Daily Kos

It wasn't that long ago that the left considered this November's election a mere formality on the road to Barack Obama's coronation as president. They loved posting poll after poll showing Obama winning by huge margins. Oh, how they gloated about the massive loss John McCain was sure to suffer. Well, the polls have changed and now the latest USA Today/Gallup poll shows quite a different result:

WASHINGTON — The Republican National Convention has given John McCain and his party a significant boost, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken over the weekend shows, as running mate Sarah Palin helps close an "enthusiasm gap" that has dogged the GOP all year.

McCain leads Democrat Barack Obama by 50%-46% among registered voters, the Republican's biggest advantage since January and a turnaround from the USA TODAY poll taken just before the convention opened in St. Paul. Then, he lagged by 7 percentage points.

The convention bounce has helped not only McCain but also attitudes toward Republican congressional candidates and the GOP in general.

A new whisper campaign is forming in the blogosphere and creeping into web search engines across the internet as a self proclaimed e-zine called "LA Progressive" is spreading a false rumor that Sarah Palin called Barack Obama 'Sambo' while dining in an Alaska restaurant. Charley James, the author of the article that is unlikely to have his blogspot site shut down for Obama bias, also claims through 'anonymous sources' that Palin called Hillary Clinton a "b#^@h" in the same breath. It is getting pretty desperate out there.

Here are the opening paragraphs from Alaskans Speak (In A Frightened Whisper): Palin Is “Racist, Sexist, Vindictive, And Mean” (emphasis mine, src. Michelle Malkin):

As I reported earlier, the scurrilous claim that McCain vice presidential pick Governor Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy with a Down's Syndrome child is beginning to spread among the lowest of the nutrooters. Now, the unhinged, smear site DemocraticUnderground.com has boosted this lie to their front pages. Naturally, since these hate sites feed into each other, the spurious source of the DU story is another DailyKos story like the one I earlier reported upon.

Of course, this whole meme is nothing but a lie. Are we expected to believe an entire state, its hospitals, doctors and media establishment helped cover up this pregnancy story? And they all did this for a Republican, to boot? It makes little logical sense to believe a word of this black helicopter conspiracy theory. Next thing we know, the Kossacks and DUers are going to expect us to believe that Big Foot and some gray aliens were the attendants at the birth!

Taking a look at the stories in the Old Media will show that the Media is turning attack dog ASAP on McCain's choice for vice president, Sarah Palin. Notice the main meme is her supposed "inexperience." Funny how Palin was the VP pick for about 15 seconds before the Old Media went after her "inexperience" while they have yet to hit Barry Obama on HIS inexperience at all and he's been running for president since 2004. We should also note that Palin didn't get the honeymoon that Biden got when his announcement was made. But, the worst is yet to come and the Daily Kos is doing its level best to mine the lowest of lows. In a Kos diary today, it is being alleged that Sarah Palin "faked" the pregnancy of her last child, a baby born with Down's Syndrome. The claim is that it was her teenaged daughter's child, not hers. And, true to form, the Kossacks took that absurd calumny and hate even further in the comments.

With all the pseudo gravity the Kos diarist could muster, this ridiculous story of a "cover-up" was floated for the foolish Kossacks to lap up. Inky99 gave us the scurrilous diary headlined "Palin's faked 'pregnancy'? Covering for teen daughter?," in which the Kossacks posit that Governor Palin covered up her own teenage daughter's teen pregnancy by pretending it is her own child instead of her daughter's.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann made his support for Barack Obama even clearer Thursday when moments after the junior senator from Illinois accepted his party's nomination as president, the "Countdown" host assailed an Associated Press writer for having the nerve to not be as enthralled with the Messiah's address as he was.

In Olbermann's crosshairs on this occasion was Charles Babington who penned an article that largely mirrored the opinions offered on Fox News by liberal contributors Juan Williams and Nina Easton: the speech was short on specifics.

This didn't sit well with Olbermann who said the following (video embedded right) :

NBC News has responded to John McCain's protest concerning biased election coverage by giving one of the most left-leaning members of the media -- a host from the ultra-liberal radio network Air America -- her own prime time program on MSNBC.

Honestly, how much further to the left can this network go?

While you ponder, this is what the New York Times reported just a few hours ago (h/t TVNewser via Hot Air):

As my colleague D.S. Hube reported, Andrea Mitchell on Sunday's "Meet the Press" suggested the Obama campaign felt John McCain "may not have been in the cone of silence" during Saturday's Saddleback Civil Forum, "and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were."

Although she claimed this was being "[put] out privately" by Obama's people, CNN is now reporting that his campaign is "not pursuing whether McCain heard any of the other questions," and that they're "assuming McCain had the same information they did."

So where did Mitchell get this idea from? Might it have been a Daily Kos blog posted at 9:22 PM PDT Saturday entitled "McCain cheated? proof he knew the questions ahead of time":

Yesterday, in a stinging indictment of his Old Media colleagues' la-la-la treatment of the story of John Edwards's affair with Rielle Hunter, Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten asserted that Edwards "may have ended his public life but he certainly ratified an end to the era in which traditional media set the agenda for national political journalism."

I'll get to Rutten's mostly perceptive points in a bit.

That's because recent developments indicate that Edwards may still be believe he can eventually re-enter public life, and they are relevant to Rutten's assertion:

Want to know just how beholden Democrats are to the ultra-left members of their Party?

Well, consider that Elizabeth Edwards actually posted an apology for her husband's affair -- as well as her own complicity in hiding it from people that were working for and supporting his presidential campaign -- at the extreme-left website Daily Kos.

Imagine that.

Here are some highlights (emphasis added, h/t Lee Stranahan, photo courtesy Washington Post):

Profanity, those taboo words banned from the broadcast airwaves, is a feature of many people's daily lives. It's much less so in the establishment media world. TV and radio broadcasts are legally prohibited from using it, most newspapers have traditionally refrained from its usage.

That's not the case with the Web, where bloggers and readers face no such restrictions. That likely comes as no surprise; what may be surprising, however, is to what degree profanity seems to be a feature more common on one side of the political blogosphere than the other.

Which side is that? For answers, I turned to the search engine Google to see how common swearing is in the right and left blog universes by looking up the late stand-up comic George Carlin's "seven dirty words" in the most popular blog communities.

The results showed that online liberals tend to use profanity a lot more than online conservatives.

It appears something else that isn't tolerated at the ultra-left-leaning website Daily Kos is too much discussion about the extra-marital sexual escapades of Democrats the Netroots hold in high esteem.

At least, this appears to be the case given Saturday's banning of Lee Stranahan, a liberal blogger and video producer who's been writing diaries at DKos since at least April 2007, and has had his work featured at the Huffington Post.

My colleague P.J. Gladnick referenced Stranahan's HuffPo piece about Edwards back on July 27:

NewsBusters has reported for years how the ultra-left wing website Daily Kos will publish all kinds of hateful articles about conservative politicians and figures without ever deleting or editing them.

On Sunday, it was made infinitely clear to the Kossacks that although attacks on right-leaning figures are encouraged -- even if they've just passed away, such as the recent disgraceful posts about Jesse Helms' death -- you're not allowed to say anything bad about their hero, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann.

UPDATE at end of post: Kos denies the allegations.

Although frequent DK poster The Baculum King's "Keith Olbermann Stooping to Fox's Level Now??" has been deleted, Google still has the cached version for all to see (h/t NBer Thomas Stewart, vulgarity alert):

Just as I finish a piece laughing at DailyKos for claiming that it is conservatives that feel they have to "create their own alternate reality" because of their "rigid ideology," I find a story out of The Austin American-Statesman where the DailyKos forced that paper to pull a story that had a mildly satirical take on last weekend's Netroots Nation conference in Texas. Apparently, the DailyKos folks didn't like The Austin American-Statesman's "reality" so the Kossacks flooded the paper with their insistence on creating a new one.

The original article by the Statesman's Patrick Beach knocked the nutrooters for the so-called "surprise" Gore visit, said it turned into a "faint-in," and that their general feeling was "terribly self-confirming," among other snippy comments... fun, but snippy. The general tone of the piece was that of amusement at how seriously the nutrooters took themselves. And, even more galling to said nutrooters, this story was the front page editorial of Sunday's edition. (Original, Google cached version of Beach's piece.)

This did not sit well with the nutrooters in question.

The hiring of Howard Wolfson as a political contributor to Fox News has resulted in the ritual outrage from blue blogs and Fox haters. When they aren't smearing Wolfson ("sell-out", "right-wing Zionist", etc) the alternate tactic is used: diminish Fox by lying about its influence and reach.

The preferred method for doing so is to marginalize the Fox audience. It's something you've read repeatedly: Fox viewers are "a devout congregation of true believers, incapable of critical thought". They are overwhelmingly Republican and "will not vote for Democrats".

What do all these hyperbolic squeals have in common? They all reference the same single "source", as does this one whipped up by the Daily Kos today, fulminating over Wolfson "whoring" himself:

NewsBusters readers are likely aware of my frequent appeal for civility in our comments sections due to my unwavering belief that despite political differences, when the sun sets, we're all Americans.

Such reverence should be crucial on the day someone that has tirelessly served this nation for thirty years passes away.

Apparently devoid of such human decency, the folks in the Netroots, within minutes of Friday's announcement concerning the death of Jesse Helms, began publishing virulent and vulgar epithets directed at the former senator, with some actually voicing a desire to dance on his grave.

Here are but a few examples, beginning with some truly disgusting diaries posted at Daily Kos (readers are warned that the following contains possibly offensive graphic and vulgar content, h/t LGF):

The media might not be overly concerned with presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Barack Obama's incessant campaign flip-flops, but the leader of the Netroots, Daily Kos proprietor Markos Moulitsas, is so disturbed by the junior senator's recent changes of heart that he has decided to hold back his financial contribution (file photo).

As NewsBusters has been reporting the past few weeks, this disillusionment with Obama from the ultra-left has been quite vocal of late, and growing.

However, such publicly expressed disheartenment from someone like Moulitsas, coming just weeks after Hillary Clinton's concession, could be quite a problem for the Democrat candidate that media seem to be ignoring; a Google news search identified very little coverage of Kos's 2:05PM post on Tuesday (emphasis added, h/t Hot Air):

It seems not everyone in the liberal blogosphere is smitten with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann.

Take for example Huffington Post editor Rachel Sklar who on Thursday called out the insufferably arrogant and pompous "Countdown" host for naming CBS's Katie Couric his "Worst Person in the World" previously reported by NewsBuster Brad Wilmouth:

Olbermann accused Couric of taking out of "context" comments by NBC correspondent Lee Cowan, who, as he covers the Barack Obama campaign, has said he finds it "hard to be objective," as she, not naming him, suggested he "find another line of work." Olbermann, who has attacked Hillary Clinton on several occasions while being softer on Obama, declared Cowan's reporting to be "utterly objective and accurate," and castigated Couric for "her own promulgation of the nonsense that Senator Clinton was a victim of sexism."

Sklar deliciously objected (h/t TVNewser):

CNN’s Veronica De La Cruz pulled her scoop on Thursday’s "American Morning" straight out of the left-wing blogosphere. The network’s Internet correspondent cited both the Huffington Post and the Daily Kos in her short segment on the brand-new changes on John McCain’s presidential campaign website.

De La Cruz first zeroed in on McCain’s new slogan. " His new slogan reads ‘a leader we can believe in,' 'a leader we can believe in.' If it sounds somewhat familiar, you probably know that Barack Obama always used the slogan 'change you can believe in.’" She then used an image from the Huffington Post to make her next point. "And if you take a look at this image, we are looking at this. This is found on huffingtonpost.com. You see that, when you put the two Web sites up next to each other. There's one on top, you see Barack is up there, McCain's new logo also looks similar to Barack Obama's as well."

Here's something you don't see every day: a female member of the media blaming the sexism and misogyny in the presidential campaign on liberal Democrats, liberal bloggers, and Barack Obama supporters.

Yet, that's what occurred Sunday morning when syndicated columnist Marie Cocco was invited on CNN's "Reliable Sources" to discuss the role sexism and misogyny have played in this election cycle.

Fasten those seatbelts tightly, for you're about to enter an alternate reality (picture courtesy Washington Post Writers Group):

**Shocking Image Below the Fold**

Yesterday, Barack Obama began crying again. Someone should remind him... there's no crying in politics. He has whined that we can't use his middle name, he has whined when we bring up his close relations with aging hippy terrorists, that we ask aloud about his "spiritual mentor," the racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and now he is crying that we are highlighting the anti-American statements made by his wife as she campaigns for him all across the country. So, on Monday he whined "lay off my wife." Well, fast on the heels of Obama telling us we can't use the anti-American statements of his wife as a campaign issue we get the kiddies over at the DailyKos doing their best to "help" Barack Obama by making an image of Michelle Obama hanging from a tree with robbed KKK figures torturing her with a branding iron and claiming that this is the "NEW IMPROVED" GOP strategy. So much for the subtleties and civility that Barack claims he wants, eh?

Even more damning, Kos pulled the entire post off the website, photoshopped image of Michelle as KKK victim and all. Little Green Footballs has a great screen shot of the original post, but here is the original photoshopped image:

For years, NewsBusters has reported the unfortunate incidence of vulgarity and virulence in the liberal blogosphere, as well as how some prominent politicians and left-leaning media members have expressed concern regarding how such behavior negatively reflects on the Democrat Party.

On Friday, this invective hit a new low at Daily Kos when a piece that was quickly promoted to the highly-coveted "Recommended Diaries" list had an extraordinarily deplorable title -- which will NOT be printed here for what will be obvious reasons! -- dealing with relieving oneself on the likeness of former President Ronald Reagan.

This piece of detritus is so vile (h/t NBer lumpy) I won't dishonor the former president, or my readers for that matter, by linking to it; before curiosity sends you over there to see for yourself, be forewarned to do so with an empty stomach and the understanding that you will be revolted beyond your wildest imagination.

This raises an important question:

In today's episode of "As The Left Eat Their Own," a tape of Hillary Clinton complaining after Super Tuesday that activists from MoveOn.org "flood into these caucuses and dominate them and really intimidate people who actually show up to support [her]" was published at The Huffington Post Friday.

This has set off a predictably hostile reaction from the liberal blogosphere, and was considered such a bombshell that Barack Obama-loving MSNBC actually began Friday's installment of "Verdict" with this revelation.

But, before we get there, here's the text of Hillary's remarks (audio embedded upper-right):

Recycle videos, buy used cars, eat non-Nabisco cookies, and drink microbrewery beer. These are among the highly laughable suggestions promoted at the Daily Kos as part of their proposed boycott of ABC and Disney because Barack Obama was finally asked some tough questions at Wednesday's Democrat debate in Philadelphia. It was only 23 minutes into the debate before the boycott thread was posted at the Daily Kos with the outraged title of Tomorrow We Take On ABC, and Disney. It is hard to figure out which is funnier, the boiling outrage over the fact that their blessed messiah was asked challenging questions or the incredibly lame ideas for the proposed boycott. Here is a sampling of the Kossack inadvertent comedy act:

keep watching the videos you already have. SHARE them with other parents who would otherwise buy the Disney DVD, and don't buy Disney in the future. And talk to your kids about the power of the corporate media and the RESPONSIBILITY of the consumer to use their power as a balance. Spoken as a mom of a 7, 10 and 11 yr old. Yes, I do have these crazy, nerdy conversations with my children.

I guess we shouldn't expect any sense of decorum from Kossacks, but it is pretty lame that they had to unleash their hatred only minutes after the announcement of the passing of famed American actor Charlton Heston. A Daily Kos "diarist" named doriangz started out calling Heston a "gun-nut" and ending with his life and causes being considered "political nutdouchebaggery," and the incivility just flowed like the opening of a damn from Kos posters' keyboards after that. Not much respect for a man who's film career spanned many decades, who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., and fought to uphold our Constitution.

One poster said that Heston tore into the "victims of Columbine," one Marcus Tullius said he laughed when Jerry Falwell died and that Heston's death made the world a better place. And Fairy Tale echoed that with a post that said, "Things are already getting better in America" now that Heston was dead. RandySF said that he was sorry but that he "can't think of anything nice" to say about Heston. Aqualad08 seemed to think that if there were "no guns in heaven" that would make it "hell" for Heston.

And they were just getting warmed up.

Liberal arrogance alert: In promoting his new book (and Brent Bozell's attack on it, too), leftist Eric Alterman asks his fans at the Altercation blog to travel over to Daily Kos: "If Brent is not your cup of ideological tea, I came across this smart commentary on Daily Kos, which illustrates at least one of the reasons I wanted to write the book in the first place, and so I'm pleased to see it."

In it, the Daily Kos diarist "Killer of Sacred Cows" theorizes on the differences between liberals and conservatives in a post titled Liberalism: Reclaiming the Right to Think. First and foremost, conservatives are rigid and inflexible in their ideological rules, while liberals are more fluid in their means to achieve liberal ends. Why? Because liberals are the deep thinkers, while conservatives are naive, afraid, and allergic to thinking deeply. The Kosmonaut advises: Introduce some complexity to their mental diet, because their brains are starving:

As has been noted by NewsBusters correspondents Brent Baker, Kyle Drennen, and Clay Waters, the Mainstream Media has mostly assumed an attitude of respectful awe towards Barack Obama's March 18 speech on race. That emotional awe towards Obama's speech has reached the level of mass weeping in the Leftwing blogosphere. The leftists profess to be so awestruck by that speech that it seems mass crying will soon replace the fainting attacks at future Obama appearances.

The left and the media love to hyperventilate about the right wing “hate speech” on the Internet, but the anger and vitriol of the left dwarfs that of the right, especially where female or minority bloggers are concerned. Hateful comments are not uncommon at lefty blogs like Daily Kos. That kind of hostility forces the Huffington Post to occassionally close comments on articles involving certain topics like Israel, the military or even Margaret Thatcher.

Right Wing News addressed this trend in its excellent ongoing series “Blogging While Female: 5 Conservative Women Bloggers Talk About Gender Issues and the Blogosphere.” (Pt 2 here). RWN sampled a variety of righty opinion from Michelle Malkin, Mary Katherine Ham, LaShawn Barber, Rachel Lucas and more, and they discussed experiencing misogynistic and often disturbingly aggressive comments.

Pictures of them are photoshopped into violent or sexually explicit positions, and they are stalked, online and occasionally offline. Liberals track down their addresses and phone numbers and leave obscene messages, even threaten rape. Moderate blogger Ann Althouse nailed the root of the hostility, “...people on the Left think you are evil if you don't agree with them, that you're actually a bad person” (all bold mine). 

Little Green Footballs has reported on the latest left-wing lunacy from the incredibly popular Democrat website Daily Kos, the Internet force that nearly every presidential contender sought out for support. The diarist "professorfate" thinks Americans are not only a flock of sheep, but that they need an invasion and occupation on their own soil to get their empathy and their consciousness raised: "It only took one incredibly destructive Civil War to make the United States realize that - oh well - this is really not an activity in which one wants to engage in one’s homeland - better to do it in someone else’s country." (As LGF put it, "being invaded, slaughtered, and occupied is the only way we’ll become a nation of compassionate pacifists.")

Markos "Kos" Moulitsas has bought into the latest loopy conspiracy theory spinning around the left-wing Web.: that the Hillary Clinton campaign deliberately darkened a photo of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) to make him appear darker in skin tone than he actually is.

But as Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs points out Markos and other

...morons are hyperventilating over videos they are watching via the internet, and assuming that the orangey color of Obama’s face in one video is somehow “genuine,” while the desaturated color and slightly different aspect ratio in the Clinton video is a nefarious racist plot.

That sounds about right. Here at NewsBusters, we often make basic color and contrast adjustments for video captures from network TV. If we posted photos from TV screen captures without doing so, everyone would appear darker, regardless of their race or ethnic background.

Besides, Johnson points out, following Kossack logic, the Associated Press would be playing the race card too while oddly enough the Black College Wire is making Obama whiter:

Well isn't this special?

Not only does Keith Olbermann get to attack the President of the United States on national television five nights a week, but now he's giving previews of his deplorable rants at the far-left website Daily Kos.

All likely with the blessing of MSNBC's top brass, I suppose.

After all, they're clearly not trying to hide their political leanings anymore. So, why should they care if one of their hosts speaks and writes such detritus that it evokes the following vitriolic commentary from his readers aimed at America's president (vulgarity alert, h/t NBer Thomas Stewart):