There was a time, probably before you were born, that the NBC News brand was the standard bearer for quality news. Granted, that bar was always low, but there was a time when they cleared it with ease. Now they have to jump up to reach it … they usually miss.

Two weeks ago news came down that MSNBC had hired Meghan McCain, daughter of Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Daily Beast “columnist,” as a contributor. That means she would now be paid to give her opinion on TV, an opinion no thinking human being has ever sought out even when offered for free online.

It was a move so puzzling that the liberal website Gawker.com titled their piece on it “‘Lean Stupid’: MSNBC Hired Meghan McCain.” In her first appearance on the payroll, McCain said “she “bets [her] career” that Newt Gingrich won’t win the GOP nomination.” Gawker added, “What career?”

To that point her “career” had consisted of saying and Tweeting embarrassing things, complaining when people pointed them out, and authoring a book so poorly written and painful to read as to make “Everyone Poops” read like Hemingway. Now she’s MSNBC’s insight offerer on Republican politics, bring to that position all the wisdom being her father’s daughter and an “art history” degree has to offer … none.

But NBC wasn’t done building up their stable of members of the “Lucky Sperm Club,” people whose greatest (or only real) accomplishment is to be born to the right people.

It used to be mostly confined to Hollywood, when children of famous parents would miraculously find themselves cast on TV shows and movies regardless of talent because someone made a phone call or a producer saw an opportunity to kiss the right butt. No more.

As network “news” bleeds from objective reporting to an agenda-driven extension of corporate entertainment divisions, more and more “golden children” find themselves with positions that were once, not so long ago, reserved for those who earned them.

Enter Chelsea Clinton.

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I can hear them right now in newsrooms  across the country—

“Are you sure we need to cover this story about a possible fraudulent solar power company?”

“Won’t we look bad when we promote ‘Green Week?’”

“Should we show that video of the Obama at the Solyndra plant, or just act like we lost that file video?”

“But we have been saying for years that Green Jobs will save our future and our economy, how do we walk this back?”

“Won’t this make the Stimulus look bad?”

“If we just ignore it, it’ll go away, besides, we have the Michael Jackson doctor story to lead with!”

“How much did Obama know and when did he know it?” Wait, forget that last question, they won’t be asking that.

These questions might not be asked out loud at meetings, but they don’t have to be.

Don’t worry my media friends, I know how you roll, I’ve been in those meetings, you are hoping the public is much more stupid than they are (they are not) and hoping that they are not paying attention (and they are.) Some of those viewers actually have the internet and they know how to use it. They might even (gasp) listen to Evil Talk Radio.

The Obama connection with Solyndra is an easy one to make. Perhaps that’s why we’re not seeing the story. Protect Dear Leader.

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When George W. Bush was president, one thing we didn’t have to worry about was the media doing their jobs in the watchdog department. Frequently the press went overboard in this regard, but when it comes to protecting democracy, an over-zealous media is always preferable to a lapdog media so enamored with those in power that they lose their curiosity, skepticism and willingness to dig or ask questions for fear of what they might find.

In the case of the brewing Solyndra scandal, this is apparently what happened. All the signs, warnings, and red flags any reporter or news outlet worth his or her salt could possibly ask for were … everywhere.

A quick Lexus Nexis search informs us that the story of the Solyndra collapse was being told a year prior to the company filing bankruptcy in both local and trade media. Why the mainstream media, the same clowns who had time to pore through Sarah Palin’s emails and put nearly a dozen fact-checkers on her book, didn’t find any of this interesting is a breathtaking dereliction of duty.

On March 29, 2009, President Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced a $535 million taxpayer loan to Solynda.

On September 6, 2011, Solyndra filed for bankruptcy.

Below is a quick snapshot of what was known by anyone paying attention in-between the federal loan and the bankruptcy. As you’ll see, these were not difficult dots to connect unless you were in “see no negatives about Obama” mode.

April 3, 2010 – San Francisco Chronicle: “Solyndra’s finances raise IPO questions”

Auditors noted Solyndra’s sizable losses – $518.7 million in the past three years – and its accumulated deficit of $557.7 million.  Solyndra, the auditors wrote, “has suffered recurring losses from operations[.]

[There's] doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”

June 21, 2010 – Contra Costa Times (California): “Solyndra’s IPO cancellation seen by some as red flag for solar industry”

Why are investors nervous about Solyndra? The company has lost $558 million since its inception  …

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Every now and again I like to play “name that party.” This is the fun parlor game where you read a story about a politician that has either been indicted, arrested, or imprisoned and try to guess by the story from which party he hails. If you read the story and no political party affiliation is mentioned, 99 out of 100 times you can be sure that the troubled pol is a Democrat. However, if it is a Republican that is going to jail or to court his party usually makes the first paragraph if not the headline itself.

Well, today we have yet another edition of “name that party” going on in the Old Line State where Prince George’s County Executive Jack B. Johnson and his wife Leslie have been arrested and charged with tampering with a witness in connection with a criminal offense and destruction of evidence in a federal investigation. Johnson is a Democrat, not that the news helps you learn that little factoid.

As this is breaking news, the story has popped up on the AP, the Washington Post, Reuters, and several other sources. The stories are filled with all sorts of details about the case, what the charges are, the particulars of the crime, the names and offices of those accused, their ages, where they live… all these things fill the various stories that announce the arrest. But one tiny little detail seems to have escaped many of the news stories: the fact that Johnson is a Democrat. It seems like they just plum forgot to mention his political party.

You are shocked, I am sure.

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In case anyone was wondering, or cares: I am not a Republican nor a Democrat. I don’t like either party. Never have. I am an independent.

I don’t like the Democrats because they are statists. They are for big government and more taxes. They are also for mob rule. They want a democratic society, not a Republic. That is a disastrous recipe. Big government always leads to tyranny, democracy lacks the limited government structure of a Republic, which makes it harder for corruption to prevail. Democrats seem to love corruption. They wallow in it like pigs in their own dung. That’s why they seek to undermine our limited-government constitution at every point. You can go back to Tammany Hall right up to today to see their disregard for the rule of law. Rangel and Waters were merely caught. They are far from outliers.

I dislike the Republicans because they don’t practice what they preach. They’re supposed to be the party of smaller government and lower taxes. But they are just like ’70s Democrats now. Aside from the Bush tax cuts, they’ve expanded government and spending to obscene levels. When the Democrats came into power they just made the Republicans look conservative by contrast.

Less terrible is still terrible. The Republicans share the blame for our debt. But what I really dislike about Republicans is how elitist they are. They cherry pick their primary candidates before the people can choose. They ram their picks through. The public is given a token choice, but the party rigs the results. A great example was the primary race this week. Delaware says it all. (more…)

Ann Coulter delves into another Democrat Media Complex cover-up in her entertaining column:

In the greatest party-affiliation cover-up since the media tried to portray Gary Condit as a Republican, the media are refusing to mention the party affiliation of the thieving government officials in Bell, Calif.

There have been hundreds of news stories about Bell city officials’ jaw-dropping salaries. In this poor city on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where the per capita annual income is $24,800 a year, the city manager, Robert Rizzo, had a salary of $787,637.

That’s about twice what the president of the United States makes. (To be fair, Rizzo was doing a better job.)

Rizzo was the highest-paid government employee in the entire country, not counting Maxine Waters’ husband — pending further revelations. With benefits, his total annual compensation, according to the Los Angeles Times, came to $1.5 million a year. (more…)

There’s a lot of buzz on the Internet about what has been called the JournoList. This was a private e-mail list maintained by Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein of about 400 journalists, bloggers, and academics who may have colluded in aiding the election of Mr. Obama. Mr. Breitbart is the king of the alternative media and created his “Big” sites to report what was being unreported by the mainstream media. Big Journalism and Big Government are two Breitbart sites that have uncovered scoops that took weeks for the mainstream media to report. The Acorn scandal would never have come to light without this exposure. On May 10, Brad Thor posted on Big Government the capture of Taliban leader Mullah Omar in Pakistan, yet to date we haven’t heard a ripple in the mainstream media.

Mr. Breitbart offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who could provide the complete Journolist e-mail sessions and while no one has claimed that reward yet, Tucker Carlson, the editor of the DailyCaller.com, has released copies of some of the e-mail correspondence. These have been reported on the “Big” sites and Fox News. What they reveal is very disturbing to those who still naively believe that the Fourth Estate is incorruptible. Uncovered is an egregious conspiracy to slant the news for an ideological motive rather than journalistic integrity.

The mostly white, liberal, leftist group correspondence suggested ways to cover the 2008 presidential campaign that would benefit Mr. Obama and vilify the McCain/Palin team. Of course, this media bias is not news to anyone on the right, but for the first time there is concrete proof that Mr. Obama was the choice of the mainstream media, which aided and abetted his campaign. (more…)

Charlie Rangel (D, Tammany Hall), under a long-gathering ethical storm, knows the game is just about over:

It doesn’t even sound like MSNBC, asking these dumb questions.

We’ll miss Cholly, the owner of one of the great Manhattan accents, now almost extinct. But as long as we’re on the subject of how Charlie got his job in the first place… (more…)

In December 2008, a few days after Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was arrested, I discovered this photograph in a newsletter published by the State of Illinois on November 12 celebrating the election of Barack Obama:

The photo was posted along with an article discussing the selection process for Obama’s replacement in the Senate. The caption to the photo read simply:

Governor Blagojevich confers with now President-elect Barack Obama

Within hours after we published the photo on Verum Serum, and after it was picked up by Hot Air and ultimately the Drudge Report (along with other blogs), the newsletter disappeared from the State of Illinois web site. Fortunately we were smart enough to save a copy.

The question of course is this: when did this meeting take place and what exactly were Blagojevich and the President-elect “conferring” about? (more…)

According to an LA Weekly investigation, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa “has very quietly accepted — and even angled for — free tickets to as many as 80 pricey events, then failed to report all but one of them, as well as failed to keep records of his actions or the sources of this largesse.”

From an article published today:

It is not known who gave him the tickets, or the precise number of these events Villaraigosa actually attended, although it is known that he frequently did show up. The 80 events, which appear on the mayor’s private official schedule, were recently sent by Villaraigosa to the Ethics Commission amid an outcry from the public over his freebies. The Weekly obtained a copy of the list. Click here to see the Weekly’s exclusive ticket-price values of Mayor Villaraigosa’s 80 freebies.

According to L.A. Weekly’s calculations, Villaraigosa has taken tickets worth $50,000, and perhaps as much as $100,000 — a staggering amount for an American politician at any level, and more than he could cover with his $223,000 salary and extensive family obligations.

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When CBS 2 News producer Ed Marshall interviewed Republican Senatorial candidate Mark Kirk on May 3, 2010, he revealed his bias in the race that pits Kirk against Democrat Alexi Giannoulias, Illinois Secretary of the Treasury, whose family bank, Broadway Bank, recently went bust.

WLS radio in Chicago noted the exchange between Marshall and Kirk and thought it odd. First, here’s a transcript of Marshall’s comment to Kirk that caught WLS’s attention:

Marshall: “Channel 2’s made a decision. We’re really not going to cover the Senate race if it consistently, only in your terms, is about Broadway Bank. The bank’s been taken over by the government, Alexi’s been pilloried. Tell me: what is your campaign going forward? What are the issues that you are going to tell the voters why they should vote for you?”

Now listen to the WLS’s on-air comments about Marshall’s question here, as a Windy City media mini-fire storm broke out between the two news outlets. (more…)

Guillermo Fariñas lies in a bed in Santa Clara, Cuba, ready to die. Six weeks ago, Cuban political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo died while on hunger strike in protest of the torture he had endured for seven years and in protest of the Cuban government’s treatment of all of its prisoners.Since his death, Fariñas has refused food in solidarity with Zapata.

Like Zapata, Fariñas is prepared to die so that the suffering of people inside Cuba exacts a heavy price on the Castro regime’s international reputation.

These photographs, published here for the first time, were taken by an independent journalist in Cuba four days ago.

Guillermo Fariñas is a journalist and a doctor of psychology. Like his father, Fariñas was a soldier of the Cuban revolution. He fought in Angola and received military education in Moscow. Later, he was elected General Secretary of Healthcare Union Workers. Fariñas was jailed in 1995 for speaking out about the corruption of Cuban healthcare. As they do with all such dissidents, the Cuban government labeled him a “mercenary” and a “CIA agent.” (more…)

If you want to know what “progressive” policies will do to America in the long run, look no farther than the president’s home state. According to the MSM narrative, the economic disaster in Illinois is Rod Blagojevich’s fault. That’s true to some extent, but there’s much more to the story than the incompetence of one man. Despite the recession, there is no good reason that Illinois should be bleeding jobs and that its state budget should be on life support.

The Prairie State – my state – sits atop the transportation crossroads of America, has a rich, diversified economic base and a multi-talented workforce. Less than a decade ago, the state had money in the bank, unemployment was low and the outlook was bright. Illinois even managed to shrug off the mini-recession that followed 9-11 with barely a pause. Then, in 2003, Democrats took over complete control of state government, brimming with progressive policies that – cross their hearts and hope to die – wouldn’t hurt the state’s budget or damage its economy one little bit. Happy days, the bedazzled citizens of Illinois were told, were here again.

Seven years later, the Illinois’ economy is lies in smoldering ruins thanks to the progressive policies foisted upon its citizens by a cabal of Democrats that included then-state senator Barack H. Obama. Illinois ranks forty eighth in the nation in job loss, with over 200,000 jobs lost in 2009 alone and unemployment over eleven per cent. Our leading exports used to be corn and soybeans. Today, our number one export is college graduates, because young adults can’t find jobs in the state that gave them their education. In 2000, Illinois debt basically matched revenues. Now, the state’s total debt totals over $100 billion, almost four times annual revenue. (more…)

The Better Government Association, a busy Chicago-based watchdog group that has its work cut out for it, recently released its “Hall of Shame” report that details the nearly 150 county officials who have gone to jail for corruption in Barack Obama’s Cook County. And that doesn’t even include the more than one hundred Chicago officials who have also gone to jail over the last few decades.

Because of the high level of corruption and the large and ever-growing roster of jailed county officials, in its press release, the BGA bitingly asks, “[I]s it any surprise this multi-billion dollar labyrinth of governmental entities is referred to disparagingly as ‘Crook County?’”

The scams took place over the past four decades in the courts; the offices of the Assessor, Sheriff and Treasurer; and the President’s Office of Employment and Training. They involve bribes, payoffs, rip-offs, padded contracts, ghost payrollers and the wholesale subversion of the judicial system. The perpetrators include elected officials at the highest and lowest levels of city, county and state government; judges, lawyers and lobbyists.

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In their February 9 column on BustedHalo.com, “Tricks Are For Kids,”  conservative Catholic writers Dawn Eden and William Doino, Jr. joined the herd of pious finger-waggers who have taken to the high ledges to point at James O’Keefe, upon his recent arrest in New Orleans.

In an interview with Matt C. Abbott of RenewAmerica.com, Ms. Eden blasts the work of O’Keefe, Hannah Giles, and Lila Rose of Live Action Films (O’Keefe’s partner in the Planned Parenthood investigations):

We noted that Alinsky’s tactics ran directly counter to St. Paul’s dictum that we cannot do evil that good may come. Live Action’s work, like O’Keefe’s, uses the means of lying and deception in order to accomplish a good, which in their case is pointing out the lying and deception of Planned Parenthood.

About the ACORN investigation, she continues:

Was it really necessary to have an undergrad disguised as a scantily clad prostitute to expose the organization?

Well, it worked, didn’t it? With an enveloping sigh of disdain, Eden and Doino write: (more…)

Chicago Tribune reporter John Kass is an old school journalist. He’s one among a cadre of Windy City reporters, most from the Sun Times and the Tribune, who routinely expose the hooligans and shenanigans of the Chicago Political Machine.

Kass says the national MSM ignored the political environment that gave birth to Barack Obama.

While Kass calls Obama “a Chicago political guy,” he knows the Machine is multi-layered. While the hub is Chicago, spokes extend throughout Cook County, and reach deep inside the state capital at Springfield.

Because the MSM ignored the Machine from which Obama emerged, the electorate didn’t realize that voting for Obama meant endorsing politics the Chicago way. Consequently, those outside Illinois knew little about the Machine, how it cleans up its messes, and how the clean-ups can impact individual lives. For example: (more…)

A major provision of the “Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002″, aka McCain-Feingold, was largely dismissed by the Supreme Court on January 21, 2010. President Obama’s reaction was swift and almost comically over the top.

With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington–while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates. That’s why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less.

Uh-oh! Whenever they use the term “bipartisan” you know they’re trying to sucker us. It’s become as transparent as their disingenuous names for bills like the so called “Stimulus” which was supposed to fund “shovel ready jobs” and instead went to non-existent zip codes. Our unemployment rate went up dramatically.

But why is Obama so upset about the decision? He’s upset by unions and special interests donating large sums of money to candidates? This is the president who took $60 million from SEIU members and was visited by its head, Andy Stern, more than any other person last year. Obama’s “outrage” deserves a closer look. (more…)

This past week marked one of the strangest periods of my life.  And yes, the arrest of my friend and colleague James O’Keefe had a lot to do with it. James found himself, once again, in the middle of a raging media battle all because he wanted to shine a little light on public corruption.  Let me tell you something, he certainly rang in the New Year with this one.  As James said:

My goal is to expose corruption and lack of concern for citizens by government and other institutions…

Target: Mary Landrieu. Why: she’s been taking legal “bribes” in the form of the “Louisiana Purchase” in exchange for her vote on Sen. Harry Reid’s healthcare bill, and ignoring phone calls from her outraged constituents.  Bold, dirty, rude politics at its finest.

Putting his head down, and plowing ahead, James was off to New Orleans working on a new project.  A project that would hopefully raise questions, demand answers, and spur people to action. (more…)

Tonight on “Hannity,” James O’Keefe gave his first public interview since his arrest in New Orleans:

“It’s journalism malpractice”