George Soros is a superhero along the lines of Batman and Superman? That's the comparison correspondent John Berman made on Thursday's "Good Morning America." The ABC journalist was reporting on a closed door meeting of billionaires that included liberals such as Soros, Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss charitable giving, leading ABC to feature a graphic with Turner as Superman and Winfrey as Wonder Woman. [audio for download here]

 

And while well known arch-liberal Soros, financier of groups such as Moveon.org, wasn't featured in the silly illustration, he was discussed in the piece, with no mention of his hard-left positions. (Billionaire/Mayor Michael Bloomberg was relegated to being portrayed as a lesser hero, Aquaman.) Soros, who once compared the Bush administration to Nazis, was simply referred to this way: "Together with others in the meeting, including George Soros, Ted Turner, David Rockefeller, they're worth more than $125 billion."

For over six months, bankers, traders, financial institution employees, and anybody in any way associated with Wall Street have been eviscerated by the media as greedy, lying crooks.

Considering this, and how shortly after his inauguration, President Barack Obama said this isn't the time for people to be worried about profits, one has to wonder what kind of reaction the left and their media minions will have towards George Soros's declaration that he's "having a very good crisis."

The following shocking revelation was reported Wednesday by Britain's Daily Mail in an article astoundingly titled "'I'm Having a Very Good Crisis,' says Soros as Hedge Fund Managers Make Billions Off Recession":

The liberal media isn't going to spell out exactly how it goes about smearing conservatives, so Bill O'Reilly helpfully explained it last night on "The O'Reilly Factor."

Boiled down it goes like this: George Soros (and others) fund one of the left's most prominent noise machines, Media Matters for America, which distorts statements made by conservatives and then urges reporters to provide saturation coverage of such statements as proof conservatives are hypocritical and sinister.

In his "talking points" segment, O'Reilly references the Obama administration's strategy of attempting to marginalize its most vocal opponent, radio talk show giant Rush Limbaugh (video available at YouTube): 

BILL O'REILLY: The Limbaugh-Obama controversy is thankfully just about over, but the far-left smear machine that propelled it to our attention is just getting started.

A George Soros-funded political action group has created a new advertisement bashing Republicans for having the nerve to pay attention to conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

For those unfamiliar, Americans United for Change is the far-left organization that brought a bus featuring videos of United States' soldiers being killed in Iraq to last August's Democratic National Convention.

They're also responsible for ads created in 2005 which aided in blocking Social Security reform.

Now they're urging citizens to "Tell Republicans that Americans Won't Take NO for an Answer" (embedded video and transcript below the fold):

In one of her first official decisions since being confirmed as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton on Monday appointed a special envoy on climate change who is currently a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

As NewsBusters reported in June 2007, CAP is led by former President Clinton's Chief of Staff John Podesta, and the list of all those involved reads like a Clinton administration Who's Who.

Not feeling the need to keep this secret, Hillary actually bragged to a group of liberal bloggers in October 2007 that she helped create the organization.

Now, according to the Associated Press, she has appointed someone from this institution to a newly-created post within the State Department:

The mainstream media is going through another one of their meltdown moments as they rush to defend Barack Obama from his relationship with American terrorists William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. (plural)

John Stephenson of Newsbusters detailed CNN's supposed fact check that came in response to a speech that Sarah Palin gave. In that speech Palin did the job the mainstream media refuses to do by mentioning the words terrorists, relationships and Barack Obama in a single sentence while referring to the former Weather Underground leaders.

In rushing to Barack Obama's defense CNN slipped the following into the end of their fact check: 

The McCain campaign did not respond Saturday to a request for elaboration on Palin's use of the plural "terrorists."

Well excuse me, but why should they? If CNN doesn't know that Bernardine Dohrn was a leader of the Weather Underground while they were bombing federal buildings and police stations why should the McCain campaign give CNN the legitimacy of a real news organization by providing a response?

Was George Soros behind the publication of Scott McClellan's book? Meredith Vieira had the perfect opportunity this morning to find out—but chose to punt. The Today co-anchor certainly had the time: her much-touted exclusive interview with the author of What Happened ranged over the show's first two half-hours. But even when McClellan himself put the issue on the table—citing his publisher by name and alluding to its philosophy—Vieira failed to pursue a line of questioning that could have put matters in an explosive new light.

As MRC's Brent Baker has detailed, McClellan's publisher, PublicAffairs:

is part of the Perseus Books Group, which also owns Nation Books, “a project of The Nation Institute” which publishes the magazine of the same name, and Vanguard Press, whose home page now features The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, a new book by Vincent Bugliosi that “presents a tight, meticulously researched legal case that puts George W. Bush on trial in an American courtroom for the murder of nearly 4,000 American soldiers fighting the war in Iraq.”

Baker also notes that PublicAffairs is the publisher of no fewer than six books by Soros himself, and that McClellan's editor, Peter Osnos, who acknowledges having "worked very closely" with the author, is a liberal pundit in his own right.

Finally, Little Green Footballs has documented that there are several Perseus companies that actually include "Soros" as part of their name, as in Perseus-Soros Management, LLC.

Put it all together, and there's every reason to wonder whether Soros isn't behind McClellan's manifesto. But given the golden opportunity to pursue the matter, Meredith chose to move on. Here's the relevant exchange, which came during the second half-hour of this morning's Today.

Peter Osnos, who wrote Wednesday that he “worked very closely” with Scott McClellan on McClellan's new book published by PublicAffairs which Osnos founded, is a liberal whose publishing house is affiliated with the far-left The Nation magazine and the publisher of The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. PublicAffairs has a roster of authors who are nearly all liberals and/or liberal-leaning mainstream media figures, including six books by far-left bank-roller George Soros. On Wednesday's CBS Evening News, Ari Fleischer related that “Scott told me that his editor did 'tweak,' in Scott's word, a lot of the writing, especially in the last few months.” In an “Eat the Press” blog entry Wednesday, Rachel Sklar asked Osnos: “Did you work directly on the book with McClellan? (Who was his editor?)” Osnos replied: “The editor was Lisa Kaufman and yes, I worked very closely with them.”

We've seen it over and over, people in Europe who imagine that they should be allowed to vote U.S. presidential elections. Some of these people imagine that they should have a voice in our elections because, they say, America is so supremely powerful that the man who becomes our president makes decisions that will impact the entire world. Now some far left think tanks and foundations have created a so-called "non-partisan" website called "Dear American Voter" for foreigners to make videos aimed at letting Americans know how they feel about our elections.

Obviously I don't want to beat around the bush (no pun intended) about who I think should be allowed to elect an American president. The Constitution wasn't made to cover the entire world so this is OUR election. No true American should give a flying fig what a foreigner says about our elections. Period.

So, what is their deal, anyway? Well, here is what they say about their mission:

If you're a believer in the Larry Kudlow creed, that "free-market capitalism is the best path to prosperity," then look out, because George Soros is going to make you cringe.

A May 13 USA Today article by David J. Lynch profiled the Hungarian billionaire who said he sees traditional free market theory as "flawed."

"Of course, real life never matches up exactly with the theory's assumptions. But they represent, economists say, a useful way of making sense of a complex world," Lynch wrote.

"To Soros, the conventional approach is rubbish. Instead of a world of near-identical actors, coolly assessing their economic interests and acting with clear-eyed precision, he sees a world (and markets) governed by passion, bias and self-reinforcing errors," Lynch wrote. "Because fallible human beings are both involved in, and trying to make sense of, this world, they inevitably make mistakes. Those mistakes then feed on themselves in ‘reflexive' ways that, when taken to extremes, result in situations such as the now-deflating U.S. housing bubble."

David Brock, the president and CEO of the George Soros-funded character assassination factory, Media Matters for America (MM), which euphemistically describes its mission as “comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media,” isn’t even pretending to be nonpartisan or fair anymore. Brock has assumed the chairmanship of Progressive Media USA (PMUSA) and in that role will spearhead “a four-month, $40 million media campaign centered on attacks on Sen. John McCain,” the Politico reports. “We’re a little behind where we need to be,” Brock said last week of the fledgling group’s fundraising following a Manhattan meeting with Soros, the left-wing philanthropist, and Paul Begala, the ubiquitous TV talking head and longtime Democratic Party operative.

Not too many commentators seem to have noticed that George Soros is slowly but surely becoming the mainstream media that is the focus of the analysis we do at NewsBusters. The liberal billionaire-turned-philanthropist has been buying up media properties for years in order to drive home his message to the American public that they are too materialistic, too wasteful, too selfish, and too stupid to decide for themselves how to run their own lives.

(h/t Moe Lane/RedState)

Liberal blogger Molly Priesmeyer may have bitten off a bit more than she can chew with a blog mocking Republican presidential candidate John McCain for his false teeth. Of course, commenters on her blog have noted that McCain's teeth were smashed out by North Vietnamese tormentors, but Priesmeyer's entry at Minnesota Monitor remains online although it obviously is in poor taste:

If bloggers are saying one thing about John McCain this week it's that the 71-year-old has some serious grit. Of course, that grit comes in the form of McCain Mouth, a deformity that apparently causes teeth to look like a mess of yellowed and contorted Chiclets. Today, BuzzFeed.com has picked up on the mouth meme, turning McCain's piano-key chompers into an official phenomenon.

The consensus? "They're old." And, "He looks like Reverend Kane from Poltergeist II." And, "Dude has had a ton of plastic surgery, can't he afford a dentist?"

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey noted today that Minnesota Monitor is funded by left-wing megamillionaire George Soros:

The newest update to a study published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, claims that 655,000 Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invaded Iraq. This absurd claim has been hailed around the world as evidence of the evil American empire's murderous reign in the Mid East. But it turns out that the entire study is not only filled with lies, the creators of the study even tried to hide the fact that George Soros funded the thing.

MSM sources like the AP and the Washington Post, among many others, highlighted the report lending it credence when it came out last month but few of those news outlets revealed the source of the study's funding. While most did reveal that the study was "controversial," few went into just how far off from the truth the details of this study are.

The real facts, however, are beginning to come out.

NewsBusters readers should recall that in September, as many in Congress condemned the "General Betray Us" advertisement placed in the New York Times by George Soros's MoveOn.org, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said on the Senate floor:

Now, all of America understands MoveOn.org and other groups like it are called the nutroots of our society. These people are nuts and they don't care who they hurt, they don't care who they smear they don't care who they libel.

On Wednesday, during a conference call with bloggers, Hatch once again lashed out at these far-left leaning entities that are unduly influencing Democrats in order to block key legislation concerning FISA (27-minute audio available here):

Through the pessimistically, penumbrous pen of Parag Khanna, the New York Times has declared that the U.S.A. is finished. Yes, we have lost our "global hegemony" and we will find that by 2016, "America’s standing in the world remains in steady decline." Boy, it looks bad the for the good 'ol U.S. of A., as far as the Times is concerned. My guess is that the news of our demise is being greatly exaggerated.

So, who is this Parag Khanna to whom the Times has given all this space? Well, he's a "senior research fellow in the American Strategy Program of the New America Foundation" and guess who this organization is linked with? You guessed it: George Soros. Jonathan Soros, son of George Soros is one of those listed on the "Leadership council." In fact, the larger portion of the Board members and other associates are journalists and left leaning activists. With a few token and so-called right leaning folks -- like Francis Fukuyama and Christine Todd Whitman, neither of whom are conservatives -- the Board of directors also sports such well-known names as the leftie Google king Eric Schmidt and Bernard L. Schwartz, the man responsible for transferring restricted technology to China during Clinton's lamentable years in office.

No wonder Khanna thinks the U.S.A. is finished, look who he hangs out with!

CNN’s Jack Cafferty, on Wednesday’s "The Situation Room," unsurprisingly heralded the study by the Center for Public Integrity that Bush Administration officials made hundreds of false statements in the lead-up to the Iraq war. He did not mention, however, the Center’s funding by various left-wing individuals and foundations, most notably George Soros.

Cafferty, who commented on the study during his regular "Cafferty File" segment eight minutes into the 4 pm Eastern hour of the CNN program, bluntly referred to the supposed "false statements" made by these officials as "lies." He also repeated a line from the study that the "lies" "were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses." With that last phrase, one cannot doubt the political leanings of these "nonprofit journalism groups," as Cafferty referred to them.

Billionaire investor George Soros called for more government monitoring and involvement in markets in an interview on CNBC January 23.

"Now we really have to reconsider the whole policy, which has been in my opinion misplaced, of relying on the markets to police themselves," Soros told Maria Bartiromo in Davos, Switzerland, "to recognize the risks. And there are risks which it is the job of the authorities to control, and the authorities have abdicated their responsibilities. So did the rating agencies."

Soros slammed the government for "not taking the right steps in dealing with" what he called upset financial markets. "[T]he authorities ought to move into the market makers, look at the books and make sure that the bad risks are recognized and reassure the markets that the main actors, the banks that are too big to fail, will not fail, that they will in fact be bailed out the same way as Northern Rock was bailed out even if that means wiping out the shareholders or greatly reducing their benefits."

The left-wing Center for Public Integrity has put together a database allegedly proving the Bush administration lied about WMDs in Iraq, and the New York Times joined the rest of the media in celebrating it with left-wing talking points that sound like they came straight off a press release.

The humdrum headline over John Cushman Jr.'s Wednesday story ("Web Site Assembles U.S. Prewar Claims") hid some deep bias.

For one, the Times failed to pin an ideological label on the organization and made no mention of CPI's ties to the left-wing billionaire George Soros, which funds the organization through his Open Society Institute.

For the rest, well, simply read the encouraging prose and references to Watergate.

Video update posted below.

Well, the AP has done it again. They have given us leftist propaganda and painted it as news. This time they have published the results of a "study" that claims that "Bush lied" in the run-up to Iraq and somehow the AP forgot to mention that the organization that released this study was funded by extreme leftist George Soros, who has spent billions funding the Democrat Party and many far left think tank and advocacy organizations. Yeah, THAT study is going to be legitimate!

This one may as well have been just a reprint of the press release of the Soros-funded Center for Public Integrity, but the AP dressed it up as an actual story written by reporter Douglass K. Daniel. Headlined "Study: False statements preceded war," the AP reveals how, "A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks."