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

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

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

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

And with quotes from the Post story like, “Overall, 55 percent of those who are closely following the campaign say they disapprove of what the GOP candidates have been saying,” one has to wonder if those respondents scoffing at the Republican message were actual voters that the GOP should pay attention to, or partisan Democrats whom they won’t be able to reach anyway, or even disinterested “adults” that aren’t voting in the first place? Unfortunately, with this poll we have no way to assess the answers to those questions.

Still, the Post assures us that, “Meanwhile, the president’s recent remarks are better reviewed.” How do we know? Well, we don’t. We just have to take the Post’s word for it if we are going to believe it.

Essentially, what we have with these Washington Post polls is simple cheerleading for the president instead of legitimate analysis of the current sentiments of voters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A portion of the video’s transcript:

Brian Lamb: “Is it fair to say that the Polk Award winners are usually liberal journalists?”

Michael Hastings: “Um, probably. I mean most journalists I know are liberal.”

BL: “Activist journalists. I mean activist people, would you consider yourself an activist?

MH: “I think any.. no, no… I think any journalist worth his salt often has a real moralistic kind of righteousness to them somewhere in their soul. And I think that’s a, you know, we’re gonna protect the — and we talk in grand terms about ourselves, you know, afflicting the powerful and comforting the afflicted.”

One can just feel Hastings’ discomfiture with his admission as he struggles with his reply. With his first thought that he doesn’t consider himself an “activist,” he seems to have a vague feeling he shouldn’t be admitting all this, but he does it anyway.

Naturally we aren’t surprised by the whole affair.

Finally, I know what many of you are going to say. Many of you are going to be rolling your eyes asking me if I think this is new. Of course I don’t think that the sentiments that Hastings related is in any way “new” — but it is unusual to see a “journalist” confessing publicly of his and his fellow’s blatant bias.

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

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

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

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

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

There is even a website dedicated to chronicling the arrests made at OWS events. As of the writing of this article they had noted 5,975 arrests at OWS events across the nation. And this is a left-wing hosted website, too. You see they are proud of these arrests.

Compared to the several years of tea party events, the OWS events have been a criminal’s paradise. Not only have the tea partiers never had any arrests, or fights, or criminality, at their events they’ve even left every park they used cleaner than they were when they started their events!

Just because the OWS movement is dying down right now — maybe only due to the winter cold — that doesn’t mean the outrages of the OWSers is slowing. Just recently a church that made the foolish mistake of helping these criminals found its facilities vandalized. A $12,000 baptismal fount was stolen along with laptops and other items. These creeps even urinated on Church property. There have been other churches that have been vandalized when they tried to assist the OWSers, too.

With all the criminality that has occurred at these supposedly peaceful events, the public should have long ago turned against OWS. Yet polls still show that Americans have not turned against OWS. Why? Because the Old Media has told them how great it all is and has made a concerted effort to hide the truth from people.

By contrast, the tea party’s image has been thoroughly battered with Americans. Is it any surprise with the near daily barrage of hate the Old Media bludgeons the tea party with?

If no other example is believable to show how the Old Media establishment is sold out to the far left, the difference in the way it has treated the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement is solid proof of that bias.

Sadly, even after we’ve exposed all the criminality at the OWS events in conservative media outlets from newspapers to TV to blogs, the fact that Americans still have not turned foursquare against the Occupiers shows that we have made little headway in reaching the country with the truth.

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.

… many American newspapers were unabashedly partisan, and not necessarily only on the editorial page. Not unlike news shops on cable TV and the Web today, they catered to a core of readers who thought very much like them.

This is a good point to make, though it is doubtful that the Times gets it as thoroughly as one might expect. You see, in the salad days of local newspaper wars, each city had two, four, or even more newspapers and each paper was well known for its support of a party or candidate. Readers could scan these papers and get all sides of the endorsement game in order to make their own decision. But these days few newspapers take anything other than the left-wing line on endorsements and the reading public can no longer get both sides of the issue.

The fact is, endorsements are meaningless if every reader can predict based along partisan lines which candidate the paper will pick far in advance of a paper’s “carefully considered” endorsement!

Certainly we can applaud the Sun-Times’ decision to dispense with these predictable endorsements that surprise no one. Perhaps this is the beginning of a sea change in the newspaper industry, led by the Times? If so it would be a welcome change, indeed.

Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth emailed her year-end thank-you memo to a bunch of WaPo swells on New Year’s Eve (her first mistake). Before the electrons were even dry, the must-read Jim Romenesko posted her email in its entirety with the breaker that Weymouth blew air kisses to almost everyone at the Post—except executive editor Marcus Brauchli.

Image Credit: Washington Post

A C-Suite semaphore? Perhaps. But the real news wasn’t the errant Post Toasties. The real news was the unintentional candor with which Weymouth described how she is driving the paper straight into a digital tar pit.

If you care a whit about real journalism (in any medium), this memo will irk you, and not because of the grammar issues.

I can overlook the dozen or so typos—it was New Year’s Eve, after all. And I can ignore the “they’re-their” slip-up. Spell check doesn’t always catch that one. I can even see past the occasional subject-verb-agreement lapse.

No. No, actually, I can’t. She’s the publisher of the Washington Freakin’ Post, fer chrissake! Doesn’t she have people to catch that??

But what really gives me eye-bulge is watching the Sacagawea of the Fourth Estate instruct her expedition to press on after they’ve reached the Pacific.

The Internet asteroid has hit the Earth, threatening to bring an end to the Guttenberg Period of the Paleozoic Era. The time has come to challenge the talented WaPo team to innovate in the face this of pension-decimating upheaval. So what does Weymouth do? She instructs Wallace Hartley to keep playing the old favorites.

Four examples:

Celebrating Attrition: Unless Weymouth is employing the “Zeno’s dichotomy paradox” marketing strategy, there is no reason to celebrate “a rate of decline that is about half of what it was last year.”

Suffering from Polaris-is: The customer has always been considered the North Star in successful communications, even before the Internet demanded it. But Weymouth, apparently, is just coming around to that quaint notion.

“We set ourselves five priorities in the beginning of the year … 5) become more customer centric, by focusing on how we get our stories to people, how we package and promote them, how we can enlighten, engage, amuse and move readers.”

Early-onset Polaris-is: Worse, by Weymouth’s own admission, customer focus has only eked into the “top five priorities” in 2011.

“Customer focus has always been a priority at the Washington Post. By naming it one of our five priorities for the year, I wanted to push us to get even better and more disciplined.”

And even with that recent promotion, customer focus is still an also-ran.

“We are in the process of evolving to a company which uses data and our expertise to provide customers with more and more compelling consumer experiences. The most successful companies, from Southwest airlines, to Apple, to Walmart, have demonstrated, time and again, that a relentless focus on the customer always wins. Laura Evans, in her new role as Chief Experience Officer, will help us get there.”

“Strike up ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee,’ would you please, Mr. Hartley.”

Investing in the past: It is a given that shredding trees into pulp, spraying the dried mess with ink, wrapping it in plastic bags, and tossing those bags onto doorsteps across America is a fairly antiquated way to communicate a message.

But when you’re the Top Dog of this enterprise, it’s your job to shine a hopeful, promising light on the looming overhaul of this 20th century story factory. It is incumbent upon you to give hope to the ink-stained wretches who actually write, print and deliver the daily paper. “[W]e will continue to invest in our newspaper as long as their (sic) are customers who demand it,” has kind of a Little Big Horn ring to it, don’t you think?

To her credit, Weymouth does address, briefly, how the Post is embracing new technology.

“We are telling stories using the tools available to bring our stories to life in new ways, through pictures, video, text and graphics.”

But I figured being the niece of of Tina Weymouth, the bass-thumping founding member of the Talking Heads, Katharine would have realized before the rest of us that “talking heads” are, in fact, the future of news, and that she would have already developed a plan to drive the Post to that bright future.

When Anita Dunn hasn’t been on CNN or MSNBC bashing the Republican presidential candidates and/or praising President Obama, she has been successfully lobbying for a Washington Post subsidiary by the name of Kaplan University.

You may remember Dunn as the Obama aide who once said communist mass murderer Mao and Mother Teresa were “two of my favorite political philosophers.” The Soros-funded Media Matters said she was taken out of context.

Dunn is now claiming that she is not a lobbyist, even though she works for a firm that does lobbying. Will the progressives defend this, too?

We have written in the past about Kaplan, which is the cash cow for the Post Company, whose newspaper has been losing money and readers. Steven Pearlstein of the Post wrote that Kaplan “has provided the handsome profits that have helped to cover this newspaper’s operating losses” and that “Although we in the Post newsroom have nothing to do with Kaplan, we’ve all benefited from its financial success.”

But that success came at the expense of students, including veterans, who got educated through Kaplan and found that some of their degrees were worthless.

After congressional investigations exposed abuses in the $30 billion for-profit education industry, Kaplan and other companies got very concerned that proposed regulations from the Obama Administration would potentially “cut off the huge flow of federal aid” to private sector colleges declared unfit to receive the money, The New York Times reported.

In the end, “after a ferocious response that administration officials called one of the most intense they had seen, the Education Department produced a much-weakened final plan that almost certainly will have far less impact as it goes into effect” this year.

Former Obama official Dunn played a key role in making sure the for-profit education companies will continue largely with business as usual.

Military columnist Tom Philpott, a former Coast Guardsman, has led the criticism of what he calls the “predatory for-profit schools” that “rob veterans of their Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits.” He quotes Theodore (Ted) L. Daywalt, chief executive officer and president of VetJobs, an online job search firm for military veterans, as saying that he learned about the problem through working with disappointed vets who thought they had used their GI Bill to earn credible degrees only to learn they were “worthless.”

“The eighth for-profit company among the top 10 institutions getting GI Bill payments is Kaplan, owned by The Washington Post. Its Post-9/11 GI Bill payments climbed in 12 months from $17 million to $44 million,” noted Philpott. These are the payments that help pay the salaries of the liberal editorial writers and columnists at the Post newspaper.

In a sign that some news competition is in play among the big papers and that some criticism of the Obama Administration is still permitted in print, the Times noted the key role played by Dunn, “a close friend of President Obama and his former White House communications director.” She had “worked with” Kaplan, the paper said. “And politically well-connected investors, including Donald E. Graham, chief executive of the Washington Post Company, which owns Kaplan, and John Sperling, founder of the University of Phoenix and a longtime friend of the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, made impassioned appeals,” the paper added.

Dunn had left the Obama Administration to make money at SKDKnickerbocker (SKDK), which describes itself as “a nationally recognized strategic communications consulting firm.” This is what lobbying is called these days. Dunn’s work in the media is highlighted in her bio, where she is described as “a frequent guest on cable and network television, including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, 60 Minutes, Today, Meet the Press and many more.”

Stephen Burd, a writer for The Quick and the Ed, a blog published by Education Sector, was intrigued by the Times story about the lobbying for Kaplan and wrote, “When executives at Kaplan University were looking for an Obama insider to help fight the administration’s efforts to rein in the for-profit higher education industry, they scored a major coup. They landed Anita Dunn, the former White House communications director and FOO (friend of Obama).”

But Burd was intrigued by the claim that Dunn is not a lobbyist. He asked, “…how does Dunn reconcile the role she played in this fight with rules that President Obama put in place to stop the revolving door between executive branch officials and lobbing [sic] firms from spinning. [Under an executive order that the President issued on his first full day in office, administration officials are barred from lobbying their former colleagues.] Simple: she claims that she did not engage in lobbying.”

The claim that Dunn was not a lobbyist was included in the Times story, which said, “While Ms. Dunn visited the White House about 80 times since leaving the administration, she said she was careful to avoid talking to former colleagues about the issue because she is not a lobbyist and such conduct would violate the ethics policies put in place by Mr. Obama regarding lobbying by former advisers.”

The Times didn’t raise an eyebrow. But Burd didn’t buy it: “Not a lobbyist, really? Let’s review: Dunn traded in on her White House experience to land the lucrative job of helping develop strategy and messaging for an industry that was under fire from the very same administration she had served. Perhaps I’m missing something, but that seems like the very definition of how the revolving door works. Sure, Dunn may not be a registered lobbyist. But that is the type of distinction that has made so many cynical about how our government works.”

Clearly, it is lobbying, registered or not.

In addition to her lobbying for The Washington Post, she continues working for the Obama Administration, in an unofficial capacity.

On December 11, Dunn appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” to denounce various Republican candidates for president. On MSNBC on September 8, she said that Obama “will challenge this nation to basically hold their leaders accountable for putting the interests of the people—getting them back to work, getting this economy growing again—ahead of the partisan political interests that are dominating Washington.”

Only a paid lobbyist for the liberal-left would make such a laughable claim on national television. It was during this time that she was lobbying for Kaplan against the interests of students and veterans.

But lobbying is where the money is. Last October Obama Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s director of public affairs, Jill Zuckman, moved to SKDK. She is a former political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe.

At SKDKnickerbocker, she also touts her journalistic credentials. “As a reporter, Jill was a frequent presence on television and radio, providing political analysis on MSNBC’s Hardball, CNN, Fox and NPR’s Diane Rehm Show,” her bio states.

It’s called cashing in on political and media connections. And it’s all done in the name of “the people” and the 99 percent.

In an article published last week, Rachel Coward of the Columbia Missourian falsely claimed that Andrew Breitbart edited videos of a controversial labor studies course at the University of Missouri in which lecturers instructed students in violent tactics, indoctrinated them with revisionist left-wing economic history, and encouraged them to join the Communist Party, among other inappropriate conduct.

Here are the facts.

A highlight video of clips from 31 hours of classroom instruction (which has since been removed from YouTube) was published at Big Government on April 25, 2011. Neither Andrew Breitbart nor anyone employed by Breitbart.com edited the videos–a fact long since established by Insurgent Visuals, which claimed full responsibility for the highlight reel.

Coward claimed:

Conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart manipulated classroom videos to make the instructors seem as though they supported violence in labor-management relations, according to an article by Inside Higher Ed.

Coward cites an inaccurate article at Inside Higher Ed that was itself the subject of a correction request last May.

Moreover, the instructors of the course did, in fact, support violence and intimidation in labor-management relations. As student Phil Christofanelli recalled:

In our lesson on bargaining we learned that we should use fear and intimidation–which Prof. Giljam falsely described as “mundane” and “non-threatening”–to play on the emotions of management.  We were told that we should frighten a man to the point where he is so afraid for his life that he wears body armor at work.  And all the while we were learning these profound academic insights, Prof. Ancel was heard in the background laughing, just tickled pink at the idea of terrifying management by making one’s union appear more militant than its workers actually want it to be….

Of course, the professors now point to the few caveats they applied, as above. Still, as I have demonstrated, at various junctures throughout the course, Prof. Giljum proudly endorsed industrial sabotage, the destruction of property, the use of fear and intimidation, and limited violence, “strategically played out.”  Prof. Ancel, was delighted when Prof. Giljum told these stories, and shared similar, second-hand anecdotes or histories.

Coward reports that the University of Missouri has issued a new policy that requires students to obtain permission before sharing classroom videos. However, she ignored the fact that the professors in the labor studies course had already encouraged students to share course materials. As Christofanelli noted:

In fact, Prof. Ancel said: “All labor education materials are uncopyrighted and to be shared.  We do not believe for the most part in intellectual property rights.  That’s one of the principles of labor education: we share.”

We request that the Columbia Missourian publish a retraction for this false claim.

With the first legitimate event of the 2012 Republican presidential primary just days away in Iowa, the Associated Press today offered a clear example of hatchet jobs to come for the candidates. Mitt Romney was given an early example of what the AP means by “journalism with voice.”

I previously raised concerns over a leaked memo from AP Managing Editor Mike Oreskes two weeks ago. Charging all journalists to use the said “voice,” he did not offer any examples but, rather very contradictory directions (emphasis added):

“We’re going to be pushing hard on journalism with voice, with context, with more interpretation. This does not mean that we’re sacrificing any of our deep commitment to unbiased, fair journalism. It does not mean that we’re venturing into opinion, either. It does mean that we need to be looking for ways to be more distinctive and stand out in the field — something our customers need and want. The why and the how of the news are as crucial as the who, what, when and where.”

The AP offered a very clear example this morning for how these directions will be executed.

The title, “Romney tries to come across as man of the people” was bad enough and it only got worse from there. The AP revealed its playbook as to how they will frame the Romney campaign in 2012.

Step 1: Paint Romney as filthy rich; like his daddy before him. What better way to fan the flames of class warfare than to paint the Republican frontrunner as the quintessential political aristocrat of one-percenter roots? The AP led with (emphasis added):

“Mitt Romney reminisced before a noontime crowd about the long car trips his family took when he was a boy. ‘My dad made Ramblers, so we had one,’ the Republican presidential hopeful said…In fact, Romney’s father didn’t just make cars. He was chairman and president of American Motors, the company that made Ramblers, and a highly successful businessman before he entered politics. It’s a detail the son omitted as he sought to establish a bond with Iowans he hopes will support him in next week’s presidential caucuses.”

Toward the end of the piece, another wealth jab that now opens the Romney wardrobe and Christmas list to criticism:

“As he stood at the cash register at a Concord, N.H., toy store, picking up a few gifts for charity, a patron asked him what he gave his family for Christmas. Earlier in the day, he had bought his wife a $285 North Face jacket as a gift, he said…For his sons? ‘We sent them checks,’ said Romney, a multimillionaire. ‘Cash is always good’.”

Some may remember just how effective the smears were against the Palin family wardrobe in 2008; a standard not held to Michelle Obama.

Step 2: Suggest to readers that either Romney is too smart, or Republicans are too dumb to understand him. Not only is Romney rich and therefore uncaring, but he cannot speak the language and empathize with the common man. The AP cited Romney’s comments regarding company relocation affecting employee commutes:

“Sometimes it’s counter-intuitive,’ replied Romney, a former businessman, explaining that businesses often invent new, more efficient ways to compete…The term is called productivity. Output per person,’ he said. ‘Our productivity equals our income’.”

Anyone with a Business 101 course under their belt or basic sense gained from commercial employment can understand what that statement means, and therefore why the question was properly answered. To argue otherwise is an insult to the general intelligence of the electorate. But the AP does not stop there, suggesting that he can also be too smart and systematically-minded to be “sympathetic.”

“When one retired firefighter in New Hampshire said he was drawing a reduced Social Security check because he also had a state pension, the former Massachusetts governor was less than sympathetic. ‘If there’s a competition for who will give you the most free stuff, go vote for that guy.’ When the man said he wasn’t asking for any handouts, Romney said, ‘You knew what you were getting into. … I wish you well, but I’m not going to promise you more bucks’.”

Regardless of the approach, Romney will be made to look unfit to chat up a voter on Main Street. It also would be helpful to know the context of that exchange and the tone of the question.

Step 3: Always remind the reader that he’s a Mormon. Forget the fact that “Mormon” is the incorrect description, or that LDS Church is the fifth largest in the United States. Use any opportunity to drive the Obama campaign concept that Mormonism is “weird.” Extra points if you can wrap the reminder in some sort of a compliment:

“He’s not always distant. At an earlier stop in New Hampshire, Romney explained how he lived on a careful budget as a Mormon missionary, using crude toilets and living in modest apartments. He also talked about his time as a lay pastor in Boston’s Mormon church, when he says he counseled struggling families.”

Remember, he only used a crude, French toilet because he’s a Latter-Day Saint. Weird, right?

The 2012 Election has all the makings of what will probably be the nastiest campaign in human memory. Race, religion and even hair will all be fair game. You can at least thank the Associated Press for telegraphing how its writers will frame the candidacy of one Mitt Romney.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This graphic is a great illustration of the way the left influences the emotions of the viewer toward their positions. George Scoville puts it perfectly in his post about this graphic.

If you don’t make your living thinking strategically about political communications, this might not have jumped out at you. But this is a very clever and very deceptive messaging tactic. If Democrats… are going to use this type of tactic, then Republicans and pro-liberty advocacy organizations need to take a page from this playbook quickly. We certainly can’t rely on the media to apply the kind of scrutiny that pulls back the curtain for casual political observers.

Exactly right. We on the right don’t think of this type of messaging often enough.

Then there is the rest of this story. In truth, the graphic that Blake claimed illustrated the riches of Congress directly, in fact did not. It actually meant to illustrate the wealth distribution of all Americans as a percentage of Congress.

A little later on Wednesday morning, Aaron Blake removed the graphic and issued this mea culpa:

This post initially used a chart that included data that we and others misunderstood. It did not reflect the wealth of Congress, but instead the wealth of the country, described according to numbers of seats in Congress. The Fix regrets the error.

Ooops. I guess the facts were “too good to check for the good folks at the Washington Post.”

But wait. Don’t get upset at Mr. Blake too quickly. After all, this graphic stirred the liberal heart. A quick glance makes viewers imagine that it is showing the number of eeevil Republicans compared to the nice, poor Democrats in Congress. In fact, that is precisely the emotion that the graphic is intended to evoke. So, we can fault Mr. Blake for not looking close enough at the graphic to discern its statistical facts, but we cannot fault him for having instantly grasped the subliminal message it was intended to relay. The fact is, the graphic works beautifully.

These are the sort of tactics the left employs, folks. We’d best become hip to them fast.

The hypocrisy at The New York Times is too much to take. I’ve read The New York Times articles on Mr. Gonzales over and over. I never once saw an article that was sympathetic to Mr. Gonzales. My favorite piece is an editorial titled, “Why This Scandal Matters.” What a great title! The Times covered every single detail in the Gonzales “scandal” someone had to write an editorial to justify it. You could fit the first paragraph with Operation Fast and Furious. [Bold my emphasis.]

It (the administration) has offered up implausible excuses, hidden the most damaging evidence and feigned memory lapses, while hoping that the public’s attention moves on. But this scandal is too important for the public or Congress to move on. This story should not end until Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is gone, and the serious damage that has been done to the Justice Department is repaired.

This “scandal” involved the firing of eight US Attorneys. No one died. Not a single person. Three hundred-plus Mexicans have died because of Operation Fast and Furious. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered with a gun from the operation on American soil. I wonder if The New York Times and Mr. Savage could explain to me why Mr. Gonzales’s scandal mattered and Fast and Furious does not?

The best part, though, was Mr. Holder taking a jab at people like Sharyl Attkisson, Cam Edwards, Katie Pavlich, Matthew Boyle, and myself. [Bold my emphasis.]

But Mr. Holder contended that many of his other critics — not only elected Republicans but also a broader universe of conservative commentators and bloggers — were instead playing “Washington gotcha” games, portraying them as frequently “conflating things, conveniently leaving some stuff out, construing things to make it seem not quite what it was” to paint him and other department figures in the worst possible light.

Of that group of critics, Mr. Holder said he believed that a few — the “more extreme segment” — were motivated by animus against Mr. Obama and that he served as a stand-in for him. “This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” he said, “both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”

Conflating things? How do we “conflate things” when we provide the documents PROVING our points? Plus if we are leaving out things it’s because Mr. Holder and the Department of Justice aren’t providing us with all the details.

This is what angers me the most. Basically Mr. Holder says that people like Ms. Attkisson, Mr. Edwards, Mr. Boyle, Ms. Pavlich, and I are staying on top of Operation Fast and Furious and asking you questions is because we’re racist? Let’s return to the Times editorial “Why This Scandal Matters” shall we? Whoever wrote this editorial (I cannot find the author) said, as I stated above, “This story should not end until Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is gone, and the serious damage that has been done to the Justice Department is repaired.”

So was The New York Times being racist? After all, Mr. Gonzales is Hispanic. Think about it Mr. Savage and Mr. Holder.

How about members of the Congressional Black Caucus Mr. Holder and Mr. Savage? As Mr. Boyle and Michelle Fields report the feeling in the caucus is that the congressional investigation is warranted. So do they feel this way because Mr. Holder is an African American? Are they racists against their own race?

Of course Mr. Holder says he thinks it has more to do with his political ideology. No Mr. Holder. We don’t care you’re a Democrat. If you didn’t know about Operation Fast and Furious then why aren’t you outraged? Why aren’t you firing those who are responsible for the operation? Why aren’t you cleaning house? Why aren’t you outraged that the people who started this operation haven’t been identified? Why aren’t you outraged that when people found out about Operation Fast and Furious (including your second in command) did nothing to stop it and more importantly did not tell you? I can’t speak for the others, but the fact it appears you don’t care something like this happened bothers me a lot.

Mr. Savage has not done his research because he says (bold my emphasis):

“Some accused him of perjury; others floated theories that the operation was intended to go bad so as to build a case for stronger gun-control laws and called the Holder Justice Department an accessory to murder.”

Um, Mr. Savage, on December 7th Ms. Attkisson released a story about documents showing the ATF was using this operation to get stronger gun control laws. But I’m not shocked he doesn’t know about this. After all it seems the only time a mainstream media outlet writes on anything about Fast and Furious is when the AP writes about it. The AP has not written about these documents. By the way, Ms. Attkisson provides these emails in her article so Mr. Holder cannot say she conflated anything or left anything out.

Mr. Holder also thinks our “attacks” are payback because of Mr. Gonzales and John Ashcroft, George Bush’s other attorney general. No Mr. Holder. We’re holding you and the DOJ accountable for your actions the same way we did for Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Ashcroft. It doesn’t matter what your skin color is or your political leanings. When you do something wrong you should be held accountable. It’s that simple.

Again, it’s awful Mr. Savage just says a Border Patrol agent. Mr. Savage, that agent had a name. His name was Brian Terry. He was a son, brother, nephew, uncle, and godfather. He was a Marine veteran. More importantly he was an American citizen murdered with a gun from this operation on American soil.

Don't forget Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.