Alan Colmes earlier today made a despicable remark about how the Santorum family grieved over their child, a remark for which he had to later apologize.

Colmes faced off with National Review editor Rich Lowry, who responded to a question on whether or not undecided voters will truly stick by Santorum when it’s time to cast a vote. Colmes answered, saying that his rising support will stop short once people “get a load of some of the crazy things he’s said and done, like taking his two-hour-old baby when it died right after child birth home and played with it so that his other children would know that the child was real.”

Lowry  cut off Colmes, calling the statement “a cheap shot.”

“To take something that is that personal and that hurtful as losing a child and mocking it like that … that is beneath you, Alan,” he said. “What you’re saying is contemptible.”

It was more than a cheap shot, it was using someone else’s tragedy to make a political point. The flippant way he described taking baby Gabriel home was an attempt to make light of a horrific time for the Santorum family.  They did not take the child home to ”play with him” but because they felt before they sent him to his eternal resting place he should become a “real human being” to his siblings.

He and his wife, Karen, have seven children – including, as Santorum puts it, “the one in Heaven.” Their fourth baby, Gabriel Michael, died in 1996, two hours after an emergency delivery in Karen Santorum’s 20th week of pregnancy. The couple took Gabriel’s body home to let their three other young children see and hold the baby before burying him, according to Karen Santorum’s book of the ordeal, “Letters to Gabriel.”

Santorum’s wife described the aftermath to Gabriel’s death in a heart breaking way.

Gabriel Michael Santorum was born at 12:45 AM on Friday, October 11, 1996. He was a beautiful boy. He did not give a cry or open his tiny eyes. We baptized him, bundled him, and held him ever so close. We sang to him, held his little hands and kissed him. Gabriel lived for two hours. In those two hours something simple but profound happened. Rick and I became parents to a newborn baby and welcomed him into our family. That was all….but it was everything. His life was so brief, yet his impact so great. In two hours we experienced a lifetime of emotions. Love, sorrow, regret, joy—-all were packed into that brief span. To have rejected that experience would have been to reject life itself.

I pray that Colmes never has to face the pain of losing a child to learn what he would do in the face of such a horrible tragedy. He has no right to make light of the pain of others.

Then again, this is the same Alan Colmes who accused Sarah Palin of causing her son’s Downs Syndrome. via Prenatal neglect Not only does that belay genetics at the time it was the most disgusting thing I have ever heard from a liberal commentator. But today Colmes topped himself.

Apparently even Colmes realized he went too far.  Santorum appeared on Hannity later in the day and said Colmes apologized.

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There’s so much going on these days. The Occupy movement, a man arrested for attempting to assassinate our president, the never-ending drama behind the GOP primary, and–as always–we have to fight the corrupt mainstream media.

There are so many dragons to slay with only so many hours in a day, and no one knows better than a political blogger that it’s impossible to go to bed feeling as though you’ve covered everything that deserved covering.

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But we need conservative leadership on this one; your voice, your passion, your reasoned arguments and your moral authority:

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) announced Thursday that his panel would be considering legislation to prohibit lawmakers from investing based on private information.The chairman announced the Dec. 6 hearing one day after ranking member Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), sent a letter to Bachus, calling on the committee to consider such legislation and eventually pass it. The announcement also comes after Bachus has come under scrutiny for allegations that he profited on investments made based on private information.

“Existing law clearly prohibits insider trading by members of Congress.  However, the American public deserves for there to be no question or equivocation concerning members of Congress or any citizen being exempted from laws prohibiting insider trading,” Bachus said in a statement.Frank told Bachus in his letter that he had “neglected” similar legislation when he was chairman of the committee, but that recent attention to the matter meant the bill should be considered and passed.

The panel will consider a bill, introduced by Reps. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and Tim Walz (D-Minn.), which would prohibit members and White House employees from investing based on private information, or from passing that information along to others for investment purposes.

As you know already, it is currently legal for members of Congress to enrich themselves with insider information to which the rest of us aren’t privy. When corporate executives do this they go to jail, and should. Insider trading breeds corruption and can create conflicts of interest whereby as those charged with the public trust manipulate markets and, yes, legislation to enrich their own personal portfolios.

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While we at Big Journalism spend most of our energy correcting bias and falsehoods originating from the left, every now and then we must take a moment to gently correct things that go off track with our friends on the right. This is one such case.

Jim Geraghty started a brouhaha yesterday by criticizing how the makers of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” received $1.2 million in tax credits by filming in the state — and that Palin signed the 2008 law which made it possible. Because she’s now apparently omnipotent, able to see into the future and plan for it by signing into law a complex program with numerous in-house checks and balances. Geraghty questioned Palin’s conservative credentials.

… but it looks problematic for a crusader for small government to end up collecting a seven-figure paycheck from an endeavor that received a seven-figure subsidy, all set up by a program she signed into law.

What’s problematic is to define the tax credit in this issue as a “subsidy.” 

Tax credits are offered as an incentive to do business in a particular area, city, or state as a way to attract business and commerce into said area. These tax credits are usually offered as a percentage of total money spent and the credits can be sold at a discount to businesses looking to alleviate their tax load. The exchange creates a cashflow that helps offset the costs of doing that particular business in that area; in this case filming in Alaska is very expensive. A net gain of dollars flows into those local communities and the credits establish a way for a particular locality to compete with other cities or states for business; over the long term it can they help establish a broader tax base by increasing the number of professionals drawn to the area.

The optimal situation is to have a tax code is low enough where regulations aren’t so restrictive so as to warrant the need for tax credits. That is the real debate. However, it is within every state and city’s right to make themselves more competitive by offering tax incentives to attract business and create a business community. Aren’t we, as conservatives, supporters of the 10th Amendment? You pay for things by increasing your tax base, not by increasing regulations or taxes.

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Ah, why don’t conservatives love Conor Friedersdorf? He is one of us, is he not? He even wants to help Andrew Breitbart – and even us poor little old folks here at Big Journalism. Things here would be fine with a little free counseling from Friedersdorf, who, as Features Editor, helped run website Culture 11 into the ground in record time, ” its lifespan was like one of those bugs that hatches, mates, and dies in just a few days,” wasting millions in the process. Oh, the unaccomplished Conor Friedersdorf was still in grad school in 2008. But he knows it all. I suppose the boy learns quick.

When I criticize Mr. Breitbart, or his sites Big Hollywood, Big Government and Big Journalism, part of my project is pressuring them to do better work. In fact, I’d happily provide my counsel to anyone at those sites privately and free of charge, and I think that much of the critiques I’ve published thus far are constructive.

Here is Conor Friedersdorf posting on Andrew McCarthy. Friedersdorf defends the Marxist Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), while calling McCarthy “ridiculous,” “dishonorable,” “odious” and “terrifying” as a public servant, dismissing his arguments as specious and simply slurs. He also defends the Left, while reviewing McCarthy’s book with this headline: “The Manifold Inaccuracies of Andy McCarthy’s New Book.” Why don’t conservatives love Conor Friedersdorf? (more…)

William Buckley achieved notoriety, if not celebrity, with the publication of God and Man at Yale in 1951. The book was asuccès de scandale. In it Buckley attacked the undergraduate education on offer at Yale for its hostility to Christianity and its adulation of collectivism; he also sought to dispel the indifference of Yale alumni to their supervisory responsibility. In 1955 Buckley founded National Review as the voice of the conservative movement. Recall, as John Judis does in his biography of Buckley, that the fortunes of the American Right had never appeared dimmer; the principal right-wing organizations were anti-Semitic and neo-isolationist throwbacks to the thirties and forties. Recall also that in the Publisher’s Statement of National Review’s first issue, Buckley defined conservatism as the willingness to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who do.” He was an outrageous character.

Dartmouth English Professor and long-time National Review senior editor Jeffrey Hart captured Buckley in his glory at the moment National Review was about to make its debut:

A debate had been announced, to take place in Harvard’s Lamont Library, between Buckley and James Wechsler, the diamond-pure liberal editor of The New York Post… What happened on the appointed night in an auditorium at Lamont Library gave a preliminary indication of at least one of the many qualities that would render Buckley famous and National Review successful: Buckley’s bravura… At the podium, after thanking the host for his introduction, Buckley observed, with an elfin grin (soon a signature feature), that he was very pleased to see Professor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., there in the audience. Then he added, “His many books would be dangerous if they weren’t so boring…”

Whatever sober points Wechsler might have made, he was obliterated by the stylistic contrast and, ink-stained wretch that he obviously was, slunk back to the then-liberal New York Post. Right there, I saw the conservative movement being born, and liberalism made otiose. Right there was the esprit that caught the attention of early National Review readers — especially the young. This was no stuffed-shirt or classroom policy wonk. This had nothing to do with the dismal science and its green eye-shades. This was great theater.

Considering his esprit as well as well as the splash of his Web sites, it seems to me that Andrew Breitbart may be the Wililam Buckley of the Internet Age — part journalist, part showman, part conservative visionary and ideological entrepreneur. He has an instinctive understanding of the media environment that is the base of the left’s cultural monopoly and he means to do his best to overthrow it. (more…)

President Obama called the murder of a soldier in Little Rock by a self-proclaimed jihadist “a senseless tragedy.” The Christmas bomber, “an isolated extremist.” The Ft. Hood shooting, a “horrific outburst of violence.” Daniel Pearl’s beheading, an act which “captured the world’s imagination” (truly the most repugnant euphemism possible for such barbarism), he magically transformed from an act of Koran-mandated Jew-hatred to a “free press” issue. At every turn, the Obama administration feeds us maddening and relentless disinformation, parroted by a credulous and/or complicit press, that terrorism carried out in the name of Islam has nothing to do with Islam.

Andrew C. McCarthy begs to differ. A contributing editor at the National Review Online, McCarthy is a former New York prosecutor and author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad. He knows a thing or two about Muslim fundamentalism, having put away the Blind Sheikh and fellow conspirators involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to destroy other New York landmarks. And his new book clarifies exactly how that Islamic threat has not only metastasized under the radar since ‘93, but has partnered itself with the Left toward a common end.

In The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left are Sabotaging America, McCarthy wastes no time driving home the point of his subtitle. He opens by revisiting Obama’s jaw-droppingly subservient bow before the Saudi king in England, correctly attributing the emblematic gesture to the pair’s “shared dream” of bringing about the collapse of American political, economic, and cultural values. “With their collectivist philosophy,” McCarthy writes, “transnational outlook, totalitarian demands, and revolutionary designs, Islamists are natural allies of the radical Left.” (more…)

A few years ago, the Human Life Foundation’s Defender of Life annual award was given to Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, and in the brochure noting his accomplishments I learned that the congressman is co-chairman of the bipartisan pro-life caucus. Bipartisan? In amazement, I asked him if there really are pro-life Democrats in Congress. “Oh yes,” he assured me, “about 30.” He went on to name one, but I promised Smith I would not mention the congressman’s name in my column.

I probably have it my notes somewhere and for all I know it might have been Bart Stupak — who has announced tonight he will vote in favor of “health-care reform,” relying on an Obama “signing statement” to allay his concerns over government funding for abortion — but what Rep. Smith’s conversation revealed to me is that the pro-life Democrats do not wear their convictions overtly.

Well, they all had to come out of the closet tonight to vote for their belief in the sanctity of human life but instead they gave their obeisance to the One and his minions from hell. In this video we learn that the so-called pro-life Democrat Stupak never intended to vote NO.

At that same HLF dinner, National Review senior editor, Ramesh Ponnuru, introduced Mr. Smith. In his book, The Party of Death, Mr. Ponnuru makes no bones about which political party deserves that description. (more…)

No clearer difference can be seen in how the Old Media and its left-wing compatriots treat mass killers, terrorists and nutjobs than the way Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and Joe Stack have been portrayed by the Old Media and the left. Abdulmutallab, the jihadi Christmas Bomber, was treated as an aberration unconnected with any larger group — despite that he trained with al Qaeda — and Joe Stack, who flew a plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, has been held up as the epitome of the “teabaggers” and the “anti-government right” despite that not a single tie to those folks has been yet discovered.

Immediately after Abdulmutallab tried to blow himself and a plane full of passengers into martyrdom on Christmas Day 2009, President Obama’s administration declared this guy an “isolated extremist” and said he had no connection to our Islamofascist enemies. Obama was helped along in this by many Old Media news sources.

On Dec. 26, for instance, CBS reported that Abdulmutallab was a loner: “As of now, he appears to be a lone actor with no conspirators. A report the following day said of the jihadist bomber, ‘We’re not aware of anybody else,’ one official told Orr. No further arrests are imminent.” (more…)

In Max Blumenthal’s article “James O’Keefe’s race problem” for Salon.com of February 3, 2010, Mr. Blumenthal makes a number of unverifiable and provably false claims regarding James O’Keefe’s attendance at a 2006 conference called “Race and Conservatism.”  Below are the list of quotes containing misinformation and an explanation of why they need to be addressed by the editors of your publication.

From left: Marcus Epstein, Jared Taylor, Kevin Martin, and John Derbyshire at what Max Blumenthal dubbed “a white-nationalist confab”

We kindly request corrections to all:

According to One People’s Project founder Daryle Jenkins, O’Keefe was manning the literature table at the gathering that brought together anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism.

As noted in this post here by Larry O’Connor, we contacted Mr. Jenkins, who identified David Weigel as his source for the claim that Mr. O’Keefe was manning the table.  Mr. Weigel has denied that Mr. O’Keefe manned the table and has no knowledge to suggest Mr. O’Keefe was involved in the orchestration of the event at any level. In an interview with BigJournalism.com, Mr. O’Keefe denied having planned the event.

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