I read the Washington Post’s article, “Violence and the occupy movement,” expecting to see a discussion of the sexual assaults and rapes being reported during the Wall Street protests. Instead, the author, Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, writes about “the violence of systems that create and sustain economic and social injustice on a wide scale.” She is apparently talking about capitalism, a system that has lifted more people out of poverty than any in human history.

Brandon Darby broke the story at Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com that the protests “pose special dangers for women” because of the rapes and sexual assaults taking place. He notes several such incidents:

• A 14-year-old runaway was allegedly sexually assaulted at Occupy Dallas.
• A 19-year-old student activist was allegedly raped at Occupy Cleveland.
• A man was arrested on charges of indecent exposure to children at Occupy Seattle.
• A female reporter was threatened by activists at Occupy Oakland.

Also at BigGovernment, John Nolte wrote about the protesters’ “rap sheet,” which numbers 119 cases of sexual assault, violence, vandalism, anti-Semitism, extortion, perversion, and lawlessness. These are hardly law-abiding protesters, as the lawyers at the National Lawyers Guild and Center for Constitutional Rights maintain. These incidents are occurring because of the complete breakdown of law and order in the makeshift tent cities of the Occupy movement. Under political pressure, the local and even federal authorities have ceded the space to the protesters, effectively abdicating law enforcement’s role. As a result, when police finally do move into these places, as we saw in Oakland, they are met with violence from organizers of the protests. When the police defend themselves, they are accused of police brutality. This accusation was a prominent charge made in Thistlethwaite’s piece.

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In this weekend’s featured interview in the Wall Street Journal, Juan Rangel, the leader of United Neighborhood Organization (UNO), attempts to sanitize the history of what was once one of the most notorious Alinskyite “community organizing” groups in Chicago.

Rangel paints his group as the moderate, patriotic alternative to the victim-mongerers at the National Council of La Raza and other Hispanic groups.

WSJ: Juan Rangel of UNO

The truth is more complex.

UNO is the Mexican-American ACORN, founded in 1980 by radicals who were tied to the left-wing academic/activist Chicago clique that would later produce Barack Obama. (more…)

From Accuracy in Media’s Benjamin Johnson:

Question: What do leprechauns, hookers, anti-Semite Muslims, Russian coke heads, drunken New Jersey teachers and pregnant 14 year olds have in common?

Answer: James O’Keefe

More specifically, these absurd caricatures have been used by James to incinerate the paper thin façade of tolerance and morality projected by the liberal establishment. The mainstream media has had a particularly difficult time swallowing the phenomenon of O’keefian investigative tactics. Perhaps this is due to journalistic envy. After the ACORN scandal, John Stewart memorably lamented “I’m a FAKE journalist and I’m embarrassed this guy scooped me!” “I agree there is a degree of contempt from the media. ‘How can these young people do something that we can’t do or we haven’t done?” James states regarding his relationship with the Media’s “Ivy Leauge.”

James’s recent write up in the NYT sheds some light on why he is particularly singled out for establishment vilification. “Muckrakers are hated or loved depending on the targets they choose” he states. Since James chooses targets like government squalor and advertent racism in the Liberal élite, he is enemy #1.

“(James O’Keefe has) a history of releasing deceptively edited videos that ultimately failed.”

“(James O’Keefe’s) record is defined by falsehoods, distortions, and discrediting stunts.”

These are only some of the things the reliable and George Soros avatars at Media Matters have to say about AIM’s most recent interview subject.

To see if Eric Boehlert and his fellow “Senior Fellows” were right, AIM’s Benjamin Johnson sat down with O’Keefe to discuss the efforts of his Project Veritas and why the mainstream media leaves a vacuum that young conservatives like James have to fill.

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It’s rare anymore that you read a story where you feel the writer respects both your opinion and their craft enough to allow you your own interpretation. Rarer still when it’s an article published by the New York Times. Most journalists are eager to make names for themselves and in absence of a big story opportunity and due diligence on a piece, they supplant their opinions and suffocate with bias the very thing about which they write.

Perhaps more articles from Zev Chafets are due.

It isn’t exactly a secret that some Medicaid money winds up in unqualified hands, but it was surprising to see how willingly minor officials turned a blind eye and, in some cases, even offered advice on how to game the system. No money was distributed, but there will be repercussions. The first video was out for only hours before an Ohio state spokesman called it “extremely troubling.” Soon after, it was announced that the Medicaid worker who coached them on how to hide their ownership of an $800,000 automobile had been placed on paid administrative leave. Officials in at least two states immediately began their own investigations.

Had the videos revealed a larger injustice, O’Keefe’s stated goal? Had they demonstrated waste and abuse in Great Society initiatives run amok, or were they simply exposing the failures of some well-meaning, low-level bureaucrats in a basically worthy government program? It depends on your perspective. As for James O’Keefe, he is already looking for the next target.

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As the Weinergate story leaves behind many unanswered questions, the Twitterverse is not likely to get many truthful answers – not as long as Joan Walsh has anything to do about it.  The Salon.com editor had some harsh words for reporters who tried to cover the story from an angle that didn’t suit her own anti-Breitbart bias.

Over Memorial Day weekend, the Weinergate story developed in the wee hours of the night on Friday evening and early Saturday morning, when a lewd photo purported to be from Congressman Weiner’s yfrog account surfaced on Twitter.  Given that the story was literally unfolding on Twitter, where thousands of other users were witnessing the now infamous tweet in real time, it wasn’t exactly a “sit and wait” situation.  In the age of social media, stories make themselves – good or bad, one tweet can erupt into a firestorm in the blink of instant.  This presents both a challenge and an opportunity.  On one hand, media can wait and verify every fact, but at Twitter speed, the story will move far more quickly than standard fact finding and requests for comments can possibly occur.  On the other hand, new media journalism can fill that void and get ahead of such a story before the firestorm gets out of hand.

And this is exactly what the Big sites did when Weinergate erupted.  BigGovernment.com ran with a post just before 12:30am on Saturday, headlined “Weinergate: Congressman Claims ‘Facebook Hacked’ as Lewd Photo Hits Twitter.”  Given that the story was in its infancy but was moving so quickly online, editors merely presented the facts as they were known at the time, indicating that it was a developing story.  They also decided to publish the tweet and photo, but took caution by redacting all of the personal information of the young woman for whom the tweet was supposedly intended. (more…)

If you tuned in to Rush Limbaugh yesterday, you probably caught El Rushbo talking about Andrew’s new book.  Rush reminds us that Andrew, yes, Andrew Breitbart, “was a big lefty until he heard me.”  Me, meaning…Rush Limbaugh.

By the way, great news!  Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World has been hovering between #1 and #2 on the Amazon Bestseller’s List in Non-Fiction, and between #10 and #12 Overall. Congratulations, Andrew!!!

Check out Andrew’s list of upcoming appearances and other press coverage.

Andrew Breitbart sits down with FOX News’ Sean Hannity on April 18, 2011 to discuss his new book, “Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World,” released April 15, 2011.  It wasn’t all just book conversation though…you’ll have to watch it and see!

Check out Andrew’s list of upcoming appearances and other press coverage.

As Andrew Breitbart recounts in his excellent new book Righteous Indignation, when James O’Keefe first showed him a series of tapes in which he and Hannah Giles had posed as a pimp and a prostitute successfully requesting help from ACORN to set up brothels for their 14-year-old El Salvadoran sex slaves, James turned to Andrew and said, “We’re going to take down ACORN.” Andrew responded, “No. We’re going to take down the media.”

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John Hawkins of RightWing News recently interviewed Andrew Breitbart about his new book.  It’s a fun interview and a great read!

I always find it fascinating when people who used to be liberal say they turned to the right. That happened with you. Can you tell us about it?

Well, it’s a cliché from the left to the right. And it’s usually a story of opportunism in those few cases where the people move from the right to the left. It’s almost embarrassing to go back into my liberal background because it was about as shallow a belief system as humanly possible. It was go-along to get-along social. It was living in Los Angeles, being young, and single, and flowing with the trendy liberal crowd.

When I started to work in Hollywood at a fairly low level delivering scripts around town, listening to AM talk radio, I at first listened to it as a novelty. But I started to have certain things in my life going on such as living in a rent controlled apartment, having listened to the Clarence Thomas hearings, the OJ Simpson trial — I just started to see trends in my personal experiences that ran so contrary to what the media narratives were. At first I was flummoxed by it and then I just started to listen to certain people on the radio who were more clear thinking than the professors that I had in college.

I remember thinking when I was in college that a lot of these known Chomsky-like, verbose high lefty thinkers made absolutely no sense but I thought that was my problem. So when I started to listen to conservative thinkers and to read conservative thinkers, there was a clarity of thought. It wasn’t muddled. It wasn’t confusing. It started to make sense at an intellectual level and tie into the values that my parents gave me when I was a young kid that I diverted from when I was in high school.

So it was basically a reconnecting with everything that my parents attempted to instill in me in my youth. It has made me sleep a lot better at night, being centered and oriented with human nature as opposed to living in a world of self loathing nihilism, trying to undo human nature, and trying to create a path towards an unrealistic utopia.

Now, you were recently banned from the front page of The Huffington Post….

Oh, the tragedy of my life.

(Laughs) It is, it is. Apparently you made some sort of ad hominem attack on Van Jones and The Huffington Post has a policy against that. It must have been in place for at least two minutes or so before you were banned. Can you talk about that?

Read the entire review at RightWing News.

Check out Andrew’s list of upcoming appearances and other press coverage.

This weekend, President Obama’s senior advisor David Plouffe stepped into the Donald Trump MSM-birther fray, dissing – what he termed – Trump’s “sideshow” public appearances.

“There may be a small part of the country that believes these things, but mainstream Americans think it’s (Trump’s birther remarks) a sideshow,” said Plouffe.

“Birther,” is, of course, the media’s pejorative term for those that believe the President is not a natural born U.S. citizen. Back in June 2008, after months of speculation, then candidate Barack Obama succumbed to the political pressure and released a “Certification of Live Birth” from the State of Hawaii. Unfortunately for Team Obama, a certification is not the original record of live birth, the document has only continued to fuel the controversy.

Enter Donald Trump.

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From Fox Nation:

Fired NPR CEO Vivian Schiller spoke Tuesday at the Paley Center for Media in New York and lashed out at the videographers who exposed the bigotry in her organization, calling the undercover sting an “abomination.” She admitted the rest of the establishment is “terrified” of being the next NPR, Planned Parenthood or ACORN…and speculated that the goal of these stings is to instill fear. “It’s terrifying,” Schiller said, that’s their “objective.”

Terrified? Hmmm. Now you know what it’s like to be in the Tea Party and listening to NPR, Ms. Schiller. Or worse, to be Israel.

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There’s been quite the kerfuffle of late over AOL/Huffington Post’s decision to permanently yank Andrew Breitbart from the cushy high exposure of its front page.  Liberals voiced immediate discontent in HuffPo’s decision to include Breitbart as a contributor in the first place.  Even after Color of Change, the online (un)civil rights organization founded by Van Jones and James Rucker, launched an online letter writing campaign in protest, HuffPo stood by its decision, citing its desire to broaden the site’s political viewpoints and encourage civil debate, something it says was accomplished in Breitbart’s first two pieces.

Strangely, it wasn’t anything Breitbart wrote in either of those first two posts that got him the heave-ho – it was comments he’d made in a phone interview to another site, The Daily Caller, for which HuffPo saw fit to admonish as an ad-hominem attack that violated its editorial policy.

I think we all fully recognize that HuffPo is its own entity, it can do as it pleases.  As a libertarian minded individual, I embrace self-regulation.  But there are instances where certain actions defy all logic, and in my view, this is one of them.  The concept of an ex post facto “no ad hominem attacks” rule is not only ludicrous, it leaves the door wide open to show just how arbitrary and desperate this decision really was.  We’ll all be pouring through HuffPo’s list of bloggers and pointing out instances where they’ve committed the atrocity of ad-hominem attacks on other websites, radio or television.  In fact, my colleague Alex Marlow has thoroughly busted Van Jones for this violation already.

All this left me wondering what else is driving such arbitrary decision making over at HuffPo.  Hearkening back to the anti-Glenn Beck campaign  that Color of Change and its partner CREDO have been running, my attention was diverted to Color of Change’s other co-founder, James Rucker.

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I can think of no better way to upset the lefties in your life – and please the inner you – than pre-ordering my forthcoming coming-of-rage® book, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World. Learn how I went from left to right, then decided to take on the world and become an unexpected culture warrior.

Buy it at Amazon.com

Come one, come all. Come Tea Partiers, come conservatives, RINOs, classical liberals, drum circle types, SEIU/ACORN community organizees! This book is about love, rage, righteousness, a great media correcting, and about cultural and political renewal!

Come people who have met me at restaurants, tapas bars, taquerias, expensive cupcake shoppes. People who have gone to grade school, high school and college with me. Kids who grew up playing little league with me. The teachers whose lives I often made miserable.

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In today’s article “Planned Parenthood Video Fuels Abortion Debate,” CBS News incorrectly reports, “[Lila] Rose has worked with the organization whose undercover videos helped bring down the community organizing group Acorn.”

Veritas Visuals compiled the ACORN video exposé; Ms. Rose have never worked with Veritas Visuals.

We kindly request they correct the record.

UPDATE: NPR published the following correction:

***

Yesterday, NPR’s Ombudsman released a column entitled “NPR Blog on Planned Parenthood Sting Earns Critics,” where the author’s critique of her own organization quickly devolves into a two-minute hate against Andrew Breitbart.  Alicia C. Shepard took the opportunity to trot out some of the left’s favorite anti-Breitbart talking points.  A highlight:

Breitbart posted the [ACORN] videos at biggovernment.com. ACORN, a left-leaning community services organization, subsequently was forced out of business, even though it had become clear that the videos had been heavily edited to make the actions of ACORN employees appear worse than they were.

Shepard is intentionally cryptic when she writes the “ACORN employees appear worse than they were,” but she’s presumably referring to the fact that the ACORN employees, who appeared to be engaging in illegal activities, were “cleared legally.”  It is a huge misconception that the ACORN employees were cleared because of malicious editing; they were not in violation of the law because the undercover actors didn’t have criminal intent.  This is all explained on page 16 in Jerry Brown’s ACORN California report: (more…)

ABC reporter John Quinones produced a deceptive propaganda piece about the recent Arizona law (SB1070) dealing with illegal immigration. John Quinones, with the support of ABC, again peddles the mainstream media meme that anyone who is for the enforcement of our immigration laws is “anti-immigration” or “anti-immigrant.” But Quinones (and, by extension, ABC) doesn’t stop there. He goes on to completely misrepresent the law (using the Media Matters talking point) by framing the issue this way:

“So, we took our cameras down to Arizona, where a controversial, new law would give police the authority to question and perhaps deport anyone who, in their eyes, appears to be in the U.S. illegally. So, I go undercover, pretending to be someone who is about to be arrested and deported, simply by the way I look.”

The misinformation and ignorance in that statement would be laughable if it weren’t so infuriating. Here’s the full clip:

Skimming over the fact that ABC even hatching the idea of this expose’ is revealing to show how these East Coast ABC newsies clearly believe that everyone from Arizona who supported the law is racist and for racial profiling, the framing of this issue is rejected by the facts of the law:

Page 1 Line 20 of SB1070 clearly states:

“FOR ANY LAWFUL CONTACT MADE BY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL OR AGENCY OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS STATE FOR ANY LAWFUL CONTACT MADE BY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL OR AGENCY  OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS STATE…”

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Earlier today BigGovernment.com, BigJournalism.com, and Breitbart.TV published a shocking video investigation from Lila Rose’s pro-life organization, Live Action, showing a Planned Parenthood employee advising a “pimp” on underage sex trafficking and secret abortions for minors  The post had only been live for a few hours when NPR began to run interference for Planned Parenthood, the government-supported clinics widely known for counseling women on abortions.  There are factual errors in the piece that NPR ought to address.

First, note the original headline of the NPR article:

The article by Eyder Peralta was originally given the title “Group Behind ACORN Undercover Videos, Sets Up Planned Parenthood ‘Sting.’”  The ACORN investigation was conducted by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles for O’Keefe’s Veritas Visuals organization, while the Planned Parenthood investigation released today was conducted by Lila Rose and her team at Live Action.  Ms. Rose was not involved in the ACORN videos.  NPR has since corrected the headline, which is especially convenient because we also take issue with their comma usage as well as their decision to use scare quotes around the word “sting.”  The URL slug of the updated version of the post still contains the original headline:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/02/01/133403770/group-behind-acorn-undercover-videos-sets-up-planned-parenthood-sting

The folks at Live Action discreetly let NPR know they had mischaracterized the organization, and NPR obliged with a correction, but the fact that this error was made at all is extremely revealing.  Live Action’s investigation clearly demonstrates a manager of a government-funded organization, trusted to abide by the law, advising young people to perform illegal (and immoral) activities, even offering tips to not get caught, yet NPR ran the story with the aforementioned headline.  Their editorial staff used a false fact as an attempt to diminish Live Action’s findings, portraying the investigation in a controversial light instead of letting their audience simply see and hear the facts for themselves.  While we appreciate the correction, this was a mistake that diligent and honest journalists never would have made.

But wait, there’s more.

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The left-wing website Talking Points Memo (known as TPM) is worried that the tea party-backed True The Vote effort in Harris County, Texas — home of the City of Houston — is going to successfully enlist Texans to join an effort to “true the vote” by battling vote fraud. Because of this fear, TPM has been trying to undermine the event with several left-slanted blog posts.

TPMs latest posting is artful for its vague accusations and spin, but it is short on any actual proof of the nefarious goals that the left-wing site is trying to ascribe to the True The Vote National Summit, coming up on March 25 and 26. Read closely TPM’s post also has the odd effect of coming to the support of vote fraud by seeming to discount the True The Vote event. Sadly, this dismissive attitude is of a piece with the left’s desire to shy people from paying attention to the massive vote fraud that they, themselves have been involved in for decades.

Typical of left-wing alarmism, TPM’s rhetoric casts suspicion on everything that True The Vote is trying to do, but never makes any actual accusations. For instance, of the addition of John Fund, Andrew Breitbart, and Hans von Spakovsky to the event program, TPM calls them “three of the biggest voter fraud alarmists in the country.” I guess from this we can assume that TPM doesn’t care about voter fraud because it is merely alarmism?

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Last week, I was enjoying a leisurely cup of coffee while perusing my local New Jersey newspapers online.  That moment of serenity promptly evaporated when I was jolted by a headline that read, “Stop the Vitriol of the Right? A Lesson From the ACORN Tragedy.”

What?  This wasn’t the Huffington Post or Media Matters, it was my local NJ online news site.  After reading it, I initially dismissed the post, shrugging it off as an asinine tirade by the author, John Atlas, who also lives here in NJ and is a very active supporter of ACORN and hostile to any views that aren’t on the far left.  While I almost expected the lecture about promoting civility in the wake of the Tucson tragedy, it was the ugliness of his rant against the right and the stretch he made to connect it all to ACORN that befuddled me.  Nearly a week later, that post was still on my mind.

Then came the left’s latest meme against free speech, and this bizarre charade of hoisting Frances Fox Piven as their newest martyr.  Ah, now it made sense.

To start with, Atlas’ post was certainly interestingly timed. Just last month, he was making the rounds promoting his new book, “Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, America’s Most Controversial Antipoverty Community Organizing Group.” In this interview below, he ends by saying,

“We need organizations that are going to give voice to the poor so that our democratic system works better, and that is the biggest tragedy. And to the extent that Breitbart and his gang undermine that effort, I think that’s a disaster.”

(Part 1 of the video is here.  Take notice of who’s conducting the interview, by the way.  That would be IndictBreitbart.org, the campaign run by Velvet Revolution. We wrote about them and their co-founders, one of whom is a convicted domestic terrorist.  The irony speaks for itself.)

Then of course, there is Tucson.

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I’ve said before that the media is so invested in this administration because their very survival depends upon its success. The only people who consume mainstream media anymore are the people who are part of the ideology that the MSM blatantly supports. They’ve bet all their chips on the success of the Progressocrats, the new amalgam of socialists and Democrats which saw the progressive caucus bubble up within the DNC before eating it away from the inside.

You won’t see the stories below in the pages of the NYT or on the screens of NBC. You won’t hear them discussed at the water cooler. They’re the stories that show without any doubt the cards held by those who wish to enslave the masses to the god of government. A theocracy, to be sure, but one that holds up the state above all else.

Each of these stories have been chronicled across the Bigs sites over the past year. These stories are what progressives are trying desperately to erase from the annals of history, an effort that the new penny press, new media, refuses to allow.

1. The Pigford Case

You have a finite number of black farmers discriminated against by the USDA. They are awarded a settlement. You have over 73,000 more applicants, more than the number of actual farmers or people related to farming, all claiming a piece of the settlement. The settlement is billions of dollars of taxpayer money. Over 36% of the claims were already rejected due to fraud. Instead of vetting the claims and awarding to those who were truly wronged, elected officials decide to increase the size of the settlement so everyone can get a check. People who farmed their whole lives got the same size check as someone who never farmed.

If you think that sounds wonky, then you may be someone who doesn’t believe that the Pigford case was on the up-and-up. Also, you are probably a racist, since this case involves black Americans and even the original black farmers who are raising concern about this case are also racists, according to INSERT SOROS OUTLET HERE.

Related:

Pigford Investigation Resources

Credit Where It’s Due: HuffPo Blogger On Pigford Fraud

2. Journolist

Long story short: a bunch of editorial geniuses decided to gather in an email distro and share ideas about how to inject their socialist narrative into mainstream media. They also talked smack about conservative political leaders because takes balls to talk cruelly about people with whom you disagree in a private email thread full of glee club members. These people all still write for the same publications that they did before, with the exception of the whistleblower, and these are the folks who tell you that media is not progressively biased.

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