The protest endorsed by progressive media. From Huffington Post San Francisco:

Have you noticed that MSM started distancing itself from the occupy protests?

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With the publication of Peter Schweizer’s best-selling book Throw Them All Out, Media Matters for America embarked on a scorched-earth campaign in an attempt to undermine both Schweizer and his book, while dismissing the topic of insider trading in Congress.

Bet they’d like to have that one back.

Here’s just a taste of their relentless attack. Each headline represents another post, with even more vitriol at the link on MMfA’s website:

60 Minutes Questions Suggesting Pelosi “Conflict” Reportedly Based On Schweizer Book

Bush, Beck, Breitbart, Palin: Schweizer’s Deep Right-Wing Ties

Schweizer Previously Pushed Dishonest Smears Of Pelosi In Prior Book

Schweizer Wrote Falsehood-Laden Op-ed Accusing Al Gore Of “Hypocrisy”

Schweizer Authored Book Blaming “Big Government Liberals” For Financial Meltdown

For its part, Politico mostly followed the Media Matters line on the story, with much of its report relying on quotes from Nancy Pelosi’s office. They even included a shot at Schweizer: (more…)

When President Obama called for an end to congressional insider trading during his State of the Union Address last night, there may have been some colorful Greek expletives muttered by a multi-millionaire publisher we all know and love.

When Breitbart News began our coverage of Peter Schweizer’s best-selling book Throw Them All Out, AOL/Huffington Post was quick to proclaim the story dead on arrival.  Their full-page headline proudly proclaimed “Hit Job Falls Flat,” which displayed lousy journalism on multiple levels. AOL/HuffPo characterized the diligently investigated report as a “hit job,” they prematurely proclaimed the story a failure and as we revealed at the time, they allowed Arianna Huffington’s cozy relationship with Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to falsely inform their readers that there was no validity to the congressional insider trading scandal.

Here we are, only ten weeks after AOL/Huffpo called our story a dud, there have been multiple congressional and senate hearings, three different laws drafted and now, using his ultimate bully pulpit, President Obama said this:

What a humiliating moment for the smart-set over at AOL/HuffPo when their candidate lends this level of importance to a story they tried hard to spike. There was a time when AOL/HuffPo tried to sell themselves to the public as a new brand of aggressive and independent journalism fighting against the old guard media who no longer resonate with the American public. Now, AOL/HuffPo is the old guard, running interference for political cronies and using their $300 million megaphone to try to shout-down others who don’t fall in line.

The old-guard media versus new media conflict has less to do with the method of delivery of the news (newsprint versus kilobytes) as much as it has to do with the stale, predictable establishment philosophy that permeates the newsrooms of these organizations.  Take a liberal political reporter from the old-guard like Howard Fineman out of the Newsweek office and put him in the high-tech environment of AOL/HuffPo and you still have the same old repetitive and destructive mindset you had before.

This phenomenon, and what sets true citizen journalism apart from the cronies in the establishment media, was best revealed on my show last night by the journalist who got all this started in the first place, Peter Schweizer, author of Throw Them All Out:

Peter Jamison, in Snuggie (Source: SF Weekly)

Peter Jamison of SF Weekly (in Snuggie, above) has declared that Jeffrey Scott Shapiro’s scoop at Big Government about Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s wish to leave Congress is a “fake.”

Though Jamison admits that comments from Pelosi’s daughter Alexandra “were certainly catalyst enough for a news story,” he concludes that the story is a fraud because Alexandra later amended her comment.

Shapiro had reported that Alexandra had said her mother was “destined for the wilderness.” Alexandra then texted him to say she had said Nancy Pelosi was “destined for greatness.” Shapiro dutifully reported Alexandra’s new text message, but not as a correction–and observed that Alexandra had not challenged “the crux of the story; that Pelosi would prefer to leave Congress and only remains out of a sense of obligation to her donors.”

Shapiro stands by the original version of the quote, as he indicated via email to me this afternoon:

I’m one-hundred percent certain that Alexandra Pelosi said to me that her mother wanted to leave Congress and that her donors thought she was ‘destined for the wilderness.’ Even the tone she used when she said the word ‘wilderness’ implied that she was referring to some middle of the nowhere place. Alexandra said a lot of other things to me about Nancy Pelosi wanting to leave Congress, but that was all I was able to type up because she was talking quickly. I’m disappointed that she’s changing her story now because she struck me as a very sincere person when we were on the telephone.

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BigGovernment.com broke an exclusive story in which Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, Alexandra, goes on the record stating that her mother actually wants out of Congress.

During a telephone interview, Ms. Pelosi–speaking from a friend’s home in New York City–described her mother’s predicament:

She would retire right now, if the donors she has didn’t want her to stay so badly. They know she wants to leave, though. They think she’s destined for the wilderness. She has very few days left. She’s 71, she wants to have a life, she’s done. It’s obligation, that’s all I’m saying.

After the story was published, Alexandra notified BigGovernment.com that she had said “greatness,” not “wilderness.” The crux of the story, that her mother would rather leave Congress, remained unchallenged. So here we have the daughter of the former Speaker of the House stating that her mother would retire if it weren’t for people who donated to her election keeping her in office.

Pretty big news, right? All kinds of questions come immediately to mind when I read this. What do her donors want of her? What has she not done that they need her in office to accomplish? There are dozens of questions a news organization would want answers to in order to give their readers the best possible coverage of this significant story. That is, of course, if the news organization is really interested in informing their readers rather than moving a narrative forward.

Enter Politico. (more…)

Michele Bachmann was the first GOP presidential candidate to demand Eric Holder’s resignation. Last Monday Rick Perry published an op-ed in The Washington Times demanding Mr. Holder’s resignation and yesterday morning Jon Huntsman also remarked that Mr. Holder should resign, yet the majority of the Old Media ignore them and the other congressmen who think Mr. Holder should resign.

There is no excuse from the Old Media we should accept, especially since Mr. Perry’s op-ed appears in The Washington Times. The Old Media can deny it all they want, but we all know if this was a GOP administration they would be contacting every single Democrat politician and reporting anyone calling for the attorney general to resign.

Wait a minute. They already did! Oh yes: Remember my previous articles comparing coverage of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Mr. Holder? That’s right. The Old Media was reporting on Mr. Gonzales so much in 2007 even I was sick of it and that’s when I was still a super liberal.

Politico gave a report on May, 20 2007 when Nancy Pelosi joined in: ”The nation cannot have a chief law enforcement officer whose candor and judgment are in serious question,” Pelosi said. “The president should restore credibility to the office of the attorney general. Alberto Gonzales must resign.” Why hasn’t she said the same thing about Mr. Holder? Of course Politico included the Republicans who thought Mr. Gonzales should go. I can’t imagine how happy that made them.

Look what I found! Then Senator Barack Obama calls for Mr. Gonzales to step down! I think someone should replay this to President Obama because he could apply his answer to Mr. Holder now.

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Is it a coincidence that four days after Nancy Pelosi sat and gave an exclusive pep talk/schmooze session with AOL’s Arianna Huffington and an all-female editorial meeting in the offices of AOL/HuffPo, Arianna’s Washington Bureau Chief phoned-in a “nothing-to-see-here” apologia for the former-Speaker’s congressional insider trading scandal?

Huffington Post's wishful thinking headline a few hours after a "60 Minutes" report on congressional insider trading.

As liberal news outlets like CBS News, Daily Beast/Newsweek and even MSNBC saw fit to report the fact that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi was involved in a sweetheart IPO for VISA, while at the same time ensuring that tough regulations that would have stifled VISA’s profits stayed bottled up in the Pelosi-controlled House of Representatives, AOL/HuffPo opted to re-print Pelosi’s talking points and obfuscations in lieu of doing actual reporting.

With the awkward and ham-handed headline “Hit Job Falls Flat,” you can almost see Arianna herself hammering out bullet points on her blackberry, firing them off to reporter Ryan Grim in an effort to put her elegant fingers in the metaphorical dyke to stop the gushing in the most serious corruption story to hit Pelosi’s long career.  The banner headline, full of wishful thinking, ran just hours after the “60 Minutes” story.  First thing on a Monday morning at the beginning of a news cycle is a curious time to declare that a story “fell flat.”

In fact, the story was talked about on cable news and in the halls of congress all day.  It inspired new legislation to finally make the corrupt practice of congressional insider trading illegal.  Presidential candidate Rick Perry produced a 30-second ad featuring the story and calling for jail-time for any politician who profited from insider information.  If this is “falling flat” I would like to see AOL/HuffPo’s idea of a successful investigative report.

Seriously, I’d really like to see one.  Do they even do anything like that, or do they just sit back and let the rest of us do all of the real reporting?

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- Google chief: Internet keeps government honest.

Broader adoption of the Internet will keep governments on their toes as wired-up citizens exercise their newfound power to check rights abuses, Google chief Eric Schmidt said on Saturday.
“In nations and communities around the world, citizens are turning to online tools to keep their governments honest,” he told business leaders on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Honolulu.

“Whistleblowing has never been so easy,” he said.

- Requisite boring interview with misguided Gloria Steinem: “We need to be angrier.” Really? Angrier than this? Not one question for Ms. Steinem about the number of rapes at the OWS demonstrations and the need for some to create “safe women” zones because the movement overall is unsafe for women? Steinem doesn’t want to site that sarcastically as “progress” right along with her views of abortion? It’s 2011 and progressives can’t even have a protest without raping everything in sight.

- Forbes weighs in on the Chelsea Clinton hire:

But you can’t really buy authority. What you get instead is attention, and it’s not clear networks know the difference. (Have you watched the Today Show lately?) NBC in particular is hooked on this fame trading. Clinton joins a stable of other famous media-political offspring, including Luke Russert, Jenna Bush Hager, Meghan McCain. The message here is that fame and parentage confer journalistic authority, rather than talent or an ability to get the story right. If you’ve grown up in the media bubble that no doubt helps you understand how it works. But such experience doesn’t give you an insight into how the real world works.

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Sunday night, CBS aired an edition of “60 Minutes” that took a rare look at corruption in Washington on both sides of the aisle. It even took a book by a conservative journalist and Big Peace editor, Peter Schweizer’s Throw Them All Out, as the basis for its investigations.

Yet as Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters points out, “60 Minutes” “cherry picked” Republican examples from Schweizer’s book–so much so that four out of the five targets of its investigation were Republican, even though “60 to 70 percent” of the politicians described in Schweizer’s book are Democrats.

Eighty percent Republican was still too much for Politico, whose journalists appear on the majority of daily shows on the far-left, hyper-partisan MSNBC network, according to a Daily Caller report today. The Washington-based political digest panned the CBS story.

Nevertheless, CBS seems to have revealed that a 4-to-1 ratio of Republican to Democrat targets is the minimum threshold that a mainstream media outlet must reach before it exposes massive corruption in Washington. (more…)

Faced with a groundbreaking investigation by investigative journalist and Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer that reveals corrupt self-dealing on both sides of the aisle in Congress, the mainstream media had two options:

1. Criticize both sides in proportion to their involvement.
2. Defend both sides, in order to protect Democrats in power.

Yesterday, Politico chose #2. Today, Huffington Post has joined it, defending the Republican speaker it routinely derides, in order to protect the former Democrat speaker that many of its contributors hope to reinstate.

Screen grab by NewsBusters.org

As Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters points out:

As far-left outlets like the Huffington Post applaud what’s happening with the Occupy Wall Street movement around the country, you would think they’d welcome the sunlight being brought by Schweizer and 60 Minutes exposing a little known way that lawmakers use their access to further their own nests.

Pelosi is said to be worth $35 million. If she is using her position in Congress to add to her riches, shouldn’t the Huffington Post, as an unapologetic supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement, applaud efforts to end such graft as it’s being exposed? (more…)

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (DC) has linked to Media Matters for Democrats America’s attempt to defend her against revelations by Big Peace’s Peter Schweizer, who blew the lid off insider trading in Congress on 60 Minutes. CBS independently verified the research in Schweizer’s book.

Clicking the link http://goo.gl/ghOFV takes one to …

Media Matters’s website. Curiously, Media Matters defended the sole Democrat identified by 60 Minutes, and not one of the four Republicans.

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In response to this evening’s groundbreaking report on 60 Minutes, which targeted both Republicans and Democrats for insider trading in Congress, Politico has circled the wagons around Washington’s political elite.

The CBS story was based on original research by Hoover Institution fellow and Big Peace editor Peter Schweizer for his new book, Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison.

That, apparently, was enough to send Politico–and the clowns at Media Matters for America–into a panic.

While hyper-partisan Media Matters has vomited a torrent of non-sequiturs to defend House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi from charges of inside deals (she paid high wages to her non-union farm workers? really?), Politico has attempted to defend Washington’s political class as a whole.

First, says Politico’s John Bresnahan–before describing the 60 Minutes report in any detail–Schweizer is a conservative. Hence, by implication, he has an agenda (unlike Politico, of course).

Second, Bresnahan claims, Schweizer’s allegations are old charges–nothing to see here:

The allegations regarding Bachus, Hastert and Gregg [all Republicans!] covered by 60 Minutes are several years old and have received extensive media coverage already.

Curiously, Bresnahan does not link to previous reports by Politico on these individuals. (Perhaps they were at the bottom of the page somewhere, near the Solyndra scandal.)

Third, Bresnahan adds, Pelosi and House Speaker John Boehner (also criticized in Schweizer’s book and the 60 Minutes report) are innocent of wrongdoing, because… because… they say so:

“I have not made any decisions on day-to-day trading activities of my account and haven’t for years. I do not do it, haven’t done it and wouldn’t do it,” Boehner said during a Nov. 3 press conference when asked about the transactions by Steve Kroft.

Boehner’s office dismissed the 60 Minutes report as absurd…

“First of all, what you’re contending is not true,” Pelosi said. “Second of all, we are very proud of our record of what happened.”

Instead of following up original research by Schweizer–and by CBS, which did its own, independent investigations–Politico has stepped in to act as mouthpiece for the leaders of the Washington elite.

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Forget “Sixty Minutes”–it took the geniuses over at Media Matters for America (MMfA) all of about 60 seconds to pounce foolishly on the Breitbart TV video of CBS’ Steve Kroft asking a question of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. MMfA immediately pronounced it a “Right-Wing” smear job.

Right-Wing’s Pelosi Smear Ignores Historic Credit Card Reform Passed Under Her Watch

And MMfA didn’t stop there. It was like watching a one-legged man off to the races, down the track of a newly discovered dastardly Right-Wing smear campaign in action:

Breitbart.tv: “60 Minutes Challenged Nancy Pelosi On Her Conflict Of Interest While Speaker And Facilitating Financial Reform While Being Involved With Credit Card Companies.” The exchange was posted on Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart.tv website, promoting the notion that Pelosi faced a “conflict of interest” while overseeing credit card reform as Speaker:

Fox Nation: “Pelosi Visibly Shaken When ‘60 Minutes’ Confronts Her About Shady Investments.” Fox Nation suggested that the exchange demonstrated that Pelosi had “shady investments”:

From there, MMfA quickly circled the wagons around the former Speaker, desperate to show her as an innocent champion of the people against those evil credit card companies–one of which she seems to have invested with on favorable terms, despite relevant legislation making its way through the Congress she then led.

Wall Street Journal: “Congress And The White House Are Taking Aim At Controversial Credit-Card Practices.” In April 2009, The Wall Street Journal reported:

McClatchy: “Consumers … Would Get Strong New Protection” Under Credit Cardholders’ Bill Of Rights. McClatchy reported in May 2009:

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In a curious nod to James O’Keefe-style guerrilla filmmaking, Steve Kroft of CBS’s 60 Minutes turned up at Capitol Hill press conferences yesterday with surprise questions for both House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

Kroft quizzed both about their stock transactions in their respective roles as Speaker.

Pelosi’s shocked response set the rumor mill going:

Boehner was more collected, calling for House members to follow existing rules on insider trading:

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Two weeks ago, I responded to the mainstream media labeling the Occupy Wall Street protests the left-wing version of the Tea Party. Apparently the reasons given to prove that comparison false were too vague for the media to understand, because they continue to  make that comparison.

So to be helpful to the people in the “fourth estate,” I have created sort of a “difference between the Occupy Wall Street Protests, and the Tea Party Movement” guide for idiots and the Mainstream Media. It follows below:

• There was never a turd left on a Police Car during a tea party but there was at least one left during an Occupy Wall Street protest.

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In case you were wondering if “The View” views the Democrat memo, wonder no more.

“They’re at the White House, they’re all over the country. But I just think it’s very, very strange when people say ‘you know, this group is doing this, this group is doing that.’ When we’ve criticized the Tea Party when they spit on people that were going in to their work. It’s very different than putting your hand up and saying ‘you know, stop taking a ga-billion dollars and throw some of that money because cause you’re not putting any jobs out there,’” Whoopi Goldberg says on “The View.”

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- Why is Media Matters tax exempt when they’re so overtly and directly political regarding issues before Congress?

- ABC’s Christiane Amanpour knows a little bit about occupation and revolution. But what does she know about Occupy Wall Street, versus the tea party?

- Plus, is the media reporting the real story behind the “occupy” movement? Mother Jones isn’t  known as the most objective  outlet  for  news, after all.

- Yahoo includes Bill Clinton in its lists of “successful stars.” Of course Bush didn’t make the list.

- It does seem somewhat curious that, hand-in-hand with the Occupy movement, comes the return of Van Jones. Both just in time for Obama’s re-election effort. Imagine that!

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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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This is “what democracy looks like,” I guess.

Remember when the tea partiers defecated on cop cars?

Remember when tea partiers sent death threats to law enforcement and American citizens?

Remember when tea parties had Marxist front groups place ads looking to astroturf by hiring protesters?

How about when tea partiers vandalized city property?

What about when the tea party silenced a civil rights leader?

Right. The tea party didn’t do any of those things.

Andre Carson did slander the tea party by saying that they called them the “N” word “fifteen times” while walking to the Capitol building. A copious amount of video footage taken from various perspectives debunked Carson’s claim entirely. The incident is a real life demonstration of Frankenstein’s Monster. Sadly, Lewis helped to create the creepy liberal attitude that silenced him at that rally. Tea partiers don’t have to take votes before they decide whether or not they’ll allow black people to speak and they don’t make jazz hands while talking in groupspeak as they discuss it. Lewis would have found more encouragement to speak at a tea party than an Occupy Wall Street protest.

Nancy Pelosi likened the tea party to Nazis.

Last week she said of the OWS protesters and their actions: “bless them.”

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The video below is apparently a preview of “This Week With Christiane Amanpour,” and while we won’t see the entire interview until it broadcasts tomorrow morning, from what we do see it looks as though Nancy Pelosi, the instigator of the Great Tea Party Smear of 2010, is once again allowed by the corrupt MSM to get away with trotting out this thoroughly debunked anti-Tea Party trope:

“I didn’t hear [Eric Cantor] saying anything when the tea party was demonstrating — actually spitting on members of congress right here in the Capitol.”

The Tea Party spitting on members of Congress never happened. [And Cantor did condemn Tea Party "epithets" at the time, though those accusations were also disproved. - JP] Pelosi knows it. Amanpour knows it.

But who knows? Like I said, that’s just a preview and maybe in the full interview Amanpour challenges the hell out of Pelosi for trying to get away with floating the spitting fairy tale … again. And maybe a unicorn will bring me my coffee with those little muffins I like with the walnuts.

First, a little context and background…

In late March of 2010, after using a number of procedural tricks to jam ObamaCare down the throats of the American people, Pelosi attempted to change this narrative by grabbing a big old gavel for a quick jaunt through a sea of peaceful Tea Partiers who had gathered to protest the passage of the heath care bill. It’s common knowledge that the then-Speaker of the House could’ve easily avoided antagonizing this group by taking another route to her destination, but the obvious idea was to paint a smug, screw-you grin on her face and attempt to create an incident that would abruptly change the subject from this wildly unpopular legislation to the villainous Tea Party’s behavior. In one fell swoop, Democrats and their media allies were hoping to socialize medicine and destroy a growing grassroots citizens’ movement.

Unfortunately for all those involved, the Tea Party didn’t take the bait and just let her walk on by without uttering anything more than “kill the bill.” But little setbacks like reality never stop the Left, so her fellow travelers — Rep Andre Carson (D-IN), Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), and Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) — just made a bunch of stuff up after their own incident-free stroll down Tea Party Lane.

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