On Sunday I was honored to be a speaker at the rally against building the mosque at ground zero put on by the Coalition to Honor Ground Zero. As the rally concluded, thousands of the participants marched the one block from the rally site to the actual site of Ground Zero.

I noticed a man in black shirt with a phone camera aggressively questioning and haranguing a gentleman with the sign, “No Sharia Here.” He was very aggressive, disrespectful and condescending; apparently, he did not like the man’s answers about Shariah and pushed the point: “Why do you feel threatened? What are you afraid of? Why can’t you answer my questions?”

My instincts told me to document the scene, and I took out my camera. I originally thought he was a supporter of the mosque (they’d gathered in much smaller numbers a few blocks away), or some kind of fringe reporter for a small, even fringier leftist paper. When I challenged the man in the black shirt, asking him to tell me what media outlet he worked for, he refused to answer. He walked away.

But there was cameraman was standing nearby, watching the scene play out. When I asked, he said he worked for ABC News. I then asked if the man in the black shirt was with him. The ABC cameraman said, “yes.”
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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…)

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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There’s an old saying that when you scratch a person you see what lies beneath their skin. People are defined under pressure. The press, the Administration and its allies are under pressure and what we’re seeing under their skin is something similar to the scaled aliens in the TV show “V”. The methods being employed in recent days is borderline fascist. Take that Frank Rich.

There’s an attempt to brand any dissenters of this administration as being crazed and dangerous radicals. CBS made the claim that the Tea Party is made up almost entirely of older white people, which is media code for “racist”. Apparently, having a group of white people is equal to the Klan or a Nazi march. Which is fascinating because CBS, MSNBC, et al. are groups made up mostly of older white people. Bust out the schnapps!

Of course, CBS has a poor record of polling, as theirs tends to be skewed. Gallup did a poll of Tea Partiers that found they were very close to the American mainstream except for having fewer Democrats. And this is what scares the establishment. The mainstream is against them. So they’ve decided to attack the Tea Party — and, by extension, ordinary Americans — as never before. (more…)

The leftist elements of the mainstream media (MSM) could be content just to gloat because they got away with the biggest coup in political history.  Instead, they are launching a full frontal assault on conservatism.  The left must be very afraid.

The accusations are flying.  Virtually every MSM news outlet is running commentary of alleged “racial slurs” and “violent outbursts.”   Shouldn’t they be running video of the actual incidents, instead (if they actually happened)?

Congressman Emanuel Cleaver (D, Mo.) made accusations and the media took the allegation as gospel despite the absence of any corroborating evidence.  The  MSM reported the allegation as news. Interesting, there was almost no national MSM coverage of an innocent black man who was attacked, beaten, and stomped on tape by SEIU protesters in St. Louis.

When Representative Cleaver found media attention for his yet unfounded accusations, others jumped in with more accusations.   They all got press, too.  They all accused conservative groups like the Tea Party of the threats, violent actions, and vicious activities. (more…)

With all the tales in the Old Media of the supposed violence committed by Tea Partiers going on since Obama’s takeover of our nation’s healthcare system, I thought it might be instructive to recall how hate-filled the unhinged left is in America today.

A year ago, the good folks at Zomblog assembled a great series of photos showing the mental derangement exhibited by the human detritus at those once ubiquitous anti-war rallies that the distempered left hosted so often between the years 2003 and 2009… you know, those anti-war rallies that totally disappeared after Obama took office even as the wars rage on? Yeah, those anti-war rallies.

Why was no one ever arrested for threatening President Bush at protests, when they displayed signs in public that called for his death? (more…)

Bill Whittle posted this video essay on Big Journalism recently, which got us to thinking: what would today’s media make of the sentiments that animated the Declaration of Independence? You remember, this musty old thing:

Not so much the famous bit about “when in the course of human events,” but the stuff further down, the things that really angered the colonists about the form of government they were about to cast off.

Let the Facts be submitted to a candid world: (more…)

You can dump only so much manure on a plant before it has to thrive on its own, and the same principle applies in journalism. An initiative that lacks grass roots can wither in the sun despite liberal doses of mainstream media Miracle-Gro—which explains why Air America found a more receptive audience in the press than in the public, and why Martha Burk’s protest against the men-only membership policy at Augusta National Golf Club drew fewer demonstrators (a couple dozen) than the total number of New York Times stories hyping her who-cares crusade (more than 100).

Having enjoyed seedling-of-the-month treatment in the MSM greenhouse since late February, Coffee Party USA—the supposedly less strident alternative to the Tea Party—designated Saturday its National Coffee Party Kick-off Day. With gatherings in “more than 350 coffee shops in 44 states,” according to its Web site, the fledgling political organization was hoping to make a statement. Instead, it merely raised questions, exposed truths and, worst of all, inspired ridicule.

So, Coffee Kiddies, you want to be like the big boys and girls in the Tea Party treehouse? Sit down and have a cup of reality. Here are 10 reasons why your Coffee Party Kick-off didn’t amount to a hill of beans: (more…)