Credit where credit is due:  Wired Magazine’s Noah Schachtman and Conde Nast have a scoop on their hands. In the course of researching his new and largely fair piece on Andrew Breitbart and the “Big” websites, during which he was given unprecedented access, Schachtman learned of a new project-in-process by ACORN stingmeister James O’Keefe involving the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) offices in Detroit and Chicago:

This time, there are no prostitutes involved, just a shady, and serious, tax-fraud scheme. The ploy involves the Obama administration’s 10 percent tax credit to first-time home buyers. The law says that the credit maxes out at $8,000 for an $80,000 home. But at the Detroit office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the rule seems open to interpretation. O’Keefe asks a staffer, What if I bought a place for $50,000, but the seller and I agreed to write down $80,000 as the purchase price?

“Flip it any way you want,” the staffer replies.

What if the place is worth much less — like only $6,000?

“Yup, you can do that.”

O’Keefe and fellow activist Joe Basel ran the same sting at HUD’s Chicago office and at several federally supported independent housing groups. Breitbart paces the parquet floor. The video is damning but not exactly Acorn-explosive.

Then O’Keefe stops the playback. “Oh yeah, I forgot,” he says. “We went to the Detroit Free Press, to the managing editor. We told her the whole thing. She said she wasn’t interested. Wanna see the tape?” (more…)

As you may know, I do a cartoon on Big Hollywood every Sunday with Batton Lash called Obama Nation. It gives us the opportunity to lampoon the WPE* since few others seemed willing to do it when we started. But Big Journalism offers the opportunity to mock the “mainstream media” which constantly fails to report the facts or deal with reality. So I called up another friend, comics veteran and fellow libertarian, Val Mayerik to enter the fray and have a few laughs.

The strip we’re doing is called “Useful Idiots.” A term coined by the Soviets as the pet name they had for Western Lefties who believed any lie they were fed. It will feature a cast of familiar characters you may have seen on TV while changing channels. For the sake of storytelling we’ve put them all at the same network which we call BSN. And we focus on showing how the so called infotainment world provides neither. Info nor entertainment. Just a lot of partisan noise dressed up as “news” or “commentary”.

(more…)

King Leonidas punctuated his epic resistance to the Persian horde by responding to Xerxes’ demand that the Three Hundred Spartans surrender their weapons.  Molon labe! … “Come and take them!”   Our senators and representatives should respond in kind to President Obama’s demand for their votes on his epochal healthcare takeover.

For much of a year … longer that most would have predicted … a vastly outnumbered force of 218 Republican congressmen and senators – prodded, poked and arm-twisted by the most powerful grassroots movement of our generation and egged on my its cheerleaders in the Mainstream Media – has withstood the Xerxian onslaught that is Obamacare.  And like Leonidas, Obamacare opponents know more is at stake than this single battle.

As important as the outcome is the manner in which this battle is waged.  A courageous and principled stand against overwhelming odds historically evokes sympathy and support by an otherwise unengaged populace – witness Thermopylae, the Alamo, Rorke’s Drift, to name a few. (more…)

There’s an old saying that describes the fortunes of families, corporations and criminal enterprises: “From shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” You know: John D. Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Nelson Rockefeller… the other Rockefellers.  Time Inc. editor-in-chief Henry Luce, Hedley Donovan, Henry Grunwald… Your Name Here. Five Families Boss Carlo Gambino, Paul Castellano, John Gotti… Gotti, Jr.

But what better example of declining fortunes can there be than the Kennedy clan of County Wexford, Boston, Hyannisport, Palm Beach and Chappaquiddick.  From Patrick Joseph Kennedy to Joseph P. Kennedy (the Patriarch), to John Fitzgerald Kennedy to…

Yes, Patrick Kennedy, the soon-to-be-former Congressman from Rhode Island, substance abuser, drunk, late-night car crasher and all-around whackjob, was in the news again today, lashing out at, well, pretty much everybody in one of his farewell addresses to the nation.

Amazingly, he went after the media.  From ABC News’ The Note: (more…)

The Better Government Association, a busy Chicago-based watchdog group that has its work cut out for it, recently released its “Hall of Shame” report that details the nearly 150 county officials who have gone to jail for corruption in Barack Obama’s Cook County. And that doesn’t even include the more than one hundred Chicago officials who have also gone to jail over the last few decades.

Because of the high level of corruption and the large and ever-growing roster of jailed county officials, in its press release, the BGA bitingly asks, “[I]s it any surprise this multi-billion dollar labyrinth of governmental entities is referred to disparagingly as ‘Crook County?’”

The scams took place over the past four decades in the courts; the offices of the Assessor, Sheriff and Treasurer; and the President’s Office of Employment and Training. They involve bribes, payoffs, rip-offs, padded contracts, ghost payrollers and the wholesale subversion of the judicial system. The perpetrators include elected officials at the highest and lowest levels of city, county and state government; judges, lawyers and lobbyists.

(more…)

There’s an interesting piece out from the AFP entitled “Bold new Gaza play skewers Fatah and Hamas.”  Apparently, there’s a play out in the Gaza Strip that rips Hamas and Fatah:

A new play has shocked audiences in the Gaza Strip by shouting out what many in the Hamas-ruled territory mutter behind closed doors — that Palestinian politicians are a bunch of crooks. The biting comedy entitled “Umbilical Cord” goes after the Islamist Hamas and its secular Fatah rivals, accusing them of ignoring the suffering of their people and selling out to Iran and the United States, respectively.

The shocking part about the play obviously isn’t the content of the play – it’s that Hamas hasn’t shut it down and shot all the participants.  The question is: why not? (more…)

Another stunning rebuke to Barack Obama: Armenian American groups have for decades sought Congressional recognition as genocide of the murder of just under two million Armenian Christians by the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Last week, they cleared an important hurdle in getting this recognition: the House Foreign Affairs Committee, over Obama’s opposition, approved a resolution calling the Turkish mass murder of the Armenians a genocide.

The Islamic supremacists haven’t infiltrated as deeply as they thought. As long as Turkey was secular, we pretended it wasn’t genocide. And now Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who once said that “there is no moderate or immoderate Islam, Islam is Islam and that’s it,” is taking on the secular military in Turkey. Traditionally, the secular army kept Turkey a “moderate” secular Muslim country, but with the election of the devout Muslim Erdogan, Turkish secularism is on the ropes. And now that Turkey is returning to the dark side, we don’t have to lie for jihadis anymore.

The Turks were furious over the Foreign Affairs Committee vote, and withdrew their ambassador to the U.S. Turkish President Abdullah Gul issued a veiled threat: “Turkey will not be responsible for the negative results that this event may lead to.”

Turkey threatens…what? Another genocide? (more…)

A new piece by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman will be largely ignored by the MSM because it doesn’t fit their Bush-Bashing template. Yesterday, Friedman wrote this in an op-ed column entitled “It’s Up to Iraqis Now. Good Luck.”

Saddam’s Iraq was a temporary iron-fisted bulwark against Iranian expansion. But if Iraq has any sort of decent outcome — and becomes a real Shiite-majority, multiethnic democracy right next door to the phony Iranian version — it will be a source of permanent pressure on the Iranian regime. It will be a constant reminder that “Islamic democracy” — the rigged system the Iranians set up — is nonsense. Real “Islamic democracy” is just like any other democracy, except with Muslims voting.

Former President George W. Bush’s gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right. It should have and could have been pursued with much better planning and execution. This war has been extraordinarily painful and costly. But democracy was never going to have a virgin birth in a place like Iraq, which has never known any such thing.

Yes, that appeared in the New York Times. (more…)

A week ago, news began to break in San Francisco about a targeted gay-bashing crime that allegedly occurred on February 26.

Three cousins from Hayward have been charged in San Francisco with a hate crime and assault for allegedly firing a BB rifle at the face of a man they believed was gay, an attack the men videotaped, authorities said Wednesday.

Investigators believe the assailants chose the victim because he appeared to be gay. When the men were pulled over, police found a video camera that was used to film the shooting, investigators said.

Clearly, of course, this had to be a Christian right-wing, tea party, anti-government, bigoted homophobe from the South. Right?

Wrong.

The three men, Shafiq Hashemi, 21, Sayed Bassam, 21, and Mohammad Habibzada, 24, the driver, were arrested. (more…)

From a speech by Jimmy Carter at the University of Havana on May 14, 2002 which was broadcast throughout Castro’s islandwide fiefdom and trumpeted worldwide by all “news” agencies with Havana bureaus:

My nation is hardly perfect in human rights. A very large number of our citizens are incarcerated in prison, and there is little doubt that the death penalty is imposed most harshly on those who are poor, black, or mentally ill. For more than a quarter century, we have struggled unsuccessfully to guarantee the basic right of universal health care for our people. …but Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal education.

Thus did a former President of the United States prostrate himself before a regime that jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s and murdered (in absolute numbers) more political prisoners in its first three years in power (out of a population of 6.4 million) than Hitler’s murdered in its first six years (out of a population of 70 million.) Not to mention that Pres. Carter’s host insulted his nation as “a vulture preying on humanity!” and came within a hair of nuking it.

There’s more: (more…)

Two clips, one comment.  Up to you to find the common thread.  First, Glenn Beck today:

Now, everybody’s favorite gangster movie. For copyright reasons, we can’t show you the scene in which Frankie Five Angels recants his testimony before the congressional committee, but you know the one we mean:

Compare, contrast, discuss, enjoy.

When I was at CPAC a few weeks ago, I decided to stay an extra day and do the Washington tour. Now as someone who lives in Los Angeles, it is simply shocking to me how much history is within walking distance of the Washington monument, say.

At the Air and Space Museum, you can see John Glenn’s FRIENDSHIP 7 capsule and a replica of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module (you can tell it’s a replica, and not one of the built but unflown actual LMs, because the Lunar Module is so fragile it cannot support itself on its own legs in the Earth’s gravity field.)

Just a few blocks away is Ford’s Theater, and across the street, the Peterson House where Abraham Lincoln spent his final eight hours of agony. To go from that dingy, cheap little flophouse and then to the marble temple at the far end of the Mall produces a profound reaction in the human heart. But nothing I saw affected me as did the Declaration of Independence. I expected to be filled with reverence and awe. Instead, I was overwhelmed with despair.

My friends, the Declaration of Independence is gone: irreparably faded. And I fear that the ideals so boldly pronounced in that document are also fading from the pages of society. A few years ago, they opened the Super Bowl telecast by having players from both teams simply read lines from the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, and the switchboards were flooded with thousands of irate calls protesting this “right-wing propaganda.” (more…)

Here’s my problem with NBC political correspondent Chuck Todd’s blast against “Drudge driven journalism:” the alternative that Todd attempts to defend isn’t actually journalism. If Chuck Todd’s network and the rest of the MSM really had been practicing journalism all along, there would never have been a vacuum for people like Matt Drudge, Andrew Breitbart, etc. to fill.

Many people would like to define the term “journalism” as the unbiased dissemination of information, but it’s never been that. For a very long time publications made no secret of their political points of view. Historically, America had Whig newspapers, Republican newspapers and Democratic newspapers. All of them spun the news in a particular direction and readers knew it. The situation has not changed, except that the legacy media desperately and unconvincingly clings to the notion that it is detached from any ideology and therefore the sole arbiter of truth. No matter where they fall on the the political spectrum, Americans know better. That’s the reason the Drudge Report, Breitbart’s “Big” sites and, to put a point on it, liberal outlets like Huff Po and the Daily Kos thrive.

My own field of expertise provides an object lesson in why legacy journalism is fading into irrelevance as “Drudge-driven journalism” fills the void in a world hungry for knowledge. The MSM’s coverage of science in general and environmental issues in particular has been abysmal for years. Journalists are, by training and inclination, generalists. How many times have members of the old media tried to explain away slanted coverage of the non-existent global warming crisis by declaring that they of course are not scientists and can not be therefore expected to personally understand the issue? Instead, they insist that they must rely on experts and if you have a problem with the way they’re covering the issue, go talk to the experts. (more…)

NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd is a neo-Luddite and he doesn’t even know it. In a brief impromptu video clip, Todd said that, “there is no worse crime in journalism these days than simply deciding something’s a story because Drudge links to it.”

So forget plagiarism, intentional misinformation, news fabrication -– remember the New York Times’s Jayson Blair? –- intentional shilling for a political philosophy or politician, and just plain incompetence. None, according to Todd, are as journalistically “criminal,” in the non-judicial sense, as taking a story cue from Matt Drudge.

Todd is replicating the two-hundred years old whine of the early 19th-century Luddites.  Here’s a brief reminder of the movement of British textile workers led by General Ned Ludd between 1811-1816: (more…)

One must at least credit NBC’s Chuck Todd with one virtue.  He is utterly transparent.

When real “journalist” Todd – Chief White House Correspondent for NBC News and the co-hose of The Daily Rundown — gave this impish put down of what he calls, “Drudge-Driven Journalism,” his resentment, fear and school-boy petulance could not have been clearer to any sentient observer.

Such a pity, really.  A grown man reduced to whining in front of the White House makes his viewers so embarrassed for him that it’s painful to watch.  He should have saved all that peevish poppycock for Al Gore, the inventor of the internet.  For, in reality, the saving grace of journalism today – the only thing that gives these leftist buffoons in the MSM even a tiny shred of credibility – is the internet’s check and balance on their politically driven narratives.

Their animus is usually aimed at the Drudge Report because of the number of hits.  It’s Drudge’s numbers that drive the most powerful wedge between these MSM indoctrinated monkeys parading as journalists and their monopoly on the “truth.”  And all it takes is a single flashback to know why all the hacks associated with the once-august MSM fear “Drudge-Driven Journalism” – down to their quaking toes in their manure-muddied Gucci’s.

Flashback:  Dan Rather, 60 Minutes Wednesday, September 8, 2004. (more…)

Time was when newspapers were as stalwart in defending the First Amendment rights of others as they were for themselves.  But increasingly, some media organizations are using their constitutionally protected platforms to intimidate others into surrendering their rights.

Specifically, we’re talking about the right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances,” which is part of the First Amendment, along with freedom of religion, speech, the press, and assembly.  In contemporary parlance, redress of grievances translates into lobbying, which has become something of a dirty word.  In practice, it covers everything from writing your congressman on an issue or seeking a service academy appointment for your kid, to organized meetings between government officials and industry representatives.

Most news organizations understand and respect this precept, and it’s reflected in their coverage of events that involve the matter.  This February 25 article from the financial news organization Marketwatch illustrates how reporting of this nature should be handled – flatly and factually: (more…)

As everyone knows – everyone, that is, excepting those sophisticates who revere The New York Times – the former “paper of record” routinely plays fast and loose with news that bears on its ideological agenda, both by how (and whether) such stories are reported and, more subtly, by the emphasis they’re given (or not given) by their placement in the paper. Thus it was, for instance, most infamously, that Abu Grahaib was on the paper’s front page for an astonishing 32 straight days; while The Times somehow managed to report on Barack Obama’s dropping a certain Reverend Jeremiah Wright from the ceremony announcing his candidacy for the presidency without getting into the ugly details of precisely what it was that made his self-identified mentor so embarrassing. And, by the way, even then, burying the story on page 19.  The Wright story was there for the taking – he’d already been quoted in all his inflammatory viciousness by Rolling Stone – but, given The Times’s outsized influence with the lemmings of the mainstream media, the practical effect of its indulgent coverage was to bury for a full year the story that would  have surely derailed the freshman senator’s candidacy before it got started.

Then, again, sometimes ideologically difficult stories never get run at all. Which brings us to the curious case of Eric Massa, the upstate New York Democratic congressman who’s just resigned in the face of an ethics investigation for having allegedly harassed an aide. Last Thursday, the Times covered the story the same way as everyone else – okay, they stuck it on page 28, and they didn’t specify the aide was male, (except via a single reference to the aide as “him”), the same way males and females are interchangeable in their wedding announcements, but that sort of lunatic p.c. is pro forma. So, for that matter, was that Massa’s resignation seemed as much a concern for Timesmen David Halbfinger and Raymond Hernandez as for “blindsided Democratic leaders in Washington, who are already facing a brutal political climate as they try to defend the party’s majority in the midterm elections in November.”

Nor was the paper’s Saturday follow-up story on Massa’s mea culpa – “there is no doubt that this ethics issue is my fault and mine alone” –  problematic. Indeed, for Times readers that seemed the end of the story. As usual, they dwell in smug ignorance. (more…)

The religiously pro-abortion New York Times recently gave needed, though less than straightforward coverage to the pro-life outreach, only recently successful, to black women regarding abortion. The issue, long neglected by the MSM, is significant: Although blacks make up only 13 percent of the population, black women undergo nearly 40 percent of all the nation’s abortions.

What is now rousing black audiences, according to Times writer Shaila Dewan, is the pro-lifers’ ramped-up message, which links abortion to slavery, lynching, genocide, Nazi-style eugenics, and birth control. As she describes the pitch of one of the newly effective pro-life groups, Georgia Right to Life, abortion is “a decades-old conspiracy to kill off blacks.”

Perhaps, but Dewan and her article sources do not prove the charge historically. Nor do they specifically identify who these conspirators are. The reader is left possibly to infer that they lurk in the ranks of the very pro-abortion forces cited by Dewan, those forces that advocate, fund and perform abortions – to wit, abortion-providing organizations such as the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (highlighted as under “sustained attack by black abortion opponents”); the U.S. government itself (duly noted as providing about $350 million a year to Planned Parenthood for “education and medical services”); pro-abortion politicians (who are let off the hook entirely); doctors who abort black children (black physicians who provided illegal abortions, Dewan points out, were praised as “community heroes”); and abortion-driving feminists (unmentioned, except for Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, whom Dewan portrays with unseemly ambivalence: Sanger’s guilt for having allied herself with eugenics is mitigated, the writer suggests, because “at the time [it was] a mainstream movement.”). (more…)

Don’t blame us: Renegade Democrat, health-care “no” vote and therefore soon-to-be-ex-Congressman from upstate New York Eric Massa said it:

Rahm Emanuel is son of the devil’s spawn. He is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive.

Then there’s this piquant detail:

I am showering, naked as a jaybird, and here comes Rahm Emanuel, not even with a towel wrapped around his tush, poking his finger in my chest, yelling at me.

TMI! The floor is now open for comments, observations and theories about the latest flap to involve the Ballerina and his amazing Dead Fish act. Just keep this in mind before you opine:

Chicago ain’t ready for reform.

For the Independent Weekly of Durham, North Carolina, writer Sam Wardle proves that he hasn’t a clue how the phrase “religious extremist” is properly defined. Wardle reveals his hatred of all things Christian in a piece titled, “For Rep. Sue Myrick, Islamic moderates are extreme, Christian extremists are moderate,” wherein he equates Rep. Myrick to a religious extremist.

But, I’d suggest that his confusion is endemic in the far left and proves to show why so many in the west don’t understand how to face and defeat the real religious extremism of radical Islam.

In a story about Representative Sue Myrick (R, NC) and her association with The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, as juxtaposed with her condemnation of radical Islam, Wardle sees no difference between a radical Islamist that might blow himself up with a suicide vest or cut off the head of a helpless captive and a Christian American that wants to use properly constituted law to have the Holy Bible used in the classroom. (more…)