- South Carolina newspaper endorses Huntsman the same day news breaks that he planned to drop out and endorse Romney.

- Wherein RT/ Russia Today / Komrade Kommuniqué doesn’t deny that they are financed and controlled by the Kremlin. They also don’t deny that they made up quotes and attributed them to Dana Loesch. Also, Everything Loesch Tweets becomes their headline news. I love the Internet. I also love that Big Journalism ceremoniously spanked their entire network in one post.

(And also, they were attacked not because they linked to audio taken of her show, but because they misrepresented her remarks. Please note that Prime Minister Putin did not sanction Komrade Kommuniqué to inform you of that.)

- Litigious bullies Righthaven slammed in court, again.

- ICYDK: No, MMfA has not written about Bill Maher and his comments on the Marines. They’re hoping this all blows over before you notice.

- Politico:

CNN touts itself as the one network without a dog in any ideological fight. But in the current media climate, where commentary is king, the center is a hard place to win ratings. Despite growth in 2011, CNN remains in third placebehind the other two networks for primetime, in part because CNN can’t be relied upon to consistently satisfy conservative or liberal appetites. CNN’s response to that challenge has been to go wide rather than long, hiring voices from farther afield on the ideological spectrum rather than building up a team of independent analysts to run a conversation down the middle.

Loesch was clearly highlighting the absurdity of the response to the Marines, which is why, after her remark, she asked, “is that harsh to say?!” as a furious response to those calling for the heads of the four Marines. Of course, this is consistently omitted. CNN has done a lot of shifting to present viewers with diverse thought and their strategy is causing many folks to reconsider the network when they once flipped past it. To be honest, I didn’t start watching the network until Erick Erickson announced that he was joining and I began tuning in regularly when the network announced the hiring of Loesch and Will Cain. Further honesty: I wanted to see how the network went to town on them, whether or not they were brought in just to serve as scratching posts and token conservatives, but I was surprised, pleasantly so. Such was the diverse thought that I watched each of the CNN debates (only one of Fox’s, which was last night’s) and during the caucuses and recent primary, kept it on CNN. Granted, my mind isn’t completely made up on CNN but I feel that they’ve been making some genuine moves to increase the scope of their audience. I hope conservatives support that and I also hope that conservatives recognize that the network has consistently stood by Erickson and Loesch throughout the regular tantrums from MSNBC sympathizers like Media Matters and Mediaite.

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It seems like only yesterday Newsweek was sold to the highest bidder for $1.00. Of course a sweetheart deal like that had to have a catch, in this case the buyer’s assumption of the liabilities on Newsweek’s balance sheet. In 2009 alone, Newsweek lost $30 million, most likely due to “journalistic” efforts like this one:

Obama’s critics have gone from being racists to being just plain reckless. They see us as a gang of hayseed, Bible-thumping hicks clinging to their guns and religion while the most brilliant man ever to occupy the White House proceeds to turn America into a European-style democratic socialist state. Sullivan believes Obama is so smart he may just outfox everyone:

The right calls him a socialist, the left says he sucks up to Wall Street, and independents think he’s a wimp. Andrew Sullivan on how the president may just end up outsmarting them all.

For those who are unfamiliar with Andrew Sullivan, he is the Editor of The Daily Beast and contributor to Newsweek. He is most recently notorious for being a Trig-Truther and the class-act that spun-off a piece about Sarah Palin’s presidential campaign negatives using Steve Job’s death:

I know which one will get the bigger headlines tomorrow. And there is some comfort in knowing it will pain her.

Sullivan’s list of journalistic indiscretions and mind-numbing bloviating is so long and undistinguished that even just publishing the headlines causes irreversible loss of gray matter. I, your humble corespondent, have saved you from that fate.

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Tacky Andrew Sullivan spins off Steve Jobs’ death with a bitter post about Sarah Palin’s negative on running for President. I will condense because I know it kills brain cells without the benefit of alcohol to read Sullivan:

I know which one will get the bigger headlines tomorrow. And there is some comfort in knowing it will pain her.

Palin talks to Mark Levin here (her voice is the deeper one). [...] But the idea that this person is protecting her family – after putting them all on a reality show, after deploying an infant with Down Syndrome as a book-selling prop …

ZING! Good one, Andrew! Making fun of her family and doing it off the death of a visionary, you sassy necromancer. Babies are easy targets because they generally suck at hitting back. Of course, Sullivan would attack her if she didn’t have her son with her while she was working, too, so it’s damn her either way scenario. I mean, I realize that it’s only 2011 and some males of the progression persuasion haven’t yet come to terms with women being all out in the open, free-range, and doing crazy things like voting (gasp!) and working (OMG!), but for someone who presents himself as such a forward thinker, I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you. Even more shocking: women have babies sometimes. And women are actually able to work and raise children at the same time.

I can’t wait to delve into Never Never Land and see all the articles where Sullivan excoriates male candidates for daring to raise children while working. The Obama girls on the trail with then-presidential candidate Obama? The lack of such a balance would be repulsively sexist and Sullivan is too much of a progressive, forward thinker to betray his poseuriffic posturing as an equal-rights kinda guy while chaining women to some BS patriarchal stereotype, right?

The most unbelievable part of this article was when Sullivan wrote he was at the gym.

I was at the gym when the news broke, hence the late post.

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As John Nolte points out here, The Daily Beast/Newseek’s Andrew Sullivan — with the help of some MSM allies — is always on the lookout to weaponize Sarah Palin’s own children as political weapons against her. It’s an obscene tactic and also an unprecedented one.  But because nothing and no one will stop Uncle Sully from using a mother’s own children as a partisan bludgeon, he went off again earlier this week:

Is it too outrageous to ask why this little girl is not in school, rather than acting as a media bouncer for her mother on a publicity/campaign tour?

The “little girl” he’s weaponizing is Piper Palin, Sarah Palin’s youngest daughter. Not only is this no one’s business but the Palin family’s — is Sullivan’s bubble so thick he’s never heard of home schooling? — but he also happens to be dead wrong.

Here’s his later backfill:

Update: because school in Alaska is now out for the summer. My bad.

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…And congratulations to me, for I have won the BIG office pool.

Here at the BIGS, we all picked squares to back up our prediction of who would be the first member of the MSM to compare the upcoming Sarah Palin documentary”The Undefeated” to Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous pro-Nazi propaganda film. “Triumph of the Will.”

Looking oh-so sincere and innocent in black and white…

Personally, my gut told me this person would have to be uncommonly angry and cruel; someone willing to stoop to a level of partisan inhumanity where few fear to tread, someone so despicably desperate to destroy another they would use a political figure’s own children as weapons of attack.

Well, according to my Google Alert… Ladies and gents, Mr. Andrew Sullivan:

“If someone gives it a chance and watches it, watches the film, I think they will be surprised at the caricature that’s been drawn and the contrast to reality. I just think every aspect of it is so powerful, you cannot walk away from this film looking at Sarah Palin the same way. You just can’t,” – Meg Stapleton, on the upcoming propaganda movie, “Triumph Of The Will” “The Undefeated.”

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In an argument (usually a political debate), a concern troll is someone who is on one side of the discussion, but pretends to be a supporter of the other side with “concerns”. The idea behind this is that your opponents will take your arguments more seriously if they think you’re an ally. – Urban Dictionary

Before she’s even announced her decision as to whether or not to run for president, according to a new Gallup poll, Governor Sarah Palin currently sits in second place among 11 announced and/or potential GOP candidates. Gee, how did that happen? After all, the MSM told me Palin was irrelevant (usually in 1200 word articles obsessing over one of her tweets or the tweets of one of her staffers).

Ezra Klein’s sinister Journolist might be dismantled (though I suspect it lives on elsewhere), but “journ-o-lism” has always been alive and well and lately, when it comes to their unrelenting  and somewhat perverse need to demolish a mother of five, the corrupt path of Obama’s MSM Palace Guards has gone a little something like this: After pulling a minding-her-own-business Sarah Palin out of her Wasilla home in order to beat her about the neck and shoulders for causing that terrible crime in Tucson,  led by this rocket scientist, it was decided the time had come to ignore Palin and write her political obituary.

Indulge my backing up just a bit here …

You have to keep in mind that journ-o-lism is just another term to describe how dishonest journ-o-lists conspire to create corrupt narratives. Have you ever noticed how the MSM almost never competes for stories? What I mean is that nine times out of ten they all cover the exact same things with the exact same emphasis. Why is that?  You would think that in order to stand out from the herd, ABC News would sell a Whopper to compete with NBC’s Big Mac. Or that the Washington Post would come up with Pepsi to the New York Times’ Coke.  Don’t even get me started on Mountain Dew.

The reason for this is that the MSM isn’t about The News, it’s about The Agenda, and what they do is no different than what they accuse Big Business of doing. Only instead of conspiring through a secret monopoly with other companies to fix prices, they conspire through a secret monopoly of other media outlets to create a version of the truth –which we call The Narrative.  The word goes out and suddenly….

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The Internet phenomenon that is Trig’s Crew (Twitter tag #TrigsCrew) might represent the most potent example of the power of online activism we’ve seen yet. In a matter of hours, citizen activists rallied around the righteous cause of condemning a vile Wonkette attack against Governor Sarah Palin’s three-year-old son, Trig with astonishing results.

Best of all, and contrary to Andrew Sullivan feeling all “queasy,” this was not a “Palinista” uprising. (Heads up: When it comes to Trig Palin, Sullivan is nothing more than Wonkette with professorial elbow patches.) Decent people of all political stripes, including some in the media, put partisan politics aside over this — and it was a beautiful thing to behold. Better still, organized under their hash tag, a group of citizen activists discovered the small “d” democratic wonder of Twitter and effectively learned how to politely, firmly, and publicly fight for something they believed in.

Personally, I’m not a boycott person, but that’s my right. Others have a right to boycott, and brother, did Trig’s Crew put on a boycott. All on their own, they organized a list of Wonkette advertisers, tweeted them directly with a request that they pull their ads, and kept track of those who did and didn’t. Within hours, it was obvious a tidal wave was brewing and by the next day it was just as obvious that it had hit. As of this writing, over 30 advertisers agreed with Trig’s Crew and pulled their ads from Wonkette. Seemingly, and in record time, the dismantling of a fairly mainstream, left-wing snark-site seemed probable.

Like the Tea Party, Trig’s Crew has represented the very best of mainstream America as they engaged in an inspiring First Amendment online debate with dignity and decency. So commendable is their behavior, that Slate’s Dave Weigel obviously had to dig pretty deep to come up with this single tweet — one of thousands — in order to manufacture something (which required some back-filling in the form of a later update) that might tarnish the whole movement as “jumping the shark.” Obviously, this is the MSM-Alinsky-Tea Party-Playbook all over again — where a single and unique negative out of an ocean of positives is intentionally amplified to unfairly brand the kind of grassroots campaign elites always find so threatening.

Whatever.

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Apparently, having a baby in public is using said baby as a prop but using said baby as a ploy against the object of your political hatred is not using baby as a prop at all. Interesting logic.

I feel as queasy about this flexing of Palinite muscle as I do about the original, disgusting, asinine story. In some ways, I see a legitimate come-uppance for a tacky site that published a simply inexcusable piece of mean-spirited dreck using a child who cannot defend himself, treating him as if he were subhuman, which he most definitely isn’t. But I also recoil from mob action like this, for the impact it has on fearless free speech and the chilling effect it will have on an already cowed and defensive MSM when covering the truly tough stuff about Palin.

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Conor Friedersdorf, subbing for Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic, is trying to tell you how to talk about Pigford.

In a couple of pieces recently, Friedersdorf focuses on the gap between the number of Pigford claimants and census records of the number of the black farmers. It’s an odd issue to focus on – although Media Matters does it, too – because it doesn’t really prove anything. It’s just floating numbers. What does prove something are the testimonies of Jimmy Dismuke, Willie Head, Eddie Slaughter, Lucious Abrams, and other black farmers who all have first hand knowledge of Pigford fraud.

Of course, Friedersdorf doesn’t mention the black farmers. They aren’t his concern. He’s much more interested in slicing and dicing numbers, comparing reports and – mostly – trying to impugn the motives of people like Andrew Breitbart (and Republicans in general) for covering the story in the first place.

Friedersdorf doesn’t care about the black farmers and their stories, so he can’t imagine anyone else caring, either.

And then the echo chamber begins, with The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates discussing the motivation of Republicans while ignoring the actual black farmers and then The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer opining on what Friedersdorf and Coates said, while once again ignoring what the black farmers said. (more…)

This is really priceless. Since the Arizona shootings, Sullivan has been on a tear about the right’s rhetoric. After more than a week of this nonsense, Megan McArdle finally let Sullivan have it:

Andrew’s defense seems to be that there are a lot of right wing jerks out there, and that by combing Loughner’s writing, he can find a few sentences here and there that sort of sound like things that might have been said by one of those right wing jerks.  But I’m pretty sure that if I combed Loughner’s writing, I could find some sentences here and there that imply that Loughner read Andrew’s writing, or gay rights literature, or Edmund Burke.

Sullivan responded to McArdle Friday by quoting the paragraph above and saying:

Really? Go ahead. Make my day. Or withdraw the claim.

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Even as the early, sketchy details of the shooting incident in Arizona were still emerging some members of the left-leaning media were already trying to tie the killer to Tea Party activism in general and Sarah Palin in particular.

Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic.com was early to attempt to link lunatic killer Jared Loughner to the Tea Party, but he wasn’t the only one. The Washington Post’s Sandhya Somashekhar immediately attempted to color the story as an example of the “militant rhetoric” of the Tea Party movement and Sarah Palin.

Liberals on Saturday blamed the tea party movement’s sometimes militant rhetoric — for example, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s advice to her supporters via Twitter, “Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD,” or Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle (R) advocating “second-amendment remedies” for some of the nation’s problems. Palin had also posted a U.S. map depicting crosshairs over the states where she hoped to oust Democratic incumbents. That map no longer appears on the Web site of her political action committee.

Additionally, within minutes of the attack, hard left-winger Paul Krugman of the New York Times asserted that the reason Giffords was shot was because her seat was not turned over to Republicans. Despite that no political motive was at all known, Krugman immediately asserted that it was the fault of the Tea Party and Sarah Palin.

As to Andrew Sullivan, on his DailyDish blog for the Atlantic, Sullivan posted an unconfirmed and anonymous claim from “a reader” who claimed to have heard people in a store callously saying that they were glad that a Republican could be appointed to replace the wounded Giffords. This “reader” also claimed that one of them said, “Well, that’s to be expected when you’re so liberal.”

Sullivan’s disgusting attempt to smear conservatives went on even as it was emerging that the killer’s ideology seems incoherent and not legitimately anchored in the left or the right.

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I’ve long known The Atlantic has at least one resident Jew hater and Israel basher in Andrew Sullivan. It appears the virus has spread to Jeff Goldberg as well.

In response to the catastrophic forest fires in Israel, the Jewish National Fund has mounted a special campaign asking for donations for its “Forest Fire Emergency Campaign.”

Goldberg urges people not to donate, because after all, those Rich Jew Boys have plenty of money, and besides, it’s all their own fault anyway for not having their fire services up to Goldberg’s standards, him being an expert and all.

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Writing at Politico, Keach Hagey tries to sum up one possible lesson of Dave Weigel’s recent firing from the Washington Post. Hagey’s argument is that, in the new media environment, public disgrace may actually be good for your career. To bolster her point she offers several examples:

Or how about Christopher Buckley? … Buckley wrote a column for National Review until he wrote a piece for the Daily Beast titled, “Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting For Obama.”  Soon after the piece was published National Review received a flurry of criticism and Buckley was forced out as damage control. Buckley continued writing books and at the Daily Beast, his credentials, with liberals at least, greatly enhanced.

David Frum provides one of the most recent examples…During the healthcare reform debates, he wrote a post called “Waterloo” in which he criticized the Republican Party’s obstruction of passing a healthcare bill. The post garnered a lot of criticism from the right and soon after “Waterloo,” AEI fired Frum. Since then, FrumForum’s traffic has continued to grow and the site has increasingly become one of the primary destinations for conservative news and analysis.

David Frum

What do all these individuals have in common with one another and with Dave Weigel? They all moved very publicly to the left. (more…)

Leave it to Andrew Sullivan.  It’s been 24 hours since I offered $100,000 for the full list and contents of the Ezra Klein’s four-year experiment in political-journalist editorial collusion — the on line progressive jazz fusion station known as JournoList.  A natural free for all of death-wishing upon their political enemies and other such innocuous scribblings.

It took 24 hours for Sullivan to proclaim that all the rules now were broken.

When Andrew Breitbart offers $100,000 for a private email list-serv archive, essentially all bets are off. Every blogger or writer who has ever offered an opinion is now on warning: your opponents will not just argue against you, they will do all they can to ransack your private life, cull your email in-tray, and use whatever material they have to unleash the moronic hounds of today’s right-wing base.

Yes, the Economist was right. This is not about transparency, or hypocrisy. It’s about power. And when you are Andrew Breitbart, power is all that matters. There is not a whit of thoughtfulness about this, not an iota of pretense that it might actually advance the conversation about how to deal with, say, a world still perilously close to a second Great Depression, a government that is bankrupt, two wars that have been or are being lost, an energy crisis that is also threatening our planet’s ecosystem, and a media increasingly incapable of holding the powerful accountable.

In fact, when one of the progressives on this list outed Dave Weigel, the actual rules were broken.  That leaker who destroyed Weigel’s career had agreed to the off-the-record nature of the 400-strong list; the minute the leaker went public with the material the story was no longer about Weigel but about the JournoList itself. (more…)

What is it about Sarah Palin that drives the left nuts? They hate everything about her, and yet at the same time they can’t stop talking about her. Like a succubus, she haunts their fever dreams, visits them in their sleep, and sucks the life force out of them. No matter what she does, what she says, or where she goes, Sarah is an object of endless fascination to the “progressives,” who hate her with a mad passion, cower in fear of her awesome endorsement powers and well… just can take their eyes off her:

Sarah’s appearance at the Belmont Stakes on Sunday (right) has set them off again. Here’s the dreadful Wonkette, shamelessly ogling:

We got a political news tip on our Facebook page from Wonkette operative “Laura,” and it goes like this: “Sarah Palin 12/09 no boobs http://bit.ly/bmQtPJ #Sarah Palin today, Instant boobage! http://j.mp/dokqd2 only her #plasticsurgeon knows4sure.” We are not fluent in the Twitter-Facebook dialects, but somehow we can follow the gist.

And the HuffPo: (more…)

Andrew Sullivan is not a huge fan of Israel; he is entitled to his opinion.  However, his latest column about the incident in the waters outside of Gaza makes up the facts. Honestly, in the case of most of the posts Sullivan writes about Israel, Andrew is living in his own reality, where truth and facts do not matter.

The Atlantic columnist begins his latest example of creative writing begins with the first paragraph.

Maintaining the siege and blockade of Gaza (because its citizens elected a government Israeli abhors), and strafing it with military might over a year ago, is not exactly what one expects of a civilized Western state. To then go on the offensive against a flotilla of aid ships, trying to bypass the blockade, and killing at least ten people aboard is bordering on insanity…

There are at least three bald-faced lies in that  paragraph. First, the blockade was established to stem terrorism from Gaza (perhaps Sullivan forgot the five thousand rockets sent from the strip into Israel from 2005-2009).

His comment “Strafing it with military might over a year ago is not what one expects of a civilized Western State.” is also wrong.  That is exactly one should expect from a western state.  If rockets landed in Andrew Sullivan’s backyard, I guarantee that he would expect Obama to start “strafing” the offending party. (more…)

“The former Alaska governor has complained on her Facebook page that [writer Joe] McGinniss is spying on her famous brood as writes a book about her while living next door in Wasilla, Alaska. She says McGinniss can see into her daughter’s bedroom and into her garden as he works on the tome with the working title: Sarah Palin’s Year of Living Dangerously.” The Canadian Press, May 26, 2010.

May 19, 2010:  I’ve arrived in Wasilla, Alaska, home to Sarah Palin!  But it’s clear she’s already prepared an unfriendly reception. When I told the cabbie “I’m Joe McGinniss, the best-selling author,” he tried to act like he didn’t even know who I was.  Well, if these hillbillies think they can fool this newshound, they’ve got another thing coming!

May 20, 2010:  Delighted to find indoor plumbing and electricity up here.  Took a break from unpacking to check out the new place’s view.  As soon as Bristol saw me, she shut her curtains – as if a few strips of cloth are going to protect her deceptions from exposure!  Next, I tried from every angle to see Russia from here but it simply can’t be done.  Just one day on the ground and already I’ve uncovered another Palin lie – Chapter Five has already written itself! Think I’ll call it “Hoop Dreams…”

May 21, 2010 (10 a.m.):  Walked around town today.  I asked a local where the nearest Whole Foods was and he just stared at me.  I sat down at a diner and asked if the mushrooms in my omelet were shiitake.  The owner told me, “This is a family place and we don’t use that kind of language.” I told him, “Well, that language was Japanese, sir, and where I come from – Massachusetts – we don’t appreciate racism!” (more…)

First it was Bristol Palin’s pregnancy. Then it was Sarah Palin’s very existence. And now, courtesy of the once-interesting but now completely unhinged blogger/amateur gynecologist Andrew Sullivan, it’s the Palin Family Fence.

You heard that right.

Poor Sullivan. Once one of the most interesting writers in the blogosphere, the Prince of Provincetown has managed to parlay an exalted state in both the MSM and online into a crude caricature of his former self.

The occasion for his latest burst of high dudgeon is the Palin family’s newly constructed fence between their property and a rental house being leased by Joe McGinniss, the writer whose last major book, the true-crime thriller, Fatal Vision, was published in 1983, yet whose name still retains some cachet among his former journalistic brethren. McGinniss is currently at work on a book about… wait for it — Sarah Palin. (more…)