Remember this?

Famous moment. I was in seventh grade when it happened and remember it well. Our dutiful teacher made sure to use it in the lessons for the next few days. Dan Quayle is actually an exceptionally bright man who had an unfortunate mishap at the chalkboard with an unnecessary vowel. Joe Biden, the fun Homer Simpson of the Obama Administration, has suffered far greater gaffes; the latest from the administration on his behalf. Two words: “Road Island.”

The White House recently announced that the Vice President would be attending campaign events in “Road Island.”

I’ve heard far more reporting about Santorum’s gaffe, Romney’s hair, and Gingrich’s Tiffany credit line than this.

Of course, there are other Bidenisms. He has a thing with Indian Americans.

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Resist we much! Shame on you Reverend Al Sharpton. Shame on you MSNBC. Especially shame on you Representative Elijah Cummings. Sharpton recently addressed Fast and Furious on his show, Politics Nation (hat tip: everrest). Needless to say it was a mess.

Mr. Sharpton starts the show with a flat out lie: Fast and Furious was just like the programs under President Bush. Katie Pavlich at Townhall points out the differences in this article. There are major differences, but the main one is the guns under Fast & Furious were allowed to head into Mexico without interference or arrests.

Mr. Sharpton asks Rep Cummings if is the GOP are interested in a fair and balanced investigation. Rep Cummings immediately says no. He says Rep Darrell Issa cannot verify any of his “facts” and is treating Mr. Holder unfairly. Mr. Sharpton replies the hearings have become disrespectful and hostile. Gee, I wonder why!! Could it be because the DOJ is stonewalling them? Rep Cummings brings up the Democrat report clearing Mr. Holder & the DOJ of all responsibility. There’s no mention of all the holes left in the report.

Take a look back at my article on this report. Ms. Pavlich wrote about it as well. The Democrats completely ignored the facts and MSNBC, due to NO integrity whatsoever, did not bother to call out Rep Cummings.

Mr. Sharpton & Mr. Cummings, let’s start with these actual facts Rep Issa can verify. The DOJ dumped a whole bunch of documents on Congress on Friday, January 27. These documents contained some pretty damning emails, including ones between former US Attorney Dennis Burke and Mr. Holder’s deputy chief of staff Monty Wilkinson. In the report Mr. Cummings said, “The committee has obtained no evidence indicating that the attorney general authorized gun-walking or that he was aware of such allegations before they became public.” Here are the screen shots of those emails.

Again, these emails give Rep Issa more than enough room to suspect Mr. Holder knew about Operation Fast & Furious before everything became public. Mr. Sharpton, can you tell me that you fully believe Mr. Wilkinson, Mr. Holder’s deputy chief of staff, did not tell his boss about the second email?

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The other day The Daily Caller released David Brock’s enemies list. At first I didn’t think much of it until the last group: It’s a group of GOP politicians. What do GOP politicians have to do with “conservative misinformation?” Unless … these GOP politicians are standing in the way of a Democrat. Look at the list:

The first name is Carly Fiorina. Ms. Fiorina was Democrat Senator Barbara Boxer’s opponent in the 2010 election. So I scurried over to the MMfA website. There is a major difference in their coverage of Ms. Fiorina and Ms. Boxer. I thought MMfA was suppose to call out conservative misinformation in the conservative media? Their coverage highly favors Ms. Boxer. I couldn’t find one article that showed Ms. Boxer in a negative light. Their articles appear to target the news organization, but within the articles there are slight jabs to Ms. Fiorina.

For instance, MMfA wrote four articles targeting Sean Hannity. However, the articles were more aimed at Ms. Fiorina than they were Mr. Hannity. After stating “Sean Hannity is not an easy interview” into an open mic, MMfA quoted her as saying she only apologized for that statement because alienating Mr. Hannity would alienate a large Republican base. They blew off her excuse that he’s a hard interviewer and gave an example of how easygoing he was with her. Author Brian Frederick’s conclusion was that Fiorina merely feared looking “fanatical” and “zealous” like Mr. Hannity. In other words, she doesn’t really believe any of that conservative hooey, and she’s just pandering to Hannity’s audience–she’s disingenuous.

Now, remember, MMfA is supposed to correct the conservative media. According to them, all of the media is conservative or controlled by conservatives. So how come MMfA goes after anyone who attempts to smear Ms. Boxer but never comes to Ms. Fiorina’s defense? Why they didn’t come to Ms. Fiorina’s defense when this awful reporter got in her face?

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From Accuracy in Media’s Logan Churchwell:

Go ahead, read the headline again. Mine is almost as bizarre as the original Associated Press piece, titled “How is Romney like 007? Both have money offshore.” Giving us yet another example of the AP’s “New Distinctiveness” in reporting, readers are offered a six-step tutorial on how to hide your money from the Feds. Clearly the intent of this article is to imply that that’s what GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney has done, but the AP doesn’t actually accuse Gov. Romney of any untoward financial activity, right? Read the lead sentence closely (emphasis added):

“Movie super spies James Bond and Jason Bourne use them. So does real-life U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who says he pays his taxes, and untold numbers of Americans who don’t.”

Through each step, the AP is pleased to report how criminals and tax dodgers use foreign (usually Swiss or Cayman, like Romney) accounts to avoid the divine wrath of the Internal Revenue Service; but they neglect to offer legal examples for depositing. In “Step 1: Get a million dollars,” we are advised:

“How? There are essentially two ways — legally or illegally. For those with dirty cash to launder — drug traffickers, mobsters, smugglers, swindlers and such — offshore accounts hidden from the law are the obvious choice (skip to Step 5).”

Don’t hold your breath for the legal method of gaining wealth here. In “Step 2: Decide whether to tell the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. tax agency,” Americans (and therefore Romney) must choose whether to alert the Feds. If they do not, beware: “The government has landed some big fish — notably the largest Swiss bank, UBS AG — and tax cheats are getting scooped up in the net.”

In “Step 3: Look for legal ways to pare taxes,” the author removes any remaining shroud of unmotivated reporting by calling in the experts at Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ), a partisan interest group that has been a cheerleader for Stimulus I, the estate tax and Obamacare. The Associated Press quotes the CTJ, saying “There’s a thin line between tax avoidance and evasion … A lot of these transactions might not stand up in court if the IRS had the resources to pursue them.” Either way, Romney is a bad guy.

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Now that the Super Bowl is over, there’s the usual selective outrage arguing that ‘this or that ad is racist.’ Last year, it was the Tibetans and GroupOn; this year, it is the Chinese and Pete Hoekstra’s bid for the U.S. Senate.The Democrats sense their opportunity to get the very unpopular Debbie Stabenow re-elected and turn Hoekstra’s ad into a Macaca moment.

Predictably the media is already in overdrive. “Ad Draws Protests for Portrayal of Asians,” was the headline for The New York Times article. Lawrence O’Donnell has even attacked the Asian-American girl who dared to appear in the ad, going so far as to compare her decision to play the part of a Chinese villager to a decision a friend of his made not to play Hitler’s daughter. Naturally, the squishy GOP consultants are upset, too, according to Politico. Talking Points Memo went into convulsions when discovering that the Asian girl wearing the yellow shirt was called “yellowgirl” in the html code on Hoekstra’s website.

But Hoekstra is defending himself.

Only to have Rep. Judy Chu of California call the ad “violent and hateful” and blame Bush for the economic downturn on CNN.

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

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

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

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

Here’s something that no one is talking about concerning tonight’s primaries: In my homestate of Missouri Prop C, the first legislative challenge to Obamacare exempting Missourians from Obamacare penalities, passed by 3-1 in every single county except Kansas City and St. Louis City. Rick Santorum took every single county in Missouri. Missourians don’t like mandates. Missourians, like folks from MN and CO, don’t like being strong-armed into the falsehood of “electable inevitability.”

That’s what we’ve been sold for the past six months. Tonight inevitability was rejected in three states.

Numerous talking heads discounted the “beauty contests,” especially Missouri’s, which holds a separate caucus for its 52 delegates in March due to state-level silliness. Coincidentally, these are the same folks, Karl Rove and Company, who seem to save their most favorable comments for Romney. Iowa was important until it was realized Santorum won. South Carolina didn’t matter because hey, they were all bigots and hillbillies. Only the states that went Romney seemed to count.

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Yesterday, Juan Williams of Fox News doubled down on his accusation that Republican presidential candidates are using “racial code words.”

Today, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic has followed suit with an article rehashing the tired allegation that Republicans are using so-called “dog whistle” tactics–“the use of coded, ambiguous language to appeal to the prejudices of certain subsets of voters”–i.e. white voters (Democrats’ use of race to appeal to the prejudices and fears of black voters is rarely subject to scrutiny.)

Jeffrey Goldberg (Photo: Bloomberg News)

Goldberg says that the Obama’s Republican opponents have alleged the following (original links, including one to Media Matters–itself the subject of serious charges of antisemitism–included):

Black people have lost the desire to perform a day’s work. Black people rely on food stamps provided to them by white taxpayers. Black people, including Barack and Michelle Obama, believe that the U.S. owes them something because they are black. Black children should work as janitors in their high schools as a way to keep them from becoming pimps. And the pathologies afflicting black Americans are caused partly by the Democratic Party, which has created in them a dependency on government not dissimilar to the forced dependency of slaves on their owners.

I’ll go even further, and admit that I personally heard a presidential candidate give a speech–in a church, no less–in which he blasted the black community, and black men in particular, for the phenomenon of single-parent households; who noted that black children with absent fathers have a greater chance of becoming criminals; who scolded black parents, “don’t just sit in the house and watch ‘Sports Center’ all weekend long”; and who told blacks to “read a book once in awhile.”

That candidate was Barack Obama.

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This is what real journalism looks like, folks. Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes a 2,300 word piece about Newt Gingrich’s relationship to ethics charges (those brought by and against him) that ends with this rehash of his fall from grace:

In the end, nearly all of the charges were dismissed. But the ethics committee did find that Mr. Gingrich had used tax-exempt money to promote Republican goals, and given the panel inaccurate information for its inquiry.

Mr. Gingrich formally apologized, conceding he had brought discredit on the House. He had always   regarded himself as a “transformative figure” who would change the course of history, but on Jan. 21, 1997, he made history in another way.

The House voted 395-28 to reprimand him and fine him $300,000, making him the first speaker ever disciplined for unethical conduct.

That’s it. That’s how the tale ends. It’s as if they’ve quoted Newt’s history but added an invisible ellipsis over the final portion of the story. This is a doctored quote of the record. This is “agenda journalism.”

Do you think it’s relevant that after the events described above Democrats campaigned for a further investigation? Is it relevant that the IRS took them up on it, and that after more than three years determined that Newt did nothing wrong? Simply put, all the charges, even the ones Newt was reprimanded for, were bogus. Is any of that worth mentioning in a front page story on the topic at the New York Times?

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As reported by Big Government:

Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), who was the subject of allegations of congressional insider trading, has indicated that he will not seek to extend his term as chair of the House Financial Services Committee after 2012.

Progressive media has fought hard against the story of insider trading, first broken by Big Peace Editor Peter Schweizer with his book Throw Them All Out. Leftist media attempted to discredit the sources and blow off the story, but after President Obama mentioned it in his State of the Union Address, the tactic was turned on its ear.

Earlier this week Joel Pollak discussed how the Huffington Post issued a mea culpa after working hard to encourage dismissal of the story:

Give Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post credit: it takes courage to change one’s mind, and to admit an earlier mistake.

Grim has written that he was wrong to dismiss a November 2011 report by 60 Minutes (based on Breitbart editor Peter Schweitzer’s book, Throw Them All Out) on insider trading in Congress:

At the time, I wrongly reported that 60 Minutes’ poor choice of targets for its report, and its clumsy attempt to connect specific trading to specific legislative action, set momentum for the bill back. Instead, in fact, the report propelled the legislation forward.

Grim had initially reported that the 60 Minutes report “falls short.”

What changed?

Much of the left and the left media–including the Huffington Post, Politico, and Media Matters for America–dismissed the issue of insider trading and tried to discredit both the allegations and their source. Now that Obama has taken up the legislation–with its sponsor, Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) obtaining Obama’s explicit commitment to make Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid move it through the Senate–the left is scrambling to catch up.

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Yesterday Elliot Abrams was part of a calculated effort against one of the GOP primary candidates whose last name wasn’t “Romney.” It’s typical in any primary, but what wasn’t typical was that in this republican primary, the information was misconstrued and presented a false narrative to readers. Jeffrey Lord at the American Spectator takes Abrams to task for his piece and says it is “not worthy” of its author:

Abrams

A piece like the one Abrams wrote depends for its success in garnering headlines — which it did — by assuming no one will bother to get into the weeds and do the homework. Usually a safe assumption when dealing with the mainstream media, particularly a mainstream media that, as one with Establishment Republicans, hates Newt Gingrich.

Not so fast.

Due to the diligence of one Chris Scheve of a group called Aqua Terra Strategies in Washington, Mr. Abrams has been caught red-handed in lending himself to this attempted Romney hit job.

Mr. Scheve, you see, is himself a former foreign policy aide to none other than Speaker Newt Gingrich in his days as Speaker. While now out on his own and not working for Gingrich, Scheve is considerably conversant with the Gingrich foreign policy record.

Uh-oh.

That’s right. Mr. Scheve, incensed at what he felt was a deliberate misrepresentation of his old boss by Abrams and the Romney forces, specifically of Gingrich’s long ago March 21, 1986 “Special Order” speech on the floor of the House, and aware “that most of his [Abrams'] comments had to have been selectively taken from the special order” — Scheve started digging. Since the Congressional Record for 1986 was difficult to obtain electronically, Scheve trekked to the George Mason Library to physically track down the March 21, 1986 edition of the Congressional Record. Locating it, copying and scanning, he was kind enough to send to me …

… I can only say that what Elliott Abrams wrote in NRO about Newt Gingrich based on this long ago speech is not worthy of Elliott Abrams.

Specifically, Abrams implies that Newt Gingrich was spewing mindless vitriol about Reagan on the House floor. Not only not so, it was quite to the contrary.

Read the whole thing. Ben Shapiro has the full text of Gingrich’s remarks.

Such hits on candidates is expected in primaries, but a heated primary is no excuse for conservatives in media to forget their principles and assume the characteristics of progressive media. Lord is right on this. Let the purposeful inaccuracies stop.

It’s hard for the Activist Old Media to out-do itself with their leftist bias, but the Romney tax returns have them freaked out.

This fits right in their wheelhouse of deception and class envy.

The latest is an ABC story with this headline. “Romney Failed to Disclose Swiss Bank Account Income.”

Sounds serious there. Sounds like they finally busted Mitt and they are preparing the graphics and music for the hour-long prime time special showing him doing the IRS perp walk.

Five paragraphs into the story you find out the amount is $1,700 dollars. Now, $1,700 is more than most recent Democrats candidates for president donate to charity in a year, but on Romney’s tax returns to find a missing $1,700 dollars is like finding a penny in the cushions that you forgot to report. I guess the dollar amount is not important (unless its somebody making too much money,) it’s the headline they were after here.

Better get top terrorist reporter Brian Ross out of the Caribbean and off to Switzerland to uncover this latest Romney plot.

NBC’s Brian Williams called Romney’s wealth “unimaginable.” Unimaginable? How you doing Brian in your luxury Manhattan apartment? Ask your neighbor Beyonce if you can borrow some sugar.

Better send that crew back to Mexico to see how the branch of the Romney family is doing down there and demand they tell you how much money they make off their citrus farms. You left that out of the last story you did on them.

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Mitt Romney appears to be so anxious to hit Newt Gingrich on anything and everything, he completely misses the point that the mainstream media moderators of debates are the most powerful people in the room. They can shape, or frame questions, or an entire debate however they please. The Right feels they often do so to our disadvantage. Romney would appear to disagree.

Mitt Romney dismissed Newt Gingrich’s attacks on the media during an appearance on Wednesday’s “Fox and Friends.”

The former Massachusetts governor lambasted this strategy. “It’s very easy to talk down a moderator,” he said. “The moderator asks a question and then has to sit by and take whatever you send to them. And Speaker Gingrich has been wonderful at attacking the moderators and attacking the media. That’s always a favorite response for the home crowd….

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When President Obama called for an end to congressional insider trading during his State of the Union Address last night, there may have been some colorful Greek expletives muttered by a multi-millionaire publisher we all know and love.

When Breitbart News began our coverage of Peter Schweizer’s best-selling book Throw Them All Out, AOL/Huffington Post was quick to proclaim the story dead on arrival.  Their full-page headline proudly proclaimed “Hit Job Falls Flat,” which displayed lousy journalism on multiple levels. AOL/HuffPo characterized the diligently investigated report as a “hit job,” they prematurely proclaimed the story a failure and as we revealed at the time, they allowed Arianna Huffington’s cozy relationship with Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to falsely inform their readers that there was no validity to the congressional insider trading scandal.

Here we are, only ten weeks after AOL/Huffpo called our story a dud, there have been multiple congressional and senate hearings, three different laws drafted and now, using his ultimate bully pulpit, President Obama said this:

What a humiliating moment for the smart-set over at AOL/HuffPo when their candidate lends this level of importance to a story they tried hard to spike. There was a time when AOL/HuffPo tried to sell themselves to the public as a new brand of aggressive and independent journalism fighting against the old guard media who no longer resonate with the American public. Now, AOL/HuffPo is the old guard, running interference for political cronies and using their $300 million megaphone to try to shout-down others who don’t fall in line.

The old-guard media versus new media conflict has less to do with the method of delivery of the news (newsprint versus kilobytes) as much as it has to do with the stale, predictable establishment philosophy that permeates the newsrooms of these organizations.  Take a liberal political reporter from the old-guard like Howard Fineman out of the Newsweek office and put him in the high-tech environment of AOL/HuffPo and you still have the same old repetitive and destructive mindset you had before.

This phenomenon, and what sets true citizen journalism apart from the cronies in the establishment media, was best revealed on my show last night by the journalist who got all this started in the first place, Peter Schweizer, author of Throw Them All Out:

The mainstream media pontificators bloviating over President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech last night failed to notice what should have been evident to anyone who had spent any time reviewing his past addresses to Congress: Obama plagiarized himself.

The Republican National Committee noticed, and produced this quick and helpful video:

Why bother analyzing something that you’ve heard every year–and never seen fulfilled? (more…)

Newt Gingrich

Charles M. Blow, over at The New York Times, loves to allege that Republicans are racist, racist, racist. James Clyburn, the third ranking Democrat in the House, accused Gingrich of practicing the Southern Strategy. The NAACP piled on.

In Gingrich’s populist call and celebration of the nobility of work, they hear Nixon’s ominous “Southern Strategy.” The media alone seems acutely attuned to the racist dog whistles we conservatives are supposed to be hearing, but their dogged attempt to sully the Republican Party’s strategy in the South runs afoul of historical facts. Ironically, one commentator, Jim Sleeper, professor at Yale University, plays the race card in suggesting that Gingrich plays the race card.

In 2004, the masterly Claremont Review of Books debunked this growing media narrative in greater depth than I can venture here, but the left-wing argument rests on three key assumptions: that Republicans tailored their message to attract racists, that those of us who oppose racial preferences are somehow racist, and that, having won the South in ‘68, the Republican party continued to play to racism. This is what they believe, made clear by Dan T. Carter, author of From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution 1963-1994: “Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, in Richard Nixon’s subtle manipulation of the busing issue, in Ronald Reagan’s genial demolition of affirmative action, in George Bush’s use of the Willie Horton ads, and in Newt Gingrich’s demonization of welfare mothers.”

The problem with each of these instances of supposed racism is that you have to believe that the issue is racism, not principle. To wit, plenty of non-racists doubt the wisdom of busing, racial preferences, furloughing criminals, and giving lavish government benefits. This is a subtle game the media plays and as tautological as it is stupid: views are deemed racist because they are defined as racist. It’s not really an argument because it already assumes its premise.

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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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When the South Carolina primary results revealed a blowout victory for Gingrich, Romney supporters and the Establishment Apology Brigade responded by borrowing progressives’s talking points against the tea party. That a sizable chunk of tea partiers, independents, and women voted for Newt Gingrich doesn’t make them “racists,” as I have heard suggested, or “bitter clingers,” or any other pejorative favored by progressives and suddenly subtly adopted by establishment types.

I know and respect many of these individuals and I don’t begrudge them their passionate support of the candidate in whom they believe; rather, I disagree with their chosen tactics in attempting to undermine their opposition’s support.

We spent three-and-a-half years protesting for limited government and were called nazis, racists, bigots, etc. by progressives, many of them sitting lawmakers. The above-mentioned apologists were right with us in denouncing such tactics. Now suddenly they’re echoing them simply because the majority of grassroots do not share their choice of primary candidate? Their strategy is to browbeat and verbally abuse grassroots into lining up behind an uncertain and not “inevitable” candidate? Isn’t that what progressives have been doing to grassroots for the past several years? We were called racists and “bitter clingers” for not supporting Obama. Are we now suggested racists and “bitter clingers” because we don’t support Romney? How does that work?

Let me put it another way: it wasn’t OK to call tea partiers “racists and hillbillies” when they opposed Obama’s big government, but it is OK to call tea partiers “racists and hillbillies” when they oppose the establishment’s pick for primary candidate?

What sort of bass-ackwards logic is this?

The South Carolina results have more to do with a repudiation of Romney than a widespread preference for Gingrich as a candidate. This isn’t to say that there aren’t any tea partiers who support Gingrich–to the contrary. There is simply a general, “damn the man” sentiment when it concerns the GOP establishment, and it’s of the establishment’s own doing.

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It’s bad when national media outlets show bias, but I honestly think it’s worse when your local media shows bias. Last night on Twitter I came across a tweet about thousands at a pro-Walker rally, but the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel said only hundreds were there.

This may not seem like a big deal, but the Associated Press picked it up and didn’t bother to check the facts. Other media outlets reported the original AP article. The MacIver Institute took a screen shot and posted it to their Facebook account:

I looked all over the Associated Press website and couldn’t find their articles. Not shocked at all, but luckily other local outlets used the numerous AP articles on their site. The first one appeared on their ABC website. This article is interesting because it glosses over the pro-Walker protestors, but goes into detail about the anti-Walker protestors. No bias here, right? The AP did post another article that was picked up by Madison.com. This one did get into more detail about the rally and the supporters, including those who spoke. The only article I could find that is any good is from Wauwatosa Patch. The writer, Jim Price, uses accurate numbers. He mentions the organizers were expecting 1,000 people, but 3,000 attended.

I don’t know about you, but when I hear someone say over 1,000 I picture 1,200, maybe even 1,500. I definitely don’t picture 3,000! It doesn’t change the perspective much by updating the articles to say over 1,000 when they will be specific about the number of counter protestors. Matt Batzel, from the original tweet, told me this is unfair because it appears the pro-Walker protestors only outnumbered the anti-Walker protestors 10 to 1.

The local TV stations also repeated the numbers like TMJ-4 and WSAW. Now, the TMJ-4 article says thousands now, but if you look under the by line it will say it was updated. The video of the actual news broadcast shows they changed their mind. The broadcaster says hundreds instead of thousands. Luckily, the MacIver Institute also posted a video on YouTube.

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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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