I have always wondered who made Howard Kurtz the arbiter of Reliable Sources, but in Weinergate, we are reminded that Kurtz’s ability to discern them is very much in question.  For that matter, so is CNN’s.  It has never been a secret that the supposedly even-handed journalism maven is in reality almost too liberal to function, but if he can’t get his head screwed on straight, he might have to fork over the name of his show to someone else altogether.  Hopefully Kurtz will have the decency to straighten out some of his Weinergate missteps soon and reconsider who really are “reliable sources.”

Kurtz’s history of judging Reliable Sources is staggeringly one sided and ideological.  For one thing, I have frequently seen him go out of his way to profess his respect for the reliability of Keith Olbermann, of all people, not to mention the rest of the guttersnipes at MSNBC:

Now, I don’t put Keith Olbermann in the same category as Beck at all. His MSNBC show, agree with it, disagree with it, was a very well-researched program.

Sure it was, Howard.  Also have a look at how incensed he got when Hugh Hewitt insulted Olbermann on Reliable Sources.  Kurtz and his publication The Daily Beast also seem to regard the Daily Kos, where Olbermann once blogged, as a very legitimate publication.  The most recent example comes during Weinergate.  The Daily Beast didn’t respond when I inquired who writes the captions for their “Cheat Sheet,” but have a look at this caption.  This is The Daily Beast’s own writing, not a quote from the linked story:

Not even a hint of suspicion about the reliability of the post by an anonymous blogger “stef” at a radically partisan website with absolutely no editorial oversight.  The Daily Beast simply reported it as fact. Not long after this story was posted, Kurtz gave it his blessing on twitter, boasting how his “wait[ing] for the facts” had just been validated:

The bottom line is that Kurtz actually believes “the facts” come from anonymous, unaccountable bloggers at one of the murkiest breeding grounds for partisan trolls there is.  Once “stef” weighed in, Kurtz could finally comment on Weinergate without even bothering to check.  “The facts” had arrived. (more…)

Jon Stewart got away with a lot of ridiculous arguments on The Factor the other night.  Stewart’s argument that Common wasn’t actually supporting cop killing because he somehow believes that both Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu Jamal are actually innocent of the crime – and therefore should be excused – is both irrelevant and ludicrous.  O’Reilly didn’t completely let him get away with it, but he went easy on Stewart.  Does Stewart think Rashard Mendenhall should be off the hook because he *technically* doesn’t support or sympathize with terrorism if he actually thinks Bin Laden’s hijacked airplanes might not have been the cause of the World Trade Center buildings collapsing?  Attempting to rewrite the history of clearly and unforgivably evil people is decidedly rejected by good and decent people.  Stewart can shove that argument.

Mendenhall recently lost his endorsement from Champion Sports over a few infamous, perhaps impulsive tweets.  Common wrote a damn love song about convicted cop-killer and domestic terrorist Assata Shakur, went to visit her in Cuba, and named his daughter after her.  I have attached that song at the end of this post, because I want everyone to see exactly what we’re talking about here.  If you name your daughter after a convicted cop-killer, domestic terrorist and violent, militant Black Nationalist, then the song you wrote worshipping said cop-killer was not simply adopting an artistic voice, another defense Stewart attempted.  If your defense is going to be that you believe she’s really completely innocent, you better have some damn good reasons for believing so if you expect anyone to let it slide.

Common’s taking sides with Assata Shakur doesn’t have anything to do with his expert legal opinion.  He’s taking sides with Assata Shakur because he worships everything for which she stood – Black Panthers, Black Liberation Army (BLA), ethnic sectarianism, and the great socialist revolution.  He didn’t write a song arguing that even though Assata Shakur joined a reprehensible, racist and violent terrorist organization like the BLA and did a number of awful things with them, in this particular incident there were anomalies in the application of due process.  He wrote a song worshiping her values and her life’s mission.

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I’m going to make some points about the lesser controversies (namely the lyrics issue) surrounding the invitation of rapper/poet “Common” to the Whitehouse, because John Nolte has the larger controversies that were completely ignored by Jon Stewart pretty well covered.

One thing that stuck out to me in Stewart’s attempted takedown of Fox News (or “epic takedown” if you’re a Mediaite straight news guy: notice how the first linked article is entirely opinionated but not distinguished as such as Mediaite claims to do, and the second glosses over convicted cop-killer and FBI-classified domestic terrorist Assata Shakur, aka Joanne Chesimar — also a hero to Common as an “alleged” cop killer). It was the equivalence Stewart attempted to draw between Johnny Cash and Common.  Stewart showed George Bush presenting the National Medal of Arts to Johnny Cash (who had written some rough lyrics in his day as well) and then asked emphatically, “What’s the difference?! What’s the difference?!”  The answer Stewart was getting at was as subtle as the CB4 rap he played the next day (yeah, this actually exists.  I couldn’t stop singing it either):

Stewart is unsurprisingly asserting that anyone who objects to Common’s Whitehouse invite is either racist or trying to influence people who are, and are holding different standards to Bush’s and Obama’s choice of honorees.  But Stewart’s first deception is that while the National Medal of Arts is presented by the President, honorees are selected by the National Endowment for the Arts, not the Whitehouse, so it was not Bush’s decision at all.

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At the end of April, Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher decided Ed Schultz looked like a genius for outing Donald Trump as a racist, partly on the grounds that Trump had the audacity to reference basketball as one of the President’s pleasures (the piece was recently relabeled a “column”).  The President constantly makes an ostentatious show of his love for basketball – whether he is filling out tournament brackets, staging photo-ops with the UNC basketball team, joining sportscasters to give basketball commentary at Duke games, publicizing his own basketball games at the White House, promoting his former Duke Basketball playing “body man” and on and on.

But Tommy Christopher of course found it viciously racist for Donald Trump to associate President Obama with basketball regardless of how desperately the President tries to associate himself with basketball.  Surely it is just another attempt by Trump to “other-ize” the President by associating him with some exotic sport that is extremely foreign to the white people of America (like John Thune and Scott Brown perhaps?).

But there are race mongers, and then there is Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher.

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Rabid leftist and Mediate goofball Tommy Christopher certainly isn’t above race baiting, but unlike some halfhearted MSM “racers,” he isn’t content with merely maligning someone as a racist through innuendo.  No, he’s going to make up some facts as well.  Way to put your back into, Tommy.  Whatever helps you manufacture a racial incident for political gain.

First Christopher asserted that Trump’s reference to Obama’s penchant for playing highly public basketball games was actually coded racism (in Tommy Christopher’s world, only one race of people play basketball, and nobody is allowed to note what Obama does with his spare time if it also fits into Christopher’s stereotypes).  Trump sure “blew hard on the [racist] dogwhistle [sic].” Here’s what Trump said:

“… you look at what’s happening with gasoline prices, where – he said he has no control over prices, which he does if he gets on the phone or gets off his basketball court, or whatever he’s doing at the time, I mean he should be focused on OPEC and getting those prices down.”

If Christopher merely settled for that kind of baseless, contrived inference, he would only barely be keeping up with the MSM pack.

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Here you see the President depicted in half man, half animal form with ears that don’t exist in the Homo sapiens species.

Far worse, the JibJab brothers’ idea of a clever political joke was to present this racist obscenity in front of the President at the 2009 White House Correspondents Dinner.

The JibJab brothers won’t listen to me, but they might listen to you.  Please. Tell them how disappointed you are.  Please.  Tell them to stop.  Be sure to use the creepiest voice you can imagine, and keep repeating yourself for at least 6 full minutes.

Other parts of this juvenile video attribute other racist stereotypes about Barack Obama: that he is prone to violence, is an arsonist, and is really bad with money.

So why didn’t Lawrence O’Donnell go off forever on this cartoon?

Answer after the jump (original racist video too).

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Correction: Mediaite reports that the slogan “Rocking the Vote” did not appear on the “Together We Thrive” t-shirts.  While the author of this article cautiously noted in the text that we had not verified the claim made at the Canada Free Press that the slogan had appeared on the shirts, our original headline implied that we knew the information to be fact.  We have updated the headline to reflect what is reported in the column.

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Did it seem odd to you that even the Fox all-star panel would have us believe that the President with the most micromanaged image in recent memory had no control or influence whatsoever over the preparation, format, and tenor etc. of the commercialized, pep rally memorial we witnessed this week, and that the White House can blame the embarrassment entirely on the University of Arizona?  The entire event was about Captain Greek Columns - who gave a half hour speech – and his time to shine and show off his magical healing abilities.

“Togethere We Thrive” sure sounded a lot more campaign like than memorial like. Usually the themes for memorials – assuming they’re meant to feature those we’re supposedly remembering – are not about “thriving” or “prospering” or anything of that sort. It was a jarring oddity. Now we have an idea where it came from. Not only did the slogan for this Obama 2012 campaign kickoff, ”Together We Thrive,” originate from President Obama’s campaign organization Organizing for America, but it was the title of a post calling for revolution:

“For too long Americans have been set one against the other.  It is a side affect of a free market society,” Berry IV posted.  “How can profits be maximized, how can I get the work down for the lowest possible costs.  This continually sets one group against the other, especially in the blue collar sectors of America.  It has become part of the American Business model, whether it was indentured servants, slaves picking cotton, sharecroppers, the industrious people that built the railroads or today’s migrant workers.  As long as we remain divided, fighting for the scraps that America has to offer it will be one group against the other.

“What I see in Obama is a chance for revolution. (Italics CFP’s).  A chance for every group to be heard; A chance to live the American dream that has been denied to so many…

“In a previous career, I was the global leader of Diversity for a global fortune 500 corporation.  I have studied the affects of diverse groups working together and the results can not be denied.  Together we Thrive!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Revolution was just a metaphor, you say, not a call for political violence?  Doesn’t matter anymore, apparently.

But worst of all is that according to Judi McLeod of the Canada Free Press, at the bottom of the t-shirts is the DNC slogan “Rocking America and Rocking the Vote.”

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I think everyone always knew that CNN only recruited Kathleen Parker for “Parker Spitzer” as an effort to somehow make it socially acceptable to introduce a man known nationally only for prostitutes as a TV personality and anchor envisioned to match O’Reilly and Olbermann.  After all, a CNN source quoted by New York Magazine said Parker was chosen because “a young, beautiful co-host wouldn’t work” with Captain Black Socks.  Someone forgot to tell Kathleen Parker, who apparently has been increasingly frustrated by producers allowing Spitzer to dominate the program.

The New York Post reported Wednesday that Parker “actually stormed off the set of the ‘Parker Spitzer’ show during a pre-taping a few weeks ago — furious that her co-host is continually allowed to take charge of their nightly CNN chat-fest, the insiders said.”  More importantly, she’s threatening to leave the program.

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A day after Joe Scarborough dialed up the phony outrage in a Politico opinion piece, claiming that Palin was insulting and tearing down “Republican giants” like Reagan and both Bushes to “build her weak résumé,” Morning Joe brought on Nicole Wallace for a similar discussion.  The point of Scarborough’s Politico article and his MSNBC show over the last two days (arguably the last two years) was to call on Republican and conservative leaders to “man up,” as his title says, and criticize Palin, as if that hasn’t been going on since the 2008 election.

Joe Scarborough, like Peggy Noonan, needed to gin up such a ridiculous pretext like defending the honor of Ronald Reagan from the contempt of Sarah Palin – who idolizes Reagan – in order to attack her with language akin to Noonan’s “nincompoop.”  Why can’t Scarborough just “man up” and let it fly without manufacturing an excuse if he’s calling on others to do so?

Nicole Wallace had some interesting things to say, notably blowing a hole through Scarborough’s claim from the day before that “all of your talk radio hosts that will defend Sarah Palin” on the air, “off-set quietly say” the same nasty things that Scarborough does about Palin.  The next day Wallace explained why conservative leaders won’t take her on: because of…all the radio hosts who love her, “the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.”  That wasn’t the first time Scarborough was shot down after claiming everyone else secretly agrees with him.

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As disturbingly amusing as David Frum’s sexual fascination with Sarah Palin has been (you really went for it this time didn’t you, David?), Frum believes he’s finally found the smoking gun proving Sarah Palin is racist, in an excerpt from her book, America by Heart, where Palin writes:

“But from what I’ve read, family life at the time of the founding was a lot like family life for Americans today: full of challenges, sure, but also full of simple pleasures.”

Frum responded in a post at Frum Forum, “Bigger Problems with Palin’s New Book:”

“For the 1 in 6 Americans who were held as slaves in 1790 – often unable to marry legally, and always liable to be sold and separated from spouses or children – family life was quite a lot different at the time of the founding than it is today.

“A would-be president should remember that part of the American story too.”

He later elaborated in an update in response to a number of shocked commenters (they rarely appear at Frum Forum unless someone says something this stupid).  Frum clarifies that he doesn’t think we have to “mention slavery every time we talk about the Founders,” and he doesn’t “call for national self-flagellation or self disparagement.”  He just wanted to make clear that “Palin’s remark was the remark of somebody who looked back at the 1790s and saw only … white people.”

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Of course you did, NBC.  How could you resist?

NBC will apparently be naming the remarkably shady developer of the Ground Zero Mosque one of its “People of the Year.”  NBC released a preview of what appears to be yet another slobbering, softball interview of Gamal this time performed by Matt Lauer.

Here is an impromptu summary of some issues regarding El Gamal’s from Robert Spencer at JihadWatch.org:

Marisol summarized part of the problem with this here: “Meanwhile, the thug Sharif el-Gamal has been sued for an unpaid loan, and faced eviction from his SoHo office over $39,000 in back rent. He was found to owe $21,000 in fines on a property with 13 violations. And there are other unanswered questions.”

El-Gamal has also threatened a Muslim opponent of the Islamic supremacist mega-mosque at Ground Zero; spoken at an event for Hamas-linked CAIR; and has a history of thuggishness, including a recent comment about how beating people up is “exercise & stress relief.”

So why is NBC honoring this thug? Because the mainstream media is avid to get this Islamic supremacist mosque built, and the will of the people be damned.

Could NBC make it any clearer what they think of the opinions and sensitivities of their viewers or 70% of the American public at large?  I think we are all looking forward to seeing both the rest of the list and who NBC passed over in order to bestow this honor on El Gamal (other than Imam Rauf).

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Any public figure who is as easy to make fun of as Glenn Beck deserves to be made fun of regardless of their politics.  Life is too short, and it has always been a healthy sign for conservatives that we are generally much more capable of laughing at ourselves than the other guys, whether it is Rush Limbaugh on Family Guy or George Bush’s entire presidency.

We at Big Journalism are all about credit where credit is due, and unlike most left wingers (and even some others) who have been taking shots at Beck this last week, Stewart ridiculed Beck for his entire show (pre-interview) last night to great effect without resorting to a bogus charge of bigotry.  Attacking the substance of Beck’s “The Puppet Master” series is absolutely fair game for those who disagree, and there is ample territory to make that case.

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“Good judgment prevailed as Congress rejected a move to assert government control over the content of news.” – National Public Radio

So spoke the government financed news of the failed efforts to sever government ties.  Good god, how Orwellian can the government news get?  If NPR can tell us with a straight face that severing federal funding and cutting NPR completely off from the government like every other radio station and news outlet (except PBS) is “an unwarranted attempt to interject federal authority” into the news, then NPR is a step away from fooling around with the laws of arithmetic.

The House voted yesterday 239-171 against stripping NPR of government funding, with Republicans voting unanimously to cut NPR loose.  Following the vote, NPR unleashed the aforementioned series of knee-slappers, which also included the positioning of the no-conservatives-allowed (or Juan Williams) station as a solution to America’s “increasingly fractious media environment.”  NPR then stressed that we keep funding “this essential tool of Democracy,” reminding us that before public radio, America was not a democracy.

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It’s never pretty when a debate over charges of bigotry comes down to how many organizations with ethnic identities whose leaders have proclaimed themselves unelected spokesmen for an entire ethnicity of people have lined up on either side.  In Beck v. Soros, one would think that the factual basis of what Beck said should be more important, but unfortunately that’s generally not how such high profile controversies usually play out.

While accusing Beck of anti-Semitism, “Holocaust exploitation,” and of labeling Soros as a “former Nazi” (which Beck simply did not come close to saying) among other things, one writer for The Jewish Journal was tawdry enough to suggest Beck’s problem is that he is a “non-Jewish pundit” who “simply do[esn’t] have enough bona fides in the Jewish community” to report the things that Beck has been reporting.  Oddly, that writer Mark Paredes is a Mormon, but he’s apparently convinced the Jewish people are all on his side in defending Soros, claiming Beck’s “remarks were universally condemned in the Jewish press.”

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Reason Magazine editor Matt Welch begins a critique of Beck’s “The Puppet Master” series from last week with a sentence that captures the general approach of many other critics of the series: “I didn’t watch Glenn Beck’s three-part series on […] George Soros, but…”  He goes on to clarify that he had read at least parts of the transcript, but that’s never a promising way to begin an evaluation of anything.  The rest of his piece confirms that no, he definitely did not watch it and generally doesn’t know what he is talking about in evaluating it.

Welch doesn’t bother to address the main points of Beck’s argument, but he is confident he has caught Beck making embarrassing mistakes he can use to ruin Beck’s credibility.  He counters Beck’s evaluation of  Soros’ intentions regarding American sovereignty and independence from international governance with a non-sequitur about the original meaning of Karl Popper’s term “open society” – as though that proves Soros’ Open Society Institute couldn’t possibly be used for anything else.   But more amusing is Welch’s mocking this quote from Beck as evidence of Beck getting a “whole bunch of other stuff about Soros dead wrong:”

Along with currencies, Soros also collapses regimes with his Open Society fund. He helped to fund the Velvet Revolution in Czech Republic, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, he also helped to engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia, Yugoslavia. So what is his target now? Us, America.

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The Soros-funded Media Matters and the Soros-funded Jewish Funds for Justice (JFSJ) social justice group have both mysteriously sided with George Soros and denounced Glenn Beck’s unique brand of pro-Israel anti-Semitism in his “The Puppet Master” expose.  Incidentally, The Shefa Fund, which merged into JFSJ, was as critical of Israel as Beck has been supportive.  On Thursday JFSJ President and CEO Simon Greer published a letter on the group’s website aggressively denouncing Beck.  On Friday, Greer went on MSNBC for some more denouncing.

What Greer left out of his letter and what both Greer and Olbermann omitted was that the group Greer leads has received at least $350,000 from Soros’ Open Society Institute in the last two years – $150,000 in 2009 and $200,000 in 2010.  Like a lot of “social justice” organizations, and/or progressive astroturfing outfits, Jewish Funds for Justice lists among its activities “investing in low-income communities and grassroots organizations,” “organizing” and “congregation based community organizing,” “advocacy,” and “a social change strategy developed by Saul Alinsky.” Also among the principles that JFSJ promotes are economic radicalism and wealth redistribution.

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Michael Gerson became the latest former Bush operative to escalate the post election war on the tea party and Sarah Palin in his Washington Post column “The GOP’s Sarah Palin Problem.”  He mangles the facts terribly, even blaming Palin and Senator Jim DeMint for Sharon Angle’s ill-fated nomination in spite of the fact neither endorsed Angle until after she won the nomination.  Doug Brady dismantled effectively the rest of Gerson’s specious argument at Conservatives4Palin.  But most ironic was his closing statement that “the leading figure of the Tea Party movement seems increasingly indifferent to Republican fortunes and increasingly tolerant of disturbing extremism.”

I wonder how it comports with President Bush that just as he comes forth from seclusion to begin his book tour and rehab his image with the public and perhaps with conservatives, a number of his former operatives like Gerson have been reminding everyone of their war on the tea party and Sarah Palin.  While Bush’s big government policies might be excused, generously, given his wartime presidency and small mandate as the best conservatives could have hoped for at the time, those who once believed he was only compromising conservatism out of circumstantial necessity have become rapidly disabused of such notions.  The risk for the president is that conservatives become much less generous in those presumptions and excuses the more his operatives refuse to allow the Republican Party to move on.

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Politico reporter Abby Phillip began one piece yesterday by asserting “Republicans jumped Sunday on President Barack Obama’s defense of a proposed mosque […] Democrats meanwhile sought to change the subject.”  Judging by Politico’s and Phillip’s reporting, they intend to help the Democrats do it, turning the spotlight around on the GOP and their apparent issues with Islam.

For most of the day, Politico’s front page featured Ben Smith’s and Maggie Haberman’s “GOP takes harsher stance toward Islam” followed by Abby Phillip’s aforementioned “GOP keeps mosque flap alive.”  But it was Phillip’s other piece on Sunday highlighting the GOP that takes the cake: “Peter King flips on mosques.”

Riffing off a 2007 interview with Politico, Phillip develops the premise for this piece by contrasting New York Rep. Peter King’s (R) supposed 2007 position that “we have too many mosques in this country” with his current statement that “I support mosques, obviously.”  But of course, in order to create the basis for this piece, Phillip uses the same dishonest splicing of King’s 2007 statement that Politico’s Daniel W. Reilly used in 2007 to smear Rep. King. (more…)

Newsweek commentator David Graham recently declared the Philadelphia Voter Intimidation controversy to be a non-story: “it’s not about a real investigation; it’s about staging an effective piece of political theater that hurts the Obama administration.”  He also meandered into the assertion that the ACORN scandal was “minimal” and “discredited.”  Graham’s career-long track record of suppressing news (without troubling himself with investigation) follows him way, way back to his college years at Duke University.  Why bring up such ancient history?  Well, because he graduated from Duke last year, in 2009.

One of the greatest media frauds in modern history, the Duke Lacrosse Hoax was once a story of violent, racially motivated gang rape by supposedly privileged white men (many were actually on significant financial aid).  Finally, here was the evidence verifying the far-left narrative of America as a deeply oppressive, racist society – evidence that had been missing, in the opinion of one Duke Professor, since the murder of Emmitt Till more than fifty years earlier.  Radical leftists throughout the campus and the nation came out of the woodwork to demand the alleged incident be used as a pretext for a comprehensive discussion on the roles of race, class, and gender in our society.

By the time David Graham took over as editor of the Duke Chronicle, the story was quickly becoming a story of the extraordinary bigotry of segments of the far left and their perverse willingness to exploit an obvious hoax to advance a political and cultural agenda.  The story became the willingness of the Duke Faculty and Administration to burn their own students at the stake in the advancement of, and in fear of, this same leftist narrative.

All of a sudden, none of these individuals at Duke wanted to talk about the matter anymore, least of all the administration.  It was time to put it all behind us.  Enter David Graham.

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