Barack Obama is nothing less than a hypocrite on his admonitions over public discourse and the latest example of this truth lies in his refusal to condemn the violence-tinged language of Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa not to mention his similar silence on the obscene rhetoric of many of the leading members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

While Obama has tsk tsked folks on the right like Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin and told the nation that we need to start “talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds,” he has turned a blind eye to his own vice president calling political opponents “terrorists,” members of Congress saying that Republicans and Tea Partiers can “go straight to hell,” and just this week walked on stage grinning like a Cheshire Cat immediately after Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa told a Detroit crowd that they intended to “take those sons a bitches out.” Tonight he hosts AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka in the box next to the First Lady, the same Trumka whose union members this morning stormed a port and took hostages. (MSM was careful to not report this until later today so as not to overshadow the President’s address.)

Obama loves to sound as if he’s somehow above old fashioned, boilerplate rhetoric or the mudslinging that is associated with down-and-dirty politics. He not only claims to avoid such rhetoric himself but acts the national scold and wags fingers at others that do indulge such tactics. Well, he does if it happens to be his political opponents indulging that sort of rhetoric, that is. When his side does it, the scold in chief is suddenly silent.

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Recently Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley from 1996 to 2008 and prolific journalist/author, mourned “the cascading effects of the slow-motion downsizing of one of the planet’s most magnificent landforms,” the Himalayan glaciers.  In an LA Times opinion piece surveying what no longer works in the U.S., Schell cited areas like the environment, education, and transportation, and found American hopelessness, especially compared to contemporary China.

Schell’s “studying of melting glaciers” was likely related to a much-hyped warning from the World Wildlife Fund, which was revealed to be a sham, based on an anecdotal report.  But Schell’s warnings, along with his list of American failings, suggest a general ideological bias.

A recent challenge has been identifying the bias of the mainstream media.  Oddly enough, exposing ideological bias has long been a favored project in communication studies, usually practiced by leftists.  One method, much used by recent multicultural leftists, has held that consciousness and meaning are contingent social constructs.  Following such post-modernists as Lyotard, these folks regard discourse  as a composite of  linguistic, social, and cultural formulations.  One need only examine these to reveal the consciousness or mentality of an author or work. (more…)

After pleading guilty to what is apparently the misdemeanor of “Entry by false pretenses to any real property, vessel, or aircraft of the United States” (18 U.S.C. § 1036), James O’Keefe has joined a long list of political activists convicted of charges related to their political activism.  He’s just the only conservative one.  Nonetheless, we look forward to the mainstream media enshrining him in its current pantheon of heroes of civil disobedience.  And to elephants flying.

Like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, with their like-clockwork arrests protesting whatever is in the news at any given moment, O’Keefe’s antics were apparently designed to make a political point.  In this case, the point seemed to be to show that the local staff of Senator Mary Landrieu (D., La.) was making up stories about her telephone system’s being down in order to dodge calls from outraged constituents decrying the health care reform bill.

It being a conservative point, rather than a left-wing attempt to raise racial tensions or extort money from cowardly corporations, we have not seen much sympathy for O’Keefe’s plight.

Of course, it is unfair to compare O’Keefe to lefty icons Sharpton or Jackson – unfair to O’Keefe.  The precocious O’Keefe helped blow the lid off ACORN’s twisted willingness to break not only the law but also the most basic tenets of moral decency in order to assist what its representatives understood to be child sex slavers, leading to ACORN’s welcome demise.  In contrast, Sharpton is a notorious charlatan who has spent years dodging the judgment against him entered after the Tawana Brawley charade, and Jesse Jackson is a noted shakedown artist, adulterer and father of a love child. (more…)

Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) has announced their annual awards for investigative journalism.  I’m sure you’ve already guessed the winner in the “On-line” category.   Of course, it was a tough call for them.  The competition was stiff:

• Big Hollywood’s expose of the NEA Conference Call story which led to a resignation in shame and stern guidance from the White House.

• The blockbuster revelation of the bogus science behind global warming policy which led to the resignation of the UN’s chief climate policy maker.

• James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles’ undercover investigation of ACORN which led to their losing government funding and eventually to their bankruptcy and complete collapse

Hard to pick among those great stories, isn’t it?  But, the sober and experienced judges at IRE have finally announced their winner: (more…)

What happens when a journalist asks the right questions and gets a politician a few minutes past their talking points?  Well, sometimes, as Michael Kinsley has pointed out, we get to the truth.  That’s what happened this morning on WLS 890 AM in Chicago.  Bruce Wolf and Dan Proft were filling on the Don Wade and Roma morning show and had Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. on to discuss the Health Care Reform bill.

This is the bill that President Obama has declared will lower premiums, increase benefits and cut the deficit, right?

After wading through Jesse Jr.’s talking points, the interview finally gets to the truth:

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That was Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. saying something that none of us has heard from a Democrat over the past 12 months of debate over the Health Care Reform act: (more…)

The liberal media’s newest meme is to claim that the tea party movement is made up exclusively of John Birchers, militia types, racists, and “birthers.” Politico, for instance, had an extensive story about how legitimate conservatives are coming to realize that they’ll have to conduct a Buckley-style purge of the extremists if they expect the tea party groups to be taken seriously. Of course, the left has had its extremists for decades, unlike the right has never conducted any such purges, and has also benefited from a news media that has never highlighted the left’s worst nuts.

The whole idea that conservatives have to purge their wackier, more fringe members is something that at one level is obvious but at another is proof that the left and the Old Media are nothing but hypocrites. At still a third level there is part of the attitude exhibited by some of these far right elements that is a root motivation of the tea party movement, fringe or no.

As clownish left-wing commentators such as Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, John Stewart or Stephen Colbert point fingers and guffaw at the fringes of the right and as the New York Times and Politico stroke their chins and look down their noses at the unruly tea party movement, it must be noted that none of these folks ever uttered a cross word against the Code Pink wackos, the communist infiltrators, anti-war hippies, Stalinist apologists, pro-abortion extremists, Euro-trash half-wits, eco-terrorists, and outright anarchists that have filled the left’s ranks since the birth of the new left after WWII. (more…)

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

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

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

About the ACORN investigation, she continues:

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

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

Back in early 2009, while the MSM noted the tax evasion problems of several of Obama’s appointees, Congressman Charlie Rangel (D, NY) sat nearby, grinning like the Cheshire Cat from Wonderland. The tax transgressions of Timmy Geithner, Tommy Daschle, Nancy Killefer, et al are equivalent to shoplifting a candy bar from a convenience store when compared to Charlie’s multiple, long-term, bank heists. Cholly’s been at it for four decades!

Last October, the New York Post reviewed his long history of funny money management.

So it would go for Charlie Rangel over the next four decades — a pattern of tax evasion, special treatment and enrichment that seemed to increase with his power and prestige in Congress. Whether it’s living in rent-stabilized apartments while making a hefty salary, or failing to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in earnings and assets, his actions betray a consistent, defiant sense of entitlement. And when he is caught, the powerful Democrat blames a right-wing conspiracy.

We also learned last October that the on-going congressional inquiry into Charlie’s tax issues was being “expanded” — (more…)