announcement among blacks and the wider community of the faithful."

It goes without saying that the interview was a game of softball in which Toure helpfully lobbed easy questions over the plate to drive home for readers, but particularly those who may be African-American Christians who typically vote Democratic, that it would be great if they could evolve to where President Obama has on same-sex marriage, a "civil rights" and "discrimination" issue.

Hours after New York blogger Christian Browne wrote on his blog, “The New York Conservative,” that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be quickly executed, Google shut down his blog, which was hosted on Google's free Blogger service.

While the blog – including the post that appears to have triggered its deletion – have since been restored, the circumstances of its deletion by Google remain murky – and raise a serious issue both for Google and for conservatives who use the web to spread conservative ideas and messages.

President Barack Obama's allegedly "historic" support for same-sex "marriage" apparently has "prehistoric" roots -- at least as "history" is seen by the establishment press, which has acted as if all relevant history relating to Barack Obama began with his 2004 Democratic convention speech.

A Friday Los Angeles Times puff piece ("President Obama's influence on gay marriage will be tested") on the potential impact of President Barack Obama's decision to publicly support same-sex "marriage" -- supposedly for the first time -- caused blogger and longtime LAT nemesis Patterico to remind readers that Obama was a proponent of same-sex marriage without qualification during those "prehistoric" times -- in 1996 (links are in original):

CBS anchor Gayle King, an admitted friend of Michelle Obama and a donor to Mr. Obama's reelection campaign, trumpeted the President's record during an interview with Nicholas Ballasy of The Daily Caller on Saturday: "President Obama has done everything that he said he was going to do, and I think people keep forgetting that....if you ask me, I think President Obama is doing a very good job."

Ballasy, an alumnus of the MRC's CNSNews.com, caught up with King after the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner. The CBS This Morning anchor listed several areas where the chief executive apparently kept his promises: "He talked about health care. He talked about Osama bin Laden. He talked about 'don't ask, don't tell.' He's done everything that he said he was doing to do." Of course, the President also promised to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center for terror suspects during the 2008 campaign, but broke that pledge in 2011.

Per her bio, Gail Collins at the New York Times "joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page." So she was hanging with the Old Gray Lady in 2003.

The columnist's presence at the paper that year is quite relevant. You see, Ms. Collins has brought up the 1983 story of Seamus, the Mitt Romney family Irish setter, who the presumptive GOP presidential nominee put "into a dog carrier on the roof of his station wagon for a 12-hour trip to Ontario," on dozens of occasions in her Times column in the almost five years since the story first appeared. Yet during those five years, it seems she has never recognized (and if she has, she certainly has not been chastened by) the existence an exceptionally positive dog-related Romney story printed in her employer's own paper on July 8, 2003. It follows the jump (underlines are mine; presented in full for fair use and discussion purposes):

A year ago in March, an Investor's Business Daily editorial ("America's Enemies Don't Want U.S. Drilling") informed readers that "the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington put out a Twitter post expressing disappointment that the documentary 'Gasland' didn't win an Academy Award." Specifically: "Sadly, 'Gasland' didn't win an Oscar, because a Vzlan helped make it," Venezuela's Twitterer whined." IBD went on to note that "Gasland" had "a Venezuelan production assistant, Irene Yibirin, who ... (has) ties to the (Chavez) government's Foundation National Cinematheque. ... [O]n the site, she praised Chavez."

Why is this relevant? Well, as another IBD editorial on Thursday noted, EPA Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz, who became deservedly infamous last week when his public articulation of his "Crucify Them" philosophy towards enforcement of environmental laws and regulations in a speech a year ago was exposed, really loves the film, which industry officials have shown is riddled with deceptions and outright falsehoods. Not only that, he was also involved in making it:

The willingness of the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, to cover for Democratic Party flubs, crimes, and scandals is something to behold. On Sunday, the wire service's Gary D. Robertson (pictured from a recent YouTube video) opened his coverage of North Carolina's Democratic Party executive director Jay Parmley with the following sentence: "The executive director of the North Carolina Democratic Party has resigned amid concern among party activists about high turnover at the party headquarters and harassment allegations there." Yeah, that "turnover" had to be a much bigger problem than those harassment allegations.

Gosh, the coverage two days earlier by Matt Boyle at the Daily Caller "somehow" had nothing to say about "turnover." But Boyle did name names and cite other specifics, with which the AP's Robertson, in his terse, five-paragraph "I guess I have to do this but I'm not going to like it" piece, never bothered:

In covering GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's appearance at the annual National Rifle Association convention in St. Louis yesterday, Associated Press aka Adminstration's Press reporter Charles Babington pretended to know nothing about President Barack Obama's opposition to basic Second Amendment rights. At least I hope he was pretending, because Obama's hostility to the right to keep and bear arms is longstanding, well-known, and did not stop when he swore an oath to "protect and defend the Constitution" on January 20, 2009.

I have excerpted Babington's first four paragraphs plus three others. I will follow that with a rundown of Obama's pre-2008 gun-hostile record, his meeting with the Brady group in May 2011, and this "little" thing called Operation Fast and Furious Babington and his establishment media colleagues have mostly deliberately ignored for well over a year (bolds are mine throughout this post; HT to a frequent emailer):

Jury selection in the trial of two-time Democratic Party presidential candidate and John Kerry's Democratic Party running mate in the 2004 election John Edwards began on Thursday. In the related five-paragraph Associated Press story, Michael Biesecker actually identified Edwards as a Democrat in his fourth of his five paragraphs.

That's not a stellar performance (a Republican or conservative in the kind of trouble Edwards is in would have his or her party identified in either the headline, the first paragraph, or both), but at least the party label is present. As blogger extraordinaire Doug Ross noted earlier this evening, in an 1,800-word item at the Atlantic on Wednesday ("Why the John Edwards Trial Is a Bigger Deal Than You Think"), author and undisclosed former Democratic candidate for statewide office Hampton Dellinger failed to name Edwards's party at all, while figuring out a way to tag something or someone "Republican" five times. Here are the opportunities studiously avoided in his treatise only relating to variations on the word "president" (bolded by me):

Less than two weeks after his suspension for previous intemperate tweets was lifted, CNN's Roland Martin was engaging in personally insulting "mis-tweetment" again this afternoon with PJ Media's David Steinberg.

In a series of tweets at around 5 p.m. tonight seen after the jump, Steinberg criticized Martin for spending so much time on the press's Trayvon Martin obsession -- where one person tragically died -- while ignoring the impact and meaning of the documents leaked by an unnamed Department of Justice official relating to the Fast and Furious "gunwalking" scandal -- as a result of which "at least 300 Mexicans, plus at least two American law enforcement agents" have been killed. Martin's responses were immature, insulting, condescending -- and all too typical of a press corps which, now that it is seeing poll results it doesn't like, has in certain cases taken to calling voters stupid.

The New York Times told us about three weeks ago that "there's little President Obama" can do about the current pump price of gas. Since then, it has become a well-established media meme. Poor guy.

Well, not really. Four years ago, another U.S. president did something which caused the barrel price of oil to drop by over $6, and the press spent the rest of the day trying to pretend that the drop had nothing to do with his actions -- and almost succeeded. What follows is from my related NewsBusters post on July 15, 2008 ("Oil Drops Over $6 a Barrel; I Wonder Why?"):

Jon Meacham has come down with a particularly virulent strain of Limbaugh Derangement Syndrome that is bringing him to the brink of insanity. How else could one explain the Time magazine writer hailing an anti-Limbaugh speech as "timeless"  just like Jesus's Sermon on the Mount or Lincoln's Gettysburg Address?

Yes, I kid you not, he really went there, and in a Time.com "Ideas" blog post nonetheless (emphasis mine):

In Tuesday's New York Times print edition, supposed in-house conservative David Brooks ended his column bemoaning how the Republican base (nicknamed "wingers," who are "Republicans on the extreme") is ruining the "mainstream" Grand Old Party by violating a Godwin's Law corollary, namely (rephrased for columnists) that whoever inappropriately alludes to the Nazi era in German automatically fails to make his point effectively.

Brooks's final bark: "First they went after the Rockefeller Republicans, but I was not a Rockefeller Republican. Then they went after the compassionate conservatives, but I was not a compassionate conservative. Then they went after the mainstream conservatives, and there was no one left to speak for me." Yep, he's trying to claim he's to the right of George W. Bush, but that he's not sufficiently pure enough for today's "wingers." Sure, David.

On Thursday, over 40 hours after the Pacific Institute's Peter Gleick (pictured here) revealed that he stole documents from the Heartland Institute by posing as one of that organization's board members, Seth Borenstein at the Associated Press finally broke the ice and filed a related three-paragraph "this is boring, you don't need to read it" dispatch. Two hours later, the AP science writer extended it to 500-plus words, but kept the headline as uninformative as possible -- "Scientist admits taking, leaking think-tank papers."

The "clever" failure to describe Gleick as a "climate scientist" (which he is) will dissuade many of those who see the headline from clicking through or reading further. By contrast, the headline at Borenstein's report on February 16 after Gleick (whom Borenstein did not name) disseminated the documents was: "INFLUENCE GAME: Leaks show group's climate efforts." In his longer item, Borenstein (or is it now "Boring-stein," Seth?) posits the howler that what Gleick did "mirrors" the Climategate email revelations which occurred in late 2009 and 2011. In your dreams, pal. The initial item plus excerpts from the longer one are after the jump.

During his first hour today, Rush mentioned the reaction of Peter King at Sports illustrated in King's "Monday Morning Quarterback" collection to a paragraph in the magazine's cover story on Jeremy Lin, the New York Knicks' point guard who has broken through from obscurity to phenom during the past two weeks. What King wrote is indeed an interesting giveaway of what I believe is a common but unsupportable media perspective, namely that students at and graduates of elite upper-echelon universities like those in the Ivy League are presumptively free of overt racism, because, well, they're all so enlightened.

Uh, no. As Pablo S. Torre reveals in said cover story:

“The Signal” blog at Yahoo!  is grabbing attention for a very, very early prediction: “With fewer than nine months to go before Election Day, The Signal predicts that Barack Obama will win the presidential contest with 303 electoral votes to the Republican nominee's 235. How do we know? We don't, of course.” What an eye-grabbing gimmick this is. That doesn’t stop some people from posting headlines like “Yahoo economists: Obama reelection's in the bag.”

Remember that Yahoo! is not only a major news site, it's now allied with ABC News. Why the Obama happy talk? A quick look at the curriculum vitae posted at Yahoo! by one of the prognosticators in the byline, David Rothschild, has a list of Democratic credentials, including an internship in the Clinton White House:

It seems media outlets only care about reporting on Planned Parenthood when its funding is threatened. When that happens, the liberal press goes ballistic.

When cancer charity Susan G. Komen for the Cure cut funding to Planned Parenthood, the abortion mill reacted swiftly, with a press release that rallied its allies in the media to create a ruckus about losing more than $600,000 in funding. The liberal media echo chamber began ringing with howls of rage that the cancer charity would dare to say no to funding the abortion giant. Strangely, the three broadcast networks seemed to have difficulty locating Komen supporters to interview.

Liberals have always cartooned conservatives as the ones who would say "America, love it or leave it." But with Barack Obama in the White House, they want the Obama critics to go back to Africa. Or at least that's what "Hunter" wrote on the Daily Kos on Wednesday night.

"This won't be a particularly insightful post, mainly because I'm just tired of these people and wish they would go away, or secede,' he wrote. Although it was one long run-on sentence: "...or whatever it is they need to do to separate themselves from the rest of modern society and live out their lily-white no-immigrant no-Muslims no-athiests [sic] no-gay-people no-liberals no-moderates no-funny-dressers Talibanesque fantasies about how a country should be run (tip: land in Somalia is very, very cheap these days)." The target was Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback:

While the liberal news media has been making much of an out-of-context snapshot of Gov. Jan Brewer (R-Ariz.) supposedly dressing down President Obama, missing in all the discussion is the exchange in context as could be provided by video footage of the chat.

The Washington Post's 44 Blog has such raw video -- via the Associated Press -- in a post this afternoon. Unfortunately much of the conversation between Brewer and Obama is obscured by the presidential limo, but initial footage from another camera angle shows Brewer warmly greeted the nation's chief executive as he stepped onto the tarmac. [video follows page break]