The Washington Post was very excited to report on Feb. 5 that President Obama has finally achieved “the edge” over Mitt Romney in a “general election matchup” poll. The Post was pleased to note Obama was “boosted by improved public confidence” and that he now led Romney by over 50%. Well, he does if you don’t poll actual voters, anyway and therein lies the major problem with the Post’s polling.

The flaw in the Post’s poll is that they seem to have polled “adults” instead of “likely voters” and this fact calls into question the claim in the headline that “Obama holds edge over Romney in general election matchup.” You see, you have to be an actual voter before your opinion in an “election matchup” much matters but the Post apparently did not make sure that its respondents were actual voters before declaring that Obama is now winning over more voters.

But the bigger problem is the fact that the Post has decided it no longer needs to include the partisan breakdown of its respondents for readers to assess. The Post did not include the percentages of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents in its polling data so there is no way to know if the poll included a fair representation of all parties or if the whole poll was weighted heavy with Democrats.

The Post has had troubling polls before. Ed Morrissey notes for instance that a WaPo poll from April of 2011 had 22% Republicans overpowered by 33% Democrats and 38% purported independents. If the Post is shorting Republican representation, no wonder the Obamessiah seems to be surging!

By excluding in reports its partisan breakdown, the Post risks having its results easily dismissed by serious readers. It makes the poll practically worthless. Of course, the problem is that the average reader won’t realize that things are askew with the polling and will accept the claims of Obama’s popularity at face value. But maybe that’s why the Post won’t include its partisan breakdown in its reports? As Morrissey says, “it’s easy to assume that the reason that the Post has ended its sample transparency is because they have something to hide.”

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Polk Award-Winning Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings made a startling set of admissions on CSPAN, recently. Not only did he admit that most “journalists” are liberals, but he implied that they really aren’t interested in just reporting the facts of stories. Instead he said they are filled with a liberal “moralistic righteousness” and their goal is to “afflict” those they disagree with.

In the discussion, Hastings laid out how he sees his work as a journalist. “I think any journalist worth his salt often has a real moralistic kind of righteousness to them somewhere in their soul… and we talk in grand terms about ourselves, you know, afflicting the powerful and comforting the afflicted,” he told the CSPAN host.

Not much “objectivity” going on there, is there?

In the video segment featured by Townhall, Hastings is initially asked about his “prestigious” Polk Award and this discussion led CSPAN’s Brain Lamb to ask Hastings about the ideological mindset of Polk Award winners. This brought Hastings to his admission.

Of course, if one has to explain how “prestigious” an award is, one should suspect it ain’t that prestigious! Prestige is something that others should assign to you, not something you should assign to yourself.

Now, you might recall Mr. Hastings as the man whose 2010 Rolling Stone article eventually led to the firing of General Stanley McChrystal. Hastings caught some off-record carping by McChrystal’s staffers the revelation of which made the General look bad to his political leaders. Even then, many might have questioned Hastings’ actions by actually publishing those unguarded and casual, off-record conversations. It smacked of agenda or “gotcha journalism.”

But as we see in this interview, as far as Hastings is concerned, that is what journalists are supposed to do. They are supposed to approach their work with a “moralistic” agenda guiding them. They aren’t supposed to just publish the facts and let readers decide. They are supposed to “afflict the powerful” and that with all the left-wing political ideology such a crusade implies.

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The gauzy puffery that the Old Media slathers upon the Occupy Wall Street movement has helped keep most Americans in the dark about how nasty, how violent, how outrageous, and even how incredibly lacking in integrity this movement is. On the conservative blogs the truth is well known, of course, but the fact that few Americans seem to know how bad the OWSers are shows that as conservatives we are not effectively getting our message out there.

We're sure this Occupy Oakland protester isn't vandalizing this building, rather he accidentally fell into this window with a hammer. Repeatedly.

For the initial two years of its existence the Old Media spent its every waking moment destroying, maligning, and out right lying about the tea party movement. Even today you’ll see an occasional swipe at the tea partiers made by some lefty hater and the Old Media is happy to “report” the slander, naturally.

You might remember when Obama operative Anna Park tried to start a counter movement that she prosaically called “the Coffee Party” during the heyday of the tea party. You may also recall that those Old Media mavens, while daily lying and lambasting the tea partiers, fell all over themselves to play up the silly and quickly failed and forgotten “Coffee Party” effort.

Similarly, when the Occupiers hit the scene, the Old Media went into paroxysms of ecstasy over the whole thing. Even today, after conservatives have so effortlessly ripped away the veneer from the absurdity and essential anti-Americanness of the OWSers, the Old Media is still slathering OWS with unearned and illicit praise.

Most Americans are unaware that real communists and socialists and other anti-American groups form the core of OWS. Few Americans understand that these people are drug addicts and criminals that have indulged every imaginable crime at these events. From property destruction to child abandonment to rape to gun crimes, just about every crime imaginable from small to large have been committed at these events. People have even died at these things!

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If you want a case of clear bias, the Washington D.C. affiliate of CBS will surely fill the bill for its bias against pro-life supporters. On January 23 the DC affiliate featured on its website a photo slide show of pictures taken at the March for Life rally held annually at the nation’s capitol. Curiously, though, there wasn’t a single photo of any pro-lifers. Instead, the photo essay featured only photos of abortion-supporting protesters who stood on the sidelines taunting the pro-life marchers.

The photo slide show initially featured seven photos of abortion supporters, such as one of marchers holding signs saying “Family Planning Saves Lives Worldwide,” one featuring women holding signs saying that abortion should be kept legal, and another showing a woman sporting an abortion on demand sticker.

Upwards of 50,000 pro-life supporters turned out in the DC cold to participate in the March for Life, yet apparently CBS could only find the small handful of pro-abortion supporters to photograph.

Pro-life advocates like Jill Stanek were incredulous, and it wasn’t long before the comments section on the CBS website exploded with pro-lifers crying foul. Dozens of unhappy commenters remarked how badly the bias of CBS galled them.

Finally, a day or so later, CBS altered its slide show and added some photos of some of the actual participants of the pro-life march. The slide show now features seven photos of pro-lifers and an equal amount of pro-abortion supporters.

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The Chicago Sun Times has received your message loud and clear, dear readers. As much as admitting that they are biased and they know it, the long-time Windy City staple has decided that hence forth it will no longer endorse candidates for political office.

In a Sunday editorial, the 71-year-old paper announced its new policy amusingly touting the Old Media’s party line that it engages in “unbiased news coverage” and that newspapers today wish to “appeal to the widest possible readership.”

“They want to inform you, not spin you,” the editorial avers. Yet, the editorial goes on to admit that it has heard from readers who seriously doubt that dedication to unbiased news coverage. And when you note that over the last several decades few national news papers have endorsed a Republican for President — most especially the left-leaning Chicago Sun-Times — it is easy to doubt that purported dedication to just-the-facts reporting.

The Sun-Times is so dedicated to helping Democrats get elected, it even endorsed disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich for reelection. Yes, even after his troubles were well known by even the most uninformed Illinois voter. After reelection Governor Blagojevich ended up being convicted on several counts of fraud and influence peddling when he tried to sell the Senate seat that Obama gave up to become president. Blago will begin serving a 14-year sentence in a federal prison this February.

Yet, even before Blago’s convictions for selling the Senate seat he was involved in numerous scandals and still the Times endorsed him any way saying. “There’s no denying the cloud of scandal over his administration,” the Times then wrote. Going on, the Times said, “We’ve chosen to give him the benefit of the doubt and endorse him for a number of reasons.”

It is a bit hard to escape the feeling that the “number of reasons” the Times endorsed the corrupt Blago was spelled D-E-M-O-C-R-A-T!

One has to doubt the commitment to vetting candidates, anyway. All too often the editorial board’s entire decision rests solely on the candidate questionnaires as opposed to any deeper study of candidate’s records or campaigns. Worse, when it comes to judges the Sun-Times most especially would just rely on the left-wing endorsements of the Chicago Bar Association, a horribly biased source for information on judges.

The Times did make an interesting point in its announcement, but only by accident, it appears.

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Last week two political operatives were arrested in separate incidents, one Democrat and one Republican. It certainly isn’t news that political operatives sometimes break the law, but how the different incidents were reported is typical of how the Old Media establishment uses guilt by association to tar Republicans but rarely does the same thing to take swipes at Democrats.

The similarity in the two stories is that both of the accused are former staffers of high profile politicians. The Democrat was an Obama campaign staffer while the Republican was a staffer of the Republican Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker. Neither currently works for those high profile pols, but only the Republican was linked to his former boss. The Democrat’s link to Obama was mostly ignored by the media.

Story One: Some Guy Arrested

We’ll begin with the tale of Iowa Democrat operative Zachary Edwards who tried to steal the identity of a rival Republican in order to use that identity to get the Republican in trouble.

Edwards tried to use the identity of Iowa Secretary of State, Republican Matt Schultz (and/or Schultz’s brother) to illegally obtain some sort of state benefits so that he could then claim that the Republicans were illegally obtaining state benefits. This Edwards fellow hoped he could smear the GOP Sec. of State as engaging in some sort of unethical behavior. (The Iowa Republican blog has more on the fight between Schultz and Iowa Democrats)

Now, as it happens Edwards is not only a member of a politically connected Democrat consulting firm, Link Strategies — a company with long-standing ties to powerful Iowa Democrat Senator Tom Harkin — but Edwards was also a member of Obama’s Iowa team in 2007/08. Edwards’ bio has since been scrubbed from the Link Strategies page but read in part, “In September 2007, Zach joined the Obama New Media department as co-director of the Nevada New Media team and then moved on to direct New Media operations in five other primary states (New Mexico, Texas, North Carolina, and South Dakota).”

For a screen shot of Edwards memory-holed bio from the Link Strategy site, see the Iowa Grounds blog.

So, how was Edwards’ arrest reported? For one thing, it was hard to find Edwards’ Democrat affiliation and his past role as a top Obama campaign staffer in stories of this incident.

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It seems the onetime political news website Politico is edging toward a Daily Kos-like experience. January 14th we see yet another step in Politico’s journey toward left-wing extremes with a fake poll that claims that no one in South Carolina likes the tea party movement. Did I mention it was a “Facebook poll?”

The headline ways it all, really: Facebook/POLITICO poll: South Carolina users cool to tea party. If the fact that this “poll” is just some posting on a Facebook page doesn’t make you laugh at its validity, the hilarity continues as Politico goes on to treat this silliness as real news.

“Almost two-thirds of adult Facebook users in South Carolina say they aren’t fans of the tea party, according to a Facebook poll conducted today with POLITICO,” the “news” website begins.

Come on. Does anyone imagine that Politico reached “almost two-thirds” of the Facebook uses in South Carolina? Does anyone even imagine that Politico reached even a representative number of Facebook users in South Carolina? Was there any scientific method at all to this or was it just some posting that a handful of South Carolinians saw on Facebook? Bet you can guess.

But let’s not let science get in the way of a good liberal meme, OK? Politico has decided that everyone in South Carolina hates the tea party movement and that is that, you see?

Sixty-two percent of those surveyed said they are “not at all supportive” of the tea party, compared with 20 percent who were “somewhat supportive” and 18 percent who were “very supportive.”

Of those surveyed, women were slightly less supportive of the tea party. Just 35 percent were either “somewhat” or “very” supportive of the movement, compared with 42 percent among men.

Politico does admit that this poll has some, er, limitations.

The results only represent the sentiment of South Carolina users on Facebook, not registered voters or likely GOP primary voters that tend to be more reliable barometers of primary elections. The Facebook poll, for instance, doesn’t exclude Democrats or independents.

How many Facebook respondents were Democrats? How many were white, black, or Asian? How many were actual voters? How many really lived in South Carolina? How do we quantify these results? Who needs scientific controls on a poll, anyway?

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If you want to see a perfect example of how the left-wing media plans to smear and destroy Mitt Romney should he win the GOP nomination, no better example can be found than the hoax over a photo that lefties every where are trying to sell as evidence of Romney’s “privileged” life. Lefties say the photo in question shows Romney “getting his shoes shined” before getting on a private jet during his campaign travel. That is not what the photo shows, of course, but let’s not let the truth get in the way of a good left-wing mudslinging, OK?

The meme began from a photo by Getty showing Romney sitting in a chair on the tarmac with his foot up and a red-jacketed worker attending to the candidate’s footwear. The left immediately assumed that Romney was getting his shoes shined before getting on a “corporate” jet. This story was made up out of whole cloth because in reality what the picture shows is Romney getting his shoes wanded by an explosive sniffing device wielded by a TSA agent before being allowed to board the plane.

The photo seems to have appeared early on the blog of the MSNBC smear show “The Ed Schultz Show” with the headline, “Romney Creates Another Job.” The caption set the tone for the left-wing onslaught to come saying, “Mitt Romney created another job with his presence alone… a job giving shoe shines on the tarmac in front of a corporate jet.”

From there Salon’s most virulent hater, Joan Walsh, picked up on the meme on her blog with one titled “Mr. 1 Percent is clueless about inequality,” where she used the photo as an illustration to “prove” that Romney was out of touch with the reg’lar folks.

Salon’s Steve Kornacki then went on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show and launched into his interpretation of the supposed shoe shining.

“There’s a picture that’s making the rounds today — the shoe shine on the tarmac,” Kornacki explained. “I don’t know if you saw this one. I don’t know where this came from… He’s sitting in front of an airplane. I think it might be a corporate jet, and he’s wearing a suit and he’s getting a shoe shine. He’s got a big smile on his face.”

…“He’s getting a shoe shine! We put this on Salon earlier today. I’m not sure where it originated. But it never looks good for a politician to be getting a shoe shine, you know, on a tarmac but it looks terrible when it’s Mitt Romney and this is your image and background. It looks worse when it’s the year 2012 and the economy is in such a bad place, and the Democrats are going to be going after your party for being the one that sort of favors the people who get shoe shines on tarmacs!” he added.

So, not only did Kornacki lie about the photo — he had no knowledge at all about what it really showed — but he then throw in the “I think it might be a corporate jet” on top of it — again without knowing if it really was or not — so that he could add more layers of lies to the story.

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I suppose we couldn’t get past the one-year anniversary of the crime against Democrat Representative Gabrielle Giffords without some Old Media outlet blaming the supposed “heated” political rhetoric of the day for her shooting. On Sunday we saw NPR doing just that. The fact is, no matter how many times they say it, politics and the “heated rhetoric” thereof had absolutely nothing at all to do with Giffords’ shooting. The linking of the crime to politics is just not legitimate.

On this one-year anniversary, NPR’s Linton Weeks was all about the improvement of our “civil discourse,” and full of lament that it just isn’t happening. Perhaps it is a noble sentiment, but he marred that nobility by beginning his piece with a false allusion once again tying the Giffords shooting to the “political atmosphere” of the day.

“When a gunman opened fire on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords,” Linton wrote, “some people were quick to blame the episode on the overheated political climate.”

With that false allusion we also know what NPR meant to do. It meant to blame conservatives for Giffords’ shooting.

He went on to say:

At the time of the attack, there was a high tide of political rhetoric across America and a low ebb of social civility. The New York Times reported that the shootings “raised questions about potential political motives” and that the Pima County, Ariz., sheriff was blaming the tragedies on “the toxic political environment.”

According to The Times, national reaction was immediate. “Democrats denounced the fierce partisan atmosphere in Gifford’s district and top Republicans quickly condemned the violence.”

To the extent that “some people” did indeed immediately jump to the conclusion that the rhetoric of the Tea Party, conservatives and the Republican Party was at fault for the Giffords shooting, Linton is correct.

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Here’s a new way to try and hip-up the boring, ages-old, left-wing idea of tax hikes: link it to reality TV star Kim Kardashian. That is just what ABC News tried to do on the Wednesday, January 4th edition of ABC “World News Tonight” when the venerable news program helped advertise an effort by a small group headed by a former Democrat operative that wants to hike California’s income taxes. It is a two-pronged approach of hitching a big government, big spending, high tax agenda to the TV reality show star in order to drag younger people into the left’s class warfare game.

ABC highlighted a California Millionaires Tax policy recommendation from a group called Courage Campaign. The group is headed by Rick Jacobs who is the former head of Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign in California, a Huffington Post writer, and leader of this admittedly “progressive” group.

ABC reported that the “liberal group” (and kudos to ABC for actually identifying them as a liberal group for a change) is upset that Kim Kardashian, who made some $12 million in 2011, only paid one percent more than the average middle class wage in the Golden State.

Here is what the extremist high-tax group says on it’s website about this:

Kim Kardashian made more than $12 million in 2010, but she only paid 1% more in taxes than a middle-class Californian. That’s not OK, especially when budget cuts are decimating schools and critical programs for children, the elderly, and the disabled. It’s exactly why Courage Campaign and two dozen other organizations are putting the Millionaires Tax of 2012 on the ballot.

Wow, that tiny, little one percent suuuure seems small, right? But let’s look at the actual payment, shall we? Kardashian paid a tax rate of 10.3 percent and 10.3 percent of twelve million is $1,236,000! And those middle-class folks that paid one percent less at 9.3 percent? Well if the average income in California is $47.000, then they paid only $4,371. Why aren’t these middle-class louts paying their fair share? (That’s called sarcasm, by the way.)

Now, it’s not that I care at all for Kim and her brood — I never watch so-called reality TV and have never seen her show — but this is all really just class warfare. After all, let’s look at the tact here: Instead of actually talking about what Kardashian pays, this ABC flogged extremist group focuses on that “one percent” as if that makes her tax remittance tiny. They mislead the public by purposefully avoiding any mention of the amount she actually paid.

Seriously, the fact is we could out right confiscate the millions made by the Kardashinas of this country and it wouldn’t make a dent in the hole of trillions of dollars that Democrats have dug for us.

But there is one last thing to ask about this ABC report: I’m just wondering, but has ABC ever highlighted the tax policy idea of some small tea party group that made a video to sell its plan to the people? Why does this tiny, left-wing group in California rate any attention at all in a national news program?

Obviously the answer here is that ABC saw the possibility of exploiting Kardashian and enraging her young fan base in order to drive them to support a left-wing idea. It’s all about branding, you see. If the far left and ABC can leech off Kim Kardashian to sell their creaky old socialist policies, then that’s what they will do.

On Wednesday morning the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake posted an infographic that was a perfect example of how one can use a graphic chart to influence the public in subtle ways, ways that we of the center right better start employing in our own efforts if we want to win over the public.

Blake’s post, “Why People Hate Congress,” fits in well with President Obama’s class warfare rhetoric as employed by his campaign to set different economic classes against each other in a desperate and cynically populist bid to get reelected next year. There is little of substance to Blake’s post other than to fan the flames of the sort of hatred that he wants to see grow in order to aid Obama in 2012.

The Post’s Blake also ended up having to pull the graphic off his The Fix blog post because it simply did not illustrate what he claimed it did in his story — but that is another issue that we’ll deal with at the end of this report.

Blake begins his piece asking, “Want to know why Americans hate Congress?” He then goes on to claim it is in part because our elected representatives in Washington D.C. are members of the eeeevil rich.

The fact that members of Congress are getting richer (and 57 members come from the top 1 percent, according to USA Today) confirms what Americans suspect about the people who are running this country: that they don’t empathize with normal people.

Of course, with a dispassionate application of logic, having a few dollars more than the next guy does not ipso facto make the richer guy so out of touch that he cannot empathize with anyone in a lower salary range. Only those filled with hate make this assumption. Empathy has nothing to do with class, money, or politics. It has to do with one’s character.

Further there are plenty of members of Congress with the character to understand and have empathy with others. Then there are some that don’t. People are people, rich or poor.

It is also telling that even Blake admits that Congress has always been filled with “the rich.” The founders were not groveling in poverty, after all. It often takes a person that has achieved a certain place in society to become elected. I mean, should they be elected, how can anyone expect “the poor” or even the lower middle class to afford to fund homes both in D.C. and back in their district? Who can afford to leave their family and business if half the year off more to fly off the D.C. to attend to government business? And with the costs of elections and the Byzantine election laws these days causing many candidates to self fund, it will only be natural that “the rich” end up being our representatives in Congress.

But special attention has to be paid to the graphic Blake used to illustrate his story. And what a masterwork of subtlety it is. Blake claimed that the illustration made by a well-known hate-the-rich researcher from California showed in graphic form the distribution of wealth among both chambers of Congress. The graphic depicts the “top 1%” and the “next 9%” in the color red. Then it uses blue to show the “following 10%” and the “bottom 80%.” Notice what is going on? That’s right, this graphic uses the color red to depict the eeevil rich. And what is the color red in politics these days? None other than the color the Old Media has assigned to the Republican Party.

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Top ten lists at year’s end are always subjective, to be sure, but some lists seem rather obviously out of whack at first glance. Politico’s “Top 10 political blunders of 2011” is one of those lists that is glaring for what isn’t present as opposed to what is. And what isn’t seems to bespeak that Politico wanted to avoid focusing on Democrat failures in a year when there are so many Democrat failures.

Politico bills this list as one of the “worst political strategic decisions” of 2011. Strangely enough, this list contains fully seven GOP “blunders” yet only three Democrat goofs. Some of the GOP blunders are also questionable for any top ten list considering what is missing from the thing.

First we need a rundown on what is on this list, and the order in which Politico places them.

• Obama pivots to deficits
• Republicans vote on the Ryan budget
• Tim Pawlenty bets it all on Ames
• Mitt Romney hides
• Rick Perry debates
• Jon Huntsman returns from China
• Mr. Daley goes to Washington
• Mitch and Haley stay home
• Dems pick Charlotte
• John Kasich pushes S.B. 5

Isn’t it fascinating that some of these “top blunders” did not actually result in a major reversal of great import of some type or another? Take the Jon Huntsman point, for instance. Jon Huntsman is not consequential and his decision to enter the GOP primary race instead of staying in China is not going to make much difference to anyone, anywhere. The Mitch Daniels point is also specious for such a list as Daniel’s decision to sit out 2012 did not necessarily end his career. Further the blunder of Democrats picking Charlotte, North Carolina, while certainly a messy proposition fraught with mistakes, is hardly any kind of end of the world goof, is it?

Now let’s talk about what is not on that list. Solyndra is not on that list. How can this be? This is a political blunder of epic proportions. Even the left-wing Washington Post is saying that the decision supposedly based on science and good economics was instead “infused with politics at every level.” Millions of tax dollars were thrown away during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression at a failing company just to suit Obama’s desire to tout his fantasy of “green jobs.”

If you don’t want to pick Solyndra, why you can reach for the debacle of Fast And Furious for inclusion on such a list. Here we have a program that was supposed to track guns used by Mexican narco-terrorists so that these evil cretins could be ferreted out deep in Mexico. Instead, thousands of American guns sold to these criminals right here in America were lost in the Mexican interior and then were turned to kill hundreds of Mexicans and perhaps two U.S. law enforcement officers. Then, making matters worse, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder — an Obama appointee — has lied repeatedly about what he knew about the program and when he knew it. Now over 90 government officials are calling for Holder’s resignation. If this isn’t a major political blunder, what is? This has made Eric Holder an embattled Attorney General at the least, yet, it merits no spot on this top ten blunder list.

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One of the Old Media’s favorite ways of attempting to hide the ideological track of a story is to somehow forget to mention which party someone in the news hails or to whom they owe their fealty. In this case, it is what they don’t report that misleads. This week we find a classic what-they-don’t-say story concerning the judge that blocked sections of South Carolina’s new immigration law. For those unaware, U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel temporarily blocked segments of South Carolina’s new immigration laws because he claimed that some of its provisions impinged on federal prerogatives, things over which the state has no jurisdiction. The South Carolina law was opposed in court by Obama’s left-wing, activist Department of Justice headed by Eric “Fast And Furious” Holder and a gaggle of civil rights groups. Judge Gergel agreed with these attackers and issued an injunction to stop implementation of the provisions in question.

The Old Media reported a lot of details in the story, of course. We learned all about who opposed the provisions, who scoffed at the injunction, in what District Judge Gergel hailed, and in some of the reports we even get to hear what Republican South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley had to say about it all. But there is one thing few news outlets seemed to report that might help readers understand the decision better. Judge Richard Mark Gergel is an Obama appointee. (more…)

It’s that time of year again, time for newspapers and magazines to start floating their “top stories of the year” lists and Time Magazine has a whole “Top of Everything” list with which to thrill us. But it is Time’s Top U.S. News Stories list that deserves some closer scrutiny because on it Time has determined that the Occupy Wall Street tale is the number one story of the year. As if anyone ever doubted that this left-wing temper tantrum would pique Time’s interest most.

But, seriously, now. Is the Tucson massacre somehow a lesser story than the Occupiers? Is the long-drawn out GOP primary campaign a lesser story? How about the debt crisis? Is that somehow a less important story than Occupy Wall Street? Apparently Time thinks so.

Time puts this story above the bad economy, Iraq, the Penn State sex abuse case, and the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. In fact, if it weren’t for the bad economy, the debt ceiling debate and the bank crisis this Occupy business would not have occurred at all.

Naturally, Time’s characterization of the “movement” is all sweetness and light. Not one mention is made of the now over 400 arrests made as a result of crimes perpetrated by the Occupiers. In fact, Time blames all the ills of the Occupiers on the beleaguered cities for their “heavy handed-policing” of the protests.

Time also disgorges the discreditable claim that the OWSers are the left’s tea partiers. This is a calumny against the tea party that really needs to be eliminated from the national discussion of the two movements.

Another aspect of the Occupy events went unmentioned in Time’s laudatory entry on the protests is the fact that taxpayers are being charged millions of dollars in tax money we don’t have to clean up after and police these protests. This somehow never makes an appearance in Time’s gladhanding of the Occupiers.

What is clear with this entry is that Time Magazine had an agenda with this pick. Sure the OWSers deserved a mention on a top ten list. But that it made number one and that the entry ignored all the negative aspects of the protests proves what the magazine is really attempting to do with this list.

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Jose Antonio Vargas is the perfect example of media bias. He presents himself as both an activist for illegal immigrants and a “journalist.” He’s uniquely suited to this claim in today’s PC world, too, because he is himself an “undocumented American,” as he styles it. And in a new interview he also claims that being an illegal alien made him a better journalist.

Vargas has blurred the line between journalist and activist since it became public knowledge that he has been in the United States illegally since he was a child. After his coming out, Vargas launched himself into advocacy for illegals. Only in the Old Media establishment can someone advocate for a political viewpoint yet still be consider a just-the-facts journalist. Vargas isn’t the only one, of course: Remember such “journalists” as Sanjay Gupta, Chris Matthews, Jay Carney, or Linda Douglas? Well, if you are a left-wing activist it works, anyway.

In the new interview with The Ithican’s TinaMarie Craven, Vargas posits that his status as, in his words, an “undocumented American” (nice conceit, that) made him a more careful reporter. He had to exhibit the utmost veracity, he said, because if not people might start looking closer at him and his background.

My job was to do the best job I possibly could. I was too paranoid to make a mistake, God forbid being charged with plagiarism or having a lot of corrections or people saying I needed to check a quote. I am a very diligent reporter. I’ve had maybe one dozen corrections in like almost a 12-year reporting career. That’s pretty good. And there are days where I think, yeah, I had to lie about my immigration status to get the jobs, but I don’t think my journalism — the work I produce — I don’t think people would question the quality of the work or the veracity of the work.

Well, that is some kind of justification, isn’t it? I mean, at that rate perhaps a crack dealer would make a good reporter, eh? Not that being illegal is like being a crack dealer, of course, but being illegal has no bearing on the “veracity” of a reporter’s work, either!

But what might impinge on that veracity is that since coming out as an illegal immigrant, Vargas has become a vocal and ardent activist in favor of illegal immigrant’s issues. So, how can one be an advocate for something yet still claim to be an impartial journalist? Well, one can’t, really, but since he’s in the proper, politically correct area with his activism the rest of the Old Media gives him a pass.

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On November 30, CNN’s T. J. Holmes gave us a great example of how the Old Media is soft peddling the law-breaking going on at the Occupy events in order to make these events seem far less dangerous and illicit than they are. Like many in the Old Media, Holmes seems desperate to give lawbreaking Occupiers as much cover as possible — a benefit they never offered the tea partiers.

In an interview with an L.A. city police commander about the clearing of Occupy Los Angeles, Holmes did his best to minimize the number of arrests of members of the Occupy protest. The actual number of arrests was 200, but Holmes repeatedly characterized that numbers as “dozens.”

Now, I don’t know about you but when I hear “dozens” I think of the number twenty-four. Being generous I might even say three dozen (a healthy 36) could be thought of as “dozens.” On the other hand, when someone tells me “200″ the word “dozens” doesn’t at all come to mind. I just don’t think of 18 dozen as “dozens.” I think of them as hundreds!

Of course, Holmes was desperate to make hundreds seem less imposing. So, to him, two hundred arrests became minimized to “dozens.”

It must be pointed out here that even after two years of tea party protests featuring millions of Americans and often seeing many thousands appearing at any given event never saw 200 arrests during the whole time! In fact, there weren’t even 100 arrests in two years with millions of protesters. Not even 50 or 25 arrests, for that matter.

This soft peddling of the Occupy-Whatevers, though, is of a piece with the penchant of the entire Old Media to ignore the lawbreaking going on at the Occupy events. The truth is simply being ignored by the media. A recent tally by John Nolte shows 364 serious incidents to date of criminal actions — one short of one for every day of the year — at the various Occupy events across the country. And this list doesn’t count the many thousands of local laws, ordinances, and permitting rules that have been flouted by these Occupy protests.

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Tis the season for buying books for your loved ones and as always the The New York Times Sunday Book Review is here to help. And as always the Sunday Book Review is there to help us understand that anything from the right side of the aisle, especially the tea party, is to be put in the worst possible light at all times.

So, what is it this time? Book reviewer Kevin Boyle lets us all know that he thinks that the folks of the tea partymovement are somehow just like the Ku Klux Klan. Nice, huh? That’ll get the holiday season started right!

In his Sunday book review Boyle reviews a pair of books actually on the KKK — meaning that for the first time bringing up the KKK in a New York Times article isn’t wholly gratuitous. So he has that going for him, which is nice.

But what was totally gratuitous was the way in which Boyle opened his review, slamming by inference the entire tea party and analogizing it to a modern day KKK:

Imagine a political movement created in a moment of terrible anxiety, its origins shrouded in a peculiar combination of manipulation and grass-roots mobilization, its ranks dominated by Christian conservatives and self-proclaimed patriots, its agenda driven by its members’ fervent embrace of nationalism, nativism and moral regeneration, with more than a whiff of racism wafting through it.

No, not that movement. The one from the 1920s, with the sheets and the flaming crosses and the ludicrous name meant to evoke a heroic past. The Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, they called it. And for a few years it burned across the nation, a fearsome thing to behold.

Yeah, because today’s era and the tea party are so dang similar to the KKK and the era of the 1920s, right? What is a more natural fit, anyway? What left-winger could doubt Boyle’s hatemongering?

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It’s hard to believe but Frank Rich’s latest exercise in the fantasist’s art comparing JFK to Obama is a wonder to behold. It really is. One might think it satire if Rich had never been presented as a serious essayist by the New York intelligentsia. If this were to be his first public writing, one might think him the new Jonathan Swift for its central premise is simply amazing for its utter deviation from reality. Rich, it seems, thinks that Obama is just like John Kennedy because Kennedy was somehow killed by the “hate that ended his presidency,” or something.

The part that is so fantastic is that Rich devolves to a long ago discredited theory that Kennedy was killed that dark November day in 1963 somehow because of right-wing hate for him. What is so absurd about Rich’s fantastic claim is that he wholly discounts the fact that Kennedy’s killer was a communist. In fact, Rich never even mentions that Lee Harvey Oswald was an avowed communist. He hints at it obliquely but does so in a way that dismisses the ideology as in any way important.

It has been a long time since I’ve read a piece on a public figure that is one part hero worship, one part discounting of that same figure, one part pure fantasy, and one part baseless comparison to the life of a whole other public figure that is also worshiped as a hero without a legitimate reason. But Frank Rich has done it here in a way that brings to mind make J.R.R. Tolkein’s intricate and complicated plotting.

There’s so much wrong in this one piece that it’s hard to figure out where to start first, but Rich’s central premise is that JFK was killed because of a climate of “hate” engendered by the blindness of Kennedy’s detractors on the right. This, Rich seems to think, is somehow just like Obama. Well, except that Obama is still alive and no one has even made a single attempt to kill him, and all (God forbid).

Interestingly, Rich does seem to notice that John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s presidency did not live up to its hype. Rich notes that historians have basically rated JFK’s short tenure in the White House as a wash, neither good nor horribly bad. But even with that admission, Rich writes glowingly of Kennedy. It is still all “Camelots” and “brief shinning moments” with little justification for any other reason than mere hero worship. With that, though, Rich succumbs to the worship like so many starry-eyed members of his deluded generation.

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This past weekend the Washington Post published a hit piece on the grand opening of a museum in Georgia dedicated to the birthplace of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The paper was desperate to make some grand conspiracy, some lawbreaking evil out of the project. But whatever is going on with the museum, this story was just one more shot orchestrated by the left aimed at forcing Justice Thomas to recuse himself from the upcoming hearings on whether or not Obamacare is Constitutional. Of course, this is all a smoke screen to hide the fact that it is really left-wing darling Justice Elana Kagan that should recuse herself from the case.

The Post story was a mishmash of innuendo, guesswork, and partisan claims, all amounting to much of nothing for proof of wrong doing. The Post even took the opportunity to use the word “whitewashed” when describing the color of the building housing the museum commemorating Justice Thomas’ birthplace. None too subtle, that.

There was plenty of other coverage of the opening of the museum that was positive, of course. Still it is apparent that the left hates Justice Thomas so much that they can’t even stand it that a small commemoration of his place of birth be created.

But real facts weren’t on the agenda for this article on Thomas. This article was meant as yet another slap at Thomas in order to mount pressure against him for the upcoming case against Obamacare. The left has been floating the demand that Justice Thomas recuse himself because his wife has worked as a “conservative activist and lobbyist, where she specifically agitated for the repeal of ‘Obamacare.’”

Contrary to the left’s new attack on Thomas, in America we do not hold the work of a spouse against someone. If we did that, half the members of Congress would have to be removed for the boards, or agencies, or organizations that their spouses work for. The pertinent fact is, though, that Justice Thomas himself was not the one working for any group that advocated for or against Obamacare.

This, however, is not true of another member of the Supreme Court. Justice Elana Kagan was actually involved in advising how to defend against challenges to Obamacare. If that isn’t directly relevant, what is?

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William “Bill” Randall is running for Congress out of the North Carolina 13th. Randall, an African American, experienced what must be called a hate crime in the left’s vernacular. His campaign sign had racist graffiti spray painted on it including the letters “KKK.”

Now, usually this is the sort of story that the Old Media goes wild over. It is prof that racism is alive in America, as far as they are concerned. It is proof that tea partiers, and conservative whites are eeeevil. This is usually the kind of story that would go national, yet the media has delivered a collective yawn to the defacement of Randall’s sign.

Why? Because Bill Randall is not the liberal candidate in his election. He is the conservative Republican!

The Old Media doesn’t care if so-called hate crimes are perpetrated against Republicans. They only care if they are committed against folks on their own, far left, Democrat side of the aisle.

Consider the nontroversy the media made from the story of the painted-over rock on the hunting parcel leased by Rick Perry’s family:

When Perry became a party to the hunting lease from 1997 to 2007, the property was described as northern pasture. His campaign told the press that the Governor hasn’t even been to the site since 2006. And Hugh Hewitt gets it right, “many, many people were interviewed for the story. Only seven recall seeing the rock, and not one of them connect Rick Perry to it, nor do any of the people …”

That’s not journalism.

Anonymous sources tell me that the Washington Post is dying and that race-baiting might accomplish its two objectives: 1) destroy the right-of-center movement, and 2) sell newspapers.

The Randall campaign even made a little parody video about the incident.

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