Who knew that two brave twenty-somethings and a skilled mentor constituted America's entire right wing?

That's apparently how Ian Urbina at the New York Times sees it. In a subheadline employed in a front-page article in the paper's March 20 print edition (relevant portion shown at right) but not used in the online edition's version, the reporter told readers that the poor, put-upon Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is on the brink of bankruptcy because it was "ATTACKED BY" the streamrolling monolith known at "THE RIGHT" (cue the scare music and the blood-curdling scream).

Actually, it was filmmaker James O'Keefe, his investigative partner Hannah Giles, and Andrew Breitbart, the pair's take-no-prisoners mentor. Three people, hardly "the right wing," basically did it all. What followed -- the de-fundings, the abandonments by former political and corporate friends, and now apparently its imminent financial demise -- was largely inevitable fallout from a brilliantly conceived series of stings followed by a savvily managed exposure campaign that ultimately forced holdout establishment media publications, including the Times itself, to play catch-up after days of embarrassing unprofessional silence.

Obviously, that's not how Urbina sees it, occasionally with barely concealed bitterness (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Surprise: Congressional Democrats pounce on yet another New York Times story to their liking and are swapping it among themselves "as exhibit A against Republicans."

From Michael O'Brien's Wednesday evening report from the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill (hat tip NB's Seton Motley):

Democrats are seizing on a report that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had long plotted to slow or halt Democratic priorities in Congress, planning to use it as a key piece of evidence in their case against GOP "obstructionism."

In a memo to a broad group of Democratic lawmakers, communications staff and party strategists obtained by The Hill, Democratic National Committee (DNC) Communications Director Brad Woodhouse advised using a New York Times report Wednesday on the Senate GOP leader as exhibit A against Republicans.

In David Leonhardt's latest "Economic Scene" column for the New York Times, "The Perils Of Pay Less, Get More," he reestablished his reputation as the paper's neo-liberal economic voice, admitting that at a certain point taxes hurt economic growth, but also urging Obama to break his pledge and raise taxes on everyone, not just people making over $250,000 a year, in order to cut the deficit.

Leonhardt has certainly changed his mind about Obama's tax pledge. In a huge August 2008 story for the New York Times Magazine, Leonhardt actually promoted Obama's popular campaign promise to reduce taxes for those making under $250,000, in the name of addressing "inequality":

Obama's agenda starts not with raising taxes to reduce the deficit, as Clinton's ended up doing, but with changing the tax code so that families making more than $250,000 a year pay more taxes and nearly everyone else pays less. That would begin to address inequality.

David Boies and Ted Olson, the formerly-dueling duo in the Bush-Gore 2000 recount battle now litigating for gay marriage in California, were the guests of a forum at The New York Times last week. Former Newsweek editor Charles Kaiser reflected on just how far the Times has come, so that now it is a global role model for gay-friendliness. Their news-manufacturing motto might be All the Progress That's Fit to Push:

What was even more remarkable than the spectacle of a Reagan appointee making a full-throated defense of marriage equality was the atmosphere in which this confab took place. Most of those present were gay and lesbian New Yorkers invited to the event. But in the third row sat New York Times publisher and chairman Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. , and six rows behind him was Andy Rosenthal, the editor of the Times editorial page.

Howell Raines lost his executive editor’s job at The New York Times for promoting the career of Jayson Blair, a black drug addict and fantasist who invented entire stories describing the hills of West Virginia from a saloon down the street in New York. But somehow Raines still imagines himself a media bigfoot who can pronounce on the State of Journalism, a one-man Pulitzer Prize panel. This is a little like a White House chef who poisoned an entire state-dinner crowd mounting a soapbox to lecture that the new chefs can’t be trusted.

Of course, that soapbox must be provided first. So who would give this naked man a fig leaf of respectability? The Washington Post would.

The Posties awarded Raines their marquee venue – the Sunday Outlook section -- to denounce Fox News Channel and its owner Rupert Murdoch. Announcing this was tugging at his "professional conscience" (thus suggesting he has one), Raines demanded to know "Why can't American journalists steeped in the traditional values of their profession be loud and candid about the fact that Murdoch does not belong to our team?"

Eternally optimistic New York Times pro-Obama-care reporter David Herszenhorn's Tuesday morning post managed to make the desperate proposal by House Democrats to pass a massive federal expansion of health care entitlement spending without actually voting on the legislation sound like an innocuous procedural wrinkle: “Passing Health Care Legislation, Tucked in a Rule.”

According to a plan by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the House would vote on changes to the Senate-approved bill, which would then be "deemed" to have passed the House without actually being voted on in the House.

As they push for a climactic vote on major health care legislation, House Democratic leaders face a bit of a conundrum: rank-and-file lawmakers detest the Senate-passed health care bill, and yet before the Democrats’ overall proposal becomes law, the House somehow has to find a way to approve that Senate bill.

The reason for that is simple: Democrats no longer control the 60 votes needed to stop Republican filibusters in the Senate, so passing a brand-new bill in both chambers is impossible. Instead, the House is planning to first adopt the Senate bill and then adopt a package of revisions to that bill in an expedited budget measure that cannot be filibustered and can be approved in the Senate by a simple majority.

Herszenhorn reduced the tactics of both sides to procedural maneuvers, though the idea of the House refusing to vote on such vast historic legislation would seem to at least possibly be unconstitutional. The Times doesn't even raise the possibility:

Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said Monday that Nobel Laureate Al Gore, "the world's first potential climate billionaire," is running for cover as a result of various scandals surrounding his favorite money-making theory known as manmade global warming.

"He is under siege these days," said Inhofe in a lengthy speech on the Senate floor. "The credibility of the IPCC is eroding, EPA's endangerment finding is collapsing, and belief that anthropogenic global warming is leading to catastrophe is evaporating."

"Gore seems to be drowning in a sea of his own global warming illusions," he continued. Nevertheless, he is desperately trying to keep global warming alarmism alive."

Unlike most on the Left and their media minions, Inhofe also spoke specifically about some of Gore's investments, and how the Nobel Laureate has positioned himself to amass huge profts from his climate alarmism (videos embedded below the fold with partial transcript and commentary):

As the House gears up for a final move on ObamaCare, the media are doing everything they can to pressure pro-lifers to accept federal funding for abortion while helping the Obama administration downplay what that means.

Instead of respecting the conscience of a pro-life politician, news outlets have launched an all-out campaign to blame House Democrat Bart Stupak for thwarting ObamaCare. Of course he's not pro-life, he's "anti-abortion," and he's willing to let millions of helpless Americans go without healthcare to satisfy some personal agenda.

The AP's Liz Sidoti set the tone on Saturday with a snarky, pouty article about Democrats who don't go along with what Obama wants. Gone were the days of patriotic dissent as Sidoti blamed obstructionists for trying to kill ObamaCare (h/t LiveAction):

It's a topic that would probably make the average individual's eyes glaze over, but will have a profound impact on the economy - for better or worse. The topic - financial regulation reform.

With Senate Banking Chairman Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., setting his proposal out for the public, the take away on the reporting from two of the country's major newspapers - The New York Times and Wall Street Journal can give readers a view where their reporters' loyalties lie.

On CNBC's March 15 "Squawk Box," co-host Joe Kernen raised this point - the Journal with its more pro-Wall Street point of view and the Times with a liberal pro-Democratic Party one.

"You - I like the way you highlighted the Journal's take, ‘Ohh, this thing is ahh, much worse,' but The New York Times - ‘consensus-building,'" Kernen said. "But The New York Times is talking about consensus-building within the Democratic Party, I think, right? I mean, normally that's who they're speaking to, isn't it?"

The most striking thing about Peter Baker's story at the front of the New York Times Week in Review, “Is Failure Forgivable?” is the photo illustration that takes up the entire top half of the page, a photograph taken by the Times's Damon Winter and illustrated by free-lance designer/illustrator Nola Lopez.

At first glance the symbol in the center certainly looks like a Christian cross, and the religious effect is heightened by the halo effect of the sun around Obama's head as he is giving a speech, presumably on health care. If the cross is meant as a medical symbol as used by the Red Cross (a symbol itself derived from the Christian symbol), the execution is vague and open to interpretation.

And the word “Forgivable” in the print headline is certainly a hint toward religious subtext, intentional or not, though honestly it's hard to see what the point of the photo illustration is.

Ed Morrissey has more speculation at Hot Air.

Seven of the eight Marines charged in the alleged "massacre" of 24 civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha in 2005 have been acquitted or had their charges dismissed. Yet the cover of the New York Times's Sunday Book Review is splattered with the charge that Marines at Haditha committed a "crime."

Of all the crimes that sullied the record of the United States military in Iraq -- the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the killings of 24 Iraqi men, women and children by Marines in November 2005 in Haditha -- the murder of an entire Iraqi family in the village of Yusufiya may rank as the most chilling.

Back in September, Tom Friedman, speaking of China, proclaimed that "there is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today."  That prompted Jonah Goldberg to call Friedman a "liberal fascist," drawing an example from his seminal book, Liberal Fascism, to demonstrate how Friedman's fawning over the Chi-Coms "is exactly the argument that was made by American fans of Mussolini in the 1920s."

But far from being abashed, Friedman is apparently so enamored of his formulation that he has repeated it virtually verbatim.  The Times columnist suffered another bad bout of Chi-Com envy on today's Meet The Press, guest-hosted by Tom Brokaw.

In 2009, according to financial information at nasdaq.com, the New York Times Company's revenues fell by over 17%. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company's full-time employee count shrunk by 1,681, or over 18%. Rumor has it that more layoffs are planned for 2010.

Beginning almost a year ago, the company announced corporate salary cuts of 5%, negotiated similar cuts with newspaper guild members in New York, and steeper cuts of 9% in Boston.

The company eked out full-year pre-tax earnings of roughly $23.7 million (after adding back $3.8 million in taxes to the company's reported net income of $19.9 million).

In the midst of all of this, the Journal reports that Times Company chairman "Pinch" Sulzberger's total compensation more than doubled in 2009 to roughly $6 million, and that his CEO compadre hauled in a similar amount:

“How can conservatives win the youth vote that overwhelmingly went for Barack Obama in 2008? At the Conservative Political Action Conference, apparently, some are betting on using racial stereotypes....[Author] Jason Mattera...mocked what he described, with a Chris Rock voice, as “diversity,” including, he said, college classes on 'cyber feminism' and 'what it means to be a feminist new black man.'....Offering up a slogan, he adopted the Chris Rock voice again: 'Get your government off my freedom!' Can we save our generation from Obama zombies, he asked. He answered himself by borrowing the president’s campaign slogan: 'Yes, my brothahs and sistahs. Yes we can!'” -- From a February 18 nytimes.com “Caucus” blog post by reporter Kate Zernike while covering the Conservative Political Action Conference, a post headlined “CPAC Speaker Bashes Obama, in Racial Tones.” Jason Mattera is from Brooklyn and used his own voice, not a “Chris Rock voice,” when making his anti-Obama gibes.

When former New York Times editor Howell Raines decided to attack the Fox News Channel and blame the news outlet for President Barack Obama's shortcomings, there was bound to be a response.

And delivering that response was "The O'Reilly Factor" host Bill O'Reilly, who called his show "the signature broadcast" of the network. O'Reilly dismissed Raines as a lunatic. However he was also critical of The Washington Post for giving him an outlet to trot out his ranting.

"[I] think there is a more important thing in play here," O'Reilly said. "The Washington Post has given this guy Raines a big platform on Sunday, this coming Sunday, to print this nonsense and it is nonsense. If Raines were sitting here I could carve him up and he, Raines knows it."

But O'Reilly questioned why the Post had decided to give Raines the space in its upcoming March 14 issue to rip on his network. According to O'Reilly, this was an effort to rally the media for a last stand.

Howell Raines was executive editor of the New York Times for 21 turbulent months before being forced out in June 2003, felled by the journalistic malpractice committed by a young reporter he supported, Jayson Blair, and his personal callousness and autocratic management style, as well as launching a feminist crusade against the Augusta National Golf Club (home of the Masters golf tournament) that embarrassed even fellow liberal journalists.

In retirement, the admitted "liberal to radical" Raines has settled into a Captain Ahab role against his sworn enemy, that two-headed white whale in charge of Fox News: news chief Roger Ailes and the network's owner, News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch.

Back on February 1, Raines made his first appearance in the Times since leaving with a column ostensibly about the Greensboro, NC civil rights sit-in, but also about the deviltry that is Fox News.

Today, however, there's no denying that traditional reportage of political and social trends seems almost as out of date as segregation. Surely the civil rights movement would have been hampered by the politicized, oppositional journalism that flows from Fox News and the cable talk shows. Luckily for the South, that kind of butchered news was left mostly to a few extremist newspapers in Virginia and Mississippi and to local AM radio talk shows that specialized in segregationist rants.

 

How much of a pickle is Pelosi potentially in?  Enough that Dem loyalist Charles Blow had to resort to some truly twisted reasoning to explain away her delay in responding to allegations against Eric Massa.

Of all things, the New York Times columnist tried to excuse Pelosi's failure to act by blaming . . . "our crazy misogynistic culture."  Huh?

Blow offered his odd opinion on today's Morning Joe . . .

New York Times reporter James McKinley Jr. was in Austin to cover a controversy over school curriculum in Texas, with conservatives on the state Board of Education trying to soften the liberal tone of the state's textbooks and include more records of conservative accomplishments. His Thursday story, "Texas Conservatives Seek Deeper Stamp on Texts," was positively sodden with "conservative" labels, yet he managed to ignore a radical leftist group featured in an accompanying photo.

The article included two photos accompanied by a caption (including the one above, by Jack Plunkett of Associated Press): "Diana Gomez, center, and Garrett Mize, right, and other University of Texas students rallied against conservatives at a State Board of Education meeting Wednesday in Austin, Tex. The board's chairman, Gail Lowe, left, is one of the conservatives."

Though McKinley was sufficiently attuned to get the names of Gomez and Mize, he didn't bother to identify the group they were involved with, even thought a close look at the sign Gomez was holding makes it obvious. In the bottom right corner was the phrase "MEChA." As in the "Chicano" nationalist movement MEChA, the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, translates as the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan.

The New York Times published a scathing editorial Sunday condemning Americans who have the audacity to request that attorneys who represented terrorists not set national legal policy. The Times smeared them and their elected representatives as McCarthyites, and criticized them for noting that colossal conflict of interest.

"It is not the first time that the right has tried to distract Americans from the real issues surrounding detention policy by attacking lawyers," the Times states of controversy over Attorney General Eric Holder's reluctance to inform Congress who in the Justice Department has represented alleged terrorists, and in what capacity are they now serving.

But the left has done just that -- use nominees' records as means to block their appointments -- and the Times hasn't complained. So why the sudden outrage? Well, the paper's liberal editorial board doesn't mind when the left attacks. But when conservatives demand answers, they are evil McCarthyites on a political witch hunt.

A Monday New York Times story by Stephanie Clifford gave one cheer to the National Enquirer tabloid for its work on breaking the news of former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards's affair with Rielle Hunter, and their child. It was a story the Enquirer pursued almost alone and which could earn it an unprecedented Pulitzer: "From Rumor to a Hint of Respect."

But the excuses Clifford forwarded on behalf of the rest of the media were unconvincing, especially regarding the Times's own steadfast silence on the burgeoning scandal.

By being the first and, largely, the only publication pursuing the Edwards story through his denials of the affair and of fathering a child out of wedlock, The Enquirer is under consideration for a Pulitzer Prize, and it has strong support for its bid from other journalists. The success has Mr. Levine considering opening a Washington bureau to look for more dirt among politicians.

 

Are Israeli Jews much more bigoted than their American co-religionists? An astounding 77% of American Jews voted for Barack Obama.  But according to Ethan Bronner [with a little "help" from Chris Matthews], anti-black "racism" and anti-Arab "prejudice" are significant factors accounting for PBO's unpopularity in Israel.

Bronner, Jersusalem Bureau Chief of the New York Times, floated his theory to Matthews [in Israel this week] on this afternoon's Hardball.  Asked by Matthews to rate American politicians from most to least popular in Israel, Bronner ranked them: Bill Clinton, Hillary clinton, Joe Biden, with PBO bringing up the rear.  There's no disputing that the president is wildly unpopular in Israel: recent polls there have him down in single digits.

But Israeli "prejudice" and "racism" as significant explanatory factors? Here was the exchange:

After ignoring the Tea Party movement for two months, it took the New York Times just one week to jump on the leftish "Coffee Party" in a report by Kate Zernike criticized by Times Watch and others for its gushing tone and for failing to identify the new group as a left-wing opponent of the Tea Party protesters.

By contrast, a follow up by Zernike on the front-page of the Sunday Week in Review made sure to quickly label the Coffee Party as "a leftish alternative to the Tea Party movement."

But then there's the headline over her story: "Democrats Need a Rally Monkey." Who says the Democrats "need" anything? Does the Times have a rooting interest in Democrat success?

The New York Times's City Room blog included a Friday piece on the orphaned Web site of Hiram Monserrate, a former state senator who is again running for office.  From "When Not to Accept Comments:"

Now, as many will remember, the former Queens legislator was tossed out of the State Senate in February after he was convicted of assaulting his female companion. His vacant seat will be filled in a special election on March 16 — an election in which, improbably, the disgraced Mr. Monserrate is also a candidate, on the newly formed and hopefully (or is it cynically?) named Yes We Can! line. (This proves, definitively, that you can usually find more than enough New Yorkers to take part in any crazy idea you have.)

Candidate Monserrate (Yes We Can, Queens) doesn’t have a Web site for this campaign. But a few disgruntled residents found his old site and left some less-than-friendly messages.

Old Media's fatal conceit is the belief that it's not news unless it's reported by a major newspaper, magazine, or television station. Reports from new and alternative media, in Old Media's eyes, are tainted, and not to be believed...unlike, of course, the reliable, factual, and always objective mainstream media.

NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd, at right in a file photo, has been a leading critic of what he now has dubbed "Drudge-driven journalism," perhaps better described as journalism emanating from somewhere outside of Old Media's newsrooms and television studios. "I just don't think that that's the proper way for us to decide what's news," he told Mediaite's Tommy Christopher of the Drudge Report's influence and agenda-setting ability.

"There's no worse crime in journalism these days than simply deciding something's a story because Drudge links to it," he added. Apparently he still feels that NBC and its Old Media counterparts are qualified and capable of deciding what is and is not a story.

Talk about tough love . . .

Frank Rich believes Barack Obama is approaching a "do or die moment" and that "we face the alarming prospect that his presidency could be toast" if he doesn't push ObamaCare through.  Rich's New York Times column of today, The Up-or-Down Vote on Obama’s Presidency, is a crushing compendium of criticism for a president he sees as talented but too timid.  

I'd encourage readers to read the full piece, but let's have fun with this super-condensed version of Frank's frustration-venting: