***UPDATE: As expected, Politico’s Dylan Byers uses Martin’s suspension to once again admonish CNN for not “punishing” (his word) Erick Erickson and Dana Loesch.

Fascistic GLAAD wins another scalp.

Over the years, CNN’s Roland Martin has said some awfully outrageous stuff about Republicans and the Tea Party — and not on his Twitter feed, but on the air at CNN. He’s pretty much accused us of being everything  just short of Nazis due only to legitimate policy differences we’ve had with his precious Barack Obama. As a response, the left-wing speech police — who disguise themselves as “media watchdogs” — have never (according to memory and Google) put any pressure on CNN to have Martin fired, suspended, or reprimanded.  

And they shouldn’t. Martin has every right to be a racial demagogue, and CNN has every right to broadcast him. I don’t like the guy, but the thought of trying to silence him is anathema to everything I believe in. Unfortunately for Martin, the Washington Post and Politico aren’t big fans of the First Amendment and, as a result, just a few minutes ago it was reported that CNN has suspended Mr. Martin “for the time being.”

Martin’s sin? Tweeting a few childish jokes only a fascistic outlet like GLAAD could get away with pretending they are offended by. 

Martin’s mistake? Martin inadvertently stepped into a trap he probably didn’t know existed, and as a result he is now receiving an invaluable lesson about today’s politically-correct hierarchy, where gay trumps black. 

Naturally, media watchdogs who, in the past, have taken no issue with Martin’s race-baiting, are now into day three of their passive-aggressive censorship crusade that pushed CNN into taking the kind of action that puts another win in the column of GLAAD’s ongoing censorship crusade.  

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It’s becoming clearer and clearer that the Obama Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder is not just politicized and biased – it’s a hit squad for Obama’s enemies.

Remember when President Obama’s Department of Justice shut down investigation of the New Black Panther Party in the aftermath of their taped voter intimidation in 2008?  J. Christian Adams, author of the book Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department and former DOJ attorney, exposed the DOJ’s corruption in dropping the case altogether.  Or how about when the DOJ stonewalled investigations into Fast and Furious, the gunwalking operation that ended with weapons in the hands of the Mexican drug cartels – weapons used to kill American citizens?

Well, the DOJ is on the warpath again.  Not against the New Black Panthers or the Mexican drug cartels – against Rupert Murdoch.  According to Reuters, “U.S. authorities are stepping up investigations, including an FBI criminal inquiry, into possible violations by employees of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire of a U.S. law banning corrupt payments to foreign officials such as police, law enforcement and corporate sources said.”  What’s the evidence on which they’re basing the investigation?  Says Reuters, “U.S. investigators have found little to substantiate allegations of phone hacking inside the United States by Murdoch journalists, the sources added.”

So why, then, is the DOJ so intent on finding wrongdoing about Murdoch?  It couldn’t have something to do with Murdoch’s ownership of Fox News – the same network the Obama White House tried to exclude from inside administration interviews, according to papers uncovered by Judicial Watch – could it? (more…)

The media is calling the Barack Obama attack on the Catholic Church a “culture war.” Culture War. The words and graphics are everywhere. It was the ABC News headline one morning, “Candidate’s Culture War” is what the graphic said. As if this is some sort of battle between Obama and the Republican candidates. Yes, it is that, but it us much, much more.

This is also a fight much larger than “culture.” Culture is something that defines art and common belief. Culture is something that changes with the times and can actually be defined as you wish. Much of our culture today is not what it was 50, 100, or 200 years ago. What I think is culture, may not be what you think is culture. Yes, there is an “American culture, and I believe I know what it is, but I certainly don’t trust the media or this President (who would probably see me as a “bitter” American who “clings to guns and religion”) to tell me what it is.

The Constitution doesn’t work that way, certainly not the First Amendment which guarantees religious liberty and expression. I would like to think the Constitution would define our culture, but sadly that is not always the case. For the media to call this a “culture war” greatly diminishes its value, this is a battle over the First amendment of the US Constitution. Obama wants the Constitution circumvented to pander to his base, I would hope that most of us would be united with the Catholic Church in wanting it protected.

The new part of the ObamaCare law (that nobody read before they voted on it) says that churches that provide health care and insurance, must also provide contraceptives. The Catholic Church opposes contraception.

“The White House insists this achieves a balanced approach that respects women’s health care and religious liberty, but that’s not how the Republican candidates see it,” said Jake Tapper of ABC this morning. Jake, this does nothing to protect religious liberty. It tries to destroy it.

Thankfully, the presidential hopefuls joined in the fight.

“We must have a president who is willing to protect America’s First right, a right to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience. This is a violation of conscience,” said Mitt Romney

Rick Santorum says Obama has been “hostile to people of faith particularly Christians and specifically Catholics.”

Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul have also been avid opponents to Dear Leaders actions on this. Not just because they want to be seen as opponents, they all believe what he is doing in inherently wrong.

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If John Podesta isn’t paying his Politico-parrot Dylan Byers anything, he’s getting quite the sweet deal.

In today’s lip-lock with Media Matters, Byers writes up a piece about the Accuracy In Media award our own Dana Loesch and CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson are set to receive this week but, as he does quite frequently, Byers gives Media Matters the final say:

In response to the statement, the liberal watchdog group Media Matters today noted that AIM has “a long history of promoting anti-gay views and conspiracy theories” and called the organization “a cesspool of hate.”

Media Matters also noted that the award has traditionally gone to reporters from conservative or right-wing media outlets, including Big Journalism, Fox News, the Heritage Foundation, and The Daily Caller.

We’ve done research on the unspoken relationship between Politico and Media Matters, and do you want to know what we’ve never found? Politico or Byers quoting any right-of-center media watchdog’s opinion of Media Matters.

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From Accuracy in Media’s Lynn Woolley and Cliff Kincaid:

When the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure made a decision to sever its ties with America’s number one seller of abortions, Planned Parenthood, the media went to war. The media coverage was slanted in such a way that “mainstream” reporters like Andrea Mitchell and Lisa Myers of NBC News were openly advocating for a point of view—pressuring Komen to reverse course and give in to Planned Parenthood.

Why would the media go to war over something as seemingly insignificant as a policy change regarding funding at Komen, a private cancer charity? Part of the answer lies in the fact that, for the media, “women’s rights” take precedence over all other rights, including the rights of children. This is what “feminism” has become and this is what the Komen controversy was supposed to be about. In reality, it had nothing to do with breast cancer because the fact is that most Planned Parenthood affiliates don’t even provide mammograms. That money from Komen was used to refer women at risk of contracting the disease somewhere else.

So the issue was something else as well. While there were references to Planned Parenthood being an “abortion provider,” there was no explanation of what this “service” actually “provides”—a procedure that destroys a human life. This is why the annual March for Life against abortion is mostly ignored by the major media. It is a sad fact that even some conservative women still think that Planned Parenthood is simply an organization that provides information about voluntary family planning.

You saw very little in the mainstream media from pro-life people who supported Komen’s initial decision. The bias is so pronounced that the media long ago adopted the language of the Left. The term “pro-life” is never used. But “pro-choice” is. Newspapers use the term “abortion rights” to describe the political process of terminating the lives of the unborn, but use “anti-abortion” when referring to those of us who value human life. We are “against.” They are for “rights.”

So we made it a point to tune into the Big Three network newscasts on Friday night—hours after Nancy Brinker of Komen had caved. We wanted to see if this story would be treated in a neutral manner, or if the stories would be written from the standpoint that Brinker did the right thing—and, why did it take her so long? We did receive a shock, though it was a mild one. One of the three networks actually did a fairly nice job.

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You would think that a media “analyst,” like Politico’s Dylan Byers, would be one of America’s primary defenders of free speech, especially political speech. But rather than defend political speech and satire, Byers is nothing more than a left-wing book burner, a politically correct speech-enforcer who wants certain speech chilled and specific individuals silenced. His blacklisting attempts might be disguised as passive-aggressive concern and requests for comment from employers, but when the outcome desired is obvious — to get people fired and/or reprimanded for something they’ve said — it’s still blacklisting.

Lately, Byers has been on a rampage to get two conservative CNN contributors in hot water, our own Dana Loesch and Red State’s Erick Ericson. Today Byers joined forces with GLAAD — an organization notorious for its bullying, speech policing, and un-American use of “re-education” camps – to target CNN’s Roland Martin:

Roland Martin has now become the third CNN political analyst to cause controversy this year.

Last month, Dana Loesch celebrated U.S. Marines who had urinated on Taliban corpses, announcing, “I’d drop trou and do it too.”

Last week, Erick Erickson celebrated the tasing of an Occupy D.C. protester, saying, “Watching a hippie protester get tased just makes my day.”

Now, the Gay Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation is calling for Martin’s removal from the network for a comment he made on Twitter about H&M’s Super Bowl ad featuring a near-naked David Beckham: “If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!”

In Dylan Byers’ world, the obvious political humor Loesch and Erickson used to make a point, and a silly joke tweeted by Martin, is a “CNN political contributor problem.”

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Oops. My headline mistakenly reads “cracker” journalism.

What I meant to write was ”crack” journalism – but in a completely sarcastic way.

At the top of Politico’s front page today sits a major spread on race and its cynical use in the presidential election. The co-authors claim that their inspiration came from (a week late) Arizona Governor Jan Brewer being called a bigot for daring to wag her finger at President Obama — something the media described as Speaking! Truth! To! Power! when Bush was in office.

Predictably, the article doesn’t hold the media accountable for blowing up, digging up, and focusing on bogus claims of racism, and just as predictably, the article doesn’t bother to mention Politico’s own racial scandal that blew up after their own Jonathan — He Who Investigates Private Citizens on Behalf Of His Precious One – Martin casually tossed off the slur “cracker” on a national cable channel last week.

I guess this is Politico’s transparently desperate way of pretending that neither they nor the rest of the MSM have anything to do with creating and/or fanning the flames of these phony racial firestorms, even though the media is usually the one holding the match.  The reason Politico wants to pretend the MSM isn’t the number one generator of this stuff is obvious. They want to report and create it but take no responsibility for it. This is how they fashion that artificial shield of objectivity for themselves even as they lead this partisan crusade.

It’s just a fact that both the Democrats and their MSM allies use these trumped-up racial charges as a way to distract from Obama’s failures, scandals, and issues that matter, like jobs and the deficit. By CONSTANTLY creating racism where none exists — food stamps, finger-wagging, basketball, Juan — the MSM also keeps the narrative alive that the right is racist which, in turn, keeps us on defense. After all, when we’re on defense, we’re not getting our message out.

As we’ve documented here, Politico isn’t simply reporting on this cynical game of racial gotcha; they are playing, contributing, and amplifying it.

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A recent article by Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic entitled “Why Mitt’s Wealth Matters: It’s Policy, Not Envy” offers a meme that surely will be one line of Democrat attack against Mitt Romney should he happen to win the GOP nomination. Mr. Cohn’s article focuses on a speech that President Obama recently gave at the University of Michigan promoting his program for making college more affordable. What I found fascinating was Cohn’s argument echoing Obama’s not so subtle hint that because of Mitt Romney’s wealthy upbringing, and thus his never needing a student loan, he has no “standing,” for lack of a better term, to be targeting the student loan program for cuts as a part of his total package for reducing discretionary federal spending.

Says Cohn:

“Romney also benefited from the lottery of life – among other things, by being born into a family that could afford to provide him with the very best education at every step of the way. He seems unaware of that fact and the possibility that others, born into less fortunate circumstances, might need some of the government programs he’s promised to undermine.”

In other words, because of Romney’s wealth, he simply does not understand the needs of those who use government assistance. So what is Cohn’s argument, then? That only those who had a hardscrabble upbringing need apply for the presidency?

For a columnist who clearly is in the Democratic camp to offer such a notion is utter hypocrisy. In 2004, the “party of the little guy” offered up as their standard-bearer Senator John Kerry, who was at the time the richest man in Congress. Not only was Kerry fabulously wealthy (~$500+ million net worth), but he didn’t even earn it! He married it. Add to this Kerry’s coiffed and grinning side-kick John Edwards was a sleazy trial lawyer who amassed his own pile of tens of millions by bankrupting obstetricians using junk science, and you hardly have a representation of the 99%. So how come in 2004 the Democrats felt that immense wealth didn’t matter, yet now suddenly it is a legitimate issue? (more…)

Right off the bat C-SPAN should have aired this hearing. There is absolutely no excuse not to air it on TV. Since I had to stream it online I kept my TV on DirecTV News Mix to keep an eye on the news. The only network that had consistent coverage of the testimony was FOX News. I’m not shocked at all. I didn’t see anything about the testimony on the other channels. Jeff Poor from The Daily Caller helped me keep an eye on MSNBC and he didn’t see anything. He said they were hung up on Donald Trump all day. I was informed by a friend on Twitter, Doug Mataconis, that the hearing was discussed on The Situation Room on CNN for about 15 minutes. “Special Report” and The FOX Report both started off with Mr. Holder’s testimony.

Before I continue I noticed some friends on Twitter growing upset that headlines were partisan. The MSM was right: This was a partisan fight and every single Democrat coddled Mr. Holder. The Republicans were the only ones to demand withheld documents and answers from Mr. Holder.

Right after the testimony ended I began searching for coverage of the hearing on Google. First stop was Associated Press. Remember: If the AP doesn’t write anything on Fast & Furious more than likely the rest of the media won’t mention it. Pete Yost did write about the testimony, but hat’s where the excitement ends. Again, he distorts information to favor Mr. Holder and the Department of Justice. Mr. Yost fails to mention the subpoena was issued October 12, 2011. That’s 4 months ago. That is plenty of time to go through the hoops to release the documents. Mr. Yost says, “Though neither side said so, negotiations are almost certain to be the next step.” If you watched the testimony do you honestly think Mr. Issa or Mr. Holder will negotiate? Didn’t think so. Mr. Issa won’t accept anything less than the documents he needs. Then Mr. Yost describes a few dialogues, but doesn’t bother to get down to nitty gritty of the testimony.

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I take no pleasure in the misery of others, but as someone who recognizes that the mainstream media is the arch-villain in the fight for human liberty and the survival of an America that doesn’t resemble a European socialist country – yesterday, it was impossible for my heart to do anything other than leap for joy when I read that the New York Times lost $40 million in 2011.

No one wants to see anyone lose their job, but the New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, and all the rest are nothing more than lairs for arch-villains, and when these hollowed-out volcanoes are bankrupted, the virtue of this outweighs what happens to the faceless henchmen who are now out on the streets looking for work. I wish them luck. I wish things were different. But this is about saving our country and humanity.

Over in England, some are openly panicking over the future of newspapers:

So if I understand how this works, we currently live in a media world where “Juan” is racist, where “food stamps” is racist, where pointing out that a president who enjoys basketball enjoys basketball is racist. But “cracker“? Why, that’s not improper in the least.

—–

Well, I guess it’s okay to use the slur “cracker” for the for the same reason it’s okay to use the N-word. Some in the black community use the N-word and some in Florida use the word “cracker.”

Oh, wait; it’s not okay to use the N-word.

Anyway, what does logic have to do with the mainstream media justifying and rationalizing anything they do? But justify and rationalize Jonathan Martin did when he called in to Newsbusters to justify and rationalize his use of the word “cracker.”

You can read the whole thing here, but this is my all-time favorite part:

Let’s face it, you were on MSNBC where virtually every criticism of Barack Obama they report as being somehow racist.”

“Totally agree that there is now a culture in the sort of political media universe on both sides where there is this sort of outrage industry that has been created where both sides monitor the other and try to find examples of offensive comments that can be seized upon and stirred up entirely for political gain where you have this, again, faux indignation, but it’s really just posing as indignation,” he said. “It’s all about political point scoring, and I think it absolutely takes place now on both sides.”

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***UPDATE: Politico finally added a story about today’s Fast and Furious hearings to their front page. Only they buried it waaaaay below where my screenshot ends and waaaay below the days-old Obama crooning story. Media Matters must be thrilled. Good dog.

Well, you know how it is: jounOlisting journOlists gotta journOlist.

Could this be the result of Politico taking more marching orders from Media Matters?

—–

In the bottom left-hand corner of the front page screen-cap taken minutes ago, you’ll see that Politico is still helping Obama milk his songbird moment. the story is also featured much higher in the sidebar.

And yet, not a word, not a peep, not a byte of space for the Congressional grilling Attorney General Eric Holder is currently facing after yet another Friday dump of Fast and Furious documents that don’t quite add up to what we’ve been told in the past. 

Politico provides no context, no background, no heads up – nothing on one of the biggest political stories of the day and a brewing scandal within the Obama administration. As far as Politico’s concerned, it’s just not happening today or news. Memory-holed by Obama’s Palace Guards.

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Left-wing operatives, like those who run Politico, are intentionally attempting to create their own reality. In the same way the left turned “30 Rock,” a show that ranked 106 in the ratings last season, into some sort of cultural phenom, the idea here is to push the political and social values of something no one watches into our country’s cultural and media narrative as though it’s something it’s not — popular.

Politico loves Stephen Colbert because Stephen Colbert loves Barack Obama and is waging war against the Right and free speech. America, however, is, to be kind, indifferent to Colbert. 1.44 million viewers and only half that among the 18-49 group, does not make you King of anything.

But Colbert knows how to play the game and understands that if he wants these kinds of hollow accolades and the opportunity to push his left-wing agenda and to have history revised in his favor, he must appeal to the right people, and the right people are not THE people; the right people are the left-wing elites who infest our corrupt media.

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Two weeks ago Big Government reported that Facebook and Politico created a new partnership to reveal users’ public private messages–if and when they relate to their feelings about a political candidate–will be fed through a ‘sentiment analysis tool’ and potentially reported on Politico.

Conservatives should understandably have concerns about Politico’s upcoming reporting since most Facebook users are young and supportive of Barack Obama–in fact Facebook’s own CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been rumored to be an Obama fan, too.

But now there’s new criticism coming from the left: Christopher Calabrese of the The American Civil Liberties Union’s  (ACLU) Legislative Office posted a blog on January 13th stressing their concerns:

Most troubling is Facebook’s willingness to search and collect users’ private political preferences and thoughts, preferences they may have shared only with their closest friend in a private email.

This raises at least three concerns. The first is that many users may not want to be part of any “sentiment analysis” or poll. For example, they may be a firm supporter of Mitt Romney but find Ron Paul’s ideas interesting. Are they now going to feel hesitant to talk about Paul’s ideas out of awareness that it might be registered as support or boost a candidate they don’t like? Second, we don’t see any mention of user consent anywhere in Facebook’s announcement. How has Facebook decided that users agreed that their personal communications can and should be used in this way?

Finally, what other uses might this information be put to in the future? Will it be used to serve users ads from politicians or manipulate voting preferences in some way? We can see the marketing materials from Facebook now: “Candidates, serve ads to secret supporters! No one knows about their preferences except their closest friends and us.”

The real question here is what are Facebook’s motives? In the wake of its first public offering of an IPO at $5 billion, analysts are saying that the social utility is worth a total of $85 to $100 billion–the biggest Silicon Valley IPO ever. Last year Facebook earned a revenue of $3.71 billion up 88 percent from 2010.

With such stunning financial success, why is such an invasive measure necessary?

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- How Pininterest uses content without violating copyright laws.

- On crackers. MSNBC set the rules when it declared “food stamps” as a Racist Codeword©. Going by MSNBC’s rules, “cracker,” even when used on Floridians, is Racist©.

- Memphis police delete a photographer’s cell phone photos:

If you are on a public street and take pictures or video of Memphis Police with your cell phone, you could end up in the back of a squad car and your pictures could be deleted.

ABC 24 News photographer Casey Monroe said that’s what happened to him Sunday morning. Police never charged Monroe with a crime, but this could happen to anyone with a cell phone camera.

Monroe said police went too far outside Thai Bistro Restaurant in downtown Memphis that morning, and that they violated his rights.

As police were giving the restaurant’s owner, Loy Bouaphaypengerprachan, a ticket for parking illegally, Monroe went to see what was going on and started taking pictures of the parking ticket fiasco.

The owner told abc24.com, “I think he was doing what a regular citizen would do if they see a situation that’s happening they’re trying to evidence.”

Monroe said he was “just trying to document the situation going on.”

- Bozell: Jan Brewer vs the Shoe-Tossing Journalist.

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Politico’s Jonathan Martin didn’t only malign residents of Florida’s Panhandle on MSNBC when he invoked the phrase “Cracker Counties” to refer to the region, he went on to equate the region with all of the Deep South, also mentioning Georgia and Alabama by name. We can also assume it would cover many of the military men and women residing in Florida’s Panhandle.

Jonathan Martin, right

Politico’s Jonathan Martin isn’t a big fan of everyday people, especially those who don’t vote for Obama. If you want to understand who this man really is, you need only click here. To protect then-candidate Barack Obama and get the heat off of him after making his infamous and revealing ”spread the wealth” comment, Martin needed to change the narrative quick, so he investigated and published dirt on a PRIVATE CITIZEN. What followed was a narrative-changing (to benefit Obama) MSM attack against a guy who was minding his own business when Obama approached him.

“Cracker” has a long pejorative history, much of it linked to slavery, as in he who “cracks” the whip, while other uses of the word always refer to the more lowly born.

Frederick Law Olmsted, a prominent landscape architect from Connecticut, visited the South as a journalist in the 1850s and wrote that “some crackers owned a good many Negroes, and were by no means so poor as their appearance indicated.”

Martin may just as well have slandered the people of the region by referring to them as “White Trash.” That is, in effect, how the word can be interpreted today. One can only imagine the outrage had a less than liberal outlet and journalist maligned an entire race or class, as Martin did. There’s also this from a letter to the Earl of Dartmouth. (more…)

- Juan Williams adds “Founding Fathers” and “Constitution” to the Big Book Of Words You Can’t Say Because They’re Racist, According to Me.

References to a lack of respect for the “Founding Fathers” and the “Constitution” also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anyone supposedly threatening core “old-fashioned American values.”

- Occupiers attempt citizens’ arrest of Fox News van. Well, at least they didn’t poop on it.

- MSNBC/Politico use racial slur, call Florida panhandle “cracker counties.” Does this include the vast amount of those in the navy who are stationed there?

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Yesterday, Juan Williams of Fox News doubled down on his accusation that Republican presidential candidates are using “racial code words.”

Today, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic has followed suit with an article rehashing the tired allegation that Republicans are using so-called “dog whistle” tactics–“the use of coded, ambiguous language to appeal to the prejudices of certain subsets of voters”–i.e. white voters (Democrats’ use of race to appeal to the prejudices and fears of black voters is rarely subject to scrutiny.)

Jeffrey Goldberg (Photo: Bloomberg News)

Goldberg says that the Obama’s Republican opponents have alleged the following (original links, including one to Media Matters–itself the subject of serious charges of antisemitism–included):

Black people have lost the desire to perform a day’s work. Black people rely on food stamps provided to them by white taxpayers. Black people, including Barack and Michelle Obama, believe that the U.S. owes them something because they are black. Black children should work as janitors in their high schools as a way to keep them from becoming pimps. And the pathologies afflicting black Americans are caused partly by the Democratic Party, which has created in them a dependency on government not dissimilar to the forced dependency of slaves on their owners.

I’ll go even further, and admit that I personally heard a presidential candidate give a speech–in a church, no less–in which he blasted the black community, and black men in particular, for the phenomenon of single-parent households; who noted that black children with absent fathers have a greater chance of becoming criminals; who scolded black parents, “don’t just sit in the house and watch ‘Sports Center’ all weekend long”; and who told blacks to “read a book once in awhile.”

That candidate was Barack Obama.

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Today, The New York Times released a chart purporting to compare what the candidates made and gave away in 2010.

This is a bit like comparing apples to oranges, because the New York Times, like a lot of liberals, compares Romney’s income from capital gains (which were already taxed as income) to Obama’s salary as president (which is taxed as salary), but let’s go with it anyways.

Why only 2010? Because it would reveal how generous Romney is to include more years.

“[F]ew people know which is how incredibly generous [Romney] and his wife and his family have been to people in need. This is not sort of a bombshell surprise. I think it falls in the category of boring, nice surprise,” Scott Helman, co-author of The Real Romney.

But revealing more data would also show how stingy the Obamas were.

In 2011 alone, Romney gave nearly 20% of his income to charity. Barack Obama and his wife Michelle gave only $10,772 of the $1.2 million they earned from 2000 to 2004 to charities, less than one percent. In 2005 and 2006, the Obamas increased their giving to 5% of their $2.6 million income.  Biden’s 2006 tax returns showed the he gave just $380 to charity out of an adjusted income of $248,459, or roughly .15%.

Just as conservatives give more than liberals, so too do conservative politicians give more often than liberal ones. Bill Clinton famously got tax deductions in the ’80s for donating used underwear. In 1997, Vice President Al Gore gave just $353 in charitable donations, or roughly .0017% of his income to charity. Multimillionaire John Kerry’s 1995 tax returns showed he gave no money to charities at all. (more…)

As reported by Big Government:

Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), who was the subject of allegations of congressional insider trading, has indicated that he will not seek to extend his term as chair of the House Financial Services Committee after 2012.

Progressive media has fought hard against the story of insider trading, first broken by Big Peace Editor Peter Schweizer with his book Throw Them All Out. Leftist media attempted to discredit the sources and blow off the story, but after President Obama mentioned it in his State of the Union Address, the tactic was turned on its ear.

Earlier this week Joel Pollak discussed how the Huffington Post issued a mea culpa after working hard to encourage dismissal of the story:

Give Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post credit: it takes courage to change one’s mind, and to admit an earlier mistake.

Grim has written that he was wrong to dismiss a November 2011 report by 60 Minutes (based on Breitbart editor Peter Schweitzer’s book, Throw Them All Out) on insider trading in Congress:

At the time, I wrongly reported that 60 Minutes’ poor choice of targets for its report, and its clumsy attempt to connect specific trading to specific legislative action, set momentum for the bill back. Instead, in fact, the report propelled the legislation forward.

Grim had initially reported that the 60 Minutes report “falls short.”

What changed?

Much of the left and the left media–including the Huffington Post, Politico, and Media Matters for America–dismissed the issue of insider trading and tried to discredit both the allegations and their source. Now that Obama has taken up the legislation–with its sponsor, Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) obtaining Obama’s explicit commitment to make Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid move it through the Senate–the left is scrambling to catch up.

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