George Soros’ disciple Ken Vogel wrote a front-page Politico piece laying out the left-wing site’s narrative-attack regarding Governor Mitt Romney’s tax returns. To say the Vogel article is contextually challenged would be quite the understatement, and charitable.

Ebenezer Obama

What Vogel wants you to know:

Mitt Romney and his wife earned more than $20 million in each of the last two years — including a total of $13 million from Bain Capital investments — and paid a rate of about 15 percent in federal taxes, according to tax information released by his presidential campaign Tuesday morning. …

They showed a tax rate far lower than those of his rivals, and foreign investments including a since-closed $3 million Swiss bank account and a Cayman Islands-based fund as well investments in Solamere Capital[.] …

In a conference call with reporters detailing the taxes, Romney’s campaign stressed the couples’ charitable contributions of about $7 million over the two years, and cast the tax documents as a window into the affairs of someone who has achieved the American Dream, and is intent on giving back. …

The Romneys’ tax rate was far lower than the 2010 rates paid by President Barack Obama, 26 percent, or Newt Gingrich, 31.5 percent.

Here’s the context Politico’s resident Soros’ disciple did not include in his story:

[T]he Romneys paid out 42 percent of their income in taxes and charity. …

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Ahead of the opening of Congress and the renewed debt ceiling controversy, National Public Radio is attempting to frame the debate against Republicans by pushing hard on the issue of tax increases.

On today’s Morning Edition, NPR used reports from the ongoing national conference of mayors in Washington, D.C. to target Republicans by suggesting they were denying federal spending to needy cities, and that they were hypocrites for raising taxes in the cities that they govern.

In one news bulletin, NPR reported that mayors–both Democrats and Republicans–were critical of “ideologues” in “Congress” (i.e. the Republican-controlled House of Representatives) over spending cuts.

Steve Inskeep then caught up with Mick Cornett, who is mayor of Oklahoma City and President of the Republican Mayors and Local Officials (RMLO).

Cornett pointed out that much of the spending shortfall had to do with financial problems at the state government level, not in Congress (which has slowed the growth of spending but has not yet cut overall federal spending.

But Inskeep pressed further, pushing Cornett to explain why he, as mayor of Oklahoma City, had managed to raise sales taxes and extend those tax hikes in order to pay for public infrastructure. Cornett gave the reasonable answer that the Democratic Party and the media refuse to hear: the city had kept spending and debt under control, and had spent the money efficiently and transparently for the public benefit–precisely what the federal government, and many state governments, have failed to do. (more…)

Here’s an interesting look at how Media Matters for America (MMfA) works, along with the quick manner with which some in media bow to its George Soros financed influence. Whatever one may think of it, it’s beyond obvious that the 53% versus whatever percent meme is about Federal Income Tax. No one has ever suggested that anyone gets away scott-free without paying taxes of some sort in America – unless perhaps one is on Obama’s short list for a job in the White House. As the saying goes, nothing is certain but death and taxes. Unfortunately, when Anderson Cooper invoked the 53% number during the recent GOP debate, he wasn’t quite nuanced enough for the crew at MMfA and they immediately attacked.

Conservative activists have created a Tumblr called “We are the 53 percent” that’s meant to be a counterpunch to the viral “We are the 99 percent” site that’s become a prominent symbol for the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Tumblr is supposed to represent the 53 percent of Americans who pay federal income taxes, and its assumption is that the Wall Street protesters are part of the 46 percent of the country who don’t.

Erickson’s movement is based on a fraud. While nearly half of American households have paid no income taxes in the past few years, the vast majority of Americans do pay other taxes, including federal payroll taxes, as well as state and local taxes. In an April New York Times article, David Leonhardt explained how figures like the one Erickson was pushing distort the economic debate away from growing income inequality while completely ignoring taxes that all American households pay.

From there, presumably concerned at having displeased the storm troopers over at MMfA, aka the Progressive thought police watching uber alles things media, Cooper was quick to accept his comeuppance and grovel for mercy. That may sound harsh, unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there.

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Noted ‘conservanerd‘ David Brooks has abandoned all pretense of conservatism in his latest New York Times column titled “The Mother of All No-Brainers.”  It’s pretty clear that he believes that his readers are the brainless ones – rarely have so many shaky premises, false assertions and heapin’ helpings of pure nonsense been gathered into one NYT opinion column.  That’s saying something.

Brooks is Obama and Axelrod’s favorite pseudo-conservative for a reason: his creepily slavish devotion to the idea that we mere drones need to be guided, led and – sadly yes, controlled – by a coterie of Ivy League-indoctrinated betters who will lead us out of the darkness of our sad little lives.  These wise leaders may be identified by the crease in their slacks – Obama’s sharp press famously demonstrated to Brooks that The One would be The One.  It’s that kind of profound insight that has made David Brooks the most popular conservative pundit among those who hate and despise everything conservatives stand for.

Let’s take a quick look at the cheesy rhetoric and flabby thinking that this servant of the failed status quo put out on the Fourth of July.  It’s a wonderful illustration of how liberals argue – and provides a lesson in countering the nonsense.

The Republicans have changed American politics since they took control of the House of Representatives. They have put spending restraint and debt reduction at the top of the national agenda … Republican leaders have also proved to be effective negotiators.

First, he sucks up to the conservatives.  This is to try and make us think he is one of us, that he speaks as a friend instead of the house servant of his lefty overlords.  Feel your defenses crumbling?  Then:

[The Democrats] have agreed not to raise tax rates.

Wait, what?  Since when have the Democrats agreed not to raise tax rates?  Isn’t the President still talking about raising the rates next year, or is that one of those inconvenient truths?

[The Democrats] have agreed to a roughly 3-to-1 rate of spending cuts to revenue increases, an astonishing concession.

Hold on … weren’t they agreeing not to raise rates just a sentence ago?  Or are these “revenue increases” – don’t you love euphemisms? – all going to come from wiping out the scourge of corporate jets?  Whatever.

And wait a second – exactly who has agreed to this 3-to-1 ratio?  It best not be someone on the GOP side unless she or she wants a well-funded primary opponent next year.

Watch out, because these harmless “revenue increases” are “to close loopholes and eliminate tax expenditures.”  The “tax expenditures” language is priceless – as if the government “spends” money by not taking it.  And the “loopholes” are the same kind of deductions that every business takes – deductions merely being a recognition of costs since what is taxed is profits.  David, if you want to get on board with a low corporate tax rate and wipe out most all deductions, we conservatives might be on board.  But you don’t.  You want to raise rates without raising marginal rates; the sneaky way to do that is make more income taxable by eliminating deductions.  And you think your readers are too stupid to see that.

And now comes the good part.

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We are told Fareed Zakaria is an intelligent man, a man of letters and a journalist. With his latest article in TIME, I’m just not seeing it. It is full of contradictions and transparent attacks on conservatives followed by praise for Ye Olde School conservatives, who espoused more or less the same thing as current conservatives.

Zakaria starts by praising the classical conservatives for basing their ideas on reality, as compared to the Marxists as socialists who start from an imagined society. The great conservative thinkers, he goes on, have tried to understand society, accept it and then help it evolve. He’s one hundred percent correct.

This is the point at which he begins to go wrong. His main claim is that conservatives have moved from the concrete to the abstract and he laments this supposed shift. His first attack is on the idea that Americans are over taxed. While it can be argued that America has a relatively low INDIVIDUAL tax rate as compared to other industrialized nations, he doesn’t take into effect two main points. If one includes State taxes, for those states that levy these as well as other taxes, the mean tax rate on Americans is approximately 40%. More importantly the CORPORATE tax rate on American businesses is the second highest amongst OECD nations, also at about 40%. Zakaria goes out his way to point to Germany as a country that has high taxes while avoiding the same financial issues that we see in the US. That is a debatable issue, one that balances on Germany’s role in the European Union and its control of the Euro, but one thing that the article leaves out is that, in 2008, Germany cut its corporate income tax rate by 8.7%, putting it as one of the countries with the LOWEST corporate income tax rates.

The next straw man Zakaria tries to build is in finding another President who has been as hostile to business as Obama. Yes, Nixon was not a conservative when it came to business. Yes, Nixon presided over 70% tax rates and price controls, but nobody can say that Nixon took every opportunity to bash business, increase the regulatory state exponentially or create such a wide swath of uncertainty in the business markets.

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From Accuracy in Media‘s Allie Duzett:

Although the Associated Press purports to be a news service, sometimes the articles it publishes read more like opinion pieces. Today, an article from the AP did just that. This “news” article was linked at the top of the Drudge Report.

The article, entitled “Super rich see federal taxes drop dramatically,” seems less dedicated to straight reporting than to the subtle promotion of progressive tax policy: taxing the “rich” more while removing tax breaks.

By the fourth paragraph of the article, the AP reporter is already asking the question: “The top income tax rate is 35 percent, so how can people who make so much pay so little in taxes?” The reporter never clarifies exactly who the “people who make so much” are (are they the top 400 income earners? Or the top 1 percent of taxpayers? Or just the “wealthy” in general?), and he never explains how much (or how “little”) any of them pay in taxes.

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About three miles south of Beverly Hills in the upper-middle class neighborhood of Beverlywood is Hamilton High School. An otherwise ordinary Los Angeles Unified School District-sponsored juvenile detention center, Hamilton is home to a couple of well regarded magnet programs, particularly the Academy of Music Magnet. The Music Magnet is the old stomping grounds of pop stars, Broadway talent, and even Hollywood A-listers who were drawn to a public school program that has a focus on the arts. Yet, even this rare LAUSD high school that students actually want to attend has become a casualty of the horrendous budget crises in the state of California.

Reporter Steve Lopez was dispatched to the scene to write up the various cutbacks for the Los Angeles Times. Lopez is known for being the journalist whose articles on a schizophrenic musician inspired the Robert Downey Jr./Jaime Foxx film The Soloist. Then all of a sudden, what had the makings of a compelling human interest piece on one of the handful of quintessentially Hollywood high schools quickly devolved into a sob story about how these poor teachers and students have been victimized by the dastardly Republicans and their resistance to tax hikes.

How did he do this?

First, Lopez paints a rosy picture of the school by glowingly describing a performance by the jazz band and cherry-picking quotes raving about teachers; his portrayal of Hamilton is a lot like Sean Penn’s depiction of Iraq in Team America:

As it happens, Hamilton is my local high school and I have family and friends who have graduated from the Music Magnet in recent years. To put it bluntly, many of their experiences didn’t resemble the mythical land of incredible teachers and students anxious to learn that Lopez describes. An anonymous Hamilton graduate told me she recalls students doing cocaine in the state-of the art auditorium (which was overhauled with a lavish grant to the Music Magnet)—in fact, the source recalled students showing up to class on an assortment of drugs. Faculty members were seen “celebrating” with students at cast parties after plays.

And I thought programs like these were meant to keep kids off drugs. (more…)

Predictions, expectations, sure bets for the next two years?

The Bush Tax Cuts are a great tool that the left uses to set up the “us vs. them” platform, with “them” invariably being the super wealthy. There are a lot of misconceptions regarding the Bush tax cuts, all of them deliberately propagated by none other than Obama and pals. Dana and her fantastic crew over here at BigJournalism can tell you all about them. The biggest lie of them all is that these tax cuts will only affect the wealthiest two percent. To hear Harry Reid’s spin on it, only the folks with monocles and meerschaum pipes need fear this administration. In my quest to debunk said myth, I headed down to Leland International in Grand Rapids, Michigan as part of my multi-part video series on the Bush Tax Cuts. I chose Leland Int. because it’s a truly small business, the owner is passionate about his work and above all else, he has two daughters… and I’m desperate.

Behold, the face of the heinous two percent. Surprising? Well, it shouldn’t be. If you’ve been following the administration’s crawl towards redistributive change, you know that the effects of repealing these tax cuts won’t be isolated to the super wealthy. Instead, they’ll be coming to your towns, businesses and eventually your very own homes. Remember that when you vote.

Is the survival instinct finally begin to kick in for the MSM? Or will they simply gather on the decks and sing, “Nearer My God To Thee?”

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While we’re on the subject of the MSM foisting the idiotic fantasy land in which most of them dwell onto their readers and viewers, take a gander at this clip from the ineffable Ricardo Leon Sánchez de Reinaldo, better known as CNN’s vehicularly challenged anchorman, Rick Sanchez.

It’s all about Rush of course, and Rick wants you to know he’s on the side of the Little Guy in the never-ending Manichean battle between the one percent of the population who pay 40.4 percent of all the income taxes in this country — some of whom don’t even have a college degree! — and the 95 percent, who pay 39.4 percent of the total tax burden.

So watch Rick yuk it up with his guest. And then ask yourself:

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Speaking truth to power in Milwaukee: Biden’s reaction speaks volumes:

“Why don’t you say something nice instead of being a smarta– all the time?” he said to the manager, in an exchange captured on video by local station WISN. “Say something nice.”

It’s unclear if the store manager had said anything else to the vice president, but he told WISN News that he didn’t feel slighted.

“I don’t think he liked it,” he said. “But later on he whispered to me, ‘I’m just kidding.’” (more…)

And so we begin to hear some feedback from the liberal side, including direct comments from one prominent member of the “Cry Wolf” project.  On the Inside Higher Ed website Friday, founder and editor Scott Jaschik addresses Big Journalism’s Academia-Gate series in his post, “Who Is Crying Wolf?”

Some prominent liberal academics are soliciting short essays from faculty members and graduate students to document a pattern in American history of major social advances being opposed by conservatives who “cry wolf” about the impact of proposed reforms. The campaign — known as the “Cry Wolf Project” — hasn’t been officially announced. But conservative bloggers obtained some of the solicitations of essays and published them this week, along with considerable criticism.

A series of posts on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism Web site have called the program “Academia-Gate” and suggested that the effort is inappropriately political. The creators of Cry Wolf, meanwhile, say that what they are doing is awfully similar to the ways that right-leaning scholars have used academic work to advance their causes over the years.

Jaschik acquaints readers with the members of the “Cry Wolf” project coordinators and the details of the request for proposals.  He then goes on to cite from a couple of BigJournalism’s posts in the series:

One post on Big Journalism noted that those involved in the project are sympathetic to organized labor, and that many influential academics are serving on the advisory board. “This is what our higher education system has become – a publicly funded amplifier of progressive ideology,” says the post by Patrick Courrielche. “If this Cry Wolf program were just limited to a few faculty members at a limited number of universities, it would be of little concern. But the project reaches into some of the most prestigious public and private schools of higher learning in the U.S., including MIT, Yale, Harvard, USC, Columbia, Rutgers, UC Santa Barbara, University of Pennsylvania, and President Obama’s alma mater — Occidental College.”

Liberty Chick, the blogger who started calling Cry Wolf “Academia-Gate,” described her concerns this way: “What’s far more dangerous is that the ideological academic, in his capacity as a professor, actually possesses the power to control. The power to influence students’ minds, to mold the students’ way of thinking to embrace their own power-hungry desires and believe in it as ’social justice’ — this is a frightening weapon. Via union solidarity, this weapon is shared with the mobilizers, the janitors and cafeteria workers who agitate the students with various demands against the university after ideologically minded professors have indoctrinated them to hear every grievance as a call for ’social justice.’

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After a week-long series of Big Journalism articles delving into the funding, agenda and dubious academic credentials behind the now-infamous “Cry Wolf Project,” the program’s co-chair, Prof. Peter Dreier has finally emerged from his bunker at Occidental College to respond to the controversy.

After first quoting heavily from the Soros-funded talking points supplied by our pals, the Senior Fellows over at Media Matters, Scott Jaschik at InsideHigherEd.com, quotes Dreier as follows:

Dreier, one of the organizers of Cry Wolf, said in an interview Thursday that the furor over the project was unfair. “This is legitimate work,” he said, and the essays will be scrutinized for accuracy. The end result will simply be better organized resources that might be consulted by the public, op-ed writers or others. He also said that he didn’t view this effort as either replacing traditional scholarship or doing anything that conservative groups don’t already do. He added that the pattern of “the world is going to end” reactions to “progressive efforts” is a legitimate issue for scholars to raise and explore.

Why are the conservatives so critical? Said Dreier: “That’s what they are paid to do.”

Let’s savor the delicious irony of Dreier’s last statement. (more…)

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…)

ACORN’s radical allies are now attempting to rewrite history to cast the organized crime syndicate as victim instead of as the prolific victimizer that it has been ever since it was created in 1970. ACORN online campaign director Nathan Henderson-James served notice in February that a propaganda effort was about to begin.

“[T]here will be a fight over the narrative of ACORN’s demise,” he wrote to members of Townhouse, a discussion forum run by Matt Stoller, senior policy adviser to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.). The other side wants “a narrative about the corruption of popular organizations and how they are simply vehicles for the personal enrichment and power fantasies of their top staff members while pushing public policies that destroy middle America.”

Such a narrative must be fought, Henderson-James argued, because it “gives people pushing a pro-corporate agenda a way to tar progressives and even non-progressive Democrats running for office with the ACORN brush.”

The effort was already underway when Henderson-James reached out to the leftist community. After ACORN’s national board expelled ACORN founder Wade Rathke for engineering an eight-year cover-up of a million dollar embezzlement, Rathke wrote a combination political memoir/manifesto called Citizen Wealth. More recently, Seeds of Change, an institutional hagiography of ACORN by true believer John Atlas was published.

And now comes the “Cry Wolf” Project, a push to encourage academics to help spread more lies about the corrupt group. (more…)

Over at the website Minding the Campus, Prof. KC Johnson takes a look at the academic astroturf project called “Cry Wolf” that Big Journalism has been breaking all week.  The reviews are not good for Prof. Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Urban & Environmental Policy Program director at Occidental College:

A newly announced project called “Crying Wolf,” organized out of the Center on Policy Initiatives, seems blithely unconcerned with any requirements associated with academic freedom… project coordinators Peter Dreier (a distinguished professor of politics at Occidental College), Nelson Lichtenstein (a historian of 20th century U.S. history at UC Santa Barbara who directs the university’s Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy), and Donald Cohen, CPI executive director, are recruiting professors and graduate students (in “history, sociology, economics, political science, planning, public health, and public policy”) to perform “paid academic research” that can “serve in the battle with conservative ideas.”

The initiative is open about its biases: it intends to “construct a counter narrative” against what it describes as conservative opinions about taxation and regulation policy.

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The co-chair of the ‘Cry Wolf” project, Professor Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Urban & Environmental Policy Program director at Occidental College, is a sort of email buddy of mine. If by “email buddy” I mean someone who once sent me a snide one-line missive with a link to an alternative weekly paper political cartoon depicting me in a negative light.

I’ll show you that email shortly but first background on why Professor Dreier is in my life:

In late September of 2009 two weeks into the beginning of the explosive James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles ACORN video scandal, an academic study critical of media coverage of ACORN came out from Peter Dreier and Christopher Martin, professor of journalism, University of Northern Iowa, Department of Communication Studies. The study, “Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, or,What the News Got Wrong,” was billed as “[a]n independent study by two prominent academics” that purported to have “found repetition of unverified allegations and distortions was the rule in national reporting of a purported ‘voter fraud’ scandal involving the community organizing group ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) during the 2008 presidential campaign.”

Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and Urban & Environmental Policy Program director at Occidental College

When I first saw the study’s press release, I naively reached out to Professor Martin to offer him and Dreier a place at our new website Big Government to act as ongoing ombudsmen of our ACORN story. We were cognizant that a left-leaning media would likely come to ACORN’s defense, so why not provide a platform for two professors claiming the media had wronged ACORN in its previous coverage of the organization to show that we were doing everything in our power to play the story fair? Recall, we proactively offered unedited transcripts and audio of O’Keefe and Giles work to show that the edited videos did not take things out of context.

After conferring with his colleague, Professor Martin declined my offer: (more…)

A fixed fight: The Influence of Labor Unions in Academe. Part One is here.

In the academic world, employees are very often public employees. This means that they are also very often union employees. At all levels. This includes everyone from janitors, to dormitory housekeepers, cafeteria workers, clerical staff, and computer techs, to even the graduate assistants and professors. While the salary gap between a cafeteria worker and a senior professor may be huge, the solidarity of the unions is a powerful magnet that creates an unbreakable bond amongst them.

Unions are fond of bashing capitalism with seething rhetoric, decrying the economic system as irredeemably corrupted by greed and racism and classism. But the ideology they themselves embrace is itself driven by the same ugly characteristics they profess to detest. Except in their case, power is the motivating force, the passion that drives them.

The burning desire for the power to control your life is the tie that binds the union service worker to the academic intellectual. It is this common fabric that connects the union janitor more closely to the ideological academic intellectual than to his working-class counterparts beyond campus.

What’s far more dangerous is that the ideological academic, in his capacity as a professor, actually possesses the power to control. The power to influence students’ minds, to mold the students’ way of thinking to embrace their own power-hungry desires and believe in it as “social justice” – this is a frightening weapon. Via union solidarity, this weapon is shared with the mobilizers, the janitors and cafeteria workers who agitate the students with various demands against the university after ideologically minded professors have indoctrinated them to hear every grievance as a call for “social justice.”

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Critical Mass, a blog devoted to what’s wrong with American academe, has weighed in on the emerging scandal we here at Big Journalism are calling “Academia-Gate” — the “Cry Wolf” request for proposals devoted to pre-empting and discrediting conservative political positions in the sheep’s clothing of disinterested academic “scholarship,” spearheaded by leftist professor Peter Dreier at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

It’s not a pretty sight:

On the one hand, there are no surprises–there has been a decades-long academic tradition, at this point, of discounting the notion that disinterested research is even possible, and of selling the idea that the proper response to this is to shape one’s scholarship self-consciously, as a means of ensuring that it assists and justifies the kinds of social justice one would like to see in the world. On the other hand, this activist line of thought has historically had only one line of defense–and that is that it is conducted with impeccable scholarly integrity, is entirely above-board vis a vis research ethics, and is unimpeachable from within the standards of professional conduct. In other words, the ethical standards that accompany interested scholarship are, in theory, terrifically strict. That’s how such scholarship can continue to call itself scholarship, and escape being dismissed as propaganda. It’s a shaky edifice, but it’s an edifice all the same, and it has succeeded. Arguably, though, the Cry Wolf project undermines that entire edifice, as it explicitly supports the arguments of those who would say that large swathes of academia are little more than publicly funded mechanisms for disseminating and producing an ideologically-driven world view.

Ya think? (more…)