The media should be destroying Joe Biden right now. There should be a countdown clock on his resignation.

The Vice-President of the United States of America said that tea party Republicans “acted like terrorists” during the recent budget and debt ceiling discussions.

Where’s the “wall to wall” stories, live shots, commentary and demand of accountability here?

Terrorists.

This administration doesn’t call terrorists, terrorists.

Biden has denied making the comments, but Politico is sticking by its story, they also say Pennsylvania Democrat Mike Doyle used the same phrase.

In this post 9/11 world it’s unthinkable that the White House would so blatantly attack its own citizens by using that phrase. Terrorists killed my son’s high school language teacher on the Flight 77 that was forced in to the Pentagon. I drive by the memorial for Barbara Edwards at least 2 or 3 times a day and there is not a time that I go by that I do not recall those horrific attacks of that day.

Personal note here to Biden: I can get creative with words, Joe, but unlike you, I am not a plagiarist. I can think of a lot of things to call you right now, and if you ever have the pleasure of meeting me, I will use them. For now, you can use your imagination. You are not worth getting into a pissing match with.

These are fellow American that Joe Biden is calling terrorists. You and me. In using that phrase towards Republicans in Congress, Biden uses it against each of us who called for Representatives who would vote for fiscal responsibility in Washington DC and not blow our money and lead to Homeland Insecurity.

Personal note to the media: Where the hell are you on this?  You patronize by your silence. I’m waiting for one of you to refer to this a just another Biden “gaffe.” Enablers. You have made careers out of trying to destroy Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin, but you will find no story here. Speak truth to power. You don’t get much more powerful than the White House. Bob Woodward, where are you?

(more…)

My memory is getting worse with time, but it’s still pretty good. Anybody out there remember what happened on Nov. 2, 2010?

I think there was an election that day and if my memory serves me well, Democrats and liberal Republicans got creamed. Bear with me for a second, I think my numbers are pretty good here, 63 House seats, six Senate seats, about a dozen governorships, and close to 700 State House seats flipped from “D” to “R.” I also seem to recall at the time that the Democrats and their activist old media worked hard to downplay and ignore the massacre because….well….because it just hurt too much to acknowledge the slaughter.

American voters sent one of their most clear messages ever.

Voices have been heard in DC over the recent debt ceiling talks, but they will not be silenced until this problem is solved Constitutionally. Government cannot solve its spending problem on its own, it must be controlled through the Constitution. Our Founders knew this, the tea party patriots know this, the media and the Democrats still don’t get it, but they are on the run right now, and they do know that.

While both sides will claim victory over the debt ceiling talks, there is no question the debate has changed. Victory never happens soon enough for those on the right side, but serious ground has been gained. A battle has been won, but the war itself is still undecided.

Elections have consequences and the progress being made right now is because of what happened Nov 2, 2010. (more…)

From Accuracy in Media’s Allie Duzett:

As Accuracy in Media has documented, The New York Times has a strong history of defending unions and union bosses. An article published on April 12, 2011, followed this Times tradition by glorifying union boss Gerald W. McEntee, leader of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The Times simultaneously used selective quotation throughout the article to denigrate Republican efforts to curb spending.

Featured in the Business section of the Times, the article, “Gerald McEntee Energized by Anti-Union Movement,” makes boss McEntee out to be a hero. This is done through word choice and careful use of phrasing throughout the article.

The word choice in the article, while subtle, definitely advances a pro-union and pro-McEntee agenda. “Public sector unions” are “under attack.” Wisconsin and Ohio laws will “cripple” the “rights” of union members, “jeopardizing” the union’s income stream and “political clout.” McEntee’s union is under “assault” in New Jersey and Florida, states attempting to “curb bargaining rights or achieve far-reaching concessions” on “health benefits and pensions.”

When the Times uses words like “attack” and “assault” to describe the way in which state governments are attempting to mitigate union influence on the economy, that word choice indicates that unions are the victim. In reality, while unions may be victims here, so also may be private sector workers, who make up a far larger percentage of overall workers in the United States: In 2010, the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that only 11.9% of American workers were unionized—leaving 88.1% of American workers un-unionized.

(more…)

Is President Obama really the Deficit-Cutter-in-Chief? After racking up massive deficits through his various Stimulus programs and facing continued losses from Obamacare, the White House is now trying to portray Obama as taking a leading role in solving the problem. Time after time, White House senior adviser David Plouffe told Sunday morning talk show hosts yesterday that Obama’s 2012 budget was already proposing ways to reduce the deficits over the next decade by $1 trillion. Surprisingly, not a single host challenged him on his math.

And the Obama administration strategy seems to be working. A new CNN poll conducted April 9-10 shows that by a 48% to 35% margin Americans think that Obama and the Democrats are more responsible than Republicans for the budget agreement to cut spending.

Mr. Plouffe asserted: “Well, first, on the 2012 budget, that would be $1 trillion of deficit reduction over the next decade and lowest level of domestic spending since Dwight Eisenhower. And he said it in the State of the Union, that was just a start.” He told this to Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace, and he repeated it almost word-for-word on NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week with Christiane Amanpour, and CNN’s State of the Union.

Yet, the assertions of bold deficit-cutting are absurd. The Congressional Budget Office just reported in late March that Obama’s newest budget plans will increase the deficits over the coming decade by $1.2 trillion, hardly the $1 trillion cut that Mr. Plouffe claims. The CBO, which has been designated by the White House as the ultimate referee on spending questions, was rather blunt in dismissing the president’s numbers, explaining that he was underestimating the expected cost-increases for existing programs as well as the price-tags of new ones.

(more…)

There was a lot of discussion in the media this week about using our soldiers as a “political football.” After we learned that a White House draft guidance targeted the pay of our service men and women as a way to take revenge on Republicans’ targeting DC Planned Parenthoods, Democrats felt the wrath of the country — and support for Obama’s Libyan offensive sank further.

Prior to the discussion about our military however, was the discussion of the billion-dollar windfall profit AARP is set to receive, a gift from the Democrats. They cared so much about the elderly during the campaign season that they decided to craft legislation that would force millions of elderly Americans off Medicare Advantage and on to MediGap (which one can purchase as a member of AARP). Paul Begala last week argued on CNN that Democrats had to cut the federal subsidy for Medicare Advantage, you know, to cut the spending, while also ironically supporting the health control law, a subsidy that trumps any figure Medicare Advantage could have ever accrued. How convenient, too, that Democrats found a way to do this and also boost the member rolls and bottom line of AARP, one of the biggest supporters of their national health care subsidy.

While Nancy Pelosi said that Republicans were going to steal old people’s meals, while Louise Slaughter said that Republicans were going to “kill women,” Democrats themselves were quietly crafting cuts that would further affect the poor and elderly:

(more…)

Of course.

Despite several ugly recent episodes and considerable movement by conservative activists to defund it, federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio survived an 11th hour deal on a spending bill to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year.

The continuation of funding for public broadcasting is one of several significant victories for Democrats regarding the policy riders in the bill still emerging 12 hours after Democratic and Republican leaders struck a deal to avert government shutdown.

(more…)

You may remember President Obama’s recent call for civil discourse this past January.  Well, it appears that the Left is still very much struggling with the #newtone online.  Unless, of course, you consider a persistent stream of steady death threats against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker a display of etiquette straight from the Emily Post Etipedia of manners.

Here’s but a small sampling from the #caring Tweeters:
(NOTE:  I prefer to view the video with music like this as accompaniment…)

Initially, I’d written a summary here of some of the details around Gov. Walker’s proposal, including some of the positive highlights, like granting employees the right to choose whether or not to contribute dues to a labor union.  But then I decided, “nahhhh….why bother?”  Agree or disagree with some, all or none of the Governor’s proposal, everyone has something to contribute to the conversation.  But death threats are NOT an acceptable part of ANY conversation.

I’d thought we’d learned that by now, after documenting the same exact behavior in January.  With all the Big-Brother Twitter monitoring the Soros flunkies are doing out there, you’d think they would have posted and condemned this by now.

So much for that #newtone.

Video h/t Joe Haas and Kim Hedum.

Barry is now a budget buster.

After being told by the media that President Obama is the new Ronald Reagan, we are now being told he is busting the budget.

“The President says the plan he’s sending to Congress today is gonna slash more than a trillion dollars from the deficit. We’ll tell you what those cuts will mean to you and your family.”

That was George Stephanopoulos on ABC Good Morning America. George left out the part that the President’s plan would be over a ten year period, but when you’re trying to create “Barry the Budget Buster,” you have to leave out little facts like the number of years needed to come up with that trillion dollar number. They just want to help Barry the Budget Buster perpetuate the myth that he is out to protect our dollars from those evil people in government who want to steal them from us.

The deception continued. George finally mentioned that the cuts would take a decade to be fully realized (presumably Obama would be out of the White House by then, unless he chooses to ignore the 22^nd amendment.) “OBAMA PROPOSES SEVERE CUTS’ was the graphic at the bottom of the screen. Severe cuts? Which adjective would ABC use to describe the Republicans budget cuts, if they are using “severe” to describe Obama’s, super-duper severe?

(more…)

And so we begin to hear some feedback from the liberal side, including direct comments from one prominent member of the “Cry Wolf” project.  On the Inside Higher Ed website Friday, founder and editor Scott Jaschik addresses Big Journalism’s Academia-Gate series in his post, “Who Is Crying Wolf?”

Some prominent liberal academics are soliciting short essays from faculty members and graduate students to document a pattern in American history of major social advances being opposed by conservatives who “cry wolf” about the impact of proposed reforms. The campaign — known as the “Cry Wolf Project” — hasn’t been officially announced. But conservative bloggers obtained some of the solicitations of essays and published them this week, along with considerable criticism.

A series of posts on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism Web site have called the program “Academia-Gate” and suggested that the effort is inappropriately political. The creators of Cry Wolf, meanwhile, say that what they are doing is awfully similar to the ways that right-leaning scholars have used academic work to advance their causes over the years.

Jaschik acquaints readers with the members of the “Cry Wolf” project coordinators and the details of the request for proposals.  He then goes on to cite from a couple of BigJournalism’s posts in the series:

One post on Big Journalism noted that those involved in the project are sympathetic to organized labor, and that many influential academics are serving on the advisory board. “This is what our higher education system has become – a publicly funded amplifier of progressive ideology,” says the post by Patrick Courrielche. “If this Cry Wolf program were just limited to a few faculty members at a limited number of universities, it would be of little concern. But the project reaches into some of the most prestigious public and private schools of higher learning in the U.S., including MIT, Yale, Harvard, USC, Columbia, Rutgers, UC Santa Barbara, University of Pennsylvania, and President Obama’s alma mater — Occidental College.”

Liberty Chick, the blogger who started calling Cry Wolf “Academia-Gate,” described her concerns this way: “What’s far more dangerous is that the ideological academic, in his capacity as a professor, actually possesses the power to control. The power to influence students’ minds, to mold the students’ way of thinking to embrace their own power-hungry desires and believe in it as ’social justice’ — this is a frightening weapon. Via union solidarity, this weapon is shared with the mobilizers, the janitors and cafeteria workers who agitate the students with various demands against the university after ideologically minded professors have indoctrinated them to hear every grievance as a call for ’social justice.’

(more…)

After a week-long series of Big Journalism articles delving into the funding, agenda and dubious academic credentials behind the now-infamous “Cry Wolf Project,” the program’s co-chair, Prof. Peter Dreier has finally emerged from his bunker at Occidental College to respond to the controversy.

After first quoting heavily from the Soros-funded talking points supplied by our pals, the Senior Fellows over at Media Matters, Scott Jaschik at InsideHigherEd.com, quotes Dreier as follows:

Dreier, one of the organizers of Cry Wolf, said in an interview Thursday that the furor over the project was unfair. “This is legitimate work,” he said, and the essays will be scrutinized for accuracy. The end result will simply be better organized resources that might be consulted by the public, op-ed writers or others. He also said that he didn’t view this effort as either replacing traditional scholarship or doing anything that conservative groups don’t already do. He added that the pattern of “the world is going to end” reactions to “progressive efforts” is a legitimate issue for scholars to raise and explore.

Why are the conservatives so critical? Said Dreier: “That’s what they are paid to do.”

Let’s savor the delicious irony of Dreier’s last statement. (more…)

Patrick Courrielche’s kickoff article exposing major university faculty and graduate students’ Cry Wolf Project is alarming. Each installment in the series has only made it more so.

CWP’s solicitation for policy briefs designed to construct politically driven narratives is a confession of academic malpractice. As Kurt Schlichter has pointed out, its participants’ intentions are unethical, insubordinate, and potentially illegal.

The CWP email shows its players to be intolerant of varying viewpoints in the pursuit of their ideological ends. The fact that they are offering colleagues and grad students money to predetermine outcomes proves their intent: to tell partisan political stories:

What are they afraid of? (more…)

ACORN’s radical allies are now attempting to rewrite history to cast the organized crime syndicate as victim instead of as the prolific victimizer that it has been ever since it was created in 1970. ACORN online campaign director Nathan Henderson-James served notice in February that a propaganda effort was about to begin.

“[T]here will be a fight over the narrative of ACORN’s demise,” he wrote to members of Townhouse, a discussion forum run by Matt Stoller, senior policy adviser to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.). The other side wants “a narrative about the corruption of popular organizations and how they are simply vehicles for the personal enrichment and power fantasies of their top staff members while pushing public policies that destroy middle America.”

Such a narrative must be fought, Henderson-James argued, because it “gives people pushing a pro-corporate agenda a way to tar progressives and even non-progressive Democrats running for office with the ACORN brush.”

The effort was already underway when Henderson-James reached out to the leftist community. After ACORN’s national board expelled ACORN founder Wade Rathke for engineering an eight-year cover-up of a million dollar embezzlement, Rathke wrote a combination political memoir/manifesto called Citizen Wealth. More recently, Seeds of Change, an institutional hagiography of ACORN by true believer John Atlas was published.

And now comes the “Cry Wolf” Project, a push to encourage academics to help spread more lies about the corrupt group. (more…)

Over at the website Minding the Campus, Prof. KC Johnson takes a look at the academic astroturf project called “Cry Wolf” that Big Journalism has been breaking all week.  The reviews are not good for Prof. Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Urban & Environmental Policy Program director at Occidental College:

A newly announced project called “Crying Wolf,” organized out of the Center on Policy Initiatives, seems blithely unconcerned with any requirements associated with academic freedom… project coordinators Peter Dreier (a distinguished professor of politics at Occidental College), Nelson Lichtenstein (a historian of 20th century U.S. history at UC Santa Barbara who directs the university’s Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy), and Donald Cohen, CPI executive director, are recruiting professors and graduate students (in “history, sociology, economics, political science, planning, public health, and public policy”) to perform “paid academic research” that can “serve in the battle with conservative ideas.”

The initiative is open about its biases: it intends to “construct a counter narrative” against what it describes as conservative opinions about taxation and regulation policy.

(more…)

The co-chair of the ‘Cry Wolf” project, Professor Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Urban & Environmental Policy Program director at Occidental College, is a sort of email buddy of mine. If by “email buddy” I mean someone who once sent me a snide one-line missive with a link to an alternative weekly paper political cartoon depicting me in a negative light.

I’ll show you that email shortly but first background on why Professor Dreier is in my life:

In late September of 2009 two weeks into the beginning of the explosive James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles ACORN video scandal, an academic study critical of media coverage of ACORN came out from Peter Dreier and Christopher Martin, professor of journalism, University of Northern Iowa, Department of Communication Studies. The study, “Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, or,What the News Got Wrong,” was billed as “[a]n independent study by two prominent academics” that purported to have “found repetition of unverified allegations and distortions was the rule in national reporting of a purported ‘voter fraud’ scandal involving the community organizing group ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) during the 2008 presidential campaign.”

Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Urban & Environmental Policy Program director at Occidental College

When I first saw the study’s press release, I naively reached out to Professor Martin to offer him and Dreier a place at our new website Big Government to act as ongoing ombudsmen of our ACORN story. We were cognizant that a left-leaning media would likely come to ACORN’s defense, so why not provide a platform for two professors claiming the media had wronged ACORN in its previous coverage of the organization to show that we were doing everything in our power to play the story fair? Recall, we proactively offered unedited transcripts and audio of O’Keefe and Giles work to show that the edited videos did not take things out of context.

After conferring with his colleague, Professor Martin declined my offer: (more…)

A fixed fight: The Influence of Labor Unions in Academe. Part One is here.

In the academic world, employees are very often public employees. This means that they are also very often union employees. At all levels. This includes everyone from janitors, to dormitory housekeepers, cafeteria workers, clerical staff, and computer techs, to even the graduate assistants and professors. While the salary gap between a cafeteria worker and a senior professor may be huge, the solidarity of the unions is a powerful magnet that creates an unbreakable bond amongst them.

Unions are fond of bashing capitalism with seething rhetoric, decrying the economic system as irredeemably corrupted by greed and racism and classism. But the ideology they themselves embrace is itself driven by the same ugly characteristics they profess to detest. Except in their case, power is the motivating force, the passion that drives them.

The burning desire for the power to control your life is the tie that binds the union service worker to the academic intellectual. It is this common fabric that connects the union janitor more closely to the ideological academic intellectual than to his working-class counterparts beyond campus.

What’s far more dangerous is that the ideological academic, in his capacity as a professor, actually possesses the power to control. The power to influence students’ minds, to mold the students’ way of thinking to embrace their own power-hungry desires and believe in it as “social justice” – this is a frightening weapon. Via union solidarity, this weapon is shared with the mobilizers, the janitors and cafeteria workers who agitate the students with various demands against the university after ideologically minded professors have indoctrinated them to hear every grievance as a call for “social justice.”

(more…)

Critical Mass, a blog devoted to what’s wrong with American academe, has weighed in on the emerging scandal we here at Big Journalism are calling “Academia-Gate” — the “Cry Wolf” request for proposals devoted to pre-empting and discrediting conservative political positions in the sheep’s clothing of disinterested academic “scholarship,” spearheaded by leftist professor Peter Dreier at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

It’s not a pretty sight:

On the one hand, there are no surprises–there has been a decades-long academic tradition, at this point, of discounting the notion that disinterested research is even possible, and of selling the idea that the proper response to this is to shape one’s scholarship self-consciously, as a means of ensuring that it assists and justifies the kinds of social justice one would like to see in the world. On the other hand, this activist line of thought has historically had only one line of defense–and that is that it is conducted with impeccable scholarly integrity, is entirely above-board vis a vis research ethics, and is unimpeachable from within the standards of professional conduct. In other words, the ethical standards that accompany interested scholarship are, in theory, terrifically strict. That’s how such scholarship can continue to call itself scholarship, and escape being dismissed as propaganda. It’s a shaky edifice, but it’s an edifice all the same, and it has succeeded. Arguably, though, the Cry Wolf project undermines that entire edifice, as it explicitly supports the arguments of those who would say that large swathes of academia are little more than publicly funded mechanisms for disseminating and producing an ideologically-driven world view.

Ya think? (more…)

The “Cry Wolf” leader Professor Peter Dreier has a clear right to solicit all the biased, agenda-driven, fraudulent “research” he desires under the First Amendment of the Constitution he and his pals have so little regard for.  But his antics may not pass muster under another set of guidelines that he – and his institution – operate under.

Occidental College, Professor Dreier’s employer, expressly promises the students, whose parents fork over a cool $55,655 a year for the privilege of attending, that they will not be subject to any political litmus test as they participate in the school’s academics between bong hits and sessions of binge drinking:

Students are entitled to an atmosphere conducive to learning and to even-handed treatment in all aspects of the teacher-student relationship. Faculty members may not refuse to enroll or teach students because of their beliefs or the possible uses to which they may put the knowledge to be gained in a course. The student should not be forced by the authority inherent in the instructional role to make particular personal choices as to political action or his or her own part in society. Evaluation of students and the award of credit must be based on academic performance professionally judged and not on matters irrelevant to that performance, whether personality, sex, race, religion, degree of political activism, or personal beliefs.  (Occidental College Faculty Handbook, p. 2)

Of course, here a professor – in his capacity as an Occidental professor while using his Occidental email account – is expressly soliciting research work to support his personal political beliefs.  Sure, he’s not technically granting or denying credit based on his students’ political views.  He’s just exercising some of the informal “authority inherent in the instructional role.”  And it’s abundantly clear – even if he doesn’t say it outright – that a student who disagrees with Professor Dreier’s politics best keep on walking. (more…)

Yesterday’s story on the “Cry Wolf” project has exposed a dangerous pretense that has been prevalent, yet well disguised, for some time in our institutions of higher learning. It’s an important post.  A small committee of professors and academic professionals, normally held in high regard, have blatantly betrayed the trust of the public and quite possibly smeared the reputations of all colleges and universities nationwide.  By soliciting “paid activists” to create research papers that are intentionally designed to silence opposing viewpoints, they have undermined the political system and manipulated the governmental policy making process.  And in the meantime, they’ve also implicated all of academia in the manufacturing of their propaganda.

It is an abuse of their power, and an abuse of the institutions they represent.  It is appalling and repellent.  Perhaps even against their employers’ rules or the industry’s ethical code. Consider it an ominous warning — this will have a dire impact on our political and economic system in the future, if we remain apathetic in the face of such a rhetorical and intellectual assault.

In fact, both the rhetoric and the intentions demonstrated in Peter Dreier’s email are a classic example of much of what is wrong with today’s educational institutions: hypocrisy, bias, recklessness, and a blatant disregard for differing beliefs and viewpoints.

As Americans, we place an enormous amount of pride in the quality of our nation’s system of higher education.  In our country, colleges and universities have long been the bastions of research, the sources to which we turn for information that is expertly developed; for data that is honestly mined, analyzed, reviewed and responsibly published by noted researchers so that individuals, business people and policy makers can make well-informed decisions.

(more…)