Blogs

Mild-mannered Minnesotan Tim Pawlenty may have his own Rev. Wright, Salon.com's Justin Elliott sensationally alerted readers of the War Room blog Thursday morning.

The reason, Elliott argues: the former Minnesota governor's preacher believes in manmade global warming and wants a liberal immigration reform policy enacted into law:

What is Daily Kos full of? Many things, of course, but this past week one correct answer to that question would have been "advice for conservatives." One Kossack suggested that if Republicans want to win in 2012, they'll have to adopt Newt Gingrich's Meet the Press position on Paul Ryan's Medicare reforms. Another asserted that GOPers ought to profusely thank President Obama for not destroying them when he had the chance.
 
As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym.

In her May 20 Moderator's View blog post at "On Faith," entitled "May 21, 2011: Not the end of the world," Washington Post's Sally Quinn at one point describes a belief in the "end times" as one held by "a large segment of Christians."

But that's kind of like saying "a large segment of Hindus believe in reincarnation."

In October of last year, the far-left blog ThinkProgress alleged - with exactly zero evidence - that the Chamber of Commerce was illegally using money collected from foreign corporations to fund its American political activities. The charge was breathlessly repeated by major media outlets, including the New York Times and MSNBC.

Well it turns out that the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the organization that runs ThinkProgress, itself takes money from foreign sources.

Surely CAPAF has adequate controls in place to prevent money acquired from foreign donors from being funneled into its electioneering activities (right?), but it was ThinkProgress itself that mere months ago was demanding that the Chamber reveal its own inner workings to hostile political observers to prove such constraints existed. A number of media personalities, most notably MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Ed Schultz and the folks at the New York Times editorial board, were happy to play along with the baseless smear campaign.

Imagine if the Bush 43 administration had decided to exclude a newspaper's reporters from full access to presidential events--regardless of the ostensible reason. Does anyone believe that the New York Times or Associated Press would have ignored the story?

Well, in a thoroughly predictable but nonetheless sad development, that is what has happened since the Boston Herald's Hillary Chabot reported that "The White House Press Office has refused to give the Boston Herald full access to President Obama’s Boston fund-raiser today, in e-mails objecting to the newspaper’s front page placement of a Mitt Romney op-ed, saying pool reporters are chosen based on whether they cover the news 'fairly.'" Lachlan Markay relayed Chabot's item at NewsBusters yesterday, and also chronicled several previous examples of White House mistreatment, maltreatment, and abuse of disfavored media members.

A search of the Associated Press's main site late this morning on "Boston Herald" (without quotes) returned nothing relevant, as seen after the jump:

Even some liberal journalists are rolling their eyes at the Obama campaign's dopey move to sell campaign merchandise emblazoned with the president's birth certificate.

Time's Adam Sorensen scoffed that the "Birtherism Death Watch [Has] Jumped the Shark" in a May 18 Swampland blog post:

According to Time's Michael Grunwald, it was insane for Florida Governor Rick Scott (R) to reject $2.4 billion for a Tampa-Orlando high-speed rail project.

And yet in the same Swampland blog post he confessed that a similar high-speed rail project going forward in California is dubious at best and that Scott's rejection of the pork project means that the money is now broken up to aid rail upgrades in other parts of the country where there's actually substantial ridership already.

Of course Grunwald gave no credit to Scott but rather to Obama for redistributing the rail money (emphasis mine):

Denizens of the Daily Kos were delighted Monday by a more-than-6,300-word rant by an abortionist from Texas bylined "Beket." The headline was "Extreme Religion Stops a Thinking Brain -- and Kills Women and Teenage Girls." Naturally, it was "One of the best diaries I have read on DKos," wrote one thrilled commenter. "Well-written. Well-thought out." 

Dr. "Beket" began: "I am a proud, even defiant, abortion provider...First, let me assure you that it is not that I love embryos and fetuses less, but that I love women and teenage girls more – although I must confess that I really have no love, nor any feeling at all, for insentient embryos and fetuses in the wombs of women and teenage girls who do not want them there." The people who call themselves "pro-life," he insisted, were "religious extremists" and deluded, psychotic torturers and murderers:

In his May 2 Swampland blog post "Osama Gone, and Now...", Time's Joe Klein makes some arguably contradictory assertions in his thoughts on the role former President Bush played in ultimately finding and killing Osama bin Laden:

The pastor who preached the Easter sermon that Barack Obama heard this past Sunday is not another Jeremiah Wright, Time's Amy Sullivan insists in an April 29 blog "Swampland" blog post entitled "Conservatives Go After Another Obama Pastor."

Sullivan was responding to the complaints of conservative talkers Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, who highlighted some controversial remarks Smith made to a college audience last year:

Are you a Christian who also is supportive of Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan? Then you'd best repent of your sin and be renew your mind with the social gospel.

That's the pronouncement of liberal theologian Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite in an April 18 post at the Washington Post/Newsweek "On Faith" website.

Brooks Thistlethwaite -- who previously hit Tea Party conservatives as tribalistic -- apparently believes that politically conservative Christians are trying to serve two masters, Jesus and Ayn Rand (emphasis mine):

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

That could accurately describe Republicans' relationship to the liberal media on budget matters.

While the mainstream media often raise a clamor about GOP plans to cut back on arts funding -- see this article from yesterday's Washington Post -- it seems any move to do the opposite will also face scorn.

Take ABCNews.com's "The Blotter" and its take on Rep. John Mica's (R-Fla.) proposal to expand funding the National Art Gallery:

What has become of today's liberalism that makes it acceptable to attack the mentally handicapped if they or their parents are conservatives?

Consider the following disgraceful posting about Trig Palin published at the left-leaning website Wonkette Monday:

As part of its effort to "shore up" the backing of social conservatives, House Republicans today "issued a contract today to pay former Solicitor General Paul Clement $575 an hour, up to $500,000 to defend the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act," San Francisco Chronicle's Carolyn Lochhead insisted in the paper's Politics Blog.

"Republicans claim they will take the money out of the Justice Department's budget, as if that will hold taxpayers harmless. But a cost is a cost and taxpayers will pay it either way. Any funds removed from DOJ are funds removed from other work," Lochhead groused.

This from the same reporter who approved of Obama's fiscal year 2012 budget proposal as "centrist."

This past week's big story in Kosland was the midweek shift in tone in posts about President Obama. Before Wednesday's budget speech, Kossacks portrayed Obama as a wimp, a Reaganite, and worse. After the speech, he was their savvy, aggressive, progressive hero.

Meanwhile, conservatives were presented as greedy racists. That's a tone that never shifts on Daily Kos. 

President Obama is "Mr. Prudent," a grown-up heralding "deficit sanity" in a Washington gone mad with "delusional" Republican plans for draconian budget cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy.

That's the predictable leftist talking point-laden take that Time magazine's Joe Klein had after listening to President Obama's hectoring lecture yesterday at George Washington University (emphasis mine):

A freelance blogger on Tuesday filed a class action lawsuit against Arianna Huffington for $105 million. The suit alleges that the Huffington Post's legion of unpaid bloggers are entitled to one third of the revenue from the site's sale to AOL in February.

Jonathan Tasini, who filed the lawsuit, compared Huffington to a "robber baron" in a blog post on Tuesday, and called her site a "blogger plantation - where her slaves work to build her fortune."

Tasini's hard-left perspective came through in his complaint (students of Marx will no doubt recognize his labor theory of value):

Clearly annoyed with conservative moves to cut the federal budget and, I suppose, with the success of conservative voters and the gun rights lobby, USA Today religion writer Cathy Lynn Grossman penned an odd entry entitled "Budget battles: Granny, get your gun," excerpted in full below:

On Friday afternoon, Time magazine religion reporter Amy Sullivan briefly blogged her complaint about what she sees as hypocrisy from conservatives who oppose federal monies for Planned Parenthood but support federal support for faith-based initiatives.

"Money is Fungible," blared her April 8 Swampland headline. Well, "[o]bviously," she agreed, then carped that:

"Evangelical Liberty University received half a billion dollars in federal aid money: One conservative college got more government cash than NPR last year."

That's the misleading headline for Alex Pareene's April 5 War Room blog post at Salon.com.

Adding insult to inaccuracy, Pareene slandered the late Jerry Falwell -- without a link to corroborating evidence -- as an apartheid supporter and bigot (h/t Matt Cover):

Burning a copy of the Koran is morally equivalent to flying a plane into the World Trade Center and equally eternally damnable.

That's essentially the fatwa of Time magazine's Joe Klein in an April 1 blog post at the magazine's Swampland blog.

Klein was condemning Florida pastor Terry Jones's "trial" and subsequent burning of a Koran which allegedly have sparked a murderous rampage against UN workers in Afghanistan last week:

[T]here should be no confusion about this: Jones's act was murderous as any suicide bomber's. If there is a hell, he's just guaranteed himself an afterlifetime membership.

One has to wonder if Klein would say the same thing about a taxpayer-funded artist who photographed a crucifix soaked in a jar of urine or portrayed the Virgin Mary in elephant dung.

The great thing about being a enviro-evangelist blogger in the United States is the moral high ground it gives you from which to condemn people who fall short of your ecological credentials.

Take Bryan Walsh, the blogger behind Time magazine's Ecocentric blog. Walsh took GoDaddy.com CEO Bob Parsons for hunting down an elephant in Zimbabwe that was a threat to a village's crops.

In an April 4 post, Walsh set out to convince readers that hunting elephants, even when done as a defensive measure to save a village's crops, is illegitimate.

Of course, that's easy to say from the climate-controlled comfort of a New York magazine office, so Walsh reserved the bulk of his ire not for the villagers or the Zimbabwean government but for Parsons, who apparently made a politically incorrect choice with his own money:

A best-selling book recounting a four-year-old child's claims to have briefly visited Heaven while under anesthesia for an appendectomy has "On Faith" contributor Susan Jacoby on a tear.

"There really is such a thing as American exceptionalism: we are more gullible than the public in the rest of the developed world," Jacoby groused in a March 30 "The Spirited Atheist" post, part of the "On Faith" website jointly operated by the Washington Post and Newsweek:

Question: What happens when you put Joe Biden, Florida Senator Bill Nelson, and Orlando Sentinel Reporter Scott Powers together in the house of a rich Democratic donor?

Answer: They don't stay together for long, as reported in a Drudge flash late this afternoon (also carried at the PJ Tatler, whose time stamp is about 45 minutes later after adjusting for its West Coast location):

Staffers with Vice President Joe Biden confined an Orlando Sentinel reporter in a closet this week to keep him from mingling with high-powered guests gathered for a Democratic fundraiser.

The leftist atheists at the Daily Kos really know how to write headlines. Take this one: Thank god for evolution!: Religion may become extinct. The blogger with the byline Rosieeriter was delighted on Tuesday with a BBC story that says religion may become extinct in nine European countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland. (And another said 65 percent of Brits checked "not religious" in a poll.) This suggests the brave new front for Christian missionaries ought to be Europe and Australia. The Kosmonaut declared about the forthcoming (alleged) death of faith: 

Probably won't happen in our lifetime, but that religion is losing favor gives me hope for evolving humanity. Religion is man made not god made. I believe religion has caused more separation and harm to humans than almost anything else...

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.

As we've noted time and again, "On Faith" -- a Washington Post/Newsweek-run religion news and discussion website -- is biased against, if not outright hostile to traditional religious belief, particularly traditional Christian theology.

This weekend's "Discussion" section topic provided more evidence of that.

Examining the controversy over Michigan pastor Rob Bell's book "Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived," editor Sally Quinn asked her panelists, "In this life (and, perhaps, the next) why does what we think about the afterlife matter?"

In their answers, all but one panelist attacked the traditional Christian doctrine of eternal punishment of the wicked, with at least two arguing that a belief in Hell engenders violence and abuse.

Twitter and other social networks have provided social scientists with unprecedented means of measuring human interaction. As it turns out, that fact has implications for the media bias debate.

In a study to be released next month, three Duke University researchers rank politicians and other public figures by political ideology as measured by a formula that incorporates whom they follow on Twitter, and who follows them. "The results dovetailed with ideological ranking systems based on the politicians’ voting records," the New York Times reported on Monday.

If the study is accurate, it demonstrates just how liberal some of America's most prominent journalists really are. Check below the break for some key findings concerning on the not-so-neutral news media.

UPDATE AT END OF POST: Tennessee state assemblyman buys the lie!

If you frequent liberal blogs, you were likely under the impression this weekend that Minnesota state Republicans were trying to make it illegal for the poor to carry more than $20 in their pockets or handbags.

Fortunately the Left has someone in its ranks interested in exposing lies rather than spreading them:

Leading the free world is highly overrated and so last century.

Just ask Time's Joe Klein, who is giddy that our European allies and the Arab League took a leading role in setting up a no-fly zone over Libya, some 31 days after Muammar al-Qadhafi started opening fire upon ragtag rebels.

From a March 18 entry entitled "Gaddafi Duck" at the magazine's Swampland blog: