It’s becoming clearer and clearer that the Obama Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder is not just politicized and biased – it’s a hit squad for Obama’s enemies.

Remember when President Obama’s Department of Justice shut down investigation of the New Black Panther Party in the aftermath of their taped voter intimidation in 2008?  J. Christian Adams, author of the book Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department and former DOJ attorney, exposed the DOJ’s corruption in dropping the case altogether.  Or how about when the DOJ stonewalled investigations into Fast and Furious, the gunwalking operation that ended with weapons in the hands of the Mexican drug cartels – weapons used to kill American citizens?

Well, the DOJ is on the warpath again.  Not against the New Black Panthers or the Mexican drug cartels – against Rupert Murdoch.  According to Reuters, “U.S. authorities are stepping up investigations, including an FBI criminal inquiry, into possible violations by employees of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire of a U.S. law banning corrupt payments to foreign officials such as police, law enforcement and corporate sources said.”  What’s the evidence on which they’re basing the investigation?  Says Reuters, “U.S. investigators have found little to substantiate allegations of phone hacking inside the United States by Murdoch journalists, the sources added.”

So why, then, is the DOJ so intent on finding wrongdoing about Murdoch?  It couldn’t have something to do with Murdoch’s ownership of Fox News – the same network the Obama White House tried to exclude from inside administration interviews, according to papers uncovered by Judicial Watch – could it? (more…)

God knows I’ve criticized Rachel Maddow before.  She’s trite, pretentious, and smug, a female version of Jon Stewart without any of the charm.  Like Obama, the left loves her largely because of her constant aura of pedantry – do you ever get the feeling that leftists still long for the guidance of the college professors who called them brave for toking up and sexually experimenting? – her supposed brilliance, and her sonorous baritone.

Only one problem: last week she proved that not only was she a raging blacklister, she proved that she was an ignoramus.

It all went down on last Thursday night’s show.  Maddow decided to “debunk” Mike Huckabee’s “Learn Our History” program, a rethinking of the American journey from the conservative point of view.  Specifically, Maddow had a problem with Huckabee’s “new and improved past, a revised American history carefully constructed to make you feel more comfortable than you might otherwise feel about our national history.”  She then picked out one specific example – the left’s favorite example:

“You may remember the House Un-American Activities Committee.  Part of that was Senator Joe McCarthy red-baiting the living heck out of the entertainment industry … In 1947, Ronald Reagan testified before that committee as a friendly witness, as the president of the Screen Actors Guild.  And in 2011, Mike Huckabee reimagines all of this as six words in his animated hagiography of Ronald Reagan for kids: … ‘He worked against Communism in Hollywood.’”

She then proceeded to attempt to blacklist the company that did the animation for the Learn Our History series, explaining, “If you know who brought this amazing animated sauce to life, please get in touch with us.  We would like to know.”

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By now, everyone knows that Michael Savage has been banned from Britain on the grounds articulated by disgraced former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith: “Considered to be engaging in unacceptable behavior by seeking to provoke others to serious criminal acts and fostering hatred which might lead to inter-community violence.”

Attorney Summary–Savage Appeals U.K. Ban:

This week, we found out that the supposedly conservative government of David Cameron is upholding the ban.  Savage’s lawyers initiated a review of the ban by sending a letter to new Home Secretary Theresa May.  In it, they lay forth the full history of the case, a selective prosecution which is mind-blowing in its moral blindness and suicidal impulse to kowtow to radical Islam.

When Savage was originally banned, as the letter states, he was placed on a list alongside terrorists, racists, a child-murderer, and the alleged leader of a violent gang “that beat migrants and posted films of their attacks on the internet.”  Savage, by contrast, has said some inflammatory things on the radio.  And by inflammatory, I mean generally correct, even if the left hates his passion and willingness to articulate the zeitgeist. (more…)

While doing research for my upcoming book, tentatively titled Programming America (Harper Collins, due 2011), the inside story of the politically-motivated evolution of television from The Dick Van Dyke Show to Sex and the City and the very real bias of the industry against conservative content and creators, I interviewed Doug Herzog, President of MTV Networks Entertainment Group. He oversees Comedy Central, and he was kind enough to grant me some time and consent to taping our conversation on June 22, 2009.

During the course of that conversation, I asked Mr. Herzog about the network’s decision to censor South Park in April 2006 – in particular, the network shut down a segment that featured a cartoon image of Mohammed.

Here’s the audio:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

SHAPIRO: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the controversy that surrounded the South Park/Mohammed controversy. How did that come about and what was the real story there?

HERZOG: The real story was the story you know, which is that the guys wanted to depict Mohammed and the network wouldn’t let them. And that was the whole story. And while I think if we had to do it all over again we would do it differently, that was the decision we made at the time. And I regret it somewhat but I’ve made worse decisions in my life. (more…)

The ACORN story is not difficult to understand.  It is about a simple sting operation designed to reveal that a prominent organization routinely aids illegal activity.  When James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles walked into ACORN offices posing as a pimp and prostitute seeking to set up a brothel stocked by underage girls from central America, ACORN employees were only too happy to help – and no doubt, they had been only too happy to help real pimps and prostitutes in the past.

Did those employees commit a crime in offering to help O’Keefe and Giles themselves?  Of course not, because O’Keefe and Giles weren’t actually a pimp and prostitute.  All conspiracy crimes (which this would have been) require that there be an underlying criminal act – if no such criminal act exists, then conspiracy cannot be prosecuted.  This makes sense.  If you and I have a conspiracy to go to Baskin-Robbins, it is not a criminal conspiracy because no criminal act was ever in the offing.  If a guy solicits an undercover police officer posing as a 12-year-old girl online, that’s not a crime unless the state legislature has specifically carved out such a situation.  Similarly, in this case, no criminal act was in the offing because O’Keefe and Giles were never going to set up a whorehouse.

Duh.

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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…)

Already, the media has jumped on the John Patrick Bedell story, claiming that he was a raving right winger “with virulent antigovernment feelings,” as the Christian Science Monitor puts it.  And, just as they did with the Joseph Stack case, they’re ignoring the evidence in order to come to that conclusion.

John Patrick Bedell, whom authorities identified as the gunman in the Pentagon shooting on Thursday, appears to have been a right-wing extremist with virulent antigovernment feelings.

If so, that would make the Pentagon shooting the second violent extremist attack on a federal building within the past month. On Feb. 18, Joseph Stack flew a small aircraft into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. Mr. Stack left behind a disjointed screed in which, among other things, he expressed his hatred of the government.

“If so…” That’s a pretty big “if.”

Let’s start by noting that Bedell was a registered Democrat.  The media has completely and conveniently ignored that little fact. (more…)

**Link fixed**

For years, the left has informed us that the right is interested in shutting down scientific inquiry.  As President Obama put it:

Our government [under President Bush] has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values … [P]romoting science isn’t just about providing resources – it is also about protecting free and open inquiry. It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us, even when it’s inconvenient – especially when it’s inconvenient. It is about ensuring that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a political agenda – and that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.

Of course, the fact is that the left is most interested in curbing science when that science conflicts with political correctness.  From comprehensive sex ed for teenagers (which ignores brain science demonstrating that teens are essentially incapable of regulating risky behavior even when given information about it) to global warming (which apparently causes earthquakes according to vagina expert Eve Ensler) to abortion (in which the actual biological development of fetuses is ignored in favor of niceties about cell clusters) to gay marriage (where leftists idiotically state that men and women are gender constructs), the left is constantly shutting down science in the name of ideology. (more…)

President Obama’s State of the Union address last night was notable for many reasons.  First, it is not often that you hear such petulance from a sitting president of the United States – complaining about not receiving applause from your political opponents is simply ridiculous.  Second, it is not often that a president directly lectures the American people – it failed when Jimmy Carter tried it in his infamous “malaise” speech, and it failed last night when President Obama told us that we needed to man up and follow him to glory.  Comparing his agenda’s stall to Bull Run, Omaha Beach, Black Tuesday and Bloody Sunday, and calling on Americans to “again … answer history’s call” is foolish and self-aggrandizing.

What’s worse is telling us that he is the spiritual embodiment of our collective strength:

And what keeps me going – what keeps me fighting – is that despite all these setbacks, that spirit of determination and optimism – that fundamental decency that has always been at the core of the American people – lives on.”  I couldn’t help but shake my head in amusement when he told us that “It lives on in the struggling small business owner … it lives on in the woman … it lives on in the 8-year-old boy in Louisiana … it lives on in all the Americans … [it] lives on in you, its people.

Quoting the Broadway version of The Lion King is not profundity.  It is silliness: (more…)

Friday, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League did what he’s most fond of doing: he focused his ire on a friend of Israel rather than an enemy in order to protect his allies in the Democratic Party.  This time, he’s attacked staunch philo-Semite and pro-Israel bulwark Rush Limbaugh.  Here’s Rush’s statement:

To some people, banker is a code word for Jewish; and guess who Obama is assaulting?  He’s assaulting bankers.  He’s assaulting money people.  And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there’s – if there’s starting to be some buyer’s remorse there.

Here’s the relevant portion of the ADL press release: (more…)

In the past, I have claimed that the mainstream media is in bed with the Obama Administration.  This time, I mean it literally.

According to the New York Post, Obama budget boss Peter Orszag is engaged to ABC correspondent Bianna Golodryga.  Meanwhile, his ex-girlfriend Claire Milonas, gave birth to his illegitimate child on November 17.  Orszag is already a two-time father by his first wife (they are divorced, naturally).

Bianna Golodryga and Peter Orszag

The media is treating this whole story as a seedy morality play starring an incredibly nerdy Director of OMB.  But even though it now appears that Orszag was spreading his seed just as profligately as taxpayer money, that isn’t the real story.

The real story here is actually Bianna Golodryga and the extremely cozy relationship that sometimes develops between reporters and their sources.

Golodryga, according to her profile at ABCNews.com, covers “the economy and business beat for all of the network’s programs, including World News Tonight, Good Morning America Weekend, and Nightline… Golodryga reported extensively on the housing and credit crisis as well as the collapse of Bear Stearns.” (more…)