Back in 2011 we had lots of fun with Rachel Maddow of MSNBC cheerfully using one of the biggest pariahs of today’s “Progressive” environmentally-correct — the Hoover Dam — to promote the environmentally-correct “Progressive” channel that employs her. Here’s an amusing following up, found at Jim Geraghty’s Campaign Spot daily email:

Why Kevin Williamson Rocks, Vol. LMXVIII

You probably don’t need any more reasons to purchase Kevin Williamson’s The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome: How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure,but I just had to share this section yesterday, dismantling Rachel Maddow’s “Lean Forward” ad featuring the Hoover Dam as a symbol of future national infrastructure projects that absolutely must be funded.

Conventional political theory holds that only the state can provide public goods such as parks, sidewalks, roads, and the like. Television commentator Rachel Maddow offered a typically exaggerated expression of this view when she visited the Hoover Dam and remarked, “When you are this close to Hoover Dam, it makes you realize how small a human is in relation to this as a human project. You can’t be the guy who builds this. You can’t even be the state that builds this. You have to be the country that builds this.” (Never mind that Hoover Dam was in fact built by a consortium of private firms headed by Bechtel-Kaiser, under precisely the sort of outsourcing/private contractor arrangement that Maddow has no time for in most other contexts — in fact, she includes a chapter in one of her books denouncing this practice.) In a sense, Maddow is correct — the Hoover Dam is an economically nonviable project from the time of its conception, and the mighty installation, visually impressive as it is, produces significantly less electricity than does a typical small nuclear power plant. Which is to say, it is a majestic boondoggle. Only politics can do that — and stay in business. And, needless to say, a “guy” attempting a project with the environmental impact of Hoover Dam would never get permission from environmental regulators, given that its construction entailed wiping out an entire local ecosystem.

So the only parts Maddow got right were the points she didn’t intend to make.

The concept that Hoover Dam was not actually built by the federal government, but was ultimately built by private companies, seemed so contrary to our usual narratives that I went and looked it up:

The Hoover Dam project was too big for any one company. So W. A. Bechtel helped form a consortium calling itself Six Companies, Inc. W. A. knew the heads of the consortium companies as friends and business associates, having been in partnerships with most of them. There was tall, lean Harry Morrison, head of Morrison-Knudsen of Boise, Idaho, and the man most directly responsible for bringing the group together; and the white-haired Wattis brothers of Utah Construction Co., the region’s foremost railroad builders. They were joined by the wry Felix Kahn of MacDonald & Kahn, a premier builder of office buildings, industrial plants, and hotels, including the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco. Phil Hart ran Pacific Bridge Co., one of the oldest construction firms on the West Coast, and was justly famous for his underwater work — a critical component in dam construction. Charlie Shea, the pugnacious, acid-tongued boss of J. F. Shea Co., was the best tunnel and sewer man west of the Rockies. And finally there was the legendary Henry Kaiser, whom W. A. had long valued for his enthusiasm and vision. W. A. Bechtel served as the second president of Six Companies; his son Steve was a member of the executive committee; and sons Warren and Ken served on the board.

Kevin is also taking no prisoners a critic, helping his local theater enforce their no cell phone rules — in appropriately dramatic style.

For my recent interview with him, click here to listen.

1 Comment

“Be prepared to love the Eagles’ Evan Mathis, even if you hate the Eagles,” Mary Katharine Ham writes.

I love Mashable.com’s self-lobotomized description of Mathis’ stunt:

Just what precisely Mathis is so pissed off about — other than just like, taxes in general, man — isn’t quite clear.

Yes, what on earth would cause him to do that?

Mashable adds, “But one thing is obvious: He’s not exactly having guilt pangs over the stunt.”

Presumably, the Eagles’ Obama-supporting owner will remind him of the futility of individual expression in a corporatist world.

Comments

Ahh, the changing face of journalism over the decades. In the 1920s, H.L. Mencken, described his vision of journalism as a fundamentally adversarial one, no matter who was in charge. “It is the prime function of a really first-rate newspaper to serve as a sort of permanent opposition in politics.”

At some point, however, that began to change, as this John McCain ad from the summer of 2008 reminds us, back when Barry seemed to totally cool and dreamy:

What wouldn’t you do for a guy like that — even if he gets a bit rough a times. He doesn’t mean it when he flies off the handle, right?

JOE SCARBOROUGH: [Reid] says he doesn’t work for Barack Obama. I think he’s wrong.

TAVIS SMILEY: Harry Reid, put down the crack pipe. You don’t work for Barack Obama? We’re all working for Barack Obama.

SCARBOROUGH: What are your thoughts? You’re going to be on Meet The Press next week, next Sunday before the inauguration. What are your thoughts as we now move closer and closer to Barack Obama being sworn in?

SMILEY: These are exciting times. When I was last year, the day after, November 5th, the day after the election, really I was excited then about what had happened and transpired the night before. As an African-american male I revel in this moment. I revel in his humanity, I revel in this victory. I love all the talk about hope and change. Here’s what I fundamentally believe, and there have been a number of examples since the election, Joe, that underscore this for me. I want Barack Obama to be a great president. I want him to be a great president. I believe that he can be a great president. But only if we help make him a great president. It is not left to his own devices, it’s not going to happen. We have to help make him a great president. And that’s not casting aspersion on him. No president who was ever great wasn’t helped in that process. There is no Abraham Lincoln without Frederick Douglas. And we could do this all day long. Every great president had people pushing them, had people helping them and encouraging them, empowering them to become great presidents. So I believe Obama can be. I want him to be. But we have to help make this guy a great president.

– “Tavis Smiley of PBS: ‘We’re All Working For Barack Obama,’” Newsbusters, January 9, 2009.

Somewhere though, the bloom fell off the romance:

NBC News Senior Investigative Correspondent Lisa Myers appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to discuss the growing AP scandal involving the Dept. of Justice secretly obtaining phone records of reporters with the Associated Press.

Myers maintained that it was unlikely that the president knew about the wire tapping because “from a political standpoint,” it would anger “one of the president’s most important constituencies, the press.” Given that, said Myers, “it’s hard to imagine they would have green-lighted this thing.”

–  “NBC News Reporter: AP Scandal Angers One Of Obama’s ‘Most Important Constituencies – The Press,’” Big Journalism, yesterday.

They are right to be angry, if a bit hypocritical given news organizations’ widespread indifference to civil liberties breaches that don’t affect them so directly. The AP records collection—by most accounts aimed at identifying a leaker inside the government—is an escalation of the administration’s unprecedented war on leaks, a war that has made journalists a secondary but no less real target of surveillance.

Comments

Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

President Obama “obviously likes giving speeches more than he does running the executive branch,” Chris Matthews said tonight.

Yes, you read that right: The MSNBC host who in 2008 felt a “thrill going up my leg” after hearing Obama speak has grown disenchanted. Tonight’s episode of Hardball saw Matthews delivering a rare, unforgiving grilling of the president as severe as anything that might appear on Fox News.

“What part of the presidency does Obama like? He doesn’t like dealing with other politicians — that means his own cabinet, that means members of the congress, either party. He doesn’t particularly like the press…. He likes to write the speeches, likes to rewrite what Favreau and the others wrote for the first draft,” Matthews said.

“So what part does he like? He likes going on the road, campaigning, visiting businesses like he does every couple days somewhere in Ohio or somewhere,” Matthews continued. “But what part does he like? He doesn’t like lobbying for the bills he cares about. He doesn’t like selling to the press. He doesn’t like giving orders or giving somebody the power to give orders. He doesn’t seem to like being an executive.”

On Tuesday’s program, Matthews similarly called Obama “a ship with the engine off.”

– “Chris Matthews sours on Obama,” the Politico, yesterday.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: The problem is there are people in this country, I don’t know the number maybe 10 percent, maybe 20 percent on a bad day, who want this president to have an asterisk next to his name in the history books, that he really wasn’t president. You know, like a guy in baseball who used drugs. They want to be able to say you know, he really didn’t have that batting average. He really wasn’t really the first African-American president. He really didn’t do healthcare. He really didn’t kill Bin-Laden. There’s an asterisk. They’ve been fighting like that, people like Donald Trump, since day one, they can’t stand the idea that he is president. And a piece of it is racism. Not that somebody in one racial group doesn’t like somebody in another race or group, so what. It is the sense the white race must rule. That’s what racism is. And they can’t stand the idea that a man who is not white is president. That is real. That sense of racial superiority and rule is in the hearts of some people in this country. Not all conservatives. Not even all right wingers. But it always come through with this birther crap and the other references and somehow trying to erase Obamacare, erase his record in history and a big part of it is bought into by people like John Boehner who is not a bad guy but he knows the only way to talk to the hard right is talk their language.

AL SHARPTON: No doubt about it.

– Chris Matthews, talking to Al Sharpton on their network home, MSNBC, as quoted in “Matthews: White Supremacy Heart of Opposition to Obama,” the Washington Free Beacon, yesterday.

Having committed thoughtcrime, will Matthews be forced to testify against himself as a radical agent of Emmanuel Goldstein? Let the Howard Kurtz-style showtrials begin in Media Oceania!

2 Comments

“Liberal Impeachment talk? It’s a Trap!,” warns blogger/radio host Peter Ingemi, aka, “DaTechGuy:”

The congress HAS to be perceived as investigating facts.  If the facts continue to go where the evidence seems to be pointing the public will demand action.

A great example of the danger of moving early was Fr. Robert Drinan (D-Mass) who introduced a resolution of impeachment on the last day of July in 1973 over the Bombing of Cambodia.  As [Tip O’Neill wrote in his autobiography] it almost blew the game:

politically , he damn near blew it, for if Drinan’s resolution  had come up for a vote it would have been overwhelming defeated by something like 400-30.  With so many members already on record as having voted once  against impeachment it would have been extremely difficult to get the to change their minds later one.

meanwhile if a vote came up and failed, Republicans, who at the time were not convinced that there was any “there there” would have said when a later resolution came up:

“Why bother?  We’ve already been through this.”

As Drinan refused to withdraw his resolution and all resolutions on impeachment are privileged the leadership O’Neill took extraordinary measures to make sure the resolution was not called up keeping one of the leadership ready  on the floor 24/7 ready to table such a resolution.  Because he didn’t want to give them the idea to move Drinan’s resolution forward.  After a long time of this he finally approached Jerry Ford who told them bluntly the White House had rejected the idea.  As O’Neill wrote:

By not forcing an early vote on impeachment, Nixon’s allies made a tremendous mistake.  In addition to winning the vote, the Republicans could have turned impeachment into a party issue which might have allowed Nixon to remain in office and blame the Democrats for harassing him, But in the summer of 1973 the White House couldn’t imagine that Watergate would end in the downfall of the president.

And that is the trap.

“The White House and their allies will do their best to wave the red flag in the hope we charge, instead we should sit back and let this scandal and the investigation cook,” Ingemi adds. Or as a commenter at the Hot Air link to Ingemi’s post writes in response:

Better yet, develop a narrative in which conservatives/Republicans are, en masse, saying things like: “We know that many, many, many people in the president’s own party are calling for his impeachment, and we certainly understand their concern. This kind of unprecedented corruption is doing real damage to the democrat party. No one trusts them anymore. So of course the president’s own party wants him impeached and tossed out of office as quickly as possible. But we are going to wait and see where these various investigations go. Like these many, many members of the president’s own party, we expect the investigations will lead us straight up to the Obama White House, straight to the Holder Justice Department, and that we’ll learn the scope of this administration’s corruption is truly staggering. But these democrats wanting to shove Obama out of there as fast as they can need to slow down so we can truly know how deep the corruption was. That’s the best way to make sure we never get another administration like this.”

Eric Holder fumbled very badly today when he lost his cool, dropped the mask, and revealed his inner liberal fascist in response to Rep. Darrell Issa, calling him “shameful” and his conduct “unacceptable” — gee Mr. Holder, are you threatening* a Congressman? That’s rather cowardly, isn’t it? And while the inner child of most leftists isn’t far under the surface, fellow Democrat Mel Watt flipped that notion on its head, bringing his tiny grandson to the hearings. The pressure is also getting to lead Obama flack Jay Carney, who brought a goofy photo montage of himself to today’s briefing, that was almost as weirdly narcissistic as his boss’s self-absorbed antics:

JAY CARNEY FOUND! BOLO canceled. Oh, crikey. He’s standing in front of a graphic of all his faces. No laughter. twitter.com/michellemalkin…

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) May 15, 2013

As even left-wing house organ Politico noted yesterday (link safe; goes to Newsbusters), “The most charitable defense offered up on background is that Obama staffers are scandal virgins, unaccustomed to dealing with a rabid press.” See also, the Washington Post-approved JournoList, of which the Politico itself has long been tainted by. Still though, that’s an odd excuse for a group led by a hardened Chicago machine hack.

But the nation should be allowed to see more of this. (Not to mention allowing the GOP to build a “highlight” reel of leftists gone wild in 2014, similar to the Democrat video trainwrecks of 2010.) One of the leitmotifs of a Bill Whittle video last year on how the left wrecked the country was “slowly…slowly…” Despite the urge to pounce as quickly and has hard as the anti-Nixon far left did in the early 1970s, that seems like a good way for House Republicans to ratchet up the pressure on the corrupt left in response:

* “Would You Believe The Administration Got Phone Records of The House Of Representatives?” Why, yes. Yes I would.

1 Comment

In attempting to explain why “Liberals Should Worry About the IRS Scandal,” Eric Liu, a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton according to his bio, seems to have a rather short memory of the past few decades:

Things got this way because from Reagan to Gingrich to Fox News and the Tea Party, right-wingers have systematically and relentlessly adopted the language and iconography of American patriotism. They’ve claimed the flag and the history of the founding of the Republic as their own.

During that time, left-wingers responded too often by walking away from the contest. They laughed off the shameless jingoism of conservatives. They made patriotism ironic, the way Colbert’s giant eagle and giant flag are meant to be ridiculous. When the Tea Party first came on the scene, progressives rolled their eyes at all the tricorner hats and colonial garb. They didn’t ask themselves how they might don the mantle of love of country. In a sense, then, those hapless IRS bureaucrats in Cincinnati were performing their questionable task in an unquestionably rational way: liberals just don’t proclaim patriotism very much any more, so it was plausible to conclude that any organization using such rhetoric while seeking tax-exempt status must be a conservative outfit.

This is trouble. When words of the nation’s creedal origins and civic identity become mere partisan code, it’s bad not only for the party that no longer has access to them; it’s bad for the nation. Anyone who cares about civic education and the integrity of democracy has to be disturbed that in the word association game of contemporary politics, “Defend the Bill of Rights” and “Respect the Constitution” sound Republican.

Yes, how did that happen? It’s not like the liberals at Time photographed themselves a couple of years ago shredding the Constitution and asking if it still matters:

Oh, right. (Err, actually, oh, left). Actually, Time magazine began thinking of conservatives as The Other even before Republican founder Henry Luce permanently left the building in 1967. In 1966, the magazine founded four decades earlier by the son of Christian missionaries killed God; at the end of 1969, it determined that “Middle America” was its collective Man of the Year, writing in utterly baffled tones at how a majority of the nation could have voted for law & order candidate Richard Nixon after witnessing the blue-on-blue horrors of 1968.

Flash-forward to the 21st century, and we find CNN, which is owned by the same conglomerate that owns Time routinely sneered at the Tea Party in 2009 and 2010. Leftwing oikophobia continued as 2012 merged into the current year; Piers Morgan, described by Jeff Zuckerman, the president of CNN (expatriated from similarly left-wing NBC) as one of the network’s “foundation brands,” sneeringly described the Constitution as “your little book,” when handed a copy on-air by Ben Shapiro of Breitbart.com in early 2013. This was only a week or so after  the New York Times ended the year by running an op-ed titled, “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution;” CBS would approvingly interview its author the following month.

If it’s true, as Liu writes, that “in the word association game of contemporary politics, ‘Defend the Bill of Rights’ and ‘Respect the Constitution,’ sound Republican,” it’s only because the left ceded those words long ago. The fact that they view their loss as merely “a game” is telling as well.

2 Comments

“The burglary occurred in 1972, the climax came in 1974, but 40 years ago this week — May 17, 1973 — the Senate Watergate hearings began exploring the nature of Richard Nixon’s administration,” George Will writes in the Washington Post, appropriately enough:

Now the nature of Barack Obama’s administration is being clarified as revelations about IRS targeting of conservative groups merge with myriad Benghazi mendacities.

This administration aggressively hawked the fiction that the Benghazi attack was just an excessively boisterous movie review. Now we are told that a few wayward souls in Cincinnati, with nary a trace of political purpose, targeted for harassment political groups with “tea party” and “patriot” in their titles. The Post has reported that the IRS also targeted groups that “criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution .” Credit the IRS operatives with understanding who and what threatens the current regime. The Post also reports that harassing inquiries have come from other IRS offices, including Washington.

Jay Carney, whose unenviable job is not to explain but to explain away what his employers say, calls the IRS’s behavior “inappropriate.” No, using the salad fork for the entree is inappropriate. Using the Internal Revenue Service for political purposes is a criminal offense.

At his Campaign Spot this week, Jim Geraghty writes, “The Mask Is Ripped Off of ‘Hope and Change,’” an open letter to the MSM:

SCANDAL ONE: Dear Media: Obama’s Indignant Benghazi Response Revealed a Lot Yesterday!

Dear friends in the media.

Come on.

I mean, come on.

You and I know what’s going with the Benghazi thing. Let me share something that I first put into play during the “was Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account hacked” debate, but that comes from watching the Lewinsky scandal, the where-did –Mark-Sanford-go scandal, the why-is-David-Wu-dressed-in-a-tiger-suit scandal, and a wide variety of wrongdoing committed by politicians:

When there is evidence of scandalous or bizarre behavior on the part of a political figure, and no reasonable explanation is revealed within 24 to 48 hours, then the truth is probably as bad as everyone suspects.

Nobody withholds exculpatory information. Nobody who’s been accused of something wrong waits for “just the right moment” to unveil information that proves the charge baseless. Political figures never choose to deliberately let themselves twist in the wind. It’s not the instinctive psychological reaction to being falsely accused, it’s not what any public communications professional would recommend, and to use one of our president’s favorite justifications, it’s just common sense.

So…

You and I both know, in our guts, and based upon everything we’ve seen in Washington since we started our careers, that there’s no innocent explanation for the Obama administration’s actions before, during, and after the Benghazi attacks.

That’s just one of three scandals Jim breaks down in his post.

Regarding another, the Obama Administration tapping the AP’s phone records, Ace of Spades’ co-blogger Drew M writes that it’s the least of the Jokers in the ever-growing Obama scandal deck (to mix playing card references)…

Keep in mind, it doesn’t appear that the AP is the subject of the investigation. What the DoJ knows is someone leaked information to the AP. The number of people who had access to that information may be relatively large but it’s not infinite. By taking the AP’s phone records and matching them to the list of people who called them with the list of people who had access to the information, you can develop a universe of potential suspects.

The AP says it’s a “roadmap” to their reporting operations. I’m more worried about people who leak a “road map” to intelligence operations.

Politically this could be a loser. People tend to not like the press and they do like catching terrorists. When people find out this is about getting to the bottom of who leaked damaging national security information to the press, I think most people we say, “go get the bastards”.

One caveat…we know this administration is power hungry and doesn’t recognize any legal or traditional limits on its powers. Might they have abused the information they gathered? Obviously. So this could turn out to be a bigger deal. But based on what we know now, it’s only a big deal because the press loves to protect themselves and their assumed privileges more than anything. Even more than they love Obama.

….But if it’s the one that p.o.’s the MSM the most, to the point where the scales fall from their eyes — even temporarily — so be it:

One of the more tense and interesting exchanges during Tuesday’s White House briefing occurred when NBC’s Chuck Todd exposed White House spokesman Jay Carney as not exactly being honest regarding a talking point involving a piece of legislation that might have protected the Associated Press from the Department of Justice seizing the phone records of 20 reporters.

Throughout the briefing, Carney kept reminding reporters that, as a United State senator, President Obama had been in favor of this “press protection” legislation, but Republicans had killed it.

Todd, who had obviously done his homework, then dropped a nuke on Carney by revealing that, in 2009 as president, Obama changed his mind and “killed” the legislation, even though at the time it likely would have easily passed through both chambers of Congress, which were then controlled by Democrats.

The video at the link is pretty astonishing to watch, as Todd, smelling blood in the water, continually lays into Carney, considering that Todd worked for the 1992 presidential bid of fellow Democrat Tom Harkin (he of the phony Vietnam combat record), and works for DNC house organs NBC and MSNBC.

But then, Carney’s been having quite a rough patch all around:

Carney insisted, was his claim that there were anti-video demonstrations outside the Benghazi compound on September 11 last year. Besides, he continued, Republicans are wrong to accuse the White House of “playing down an act of terror and an attack on the embassy,” because “the president himself” took to the Rose Garden on September 12 and told the country that the attack was an “act of terror.”

This was quite an astonishing thing for Carney to repeat, not just because the CBS transcript is available to anyone who cares to look it up but also because Carney himself claimed on September 14 that the attack “was a response to a YouTube video.” Worse, five days after that, he told the press:

Our belief based on the information we have is it was the video that caused the unrest in Cairo, and the video and the unrest in Cairo that helped — that precipitated some of the unrest in Benghazi and elsewhere. What other factors were involved is a matter of investigation.

This line was repeated at least once by Hillary Clinton, many times by Susan Rice, and, on September 26, by President Obama in his speech to the United Nations. We are thus supposed to believe that the government was so concerned about “the integrity of the investigation,” to use Carney’s peculiar words, that it removed all the suspects from public discussion while simultaneously blaming the attack on a video.

Among their many claimed sins, Republicans also drew Carney’s ire for “leaking” information “for political reasons.” “That’s their prerogative,” he sniffed. But this disgust at leaks struck a false note, given that the White House had held a secret meeting just a few minutes earlier in which it passed — “for political reasons”? — unattributable information to reporters. Just a few minutes before Carney’s on-air press conference, Politico’s Dylan Byers reported:

The White House held a “deep background” briefing with reporters on Friday afternoon to discuss recent revelations about the Benghazi investigation, sources familiar with the meeting tell POLITICO. . . . I asked [White House spokesman] Earnest to explain the meaning of “deep background,” as defined by the White House, for my readers. He emails: “Deep background means that the info presented by the briefers can be used in reporting but the briefers can’t be quoted.”

And we all know there are serious consequences when this White House is angered:

Comments

“Not Too Sharp,” quips James Taranto today:

Morgan Whitaker, a producer for NBC newsman Al Sharpton’s show, doesn’t seem to think either the murder of four Americans in Benghazi or the Obama administration’s use of the IRS to target political opponents is any big deal. She weighed in with a blog post yesterday titled “The 7 Other ‘Scandals’ That Didn’t Turn Out to Be Obama’s Watergate”: Solyndra, Fast and Furious, the alleged offer of an administration position to a 2010 Senate candidate, national-security leaks, Obama’s birth certificate, the White House’s links to MediaMutters and Janet Napolitano’s order giving work permits to some illegal aliens.

This was posted at 4:30 p.m. ET yesterday. The AP broke the story of the Justice Department’s surveillance some 20 minutes later. It’s the worst timing since the New York Times’s puff piece on unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, which ran on Sept. 11, 2001.

MSNBC President Phil Griffin told NPR in 2011 that Al Sharpton is “smart. He’s entertaining. He’s experienced. He’s thoughtful. He’s provocative, all the things I think that MSNBC is.” (And how.)

I’m sure Griffin feels that goes double for Sharpton’s producer.

1 Comment

Dr. Kermit Gosnell, a “Philadelphia abortion doctor convicted of killing three babies born alive at his grimy clinic was spared a possible death sentence Tuesday in a deal with prosecutors,” AP reports today on the ABC News Website:

Dr. Kermit Gosnell gave up his right to appeal and in return will spend life in prison. Gosnell, 72, was found guilty Monday of first-degree murder in a case that became a flashpoint in the nation’s abortion debate.

Former clinic employees testified that Gosnell routinely performed illegal abortions past Pennsylvania’s 24-week limit, that he delivered babies who were still moving, whimpering or breathing, and that he and his assistants dispatched the newborns by “snipping” their spines, as he referred to it.

Prosecutors had sought the death penalty because Gosnell killed more than one person, and his victims were especially vulnerable given their age. But Gosnell’s own advanced age had made it unlikely he would ever be executed before his appeals ran out.

Prosecutors instead agreed to two life sentences without parole, and Gosnell was to face further sentencing Wednesday: in the death of the third baby, an involuntary manslaughter conviction in the death of a patient and hundreds of lesser counts.

Gosnell has said he considered himself a pioneering inner-city doctor who helped desperate women get late-term abortions.

Of course he does. Margaret Sanger could not be reached for comment.

Note that the AP wire report appears on the ABC News Website; it was only yesterday that ABC television viewers first heard about the case:

Fifty six days after the grisly trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell began, ABC broke its self-imposed blackout and finally offered coverage. World News anchor Diane Sawyer belatedly told viewers that Gosnell was convicted on three counts of first degree murder against newborn babies, as well as on a slew of other charges. Terry Moran explained, “For two months, jurors heard often shocking, grisly testimony.” He described the details as a “house of horrors.” A house of horrors that ABC took 56 days to notice.

As the Media Research Center has aggressively documented, ABC went from March 18, 2013 (the trial’s start) through Monday afternoon with no coverage. Yet during the same time, the network devoted a staggering 187 minutes (or 70 segments) to other shocking criminal cases, such as Jodi Arias and Amanda Knox.

Just shameful.

Comments

“It’s a bad rerun of a show that was awful the first time, and yet ran far too long.” Rand Simberg writes today at PJM:

Enemies lists, IRS audits of same, cover-ups at high levels of government, an aloof president who has others do his (unspoken?) bidding — after the events of the past week, many have been comparing the Obama administration to another one that ended almost forty years ago. And while many of the comparisons of Barack Obama to Richard Nixon are indeed apt, one doesn’t have to go that far back in history to find an even better parallel.

For those of us politically aware in the 1990s, the Obama administration has come to seem like a bad rerun of the corrupt Clinton era, complete with witness intimidation and character attacks on their political opponents, stonewalling and obfuscating while claiming that their crimes are being “politicized,” false claims of “exoneration” by official reports, and, yes, even IRS audits of their political enemies. All with a sycophantic media complicit, and even incestuous and inbred, with the White House.

For example, several days ago, when the Benghazi scandal started to climb out of the grave to which the administration and its enablers in the press thought they had consigned it last fall, the first response from the president’s spokesman was that it was something that happened a long time ago, seemingly back in the Cambrian era of late 2012. As opposed, of course, to the Bush administration, which apparently remains evergreen four and a half years after its departure, at least when it comes to assigning blame for otherwise unexplainable and “unexpected” mishappenings during this one. Of course, as PJ Media’s Ed Driscoll points out, Jay Carney’s own corruption is not exactly new-fallen snow.

This was a standard tactic of the Clinton administration and its defenders, in every scandal from Whitewater and Castle Grande, to the illegal campaign donations from James Riady (who, in another case of what was old is new again, has somehow recently turned up in the new series as well). And then there was  John Huang and the Chinese donations (and others too numerous to recount in this brief piece), to L’Affaire Grand — the Lewinsky scandal.

In each and every case, the tactic would be to prevaricate, stonewall, and withhold requested documents for weeks, months or years. Then, when some evidence managed to evade the combined media/administration cover-up and come to light (such as Hillary Clinton’s law-firm billing records), it would suddenly become “old news.”

We’re seeing a repeat of other tactics as well.

Read the whole thing.

And then check out Jim Treacher, who notes that “The only difference between this week and every other week for the last 4 years is that for once we’re not the only ones paying attention.”

Speaking of which, as Moe Lane writes, guess who wrote this six years ago:

In Washington, scandals metastasize, growing and changing until we can’t remember what they were about in the beginning. A bungled burglary became a cancer on the presidency, forcing Richard Nixon to resign in disgrace. A money-losing Arkansas real estate deal led to Monica, a blue dress and Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Already, the furor over the dismissal of eight U.S. Attorneys has shifted focus from the crass but essentially routine exercise of political patronage to the essential project of George W. Bush’s presidency: its deliberate and aggressive efforts to expand and protect Executive power.

If you haven’t already figured it out, click over to Moe’s blog for schadenfreude, super-sized style.

Update: “News Anchor: IRS Targeted Me After Obama Interview.” Love the photo juxtaposition at the top of the page.

2 Comments

In 2006, Boston University professor (and PJM contributor) Richard Landes brought you “Pallywood,” which illustrated how Palestinians are experts at faking news on a Hollywood-style assembly line basis for a gullible western media that wants to believe:

Later that same year, Reuters was busted for its heavily Photoshopped image of Beirut under attack, in which Reuters’ Mideast stringer and ace Photoshop user Adnan Hajj was busted for criminal image assault with a Photoshop clone tool. An embarrassed Reuters grudgingly issued a “Picture Kill” update to the papers that rely on the wire service for its content:

And over the past decade, there have been numerous other examples of bad Photoshoppery from the Mideast region; sometimes from freelance stringers such as Hajj, sometimes from Mideast government propaganda shops.

Today, the ExtremeTech.com Website explores how, in their estimation, “the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year was faked with Photoshop:”

The photo, dubbed Gaza Burial, was purportedly captured on November 20, 2012 by Paul Hansen. Hansen was in Gaza City when Israeli forces retaliated in response to rocket fire from Palestinian rocket fire. The photo shows two of the casualties of the Israeli attack, carried to their funeral by their uncles. Now, the event itself isn’t a fake — there are lots of other photos online that show the children being carried through the streets of Gaza — but the photo itself is almost certainly a composite of three different photos, with various limbs spliced together from each of the images, and then further manipulation to illuminate the mourners’ faces.

Just looking at the photo, you can tell there’s something off. The perspective of the buildings looks weird; it seems like there’s so much unsharp mask or a similar Photoshop filter on the bald men in the front that he looks painted in, and the focus seems off on the other men in the photo:

After some extensive and (given the name of the Website) appropriately technical background on how the photo was assembled, ExtremeTech notes:

Basically, Hansen took a series of photos — and then later, realizing that his most dramatically situated photo was too dark and shadowy, decided to splice a bunch of images together and apply a liberal amount of dodging (brightening) to the shadowy regions. For what it’s worth, Hansen claims that the light in the alley was natural — and to be fair, sometimes magical lighting does occur. I think most of you will agree, though, that the photo simply feels fake — there’s just something about the lighting that sets off a warning alarm in your brain. As for why World Press Photo didn’t forensically analyze the photo using freely available, advanced, accurate analysis tools such as FourMatch or FotoForensics… who knows.

Oh, I forgot to mention the best bit: Hansen was meant to provide the Raw file for his winning photo, as proof that he didn’t significantly modify the final image — but so far, he hasn’t.

Because, as we mentioned at the top of the post, so many leftwing western news agencies want to believe. But then, modern wars — and especially postmodern wars — are fought not just on the battlefield, but inside the TV screen and Web monitor as well.

Update: Speaking of postmodern, ABC News ventures into the murky realm of “even better than the real thing” at the conclusion of their analysis of Hansen’s controversial photograph:

Ironically, the magic of Photoshop makes it possible to edit photos to look as if they had not been edited with Photoshop. Palmisano believes that in the future photographers will increasingly emphasize authenticity by using post-processing to make their images look less perfect than if they had been taken with a digital camera. The worse a spectacular photo looks, the more genuine it feels. [Ironically, this is the sort of thing that Hollywood CGI artists have been doing for the last 20 years. They frequently add simulated lens flares, camera shakes, artificial smoke elements and other techniques all designed to deliberately "dirty up" a digital special effects shot, to add verisimilitude. -- Ed]

When Paul Hansen took his picture in the Gaza Strip, another photographer was nearby. His photo must have been taken in almost the same location and at almost the same time, but it is an ordinary-looking news photo. It lacks the perfect cropping, the magical light and the debate over authenticity, but it also lacks the resonance and sympathy of Hansen’s image.

Hansen says that he wants to achieve good things with his work. Perhaps an ordinary news photo wouldn’t have been enough for that.

So the House of Stephanopoulos is entering further into “fake but accurate” territory? I thought Dan Rather and the New York Times had the lock on that defense.

Here’s an interesting Der Spiegel video (in German, but with English subtitles) with some further thoughts on how the above photo was manipulated:

And in a 2011 blog post titled “Is This Photo Ethical?” A photographer examines a 2010 image taken by Hanson of young girl shot by police after the Haiti earthquake. While Photoshop trickery isn’t discussed, photographer Eric Kim writes:

Looking at the image [of the young dead Haitian girl], it is a very emotional image that does bring great amounts of awareness to this horrible issue. However when looking at the photo below shot by photographer Nathan Weber, I feel that the story changes. Rather than having the image being a positive political tool, it looks like the photographers below are more like vultures– all trying to get the best version of the image and exploiting this horrible crime.

Yes, it’s always disconcerting to see the MSM’s sausage being made.

Comments

Wow: “Govt obtains wide AP phone records in probe,” the Associated Press claims:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.

In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know,” Pruitt said.

Perhaps Ann Coulter has the justification, at least from BHO’s POV: “Obama’s Signature Move: Unsealing Private Records,” she noted in August of last year, in an article that’s been re-linked at the Drudge Report today:

Mitt Romney presents one enormous problem for Barack Obama’s campaign: No divorce records. That’s why the media are so hot to get their hands on Romney’s tax records for the past 25 years. They need something to “pick through, distort and lie about” — as the Republican candidate says.

Obama’s usual campaign method, used in 100 percent of his races, has been to pry into the private records of his opponents.

Democrats aren’t going to find any personal dirt on the clean-cut Mormon, so they need complicated tax filings going back decades in order to create the illusion of scandal out of boring financial records.

Romney has already released his 2010 tax return and is about to release his 2011 return. After all the huffing and puffing by the media demanding those returns, the follow-up story vanished remarkably quickly when the only thing the return showed was that Romney pays millions of dollars in taxes and gives a lot of money to charity.

Let’s take a romp down memory lane and review the typical Obama campaign strategy. Obama became a U.S. senator only by virtue of David Axelrod’s former employer, the Chicago Tribune, ripping open the sealed divorce records of Obama’s two principal opponents.

Read the whole thing.

“Note to President Obama: IRS Scandal Is Why We Distrust Government,” Jonathan S. Tobin wrote at Commentary yesterday. Today’s latest Obama scandal isn’t exactly rehabilitating their reputation. Or as Erika Johnsen writes at Hot Air in response to Obama’s AP phone hack:

 This is not a good day for the White House. The IRS has been specifically targeting conservative groups; and now it looks like the DOJ has been seriously meddling into the freedom of the press? No doubt they’ll claim that it was all for the sake of national security and plugging leaks of classified information, or hey, perhaps that this was just a mix-up by some low-level Justice employees, or something… Or maybe they’re going for a, ‘Heck, let’s just overwhelm everybody and air the thugocracy scandals out all at once’-type strategy?

Which shoe drops next?

2 Comments

“Looks as though Joe Klein is back on the Narrative Plantation,” John Nolte writes at Big Journalism. “After blistering the Obama Administration over revelations that the IRS was targeting conservative groups, today Klein took his marching orders from Ezra Klein and publicly walked it all way back:”

I may have swung a bit too hard, putting Barack Obama’s Administration in the same league as Franklin Roosevelt’s and Richard Nixon’s when it comes to the Internal Revenue Service. The situation remains a major embarrassment, though.

The most important difference is that the Roosevelt and Nixon IRS depredations came from the White House. This mess seems to have percolated from the middle–the IRS’s Cincinnati office (a major facility, by the way)–up to the upper-middle. It was an overreaction, to be sure–but, as Ezra Klein explains, it was a response to a very real problem[.]

“So now Joe Klein is back in the club — back on the Narrative Plantation as a member of Ezra Klein’s JournOlist in good standing,” Nolte adds. “Now that everyone is in line and knows their place, the media can proceed to circle the wagons.”

I’d love to know how Joe was instructed to dial it back. Did anything need to be spoken, or was it simply understood? “Joe, you’re 66 years old, only a few years younger than Bob Woodward. You saw what me and the rest of the boys in the Juicebox Mafia did to him a couple of month ago, right? Shame if something like that were to happen to you…”

Update: And again (times two): “The New JournoList spin on the IRS,” as spotted by Meryl Yourish:

That’s funny. Two different articles, one in Mother Jones, one in the WaPo, yet they’re running the exact same explanation as to why the IRS targeted conservative groups filing for tax exemptions.

“I found two,”  Yourish adds. “How many more New JournoList IRS apologists can you find?” Add Klein to the list, which could keep on growing.

19 Comments

NBC, November 4th, 2007: the network, owned by GE, which makes its money selling lightbulbs, goes dark to hector viewers into going “green:”

The Atlantic today on NBC’s dismal upcoming primetime schedule: “This Is the Not-So-Bright Future of NBC:”

I just sat through NBC’s upfront presentation, which teases the new season lineup for advertisers and other assorted looky-loos, and boy, does the future not look bright for the struggling Peacock network. After clearing whole swaths of its schedule through cancellations, this could have been NBC’s chance to revitalize itself with sharp, interesting fare. But I suppose the economic realities of running a major network are such that it seemed wiser to roll out a slate of boring, predictable, almost parodic shows, none of which seem likely to do the network any good.

And speaking of National Broadcasting Karma, this also seems appropriate:

From Newsbusters, yesterday: “Chris Hayes’ ‘Easy’ Solution To Poverty: Give People Money!”

Chris Hayes is what passes at MSNBC for a progressive intellectual.

Which makes his simple-minded and manifestly mistaken proposal that much more maddening. Making a peek-a-boo video-clip appearance on today’s Melissa Harris-Perry’s show, which focused on finding solutions to poverty in America, Hayes was seen holding up a hand-written sign with his solution, reading “Giving people money: It’s actually that easy.” View the video after the jump.

Presumably then Hayes and the rest of the on-air “talent” at MSNBC are OK with this Reuters story, on advertisers giving less money to NBC, and the other TV networks:

“Advertisers have many more places to go to, so broadcasters are probably a little reticent of trying to push stronger (rates), even with this stronger economy,” Fratrik added.

Viewers’ biggest distraction is cable TV, which is churning out more hits that lure eyeballs from the Big Four. AMC’s zombie thriller “The Walking Dead” and the A&E reality show “Duck Dynasty” haul in broadcast-sized audiences. “Walking Dead” averaged 10.7 million viewers this season, more than all but the top 12 shows on broadcast TV.

Online video players such as Hulu and Google Inc’s YouTube are jockeying for ad dollars, and viewing hours are growing on Netflix, the streaming service that is making a big push into original programming with shows like political thriller “House of Cards.”

Plus, networks don’t yet get full credit in Nielsen ratings for the viewers who catch their favorite shows online.

So far this season, combined prime-time ratings on the four broadcasters declined 7.5 percent, the biggest year-over-year decline in six years, according to Nielsen data provided by Horizon Media and based on live viewing and those who record and watch the show the same day.

Hey, CNN also advised Americans to spend less in 2010; a year after NBC’s Tom Brokaw personally begged Mr. Obama to take money out of consumers’ pockets in the form of higher gasoline taxes. If they’re consuming less television, that’s all good news, right?

Comments

Phila abortionist Kermit #Gosnell guilty 1st degree murder in 3 of 4 babies.

— jdmullane (@jdmullane) May 13, 2013

That’s according to J.D. Mullane, the Bucks County Courier reporter who has been covering this trial from the onset — and who tweeted the famous photo of the empty press section of the courthouse holding the Gosnell trial.

At LifeNews.com, Steven Ertelt adds:

The jury in the murder trial of abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell returned a verdict and found him guilty on three of the four first-degree murder charges he faced.

The guilty verdict on these three counts subjects the abortion “doctor” to the potential he will face the death penalty when a second jury considers his sentencing on the convictions.

One local reporter covering the trial indicated Gosnell “heard verdict passively, with small bitter faced smiles.”

Gosnell is charged with four counts of first-degree murder for killing babies following delivery in an abortion process that involved “snipping” their necks and spinal cords. He also faces a third-degree murder charge related to the death of a woman, Karnamaya Mongar, 41, of Virginia, from a botched legal abortion. Gosnell, who has been in jail since his January 2011 arrest.

The abortionist faces 258 counts total and other charges against him include one count of infanticide and one of racketeering, 24 counts of performing third-trimester abortions and 227 counts of failing to follow the 24-hour waiting period law before an abortion so women can consider its risks and alternatives.

Allahpundit adds that Gosnell was also found guility “of involuntary manslaughter for the death of Karnamaya Mongar, the woman who died in a late-term abortion.”

More as it comes in.

Update: ” The penalty phase will begin one week from today,” Bryan Preston writes at the Tatler. “The first degree convictions could get [Gosnell] the death penalty.”

More: “The linguistic hoops the NYT jumps through here to avoid saying ‘murdered babies’ are impressive.”

Comments

That’s what the Hollywood Reporter is claiming tonight, with the caveat that she’ll remain on The View for one more year:

After more than half a century in broadcast journalism and nearly 40 years at ABC News, Barbara Walters is officially ready to retire. Walters will make the announcement herself on Monday’s edition of The View – the ABC daytime program she co-created and has hosted since 1997.

Walters, who will turn 84 in September, intends to remain on The View through next season and will step down after the season wraps in summer 2014. She’ll continue to be a co-executive producer of the show and will be involved in selecting new co-hosts to replace Joy Behar and Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Behar announced in March that she’ll depart after the current season. Hasselbeck has yet to confirm that she’s leaving the show.

As I wrote in March at Instapundit when the news first broke (either as a scoop, or an ambush from ABC to set her retirement in motion), the decade worth of train wrecks on The View — not the least of which were Rosie’s 9/11 Trutherisms and Whoopi’s Moon Landing Truther moment — will certainly tarnish Walters’ legacy when her career is ultimate assessed.

Update: “Didn’t Barbara Walters leave journalism years ago when she started on The View?” Well, yes.

Comments

In Orwell’s 1984, there’s a moment when Winston Smith, newly imprisoned in the sinister “Ministry of Love” sees O’Brien, his former conspirator entering his cell. Thinking he had be been arrested like himself, Winston says, “They got you, too!”

“Oh, they got me a long time ago, Winston,” O’Brien replies, revealing that it was he, an ambitious cog in the Inner Party, who had Smith arrested. (I’m writing this from memory; the effect is even more dramatic in the movie, when Richard Burton speaks the line in his sonorous baritone.)

The only torture that Jay Carney performs are his daily waterboard-like press conferences, and increasingly as the Obama administration spins out of control, they’ve become as agonizing for the performance artist as they are to the rest of us, his audience. But keep O’Brien’s phrase in mind, when reading Peter Wehner’s look at “The Corruption of Jay Carney” at Commentary:

So Mr. Carney obviously misled the public in November; the only question is whether he did so willfully. Yet rather than admit to his multiple misleading statements in the past, Carney blamed Mitt Romney and Republicans. The spin Carney used was transparently dishonest. He constructed a false reality to defend himself and the administration. In the process, he has merely further damaged his credibility. You can watch the whole painful press briefing here.

Once upon a time, Jay Carney was a journalist who wanted to search for truth. Now he is an Obama White House official awkwardly attempting to hide it. He is now part of a cover-up. The questions are just how wide and deep the cover-up extends, how many more falsehoods the Obama White House will employ in its defense, and whether being played for fools by a liberal administration will bother the elite media and White House press corps.

We’re about to find out.

It’s a great post, but the idea that “Once upon a time, Jay Carney was a journalist who wanted to search for truth,” rings rather falsely. Or, if it’s true, the idea of truthful journalistic searching was bled out of Carney’s reporting a very long time ago. Astride the White House podium, Carney looks like a smarmy teenager wearing hipster nerd glasses and his first grown-up suit; I was astonished to discover that he’s 47 years old, when I looked up his age before writing this post. But it makes sense, considering he was a Time-Warner-CNN-HBO employee dating back to the beginning of the 1990s, when he was writing liberal hack work such as these examples:

“In towns like Pushkino (pop. 90,000), many Russians view the tumult sweeping Moscow with more anxiety and skepticism than do their big-city compatriots…they wonder if the destruction of Soviet communism will bring them anything more than uncertainty and hardship.” — Time reporter James Carney, September 9, 1991.

“The fear that continues to fester about Bush — as we read about his periodic foreign-policy gaffes and then hear him blithely assert that what he doesn’t know he can learn from his advisers–is that at 53 he has the same cavalier attitude toward knowledge that he had at 21: he could learn what he needs to know, but he doesn’t seem to think it’s worth his time….There was something else jarring about what Bush said [about Israel]. There is no such thing as an ‘inter’-ballistic missile. These mistakes may seem minor, but taken together they suggest that Bush is still under water when grappling with foreign- and defense-policy basics.” — Time reporter James Carney playing up Bush gaffes, November 15, 1999.

“As he unveiled his new-look campaign in South Carolina last week, including Oprah-style sessions with citizens and banners heralding him as A REFORMER WITH RESULTS,  Bush tore into McCain like a pit bull let loose in a slaughterhouse.” — Time reporter James Carney describing “My Jog With George,” February 21, 2000.

“If it sounds as if George Bush is protesting too much, that’s because he’s got a credibility problem. It’s hard enough being the leader of a party that has made headlines by shutting down the government and refusing to add a few quarters to the minimum wage. The Texas Governor also has his own recent past to overcome, including a bruising primary fight that featured him cozying up to the religious right and running a singularly uncompassionate campaign against his opponent, John McCain.” — Time’s James Carney and John F. Dickerson, April 24. 2000.

In April of 2001, Dickerson and Carney would co-author a profile of Karl Rove for Time with this infamous passage:

Setting priorities and delivering bad news to friends is just a sliver of what Rove does as Bush’s top political gun. It was Rove who shaped the agenda, message and strategy that got Bush–the least experienced presidential nominee of modern times–into the White House. Now it is Rove’s job to keep him there through 2008.

Did Carney really believe what he wrote in that last passage — that a man who had previously been governor of Texas, toppling Democrat Ann Richards in the process, really was “the least experienced presidential nominee of modern times”? If so, how could he have taken such a high-profile job with a president who had infinitely less experience — and virtually none outside the leftwing political-academic bubble he spent his entire adult life marinating in, and no business experience, unlike Bush, before running for the job?

Which brings us to David Gerstman’s look at the Legal Insurrection blog, at how the Benghazi debacle punctures the Obama administration’s “team of rivals” myth. The “team of rivals” line was promoted in the summer of 2008 by Joe Klein, another Time-Warner-CNN-HBO-paid hack, as a way to add Lincoln-esque spin to describe the brain trust the otherwise woefully unprepared presidential candidate imagined he’d surround himself with. As with many of the early Obama myths processed in the JournoList vegan tofu sausage factory, it sounded nice on paper. But once he took office, the real Obama, as blogger Neo-Neocon notes in Gerstman’s post, “seems to prefer to have people around him with even less experience and expertise than he has, which is saying something.”

Or as Gerstman concludes:

Barry Rubin observes that the problem wasn’t just with Obama’s team either:

Benghazi is the perfect symbolism of the president of the United States going to sleep in the face of a crisis, the living embodiment of a 2008 election ad by his opponent about whether he would deal with a crisis that erupted at 3:00 a.m.

In order to “prove” that Obama was ready for the presidency despite his marked lack of relevant experience the MSM created a number of myths to help him evade the scrutiny they would have cast on any other candidate. One of them was that he’d surround himself with the best people. After the Benghazi hearings that myth has been effectively shattered.

If old media journalists continue to turn on Obama, it may because they’ve invested so much time and their own credibility (such as it is) building up their fantasy candidate and president, beginning around 2007. But if any of them really began their careers as “objective” journalists passionately in search of the truth, their lust for Inner Party status overtook their desire to report long ago.

Update: Moments after I hit the “Publish” button on this post, I came across an article by Brett Arends in the Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch column, on five ways why “The news media is even worse than you think,” which includes this passage:

Do you want to know what kind of person makes the best reporter? I’ll tell you. A borderline sociopath. Someone smart, inquisitive, stubborn, disorganized, chaotic, and in a perpetual state of simmering rage at the failings of the world. Once upon a time you saw people like this in every newsroom in the country. They often had chaotic personal lives and they died early of cirrhosis or a heart attack. But they were tough, angry SOBs and they produced great stories.

Do you want to know what kind of people get promoted and succeed in the modern news organization? Social climbers. Networkers. People who are gregarious, who “buy in” to the dominant consensus, who go along to get along and don’t ask too many really awkward questions.

Which sums up the JournoList crowd rather perfectly, no?

4 Comments

November 24, 2008. Curiously, Time meant their headline to be a compliment.

You can’t say you weren’t warned:

● “FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate.”

— Press release, UCLA Newsroom, August 10, 2004.

● “RECOVERY SUMMER #4: Obama: Our economy is ‘poised for progress.’ Or is it #5 now?”

— Blog post, Instapundit.com, today.

Or as a recent video at Prager University asked:

Oh, and speaking of Time, when I searched Google for the above cover, I came across three stories which chart the annual progress of how Time viewed BHO in relation to FDR:

● November 24, 2008: Time magazine publishes above cover with BHO as FDR, complete with Roosevelt’s jaunty cigarette holder, which is probably the most miraculous portion of the illustration, considering the leftwing MSM’s obsession with political correctness.

●  July 6, 2009: Time’s cover headline sagely cautions, “What Barack Obama Can Learn From FDR,” which seems more than a little odd, considering that a year ago, Time thought Obama was FDR.

● February 22nd, 2010: The metatag on a Time article, in other words, the headline that comes up when searching on Google  warns,  “Why Obama is not FDR.”

Given the moribund nature of the American economy, perhaps Time’s first assessment was more correct than they realized.

Comments

From those wonderful folks who brought you Walter Cronkite politicizing the Tet Offensive, Dan Rather and RatherGate, and Katie Couric writing Christmas poems in praise of ObamaCare comes this gem from CBS anchor Scott Pelley, speaking to Quinnipiac University:

1 Comment

James Taranto on “The New Nixon,” only this time around, “the press cheered as the IRS investigated the president’s opponents,” he adds:

Last year, the Post notes, “Tea Party groups complained . . . that they were receiving dozens of questionnaires from the IRS with regard to their applications for nonprofit tax status, probing their political leanings and activities.”

That prompted an editorial from the New York Times cheering on the IRS: “Taxpayers should be encouraged by complaints from Tea Party chapters applying for nonprofit tax status at being asked by the Internal Revenue Service to prove they are ‘social welfare’ organizations and not the political activists they so obviously are.” The Times did say the rules “should be applied across the board,” and the list of groups it wanted investigated included Priorities USA, a pro-Obama group, as well as a couple of conservative groups and Americans Elect, the failed third-party effort.

But the IRS now acknowledges that Tea Party people were right: The agency was investigating them because of their political profile. Viewpoint-based selective enforcement of IRS regulations would be a First Amendment violation even if the regulations themselves are constitutional. It is difficult to credit Lois Lerner’s claim that this was merely an error and not politically motivated. Imagine if the NAACP and the United Negro College Fund got hit with this sort of treatment and the IRS denied a racial motive while acknowledging it had deliberately chosen groups whose names contained synonyms for “black.”

Read the whole thing.

Regarding the Watergate flashbacks caused by Benghazi, in a guest post at Power Line, David Gelernter writes:

It is the Democratic Party that’s on trial today; and to a lesser extent, America’s mainstream media.  For Democrats (and especially Democratic senators) it is put-up-or-shut-up time: are they Democrats or Americans first?  Obviously their first instinct was to defend the Democratic administration.  Republicans would have done the same.  But starting with the Hayes story on the Rice propaganda points (and the neo-Soviet process that turned them from truth to lies), and then the Issa hearing Wednesday (and a recent ABC news piece focusing again on the phonied-up talking points), no honest observer can fail to suspect this administration of doing unspeakable things.  It is Congress’s duty to find out the truth.

How would Republicans act if a GOP administration were under this sort of cloud?  We know exactly how.  It was the radically partisan Edward Kennedy who proposed that a senate select committee investigate Watergate—but in February 1973, the Senate voted unanimously to create that committee.  Republican Senator Howard Baker was vice chairman, and asked the key question: ”What did the president know and when did he know it?”  Which Democratic senator will ask that question today, now that the issue isn’t breaking-and-entering but lying about four murders, including the murder of an American ambassador?  Which cabinet member will be Eliot Richardson and resign rather than continuing to be part of a coverup?  Will John Kerry rise to the challenge?

To ask the question is to answer it.

But speaking of All the President’s Men…

Update: Also at Power Line, John Hinderaker adds, “Come to think of it, this may be one more reason why Obama is so single-mindedly devoted to winning back the House in 2014: the way his administration’s scandals are multiplying, an all-Democrat Congress provides insurance against having to leave office via helicopter.”

And via the comments section:

3 Comments