During the rise of the tea party Anderson Cooper called conservatives “tea baggers” on CNN and remarked about “teabagging.” The network featured a multitude of guests and contributors who likened tea partiers to nazis, bigots, pick your poison. No pressure was ever brought about to censor the speech of those babbling on air. CNN never found any of the remarks objectionable. Fast-forward to present time. Dana Loesch mocks the absurdity of the left’s predictable Outrage Chic on her radio show, Erick Erickson mocks occupiers on his radio show, Roland Martin mocks soccer (who doesn’t mock soccer?) and David Beckham’s underwear using his personal Twitter account and all hell breaks loose. Note: not a single one of these individuals said any of this on CNN’s airwaves, as demonstrated above. That doesn’t matter to the Progressive Inquisition.

Progressives have been falling over themselves to get Loesch and Erickson fired from CNN since CNN decided it wasn’t going to actually attempt to make money and offer a variety of opinion. Progressives hate variety, they loathe diversity of thought. The George Soros mouthpiece, Media Matters for America actually pays people to listen to Erickson and Loesch’s radio shows, record them, and try to trump up outrage over nothing. For instance, last week Loesch said that women can use birth control methods such as pills, condoms, and natural family planning as their “choice,” as opposed to the “choice” of murdering a baby. Eric Boehlert, a man who, to our knowledge, is not a licensed OB/GYN and has not, to our knowledge, ever been a woman at any time, mocked the idea that a woman is smart enough on her own to actually prevent pregnancy naturally. Because they don’t teach about menstrual cycles in high school, or the most fertile times of the month for a woman, information Boehlert apparently missed out on in school. They tried to get CNN’s attention with it on Twitter after posting it to their site.

Erickson joked about violent, raping, drug peddling occupiers getting tased — the violent movement MMfA endorsed — and MMfA/Boehlert put the clip on their site and also tried to get CNN’s attention with it. MMfA endorsed Occupy, defended it, and said nothing with this hit a cop in the face with a brick, when women were being raped, drugs being sold, absolutely nothing when the White House was shot up and smoke bombs were thrown by occupy campers. That wasn’t bad enough to earn their condemnation but cracking a joke when one of them is so out of control they have to be tasered for the safety of the police — and the person who cracked the joke is the bad guy. Those are their priorities.

They failed. They did the same thing last month as well, completely proving the point Loesch was making about hysterical reactions to the Marines appearing to urinate on the bodies of dead terrorists who had just tried to kill them in battle.

CNN didn’t fire Loesch, they didn’t fire Erickson, either which enraged Boehlert and MMfA. It showed their impotence, their weakness, that no one truly gives a damn what they do all day over on their little corner of the Internet.

Roland Martin spent Super Bowl Sunday writing #rolandsrules, jokes about watching the Super Bowl. I cannot stand the man’s politics and I damn near hated him during the midterm elections because he was one of the racial demagogues who called tea partiers every name in the book. His Tweets were funny. He joked about appetizers, about soccer — because soccer is stupid — and David Beckham’s underwear. His Tweets angered GLAAD, who believe that they have the patent on soccer and David Beckham’s underwear, thus if you insult and/or mock them, they will take it as gay bashing. Advocacy to GLAAD is trolling Twitter trying to see how many different ways innocuous Tweets can offend them.

GLAAD does more to make a mockery of themselves than Martin or anyone else could ever do.

CNN suspended Martin over the Tweets as they are close with GLAAD.

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You would think that a media “analyst,” like Politico’s Dylan Byers, would be one of America’s primary defenders of free speech, especially political speech. But rather than defend political speech and satire, Byers is nothing more than a left-wing book burner, a politically correct speech-enforcer who wants certain speech chilled and specific individuals silenced. His blacklisting attempts might be disguised as passive-aggressive concern and requests for comment from employers, but when the outcome desired is obvious — to get people fired and/or reprimanded for something they’ve said — it’s still blacklisting.

Lately, Byers has been on a rampage to get two conservative CNN contributors in hot water, our own Dana Loesch and Red State’s Erick Ericson. Today Byers joined forces with GLAAD — an organization notorious for its bullying, speech policing, and un-American use of “re-education” camps – to target CNN’s Roland Martin:

Roland Martin has now become the third CNN political analyst to cause controversy this year.

Last month, Dana Loesch celebrated U.S. Marines who had urinated on Taliban corpses, announcing, “I’d drop trou and do it too.”

Last week, Erick Erickson celebrated the tasing of an Occupy D.C. protester, saying, “Watching a hippie protester get tased just makes my day.”

Now, the Gay Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation is calling for Martin’s removal from the network for a comment he made on Twitter about H&M’s Super Bowl ad featuring a near-naked David Beckham: “If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!”

In Dylan Byers’ world, the obvious political humor Loesch and Erickson used to make a point, and a silly joke tweeted by Martin, is a “CNN political contributor problem.”

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Unless you missed it this week:

• Media Matters still refuses to condemn the violence in the Media Matters-endorsed OWS movement.
• Media Matters also refuses to answer why a “media site” is seemingly in violation of the rules binding 501 c(3)s by politicking. They were caught sending out emails to their “Democrat allies” last week.
• After failing to force censorship of Big Journalism’s Dana Loesch the week prior (and again today), Media Matters is attempting the same blacklist technique with Red State’s Erick Erickson. What’s unclear is whether the motivation comes from their intolerance of diverse thought on the airwaves or bitterness at the lack of invitations MMFA staffers, namely Editor Eric Boehlert, receive themselves from networks.
• MMFA Editor Boehlert also refused to condemn or disavow his site’s use of the slur “Israel firster.” MMFA has received heavy criticism for its continued use of the slur, even after its use was criticized by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and MMFA ally and former journolister Spencer Ackerman.
• MMFA still hasn’t walked back its claim that the insider trading scandal, which resulted in the now-passed STOCK Act, wasn’t ‘a big deal.’

OUTSTANDING ITEMS

Media Matters has yet to correct these glaring mistakes:

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It’s been over 25 years since radio shock jock Howard Stern went national and in his own way helped to define today’s AM radio. So, it’s amazing to see the liberal media now suddenly discover a mean puritanical streak in what looks to be an effort to silence voices on the Right. And I thought it was the Christian right that seeks to enforce some moral order on the population?

With cross-over media and careers being so much in vogue today, should it really be a surprise that what may work, or be fine in one medium, could be interpreted as inappropriate on another? And why is it that only conservative voices seem to suffer this guilt by association, generated by the Left, to try and get them kicked off the air? This despicable political tactic deserves to be called out for what it is, the modern day equivalent of book burning.

Call it a Vast Left-wing Conspiracy, or some interesting connections if you follow New Media. It seems that not long after former Politico staffer Ben Smith moved to Buzzfeed, Politico may now be linking up with Buzzfeed to put some distance between itself and ideologically-biased media outlet Media Matters.

The most aggressive would be book burner at Politico these days appears to be Dylan Byers. After going after Big Journalism editor, Dana Loesch, he’s now targeted Erick Erickson for comments made on his AM radio show.

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Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin is the perfect example of what a conservative writer should be (if conservatives were supposed to be liberal).

Rubin is the type of writer who delights in bashing conservatives in the name of saving them, kind of the way progressives bashed the medical field during the Obamacare* debate. The progressives claimed to have the medical people’s best interests at heart as they worked on a piece of legislation that would cause them all to leave the field.

* Please Note: the word Obamacare used in the above paragraph has been declared obscene by Congressional Democrats–if anyone is offended by that harsh word, I sincerely apologize.

“Conservatives” such as Rubin spend more time bashing conservative principles than supporting them. For example Rubin bashes supporters of a balanced budget amendment as extremists; this is from her summary of the debt ceiling deal at the end of July:

The president gets a deal through 2012; the House gets its cuts; and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) gets his commission. And the GOP extremists don’t get their balanced budget amendment passed and sent to the states or the satisfaction of blowing up the deal. As for the country, if it passes, the agreement will take us from the days of automatic debt-ceiling raises to the first, tentative steps toward fiscal sanity.

I supposed it didn’t matter to this “conservative” that a balanced budget amendment is a key policy pushed by most conservatives and it is supported by the majority of voters. (more…)

Here’s an interesting look at how Media Matters for America (MMfA) works, along with the quick manner with which some in media bow to its George Soros financed influence. Whatever one may think of it, it’s beyond obvious that the 53% versus whatever percent meme is about Federal Income Tax. No one has ever suggested that anyone gets away scott-free without paying taxes of some sort in America – unless perhaps one is on Obama’s short list for a job in the White House. As the saying goes, nothing is certain but death and taxes. Unfortunately, when Anderson Cooper invoked the 53% number during the recent GOP debate, he wasn’t quite nuanced enough for the crew at MMfA and they immediately attacked.

Conservative activists have created a Tumblr called “We are the 53 percent” that’s meant to be a counterpunch to the viral “We are the 99 percent” site that’s become a prominent symbol for the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Tumblr is supposed to represent the 53 percent of Americans who pay federal income taxes, and its assumption is that the Wall Street protesters are part of the 46 percent of the country who don’t.

Erickson’s movement is based on a fraud. While nearly half of American households have paid no income taxes in the past few years, the vast majority of Americans do pay other taxes, including federal payroll taxes, as well as state and local taxes. In an April New York Times article, David Leonhardt explained how figures like the one Erickson was pushing distort the economic debate away from growing income inequality while completely ignoring taxes that all American households pay.

From there, presumably concerned at having displeased the storm troopers over at MMfA, aka the Progressive thought police watching uber alles things media, Cooper was quick to accept his comeuppance and grovel for mercy. That may sound harsh, unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there.

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In response to the announcement that I would provide my analysis on ABC News from Arizona on election night, like-clockwork, from the George Soros-funded Media Matters to Keith Olbermann to Huffington Post to Daily Kos to Talking Points Memo to Twitter (#boycottABCNEWS), the institutional left began on Friday to inundate ABC News with a wave of partisan objections and unfounded allegations against me.

Make no mistake: this is a calculated “astroturf“ intimidation campaign by the well-funded and frightened-for-their-political-lives institutional left to quash dissenting voices. It’s what they do.

What was ABC News’ response? Not standing up for free speech and the 1^st Amendment. Not sticking by their original invitation. Not standing up for diversity of opinion.

Instead, on Saturday, ABC News issued an official statement that was immediately heralded as a victory by the anti-free speech forces on the left:

Since conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart announced on his website that he was going to be a participant in ABC’s Town Hall meeting at Arizona State University, there has been considerable consternation and misinformation regarding my decision to ask him to participate in an election night Town Hall event for ABC News Digital. I want to explain what Mr. Breitbart’s role has always been as one of our guests at our digital town hall event:

Mr. Breitbart is not an ABC News analyst.

He is not an ABC News consultant.

He is not, in any way, affiliated with ABC News.

He is not being paid by ABC News.

He has not been asked to analyze the results of the election for ABC News.

Mr. Breitbart will not be a part of the ABC News broadcast coverage, anchored by Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos. For the broadcast coverage, David Muir and Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg will contribute reaction and response gathered from the students and faculty of Arizona State University at an ABC News/Facebook town hall.

He has been invited as one of several guests, from a variety of different political persuasions, to engage with a live, studio audience that will be closely following the election results and participating in an online-only discussion and debate to be moderated by David Muir and Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg on ABCNews.com and Facebook. We will have other guests, as well as a live studio audience and a large audience on ABCNews.com and Facebook, who can question the guests and the audience’s opinions.

George Stephanoplous quickly tweeted, “Breitbart NOT on ABC network broadcast http://bit.ly/bgkseJ.” (more…)

In an August 2 column, the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz cried a river over the rancor he saw in today’s media calling it a “nastiness index” that continues to rise. But his lament is not only off base in many ways, it is also historically illiterate and is built on only one real complaint: the left no longer has a lock on what is considered newsworthy.

Kurtz starts off with this lament: “Media outlets, which once merely chronicled this era of hyper-partisanship, now seem to be both the purveyors and often the targets of ugly attacks.” Kurtz sadly says that it has all become “journalism as blood sport, performed for the masses.”

Oh the humanities. We just hate to see the media business cater to the great, unwashed masses, don’t we? (By “the masses” he means us, folks.)

Kurtz goes on to detail just some of the latest journalistic transgressions as he sees them.

In just the last few weeks, Salon Editor in Chief Joan Walsh and CNBC contributor Howard Dean have accused Fox News of racism; conservative crusader Andrew Breitbart has delighted in pushing a maliciously edited video smearing Shirley Sherrod and refused to apologize; Fox hosts have denounced mainstream organizations as Obama lap dogs for downplaying a case involving the New Black Panther Party; e-mails from an off-the-record discussion group showed one liberal pundit wishing for Rush Limbaugh’s death and another suggesting that conservatives such as Fred Barnes be tarred as racist; Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings was accused of betraying journalistic ethics with the story that torpedoed Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and Hastings’s critics were ripped as lackeys of the military establishment.

Kurtz also carps that anyone who tries to speak up for the “old regime” is “pilloried” for the effort. Then he attacks me… and everyone who blogs: (more…)

Yesterday I had the displeasure of reading Gregory Ferenstein’s column, “Why the web benefits liberals more than conservatives.” Ferenstein’s thesis is that liberal ideological characteristics facilitate Internet success, while the opposite is true for conservatism. Frankly, his entire piece is based on assumptions without evidence. Ferenstein states:

From…the million-strong Barack Obama Facebook page to the huge audience of the Huffington Post, liberals have been the dominant political force on the internet since the digital revolution began.”

Ferenstein avoids the most important reason for this phenomenon: Age. Younger people dominate the Internet, and younger people are more liberal by significant margins. So, Ferenstein could replace the phrase, “Liberals have been the dominant political force on the Internet since the digital revolution began,” with “Young people have been the dominant demographic on the Internet since the digital revolution began.” They have the same meaning.

He continues:

Research…suggests that the reason behind this imbalance may be the liberal belief system itself.

Liberals, the research finds, are oriented toward community activism…and feature user-generated content. Conservatives…are more comfortable with a commanding leadership and use restrictive policies to combat disorderly speech in online forums.

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Over the past few days there has been a manufactured firestorm over comments Erick Erickson made on his local Georgia radio show last week. You can hear his full remarks by clicking here.

Today the White House joined in the pile-on at the instigation of a left-wing talk radio host and former CNN employee who somehow got credentials:

BILL PRESS:  Robert, on the Census, Erick Erickson, a commentator for CNN, a couple of days ago, he said he was not going to fill out his Census form, and if a Census worker came to the door, he said he would “pull out my wife’s shotgun and see how that little twerp likes being scared at the door.” So my question is, do those remarks concern the White House? And are there any –

ROBERT GIBBS:  It should concern CNN — probably first and foremost. Probably concerns his wife as well.

PRESS:  Any thoughts about protection for Census workers?

GIBBS:  Well, I think there are a lot of people that get on cable TV and say stuff so that people will quote it back to other people.

Allow me to rip this apart. (My comments in italics): (more…)

Over the past week, two good friends of mine have been raked over the coals by the left because they are conservatives.  Both have recently taken on new challenges and the left can’t stand to see these two outspoken conservatives succeed.  The left-wing noise machine will say anything to destroy the reputations of good people.

Erick Erickson, editor of the popular conservative web site Red State, had the misfortune of being hired as a contributor to CNN.  Erick is a frequent guest on Sean Hannity’s show.

Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, dared to start a group Liberty Central dedicated to promoting liberty and freedom.  This new group is associated with the Tea Party movement by providing “an online community for visitors to preserve freedom and reaffirm the core founding principles.”

How dare they. (more…)

The response from the left over CNN’s hiring of Erick Erickson as a political contributor has been typically over-the-top.  From Salon (What was CNN Thinking?) to Huffington Post (It’s Enough to Make You Throw-up) to our pals at Media Matters for America (Erickson’s History of Violent Incendiary, Sexist and Racially Charged Commentary), the intolerance for opposing viewpoints is really a breathtaking sight to behold.

Erickson, Editor-in-chief at Redstate.com, also serves as a City Council Member in Macon, GA.  His conservative viewpoint and his high-profile on one of the more well-read blogs in America, as well as his small-town perspective is what caught CNN’s eye.  Erick’s a perfect fit for John King, USA, because not only is he an agenda-setter whose words are closely watched in Washington but as a person who still lives in small-town America, Erick is in touch with the very people John hopes to reach,” CNN’s political director Sam Feist said in an announcement.

As soon as the announcement was made, #dumpCNN Tweets began surfacing on Twitter.  Media Matters posted a series of statements Erickson has made over the years on his blog and on Twitter.  Apparently, Erickson suggested that the Vice President’s heart should be ripped out, and once he said that Democrats lie and want to see the American people dead. Oh no… wait… that wasn’t Erickson, it was Ed Schultz talking about Vice-President Cheney and Republicans!  And Shultz is not just a political contributor, he has his own show!   I missed MMFA’s outrage over that hire. (more…)