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Ben Howe

I don’t read the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune.  For that matter, I don’t read the closest newspaper to my home, the Charlotte Observer.  I don’t read these rags for a simple reason: I find that the objectivity that is claimed within their pages is a sham.  There are plenty of polls and countless bits of anecdotal evidence and investigations that have shown a liberal bias that overwhelmingly represents the modern newspaper.

Within the ever shrinking world of the newspapers I ignore is the paper of record for Denton, Texas: The Denton Record-Chronicle.  Within the pages of this old world media artifact is a journalist named Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe.  Peggy is the designated reporter on the Shale Gas industry which is a very important issue in the state of Texas.  She also happens to be suing that industry for building a gas processing plant near her home.

Now, Peggy may be the nicest lady in the world.  She could be the most honest, straight-up, caring and unbiased person that’s ever walked the face of the Earth.  I can’t say for certain since I’ve never met her.  But there’s a phrase that comes to mind when someone is in a position that conflicts with another position: appearance of impropriety.  It’s something that Rick Perry took heat for when he pushed through Gardasil while also being friends with and former boss of the lobbyist that worked for the company that made Gardasil.  It’s something for which Jeffrey Immelt was scrutinized as he pushed for government subsidized “green” jobs (while serving as an adviser in an official capacity for President Obama yet simultaneously expanded the company he leads to expand their green technology manufacturing).

Peggy has the same type of issue.  For her, it starts with a situation we can all empathize with: she’s concerned about a corporation putting a factory uncomfortably close to her home.  This type of situation can cause all kinds of headaches, from resell values to health concerns.  As such, she has joined in a lawsuit targeting several natural gas producers in the area.  If I were in her position, and I truly believed there were an issue and felt that I had the power to stop it using the megaphone which has been so graciously provided to me by RedState.com and BigJournalism.com, I would absolutely do so.

But there is a big difference between my megaphone and Peggy’s megaphone: Mine is an openly partisan and opinionated format where I express my opinions based on the facts as I perceive them.  Her’s is as a member of the dying breed of ‘objective journalists.’  She’s there to report the facts, not express opinions.  In fact, Peggy is the lead natural gas reporter for the Denton Record-Chronicle.

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Mary Chastain

On October 31, government officials broke up a drug ring in Arizona. The New York Times had a great article on it, and even though it wasn’t on the front page, it was in a good spot in the US section of their website. But that’s where my compliments stop, because the AP reported a major development the following day: two guns in that raid are connected to Operation Fast & Furious.

Put aside your personal feelings about The New York Times and remember they are The New York Times. They’re supposed to be the “best” source of printed news for us. Usually, when you want information on an important subject you head to the Times. Not this time. The AP posted the update at 7:10PM EDT. ABC News posted the report that very same night. Actually if you Google the title, “AZ Sheriff Says 2 Guns Tied To Fast & Furious” there are a lot of hits! (more…)

Bytor

What happens when you look at the facts involved with Issue 2 instead of basing your decision on the emotional hysteria coming from unions bent solely on preserving their power? You find out that the need for reform is real, and that Ohio NEEDS Issue 2.

That what the newspapers from Ohio’s three largest cities found out when the looked past the rhetoric, and focused on the facts. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Columbus Dispatch, and the Cincinnati Enquirer all agree. Ohioans should vote YES on Issue 2. And what they say pretty much mirrors what we have been telling you.

Some key quotes from The Plain Dealer:

Ohio law must not impede reform, and it won’t if it creates a level playing field for public-sector workers and their employers.

Right now, that field is tipped in favor of the unions. Recognizing that reality does not mean we oppose public-employee unions or that we do not appreciate what their members do and the sacrifices some already have made…

In schools, the emphasis has to be on the progress of children, not the comfort of adults. In city halls and county offices, the impact on those who pay the bills — and the sheer magnitude of those bills — must be paramount.

Rules that made sense in 1983 do not make sense anymore. Ohio needs a fresh start…

When they mark their ballots, Ohioans cannot worry about what is best for any political party or interest group — on either side of this debate. They need to consider what’s best for the future of their children, their communities, their state.

They need to pass Issue 2.

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Warner Todd Huston

When does a columnist write something so utterly absurd that his credibility is forever damaged? I am not sure how to answer that in general terms, but I think at least one journalist answered the question for his own, now-thoroughly destroyed veracity. Jonathan Alter of Bloomberg has written one of the most ridiculous, least reality-based assessments yet of Barack Obama’s short White House tenure.

Alter

Alter put on his strongest rose-colored glasses and penned an uproarious piece headlined: “The Obama Miracle, a White House Free of Scandal.”

In his Bloomberg piece Alter claimed that Obama is “honest” and falsely asserted that his White House has been “free of scandal.” In fact, some of the incidents that Alter himself notes, and immediately dismisses, carry at least a whiff of scandal — if not untruthfulness.

Naturally, Alter ignores far more than he reports on Obama scandals but he also misses the biggest reason why Obama seems to him to have a scandal free presidency. The Media refuses to call anything Obama does a scandal!

After all, if you have a guy that wantonly lies, that double deals, that hides facts, that also allows subordinates to lie and that fellow is allowed to just get away with it without repercussion from journalists, I guess that makes for a “scandal free” guy, eh?

Alter’s first attempt to give succor to Obama’s failing presidency comes with a baseless swipe at “the whole” Republican Party.

The sight of Texas Governor Rick Perry tumbling out of the clown car recently as a “birther” (or at least a birther- enabler) is a sign of weakness, not just for the Perry campaign but for the whole Republican effort to tarnish the president’s character.

This is a false premise. It assumes that “the whole” Republican Party is using birtherism to “tarnish the president’s character.” This is a flat out untruth. Only a small portion of the center right polity in America has any interest in Obama’s birth certificate. Alter’s attempt to make the whole of the GOP into birthers is simply baseless.

Next, Alter dismisses the Solyndra scandal as meaningless. I guess if you don’t think its a touch scandalous when you have millions upon millions of tax dollars going into the pockets of buddies who turn around and go bankrupt almost immediately, well, what can you say to that?

Alter also dismisses both Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s tax evasion and Obama’s firing of Ag. Dept. official Shirley Sherrod without knowing what she really did. Then Alter makes the silly claim that Obama’s stimulus spending was free of any waste or abuse — the latter claim is laughable on its face. Have you ever heard of a government spending program that had no waste at all?

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Joel B. Pollak

Earlier this morning, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas released a new video that sheds light on the way the New York Times promotes its favored candidates and causes, from Barack Obama to Occupy Wall Street.


The video is an undercover recording of a recent seminar at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, taught jointly by professors Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky. Both have done work for the Times in the past–Rosen as a writer, and Shirky apparently as a consultant.

Rosen and Shirky openly admit that the Times is a “liberal” newspaper. In fact, they also argue that it should be more open about its bias, in order to regain the trust of its readers.

And Rosen and Shirky discuss the “dilemma” the Times faces as it shapes current events through its coverage without admitting to its readers, or even to itself, that it is doing so.

Shirky describes, for example, the way that the Times tried to legitimize Obama’s early candidacy for president–without appearing to do so, lest it be accused of bias: (more…)

Warner Todd Huston

Like the rest of the large cities in the US, Chicago is currently suffering from small pockets of Occupy protesters and their ever-present signs. Like with every other big city these signs are often misspelled, sometimes profane, commonly anti-capitalist, occasionally anti-Semitic, almost always anti-American, not to mention merely ignorant of the facts. But one thing that is the same in every protest, at least in the media reportage of same, is that the worst of the signs go unseen by the general American news consumer.

Chicago blogger John Ruberry took his trusty camera downtown to the Windy City and captured some pretty representative signs the like of which were similar signs seen at Tea Party events would have made the nightly news programs for their outrageous messages.

For instance, there’s this polite placard:

Now imagine if a tea party sign said something like, “Dear Gay Blacks, F**k Off.” The media would have lost its tiny hive mind over such a blatantly ignorant sign. It’s been two+ years of tea party protests and there have existed few (if any) signs as blatant as the dozens seen at many of these Occupy-Whatever events.

Then there are the militant Communists and socialists:

It simply amazes me that the Old Media so consistently shields Americans from the fact that communists and socialists make up a large part of these protests. That true commies are involved to the hilt in these things is not just the fevered imagination and demagogy of conservatives trying somehow to scare people but it does show the anti-American nature of these protests. I say these “protests” and not just the Occupy events because militant commies and socialists form the base constituency for all these sort of lefty protests.

Would the average American support these protests if they fully understood that true communists, hateful of our system of government formed the core groups that attend these events? Likely not, and that’s just as likely why the Old Media never tells America that the commies are there. It’s why Lech Walesa refused to support OWS.

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Joel B. Pollak

George Soros, billionaire investor and grand patron of the American institutional left, has just failed in his attempt to have his 2002 conviction for insider trading in France overturned. He plans to appeal.

The Soros result has gone virtually unnoticed in the U.S. media, which has paid more attention to a rather lame attempt by Bloomberg Markets magazine to develop the Koch brothers conspiracy theory into a tale of global corruption.

How bad was that article? The Atlantic summed it up nicely:

The article purports to be a hard-hitting exposé on the giant multinational, run by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. According to Bloomberg, 14 reporters around the globe worked for six months on the story. What did they turn up? Really, shockingly little. And what’s worse: from the very outset, the reporters’ bias against the Koch brothers is utterly clear.

Meanwhile, Media Matters for America–the Soros-funded, self-appointed would-be censor of conservative opinion–continues hankering after the Koch brothers.

And just in time to catch the Astroturf fever of #OccupyWallStreet, Democrats are rumored to be heading to this weekend’s Sunday news shows armed with talking points about the Koch brothers’ alleged past dealings in Iran through a foreign subsidiary.

Yet Rahm Emanuel, who will appear on NBC’s Meet the Press, and Nancy Pelosi, who will appear on ABC’s This Week, received campaign contributions from companies alleged to have operated in Iran through subsidiaries–including Honeywell, for example, which has contributed to both. (more…)

Warner Todd Huston

During the latest campaign appearance disguised as a presidential press conference, President Obama uttered one straight out lie that stands out above the rest of them. To help sell his “jobs bill,” Obama claimed to have met a Boston-based teacher named Robert Baroz and intimated that Baroz had no job despite his excellent teaching credentials. The problem is, neither claim is true. Obama simply lied. So, where is the national Old Media to pin Obama to the wall over this out right lie?

During his presser, Obama introduced teacher Baroz into the national discussion of his “jobs bill.” Obama claimed to have met Mr. Baroz and lamented that Baroz was out of work.

I had a chance to meet a young man named Robert Baroz. He’s got two decades of teaching experience. He’s got a master’s degree. He’s got an outstanding track record of helping his students make huge gains in reading and writing. In the last few years, he’s received three pink slips because of budget cuts. Why wouldn’t we want to pass a bill that puts somebody like Robert back in the classroom teaching our kids?

The problem with this little tale of woe? Firstly President Obama did not meet teacher Baroz. Robert Baroz did attend a Rose Garden press conference last September with a few other teachers, but the closest he ever got to the president was Baroz’ front row seat during the event. The two never came face to face, never shook hands, never actually met. Baroz saw Obama up at the lectern and Obama may have noticed Baroz sitting in the audience. That hardly makes for a meeting.

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Der Kommissar

Comrades! The Koch Brothers conspiracy theory ought to be simple enough.

“They pay their conservative political puppets to hand over lucrative public energy contracts, and to erase regulations, so that they can become even richer.”

Simple, comrades! Not quite simple enough for the Tea Party rabble to understand, but simple enough for journalists of normal intelligence to reproduce as needed. That’s why it was invented to begin with.

Stay On Message, Comrades!

Yet some of us, comrades, are in need of urgent re-education.

Bloomberg Markets’s Asjylyn Loder and David Evans have just published a profile of the Koch Brothers that ruins the careful propaganda efforts of the past two-and-a-half years.

They try to cast the Koch Brothers as the masters of a nefarious global conspiracy, alleging crimes committed around the world–and in the process, make the Kochs out to be law-abiding corporate citizens!

Consider, for example, their star witness, one Ludmile Egorova-Farines, who they say is a whistleblower unjustly dismissed by the Kochs for uncovering foreign corruption. Not only did the French courts dismiss her lawsuit for wrongful termination, and order her to pay her own legal costs, but they affirmed that she had shown “serious deficiencies,” an “irrational attitude,” and a “lack of transparency.” A colossal blunder! (more…)

Accuracy in Media

From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid:

Charles Lane must be one of the loneliest people in the newsroom of The Washington Post. A member of the editorial page staff of the Post and occasional guest on the Fox News Channel, he dared to put his name on a column in the paper that carried the headline, “Troy Davis was guilty,” a reference to the convicted cop killer executed by the state of Georgia but who was declared innocent by the “progressive” community.

Davis, who had been convicted of the murder back in 1991, acknowledged he was at the scene of the crime but claimed that he didn’t pull the trigger.

But wait. Didn’t we read in the Post that “all but two eyewitnesses recanted” their testimony against him? That’s what Post reporter Sandhya Somashekhar put in her September 22nd story about how the case was expected to shape a debate over the use of capital punishment.

We should hope that the case helps shape a debate about the need for our media to reports facts and not the lies and myths of those trying to abolish the death penalty. Charles Lane has begun that debate.

Amnesty International used a variation of the claim, insisting that “all but two of the state’s non-police witnesses from the trial have recanted or contradicted their testimony.” So the Post distorted the matter even beyond what Davis’s apologists were saying.

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Warner Todd Huston

It is a lie that serves as the left’s basic narrative for the birth of the tea party movement and this weekend it was The New York Times’s turn to push that lie claiming that the tea party is “led by veteran conservative activists and bankrolled by billionaires.” This bull hockey (yes, I said bull hockey) can’t be debunked enough, because to undermine the legitimacy of the tea party movement, extremists and left-wingers pretend to be journalists push this lie for all its worth.

Left-wing Georgetown Professor Michael Kazin, who masquerades as a history professor by day, penned this latest piece for the Times pushing the left’s favorite false narrative about the tea party movement. The piece lamented the loss of the spirit of activism and protest in the American left and revealed a taxpayer-funded professor longing for the violent anarchist protests of the early 20th century.

Kazin cries that the left has lost its umpf and wails that “the tea party rebellion” has instead come to the fore:

“Instead, the Tea Party rebellion — led by veteran conservative activists and bankrolled by billionaires — has compelled politicians from both parties to slash federal spending and defeat proposals to tax the rich and hold financiers accountable for their misdeeds.”

Of course, his blithe claim that “the tea party” is run and funded by the rich and powerful in conservative circles is simply untrue. It is a claim repeated over and over again by the left and its handmaidens in the Old Media.

The truth is that “the tea party” is no single entity funded by billionaires and run by long-time conservative activists. This is a lie that reflects what some call “projection” because it is the left that operates this way. Left-wingism in America is a top down, big money game and always has been. There are no true grassroots efforts on the left. The tea partiers, however, are not like that and never have been.

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P.J. Salvatore

Attorneys representing former Alaska governor Sarah Palin have written to Crown Publishing, a division of Random House, serving notice of possible litigation for defamation in connection with Joe McGinniss’s recent anti-Palin biography, and warning the company not to delete or destroy relevant documents.

The letter reads, in part:

Enclosed is an e-mail by your author Joe McGinniss. In this e-mail, Mr. McGinniss admits that your own lawyers instructed him that “nothing I can cite other than my own reporting rises above the level of tawdry gossip.”….Indeed, Mr. McGinniss admits that the allegations are false unless he can find someone or something to show they are true. We know from the final book that he was unable to do so.

It is malicious for your company to publish a book wherein it, and the author, admit that they were fully aware the statements in the book were false, intended to be false, and were intended to harm…

Accordingly, since both your company, and the author, clearly knew the statements were false, admitted they had no basis in fact or reality, but decided to publish in order to harm Governor Palin’s family, you and Mr. McGinniss have defamed the Palins. This letter shall serve as written notice under AS.09.30.070 (b) that a claim may be brought against you, your company and Mr. McGinniss for knowingly publishing false statements.

In the interim, please take note of the following:  It is unlawful to delete emails or destroy records upon being notified of the need of business records for litigation purposes. In addition, courts may impose civil sanctions against a defendant that destroys emails and other documentation.  Please immediately provide notice to your employees to save and back up all records pertaining to the Palins and the book “The Rogue.”…

Andrew Breitbart

In an email dated January 27, 2011, Joe McGinniss, author of The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, says that Random House lawyers have told him he has provided nothing more than “tawdry gossip” to substantiate “any of the salacious stories about the Palin family.”

He adds that “No one has ever provided factual evidence” (original emphasis) of the following accusations:

a)  Todd had sex with a hooker, or with anyone else outside his marriage.

b)  Sarah had an affair with Brad Hanson, or anyone else.

c)  Track was a druggie who enlisted in the army to avoid a jail term.  Or that he vandalized Wasilla school buses.

d)  Willow was involved in the vandalism of the empty house in Meadow Lakes.  Or that Sarah rushed back from Hawaii to put the lid on that.

e)  Trig is not Sarah’s natural born child.

f)   Bristol was promiscuous as a high schooler and drank and used drugs, or became pregnant again after Tripp’s birth.

Yet almost all of these accusations appear in McGinniss’s book, without any substantial proof beyond gossip, and without any apparent new information to address the lack of “factual evidence” in January 2011.

Furthermore, McGinniss continues to promote his claims, as he did yesterday in his remarks about Trig Palin in an appearance on The View to promote his book:

Below, I present each of these accusations in turn, and how McGinniss used most of them in The Rogue, even though he admitted in his email that he could not prove them: (more…)

Joel B. Pollak

The most memorable article in the New Yorker issue devoted to 9/11, “Ten Years Later,” is Paul Goldberger’s review of the new World Trade Center.

Goldberg dislikes the new buildings going up around Ground Zero, particularly the Freedom Tower, which he calls “not much more than a big version of a typical New York developer’s skyscraper.” But he likes the 9/11 memorial itself, designed by Michael Arad where the twin towers stood. “Arad figured out how to express the idea that what were once the largest solids in Manhattan are now a void, and he made the shape of this void into something monumental,” Goldberger writes.

It’s a sincere and eloquent review. And yet the fact that Goldberger prefers the memorial to the new commercial and residential structures around it neatly summarizes the posture the New Yorker itself has adopted toward 9/11.

The magazine is not only mournful about the past, but morose about the present and gloomy about the future. The dark cover is more optimistic than the appropriately stark “black on black” cover after 9/11–but only just, depicting the Twin Towers descending into the waters around Manhattan. The featured articles by Adam Gopnik (“Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat: Is America Going Down?”) and George Packer (“Coming Apart: After 9/11 transfixed America, the country’s problems were left to rot”) leave little room for new hope.

The “Talk of the Town” section is extended to make room for the reflections of a dozen authors–many of whom are still hung up on “Bush, Cheney, Halliburton, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, bin Laden” (Colum McCann), or blame America for the attacks. Author Lorrie Moore even attacks J.K. Rowling for creating a “gruesomely cheering” generation of “‘Harry Potter’ readers” that celebrated the killing of Osama bin Laden this past May.

The fear and loathing that drip from the pages of the New Yorker are a striking reversal of the “hope and change” with which the New York literary elite greeted the election of President Barack Obama. They are also a dramatic contrast to the reality of life in New York today, which seems almost as lively today as it did before 9/11–perhaps not quite as self-confident, but every bit as spontaneous, bizarre, steamy, stinky, and beautiful.

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Warner Todd Huston

USA Today published a story recently by Bob Smietana of the Nashville newspaper The Tennessean attacking the integrity and work of well-known Christian First Amendment defense attorney Jay Sekulow – that is shocking for what is left out.

Sekulow is the head man of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a Washington D.C.-based organization that takes on attackers of Christian’s First Amendment rights to free exercise of religion, a tempting target in some corners of America’s political establishment.

In fact, writer Smietana didn’t just write one piece attacking Sekulow and the ACLJ but in the space of only a few days wrote two. In one piece Smietana accuses Sekulow and his family of making too much money from the charities they represent and in the second he claims that the ACLJ might be improperly pursuing cases not in its tax exempt charter.

In both cases Smietana employs the “some say” style of indictment by writing innuendoes backed up by little actual evidence, but the piece in USA Today is by far the worst example of the tactic. (more…)

Warner Todd Huston

In a recent article on the dissatisfaction of Big Labor once again see the Associated Press weaving bias and left-wing “definitions into what is otherwise an everyday news story.

Even while presenting straight “news” the AP can’t resist swinging all terms and discussions to the liberal side of the fence, a tactic that it employs to push every story to the left.

In an article headlined, “Labor Unions Adjust to New Reality Under Obama,” AP writer Sam Hannanel reports the dissatisfaction that Big Labor leaders are increasingly expressing about their Obammessiah. Even though he’s been the most union-friendly president in American history their grumbling is rising as they see Obama “failing” them.

The complaint is that Obama hasn’t done enough for unions — an astounding claim for what he has done for them in comparison to what past presidents have done.

One can almost understand Big Labor’s lament, truthfully. After all, Obama ran as a red-fisted, union-pushing, socialist extremist when he campaigned with unionistas throughout the 2008 campaign. They certainly expected Obama to act Chavez-like assuming the sort of dictatorial powers that one would need to push the union’s agenda.

While he has done more than any other president to implement Big Labor’s agenda he hasn’t been able to defeat the voter’s concerns that that agenda is detrimental to any hope of economic recovery and certain political realities have prevented el Presidente Obama’s grand reordering of things in the union’s favor.

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Joel B. Pollak

Rolling Stone, whose political editor Matt Taibbi used to co-edit the eXile with Mark Ames, is pushing Ames’s discredited Koch brothers conspiracy theory in a new article about voter ID laws.

The article, by Ari Berman, trumpets a supposed Koch plot in the sub-headline, but fails to deliver the goods, mentioning the Kochs only once in the entire article:

The GOP War on Voting
In a campaign supported by the Koch brothers, Republicans are working to prevent millions of Democrats from voting next year

In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.

“Funded in part.” Greenpeace — not a Koch-friendly source — claims the Koch brothers gave just over $600,000 to the American Legislative Exchange Council from 1997 to 2009. That’s not pocket change, but at less than $50,000 per year, roughly $1,000 per state, it’s hardly enough to account for voter ID efforts in 38 states.

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Warner Todd Huston

The Hill has an interesting, if not a bit slanted, report about the faux grassroots efforts of unions and left-wing advocates to pretend they are somehow just like the tea party by attacking the town hall meetings of various GOP congressman across the country this Summer.

The Hill dutifully reports without complaint the union’s claims that they are organizing just like the tea partiers and forcing GOP congressmen to face “angry protests at home” this month in a “replication” of the tea party backlash that “bit” Democrats in 2009.

“Liberal groups have been planning these protests for months,” trumpets The Hill, “One organizer told The Hill in February that the campaign would ‘build to a crescendo’ in August.”

These protests have been organized by Obama’s supporters in government unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the AFL-CIO as well as far left NGOs such as MoveOn.org, Campaign for America’s Future and others.

The report goes on to note that several congressmen have faced unruly audiences this August.

At least ten other House Republicans have been the targets of protests or angry questions at public events in the last two weeks. Many of the protests are the outcome of a months-long effort by labor unions and liberal advocacy groups to turn up public pressure on GOP lawmakers.

These groups have taken a page from the Tea-Party playbook and are trying to replicate the August of outrage that nearly sunk President Obama’s healthcare reform initiative in 2009.

“This is very similar to what the Tea Party did,” said Roger Hickey, co-director of Campaign for America’s Future, which has worked with labor unions and liberal groups to help organize a public backlash to the House GOP agenda.

Only these orchestrated attacks are nothing like what happened in 2009 as the tea party movement first started gaining steam.

The tea party events were not organized by unions, they did not have millions of dollars behind them, they had no national organizations, no formal groups to which to belong or by which to organize. The protests that Democrats faced in 2009 were real citizens gathering on their own hook not organized from the top like these faux protests are being raised today.

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Accuracy in Media

From Accuracy in Media’s Michael Watson:

In a news analysis article, Reuters looked at Republican efforts to stymie the activism of the Environmental Protection Agency, which has increased its regulatory efforts under President Obama. Reuters, in keeping with the post-Giffords “new civility,” characterizes the Republican efforts as an “assault of similar vigor” to that which accompanied the debt ceiling increase.

Reuters’ second paragraph asserts that Republican opposition is “backed by wealthy conservative lobbyists.” The report asserts that the EPA is the “last bastion of hope for [President Obama’s] environmental policy” after his “push for a climate bill in Congress collapsed last year.”

It collapsed in a Democrat-controlled Congress for good political reason, too. Popular opposition to cap-and-trade in the U.S. led to the loss of two long-held Democratic House seats in 2010 as well: Morgan Griffith (R-VA) defeated the former chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, Rick Boucher, who co-authored the cap-and-trade proposal in a Virginia coal-country seat that Boucher had held since 1983. In Minnesota’s Iron Belt, retired Northwest Airlines pilot Chip Cravaack defeated Jim Oberstar, the chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, who had served since 1975 and supported President Obama’s cap-and-trade plan as well as an extension of the Clean Water Act opposed by his constituents. Elsewhere, in Australia, a similar effort by the Australian Labor Party to institute a tax on carbon dioxide has seen that party fall to devastating lows in opinion polls.

Reuters notes that Richard Nixon’s administration established the EPA, calling it “ironic” that Republicans now oppose its expanded authority. Of course, Nixon was no Goldwater-Reagan conservative. He once said that “I am now a Keynesian in economics” and instituted wage and price controls.

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Warner Todd Huston

To echo Dana’s post about how the Media is going apoplectic over perry’s remarks, as if we needed another example of the utter hypocrisy of the Old Media, we get New York Times screed-maker Binyamin Appelbaum who used his Twitter feed to smear Gov. Rick Perry over his Bernanke comments while giving V.P. Joe “Tea Partiers are Terrorists” Biden a complete pass.

Once again, Twitter catches the unhinged left revealing itself as the hypocrites they are. On Aug. 16, Appelbaum was all a twitter on Twitter over Rick Perry’s slap at Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

If you missed the story that caused Appelbaum’s heart to skip a beat, on Aug. 15 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa Texas Governor Rick Perry said that in Texas Chairman Bernanke wouldn’t be given the wide latitude to muck up the economy as Obama has allowed him to do in Washington D.C.

If this guy [Bernanke] prints more money between now and the election … I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we — we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treacherous — or treasonous in my opinion.

“News” inventor Appelbaum wasn’t having any of Perry’s talk, apparently.

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