Joe Wurzelbacher

In a heated exchange Thursday between CNN’s Zoraida Sambolin and Samuel Wurzelbacher, also known as “Joe the Plumber,” Sambolin dug up comments he made about “gay people” in 2009, causing Wurzelbacher to quip that "this is TMZ. This isn't CNN, is what you're saying."

Sambolin also questioned his qualifications to run for office, and mislabeled his liberal opponent as a "conservative Democrat" while branding Wurzelbacher as a "conservative Republican."  [Video below the break.]

Joe the Plumber was certainly on to something when he got then-candidate Barack Obama to admit he wanted to redistribute the wealth, according to former Republican presidential candidate and Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. 

Huckabee, who now hosts a show aired on the weekends on the Fox News Channel, told "On The Record" host Greta Van Sustren on Nov. 16 that Obama's policies go beyond just the redistribution of wealth, especially on health care. He likened a provision in the House health care bill that would require people to have some sort of health care coverage to a "poll tax."

"[W]hile we really wish [the president's priorities] were recovery, getting jobs back - that's the number one thing we ought to be focused on - but it appears to be redistribution," Huckabee said. "That's what's going on in the health care world, where we're trying to make sure that we've redistributed health care, taking it from people who have it, taking from them, giving it to people who may not even desire to have it, and forcing people into an unconstitutional system where they're going to have to virtually pay into a private marketplace in order to get full rights of citizenship. It's the equivalent of a poll tax."

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:

We just received word that C-SPAN 2 is going to air a "slightly abbreviated version" of the Media Research Center's 2009 Gala and Dishonors Awards dinner.

It should start airing at 1:26 p.m. EDT.

Check here for more details, and your check local cable listings for the channel assignment.

You can also watch a Web stream of the program here at that time.

The Media Research Center's annual “DisHonors Awards,” held Thursday night, furnished MSNBC's Keith Olbermann with comments to ridicule, but his rants exposed his own hypocrisy. As Brit Hume accepted our “William F. Buckley Jr. Award for Media Excellence” he thanked the MRC for providing information he could use, leading Olbermann to denounce Hume at the top of Friday's Countdown: “Brit Hume's dumbfounding admission. He was fed a buffet of daily talking points by an ultra-conservative media site and quote 'we certainly made tremendous use of it.'”

As if Olbermann doesn't graze a “buffet of daily talking points” from an “ultra-liberal media site.” The headline over a post earlier in the day on Media Matters' “County Fair” blog: “Accepting Buckley award, Fox's Hume thanked Media Research Center 'for the tremendous amount of material' they 'provided me for so many years when I was anchoring Special Report.'” Unlike Olbermann, however, Hume almost always credited the MRC so viewers were informed of his source.

Before subsequently reading the Hume quote verbatim as transcribed by Media Matters, Olbermann charged “Brit Hume admits that for years he's been reading daily talking points, from a lunatic-fringe right wing Web site, on the news” and that Hume “made an admission at a DC dinner last night as startling as if he had confessed to making up the news out of whole cloth or reading it off a ouija board.”

As if out to prove our point about media bias, the Washington Post's Mary Ann Akers seized on a one-liner by Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher made last night at the MRC Gala and DisHonors Awards. Wurzelbacher, accepting the "Obamagasm Award" on behalf of ABC's Bill Weir, made a crack playing off the orgasmic delight that Chris Matthews and others in the media expressed after watching then-candidate Obama deliver rousing campaign speeches.

"God, all this love and everything in the room - I'm horny," Akers quoted Wurzelbacher, before going on to insist that no one in the whole room, especially at her table, understood why he said that.

There were many famous people at CPAC this year and I was lucky enough to run into some of them. And some of those I ran into even let me ask them a few questions about media bias. The resulting videos are embedded below the fold.

The four interviews I was able to get where with Joe the Plumber, John Ziegler, George Phillips, and Roger Simon. Each have unique experiences with liberal media bias and each articulated different but insightful points about the media.

Make sure you check out each of the videos and watch them all the way through.

Washington Post staff writer Paul Farhi penned a nasty little critique of Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher in Thursday's paper, deriding the conservative critic of Barack Obama as "a leftover artifact from a forgotten time." Grouping Wurzelbacher in with other "campaign distractions," Farhi panned, "He's Clara Peller, Willie Horton or Gennifer Flowers -- names that are the questions in a 'Jeopardy!' category called 'Presidential Campaign Distractions.'" (Of course, Wurzelbacher's "distraction" was to challenge the economic policy of Obama.)

The Washington Post writer gleefully recounted how only 11 people showed up to a Joe the Plumber book signing event in Washington D.C. Farhi added odd asides, such as noting Wurzelbacher's "shiny bullet head." Even the headline, which read "Joe the Author, Plumbing New Lows in Interest," adopted a condescending tone.

While the mainstream media whines that everyone should just "move on" from the Blagojevich scandal, they continue to harp on any conservative who was involved with McCain-Palin campaign. Los Angeles Times writer Tina Susman took a shot at Joe Wurzelbacher on Monday and compared him to Iraqi journalist and part-time shoe thrower Muntather Zaidi.(my emphasis throughout:)

 In the few seconds it took Iraqi journalist Muntather Zaidi to wing a pair of shoes at President George Bush, the Middle East got its own version of Joe the Plumber.

Given the flap that ensued when he famously told Joe the Plumber that he wanted to "spread the wealth," I figured Barack Obama wouldn't be making such a suggestion again anytime soon.  I figured wrong.

Pres.-elect Obama to Tom Brokaw on today's Meet The Press:

I think the important principle, because sometimes when we start talking about taxes, and I say I want a more balanced tax code, people think, well, that's class warfare. No.  It turns out that our economy grows best when the benefits of the economy are most widely spread.  And that has been true historically.

Note to Chris Matthews: when mocking someone for using a ghostwriter, it's best to avoid doing so on a day when Hillary Clinton is prominently in the news . . .

On this evening's Hardball, Matthews went out of his way to mock Joe The Plumber for his use of a ghostwriter on his just-released book.  This on the day Hillary Clinton was in the headlines, having been named Barack Obama's Secretary of State.  You know, Hillary Clinton.  The woman famous, in writing "It Takes A Village," for failing to credit her . . . ghostwriter.

The liberal talk-radio host who said in a vulgar, on-air tirade that he wanted Joe (The Plumber) Wurzelbacher "dead" is out of a job.

Examiner.com reports that Charles "Karel" Bouley was fired Tuesday. Michelle Malkin noted that Karel is "playing the victim card." He whined that the station has fired "the most prominent gay voice" in San Francisco and blamed an engineer for his vulgarities being broadcast during a news break in the show.

H/T to Radio Equalizer’s Brian Maloney who picked up this on-air obscenity laced diatribe from San Francisco KGO radio host Karel, who called for the “death” of Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, AKA “Joe the Plumber.”

 “F__G__D__Joe the G__D__M__F__plumber! I want M__F Joe the plumber dead.”

 Maloney notes some interesting background information on the San Francisco radio host:

 Karel, also known as Charles Karel Bouley, is an evening and weekend host at KGO radio in San Francisco.

Imagine that a week before a presidential election, a radio interview surfaced in which the Republican candidate had called for, say, the abolition of Social Security. Now imagine the broadcast networks' reaction to that nugget: "We interrupt regularly-scheduled programming for this Breaking News," followed by 24/7 coverage with talking heads pondering the devastating impact on America's seniors, the overall economy, the future of Western civilization, etc. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman would be booked from now till election day, offering his pained pronouncements.

But how do those same networks react when a radio interview [YouTube after the jump] surfaces of Barack Obama in a call for the redistribution of wealth, in which he laments the Supreme Court's insufficient radicalism in pursuing redistribution and refers to the civil rights movement's failure to develop a better strategy to bring about wealth redistribution as a "tragedy?

Insert cricket-chirp soundtrack here.

Want to talk media bias?

A new survey found that more Americans know who Joe the Plumber is than about Barack Obama's ties to the radical group ACORN.

The same study released Wednesday by the highly-respected Pew Resesearch Center found that voters, by a margin of almost eight to one, believe media want Barack Obama to win on Election Day instead of John McCain.

Although it is typical the public feels journalists are pulling for the Democrat presidential candidate, the numbers this election cycle are nothing but astounding (emphasis added):

Shades of McCain from an unlikely corner . . .

When at the beginning of the current financial mess John McCain declared that "the fundamentals of the economy are strong," he was roundly lambasted by the MSM, while the Obama campaign called his statement "an enormous mistake."

So, should we expect the liberal media and the Obama campaign to go after Barney Frank . . . now that he has said something remarkably similar? Discussing the markets with Maria Bartiromo on CNBC this afternoon, Frank declared: "I think it's clear that the fundamentals are better than the psychology."

View video here.

The media were quick to dig into Joe Wurzelbacher's personal and private information such as tax records, and trumpet it to the world in an attempt to discredit someone that dared question Barack Obama's tax plan.  Lets see if they even report on this when they don’t have any digging to do whatsoever.

Apparently, on Obama’s released tax records, he discloses income from speaking fees. The problem? Accepting payment for speaking fees when you’re a legislator is against Illinois state law

Apparently, as an Illinois state legislator through 2004, Barack was prohibited from taking honoraria for speaking under the Illinois Governmental Ethics Act

But what about Barack Obama’s 2000 and 2002 tax returns?

2000: On his 2000 Schedule C-EZ, Barack reported that he received $16,500 as a “Foundation director/Educational speaker.”

ABC's Sam Donaldson has validated Joe the Plumber's worst fears: socialism has indeed washed over capitalism.

Maybe worse, Donaldson is clearly less unhappy about this than our new campaign spokesman from Ohio.

Such appeared to be the case when the former White House correspondent published a rather ominous commentary at ABCNews.com Tuesday both in written and video form (emphasis added, h/t Extreme Mortman via Glenn Reynolds):

Embarrass Obama, and expect the liberal media to go after you, no matter who you are: That's what National Review journalist Byron York warned early Thursday afternoon.

He was quickly proven right by a story from reporter Larry Rohter in Friday's New York Times, "Real Deal On Plumber Reveals New Slant," in which Rohter took a wrench to Joe Wurzelbacher (aka "Joe the Plumber"), the citizen who dared to question Obama on his tax plan as the Democrat campaigned in his neighborhood in Toledo, Ohio. Obama responded with a classic paleo-liberal cliche: "I think that when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

That insight into Obama's mindset was politically fascinating, but Rohter buried it in the 11th paragraph of his story, focusing his investigation on such vital matters as "Joe's" actual first name (Samuel) and whether or not he has a plumber's license.

After smearing Joe the Plumber on Friday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith turned to a group of his own hand selected ‘average Joes’ to defend Barack Obama’s tax plan: "I'll tell you, we have assembled a panel of 'average Joes.' Joe the plumber, the most famous person in America now. Well, we have five Joes here this morning, from various walks of life, and we're going to put their incomes to the test against the candidates' tax plans and see how it will affect them all." Financial analyst Jennifer Openshaw then proceeded to examine the personal financial situations of each "Joe" and concluded that four of them would save more money under Obama’s tax plan as promoted by his campaign.

Smith did acknowledge these projections were hypothetical: "...according to the Obama tax plan, and this, of course, is subject to passed by Congress...Talk about a pie in the sky." However, he then continued to assume it would be implemented and focused on the first guest, asking Openshaw: "He would do much better with Obama plan?" Openshaw replied: "You bet, he would do a lot better. But under McCain, what's interesting is, you know, he's got that $2,500 health care tax credit...for coverage, you know, you might not be able to cover both you and your son if you have to go find coverage someplace. So that's something to watch out for."

Continuing the mainstream media's dogged pursuit of the truth, Thursday's "Nightline" breathlessly asserted that Joe "the plumber" Wurzelbacher isn't really named Joe. In a segment on the Ohio man who quizzed Senator Barack Obama about his tax plan, co-anchor Martin Bashir derided, "But his name's not Joe and he's not a registered plumber. And those are only half his problems."

Of course, his middle name is Joseph. Continuing to harp on this subject, reporter Jake Tapper alerted, "And it turns out Joe the plumber is not even technically named Joe...His name is Sam, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher." Now, although it took the media almost a year to report on Jeremiah Wright, Obama's radical preacher, Bashir announced that in the case of Wurzelbacher, "It wasn't long before the media pounced. But with the spotlight has come some scrutiny." Before launching into an investigation of Joe the plumber, Tapper chided, "The McCain campaign did not necessarily vet Joe, it seems." (Do voters need to be vetted before they're allowed to ask Obama a question?)

On Thursday’s Anderson Cooper 360 program, CNN senior political analyst David Gergen followed the liberal talking points about how Joe the Plumber’s real first name is Samuel and how he doesn’t have a plumbing license. When host Anderson Cooper asked if John McCain benefitted from the attention on the Ohio laborer, Gergen replied, "Well, I think he was for a while. But I -- when we found out he was Sam the non-plumber, it changed a little bit." Gergen went on to treat Joe Wurzelbacher, who works with plumbing, as if he worked as a McCain campaign surrogate: "...I don't understand why the McCain team didn't vet the guy before they made such a -- you know, made such a focus on him on national television. I can guarantee you that the George W. Bush campaign, you know, which ran a highly disciplined campaign, would have vetted and would have known before he went out there about... his personal status."

Barack Obama speaks with Joe-the-Plumber Wurzelbacher on October 12, 2008 in Holland, Ohio. (AFP/Getty Images/Joe Raedle)

 

Days after U.S. News & World Report's Bonnie Erbe declared "when one thinks of voter fraud, one usually associates it with the GOP," she predicted "the McCain campaign could go down as the most corrupt and inept in history."

Writing at her blog at the News's website Thursday, Erbe joined the rest of the mainstream media's attacks on Joe the Plumber, the Ohio man who recently challenged Barack Obama about his socialist tax plan.

As she cited far-left leaning websites including Daily Kos, Erbe sought to make the case that Joe is a Republican plant (emphasis added):

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Friday strongly challenged "Good Morning America" host Diane Sawyer about the media's lack of fairness towards the McCain/Palin presidential ticket. The exchange came after the ABC journalist followed up on negative Gingrich remarks about the Obama tax plan by asserting, "for fairness," Obama talking points on middle class tax cuts.

An irritated Gingrich refused to allow Sawyer to move on to another topic and retorted, "No, wait a second. I don't notice very often, reporters, for fairness, pointing out what Governor Palin said or pointing out what Senator McCain said." The GMA anchor, slightly taken aback, defended, "And let me just say, I do point out what Senator McCain says, Mr. Speaker. You know I do." [audio excerpt available here]

And yet, just a few minutes earlier, during a different segment, Sawyer seemed to prove Gingrich's point that the media often recite the left's talking points and attacks. She launched into an update on Joe "the plumber" Wurzelbacher, which was really a series of gratuitous attacks on the Ohio man who famously challenged Obama over his tax plan. She derided, "It turns out, even though he was arguing about taxes for plumbers who end up making $250,000 a year, it turns out that he doesn't have a plumbing license, though the company he works for does."

On Friday’s CBS Early Show, correspondent Jeff Glor reported on the role of Joe the Plumber, a.k.a. Joe Wurzelbacher, in the presidential campaign: "The McCain campaign is using Wurzelbacher to say their opponent would raise taxes. Though it turns out, Wurzelbacher himself owes nearly $1,200 in back taxes and his annual tax bill would actually go down under Obama's plan." Glor then added: "Obama mocked the McCain strategy."

At the end of Glor’s report, co-host Harry Smith asked: "Yeah Jeff, we're starting to learn a little bit more about Joe/Steven, the Plumber?" Smith mistakenly referred to Wurzelbacher’s first name being Steven, when in fact it is Samuel, and he corrected himself: "Samuel." Glor responded: "A couple of more things about Joe the Plumber -- Samuel, indeed. He is registered to vote. There were some questions about that. He does not have a plumber's license, though. And it turns out his real first name is Samuel. Joe is his middle name." At that moment, an on screen Graphic appeared with the headline: "The Real Joe the Plumber" and listed the details Glor mentioned. On Thursday, co-host Maggie Rodriguez claimed that Wurzelbacher: "...feels like he is being used by the Republican Party as a pawn to make their point..." but offered no direct quote of any such comment.

Liberal talk radio host Ed Schultz stormed out of a "Fox & Friends" debate Friday morning with conservative talk radio host Steve Malzberg that involved Barack Obama's tax plan and the now famous Joe the Plumber.

After discussing the state of the current presidential campaign, the issue of Joe Wurzelbacher -- the Ohio man who recently challenged Obama over how the candidate's tax plan would negatively impact him if he bought into a plumbing business he was looking at -- surfaced.

Malzberg was first up, and claimed that Obama's plan "takes the incentive out of America; that's Marxism, my friend. Marxism."

After a loud guffaw, Schultz responded (video embedded right):

With 15 minutes of fame comes 15 hours of “gotcha” scrutiny -- especially if you’re a voter who has dared to criticize Barack Obama, the liberal media’s Chosen One for president.

Ohio plumber Joe Wurzelbacher has had his 15 minutes of fame, capping it off with an unplanned appearance as the poster boy of populist tax policy in last night’s presidential debate. So now it’s time for the press to turn its sights on him not as a human-interest story but as an investigative subject.

Jonathan Martin of The Politico was among the first out of the gate, with blog posts noting that Wurzelbacher, affectionately known by most of America as “Joe The Plumber,” has a tax lien against him and doesn’t have a plumber’s license. Martin conveniently forgot to mention that the law doesn’t require one.) Bloomberg also has a story on the tax lien, and AP and The Washington Post did their part to make a story out of the “unlicensed” non-story.

It may not have been "huge" when CNBC's Joe Kernen said it but the dude has been on practically every news station by now.

Kernen told chief Washington correspondent John Harwood that the "Joe the plumber" story "would be huge" and even a "bombshell," in any other election year. Kernen said voters "don't care" because they are buying into Sen. Obama's assertion that the Bush tax policies have led to the financial crisis.

"Obviously not everyone out there knows how to connect the dots between the [financial crisis] and tax policy. For some reason the Bush tax policies are being cited by Obama as the reason that we're in this position right now, again and again and again," said "Squawk Box" co-host Kernen Oct. 16.

But Kernen didn't stop there:

ABC's "View" co-host Joy Behar dismissively called Joe Wurzelbacher's [Joe the Plumber] dream of owning a plumbing company a "fantasy" on the October 16 program. Co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck called her out on it (audio available here):

JOY BEHAR, co-host: Joe the Plumber doesn't have a business yet, he's fantasizing about a business he's going to have.

ELISABETH HASSELBECK, co-host: Fantasizing?! This is a man who's trying to realize his hard work.

BEHAR: Excuse me! Fantasizing is a very legitimate term to describe somebody who's predicting the future for themselves. Creative visualization, okay.

HASSELBECK: Fantasizing is a dangerous thing to say because it assumes that it is not attainable.

[...]