Today, on Fox News Channel’s The Five, liberal panelist Bob Beckel praised President Barack Obama’s efforts at job creation: “One good sign of the economy is there are more manufacturing jobs created in the last two years than the last eight,” he said.

Beckel did acknowledge that American manufacturing was still in a bad state, and lamented that the manufacturing sector “has been bleeding jobs because corporations are going to find cheap labor overseas.”

His conservative colleague, Republican strategist Andrea Tantaros, interjected: “So cut the corporate tax.” Fellow conservative Eric Bolling backed her up–”A hundred percent right, Andrea!”–and added that U.S. corporations pay the highest tax rates in the industrialized world, after Japan recently lowered its rate.

Beckel, on the defensive, retorted: “As much as Botswana?”

Tantaros and Bolling didn’t know what to say, and appeared to concede the point: “Botswana? Botswana is the bar? Botswana?” Tantaros protested. “That was a joke,” Beckel reassured her.

It must have been a joke–because, in fact, Botswana does have a far lower corporate tax rate than the U.S., which has helped propel Botswana to rapid and sustained economic growth. (more…)

Media Matters for America (MMfA) must be really afraid of Andrew Breitbart. Once again, he’s their number one target for elimination from mainstream media appearances–even ahead of conservative media luminary Rush Limbaugh, whom MMfA hates with a passion.

The above attack, on MMfA’s front page, is pathetic in form and function. (Note to MMfA editors: “vigorously” only has one “u,” unless you’re not writing to be read by Americans.)

MMfA’s intent is not to respond to anything Breitbart said on CNN–where he defended South Carolinians and conservatives against mainstream media attacks–but to protest the fact that he appeared on CNN.

And what, according to MMfA, has Breitbart said or done that would justify his exclusion from American public discourse? Let’s take each claim in turn: (more…)

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.

(more…)

Eric Boehlert of Media Matters for America was so enthusiastic about new accusations of infidelity by Newt Gingrich’s ex-wife that he boasted on Twitter: “noted: it’s been 16 yrs since Dems had to defend a WH candidate’s marraige/sex [sic] life. For GOP, its now become wkly thing;”.

Someone going by the Twitter handle “OH_Robb” responded soon thereafter by pointing out an obvious counter-example: “John Edwards ran in 2008.”

Instead of acknowledging the error, Boehlert doubled down: “Q’s abt. Edwards marriage arose after his 2008 run was over; was never part of the campaign dialogue.”

Not only was that claim untrue–the National Enquirer accused Edwards in October of 2007–but it also highlights the left-wing media bias that Media Matters is at great pains to deny. It was no accident that journalists failed to probe Edwards until after he had dropped out.

Media Matters declares that its purpose is to correct “conservative misinformation” in the American media. To that end, it also tries to dismiss conservative allegations of left-wing bias in the mainstream media, either by denying that such bias exists, or claiming that such bias, even if it does exist, has no effect on Americans’ views. On matters such as the Edwards scandal, Media Matters provides the cover-up for the media cover-up.

The goal for Media Matters is not to win a political debate but to prevent one–to shift the terms by eliminating the few conservative voices in the mainstream media. (more…)

On Monday evening, the political blogosphere was rocked by the unprecedented publishing of a 200-page opposition research book on Mitt Romney written by the John McCain campaign for the 2008 GOP presidential primary. Who decided to release this information to the public? It wasn’t ThinkProgress; it wasn’t Newsweek or the Washington Post or Mother Jones. It was by a website which currently features the headlines “Martial Artist Kicks Down Banana Tree,” “Baby Flummoxed By New Sound,” and “Jessica Simpson Wearing A Giant Deformed Penis Mask.” I kid you not.

BuzzFeed, the name of the site in question, is the latest venture for Politico’s JournoList-er Ben Smith, as previously reported by John Nolte. Smith is heading up the “Politics” section of BuzzFeed, and while he claims objectivity, the case of this leaked document reveals exactly how he plans to use the site to hurt the GOP and aid Obama’s reelection campaign.

Screenshot of BuzzFeed’s politics page

The “About” page of BuzzFeed presents the site as nothing more than a place where readers can find interesting and viral Internet content:

We feature the kind of things you’d want to pass along to your friends: an outrageous video that’s about to go viral, an obscure subculture breaking into the mainstream, a juicy bit of gossip that everyone at the office will be talking about tomorrow, or an ordinary guy having his glorious 15-minutes of fame.

The site’s niche naturally extends to its political page, headed up by Smith. The political news cycle is chock full of bizarre and hilarious information that normally doesn’t end up on NPR–Mitt Romney sparring with pop group LMFAO, Herman Cain singing “Imagine” with pizza-themed lyrics, or Rick Perry blasting a coyote while jogging, for instance. Thus, a site to present this kind of offbeat content (the categories on BuzzFeed include “LOL,” “WTF,” and “Fail”) sounds like a great place to unwind, to set aside all the partisan bickering and just check out posts “for the lulz,” as we whippersnappers say.

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The mainstream media’s glee in reporting that public sector unions have likely succeeded in drumming up enough signatures to force Wisconsin governor Scott Walker to face a recall election betrays their thinly-veiled sympathies for the effort.

The day began with a National Public Radio report that told listeners of the “festive” mood among organizers of the petition drive, contrasting enthusiastic man-on-the-street opposition to Walker with the institutional voice of the embattled state GOP.

Hooray! Recall Walker (Source: NPR/Scott Bauer/AP)

The NPR story was careful to note that “the governor continues to take advantage of a state law that allows recall targets to raise unlimited amounts of money during a recall period.”

Scott Bauer–whose November photograph (above) of a smiling Democrat donor accompanied NPR’s story on its website–followed the same line at the Associated Press, reporting that Walker was out of the state raising money to defeat Democrats’ effort to unseat him. But Bauer added a sinister–and false–insinuation that Walker was raking in federal bailout money: (more…)

It’s always fun when media and their analysts tie themselves into knots when confronted with something that destroys their template.

Republican front runner Mitt Romney gives 50 or 60 bucks to one of his volunteer campaign staffers and leftists spin themselves into a self-imposed Ken Shamrock-style submission.

The fact that the volunteer was black is driving the left and their media absolutely nuts. “It galls me, I don’t even like to watch it. I felt like it plays into every sort of patronizing stereotype of what black people are.” That was the line on MSNBC over Romney paying Ruth Williams the cash.

Now, let’s get this straight, Williams felt inspired (by God, she said) to volunteer for the Romney campaign before he paid her. She earned the money. She worked for the money. She never expected it, but she was unemployed, she needed the cash and Romney gave it to her. Sounds like a fair transaction to me. Of course, the problem here is that it was done by an Evil Rich Republican who isn’t supposed to do acts of gratitude and since the recipient was a minority they are angrier than an OWS’er being told to find a job. Listen to the entire MSNBC segment and you’ll learn that it’s government’s job to take care of people like this, not churches or individuals. Seriously, these loons have snapped over this.

What they don’t care to mention is that this is nothing unusual for Romney. He sacrificed two and a half years of his life (beginning at age 19) to serve the people of France on an LDS mission. Hey, he was an unpaid community organizer before it was supposedly cool to call yourself that. You can just begin and end with that act of service, but if they cared to look at the rest of his life, they would learn more.

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When I check my morning inbox, there’s no shortage of advertising waiting for me.

The Gap is offering to sell me clothes. Radio Shack is offering to sell me electronics.  And Media Matters for America is offering to sell me a mainstream media landscape free of conservative voices.

Make no mistake; as much as it may appear that ideology is driving groups like Media Matters, MoveOn.org and Color of Change, they’re also pushing their agenda for marketing reasons, citing dubious “achievements” designed to get their liberal niche audience to click the Donate Now button.

You can see this in Media Matters’ latest public-relations assault on Dana Loesch. Media Matters states its mission as combating “conservative misinformation,” but in this case, there is very clearly no misinformation speak of.

Loesch — at worst — was delivering an outrageous opinion in a show of support for the troops, as part of her job trying have an interesting and entertaining radio show. That’s not misinformation, and MMfA knows it.

So why does Media Matters care, and why drag CNN into it? The answer is very simple. It’s how they raise money.

This is from a fundraising letter from Media Matters for America that I received on December 27, 2011. If you’d like to learn how to write fundraising emails, pay attention, because this one is pretty well done. Bang on a few hot button issues, make it seem like you made some real progress, toss in a few references to the idea that “we’re all in this together!”, and then go for the kill and ask people to dig deep to help support you with a donation: (more…)

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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Glenn Beck’s The Blaze has joined the “progressive” left’s all-out attack on James O’Keefe after his Project Veritas successfully demonstrated that dead people could vote in the New Hampshire primary due to the state’s lack of voter ID requirements at the polls.

Instead of focusing on the issue of voter fraud, Beck has slandered O’Keefe, stoking an apparent grudge that surfaced during O’Keefe’s successful NPR sting last year. At that time, The Blaze tried–and failed–to discredit O’Keefe’s exposé of political bias among NPR’s senior executives, which resulted in the departure of CEO Vivian Schiller. Today, The Blaze claims the New Hampshire attorney general is investigating O’Keefe, when in fact the attorney general is investigating the state’s voting system over the flaws O’Keefe exposed.

Ironically, Beck had previously treated voter fraud with the seriousness it deserves.

In 2008, he attacked “liberal whiners” for defending ACORN on the issue of voter fraud. In 2009, he attacked voter fraud by Democrats in the Minnesota election that saw Al Franken unseat Republican Norm Coleman. In 2010–relying on O’Keefe’s ACORN exposé–Beck attacked “progressives” and MSNBC, whom he said were promoting voter fraud in an attempt to help Democrat Martha Coakley defeat Scott Brown in the Massachusetts special election for U.S. Senate:

“Fix the rules! Make sure that it doesn’t happen again! The rules are severely flawed, clearly!” Beck exclaimed in 2009. O’Keefe has made the same case with his New Hampshire sting.

But today, Beck is so desperate to discredit O’Keefe that he has discarded his principled stance against voter fraud and thrown his lot in with Barack Obama’s legal team and dead voters.

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NEWPORT, N.H. (AP) – Republican presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman has won the endorsement of The Boston Globe, marking the second time Massachusetts’ largest newspaper has snubbed its former governor, Mitt Romney, ahead of the New Hampshire primary.

Huntsman announced the endorsement Thursday night at a town hall meeting. He calls it proof that in New Hampshire, in his words, “there’s something happening.”

The former Utah governor is counting on a strong finish in Tuesday’s primary to stay in the GOP race.

The Boston Globe has subscribers in southern New Hampshire. It endorsed Sen. John McCain over Romney in 2007. (more…)

Following Rick Santorum’s impressive Iowa showing, the heretofore largely ignored GOP candidate is now being heavily scrutinized.  Fair enough.

The morning following the Iowa caucus, I awoke to an Internet ablaze about Santorum’s apparent characterization of male homosexual relations as “man on dog.”  Ouch.  I was, as are many on the Right, immediately offended that Santorum would use such a crude, offensive, unnecessary analogy, embarrassing not only himself but Republicans as a whole, and I immediately Tweeted about my disgust with Santorum’s remark.

Others were similarly critical:  National Review Online’s Michael Tanner blasted Santorum (“In fact, with his comparison of gay sex to ‘man on dog’ relationships, Santorum seldom even makes a pretense of tolerance”), as did Fox News’ Shepard Smith that afternoon on his show, Studio B (“Rick Santorum is, among other things, a man who equated homosexual sex to bestiality”).

Within minutes of Studio B’s airing, Mediate gleefully reported on the controversy with the headline:  “Shep Smith: How Will Equating ‘Homosexual Sex To Bestiality’ Affect Santorum’s Run?”  This morning, the L.A. Times unsurprisingly ran with it, writing:  “He [Santorum] said gay marriage could lead to bestiality.”

Then I remembered the Gipper: “Trust… but verify.”  So I did a little quick digging and looked at the actual text from which the controversial quote originated–the transcript of the April 23, 2003 Associated Press interview with Santorum.   (more…)

On January 3, Media Matters for America (MMfA) linked, among others, a Big Government item by J. Christian Adams to support its mischaracterization of a Fox News segment on South Carolina’s contested voter ID law.

MMfA cherry-picked a small portion of Adams’s post, while ignoring the bulk of Adams’s argument solidly refuting MMfA’s own weak defense of Attorney General Eric Holder, thereby obscuring his criticism from their readers.

Emphasis via MMfA:

In a January 3 segment on Fox News’ Fox & Friends, correspondent Jim Angle promoted a number of falsehoods and misleading claims about voter ID laws and the Department of Justice’s action preventing one such law from being implemented in South Carolina.

Even Vote Fraudster J. Christian Adams Calls The Analogy “Silly And Constitutionally Incorrect”

Adams: Arguments “Flimsy” Since “The 15^th Amendment Is In Play When It Comes To Voting.”In a BigGovernment.com piece attacking the DOJ’s letter, J. Christian Adams wrote:

What Adams did was provide several solid arguments as to why Holder’s DOJ appears to be contesting the South Carolina law based largely upon misperceptions and fuzzy math for political reasons. Media Matters neglects to point out that Holder’s DOJ used out-dated data, grossly inflating any potential problem in South Carolina. They also repeatedly highlighted a 20% number already exposed as a math gimmick aimed at making the issue appear to be far more significant than it may actually be.

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Earlier today, Mark Allen, who is a contributor to the New York Times and National Public Radio, compared Republican presidential candidate Sen. Rick Santorum to Dan White, the man who assassinated Harvey Milk, San Francisco’s first openly gay member of the Board of Supervisors, in 1978.

Allen’s comments reflect a continued trend in Democrat-friendly media to compare Republican candidates to notorious criminals. Recently, for example, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews declared that former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich “looks like a car bomber.” (more…)

Time’s Mark Halperin wondered openly this morning whether the mainstream media might be “rooting for” Sen. Rick Santorum in the Republican primary. That could happen if journalists decide that Santorum would be a weaker general election threat to President Barack Obama than the presumed Republican nominee, Gov. Mitt Romney.

But Halperin’s theory is wishful thinking, and obscures one of the most important factors in Santorum’s come-from-nowhere success in the Iowa caucuses last night: the former Pennsylvania senator has thrashed the mainstream media relentlessly in the past few weeks, making it clear he has the courage to stand up to the Democrats’ Greek chorus.

Most recently, Santorum schooled NBC’s David Gregory and CNN’s Candy Crowley on the subject of Obama’s “appeasement” in foreign policy. Santorum showed a patient deftness in drawing a stark contrast with Obama, then defending it with hard facts and fresh, alternative ideas. The journalists, expecting easy prey, were dumbstruck.

Santorum also endured a truly low blow from Alan Colmes, and overcame bizarre attempts by NPR and CBS to cast him as a racist. He irritates the mainstream media, and for good reason–because so far, he is beating them.

In a way, Santorum has picked up where former House speaker Newt Gingrich had left off. Gingrich rose through the polls after targeting the media rather than fellow Republicans. His clashes with Romney knocked Gingrich off that message. Yet Santorum also has discipline and an knock for retail politics. He takes his fight with the media off air and offline. (more…)