Politico

Dylan Byers of Politico reports “Sharyl Attkisson, the Emmy-award winning CBS News investigative reporter, says that her personal and work computers have been compromised and are under investigation.”

"I can confirm that an intrusion of my computers has been under some investigation on my end for some months. But I'm not prepared to make an allegation against a specific entity today as I've been patient and methodical about this matter," Attkisson told Politico on Tuesday. She suggested it could be related to the probe of Fox reporter James Rosen:

When a reporter makes an assertion about someone else's beliefs or motivations, he or she is supposed to offer something up as evidence, say a direct quote, something that person has written, or even something someone else close to him or her has said.

Politico's Josh Gerstein offered nothing of the sort in his coverage of Eric Holder's "you can't touch me" attitude, though he provides plenty of evidence to support my characterization of Holder's outlook. Gerstein, without a shred of support, wrote the following in describing what he believes Republicans and conservatives are trying to accomplish in pursuing the myriad scandals in the Obama administration which have burst forth during the past two weeks, along with others, including but not limited to Operation Fast and Furious, which occurred during the Obama administration's first term (bolds are mine throughout this post):

In a story appearing this morning at the Politico about the Department of Justice's broad and unannounced subpoenas of the April and May 2012 personal and business phone records of reporters and editors at the Associated Press involving 20 phone lines and involving over 100 reporters and editors, James Hohmann found several "veteran prosecutors" who aren't necessarily outraged by what most members of the press and several watchdog groups have declared a blatant overreach. Instead, Hohmann summarizes their "far more measured response" as: "It’s complicated."

Hohmann utterly ignored a May 15 Washington Post story which chronicled claimed discussions between AP and government officials. Ultimately, it appears that the Obama administration's Department of Justice under Eric Holder may have only gone after AP out of spite because the wire service refused to accommodate administration requests to allow it time to crow about foiling a terrorist plot before the story gained meaningful visibility, and not because the release of the story, especially after what appears to have been an appropriate and negotiated delay, represented a genuine security risk. One obvious unanswered question is why DOJ waited, according to the AP's Mark Sherman in his original story, until "earlier this year" to obtain the phone records if it was so darned important to find out who the alleged leaker was.

Imagine that. Politico has a very negative story on our second-term president.

After over five years during which the online publication has engaged in virtual non-stop fawning over the wonders of Barack Obama -- going all the way back to shortly after its founding in January 2007, when Ben Smith found someone who described him as "frighteningly coherent" -- Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei tonight employed adjectives and described personality traits of their beloved "44" and those surrounding hime which just about anyone with eyes, meaning everyone except all too many members of the establishment press and those who have been deceived by them, has recognized for a long, long time (bolds are mine):

The latest target for gun-control activists appears to be freshman Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.). In strikingly similar articles appearing on May 1, the Washington Post hyped the “contentious political fight” over gun control, and Politico describing the “lingering controversy that continues to hover over the New Hampshire senator.”

The two articles try to portray Ayotte as at odds with the majority of Americans over the issue of expanding background checks, pushing flawed polling that show 88 percent of New Hampshire citizens supporting background checks. Neither the Post nor Politico mention that background checks already exist for the vast majority of gun purchases.

How do you know when a Democratic politician's or candidate's quote will either hurt that person or hurt President Obama (in this case, it's the latter)? When the Politico reports it, and the Associated Press avoids it.

Elizabeth Colbert Busch, who is running against former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford for the congressional seat opened up when Tim Scott was appointed to replace Jim DeMint, apparently felt the need to appeal to those who oppose ObamaCare during a debate on Monday evening. Here's what she said, according to Politico's David Nather and Darren Samuelsohn:

They must be paying by the word over at Politico. It's difficult to come up with another explanation as to why reporter Jonathan Martin would slog through about 3,100 words on an item entitled "Black pols stymied in Obama era." He could have easily summarized why this is the case in eight words: "Because Barack Obama is all about Barack Obama." Oh, he could have added a few more, namely "and everybody knows Barack Obama is all about Barack Obama."

Since he didn't limit himself, yours truly will note a few things Martin still left out, identify a few interesting points that were made, and then quote certain naive and/or inflammatory statements contained in Martin's mess.

The left's media-echo chamber just got louder. On Thursday morning in a claimed exclusive, the Politico reported that "(Former presidential adviser and campaign official David) Plouffe will appear regularly on Bloomberg Television to offer analysis and commentary on political and business issues as they impact the intersection of Wall Street, Main Street and K Street and will lend his expertise to the discussion of technology, demographic changes and crisis management."

That day at his new place of work, in response to a "kerfuffle" over errors in an academic paper which showed that, throughout history, government debt levels have held back economic growth -- errors which the authors insisted in a New York Times op-ed did not alter the fundamental validity of their conclusions, Plouffe delivered exactly what one would expect of a "former" lead Obama apparatchik:

Former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw made some serious waves last year when he spoke critically about the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.

Brokaw's at it again this year telling Politico, "[T]here was more dignity at my daughter’s junior prom."

In a 1,700-word report on conflict and office politics at the New York Times, the Politico's Dylan Byers omitted critical context about the apparent personality clash between Jill Abramson, the paper's executive editor, and Dean Baquet, its managing editor.

Byers could have remedied the situation by including these seven words at an appropriate point: "Baquet, who has a history of insubordination ..." This history is not a secret, as illustrated in the following writeup at the (I'm not kidding) New York Times in September 2006 (bolds are mine):

**UPDATE** MSNBC’s Chris Jansing and Thomas Roberts did mention the new USA Today poll on their MSNBC shows at 10:10 a.m. and 11:18 a.m respectively. However, NBC's Today, ABC's Good Morning America and CBS This Morning did not mention the new poll.

For conservatives out there, this probably will come as no surprise; support for additional federal gun control legislation has fallen below 50 percent.  In a new USA Today poll released on April 23, only 49 percent of Americans support Congress passing a new gun-control law, with 45 percent opposing.

This new poll marks a six percentage point drop from an early April NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showing 55 percent support for stricter gun laws.  That number was even lower than the 61 percent of Americans who favored stricter gun-control laws in February. Keep in mind as well that in early April in a Gallup poll, only 4 percent thought gun control was the "most important problem" on the country's plate.

On Friday, Matt Sheffield and Bob Owens and other conservative bloggers spread the news that Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sent pro-Obama tweets out on Election Night, retweeting one that said "Barack you my dawg" and hailing how “america is impervious to the f--kery #justforthisoneday.”

Speaking of impervious, Politico reporter Josh Gerstein reported on Monday that "The Boston Marathon bombing suspects’ geopolitical leanings are still largely a mystery, and so is their American political outlook, after a review of records in this city where they lived for the last several years."

Add Anna Palmer and her blinkered editors at Politico to this week's outbreak of Fort Hood amnesia. In a piece on how the Boston bombings would affect the political scene, she asked, "Where does this leave Obama’s record on terror?" She answered herself: "President Barack Obama no longer has an unblemished record in stopping domestic terrorism."

To the Obama voters at Politico it all begins and ends at Zero Dark Thirty, and no one there can seem to have the memory of a certain terrorist mass shooting that killed 13 and wounded 30:

Proving once again that MSNBC is less of a cable news channel and more of a platform for liberal activism, the “Morning Joe” crew today lashed out at members of the U.S. Senate who decided to vote against a gun bill backed by President Obama.

Taking his cue from the fiery and petulant speech the president delivered yesterday, self-described conservative Republican Joe Scarborough lashed out at the “pathetic” vote. His co-host Mika Brzezinski was even more hateful, repeatedly denouncing the senators who voted to support the NRA’s position on the bill as “cowards.” She then ordered producers for the show to put the names and faces of these senators on wanted-style posters in attempt to anger viewers against them.

Martin O’Malley’s One Maryland is a fairy tale, and Politico’s Alexander Burns and Burgess Everett are the Brothers Grimm. 

In another Politico puff piece Burns, aided by “transportation reporter” Everett, uncritically report O’Malley spin as fact.  

Burns and Everett overly indulge and perpetuate O’Malley’s pragmatism fetish.  O’Malley paints himself as a results oriented politician, and the reporters uncritically accept it.

Any time you see an establishment press reporter fail to use quotation marks in characterizing something said by a subject of his or her report, be on the lookout for misdirection, misinterpretation, and downright distortion, especially if the person is a conservative or Republican. A story at Politico by Donovan Slack early this afternoon about the reactions of House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to President Obama's budget is a case in point. Slack pretended that Boehner said something he simply did not say.

Slack wrote: "House Speaker John Boehner hit President Obama's budget for failing to cut enough spending while Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed it as 'just another left-wing wish list.'" Slack didn't quote Boehner. Boehner didn't come anywhere close to saying what Slack claims he said, as seen in the complete text of the Speaker's statement (video is at the link) following the jump:

On April 8, President Obama spoke yet again on the issue of gun violence in Connecticut, only an hour away from the Newtown massacre. NBC, ABC, and CBS all ran stories on this speech. While the media have continually attacked the gun industry and promoted stricter gun control than even the administration, they conveniently ignored new tax plans being implemented and proposed in five different states. 

These taxes will raise the price on guns and ammo, punishing law-abiding citizens for their gun ownership, and ultimately make it harder to exercise Second Amendment rights. 

Fox News reporter Jana Winter may serve six months in jail for refusing to disclose to a court two anonymous sources from a story she broke on July 25, 2012, related to alleged Aurora, Colorado theater shooter James Holmes.

Mackenzie Weinger of Politico has the details and notes that, at least thus far, it seems only Fox News has shown concern over a journalist being squeezed to break the confidence of her sources (emphases mine):

As the media predictably gush and fawn over the thought of Hillary Clinton as president, there's something extremely obvious they've been missing.

Rather surprisingly, Roger Simon, the perilously liberal chief political columnist at Politico, asked the $64 million question on CNN's Reliable Sources Sunday, "How good a job did she really do as Secretary of State?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

I guess Byron Tau thought he had to make it look like Big Labor is really, really mad at President Barack Obama and the White House so he could make Obama look like he's a moderate on economic and fiscal issues. Thus his Sunday morning post's headline: "Labor targets Obama over proposed benefit cuts."

Of course, they aren't "cuts" at all, though they are being portrayed as such. All Obama has done, according to information which appears to have been conveniently leaked (perhaps in hopes of killing the idea) to the New York Times ahead of his very late President's Budget, is "propose a new inflation formula that would have the effect of reducing cost-of-living payments for Social Security benefits, though with financial protections for low-income and very old beneficiaries, administration officials said." Despite the weakly descriptive language at the Times, monthly Social Security and other checks would continue to increase under the proposal each year inflation occurs -- just not by as much.

As of about 4:30 p.m., a search at the Politico on "Hillary Clinton" (in quotes) returned about 20 results -- for April alone. While a few of the results are teases for longer items, that's out-of-control coverage of someone who officially left government weeks ago.

The reasons for the obsession, of course, are to try to convince Mrs. Clinton to run for president in 2016 and to clear the field of other Democrats who might think that a strong presidential resume does not consist of 25 years of playing the good wife for a political and behavioral scoundrel, eight years as senator from a state in which she never live until the year she first ran for election, and four years as Secretary of State which ended in "What difference does it make?" after four Americans died in Benghazi on her watch. The lastest Politico offering from Maggie Haberman indicates that we can expect the website's obsession to continue indefinitely, because they think, or want us to think, that "average Americans" are just as obsessed:

Politico's "About" page consists of two rotating graphics: One says: "More reporters. Better coverage." The other: "A distinctive brand of journalism driving the conversation."

It's hard to make a case that Politico's coverage is "better" (than what -- the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press? That would be setting the bar pretty low). And while it is distinctive, the web site should replace the "c" in "distinctive" with a "k." In one example of stinky distinctiveness, Katie Glueck spent four paragraphs smearing the NRA by inference in a story about evidence found at the home of Newtown, Connecticut mass murderer Adam Lanza and his mother Nancy before recognizing the NRA's response that neither person was ever a member of the organization (bolds are mine throughout this post:

At the Politico, Darren Samuelsohn reports that "The public has largely tuned out the Democrats’ repeated warnings about ... (what will happen) if the sequester cuts stay in place." He also notes in a separate report that Republicans "Republicans are winning the sequester wars," and that "even the White House admits there’s little chance of reversing all the cuts."

Of course, what's in question here mostly aren't "cuts" at all, but reductions in projected spending increases, as pollster Scott Rasmussen explained in his note accompanying a recent poll his organization did on the topic:

So, Politico jumped the shark on gay marriage yesterday in reporting that Justice Elena Kagan that she had a ‘gotcha’ moment during yesterday’s hearings on the Defense of Marriage Act.

But a real ‘gotcha’ moment would have been if Politico did their homework and resurrected Kagan’s past comments about gay marriage from 2009, when she was awaiting confirmation to the post of solicitor general and she insisted in the answer to a questionnaire that “there is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage.”

In Elena Kagan's DOMA 'Gotcha' Moment, Jennifer Epstein and Josh Gerstein gushed that: