Yesterday, NPR reported an unclear snippet of audio as former Senator Rick Santorum having said the word “black” when discussing individuals becoming dependent on government’s redistribution of wealth, as opposed to being able to go out and earn their money themselves.

As per Tommy Christopher at Mediaite, a new, cleaner version of the clip does not support that conclusion.

NPR’s Ted Robbins noted: “Santorum did not elaborate on why he singled out blacks who rely on federal assistance. The voters here didn’t seem to care.”

CBS doubled down on the error, offering a brief transcript with the clip:

While campaigning in Sioux City, Iowa Sunday, GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said if elected he plans to cut regulations and entitlements and he doesn’t want to “make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”

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This was the battle-cry of the 2008 elections: Obama was the Great Uniter who would bring America together and save it from the horrible division that Evil Bush caused.

The activist old media (who constantly promise to protect us from everything that could possibly harm us) easily bought this line because it fit their template and they wanted to believe it. Today will any of them walk this back, even a little bit? Nope — instead they blame the GOP and try to convince us that their poor Dear Leader has become a victim of the Rancorous Republicans.

Here’s just one example of the story line from 2007 with this little bit from the Washington Post about Obama, “he has the capacity … to unify the country and move it out of what he called “ideological gridlock.” Wow, good thing we don’t have gridlock and we hired the guy for the job who could stop it with a beer summit or the wave of his magic cigarette.

I anchored local news during the 2008 Democrat Primary, I covered one of the debates back then, and I know what I read and you know what you heard. Obama was the “Great Uniter.” Of course, nobody with a brain bought it, but the media loved it and spread it like barnyard fuel.

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***UPDATE: ABC News changed their headline. Somehow they’ve made it even more dishonest:

David Stockman Criticizes Obama’s Jobs Plan, Other Economists Cheer

Does this sound like a cheer from one of their non-Stockman economists?

“So this is an incomplete proposal.”

However, Swagel said the tax cuts on wages and on investment would be helpful. Swagel said he is waiting to see further details[.]

The good news is that Jake Tapper’s broadcast report pretty much stuck to the basic facts. Jake’s a gem. If the MSM was made up of Jake Tappers, there would be no Big Journalism.   

Sometimes Obama’s media Palace Guards get in the Tank and leave a mark, and sometimes they look like Michael Dukakis.

Here’s a an example of the latter, an utterly shames ABC News headline:

Economists Support President’s Job Proposals, Worry About Do-Nothing Congress

My guess is that some editor watered this down from the originally submitted, ”Obama Could Save the World If Not For Those Goddamn Republicans.”

But even more laughable than the headline is the fact that ABC’s own story doesn’t support it. Naturally, you have to read deeper into the piece for the full skinny, but here are a couple of samples found at the bottom of page 1 through page 2:

David Stockman, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, was skeptical of the plan.  “This should scare the living daylights out of investors–it’s just more Keynesian poison,” Stockman said. “Obama lectured us about the simple math, but the part of that he still doesn’t get is that Uncle Sam is broke, and that we can’t afford one more dime for his stimulus 6.0 plan.”

But-but-but the headline told me “Economists Support President’s Job Proposals, not “Some Economists Support President’s Job Proposals.”

But wait, there’s more:

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Death threat sent to MADISON legislator

This just out from the Associated Press, another breathtaking but predictable piece of sleight-of-hand dishonesty directed at Sarah Palin’s credibility:

[Palin] said she was proud Wisconsin conservatives prevailed against union “hatred and violence” — even though none of the protests in Madison ever became physically violent and only one person was arrested Saturday, for disorderly conduct, police said.

The AP can “even though” all they want and all day long and pretend that Palin was narrowly referring to “protests in Madison.” But we all know that in order to question her credibility the AP intentionally narrowed  down her statement to the definition they needed it to be. Those of us paying attention, however, know exactly what the Governor was talking about. And I suspect the AP did, as well.

Unfortunately for the liberal media, Palin’s speech was such an unqualified grand slam, this is the kind of games they’re forced to play.

And maybe, just maybe, if the AP and the rest of the corrupt MSM gave public union thuggery a tenth of the scrutiny they do the Tea Party, they would know that Sarah Palin was talking about this….

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Poor politically correct leftists in the activist old media.

They are now stumbling and bumbling all over themselves when they use words that they feel Americans do not want used in a political context. This is about as silly as it gets.

Click image for video

A guest on CNN used the term “crosshairs” to describe the Chicago mayoral race and John King fell all over himself trying to apologize for his friend Andy Shaw.

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Any time someone commits an act of violence that grabs headlines, journalists scramble desperately for a scapegoat, some person or social force to crusade against and extend the story’s expiration date (and thus ratings).  While it appears that Jared Lee Loughner’s motivation for shooting Gabrielle Giffords was nonpartisan (aka mental illness), there have already been reports from CBS, CNN, and the Associated Press attempting to pin Loughner’s motivations to Sarah Palin’s gun-target map, Giffords’ opponent Jesse Kelly using an M16 at a campaign event, and a general atmosphere of fear and animosity created solely by Republicans in Arizona.

As long as they’re bringing this subject up, I believe it’s a good time to discuss what the media could do if they really wanted to prevent future violence.  The answer is not to force conservative speakers to be “more careful” with their rhetoric.  In fact, I believe that the greater responsibility to prevent violence lies on the shoulders of journalists themselves; the media must stop suppressing conservative voices and increasing the ire of the nation.

This is not what makes us angry.

Only a literalistic idiot could find Palin’s “target” map something that would inspire violence, and only a partisan idiot could think that Loughner, a fan of flag-burning, would be a big enough Palin fan to have ever seen that map.  I find it extremely unlikely that someone can be inspired to violence through the words of a political leader unless it’s a direct order, which neither Palin nor Beck nor Rush have come anywhere close to saying.  The people who claim that these three use “coded language” to incite violence are as paranoid as Loughner; only crazy people see calls to violence in innocuous speech, such as John Lennon’s shooter claiming The Catcher in the Rye as his inspiration.

Indeed, when these conservative media personalities talk about removing politicians through the power of one’s vote, that is actually a deterrent to violence.  For Palin fans, her political speech gives them joy and hope, a cathartic reminder that someone out there is speaking for them.  Her defining political contribution has been giving hope to all the flyover country-dwellers deemed subhuman and unworthy by the elites in the media — hope that their votes mattered and that they could change things through their speech and political involvement. (more…)

Quite an unbelievable case. Reporter Tom Burlington files suit against the station that fired him, because, he alleges, it was acceptable for a black person to use the “n word” but not him. When illustrating the discrepancy in a staff meeting, he says in his suit, he used the word and was fired for it.

I don’t think there should be any restrictions at all whatsoever on speech in any form, period. I’m all for people using whatever charged-term they want, be they black, white, etc. because when people let their freak-flags fly, you know what you’re dealing with right from the start. Also, I trust people, not the government, to be the arbitrators of what is or is not acceptable speech. When the government elects to decide acceptability for people it removes the opportunity for people to better themselves by deciding that certain terms are no longer acceptable for themselves. Government robs society of the change to truly and organically progress which will have a more lasting effect than any change government could artificially create by suppression.

Tom Burlington

From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

A federal jury will be asked to decide whether it is acceptable for an African American person, but not a white person, to use the “n” word in a workplace.

U.S. District Judge R. Barclay Surrick has ruled that former Fox29 reporter-anchor Tom Burlington’s lawsuit against the station, claiming a double standard and alleging that he was the victim of racial discrimination, may go to trial. However, Surrick denied Burlington’s claim of a hostile work environment.

Burlington, who is white, was fired after using the “n” word during a June 2007 staff meeting at which reporters and producers were discussing reporter Robin Taylor’s story about the symbolic burial of the word by the Philadelphia Youth Council of the NAACP.

Burlington, who began work at the station in 2004 and is now working as a real estate agent, was suspended within days and fired after an account of the incident was published in the Philadelphia Daily News. He alleges that he “was discriminated against because of his race,” according to court documents. He claims in his lawsuit that at least two African American employees at Fox29 had used the word in the workplace and were not disciplined.

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The venom bubbling below the visible anger of MSNBC’s three nightly hosts —  Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow — was unmistakable after President Obama’s speech, in which he praised former President Bush and the brave troops who gave their all to get us to this point.

For those like Matthews, Olbermann and Maddow, President Obama’s admission is a defeat for their network, which spent the last seven years of Operation Iraqi Freedom seeking to undermine the mission there through hearsay, spin, lies and general misinformation. Olbermann and Maddow, who have basically built their careers by fanning the flames of the public discontent, were visibly shaken; they had once proudly professed that Iraq was a lost effort from the start, yet through it all the fine men and women of the military, some giving life and limbs, were able to secure victory and thus spell the leftists’ defeat.

The venom rest in the fact that President Obama, a President many of them feel they help get elected, would praise the former President Bush – whom Olbermann and Maddow detest to his core — would receive public praise from one of their own for standing behind those troops that lead the surge efforts in Iraq. (more…)

The arc of the MSM is at once predictable and satisfying, especially when it comes to the liberal media’s slowly dawning realization that the Obamessiah ain’t all they cracked him up to be.  First, a willful decision to opt for fantasy over reality, then denials, then the most modest of criticisms (delivered more in sorrow than in anger), then the who-cares turn of the worm, then outright hostility, then the acceptance of defeat… and finally, Jimmy Carter-like, rehabilitation and reassement.

In the “Being There” presidency of Barack Obama, we have now arrived somewhere between step 4 and step 5, the part of the movie where the media, having been treated like cheap slatterns, drabs and courtesans, wakes up one morning face down in the gutter and realizes she’s no good. Not yet ready to start regaining her lost dignity,  she blames herself for the misfortune than has befallen her lover — she’s not worthy!

The occasion for these reflections is the disastrous Oval Office, empty-desk speech made by the president manque the other night as he attempted to convince the nation that he is, in fact, in charge of something other than his malevolent shredding of a Constitution he obviously so clearly despises. It was a speech panned by nearly everybody (except the reliably ridiculous Paul Begala, a man who gives the word “toady” a bad name), made all the more risible by the ludicrous sight of Obama sitting behind the empty Resolute desk, like a ’60s college radical who’s briefly occupying the president’s study. From a thumb-sucker by Adam Nagourney in the New York Times:

On blogs, on a blur of cable news shows, on magazine Web sites, in the morning newspapers, the verdict within 12 hours was nearly unanimous: Mr. Obama’s speech on Tuesday night about the oil spill had been pedantic, vague and uninspiring — a lost opportunity.

“It’s the first Obama speech ever panned by the talking heads,” Mike Allen reported in the Politico Playbook.

But so what? Does it really matter if you lose the pundits anymore?

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The childish, feminized fantasy world in which the left dwells was never more in evidence than in this lunatic rant by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, in which the Rhodes Scholar plays president for a few minutes and gives the speech she wishes Obama had given the other night.

It’s a speech that basically boils down to an uniformed, juvenile cri de coeur against BP, filled with the “shoulds” and “woulds” the left habitually uses in demanding that mommy and daddy protect them from things that go bump in the night. As usual, there’s not a single thought devoted to practicalities, alternatives or the larger issues of why and how, just the standard search for a villain and the demand for punishment. What a desperately miserable world these people live in; no wonder they’re all nuts.

“Enjoy:”

Patrick Courrielche’s kickoff article exposing major university faculty and graduate students’ Cry Wolf Project is alarming. Each installment in the series has only made it more so.

CWP’s solicitation for policy briefs designed to construct politically driven narratives is a confession of academic malpractice. As Kurt Schlichter has pointed out, its participants’ intentions are unethical, insubordinate, and potentially illegal.

The CWP email shows its players to be intolerant of varying viewpoints in the pursuit of their ideological ends. The fact that they are offering colleagues and grad students money to predetermine outcomes proves their intent: to tell partisan political stories:

What are they afraid of? (more…)

Ever wanted to be one of those highly paid caption writers on a large metropolitan daily or a major news magazine? Well, here’s your chance.

Even though the House chamber was chilly enough for an overcoat, a few folks got sleepy Wednesday night as they listened to the president’s State of the Union speech.  Harry Reid even nodded off.

But it looks like Janet Napolitano really caught up on her zzzzzs after exhausting herself stopping the BVD Bomber on Christmas.   Thanks for the nap, Barry!

The caption forum is now open, so have at it.