Too good to check: “Report: Kim Jong Un Hands Copies of ‘Mein Kampf’ to Top Officers:”

A report from New Focus International, a North Korean news organization that runs underground to avoid the scrutiny of the tyrannical government, senior government officials got copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf for Kim Jong Un’s birthday in January.

Only a few copies were handed out, since most books are banned in the country; such gifts are called “hundred-copy books” in North Korea. According to the report, the book was not intended to idolize the anti-Semitic aspects of Nazism, but to focus in on Hitler’s plans for economic recovery in the country. “Kim Jong Un gave a lecture to high-ranking officials, stressing that we must pursue the policy of Byungjin in terms of nuclear and economic development,” the government source said. “Mentioning that Hitler managed to rebuild Germany in a short time following its defeat in World War One, Kim Jong Un issued an order for the Third Reich to be studied in depth and asked that practical applications be drawn from it.”

Isn’t it a little too late to be handing out copies of Mein Kampf, when you’re already living out Downfall?

“Suspension won’t be removed for five-year-old grilled over cap gun who then peed his pants,” the Daily Caller reports:

School officials in Calvert County, Maryland have denied a request to expunge the suspension of the kindergartener who brought a plastic cap gun on a school bus last month and then wet his pants during a subsequent interrogation.

The refusal came in the form of a letter dated Friday, reports The Washington Post. The letter stated that the five-year-old “did bring a cap gun in his book bag.” It also charged that some other children were frightened and told school officials that they couldn’t discern if the orange-tipped cowboy-style gun was real or fake.

The unidentified kindergartener had brought the toy gun in his backpack because his friend had brought a water gun the previous day. He later told his mother that he “really, really” wanted his friend to see it. (RELATED: Kindergartener interrogated over cap gun until he pees his pants)

School officials at Dowell Elementary School in the town of Lusby proceeded to question the five-year-old for over two hours before finally calling his mother at 10:50 a.m. By that time, he had wet his pants (which the mother called highly unusual).

The Post notes that the principal — Jennifer L. Young, according to Dowell Elementary’s website — told the boy’s mother that things would have been even worse had the toy gun been loaded with caps. In that case, the school would have regarded the plaything as an explosive and called the police.

I think the key element there is the water gun. From an enlightened, “Progressive” point of view, anybody carrying one of those is clearly of questionable character, no matter what his age:

As Dr. Floyd said of the monolith in 2001, “Its origin and purpose, still a total mystery:”

Five months into his second term, allies and enemies are as confounded as ever about who President Obama really is.

Is he the dyed-in-the-wool liberal that his biggest supporters and critics suggest? Or is he a pragmatic, even cynical, politician who cares more for his popularity than taking risks for his ideological goals or living up to his rhetoric?

Even in the short period since his reelection, Obama has provided evidence to support conflicting interpretations.

— Justin Sink in The Hill today, in a piece titled “Who is he? Obama keeps allies, enemies guessing in second term.”

Mr. Obama has certainly kept “liberal” “journalists” and their editors guessing — they’ve been submitting copy about him for six years in which, despite having the collective resources of some of the biggest journalistic enterprises behind them, and the entire Internet at their fingertips, they…just…can’t..seem…to…put..their…finger…on…who this strange and exotic Barack Obama fellow they helped push into the White House truly is.

One of the earliest examples of this genre literally used the E-word in its headline:

What Obama really thinks should be done about health care and the terrorist threat remain secrets that his book does not unlock. His two years in the Senate certainly haven’t revealed any bold policy ideas.

This leave-them-guessing strategy slips out in the book’s prologue. “I serve as a blank screen,” Obama writes, “on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” He notifies readers that “my treatment of the issues is often partial and incomplete.” It takes some doing for a politician to write a 364-page book, his second volume, and skate past all controversy.

— “Obama Scores as Exotic Who Says Nothing,” from the December 26, 2006 edition of Real Clear Politics, by Froma Harrop.

Almost two years later, on the eve of the 2008 presidential election, here are two senior network television journalists tacitly admitting on-air that their own news departments have utterly failed both them and millions of American voters:

CHARLIE ROSE: I don’t know what Barack Obama’s worldview is.

TOM BROKAW: No, I don’t, either.

ROSE: I don’t know how he really sees where China is.

BROKAW: We don’t know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.

ROSE: I don’t really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?

BROKAW: Yeah, it’s an interesting question.

ROSE: He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational (sic) speeches.

BROKAW: Two of them! I don’t know what books he’s read.

ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?

BROKAW: There’s a lot about him we don’t know.

— Charlie Rose of PBS and NBC’s Tom Brokaw, October 30, 2008.

A CNN reporter uttered the same quiet admission of failure regarding his own TV network less than a month later:

“The Americans who are comparing him to those remarkable predecessors are putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know.”

— Jonathan Mann of CNN, November 28, 2008, in an article titled “Which hero do we want Obama to be?”, which compared Obama to JFK, FDR, Lincoln…and Bill Clinton.

And last year, Real Clear Politics came full circle. Despite Obama having been near the conclusion of his first term in office, the president was still scoring as an exotic who revealed nothing to left-leaning journalists with inch-thick blindfolds on:

George W. Bush was not an enigma. He had no hidden parts. His father was not mysterious. George H.W. Bush’s life was dedicated to achievement and service. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t unfathomable. Nothing in his presidency — the brilliant highs, the shocking lows — was a substantial, unpredictable departure from his past.

Barack Obama, though, is the most enigmatic president since Jimmy Carter, the most mysterious since Lyndon Johnson, the most unfathomable since Franklin Roosevelt. Political professionals sometimes say of public figures that what you see is what you get, more or less. But with Mr. Obama, what you see is both more and less than what you get. [...]

The gravest warning sign in Mr. Obama’s background wasn’t his spare record in the U.S. Senate (Johnson often ridiculed John F. Kennedy for having accomplished almost nothing in the Capitol), nor his limited experience in electoral office (Lincoln had but one term in the House). Instead, the most troubling aspect of Mr. Obama’s past were the 129 abstentions in his Illinois Senate career. They suggested that Mr. Obama was more interested in getting elected than in doing the work he had been elected to perform.

— “Even After 4 Years, Obama Remains a Mystery,” David Shribman, Real Clear Politics, August 19, 2012.

Flash-forward nearly a year later to today. Linking to the latest example in the MSM’s genre of “who is this strange and mysterious Barack Obama fellow, and what on earth could his curious agenda be?”, blogger Jammie Wearing Fool quotes the aforementioned Justin Sink of The Hill and replies:

Part of that agenda, apparently, is using the IRS to go after his political opponents. Of course they fail to even mention his targeting of tea partiers, although there’s passing mentions of his numerous scandals.

The inaugural in particular seemed to show Obama believing that “his reelection would convince Republicans that they had to deal with him, that they had to come to the table,” Jillson said. “He articulated that idea at several points during the campaign, that the fever among the Republicans will break.”

But a tsunami of scandals and controversies since then has confounded the president’s ambitions.

It probably would help if they mentioned some of the tsunami of scandals, but the readers are left to figure out what they are. Heckuva job.

And that’s the problem: to reveal who Obama is and what his agenda is, would be to a shine a light on the goals of what passes for “liberalism” and “progressivism” in the second decade of the 21st century. And no MSM journalist wants to be accused of telling the American public what those truly are.

Update: “Americans’ Confidence in Newspapers Continues to Erode,” Gallup reports. “Fewer than one in four Americans confident in newspapers, TV news.”

What on earth could be the cause of this mysterious, impossible to understand development? It’s all happened so...unexpectedly.

“When no one listens, people tune out and start to do their own thing,” Dr. Helen Smith writes in the introduction to hew new book, Men On Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood and the American Dream – and Why it Matters:

There is a term for bailing out of the mainstream of society that I blogged about in 2008 called “Going John Galt” or “going Galt” for short. Have you ever read Atlas Shrugged? If not, do so. If you have read the book, you know where I am going with this. In Ayn Rand’s book, the basic theme is that John Galt and his allies take actions that include withdrawing their talents and “stopping the motor of the world” while leading the “strikers” (those who refused to be exploited) against the “looters” (the exploiters, backed by the government). One interesting fact about Atlas Shrugged is that the original title was The Strike, but Rand changed it at her husband’s suggestion. The original title of Rand’s book seems fitting for what is happening with today’s twenty-first-century man.

In some sense, men today feel very much like Rand’s characters in Atlas Shrugged, knowing that they can be exploited for their sense of duty, production and just for being male at any time. The state transfers men’s production to women and children through child support, alimony, divorce laws, and government entitlements that are mainly for women, such as WIC (grants to states for women, infants and children) or welfare payments to single mothers. It is not only in family relationships that men are screwed, but also in many areas of modern society. Men are portrayed as the bad guys, ready to rape, pillage, beat or abuse women and children at the drop of a hat. From rape laws that protect women but not the men they may accuse falsely to the lack of due process in sexual harassment cases on college campuses to airlines that will not allow men (possible perverts!) to sit next to a child, our society is at war with men and men know it full well.

In fact, men have known that a backlash against them has been happening for decades, so why is it taking so long for men to fight back? Psychologist Warren Farrell, in his prophetic book The Myth of Male Power, written in 1993, talks about “the men’s movement as an evolutionary shift” and says the movement will be “the most incremental of movements” because it is “hard to confront the feelings we’ve learned to repress and hard to confront the women we’ve learned to protect.” Farrell believes that the greatest challenge of the men’s movement will be “getting men to ask for help for themselves. Men were always able to ask for help on behalf of others—for a congregation, their wives, children, or a cause—but not for themselves.”

If that’s changing, then the contributions that Helen has made, first at her long-running blog and now in Men on Strike, have played a large part in, as the left likes to say about its own pet causes, “increasing awareness.”

During our 27-minute long interview, Helen will discuss:

● Why “Enslavement used to be based on race, [but] now it’s based on gender.”

● Why men dominate the number of suicides reported each year.

● What are some of the ways that college is stacked against men?

● How the increasing popularity of the “man cave” is a bad sign for men.

● How comments posted on her blog at PJM led directly to the new book.

And much more. Click here to listen:

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(27 minutes long; 25MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this interview to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 4.68MB lo-fi edition.)

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Transcript of our interview begins on the following page; for our many previous podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.

Even on Father’s Day, dad can’t catch a break from “liberal” Hollywood, whether it’s TV commercials, story plots, or even the Internet Movie Database homepage today. While the article’s headline gets it right, the IMDB homepage screencapped above sure didn’t.

It’s enough to make a man want to go on strike to protest a society that’s so stacked against him; watch the space for our interview with Dr. Helen on her new book in the not-too-distant future.

Now is the time when we juxtapose, Small Dead Animals-style:

CBS anchor Scott Pelley said at a speech at Quinnipiac University that journalists “are getting big stories wrong, over and over again.”

— Daniel Halper, the Weekly Standard, May 11, 2013.

In a recent interview, CBS Evening News host Scott Pelley said that he thinks that Fox News really doesn’t have very many viewers–underestimating the network’s actual ratings by about 90 percent.

Pelley told Deadline Hollywood that Fox might have perhaps as few as “200,000 viewers.”

Deadline asked Pelley what he thought of the cable news outlets that cater to “just one segment of the political spectrum in their reporting.”

“Certainly. It’s no surprise,” Pelley replied. “Fox is associated with the right and MSNBC is associated with the left and they’ve done that because it is a business model. It’s a strategy. They’ve decided to bite off one small part of the viewership and be happy with that 200,000 viewers, 300,000 viewers that they have.”

— “CBS’s Scott Pelley Underestimates Fox News Ratings by 90%,” Warner Todd Huston, Big Journalism, today.

Oh, and note this quote from Pelley in the same interview with Deadline Hollywood:

But when you are talking to 7 million viewers across the country, man you have got to represent everybody’s views and have got to give them the impression that you are being as honest as you know how to be.

As Huston noted at the conclusion of his post, Pelley overestimated his own numbers by almost a million and a half viewers. Beyond that, telling an interviewer that your goal is to give those viewers “the impression that you are being as honest as you know how to be” is veering dangerously close into the sort of sophistry that Pelley’s most infamous antecedent on CBS would approve:

Especially when far from attempting to “represent everybody’s views,” when it comes to global warming skeptics, Pelley notoriously said in a 2005 profile at CBS News.com, “If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?”

How seriously does CNN take the important events of the day? As seriously as the above screencap from Twitter illustrates. As a commenter at William Jacobson’s Legal Insurrection blog quips, “in a hundred thousand years, an alien archeologist digging through ancient Earth civilization will come to the conclusion that Kim Kardashian was Queen of our planet at this time.”

Our alien archeologist might also conclude that this gentleman was enough of an expert on data mining, the War on Terror, and American national security as to warrant the following description on his Chyron:

Click to enlarge.

Finally, never let it be said that CNN doesn’t take seriously the notion of freedom, liberty, and the First Amendment:

On Sunday’s edition of Global Public Square, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria invited Mona Eltahawy to offer her perspective on the anti-government protests in Turkey and the rights of women in the Muslim world. It is unclear what qualifies Eltahawy as an authority on rights of any kind, since she is currently being prosecuted for defacing a poster on the New York City subway that she happened to dislike–a crime of which she is proud.

The poster, sponsored by Pam Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative, read: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

Eltahawy took offense and attempted to spray-paint the word “racist” on the poster–in the process spray-painting a photographer who attempted to guard the poster. As she was being arrested, she complained: “This is non-violent protest.”

Something very strange has gotten into the water at CNN — and American viewers know it.

Big Hollywood links to an article by Lynda Obst, the producer of Contact, Sleepless in Seattle, and TV’s Hot in Cleveland (among many other projects) in Salon, setting up her quotes by first noting that “For consumers, the decline of the DVD market has meant switching over to both Blu-ray and, more recently, streaming options for their viewing pleasure.  The end of the DVD format’s dominance meant something much more, and far worse, for Hollywood.”

In Salon, Obst writes:

“The DVD business represented fifty percent of their profits,” [20th Century Fox executive Peter Chernin] went on. “Fifty percent. The decline of that business means their entire profit could come down between forty and fifty percent for new movies.”

For those of you like me who are not good at math, let me make Peter’s statement even simpler. If a studio’s margin of profit was only 10 percent in the Old Abnormal, now with the collapsing DVD market that profit margin was hovering around 6 percent. The loss of profit on those little silver discs had nearly halved our profit margin.

This was, literally, a Great Contraction. Something drastic had happened to our industry, and this was it. Surely there were other factors: Young males were disappearing into video games; there were hundreds of home entertainment choices available for nesting families; the Net. But slicing a huge chunk of reliable profits right out of the bottom line forever?

This was mind-boggling to me, and I’ve been in the business for thirty years. Peter continued as I absorbed the depths and roots of what I was starting to think of as the Great Contraction. “Which means if nothing else changed, they would all be losing money. That’s how serious the DVD downturn is. At best, it could cut their profit in half for new movies.”

* * * * *

“When did the collapse begin?”

“The bad news started in 2008,” he said. “Bad 2009. Bad 2010. Bad 2011.”

It was as if he were scolding those years. They were bad, very bad. I wouldn’t want to be those years.

“The international market will still grow,” he said, “but the DVD sell-through business is not coming back again. Consumers will buy their movies on Netflix, iTunes, Amazon et al. before they will purchase a DVD.” What had been our profit margin has gone the way of the old media.

But it was in 2010 that James Cameron told the Washington Post that DVDs were bad for the Gaia and other living things, and needed to be eliminated (while simultaneously having multiple versions of Avatar coming out that same year on DVD):

It’s a consumer product like any consumer product. I think ultimately we’re going to bypass a physical medium and go directly to a download model and then it’s just bits moving in the system. And then the only impact to the environment is the power it takes to run the computers, run the devices. I think that we’re not there yet, but we’re moving that direction. Twentieth Century Fox has made a commitment to be carbon neutral by the end of 2010. Because of some of these practices that can’t be changed, the only way to do that is to buy carbon offsets. You know, which again, these are interim solutions. But at least it shows that there’s a consciousness that we have to be dealing with carbon pollution and sustainability. …

And the following year, many in Hollywood went all-in with Occupy Wall Street, which was obsessed with the “obscene” profits made by gigantic multinational corporations. You know, like movie studios.

Presumably, losing the cushion of DVD sales is part of the reason why Steven Spielberg recently told a USC audience that, as the Hollywood Reporter paraphrased, “an ‘implosion’ in the film industry is inevitable, whereby a half dozen or so $250 million movies flop at the box office and alter the industry forever.”

But it’s not like Hollywood has much respect for the audience who pays the tickets to see those $250 million products during their initial run in theaters. Obst’s article on the collapse of her industry appears in Salon, which isn’t exactly sympathetic to Hollywood’s core audience in flyover country, when its editor at large has a new book titled, What’s the Matter with White People?: Finding Our Way in the Next America.

Similarly, in 2008, the late Nora Ephron, who in the previous decade had written and directed the Obst-produced Sleepless in Seattle, wrote in the Huffington Post, “This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don’t mean people, I mean white men.” Incidentally those people in Pennsylvania that Ephron was writing off as troglodytic racists were her fellow Democrats, who were about to decide between Obama and Hillary in the PA Democrat primary — the same primary voters that Obama wrote off at the time as bitter, gun and God-obsessed clingers.

The Gray Lady has a narrative, and she’s not going to deviate from it, no matter how incorrect it’s been proven to be. Check out the questions that music writer Jon Caramonica of the New York Times asks rapper Kanye West about his infamous racialist politicization of an NBC fundraiser for victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, as spotted by Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center in his latest column:

Egotistical musicians often exaggerate their political influence, none moreso than the nattering, narcissistic rapper Kanye West. He has compared himself in global stature to Apple founder Steve Jobs, and has titled his latest album “Yeesus.”

Rolling Stone magazine has posted part of a West song titled “I Am a God,” where West raps that Jesus is the “Most High,” but he’s a “close high.”

Now it’s the New York Times pandering to West’s colossal self-regard – and it’s downright embarrassing. Mouth-breathing Times writer/superfan Jon Caramonica stooped to telling West that “what I find probably the most moving thing that you’ve ever done, which is calling out President Bush at the Hurricane Katrina telethon. To me, that moment is actually the peak of putting a message in a pop format.” West agreed, designating it as “a very pop moment of a lifetime or generation.”

Do you remember this? Does anyone? Let me remind you of that generation-shaping moment. In the middle of an NBC telethon, as celebrities somberly asked for donations to the Red Cross, West lashed, for no reason, and stupidly, arrogantly, and rudely declared that President Bush “doesn’t care about black people.” [Video here -- Ed] He proceeded to add black people were smeared as looters and “now they’ve given them [police?] permission to go down and shoot us.”

Lyndon LaRouche is more rational than this idiot.

Caramonica thought this burp of hate was brilliant. “Were you conscious that that’s what you were doing, or was it totally just instinct?” West replied “it was pretty bugged out. When you think about it, I was wearing like, a Juicy Couture men’s polo shirt. We weren’t there, like, ready for war.”

In addition to President Bush’s efforts to fight AIDS and malaria in Africa, as even Donna Brazile, a chairwoman for the DNC and manager for the Gore-Lieberman presidential campaign in 2000 wrote for CNN this past April, “Bush came through on Katrina:”

Bush understood the need for civility. I joined him despite my frustration because the need was too great for finger-pointing and blame-making. He flew to New Orleans and addressed the nation: “Tonight I also offer this pledge to the American people: Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes. We will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives.”

George W. Bush was good as his word. He visited the Gulf states 17 times; went 13 times to New Orleans. Laura Bush made 24 trips. Bush saw that $126 billion in aid was sent to the Gulf’s residents, as some members of his own party in Congress balked.

Bush put a special emphasis on rebuilding schools and universities. He didn’t forget African-Americans: Bush provided $400 million to the historically black colleges, now integrated, that remain a pride, and magnet for African-American students. Laura Bush, a librarian, saw to it that thousands of books ruined by the floods were replaced. To this day, there are many local libraries with tributes devoted to her efforts.

It was a team effort. I’m glad to report the commission I served on went out-of-business in 2010. I’m also grateful and proud to report that President Bush was one of the leaders, and a very important member, of that team. Our recovery can be credited to the civility and tireless efforts of President Bush and other Americans, who united and worked together to help rebuild the Gulf and the place of my birth, New Orleans.

Kudos to Brazile for writing that, particularly in CNN. Glenn Reynolds responded at Instapundit, “Boy, talk about a narrative-buster.”

I don’t know — it didn’t have enough force to penetrate the bunker that houses the New York Times’ editorial bullpen, but with walls — and minds — that thick, what can?

Yes we scan!  “NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants.” C/Net reports:

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”

If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA’s formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.

Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler’s disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.

The disclosure appears to confirm some of the allegations made by Edward Snowden, a former NSA infrastructure analyst who leaked classified documents to the Guardian. Snowden said in a video interview that, while not all NSA analysts had this ability, he could from Hawaii “wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president.”

There are serious “constitutional problems” with this approach, said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has litigated warrantless wiretapping cases. “It epitomizes the problem of secret laws.”

No word yet if the DNC’s spying apparatus can retrieve data from the DNC’s proprietary $30K iPhones and $54k Blackberries.

Or Sharyl Attkisson’s laptop.

Bethany Mandel of Commentary reads the Gray Lady so you don’t have to:

If there’s one thing that liberals seem uncomfortable with above all else, it’s the importance of personal responsibility. With many issues that divide the right and the left, most come down to conservatives’ understanding that a need exists for individuals to be accountable for their own actions. As conservatives, we believe it is important to plan and provide for our own health care, retirement and finances, and families. Liberals, however, believe that this responsibility rests also with the government and fellow citizens, hence their promotion of ObamaCare, Social Security, welfare, food stamps, and public housing in place of private and charitable solutions to genuine poverty.

In yesterday’s New York Times we witnessed a jaw-dropping example of this phenomenon as Laurie Shrage, a professor of “gender studies” argues that just because a man impregnates a woman doesn’t mean he should be legally considered his child’s father. Shrage contends that only when a man chooses to take on that mantle should he be legally and socially required to take on the responsibilities of fatherhood, especially as it pertains to financial obligations like child support.

What could go wrong? Oh yeah, there’s that.

Oh, and when you’re raising your* young tikes, avoid reading them samizdat that might expose them to “racist, colonial, consumerist, heteronormative, and patriarchal norms.”

Currently on the doubleplusungood list: Franklin the Turtle and Arthur the Aardvark.

* For the word “your,” read: “the state’s,” of course.

“Last week John Nolte of Breitbart observed that the mainstream media had failed to break any of the controversial news occupying Washington. This week Paul Farhi of the Washington Post, without intending to, explained why.”

Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon flips open Occam’s Razor and slices up one of the chief reasons “Why the mainstream media failed to break Obama scandals:”

“Conflicts” is not the best description of Farhi’s subject. His topic is marriages, unions, and blood, legal and romantic and familial connections between individuals where one party works in media and another works in politics. The extent of such links is staggering. Farhi has to interrupt his story to announce, in a parenthetical, that Post reporter Sari Horwitz, who covers the Justice Department, is married to William B. Schultz, who is Kathleen Sebelius’ top lawyer at the Department of Health and Human Services. Ben Sherwood, the president of ABC News, is brother to Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, “a top national security adviser to President Obama.” Another Obama national security aide, Ben Rhodes, is brother to David Rhodes, president of CBS News. One of CNN’s top D.C. hacks is married to Tom Nides, whose upward career trajectory has taken him from the office of Democratic congressional powerbroker Tony Coelho to, where else, Fannie Mae, Credit Suisse, and Morgan Stanley, as well as a two-year stint as an undersecretary of state for Hillary Clinton. Whose daughter is on contract with NBC.

White House spokesman Jay Carney, who worked for many years at Time magazine, is married to Claire Shipman, a correspondent for ABC News. The White House correspondent for NPR, Ari Shapiro, has been married to former White House counsel Michael Gottlieb since 2004. Longtime NPR personality Michele Norris went on leave in 2011, when her husband Broderick Johnson, a corporate lawyer who served in the Clinton White House, joined the Obama reelection campaign as a full-time adviser. Wall Street Journal political reporter Neil King is married to Shailagh Murray, who serves as communications director for Vice President Joe Biden, and who used to report on Congress for the Post. Savannah Guthrie of NBC recently became engaged to Mike Feldman, a former Gore aide who is now part of the Democratic Glover Park Group consultancy. Syndicated columnist Connie Schultz is married to Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

Tracing these associations is enough to keep busy any student of the caste.

Read the whole thing.

Oh, and speaking of keeping it all in the family, “Obama Chooses HBO VP for Ambassador to Spain Position:”

HBO co-president Richard Plepler gave between $50,000 and $100,000 to Obama, and James Costos, HBO VP of Global Licensing and Retail donated north of $500,000 while hosting fundraisers for the Commander in Chief.

Costos just received a very nice thank you note from Obama.

As was widely expected, President Barack Obama today named James Costos as next Ambassador to Spain. The HBO VP of Global Licensing and Retail was a big bundler for Obama’s reelection campaign last year and co-hosted fundraisers in both LA and NYC along with his partner Michael Smith.

HBO is part of the Time-Warner conglomerate, which also owns CNN. As Continetti notes above, Jay Carney, the president’s press secretary, cut his teeth at Time, and CNN’s Fareed Zakaria has attempted to position himself as a wannabe Obama advisor.

Add the above to the JournoList, and it’s one big revolving door between the offices of the MSM and BHO.

Related: “Our Partisan Bureaucracy — Lawyers Love President Obama,” as this ominous chart illustrates, “detailing political giving by government lawyers,” David French writes at the Corner:

Read the whole thing.

“The Digital Superstate is Useless When It Matters,” Mark Steyn writes in his latest weekly column:

If you had the misfortune to be blown up by the Tsarnaev brothers, and are now facing a future with one leg and suddenly circumscribed goals, like those brave Americans featured on the cover of the current People magazine under the headline “Boston Tough,” you might wish Boston had been a little tougher on Tamerlan and spent less time chasing the phantoms of “Free America Citizens.” But, in fact, it would have been extremely difficult to track the Tsarnaevs at, say, the mosque they attended. Your Granny’s phone calls, your teenager’s Flickr stream your Telecharge tickets for two on the aisle at “Mamma Mia!” for your wife’s birthday, and the MasterCard bill for dinner with your mistress three days later are all fair game, but since October 2011 mosques have been off-limits to the security state. If the FBI guy who got the tip-off from Moscow about young Tamerlan had been sufficiently intrigued to want to visit the Boston mosque where he is said to have made pro-terrorism statements during worship, the agent would have been unable to do so without seeking approval from something called the Sensitive Operations Review Committee high up in Eric Holder’s Department of Justice. The Sensitive Operations Review Committee is so sensitive nobody knows who’s on it. You might get approved, or you might get sentenced to extra sensitivity training for the next three months. Even after the bombing, the cops forbore to set foot in the lads’ mosque for four days. Three hundred million Americans are standing naked in the NSA digital scanner, but the all-seeing security state has agreed that not just their womenfolk, but Islam itself, can be fully veiled from head to toe.

We’re told that universal surveillance has prevented all kinds of atrocities we can never hear about – an answer straight out of Orwell. Yet, oddly, in the ones we do hear about, the perps are hiding in plain sight (Maj. Hasan with “Soldier of Allah” on his business card), the intelligence services do nothing (the Pantybomber known to the CIA but still permitted to board the plane), and the digital superstate is useless (the Tsarnaev photo rang no bells with the facial-recognition software, but was identified by friends who saw it on TV).

And thus, the bozo leviathan blunders on. Big Politically Correct Brother sees everything … and nothing.

The Founding Founders could not be reached for comment.

Related: Straight out of Watergate: “It all started with a third-rate break-in into a reporter’s computer…”

“You could see a map of every ship at sea that has cargo carrying orange juice,” on the Bloomberg computer system. “Or, someone would say ‘Check out UUID*. Ben Bernanke was logged on today.’” That’s from a new post by Matthew Sheffield of Newsbusters, who writes that, “While government spying on citizens has been a hot topic of conversation lately, it’s worth noting that such snooping can also happen in the private sector:”

The Bloomberg wire service, founded by anti-gun nut New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, has admitted that its reporters have been spying on customers of its business data service for years and using that information to generate news stories.

Through an established company policy, reporters for the news service were given exclusive access to private customer records for anyone they wanted to look up. Once they pulled up a user’s records, they had the ability to see that person’s last login date, his contact information, view her requests for technical support, and even see what types of data that the customer was calling up within the vast Bloomberg financial database.

After the practice was exposed in April by investment bank Goldman Sachs, the rest of the news media began poking around in the story, albeit only in the business pages. What has emerged is a portrait of a company where spying on customers and employees is basically genetic.

“We were told again and again and again, find ways to use what’s on the terminal to write stories,” an anonymous former Bloomberg employee told the New York Times, describing a function of the database they had access to call UUID. “They never said ‘Oh, please be careful and don’t breach any kind of privacy.’”

Since the spying was brought to light, Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler apologized but tried to simply brush the scandal away in a blog post in which he announced that reporter access to customer data had been revoked.

* Last month, the Times explained more about UUID:

There are now more than 315,000 Bloomberg terminal subscribers worldwide who rely on the desktop computer for research, trading, communication and a constant stream of financial information and news.

But as it turned out, what the subscribers were doing was not always confidential. Bloomberg reporters used the “Z function” — a command using the letter Z and a company’s name — to view a list of subscribers at a firm. Then, a Bloomberg user could click on a subscriber’s name, which would take the user to a function called UUID. The UUID function then provided background on an individual subscriber, including contact information, when the subscriber had last logged on, chat information between subscribers and customer service representatives, and weekly statistics on how often they used a particular function. A company spokesman said both of those functions had been disabled in the newsroom.

Terminals never allowed journalists to see specific securities or trades, but even general hints of what users are searching could provide a glimpse into Wall Street’s thinking — powerful currency in the competitive world of financial journalism. Daniel L. Doctoroff, chief executive of Bloomberg L.P. and a close confidant to the company’s founder, Michael R. Bloomberg, said in a memo to employees that “client trust is our highest priority and the cornerstone of our business.” Mr. Bloomberg stepped away from day-to-day operations when he became mayor of New York City.

No wonder Michael Bloomberg has seemed to relish the role of Big Brother (and/or Big Nanny) as mayor; the company where he made his wealth appears modeled after 1984′s Ministry of Truth.

Oh and speaking of Orwellian subjects, “U.S. Agencies Said to Swap Data With Thousands of Firms:”

Thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with U.S. national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits that include access to classified intelligence, four people familiar with the process said.

These programs, whose participants are known as trusted partners, extend far beyond what was revealed by Edward Snowden, a computer technician who did work for the National Security Agency. The role of private companies has come under intense scrutiny since his disclosure this month that the NSA is collecting millions of U.S. residents’ telephone records and the computer communications of foreigners from Google Inc. and other Internet companies under court order.

Many of these same Internet and telecommunications companies voluntarily provide U.S. intelligence organizations with additional data, such as equipment specifications, that don’t involve private communications of their customers, the four people said.

Makers of hardware and software, banks, Internet security providers, satellite telecommunications companies and many other companies also participate in the government programs. In some cases, the information gathered may be used not just to defend the nation but to help infiltrate computers of its adversaries.

That report comes from…Bloomberg.com. At Hot Air, Ed Morissey adds:

This raises a number of interesting questions and concerns. First, are cooperating firms gaining competitive advantages against non-cooperating (and/or unaware) firms in the same market? That kind of distortion would corrupt markets in favor of snitching as a survival tactic, would it not? Second, are there political organizations that have this kind of friendly relationship with intelligence services that give them a competitive advantage? Two months ago, one might have laughed off such a suggestion, but after what took place at the IRS, it’s a little more difficult to dismiss.

The part about the Microsoft bug reporting is especially interesting in light of the Attkisson story today, too.

All of which dovetails with J.R. Dunn’s column today at PJM: “The Sheep Look Up,” on “The nightmare of political modernism:”

Involving as it does the NSA, it’s unlikely we will ever learn exactly who was behind this, who gave the orders, and what the precise purpose was. But in a way, that doesn’t matter. We know what the source is, and the rest we can guess.

In the late 18th century, Jeremy Bentham, progressive patriarch and founder of the doctrine of utilitarianism, came up the idea of the Panopticon, a prison built in an octagonal format in which the prisoners would be watched twenty-four hours a day from a central point. Bentham predicted all sorts of benefits from the Panopticon that don’t appear to spring logically from the idea.

He spent much of his later life attempting to interest the British and various local governments in building a Panoptican, without much in the way of success. But at the same time his ideas grew more grandiose, and he began picturing whole communities, perhaps even entire societies, based on the concept of total surveillance, with everyone watched constantly to assure they were acting according to plan.

So there’s nothing new about any of this. All that’s changed is the technology. Our modern Benthams think they have the answer in infotech, and the Internet. The old dream is almost within their grasp.

They are forgetting that every state in the West built on surveillance, from fascist Italy to Nazi Germany and the entire constellation of Marxist states, excepting only the cesspool that is Cuba, has been destroyed, and destroyed ignominiously.

And what about Obama, you ask? What about his role? Simply put: he sowed the wind.

Read the whole thing.

Related: “The IRS Sees Everything,” Steve Green writes, linking to a CNN report on the pervasiveness of the IRS’s data mining operations. Which, presumbably, the boys at Time-Warner-CNN-HBO view as a feature, not a bug. The rest of us? “You’re not paranoid. They really are watching everything,” Steve writes.

Beginning with his headline, George Will gets off quite a stem-winder on Lois Lerner, the disgraced former (hopefully former…) IRS chief. That he does so in the Washington Post is all the more amazing. Although likely, the JournoLista in the Post are only angry that she got caught. Presumably, if you do believe, as the Post did when Barack Obama took office that “We Are All Socialists Now,” you don’t mind breaking eggs (never mind the omelet) and becoming East Germany on the Potomac:

Lerner, it is prudent to assume, is one among thousands like her who infest the regulatory state. She is not just a bureaucratic bully and a slithering partisan. Now she also is a national security problem because she is contributing to a comprehensive distrust of government.

The case for the National Security Agency’s gathering of metadata is: America is threatened not by a nation but by a network, dispersed and largely invisible until made visible by connecting dots. The network cannot help but leave, as we all do daily, a digital trail of cellphone, credit card and Internet uses. The dots are in such data; algorithms connect them. The technological gathering of 300 billion bits of data is less menacing than the gathering of 300 by bureaucrats. Mass gatherings by the executive branch twice receive judicial scrutiny, once concerning phone and Internet usages, another concerning the content of messages.

The case against the NSA is: Lois Lerner and others of her ilk.

Government requires trust. Government by progressives, however, demands such inordinate amounts of trust that the demand itself should provoke distrust. Progressivism can be distilled into two words: “Trust us.” The antecedent of the pronoun is: The wise, disinterested experts through whom the vast powers of the regulatory state’s executive branch will deliver progress for our own good, as the executive branch understands this, whether we understand it or not. Lois Lerner is the scowling face of this state, which has earned Americans’ distrust.

According to a Rasmussen poll, “57% Fear Government Will Use NSA Data to Harass Political Opponents.” 

Which is why paranoia can run deep, as Michael Malone illustrates today in Forbes:

The other day, my college age son quietly went around the house and put electricians tape over the camera lenses on the displays of all our home computers.  I laughed when I discovered what he had done. . .then paused:  after all, it wouldn’t be that hard for someone to remotely turn that camera on and secretly watch me and my family.  I left the tape on.

This is what it has come to.  The revelations of recent days about the NSA being able to spy on the phone calls of millions of everyday Americans, without warrant, in search of a few possible terrorists has made everyone just a little more paranoid – and a little less trusting of the benign nature of our Federal government.  The reality is that we may not yet be paranoid enough.

Michael adds, “No doubt once again there will be a mad scramble in the Capitol to do something – new regulations, new oversight, new attempts to protect civil liberties.  But, thanks to Moore’s Law, the technology will have already moved on.  Is it too much to ask, just once, that Congress get ahead of this mess before all of those newly-purchased copies of 1984 turn into tour guides?”

Well, yes, but I’m not holding breath, given that Congress is primarily interested in winning elections and staying in power — although another swell aspect of the Obama era may thin the herd a little bit at the end of the year, Jonathan S. Tobin writes at Commentary:

Though Democrats have mocked the more than three dozen attempts by House Republicans to repeal [ObamaCare], the party leadership views the impending deadline with horror since the prospect of being forced into ObamaCare insurance has set off a mass exodus of members and their senior staffs. As Politico reports, there could be a surge in resignations before December 31 since doing so will allow representatives, senators and other congressional employees to retain their old federal insurance plans. That has led the same Democrats who pushed for the passage of ObamaCare to demand that it be changed to let the inhabitants of Capitol Hill of the hook. But even though Republicans have just as much incentive to want to amend the bill to save their own members and their staffs, their answer should be no. If Congress doesn’t want to cope with the far higher costs and poorer coverage that ObamaCare will ensure, they can scrap the entire misbegotten bill rather than just change it to suit their own interests.

If a Democratic leader like Connecticut’s John Larson thinks it’s unfair to expect his employees to be put in the same boat as his constituents, then maybe he should rethink the entire measure that he played a pivotal role in passing when his party controlled Congress.

Really? Congressional aides won’t be able to afford ObamaCare?! But Obamastenographer Ezra Klein says that it’s such a cost saver! He couldn’t be wrong, could he? Tobin’s Commentary post is titled, “Congress Can’t Weasel Out of ObamaCare.”As Tobin writes, “Republicans may be as miserable as Democrats about this mess, but they need to understand that if they vote for a fix that will exempt Congress they are signing their own political death warrants.” Something to watch for this year.

All of these train wrecks are reminders why “The libertarian idea is the only truly new political idea in the last couple thousand years,” Jonah Goldberg writes today:

It’s a little bizarre how the Left has always conflated statism with modernity and progress. The idea that rulers — be they chieftains, kings, priests, politburos, or wonkish bureaucrats — are enlightened or smart enough to tell others how to live is older than the written word. And the idea that someone stronger, with better weapons, has the right to take what is yours predates man’s discovery of fire by millennia. And yet, we’re always told that the latest rationalization for increased state power is the “wave of the future.”

That phrase, “the wave of the future,” became famous thanks to a 1940 essay by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. She argued that the time of liberal democratic capitalism was drawing to a close and the smart money was on statism of one flavor or another — fascism, Communism, socialism, etc. What was lost on her, and millions of others, was that this wasn’t progress toward the new, but regression to the past. These “waves of the future” were simply gussied-up tribalisms, anachronisms made gaudy with the trappings of modernity, like a gibbon in a spacesuit.

The only truly new political idea in the last couple thousand years is this libertarian idea, broadly understood. The revolution wrought by John Locke, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and the Founding Fathers is the only real revolution going. And it’s still unfolding.

Indeed, what’s remarkable about all of the states Lind identifies as proof that libertarianism doesn’t work is that they are in fact proof that it does. What made the American experiment new were its libertarian innovations, broadly speaking. Moreover, those innovations made us prosper. Even Sweden — the liberal Best in Show — owes its successes to its libertarian concessions.

I’m actually not a full-blown libertarian myself, but it’s an ideal I’d like America to move closer to, not further away from as we’ve been doing of late — bizarrely in the name of “progress,” of all things.

Don’t let Lois Lerner — or her equally scowling boss, who “joked” about siccing the IRS on his enemies in 2009 — hear you saying something like that.

(George Will column found via JWF.)

Update: FBI Director Robert Mueller: We have top men working on investigating the IRS. Who? Top. Men.

Elsewhere: “Sir, the Iranians are rigging the elections again…”

Oh, and maybe Michael Malone’s son was onto something covering his laptop camera with electrical tape: “Sharyl Attkisson: CBS confirmed my computer was hacked ‘on multiple occasions.’”

Derp!

But hey, look at it from the Obama White House’s point of view. The Founding Founders produced a confusing document that’s over 100 years old and that 21st century ‘Progressives’ (in thrall to a philosophy that’s also over 100 years old) pay no attention to, when they’re not outright calling for its demise:

Plus in a town that’s so PC that homebuilders now eschew references to “The Master Bedroom,” that whole “Fathers” thing is awfully sexist sounding, isn’t it?

And besides, even Obama staffers don’t want to risk having the IRS sicced on them by their boss for using the wrong language.

Update (10:56 PM PDT): Looks like enough reverse-Alinsky shaming by the Blogosphere and Twittersphere caused them to change it. Still, I suspect the “Founding Founders” malapropism will live on for quite some time.

Unless they’re star names in their own right, I don’t often name the journalists who write pieces for “liberal” news sites when I quote their work. They make the sausage that goes out under the NYT, WaPo, AP, Reuters and Atlantic banners, we as news consumers decide what — if anything — they’ve written seems truthful. Rinse and repeat the news cycle ad nauseam.

But this morning, I linked to the WaPo’s Paul Farhi, and his effort to say “look, there’s no news here” to the multiple reports of White House-MSM nepotism. As I mentioned, the WaPo is already off on the wrong foot in minimizing a story on White House/MSM conflicts of interest. As it happens, Farhi’s name also appears atop this Drudge-linked item today titled “Roger Ailes wows conservatives in accepting Bradley prize.”

The Butterfield Effect is strong in this one:

Turning serious, Ailes offered a spirited critique of multiculturalism:

“We must stop waving our extended arms in an effort to balance ourselves as we tiptoe along the edges of the Constitution in an effort not to upset weak-kneed appeasers with our unflinching belief in the ideas that made our country different and, yes, great,” he said. “Are we losing America to the inevitable onrushing tide of history? No. But we’re in a storm, the mast is broken, the compass is off , and there’s a damn big hole in the boat. We have allowed ourselves to be manipulated by others, many of whom want to impose their culture and laws under the manufactured utopian idea that all all cultures are equal and most of them are better than America….America is a culture, it has a culture, and it must be recognized….We must not allow our collective memory to fade or morph into trendy revisionist versions of political correctness, which become a substitute for the truth.”

It wasn’t exactly clear who or what he was referring to, but the audience ate it up.

Yes, whatever could he be referring to? To answer the question might raise some of the more unsavory elements of what passes for “Progressivism” in the Post’s collective worldview, so perhaps it’s best to leave the topic unexplored, both for the journalist and his core audience.

In his conclusion, Farhi writes:

Ailes said that he intended to donate his prize money to a charity for senior citizens (he didn’t name the charity) and that he would match the money with his own contribution.

He also didn’t address a possibly awkward bit of business: Is it appropriate for a man running a news organization that promotes itself as “fair and balanced” to accept a large check from a partisan organization?

Yes, it’s a good thing the Post doesn’t need to worry about that, is it?

Related: Click hear for my March interview with Ailes biographer Zev Chafets.

“Maria Miller said the Government would not take a judgemental position on the cause of WWI, as this is the job of historians,” the London Telegraph reports. Miller is Britain’s “Culture Secretary;” at Ricochet, Andrew Stuttaford dubs it a case of “World War One Explained (Not):”

As the country limbers up to commemorate the start of the Great War, the Daily Telegraph is reporting that the British government will not be putting the blame for starting the conflict on any country or countries, something that has given rise to the suspicion that it is worried about offending the Germans (nobody seems to be worried about hurt feelings in Austria-Hungary).

That’s irritating enough , but Ms. Miller’s stumbling approach to the rather more genuinely difficult question of whether Britain should have gone to war at all (the answer , by the way, is a carefully qualified no), is not much better:

 ”The reasons why it was necessary are there for everybody to see,” [Miller] told BBC Radio Four’s Today programme. “I think it’s important that you set out the facts and it’s clear that at that point in Britain’s history, it was important that there was a war that ensured that Europe could continue to be a set of countries which were strong and could be working together rather than in any other way.”

I think I know what she means (that the objective of the war was to stop Europe being dominated by Germany), but it is wrapped up in language of so much EU-friendly sanctimony that it is impossible to avoid the sneaking suspicion that Ms. Miller does not really know what she is talking about.

The first commenter to Stuttaford’s post replies, “After reading her comments, I’m afraid Whig history is about to be replaced by EU history.”

Actually, it already has, if this London Daily Mail story that Bryan Preston linked to at the PJ Tatler last year is true:

Today we learn that the European Union (our real ruler) is opening a £44m museum that will be a House of European History. This vanity project in and of itself is an offensive waste of money as governments and peoples tighten belts across Europe.

But what I found most offensive of all is that World War II is to be described as “the European Civil War”.

That’s a rather provincial attitude to take, regarding a conflict that saw action from Guam to Alaska and the Philippines to North Africa. For a continental civil war, it was a very far-flung conflict. I’ve personally stood atop Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima, and walked the streets of Paris, France. They’re…pretty far apart.

If this is to be Europe’s revisionist attitude going forward, then on behalf of everyone outside Europe, I ask the continentals from now on to keep their “civil wars” to themselves.

As I wrote at the time, “In the 1990s, the Smithsonian went out of its way to warp Hiroshima through the PC Play-Doh Fun Factory; we shouldn’t be too surprised when the Europeans, who invented PC, really go to town with the concept.”

To steal from a post I wrote in April, in his 2011 book, The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism, Theodore Dalrymple explored how the meaning of World War One morphed among European intellectuals from the late teens to the 1920s:

At least to the victors, the war did not seem self-evidently senseless, and disillusionment was not immediate. The war memorials to be found everywhere in France are tributes to loss, but not to meaninglessness. The soldiers really did die for France, or so almost everyone supposed; in Britain, my next-door neighbor, who collects coins and medals, showed me some First World War service medals for those who survived the war, with an athletic (and naked) young man upon a horse, wielding a sword as if he were a latter-day St. George about to slay a dragon. One of the medals bore the inscription “The War to Save Civilization.” I doubt that these medals were greeted solely by hollow laughter; for one thing, they would hardly have been preserved so carefully if they had been. And browsing in a bookshop recently, I found a book published in 1918 with the title The Romance of War Inventions. It was an attempt to interest boys in science by explaining how shells, mortars, tanks, and so forth had been developed and how they worked. By the time of its publication, millions had already been killed, and surely no one in Britain could by that time not have known someone who had been killed or at least someone whose child or brother or parent had been killed. It seems to me unlikely that such a publication would have seen the light of day in an atmosphere of generalized cynicism about the war.

“The version of the First World War that is now almost universally accepted as ‘true’ is that of the disillusioned writers, male and female, of the late 1920s and 1930s. The war, according this version, was about nothing at all and was caused by blundering politicians, prolonged by stupid generals and lauded by patriotic fools,” Dalrymple adds.

A century later, it’s not at all surprising to see both World Wars undergoing further historical revisionism by European elites, perhaps auditioning for their own MSNBC shows.

“Media, administration deal with conflicts,” the Washington Post reports:

It’s all but a journalistic commandment: Thou shalt not have a vested interest in the story you’re covering. Otherwise, a personal entanglement could color a reporter’s neutrality or cloud public perceptions of fairness. An obvious area of concern: when a journalist’s relatives or spouse is part of the news.

So what to make of all the family ties between the news media and the Obama administration?

According to the news media, nothing much at all. News organizations say they’ve worked out the conflicts — real or potential — involving their journalists. But that hasn’t stopped a few eyebrows from being raised.

The list of prominent news people with close White House relations includes ABC News President Ben Sherwood, who is the brother of Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a top national-security adviser to President Obama. His counterpart at CBS, news division president David Rhodes, is the brother of Benjamin Rhodes, a key foreign-policy specialist. CNN’s deputy Washington bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Tom Nides, who until earlier this year was deputy secretary of state under Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Further, White House press secretary Jay Carney’s wife is Claire Shipman, a veteran reporter for ABC. And NPR’s White House correspondent, Ari Shapiro, is married to a lawyer, Michael Gottlieb, who joined the White House counsel’s office in April.

Conservatives have suggested that these relationships may play a role in how the media cover Obama, specifically in their supposedly timid approach to reporting on the White House’s handling of the terrorist attacks last year on American facilities in Benghazi, Libya. The National Review Online recently claimed that such ties amount to professional incest: “The inbreeding among Obama’s court and its press corps is more like one of those ‘I’m my own grandpaw’ deals,” wrote NRO’s Mark Steyn in a posting titled “Band of Brothers.”

Such insinuations make media types bristle. They take exception to the notion that complicated judgments about the news — often made by others within an organization — have anything to do with personal favoritism or familial relationships. The critics, they say, can’t point to any direct evidence that such relationships have affected the amount or tone of their news coverage.

Of course, the Post has some pretty obvious conflicts of interest itself, when it comes to its relationship with an administration its own ombudsperson admitted that “most Post journalists voted for” in 2008.

I don’t have to listen to your phone calls to know what you’re doing. If I know every single phone call you’ve made, I’m  able to determine every single person you talked to — I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive. And the real question here is what do they do with this information that they collect that does not have anything to do with al Qaeda? And we’re gonna trust the President and the Vice President of the United States to do the right thing? Don’t count me in on that.

– Joe Biden in May 2006, appearing on CBS News.