Last week, a post I wrote for Big Journalism which, unbeknownst to me, possibly inspired Bill O’Reilly’s Talking Points Memo later that evening. I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t notice it at the time. I watch Bill and the rest of the Fox guys when I can, but with three kids in the house it’s not every day. In any case, my post and Bill’s memo were strongly worded critiques of this David A. Graham piece for Newsweek in which he downplayed the New Black Panther story. Last Friday, Graham issued a somewhat belated response to Bill and me (okay, I admit, I like saying that). Here’s how his piece opens:

Last week, I found myself in the crosshairs of conservative ire because a news analysis I wrote didn’t take the allegations of voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party story as seriously as conservatives felt it should.

Right off the bat we’ve shifted the goalposts. My critique was based on Graham’s biased handling of the material, in particular his use of the hacks and non-entities at Media Matters as a primary source, as well as his failure to get even Media Matters’ highly spun version of the story straight. Here’s a bit of what I wrote:

That second link–the one about questionable testimony–goes right back to Media Matters. David A. Graham summarizes MM’s lengthy hit piece by saying, “there are doubts about whether he was actually present for the incidents he described.” Well, no, there are not doubts about that at all. In his interview with Megyn Kelly (which Media Matters transcribes), [J. Christian] Adams plainly states that he wasn’t there…

That’s not a critique of Graham’s news judgment; it’s a critique of his facts. Rather than address the problem directly or issue a correction, he simply revises his original claim in the new piece: (more…)

“My bosses aren’t interested in tackling the story.”  That’s what a top investigative reporter at a major Chicago newspaper said when I asked why the story of Annabel Melongo – former Save A Life Foundation employee turned whistleblower – wasn’t being covered. “We’d have to spend a lot of time to get it right.” The reporter explained how, with a limited staff of investigative reporters tasked to write one “investigative story” each week, there aren’t enough resources to focus on the Melongo case.

And besides, it’d be “covering ground on someone else’s story.” In other words, bloggers have already told the what of Melongo’s incarceration in the Cook County Jail – a nasty place – under a $300,000 bond for “eavesdropping.” The reporter was right about that. But ferreting out the why of her imprisonment as she awaits trial is a different task.

If the Chicago print reporters were interested, they’d follow the money. If resources are so tight, here’s an economical way to do it:

First, add up all the government grants listed by the Chicago suburb-based Save A Life Foundation (SALF) in their Form 990s. That’s the yearly paperwork that 501(c)(3) nonprofits submit to the Illinois Attorney General (AG) and to the IRS. A simple email FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request to the AG for SALF’s 990’s from its birth in 1993 until it folded last year takes a minute, and the information is free. Their reported government grants total $7,850,777.

Next, add up the dollar amounts of state and federal grants obtained via FOIA requests and email exchanges with agency officials. That number is considerably more than $7,850,777.

So what’s up with the discrepancy? (more…)

On Tuesday, seven bullets believed to have been fired from one or more AK-47s from across the border hit the El Paso City Hall. It was big news in the Texas border town right across the river from Juarez, Mexico, but it earned a collective yawn from the national MSM. What do the East Coast news gods care about us here in Texas anyway?

Folks in El Paso, though, were somewhat offended.  The El Paso Times reported:

EL PASO — Several gunshots apparently fired from Juárez hit El Paso City Hall on Tuesday afternoon.  No one was hurt, but nerves were rattled at City Hall in what is thought to be the first cross-border gunfire during a drug war that has engulfed Juárez since 2008.  El Paso police spokesman Darrel Petry said investigators do not think City Hall was intentionally targeted but rather was struck by stray shots. “It does appear the rounds may have come from an incident in Juárez,” Petry said.

El Paso NBC NewsChannel9 aired a video showing just how close the City Hall is to the site of the shoot out in Mexico.  ABC7 interviewed El Paso residents who live near City Hall. And, KFOX14 got a shot – a camera shot that is – of the circling Blackhawk mentioned below in the El Paso Times.

Authorities said a Mexican federal police officer was killed during an attack by gunmen near a Smart supermarket on Norzagaray boulevard.  Chihuahua state police identified the dead man as Domingo Hernández Espinoza and said that two other people were wounded. Investigators found 40 bullet casings from an AK-47 and other firearms. (more…)

Sometimes you just can’t believe your eyes. Read this sentence from today’s Politics Nation (“Blumenthal Camp: Vietnam Issue Behind Us”) and then ask yourself if you or the “ Democratic strategist” is the crazy one:

“This [how Richard Blumenthal handled his Vietnam whopper-gate crisis] ended up being a textbook case in crisis management,” said a Democratic strategist who was involved in the effort.

Of course, the strategist gets the Blumenthal Badge of Bravery for having the courage to withhold his name. Gutsy. But what about that “textbook case of crisis management?” What does a textbook case consist of exactly?

Well, first you trot out the human shields at your press conference, in this case a passel of the very veterans you’ve offended by that harmless, oft-told tall-tale about your combat days in Nam. Next, you work in the “take full responsibility” line. That’s merely apology code for “Hey, I’m holding this embarrassing press conference—that’s responsibility enough. Now will you all just leave me alone?” Third, you never really say you’re sorry—because that would be an admission of guilt, and guilt is campaign kryptonite. (more…)

Did we just hear Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal try to blame local journalists for his ‘misspoken’ words about his Vietnam war record? When Blumenthal was asked at Tuesday’s press conference why he didn’t correct published accounts of his Vietnam service, he said:

There were a few articles, not many. I am responsible for my own statements….I can’t be responsible for all the articles, I may not even have seen them. ….sometimes journalists do make mistakes.

Cr: Chion Wolf

Really?  Sure, journalists get quotes and background wrong from time to time but civil servants, who are in the public eye like Blumenthal, often call right away to demand a correction. In fact, that’s just what our A.G.’s press staff usually did with me – even when I wrote the quotes exactlyas he said them during phone interviews. Case in point: (more…)

In the wake of revelations by the New York Times that Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal lied about serving in Vietnam, the Beltway media has already gone into its protective crouch: yesterday’s breathtakingly defiant and disgraceful press conference is being hailed as a win. From Politico, which ought to know better:

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s defiant response to a report that he falsely claimed to have served in Vietnam appears to have salvaged his Democratic nomination for the Senate.

“Defiant?” That’s one way to put it.

But the controversy touched off by a story in The New York Times has robbed the Democratic Party of another safe seat and reopened the door, if narrowly, to Republicans’ retaking control of the upper house this fall. Blumenthal’s self-inflicted wound is the latest in a surprising series of retirements, deferrals, misfortunes and intramural bloodbaths that have transformed a map seen a year ago as heavily favoring Democrats into a grab bag of Republican opportunities deep in Obama country.

Boo hoo. A series of unfortunate events is robbing the Democrats of their historic opportunity to inflict unwanted hope and change. (more…)

Connecticut attorney general Dick Blumenthal, running for “Tammany” Chris Dodd’s U.S. Senate seat, wants you to know he’s proud of his service in the United States Marine Corps. Who said he wasn’t? Note also the disgraceful use of veterans as human shields.

WARNING: Classic liberal weaseling and “misspeaking” ahead.

By the way, despite his statements to the contrary, he did not serve in Vietnam.

What else has he been lying about?

Ahead of multiple ethics violations Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd is retiring from his long-time Democrat held seat. The Conn. Democrat Party is keen to keep that seat and has proffered state attorney general Richard Blumenthal as the man to do it for them. But, Blumenthal has a tiny little problem: for three decades he’s told fibs and outright untruths about his service in Vietnam.

Blumenthal has for decades said he was a veteran of the war and led constituents to believe he served overseas but the truth is he served only during the last few years of the war, having gotten multiple deferments before 1970, and then served only here in the United States, never overseas.

Kudos to the New York Times for reporting this fact, of course, but the Old Media is not absolved because of this one story. Condemnation for the media is evident in these words in the Times’s story:

The Vietnam chapter in Mr. Blumenthal’s biography has received little attention despite his nearly three decades in Connecticut politics.

Amazing. This man has been prevaricating about his non-existent service in the war for three decades and only NOW he’s getting called on the carpet for it? Where has the Connecticut media been all this time? Where has the national media been for the months that Blumenthal has been running for Senate? (more…)

The dust-up started with a USA Today editorial entitled “Our view on war on terror: National security team fails to inspire confidence.”  It featured this photo of a confused National Intelligence Director named Dennis Blair.

The bite was in the article’s subtitle: “Officials’ handling of Christmas Day attack looks like amateur hour.”  That left a bruise.

The accompanying photo of Blair was excerpted from a video clip that featured his admission of a “Duh” moment surrounding the initial questioning of Christmas Day would-be bomber Abdulmutallab. Watch the grilling here:

The USAToday piece did everything except compare administration anti-terrorist officials to the Keystone Cops: (more…)

“CBS, 60 Minutes — they built their careers on this. So, that’s the tradition I’m following in sort of a new age journalism.”

Careful, Mr O’Keefe ! Don’t go there! Nothing in the FBI affidavit even hints that you brushed with the type of swinishness and ethical squalor 60 Minutes was capable of, especially on April 16, 2000.

I’ll report. Y’all decide:

On April 16, 2000, viewers of CBS’ 60 Minutes saw Dan Rather interviewing Elian Gonzalez’s father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. America saw a bewildered and heartsick father simply pleading to be allowed to have his motherless son accompany him back to Cuba, his cherished homeland. How could anyone oppose this? How could simple decency and common sense possibly allow for anything else?

“Did you cry?” the pained and frowning Dan Rather asked the “bereaved” father during the 60 Minutes drama.“A father never runs out of tears,” Juan (actually, the voice of Juan’s drama school-trained translator) sniffled back to Dan. And the 60 Minutes prime-time audience could hardly contain their own sniffles.

Here’s what America didn’t see: (more…)

The flashy British tabloid the Daily Mirror and America’s so-called newspaper of record, the New York Times, would seem to represent opposite ends of the MSM.  Yet in the third week of January 2009, as two of their respective columnists rendered verdict on the outgoing president George W. Bush, the two papers seemed barely a bitch slap apart.

On one side of the Atlantic, writing for the fish-and-chips crowd, Tony Parsons declared Bush “the global village idiot,” “a 10th-rate President for a nation in decline,” “a natural simpleton, a rich man’s son who got to the Oval Office on his daddy’s shirttails.”  Meanwhile, in the learned pages of the Gray Lady, Maureen Dowd dropped the guillotine, deriding Bush as “the parody of a monosyllabic Western gunslinger who disdains nuance,” “Oedipally oddball,” “an asphyxiated and pampered son.”

Now that is all clever stuff, sure to win a round on the house at the MSM bar, where everybody knows that the Nobel Laureate out of Chicago will be remembered as a better president than the one-time drunk driver from Texas.

But the view from the future will likely be a different one.  The notions of Parsons and Dowd, like so much of the MSM storyboard, shall be of scant interest to presidential historians.  Instead the media’s decade of rage at George W. Bush will be written about by doctoral candidates in social psychology under the title “5 million minutes of hate.” (more…)

Sixth in a series.  Find parts one, two, three, four and five here.  .

Not since the Salem witchcraft trials has there been a worse disgrace in the annals of Massachusetts jurisprudence:  the railroading of an innocent Malden family during the legally sanctioned insanity known as the Fells Acres child-abuse case.  Probably the apogee of the mass hysteria that gripped the U.S. beginning about 1995, the Amirault case continues to resonate – in part thanks to Martha Coakley’s inexplicable disinterest in seeing that justice was done.

You can read up on the case here and here.   Be sure to steel yourself.  And then ask yourself: how could any rational human being have possibly believed the charges were true?

And this: Why did Martha Coakley not lift a finger to free an obviously innocent man?  As Ann Coulter noted just after the primary last month, she’s “too immoral for Teddy Kennedy’s seat,” which is really saying something: (more…)

Fifth in a series.  Find parts one, two, three and four here.  And don’t miss this important update.

There’s an old saying in New England, something one utters when another person grabs your chair or bar stool and plops himself into it before you were ready to leave:  “You wouldn’t jump into my grave so fast.”

Well, hold the phone.  As everyone in the State of Massachusetts and the country knows, Ted Kennedy was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor in May 2008, and as the months went on into 2009, the prognosis was: terminal.

With the imminent vacancy of Kennedy’s seat a foregone conclusion, Martha Coakley began ramping up her campaign for his seat… as early as January 2009.

The Boston Herald first reported on this story on September 25, 2009:

Attorney General Martha Coakley has run a shadow Senate campaign for months, shelling out $126,000 from her state campaign account for expenses likely tied to her Capitol Hill bid, including $15,000 for Web site upgrades just days before Sen. Edward M. Kennedy died, records show.

The spending spree began in January but ramped up the last two weeks of August as Coakley funneled $31,000 to consultants, fund-raisers and a Web design company in preparation for her foray into the high-stakes Senate race.

(more…)

Fourth of a series.  Find parts one, two and three here.  And don’t miss this report, either.

Martha Coakley declares that terrorists are “gone from Afghanistan” and has no idea the Taliban are either terrorists or our sworn enemies.

No one ever accused Martha Coakley of having any foreign-policy experience.  After all, as a career lawyer, prosecutor, state attorney general and lifelong Democrat party hack, the “Massachusette” can’t rationally be expected to be as up on the nuances of the “war on terror” as, say, Joe Biden.

Still, her remarks during her one debate with Scott Brown on January 11 should trouble anyone who hopes that a potential successor to the warm body currently occupying the deceased Lion of the Senate’s seat would have, shall we say, a greater grasp of the geo-political situation.

First, in her own words, her foreign-policy credentials:

I have a sister who lives overseas and she’s been in England and now lives in the Middle East.  I’ve spent a lot of time on my own traveling, ‘cause I’m interested in it.  Less so as attorney general, and my responsibilities don’t take me overseas.

Unbelievable?  See for yourself:

(more…)

Third of a series.  Find parts one here and two here.

Martha Coakley is caught making false statements on financial disclosure form, does not report  $262,000 in assets.

Now this is a story that only Charles Rangel could love.  One of Coakley’s selling points among the plutocratic liberals of the greater Boston area is that she’s honest, since unlike a lot of other politicians, she doesn’t seem to have enriched herself unduly while “serving” at the public trough.  As proof, she’s offered her financial-disclosure statements.

Oops!  From the Boston Globe last November:

Coakley admits to federal filing error

Attorney General Martha Coakley, the state’s top lawyer, acknowledged yesterday that she improperly filled out a federal financial disclosure she submitted to the US Senate as part of her candidacy in the special election.

The Globe reported yesterday that Coakley was the only candidate, in disclosures due to the Senate by this week, to report that neither she nor her spouse had any reportable financial asset worth more than $1,000.

(more…)

Part one of a series.  Find parts two here and three here.

In researching the ever-intensifying Massachusetts Senate race between Democrat Martha Coakley and her Republican challenger Scott Brown, it only takes a few keystrokes to unearth her ongoing history of questionable judgment and puzzling prosecutorial decisions.  Even though the election has been effectively nationalized, with some polls showing the underdog Brown within two points or so of the colorless Coakley, she remains largely unknown outside New England.

So as a public service to the voters of the Bay State, during the run-up to the special election on Jan. 19, Big Journalism will be offering some of the Martha’s Greatest Hits, so that they can fully make up their minds whether she would make a suitable successor to the late Edward Moore Kennedy – who, as you recall, began his illustrious career by being expelled from Harvard for cheating, went on to drown Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick, and then turned to a life of drinking and debauchery, including the infamous “waitress sandwich” with soon-to-be-retired Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd, before attempting to inflict “universal health care” on the country shortly before his death last year.

You can read all about Ted here in this classic profile of the last and worst of the Kennedy brothers by the late Michael Kelly.  Be sure to read the whole thing, just to get a flavor of the kind of candidate Massachusetts voters seem to like.

Homework done?  Good.  Because Martha Coakley, the current Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and thus its top law enforcement officer, is shaping up as a worthy heir to the Lion of the Senate. (more…)