John Podesta

Jason Mattera of Human Events recently confronted Democratic congressman Barney Frank over all the ethics violations he has been accused of in his time on Capitol Hill:

Jason also confronted John Podesta of the Center for American Progress over his hiring of Van Jones. (video below the fold)

On This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, December 13, during the show’s Roundtable segment, liberal blogger Arianna Huffington argued that the war in Afghanistan is "the gold standard of a dumb war, immoral and unnecessary," during a discussion of President Obama’s recent speech at West Point announcing that he would send more troops to Afghanistan, and his speech in Oslo accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.

Huffington also criticized fellow liberal panel member John Podesta -- a former Clinton administration member who is now president of the Center for American Progress -- charging that, "You now sound like George Bush," after Podesta explained President Obama’s rationale for sending more troops into Afghanistan.

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the December 13 This Week on ABC:

The Best Censorship Weapon of All

UPDATE: Nationally syndicated radio talk show host Mark Levin read this piece in nearly its entirety last night.  His on-air stylings can be found here.

 

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced a new "Chief Diversity Officer," communications attorney Mark Lloyd.   

But Doctor of Jurisprudence Lloyd is far more than merely a communications attorney.  He was at one time a Senior Fellow at the uber-liberal Center for American Progress (CAP), for whom he co-wrote a June 2007 report entitled "The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio."

Which rails against the fact that the American people overwhelmingly prefer to listen to conservative (and Christian) talk radio rather than the liberal alternative, and suggests ways the federal government can remedy this free-market created "problem."

• Restore local and national caps on the ownership of commercial radio stations.
• Ensure greater local accountability over radio licensing.
• Require commercial owners who fail to abide by enforceable public interest obligations to pay a fee to support public broadcasting.

These last two get perilously close to the use of "localism" to silence conservative (and Christian) radio stations, about which we have been warning for quite some time. 

As Newsbusters has been covering for nearly a year, ABC developed and heavily promoted a nightmare "documentary" of our future (unless we listen to the einironmentalists). The Business & Media Institute's Dan Gainor watched "Earth 2100" when it aired last night:

ABC’s “Earth 2100” tried to tell the story of the future but ended up a documentary about the present. The global warming Armageddon-fest tried to scold and scare Americans into changing habits to prevent the deadly end. Instead, it told a tale of just how far journalism has descended from neutrality to bias to outright propaganda. That’s what host Bob Woodruff called “a different kind of journalism.”

The program focused most on the fictional character “Lucy” who he used to tell his equally fictional tale of the future. Immediately after viewers met Lucy, the first real human they saw other than Woodruff was John Podesta, president and CEO of the lefty-wing think tank Center for American Progress. Podesta also headed up the Obama transition team.

Since Earth 2100 was a two-hour, left-wing, Obama commercial complete with an early talking head appearance by the president, Podesta was an appropriate choice. But not so appropriate that he actually appeared in that part of the transcript, which ABC posted to go with its massive Web effort for the show. ABC had to add him in after the transcripts were completed. Apparently, the Obama connection wasn’t clear enough before that.

"Controversial." "Onerous." "Ideologically offensive."  These are the words used by Washington Post reporters Ceci Connolly and R. Jeffrey Smith to describe the pro-life policies of President George W. Bush.  The liberal slam came in an article about some of the early actions President-elect Obama will take when he is inaugurated next year.

"Obama Positioned to Quickly Reverse Bush Actions" was carried in the November 9 edition of the Post.  The story revealed that Obama is "now consulting with liberal advocacy groups" in order to create a hit list of "the most onerous or ideologically offensive" regulatory and policy initiatives of the Bush administration.  Two of the top three initiatives singled out in the Post's story are pro-life: embryonic stem cell research and abortion funding. The other is global warming.

A former member of the Clinton administration, and current Senior Fellow at the virtual Clinton think tank the Center for American Progress, claimed Monday that global warming might have played a factor in the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis last week.

I kid you not.

Writing at Climate Progress, the global warming blog of CAP, Joseph Romm - who served as Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy in 1997 and as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary from 1995 though 1998 - stated in a piece amazingly entitled "Did Climate Change Contribute To The Minneapolis Bridge Collapse?" (emphasis added throughout):