George Soros’ disciple Ken Vogel wrote a front-page Politico piece laying out the left-wing site’s narrative-attack regarding Governor Mitt Romney’s tax returns. To say the Vogel article is contextually challenged would be quite the understatement, and charitable.

Ebenezer Obama

What Vogel wants you to know:

Mitt Romney and his wife earned more than $20 million in each of the last two years — including a total of $13 million from Bain Capital investments — and paid a rate of about 15 percent in federal taxes, according to tax information released by his presidential campaign Tuesday morning. …

They showed a tax rate far lower than those of his rivals, and foreign investments including a since-closed $3 million Swiss bank account and a Cayman Islands-based fund as well investments in Solamere Capital[.] …

In a conference call with reporters detailing the taxes, Romney’s campaign stressed the couples’ charitable contributions of about $7 million over the two years, and cast the tax documents as a window into the affairs of someone who has achieved the American Dream, and is intent on giving back. …

The Romneys’ tax rate was far lower than the 2010 rates paid by President Barack Obama, 26 percent, or Newt Gingrich, 31.5 percent.

Here’s the context Politico’s resident Soros’ disciple did not include in his story:

[T]he Romneys paid out 42 percent of their income in taxes and charity. …

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Buried near the bottom of a mostly glowing feature piece written by George Soros’ disciple Ken Vogel at the left-wing Politico:

Brad Smith, a past FEC chairman who now heads the Center for Competitive Politics, which advocates for less campaign finance regulation, also counts himself a fan of Colbert’s campaign finance jokes in the past, but thinks that this year, he’s off base.

“I think his super PAC stuff has largely been misleading the public,” he said. “He’s giving very misleading impressions about how disclosure obligations work, and he’s given a misleading understanding about why there are rules about coordination in politics.”

The rule banning coordination is “intended to prevent campaign contributions from being essentially a substitute for bribery,” he said, and is not really as ridiculous as Colbert and Stewart try to make it seem.

More broadly, he takes issue with those who look at Citizens United as some kind of cataclysmic event.

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- Creepy. New website builds dossiers on journalists:

Ira Stoll is 38. He has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. His phone number is (718) 499-2199 and his email is ira@futureofcapitalism.com. He went to college at Harvard, has worked at the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and New York Sun, and he considers Seth Lipsky a personal friend.

I know all this from Stoll’s profile page on NewsTransparency.com, a new site he just launched to make it easier for the public “to find out about the individual human beings who produce the news — human beings with opinions, relationships, history, and agendas.”

- Anonymous threatens the Zeta Drug Cartel, but will that make it more dangerous for Mexican bloggers to write about the drug war?

- Politico’s Ken “We don’t want to get into details” Vogel used to work for a George Soros group. Explains so much.

- FLASHBACK: Romney adviser to 2008 campaign behind fake Fred Thompson smear site.

- More on the Romney strategy of avoiding national media:

“In 2008, Mitt Romney was new to the national stage and not very well-known outside of Massachusetts,” spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom said in an email to The Huffington Post. “There was an obvious benefit to doing a lot of earned media because it helped raise his profile, and we wanted to increase name awareness and recognition. The downside was that we often found ourselves at the mercy of the daily news cycle and answering questions about whatever happened to be in the headlines that day. One of the things we learned from that experience is that we had to do a better job of getting his message across in media interviews.”

This cycle, Fehrnstrom said, the campaign is “generally more careful about when and where we put him out to do interviews.”

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The good news is that Politico’s Andy Barr is now going to work out in the open against Palin and the Right, as opposed to what he’s been doing since 2008, and that’s the exact same thing at Politico under the failed disguise of an objective journalist. One wonders if all he had to do in order to get his Democratic Party job was either staple his Politico work to the application or simply write “I work for Politico” when asked for a list of experience in promoting the Leftist cause.

Peas in a pod

The Daily Caller reports:

“No it wasn’t deceptive, that’s what everybody’s saying about it. I saw the first version of it, and it told pretty much the whole story, of how that woman had gone through an epiphany of understanding how race works.”

Related:
Nolte: Who Got to Chris Matthews?: ‘Hardball’ Defense of Breitbart Memory-Holed (July 30, 2010)
Marlow: WaPo’s Kurtz “dishonestly suggests Matthews had gotten his facts wrong regarding Breitbart including footage of Shirley Sherrod’s redemption” (August 3, 2010)

In their ongoing crusade to target and silence decent, everyday Americans as racists, some in the MSM love to use the term “dog-whistle” in order to ascribe racial motives to words like, say,  “basketball.” Well, lately I’ve been hearing a dog-whistle of my own — a dog-whistle of the journ-o-list variety that tells me that in their relentless campaign to destroy Sarah Palin and undercut her as a serious political force, the MSM is preparing to up the ante when it comes to using the Governor’s own family and children as a political weapon against her.

First, a little background…

Why the Media Whips Up the Palin-Fury

Watching the MSM react to Governor Palin over the last few years has been an illuminating crash course in Alinsky 101. Like elite, elbow-patched community organizers, the media collectively targets, polarizes, demonizes and intentionally creates a perpetual storm of personal drama around the Governor in the hopes of exhausting even those of us who support her. I call it whipping up the Palin-Fury.

This is a common tactic from the Left, but one we usually see played out in the streets with the idea being to so toxify the atmosphere that decent people give up the fight and go home just to get away from the awfulness of it all. The last few months of ugly and relentless pro-union protests in Wisconsin — though a failure for the left — were a textbook example of this. However, when it comes to Governor Palin, what we’re seeing is this tactic practiced by almost every so-called “objective” news outlet in America.

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It’s one thing to be a run of the mill, left-wing press agency. However, on Monday, Politico took their bias to a whole new (yes, rabid) level. On a morning when gas prices were approaching record highs, the EPA blocked drilling in the Arctic, Obama escalated America’s role in Libya, and the IMF predicted that the Chinese economy will surpass our own in a few short years, this bastion of journalistic hackery chose instead to promote a group of nuts “on a mission” to destroy Governor Palin, as their top story. As William Jacobson noted:

Under the guise of reporting on the anti-Palin movement, Politico manages to dredge up almost every crank accusation against Palin. The fourth word in the first sentence of the article just happens to be “promiscuous.” How nice.

In the course of the article, Politico manages to compare Palin to Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, Hitler, and Father Coughlin, but only because such people were controversial and celebrities, of course. And Politico did not make the connection itself, it merely quoted someone making the connection, that’s how real reporters do it, right?

Politico even refers to Rebecca Mansour, an aide to Palin who helps with SarahPAC, as an “attack dog,” with an embeded link in Mansour’s name in the Politico article to the viciously anti-Palin Palingates website. This is beyond contemptible even for Politico.

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In Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother increased chocolate rations from 30 grams per week to 25 grams per week.  You read that right.  There are no objective facts; there is only the word of the Ministry of Truth. The 21st century Thought Police,  i.e. the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and the JournoList, don’t just get the facts completely wrong, but they double down and congratulate themselves as if they’d gotten them right, so long as the misinformation they spread serve their political purposes.  This mainstream media totalitarianism was on full display on Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources this weekend on CNN:

As we documented last week, Chris Matthews aired a highly entertaining segment of Hardball where he blasted Howard Dean for not watching the original Shirley Sherrod footage and rightfully pointed out that Breitbart had included footage of her redemption in the original video.  Apparently, the Thought Police tracked Matthews down between shows and made him re-tape the segment with Politico’s Breitbart beat writer/lefty double agent Ken Vogel replacing Dean; the discussion changed from the actual substance of Breitbart’s multimedia presentation to popcorn “the state of journalism today” malarkey. (more…)

Update: Politico corrected this piece and issued the following statement:

CORRECTION: This story was altered to reflect that O’Keefe and Basel are on pre-trial release, not probation or parole, as was stated in an earlier version.

We thank them for their diligence.

**

In Kenneth P. Vogel’s piece “James O’Keefe says next video ‘ready to go,’” published by Politico on February 18th, there are a number of factual errors that ought to be corrected.  The problematic sentences are identified in block quotes with explanations of the errors beneath each quote:

O’Keefe – who had to get permission from his parole office to attend CPAC – told POLITICO he wasn’t sure if the terms of his probation would allow him to remain in Washington to accept the award or would require him to return to his parents’ home in New Jersey.

There are multiple problems in this sentence.  First, Mr. O’Keefe did not need “permission from his parole office to attend CPAC,” as he has never been paroled.  We’re not sure Mr. Vogel meant “parole office” or “parole officer” (the latter makes more sense since O’Keefe does not own or operate a New Jersey parole office), but the claim is factually inaccurate either way.   The lead entry for the word “parole” at dictionary.com is, “the conditional release of a person from prison prior to the end of the maximum sentence imposed.” In other words, in order to be paroled, one must first be convicted and sentenced.  Mr. O’Keefe, of course, is still pending trial.  In a statement to BigJournalism.com, Mr. O’Keefe said he was granted permission to attend CPAC from a “pretrial services officer” from the New Jersey Pre-Trial Services Agency.  The role of the officer assigned to him is to “investigate defendants who are charged with federal crimes and awaiting a court hearing.”  The operative word being “charged.”  Politico’s characterization of Mr. O’Keefe implies a conviction. (more…)