Keith Olbermann is making waves. Again.

The former MSNBC host has pulled out the big guns, bringing in Hollywood (and gaming) superlawyer Patricia Glaser “to ‘determine his rights’ in his five-year contract,” after his public spat with Current TV bosses, a source tells The Wrap.

Meanwhile, executives at Current TV said that relations – especially those with Current CEO Joel Hyatt – were at a breaking point after deteriorating over the past several months.

“I hope Keith is part of our future, but it’s up to Keith,” an executive with Current who declined to be identified told TheWrap. “Keith set us in the right direction and we’re on that path now … and as I’ve learned over the years, everybody is replaceable.”

Olbermann was conspicuously absent from special election coverage of the Iowa Caucuses at Current TV, where the notably cantankerous host has held the title of Chief News Officer since his abrupt departure from MSNBC last summer. After his “Countdown” program, which was migrated from MSNBC to Current TV, was pre-empted Tuesday night by the GOP primary coverage, sans Olbermann, details of a breaking point began unfolding to the public.

It initially appeared that the programming change came as a surprise to Olbermann. On Tuesday, he tweeted what implied the return of Countdown following its holiday hiatus, only to later tweet a correction, directing his 360,000+ followers to defer questions to his bosses.

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Academics have, for centuries, looked far back in time as they argued and speculated about why the Roman Empire fell, but we now have an opportunity to observe in real time the accelerating decay of that imperial gatekeeper of liberal conventional wisdom, the New York Times.

A pair of op-eds from August 27^th illustrate this sad phenomena as its writers invent a new stage in the Kübler-Ross grief scale inserted somewhere between “denial”, “anger” and eventual “acceptance”: “delusion.”

The first op-ed is by congressman and civil rights legend John Lewis, whose work in the Sixties makes it awkward to have to point out that he is entirely full of it, having morphed from an anti-establishment hero into just another establishment hack.  Sadly, he seems totally oblivious to his sad transformation over the last five decades even as he keeps milking his past in order to block any kind of critical look at the nonsense he is peddling in the 21^st Century.

His op-ed is entitled “A Poll Tax by Another Name,” which is a problem because what he is whining about – mostly laws that require voters to prove that they are who they say they are – is neither literally nor figuratively a “poll tax.”

Poll taxes are, well, taxes charged voters for the privilege of voting.  Voter ID laws, in contrast, are requirements that people identify themselves before voting.  Nope, not the same.  Not even close.

“Despite decades of progress, this year’s Republican-backed wave of voting restrictions has demonstrated that the fundamental right to vote is still subject to partisan manipulation. The most common new requirement, that citizens obtain and display unexpired government-issued photo identification before entering the voting booth, was advanced in 35 states and passed by Republican legislatures in Alabama, Minnesota, Missouri and nine other states — despite the fact that as many as 25 percent of African-Americans lack acceptable identification.”

Those GOP bastards, forcing people to prove they are who they say they are before voting in an election!  It’s almost a Robert Byrdian level of racism!

Wait, I should show more respect for this Democrat icon.  After all, Byrd was a kleagle.

Let’s leave aside the dubious notion that a quarter of all black adults lack a photo ID – which would mean, among other things, that a quarter of them can’t drive.  Or cash checks.  Or fly on an airliner.  Or get a job, not that this would be a big issue in the miserable Obama economy.

Let’s also leave aside the even more dubious (not to mention patronizing and utterly obnoxious) idea implied by Lewis that these citizens lack the basic competence to obtain such ID.  It’s interesting that hardcore conservatives have a significantly higher opinion of African-Americans’ ability to function than those liberals who loudly claim their leadership, but it isn’t surprising.  Liberalism is an ideology based upon low expectations.

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From Accuracy in Media’s Michael Watson:

On his TV show “Fareed Zakaria GPS” (transcript here) from Sunday, June 19, 2011, journalist Fareed Zakaria of CNN and Time magazine stated that “we could use the ideas of social media that were actually invented in this country to suggest a set of amendments to modernize the constitution for the 21st Century.” Zakaria praised the nation of Iceland for using Facebook and Twitter to solicit revisions to the country’s WWII-era constitution. However, in making the case that the United States should “talk about a few revisions” to the current Constitution, Zakaria undermines his own case.

Zakaria notes that although the nation of Iceland only became a republic “all the way back in 1944,” the Icelandic people “all wanted a fresh start” after the financial crisis. Zakaria claims that since the Icelandic political tradition dates to the first Althingi (parliament) in 930 AD, the 222-year history of Constitutional government in the United States should not be an obstacle to radical systemic change.

Zakaria begins his case by noting that the Constitution has been formally amended 27 times. This is not an effective argument that the Constitution needs to be changed now; rather, it is an argument that the present Constitutional order is capable of responding to challenges as grave as the abolition of slavery and the extension of the franchise to women.

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The left-wing website Talking Points Memo (known as TPM) is worried that the tea party-backed True The Vote effort in Harris County, Texas — home of the City of Houston — is going to successfully enlist Texans to join an effort to “true the vote” by battling vote fraud. Because of this fear, TPM has been trying to undermine the event with several left-slanted blog posts.

TPMs latest posting is artful for its vague accusations and spin, but it is short on any actual proof of the nefarious goals that the left-wing site is trying to ascribe to the True The Vote National Summit, coming up on March 25 and 26. Read closely TPM’s post also has the odd effect of coming to the support of vote fraud by seeming to discount the True The Vote event. Sadly, this dismissive attitude is of a piece with the left’s desire to shy people from paying attention to the massive vote fraud that they, themselves have been involved in for decades.

Typical of left-wing alarmism, TPM’s rhetoric casts suspicion on everything that True The Vote is trying to do, but never makes any actual accusations. For instance, of the addition of John Fund, Andrew Breitbart, and Hans von Spakovsky to the event program, TPM calls them “three of the biggest voter fraud alarmists in the country.” I guess from this we can assume that TPM doesn’t care about voter fraud because it is merely alarmism?

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All rally around the Civility Pole.

The latest example of supposed civility is nothing more than a “made for TV” battle cry that the media will love. Mark Udal of Colorado proposed that Congress sit in no particular political side of the aisle for the upcoming State of the Union Address.  Udal proposed this in a letter to his colleagues pointing out that there’s nothing in our founding documents saying that lawmakers must sit in separate parts of the Capitol Building during the speech.

He’s right, it’s not specifically written in the Constitution, but he must not have read Federalist Paper 10, or James Madison Rules America, by William Connelly Jr. Either will give him a good look at the Constitutional origins of partisanship.

I’ll get to that in a moment, but first, Udal knows the media will take this “ball of supposed bi-partisanship” and run with it. Democrats don’t have to appear as bi-partisan as Republicans because they have the media doing their dirty work for them every step of the way. Democrats have the luxury of knowing they can sit in their Ivory Tower of Unity and the activist old media will be there to give them cover.

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Ever since the shellacking Democrats suffered in the midterms, their strategists and donors have been meeting to discuss plans for 2012. Tuesday, the New York Times reported on the latest high profile effort by David Brock, head of Media Matters:

David Brock, a prominent Democratic political operative, says he has amassed $4 million in pledges over the last few weeks and is moving quickly to hire a staff to set up what he hopes will become a permanent liberal counterweight over the airwaves to the Republican-leaning outside groups that spent so heavily on this year’s midterm elections.

The new group, called American Bridge, will be required to publish its donors on a regular basis; however, the Times indicates that Brock is positioning his new entity in such a way that it will be able to receive anonymous money as well:

Mr. Brock appears to be positioning his new organization so that fund-raising consultants can raise money for Democratic-oriented media efforts not just through American Bridge but also via one of the nonprofit organizations Mr. Brock currently runs, Media Matters Action Network, which does not disclose its donors.

The action network, which tracks conservative politicians and advocacy organizations, is organized as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit group and is set to take on an expanded role in the 2012 elections, including potentially running television ads, according to an internal draft concept paper about American Bridge’s and Media Matter Action Network’s plans obtained by The New York Times.

The hypocrisy of this move is nothing short of stunning. Indeed, even the reliably liberal Greg Sargent at the Washington Post finds it disconcerting. Before the midterm elections, Brock’s Media Matters was churning out partisan analysis calling Karl Rove’s group a “slush fund” full of “secret donations.” Media Matters’ Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert wrote repeatedly that the press was not taking enough interest in the Chamber of Commerce story (a baseless story invented by a writer at Think Progress). And that’s truly just scratching the surface. Searching Media Matters’ for the words “Chamber of Commerce”  yields 154 results between 10/4/10  and 11/4/10. Apparently, railing against anonymous donations was a big deal at Media Matters, but that was long ago…in October.

Now David Brock is raising millions to build his own group which will operate along similar lines. He offered this defense to Greg Sargent “We do not make the rules. We must make 2012 a more equal contest than 2010.” So, like everything that Media Matters puts out, it was always about politics and never about principle. Mainstream journalists who rely on Brock’s content might want to keep that in mind.

Kool-Aid has no expiration date.

In the longer term, though, the importance of any wave election isn’t only about the sheer number of seats gained and lost, but also about when the wave hits — or, more specifically, where it falls in the economic cycles of the country. And if you look at it that way, history suggests that the expected big bang of 2010 may well end up reverberating loudly through our politics for a long time to come.

That’s because, in the years ahead, the country might well experience the kind of economic recovery that the White House had hoped would take hold in time for this year’s elections.

Perhaps the New York Times should be given credit for temporarily abandoning the “You’re all too stupid to understand how awesome he is…” meme and going with “Don’t worry, the awesome will be here soon…” nonsense. That’s difficult to do, however, because they only abandoned it for two sentences.

This isn’t a sure thing, by any means; some economists are still predicting a long period of Japanese-style stagnation. But most Washington observers seem to be betting on the kind of upturn that’s more evident to voters.

You see, the stimulus has been a spectacular success, we’re all just too stupid to realize it.

One has to give the Times credit for this: once it goes through the looking glass it commits. It’s not enough to attribute any future GOP success to a whimsical economy, past successes get the spin treatment as well. (more…)

Gawker, that pit of disgusting, published an anonymous hit piece on Christine O’Donnell today. I refuse to link to it; y’all can google and find it yourself. I’m a mean girl like that. The ‘exclusive’ – exclusive in this case meaning only Gawker was vile enough to publish, and pay for, such a thing – was a tale told by an idiot. A piggish, pitiful idiot who exposed himself for the total tool that he is; an alleged man, lacking an ounce of  chivalry or even human decency. Plus, according to him, he couldn’t even score with a drunk,  feisty-feeling broad!  Even though the gross hit piece was titled “My One Night Stand With Christine O’Donnell” there was no actual, um, “stand”. You see, apparently Christine O’Donnell is a total slut. Who is also a prude. Or something.

I won’t go into the particulars alleged by “anonymous”, who we now know is Dustin Dominiak. Particulars that sunk so low as to discuss “feminine upkeep”; apparently Dominiak prefers pre-pubescent girls. The disgusting smears aren’t even the point, really. I mean, it’s Gawker. They are, and always have been, abhorrent. There is nothing redeeming about that site at all and they should not be given any credence whatsoever.

Gawker, or as I shall now refer to them, “the site with microscopic boy bits that shall not be named”  has a record of misogyny, including the latest trend – a kind of Pornification of Conservative women.  Michelle Malkin has further chronicled their smear machine against conservative women. The larger issue is that this is symptomatic of how the left sexualizes, demeans and dehumanizes Conservative women, always. It is a perfect example of how the Left tries to paint all conservative women as either a) not real women (Pat Buchanan in drag, for example, as Palin was called) to try to take away their gender completely or b) whores (in this case a “virginal” whore, which is even more absurd)  as a way to reduce them to sexual use only.

The reaction of the Left to this latest atrocity proves it further.

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The two latest examples of Democrat ineptitude, incompetence and total math fail come to us from none other than Nancy Pelosi (the best speaker of the house EVAH)  and Joe “doll hair” Biden. First up is Nancy Pelosi with both bad math and shameless lies. As Ben Domenech points out at RedState, Pelosi claimed that Obamacare would create (or save!) 4 million jobs with 400,000 of them being created immediately. While no one else could know what was in the bill, before they passed the bill, she was somehow magically able to pull that figure out of her arse.  Why? Because it was a total lie.  In fact, the bill actually lost Americans nearly 800,000 jobs. (pdf)  Eh. Why let pesky old facts and figures get in the way of lies and damn lies?  Plus, math is hard anyway.

Telling the truth is difficult too, evidently. If you are a Democrat, at least. Remember, that whole “jobs bill” was also a total fabrication.

PROMISES, PROMISES: Jobs Bill Won’t Add Many Jobs

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s a bipartisan jobs bill that would hand President Barack Obama a badly needed political victory and placate Republicans with tax cuts at the same time. But it has a problem: It won’t create many jobs.

[snip]

”We’re skeptical that it’s going to be a big job creator,” said Bill Rys, tax counsel for the National Federation of Independent Business. ”There’s certainly nothing wrong with giving a tax break to a business that’s hired a new worker, especially in these tough times. But in terms of being an incentive to hire a lot of workers, we’re skeptical.”

Whoops! Jobs Shmobs; it’s all about the speeches, baby. If only they would spend more time explaining their outright fallacies to us rubes. That is the problem, you see. It couldn’t possibly be that everything they touch turns into massive fail.  That’s what happens when the people in charge have never actually ran a business or, you know, lived and worked in the real world. No wonder President Obama, and most of the Democrats on the campaign trail, are always talking about how they “hear stories”.  It is because they have zero real world experience of their own. I wonder if they can see November from their Ivory Towers?

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This past July, in a formal request it filed with the prosecutors of Maryland state and the city of Baltimore, a left-leaning organization known as Velvet Revolution urged prosecutors to press criminal charges against James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles for what it says was a violation of Maryland’s Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act.  But the letter also went a step further, naming Andrew Breitbart as a conspirator in masterminding the whole operation.

The accusation against Breitbart is of course patently false and baseless.  No evidence exists to even suggest such an accusation, because it simply did not happen that way.  Then again, this story’s not about Andrew Breitbart.  It’s about Velvet Revolution, the source making the claim.

Progressives are also rallying behind Velvet Revolution for another of its most recent campaigns – AmericanCrossRoadsWatch, which, to the delight of familiar folks like Karoli at Crooks and Liars, has offered a $100,000 bounty “for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Karl Rove or any principal of American Crossroads for money laundering, election rigging, or felony campaign finance violations.”  It features a WANTED poster:

Interesting, that the words “felony” and “Wanted” would be used.  Again, considering the source.

You see, while Velvet Revolution has inspired quite a flurry of excitement from its progressive partners these days, who seem to be frolicking in their apparent muckraking efforts, their glaring omission and utter hypocrisy is absolutely astonishing.  With so much dirt digging going on, one would be very hard pressed to believe that none of Velvet Revolution’s cheerleaders had any idea whatsoever that a convicted violent felon is one of its co-founders.  In an environment today when the left has repeatedly falsely accused most opposition of being racist, hateful and violent, how convenient that progressives would fail to acknowledge the hypocrisy of their own implicit support of real violence and law-breaking.

The story behind Velvet Revolution begins with musician-activist turned immigrants’ rights defender turned voting rights activist, Brett Kimberlin, who also runs the “Justice Through Music Project (JTMP).”  According to journalist Brad Friedman of the Brad Blog, he and Kimberlin co-founded Velvet Revolution together, a detail Friedman has specifically noted in a number of posts such as this one from 5/31/2007.

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The last-place cable news network, CNN, is the channel Wolf Blizter regularly calls “the place for politics.” It also operates a website with the motto, “all politics, all the time.” So you would expect the outlet to offer only the best and most credible analysis of the political headlines.

Last night, on the final primary election night across the country, it should be no surprise to any right thinking person that CNN opened the intellectual sluices and turned loose their political heavyweights to discuss the state of American politics. Presenting Larry King and Bill Maher.

As the political sands were shifting beneath their feet and with infomercial-like dialogue, Larry King and Bill Maher delivered what can only be described as the television version of throwing in the towel to FOX and MSNBC’s election night coverage.  The closest I can come to comparison is the now legendary dialogue between the “chef of the future” Ralph Kramden and the “chef of the past” Ed Norton in a classic Honeymooners episode: (more…)

Paul “The End Is Near” Krugman thinks conservatives are seeing witches but it’s really the Nobel Laureate who’s fighting his own liberal demons. In his August 29 New York Times op-ed, “It’s Witch-Hunt Season Again,” Krugman showcases both his traditional humorlessness and his peerless paranoia about what the inevitable Republican rout in the November mid-terms “will do to America.”

The last time a Democrat sat in the White House, he faced a nonstop witch-hunt by his political opponents… Now it’s happening again — except that this time it’s even worse. Let’s turn the floor over to Rush Limbaugh: “Imam Hussein Obama,” he recently declared, is “probably the best anti-American president we’ve ever had.”… When people like Mr. Limbaugh talk like this, bear in mind that he’s an utterly mainstream figure within the Republican Party; bear in mind, too, that unless something changes the political dynamics, Republicans will soon control at least one house of Congress. This is going to be very, very ugly.  So where is this rage coming from? Why is it flourishing? What will it do to America?

Before proceeding, let us not fail to note that Krugman’s conceding at minimum a Republican take-over of the House implies an accompanying fear of loss of the Senate as well. No wonder poor Paul’s a pallid pundit these days.

Now let’s examine Krugman’s inability to understand satire. This is a common liberal malady brought about by years of wearing one’s bleeding heart all over one’s sleeve. While Krugman’s humorlessness is no doubt incurable at this point, there may be other liberals whose capacity for laughter can still be salvaged by examining the Krugman case. At least it’s worth a try. (more…)

Q. The name of your new book is To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine. Are things really that dire?

Yes. America is not merely a genetic or geographic identity. Our country was founded upon a set of principles clearly expressed in the Declaration of Independence and ensconced in the Constitution. These include: God given rights; the importance of the work ethic; elected representation; local control limited government. All these uniquely American values are under assault from the modern Left, what I describe in To Save America as “Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine.” The President’s ideology is clearly more European than historic American and his policies are clearly going to centralize power in Washington. His economics are going to keep American unemployed while his total lack of reality in foreign policy makes America vulnerable. Collectively, this assault on our core identity and the danger to our economy and safety makes our situation pretty dire.

Q. If so, why did John McCain and the Republicans take so many issues off the table in the 2008 election, especially any meaningful discussion of Obama’s radical background and associates?

It was a mistake. Too many Republican politicians and consultants are anti-intellectual, don’t do their homework, and aren’t prepared to engage in a lengthy, intellectual debate with the editor of the Harvard Law review who taught at the University of Chicago. In order to convince the American people we should govern, we have to be willing to stand on the same stage as our opponents and debate. To quote Margaret Thatcher, “First you win the argument then you win the vote.” If you are not prepared to do your homework and learn the argument, you are not going to win it.

Q. In the introduction to your book, you refer to the legislative program of Obama and the Democrats as “alien ideology,” and quote your daughter as saying that “we were told to vote for change we could believe in and found we had elected people who wanted to change what we believe.” Why did this come as a shock to so many people? Did the media not do its job? (more…)

A new piece by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman will be largely ignored by the MSM because it doesn’t fit their Bush-Bashing template. Yesterday, Friedman wrote this in an op-ed column entitled “It’s Up to Iraqis Now. Good Luck.”

Saddam’s Iraq was a temporary iron-fisted bulwark against Iranian expansion. But if Iraq has any sort of decent outcome — and becomes a real Shiite-majority, multiethnic democracy right next door to the phony Iranian version — it will be a source of permanent pressure on the Iranian regime. It will be a constant reminder that “Islamic democracy” — the rigged system the Iranians set up — is nonsense. Real “Islamic democracy” is just like any other democracy, except with Muslims voting.

Former President George W. Bush’s gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right. It should have and could have been pursued with much better planning and execution. This war has been extraordinarily painful and costly. But democracy was never going to have a virgin birth in a place like Iraq, which has never known any such thing.

Yes, that appeared in the New York Times. (more…)

An entire generation of Democrat voters failed to vote in Massachusetts Tuesday night.  The same generation of Democrat voters failed to thwart recent GOP victories in New Jersey and Virginia.  But no one’s reporting on them.  They’re the silent generation.

The Silent Generation is between the favored ages of 18 and 37 years old.   There are over 49 million of them, and they make up approximately 15% of the American population, certainly enough to swing any election in any state in any race.  Problem is this:  they have been denied the right to vote in these elections.

That’s because, thanks to Roe v. Wade, which was decided 37 years ago today, they’re not even here.

Ironically, the ACLU does not concern itself with them.  They are never interviewed and are rarely mentioned by Democrat candidates.  No one knows for sure how many of them are Democrats or Republicans or independents for that matter because they are invisible and unregistered.  They are those Americans, those voters, who have been aborted since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalized their demise.  They cannot vote because they were denied lives as American citizens. (more…)