New Hampshire

While the news media has a professional "obligation to get it right," liberal network news anchor last week set out to "purposefully" take Mitt Romney's "fire people" comment out of context, Fox News host Sean Hannity complained on his January 13 program.

But it's not only "purposeful distortion" but "purposeful character assassination" by the liberal media added NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell, who appeared via satellite for the popular recurring "Media Mash" feature. [MP3 audio available here; video embedded below page break]

As part of a team of New York Times reporters fact-checking the presidential debate that took place Sunday morning in Concord, N.H., White House reporter Jackie Calmes once again baselessly claimed that expensive Obama-care is actually a money-saver, claiming GOP candidate Mitt Romney was false to assert otherwise. But the history of government cost projections (Medicare, anyone?) strongly suggest Calmes is wrong.

(After the GOP took the November 2010 elections, Calmes confidently stated as fact: “Republicans also say they will try to deny money to put Mr. Obama’s new health care law into effect, though they have not made clear what they would do to make up the cost savings that would be lost if they succeeded in repealing the law.”) Calmes posted Sunday:

The Washington Post reported on Obama's bus tour without making much of the protesters (but promoted supporters strangely suggesting he "inherited a very big deficit.") The president's conversation with Tea Party activist Ryan Rhodes only appeared once -- in the Fact Checker column, as the Post's Glenn Kessler suggested it was dubious for Rhodes to claim Vice President Biden compared the Tea Party to terrorists, and awarded Obama a "rare Geppetto" (as opposed to the usual liar's "Pinocchio") for defending Biden.

But in Friday's Post, Krissah Thompson's report on Rick Perry's campaigning in New Hampshire was dominated by protesters and hecklers from the left. The headline was "Perry hits bumps on campaign trail in NH: Candidate faces tough questions from protesters, others."

Times reporter Ashley Parker’s profile of Texas Gov. Rick Perry on the campaign trail in New Hampshire portrayed a more cautious and subdued candidate, days after Perry’s claim that actions taken by Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, were potentially “treasonous,” a remark that offended the delicate sensibilities of Times reporter Binyamin Appelbaum, who found it simply “horrifying.” Parker's Thursday piece from New Hampshire, “Day After Fed Uproar, Perry Tones It Down," featured six paragraphs on an exchange on global warming between Perry and N.H. citizen Jim Rubens, described by Parker as a “a Republican activist and high-tech investor from Etna."

But Rubens is also a consultant with the left-wing environmental group Union of Concerned Scientists, a fact Parker didn’t include but which found its way into the Los Angeles Times: “One of his questioners was Jim Rubens, a Republican from the village of Etna who works as a consultant for the Union of Concerned Scientists.” UCS, which was formed in 1969 to protest the Vietnam War, has lobbied against Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") and nuclear power.

For the second day in a row, MSNBC worked up a biased segment with Rock the Vote president Heather Smith about a "war on voting" -- see screen capture below page break-- by Republican legislators in numerous states where the GOP controls both state legislative chambers, such as New Hampshire.

Today "NewsNation" host Tamron Hall picked up the torch from colleague Thomas Roberts, who conducted a softball interview with Smith on March 8.

Hall even parroted some of his script from the day before:

"With such a strong bloc of these young people voting Democratic [in presidential elections], Republican leaders in some key swing states are looking to even the playing field coming up in 2012," MSNBC's Thomas Roberts insisted as he introduced Heather Smith of Rock the Vote (RTV) in a segment devoted to that group's fears about "voter suppression" -- see RTV screen capture below the page break -- in states such as New Hampshire, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Missouri.

Those are four states where Republicans control both houses of the state legislature and are pushing reform laws aimed at voter ID requirements, tightening up residency requirements that largely impact college kids, and/or repealing last-minute voter registration at the polls.

"State Republicans seek more limits on voters" warned the front page Washington Post headline for Peter Wallsten's March 7 article.

"GOP says the push targets fraud; Democrats call it a power play," added the subheader. The online version of the article had a decidedly less-loaded headline, but Wallsten's article skewed towards the Democratic complaint (emphasis mine):

It would sound odd to say the Washington Post is harsher on Tea Party activists than they are on the man who shot Ronald Reagan. But that's what happened on Monday's front page. Shailagh Murray's article on former Congressman Charlie Bass moving to the right, endorsing the Tea Parties, and saying "their agenda is exactly the same as mine," painted conservatives this way:

But for a career politician who served on Capitol Hill for a dozen years, addressing serious policy questions with people who profess to hold zero faith in the federal government can get awkward. Bass's challenge is to recraft his image in a way that will defang his conservative Republican opponents yet stay true enough to his centrist self to win back the crucial independent voters who defected to his Democratic opponent in 2006.

Conservative Republicans have "fangs"? You can't constructively "address serious policy questions" in their presence? Right next to that story, Annys Shin writes about Reagan-shooter John Hinckley and his "steps toward freedom" away from his charmed life at St. Elizabeth's Hospital: "He fills his free time strumming on his guitar, crafting pop songs about ideal love, or going on supervised jaunts to the beach or the bowling alley."

**UPDATE - 09/28/08 PM**

Barack Obama played the "me too" game during the Friday debates on September 26 after Senator John McCain mentioned that he was wearing a bracelet with the name of Cpl. Matthew Stanley, a resident of New Hampshire and a soldier that lost his life in Iraq in 2006. Obama said that he too had a bracelet. After fumbling and straining to remember the name, he revealed that his had the name of Sergeant Ryan David Jopek of Merrill, Wisconsin.

Shockingly, however, Madison resident Brian Jopek, the father of Ryan Jopek, the young soldier who tragically lost his life to a roadside bomb in 2006, recently said on a Wisconsin Public Radio show that his family had asked Barack Obama to stop wearing the bracelet with his son's name on it. Yet Obama continues to do so despite the wishes of the family.

Only in the west can one see a school that hosts a day when school children are encouraged to dress like, act like, and "learn about" those trying to kill them and all in a day that the country is in the midst of war. And only in the west would the media help celebrate such an outrageous example of support for what, in truth, are our enemies.

On May 9, the kids of the Amherst Middle School in Amherst, New Hampshire, were forced to parade about their school dressed as "Saudi Arabians" so that they could "learn from people around the world" in a happy day of multiculturalism. But, what they ended up being taught was the wholly sanitized version of how wonderful Saudi society is instead of the truth.

Sadly, the Milford (NH) Cabinet, a small newspaper group in the Granite State, is full of uncritical praise and wonder at the multicultural extravaganza forced upon these children unawares. Worse, they didn't do any reporting on how this day of appeasement came to be held.

It’s not just the national media that’s got the ear of New Hampshire voters in the days before their first-in-the-nation primary tomorrow. Local newspapers are filled with stories about the various candidates, and The Concord Monitor (which reaches about 20,000 weekday readers in and around the state’s capital city) has had a spate of stories favorable to Barack Obama since Thursday’s Iowa caucuses.

What makes that all the more interesting is that the generally liberal newspaper endorsed Hillary Clinton back on December 30, saying the former First Lady “has the right experience, the right agenda and the know-how to lead the country back to respect on the world stage and meaningful progress on long-neglected problems.”

But since the caucuses, more than a few pro-Obama pieces have found their way into the paper. On January 4, for example, the Monitor ran a long story headlined “Speaking of faith, Obama does; Senator bucks party trend to reach out.” The first couple of paragraphs will give you the flavor:

I'm calling this the Day's Daffiest Question Award. Suzanne Malveaux, come on up and accept it on behalf of CNN. You asked the question, after all.

Malveaux was interviewing Mike Huckabee this afternoon and talk turned to a tough editorial a New Hampshire paper had written about Mitt Romney.

SUZANNE MALVEAUX: Saturday, New Hampshire's Concord Monitor broke with tradition. They're not endorsing someone, but they certainly took a slap at your opponent, calling him "a phony that must be stopped." Do you think that they went too far?

View video here.

We had a little campaign drama yesterday as a disturbed man (who claimed he had a bomb) took hostages in the Rochester, New Hampshire, headquarters of the Hillary Clinton campaign. Over a period of several hours, all of the hostages were released. And eventually the hostage-taker, Lee Eisenberg, surrendered without incident (but not before calling CNN ... maybe he had a debate question?).

When the incident began, Hillary Clinton was in the Washington area. She cancelled her campaign schedule for the day and immediately travelled to New Hampshire, where she met with law enforcment and the families of the hostages. Clinton made at least two public statements during the day, and she held a news conference (video) after the ordeal ended. Clinton's actions were certainly appropriate for the incident, and her statements were sober and direct. But in the end, her actions were no different than what any other politician or candidate would have done.

Abracadabra seems to be the magic word - at least for one New Hampshire Democrat and United Press International (UPI).

Prosecutors in Strafford County are claiming in court papers that former congressional candidate, Gary Dodds (D-NH) staged his own car accident and faked his disappearance in 2006 in order to garner sympathy and support for his weak campaign.

In that same disappearing Dodds spirit, UPI made the vanishing politician's party affiliation disappear. Voila!

The John Edwards presidential campaign couldn't have asked for a more flattering article than the one printed Friday by New Hampshire's Concord Monitor.

In an interview with the paper's Lauren Dorgan, Edwards promised universal health care, universal pre-kindergarten, matched savings accounts for poor people, and a new iniative called "College for Everyone." All of these new programs are going to require significant amounts of tax money in order to be paid for.

Instead of asking Edwards where he would get the money to pay for his massive spending increases, Dorgan and her Monitor colleages let Edwards off the hook with a spin that he's only asking America to "sacrifice." Here's an excerpt:

In December of 1999, Katherine Prudhomme created an uncomfortable moment for Al Gore in New Hampshire, one the liberal media never would have dreamed of creating: she asked him about Juanita Broaddick's claim that Bill Clinton raped her in 1978 at a Little Rock hotel. The video from WNDS-TV showed Gore claiming he never watched the Broaddrick interview, and he had no opinion on it. Embarrassing. Along with posting the video, Brent Baker reported only Fox News (and a day later, the Brian Williams show on MSNBC) showed it, while the nets stayed away.

Now, Prudhomme reports on Free Republic (h/t Doug from Upland) that she just tried on Friday to confront Hillary Clinton on the same Broaddrick question at an event in Nashua, and Hillary claimed "I don't know anything about that" and "I don't know what you're talking about." Prudhomme says she was carrying a certified-mail receipt that she's sent the Broaddrick interview on tape to Hillary's office. Since this alleged exchange apparently happened off-mike, it probably won't carry the same delicious video. Will the media follow up on this, or will their usual severe allergy to the Broaddrick issue continue? This is her account of the event: