Everybody and his cousin in the starboard side of the Blogosphere has linked to the Daily Caller’s first expose inside the paranoid Media Matters bunker, the sequel to their brilliant 2010 reporting on the JournoList, the self-described “non-official campaign” in the Beltway media to help elect Obama president in 2008. And speaking of which, note this in yesterday’s article:

“The entire progressive blogosphere picked up our stuff,” says a Media Matters source, “from Daily Kos to Salon. Greg Sargent [of the Washington Post] will write anything you give him. He was the go-to guy to leak stuff.”

“If you can’t get it anywhere else, Greg Sargent’s always game,” agreed another source with firsthand knowledge.

Reached by phone, Sargent declined to comment.

“The HuffPo guys were good, Sam Stein and Nico [Pitney],” remembered one former staffer. “The people at Huffington Post were always eager to cooperate, which is no surprise given David’s long history with Arianna [Huffington].”

“Jim Rainey at the LA Times took a lot of our stuff,” the staffer continued. “So did Joe Garofoli at the San Francisco Chronicle. We’ve pushed stories to Eugene Robinson and E.J. Dionne [at the Washington Post]. Brian Stelter at the New York Times was helpful.”

“Ben Smith [formerly of Politico, now at BuzzFeed.com] will take stories and write what you want him to write,” explained the former employee, whose account was confirmed by other sources. Staffers at Media Matters “knew they could dump stuff to Ben Smith, they knew they could dump it at Plum Line [Greg Sargent’s Washington Post blog], so that’s where they sent it.”

Smith, who refused to comment on the substance of these claims, later took to Twitter to say that he has been critical of Media Matters.

Smith was also a self-confessed member of the JournoList; as Glenn Reynolds notes, MMFA and the JournoList share some remarkable traits:

Of course, to the extent that Media Matters affects coverage it’s because left-leaning journos regard it as legitimate, and want to help. In this regard, like JournoList, it’s a “self-herding device.”

And like the JournoList, a way to take ordinarily mild-mannered folks and whip them into a frenzied mob.

But Ed Morrissey, the source of our headline above, wonders if the Daily Caller didn’t out-think themselves and wound-up burying the lede on their story:

The actual story here might be the reverse of how Carlson et al frame it here.  This sounds as though the White House uses Brock and Media Matters to conduct a proxy war against its perceived enemies in the news media and to push its propaganda out through the MSM.  The DC’s descriptions of attacks on reporters and media outlets who don’t fall in line would make MMFA a very valuable pitbull for Jarrett and Obama, and one with some plausible deniability, at least until now.  This should really be the screaming red flag in the article, rather than some of the salacious tidbits about Brock.

Interestingly, just a few days ago someone else connected the White House to Media Matters, along with a warning that their relationship could cost Obama the next election.  The name of that right-wing nut?  Alan Dershowitz:

Read the whole thing (both Ed’s post and the underlying Daily Caller article).

Another timely question is posed by P.J. Salvatore of Big Journalism: “Who did MMfA tick off that so many sources as of late are throwing them under the bus?

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“Remember when no one understood why ABC asked about contraception at the NH Republican debate?” William A. Jacobson writes, adding that Newt’s comeback (posted above) “was prophetic in hindsight:”

Well what do you know, about a month later the Obama administration proposes administrative rules under Obamacare which would require free contraception be provided even by religious institutions which oppose contraception on religious grounds.

It’s almost as if Stephanopoulos got the memo first. Unless, of course, you believe in coincidences.

Disney-ABC in tight message coordination with Democrats? Heaven forfend.

At the Tatler, Clarice Feldman adds, “It’s time the RNC asks [Stephanopoulos] if he coordinated this with the White House directly or through its media shills like Media Matters.  And if he did or refuses to answer or to offer a credible explanation, ABC should be booted from further debate moderating privileges.

Why should the RNC grow a spine now?

Earlier: “CNN Host Asks If Initial Outrage Over Contraception Mandate was ‘Manufactured’ to Hurt Obama.” Can you spell projection, boys and girls?

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

• “NBC’s Lauer to Obama: Can Mitt Romney ‘Identify With the Middle Class?’”

– Newsbusters, February 6th.

• “Sources connected to NBC tell TMZ … Lauer was done with Today and wanted out — but the word at the network is he will now re-sign if NBC ponies up way more than the $17 mil he’s currently making, “TMZ reported yesterday. “We’re told negotiations are now ongoing — but if NBC agrees … Lauer could score as much as $30 MILLION a year.”

Related: “Multimillionaire Chris Matthews: Is Mitt Romney ‘Just Too Damn Rich?’”  Matthews’ fortune is estimated at “$16 million with an annual salary of $5 million.”

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Forget six degrees of separation — CNN’s Roland Martin is separated by only one — very famous — person away from President Obama. During the 2008 NAACP speech by Obama’s infamous, presumably former spiritual advisor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Martin was namechecked, along with his fellow CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien (who dubbed Wright’s speech “a home run” on the air) as a “long-term friend” by Wright. Martin has also had friendly chats on CNN with Wright’s equally inflammatory colleague Father Michael Pfleger. But just as Obama threw Wright under the bus almost immediately after the aforementioned speech — with CNN quickly following his lead — when one of Martin’s Tweets hit the fan at the start of week, Martin discovered that everybody’s expendable in the MSM:

Roland Martin, tweeted on Sunday, walked it back Monday, chastened on Tuesday, suspended on Wednesday…

That’s the short version of recent events in the life of the CNN commentator and author of Speak, Brother! A Black Man’s View of America.

The tale begins on Super Bowl Sunday, when Martin tweeted:

If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!

and

Who the hell was that New England Patriot they just showed in a head to toe pink suit? Oh, he needs a visit from #teamwhipdatass.

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) took umbrage, immediately tweeting back:

@rolandsmartin Advocates of gay bashing have no place at @CNN #SuperBowl #LGBT.

The organization followed up with a statement demanding Martin’s dismissal.

As John Nolte writes at Big Journalism:

Fascistic GLAAD wins another scalp.

Over the years, CNN’s Roland Martin has said some awfully outrageous stuff about Republicans and the Tea Party — and not on his Twitter feed, but on the air at CNN. [Not to mention the rest of the country -- Ed] He’s pretty much accused us of being everything  just short of Nazis due only to legitimate policy differences we’ve had with his precious Barack Obama. As a response, the left-wing speech police — who disguise themselves as “media watchdogs” — have never (according to memory and Google) put any pressure on CNN to have Martin fired, suspended, or reprimanded.

And they shouldn’t. Martin has every right to be a racial demagogue, and CNN has every right to broadcast him. I don’t like the guy, but the thought of trying to silence him is anathema to everything I believe in. Unfortunately for Martin, the Washington Post and Politico aren’t big fans of the First Amendment and, as a result, just a few minutes ago it was reported that CNN has suspended Mr. Martin “for the time being.”

Martin’s sin? Tweeting a few childish jokes only a fascistic outlet like GLAAD could get away with pretending they are offended by.

Martin’s mistake? Martin inadvertently stepped into a trap he probably didn’t know existed, and as a result he is now receiving an invaluable lesson about today’s politically-correct hierarchy, where gay trumps black.

But a year ago, Martin himself was eager to join the rest of the leftwing MSM in its calls for a new civility in the wake of clip art that a crazed apolitical assassin likely never saw not leading to his shooting of Democrat Senator Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tuscon, in an editorial at CNN with the now ironic title, “After Tucson, will media tone it down?”

Note the first sentence in the quoted passage below:

If we are to embrace the notion of civility and humility in our discourse, that means not falling into our old habits. I was impressed that Roger Ailes, head of Fox News Channel, relayed to Russell Simmons’ GlobalGrind.com what he told his staff after the Tucson shootings: “I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually. You don’t have to do it with bombast. I hope the other side does that.”

Who knows if this edict will be photocopied and posted in the office of every Fox talk show host, and throughout its newsroom, to serve as a reminder to everyone when the nation moves further and further away from the shooting?

And he’s correct; those who vehemently oppose the views of Fox News and conservative radio hosts must also adhere to the president’s call for civility.

Maybe what we should all do is make “Remember Gabby and the Tucson 6″ buttons, T-shirts, and bumper stickers, as a way to stop someone in his tracks who chooses to get out of control.

Live by political correctness, die by it as well — or at least go into broadcasting purgatory. Or as Michael Graham asks at the Boston Herald, “What do the Catholic Church, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and CNN’s Roland Martin all have in common? They’ve all just been given a lesson in liberal ‘tolerance:’”

The most confused victim of the New Tolerance has to be CNN’s Roland Martin. All he did was send a tweet: “If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!”For reasons I don’t understand, this makes Martin a homophobe. GLAAD demanded he be pulled off the air, and his lame joke was labeled “the equivalent of cheerleading for violence against gays” in The Washington Post.

Now this isn’t David Duke. It’s Roland Martin — one of the New Tolerance thugs who has long played the race card in service of the liberal agenda.

If the left is willing to throw him under the bus, nobody is safe. Forget “Yes We Can!” Today it’s “You’ve Been Warned.”

Considering Martin’s impeccably radical chic connections, like the supine Outer Party member Parsons when he winds up in 1984′s Ministry of Love for political re-education and/or a visit to Room 101, he must have been astonished to find himself a victim of the same forces of political correctness — and correction — he’s long since championed. But then, as P.J. Salvatore writes at Big Journalism, “Nobody Expects The Progressive Inquisition.”

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Kathy Shaidle spots Timothy Noah of the New Republic (link safe; goes to Hot Air) with a bad case of the vapors over the newest revelations concerning JFK’s improprieties, in article titled “JFK, Monster:”

Afterwards, Alford says she was “deeply embarrassed,” and as she climbed out of the pool she “could hear Dave speak in as stern a tone as I ever heard him use with his boss. ‘You shouldn’t have made her do that,’ Dave said. ‘I know, I know,’ I heard the President say. Later, a chastened President Kennedy apologized to us both.” Alford believes that Kennedy showed “his darker side … when we were among men he knew. That’s when he felt a need to display his power over me.” Kennedy didn’t just have a thing for Social Register girls; he had a thing for humiliating Social Register girls. He also had a thing for humiliating his fellow Irishman, Dave Powers.

Maybe Kennedy wasn’t this much of a creep all that much (though Alford also tells of him once forcing her to take an amyl nitrite “popper” in Bing Crosby’s living room). But the poolside ritual of humiliation is not easy to reconcile with any kind of worldly tolerance for Kennedy’s peccadilloes. Perhaps the fairest conclusion to make is that Kennedy did some good things in his public life (and also some bad), but that he was capable of monstrous cruelty that’s hard to forgive and also hard to equate even with that of successors like Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon (or with any in his less polished younger brother Ted, whose own private life had plenty of dark moments but whose public accomplishment ultimately outshone JFK’s). Clinton shared many vices with President Kennedy, but I can’t imagine him ever doing anything like this.

“I can, very easily. So can my readers,” Kathy writes, dubbing Noah’s response a textbook example of liberals as “naive sophisticates:”

As a matter of fact, isn’t one of the most famous quotes about the Clintons that of the female Democrat who claimed she’d have blown Clinton, just to thank him for keeping abortion legal? [Nina Burleigh, then-White House correspondent for Time magazine -- Ed.]

It’s always surprising what liberals claim they “can’t imagine,” despite all the stubborn protestations of “backward, paranoid” right wingers.

You don’t usually have to “imagine” it, guys. It’s usually right in front of you, and you’re just refusing to see it, because we’re the ones showing it to you.

Which dovetails into a related post of mine from November of 2010:

Ann Althouse spots an endless reoccurring cliche amongst Leftwing Elites:

Welcome to my world: Dane County, Wisconsin, home of people who tell themselves they are the smart people and those who disagree with them must certainly be dumb. They don’t go through the exercise of putting themselves in the place of someone who thinks differently from the way they do. But how would it feel to be intelligent, informed, and well-meaning and to think what conservatives think? Isn’t that the right way for an intelligent, informed, and well-meaning person to understand other people? If you short circuit that process and go right to the assumption that people who don’t agree with you are stupid, how do you maintain the belief that you are, in fact, intelligent, informed, and well-meaning?

What is liberal about this attitude toward other people? You wallow in self-love, and what is it you love yourself for? For wanting to shower benefits on people… that you have nothing but contempt for.

You see this worldview manifested endlessly among the left, whenever you hear the hyperbolic phrase, “I can’t understand why anyone would be a conservative/Republican/libertarian/vote for Bush/vote for Reagan, etc.” Well, why the heck can can’t you? Is it really that difficult to mentally spend a few minutes in our shoes? We’re always asked by the left to celebrate diversity, and to try to understand those not like ourselves. How hard it can be to get a handle on why someone has a different view on say, income tax rates, transfer payments, small business, and government handouts than you do? Or why he likes to get his news from channel #360 on his DirecTV dial than say, channel #202 or #356?

Another example of this mindset can be in the title of Harry Stein’s terrific book last year, which grew out of a conversation he had with a self-described “liberal,” when Harry dared to supply the voice of reason at a dinner party in 2008 and suggest that the young would-be emperor, soul-fixer and lightworker had no clothes.

Perhaps the ultimate mote in a far leftist’s eye can be found here.

Also Related: Paul Rahe at Ricochet on “American Catholicism’s Pact With the Devil.”

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In his weekly column, Mark Steyn writes, “The president of the United States has decided to go Henry VIII on the Church’s medieval ass:”

Announcing his support for Commissar Sebelius’ edicts on contraception, sterilization, and pharmacological abortion, that noted theologian the Most Reverend Al Sharpton explained: “If we are going to have a separation of church and state, we’re going to have a separation of church and state.”

Thanks for clarifying that. The church model the young American state wished to separate from was that of the British monarch, who remains to this day Supreme Governor of the Church of England. This convenient arrangement dates from the 1534 Act of Supremacy. The title of the law gives you the general upshot, but, just in case you’re a bit slow on the uptake, the text proclaims “the King’s Majesty justly and rightfully is and ought to be the supreme head of the Church of England.” That’s to say, the sovereign is “the only supreme head on earth of the Church” and he shall enjoy “all honors, dignities, pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits and commodities to the said dignity,” not to mention His Majesty “shall have full power and authority from time to time to visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offenses, contempts and enormities, whatsoever they be.”

Welcome to Obamacare.

You know what to do next.

Related: “No one wants to believe the president of the United States or any other high governmental official would deliberately lie to the Archbishop of New York. But what other conclusion can a reasonable person reach? That Valerie Jarrett and Kathleen Sebelius made him do it?” Michael Walsh writes:

One of the problems the Right consistently has in dealing with the Left is its touching credulity in their stated motives, instead of assessing their genuine objectives. Like the Archbishop, we’re constantly taken by surprise when the entirely predictable happens. Haven’t any of the princes of the Church read the essential text on the subject of good and evil (and the deception that evil must practice in order to overcome good), Milton’s Paradise Lost?

It’s star was certainly beloved by Saul himself.

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Ace asks a question that all of us have pondered at one point or another in the career of Barack H. Obama. “Has he gone insane?” As Ace notes in his headline, “Obama’s Compromise: I’ll Just Mandate That Employers Contract With Insurers To Cover Contraception For Free, and Hence Employers Cannot Be Said To Be Paying For It:”

The revised Obama mandate will make religious groups contract with insurers to offer birth control and the potentially abortion-causing drugs to women at no cost. The revised mandate will have religious employers refer women to their insurance company for coverage that still violates their moral and religious beliefs. Under this plan, every insurance company will be obligated to provide coverage at no cost.Essentially, religious groups will still be mandated to offer plans that cover both birth control and the ella abortion drug

According to Obama administration officials on a conference call this morning, a woman’s insurance company “will be required to reach out directly and offer her contraceptive care free of charge. The religious institutions will not have to pay for it.”

The birth control and abortion-causing drugs will simply be “part of the bundle of services that all insurance companies are required to offer,” White House officials said.

So here’s how this works.

I’m an insurer. Here were your two options, before Obama’s brilliant solution:

I could cover your employees for x dollars.

If you want birth control/abortifacient coverage, we’ll add that rider for y dollars. So this option is x + y dollars.

Obama’s genius solution is:

Hey, we’ll cover your employees for x + y dollars as a baseline. But we’ll toss in abortifacient coverage for 0 dollars.

Uhhh… That x+y is what it cost to have base insurance + birth control/abortifacient coverage. All that’s being done here is that people are lying about the costs — now the insurer and the contracting party lie and pretend the base insurance cost is x + y (which it isn’t; it’s x) and also pretend the cost for the birth control coverage is 0 (which it isn’t; it’s y).

All Obama’s doing is mandating that employers enter into a contract with insurers in which both parties pretend that the base cost of the service is higher than it is, and that abortifacient coverage now costs zero dollars.

Obama’s mandate solution is now just to force the conscience-objectors to lie about it.

At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey concurs with that last sentence:

Basically, the Obama administration told religious organizations to stop complaining and get in line.  This “accommodation” only attempts to accommodate Obama’s political standing and nothing more.

Update: The LA Times’ Jon Healy calls this new position “magical thinking”:

Here’s where the magical thinking comes in. The following is from the fact sheet the White House released Friday:

Covering contraception saves money for insurance companies by keeping women healthy and preventing spending on other health services. For example, there was no increase in premiums when contraception was added to the Federal Employees Health Benefit System and required of non-religious employers in Hawaii. One study found that covering contraception lowered premiums by 10 percent or more.

Making everyone in a pool carry coverage whether they need it or not spreads the cost, saving money for those who really do need it and who’d choose to carry it if it were merely optional. But costs faced by the insurer are the same — and when the care is provided with no out-of-pocket costs, the insurer’s costs are likely to go up because more people will use it. Such is likely to be the case with contraception.

Also, let me emphasize one point that this does not address.  The government is forcing religious organizations to both pay for and facilitate activities that violate their religious doctrine.  If anyone thinks that passes muster with the First Amendment, that’s even more magical thinking than this funding shell game.

Mr. Obama has engaged in magical thinking throughout his public career. However, I’m not sure if the L.A. Times is the best source to attack him from that angle, lest anyone recall this infamous moment from the paper.

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James Pethokoukis has your scary-ass chart of the day and writes:

Tell me what U.S. consumers are thinking, Reuters:

Americans felt worse about their personal finances in early February, even as they saw a light at the end of the tunnel for the jobs market, a survey released on Friday showed. The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan overall index of consumer sentiment fell to 72.5 in early February from January’s 75.0, which was the highest level since February 2011. The latest figure fell short of the median forecast of 74.5 among economists polled by Reuters. ”This pattern of responses – less favorable current assessments and more favorable prospects – is not surprising. It simply indicates that consumers find their current situation all the harder to bear when improvement is finally in sight,” said survey director Richard Curtin said in a statement.

When you drill down into these numbers, you find out two things. First, consumers are still pretty dour. Most of the drop in the index was caused by a decline in the current conditions index, which came in at 79.6 vs.  84.2 previously. Indeed, 45 percent of respondents said they were worse off financially than a year ago, up from 41 percent in January and 39 percent in February 2011.

Second, the drop would have been much worse if not for much greater optimism about the job market, with 34 percent of respondents saying they’ve been hearing good things about employment. This, Barclays Capital notes, was the highest percentage in the history of the survey. And 32 percent said that they expected better business conditions a year from now, which was the highest reading since May. Finally, 31 percent expected lower unemployment levels in the next 12 months, which was the largest percentage since 1984.

So people think today stinks, but tomorrow will be way better.

Read the whole thing.

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“The trailer for the new film produced by Citizens United and directed by Stephen K. Bannon. ‘Occupy Unmasked’ goes deep into the ‘Occupy’ movement and exposes its origins as well as the radical ideas behind ‘income inequality’ that has become the centerpiece of the Obama re-election effort.”

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“Rick Santorum Is Right: Gas Prices Caused the Great Recession,” Derek Thompson writes at the Atlantic, though he cautions high gasoline prices were but one of several factors. It’s a fascinating post, especially considering the pro-Obama publication running it.  It was, not coincidentally, home to the MSM’s uterus detective during his most manic phase, obsessed with destroying a vice-presidential candidate who had the obvious solution to reducing energy prices — and thus jump-starting the economy:

In 2009, economist James Hamilton published a paper that retroactively forecast what an oil shock, like the one we experienced in 2007-08, would do to GDP. And guess what? His model accurately predicated much of the collapse in GDP that resulted from the Great Recession — as if there had been no housing bubble or financial crisis! The oil spike was that bad.

Still, there was a housing bubble. And there was a financial crisis. How do we account for them and still hold onto the gas story? Here’s a one-paragraph theory of the Great Recession that begins with gasoline. Cheap gas ruled in the 1990s. This encouraged families to settle down farther from the cities where they worked. In the 2000s, super-low interest rates, declining lending standards, and an appetite for mortgages on Wall Street (among other factors) further encouraged sprawl and residential development in the ‘burbs. As the price of gas went up, families stopped buying homes 30 minutes from the city. For folks shacking up in the exurbs, higher gas bills ate into mortgage money. For companies, higher energy bills shocked productivity. Classic oil-shock + housing development arrested + financial crisis = Great Recession.

There appears to be pretty strong correlation (if not causation) between national gas prices, which accelerated after 2005, and housing starts, which declined after 2005.

Say, what was different about America in 2005?

The video above provides the answer. And how did the entire elite media react in late 2008 when gas prices had temporarily cratered? NBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post all begged the Office of the President Elect in lockstep unison to tax the daylights out of energy and get those prices back into the stratosphere — and the economy stuck in the mud of Obamaville.

(Update: Video moved to top of post to avoid positioning conflict with our advertisement.)

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The weekend before the election of 2004: Walter Cronkite tells Larry King* that George Bush and Karl Rove had captured Osama bin Laden and were evidently holding him in cryogenic storage at the Ministry of Defense alongside Austin Powers, Evel Knievel and Vanilla Ice.

Flash-forward to election year 2012: “Current TV** host Cenk Uygur claimed President George W. Bush had no interest in finding Osama bin Laden,” adding that Bush was “sitting on his ass.”

Bill Clinton could not be reached for comment.

Related: “Oh my: Majorities of liberal Democrats now support drone strikes, keeping Gitmo open.” Fancy that.

* The Piers Morgan of your parents’ generation.

** No, we’re not sure what that refers to, either.

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We already know about the JournoList, and the Obama administration emailing MSNBC to “correct” them mid-show. And the Washington Post’s then-ombudsman admitted immediately after the 2008 election how deeply in the tank her paper was (and is) for the then-president elect. Now a new article at the Washington Beacon notes that the New York Times’ angel investor dropped by the Obama White House this week for a chat, which his admittedly liberal paper “unexpectedly” chose not to disclose:

The world’s richest man quietly slipped into Washington, D.C., this week for a series of powwows with top Obama administration officials – but you would not know it if you read the New York Times.

Univision’s Jordan Fabian reports that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim held a series of closed-door meetings with senior Obama officials such as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk.

Slim is worth an estimated $63 billion, and owns more than seven percent of the New York Times Company – though the eponymous newspaper of record didn’t deem it necessary to report on its partial owners’ D.C. trip. (Slim also loaned the Times $250 million last year, which earned him warrants to bump his holding in the company to nearly 16 percent.)

Often referred to as “Mexico’s Mr. Monopoly,” Slim has been accused of employing mafia-esque tactics to retain control of his 70 percent stake in the country’s telecom industry. Last week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development accused Slim’s telecommunications companies of overcharging customers and stymieing economic growth in Mexico.

Overcharging customers and stymieing economic growth? No wonder he feels so close to Mr. Obama.

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“In New York City alone, there’s about $70 billion worth of commercial mortgages — some of which have been sold off as mortgage-backed securities, naturally — coming due this year,” Kevin D. Williamson writes at National Review Online. “The national total is more than $150 billion, or a bit more than 1 percent of U.S. GDP:”

Trepp [a commercial mortgage-backed securities analysis firm] gets to the real concern here, which is that these mortgages and mortgage-backed securities are sitting on the balance sheets of a bunch of still-wobbly banks. How wobbly? About 100 banks went under last year, and about 250 are expected to go under this year. Trepp finds that, of the banks that went toes-up in 2011, bad commercial real estate accounted for two-thirds of their failing loans.

This is a textbook case for the Austrian business-cycle theory: Artificially low interest rates and loose money produce overinvestment, by both bankers and builders, in a bubble — this time, offices, apartment buildings, and retail space — that can’t be sustained once the artificial stimulation comes to an end, as it must. In this case, that malinvestment has to be worked out at two levels: At the financial level, among the lenders and borrowers, but also at the physical level: There’s going to be a lot of dark storefronts out there, with serious long-term consequences for nearby neighbors and for local real-estate markets: Foreclosures will put more property onto the market, driving down rents and subsequently making existing loans less tenable as the cashflow of commercial properties is diminished. They called the Depression-era tent cities “Hoovervilles.” The next time you see a mile of half-abandoned strip malls, think “Obamaville.”

Not as bad as 2008? Probably not — and let’s hope it is not even close. But there’s a $3 trillion commercial-mortgage market lurking out there, and a lot of CMBS investors — banks and insurance companies in particular — that Washington thinks are “too big to fail,” a problem we persistently refuse to address.

Related: “Shipping Rates Go… Negative.” I’ve seen this movie before.

More: James Lileks kicks off a new section of his sprawling Website titled “Malls of Yore.” There coming years will provide the opportunity for far too many potential additions.

Meanwhile at Ricochet, George Savage explores how brutal — and brutally slow — it can be to get a retail business off the ground in über-blue San Francisco. Satirizing the warped priorities of the “mostly violent” Occumutants he asks, “Why Not Occupy City Hall Instead?”

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In Time — which is careful to remind its delicate readers that “the views expressed are solely his own” — Charles Murray outlines some of the material in his new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010:

What makes the new upper class new is that its members not only have power and influence but also increasingly share a common culture that separates them from the rest of the country. Fifty years ago, the people who rose to the most influential positions overwhelmingly had Hank’s kind of background, thoroughly grounded in the American mainstream. Today, people of influence are characterized by college education, often from elite colleges. The men are married not to the girl next door but to highly educated women socialized at the same elite schools who are often as professionally successful as their husbands. They were admitted to this path by a combination of high IQ and personality strengths. They are often the children — and, increasingly, grandchildren — of the upper-middle class and have never known any other kind of life.

As adults, they have distinctive tastes and preferences and seek out enclaves of others who share them. Their culture incorporates little of the lifestyle or the popular culture of the rest of the nation; in fact, members of the new upper class increasingly look down on that mainstream lifestyle and culture. Meanwhile, their children are so sheltered from the rest of the nation that they barely know what life is like outside Georgetown, Scarsdale, Kenilworth or Atherton. If this divide continues to widen, it will completely destroy what has made America’s national civic culture exceptional: a fluid, mobile society where people from different backgrounds live side by side and come together for the common good.

Much truth in Murray’s diagnosis, but I can’t say much for his prescription for a cure though, as Kathy Shaidle writes, paraphrasing Murray’s solution. “Competent, responsible rich people should move next door to incompetent, irresponsible poor people, who will then supposedly be inspired by the former’s example to pull themselves up by their own Air Jordan laces:”

Murray’s startling reverse-Beverly Hillbillies “solution” to the great divide’s “problem” is his new book’s biggest “takeaway,” and not always in a good way.

Writing in The American Conservative, Rod Dreher remarked dryly:

But why, concretely, should a particular family choose to do that? Murray, a libertarian, suggests that it would make life more interesting for them. I bet it would….

Yes, no doubt life was terribly “interesting” for Helen Hill, Susan Poff, and Robert Kamin—right up to the second they were killed by the “underprivileged” ingrates they’d stooped to embrace.

(Naturally, The New York Times’ David Brooks thinks Murray’s idea is just dandy and would be even better if it was turned into a federal government program.)

Charles Murray has forgotten more about race, class, education, and intelligence than I could ever learn, so I feel deeply sheepish issuing the same challenge to him (and to David Brooks) that I would to any semi-anonymous, upper-class, bumper-stickered do-gooder preaching “zero population growth,” state-sponsored solar-powered homes, and a ban on the internal-combustion engine:

After you, sir.

Immediately after the 2004 election, Rush Limbaugh was fond of quoting this exchange between David Westin, then the president of ABC News (the initial reporting on 9/11 certainly proved a challenge to Westin, you may recall), and Tina Brown, now the editor of the Daily Beastweek, then the host of a long-since-canceled CNBC show.

RUSH: So, anyway, she’s got David Westin on the program, and she says, “David, would you have a reporter/producer live in any of these communities?” She’s talking about the red states of America here, folks. “Would you have a reporter/producer live in any of these communities and saturate themselves in these cultures so that they get more stories from those communities?”

WESTIN: I think we don’t do that enough, and I’m not just talking religious communities. I’m talking all sorts of communities across the country. I think that… You understand this, Tina, living in New York or in Los Angeles, we have busy jobs. We go into the office every day. We tend to socialize with the same people, or the same types of people, and I think it’s terribly important for journalists to get out whether it’s overseas or domestically and try to understand.

RUSH: We need more foreign correspondents in Alabama! We need more foreign correspondents north of Palm Beach County in Florida! We need embeds to go to church, find out what’s going on with these holy rollers! Ah, folks, you can’t know how much I love this.

Instead of dispatching foreign correspondents to red state Alabama, what Murray is calling for is wealthy coastal elites to “Occupy” less fortunate neighborhoods mostly in their own blue states. Living in Silicon Valley, adjacent to Palo Alto,  Marin, and the aforementioned Atherton, I can’t see that happening, well, ever. Can you?

Update: “Mitt did it all wrong” Don Surber writes, in a very much related post:

No matter who you support this year, you have to admit Mitt Romney went about becoming president the wrong way. Instead of wasting his time learning how business works and building a multi-billion-dollar company that really did save or create hundreds of thousands of jobs, Mitt should have lived off his daddy’s fortune like Jack Kennedy. Chasing skirts and molesting teenage virgin is a lot more fun than figuring out how to revive an old business.

Instead, Mitt Romney gave his inheritance to charity. Who does that anymore?

The press loves the kids of privilege — Bobby Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Jay Rockefeller and the rest of the trust fund babies — but only if they support huge government programs that transfer wealth from workers to non-workers. Remember, the press says liberals win despite their wealth while the press says conservatives win because of their wealth. The press never inquires into the manipulation of the tax code that allows wealth to transfer on to the fifth generation of a 19th century robber baron or 20th century bootlegger.

As the Professor writes, read the whole thing.™

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I have no idea whether or not Matthew Continetti’s new Washington Beacon will ultimately succeed, but he kicks it off with one helluva manifesto, which promises a little political jiu-jitsu. “What would happen,” Continetti asks, “if a website covered the left in the same way that the left covers the right?”

After hours listening to the drone of Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, or Scott Pelley, one might conclude that America is a one-party state ruled by the GOP. But in fact the Republicans have controlled just one chamber of Congress for just one year, have been outspent by Democrats in the two most recent election cycles and are likely to be outspent in the current cycle, have drawn the ire and opposition of the 10 richest zip codes in the country, and have been so inept at shaping public opinion that one of America’s premier anti-cancer organizations had to backtrack when it decided to part ways with the country’s largest abortion provider.

Meanwhile, rather than tease out the connections between the big banks, unions, alternative energy companies, entrenched market incumbents, institutions such as the Center for American Progress and its Action Fund, and the policy apparatus of the Democratic Party, the press is far happier to mock Republicans as rubes and incompetents and to cover with relish Mitt Romney’s latest gaffe.

What would happen, though, if a website covered the left in the same way that the left covers the right? What picture of the world would one have in mind if the morning paper read like the New York Times—but with the subjects of the stories and the assumptions built into the text changed to reflect a conservative, not liberal, worldview? What would happen if the media wolf pack suddenly had to worry about an aerial hunting operation?

You are about to find out. The Washington Free Beacon is here to enter the arena of combat journalism. Our talented staff will add to the chorus of enterprising conservative reporters, publishing original stories, seeking out scoops, and focusing on the myriad connections between money and power in the progressive movement and Obama’s Washington. Our research and war room divisions will supplement that reporting with context, additional materials, and breaking video. At the Beacon, you will find the other half of the story, the half that the elite media have taken such pains to ignore: the inside deals, cronyism cloaked in the public interest, and far-out nostrums of contemporary progressivism and the Democratic Party. At the Beacon, all friends of freedom will find an alternative to the hackneyed spin, routine misstatements, paranoid hyperbole, and insipid folderol of Democratic officials and the liberal gasbags on MSNBC and talk radio. At the Beacon, we follow only one commandment: Do unto them.

Hey remember all that hypocritical BS a year ago by an MSM railing against war and gun-related imagery? I think Continetti just told the MSM to shove it all up their lavalier mics.

And the timing of his new Website couldn’t be better, as an otherwise unrelated post by Peter Robinson makes clear today at Ricochet:

As recently as this past Friday, I would still have said that the single, overriding issue in this election year would be the economy.  Yet in the past 100 hours, Planned Parenthood and its pro-choice supporters in the press have savaged the Komen Foundation; the Obama administration, which might easily have backed down from its regulations forcing Catholic health care institutions to provide contraceptives in direct violation of Catholic teaching, has instead mounted a public relations offensive to insist upon its position; and the Ninth Circuit has ruled unconstitutional California’s Proposition 8, issuing its decision in language so self-righteous and so bald that it could only have been intended to insult the millions of Californians who supported the ballot measure.

As Peter writes, “Already the highest in a generation, the stakes in this election have just risen.” It would nice if the right had anything approaching parity with old media and the establishment left. Perhaps a more pugilistic tone might be a good first start.

Related: “And what is true of liberal politics is also true of liberal public policy, Jonah Goldberg writes in USA Today. “As the Obama administration has made clear to the Catholic Church, there is no neutrality, no safe harbor from liberalism’s moral vision. You’re either with us, or against us — which means we shall be against you.”

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You stay classy, Barry:

Another illustration of presidential hubris involved the Bush family. The White House put out a picture of a private meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 27 that included former President George H.W. Bush and his son, Jeb, the former governor of Florida.

The Bushes were in town for the annual black tie dinner the next night at the Alfalfa Club, a gathering of business and political elites. The two featured speakers, both intended to be brief and humorous, were Obama and Jeb Bush. The president spoke to good reviews. He left before Bush spoke.

Obama hates such dinners. Some of his aides, in particular his political adviser David Plouffe, urged him not to spend an evening mingling with the 1 percent. Yet he chose to go, and attendees said it was the first time they could recall a speaker leaving before the other side had its fun. In addition, Obama’s 87-year-old predecessor was present.

Imagine the criticism five years ago if President George W. Bush had walked out on a dinner before Hillary Clinton spoke, with Bill Clinton in the audience.

“We would have to imagine it,” Ed Morrissey writes, “because the Bushes have too much class to have pulled this stunt.”

(Headline above by this Hot Air commenter.)

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Ann Coulter goes all-in for Mitt Romney:

“you owe me and you’d better be as right-wing a President as I tell people you will be!”

– Ann Coulter on Hannity last night recounting her exchange with Mitt Romney

That’s the quote The Blaze and Mediaite are jumping on to highlight — a pundit who has taken a lot of hits for her defense of Romneycare insisting to the candidate that he really does pursue a conservative course once in government. One dares even imagine how sharp Coulter’s barbs would be for a President Romney devolving back into Massachusetts Moderation.

Another one that’s more important though is the quote I chose for the headline. “We’ve killed off Rockefeller Republicans” Coulter declares, pointing out that Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum have little ideological differences and juxtaposed with John McCain are much more conservative.

I missed the memo — Romney is in many ways a good man, and would be a far better president than Barack Obama — but then that’s not setting the baseline very high. But if only by way of RomneyCare, isn’t he the very definition of a Rockefeller Republican?

Related: Gabriel Malor at Ace of Spades on “Mitt Romney and the Tea Party Pundit.”

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At the DC Examiner, Charlie Spiering writes:

An obvious victim of CNN’s graphic-heavy election presentation, news anchor John King called Mitt Romney “Governor Mormon” last night, during coverage of the Nevada election results.

“If you look here among faith, obviously Governor Mormon is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” King said. “He’s a Mormon and he also won big among Mormons.”

Romney won the vote of 9 out of 10 Mormons in Nevada.

“Bigotry will slip out,” Glenn Reynolds writes, clearly in nowhere near as charitable a mood as Spiering. Nor should he be. A year ago, King apologized on-air for a guest using the word “crosshairs,” which for a time was a temporarily-loaded word amongst King’s fellow left-leaning members of old media — even on one that for years hosted a show with an almost identical title:

On Tuesday’s John King USA, CNN’s John King issued a prompt on-air apology minutes after a guest on his program used the term “crosshairs” during a segment: “We’re trying to get away from using that kind of language” (audio available here). This action stands in stark contrast to an incident over a year earlier where former anchor Rick Sanchez took four days to apologize for using a unconfirmed quote attributed to Rush Limbaugh.

Since King himself set the standard, clearly, he must apologize for using his own similarly potentially inflammatory language or risk being called a hypocrite.

Well, again, especially given his network’s repeated penchant for religious bigotry.

Update: As a commenter asks below, does King ever refer to Harry Reid as “Senator Mormon?”

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• “Stock Market Predicts Defeat For President Obama.”

– Headline, Investor’s Business Daily, yesterday.

• “As the probability of President Barack Obama’s reelection grows, state and local officials across the country are tallying up the potential ramifications of a second term.”

– Lede of Joel Kotkin’s Thursday article at Forbes, titled, “Who Stands The Most To Win – And Lose – From A Second Obama Term.”

Not surprisingly, I find the first scenario much more interesting to contemplate, but your mileage may vary.

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“Politico: Enough of the ‘Indignation Industry,’” Ace writes:

I wish they were serious about this. I’d sure like an end to the left’s incessant “He said a dirty word” childish tattletaling and, even worse, the silly crap we on the right respond with in kind, to make the point.

I get the reason to make the point, to notify the left of what the same rules feel like when used as a weapon against them. But despite that defensible point, I feel silly about doing it. It doesn’t feel like us. It feels like them. It feels like imbeciles who shriek at the sight of a mouse.

Jonathan Martin of Politico recently referred to the “cracker counties” of Florida (those bordering Georgia and Alabama), and the right has taken him to task for his very own Macacca Moment.

After he complained how silly that all was, now a fellow writer at Politico writes about how silly the game is, generally.

I agree. But let’s remember that going forward, huh? Let’s not just realize it’s silly when applied against a co-worker, eh?

* * * * *

Back to Politico’s point: It’s a great point. I’m glad someone in the liberal media made it.

And I expect they’ll drop what they know about the essential falseness and triviality of the Indignation Industry the next time the Democratic Party and Obama for America needs them to.

Especially given that it’s Politico, which makes its living pitting various American political factions against each other — invariably, given the Website’s liberal allegiances, using conservatives as punching bags.  It’s awfully rich of them to pretend to get offended when someone calls them on their shtick.

(And don’t miss Ace’s thoughts in the same post on why Romney is running. Romney’s reasoning as a candidate is a sort of Reader’s Digest condensed version 0f the decisions Bush #43 made in office, determined to avoid the mistakes his father made as president.)

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