It was an onslaught of savvy PR tactics yesterday that brought the Susan G. Komen Foundation to its knees, apparently prompting the organization’s retreat today from its initial decision to cut its funding to Planned Parenthood.  As Politico reported this morning:

On a day when the breast cancer charity’s top official made the rounds with the national media, insisting the organization’s decision to stop giving grants to Planned Parenthood wasn’t political, the firestorm only got worse. Top Democrats piled on; the head of the Komen chapter in Los Angeles quit; and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is giving a $250,000 matching gift to Planned Parenthood.

The Atlantic Wire reports that the Susan G. Komen foundation’s website was even hacked, for some period displaying a banner that had been changed from “help us get 26.2 or 13.1 miles closer to a world without breast cancer“  to read, “help us run over poor women on our way to the bank.”  And the long repeated myth that the current Komen CEO takes home a half a million dollar salary was brought back to life yesterday – even though the truth is that Komen’s current CEO, Nancy Brinker, takes home $0 in annual salary.

But hey, breast cancer isn’t supposed to be political, right?

Officials with the Susan G. Komen foundation had insisted the initial decision was never political, that it was about providing more direct mammography screening services for women, according to Nancy Brinker, the charity’s founder and CEO.  From Politico:

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Reuters this morning published a grossly inaccurate story on Senator Marco Rubio. Among the eight fallacies:

Rubio also voted against Sonia Sotomayor, Obama’s Supreme Court nominee who is of Puerto Rican descent, and more recently blocked the confirmation of another Puerto Rican, Marie Carmen Aponte, as ambassador to El Salvador.

Rubio was not a senator at the time the Sotomayor vote was cast.

Reuters also asserts:

He also voted against Obama’s healthcare overhaul, which is popular among many low-income Hispanics.

Rubio was and is against it but could not have voted for it at the time because he had not been elected. Obamacare passed in March 21, 2010. Rubio was elected on November 2, 2010 and assumed office on January 3, 2011.

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Take note, South Carolina. We know that Mitt Romney has been on all sides of basically every issue, but the broader concern here is:  are conservatives tired of stressing about and being duped by northeastern so-called Republicans and their mostly liberal voting records–leading to political survival in Democrat states.  But, seriously, is anyone else tired of this? And again, I ask,  why is a government-run healthcare lover a GOP frontrunner? Name recognition, gaining independent voters, and anyone but Obama, I get that, but come on already. Romney? I’m not buying the media hype over who can beat Obama.

From Jonah Goldberg:

Romney, the son of a politician, has been running for office, holding office or thinking about running for office for more than two decades. “Just level with the American people,” Gingrich growled. “You’ve been running … at least since the 1990s.”

For some reason, Romney can’t do that. Or at least it seems like he can’t. His authentic inauthenticity problem isn’t going away. And it’s sapping enthusiasm from the rank and file.

Goldberg is right, but the underlying theme that voters need to be reminded of is that during so many important debates from healthcare, jobs, Wall Street Reform, confirmations, recess appointments, to taxes the culprits to invoke cloture or side with the Democrats typically are the same:  Senators Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe,  and Scott Brown–the trifecta of RINOs. All from the northeast, too.  See where I’m going with this?

Frankly, Romney, who the mainstream liberal media would like to see win the nomination, has yet to unite the GOP base.  His used car salesman pitch simply rubs people the wrong way.  We’ve seen this over and over again–even John McCain pointed this out and won in 2007’s primary–and now supports him–that should speak volumes to my point.  Romney has always been dogged by this and this is why we have such a large ‘Not Romney’ camp on the right side of the aisle.

The GOP is also paying the bitter price for not having anyone in line to succeed GW Bush.  The party’s internal tug of war will be an historical teachable moment and prepare the party for future elections.  The one saving grace is that, while the Democrats have Hillary, they have no one to succeed her at this point in time.  I say Hillary because she seems to be the only power broker left untarnished by Obama–even though she is an Alinsky kinda girl.

Additionally, the GOP presidential candidate will have a two-pronged mission as the nominee:  to beat the MSM and Obama.  However, enlightened voters now know for sure the media is mostly state-controlled, Obama was never vetted, and that his radical leftist ideology drives his policies, appointments, and regulations out of the mainstream.

Furthermore, the MSM needs Romney to offset Obama.  The formula is quite simple: RomneyCare is to ObamaCare as Obama’s rhetoric is to Romney’s rhetoric all of which cancel each other out according to how the media sees it.

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This past weekend the Washington Post published a hit piece on the grand opening of a museum in Georgia dedicated to the birthplace of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The paper was desperate to make some grand conspiracy, some lawbreaking evil out of the project. But whatever is going on with the museum, this story was just one more shot orchestrated by the left aimed at forcing Justice Thomas to recuse himself from the upcoming hearings on whether or not Obamacare is Constitutional. Of course, this is all a smoke screen to hide the fact that it is really left-wing darling Justice Elana Kagan that should recuse herself from the case.

The Post story was a mishmash of innuendo, guesswork, and partisan claims, all amounting to much of nothing for proof of wrong doing. The Post even took the opportunity to use the word “whitewashed” when describing the color of the building housing the museum commemorating Justice Thomas’ birthplace. None too subtle, that.

There was plenty of other coverage of the opening of the museum that was positive, of course. Still it is apparent that the left hates Justice Thomas so much that they can’t even stand it that a small commemoration of his place of birth be created.

But real facts weren’t on the agenda for this article on Thomas. This article was meant as yet another slap at Thomas in order to mount pressure against him for the upcoming case against Obamacare. The left has been floating the demand that Justice Thomas recuse himself because his wife has worked as a “conservative activist and lobbyist, where she specifically agitated for the repeal of ‘Obamacare.’”

Contrary to the left’s new attack on Thomas, in America we do not hold the work of a spouse against someone. If we did that, half the members of Congress would have to be removed for the boards, or agencies, or organizations that their spouses work for. The pertinent fact is, though, that Justice Thomas himself was not the one working for any group that advocated for or against Obamacare.

This, however, is not true of another member of the Supreme Court. Justice Elana Kagan was actually involved in advising how to defend against challenges to Obamacare. If that isn’t directly relevant, what is?

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Sunday on ABC”s “This Week” Nancy Pelosi shamelessly repeated the debunked lie that the tea party “spit” on congressmen during the walk to sign the health care law in spring of 2010. The thing is, Pelosi’s story never happened.

We’ve published countless video from a multitude of sources which completely disproves this lie. The NAACP couldn’t keep their story straight initially. When it was proven that the “spitting” incident was a lie, Congressman Cleaver immediately walked back his story. From Big Government:

3.  Rep. Emanuel Cleaver DID claim HE was spat on, but then after he and everyone else in the world reviewed the video and saw that errant spittle from a man screaming “Kill the Bill!” is what hit Rep Cleaver, he walked back the charge.

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In a single year, health care premium costs have jumped 9% and nowhere in this report does the NBC Nightly News bother to look at the reasons why. All they appear to be doing is trying to scare people … right into the arms of the federal government and ObamaCare.

Furthermore, at no time does NBC even float the idea that maybe, just maybe, the very idea of ObamaCare – the inevitable burdens, costs and mandates just a year or so away  – might have something to do with this jump in the cost of premiums.

My favorite part of the report, however, is when they announce that 31% of those covered by health insurance pay the first thousand dollars of their health care costs out of their own pocket.

Well, gasp and egads.

As far as I’m concerned, out-of-pocket costs are mostly a good thing. And I say that as someone who regularly pays upwards of  $10,000 a year in co-pays and deductibles. But as someone who puts the well-being of his country over his own selfish interests, I realize that one component in bringing down the artificially-inflated cost of  health care is to have the customers incentivized to shop around a little bit — create something along the lines of a free market atmosphere. As things stand now, there’s no benefit to doing that because insurance pays for everything. But if, for instance, you have to pay for your own MRI, you might actually make a few phone calls.

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By now we’ve all heard the reprehensible remarks made by Congressional Black Caucus Whip Andre Carson (D-IN) where he told the audience at a CBC Jobs Fair Town Hall in Miami that Tea Party Congressmen would like to lynch black people. Given the opportunity to revise or retract his remarks, Carson instead stood by “the truth” of his comments.

So now it seems pretty fair to say that Andre Carson is a race-baiting bigot who has brought shame upon the U. S. House of Representatives. But any regular reader of Big Government knows that this is not new information. In fact, Andre Carson’s despicable, divisive slander of August 22nd is just the latest of bogus attacks made by the 2nd term congressman against the Tea Party. Andre Carson is the man who told the mother of all race-baiting lies against the Tea Party: That racial slurs were screamed “fifteen times” at he and Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) in Washington DC on the day before the ObamaCare vote in 2010.

The headlines at the time (as well as Topic #1 on cable news and Sunday talk shows) was “Racist Tea Party Yells ‘N-Word’ at Civil Rights Icon John Lewis”. Andre Carson’s name was hardly mentioned in any of the stories. But a Big Government investigation revealed that it was he, in fact, who gathered Capitol Hill reporters around himself on March 20, 2010 and breathlessly told them what had happened “outside of Cannon (Congressional Office Building)” just moments before. (audio courtesy Kerry Pickett, Washington Times)

By now you know the story become part of Democratic Party lore showing up in talking points as recently as just last week as Alan Colmes mangled the “facts” but still was able to perpetuate the lie on Fox News’ “O’Reilly Factor”. You should also know by now that Andrew Breitbart offered a $100, 000 reward for anyone who can produce video proof o the supposed racial hatred. The only videos uncovered were found by the Big Government staff. They show the exact moment Carson described, “down the steps of Cannon”, from four different angles. Not only were there no slurs heard on any of the videos, but the scene is not at all how Carson described it to Capitol Hill reporters.

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In a blow to the autonomy of the media it has been discovered that employees of two Old Media outlets are the happy beneficiaries of hundreds of thousands of federal dollars from an Obamacare slush fund. CBS and the Washington Post have both taken large payments from Obama’s Early Retiree Reinsurance Program (ERRP), with the Post getting $573,217 while CBS has received a whopping $722,388.

Matthew Boyle reported that the news of the media giants taking federal cash was revealed at a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week.

The question here becomes one of disclosure. Will CBS and the Washington Post put disclaimers on any story they relate about Obamacare? After all, if we see a positive story about Obamacare from the Washington Post or CBS might we assume the stories are so positive because employees of those media organizations know they could be the beneficiaries of thousands of dollars in federal cash? Might we assume that these Old Media employees might fear that any negative story might put that largess at risk?

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I’ve had my own questions about the plan; yesterday I interviewed Rep. Todd Rokita of Indiana who helped to draft the Path to Prosperity, and he confirmed my fears: in order for the plan to work, Democrats have to a) accept it and b) economic and congressional variables must stay the same for the next 26 years. Otherwise, I like it. I want to be optimistic but some of that is tempered from Ryan’s past as a congressman who helped bring us TARP and other programs where big spending actually helped to create the tea party. In short: I think Ryan’s plan a nice gamble but I’m more of a cynic.

However, that Congressman Ryan goes so far as to defund health control warrants much credit and I was please to see Slate notice it, too. Slate doesn’t have to agree, but so far it’s one of the first liberal publications that noticed hey, Republicans have some good ideas, too.

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It’s no shock that liberal darling and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman doesn’t like the GOP or its plan to repeal President Obama’s health control law.  However, in his Sunday column he felt it necessary to not only call the Republican effort wrong, the bearded Spock called them illogical.

He begins with an anecdote to prove wrong the GOP’s insistence that the Medicare “Doc Fix,” which totals over $200 billion, should be included in the cost of Obamacare.  Many could retort Krugman’s critique by pointing out the $500 billion in Medicare that Obamacare actually cuts, so paying for another year of doctor fixes is very much related to the overall health tab of the United States.

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I’ve said before that the media is so invested in this administration because their very survival depends upon its success. The only people who consume mainstream media anymore are the people who are part of the ideology that the MSM blatantly supports. They’ve bet all their chips on the success of the Progressocrats, the new amalgam of socialists and Democrats which saw the progressive caucus bubble up within the DNC before eating it away from the inside.

You won’t see the stories below in the pages of the NYT or on the screens of NBC. You won’t hear them discussed at the water cooler. They’re the stories that show without any doubt the cards held by those who wish to enslave the masses to the god of government. A theocracy, to be sure, but one that holds up the state above all else.

Each of these stories have been chronicled across the Bigs sites over the past year. These stories are what progressives are trying desperately to erase from the annals of history, an effort that the new penny press, new media, refuses to allow.

1. The Pigford Case

You have a finite number of black farmers discriminated against by the USDA. They are awarded a settlement. You have over 73,000 more applicants, more than the number of actual farmers or people related to farming, all claiming a piece of the settlement. The settlement is billions of dollars of taxpayer money. Over 36% of the claims were already rejected due to fraud. Instead of vetting the claims and awarding to those who were truly wronged, elected officials decide to increase the size of the settlement so everyone can get a check. People who farmed their whole lives got the same size check as someone who never farmed.

If you think that sounds wonky, then you may be someone who doesn’t believe that the Pigford case was on the up-and-up. Also, you are probably a racist, since this case involves black Americans and even the original black farmers who are raising concern about this case are also racists, according to INSERT SOROS OUTLET HERE.

Related:

Pigford Investigation Resources

Credit Where It’s Due: HuffPo Blogger On Pigford Fraud

2. Journolist

Long story short: a bunch of editorial geniuses decided to gather in an email distro and share ideas about how to inject their socialist narrative into mainstream media. They also talked smack about conservative political leaders because takes balls to talk cruelly about people with whom you disagree in a private email thread full of glee club members. These people all still write for the same publications that they did before, with the exception of the whistleblower, and these are the folks who tell you that media is not progressively biased.

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The so-called “non-partisan” and “independent” fact checkers over at Politifact have named  2010’s “Lie of the year.” The winner was the phrase “A government takeover of healthcare” used by critics of the President’s healt care takeover.

A number of issues arise when you start to fact check the fact checkers.

They first blamed the quote on GOP strategist Frank Luntz, who Politifact claims is “a consultant famous for his phraseology.” The phrasing in the article has similar implications to when President Obama and others repeatedly claimed the existence of some vast right wing network thwarting their plans, even when they controlled Washington for 13 months. Politifact plays right into the notion of shadowy GOP figures weaving a tapestry of lies, et cetera.

In the actual fact-check portion they say, “’Government takeover conjures a European approach where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are public employees. But the law Congress passed … relies largely on the free market.” I’m not sure how a 2,000 plus page bill creating a mountain of new regulations, allowing less free activity, and unconstitutionally forcing people to buy a product “relies on the free market”. It seems the authors of the bill had a different end in mind.

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From Judge Henry Hudson, an early Christmas gift to America [pdf of decision]:

Despite the laudable intentions of Congress in enacting a comprehensive and transformative health care regime, the legislative process must still act withing constitutional bounds. Salutatory goals and creative drafting have never been sufficient to offset an absence of enumerated powers. – page 21

And a few pages later we get this:

In her argument, the Secretary urges an expansive interpretation of the concept of activity. She posits that every individual in the United States will require health care at some point in their lifetime, if not today, perhaps next week or even next year. Her theory further postulates that because near universal participation is critical to the underwriting process, the collective effect of refusal to purchase health insurance affects the national market. Therefore, she argues, requiring advance purchase of insurance based upon a future contingency is an activity that will inevitably affect interstate commerce. Of course, the same reasoning could apply to transportation, housing, or nutritional decisions. This broad definition of the economic activity subject to congressional regulation lacks logical limitation and is unsupported by Commerce Clause jurisprudence.

It should be noted that Judge Hudson is already under attack by the Center for American Progess, which set up a conference call trashing his decision, it appears, the moment it was released. Their complaints being echoed by the usual suspects at the Washington Post. Over at Gawker, they’re rehashing claims that Judge Hudson has a connection to Sarah Palin and Republican politics.

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Bill Sammon, manager of Fox’s Washington Bureau, sent out an email instructing staff to call the “public option” the “government option.” Renaming government projects and entities to falsely reflect public ownership (and suggest choice, when in fact, there is none) isn’t new. Germany had the Volkswagon which literally translates to “People’s Car,” then there’s the People’s Republic of China.

So Sammon had no interest playing a game of semantics devised by the left to curate public favor by renaming what the option actually is – and? Media Matters is furious that Fox refused to play the game according to the frame that Media Matters is desperately trying to set.

Luntz argued that “if you call it a ‘public option,’ the American people are split,” but that “if you call it the ‘government option,’ the public is overwhelmingly against it.” Luntz explained that the program would be “sponsored by the government” and falsely claimed that it would also be “paid for by the government.”

Media Matters is upset that Fox didn’t use a term that would skew the field to the left.

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Bad history is bad history and Rob Reiner is a student of some seriously bad history. One would be pressed to find a case where bad history lead to good decisions concerning the present. Case in point: On Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher Rob Reiner spewed his bad history as fact at the expense of smearing one of the largest political grassroots movements in our nation’s history. What’s even more disappointing is that Bill Maher agreed with Reiner multiple times during his factually-challenged rant. I realize Rob, that you probably weren’t a history major, but when you’re accusing the Tea Party of being like Hitler, please try to get your facts straight.

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Hitler promised health care, said that Germany’s business infrastructure needed a total government reform, and promised that all of the Germans would have jobs. Also, Hitler may have been elected by less than 40% of the people in Germany, but he was elected by 98.8% in Austria. After becoming Chancellor of Austria he took over the health care system, the car company (Austria had one major car manufacturing company at the time), and the business infrastructure.

Hitler did not sell fear and anger, he sold fundamental change of the nation’s infrastructure. He sold the hope of everyone having a job and that everyone had a right to be given medical treatment at the government’s provision. (more…)

And why can’t they ask questions like this:

If [the federal government} can do this, what can't they [do]?

That would be declaring a health-care a “right” — no matter that it may be in violation of the 14th Amendment, not to mention the Ninth and Tenth.

The answer is, of course, provided by one of America’s worst congressmen and the true face of fascist liberalism, Fortney “Pete” Stark: (more…)

Number three on our list almost violates the criteria that I set up in the first piece I wrote for this series. I said then that denizens of the Old Media that are too much a “cartoon of journalism” would not be included on my list. Yet despite my dismissal of such Old Media clowns, in the number three slot on the list you’ll find Paul Krugman of The New York Times.

Given today’s revelations about the JournoList, we now know Krugman either participated in a media conspiracy to get Obama elected or at least witnessed it first hand and did nothing to stop it.  Consider this fact merely the latest insight into a man who’s done more consistently left-biased journalism than nearly anyone in America.

Krugman is indeed quite a cartoon of modern liberalism. He is hidebound and far from a new or even a very free thinker. But he makes the list simply because he is not only a Nobel Prize winner but is one of the leading media figures in America today. So, despite that he is not an original thinker and is steeped in liberal orthodoxy, his prominence argues for his inclusion here.

And besides that he is a true liberal loon.

Krugman’s January 17 piece is a perfect example of the nonsense that he tries to pass off as political analysis. In his piece headlined “What Didn’t Happen,” Krugman seriously tried to claim that one of Barack Obama’s biggest failings was that he doesn’t blame Bush enough for his own failings.

Mr. Obama didn’t… shelter himself from criticism with a narrative that placed the blame on previous administrations.

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It’s always disheartening to see someone from your own camp take a bad hit as Dave Weigel has.  The Washington Post blogger, who was hired to provide coverage “inside the conservative movement and the Republican Party,”resigned over recently leaked emails from the Journolist listserv, in which he used some less than flattering language in his personal commentary about many of the people he was covering.

While I’ve always been respectful of Weigel’s insights and his writing, I would be being less than honest however if I’d said there wasn’t something about his posts that I’d also found worrisome.  The revelation of the Journolist emails only strengthened my gut feeling, especially when I saw how nasty the rhetoric was in the emails.  Frankly, that part surprised even me.

It’s not that I wasn’t open-minded to the views that Weigel has always presented; I could appreciate that he has criticisms of the right.  But as someone assigned to provide conservative insight, his commentary sometimes struck me as being penned more from a liberal viewpoint than that of a conservative or libertarian one.  It almost seemed more targeted to pleasing Media Matters’ readers.  And since I already follow a number of liberal journalists to balance out the material I read from conservative and libertarian leaning authors, Media Matters’ tone isn’t exactly what I’m usually looking for.  But perhaps there was a reason his posts sometimes seemed that way to me. (more…)

In the first (and still best) “Austin Powers” film, a United Nations representative makes a faux pas and calls the film’s villain “Mr. Evil.”

“It’s Dr. Evil,” he huffs. “I didn’t spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called ‘mister,’ thank you very much.”

This is how I feel when I’m referred to as a “blogger,” sometimes with a political qualifier like “liberal” or “conservative” attached. I’m a reporter. I’ve been a reporter since high school. Like a lot of other people, I lucked into some reporting jobs that took advantage of the speed of the web — thus, I blogged. And I left the Washington Post because I was intoxicated by this medium and the privileges of reporting. The leak of my private e-mails wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago; but then, neither would have my career been possible.

Let’s go back to the start. I started in journalism in a fairly typical manner, by discovering how much I liked writing articles and doing interviews at my high school paper. I chose to go to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. It was there that I became editor of the campus’s weekly conservative paper, and became plugged into the campus conservative journalism network.

Was I really that conservative? Yes. (more…)