Politico’s Jonathan Martin didn’t only malign residents of Florida’s Panhandle on MSNBC when he invoked the phrase “Cracker Counties” to refer to the region, he went on to equate the region with all of the Deep South, also mentioning Georgia and Alabama by name. We can also assume it would cover many of the military men and women residing in Florida’s Panhandle.

Jonathan Martin, right

Politico’s Jonathan Martin isn’t a big fan of everyday people, especially those who don’t vote for Obama. If you want to understand who this man really is, you need only click here. To protect then-candidate Barack Obama and get the heat off of him after making his infamous and revealing ”spread the wealth” comment, Martin needed to change the narrative quick, so he investigated and published dirt on a PRIVATE CITIZEN. What followed was a narrative-changing (to benefit Obama) MSM attack against a guy who was minding his own business when Obama approached him.

“Cracker” has a long pejorative history, much of it linked to slavery, as in he who “cracks” the whip, while other uses of the word always refer to the more lowly born.

Frederick Law Olmsted, a prominent landscape architect from Connecticut, visited the South as a journalist in the 1850s and wrote that “some crackers owned a good many Negroes, and were by no means so poor as their appearance indicated.”

Martin may just as well have slandered the people of the region by referring to them as “White Trash.” That is, in effect, how the word can be interpreted today. One can only imagine the outrage had a less than liberal outlet and journalist maligned an entire race or class, as Martin did. There’s also this from a letter to the Earl of Dartmouth. (more…)

Tablet magazine, the new online Jewish-themed publication that focuses on a broad range of current affairs topics, has taken Media Matters for America (MMfA) and the Center for American Progress (CAP) to task for using antisemitic language in criticizing Israel.

Illustration from Tablet: Daniel Hertzberg

In two separate articles, Tablet takes on the organizations that are the core of the Democrats’ media and policy strategy, joining a debate in which the defenders of MMfA and CAP have resorted to the worn-out fallacy that their critics are trying to silence debate on Israel.

One article by Spencer Ackerman–whose blog was once hosted by CAP–addresses “fellow progressives” and insists that while criticism of Israel is sometimes appropriate, those who use anti-Jewish tropes–like specious charges of dual loyalty and “Israel first”–undermine the case they are trying to make. He singles out Media Matters, CAP, and the radical pro-Palestinian lobby J Street, among others, for their rhetorical record of bigotry:

Some on the left have recently taken to using the term “Israel Firster” and similar rhetoric to suggest that some conservative American Jewish reporters, pundits, and policymakers are more concerned with the interests of the Jewish state than those of the United States….

“Israel Firster” has a nasty anti-Semitic pedigree, one that many Jews will intuitively understand without knowing its specific history. It turns out white supremacist Willis Carto was reportedly the first to use it, and David Duke popularized it through his propaganda network. And yet [Media Matters' M.J.] Rosenberg and others actually claim they’re using it to stimulate “debate,” rather than effectively mirroring the tactics of some of the people they criticize….

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Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere were on fire yesterday, with the news that Homeland Security Is Monitoring The Drudge Report, The New York Times, and other various websites.  The headline sparked burning blog posts all across the web, some bordering on hysterics. Type “Homeland Security” and “Drudge” into Google and perform a search within the last twenty four hours, and you’ll find 56,700 results at this writing.

The story was borne out of an upcoming privacy compliance review from the Department of Homeland Security regarding one of the agency’s initiatives that entails monitoring “publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards.”  There’s just one important detail missing here:  the program was actually implemented in January of 2010.

The Volokh Conspiracy, a well-known group blog of law professors, puts the hype in check:

Matt Drudge and The Atlantic are hyperventilating, and Mark Hosenball of Reuters is bragging, about what The Atlantic calls an “exclusive” report that DHS “routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news and gossip sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report.”

There are just two problems with this exclusive news report.

It isn’t news and it isn’t exclusive.

Readers of this blog could have learned exactly the same thing in one of my posts from, uh, February of 2010.

Here’s what I said two years ago:

With his usual nudge-and-wink, Matt Drudge invites us to be dismayed that “BIG SIS” — his moniker for Janet Napolitano — is “Monitoring Web Sites for Terror and Disaster Info.” Drudge links to a story saying that DHS will be monitoring social media like Twitter, as well as websites like Drudge, to keep abreast of events during the Winter Olympics. The source of the story is a twelve-page “Privacy Impact Assessment” issued by DHS.

This isn’t the first Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) on DHS’s use of social media. A few weeks earlier, DHS wrote a similar assessment of using social media during Haitian rescue operations.

I am indeed dismayed, but not for Drudge’s reasons.  True, it’s disappointing that neither the Volokh Conspiracy nor www.skatingonstilts.com is deemed worthy of government monitoring.  But what’s really dismaying is that DHS and its Privacy Office felt obliged to labor over two separate and painfully obvious privacy assessments just to do things that you and I would do by simply firing up our browsers.

That’s it.  The story is that people at DHS are, gasp, browsing the Internet. As I said then, there’s no scandal, other than the electrons wasted by DHS agonizing over the privacy implications of browsing public Internet sources to find out what’s happening in the world.

The program is referred to as the Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative (pdf), and it was first implemented to monitor activity and news during events like those mentioned above.

Some seem especially concerned about the portion of the initiative that pertains to actually retaining personally identifiable information.

The DHS Privacy Office (PRIV) and OPS/NOC decided to further broaden the program’s capability to collect additional information, including limited instances of personally identifiable information (PII). As such, a Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) Update5 and new DHS/OPS-004 – Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative System of Records Notice (SORN)6 were issued on January 6, 2011 and February 1, 2011 respectively and are the basis for this Privacy Compliance Review (PCR).

But upon close inspection of “personally identifiable information,” the activity is really no different from what you or I might do to gather our own news interests.

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The Shell Game is in full swing.

Watch closely; the hands move quickly and it takes a sharp mind, quick eyes and cat-like instincts to keep up with all the movement going on right in front of us.

Much has been written and will still be written about the way the media is covering the Republican candidates, but while that is going on, Barack Obama is destroying the US military and trashing our Constitution … and who knows what else?

The media has eyes wide shut and can only tell us Mitt Romney is unacceptable and Rick Santorum is un-electable. But skip that for now; there are actually much larger issues.

While the world gets more dangerous under his watch, Obama is cutting defense spending by half a trillion dollars over the next 10 years. Oh, the Activist Old Media may give it a passing mention and may even show Obama’s soundbites while saying he is acting in ours, and the worlds, best interest, but if you blink you will miss where the shell is hidden. Obama is now officially more dangerous than Jimmy Carter, and Carter gave us the first “Arab Spring.” (more…)

From Accuracy in Media’s Roger Aronoff:

The incident involving a live microphone that took place last week at the G20 summit in Cannes, France involving President Barack Obama, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, and the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, was an important revelation on several levels.

First, it revealed the true feelings that Obama and Sarkozy have toward Netanyahu, which is quite different from their public pronouncements and actions. No big surprise in either case. But the bigger story is how corrupt the media are to go along with the attempted deception.

What occurred is that the two presidents were speaking in what they thought was a private conversation, but what they overlooked was that the mics they were wearing were live, and a simultaneous translation of their conversation was being broadcast to the journalists outside the room. Those journalists were not to be given headphones until the session resumed, but a number of them had their own and were listening as a translator repeated the comments of the two men.

Initially, in the conversation, Obama was critical of Sarkozy for not letting him know in advance that France would be voting to allow the Palestinians membership in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). After they were voted in to the organization, the U.S. Congress voted to cut off its portion of the funding for UNESCO, as it is required by law to do if Palestine is admitted as a member of any international organization before it reaches a peace agreement with Israel. Obama, whose spokesmen have made clear that he once again will ignore Congress and do what he can to help UNESCO, was also reported to have asked Sarkozy to try to help persuade the Palestinians to stop their bid to gain full UN recognition as a state.

Sarkozy then said of Netanyahu, “I cannot bear him, he’s a liar,” to which President Obama reportedly said, “You may be sick of him, but me, I have to deal with him every day.” (more…)

Surprise surprise. Dana Milbank, an op-ed writer at The Washington Post, doesn’t think Operation Fast & Furious is a scandal. Of course I sent him an email because I want to know why he doesn’t think this is a scandal.

Dear Dana:

I am a writer for Big Journalism and I’ve been keeping on eye on the media’s coverage of Operation Fast and Furious. My main question for you is what qualifies for a scandal? Please explain to my readers, editor, and me why this isn’t a scandal. Would you care to explain to Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s family why this isn’t a scandal?

You admit the operation was a debacle and acknowledge the bloodshed caused by this operation. Yet you claim it hasn’t reached the level of a political scandal? Sir, what would you call this? Guns have been found at hundreds of crime scenes in America. AMERICA. These guns have caused 200+ deaths in Mexico. Our federal government allowed guns to get into the hands of dangerous drug cartels. OUR FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. How is that not a political scandal? People have died. People like Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

There’s no smoking gun? How about the numerous memos from July 2010 proving Eric Holder was briefed on this operation? That’s not a smoking gun? Actually there have been smoking guns. about 1400+ smoking guns! I know The Washington Post isn’t covering the story that well, but you should look at CBS and Sharyl Atkisson. She has interviews of ATF agents detailing the operation. Her coverage proves this is scandal going somewhere fast.

So would you like it if they just agreed to never do this again? You don’t want them to get to the bottom of this? You don’t want to find justice for Brian Terry and his family?

I’ve attached a picture of Brian Terry. Please respond ASAP. I will be emailing until I receive a response.

Thank you,
Mary Chastain

Mr. Milbank actually wrote about the operation being a debacle and the bloodshed, but somehow that still isn’t enough to be called a scandal? I am dying to know what qualifies as a political scandal. I also love how he doesn’t think there hasn’t been a smoking gun. Yes Mr. Milbank. At least 1,400+ smoking guns! (I must credit my wonderful husband with that one) He appears to not care that one of those smoking guns appeared at Brian Terry’s murder scene. Who cares that Brian Terry died, who cares that 200+ Mexican civilians have died because of these guns, is that what we’re saying? Who cares these guns have shown up at hundreds of crime scenes in America!

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From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid:

The FBI has released photos, videos, and documents in the case of 10 Russian secret agents arrested—and quickly deported—in 2010. The documents are mostly heavily redacted and of no practical value to those interested in the details about on-going Russian operations against the U.S. What is perhaps more interesting and significant is what the Russians are doing in plain sight by using American cable and satellite systems against us.

In this context, a complaint has now been filed with the Obama Justice Department over Russian propaganda broadcasts in the U.S.

While the FBI disclosures, such as they are, suggest that the Moscow regime regards the U.S. as an adversary, if not enemy, they are not nearly as fascinating as what Moscow is doing in the form of Russia Today (RT) propaganda broadcasts reaching tens of millions of American homes.

Media carriers for the Moscow-funded channel, which changed its name to RT from Russia Today to mask the foreign connection, include Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Verizon Fios, Cox Cable, RCN Cable, MHz Networks, and Dish Networks.

RT, a big backer of the Occupy Wall Street protests, has assigned several reporters to cover the demonstrations around the country. The channel has called the protests “America’s Arab Spring,” with an emphasis on alleged police brutality against the demonstrators. One RT program, “The Big Picture,” with self-described progressive Democrat Thom Hartmann, has also focused on the Wall Street protests. Hartmann has refused to disclose how much he is paid by RT for the rights to broadcast his show.

RT’s media “partners” include The Huffington Post and the website WhatReallyHappened, which questions whether Arab terrorists were behind 9/11.

RT employs a correspondent in Britain, Katia Zatuliveter, who went to work for the channel after being accused of conducting espionage against Britain. She is in the process of being deported. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to consider that some of its reporters working in America may also be agents of the Vladimir Putin regime.

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Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin is the perfect example of what a conservative writer should be (if conservatives were supposed to be liberal).

Rubin is the type of writer who delights in bashing conservatives in the name of saving them, kind of the way progressives bashed the medical field during the Obamacare* debate. The progressives claimed to have the medical people’s best interests at heart as they worked on a piece of legislation that would cause them all to leave the field.

* Please Note: the word Obamacare used in the above paragraph has been declared obscene by Congressional Democrats–if anyone is offended by that harsh word, I sincerely apologize.

“Conservatives” such as Rubin spend more time bashing conservative principles than supporting them. For example Rubin bashes supporters of a balanced budget amendment as extremists; this is from her summary of the debt ceiling deal at the end of July:

The president gets a deal through 2012; the House gets its cuts; and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) gets his commission. And the GOP extremists don’t get their balanced budget amendment passed and sent to the states or the satisfaction of blowing up the deal. As for the country, if it passes, the agreement will take us from the days of automatic debt-ceiling raises to the first, tentative steps toward fiscal sanity.

I supposed it didn’t matter to this “conservative” that a balanced budget amendment is a key policy pushed by most conservatives and it is supported by the majority of voters. (more…)

Within hours of the news, the AP reported “Gadhafi’s Death Clears Way for Oil Exports,” gleefully explaining that Gadhafi’s death will result in lower oil prices the world over!  Energy crisis is solved!  Recession ended!

Remember the Left’s incessant ”No Blood for Oil“ smear against President Bush for the ”illegitimate” wars in Iraq?  According to the Left, and rarely challenged by the Make-Believe Media, Bush’s war in the Middle east was only about getting oil.

But it’s now 2011, not 2003.  There’s a new sheriff in town.  Apparently, blood for oil is a good thing now.   The radical leftwing media source The Guardian only reports how Obama has ”chalked up Libya as another foreign policy success to place alongside the killing in May of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden” and, more ominously, that Gadhafi’s bloody assassination signals a “prescription” for actions against other Middle East countries including Syria.  Syrian President Assad may be wondering if he’s on the White House Secret Assassination List. No mention of blood-for-oil. No mention of illegal regime change.

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From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid:

In a major blow to Al-Jazeera’s drive for acceptance and respectability in the West, the government of Israel says that one of the channel’s correspondents has confessed to acting as an agent of the terrorist group Hamas. The Israeli government also claims to have uncovered a network of Hamas operatives using Al-Jazeera as a cover.

The U.S. State Department designates Hamas as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” and states that it “was formed in late 1987 as an outgrowth of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Hamas does not recognize Israel and its founding charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. The group considers Israeli settlers and civilians legitimate military targets.

Samer Allawi, a Palestinian who ran Al-Jazeera’s Kabul, Afghanistan, bureau, was released, sentenced to time served, and agreed to pay a $1,400 fine. He was arrested on August 9 and held in an Israeli prison. Various press freedom groups had clamored for his release.

Some commentators are saying that the treatment of the Al-Jazeera correspondent is evidence of a tougher policy by Israel toward Qatar, an Arab dictatorship which completely finances Al-Jazeera and selects its news and editorial personnel. A classified report prepared by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and leaked to the Israeli media in August outlined Qatar’s more radical stance in the Arab and Muslim world and noted evidence of more frequent Hamas visits to Doha, the capital, and funding by Qatar of Hamas.

A story on the Israelnationalnews.com website about the report also indicated that Israel may start restricting the activities of Al-Jazeera correspondents inside Israel. It said, “Qatar is also the home of Arab satellite network Al-Jazeera, which the Foreign Ministry considers extremely anti-Israel. As a result, the Ministry has worked in recent months to prevent reporters from the network from operating in Israel, and has stopped giving them visas. Currently, the only way for an Al-Jazeera reporter to enter Israel is using a passport from a country that has full diplomatic relations with Jerusalem, but the Ministry is seeking ways to keep these individuals out of Israel as well.”

Although the emir of Qatar pours hundreds of millions of dollars into the channel, making it effectively a propaganda machine for the regime, he prohibits a free press and free elections at home. Bloggers critical of the royal family are simply taken away and tortured, while Al-Jazeera turns a blind eye and deaf ear to their fate.

But because the country hosts a U.S. military base, it enjoys a moderate and even pro-Western reputation. Qatar uses expensive public relations and lobbying firms like Barbour, Griffith & Rogers (BGR) and Brown Lloyd James.

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From the Accuracy in Media Center for Investigative Journalism:

After years of spreading the lie that Gaddafi’s “adopted daughter” had died in the 1986 American bombing raid on Libya, many in the media are finally admitting it was all a hoax. Will Andrea Mitchell of NBC News now apologize and resign for passing off terrorist disinformation as “news?”

As we noted in a column earlier this year, Mitchell went on the NBC Nightly News to say that Libya was “accused of bombing a Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. soldiers” and that “Ronald Reagan retaliated, ordering an air strike against Gaddafi’s tent, accidentally killing his young daughter. Gaddafi escaped unharmed.” Mitchell even showed Gaddafi visiting a hospital. It was pro-Gaddafi and anti-Reagan propaganda.

The facts, which we have consistently provided, are that there were no public media reports of Gaddafi having a daughter at the time of the raid, and so it wasn’t possible that she was killed.  Now it appears that Gaddafi did have a daughter with the same name, Hana or Hanna, who may have been born around the same time as the raid, and is said to be very much alive.

Whatever the ultimate truth about this girl, who may have studied to be a doctor in Libya, the dead “adopted daughter” story was a pure lie, as we have maintained for years.

The revelations are a big black eye for Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent and host of an all political hour from 1 to 2 p.m. EST on the MSNBC cable channel. Her bio says: “Mitchell currently covers foreign policy, intelligence and national security issues, including the diplomacy of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for all NBC News properties.”

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From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid:

A journalist for Al-Jazeera has been arrested on suspicion of being an agent of the Palestinian terror group Hamas. The journalist, Samer Allawi, Al-Jazeera’s bureau chief in Afghanistan, is a Palestinian. He was apprehended by Israeli authorities as he attempted to leave the West Bank.

The detention of Allawi, a major development in the media wars over the future of the Middle East, is not the first time that Israel has detained journalists from the channel. During the 2006 war in Lebanon, several Al-Jazeera journalists working in Israel were apprehended and warned about providing military information to Hezbollah, another terrorist organization. The accusation was that Al-Jazeera journalists were reporting the specific location of Hezbollah rocket strikes on Israel, enabling the terrorists to more accurately aim their weapons. In total, Hezbollah rained an estimated 3,970 Katyusha rockets and longer range missiles on military and civilian targets in Israel. The rockets have no internal guidance system and needed to rely on spotters or media coverage of their strikes to increase their accuracy.

This kind of activity earned the channel a lawsuit, filed by the Israel Law Center in the U.S., accusing Al-Jazeera of facilitating the deaths of Israeli and American victims of the war. Judge Kimba Wood dismissed the suit, claiming that the victims had failed to show Al-Jazeera had the specific intention of aiding Hezbollah.

Since its inception, however, Al-Jazeera has functioned as a mouthpiece for terrorist organizations, including but not limited to al-Qaeda. Tayseer Alouni, the channel’s Afghanistan correspondent during the 9/11 attacks, was apprehended by U.S. military authorities and turned over to Spain, his native country, where he was prosecuted, convicted, and jailed as an agent of al-Qaeda. Al-Jazeera defended him and paid his legal fees.

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CNNs Fareed Zakaria and the New York Times’ Paul Krugman have solved our economic problems. They’ve decided that a space alien attack will save us. Aside from the guffaw factor of space aliens, there was so much wrong with this CNN segment that we must lay them out for discussion.

First on the clip is some pinhead from Harvard claiming that “infrastructure spending, that’s great.” He says he’d even borrow money for such programs. This guy thinks that if we had another giant stimulus (like a WWII Works program), why we’d be doing just “great.”

He is, of course, a Keynesian fool. Stimulus does not work. Stimulus has never worked. Further, “stimulus” itself is a misnomer. Take Illinois, for instance. It got millions upon millions of dollars in so-called stimulus money from Obama. Do you know what Illinois did with that money? It paid existing debt, it paid current bills. It “stimulated” nothing with all those millions. This happened all across the country in every state. The “stimulus” did not stimulate anything but instead went to pay exiting bills and created nothing new, supported no new projects. It was a sham.

Amusingly, this guy tried to qualify his support of infrastructure spending saying “as long as it isn’t Big Dig” sort of over spending. The “Big Dig” is a reference to the underground Central Artery/Tunnel Project undertaken by the Boston Metro Highway System that is famous for being a total boondoggle that has gone billions over budget, not to mention having so many structural and engineering failures that the whole thing is a death trap waiting to happen.

Problem is, every state project becomes a version of the Big Dig at some level. At the very least they always, always, always go over budget, at worst they become a pit of political failure and corruption. So, while this Harvard pinhead tried to qualify his position, he did so on a bed of quicksand.

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From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid:

Abdirizak Bihi, director of the Somali Education and Social Advocacy Center, testifies during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on the extent of radicalization in the American Muslim community and the community's response, on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 10, 2011. UPI/Kevin Dietsch

In the “better-late-than-never” department, The Washington Post has devoted 3,783 words to Abdirizak Bihi, a Muslim activist trying to counter radical Islamic activities in Minnesota and the recruitment of Muslim youth in America by a “shadowy network of recruiters.” This is the same individual who got little attention from the Post when he testified on March 10 before Rep. Peter King’s Homeland Security Committee.

The Post is finally confirming in dramatic detail the nature of the internal terrorist threat in the United States.

But you may recall that the liberal media tried to demonize King for even holding the hearings.

This is how the Post then reported on Bihi: “Abdirizak Bihi, a Somali American from Minnesota, described how a nephew turned radical and left to fight with an Islamic militia in Somalia. He said religious leaders had discouraged him from going to the authorities, warning that ‘you will have eternal fire and hell’ for betraying Islam.”

We noted at the time that the media, including the Post, had focused on Rep. Keith Ellison’s testimony, during which he broke down in tears, but that Bihi, Director of the Somali Education and Social Advocacy Center in Minneapolis, had been offering something more newsworthy—an indictment of Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, himself.

As noted in advance by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, “Bihi has been publicly critical of Ellison’s handling of the disappearance of some 20 Somali youths recruited by a Jihadist group in their native country.” Bihi’s nephew Burhan Hassan was killed in Somalia after traveling there to join al-Shabab, a terrorist organization working to overthrow the Somali government.

What the Post failed to report on, at the time of King’s hearings, was Bihi’s statement, “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response.”

The Post now seems to be taking the problem seriously. It reports:

“There have been 51 homegrown jihadist plots or attacks in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to law enforcement reports, and their frequency is increasing. Nowhere else is the problem of radicalization so concentrated as in Bihi’s section of downtown Minneapolis, where about 10,000 Somali immigrants live in a collection of faded apartment towers bordering the freeway. At least 25 young men have disappeared from here to fight for al-Shabab in the past three years, and dozens more are being investigated on suspicion of recruiting or fundraising on behalf of the terrorist organization. None so far have tried to attack in the United States, but intelligence gathered by law enforcement suggests that they will.”

Notice how the number of missing youth has gone from 20 to 25.

Yet, in its Sunday follow-up article, there is no mention of the role of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) in discouraging a legitimate inquiry and solution to the problem in America’s Muslim communities.

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National Security reporting saw a long lull during the Clinton ‘peace dividend’ and relatively stable period of international affairs during the 1990s. Since the demand for foreign reporters dropped, so did the availability of education for these journalists. After the attacks of September 11^th, national security reporting was once again pushed to the forefront of media attention, and a new generation of editors, reporters and producers found themselves struggling with these issues.

With constant dangers to American security and instability in the world such as the war on terror, nuclear arms proliferation and arms control, the growing threat posed by the People’s Republic of China, and Russia’s gradual reversion into an anti-democratic state the need is as acute as ever for solid reporting on these issues.

In response, the Center for Security Policy established the National Security and New Media Journalism Project. Few reporters today have the background, expertise and understanding of critical national security issues required to report effectively on the subject. Worse, the Center noticed signs of increasing bias among journalists who often promote value-neutral and politically-correct news that is undermining the American system of government while ill-serving both American and foreign publics.

The goal of the Project is to focus the debate on these trends in news reporting, and work towards new standards for accuracy and integrity in national security journalism.

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ABC’s Christiane Amanpour practically begs Mitch McConnell to raise taxes:

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NY Times Columnist Carr says Kansas, Missouri “middle places,” land of “low sloping foreheads”:

“If it’s Kansas, Missouri, no big deal. You know, that’s the dance of the low-sloping foreheads. The middle places, right? …Did I just say that aloud?” – David Carr, NY Times

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Join Andrew Breitbart and Melanie Morgan for Troopathon 2011, today from 4pm to Midnight EDT!

Troopathon brings together famous celebrities from radio, television, the movie, musicians, journalists, and more to create a one-of-a-kind event with one purpose – to support our troops on the front lines in the war on terror and honor their service and sacrifice for our nation. Guests include: Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, Mark Levin, Kelsey Grammer, Former President George H.W. Bush, Gary Sinise, Dennis Miller, Former Ambassador John Bolton, Greg Gutfeld and many more!

Click here to send your care package or call 866-866-6372.

On Thursday June 23rd celebrities from Hollywood, radio, and TV will gather at the Nixon Library for a one of a kind event with a special purpose: to support our troops on the front lines in the war on terror and honor their service and sacrifice for our nation.

Troopathon 2011, as it is called, has the focused goal of sending as many care packages as it can get sponsored during an eight hour event. It its first year (2008) Troopathon brought in over $1.5 million for care packages for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. A $25 donation buys and delivers one care package.

One of the scheduled speakers is war hero and marine Nick Popaditch. Nick (a frequent guest on FOX’s “Red Eye”) was the tank commander and platoon sergeant in Baghdad during the historic fall of the statue of Saddam.

Recently Nick and his wife April joined me to talk about Troopathon and the significance it has for our troops serving in the Middle East. The YouTube video of the interview is below:

Troopathon Facts:

What: Troopathon 2011, the largest care package drive in America in support of our troops.

When: Thursday June 23rd, 4pm-midnight EDT / 1pm-9pm PDT

How You Can Watch: Right here at the Bigs!

How To Donate: Donation page.

Hosts: Andrew Breitbart and Melanie Morgan

Who Will Be Participating?: Several famous celebrities including actors Jon Voight, Gary Sinise and Robert Davi, media personalities Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, SE Cupp, and many others including yours truly. (more…)