Time

The popular photo sharing website Flickr has taken down the original version of the now famous Obama Joker poster that's been sweeping the nation.

Apparently, management is concerned about a copyright infringement issue due to the appearance of the Time magazine logo in Firas Alkhateeb's parody that ended up being reprinted with the word "Socialism" at the bottom.

Oddly, a quick search of Flickr identified a number of Bush parodies with Time's logo present (vulgarity alert below the fold).

As such, one has to wonder if Flickr's decision is actually censorship. According to Read Write Web (h/t Ken Shepherd):

Time magazine’s Joe Klein complained about the legal appearance of openly-carried weapons at protests against President Obama during a segment on CNN’s Newsroom on Monday, and labeled the protests against ObamaCare as a “celebration of ignorance and misinformation.” Anchor Rick Sanchez and his other guest also falsely characterized one of the guns carried at a recent protest.

Sanchez first asked Klein about the appearance of guns at several recent protests against President Obama outside his health care town hall events or speeches: “Joe, I don’t remember people protesting against President Bush showing up with weapons. Do you?” The Time columnist answered, “No. I’ve been doing this for almost 40 years now, and I’ve never seen anything like this. There should be like a Second Amendment equivalent of the First Amendment- shouting fire in a crowded theater.”

While some in the media have been dusting off their love beads, bell-bottoms and broomstick skirts in an effort to wax nostalgic about Woodstock, the VFW has reminded its members that the world did not stop for those four days in August 1969.

In fact, for 109 American soldiers, the world ended that weekend.

VFW Magazine honored those soldiers in the August 2009 cover story, "While Woodstock Rocked, GIs Died."

Much has been made over the "half a million strong" that flocked to a dairy farm in rural New York to celebrate music and peace. Richard K. Kolb instead compared the coverage Newsweek and Time gave to the festival while shortchanging American efforts in Vietnam.

"The cruelty inherent in scaring the elderly to score political points is beyond reprehensible.... [T]he sort of scurrilous campaign they are conducting--the seditious fear-mongering that is the main staple of their public diet--is a matter of profound disrespect and incivility toward the individuals whose rights they claim to cherish."

So huffed Time magazine's Joe Klein, in an August 12 Swampland blog post seething at rumors of "death panels" being provided for in health care reform legislation before Congress. Klein expressed disgust at Republicans who would seek political advantage by scaring the elderly with inaccurate and misleading rhetoric.

But one might wonder where Klein's moral indignation was during the 1990s, when the liberal media, including Time magazine, were complicit in bolstering the Democratic meme about drastic Republican "cuts" to Medicare.

As MRC archives show, the liberal media was complicit with liberal Democrats in the 1990s in scaring seniors into fearing non-existent "cuts" to Medicare. From the July 1996 MediaWatch (emphasis mine):

On today's Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough was shocked to hear from Mark Halperin of Time and co-host Mika Brzezinski that most people in the MSM don't admit that the press is biased, and to the contrary most in the MSM see themselves as "right down the middle."

JOE SCARBOROUGH: So you're saying that most people in the mainstream media don't admit that the press is biased?

MARK HALPERIN: I don't think so.  You take a survey around the news room --

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: No, they don't admit it: I agree that.

"Shop Sold Guns to Pa., Va. Tech Shooters" blares the headline for an August 7 Associated Press story carried on Time.com.

But Time's headline for the accompanying AP story is woefully inaccurate and worse, deceptive. Pittsburgh fitness center shooter George Sodini, whom police say purchased his firearms legally, did not purchase them from online accessories dealer TGSCOM, Inc.

The same story accessed at Google has a more accurate headline,  "Pa. gunman used same Web store as Va. Tech shooter."

Here's the story as carried on Time.com:

In a one-line blog post, "Health Reform: Euthanasia and Other Rumors," Time magazine's Karen Tumulty pointed readers to a blog post at The New Republic's Web site set on "Exposing the Euthanasia Scare" that has cropped up in the debate over health care reform:

Harold Pollack dispenses with them (and their sources) here.

Tumulty failed to mention the liberal bent of either TNR or Dr. Pollack (Ph.D., not M.D.), which would have been helpful considering her terse blog post practically amounted to an unqualified stamp of approval of Pollack's August 4 item.

Albeit in kinder, gentler language, Pollack posited that opposition to socialized medicine among American senior citizens was due to racism, xenophobia, and homophobia (emphasis mine):

So how unusual is it for a new President to be featured seven times on Time’s cover, as Barack Obama has been (with First Lady Michelle Obama snagging her own solo appearance)? A look back at Time’s covers finds Bill Clinton matched Obama’s celebrity in 1993 — seven covers for himself, one for Hillary. But the last three Republican Presidents — Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush — were given relatively short shrift. (Larger images below the jump.)

Indeed, looking at the covers from when those three Republicans won the presidency through early August of their first year in office, Reagan and the two Bushes combined were only featured seven times — and it would have been only six if Reagan hadn’t been shot by an attempted assassin (April 13, 1981 cover story).

Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, more popularly known as "Rev. Ike", has gone to his reward. The 74-year old prosperity gospel huckster died on July 29 in Los Angeles.

But in covering the story, the Associated Press and the Washington Post have carelessly tarnished legitimate preachers of the Christian Gospel by association, by lumping in Eikerenkoetter with more biblically orthodox Protestant preachers as an "evangelist."

The July 30 Associated Press obituary, linked here as syndicated at Time.com, directly called "Rev. Ike" an "evangelist," while Joe Holley's July 31 obit at the Washington Post indirectly styled the religious con man as an evangelist by comparing his popularity to Billy Graham:

Claiming more followers during his heyday than any evangelist except Billy Graham, he earned an estimated million dollars a month from listeners across the hemisphere.  

But Holley's obituary makes clear "Rev. Ike" was interested not with saving souls but bringing in the sheaves of greenbacks:

Time magazine's August 10 edition with President Barack Obama on the cover (“Paging Dr. Obama”) trying to heal the nation in a photo illustration as a physician, wearing a white smock with a stethoscope around his neck, brings to seven the number of issues the magazine's cover has featured Obama just since November's election -- make that eight for the First Family if you add in June 1's genuflecting “The Meaning of Michelle.” Amongst the seven of President Obama: “Person of the Year” and Obama as FDR.

The frequent cover appearances led even Jon Stewart, a Bush-hater who was thrilled by Obama's election, to quip Thursday night on his Comedy Central show: “Time magazine is like O magazine, like Obama has to be on the cover -- it is like Oprah magazine. I think he's been on like thirty times this year.”

Well, not thirty, at least not yet, though at about once per month Time will hit thirty Obama covers well before the 2012 vote. To illustrate Time's predilection, I did some graphics work of my own and created an image displaying the eight covers since the election. Go below the jump for a larger jpg.

Time magazine's online staff certainly undermined any notion of impartiality in how they littered the posted version of this week's cover story, “Inside Bush and Cheney's Final Days,” with the links they chose to display between paragraphs and at page breaks of the article. Some were innocuous, such as “See TIME's George W. Bush covers,” “See TIME's politics covers” and “See pictures of presidential First Dogs.”

Others, however, reflected hostility and/or derision toward the two key players in the story, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, starting with “Visit RottenTomatoes.com for reviews of W., Oliver Stone's 2008 portrait of George W. Bush” and “Read 'Leahy's Plan to Probe Bush-Era Wrongdoings.'”

Plus, “See the top 10 George W. Bush YouTube moments.” The #1 video on the linked page: “Shoes Thrown at George W. Bush in Iraq.” Amongst the 15 highlighted in “See America's worst Vice Presidents,” no surprise: “Richard B. Cheney.” The “See the top 10 unfortunate political one-liners” link goes to a collection which includes George H.W. Bush's pledge to not raise taxes: “Read my lips: no new taxes.”

So what's the biggest obstacle to Mideast peace? Hamas terrorists who refuse to accept Israel has a right to exist? Perhaps the Iranian government that finances anti-Israel terror operations? Neither, according to Time's Joe Klein (shown at right in file photo), who insists in a July 20 Swampland blog post the fault lies with Israel:

Benjamin Netanyahu's phony flexibility on a two-state solution was always transparent--and it's now becoming apparent that Israel is the prime impediment to progress in the Middle East. Over the weekend, the State Department asked Israel's Ambassador Michael Oren to convey U.S. displeasure over continued Israeli settlement expansion in Jerusalem, which Netanyahu rejected out of hand.

Although Netanyahu and his coalition government won their February election -- some three months after Obama won his and just weeks after his inauguration-- fair and square, Klein makes clear he has no use for the will of the Israeli people and the decisions of their duly-elected government if and when they peeve the Obama administration:

Filmmakers, do you want to impress critics at The New York Times, Newsweek and Time Magazine, while alienating vast legions of moviegoers? Then "Humpday"  has the formula for you!

Have your two “straight” male leads have sex with each other in a video for an “experimental homemade pornography” film festival. Oh, and in order to impress those writers (whom you may run into at a Manhattan cocktail party) make sure to stress that it’s not gay and it’s not porn either. It’s art masquerading as “bromance” comedy. Don’t worry, they’ll understand that you’re critiquing straight men or straight society or our uptight Puritanical culture or something. After all, they’re smart like you.

It looks like Time Magazine’s Karen Tumulty is getting scared that we could be losing the healthcare battle so she is urging Obama to “step in” and fix it all for us. Why, only the dulcet tones of The One could save us all from… wait, isn’t this whole thing his deal in the first place?

What is curious with this piece is the fact that Tumulty seems oblivious to the possibility that if healthcare is failing to win the day, that failure could be squarely laid at the president’s feet. After all, it is his campaign promise and his “highest priority” that we tackle healthcare. Yet Tumulty, while mildly scolding Obama for not being hands on enough, is all too willing to blame everyone but Obama for the floundering of the debate.

Time magazine’s July 20 edition includes a “Ten Questions” interview with New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, and he took on hardballs from the left and right. But he was willing to admit to the left that the Times was soft on Bush before the Iraq War (“we floated along with the conventional wisdom”) but objected to suggestions that the Times isn’t patriotic (“Journalists at the Times love their country just as much as anybody else.”)

The first question out of the box slammed away at media softness on Bush:

Why do you think the press gave the Bush Administration a free pass on the misleading statements it made to get us into the war in Iraq? Randal Davis, PORTLAND, ORE.

The Washington Post called it an "orgy of praise" and an "exercise in excess." They were referring to the star-studded, mega-televised Michael Jackson memorial service in Los Angeles. It just as accurately described the supposedly serious national media’s weeks of outsized hyperbole concerning the life and death of a man who was a pop sensation, to be sure, but also highly controversial, even scandalous.

There certainly was the exercise in excess on the "news" programs. On the night of July 6, ABC, CBS, and NBC, paid twenty times more attention to Jackson (more than a week after his death) than to the deaths of seven brave soldiers in Afghanistan.

They were only tip of the excess iceberg. Jackson dominated every "Access Hollywood" and "Entertainment Tonight" show for two weeks. The memorial service aired on 19 different networks, drawing 31 million viewers. At least that exposed one piece of hype from the Jackson camp: that "a billion" global villagers would tune in.

Republicans, particularly those who are the biggest fans of Gov. Sarah Palin, are stuck in the vestiges of the 1984 "white-bread fantasy" of Reagan's "Morning in America," huffs Time magazine's Joe Klein in a July 6 Swampland blog post on "Sarah Palin's America":

All this talk about Sarah Palin's constituency being "real Americans" raises the question, yet again, of who the unreal Americans are. Last September, when the Governor burst upon the scene like a head-on collision, I wrote that Palin's America--white folks, small towns, traditional values--was a Republican fantasy, a vestige of Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" hornswoggle in the 1980s. (This fantasy was reinforced by John McCain's fetishizing of Joe the Unlicensed Plumber.)

Real America is much different from, and more interesting than, that white-bread fantasy, a problem the Republican Party--the party of immigrant bashing--will be wrestling with for the immediate future.

Klein conveniently omitted that 2008 presidential nominee Sen. John McCain was hardly an immigrant basher, heavily criticized by conservatives in the GOP for his push for amnesty for illegal immigrants. What's more, it was President Reagan who signed the last amnesty bill in 1986, another inconvenient fact that cuts against Klein suggesting Reagan was a quasi-racist xenophobe.

As if to bolster his own cosmopolitan credentials with which to better slam Gov. Palin as provincial, Klein casually dropped a reference to a party he recently attended in the Islamic Republic of Iran:

The recent midterm election drubbing of leftist legislative allies of Argentinan power couple President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and husband (and former president) Nestor Kirchner is partly thanks to the imperial designs of power-hungry former U.S. President George W. Bush and the consensus-building ethos of Barack Obama.

Or so Time magazine's Tim Padgett asserts without evidence in a June 30 piece, "Kirchner Loss a Lesson for Latin America":

Time magazine’s Michael Grunwald attempted in an article on Time’s Web site to make connections between two of the most prominent issues facing America and congress today, healthcare and energy. But he put forward a flawed argument that lacked balance and fell into the doomsday language so common in the main stream media.

“Everyone knows we use too much energy,” lamented Grunwald, “Our addiction to fossil fuels is torching the planet, empowering hostile petro-states and straining our wallets.” 

To justify his crisis language, Grunwald cited studies by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which “suggest that more than half of our energy is lost through inefficiencies, calculations that don't even include the energy we fritter away through wasteful behavior like leaving lights on or idling cars.” He failed, however, to mention that Livermore is not an unbiased source. According to its Web site, “More than 40 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers were key scientific contributors to the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which, along with former Vice President Al Gore, won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.”

The White House denied Time's Monday report that the Obamas have ended a search for a church home in the nation's capital. Here's Politico:

The White House said Monday that President Barack Obama continues "to look for a church home," and said a magazine report that he has stopped is erroneous.

White House deputy press secretary Jen Psaki said by e-mail: "The president and first family continue to look for a church home. They have enjoyed worshiping at Camp David and several other congregations over the months, and will choose a church at the time that is best for their family."

The Obamas haven't faced much questioning from the White House press corps about when they're going to make a church decision. With most presidents, this might not be a big deal, but the establishment media's reluctance surely reflects its sensitivity to Obama's political problems with choosing radical, ranting Rev. Jeremiah Wright in Chicago and staying in his church for 20 years.

Time’s Amy Sullivan, who worked tirelessly to sell Barack Obama as an acceptable choice for Bible-toting Evangelicals -- a choice that most evangelicals didn't accept -- reported Obama has refused to pick a D.C. church as his religious home. In his latest move copying George W. Bush, he’s going to designate the Evergreen Chapel at Camp David as his official church. Now go away, she insists to people still disturbed by his longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright.

She quotes Obama religion adviser Vashti McKenzie: "Everybody needs to just back off and settle down. Let him choose where he's comfortable, choose where he and his family are going to be spiritually fed, and then let it be his choice." Sullivan added her own "Amen."

Between the lines, a cynic can see all the political convenience on display: no flashy minister, and not much ministerial contact either:

For Time Magazine, Kevin O'Leary has decided that he's figured out why California is in such a budget mess. Is it because the state indulges over generous social programs, or always has some of the highest taxes in the nation, or because the denizens of its capitol in Sacramento are paragons of waste, fraud and theft? Nope. It's because California has Proposition 13, a measure that prevents state government from too easily raising taxes. Yep, O'Leary thinks California is in a mess because it doesn't have high enough taxes. And it's all Reagan's fault.

With some of the highest taxes in America, California is a hard place to make a living. According to the Tax Foundation, on average it takes a citizen 110 working days to earn enough money to pay his yearly tax bill. That is the fourth worst in the country. California consistently ranks in or near the top 10 worst states for its tax burdens from property taxes, to corporate taxes, to individual taxes and fees of all sorts. So, how can O'Leary imagine that taxes aren't high enough in California?

If beating dead horses were an Olympic event, Joe Klein would have more medals gracing his neck than Michael Phelps.

On his magazine's Swampland blog, the Time columnist returned to his latest overwrought left-wing pandering point: labeling hardliner President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the Iranian version of George W. Bush:

The protesters admire our freedom, but they are appalled--and insulted--by our neocolonialist condescension over the past 50 years. The reformers, and even some conservatives, consider Ahmadinejad the George W. Bush of Iran--a crude, unsophisticated demagogue, who puts a strong Potemkin face to the world without very much knowledge of what the rest of the world is about. This was an anology [sic] that came up in interview after interview, with reformers and conservatives alike.

Klein doesn't explicitly reference the "axis of evil" remarks  in then-President Bush's 2002 State of the Union address as an offense, although he quite probably has it in mind. Yet a review of the relevant passage from that speech shows Bush was dead-on and arguably eerily prophetic about the iron-fisted repression that the world is witness to presently on the streets of Tehran (portion in bold is my emphasis):

In the midst of his June 16 Swampland blog screed leveled against the "unhinged" Sen. John McCain for his criticism of President Obama's low-key response to the Iranian election, Time magazine's Joe Klein [shown in file photo at right] also worked in a comparison of hardliner Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's support base with former U.S. President George W. Bush's core supporters:

It is not even clear that Ahmadinejad--who has significant backing from the sort of people who support Republicans here (the elderly, the religious extremists) plus a real following among working-class Iranians--would have lost this election, if the votes had been counted fairly. (I tend to believe that they weren't counted at all, but that's just my opinion.)

Twelve days earlier, Klein more subtly made the Ahmadinejad/Bush connection in a comparison that favorably compared Iranian presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi to Bush's 2004 rival Sen. John Kerry (emphasis mine):

The second hottest item on Time.com on Tuesday morning was an article titled "Barack Obama, Stop Ruining My Marriage." Time reporter Sean Gregory’s shtick is that the President’s date nights with the First Lady are setting too high a standard for the average American husband. It begins with the obligatory compliment:

The list of reasons to admire Barack Obama is longer than Pennsylvania Avenue. But please, and I'm begging here, let's not hold him up as an exemplary husband simply because he takes his wife out on a date.

On Sunday, the New York Times did just that, with a story headlined "If They Can Find Time for a Date Night ..." The gist: If the Obamas — with Mom committed to her various causes and Dad trying to save the free world — can still find time for each other, hey, lame husband sitting on the couch watching sports, time to step it up. The writer suggests that the President has placed an "elbow in the ribs of husbands," while Jon Stewart has joked, "Take it down a notch, dude."

Time’s Nancy Gibbs has found the true home of President Obama, and it’s not Kenya or Kansas. "None of these quite fit our blender in chief, but it struck me recently that Obama does have a cultural home: he's the first President from Sesame Street."

In a gooey article titled "Tickle Me Obama" in the June 15 edition of the magazine, Gibbs giddily associates educational programming and Barack Obama as very similar concepts:

The President is every bit as much a product of the show, but it's not just his age and mastery of the alphabet that make Obama the first Sesame Street President. The Obama presidency is a wholly American fusion of optimism, enterprise and earnestness — rather like the far-fetched proposal of 40 years ago to create a TV show that would prove that educational television need not be an oxymoron.

She was thrilled that Sesame Street taught numbers and letters, but in an urban milieu with "noise and grime and grouches." Houses that were "not white, not rich" knew this show was for them:

MTV really knows how to stage the stunts that generate big publicity for their major events. In 2004, MTV produced the CBS Super Bowl halftime show where Justin Timberlake exposed Janet Jackson’s breast. In the fall of 2003, Britney Spears kissed Madonna suggestively at their Video Music Awards program. They’ve done it again with the 2009 MTV Movie Awards show. Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s dressed like an angel and his flying over the audience during the live show went badly awry. He crash-landed in the audience and ended up upside down with his bare buttocks exposed right in the face of the rapper Eminem.

The seeming perfection of this gross-out embarrassment, complete with Eminem wearing a microphone, having a swearing fit, and walking out of the theater, caused some to smell a calculated stunt. Cohen seemed to be wearing a thong so the gross-out didn’t include an upside-down whole-crotch hangout. So was it a fake? Scott Aukerman, head writer of this sorry program, admitted they staged this disaster. "That's all anyone wants to talk about, so let’s get it out of the way. They rehearsed it at dress and yes, it went as far as it did on the live show then."

Time magazine's Joe "Anonymous" Klein is at it again.

Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb yesterday picked up on how the journalist -- who as we've documented is harsher on Israel than Iran -- credited a terrorist with having a "good question" about what pressure the Obama administration will place on the Netanyahu government regarding settlements in Palestinian territories:

Joe Klein, who has in the past boldly declared himself "not a big fan" of Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, sits down with the terror group's commander in chief for an interview in the wake of Obama's speech:

The back page of this week's Time magazine is an essay by editor-at-large Nancy Gibbs on the new Gallup abortion poll. Gibbs reasonably wonders about why a majority of Americans now say they're pro-life. She even bows to the notion that the GOP's "message on abortion is closer to the mainstream than Democrats care to acknowledge."

It only verges on syrupy at the end, when Gibbs claims Obama -- on the cusp of nominating a leftist to the Supreme Court who thinks Latinas are wiser than white men -- is wishy-washy on the social issues:

You can tell Obama isn't interested in a culture war. He has left gay marriage to the states, dropped family-planning money from the stimulus bill, refused to fund needle-exchange programs and said he wants to "tamp down some of the anger" surrounding the abortion debate. He is inviting all sides to the White House to discuss ways to reduce the number of abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies.