From the start of the Occupy Freak Street movement the media compared the protests to the tea party.

Based on jealousy over the movement that captured the nation prior to the November 2010 elections and since, the media wanted desperately to have protests they could relate to and promote. The tea party certainly was not that, so protecting #OWS has been their mission.

The protestors are making it harder and harder for the media to do that.

Take the Occupy Oakland protestors who attacked a KGO TV cameraman who was there to “shoot” a murder scene at one of the protests (wait–a murder scene at supposedly peaceful protests?).

Cameraman (or photojournalist, if you wish) Randy Davis was attacked by about a dozen men and he suffered a mild concussion and bumps and bruises.

It has also been reported that the protesters formed a human shield around the victim, possibly keeping the person from getting the medical help needed to possibly save his life if the occasion had been that severe. Accomplices, anyone?

The rap sheet at Occupy Bizarre Street continues to grow. The media has put itself in a pickle. Do they ignore these protests because they have become too embarrassing, do they try to paint them as something they are not, or do they continue to make them seem mainstream–or all of the above? Certainly, that’s what they’ve been doing for most of the time during these protests. (more…)

The media is having a field day right now questioning the late Steve Jobs and his “Reality Distortion Field.” Skipping the fact that the deceased makes for an easy target, I find it hilarious that the media is all that shocked at the concept of reality distortion.

Take this popular statement in its many variations: Occupy Wall Street is just like the tea party. Seriously?  There’s Reality Distortion for ya, right there, by those in the media who have promised to tell us the truth and put it in the proper context. Have they not seen the destruction of property, public nudity, suspected sexual assaults, riots and near riots, numerous arrests for a variety of crimes? Still, they will continue to compare what they are seeing on the streets today with what we saw at tea party rallies? Reality Distortion Field.

I was watching ABC’s Good Morning America recently and George Stephanopoulos was interviewing Joe Biden. They were talking about #OWS and George was making his statement about how similar the protests were to the tea party movement, and while George was talking, the B-roll footage was showing cops arresting OWS protestors. Reality Distortion Field. Let’s give the benefit of the doubt and say he wasn’t looking at his monitor. I know how difficult that can be sometimes with a bunch of different things going on all at the same time, but still, anybody think George hasn’t seen the video of the anarchy and can’t tell the difference between OWS and the tea party?

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On July 26th, 2011, Adbusters posted a page on its website that asked the following question:  “Is America Ripe for a Tahrir Moment?”  Only days later, Al Gore appeared on CurrentTV’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann program to discuss what everyday, ordinary, non-astroturf Americans who happen to be angry can do to get involved.

Surprise!  Guess what Al just so happened to suggest?

Here’s the transcript:

KEITH OLBERMANN:

“Obviously the first suggestion relevant to this would be to exercise every vote that one has available to one in the next sets of elections. What else besides that do you recommend to those of us who are angry, and who have been angry throughout this whole process?”

AL GORE:

“Well, I enjoyed your special comment last night, Keith, and I want to focus on one particular suggestion you had about using the wonderful tools that are newly available for the reinvigoration of democracy.  Now, they’ve been around for a while and more and more people have been  getting involved.”

“We need to have an American spring. You know, the Arab Spring — the nonviolent part of it isn’t finished yet — but we need to have an American Spring, a kind of an American Tahrir Square. Non-violent change, where people from the grassroots get involved again.”

“Not in the Tea Party style. There are people who are genuinely upset in the Tea Party, I understand that, but that movement was funded with seed money from right-wing billionaires, the Koch brothers, and promoted on Fox News and turned into a stalking horse for this right-wing agenda that a lot of people have been trying to push on this country for a long time. What’s sacrosanct for them is to have absolutely no tax increases on the wealthiest Americans — they are at a low level now — and to try to shrink down government so they can get it out of the way of powerful corporations and special interests, so that they can have free rein. And the Supreme Court has, of course, has now declared that they’re persons and make these secret contributions.”
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The media didn’t wait for the tea party to so much as make a squeak following Arizona before hyping them as racist bigot murderers. So far I haven’t seen a peep from the MSM about any of these fine examples of New Tone.

SATURDAY: Union protester is arrested for attempting to jack with the tea partiers’ sound system at the Madison rally.

Progressive Defense: He was just helping! While cursing at the tea partiers. A lot.

TUESDAY: Union protesters accost a gay black tea partier in Denver Colorado. They call him “son,” and ask him if he has any children that he “claims.” Because, you know, apparently black men don’t already care for their children and white men have a perfect record.

Progressive Defense: He deserved it because he was trying to lord his superiority over us.

WEDNESDAY: Diminutive Tabitha Hale ventures from the new Freedom Works offices (moved to a more secure location because they received a lot of threats) to get some video of the protesters outside. She is promptly slapped upside the head by a CWA protester.

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Via Twitter:

Common Cause condemns bigotry, hateful statements caught on film at rally

Common Cause’s 40 year history of holding power accountable has been marked by a commitment to decency and civility – in public and private. So we are of course outraged to find that a few of those attending the events around a gathering Common Cause helped to organize Sunday near Palm Springs voiced hateful, narrow-minded sentiments to an interviewer in the crowd.

We condemn bigotry and hate speech in every form, even when it comes from those who fancy themselves as our friends.

Anyone who has attended a public event has encountered people whose ideas or acts misrepresented, even embarrassed, the gathering. Every sporting event has its share of “fans” whose boorish behavior on the sidelines makes a mockery of good sportsmanship; every political gathering has a crude sign-painter or epithet-spewing heckler.

We organized the “Uncloak the Kochs” panel discussion and took part in the rally afterwards to call public attention to the political power of Koch Industries and other corporations, their focus on expanding that power, and the dangers it presents to our democracy.

We’re committed to staging other forums and public events in the coming months to continue that effort. We urge all Americans of good will to join us.

###

Thoughts?

I’ve yet to hear an “epithet-spewing heckler” at a tea party or meet a sign-bearer at a tea party that wasn’t someone with the LaRouche camp trying to start trouble, so I can’t really get on board with the “every political gathering” part. Protests are fun – when people can disagree without lowering themselves to a level of humanity that should’ve been left in the 60s.

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Many people who are informed about what’s actually happening in the Middle East constantly wonder why Israel fares so badly in the information wars. The following example gives us a pretty good idea why.

Jawaher Abu Rahmah, a ‘Palestinian’ activist, died on January 1st. Saeb Erekat, the right fork of Yasser Arafat’s tongue, claimed that she died during a demonstration in the ‘Palestinian’ town of Bil’in, killed by “poison” contained in tear gas fired at the demonstration by Israeli soldiers after it deteriorated into what could best be termed a riot.

‘Palestinian’ President Mahmoud Abbas called Abu Rahmah’s death a “new Israeli crime carried out by the occupation army against our helpless nation.”

She was given a martyr’s funeral as a victim an Israeli “war crime”, with crowds of mourners and the usual Palestinian stringers who work for the dinosaur media in attendance.

The story was almost instantaneously reported around the world as fact by the AFP, the Guardian, The AP, The Independent, UPI, Voice of America, and even the Jewish Telegraphic Agency among others, while TIME’s resident Israel basher Tony Karon got off a piece celebrating this as the occasion of an alliance between ‘Palestinian’ activists and Israeli Leftists.

The real story? According to the IDF, there’s no evidence Abu Rahmah was even at the Bil’in demonstration, nor does she show up on any of the videos.

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Phoenix, Arizona, May 29, 2010. A peaceful protest against Arizona’s new immigration law, SB 1070. Here’s what the MSM told you the rally was about, as reported by the Arizona Republic:

Hoping to turn their frustration and anger into action, tens of thousands of protesters against Arizona’s new immigration law marched on the state Capitol Saturday and urged the nation’s leaders to hear their pleas.

“We must stand together for justice, opportunity and peace,” said U.S. Rep. Ed Pastor, D-Ariz., at the mid-afternoon culmination of what was a peaceful demonstration on the Capitol grounds. “What we need in the United States is not scapegoating immigrants.”

Sarahi Uribe, a representative of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which helped organize Saturday’s event, said her California-based group participated to send a message to Washington, D.C. “We have a very clear demand that President Obama stop Senate Bill 1070,” she said.

And here’s what really happened, as told in these photos you never saw, such as this one:

And this one: (more…)

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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Whenever I’d watch old WWII movies and saw the occupying Nazi soldiers demand papers from French citizens I’d think how lucky we are that here in America we don’t have to be subjected to this treatment. Since the Arizona governor signed an immigration law, Democrats and their fellow alarmists in the MSM are desperately trying to equate it with Nazism and the civil rights abuse of Hispanics. President Obama hinted that the federal government may have to circumvent the law.

As a Hispanic I recognize this ploy for what it is- a desperate attempt to incite militant Hispanic groups into protesting Arizona and liberals into boycotting the state. Why, you may ask? Because if what Arizona did spreads to the entire country, the Democrats are toast. And their media pals know this.

Ironically even some Republicans like Karl Rove and Lindsey Graham are worried that the law allowing police to ask potential illegal immigrants for papers will lead to abuses. Michael Gerson explained the potential civil rights violation in his Townhall column: (more…)

Nancy Pelosi said there were protesters parading around with swastikas – it turns out she was right! The images below are a sampling from a gallery posted by AZCentral.com, covering the protests in Arizona against the passage of SB 1070.

Yes, that’s Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s face adorned on the piñata being bashed, to the amusement of the surrounding crowd. But it’s OK – she’s a Republican after all.

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On May 18, 2006, CBS News alerted us to planned protests against President Bush during his then pending visit to Jakarta. Along with the article entitled “Jakarta Awaits Bush Visit, Bush Faces Rising Anti-U.S. Sentiment…,” we saw this photo of “Indonesian Muslim and student groups” rehearsing their protests against Bush.

A politically weakened U.S. President George W. Bush will face anger over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when he visits mostly Muslim Indonesia on Monday for talks aimed at broadening ties with a strategic ally in the war on terror…Anti-American sentiment is mounting and Islamic hard-liners and students have held near-daily rallies this month, calling Mr. Bush a terrorist and burning effigies of the U.S. leader…Mr. Bush, meanwhile, with his popularity plummeting at home and abroad, is expected to have on kid gloves when discussing issues like Indonesia’s ongoing battle with Islamic extremism, its failure to find justice in the poisoning death of the country’s top human rights activist, and foot-dragging in fighting bird flu.

That was then. What are CBS News and the MSM telling us now about President Obama’s visit?  Answer: Little.  You have to read the news from Indonesia for information.  Here are three samples: (more…)

We are in the middle of the Dahe Fajr (the “Ten-Day Dawn”) in Iran.  On February 1, thirty-one years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini landed at Mehrabad Airport in Tehran.  Ten days later, the Shah’s government fell.  For these ten days Iran strings its streets with lights and joyfully makes ready to celebrate the founding of the Islamic Republic on February 11, which is this Thursday.

And indeed, everywhere you look, everybody’s getting ready for the holiday:

The Islamic Republic

On February 1, President Ahmadinejad announced that Iran will “deliver a telling blow” to the “arrogant global powers” on the 11^th. (more…)