Leftist publication Mother Jones took to Twitter to call for pictures of graffiti in cities and towns across America, done to show support for the Occupy whatever movement.

There are already any number of irresponsible voices involved with the Occupy movement at ground-level. Mother Jones should have done what serious publications are supposed to do, get the facts before you publish, especially if you intend to encourage costly, potentially criminal behavior.

Graffiti vandals believe their actions harm no one. The reality is graffiti hurts everyone: homeowners, communities, businesses, schools, and you. And, those who practice it risk personal injury, violence, and arrest.

Although the cost of graffiti vandalism in the U.S. has yet to be definitively documented, for many communities, private property owners, and public agencies the cost is rising each year. Figures from a variety of cities across the U.S. suggest that graffiti cleanup alone costs taxpayers about $1-3 per person each year.

(more…)

The goat rodeo that is Mother Jones never lets the facts get in the way of a highly entertaining and bias-fueled story.

Mother Jones staffer attempts to wrestle narrative by furiously twisting its legs.

The outlet most recently demonstrated this with a puzzling story on Brandon Darby, progressive super-activist-turned-conservative FBI informant. Darby committed the cardinal sin of moral awakening and told the po-po that two of his prog-activist friends were making Molotov cocktails for reportedly violent use at the 2008 RNC.

Mother Jones author Josh Harkinson wrings his hands over Darby’s political conversion, completely shrugging off the fact that, oh, I don’t know, two progressives were, according to published materials, planning on blowing stuff up and possibly injuring and/or killing people at a public event.

After flirting with some of the same information for which the NYT is getting sued (defamation and libel; NYT even admitted their error) , Harkinson waits until the end of the piece to drop this nugget in between graphs suggesting entrapment and questioning Darby’s character:

The feds ultimately convicted the pair [Darby's progressive activist associates] for making the Molotov cocktails, but they didn’t have enough evidence of intent to use them. Crowder, who pleaded guilty rather than risk trial, and a heavier sentence, got two years. McKay, who was offered seven years if he pleaded guilty, opted for a trial, arguing on the stand that Darby told him to make the Molotovs, a claim he recanted after learning that Crowder had given a conflicting account. McKay is now serving out the last of his four years in federal prison.

Wait – so one of them changed their stories after the other’s story didn’t corroborate it? Who cares! GET DARBY. The snitch.

The most insane thing of all about this story is Harkinson’s bizarre comparisons. He fumbles to convey how he wants you to think without admitting his bias, my bold emphasis:

The atmosphere around town was tense, with local and federal police facing off against activists who had descended upon the city. Convinced that anarchists were plotting violent acts, they sought to bust the protesters’ hangouts, sometimes bursting into apartments and houses brandishing assault rifles.

You mean how two individuals mentioned in the article were hauled in after it was discovered, and they were convicted, of making explosives? Yes, I’d say that the FBI was “convinced.”

(more…)

If one read’s this Mother Jones hit piece, you’d think there’s rampant homophobia in Rep. Michele Bachmann’s home school district and it’s somehow Bachmann’s fault. Nonsense. Also, the Southern Poverty Law Center, choosing politics over integrity, has filed a federal lawsuit. Funny how it was timed to her rise in the polls.  Imagine that.

The Teen Suicide Epidemic in Michele Bachmann’s District

The reality is, the issue surfaced in the news purely as a matter of teen suicide in general and the district’s numbers are not at all out of line with national averages. Factually, there is no suicide epidemic at all, let alone one for gay teens.

Furthermore, there have been several recent health-related staff and student deaths, a murder and a car accident in the district. Professionals felt those might put surviving teens at risk; so, they’ve instituted a Summer care program.

Sadly, that didn’t stop Leftist activist organizations and publications from trying to make political hay out of it. These elements have no shame and are disgracefully exploiting a well-known at risk group, teenagers as a whole, by twisting the facts to suit a purely political agenda. (more…)

I find the rush to exploit the tragedy of the Arizona shooting for political grandstanding sickening. Of course, if you’re at all aware of how the Paul Wellstone memorial service played out, you’re not surprised.

Congressman Grijalva was quick to blame Sarah Palin and the tea party in an interview with Mother Jones:

Asked whether the tea party right deserved to be singled out for particular blame, Grijalva assented:

[When] you stoke these flames, and you go to public meetings and you scream at the elected officials, you threaten them—you make us expendable you make us part of the cannon fodder. For a while, you’ve been feeding this hatred, this division…you feed it, you encourage it….Something’s going to happen. People are feeding this monster….Some of the extreme right wing has made demonization of elected officials their priority.

People went to townhalls to voice their concerns because elected officials purposefully ignored the people and the people have every right to voice their displeasure. Grijalva is attempting to sloppily make an analogy between the democratic process and violence which is irresponsible.

(more…)

In a widely read and discussed piece at the Daily Beast, Reihan Salan asks:

Has a shadowy gang of left-wing journalists and intellectuals been plotting to manipulate the news cycle…

His answer is, yes, perhaps so, but they’d be doing it with or without JournoList. Salan is more right than he probably knows.

The list of those identified as former members of the group is now up to more than 150 names, out of 400 in all. Nearly a quarter of those individuals were connected with another media organization called the Media Consortium. The Consortium is an organization of progressive media outlets formed in 2005, a full two years before JournoList. Its dues paying member organizations include The Nation, Mother Jones, Talking Points Memo, The American Prospect, Ms., Democracy Now! and many more (a complete list is here). The purpose of the group was explicit and can be found on their website:

Our mission is to amplify independent media’s voice, increase our collective clout, leverage our current audience and reach new ones. We believe it is possible and necessary to seize the current moment and change the debate in this country. We will accomplish this mission by fulfilling our five strategic principles: (more…)

So, thanks to the Daily Caller, more emails are emerging from “Journolist,” that secret list of liberal media hacks – and guess what, they’re about Sarah Palin.

And surprise: they aren’t positive!

First, they focused on how the media could help Obama beat McCain, after Sarah was picked as a running mate.

Jonathan Stein from Mother Jones loved the idea that the pick should be labeled sexist.

He writes: “That’s excellent! If enough people – people on this list? – write that the pick is sexist, you’ll have the networks debating it for days. And that negates the SINGLE thing Palin brings to the ticket.”

Thank God he capitalized “single!”

But my fave? Politico reporter Ben Adler, now at Newsweek, writing,

“… doesn’t leaving sad baby without its mother while she campaigns weaken that family values argument?”

Maybe so Ben, although I wonder how you know her baby is “sad.” Perhaps you could share your expertise in this area, douchebag.

So, here’s what we’ve learned so far from the leaked emails: (more…)

The Daily Caller is currently running a series of articles proving the collusion we’ve long suspected among members of the media. The articles expose the thoughts of some of the liberal writers that belonged to JournoList, a now-defunct listserv of hundreds of left wing journalists, educators, and pundits, in relation to revelations about then-candidate Obama’s relationship to his pastor Jeremiah Wright, John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate and other weighty matters.

Matthew Yglesias, JournoList member

As you may suspect, it seems that every blogger on the center-right has an opinion about the revelation—for most Americans, actually just a confirmation—of the naked collusion among journalists in support of left-wing Democratic politics, politicians, and policy.

But this collusion is more than just an example of media corruption. It is an example of these journalists and pundits using their positions, accumulated credibility, and power to thwart the freedom of speech from the inside. Allow yourself just a few minutes to consider the ramifications of this surrender of ethics and their demand for conformity, and you will be terrified. (more…)

JournoList scandal is back and prepare for it to be a driving force in the news for quite some time. The Daily Caller published an article tonight indicating they’ve obtained emails from the JournoList and the initial details are as damning as we expected when the list-serv, founded by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein in 2007, surfaced with the Dave Weigel kerfuffle last month.

Snippets from the article below, but make sure to read the whole thing at the Daily Caller and return to Big Journalism early and often as we unpack the details that emerge and track the fallout from this seminal event in the history of left-wing media bias.  It’s unclear exactly what the Daily Caller has, but there’s certainly no indication from this article they’ve already laid all their cards out on the table.

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.” (more…)

Mother Jones prides itself on “smart, fearless journalism.”

So, let’s see how MoJo did with a recent profile of Kris Kobach, University of Missouri/Kansas City law professor and Republican candidate for Kansas’s secretary of state position, who was described in the headline as “the man behind Arizona’s immigration law.”

Kobach is an experienced immigration litigator, involved in several high-profile cases over the past few years. (See Hazleton, Farmers Branch, etc). But he’s no legal puppeteer, as the headline implies. He is merely the lawyer who helped draft S.B. 1070.

… Kobach advanced an idea that had long been circulating in conservative legal circles: that local and state officials have the “inherent authority” to enforce federal immigration laws. This unorthodox notion bucked the prevailing view—long held by both Republican and Democratic administrations—that the federal government has principal jurisdiction over immigration under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. If local and state governments were to strike out on their own, they could undermine federal efforts, create the potential for draconian crackdowns, and detract from law enforcement efforts by discouraging immigrants from cooperating with police, critics argue. In 2002, however, Ashcroft’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a memo, which Kobach contributed to, supporting the “inherent authority” theory.

(more…)

**Post UPDATED at bottom.

In the weeks leading up to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last week, there was a sidebar skirmish involving two of the CPAC sponsors.  The new gay conservative group, GOProud.org, which was formed in 2009, wanted to make a splash at CPAC and introduce itself to the conservative movement.  But long-time sponsor, Liberty University, would have none of it:

Obviously as an exhibitor or participant, you don’t necessarily have to think that everyone agrees with you, and some people might even work against you [notes Liberty Law School Dean Mat] Staver.  But as a co-sponsor, even though not everybody would have the same mission, not everyone would agree with the same tactics, and some would actually focus on economics whereas others might focus on social issues and others might focus on national defense – the fact is they’re all conservative in nature.  You wouldn’t expect, however, a co-sponsor to actively work to undermine another co-sponsor, and that is in fact what GOProud does.

Liberty dropped, GOProud stayed, and CPAC took some heat.  So coming into CPAC, GOProud knew its presence would be controversial and their members were prepared to address opponents at the exhibit booth.  But last Friday, when a series of student activists spoke at the podium, no one imagined the undercurrent would erupt the way it did.

Alexander McCobin addressed the GOProud/Liberty sponsor issue head-on and praised CPAC for being inclusive and standing up for the principles of freedom and liberty.  McCobin was met with praise and applause for his remarks. (more…)

Who knew that George W. Bush had such powers over the natural world? According to some pundits, Hurricane Katrina was Bush’s fault, as was the tsunami in Indonesia and now – if you believe James Ridgeway in Mother Jones – that Bush’s policy is responsible for the devastating effects of the 7.5 earthquake that decimated the poor country of Haiti.

But during the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency, we could depend on such ridiculous musings as Mr. Ridgeway displayed. I haven’t done enough research to determine if Bush was the most reviled president in our nation’s history – that might well have been Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President — but it’s not that hard to figure out that his coverage by the media was historically the most relentlessly hostile.

I first started writing my op-ed columns during the Clinton administration and while I may have disagreed with most of his policies I never stooped to the insulting, vitriolic language routinely leveled at President Bush. What also amazed me was the lack of outrage by the president and his administration officials. There is always the possibility that I might have missed their fury because the mainstream media was unlikely to report anything other than leftist propaganda. But I was a columnist for the only New York newspaper that covered Bush honestly and without bias from 2002 to 2008, when we died as a print publication. (more…)