A recent article by Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic entitled “Why Mitt’s Wealth Matters: It’s Policy, Not Envy” offers a meme that surely will be one line of Democrat attack against Mitt Romney should he happen to win the GOP nomination. Mr. Cohn’s article focuses on a speech that President Obama recently gave at the University of Michigan promoting his program for making college more affordable. What I found fascinating was Cohn’s argument echoing Obama’s not so subtle hint that because of Mitt Romney’s wealthy upbringing, and thus his never needing a student loan, he has no “standing,” for lack of a better term, to be targeting the student loan program for cuts as a part of his total package for reducing discretionary federal spending.

Says Cohn:

“Romney also benefited from the lottery of life – among other things, by being born into a family that could afford to provide him with the very best education at every step of the way. He seems unaware of that fact and the possibility that others, born into less fortunate circumstances, might need some of the government programs he’s promised to undermine.”

In other words, because of Romney’s wealth, he simply does not understand the needs of those who use government assistance. So what is Cohn’s argument, then? That only those who had a hardscrabble upbringing need apply for the presidency?

For a columnist who clearly is in the Democratic camp to offer such a notion is utter hypocrisy. In 2004, the “party of the little guy” offered up as their standard-bearer Senator John Kerry, who was at the time the richest man in Congress. Not only was Kerry fabulously wealthy (~$500+ million net worth), but he didn’t even earn it! He married it. Add to this Kerry’s coiffed and grinning side-kick John Edwards was a sleazy trial lawyer who amassed his own pile of tens of millions by bankrupting obstetricians using junk science, and you hardly have a representation of the 99%. So how come in 2004 the Democrats felt that immense wealth didn’t matter, yet now suddenly it is a legitimate issue? (more…)

With details now erupting on Capitol Hill about Sen. John Kerry’s (D-MA) questionable investments, a curious question lingers: why did it take a Tallahassee-based think tank wonk to uncover a former presidential candidate’s aggressive trading of pharmaceutical stock during both the 2009 Obamacare debate and the 2003 prescription drug benefit plan debate?

After all, as Throw Them All Out makes clear, Sen. Kerry, while serving as a member of the Health Subcommittee on the powerful Senate Finance Committee, made huge profits off of healthcare-related trades.

So why didn’t the mainstream media expose the story, especially involving a man who ran for the nation’s highest office?

One explanation for the media’s failure to properly vet Mr. Kerry’s finances might be that some journalists believed reports like this 2005 USA Today article that claimed Mr. Kerry has a blind trust. However, according to his financial disclosure forms, Mr. Kerry does not have a blind trust. With a minimum net worth of $188.6 million, The Hill notes that Mr. Kerry is the richest member of Congress. According to Peter Schweizer’s book Throw Them All Out, “the bulk of the Kerrys’ wealth resides in a series of marital trust and commingled fund accounts.  All together, these funds include significant investments in stocks of many corporations.”

In an interview with Peter Schweizer, the author further explained that the Kerrys’ investment funds include two small funds run by Teresa Heinz Kerry’s sons, both of whom are close to Mr. Kerry and worked in senior positions on his 2004 presidential campaign. The Sustainable Technologies fund is run by Andre Heinz. He has little financial experience. The fund is set up in Sweden. The Kerrys have multiple investments in the fund through several of their trusts. Another son, Christopher Heinz, runs Rosemont Capital, where they also have invested. But neither of these are blind trusts, despite what some news outlets erroneously reported. (more…)

(more…)

On the evening of Aug. 8th, Jews across the world begin their observance of the fast of Tisha B’Av, mourning the loss of the two Jerusalem Temples (and many more calamities to the Jewish people). The Talmud tells us the cause of the Second Temple’s destruction was senseless hatred and political insults.

We are taught that during the first century CE,  a man threw a party and intended to invite his good friend Kamtza. His servant screwed up and mistakenly invited the host’s enemy, Bar Kamtza. This led to the insulting of Bar Kamtza, his slandering of the Jewish people to Caesar, and Bar Kamtza’s purposeful wounding of an animal Caesar sent to the Holy Temple to be sacrificed as a peace offering making it unfit to be used.

The offering was rejected by the Great Sanhedrin (think of the Sanhedrin as a Rabbinical Supreme Court whose 71  Judges were some of the wisest  scholars who ever lived.) The Sanhedrin met at the Holy Temple in Jerusalem until it was destroyed, after which they moved to Tiberius where today sits the Holy Land’s greatest Kosher Chinese restaurant, Pagoda (personally I do not believe that is a coincidence, from this we learned that the wise Rabbis of the Great Sanhedrin enjoyed take out now and then).

Anyway, Caesar took  the fact that his animals were rejected as a political insult and rebellious move  so he invaded, resulting in the destruction of the Holy Temple.

The public insulting of one man by one other man steamrolled out of control with the ultimate consequence of the destruction of the Holy Temple, and the exile of the Jewish people from Israel (and the ultimate Kosher Chinese place)  for almost 1900 years.

The story of the Kamtzas is apropos for the solemn day of Tisha B’Av,  but is also be a warning for America following two months of a debt ceiling debate riddled with personal insult and hateful rhetoric.

Despite the insults within and between both political parties, the compromise deal gives a political victory for some and though impotent in a cost cutting way,  it does provide an opening for our leadership to take use this “starting point” as a platform for the additional change necessary so the United States may avoid the Greece scenario and return to fiscal heath.

Although many in the movement would vehemently deny it, the big winner in the debate is the tea party movement. As recently as June 22nd the progressive Democratic Party were talking about a new stimulus package as part of a debt ceiling bill … but thanks to the tea party movement that scenario is long dead. The tea party movement switched the debate from “spending vs. cutting” to how “much should be cut and/or from where,” a huge accomplishment.

Major tea party demands going into the talks were achieved; no new taxes and cuts to the deficit larger than any increase in the debt ceiling. The biggest demand not achieved through the negotiation was the passage of the Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA). The bill passed by the House required that the Senate pass the Amendment, while the final compromise merely requires a vote. The difference is a huge one.  Since almost all of the states have a balanced budget requirement of some sort, and polls report that somewhere between 70-75% of voters want a BBA, once passed by two-thirds of each house of Congress this amendment is likely to “speed” its way thorough the state approval process (75% of the States must approve for it to be added to the constitution). A BBA would most certainly pass the house, house but will be rejected by the progressive-controlled Senate whose members are reluctant to give up their unlimited credit card.

Speaker Boehner and Minority Leader McConnell were also winners. They held to the “no new taxes” pledge despite rumors they had folded. Boehner gets more credit as he was the face of the opposition, took most of the heat, and showed himself willing to compromise not only with Democrats but with his own coalition to make a deal happen.

(more…)

On MSNBC, John Kerry told us that Tea Party ideas are not “real” ideas, not “factual,” and thinks that the media should stop reporting on anything that smacks of ideas or news coming from Tea Partiers. If this isn’t proof of how Democrats and leftists would use the power of government to quash free political speech, what is?

Not long ago, several Democrats tried to once again raise the ugly head of the defunct Fairness Doctrine that was killed during the Reagan administration in order to limit the free political speech of conservatives. In those dark days when Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House of Representatives, several Republicans talked about forever outlawing the anti-free speech rule. Democrats at the time spoke up in favor of the Fairness Doctrine and countered that they wanted to bring it back.

Fortunately, the Fairness Doctrine has not come back. But this un-American policy idea has been talked about by leftists every few years since it was torpedoed by Reagan in 1987. They would love to bring it back. And despite what they claim, the left would use a new Fairness Doctrine to squelch the free political speech of those on the right.

Want proof? Then let’s look at what Democrat Senator John Kerry said on MSNBC this week.

SEN. JOHN KERRY: And I have to tell you, I say this to you politely. The media in America has a bigger responsibility than it’s exercising today. The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual.

It doesn’t deserve the same credit as a legitimate idea about what you do. And the problem is everything is put into this tit-for-tat equal battle and America is losing any sense of what’s real, of who’s accountable, of who is not accountable, of who’s real, who isn’t, who’s serious, who isn’t?

(more…)

INTRODUCTION

I. Whoever Controls “The Narrative,” Controls the National Political Conversation

When it comes to most of today’s mainstream media we are no longer talking about an entity that reports truth or facts. Everything about the MSM is now about The Narrative. Even though they’re supposedly made up of separate and competing newsrooms, there’s a very good reason why the MSM as a whole is usually covering, emphasizing and amplifying the exact same stories. This is what The Narrative is and its usefulness to the MSM is how it pushes particular stories to the forefront of public awareness in order to further a political agenda — an agenda that 90% of the time is meant to aid the Left and damage the Right.

Another part of The Narrative is what the MSM chooses NOT to cover; what they willfully ignore.

You can see The Narrative at work as I write this. The same MSM that assured us that when it came to Barack Obama, the church he attended for two decades didn’t matter, is now obsessing over a church Rep. Michele Bachman’s hasn’t attended in over a year. Here you have two separate (and wildly hypocritical) narratives at work: one meant to protect a Democratic presidential candidate, the other meant to damage a GOP presidential candidate.

On the other hand, you can also see The Narrative working by what’s NOT being covered today. The same MSM that obsessed over the Valerie Plame non-story is currently all but ignoring Obama’s brewing “Fast and Furious” gunrunning scandal –mainly because it’s exactly the kind of scandal that can swamp a presidency into paralyzing, under-40 approval ratings.

II. How Alternative Media Created the MSM’s Need for a Media Matters for America

Prior to the rise of the Internet, the Left almost completely owned the narrative. The simple truth is that before Al Gore’s invention was fully realized, other than a few esteemed columnists, the media had no serious ideological competition from the Right. The rise of the Internet, however, changed all of that as citizen journalists — many of whom are motivated by the MSM’s liberal biases — found this new tool invaluable when it came to both debunking the MSM’s latest lie (the most famous being RatherGate) or reporting on stories the MSM chose to ignore for ideological reasons.

(more…)

Looks like Democrats got the memo.

Last week I worked for Liberty.com and covered a protest at Sharron Angle’s office in Las Vegas where a dozen MoveOn.org protesters showed up to go after the Chamber of Commerce for taking foreign money and buying TV ads during this election campaign. Of course, there is no proof of the foreign money, but the accusation is there and that’s the main thing that matters.

So far, the activist old media, to its credit, is not buying the Democrats claim. Certainly, they could be a little more forceful in refuting it, and mocking it. I’m suggesting Saturday Night Live do a skit where the Democrats go after Girl Scout Cookies because of a possible infiltration of foreign money. They sell 200 million boxes of cookies a year, there has to be some foreign money in there somewhere. Possibly, maybe, could be, might be.

Democrats have reached a new low in going after Republicans because it really is all they’ve got. They don’t want to talk about the economy, jobs, a failed “stimulus,” and a very unpopular “healthcare” bill. The media says they love to see candidates “stick to the issues” and ignore the foolishness, well, this is a great opportunity for the next three weeks for the media to “put up.” Make the Democrats stick to the issues of this election and focus on what the voters want. (more…)

Contrary to its mission to provide “reliable scientific information,” the United States Geological Survey is perpetrating a climate science fraud, with a little assist from USA Today.

On August 25, the USGS issued a press release titled, “Glaciers Retreating in Asia.” The subheading was even more frightening: “Could Impact Water Supplies for Millions and Cause Flood Conditions.” The subject of the USGS press release was “a report on the status of glaciers throughout all of Asia.”

What it failed to note, however, is that the report is decades old. Six of the seven chapters are based on manuscripts from the early 1980s. And the claim that glaciers are “retreating” in all of Asia is based almost exclusively on information collected from 1963 to 1993 regarding the tiny nation of Bhutan.

In no way does this old and limited data support the alarmist claims in the press release. That didn’t stop the USA Today website from running a story on the USGS study titled, “Asia’s Glaciers in Retreat, Could Signal Crop Failure, Floods in the Future.” Note the similarity of the USA Today title to the erroneous title of the USGS press release. This is the definition of a media echo chamber. (more…)

This is how low “profiles in courage” in Massachusetts’s U.S. Senate representation has fallen, and how bad the media-leftist complex has gotten. Today’s Washington Post carries an homage by columnist E.J. Dionne to Sen. John Kerry’s “passion” to push an “energy bill.”

The absurd, offending sentence is “Which brings us back to Kerry, who in a talk with me made no apologies for his eagerness to get an energy bill.” Well. Yes. He’s eager to tell you how his cap-and-trade global warming bill is an energy bill, rebranding it after pollster Stanley Greenberg instructed Democrats that “cap-and-trade” and “global warming” weren’t selling, and they had to rebrand it as “energy”.

Which calls into question the breathtaking courage, passion, etc. This is Kerry’s second cap-and-trade global warming bill just this Congress. After the first floundered, he came out muttering about how mean it is to describe the bill as cap-and-trade — the central component of both is cap-and-trade, of course — on the grounds that “I don’t know what cap-and-trade means” (he said that, incidentally, just after the Greenberg memo urging such abandonment). (more…)

When someone says “journalist” do you have a picture of a fedora-sporting, cigar chomping, agitator of jaded mien and independent mind, a man stubbornly outside the political establishment looking in and eyeing it all with suspicion? Do you get a flash of a writer that stands in opposition to entrenched powers, one looking out for the Little Guy?

If so you’ve been watching too many black-and-white moves from the 1940s. Today, “journalist” simply means an extension of the Democrat Party. And now even the book parties held so “journalists” can launch their latest paean to liberalism are bought and paid for by leftists, the Democrat Party, and their affiliated operatives.

To disabuse you of any old-fashioned notions you still might harbor about the days of The Front Page,  on June 9, Washington Post star reporter Ceci Connolly had to cancel her appearance at her own book party when it became common knowledge that the whole thing was being paid for by a public relations firm run by Democrat operatives. The event was bought and paid for by Blue Line Strategic Communications, a public relations firm run by Democratic communications strategist Michael Meehan and former Senate Democratic official David DiMartino. Most recently DiMartino was a Sen. John Kerry staffer and Meehan worked as a senior staff member in the Senate for years.

So much for the idea of “independent journalists.” (more…)

Will 2004 Democrat VP nominee and two-time presidential candidate John Edwards soon be indicted by the feds for campaign-finance violations?  The National Enquirer says Edwards will be indicted — and in the John Edwards Scandal, where the Enquirer leads the Mainstream Media follow.

What a difference a few years make.

When Edwards was one of the leading Democrat presidential candidates, the Enquirer broke story after story while the MSM refused to ask, refused to report and refused to inform its readers of the events.  This continued for months, while Edwards was considered for both an Obama running mate and attorney general slot.

Even after the Enquirer caught Edwards visiting Hunter and their daughter in a late night rendezvous at the Beverly Hilton in July 2008, there was no coverage in the traditional press for weeks.  After initially labeling the Enquirer’s report as “tabloid trash,“ Edwards finally confessed on ABC’s Nightline on August 8, 2008. (more…)

One must at least credit NBC’s Chuck Todd with one virtue.  He is utterly transparent.

When real “journalist” Todd – Chief White House Correspondent for NBC News and the co-hose of The Daily Rundown — gave this impish put down of what he calls, “Drudge-Driven Journalism,” his resentment, fear and school-boy petulance could not have been clearer to any sentient observer.

Such a pity, really.  A grown man reduced to whining in front of the White House makes his viewers so embarrassed for him that it’s painful to watch.  He should have saved all that peevish poppycock for Al Gore, the inventor of the internet.  For, in reality, the saving grace of journalism today – the only thing that gives these leftist buffoons in the MSM even a tiny shred of credibility – is the internet’s check and balance on their politically driven narratives.

Their animus is usually aimed at the Drudge Report because of the number of hits.  It’s Drudge’s numbers that drive the most powerful wedge between these MSM indoctrinated monkeys parading as journalists and their monopoly on the “truth.”  And all it takes is a single flashback to know why all the hacks associated with the once-august MSM fear “Drudge-Driven Journalism” – down to their quaking toes in their manure-muddied Gucci’s.

Flashback:  Dan Rather, 60 Minutes Wednesday, September 8, 2004. (more…)

During an interview with MSNBC’s Joy Behar on Feb. 21, MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch let his bigot flag fly.  While fulminating against the tea-party movement in general and in particular against the candidate known as “the tea-party candidate,” who gave the rousing opening speech at CPAC, Deutsch blurted:  “You almost need that blank piece of paper. That’s the new model. Like, you know, this coconut (Marco) Rubio down in Florida.”

In settings like MSNBC (but usually backstage) the term coconut (brown on the outside white on the inside) is generally used to castigate “Hispanics” who ignore marching orders barked by Democratic/MSM drill sergeants—same as “Oreo” for similarly uppity blacks.

Never mind that the Cuban-American Marco Rubio is probably more purely Caucasian than Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, Oral Roberts, Johnny Depp among many other southerners who boast Choctaw/Cherokee heritage. We’ll deal with Deutsch’s stupidity in another article. This one’s about Deutsch’s bigotry, a derivative of his stupidity.

Exit polls show that Cuban-Americans voted against Obama by the highest margins—and by far!—of any U.S. ethnic group, including “anglos.” So we’re fair-game for ethnic slurs—and have been for decades. In fact, Deutsch has as much reason to fulminate against Cuban-Americans as the most virulent nativist.  Regarding the U.S. political mainstream, Cuban-Americans obstinately refuse to assimilate. To wit: (more…)

Readers rarely get a chance to see the re-writing of history, but they’re seeing an attempt in the recent reporting by the Legacy Media of the John Edwards Scandal.

Several recently-published books (Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s Game Change and Edwards’ ex-aide, Andrew Young’s The Politician) examine the John Edwards scandal and Edwards’ elaborate cover-up of his affair and love child with campaign videographer, Rielle Hunter.

Halperin and Heilemann would have readers believe that they were on the trail of the story from the start–and perhaps they were.  It’s just that they didn’t bother to inform the readers of their employers, TIME and New York, while the scandal and cover-up were occurring.

Both books have prompted reports and discussions of the Edwards Scandal, particularly on ABC, which scored a series of exclusive interviews of Young, intent on publicizing his book.  The interviews along with other information is featured prominently on ABC’s website under John Edwards Scandal: (more…)

Should the National Enquirer get the Pulitzer Prize for its multi-year investigation of the John Edwards affair, scandal and cover-up? That’s a question that’s been asked lately: in some cases, at the same Mainstream Media papers which participated in the news blackout of the Enquirer’s Edwards’ coverage.

Edwards, who had been Sen. John Kerry’s running mate in 2004, was one of the front-runners at the time the Enquirer broke the second installment of the story on December 18, 2007.

The Enquirer released an abundance of easily-verifiable information at that time: Rielle Hunter, a former Edwards campaign worker, was pregnant with what the Enquirer reported was Edwards’ love child; she had been moved within five miles of the Edwards campaign headquarters in Chapel Hill, NC; Hunter was living an exclusive gated community, a few houses down the street from Edwards’ former Director of Finance, Andrew Young; and, she was driving around in a BMW registered to Young.  Add all this to the fact that information about Hunter had disappeared from the Internet and other publicly-searchable databases and the MSM was handed a great story. (more…)

The blogosphere is abuzz with speculation about the real identity of the strange and wonderfully timely “Ellie Light,” President Obama’s No. 1 fan and apparently the owner of more residences than Donald Trump, John McCain and John Kerry combined.  Not to mention an indefatigable letter writer.

With Obama slumping in the polls, and reduced to more campaign-style appearances in front of friendly audiences in lieu of, you know, actually governing, the ethereal Ms. Light has taken pen in hand on multiple occasions to support her (?) fading Hope:

Courtesy of Patterico, a sample excerpt from her bountiful, revisionist, apologetic pen:

A year ago, if we had read in the paper that employers were hiring again, that health care legislation was proceeding without a bump, that Afghanistan suddenly became a nice place to take your kids, we would’ve known we were being lied to. Back then, we recognized that the problems Obama inherited as president wouldn’t go away overnight.

But today, the president is being attacked as if he were a salesman who promised us that our problems would wash off in the morning. He never made such a promise. It’s time for Americans to realize that governing is hard work, and that a president can’t just wave a magic wand and fix everything.

Why would anyone think Obama had a magic wand?  It’s not as if he’s ever made any extravagant promises: (more…)

Why did Game Change authors, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann keep quiet on one of the 2008 campaign’s juiciest stories–only to spill the beans eighteen months later?

More importantly, why did they tell their readers about the John Edwards scandal only after it became personally profitable to do so?

Political reporters Halperin and Heilemann signed their book deal in June 2008, reportedly for a “mid- to high- six-figure sum.”co-authors of the ubiquitous political tell-all, Game Change.  Sprinkled amongst this cornucopia of unsourced gossip, rumor, whispers and innuendo are nuggets of hard news, particularly about former 2008 Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards.

Of particular interest was the following passage, from the excerpt published by Heilemann’s employer, New York :

(more…)

As you all watched the Bowl Championship Series title game between Texas and Alabama, consider that this could be the final game where some degree of freedom exists in who actually plays in the game.

Reliable sources tell me that senators are lining up to make demands for future BCS Bowl Games. Of course, these demands have not yet been made public because the negotiations are taking place in a secret location, in a closed building, behind a locked door, and the senators are reportedly hiding under black sheets — just like in the top-secret “health care” reconciliation process now underway.

Say goodnight, Ben

Apparently – and you heard it here first – Ben Nelson (D-Lame Duck, Neb.) has had told Harry Reid (D-Dead Man Talking) that he’s excited about the prospect of free Medicaid forever, but since the issue is insurance, he wants the Nebraska Cornhuskers to be guaranteed a BCS Bowl game forever or until he needs a hair transplant, whichever comes first. Plus, he’d like that one second taken back off the clock in the Nebraska/Texas game that put Texas in the Championship Game.

Typically, Reid praised himself as a brilliant negotiator and said Nelson could have his “Cornhusker Guarantee” by getting his team in the new Forever BCS Series, but that he could not take the second off the clock. Reid then reportedly said, “This has to be done in the spirit of bi-partisanship, there are Republicans in Texas. Besides, I want to use the word “bipartisanship” in a sentence I actually mean.” (more…)