Right off the bat C-SPAN should have aired this hearing. There is absolutely no excuse not to air it on TV. Since I had to stream it online I kept my TV on DirecTV News Mix to keep an eye on the news. The only network that had consistent coverage of the testimony was FOX News. I’m not shocked at all. I didn’t see anything about the testimony on the other channels. Jeff Poor from The Daily Caller helped me keep an eye on MSNBC and he didn’t see anything. He said they were hung up on Donald Trump all day. I was informed by a friend on Twitter, Doug Mataconis, that the hearing was discussed on The Situation Room on CNN for about 15 minutes. “Special Report” and The FOX Report both started off with Mr. Holder’s testimony.

Before I continue I noticed some friends on Twitter growing upset that headlines were partisan. The MSM was right: This was a partisan fight and every single Democrat coddled Mr. Holder. The Republicans were the only ones to demand withheld documents and answers from Mr. Holder.

Right after the testimony ended I began searching for coverage of the hearing on Google. First stop was Associated Press. Remember: If the AP doesn’t write anything on Fast & Furious more than likely the rest of the media won’t mention it. Pete Yost did write about the testimony, but hat’s where the excitement ends. Again, he distorts information to favor Mr. Holder and the Department of Justice. Mr. Yost fails to mention the subpoena was issued October 12, 2011. That’s 4 months ago. That is plenty of time to go through the hoops to release the documents. Mr. Yost says, “Though neither side said so, negotiations are almost certain to be the next step.” If you watched the testimony do you honestly think Mr. Issa or Mr. Holder will negotiate? Didn’t think so. Mr. Issa won’t accept anything less than the documents he needs. Then Mr. Yost describes a few dialogues, but doesn’t bother to get down to nitty gritty of the testimony.

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Relentlessly and unreasonably prattling on without any objectivity for one candidate and against another with all the self control of a Meth head tweaking away the night disassembling their stereo, or an old AM radio, is bound to catch up to a pundit. Today is that day for the Right’s beloved Jennifer Rubin.

Referring to this December report on the least desirable endorsements (“According to a Marist poll, 79 percent of New Hampshire voters say getting Trump’s support would make them less likely or no more likely to vote for him or her”), Jesse Benton, spokesman for Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), e-mails me, “Poor Newt. Based on the polling I’ve seen, he stands to lose 5 points from this circus act.” As for Trump, Benton cracks, “I didn’t think it was possible for Trump to lower his credibility, but somehow, he just did.”

Perhaps it was the Donald’s appreciation for Mitt Romney’s unproductive style of governance in Massachusetts that caused him to settle on Mitt, or maybe he simply longs to sing a duet of America the Beautiful with him – we may never know. But rest assured, give it a day, or two and the light, life and inspiration of conservativism, our dear Jenn Rubin of the Washington Post will somehow manage to convince herself that joining them for a little three part harmony would just be the bomb. Let’s wait and see.

… all of these pro-Newt characters share a penchant for extreme, nasty rhetoric with a disdain for productive governance. This is all about THEM and their PR machines.

Really, what’s next for Newt — a Duke Cunningham endorsement from a jail cell?

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On Monday Representative Darrell Issa threatened Attorney General Eric Holder with a contempt of Congress if he does not fulfill Mr. Issa’s subpoena from October 12, 2011. Hardly anyone reported it. But then when I went to Google “Issa Eric Holder” this evening and a bunch of results came up. Unfortunately it was not about Mr. Issa’s statements. Instead it’s all about Mr. Holder and the Department of Justice’s remarks.

I’ve mentioned before it’s unusual for the Old Media to run any Fast and Furious news if the AP didn’t run something first. Same thing with this story. AP didn’t bother to post a story about Mr. Issa, but as soon as Mr. Holder says something they’re all over it. It’s quite pathetic and reminds me of Pavlov’s dog. This is the explanation of Mr. Issa’s letter:

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., made the accusation in a letter threatening to seek a contempt of Congress ruling against Attorney General Eric Holder for failing to turn over congressionally subpoenaed documents that were created after problems with Fast and Furious came to light. Holder was to testify Thursday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which Issa chairs.

That’s it. No mention that this is a response to his subpoena on October 12, 2011. No mention of the emails sent Friday night. But the media goes crazy and reprints this article.

Not every outlet used the AP story though. The Washington Post again had an original piece written by Sari Horwitz! Weird, isn’t it, that she writes original posts when the DOJ and Democrats are on the defense. Surprise surprise! The story is on the front page of the website.

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Senator Marco Rubio is a bona fide political star able to communicate his ideas and vision with an eloquence few can match. He’s also Hispanic and a Republican, which freaks the left out — and by “left,” I of course mean the mainstream media.

The media’s biggest fear is Obama losing his upcoming reelection, and Rubio is the kind of VP candidate that keeps the corrupt MSM up at night. Not only could he help swing the all-important Hispanic vote into GOP territory; he also hails from the all-important swing state of Florida.

The nightmare scenario for Obama’s MSM Palace Guards is this attractive, articulate young man taking it to Obama on the campaign trail while wrapped in the mantle of history as the very first Hispanic nominated as vice president.

Unfortunately, the MSM is corrupt but not dumb, which is why over the last few months we’ve seen two major pushes from two major news outlets to discredit, toxify, and marginalize Rubio. Oh, and both of those stories were riddled with factual errors that we’re assured were nothing more than honest mistakes.

The first hit came from The Washington Post back in October. Their information was so blatantly wrong that early one Saturday morning I caught them red-handed quietly scrubbing away their mistakes from the hit piece. This is what I wrote at the time:

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On Monday, both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post each published opinion articles attacking President Barack Obama’s foreign policy.

Obama and Venezuela;s Hugo Chavez. (Photo source: Huffington Post)

The LAT article, by former Dick Cheney adviser John Hannah, was entitled: “The U.S.: MIA in the Mideast.” It makes the case that despite Obama’s success in the war against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, overall his foreign policy of “retreat” has destabilized the region:

In private conversations I’ve had with Middle Eastern officials, the sense of unease and dread expressed are only more severe. Fairly or not, these leaders appear to have taken Obama’s measure and found him wanting. Their bill of indictment includes retreat from Iraq and, soon, Afghanistan; betrayal of longtime U.S. allies, especially Mubarak; indulgence of enemy regimes in Tehran and Damascus; overblown promises to end the Palestinian conflict; and a persistent failure to mount the type of credible military option that these leaders believe is necessary for addressing the region’s most urgent threat — Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons.

The hardening conviction that the U.S. is disengaging from the Middle East should be cause for real concern.

Hannah also attacks “the administration’s lack of strategic vision, its instinct for retreat and its complicity in the unraveling of a benevolent imperium that has for decades underwritten the region’s security.” He notes that a perception of U.S. weakness is “one that left unchecked will breed uncertainty, instability and even war.”

The Washington Post article, by columnist Jackson Diehl, declares: “Obama’s foreign initiatives have failed.” Like Hannah, Diehl questions the conventional political wisdom, which sees foreign policy as a strong card for Obama to play in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death. (more…)

The Internet doesn’t kill newspapers. Publishers do.

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. (more…)

From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid:

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.”

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Courtesy of the Washington Post.

Writer Amy Gardner makes no attempt to explain her headline. We’re left to assume that she’s equating Callista Gingrich and Camilla Parker Bowles because they both were at one time the “other woman.” That’s pretty much where the similarities end, unless Gardner thinks that Gingrich is the heir apparent to the White House, the Gingriches the royal family, and that the White House is the same as the English monarchy. The Kennedys seem closer to such a comparison.

The Washington Post is eager to tell you all about Gingrich’s past troubled personal life, but won’t touch the story of Vera Baker, or the 20 years the Democrat opponent spent sitting in a church where antisemitic and racist remarks were considered “Gospel.”

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Larry O’Connor’s well-caught “sound bite for the day” yesterday deserves further elaboration.

Yesterday, on MSNBC, left-wing journalists Chris Hayes of The Nation and Ezra Klein of the Washington Post–no strangers to Democrat-media collusion–revealed that they had been part of an off-the-record White House briefing in which it was made clear that President Barack Obama planned all along to let the temporary payroll tax holiday expire, and then blame Republicans.

The meeting may have been the one first revealed on December 19, 2011 by ABC News’s senior White House correspondent, Jake Tapper, who tweeted that day that “a group of progressive media stars” had attended a private meeting at the White House with the President.

However, if Hayes is to be believed, the message of that meeting may have extended far beyond the “progressive” media niche at MSNBC, and reached a broader audience in Washington.

According to Hayes, “everyone in Washington” knew that Obama wanted the payroll tax extension to fail–and yet the same journalists eagerly covered the subsequent payroll tax debate as if Republicans were the only obstacle to an extension. The result of the media’s collusion was a year-end political victory for Obama and the Democrats at the expense of House leaders, the Tea Party, and Republicans in general.

Here is the exchange between Hayes and Klein (0:44 to 1:04), with MSNBC contributor Melissa Harris-Perry chiming in encouragingly (transcript follows):

Can a Christian be a libertarian? A column with some questionable logic that prevents the piece from being truly thought-provoking. A few things:

Libertarians talk a lot about economics, and rightfully so. Money is central to a healthy economy. Christians are also concerned about money; in fact God talks frequently about money in the Bible.

Actually, money is mentioned more in the Bible than anything else. I’ve written previously of this here. Scriptures tell us that money is a tool with which evil can control man. The Bible obviously doesn’t give political doctrine specific to the Fed, but rather as Christians we are taught to use our access to money as a way of evangelism through deed. This is something libertarianism leaves out, the God part. Are libertarians conservatives without God? That’s a question friends and I have discussed.

It is truly unfortunate that modern American churches seem to think the state’s means of “spreading democracy” through aggressive war is more important than spreading the peaceful message of the Gospel of Christ. Jesus came to bring “peace on earth, good will to men,” and by extension the Christian’s goal ought to be the same.

This passage presupposes that every conflict in which the United States has ever engaged is due to the United States’s frat boy aggression and need to sow its seed of democracy by force. Furthermore, it’s odd to me that a follower of limited government would advocate for a state-endorsed religion as a way of nation building, supplanting the previous logical fallacy. This author quotes Paul more than the Bible, which tells me everything I need to know about this piece. Ron Paul is not God. What is truly unfortunate is that by making the universal straw man that “modern American churches seem to think,” i.e. all churches, the author betrays a (conscious or subconscious) prejudice against churches based on his own presupposition.

Horn misses a huge part of Christ’s work, exemplified in Matthew 10:34:

Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.

I get that Horn wants to promote his stylized version of Biblical interpretation, but he should realize that Ron Paul’s words carry no weight compared to Christ’s, and he perhaps should study the Word of God more than Paul’s words, especially those newsletters.

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On Wednesday morning the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake posted an infographic that was a perfect example of how one can use a graphic chart to influence the public in subtle ways, ways that we of the center right better start employing in our own efforts if we want to win over the public.

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.

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The Washington Post, in an apparent effort to embellish President Barack Obama’s national security credentials, has given him credit for accelerating the military’s highly successful drone program in an article entitled, “Under Obama, an emerging global apparatus for drone killing.”

President-elect Obama greets eager Washington Post fans (Jan. 2009)

That headline is impressive to all but the most die-hard anti-war activists (mostly quiescent under a Democratic president). The conclusion the Post evidently wishes readers to draw is that Obama has been a tough, courageous, and uniquely successful commander-in-chief.

The article begins:

The Obama administration’s counterterrorism accomplishments are most apparent in what it has been able to dismantle, including CIA prisons and entire tiers of al-Qaeda’s leadership. But what the administration has assembled, hidden from public view, may be equally consequential.

In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force­ ­cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents…

With a year to go in President Obama’s first term, his administration can point to undeniable results: Osama bin Laden is dead, the core al-Qaeda network is near defeat, and members of its regional affiliates scan the sky for metallic glints.

But the drone program did not begin on January 20, 2009–even if mainstream media squeamishness about it ended on the day. The most important elements of the program began under Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush–a fact buried deep into the article:

Inside the White House, according to officials who would discuss the drone program only on the condition of anonymity, the drone is seen as a critical tool whose evolution was accelerating even before Obama was elected.

What is new is that Obama reversed himself and embraced the idea that terrorists could be killed abroad in what the left used to described as “extrajudicial killings,” partly because of Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder’s ideological hostility to terrorist detention. (more…)

It is inconceivable to me that on issues not involving the fairly declarative Ten Commandments, anyone would skew the Hebrew Scriptures or the New Testament into something that fits their partisan political point of view. And as far as the Ten Commandments go, there’s more than a little of the old coveting in the subtext of this latest nonsense from the utterly shameless Washington Post:

Christmas means the redistribution of wealth …

The concept of society’s structural sin that is suggested in Pauline teaching was crystallized in the theology of liberation when it appeared among Latin American theologians after the II Vatican Council. Based on a socio-economic secular analysis of history in secular academia, theologians like Father Gustavo Gutierrez spoke of structural sin. Upholding an unjust political and economic system would only perpetuate injustice, they argued. Good people could be trapped into a web of doing bad things because society fostered a way of acting that normalized immoral behavior.

Detractors have caricatured Liberation Theology as advocating violent revolution against White capitalists. In contrast, based on the Just War Theory, theology restricted violence to a response against violent attack, reasoning that self-defense is legitimate when measured by the countervailing force trying to take away human life and liberty. (The Declaration of Independence was founded on that same principle: armed revolution in defense of God-given rights is “as American as apple pie.”)

A-hem:

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that [is] thy neighbour’s.

I must’ve missed the asterisk in the tenth commandment and the small print at the bottom the of the tablet that reads:

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Something to understand about how bias works in the corrupt mainstream media is that it has less to do with what Obama’s Media Palace Guards cover than what you might think. Frequently, bias can be found in what isn‘t covered, but more often than not, bias comes from The Narrative. In order to destroy or build up something or someone, The News Narrative is used to drive and define whatever the MSM wants to drive and define. A perfect example is how the MSM all but ignored Obama potentially lying about his relationship with Bill Ayers but wouldn’t stop driving the story surrounding Herman Cain’s personal life. In fact, Cain’s private life trumped Fast and Furious, Solyndra, and anything having to do with Barack Obama’s own past — something his MSM Palace Guards wouldn’t look into in 2008 and surely won’t consider today.

Something else the corrupt MSM does is cover their collective butts. Even though media bias is now so obvious no one even bothers to pretend it doesn’t exist, for some reason entities like the Washington Post still like to pretend it’s a serious, objective, and responsible news outlet — which is why we got this dropped on us on Christmas Day:

Solyndra: Politics infused Obama energy programs

Linda Sterio remembers the excitement when President Obama arrived at Solyndra last year and described how his administration’s financial support for the plant was helping create hundreds of jobs. The company’s prospects appeared unlimited as Solyndra executives described the backlog of orders for its solar panels.

Then came the August morning when Sterio heard a newscaster announce that more than a thousand Solyndra employees were out of work. Only recently did she learn that, within the Obama administration, the company’s potential collapse had long been discussed.

“It’s not about the people; it’s politics,” said Sterio, who remains jobless and at risk of losing her home. “We all feel betrayed.”

Since the failure of the company, Obama’s entire $80 billion clean-technology program has begun to look like a political liability for an administration about to enter a bruising reelection campaign.

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WaPo:

The White House’s relationship with the reporters who cover it has blown hot and cold throughout history. And this year, some reporters say, things have taken a decidedly frosty turn.

When a reporter gets something wrong or is perceived as being too aggressive, the response is often swift and sometimes at top volume, reporters say. …

Glenn Thrush, who is a reporter for a Web site and Capitol Hill newspaper, Politico, said his encounters have been far more mild than what he experienced as a reporter covering New York City politics for Newsday.

“Coming from a New York tabloid background, having a flack speak to me in an elevated tone does not make me crawl under my desk,” he said. “It does not terrify me to have someone raise their voice occasionally. The expectation in covering the White House is that it’s always going to be about using the good china. Sometimes this is about paper plates.”

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Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has caused something of a storm with his latest statements on foreign policy.

Earlier in the week he threw the leftist MSM into a bit of a tizzy with his promise to appoint John Bolton to head up the State Department. Now, in a bit leaked from an interview with The Jewish Channel, Gingrich has once again stepped on a sacred cow by calling the Palestinians an “invented people.” This has, predictably, drawn the ire of all sorts of people, sending the press scurrying around for outraged statements from Arabs and the politicians who support them.

In the hundreds of news articles that have been written on that short blurb none that I managed to see actually spoke to any historians. Most quoted various Palestinians saying Gingrich is wrong, but without bringing any real arguments to the table. Several articles did make an effort to mention some history as well as comment that, being the Jewish Sabbath in Israel, that no Israeli politicians were available for comment; though this seems to have been a rare occurrence of actual journalism.

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WaPo’s Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite abuses both her position as a Washington Post writer and as someone charged with the heady responsibility of covering areas of religious faith.

This has to be read to be believed:

We need to start taking student loan debt seriously, both as a troubling moral issue and as a ticking economic time bomb. By some reports, student loan debt in the U.S. will exceed 1 trillion dollars this year, more than the credit card debt of all Americans.

A whole generation of young Americans is at risk in this excessive borrowing. They fall further and further behind in “servicing their debt” because they have no way to keep up with the payments as many of them are unemployed or underemployed. They will delay starting marriage and families; they dare not take the risk of quitting a paying job (if they have one!) and starting their own business to create jobs, and they certainly cannot save to buy a home. They are trapped.

Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” (Matthew 6:12) Forgiving debt is a moral issue. Forgiving some of the worst of this student debt is crucial literally to save this American generation.

[...]

Currently, I’m advocating debt forgiveness. It is the moral thing to do and it is the right civic thing to do. This is what Jesus actually meant; real debts, real debtors, forgiving and forgiven. This is what government is actually about—of the people, by the people, for the people. We still have a chance to show young people that democracy can work for the common good.

This woman is not only drunk with her own power, she’s also way, way out of line. And what a simpleton to think the answer to this complicated question is as cut and dried as she presents it.

After all, who holds that trillion dollar student loan note?

Not the evil banks or even the evil 1%. Not the moneychangers and not the Romans.

We the taxpayers own that trillion dollar note. And some of us taxpayers never enjoyed the benefit of a college education because we couldn’t afford one, and we surely can’t afford another trillion dollars added to the deficit just to benefit the college-educated elite.

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The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein is the founder of the infamous Journolist, a notorious online gathering place where 400 or so elite “journalists” got together to plot out their anti-Republican narratives in order to help Obama win the presidency. The fact that the Washington Post didn’t fire Klein immediately upon the discovery of this tells you how far that once storied institution has fallen. It’s also important to remember that Klein is presented by Wapo, not as the partisan leftist he is, but as…

“…the editor of Wonkblog and a columnist at the Washington Post, as well as a contributor to MSNBC and Bloomberg. His work focuses on domestic and economic policymaking, as well as the political system that’s constantly screwing it up.”

Well, last week Klein was apparently caught crossing another line:

From JournoList to activist, it appears that WaPo‘s liberal blogger Ezra Klein is once again blurring the lines between being a journalist and trying to sway politics. In what appears to be at a minimum a breach of journalism ethics, Klein spoke to a group of Senate Democratic Chiefs of Staff last Friday about the Supercommittee, just days before the Committee announced its failing. “It was kind of weird,” said a longtime Senate Democratic aide, explaining that while people “enjoyed it” and gave it “positive reviews” this sort of thing is far from typical.

A longtime Washington editor who deals with Capitol Hill regularly also said this is not the norm: “”I have never heard of a reporter briefing staffers. It’s supposed to be the other way around. This arrangement seems highly unusual.”

Klein’s speech to high-level Democratic aides was in the Capitol, closed door and off the record. It lasted 30 minutes. “I think they thought it was very helpful,” said the aide. “I think it’s unusual. What’s more common is to get someone like Paul Begala or a White House staffer. To get a journalist to talk is a little unusual.”

Today Klein responded with this non-denial denial:

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Before you take a gander at that tweet, keep in mind that “The Fix” poses as a non-biased look at politics:

Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters:

From Fishbowl DC:

From JournoList to activist, it appears that WaPo‘s liberal blogger Ezra Kleinis once again blurring the lines between being a journalist and trying to sway politics. In what appears to be at a minimum a breach of journalism ethics, Klein spoke to a group of Senate Democratic Chiefs of Staff last Friday about the Supercommittee, just days before the Committee announced its failing. “It was kind of weird,” said a longtime Senate Democratic aide, explaining that while people “enjoyed it” and gave it “positive reviews” this sort of thing is far from typical.

(more…)