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Posts Tagged ‘Barack Obama, MSNBC,Politico, Stephen Colbert, Super PAC’

Warner Todd Huston

The Washington Post was very excited to report on Feb. 5 that President Obama has finally achieved “the edge” over Mitt Romney in a “general election matchup” poll. The Post was pleased to note Obama was “boosted by improved public confidence” and that he now led Romney by over 50%. Well, he does if you don’t poll actual voters, anyway and therein lies the major problem with the Post’s polling.

The flaw in the Post’s poll is that they seem to have polled “adults” instead of “likely voters” and this fact calls into question the claim in the headline that “Obama holds edge over Romney in general election matchup.” You see, you have to be an actual voter before your opinion in an “election matchup” much matters but the Post apparently did not make sure that its respondents were actual voters before declaring that Obama is now winning over more voters.

But the bigger problem is the fact that the Post has decided it no longer needs to include the partisan breakdown of its respondents for readers to assess. The Post did not include the percentages of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents in its polling data so there is no way to know if the poll included a fair representation of all parties or if the whole poll was weighted heavy with Democrats.

The Post has had troubling polls before. Ed Morrissey notes for instance that a WaPo poll from April of 2011 had 22% Republicans overpowered by 33% Democrats and 38% purported independents. If the Post is shorting Republican representation, no wonder the Obamessiah seems to be surging!

By excluding in reports its partisan breakdown, the Post risks having its results easily dismissed by serious readers. It makes the poll practically worthless. Of course, the problem is that the average reader won’t realize that things are askew with the polling and will accept the claims of Obama’s popularity at face value. But maybe that’s why the Post won’t include its partisan breakdown in its reports? As Morrissey says, “it’s easy to assume that the reason that the Post has ended its sample transparency is because they have something to hide.”

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Ben Shapiro

It’s becoming clearer and clearer that the Obama Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder is not just politicized and biased – it’s a hit squad for Obama’s enemies.

Remember when President Obama’s Department of Justice shut down investigation of the New Black Panther Party in the aftermath of their taped voter intimidation in 2008?  J. Christian Adams, author of the book Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department and former DOJ attorney, exposed the DOJ’s corruption in dropping the case altogether.  Or how about when the DOJ stonewalled investigations into Fast and Furious, the gunwalking operation that ended with weapons in the hands of the Mexican drug cartels – weapons used to kill American citizens?

Well, the DOJ is on the warpath again.  Not against the New Black Panthers or the Mexican drug cartels – against Rupert Murdoch.  According to Reuters, “U.S. authorities are stepping up investigations, including an FBI criminal inquiry, into possible violations by employees of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire of a U.S. law banning corrupt payments to foreign officials such as police, law enforcement and corporate sources said.”  What’s the evidence on which they’re basing the investigation?  Says Reuters, “U.S. investigators have found little to substantiate allegations of phone hacking inside the United States by Murdoch journalists, the sources added.”

So why, then, is the DOJ so intent on finding wrongdoing about Murdoch?  It couldn’t have something to do with Murdoch’s ownership of Fox News – the same network the Obama White House tried to exclude from inside administration interviews, according to papers uncovered by Judicial Watch – could it? (more…)

Ron Futrell

The media is calling the Barack Obama attack on the Catholic Church a “culture war.” Culture War. The words and graphics are everywhere. It was the ABC News headline one morning, “Candidate’s Culture War” is what the graphic said. As if this is some sort of battle between Obama and the Republican candidates. Yes, it is that, but it us much, much more.

This is also a fight much larger than “culture.” Culture is something that defines art and common belief. Culture is something that changes with the times and can actually be defined as you wish. Much of our culture today is not what it was 50, 100, or 200 years ago. What I think is culture, may not be what you think is culture. Yes, there is an “American culture, and I believe I know what it is, but I certainly don’t trust the media or this President (who would probably see me as a “bitter” American who “clings to guns and religion”) to tell me what it is.

The Constitution doesn’t work that way, certainly not the First Amendment which guarantees religious liberty and expression. I would like to think the Constitution would define our culture, but sadly that is not always the case. For the media to call this a “culture war” greatly diminishes its value, this is a battle over the First amendment of the US Constitution. Obama wants the Constitution circumvented to pander to his base, I would hope that most of us would be united with the Catholic Church in wanting it protected.

The new part of the ObamaCare law (that nobody read before they voted on it) says that churches that provide health care and insurance, must also provide contraceptives. The Catholic Church opposes contraception.

“The White House insists this achieves a balanced approach that respects women’s health care and religious liberty, but that’s not how the Republican candidates see it,” said Jake Tapper of ABC this morning. Jake, this does nothing to protect religious liberty. It tries to destroy it.

Thankfully, the presidential hopefuls joined in the fight.

“We must have a president who is willing to protect America’s First right, a right to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience. This is a violation of conscience,” said Mitt Romney

Rick Santorum says Obama has been “hostile to people of faith particularly Christians and specifically Catholics.”

Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul have also been avid opponents to Dear Leaders actions on this. Not just because they want to be seen as opponents, they all believe what he is doing in inherently wrong.

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Brad Schaeffer

A recent article by Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic entitled “Why Mitt’s Wealth Matters: It’s Policy, Not Envy” offers a meme that surely will be one line of Democrat attack against Mitt Romney should he happen to win the GOP nomination. Mr. Cohn’s article focuses on a speech that President Obama recently gave at the University of Michigan promoting his program for making college more affordable. What I found fascinating was Cohn’s argument echoing Obama’s not so subtle hint that because of Mitt Romney’s wealthy upbringing, and thus his never needing a student loan, he has no “standing,” for lack of a better term, to be targeting the student loan program for cuts as a part of his total package for reducing discretionary federal spending.

Says Cohn:

“Romney also benefited from the lottery of life – among other things, by being born into a family that could afford to provide him with the very best education at every step of the way. He seems unaware of that fact and the possibility that others, born into less fortunate circumstances, might need some of the government programs he’s promised to undermine.”

In other words, because of Romney’s wealth, he simply does not understand the needs of those who use government assistance. So what is Cohn’s argument, then? That only those who had a hardscrabble upbringing need apply for the presidency?

For a columnist who clearly is in the Democratic camp to offer such a notion is utter hypocrisy. In 2004, the “party of the little guy” offered up as their standard-bearer Senator John Kerry, who was at the time the richest man in Congress. Not only was Kerry fabulously wealthy (~$500+ million net worth), but he didn’t even earn it! He married it. Add to this Kerry’s coiffed and grinning side-kick John Edwards was a sleazy trial lawyer who amassed his own pile of tens of millions by bankrupting obstetricians using junk science, and you hardly have a representation of the 99%. So how come in 2004 the Democrats felt that immense wealth didn’t matter, yet now suddenly it is a legitimate issue? (more…)

P.J. Salvatore

- Branded Twitter pages are here! But only, apparently, if you’re a progressive news outlet. Seriously, Al Jazeera? What’s next, RT/ Russia Today / Komrade Kommuniqué? Rhetorical question.

- Real headline: Barack Obama controls media more than presidential predecessors.

President Obama grants many more media interviews than his predecessors, but holds far fewer impromptu question-and-answer sessions, according to data compiled by a professor who studies presidential interactions with the press.

By doing so, Mr. Obama and his administration have more control over who asks questions and where they are answered …

… However, Mr. Obama has comparatively avoided Q.&A.s with scrums of reporters, according to Ms. Kumar, answering questions at 94 photo opportunities and other such sessions in his first three years. Mr. Bush had spoken at 307 such sessions after three years in office, and Mr. Clinton, 493.

Of course. Interviewers submit questions to the President and his team, who then choose what they want to answer. If the questions go unvetted, they don’t get asked. This is why he avoids those impromptu Q and As — and interesting how his predecessors welcomed them.

- Compare the above to this from Newsbusters: Obama’s Been Skipping the White House Press Corps for Network and Social Media Softballs.

- Interesting: NYT reporter asks for readers’s help in identifying bomb.

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Jeffrey Scott Shapiro

Two weeks ago Big Government reported that Facebook and Politico created a new partnership to reveal users’ public private messages–if and when they relate to their feelings about a political candidate–will be fed through a ‘sentiment analysis tool’ and potentially reported on Politico.

Conservatives should understandably have concerns about Politico’s upcoming reporting since most Facebook users are young and supportive of Barack Obama–in fact Facebook’s own CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been rumored to be an Obama fan, too.

But now there’s new criticism coming from the left: Christopher Calabrese of the The American Civil Liberties Union’s  (ACLU) Legislative Office posted a blog on January 13th stressing their concerns:

Most troubling is Facebook’s willingness to search and collect users’ private political preferences and thoughts, preferences they may have shared only with their closest friend in a private email.

This raises at least three concerns. The first is that many users may not want to be part of any “sentiment analysis” or poll. For example, they may be a firm supporter of Mitt Romney but find Ron Paul’s ideas interesting. Are they now going to feel hesitant to talk about Paul’s ideas out of awareness that it might be registered as support or boost a candidate they don’t like? Second, we don’t see any mention of user consent anywhere in Facebook’s announcement. How has Facebook decided that users agreed that their personal communications can and should be used in this way?

Finally, what other uses might this information be put to in the future? Will it be used to serve users ads from politicians or manipulate voting preferences in some way? We can see the marketing materials from Facebook now: “Candidates, serve ads to secret supporters! No one knows about their preferences except their closest friends and us.”

The real question here is what are Facebook’s motives? In the wake of its first public offering of an IPO at $5 billion, analysts are saying that the social utility is worth a total of $85 to $100 billion–the biggest Silicon Valley IPO ever. Last year Facebook earned a revenue of $3.71 billion up 88 percent from 2010.

With such stunning financial success, why is such an invasive measure necessary?

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Dana Loesch

After President Obama was caught playing tarmac theatrics with Gov. Jan Brewer, everyone accused Brewer of being a racist. (Though, if we’re playing identify politics, I’m not sure how a man storming off a plane with a thunderous expression, stomping over to a woman only to read her the riot act as she stands there with a handwritten note welcoming him to her state isn’t viewed as sexist.) The media would like for you to believe that Obama never thrust his finger in another’s face.

Remember when Obama wagged his finger in Gov. Bobby Jindal’s face? Neither does the media.

Apparently, the Brewer incident wasn’t the first time Obama attempted to create “Tarmac Theater” for the benefit of the watchful press corps. Jindal said the President’s outburst, pictured above, was “staged.”

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Joel B. Pollak

Yesterday, Juan Williams of Fox News doubled down on his accusation that Republican presidential candidates are using “racial code words.”

Today, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic has followed suit with an article rehashing the tired allegation that Republicans are using so-called “dog whistle” tactics–“the use of coded, ambiguous language to appeal to the prejudices of certain subsets of voters”–i.e. white voters (Democrats’ use of race to appeal to the prejudices and fears of black voters is rarely subject to scrutiny.)

Jeffrey Goldberg (Photo: Bloomberg News)

Goldberg says that the Obama’s Republican opponents have alleged the following (original links, including one to Media Matters–itself the subject of serious charges of antisemitism–included):

Black people have lost the desire to perform a day’s work. Black people rely on food stamps provided to them by white taxpayers. Black people, including Barack and Michelle Obama, believe that the U.S. owes them something because they are black. Black children should work as janitors in their high schools as a way to keep them from becoming pimps. And the pathologies afflicting black Americans are caused partly by the Democratic Party, which has created in them a dependency on government not dissimilar to the forced dependency of slaves on their owners.

I’ll go even further, and admit that I personally heard a presidential candidate give a speech–in a church, no less–in which he blasted the black community, and black men in particular, for the phenomenon of single-parent households; who noted that black children with absent fathers have a greater chance of becoming criminals; who scolded black parents, “don’t just sit in the house and watch ‘Sports Center’ all weekend long”; and who told blacks to “read a book once in awhile.”

That candidate was Barack Obama.

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Charles C. Johnson

Today, The New York Times released a chart purporting to compare what the candidates made and gave away in 2010.

This is a bit like comparing apples to oranges, because the New York Times, like a lot of liberals, compares Romney’s income from capital gains (which were already taxed as income) to Obama’s salary as president (which is taxed as salary), but let’s go with it anyways.

Why only 2010? Because it would reveal how generous Romney is to include more years.

“[F]ew people know which is how incredibly generous [Romney] and his wife and his family have been to people in need. This is not sort of a bombshell surprise. I think it falls in the category of boring, nice surprise,” Scott Helman, co-author of The Real Romney.

But revealing more data would also show how stingy the Obamas were.

In 2011 alone, Romney gave nearly 20% of his income to charity. Barack Obama and his wife Michelle gave only $10,772 of the $1.2 million they earned from 2000 to 2004 to charities, less than one percent. In 2005 and 2006, the Obamas increased their giving to 5% of their $2.6 million income.  Biden’s 2006 tax returns showed the he gave just $380 to charity out of an adjusted income of $248,459, or roughly .15%.

Just as conservatives give more than liberals, so too do conservative politicians give more often than liberal ones. Bill Clinton famously got tax deductions in the ’80s for donating used underwear. In 1997, Vice President Al Gore gave just $353 in charitable donations, or roughly .0017% of his income to charity. Multimillionaire John Kerry’s 1995 tax returns showed he gave no money to charities at all. (more…)

P.J. Salvatore

The protest endorsed by progressive media. From Huffington Post San Francisco:

Have you noticed that MSM started distancing itself from the occupy protests?

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Joel B. Pollak

Marketplace, the daily business program produced by American Public Media (APM) and broadcast by public radio stations throughout the country, has been doing its best lately to support the decrepit Occupy Wall Street movement. While odd, perhaps, for a program ostensibly focused on financial news, the obsession with promoting Occupy has become a feature of public radio in general, and Marketplace is no exception to that rule.

Yesterday, for example, Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal hosted an organizer from Occupy and a leader of the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt to explore “common ground” and connections between the two groups. The intent was clearly to flatter Occupy by association with the success and idealism of the Tahrir Square revolution–although the fact that Islamist parties swept the vote in Egypt’s recent elections was not mentioned in the segment.

Curiously, the political advice offered by the Tahrir Square activist at times spoke more to the concerns of the Tea Party about big government, and inadvertently punctured some of the socialist pretensions of Occupy: “[You should] engage those 1 percent and you tell them: ‘Take bureaucracy and take away corruption. We could do way much better.’”

Nonetheless, in a related story by Ryssdal and Mitchell Hartman from Jan. 24, Marketplace sought to find the inspiration for the Occupy Wall Street protests in the Arab Spring: “Young people feeling squeezed, demanding better opportunities and a fair deal. The issues sound similar — from Maged in Cairo, to Max and Brian in Portland.”

At one point, Hartman even compared the protests against former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak to the protests against Wisconsin’s new Republican governor, Scott Walker, last spring–an inflammatory comparison favored by public sector unions in their attempt to demonize Walker and his collective bargaining reforms. Hartman suggests that the symbolism of the Wisconsin protests may have inspired the Occupy demonstrations–without noting the financial and institutional role played by public sector unions in both.

While casting the Occupy movement in a heroic mold, Marketplace often attempts to downplay and debunk the Tea Party and its concerns.

On Jan. 23, for example, the show featured a story entitled, “Why Saul Alinsky Matters in the 2012 Election.” Instead of shedding light on who Alinsky was, what he believed, and why he is important to understanding President Barack Obama and the organized left, Ryssdal and interviewee Bob Bruno from the University of Illinois attempted to obscure the true nature of Alinsky and his ideas: (more…)

Meredith Dake

Apparently, not much.


The pressing issues of the day according to NBC: Terri Schiavo, sugar subsidies, the Everglades Project, the over-asked “Will you run as a 3rd party candidate?” question, English as the official language, and the very pressing issue of deciding what to do when Fidel Castro dies. There were a few moments that allowed for internal bickering and foreign policy. Most of the time, the candidates were fighting the moderators to get in policy talking points so that the American people might be slightly more informed of what the candidates actually plan to do should they be elected President. (more…)

Ron Futrell

Let’s call it what it is now, folks. The biggest SuperPAC out there right now is the one working overtime to destroy any Republican wh0 might be so bold as want to take on the media’s Dear Leader in the White House.

Stephen Colbert won’t be parodying this SuperPAC, because he can’t make fun of his friends, but there is plenty of material out there he could use.

The Activist Old Media has two very specific goals in mind here, 1) keep the “horse-race” going as long as possible because it will help ratings and revenue, 2) work to damage whomever becomes the GOP winner. Oh, they call it good journalism, or whatever line they want to use, but the facts show otherwise. They have never been this aggressive towards Democrat candidates. The only time they go after a Democrat Presidential candidate to this degree is when he has been so damaged by his own actions that the candidate is finished and they have no other choice, then they pile on to make it look like they’re doing their job.  See: John Edwards (hey, didn’t the National Enquirer break those stories?)

Take your pick, Mitt or Newt, the media has the long knives out. Mitt Romney has already been called by some in the media, “one of the wealthiest candidates to ever run for President,” like that is some sort of negative. Let’s see here, I believe Jon Carry (intentional mis-spelling, click the link to remember why) was rather wealthy, in fact, he has four times as much money as Romney and his wealth was not an issue in 2004. Of course, Romney made his money on his own (he donated his inheritance to charity) and Kerry married his billion dollar fortune. To the media, Romney is the bad guy here, Kerry the good guy,  and he could not be put on the spot for finding a Heinz flavored Sugar Mama.

Romney has been ripped for donating to his church. 10% of his income, possibly more. Kerry donated 0 dollars to charity on his 2003 tax returns. I guess when you are the media and you are running the Obama SuperPAC you can rip candidates for donating to charity.

Romney has been ripped for paying the required 15% income tax on capital gains, Kerry paid 12%. I don’t recall that being an issue in 2004. BTW, don’t give me this garbage that it matters now because the media says it’s supposed to matter now, they would change the landscape of “what matters now” to whatever they want to fit their needs. They will pull out the class-envy card whenever it needs to be played, and since their candidate is using in now, they will belly-up to the table and unload the entire deck.

With Romney, the media has already stated that his religion will be a major issue and at the same time, Obama’s Media SuperPAC has virtually declared Reverend Wright off-limits. No, they have not vetted this issue already. Of course, now they will say this is old news and they covered it in ‘08, when they did not. NBC has yet to air audio of Reverend Wright—I saw them air video briefly once when they referred to some sort of controversy, but the audio is still too damaging to Dear Leader to have NBC put it on air.

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Dr. Jason B. Whitman

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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Ron Futrell

I think we should have Republican debates every day. Every day.

We should demand the candidates meet in one place every 24 hours and just pound each other early and often. If they can’t make it, they attack each other on Skype. Now, two debates a day might be a little much, but I’m open to that option as well, just as long as it helps the media destroy the carcass of the last Republican standing.

I have some thoughts on how this could be done and some of the questions that could be asked. I have been inspired by George Stephanopoulos and his questions in New Hampshire. Specifically, his brilliant question to Mitt Romney on whether states should be allowed to ban contraceptives. I was so happy to hear that question because it’s so relevant to us here in Nevada. I hope during the next debate somebody asks about prostitution and contraceptives. Nevada holds its caucus Feb 4th and there are certain counties in this state where they are just itching to get an answer to that burning question.

There are loads of great questions that could be asked in these new Daily Debates.
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P.J. Salvatore

The ever-objective LA Times cited left-wing propaganda site Media Matters in a piece wherein the likeness of Michelle Obama as Marie Antoinette was deemed “racist®.

The caricature of Obama as a profligate queen relies on the racist stereotype of an “uppity Negro,” which emerged among slave masters in an earlier American era.

You can’t be serious. Progressives’s incessant use of the race card to defame and libel Americans into silence as a bully tactic is what truly invokes racist comparisons. The modern day Bull Connor, ready to unleash the attack dogs on anyone who dares to disagree with the administration. Want to control your own health care? Racist®! Want a balanced budget amendment? Racist®! Believe that congress should spend within its means? Racist®! Point out statistics that more Americans than ever are on food stamps? Racist®!

Michelle Obama has received intense criticism for the flagrant way in which she spends taxpayer money and the tone-deafness she demonstrates. Two-thousand dollar dresses, wearing sneakers that cost the equivalent of three months mortgage payments while at a homeless shelter, insisting on million-dollar Hawaiian vacations while your husband simultaneously lectures Americans about scaling back, yes, the comparison to Antoinette is apropos. Those who call it racist® demonstrate the failings of public education. Antoinette was considered extravagant while France starved. Along the line of progressive thinking, heaven forbid Barack Obama ever get his likeness on Mount Rushmore for fear of defeated liberals crying out “uppity!”

The racist image appeared Tuesday on the right-wing blog Gateway Pundit; the slur was later called out by Media Matters for America.

What blows my mind about this is that the LA Times quoted propaganda site Media Matters as an authority on this. Where were the partisan hacks at the LA Times when Media Matters was paid by SEIU to attack black conservatives in the wake of the Kenneth Gladney beating? If we’re going to discuss racism, there’s a cover story right there.

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Ron Futrell

The Shell Game is in full swing.

Watch closely; the hands move quickly and it takes a sharp mind, quick eyes and cat-like instincts to keep up with all the movement going on right in front of us.

Much has been written and will still be written about the way the media is covering the Republican candidates, but while that is going on, Barack Obama is destroying the US military and trashing our Constitution … and who knows what else?

The media has eyes wide shut and can only tell us Mitt Romney is unacceptable and Rick Santorum is un-electable. But skip that for now; there are actually much larger issues.

While the world gets more dangerous under his watch, Obama is cutting defense spending by half a trillion dollars over the next 10 years. Oh, the Activist Old Media may give it a passing mention and may even show Obama’s soundbites while saying he is acting in ours, and the worlds, best interest, but if you blink you will miss where the shell is hidden. Obama is now officially more dangerous than Jimmy Carter, and Carter gave us the first “Arab Spring.” (more…)

Accuracy in Media

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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P.J. Salvatore

On Sunday’s broadcast of NBC Nightly News, Andrea Mitchell hosted a segment on the upcoming GOP caucus in Iowa. Referring to the state itself, she stated:

The rap on Iowa? It doesn’t represent the rest of the country. Too white, too evangelical, too rural.

Yet literally the sentence before, she mentioned that Iowa “established that Barack Obama could attract white voters” in 2008.

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Joel B. Pollak

In an op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times, Aaron David Miller admits the obvious: “Unlike his two predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Obama isn’t in love with the idea of Israel.”

But Miller doesn’t address Barack Obama’s immersion in the anti-Israel, antisemitic views of his pastor and mentor, Jeremiah Wright, in whose Trinity United Church of Christ Obama worshipped for two decades.

Nor does Miller note Obama’s friendship with former Palestine Liberation Organization advisor Rashid Khalidi, whose anti-Israel views are a matter of public record, or Obama’s eager association with Arab causes early in his political career.

The Obamas with Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, 1998 (Source: Electronic Intifada)

Instead, Miller cites Obama’s “logical,” “intellectual” and “moral” approach to Israel–as opposed to the “emotional” approach of previous occupants of the White House, whose views were allegedly informed by simplistic faith and fables:

Obama’s views came from another place: his own logic, the university environment in which he developed intellectually and his own moral sensibilities. And according to this view, the Arab-Israeli dispute isn’t some kind of morality play that pits the forces of good against the forces of darkness. Instead, it’s a more complex tale, not of heroes and villains but of a conflict between two rights and two just causes. It’s also a conflict that is vital to American interests. And those interests are being threatened by the divide between those who want a solution and are serious about moving toward one, and those who aren’t serious about finding a solution and throw up obstacles. After three years, the president has clearly placed the Israelis in the latter category and the Palestinians in the former.

Miller adds that the sour relationship between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a result of Obama’s allegedly “intellectual” approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He seems to forget that it was Netanyahu who famously gave Obama an “intellectual” lesson in the history of the conflict and Israel’s borders in May 2011:


The truth is that Obama’s antipathy towards Israel is rooted in a passionate, radical left-wing ideology that thrives in both the academic cloisters and the radical pulpits that gave Obama his political inspiration and foundation. And the Los Angeles Times knows it, for it is in possession of a key piece of historical evidence: the “Rashid Khalidi tape.” (more…)