Michele Norris hosts NPR’s dishonestly named  ”All Things Considered,” one of those insufferable dulcet-toned offerings where very few conservative ideas or pols are “considered” reasonable or sane. The show would be laughable if not for the fact that my hard-earned tax dollars subsidize all the self-important leftist bias and sanctimony.

Anyway, the decision to remove her from the show seems like an overreach on NPR’s part. There’s no reason why what a spouse does for a living should in any way reflect on the other spouse. Husband and wife should be allowed to have their own separate careers, worldviews, and political beliefs without a guilt-by-association conflict of interest dogging them.

NPR, however, says they think differently:

Michele Norris, co-host of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” is temporarily stepping away from all her duties and all campaign-related coverage because her husband, Broderick Johnson, has taken a senior advisor position with the president’s re-election campaign.

“After careful consideration, we decided that Broderick’s new role could make it difficult for me to continue hosting ATC,” Norris wrote in a note to NPR staff. “Given the nature of Broderick’s position with the campaign and the impact that it will most certainly have on our family life, I will temporarily step away from my hosting duties until after the 2012 elections.”

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From WGEM, and the only thing funnier than their headline is the thought that WGEM likely receives a lot of ad money from the union in advertising.

It’s Christmas caroling with a message.

Wednesday night, locked out workers from Roquette America in Keokuk staged a very unique protest.

They took a break from the picket lines to go caroling outside the homes of top Roquette executives who live in Quincy.

[...]

They took a break from the picket lines to go caroling outside the homes of top Roquette executives who live in Quincy.

The union workers have been off the job for almost three months now.

Roquette locked them out on September 28th, and contract negotiations have pretty much stalled ever since.

Are you kidding me? A caravan of 80 people to sing insults and, according to eyewitnesses, shouting “F*CK YOU” at various houses right before Christmas? This isn’t “caroling,” this is intimidation. On private property. I’m told by locals that one of the houses they visited was down a private lane of an elderly couple whose granddaughter often stays with them (and luckily wasn’t the night the union struck) – the union trespassed.

As for the carols:

It went like this, “God bless ye very wealthy men,we’re here so you can see. The workers who helped make you rich are now out on the street. You locked the doors while profits soared, how greedy could you be? Oh tidings of capital gains, oh what a shame, all you care about it capital gains.”

Yes, those evil business owners who are trying to cut costs because a president who the unions supported and donated money to is forcing business to trim costs so they can afford his massive health control law and other regulations thrown on them. If the unions are unhappy with this then perhaps then need to look at the economic situation this president has created instead of blaming skittish business owners simply trying to stay afloat in a dismal economic period. The president for whom these unions worked has created an economic environment wherein there is less discretionary money to go around, thus less demand for goods and services, thus less revenue for small business, and so on and so forth. Union members should be “caroling” the source: their union bosses. Unions have become the very thing which they were formed to fight and many good men and women (my family is predominately union) are caught up as pawns in a game played by favored fat cat union bosses who send their workers out to engage in extortion and intimidation in exchange for work. (more…)

MEMORANDUM

To:                   Eric Boehlert, Media Matters
From:               David Axelrod

Personal and Confidential

SUBJECT:       BREITBART

“O’Keefe’s humiliating guilty plea”—is that the best you could do?  Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear yesterday.  We don’t want to embarrass Breitbart; we want to destroy him.  O’Keefe is the instrument–if we act decisively.

Forget BP and Sestak.  Put Stossel, Beck, and O’Reilly on the back burner for now.  Call in your people who are sitting in toilet stalls around Washington hoping to snag a Republican congressman on the next john over.  Devote all your resources to mounting a sustained effort to morph O’Keefe’s “entry under false pretenses” charge (hey — they could get everyone in Congress on that beef! Little joke there) into a McVeigh-level atrocity sponsored by Breitbart.

The whole crew at MSNBC will be pounding on Breitbart’s mania to foster civil chaos in America as long as it takes to make the charge resonate.  He will be Olbermann’s first “Worst Person of the Millenium.”  The Times and Post have assured me they’ll give the matter their full Abu Ghraib treatment, starting with above-the-fold articles this weekend.  Williams, Couric, and Sawyer will jump on the story after a decent interval, citing a “raging controversy.”  Time Magazine’s cover next week, I have on good authority right from Rick Stengel, will feature a caricature of Breitbart setting fire to an SEIU T-shirt in front of the White House, with the headline: “What Are the Limits of Dissent in Obama’s America?”

When public indignation reaches white heat (or even if it doesn’t), the entire House Democratic caucus (and a few Republican simpletons) will demand that Attorney General Holder appoint a Special Counsel to investigate the Breitbart affair.  He will immediately agree.  I understand Ramsey Clark will make himself available to Justice, and believe me there are plenty of empty cells down at Gitmo. (more…)

This clip of Fox News’ Megyn Kelly interviewing representatives of the D.C. Metropolitan Police and the Montgomery County Police Department will make your blood boil:

Despite all the spinning, the fact remains that the protesters did not have a permit for their activities, which included terrorizing a Bank of America lawyer’s son inside the house and alarming the neighbors.

At least now we know whose side the cops are on.

You’ve read the stories about how the D.C. cops escorted a bunch of SEIU protesters to a private home across the District line in Maryland.  You’ve heard the silence of the media lambs at the absolute outrage of hordes of purple-shirted thugs charging onto private property and berating a Bank of American lawyer from his very doorstep.

ASMAN: Imagine a Sunday afternoon in your home suddenly interrupted by the chants of 500 protestors, some with megaphones, marching onto the lawn of your neighbor’s house.

That’s exactly what happened to Fox News contributor Nina Easton. The mob was organized by SEIU directed at her neighbor bank executive Greg Baer. She joins us now from Washington. Nina, how would you describe the scene.

NINA EASTON, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, “FORTUNE” MAGAZINE: It’s a lovely Sunday afternoon, I had just put my toddler down for a nap, and suddenly 14 buses pull up, 14. Hundreds and hundreds of people pour out. I did a rough calculation there were at least 500 protesters who crossed my property and went on to Greg Baer’s property, the deputy general counsel of B of A.

ASMAN: He, by the way, ironically is a former Clinton administration official, right?

EASTON: He is, and his wife is a former Hillary Clinton official and is a very prominent person on national service issues.

These are not big bad Bush people, which is what the readers of the “Huffington Post” blog, the only press who covered it, they assumed it was a Bush administration official.

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Why is the Washington Post ignoring the SEIU protest at the homes of two bank executives, one being an employee of the Bank of America? Aside from a brief mention in a larger story on May 17 about SEIU protests, the paper of record in the nation’s capital has been strangely silent.

Even after the story broke here that the buses that carried an estimated 500 protesters to the Greenville Rd, Chevy Chase residence of a B of A executive were escorted by at least two units of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, the incuriosity of the WaPo continues.

This afternoon, all the details of this story were reconfirmed through the Montgomery County Police Department spokesperson, Corporal Daniel Friz.  Meanwhile, two high-level D.C. police officials have disputed their department’s police presence at the B of A executive’s home.

Operating in full CYA mode, the first statement cames from D.C. Chief of Police Cathy Lanier: (more…)

If you haven’t read by now all the headlines on this story, you’ll want to start at the beginning and read the first post, SEIU Storms Private Residence, Terrorizes Teenage Son of Bank of America Exec. Because as each day passes, new facts are popping up. The story seemed so outrageous at first. After all, the thought of over 500 screaming and chanting protesters surrounding a Bank of America lawyer’s private residence while the man’s teenage son, home alone, hid frightened inside a bathroom – it’s just so extreme, even by SEIU’s standards.

I knew something was up when the following day, Fortune magazine editor Nina Easton, a neighbor of the targeted residence, published an account of the incident and was almost immediately attacked by what seemed like practically a coordinated dogpile of writers from several specific sources.

In almost mirror fashion to the Town Hall events last August, when both the Huffington Post and Media Matters seemingly tried to cover up and dismiss the violent acts that SEIU committed against Kenneth Gladney, the same players were again out in full force. As our Larry O’Connor wrote, both outlets behaved less like journalists and more like arms of the SEIU press office, dismissing SEIU’s bad behavior and attacking an innocent party with fabricated conflicts of interest as a method of distraction and intimidation.

Bob Borosage, Erica Payne, and John Podesta

And now we learn this: Erica Payne, the guest who was invited to appear Friday on Megyn Kelley’s Fox News show and proceeded to blame the Tea Parties for the behavior of SEIU? She was co-founder of Democracy Alliance, the very organization that spawned and is a donor to Media Matters. SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger is also the Vice-Chair of its Board.

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Media Matters and the Huffington Post have tried to expose a supposed conflict of interest for journalist Nina Easton’s coverage of the shameful tactics used by SEIU this past weekend as they stormed the home of a Bank of America executive.  In doing so, they uncritically repeated a complete and total lie spewed out by SEIU’s propaganda machine.

In yesterday’s post exposing the propaganda efforts from MMFA and HuffPo, where they carried water for SEIU blogger-goon John Vandeventer, we seem to have downplayed how completely and totally deceitful and misleading their “reporting” really was.

If you recall, SEIU thugs invaded a quiet suburban neighborhood on Sunday afternoon and protested on the lawn and private property of Bank of America executive Greg Baer.  Fortune magazine journalist Easton happened to be Baer’s neighbor and the ruckus was so obnoxious that it woke her two-year-old child from a nap.

She reported on the event in Fortune and noted that SEIU is currently in an effort to organize the bank tellers at B of A.  She also revealed that SEIU owes B of A millions of dollars and today, our own Liberty Chick fleshes that story out even more… $90 million more! (more…)

Alinsky Rule #12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Nina Easton just became the left’s latest target. Why? So that SEIU can hide from the truth about its financial liabilities to Bank of America (more on that after the jump).

Easton, a Washington Editor for Fortune Magazine, wrote a column early morning Wednesday, addressing the outrageous protest organized by SEIU and National People’s Action, where 700 protesters stormed the front lawn of the private residence of Greg Baer, deputy general counsel for corporate law at Bank of America.

As I wrote in my post yesterday, “SEIU Storms Private Residence, Terrorizes Teenage Son of Bank of America Exec,” Easton is actually a neighbor of Baer. When she was startled by the loud, screaming, bullhorn-rattling protesters, she called Baer’s teenage son to check on him. Home alone, the frightened teenager had locked himself in the bathroom. After witnessing the entire incident as it unfolded on her neighbor’s private property, Easton criticized the SEIU and left wing groups in her article for crossing the line this time.

Alinsky’s Rule # 12 states,

“Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)”

In almost coordinated lock-step fashion, the 12th Rule was promptly and firmly applied. As Larry O’Connor posted on Big Journalism yesterday, a series of several posts soon followed the publication of Nina Easton’s article: (more…)

It looks like “reporter” Arthur Delaney has a new moonlighting gig as Assistant Communications Director for SEIU and he’s so tired he accidentally posted a PR piece for the beleaguered union at his day job at the Huffington Post.

As noted at Big Government today, a gang of SEIU intimidators stormed the front lawn of Bank of America Deputy General Counsel Greg Baer this past weekend in an attempt to bully him into changing B of A’s policies toward foreclosures, or so they claimed.

In Fortune Magazine, columnist Nina Easton reported on the protest and made note of the fact that SEIU is actively trying to organize the bank tellers at B of A — and by the way, SEIU owes the bank four million dollars.  But never mind all that, SEIU just cares about “the little guy.”

But, the main thrust of Easton’s article in Fortune is the fact that she happens to be Greg Baer’s neighbor.  The issue of hundreds of protesters bused in from various states to block traffic and scream through a bull horn on a peaceful suburban street on a Sunday afternoon transcends politics.  This is about common decency and co-existing in a civil society — qualities that elude the modern fascist left. (more…)