The mainstream media has treated accusations of large-scale fraud in the Pigford settlement with overt skepticism and a distinct lack of journalistic curiosity. The press has blindly repeated the Obama Administration’s claim that there are only a handful of fraud cases among the twenty thousand or so paid Pigford claims. Worse, the media has helped promote the narrative that those raising concerns about fraud in Pigford are racist.

You’re about to watch a video clip where Othello Cross, an attorney for Pigford claimants with about fifteen years of experience on the case, admits that he is personally aware of hundreds of cases of fraud in the state of Arkansas alone. Furthermore, he explains how easy it was to commit that fraud and receive a $50,000 check from the government; it’s appropriate to deduce from Cross’s revealing statement that the actual number of fraudulent claims is likely much higher than the hundreds he knows about.

You’re about to watch this clip for the first time, but the USDA watched it over a week ago — I sent it to them for comment about 10 days ago.

After a number of phone calls to the USDA, I was given the response that Secretary Vilsack now acknowledges around ten cases of fraud, up from his original statement that there are only three known cases. If I were inclined to spin the government’s response, I’d praise the USDA for finding 300% more instances of fraud in just a few days, but the reality is that the USDA can watch a video where a pro-Pigford claimant lawyer says in no uncertain terms that he knows about hundreds of cases of fraud — over ten million dollars worth at bare minimum — and still will only acknowledge ten cases.

As Andrew Breitbart points out, the media simply doesn’t want to cover Pigford. I also sent this video to a few major media outlets that stated they wanted to “research” this. I haven’t heard back from any of them. (more…)

I knew I was going to be whacked hard, but I didn’t know when.

On Thursday, July 15th, I warned NAACP president Ben Jealous to stop the race-baiting. I directed my ire at Jealous on the Scott Hennen radio show:

“I have tapes, a tape, of racism, and it’s an NAACP dinner. You want to play with fire? I have evidence of racism, and it’s coming from the NAACP.”

This was part of an ongoing defense of the Tea Party, and in particular, a volley back against the NAACP for creating a week-long mainstream media-enabled attack built upon the provably false premise that a “mob” of the Tea Partiers hurled racial epithets at Congressmen Andre Carson (D-In) and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga).

“You are manufacturing this in a summer in which the economy is the No. 1 issue affecting blacks and whites in this country,” I said on Hennen’s show. “This country can ill-afford the schism of race to be exploited the way you are, based upon the false premise of the Tea Party being racist… This is absolutely manufactured for political gain.”

My warning to Jealous was received with modest coverage in the conservative blogosphere.

I strongly believed, and still believe, that I had irrefutable evidence that showed the NAACP caught in an act of racism far worse than anything the media and the Democrat Party had attempted to manufacture in a year and a half of relentlessly trying to destroy the Tea Party. (more…)

I adore it when a publication commits a heinous irony while attempting to condescend to its ideological opposition in a long and tortuously drawn out essay. Behold, The Atlantic presents you with this comedic headline, comedic, considering the subhead that follows: How can Americans talk to one another—let alone engage in political debate—when the Web allows every side to invent its own facts?

THIS PAST AUGUST, the left-leaning San Francisco–based Web site AlterNet posted a remarkable scoop: members of a group calling itself the Digg Patriots were banding together to promote conservative-leaning online stories and to drive down the rankings of stories that the group felt showed a liberal bias.

[...]

Further, the AlterNet story alleged, Digg Patriots were creating ghost accounts whereby they could muster “bury brigades” with far more influence than their actual numbers permitted. “One bury brigade in particular,” the article said, became “so organized and influential that they are able to bury over 90% of the articles by certain users and websites submitted within 1-3 hours.” The effect of this burying was to prevent other Digg users from finding those articles and rendering their own opinions on them, effectively coming as close to censorship as is possible in the social-media sphere. After the AlterNet article was posted, the Digg Patriots user group was taken down, and Digg eliminated the “bury” option on its site; Digg also began an internal investigation into AlterNet’s claims.

And? The Atlantic bases their shock on the presupposition that the left would never do anything of the sort.

(more…)

L’Affaire Sherrod provided a rare peek into a potential legal and government boondoogle: The Pigford Settlement. The Settlement arose out of a handful of credible claims of racism by black farmers against the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Tens of thousands of claims later, the final chunk of money to pay off the settlement, about $1.5 billion, awaits action by the U.S. Senate.

Soon after Shirley Sherrod was fired by the USDA, it was revealed that she and her husband were among the biggest recipients of Pigford, personally receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars for ‘pain and suffering,’ while their collective farm was tapped to get over $13 million. It also emerged that Ms. Sherrod was hired by the USDA just days after her settlement was announced. Hmm.

In the video below, Fox News begins to explore several issues related to the Pigford settlement.

As they say, “Stay tuned.” There is a lot more to this story. We will begin telling it over the next several weeks. We don’t yet have all the answers, but what we’ve learned so far has shocked our own cynical selves.

*** Updated

You really have to hand it to the hacks and non-entities over at Media Matters for America. I mean, they deserve an Olympic gold medal for the gymnastics they display while spinning the news to the extreme left-wing of the political spectrum. This whole Fox News/Shirley Sherrod story is a perfect example.

Eric “Boomarwrong” Boehlert is shamelessly spinning the story of the firing of USDA employee, Shirley Sherrod, as a Fox attack job with all his little Maoist heart. He is desperate to make Sherrod’s firing a result of a Fox News smear campaign and his reply to the posting at Johnny Dollar’s website proving that Fox News Channel didn’t really even take up the story until after Sherrod was fired by the White House is a masterpiece of spin.

Starting with, “So many people, all saying the same thing. The same untrue thing,” Johnny Dollar goes on to show the timeline of how Fox News approached the story. Then J$ posted the words of a Fox exec, to wit: “Michael Clemente, senior vice president of news editorial, said the network’s news programs reported the story with caution.”

After this set up, J$ goes on piece by piece to show that the news channel did not push the story on the air until after the White House pre-emptively and hastily fired Sherrod in the wake of the video Breitbart posted on Monday last week. He then shows all the lefty newsies who made the false claim that Fox News was peddling the Sherrod story before a panicky White House fired her.

But the moonbats at Media Matters have to make this whole thing a Fox conspiracy, despite the truth of the matter. So, “Boomawrong” Boehlert tries to refute J$’s correct assertion that Fox News didn’t push the story. And here is his… cough… evidence: (more…)

Yesterday Andrew Breitbart appeared on Hannity and CNN’s John King USA to discuss NAACP racism and the firing of Shirley Sherrod:

***

Breitbart’s argument is simple and straightforward: Regardless of what else is in Sherrod’s speech, the first video released on BigGovernment.com features Sherrod telling a tale of racism that is received by the NAACP audience with laughter and cheers. They weren’t cheering redemption; they were cheering discrimination. Upon hearing the cheers, Sherrod fails to offer any immediate clarification and even smiles right along with them.

Breitbart’s main objective by releasing the video was to call out the NAACP, an organization who has recently gone to great lengths to condemn the Tea Party’s alleged racism, for sanctioning racism in it’s own organization. Sherrod immediately became the scapegoat for the embarrassed NAACP and USDA, but she was never the target, the NAACP itself was, and the delight the audience took in the racist part of Sherrod’s speech leaves them exposed. (more…)

A few weeks ago, Lord Christopher Monckton told me a distressing story about a visit to Haiti. He said that poverty in that troubled nation is so pervasive that many of its inhabitants have been reduced to eating mud pies. The term “mud pies” is not slang for a local staple made from locally-grown cereal crops. We’re talking about people reduced to eating actual dirt. Monckton watched Haitians form mud into the shape of pies, mixing in a sprinkling of whatever nutritional foodstuffs might be available (like oil and salt) and then “cooking” the mud pies in the sun.

Sounds like further evidence of the devastating effects that the January 12 earthquake had on Haiti, right? Not really. Oh, did I forget to mention? This was the situation in Haiti before the earthquake hit, as this 2008 story that appeared in National Geographic documents.

Between 2000 and 2010 the World Food Price Index, the inflation-adjusted measure of how expensive food is across the globe, almost doubled. In 2000 the index sat at a value of 90. As of January 2010, the index had risen to a value of 172. That a 91% increase in the cost of food over the course of a decade.

While Americans and citizens of other industrialized nations may be able to absorb that kind of price increase, the poor living in the Third World cannot. Tragic cases of starvation like the ones Monckton witnessed in pre-earthquake Haiti are hardly unique. Dwindling, more expensive food supplies have led to an increasing number of food riots around the world. More and more people are dying, simply because they can not afford basic sustenance. How could this happen? (more…)