With many in the media focusing on Sarah Palin’s possible Presidential ambitions, her bus tour, her uncontroversial emails, etc., they say almost nothing about the actual GOP candidates expect for multiple iterations of “they’re boring.”

While this may or may not be true, it’s obvious the media is seeking out a darling.  Someone who is nice, moderate, and wants real badly to make nice as opposed to make real change.  Not to fear, for Former Utah Governor and Obama Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman is here.  Everything Huntsman does that offends conservatives enthralls the media.  In a way he’s a cross between John McCain and Joe Scarborough.

Huntsman mirrors McCain in his maverick-y-ness.  A border fence?  Huntsman says it “repulses” him.  He supported vigorously cap and trade legislation and believes in man-made global warming.  He’s okay with healthcare mandates.  He’s broken with many in the GOP and chided American foreign policy saying he wants to “manage” an end to all American wars abroad.  But above all, like McCain flirting about changing parties in the early 2000’s, Huntsman worked for a Democrat President when he was Ambassador to China from 2009 until earlier this year.

He appeals quite heavily to the “Morning Joe” crowd.  The main point of clarity between Huntsman and someone like Joe Scarborough is his position on civility.  When Huntsman announced his candidacy on Tuesday, he said “I respect the President. He and I have a difference of opinion on how to help the country we both love. But the question each of us wants the voters to answer is who will be the better President; not who’s the better American.”  More than that, he sent nauseatingly gushy letters to Obama in 2009, calling the President “a remarkable leader.”  In the letters Huntsman also lauds Sec. Hillary Clinton. Huntsman buys in to the “no labels” and no name style campaign the McCain tried to run in ’08 and Scarborough rants on consistently.

The issue here is that the media wants a GOP nominee who is timid, scared of his own rhetoric.  A sure fire way Barack Obama can win reelection is to have an opponent who is shy and coy in his criticism or second guesses whether or not to attack.  One word that doesn’t come to mind when people see Jon Huntsman is “vigorous”.  He’s nice, he’s moderate, and he’s timid.  He’s the perfect mainstream media Republican.

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria was on Charlie Rose recently and made the claim that America has become “antiquated” and the system our founding documents created is “dysfunctional.”

Zakaria begins by adopting the epic straw man of an arrogant American who thinks America is 100% perfect. Using the pronoun “we think” repeatedly he asserts:

Whenever we have a problem, we tend to think that our Constitution is the best ever created in the history of the world. The people who wrote the Constitution were demi-gods, it never needs to be changed. Our political system is the best in the world. The truth is we have a pretty complicated, antiquated system that’s grown pretty dysfunctional.

Wow, when you put it like that Mr. Zakaria, it’s a wonder we even made it out of the 19th century. Let’s go point by point.

First, the reason Americans revere the Constitution was that it, along with the Declaration of Independence, represented the first time people threw off the chains of a tyrannical government and truly put power in the hands of ordinary people. It was an intellectual revolution more than a physical one. From 1776 and 1789 on, numerous countries have taken our system and used it as a template for change in their countries. We have good reason to be proud. (more…)

Apparently the New York Times finds a decade’s old journalistic tactic to now be the work of “partisans” and reluctantly reports on its reemergence onto the national scene.

The genius of journalism is the cleverer you are in obtaining your story, the more successful you are.  The Watergate reporters employed a number of tactics to garner lead after lead.  In recent years, Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator” profiled the creeps that lurk on the Internet connecting with underage kids.  ABC uses hidden cameras for its show, “What would you do?.”  By and large these segments have been a success and have shined a light on pressing issues.

Smearing James O’Keefe and others as “gotcha” artists, the Times yet again sneers at the very tactic it accepts from  ABC, NBC, and even NPR, the target of O’Keefe’s latest video.

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Democrat Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver said on Thursday he supports the creation of a “civility watchdog group” and for them to “rank us on the basis of our civility.”

Cleaver, who, with the media’s help, was also involved in the smearing of tea party protesters in March 2010, has been a leading advocate for “toning down” political rhetoric in the wake of Rep. Giffords shooting.

Interestingly on the same day, liberal union protesters in Wisconsin frothed at the mouth to the point of near riot over Governor Scott Walker’s budget cuts – and it wasn’t simply protesting that was going on.  I’d say the language was quite, uncivil.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

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HBO host Bill Maher attempted again this week to starkly smear conservatives.  While that’s nothing new, Maher added a small little wrinkle into this profanity laced, factually ignorant diatribe, sports.

I personally love baseball and football above all other American sports.  So I found it interesting that Maher found a way to claim football is successful due to socialism, and that baseball is failing because of capitalism.

Forgetting that the NFL and MLB are private organizations and have complete authority to place rules on their sport, Maher says the NFL does something different.  They share TV revenue among the 32 teams equally, while baseball does not.  Plus, the NFL draft’s first draft pick is the worst team from the year before.  He also cites the fact that a small town like Green Bay can go to the Super Bowl, while the Pittsburg Pirates haven’t won the World Series in a long time.

Well, two can play that game Bill.  In the “socialist” sport known as football, can Maher explain why the Cleveland Browns and the Detroit Lions have never been to a Super Bowl, ever?  And can he explain how that evil capitalist sport known as baseball can see a team like the Marlins, with the smallest payroll in baseball defeat the Yankees, who have the highest in 2003?  In fact, from 2000-2010, there was a new World Series winner every year (with the exception of the Red Sox, who hadn’t won in 80 plus years prior).

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It’s no shock that liberal darling and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman doesn’t like the GOP or its plan to repeal President Obama’s health control law.  However, in his Sunday column he felt it necessary to not only call the Republican effort wrong, the bearded Spock called them illogical.

He begins with an anecdote to prove wrong the GOP’s insistence that the Medicare “Doc Fix,” which totals over $200 billion, should be included in the cost of Obamacare.  Many could retort Krugman’s critique by pointing out the $500 billion in Medicare that Obamacare actually cuts, so paying for another year of doctor fixes is very much related to the overall health tab of the United States.

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MSNBC host and Olbermann disciple, Lawrence O’Donnell played the “I thought of it first, dummy” card against the Tea Party Monday night when he stated “Most of them [tea partiers] didn’t know there was a debt ceiling until I raised the question of how they would vote on it on election night.”

Of course.  Because crazy Larry O’Donnell is just so darned smart and those Tea Party morons are so stupid.  One can’t help but have déjà vu when watching a network that profligates the very same narrative over the same prime-time air, night after night.  Tea Party dumb, liberals smart … get it?

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The so-called “non-partisan” and “independent” fact checkers over at Politifact have named  2010’s “Lie of the year.” The winner was the phrase “A government takeover of healthcare” used by critics of the President’s healt care takeover.

A number of issues arise when you start to fact check the fact checkers.

They first blamed the quote on GOP strategist Frank Luntz, who Politifact claims is “a consultant famous for his phraseology.” The phrasing in the article has similar implications to when President Obama and others repeatedly claimed the existence of some vast right wing network thwarting their plans, even when they controlled Washington for 13 months. Politifact plays right into the notion of shadowy GOP figures weaving a tapestry of lies, et cetera.

In the actual fact-check portion they say, “’Government takeover conjures a European approach where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are public employees. But the law Congress passed … relies largely on the free market.” I’m not sure how a 2,000 plus page bill creating a mountain of new regulations, allowing less free activity, and unconstitutionally forcing people to buy a product “relies on the free market”. It seems the authors of the bill had a different end in mind.

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In her epic competition with Kathleen Parker over who can be the snarkiest towards Gov. Sarah Palin, Maureen Dowd now claims a scene from TLC’s “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” is, in fact comparable to Palin hunting down the President of the United States.

Dowd is feasting on the scene from Palin’s TLC show where the former Governor is hunting a caribou with her father.  Palin eventually shoots and kills the animal, which sent the liberal blogosphere into an apoplectic shock.

Ms. Dowd’s column was pretty typical for an anti-Palin hit piece.  She points out Palin missed the caribou a couple times, which reinforces the “Palin’s a moron” meme.  She pokes Palin for, “her camo, her French manicured nails, her cap that says (in pink) Girls And Guns, her 72-year-old father and her TLC reality show crew.”  This hits the “diva” meme again.  Through it all, Dowd says Palin did everything from “pontificating” to accusing her of “eviscerating animals for fun.”  Heck, she even found a way to insert Former Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident in the fray.

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The Society for Professional Journalists recently deemed that “ethical journalism prevailed” in the leaking of hundreds of thousands of classified government documents by WikiLeaks.

In her post on Thursday, SPJ’s President Hagit Limor wouldn’t commit to saying that Julian Assange is not a journalist saying, “To exclude any format will define us as the fools of tomorrow.”  Furthermore, she says that the classification of WikiLeaks doesn’t matter to the people because “The world audience just wants information.”

Limor doesn’t doubt the “journalistic value” of the leaked information, as she cites some noteworthy tidbits that were made public.

Where Ms. Limor goes off the rails is when she states that, “Nothing I’ve read rises to the level of endangering lives.”  This might be true in the case of the most recent leaks, but on the whole WikiLeaks has made public Afghani informants that the U.S. Military depends on for support.  They give that support based on the condition of their anonymity.  One would presume that without our assurance of secrecy, we’d find our thirst for fresh Intel unquenched.

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Slate Magazine’s Jack Shafer has called for Sec. of State Hillary Clinton to resign her post after classified cables sent be her were released in the Wikileaks document dump.  Slate is often an Obama ally however Shafer said, “The leaked cables make it impossible for Hillary Clinton to continue as secretary of state.”

Not withstanding the fact that numerous nations dabble in spying and say things in classified cables that aren’t meant for public consumption, previous Secretaries of State have engaged in similar efforts.  Shafer acknowledges this but claims, “what makes Clinton’s sleuthing unique is the paper trail that documents her spying-on-their-diplomats-with-our-diplomat orders.”  And because its now public, Shafer says we must give the offended nations Clinton’s “scalp” to “save face.”

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The left’s obsession with Sarah Palin is sure to reach a fever pitch as her new book, America By Heart, debuts this week.  As if Americans haven’t figured it out yet, mainstream liberals and some liberal Republicans can’t stand her.  So desperate are they to attack her that they’ve seized on an excerpt from the book to play the racism card.

A Tuesday column in the Washington Post by Richard Cohen embodies this anti-Palin mania when he wrote that Palin, “could not be the president of black America nor of Hispanic America.”

Why, you may ask?  Well Cohen says she cares more about, “grizzlies than she does about African Americans.”  Now surely Mr. Cohen would have some rock solid proof before he accuses Palin of not caring about ethnic groups?  His “evidence” seems to be summed up in a quotation from the boom regarding First Lady Michelle Obama’s statement that her husband’s success warranted for her “the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.”

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In the first of many acts of bipartisanship to come in the 112^th Congress, House Democrats have refused to work with Republicans on cutting NPR’s public funding.

The brouhaha was created when NPR fired Juan Williams for expressing his honest opinion on Fox News.  After an obviously political move by a “public” radio station that receives taxpayer dollars, the GOP moved to end the public portion of the subsidy.

The cut was selected by American’s voting online in the House GOP’s You Cut program.  But just as they did in the healthcare, cap and trade, and stimulus bills, the Democrats failed to yield to the will of the American people.

The amount of money NPR receives from taxpayers is disputed but may be as much as 25%.

The station originally criticized the possible cut by saying, “The proposal to prohibit public radio stations from using CPB grants to purchase NPR programming is an unwarranted attempt to interject federal authority into local station program decision-making.”

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In classic the New York Times style, they found a way to paint the overwhelming majority of a Midwestern state as crazies, loons, and bigots.

In a piece written by James C. McKinley Jr. entitled “ Oklahoma Surprise” the author details the ongoing fight between extremes and rational moderates, like CAIR.  The subject is Oklahoma’s Constitutional Amendment that would ban Islamic law or any other international law from being used in an Oklahoma court.

Mr. McKinley laments that “In Oklahoma, many conservative Democrats from rural areas lost, sounding a death knell for the state’s famous Blue Dogs, who have wielded power since the 1930s”.

Due to the loss of these heroic folks, it is the extreme “right-wing” that pushes things like English as the state’s official language and proposals that mandate the showing of picture ID to vote.  Mr. McKinley frames these measures as outlandish.

In mentioning that in the article, it’s obvious that the author is attempting to frame a racists vs. moderates, a.k.a. liberals, clash.

He bemoans the law by distortion, “Muslim leaders in Oklahoma said the amendment felt like a slap in the face. They worry that marriages, wills, divorces and contracts — often drawn up between parties under Islamic principles then submitted to a court for approval — will no longer be valid.”

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Americans have seen what speech codes do to freedom in other countries, past and present.  But not to be outdone MSNBC’s Ed Schultz, a man who encouraged voter fraud, said he’d urinate on Hugh Hewitt, and admitted to wanting to kill a former Vice President, says its actually Rush Limbaugh who should be penalized in some way for exercising his freedom of speech.

Schultz again used his hardly watched MSNBC timeslot to demonize conservatives by taking clips out of context.  He plays a couple clips from Rush Limbaugh’s show where he points out that the House Democrats are attempting to push the highest ranking black official in Congress out of his leadership post.  In making his point, Limbaugh used similar language to President Obama’s statement that the GOP has to sit in the back of the car.

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