Ken Berwitz

Following is excerpted from an editorial in this morning's New York Times.  Please pay particular attention to the part I've put in bold print:

Editorial

Feckless and Cruel

Published: July 30, 2010

 

In a shameful bout of election-year politicking, the House has rejected badly needed help for rescue workers and residents still suffering from the Sept. 11, 2001, destruction of the World Trade Center. What should have been swift bipartisan approval of a plan for medical and economic compensation turned into an ugly political brawl.

The House action was an insult, especially to the tens of thousands of ordinary citizens who pitched in selflessly for weeks in the cleanup, and have since developed grave illnesses from the toxic dust and debris of ground zero. Their needs were pushed aside as lawmaking degenerated into a game of election-year chicken.

The Democratic leadership, cowed by the Republicans’ relentless campaign-focused bluster no matter what the bill, foolishly ordered limited debate. That meant they had to accept an impossible two-thirds vote for approval. Republicans then voted no in near lock step. Mayor Michael Bloomberg was correct in pronouncing a pox on all as the bill fell short, 255 to 159.  

 I'll make my point short and sweet: 

That 255 - 49 vote total is correct.  But, due to accidental oversight I'm sure, the Times - while saying that "Republicans then voted no in near lock step - didn't mention the actual distribution of yeas and nays by party.

So in the spirit of openness and full disclosure, I will.  Yea votes:  Democrats - 243, Republicans 12.  Nay votes:  Democrats 4, Republicans 155.

Don't bother to break out your calculator; I'll do it for you.  98.4% of the Democrats voted yea, and 92.8% of Republicans voted nay.

The last time I checked, 98.4% is higher than 92.8%.

So which party does the New York Times single out as voting "in near lock step"? 

Then they wonder why people call them biased.......

Ken Berwitz

Don't you just love it when someone gets caught in their own BS?

This time it is New York Times reporter Brian Stelter.  I'll let Matt Lewis of www.politicsdaily.com fill in the details:

Brian Stelter, who reports on TV and digital media for The New York Times, sent out a tweet the other day that drew lots of attention.

As Stelter tweeted,

 

"Fox, as we all know, has biggest audience in prime time. But among African Americans, it's smallest -- 29k vs. 134k for CNN, 145k for MSNBC."

 

This of course, played into the "Fox is racist" meme, and, not surprisingly, Stelter's words were retweeted many times (and also inspired several media blogs to further discuss Fox News' lack of diversity).

Interestingly, though, the media site where Stelter primarily blogs (New York Times' Media Decoder) suffers from the lowest percentage of African-American readers (4.6%) when compared to comparable media sites like Mediaite (5.8%), Gawker (6.4%), Mediabistro (9.2%), etc., according to Nielsen Media Research.

Maybe he should have checked that first?

(In case you're worried that I might be making the same mistake, according to Nielsen, Politics Daily has a larger percentage of African-American readership (7.7%) than Stelter's blog -- and also has a larger share of the African-American readership than other prominent, comparable political sites).

Whoops....

Maybe Mr. Stelter would like to tweet out his condemnation of the New York Ti....er, you don't think he'll do that?

Y'know, I think you just might have a point.

Ken Berwitz

Yesterday, President Obama toured a couple of Detroit auto plants. 

At a GM plant, he sat in a "Volt", Chevy's new electric/gas hybrid car, and drove it a few feet.  He then declared it "the car of the future".

Scott Johnson of powerlineblog.com (along with Edward Niedermeyer of the New York Times, believe it or not) takes this incredibly ridiculous claim apart with surgical precision.  You can read the entire blog by clicking here.  But let me give you a key excerpt:

According to Obama, the Volt is the car of the future. That might be true if we apply the model of Obamacare to the automobile industry. I doubt it otherwise. Edward Niedermeyer's New York Times op-ed column declared the Volt an electric lemon. (The Times even supplied a sarcastic illustration depicting the theme of Niedermeyer's column. What's happening here?) Niedermeyer introduces information necessary for the kind of analysis that is warranted, but which Obama spared his audience:

Quantifying just how much taxpayer money will have been wasted on the hastily developed Volt is no easy feat. Start with the $50 billion bailout (without which none of this would have been necessary), add $240 million in Energy Department grants doled out to G.M. last summer, $150 million in federal money to the Volt's Korean battery supplier, up to $1.5 billion in tax breaks for purchasers and other consumer incentives, and some significant portion of the $14 billion loan G.M. got in 2008 for "retooling" its plants, and you've got some idea of how much taxpayer cash is built into every Volt.

There you go.  The Obama version of a car of the future. 

Billions upon billions of dollars we don't have, showered on everyone that had anything to do with its creation - both foreign and domestic - resulting in an inferior hunk of junk which, at $41,000, is so much more expensive than a comparable fully gas-powered car that you would have to be out of your mind to even consider it.

Great going guys.  What will the next new car of the future be?  A wind-driven sedan for $51,000? 

Just push it to the intersection and hope for a breeze.....

Ken Berwitz

Just in case you have forgotten how fraudulent this administration has been with its "saved or created jobs" scam, please read, and watch, this report from ABC News, dated November 18, 2009:

Why Was White House Website Riddled With Errors?

November 18, 2009 10:54 AM

On Monday night, we reported on errors we found on the website set up by the White House to track the number of jobs created or saved by the economic stimulus program.  The website was riddled with reports of jobs in places that didn't even exist.  That report prompted anger on Capitol Hill, and defensiveness at the White House.  On last night's broadcast, our Chief Congressional Correspondent Jon Karl took another look at the stimulus confusion.

(IF YOU HAVE TROUBLE VIEWING THE VIDEO, JUST CLICK HERE)

Ken Berwitz

Wasn't it just last week that the Obama administration and its various reciters of the party line were telling us about the "Recovery Summer"?  Joe Biden certainly used that description often enough, didn't he?

Well, now the data have come out.  And guess what: the "Recovery Summer" has magically become the "Bush Recession".

Funny how political BS changes when reality becomes public knowledge.......

The Wall Street Journal has something to say about this in today's editorial commentary on its web site.  I'm posting key excerpts below, but do yourself a favor and read the whole thing, every word.  (The bold print is mine):

Americans say they are underwhelmed by the economic recovery, and yesterday's report of 2.4% growth in the second quarter met their expectations. A recovery that should be accelerating after the long and deep recession has instead downshifted into slower growth.

 

About the best that can be said is that the report showed no signs of a looming "double dip" recession.

 

The irony is that businesses and consumers have been fixing their balance sheets even as the government has been doing the opposite. States and localities have deficits of nearly $100 billion, while the federal hole will be close to $1.4 trillion for the second year in a row.

 

This implies higher taxes, which Democrats in Washington are promising to deliver on January 1, and that's only the first installment. So just as Americans are putting themselves in the financial condition to start investing and spending more robustly, the Obama Administration will suck tens of billions out of the private economy. This is not the way to nurture a recovery that is weaker than it should be.

 

A robust recovery would be building momentum, especially with historically easy monetary policy continuing. Instead this one is plodding along at a rate that won't create enough new jobs to sharply reduce the 9.5% unemployment rate. The Obama Administration, in its Keynesian confusion, is simultaneously saying the economy is so weak it needs more spending "stimulus" but also strong enough to absorb a huge tax increase.

 

The message of 2.4% second quarter growth is closer to the opposite: The epic government stimulus has failed to produce the robust expansion the White House promised, and the prospect of higher taxes and more regulation is inhibiting the private animal spirits needed for growth to accelerate. Americans may have to wait for November for Washington to get that message.

Unbelievable.

I wonder what this shamelessly dishonest bunch will call the tax hikes when they hit:  The "Bush Taxes"? 

As crazy as that sounds, who knows?  They have continuously lied to us about the economy for a year and a half -- while our wonderful "neutral" media largely have given them a free pass on doing so.  With a history like that, why not try again? 

Heck, I'm sure Joe Biden won't have any problem with the new terminology. 

The 2010 elections cannot come fast enough.  And that goes double for 2012.

Ken Berwitz

I just read a fascinating article by Sean Hao, writing for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.  It talks about how the "stimulus package" has affected Hawaii.

Let me show you an excerpt, and then we'll talk about it:

More than half of the jobs directly saved or created in Hawaii via federal stimulus spending continue to be in the government, rather than the private sector, according to data released yesterday.

There were 3,580 jobs pegged to the massive federal program during the second quarter. Fully 1,931 of the jobs were with state and local government, according to data released by Recovery.gov and the state.

When jobs indirectly saved or created are included, the stimulus program has created or saved 13,000 jobs since it began in the spring of 2009, according to previously released data from the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Overall, about $341 million has been spent locally since the spring of 2009 on capital improvement projects, tax breaks, unemployment insurance and food stamps. During that period, total nonfarm jobs statewide were down from 599,000 in March 2009 to 593,000 at the end of June. Statewide jobs hit a peak of 627,000 in early 2008, according to the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization.

Without the stimulus, the jobs picture could be much worse, said UH economist Byron Gangnes. The loss of 13,000 jobs today would equate to a roughly 2 percentage-point rise in the statewide jobless rate to about 8.5 percent, he said.

"We don't know where we'd be today if we didn't have those jobs," Gangnes said. "Should we have expected more? I don't think so.

"The program was never that big," Gangnes added. "You would have had to do a lot more tax cutting and more spending to get the economy back to full employment."

So far the state has been awarded $1.1 billion in stimulus money. Much of the stimulus money is paying for highways and bridges, transit systems, clean-water projects, public housing improvements and affordable housing.

So let's see:  1.1 billion dollars in stimulus money is claimed to have "saved or created" 13,000 new jobs.  What a bargain:  only $84,615 per job!

But wait:  how many actual NEW jobs were created?  If we assume that there are about as many "saved" as created (and, yes, I know that "saved" jobs are not quantifiable and can be whatever the administration dreams up), the actual cost per new job is $169,230 each. 

How can anyone quibble with a great result like that?

I think my favorite part of the article is when the University of Hawaii economist says we shouldn't have expected more, the program was never that big. 

Only in politics and academia is spending $168,230 apiece, to fund jobs which surely pay just a fraction of that amount per year, called a success.

Do you think it's a success? 

I have a great idea.  Why don't you register your opinion about what a "success" it is on election day.

Ken Berwitz

Weiner.  You can pronounce it WEE-ner, like a limp little hot dog, or WHY-ner, like someone who whines. 

Of course you can also just call him Anthony Rumpelstiltskin -- because sometimes it is so hard to tell the difference between the congressperson and the story character.

Yesterday was a case in point.  Weiner was furious that Republicans didn't pass a piece of legislation which the Democratic majority a) wrote and b) disallowed them to propose amendments for.  In other words, they were intentionally shut out.  Weiner, you see, could not fathom why the opposition would object to such a pleasant, agreeable situation.

And how, specifically, did Weiner react?  See for yourself:

Nice going, Rep. Weiner.  Very collegial.  Very professional.  Very mature.

Rumpelstiltskin would be proud.

Has anyone see these two in the same place?

Ken Berwitz

Charles Rangel is going down.  That seems to be inevitable. 

But what about Nancy Pelosi?

As Speaker of the House it was Pelosi who championed Rangel for years, even though his ethics violations were coming to light, one after the next.  It was Pelosi who installed Rangel as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, knowing that she was putting a serial tax cheat in charge of taxes.  And it was Pelosi who left him there for years, until the heat became too great even for "lady ethics" and she finally, grudgingly, had him "temporarily"step down .

To quote Michelle Malkin, from her latest column:

There is nothing sudden about the entitlement sclerosis that took hold of (Rangel's) career.

 

And there is nothing ethical about the Democratic enablers who have shown their own long pattern of indifference or disregard for clean, open, transparent government.

 

In March, Pelosi was minimizing Rangel's mountain of alleged transgressions by pooh-poohing that "it was a violation of the rules of the House. It was not something that jeopardized our country in any way."

 

GOP Rep. Mike McCaul, a House ethics investigative subcommittee member, begged to differ. "Credibility is what's at stake here, the very credibility of the House itself," he said at the hearing announcing the baker's dozen of ethics charges.

 

Echoing Pelosi's nonchalance, Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters sniffed that "many members" of the House are as habitually sloppy and apathetic toward House ethics rules as Rangel.

FYI:  Ms. Malkin goes on to discuss the effort to somehow exonerate Rangel on racial grounds - as dishonest and disgusting a ploy as there can be, given Rangel's behavior.  I urge you to use the link I've provided above and read all about it.

What does this all mean?  Ask former Boston Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner.  Despite Buckner's impressive 20 year major league career, he will always be remembered as the guy who muffed a ground ball and allowed the Mets to come back and win the 1986 world series.

And, despite 40 years as a politician and a once- impressive record, Charles Rangel will always be remembered as an ethical swamp on legs, who had to leave the house of representatives - one way or another - in disgrace.

If there is any justice in the world, Nancy Pelosi should be just as remembered for enabling Rangel to do it.

Ken Berwitz

Who has "ownership" of the war in Afghanistan?  Is it President Bush, who got rid of the taliban government, closed al qaeda's training camps, and kept things that way with a troop total that never got about the high 20,000's? 

Or is it Barack Obama, who declared Afghanistan a "war of necessity" (i.e. he agreed it should be fought), has quadrupled the number of our troops there, and is now overseeing dramatically more combat fatalities in that hopeless anal cavity of the world than we ever had under Bush?

Here is the first part of an Associated Press article which gives us the latest situation there.  Warning:  It is ugly:

KABUL, Afghanistan – Three U.S. troops died in blasts in Afghanistan, bringing the death toll for July to at least 63 and surpassing the previous month's record as the deadliest for American forces in the nearly 9-year-old war.

 

In Kabul, police fired weapons into the air Friday to disperse a crowd of angry Afghans who shouted "death to America," hurled stones and set fire to two vehicles after an SUV was involved in a traffic accident that killed four Afghans on the main airport road, according to the capital's criminal investigations chief, Abdul Ghaafar Sayedzada.

I hope you took advantage of the link I provided and read not just the couple of paragraphs above, but the entire story. 

Tell me:  Does this look like the Obama model is working?  Does this look like it is yielding better results than President Bush attained with a fraction of the troops and a fraction of the casualties? 

Are you pleased with what President Obama has done regarding Afghanistan, and think it is superior to President Bush's strategies?  Or do you wish that we could go back in time and revert to how Mr. Bush handled things?

Finally, do you have any doubt whatsoever that, if our wonderful "neutral" media starts attacking President Obama for his conduct of the war (how's that for a big "if"?), Mr. Obama will find a way to blame it all on President Bush?

And whose fault is this?  Ultimately, it is ours.  We voted this unqualified, incompetent Chicago machine politician into the White House, along with a huge Democratic majority in both houses to second his actions.  Now we are paying for it.  Full price.

The 2010 elections cannot come soon enough.  And that goes double for 2012.

Ken Berwitz

For three months we all have "known" that BP is solely responsible for the Gulf of Mexico oil rig disaster.

But now there is new information indicating that the coast guard not only may have contributed to the disaster, but may have been its prime cause.

These explosive revelations came to light in a report issued by the Center for Public Integrity.  On Tuesday.  

It is now Friday.  How much have you heard about this?  Anything at all?  If not, many thanks to our wonderful "neutral" media for its excellent, successful effort to keep it from you.

Ed Morrissey, writing for hotair.com, has culled some of the most important information from this report.  I will show you just the beginning - but Morrissey's entire piece is an absolute must-read:

Did the government cause the Gulf spill?

posted at 9:30 am on July 30, 2010 by Ed Morrissey

The generally accepted view of the Deepwater Horizon disaster has focused on the blowout preventer and the non-standard procedures BP conducted just before the explosion and fire.  However, most of the damage and the main source of the spill came from the collapse and sinking of the DH platform rather than the initial explosion.  A new report by the Center for Public Integrity, based on testimony from people on scene and Coast Guard logs, contains evidence that the platform sunk because of a botched response from the Coast Guard, which failed to coordinate firefighting efforts and to have the proper resources to fight the fire:

 

The Coast Guard has gathered evidence it failed to follow its own firefighting policy during the Deepwater Horizon disaster and is investigating whether the chaotic spraying of tons of salt water by private boats contributed to sinking the ill-fated oil rig, according to interviews and documents.

 

Coast Guard officials told the Center for Public Integrity that the service does not have the expertise to fight an oil rig fire and that its response to the April 20 explosion may have broken the service’s own rules by failing to ensure a firefighting expert supervised the half-dozen private boats that answered the Deepwater Horizon’s distress call to fight the blaze.

When do you suppose our media were planning to tell us about this?  When BP decides to sue for the cost it has incurred, on the grounds that the Coast Guard has admitted a significant level of blame - which, I would think, is an obvious possibility? 

What does it take these people to honestly report the news?

And, for those of you who still accept mainstream media as a last-word source of news, is this the straw that finally breaks the camel's back? 

If not, why not?

Ken Berwitz

Yesterday I speculated that there is a sexual component to leftist radio and TV host Ed Schultz's obsession with (successful, attractive, well-to-do) congressperson Michele Bachmann. 

Trust me, I don't think the same vibes exist between him and Lynn Samuels.

Lynn Samuels is a hardline leftist who, these days, does a talk show on satellite radio.  And she takes exception to the fact that Schultz called on Rangel to resign.

Here, straight from her show and guaranteed verbatim, is Ms. Samuels' delicate, diplomatic way of putting it:

"Do you know what that fat fuck freak phony liberal sack of shit Ed Schultz said? Well you couldn’t know, because he doesn’t go on here ‘til 3, (bu)t I hear him at noon.  He thinks Charlie Rangel should resign.

"This is the new thing in Washington. You know, our Charlie Rangel from New York. Our beloved Charlie Rangel.

"So he didn't pay some taxes. You went through the entire House of Representatives, out of 435 people I would bet you that 300 of them at the very least didn't pay some form of taxes they were supposed to pay. They're out to get Charlie Rangel.

"But that fat fuck freak Ed Schultz says he should resign"

Ladies, if you're ever at a singles bar and you find yourself attracted to a guy there, don't use that as a pick-up line.

If Schultz answers in kind (maybe he already has) I'll try to find the quotes and let you know about it.

Ken Berwitz

From the Boston Globe:

Senator John F. Kerry yesterday acknowledged for the first time that he mishandled the political fallout from questions about taxes on his new $7 million yacht berthed in Rhode Island, but insisted that he always intended to make the $500,000 payment once he had registered the boat in Massachusetts. “Our fault,’’ the Massachusetts Democrat said in an interview. “I don’t think I dealt with it fast enough, effectively enough. There’s nobody to blame but myself for that.’’

Ken Berwitz

You may find this a bit hard to believe but, according to a Reuters article (excerpted below) President Obama needs to "repair damage to his relationship with the black community".

I mean it.  That's what the article is saying.  Here, let me show you:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama sought on Thursday to repair damage to his relationship with the black community caused by his administration's firing of an African-American government official.

A political fracas erupted last week after Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod was forced to resign when conservative media depicted her as anti-white because of a speech she had given.

Obama later said his administration had jumped the gun and offered Sherrod her job back after a full airing of her speech showed her remarks were taken out of context.

In a speech to the National Urban League, a major civil rights organization, Obama underscored his regret for the incident, calling Sherrod an "exemplary woman."

"She deserves better than what happened last week," Obama said. He said the episode was "a bogus controversy, based on selective and deceiving excerpts of a speech."

"Many are to blame for the reaction and overreaction that followed these comments, including my own administration," said Obama, who made history when he became the nation's first African American president.

The audience gave Obama a friendly reception and he made several jokes, including mentioning how his job was turning his hair gray.

Let me get this straight:  President Obama was "damaged" in the Black community because he fired a Black official? 

Remember, the report doesn't say he was damaged because of an unfair firing - like, for example, the eminently unfair, and almost certainly illegal, firing of Gerald Walpin last year during a corruption investigation of Kevin Johnson, a big-city mayor who is one of Mr. Obama's key Black supporters.  No damage to repair there.  

No, this article's premise is that he has to repair the damage caused by firing a Black official. 

This insults and demeans Black people.  It assumes that if Barack Obama fires someone who happens to be Black, he has to answer specifically to "the Black community".  Not to the voters in general, but to voters who share the same skin color as the fired official.

Did Mr. Obama try to repair damage to "the Jewish community" after firing Gerald Walpin?  Did he speak before a specifically Jewish group to explain himself?

Racism comes in many forms.  But just about all of them consist of setting one group apart from the others and putting them in a special category, either positive or negative (usually negative).

Does this incident fit the definition?  You tell me.

Ken Berwitz

When do "hundreds of protestors" - which, protest-wise, is nothing with nothing - gain lead-story status on a major network's news show?

Tim Graham has the answer.  Here it is, excerpted from his latest blog at newsbusters.org:

“Anger in the streets and we’re there for the protests,” ABC anchor Diane Sawyer teased in making reaction from a few opposed to Arizona’s immigration enforcement efforts her top story on Thursday night. She led:

“Emboldened by a judge's rebuke of that law yesterday, hundreds of opponents of the crackdown took to the streets today. But the state's unyielding Governor stood by the law.” ABC’s Barbara Pinto touted over video which included a protester waving a Che Guevara flag:

 

Demonstrations started at dawn – hundreds of protesters, dozens of arrests, tempers flaring. Tensions are running high here outside this jail, where protesters have gathered and it's turned into a standoff with sheriff's deputies who are trying to push their way out of the building. Demonstrations were loud, disruptive, but mostly peaceful.

 

After a clip of a woman complaining “Joe Arpaio has picked the easy targets, the day laborers. Let's go after the real criminals and stop wasting our money,” Pinto fretted: “This afternoon, Sheriff Arpaio launched one of his controversial crime raids, targeting illegal immigrants.” She concluded with a warning: “Tonight's rally intended to send a clear signal to lawmakers and to Governor Brewer from those who think even a partial law is too much.”

Is it just me, or did Diane Sawyer and ABC News turn a small, noisy, rowdy protest into some kind of seminal moment that it very definitely was not?

But I'll bet Ms. Sawyer and her cohorts at the network would bristle at any suggestion that this kind of reporting is biased.

The best thing I can say about ABC's sorry performance is that, maybe, biased reporting has become so commonplace there (and at CBS and NBC), so second-nature, that they don't even realize they're doing it anymore.

Ken Berwitz

This one immediately goes to the "you can't make this stuff up" hall of fame. 

From the UK's Telegraph:

Tokyo's 'oldest man' dead for 30 years

A man listed as the oldest living male in Tokyo died some 30 years ago, city officials said after his body was found mummified in his bed.

 

Published: 9:29PM BST 29 Jul 2010

Police visited the home of Sogen Kato at the request of ward officials updating their list of centenarians ahead of Respect for the Elderly Day in September. Kato was born July 22, 1899, which would have made him 111.

Japanese welfare officials have tried to meet Kato since earlier this year, but his family members repeatedly chased them away, saying Kato was well but didn’t want to see anyone, said Tomoko Iwamatsu, an official at Tokyo’s downtown Adachi Ward, where Kato lived.

Officials grew suspicious and sought an investigation by police, who forced their way into the house Wednesday. Police said the mummified body believed to be Kato was lying in his bed, wearing underwear and pyjamas, covered with a blanket.

His granddaughter told investigators Kato holed up in his room about 30 years ago after declaring he wanted to be a living Buddha, police and Tokyo officials said. They believe Kato died soon after that.

Tokyo police were investigating possible crimes on suspicion Kato’s family received pension money of the man and his dead wife.

“His family must have known he has been dead all these years and acted as if nothing happened,” said Tokyo metropolitan welfare official Yutaka Muroi. “It’s so eerie.”

There's an old joke about a woman who goes to the butcher store for a pound of chopmeat.  The butcher says "That will be $4.99".  The woman says "What?  The store on the next block only charges $3.99".  The butcher says "Then go buy it there for $3.99".  The woman says "Because they're out of chopmeat".  And the butcher says "Lady, if I was out of chopmeat, I'd only charge $2.99".

The parallel is that if we knew dead people counted as being alive, then Adam would be the oldest living man.

Hey, I just realized that the day before he was created, had to be Adam's eve.

And I'd raise Cain if I was Abel.

Ugh.  This is enough to make a very elderly Japanese man groan -- assuming he is alive, that is.

Ken Berwitz

Shirley Sherrod now says she is going to sue Andrew Breitbart.

For what?  No one knows.  But she's suing anyway.

Here are the particulars, via an excerpt from 's article at thehill.com:

Sherrod to sue Breitbart

By Eric Zimmermann - 07/29/10 01:10 PM ET

Shirley Sherrod said Thursday she will sue conservative activist Andrew Breitbart.

Breitbart originally published the edited video clip that seemed to show Sherrod admitting to discriminating against a white farmer. The unedited video showed Sherrod was recounting an event in which she eventually helped the farmer save his land and considered it a lesson in putting race aside.

Asked during an appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists convention whether she would take legal action against Breitbart, Sherrod responded, “I will definitely do it,” according to CNN.

“At this point, he hasn’t apologized. I don’t want it at this point, and he’ll definitely hear from me,” she added.

I have not seen a response yet from Mr. Breitbart.  But I would not at all be surprised if he found a way to thank her for this asinine threat.

What is she going to do?  have him put in jail for running an edited clip -- which he used to indict her audience rather than her? 

If a judge found merit in a lawsuit over an edited video clip, every network, including the networks that haveso clearly formed their version of the Shirley Sherrod fan club, will be vulnerable to countless lawsuits.  

Plus, if there ever were a trial, Sherrod would presumably have to justify the race-based comments she made further on in her speech.  Maybe Sherrod would be forced to explain why she and her husband personally stand to gain $300,000 for "pain and suffering" from the Pigford vs. Glickman lawsuit, when the average payout is so much lower.  And, possibly, her husband's overtly racist comments from last January might make it into evidence as well.

Do I sound less than confident that this genius is going to seriously pursue a legal action against Andrew Breitbart?  If so, goood.  I'm communicating well today.

My guess (and it's not a prediction, it's only a guess) is that, with great fanfare, she will file suit.  And then, down the road, with as little fanfare as possible she will drop that suit.

We'll see......

FURTHER THOUGHT: 

If Shirley Sherrod wants to sue someone, why in @&^#% isn't she suing the Obama Administration? 

Andrew Breitbart isn't the guy who told her to pull over to the side of the road and resign, a member of the Obama administration did.

How come Sherrod isn't suing Tom Vilsak?  Or, more to the point, Barack Obama.  Did either of them so much as ask her for her side of the story before booting her booty out of the USDA?

An edited film clip did not fire Shirley Sherrod.  They did.  But she's not interested in going after them, is she?

You have to wonder why.

Could this (gasp!) be political?

Ken Berwitz

It may seem a bit strange to suggest that Ed Schultz has the hots for Minnesota congressperson Michele Bachmann.  But given his mega-obsession with her, it's hard not to at least consider the possibility.

How else do you explain why he goes off on Bachmann for being a media hound, while relentlessly featuring her on his show?

This excerpt from Jeff Poor's blog at newsbusters.org tells the story:

On his July 29 program "The ED Show," Schultz once again attacked Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn. This time this wizard of smart attacked her for loving to get "her mug out there." But if that's a crime then Schultz is an accomplice. 

"Well, that's Michele Bachmann said, she wanted to create a ‘receptacle' for the Tea Party and so, this might be the first thing in the ‘receptacle,'" Schultz said. "I think she is doing it to stay visible. She loves getting her mug out there, she loves the visibility. She was rather an obscure congresswoman until she made an asinine comment on ‘Hardball with Chris Matthews' about investigating members of Congress. That pretty much put her on the map, Roy."

Perhaps that put her on the map in Schultz's view, but he's done his part to keep her there. According to a tally of "The Ed Show" episodes compiled from a Nexis search since July 29, 2009, Bachmann has been a subject of Schultz's scorn 71 times.

Can't you feel the sexual tension?

I wonder if Schultz sleeps with a picture of Ms. Bachmann under his pillow....

Ken Berwitz

Charles Rangel is in deep excrement.  And that goes double for his party and its leadership

Read this excerpt from today's article at the New York Times web site and see for yourself - but please pay special attention to the last paragraph, which I've put in bold print:

WASHINGTON — The House ethics committee laid out 13 charges of House rules violations against Representative Charles B. Rangel on Thursday, and began the process for a public trial on the charges.

 

The move came after Mr. Rangel, a veteran congressman, failed to reach a settlement to avoid the rare and potentially embarrassing proceeding before the committee gathered at 1 p.m.

 

Mr. Rangel’s lawyers continued to hope they could still settle the case.

 

The charges against Mr. Rangel, a Democrat from Harlem, include multiple breaches of the House ban on accepting gifts of more than $50 and of the requirement that members act at all times in a way that reflects creditably on the House.

 

Committee members struck a somber but determined tone in their brief public meeting, expressing affection for Mr. Rangel while at the same time saying they needed to uphold the integrity of Congress, especially given its dismal standing with the public.

 

“Credibility is exactly what is at stake here — the very credibility of the House of Representatives itself before the American people,” said an ethics committee member, Representative Michael McCaul, a Republican of Texas.

 

The charges involve four areas: Mr. Rangel’s solicitation of contributions to a school to be named in his honor at City College of New York; his errors and omissions on his House financial disclosure forms; his acceptance of rent-stabilized apartments in Harlem, including one for his campaign office; and his failure to report and pay taxes on rental income on a beach villa he owns in the Dominican Republic.

 

Mr. Rangel did not appear at the meeting on Thursday, but has submitted a written response to the charges.

 

The fact that the case has gotten this far is a remarkable event for the secretive ethics committee. The last time the House held a public trial of a member was in 2002, after Representative James Traficant, Democrat of Ohio, had been convicted criminally of accepting bribes. Mr. Traficant was expelled from Congress and served a prison term.

 

With Democrats worried that they might lose control of the House during elections this fall, many party officials urged Mr. Rangel to spare them the public ordeal of a trial. Three Democratic members have called for his resignation and dozens have returned his campaign contributions. Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California has declined to speak out in support of Mr. Rangel, who has been a friend and ally for years, saying only that the ethics process should be allowed to run its course.

I genuinely do not know how Rangel can avoid resigning.  Does he really want to go out with the last - and lasting - public image of a man so corrupt his own party members have run from him, almost certain to be censured on the house floor and quite possibly as a convicted lawbreaker?  I guess we'll find out.

And how can Rangel's biggest fan, Nancy Pelosi, explain away his continued presence on house committees?   Can she keep hiding in plain sight?  I doubt it.  She'll have to cut the umbilical cord and remove him from them all.

What a mess.  And it is all self-created by this arrogant, corrupt shell of a formerly impressive man.

My advice to Mr. Rangel is pretty basic.  He should do himself a favor - and his party an even bigger favor - by resigning forthwith.  And good riddance to him.

Ken Berwitz

How scared is the left of the Tea Party movement?

Scared enough so that in Florida, and now in Michigan (and I'm 100% sure there are other places as well) they are creating phony-baloney "Tea Party" slates to try and fool people into voting for candidates whose views are opposite of theirs.

Warner Todd Huston, of www.publiusforum.com, has the specifics:

Fake Michigan Tea Party Acting Spoiler for Republicans?

July 29, 2010 | Filed

-By Warner Todd Huston

 

Back in May I posted a report on what seemed to be a fake tea party group circulating petitions in the state of Michigan to get themselves recognized as an official political party.

 

The group circulating the petition, Progressive Campaigns, Inc., had long-time connections to the Michigan Democrat Party and at that time no one in the various Michigan tea party groups had any knowledge of this new so-called Tea Party petition effort.

 

Now the Detroit Free Press is reporting that a United Auto Workers union member named Mark Steffek has filed papers with the state announcing that this so-called Tea Party has had a “convention” and is fielding a slate of candidates for the 2010 elections.

One thing is odd about this supposed slate of candidates from this new “Tea Party” political party, though. It appears that the only places that the new party is fielding candidates just happens to be in districts where Republicans just might pick up a seat.

 

That’s right the only place that this new party is fielding a candidate is where their interference as a fake “tea party” candidate might cause the Republican to lose and the Democrat to retain a seat.

 

I’m sure this is all just an accident… right?

 

Obviously this fake Tea Party is a Democrat dirty trick fronted by a union hack organized to defeat insurgent Republicans in a year when the GOP is growing in support. This is proof that Democrats don’t care about what voters want, proof that Democrats don’t much care to win elections legitimately, proof that dirty tricks, lies and subterfuge is Democrat’s stock-and-trade electoral style.

 

I am hopeful that the voters in these Michigan’s swing districts will see through the lies come November.

FYI, you have to get to the last paragraph of the Detroit Free Press article to find out that "...the nominations support suspicions the new party is a project of the state Democrats.". 

Democrats, of course, deny this - though the "tea party" candidates appear not to be involved with the actual Tea Party movement, they are offering virtually no access for media to interview them, and they are concentrated in places where siphoning off Republican votes is likely to change the election outcome. 

Can you spell L I A R S? 

Let's hope, for the sake of simple fairness, that media in the Detroit area fully expose these frauds, and that Republican candidates use them as a campaign issue against their Democratic opponents. 

If ever a state which boasts the Motor City needed a major backfire, this is it.

Ken Berwitz

Who fired Shirley Sherrod?

Musta been the media.

Excerpted from an article at the Associated Press:

NEW YORK – President Barack Obama blames the media for creating a "phony controversy" over racial remarks by a black Agriculture Department official that were posted on the Internet. His administration ousted the employee, but then apologized and offered to rehire her.

In an interview on ABC's daytime talk show "The View," Obama says the media often seek controversy, not the facts. But he acknowledged that the forced resignation of Shirley Sherrod could also be blamed on those in his administration who overreacted.

Sherrod's firing could also be blamed on his administration?  COULD ALSO be blamed? 

Who does this delusionary think called Ms. Sherrod and demanded her resignation?  Rupert Murdoch?  Roger Ailes?

Does this man accept the blame for anything that happens in his administation?  Ever?

Ken Berwitz

Is it possible that the Department of Justice, overseen by pathetic toady and Obama sock-puppet eric holder, values convicted felons over our country's military - especially the brave men and women who risk their lives to protect our interest overseas?

Read this excerpt from today's editorial in the Washington Times, then you tell me:

Obama Justice Department outrages never cease. The politically charged gang led by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is more interested in helping felons vote than in helping the military to vote. Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican, has put a legislative hold on the already troubled nomination of James M. Cole to be deputy attorney general until the attorney general ensures full protection for voting rights of our military (and associated civilian personnel) stationed abroad. The senator is right to raise a ruckus.

Mr. Cornyn co-authored a 2009 law mandating that states mail absentee ballots to military voters at least 45 days before the election. Yet, as former Justice Department lawyer Eric Eversole first reported in The Washington Times last week, the department seems to be encouraging states to apply for waivers so they won't have to follow that law. More than 17,000 Americans serving overseas were denied the vote in 2008 - but, presumably because military personnel are thought to lean conservative, the liberal Obama administration is in no hurry to correct the situation.

The Justice Department is so unenthusiastic about military voting that its website still lists the old requirement for a shorter 30-day military voting window, rather than the current law mandating 45 days. On the other hand, the Justice Department has no legislative mandate whatsoever to involve itself with helping felons to vote, but its website devotes a large section - 2,314 words - to advising felons how to regain voting privileges..

There are the facts.  Are they clear enough?  Could they be clearer?

But, as per usual, our wonderful "neutral" media - Washington Times obviously excluded - are not reporting this information.  If you didn't read the Wash Times or this blog, would you know a thing about it?

When Alberto Gonzalez was the Attorney General under President George Bush, we knew virtually everything he did in virtually real time, and it was reported with a clearly negative frame of reference.  

By contrast, when it comes to eric holder no outrage is too great, no action is too appalling.  He has been given an unconditional free pass on it all.  Even when one of his actions is mentioned - his lawsuit against the state of Arizona for example - it is usually because the media have come up with a rationale, however lame, to explain it away. 

And since holder's clear preference for felons over military is pretty much impossible to rationalize, it is buried.  No news here, sheeple, just move on, move on.

That said, however, though I am highly pessimistic it is conceivable that the festering boil known as eric holder can be lanced.  Maybe a major-league drubbing in the 2010 elections will force President Obama to reconsider some of the things he has done, and maybe this will somehow include holder's tenure as AG. 

But I doubt it.

Without media riding herd on holder, he's probably home free.  And with 400 or so graduates of the "journolist" school of reporting still at work, don't count on that happening any time soon.

But listen to them squeal like stuck pigs if you call them biased.

Alan Grayson, the national joke who was elected to congress from the Orlando area, is at it again.

Excerpted from an article in today's Orlando Sentinel:

WASHINGTON — If U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson were a rock star, his latest PR blitz — a DVD sent to tens of thousands of Central Florida residents — would be called Grayson's Greatest Hits.

The 90-minute disc features video highlights from his first term in office, including one of him grilling Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and another in which the Orlando Democrat preaches on the need to teach schoolchildren about the U.S. Constitution.

The DVD comes wrapped inside a mailer covered with promotional slogans: "Congressman Alan Grayson, Hard at Work for You," "He works hard. He pays attention. He gets things done," and "Video DVD Inside: Watch Congressman Grayson in Action!"

In many ways, it's the perfect campaign video — with one key difference.

 

 Thanks to perks given to all members of Congress, it's not Grayson's campaign but taxpayers who footed the nearly $73,000 bill to produce and mail the DVD to 100,000 homes in Grayson's district of Lake, Marion, Orange and Osceola counties.

It's a stunt that drew howls from Republicans, who complained that Grayson was abusing the congressional privilege of franking that allows lawmakers to send taxpayer-paid newsletters and other mail to residents.

"This is an outrageous abuse of taxpayer dollars, and it goes to show that Alan Grayson is completely out of touch with Central Florida," said state Rep. Kurt Kelly of Ocala, one of seven Republicans looking to unseat Grayson this fall.

"This is just ridiculous behavior. What congressman would do this in the face of a huge budget deficit?" he asked.

Grayson said he doesn't see the video as self-promotional and that its intent was to show residents how the sausage is made in Washington.

"Unless you glom onto C-SPAN, you don't have sense of what congressmen do on a day-to-day basis," Grayson said. "I told people in my district that I would try to be a watchdog, and I think they have a right to know whether I have kept that promise."

When pressed, however, Grayson did acknowledge that his office selected clips that make him look good.

"I'm an elected official. Do you think it's my job to put out misinformation or negative information about myself?" he asked.

My conclusion is short and sweet:  If the voters of Grayson's district do not remove him from office in November, they deserve him.  The problem is that we get stuck with him too.

Enough.  Please send him packing.

Ken Berwitz

The Shirley Sherrod incident:  it has taken us on quite a journey.

First I (and countless others) thought that Ms. Sherrod was a racist because there she was, on a video clip, telling us how, as a USDA official, she intentionally withheld the help she should have given a farmer because he was White.

Then I (and countless others) saw the subsequent part of that video clip, in which Ms. Sherrod said this was a transformational moment which caused her to reconsider and see poor people the same way whether they were Black or White.  For this, I (and countless others) apologized for thinking bad thoughts about her.

After that, however, I (and relatively few others, since a lot of our wonderful "neutral" media decided it wasn't important enough) saw other parts of the video where Ms. Sherrod demonstrated  that, her earlier claims notwithstanding, race was still front and center for her.  I also heard a race-laden commentary made earlier this year by her husband Charles.

So where does this all come out?

Columnist and commentator Larry Elder has an opinion on the subject that I think you'll find well worth reading.  Here it is, excerpted from his latest column:

But what about the rest of Shirley Sherrod's NAACP speech?

 

She made this observation about those who opposed ObamaCare: "I haven't seen such mean-spirited people as I've seen lately over this issue of health care. Some of the racism we thought was buried. Didn't it surface? (Audience responds approvingly.) Now, we endured eight years of the Bushes, and we didn't do the stuff these Republicans are doing because you have a black president."

 

So the self-proclaimed colorblind woman attributes legitimate opposition to the government takeover of health care ... to racism.

 

And what motivated Breitbart to post the out-of-context excerpt? Was Breitbart erroneously, but in good faith, using it to hold the NAACP to the same standard the organization asks of the Tea Party? Not according to Sherrod. She told CNN: "I know I've gotten past black vs. white. He's probably the person who's never gotten past it and never attempted to get past it. ... I think he would like to get us stuck back in the times of slavery. That's where I think he'd like to see all black people end up again. ... I think that's why he's so vicious against a black president, you know. He would go after me. I don't think it was even the NAACP he was totally after. I think he was after a black president."

 

This from someone who's "gotten past black vs. white"?

 

Her husband, the Rev. Sherrod, spoke this year at the University of Virginia School of Law. In the half-hour excerpt posted on YouTube, he talks about the evolution of the black struggle for freedom and equality and about his personal experiences with prejudice and brutality. He said he found inspiration from the Rev. Martin Luther King's vision of a society that judges people by the content of their character. But the Rev. Sherrod later said: "Finally, we must stop the white man and his Uncle Toms from stealing our elections. We must not be afraid to vote black, and we must not be afraid to turn a black out who votes against our interests." He provided no example, explanation or elaboration.

 

Breitbart erred in not viewing the entire NAACP speech. But neither this nor the past racist experiences of Shirley and Charles Sherrod justify giving them a pass for their own racist comments. 

Bottom line:  Shirley Sherrod (and her husband Charles) is not post-racial.  Not by a long shot.  And there are very strong reasons that the apology I and so many others gave her should be rescinded.

What do you think?

Ken Berwitz

Here is Mr. Bozell's letter to the editor of the Washington Post:

Dear Mr. Brauchli:

The JournoList scandal is getting worse every day and The Washington Post is at the center of it. Blogger Ezra Klein ran the operation and at least three other staffers were members. (Blogger Greg Sargent claims he wasn’t a member after he joined the Post.) In addition, at least one member of Slate and two from Newsweek, also owned by Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, were members.

The almost constant revelations of political activism and journalistic conspiracy raise an enormous number of questions about Post policies, professionalism and ethics. As a conservative, and therefore a member of the movement JournoListers sought to demonize, I feel Post readers are owed full disclosure.

Any understanding of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics makes clear this list and the Post’s involvement violate a number of ethical guidelines. In fact, much of the code seems to have been ignored. Here are just a few examples from the code.

“Journalists should:

·    “Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting,”
·    “Recognize a special obligation to ensure that the public's business is conducted in the open and that government records are open to inspection,”
·    “Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived,”
·    “Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.”

There is only one way for the Post to move forward from this fiasco – through transparency. You need to be forthright about the Post’s failings and give readers enough information so that we know just how serious this really was and what can be done to restore your paper’s credibility.

As Post Ombudsman Andy Alexander said recently about your “Top Secret Government” series: “Over the years, The Post has revealed classified information when it feels disclosure is in the public interest.” It is time for the Post to live by the expectations it sets for others. Here is a list of 20 questions, we would like the Post, Klein or both to address

1)    How many Washington Post staffers were part of JournoList and, if there are any currently unnamed, who are they?

2)    Will the Post be transparent and either release or order its staffers to release their contributions to the list?

3)    Will the Post release the names and affiliations of all those on the list or have its staffers do so?

4)    Did the Post know about JournoList when Klein was hired and that it was a “center to left” group? If yes, what does that say about the Post’s claims of neutrality?

5)    Did actions on JournoList violate the Post’s ethical guidelines?

6)    Has the Post revised or added any ethical guidelines as a result of this scandal?

7)    Will the Post permit staffers to belong to or operate such lists in the future?

8)    Does the Post often embrace “off the record” e-mail conversations with hundreds of people at a time?

9)    Was Klein’s supervisor(s) on the list and were they monitoring what went on?

10)    Has the Post examined the possibility that JournoList impacted Post news coverage?

11)    How much did the Post look into JournoList before hiring Klein?

12)    Were Klein and the other Post members of the list using it and posting to it on company time? If not, when were they doing so?

13)    Did Klein and the other Post members write to the list using company equipment and offices?

14)    Was Klein aware that some were using the list to boost the Obama campaign, such as adviser Jared Bernstein?

15)    Did Klein attempt to enforce a rule against campaigning and, if so, how?

16)    Did Klein post written guidelines for all members of the list? If so, what were those guidelines?

17)    Klein had said on The American Prospect on March 17, 2009: “There are no government or campaign employees on the list.” That has been proven false. How did he try to monitor this issue? Were there other members of the Obama campaign and administration on the list?

18)    Did Klein ban anyone from the list?

19)    Has Klein or any other Post staffer (other than Dave Weigel) offered to resign because of their contributions to the list?

20)    When Klein shut down the list, did he delete the list? If not, will the Post order him to release it so that readers may decide for themselves?

I eagerly await your response.

Sincerely,



L. Brent Bozell III
Founder and President
Media Research Center

There it is. 

Now, how come other "journalists" at other media venues aren't asking the same questions and demanding answers?

Why do you suppose?

Ken Berwitz

This AP photo is of someone, quite possibly an illegal, protesting Arizona's immigration law.

My reaction?  If that's what you think of the USA, why are you here? 

Go back to your heaven on earth in Mexico. 

And if you still find it so bad there that it is worth jumping the border and being an illegal in the USA (which, if you are an illegal, is what you did do to be here)?  Hold a Mexican flag up with a nazi sign and see how it goes over.

Ken Berwitz

Today, Massachusetts passed a law which says that - if enough states pass similar legislation so that they comprise an electoral majority -  it will give all its electoral votes to the candidate who gets the most votes nationwide, regardless of how the citizens of the state have voted.

By doing so, Massachusetts joins my state of New Jersey (thank you ex-governor Corzine), Maryland, Illinois and Hawaii. 

What does this mean? 

Suppose a candidate runs on a platform which favors issues important to "flyover country" far more than those which are of greatest concern to the northeast and wins the most individual votes.  It means that, even if a vast majority of Massachusetts voters reject that candidate, he/she will get all of their electoral votes.  Ditto for New Jersey and Maryland.  All their votes will go to someone who tells them in so many words he will be working against their interests.

This is supposed to be better than the present system, which recognizes each state as an individual entity with its own set of issues and concerns?  Yeah, right.

Look, I'm no fan of the electoral college.  I consider it antiquated and, frankly, ridiculous.  But I am a big fan of the electoral system, which gives each state a value equivalent to its population and, in a presidential election, adds up the electoral votes for each candidate.  There's nothing at all wrong with that. 

If the argument is "one person, one vote", the answer is that this the way it works already -- for each state individually. 

But since Massachusetts wants to become part of a national collective when it comes to presidential votes, I wonder if it would like to apply that philosophy to other areas as well.

Illustratively, gay marriages are legal in Massachusetts, but almost nowhere else.  Would the state like to change its laws to go with the majority on that one? 

And Massachusetts has higher taxes than almost any other state.  Since a majority of states have lower taxes, would it be willing to summarily revise the tax code to, say, the national average?  I thought not.

I guess the idea is just great -- sometimes.

The last time I checked the USA is still a democratic republic in which the constitution guarantees that, other for than a number of specifically defined instances, each state operates individually.  Personally, I'd prefer to keep it that way. 

But if Massachusetts wants to voluntarily give up its status as an individual state and subordinate itself to what the rest of the country says - even if the rest of the country is at odds with the wants and needs of its citizens - so be it. 

Have fun, guys.

Ken Berwitz

Every once in a while I update my weblog, and today is the big day.

I've made a couple of changes in the TO THE LEFT and TO THE RIGHT lists.  But the big difference is that I have added an "IN THE MIDDLE list with four entries.

Before anyone starts arguing with me about whether these four are truly in the middle, let me cheerfully acknowledge that you may have a point.  I've put them there not because their neutrality is pure as the driven snow, but because they are at least somewhere near the middle and provide at least some coverage of both sides.

If you have any heartfelt suggestions for further revising the lists, I'm open to hearing (well, reading) them.

Ken Berwitz

Today a Democrat-appointed federal judge blocked implementation of the key parts of Arizona's new immigration law, one day before they were to have gone into effect.

Not surprisingly, the people who care about border security are enraged and the people who do not care about border security are delighted.  But what about our media?  Where are they? 

The media, one would think, should be entirely neutral on this matter.  That is what media are supposed to be.  Whatever they think as individual citizens, when they are putting out journalistic material it should be down the middle.

Now that we've travelled through Fantasyland, let's try hitting reality.  The following excerpt is from a blog by Tim Graham, at newsbusters.org, quoting a Media Research Center analysis:

The TV networks have aggressively demonstrated their dislike of Arizona’s state law “cracking down on illegal immigrants,” a law that “pits neighbor against neighbor.” An MRC review of morning and evening news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC from April 23 to July 25 found the networks have aired 120 stories with an almost ten-to-one tilt against the Arizona law (77 negative, 35 neutral, 8 positive).

 

The soundbite count was also tilted over the last three months -- 216 to 107, or an almost exact two-to-one disparity. Network anchors and reporters sided against defenders of border control and championed sympathetic illegal aliens and their (usually American-born) children. In 120 stories, they never described “immigrants rights activists” as liberals or on the left.

Does that look "down the middle" to you?  Me neither.

Sadly, this is what our once proud mainstream media has descended to. 

Maybe that is why they eventually disbanded the journolist.  With reporting like this, who needs it?

But listen to them squeal like stuck pigs if you call them biased.

Ken Berwitz

Is the UK's David Cameron a complete moron? 

I'm not sure, but I have to admit the evidence is strong.

There are several articles which take Cameron apart for the amazingly dumb speech he made, yesterday, to the President of Turkey.  Two of the best are by Barry Rubin at pajamasmedia.com (who asks, bluntly, if he has gone "full idiot") and Melanie Phillips at newenglishreview.org.

To give you a taste of Cameron's, er, thinking process, here is an excerpt from Ms. Phillips' article in which he talks about Israel and Gaza:

Cameron attacked Israel over Gaza, which he called a ‘prison camp’. This is vile rhetoric, of the kind associated with those attempting to bring Israel down through a process of delegitimisation.

Why did Cameron ignore the evidence of the markets full of produce in Gaza, the restaurants, the Olympic-size swimming pool? Was this ignorance or malice? Why did he ignore the fact that Israel allows hundreds of tons of supplies across its border with Gaza every week?

Has Cameron even looked at a map? Does he not know that Egypt has a border with Gaza which it keeps far more tightly sealed than does Israel? If Gaza is a prison camp, why did he not condemn Egypt for making it so but singled out only Israel?

Why didn’t he condemn the severe travel restrictions on Palestinians imposed by Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon? Why didn’t he condemn Lebanon for denying Palestinians living there the right to own property, qualify for health care, or work in a large number of jobs? And while we’re asking, what about Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, who reportedly begged Obama not to lift the Gaza blockade? Why didn’t Cameron condemn him too for seeking to maintain Gaza as a ‘prison camp’?

Why did Cameron utter no word of condemnation of Hamas for its exterminatory rocket and human bomb attacks on Israelis? Or does he think that to condemn Hamas is also to show prejudice towards the Religion of Peace? Why, if he really thinks Gaza is a prison camp, did he make no condemnation of the Hamas for throwing Gazans off the tops of buildings, using Gazan civilians as human shields and burning their children’s holiday camps down to the ground?

Let me tell you;  this man is as sharp as a matzoh ball.  Not that he'd be likely to know what a matzoh ball is --my guess is that if anyone offered him one he'd ask if it was the only edible part of the matzoh.

Well, in fairness to UK voters, the choice was to be led by Gordon Brown or David Cameron -- which is a little like choosing between gout and crohn's disease. 

I'm not sure which of the two Cameron is.  But I would not give you an argument if you told me he has significant elements of both.

Ken Berwitz

Every time I think that the eric holder-run Department of Justice can't get any worse, I am proved wrong.

Read this excerpt from an article at Fox News (and just about nowhere else) to see for yourself:

The Department of Justice is ignoring a new law aimed at protecting the right of American soldiers to vote, according to two former DOJ attorneys who say states are being encouraged to use waivers to bypass the new federal Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act.

The MOVE Act, enacted last October, ensures that servicemen and women serving overseas have ample time to get in their absentee ballots. The result of the DOJ's alleged inaction in enforcing the act, say Eric Eversole and J. Christian Adams — both former litigation attorneys for the DOJ’s Voting Section — could be that thousands of soldiers' ballots will arrive too late to be counted.

"It is an absolute shame that the section appears to be spending more time finding ways to avoid the MOVE Act, rather than finding ways to ensure that military voters will have their votes counted," said Eversole, director of the Military Voter Protection Project, a new organization devoted to ensuring military voting rights. "The Voting Section seems to have forgotten that it has an obligation to enforce federal law, not to find and raise arguments for states to avoid these laws." 

Adams, a conservative blogger (www.electionlawcenter.com) who gained national attention when he testified against his former employer after it dropped its case against the New Black Panther Party, called the DOJ’s handling of the MOVE Act akin to “keystone cops enforcement.”

“I do know that they have adopted positions or attempted to adopt positions to waivers that prove they aren’t interested in aggressively enforcing the law,” Adams told FoxNews.com. “They shouldn’t be going to meeting with state election officials and telling them they don’t like to litigate cases and telling them that the waiver requirements are ambiguous.”

The MOVE act requires states to send absentee ballots to overseas military troops 45 days before an election, but a state can apply for a waiver if it can prove a specific "undue hardship" in enforcing it.

Sen. John Cornyn,R-Texas – who co-sponsored MOVE – wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on July 26 saying he is concerned that the Department of Justice is allowing states to opt out of the new law. Click here to read the letter.

Isn't it enough that holder is giving a free pass to the new black panther party thugs?  Isn't it enough that he is suing to stop Arizona's new immigration  law on the grounds that it is a federal jurisdiction, but has no plans to sue any sanctuary city which welcomes illegals?  Does he have to defecate on our military too?

And what does holder's boss, Barack Obama, have to say about this, besides nothing?

Can we move up the 2012 elections?  Please?

Ken Berwitz

Why are Democrats looking into the abyss this midterm election year?

Consider these links, all of which I found (among others) at www.drudgereport.com. 

CBO BOMB: 'Deficits will cause debt to rise to unsupportable levels'...

Cost of debt skyrocketing...

---

No criminal charges for NY Gov Paterson...

Lobbyists, unions paying Rangel's legal bills...

Ethics chairman denies meeting privately with Rangel...

---

PRIORITIES: Obama Skipping Historic Boy Scout Jamboree for Fundraisers, 'VIEW' Taping...

Any questions?

Ken Berwitz

Since virtually all mainstream media are continuing to cover this story up, I am continuing to blog about it.

Here, excerpted from his article at politico.com, is writer, and non-journolist*** member, Roger Simon's take on what it was and what it did.  His words are in rust, mine are in blue.  See if you notice a difference in our relative outlooks:

Until recently, there was a semisecret, off-the-record organization called Journolist. It was a listserv, which is a bunch of people who sign up (if allowed) and then get the same e-mails and can reply to everybody on the list.  Correct.

Journolist was founded by Ezra Klein in early 2007, when he was 22 and working for the liberal publication The American Prospect. Klein continued running it when he went to The Washington Post in 2009. The Post is a mainstream publication, but Journolist was limited to those “from nonpartisan to liberal, center to left.”  Translation:  no one from the other side was allowed.  And since Ezra Klein is a hardline liberal, beloved by the folks at MSNBC which has him on their shows more or less regularly, you can imagine what he characterizes as “nonpartisan to liberal, center to left”.  

Klein determined who would get on Journolist — political reporters, academics, think tank members, left-wing bloggers — and it grew from a manageable 30 members to a pretty unmanageable 400. There was no censorship, but if Klein felt you had gone too far, he would tell you to stop it. You could be threatened with expulsion, but nobody was ever expelled.  In other words, it was a clearinghouse for leftward journalists to compare notes and decide what was and wasn’t going to appear in their stories.  Lovely.  Very professional I’m sure. 

The first story revealing the existence of Journolist was printed by POLITICO in March 2009, but while the names of a few members (including three people at POLITICO) were revealed, and some talked about it, most would not. (I was never a member and learned about it when the public did.) No actual e-mails were printed.  The article, written by Mike Calderone (which you can read by clicking here) is actually pretty good.  And pretty damning too, since it clearly indicates how influential this insular leftward group was to individual members.  But then, as now, mainstream media didn’t pick up on the “vast left wing conspiracy” to let their readers/viewers know about it, did they? 

Daily Caller, run by Tucker Carlson, got hold of many Journolist e-mails and printed the most provocative, which to some gave every appearance of a left-wing conspiracy to slant news coverage in favor of Barack Obama. Journolist posts by Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel, who was helping cover the conservative movement, that were critical of conservative icons, including Matt Drudge, prompted Weigel to resign.  Every appearance?  This is just cosmetic?  You’re kidding, right?

The result was explosive, and Klein closed down Journolist, while denying there was anything evil about it. “If people had been getting together and deciding on a message and then publishing that message, that would have been clearly unethical, and I would not have allowed it, and it didn’t happen,” Klein told me Tuesday.   Nah, not at all.  That’s why Eric Alterman said “For me, it’s enormously useful because I don’t like to spend my time reading blogs and reading up-to-the-minute political minutia,” he said. “This list allows me to make sure I’m not missing anything important.”  What a load of BS.

Tucker Carlson e-mailed me: “What they did discredits journalism in general, and honorable liberal journalists in particular. I know plenty of progressives who have a healthy skepticism even of candidates they voted for. Most of the members of Journolist didn’t.”  I don’t see anything in Simon’s article to dispute this.  I assume it is because he can’t.

In any case, the hubbub is now virtually over. The buzz is done buzzing, and the media have moved on from Journolist to WikiLeaks. The hubbub is virtually over?  Er, the hubbub never began.  Other than the blogosphere, where has this beeen discussed, Mr. Simon?  It is a media coverup, just like the one which occurred after Mike Calderone’s article last year, and you know it.

Ken Berwitz

I can't call it fallout because falling means going down.  And that's not what is happening.

Excerpted from an article at Fox News (but unmentioned on this morning's Today Show and in the New York Times, of course):

Arizona's tourism industry has a target on its back, but the widespread boycotts over the state's immigration law might not be hitting the mark. 

 

Recent data compiled by a market research group show hotel bookings across the state -- as well as in tourism hot spots Phoenix and Scottsdale -- have been on the rise the past two months. 

 

The numbers could dispel warnings from local officials that Arizona stands to lose a fortune and dampen the chances that cities and organizations will be able to compel the state to reverse its immigration law by choking its economy with a sanctions-style business boycott. 

 

"Fundamentally, the boycotts have been unsuccessful," said Barry Broome, president of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council. 

 

The data from hotel industry research firm STR showed that for the state of Arizona, hotel occupancy was up 5.7 percent in May and up 8.3 percent in June compared with the same time a year ago. 

 

In Phoenix, occupancy was up 10.6 percent in June; in Scottsdale, it was up 10.7 percent for the same period. Revenue also was up, with Arizona hotels raking in $148 million last month -- up more than 11 percent from a year ago. 

Broome said the state also has been able to attract new businesses to locate in Arizona despite bad publicity. He said his group plans to announce 2,000 to 3,000 new jobs thanks to investment from California, where Arizona boycotts are in place in several major cities, over the next few months. 

 

"Business continues," said Garrick Taylor, spokesman with the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry. 

 So, in a time of recession, when so many other places are singing the blues, Arizona's hotel occupancy and revenues have risen substantially.

Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I'll just bet that at least some of the visitors accounting for this upswing are from cities whose councils have voted to "boycott" the state.

There's a lesson in these data.  But one that is almost certain to go unlearned by the "journalists" who need it most.

Too bad for them.  And too bad for the people who rely on them for news.

Oh, one other thing:  If Fox is reporting this obviously newsworthy material, and others are not (Today and the Times being just two major examples), what does that say about who is fair and balanced, and who is not?

Ken Berwitz

Excerpted from an article I found at Reuters - and please pay particular attention to the last sentence:

EIN SHEMER AIR BASE, Israel, July 27 (Reuters) - As World War Two raged in the years before Israel's founding, colonial British planes were scrambled here to fend off German forces. Now the German Luftwaffe is back, preparing for a far more remote fight with the modern equipment and expertise of the Jewish state established after the Nazi Holocaust.

 

Worried by insurgent ambushes on its soldiers in Afghanistan and return fire that sometimes kills civilians or local allies, Germany last year ordered a small fleet of Israeli Heron spy drones designed to provide real-time images above a battlefield.

 

That has brought German jet pilots to coastal Ein Shemer air base for accelerated retraining on the unmanned propeller planes, already daubed with their flag and Iron Cross emblem.

 

"It's for the need of the ground troops, for our own protection, like convoy protection," said a Luftwaffe (airforce) major, who formerly flew a Tornado fighter-bomber on Afghan reconnaissance missions and could not be named due to military secrecy.

 

"In Afghanistan it's really hard to compare the good guys from the bad guys. So you have to surveil them a long time."

 

Israel is a pioneer of combat drones, having deployed them in Lebanon in the Palestinian territories. Heron's manufacturer, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), says it is also used by Canadian, French and Australian forces in Afghanistan.

 

Yet the fact Israeli know-how may now be saving German military lives offers up a unique historical irony lost on none.

 

"As a Jew, I felt very proud at this specific moment," said Tomer Koriat, deputy director of the IAI training programme, who praised the Germans' mastery of the Heron within intensive courses lasting just three-and-a-half weeks.

 

"All of us have learned that today we are talking about another Germany than what we used to know ... A very, very good friend, if not the best friend of Israel today in the world."

 

Germany has become a key ally of Israel despite Berlin's criticism of its Palestinian policies.

 

While the United States regularly conducts drone air strikes in Afghanistan and on suspected insurgent bases in neighbouring Pakistan, its allies are generally limited to using the planes for unarmed surveillance.

 

This is especially true for Germany. Although it has the third-biggest NATO Afghan contingent -- some 4,300 personnel -- it often appears uncomfortable with being involved in hostilities while World War Two is still a living memory.

 

"We're kept to 'recce' (reconnaissance) missions only. We're the good guys," joked another Luftwaffe major at Ein Shemer.

 

Israelis are barred by Afghanistan, so IAI ceded maintenance services to German partner firm Rheinmetall Defence.

No Israelis in Afghanistan?  Even as Israeli technology protects the forces that prop up the government which bars them?

What a world.

Ken Berwitz

With a tip of my (nonexistent) hat to the late, great Jimmy Cannon, here is my version of "nobody asked me, but..."

-Charles Rangel has to resign.  No two ways about it.  If he doesn't, he'll bring down the wrath of his fellow Democrats, because the last thing they need in this already-disastrous-looking election year is another ethics nightmare.  Look for him to go - at the very least announce he is declining to run for re-election - within a week.

-Wegman's has the best house-brand ice cream on the planet.  Their pistachio vanilla swirl, in particular, is one of the two or three best store-bought ice creams I've ever had, "name" brands included.

-I was very sorry to read that Dick Morris' father passed away this weekend.  Condolences to Mr. Morris and his wife, Eileen McGann.

-Curtis Granderson's outfield defense has been a major asset all year, and now he is finally starting to pay some dividends at bat too.  Since Granderson seems like just about the nicest guy in the world, I am rooting for this trend to continue and strengthen (the fact that I'm a lifelong Yankee fan may also come into play here....)

-Did Barney Frank really go nuts at the Fire Island ferry terminal in Sayville, Long Island because he was refused a $1 senior discount?  If I had been there I would have paid the entire fare just to avoid listening to that mouth of his. 

For the record, my wife and I have taken this ferry (though we don't stay in the same part of Fire Island that Barney Frank would favor) and the ride is very enjoyable.  Certainly worth an extra buck.

One other thing about Frank:  why doesn’t he get a set of dentures?  Can he possibly think he looks better without them?

-Why does the Garden State Parkway always crowd up between exit 142 and 145, even when there’s no traffic before it and after it?  For that matter, why is there always heavy traffic on the Staten Island Expressway until Bradley Avenue, where it magically dissipates?

-When was the last time Tom Cruise, or Jessica Lange, or Chevy Chase had a hit movie?

-I can’t prove it, of course, but I have a strong suspicion that over the next couple of months Florida Governor/independent senate candidate Charie Crist’s poll numbers are going to drop and Democrat Kendrick Meek’s are going to rise, both movements to the benefit of Republican Marco Rubio.  

-I also have a strong suspicion that Sharron Angle’s amateurish and far-too-conservative candidacy is going to wind up handing the eminently undeserving hapless Harry Reid another senate term.  I certainly hope I’m wrong about this.

-I’m not a bartender, not by a long shot.  But when I make cosmopolitans (far and away my best mixed drink) I’ve found that Balinoff vodka is every bit good (and every bit as French), as Grey Goose, but costs about half as much.  Ditto for GranGala orange liqueur which, to me, is indistinguishable from the far more expensive Cointreau.  NOTE:  It is a couple of hours after I posted this blog.  We went to the liquor store for wine, so I checked exact prices:  Balinoff vodka is $17.99, Grey Goose $34.99.  GranGala is $18.99 and Cointreau $34.99.  That's a savings of $33 on the two of them, without any difference in the taste of the cosmo.  Good deal!

-For no rational reason I think the New Jersey Nets are going to more than double the number of wins this NBA season. After their unbelievably bad 12 wins last year, I put them somewhere in the 30 range now.  And if they pull off a major trade, that could jump higher.  Who said I’m not a hopeless optimist?

-We prefer the beach at Avon (pronounced AH-von, not AY-von) over Spring Lake because you can bring food onto Avon’s beach.  Spring Lake doesn't let you do so, and that's a big tiebreaker. 

-As weak a candidate as Kristin Gillebrand ought to be, especially in this year of the Republican, I just can’t see Rick Lazio beating her out for the senate seat formerly held by Hillary Clinton.  He sounds, and looks, like a tired, unthreatening sacrificial lamb.  Here’s hoping he’ll prove me wrong.

Ken Berwitz

Since our wonderful "neutral" media have spent the last week talking relentlessly about racism, I would like to ask a few questions on the subject:

When are these media, which spared no effort to express their shock and outrage regarding accusations that Shirley Sherrod is a racist, finally going to stop lying about the racial epithets supposedly tossed at Black congresspeople by Tea Partiers months ago?

Why is this a one-way street, in which the accusation against Sherrod (who, by the way, is not as post-racial as they're portraying her) is immediately attacked, while a far worse lie about the Tea Partiers is retold countless times as if it were true?  (FYI there are plenty of offenders, but the McClatchy newspaper group appears to be the worst of them.  McClatchy's own video, the one it put up on its web site, has not one such epithet.  Click here and see for yourself.  Then note that the headline says "Tea party protesters scream 'nigger' at Black congressman".  God, what liars they are.)

When are those same media going to demand that John Lewis, Emanuel Cleaver, Andrew Carson and James Clyburn demonstrate even one small shred of integrity and admit that no one screamed any such epithets at them?  Isn't it amazing that the same  so-called journalists who have relentlessly played the Shirley Sherrod clip to "prove" she wasn't a racist, demonstrate exactly zero interest in playing the clip of congressional Black caucus members walking through the Tea Party demonstration without so much as one instance of "nigger" being uttered by anyone?

And now the big one:  When are media going to come to grips with the fact that the Congressional Black Caucus, to which all four accusers belong, is itself an overtly racist organization? 

The Congressional Black Caucus, by design, consists solely of Black members.  No Whites can join, regardless of  how compatible their voting records are with CBC’s positions.  Why?  Because of the color of their skin.  If this were a private organization - say, a White Citizen's Council or restricted country club - it would be odious enough.  But the CBC is a group of federal employees, paid by federal dollars, who function on federal property.  That means US taxpayers are involuntarily subsidizing their racism.

When do officials, elected or otherwise, start talking about this disgrace and demanding that it come to an end?

Racism is an enormous problem in the United States (and everywhere else).  Unfortunately, there's more than enough of the real kind without having to invent incidents out of thin air.

And the existence of groups like the Congressional Black Caucus makes the problem even worse.  You can't fight racism by creating more of it.

Ken Berwitz

I apologize for this blog being over two months late.  But somehow, I missed reading Arizona Governor Jan Brewer's response to the owners of the Phoenix Suns, after they made clear their opposition to the state's new immigration law.

Here is what Ms. Brewer posted on her facebook page at that time:

"What if the owners of the Suns discovered that hordes of people were sneaking into games without paying? What if they had a good idea who the gate-crashers are, but the ushers and security personnel were not allowed to ask these folks to produce their ticket stubs, thus non-paying attendees couldn't be ejected. Furthermore, what if Suns' ownership was expected to provide those who sneaked in with complimentary eats and drink? And what if, on those days when a gate-crasher became ill or injured, the Suns had to provide free medical care and shelter?"

My reaction to Ms. Brewer's comment is from a different sport.  Maybe you recognize it.

Game.

Set.

Match.

Ken Berwitz

Before you jump all over me for that title, let me assure you I'm not the one asking.  To me, the issue of whether or not Nancy Pelosi is a liberal (more accurately, a hard-leftist) is right up there with "If I jump in the ocean will I get salt water in my bathing suit?"

So who would question whether Nancy Pelosi is a liberal?  According to hotair.com's Ed Morrissey, it is none other than Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA), who is running against Republican Pat Toomey to fill the senate seat currently held by Arlen Spector (D, but formerly R...if in name only).

Here is the relevant excerpt from Ed's latest blog:

Nancy Pelosi represents one of the most liberal Congressional districts in the country.  She has relentlessly pursued a very liberal agenda of bigger government, higher spending, and greater top-down control of the economy.  Pelosi herself has claimed to be a progressive.  Yet Joe Sestak, who has supported her agenda for four years, seems to have trouble deciding whether Pelosi is a liberal or not:

Joe Sestak continued Monday to distance himself from Nancy Pelosi while at the same time tying his Republican opponent Pat Toomey to George W. Bush.

Sestak, speaking at the Pennsylvania Press Club, was asked whether he believes Speaker of the House Pelosi is a liberal or a pragmatist. Sestak describes himself as the latter.

He said he didn’t know, but also said he never looks at her voting record.

Pat Toomey’s campaign scoffed at this claim:

“He voted for the stimulus and thought it should have been $1 trillion; he voted for the cap-and-trade energy tax and thought it didn’t go far enough; and he voted for government-run health care and thought the government should have had even more control over people’s health care decisions,” said Nachama Soloveichik, Toomey’s spokeswoman. “If that’s not liberal, what is?”

If the polls are correct, Pat Toomey currently holds a lead over Joe Sestak (Rasmussen puts it at 45% - 38%).  Does Sestak really believe that playing this dumb is going to help him close the gap?  If so, he has a terribly low opinion of Pennsylvania voters. 

It seems to me that the Toomey people should be spending the next few days, at least, pointing this out to everyone who will listen. 

Ken Berwitz

Just two quick questions for Shirley Sherrod: 

1) When you were telling the story of withholding help from a White farmer based on his skin color, and the NAACP audience was so enthusiastically receptive to what you did - before you said that you subsequently had a change of heart - did you consider them as racist as Andrew Breitbart?  Or more racist? 

2) Now that a video has surfaced of your husband, Charles, from January of this year, exhorting a Black audience to "vote Black", do you consider him as much of a racist as Andrew Breitbart?  Or more of a racist?

Any help you can give me on those two questions will be most appreciated.....

Ken Berwitz

You may or may not like Elton John as a performer (I do) but you cannot say he doesn't think for himself.

From www.azstarnet.com:

 Elton John didn't mince words in slamming his fellow musicians for boycotting Arizona over the controversial SB 1070 immigration law. From the stage at his sold-out Tucson Arena concert Thursday night, John savored a few choice, not-so-family-friendly words:

  "We are all very pleased to be playing in Arizona. I have read that some of the artists won't come here. They are (expletive)wits! Let's face it: I still play in California, and as a gay man I have no legal rights whatsoever. So what's the (expletive) with these people?"

  John has never been one to cave into political pressure from his musical colleagues. He ignored an artist boycott of Israel in June over the flotilla fiasco and played a show in Tel Aviv. He also played Rush Limbaugh's latest wedding reception in early June, which drew the ire of gays and lesbians. Limbaugh is vehemently anti-gay marriage; John is married to his longtime partner David Furnish.

Is John right?  As they say in Fargo, yer durn tootin' he is.

What is the problem with Arizona?  That after being inundated with something like a half million illegals it got tired of waiting for the federal government to DO something about it?  This is what entertainers find so objectionable that they will boycott the state?

I have a great idea.  On the theory that refusing equal rights for gay and lesbian citizens is a lot more egregious to these people than refusing an open border to illegals, and since there are almost certainly more gay and lesbian legals in the United States than Mexican illegals, why not boycott every place that does not allow either same sex marriage or same sex civil unions with all the rights of marriage. 

Huh?  What's that you say?  If entertainers did that they would not be able to work almost anywhere in the United States, and they'd lose lots and lots of MONEY?   Well, so what!  This is a principle, right?  And principle trumps money, right?

Or......

Maybe the reality is that since Arizona's new immigration law is a hot-button issue in the news, entertainers who go public with their "boycott" are getting publicity that sells tickets everywhere else, while simultaneously proving what great "humanitarians" they are.

Anyone who regularly reads this blog knows that I am fully committed to gay rights.  Always have been, always will be.  And it sickens me when these phonies play-let's pretend when it comes to immigration, even as they have no problem at all performing in places where homosexual citizens do not have equal rights.

So I applaud Elton John.  Not for being right about this issue, as I believe he is, but because he thinks for himself instead of whoring himself to get some cheap PR.

Benny would be proud.  And all the Jets too!

Ken Berwitz

I don't watch "Hardball" much anymore.  I avoid it because the show's host, Chris Matthews, has combined his pathological inability to let anyone else get a word in edgewise with a level of partisanship that suffocates any possibility of serious discussion.

So unless you agree completely with what Matthews is saying (which, I assure you, I don't), you're not likely to enjoy the show very much. 

But, despite all this, I did put the show on for a few minutes this evening.  And in those few minutes I caught Matthews trying to run roughshod over Rep. Paul Kirk (R-WI). 

Did Matthews start up with the wrong guy?  Are you kidding?  That's like asking whether Gladys Knight had Pips. 

I was going to blog about how completely Kirk took Matthews apart.  But Noel Sheppard of newsbusters.org beat me to it, and did such a good job (video and transcript both) that I don't have to bother. 

Just sit back, click on this link, and enjoy the fun.

Ken Berwitz

Here's a little something mainstream media have had exactly no problem with --- because it's Sarah Palin's family in the crosshairs.

From www.popwatch.ew.com:

'Family Guy' to further bait Palin by bringing back character with Down syndrome

by Jennifer Armstrong

Categories: Advance Advancement, Comic-Con, Family Guy, News, Politics as Entertainment, Television

You know the best way to get Family Guy to bring back a guest character? Protest vociferously in the media — it helps if you’re a publicity-magnet ex-VP candidate — so as to create a rather grand controversy. Remember that girl Chris went on a date with during a February episode, the one who has Down syndrome and whose mom is the former governor of Alaska? And remember how Sarah Palin, in real life the mother of an infant boy with Down syndrome, fought back with a Facebook post and media appearances, calling the episode a “kick in the gut”? And how her daughter, Bristol, called the Family Guy writers “heartless jerks”?

Well, congratulations, Palins — you’ve earned Ellen, the demanding girl with Down syndrome, a repeat performance on the topical Fox hit. Creator Seth MacFarlane told a Comic-Con audience that she’d be making an encore “at some point … despite all the Palin business.” Oh, that coy MacFarlane, pretending it isn’t precisely because of the Palin business that Ellen’s getting more screen time! Though I still think the episode in question was Family Guy‘s twisted version of inclusiveness, it also clearly set out to bait the Palins — and got exactly the publicity it wanted. The question is whether Palin will respond again, or leave well enough alone this time. Say what you will about Palin’s politics, but you’ve got to respect her for speaking her mind — and if there’s ever a time to be on her side, it’s when she’s defending disabled kids.

So I ask you, PopWatchers: Are you Team Palin or Team Family Guy if the show brings Ellen back? And is it better to speak out against such controversy-courting shows, or let their offensive moments pass without public incident?

Tell me:  What if "Family Guy" were a right wing-oriented show and the disabled child was Sarah Palin's 2008 opponent Joe Biden's?

Would mainstream media collectively yawn and look the other way?  Would there be no editorials about how repulsive and heartless this is?  About how disgustingly unfunny it is to use a disability for cheap laughs?

We both know the answer, don't we.

Ken Berwitz

So what's new in Iran - particularly about the woman sentenced to being stoned to death for adultery (whatever that means in Iran -- don't make any assumptions).  And how is her lawyer making out in trying to overturn the conviction?

Here, from the always-worth-reading Steve Gilbert, of www.sweetness-light.com, is your answer:

Iran Jails Lawyer’s Family In Stoning Case

July 26th, 2010

From the UK’s Guardian:

Iran stoning case lawyer Mohammad Mostafaei’s relatives arrested

The lawyer defending Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani himself faces re-arrest as his wife and brother-in-law are held by Iran authorities

Saeed Kamali Dehghan
Monday 26 July 2010

Authorities in Iran have issued an arrest warrant for an acclaimed Iranian lawyer and arrested his wife and brother-in-law over his involvement in the case of a woman sentenced to death by stoning.

Lawyer Mohammad Mostafaei’s office in Tehran was ransacked, and he was interrogated in Evin prison for four hours on Saturday over his human rights activities and involvement in the case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the 43-year-old mother of two who was convicted of adultery and whose plight in Iran has drawn international attention since her children launched a campaign for her release almost a month ago.

Mostafaei called Sakineh’s stoning sentence "a bogus conviction" and "absolutely illegal" in an interview with the Guardian earlier this month.

He was released, then called back for further questioning before being set free. Authorities then issued an arrest warrant.

When they were unable to find him the authorities arrested his wife, Fereshteh Halimi and her brother Farhad Halimi to try to force him to surrender. However, it is still unclear whether Mostafaei has been arrested or he has managed to evade officials.

"It is ridiculous that they [officials] have taken Mostafaei’s family as ransom, they have somehow taken them hostage. This confirms what Sakineh’s son wrote in his public letter, that there’s no justice in Iran," said Mina Ahadi, a human rights activist for Iran Committee against Stoning (ICAS), based in Germany who spoke to Mostafaei after he was interrogated.

"Mohammadi Ashtiani’s sentence is not Mostafaei’s first stoning case, he has defended many others against execution by stoning but it was Sakineh’s story which took world attention and made the Iranian authorities angry," she said.

Mostafaei initially wrote an open letter about Sakineh’s death by stoning after her sentence was handed down. He then tried to publicise her case by giving interviews to international media and helping her children launch the campaign for their mother’s release…

We sure hope these trivial arrests and their quaint insistence on stoning women doesn’t get Iran thrown off the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women. The UN commission, which is “dedicated exclusively to gender equality and advancement of women.”

Naturally, we are just kidding. Of course, it won’t.

There you go.  Don't like the lawyer defending a woman you want stoned to death?  Then ransack his office and arrest his relatives.  And when you get your hands on him, be sure to grill him for hours.  How dare he defend a woman against being stoned.  What makes him think he's out of the 10th century anyway?

And, as you certainly know if you read this blog, Steve's comment that Iran is on the UN's commission on the status of women?  100% true.

It's hard to tell which entity is more appalling:  Iran or the UN.

Ken Berwitz

If I had a dollar for every "journalist" who has told me that Shirley Sherrod was fired because Fox News aired a clip of her speech at an NAACP gathering, I would be very rich.  And very misinformed.

Let me say this loudly and clearly, so maybe they'll be embarrassed by their lies:

FOX NEWS DID NOT AIR THE VIDEO CLIP UNTIL AFTER THE OBAMA

 ADMINISTRATION FIRED SHIRLEY SHERROD.

Was that loud enough?  Was that clear enough?  I'd say so.

Now:  will it stop them from continuing to lie to the public about what happened?

There's a bet you don't want to make.

Ken Berwitz

After a career riddled with corruption, plus increasingly bizarre comments and behavior, is the game finally up for charles rangel?

Excerpted from today's New York Post:

Democratic Party insiders predict that many top New York Democrats will abandon embattled Rep. Charles Rangel if the veteran lawmaker doesn't admit to several ethics violations before the charges against him are outlined on Thursday.

"Democrats will start heading for the hills -- distancing themselves from Charlie once those charges are out -- so if he wants to keep a modicum of support, he better reach a deal with the House over the next few days," one of the state's most senior Democrats predicted.

State Democrats, already nervous about a series of ethical and legal scandals involving Senate Majority Leader Pedro Espada of The Bronx, now-ousted Sen. Hiram Monserrate of Queens, and several other legislators and City Council members, were described by one senior elected official as "biting their nails over the Rangel situation.

"How would you feel right now if you're one of our [five primary] candidates for attorney general, claiming you're going to be fighting state corruption, [and] you're asked how you stand on Rangel once the charges are outlined?" the official wondered.

"If the House Ethics Committee accusations are that Charlie cheated on his taxes, did favors for contributors, and gamed the rent-control laws, as we all expect, are you, a candidate for attorney general, going to back him up? I don't think so," the official continued.

Similarly, national Democrats are keeping arm's length from Rangel.

Speaking on "Fox News Sunday," former DNC Chairman Howard Dean said Rangel is owed a "fair process," but applauded Democrats in Congress for pursuing charges against their longtime colleague.

"He did some things that look like they ought to get him thrown out of Congress, and if it turns out that he did them, he's going to get thrown out of Congress," Dean said.

Ironically, rangel came to power by charging his predecessor, Adam Clayton Powell, with corruption and beating him in the Democratic primary (which, in Harlem and all too many other primarily Black congressional districts, is tantamount to winning the election).  Look at him now.

The sooner we are rid of rangel, the better off we will be.  All of us.

Let's hope he resigns forthwith.

Ken Berwitz

Here, from dailycaller.com, is an excerpt of Johnathan Strong's latest exposé of how the "journolist", comprised of hundreds of leftward media people, conspired to manage the news by making it more amenable to their political favorites.  (As with all other excerpts from this increasingly important web site, I urge you to go to the link I've provided and read every word.) 

Journolist debates making its coordination with Obama explicit

By Jonathan Strong - The Daily Caller | Published: 3:12 AM 07/26/2010 | Updated: 10:22 AM 07/26/2010

 

Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., talks with reporters after leaving Puerto Rico aboard his plane en route to Chicago Saturday, May 24, 2008. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

Sarah Palin’s speech to the 2008 Republican convention impressed more than a few doubters, including even some members of Journolist, an online community for liberal journalists.

“This speech is gangbusters,” wrote Ari Melber of the Nation. “Her tone is pitch perfect.” Adele Stan of the Media Consortium agreed: “Palin is golden.”

The exuberance appeared to unnerve the Guardian’s Michael Tomasky. “People get a hold of yourselves!” Tomasky wrote to his fellow Journolisters. “It’s a very good speech with good lines. But there’s very little substance.”

Rebecca Traister of Salon wrote to say she was grateful for Tomasky’s message. (“This is a reassuring sentiment, since at the moment, I feel like we’re in End Times.”) But the rest of the country apparently didn’t agree. Polls a few days later showed Obama’s lead in the race had narrowed to virtually nothing.

Palin’s speech had been remarkably effective. This troubled members of Journolist. On Sept. 8, 2008, five days after Palin’s national debut, some members of the group discussed producing coordinated propaganda designed to wound Palin and boost Obama.

At an appearance in Colorado immediately following the convention, Palin had remarked that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had “gotten too big and too expensive for the taxpayers,” a point that seems commonplace now, but that at the time struck some as controversial.

Ryan Avent, then a freelance blogger for the Economist, now an editor there, complained that Obama’s supporters were missing a chance to attack. “If we were the GOP, we’d be taking this opportunity to shout long and loud how unprepared Palin is—‘She doesn’t even know what Fannie and Freddie are…in the middle of a housing crisis!’….That’s the difference in the game as played by us and by them.”

Michael Tomasky responded: “So why aren’t Dems doing that? Just wundrin’.”

Luke Mitchell, then a senior editor at Harper’s magazine, asked Tomasky if his paper would be able to help: “Michael – Isn’t this something that can be fanned a bit by, say, the Guardian?”

Tomasky didn’t think it would work. “The Guardian? You’re kidding right? Remember the Clark County letters?” he wrote, referring to a failed attempt by the Guardian to elect John Kerry in 2004 by asking Britons to write letters to voters in a pivotal Ohio county.

Mitchell replied: “Fair enough! But it seems to me that a concerted effort on the part of the left partisan press could be useful. Why geld ourselves? A lot of the people on this list work for organizations that are far more influential than, say, the Washington Times.

Are you still wondering why, after a week of unbelievably devastating information like this, mainstream media are moving heaven and earth to prevent the general public from knowing about the journolist?

I hope not.  It seems to me that the answer - self-preservation -  is self-evident.

Ken Berwitz

Oliver Stone, the formerly-successful filmmaker, best known for taking real events and loading them with his politically-driven personal hatreds, is putting together a ten-part series for Showtime. Its working title is "Oliver Stone's Secret History of America".

Given Stone's only occasional acquaintance with historical facts, and given that he is half Jewish (yep, another self-hater), I thought you might be interested to know how he views Hitler and Jews.

Excerpted from yidwithlid.com:

Back in January there was a warning. American Hating/Chavez loving director announced his ten-part documentary for Showtime, called "Oliver Stone's Secret History of America," by promising a different look at Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin:

 

Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and it's been used cheaply," Stone said at the conference. "Stalin has a complete other story. Not to paint him as a hero, but to tell a more factual representation. He fought the German war machine more than any person.I've been able to walk in Stalin's shoes and Hitler's shoes, to understand their point of view. You cannot approach history unless you have empathy for the person you may hate."

 

Today, the other shoe dropped. In an interview with the Sunday Times of London, he blamed the Jewish-Dominated media for preventing Hitler from being portrayed in context.

 

“Hitler was a Frankenstein but there was also a Dr Frankenstein. German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support.”

He also seeks to put his atrocities in proportion: “Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30m.”

Why such a focus on the Holocaust then? “The Jewish domination of the media,” he says. “There’s a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has f***** up United States foreign policy for years.”

Enjoy your empathy with stalin and hitler, Oliver.  I think I'll stick with my ingoing belief that they were sick, mass-murdering subhuman monsters.  And that you are a pathetic clown who, more and more, needs to pump out this kind of idiocy to sell your crap.

Congratulations on sucking Showtime in.

Ken Berwitz

E.J. Dionne, the Washington Post's columnist - and, all too often, delusionary race-baiter - is at it again.  This time he is using Shirley Sherrod as his vehicle for invoking racism, and going after the seemingly countless number of bogeymen who torture him.

As you may gather from this, I have a problem with what Mr. Dionne is saying. 

Let me show you why, by commenting on what he has written.  Dionne is in rust, I am in blue:

Enough right-wing propaganda

By E.J. Dionne Jr.

Monday, July 26, 2010

The smearing of Shirley Sherrod ought to be a turning point in American politics. This is not, as the now-trivialized phrase has it, a "teachable moment." It is a time for action. Who smeared her?  The Obama White House which had her fired?  The NAACP which, though in possession of the entire speech tape, attacked and condemned her?  You have to be referring to them, because both events occurred before the clip was ever shown on Fox News.  I’ll read on, E.J., but somehow I doubt that these real culprits will be the focus of your attack.

The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that "fairness" requires treating extremist rants as "one side of the story." And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama and against progressives in this year's election.  Ahh, now I see.  The Obama administration dumped Sherrod, which means President Obama has been the victim of racism.  I suppose that makes lots of sense – to you and certain elements of the Bizarro world.

The administration's response to the doctored video pushed by right-wing hit man Andrew Breitbart was shameful. The obsession with "protecting" the president turned out to be the least protective approach of all.  Doctored?  Hit man?  Are you claiming that Andrew Breitbart edited the clip and what it showed is not what Shirley Sherrod said?  Uh oh, you’re in a bit of trouble now, since that isn’t at all what happened.  But rant on. 

The Obama team did not question, let alone challenge, the video. Instead, it assumed that whatever narrative Fox News might create mattered more than anything else, including the possible innocence of a human being outside the president's inner circle.  Reminding you again:  Fox did not run that video until AFTER the Obama administration had Shirley Sherrod fired.  That makes you a liar, an ignoramus, or an ignoranus.  (In case you don’t know, E.J., ignoranus is my word for someone who is both ignorant and an asshole.)

Obama complained on ABC's "Good Morning America" that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack "jumped the gun, partly because we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles." But it's his own apparatus that turned "this media culture" into a false god.  Finally a smidgen of factual material. President Obama did toss Vilsak under the bus to cover his backside.  Congratulations. 

Yet the Obama team was reacting to a reality: the bludgeoning of mainstream journalism into looking timorously over its right shoulder and believing that "balance" demands taking seriously whatever sludge the far right is pumping into the political waters. Whoops, back to BSville again.  Sherrod said what she said.  And the NAACP audience was clearly pleased when she talked about discriminating against a White farmer based on his race – before she said it was a transformational event that moved her away from racism (and into class warfare, but we won’t go there).  Somehow you overlooked the fact that Breitbart said he put up the clip to show that, for the Tea Party movement and the NAACP, a few people being ok with racism should not be used to define the entire group.

This goes way back. Al Gore never actually said he "invented the Internet," but you could be forgiven for not knowing this because the mainstream media kept reporting he had.  Gore’s exact words:  “During my service in the United States congress, I took the initiative in creating the internet”.  I’ll leave readers to decide if that can fairly be described as saying he invented the internet.  But, while we’re on the subject, how come you used such a questionable example?  Why not use something more decisively untrue - like, for example, the claim that President Nixon said he had a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam or that President Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared "mission accomplished - neither of which ever happened?  I guess examples that in any way exonerate the hated other side of the aisle don’t make the cut.

There were no "death panels" in the Democratic health-care bills. But this false charge got so much coverage that an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll last August found that 45 percent of Americans thought the reform proposals would likely allow "the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly." That was the summer when support for reform was dropping precipitously. A straight-out lie influenced the course of one of our most important debates.  “Death panels” refers to rationing of health care for the elderly – which inherently will occur because, in order to pretend ObamaCare saves rather than costs us money, $500 billion dollars was taken out of Medicare and applied to it.  With $500 billion less for Medicare, decisions will have to be made as to which life-extending procedures will and will not be provided for elderly people.  That is what the “death panels” claim - correctly - references.  Nice try.

The traditional media are so petrified of being called "liberal" that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors. Mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not jumping fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of one of their attack lines.  Yeah, ok, right.  Mainstream media skewers Fox News every day, because they are petrified of Fox News.  Er, when you're scared you don't answer back.  By the way can you really believe Fox is controlling the news?  Does it control the news at the Washington Post?  Do you also think that Jews control the world?  Let's find out just how far and deep your paranoia goes.

Thus did Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander ask this month why the paper had been slow to report on "the Justice Department's decision to scale down a voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party." Never mind that this is a story about a tiny group of crackpots who stopped no one from voting. It was aimed at doing what the doctored video Breitbart posted set out to do: convince Americans that the Obama administration favors blacks over whites.  How exactly do you know how many people were stopped from voting?  Do you know how many people saw three Black men in paramilitary garb, one holding a weapon “guarding” the voting location, and never even started up those steps?  Would you have sloughed this off if it were three KKK members in their robes and hoods too?  What a hypocrite and fraud you are.

And never mind that, to her great credit, Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, dismissed the case and those pushing it. "This doesn't have to do with the Black Panthers," she told Politico's Ben Smith. "This has to do with their fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration." Instead, the media are supposed to take seriously the charges of J. Christian Adams, who served in the Bush Justice Department. He's a Republican activist going back to the Bill Clinton era. His party services included time as a Bush poll watcher in Florida in 2004, when on one occasion he was involved in a controversy over whether a black couple could cast a regular ballot.  Ok, now J. Christian Adams is a racist too.  Add him to the list, folks.  FYI, the Florida incident refers to Adams telling a couple for whom there was no record of their change-of-address forms, to fill out a provisional ballot – something any poll watcher would tell anyone of any color.  The problem was that Democrats had told Black voters not to fill out provisional ballots because they wouldn’t be counted.  In other words, Adams acted properly, but Democrats had insisted Black voters not follow the law.  So which side does E.J. Dionne come down on?  I rest my case.

Now, Adams is accusing the Obama Justice Department of being "motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law." This is racially inflammatory, politically motivated nonsense -- and it's nonsense even if Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh talk about it a thousand times a day. When an outlandish charge for which there is no evidence is treated as an on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other-hand issue, the liars win.  You are actually complaining about someone being “racially inflammatory” after writing this column?  That’s a little like BP complaining that someone wasn’t careful enough drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico.  But at least you worked in Limbaugh and Hannity, two more of your many, many bogeymen.

The Sherrod case should be the end of the line. If Obama hates the current media climate, he should stop overreacting to it. And the mainstream media should stop being afraid of insisting on the difference between news and propaganda.  That would put you out of business, E.J.

Ken Berwitz

Want to see Howard Dean act like a mindless barroom loudmouth, by calling Fox New Channel racist without knowing what he was talking about -- and get his backside handed to him for it?

Then watch this:

My compliments to Chris Wallace! 

Being shown as an ignorant loudmouth won't shut Dean's big, stupid, fraudulent mouth up.  Nothing will.  But at least he got the major-league slapdown he deserved.

Ken Berwitz

The blogosphere is buzzing with "news" that the Obama administration agreed to the release of convicted terrorist murderer abdelbaset al megrahi.

The basis for this claim is a letter from Richard LeBaron, of the U.S. Embassy in London, to Scotland's first ministrer, Alex Salmond, in which LeBaron says:

"If Scottish authorities come to the conclusion that Megrahi must be released from custody, the US position is that conditional release on compassionate grounds would be a far preferable alternative to prisoner transfer."

Does that look like agreement to you?  It doesn't to me.  All it says is that if Scotland decided to do so, compassionate release would be preferred to just handing him over to Libya as a prisoner.

Personally, I don't know why one would be better than the other, and I fervently wish that al megrahi was rotting in jail, on his way to rotting in hell for eternity. 

But, that said, what I have seen so far does not support the charge against Obama & Co.

Ken Berwitz

How bad is the eric holder Department of Justice? 

Did you think holder couldn't top (maybe bottom is the right word)  dismissing charges against the three new black panther party thugs?  Especially when added to the other debacles, gaffes and outrages that are defining his tenure as Attorney General? 

Well, holder's lawsuit (with President Obama's approval, let's not forget) against Arizona for daring to try securing the state's border may put him in a different league altogether.

Frank McCullough, writing for townhall.com, thinks it will force Mr. Obama to dump holder. Read these excerpts from his latest commentary, and see if you agree:

Kevin McCullough

Why Eric Holder Will Not Last

 

There may be more incompetent Attorneys General who have served Presidential administrations in U.S. History, but few if any of them have had a worse record than the present head of the Justice Department.

 

In blunder after blunder the President has already repeatedly been forced to back away from the decision making at the Justice Department. But the trail of disasters has left legal litter for the administration to clean up in even more ways than they could have predicted.

 

Holder has overreached so many times people have begun to wonder if his arms were attached backwards at the joint.

 

Yet no over-reach will have been more embarrassing than the shellacking he is taking in the DOJ vs. the State of Arizona. If the early signals are indicative of the judge's final outcome I personally don't know how he survives in the administration.

 

Since the administration announced it would be suing the state of Arizona of its own rights to enforce the law within it's boundaries, legal scholars I've spoken with have by the dozens scratched their heads, and issued muted puzzled responses on what the clear legal strategy was for Holder to win. Evidently the judge in the case, Susan Bolton - a democratic appointee - had some of the same strange curiosities. She is openly questioning the grounds on which the government brought its case against state law SB 1070 - the non-controversial state law that allows the local police and sheriffs to assist federal authorities in determining the legal status of those coming into contact with the state.

 

As most of America now knows, SB 1070 maintains the same guidelines as federal immigration law, but goes one step further in toughness--against those in law enforcement. It clearly penalizes abuse of the statute by an entity attempting to racially profile with enforcement of it.

 

The DOJ under Eric Holder's direction is attempting to argue that the state law preempts federal law. The judge has openly, almost mockingly, poked holes in the thinking behind such a claim. Bolton has also openly wondered why the government should concern itself in any regard with a state's desire to be seen as hospitable or not.

 

Since these two arguments seem to be the primary planks of Holder's case against Arizona, I expect this case to be dealt with quickly, and Holder to be again seen as the laughingstock or worse yet ruthless pragmatist he's come to be seen as in the legal community. I even have repeatedly told the students as much at the various Summit conferences I've been speaking to this summer.

 

It's been a rough go for the DOJ under Obama. Holder has on more than one occasion found himself back tracking, apologizing, and being left out in the cold to pay for everything from trying to bring the caged animals of Gitmo to New York City to stand trial, to (at the request of the NAACP) looking the other way when overt racism was used to intimidate and prevent voting--by members of the Black Panthers--an overtly racist group the equivalent of the KKK. He, according to multiple witnesses at the DOJ, has even gone so far as to implement a policy of non-pursuit of cases before the DOJ in which perpetrators are black and the victims are white.

 

But his ill-advised lawsuit against the statute in Arizona is now making him look incompetent or worse yet, incapable.

 

The ultimate failure of DOJ vs. Arizona will be yet another embarrassment for the Obama administration.

The question for the President will be, how many more of these laughingstock facials can be endured before he does what desperately needs to be done, put Holder to pasture?

 

My sense is, it won't be long.

So, what do you think?  Will this cause President Obama to get rid of holder? 

Personally, I think the answer rests entirely on how public opinion falls during and after the lawsuit.  If the case continues as McCullough describes - i.e. the (Democratic-appointed) judge makes it clear she thinks this is ridiculous and ultimately rules against DOJ - it is hard to see public opinion doing anything but dropping even further from its already-low levels for Mr. Obama and his administration.

If that happens, the President's choices will be to dump holder, to tell him to proceed with the next strategy (i.e. trying to turn it into a racial issue) or to just let it go and move on.

In my opinion, if he tells holder to proceed the political fallout will almost certainly continue, and get worse. 

Where would the political benefit lie?  Voters who favor a lawsuit accusing Arizona of racism are already almost monolithically supporting the President.  And if not bringing the lawsuit makes them unhappy, what are they going to do?  Vote Republican?  Barack Obama owns these people, and is astute enough to know it.

But among the large majority who already support Arizona's law?  Trying to get rid of it by crying "racism" is going to be about as popular as Benjamin Netanyahu action figures at a meeting of the Arab League.  It is a vote-loser of the first order.

So Mr. Obama's other two choices - neither of them very good - are to get rid of holder , who is a hero to his hard-left base, not to mention the first Black Attorney General in U.S. history, or to tell him to stop the lawsuits against Arizona -- and then wait for the screams of anguish from neighboring states which will be "blessed" with a tidal wave of Arizona illegals heading their way.

It will be tremendously interesting to see how this plays out. 

And tremendously important.  Important enough to affect not only the 2010 elections but the 2012 presidential election as well.

Ken Berwitz

I think it would be fair to say that pigeons either don't like rock music, or like it so much that they lose a bit of control

Here's the latest poop on this issue, from London's Daily Mail....

Take flight! Kings of Leon cancel gig after pigeon poops on their bass player

By Daily Mail Reporter

Rock band Kings of Leon were forced to pull the plug half way through a concert after their bass player was pooped on by pigeons.

Jared Followill had been hit several times already when a particularly large splat landed on his face near his mouth.

That proved too much for the rockers, who fled the stage in St Louis, Missouri just three songs into their set.

Apparently the rafters of the Verizon Amphitheater were infested with pigeons, who didn't exactly hesitate to express their opinion on the music being played.

Kings of Leon manager Andy Mendelsohn said: 'Jared was hit several times during the first two songs.

'On the third song, when he was hit in the cheek and some of it landed near his mouth, they couldn't deal any longer. It's not only disgusting, it's a toxic health hazard. They really tried to hang in there.'

The band had already been warned about the pigeon situation but were determined that the show must go on, even after opening bands The Postelles and The Stills were covered in pigeon excrement as they came off stage.

Followill says, 'We couldn't believe what The Postelles and The Stills looked like after their sets. We didn't want to cancel the show, so we went for it. We tried to play. It was ridiculous.'

In a statement, the band stated: 'The Kings of Leon decided to carry on regardless. The band felt it would be unfair to the fans to cancel the show at that late moment.'

Disappointed concertgoers were assured that the band would return to St Louis. Fortunately none of them were attacked by the flocks of pigeons.

'No fans got pooped on as far as we know,' the band's publicist said.

And Mendolsohn added: 'We want to apologise to our fans in St Louis and will come back as soon as we can.'

The Kings of Leon are set to perform tonight at First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre in Chicago, Illinois... pigeons permitting.

Maybe the performers should wear pith helmets.

They could help with both the pith and the poop. 

And that'th all I have to thay.

Ken Berwitz

Donald Berwick, who President Obama recess-appointed to be in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, has made it clear that he loves the United Kingdom's health care system.

I wonder what he thinks of the fact that the UK disagrees.

Excerpted from an article in yesterday's New York Times (the bold print is mine):

LONDON — Perhaps the only consistent thing about Britain’s socialized health care system is that it is in a perpetual state of flux, its structure constantly changing as governments search for the elusive formula that will deliver the best care for the cheapest price while costs and demand escalate.

 

The new British government’s plan to drastically reshape the socialized health care system would put local physicians like Dr. Marita Koumettou in north London in control of much of the national health budget.

 

Even as the new coalition government said it would make enormous cuts in the public sector, it initially promised to leave health care alone. But in one of its most surprising moves so far, it has done the opposite, proposing what would be the most radical reorganization of the National Health Service, as the system is called, since its inception in 1948.

Practical details of the plan are still sketchy. But its aim is clear: to shift control of England’s $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level. Under the plan, $100 billion to $125 billion a year would be meted out to general practitioners, who would use the money to buy services from hospitals and other health care providers.

Whoops.

It seems,the UK, after over 6 decades of trying the nationalized health care Mr. Berwick thinks is so hotsy-totsy, is being forced to decentralize it, and give patients' doctors more control. 

Could it be because the system is a shambles, rife with horror stories (several of which have been posted on this blog), and that people are not getting good health care or anything like it?

Maybe Mr. Berwick would like to tell us what he thinks about this.  And maybe Mr. Berwick's answer will go some distance in explaining why his boss had to use a recess appointment to put him in place.

Ken Berwitz

Actions have consquences.  And sometimes actions that are represented as very positive have consequences that are very negative. 

With that in mind, please read these excerpts from Frank Burke's excellent piece at americanthinker.com:

July 25, 2010

The Bête Noire of Liberalism

By Frank Burke

 

Unfortunately, legislation currently under consideration or recently passed indicates that the inability to think beyond the high sounding rhetoric of the moment continues to be a reality in multiple areas affecting the lives of our citizens; and the consequences could be much more threatening and tragic than an annoying toilet.

 

The hybrid automobile is currently being touted as the ideal transitional solution to the problems of fossil fuels and air pollution.  Major auto manufacturers continue to introduce new versions, to the accolades of the politicians and the press.  It is predicted that in the near future there will be more than a million on the road.  Unfortunately, there are some inherent problems that few seem to be considering. 

 

The hybrid vehicle utilizes an internal combustion engine in conjunction with an electric drive and a battery array.  By alternating between both power sources, the car achieves substantial mileage and cuts down on emissions.  What nobody seems to be talking about are the potential problems associated with the batteries. 

 

Batteries contain some pretty nasty stuff, including lead or other heavy metals, acid, and carbon-related components.  All batteries have a finite life, and these are really BIG batteries.  With a million and more hybrid cars on the road, battery disposal could become a major problem as regards hazardous materials and pollution.  When even conventional 12-volt batteries require careful disposition, it's hard to imagine, at present, how we are to go about recycling or disposing of so much potentially dangerous waste.  Two things are certain -- it's not going to be cheap, and it's not going to be easy.

 

Comprehensive immigration reform involves amnesty or some other process for legalizing millions of illegal immigrants already in the country and bringing them into the mainstream, either through limited visas, guest worker programs, path to citizenship or some other means. 

 

What is being missed by the politicians who see today's illegals as tomorrow's voting block is that their entire appeal to the unscrupulous employers who hire them is the fact that they fly beneath the radar.  Frequently willing to work for less than the minimum wage, they are not given benefits, insurance or, in most cases, workman's compensation.  Sad as it may be, this is their primary competitive advantage.

 

All else being equal, few employers would choose an employee base unable to speak or read their language -- especially in industries where serious problems can result.  Several years ago, the top executives of an industrial plating firm in the Chicago area were convicted of murder when Polish émigré workers died after being subjected to toxic fumes because they could not read warning signs.

 

The minute illegals are inducted into the system and are on the record, their costs rise and their desirability drops.  Ironically, any path to legalization will, in many cases, effectively disqualify them for the job opportunities they sought here in the first place.

 

Obamacare carries so many unintended consequences that it is hard to know where to begin.  In fact, more are being discovered every day.  One particularly egregious example, though, is the effect that healthcare rationing would have on the older population.  Most senior citizens politely disagree with Senator Tom Daschle's "duty to die" philosophy and refuse to believe that they should bear patiently with the pains of old age when modern medicine has the capability of relieving them. 

 

Under rationed healthcare, those with the wealth and means to do so can seek treatment at exclusive off-shore facilities or through other private means -- much as affluent Canadians and others currently do in the United States. 

 

Those less fortunate or without the financial resources but equally possessed of a will to live will have to make do with a black market of dubious practitioners and spurious cures.  The same progressives who justify their extreme pro-abortion stance on the fear of women being relegated to "back-alley abortion mills" have just enabled the creation of an equal or more horrendous curse to prey on our older and least defensive citizens. 

Does Mr. Burke make as much sense to you as he does to me? 

If so, these consequences are extremely important to remember.  Especially on the first Tuesday of this coming November.

Ken Berwitz

If you think Donald Berwick's recess appointment to head Medicare and Medicaid was awful only because he is in love with the utterly disastrous British health care model, then you are wrong.  It's even worse than that. 

It turns out that Berwick apparently is an Israel hater too.

The following excerpts come from an article by , writing for American Spectator:

Donald Berwick and the Anti-Israelis

By Robert M. Goldberg on 7.23.10 @ 6:08AM

 

In bypassing Senate confirmation, Donald Berwick avoided scrutiny of his belief that Britain's National Health Service was a mode for reforming healthcare in America as well as any business relationships that might overlap with those he will oversee as he implements Obamacare and Medicare cuts. The ensuing furor overshadowed Dr. Berwick's growing involvement with the international advocacy group, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR). PHR was established with funding from the Ford Foundation "to investigate the health consequences of human rights violations and work to stop them."

 

Two facets of Berwick's involvement with PHR are noteworthy in light of his extremely liberal views about the role of healthcare as a vehicle for social justice and income redistribution. Berwick began donating thousands of dollars to PHR in 2000 when the outfit was focusing most, if not all of its, investigations on Israel's treatment of terrorists during the Intifada. For instance, PHR "conducted a medical and forensic investigation in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank from October 20-27, 2000 to investigate allegations of excessive use of force, including the use of prohibited ammunition in the current conflict between Israeli forces and Palestinian demonstrators and authorities."

 

In 2002 PHR released another report on the impact of Israel's battle against Fatah and terrorists holed up in Jenin. The PHR investigation added credibility to the false claim that the IDF massacred the population. It went after Israel in seven major reports. By comparison it launched one report on Zimbabwe, five on Sudan, none on Iran or Iraq or North Korea. (PHR also issued 12 reports on the U.S. and its interrogation of terrorists). It also gave an award to Eyad Sarraj, a human rights activist in Gaza who later justified homicide bombings as a natural response to Ariel Sharon's election as prime minister and helped organize the recent flotilla operation. During this time, Berwick's contributions to PHR steadily increased.

 

In 2008 he joined the board of PHR, which must be seen as an endorsement of the organization's mission and focus. In doing so he arrived just as Richard Goldstone, his fellow board member, was involved with the United Nations in laying the groundwork for investigating whether Israel's Operation Cast Lead, initiated in response to rocket attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas, constituted war crimes. The following PHR press release all but accuses Israel of deliberately targeting wounded civilians and medical facilities. These charges would later be the core of the Goldstone's commission report war crimes accusations:

 

During a time when PHR helped coordinate Goldstone's activities against Israel, Berwick moved from being just a contributor to being a board member. Dr. Berwick was not and should not be held responsible for Goldstone's actions on behalf on the UN Human Rights Commission. But he willingly increased his support for and involvement in an organization that singled out Israel for human rights abuses and mistreatment of civilians. He joined the board of PHR at a time when Goldstone was taking a leading role and PHR's public statements were framing the central arguments Goldstone would advance.

According to the exit polls, 78% of Jewish voters, most of whom presumably support Israel, voted for Barack Obama in 2008: 

To the 78%, let me ask: what do you think about this? 

Are you surprised?  If so, why would that be?  Did you not know that Barack Obama spent almost two decades in a virulently anti-Israel, anti-Semitic church?  Did you not know that the head of this church, jeremiah wright, was beloved by Mr. Obama, who called him his "spiritual mentor"? 

Did you con yourselves into believing that when wright called Israel "a dirty word" and "an apartheid state", Barack Obama didn't know about it?  

Did you con yourselves into believing that when wright named louis farrakhan the church's man of the year in 2007, the year before the election, and called him "the epitome of greatness", Mr. Obama didn't know about that either?  How hard did you have to work to overlook the fact that he didn't leave the church, or even say a word about it? 

Are you honest enough to admit you knew exactly what Barack Obama was, and voted for him anyway? 

Well, I hope you're happy with what you got.

Speaking as one of the 22% who did see and hear what was plainly in front of us all, I can assure you I am not.

Ken Berwitz

This one is for the poll lovers in the house.  It comes to us from William Tate at www.americanthinker.com:

While Barack Obama and Afghan president Hamid Karzai may disagree on how to deal with the Taliban and al Qaeda, they do have something in common. Gallup reports that Obama's daily job approval rating, after spiking briefly after the public learned that Obama would be leaving Washington to vacation in Maine, has dropped back down to 44%. That exactly the same level as Karzai's approval in Afghanistan, according to Gallup's new numbers. There has to be some hidden meaning there.

A tie with hamid karzai of Afghanistan?  Wow.

Maybe the two of them can make campaign appearances for Democrats during this election season.

I mean, what could it hurt.....

Ken Berwitz

Are we on the verge of nuclear war with North Korea?

Read this excerpt from an article at bloomberg.com, and decide for yourself:

North Korea said it would counter U.S. and South Korean joint naval exercises with “nuclear deterrence” after the Obama administration said the government in Pyongyang shouldn’t take any provocative steps.

 

North Korea will “legitimately counter with their powerful nuclear deterrence the largest-ever nuclear war exercises to be staged by the U.S. and the South Korean puppet forces,” the National Defense Commission said, according to the Korean Central News Agency.

 

The maneuvers, which involve 20 vessels and 200 aircraft from the U.S. and South Korea, pose a threat to the country’s sovereignty and security, Ri Tong Il, an official with North Korea’s delegation to the Asean Security Forum, told reporters in Hanoi yesterday.

 

Ri’s comments came after North Korean Foreign Minister Pak Ui Chun sat in the same room with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Hanoi for a security meeting of Asia’s largest powers. Clinton condemned North Korea for being “on a campaign of provocative, dangerous behavior,” urging Kim Jong Il’s regime to change.

 

Still, the “door remains open for North Korea,” Clinton later told reporters. “We are willing to meet with them, willing to negotiate, to move toward normal relations” if North Korea commits itself to giving up its nuclear weapons program, she said.

U.S. State Dep

artment spokesman Philip J. Crowley said in Washington yesterday that North Korea “would be better served by reflecting on the current situation, not taking any further aggressive actions or provocative steps.”

The key to preventing something that no one in his or her right mind wants is not North Korea.  That is because the leader of North Korea is not in his right mind. 

The key is China which, for years, has almost singlehandedly has propped up what little is left of North Korea's economy - very much including what little food its people have to eat.

We cannot back down and effectively tell a madman who spends more than one third of the entire economy on weapons while his people starve in the streets that he is our daddy.  However bad things are already, that will make them worse.  It will embolden North Korea to continue and escalate attacks on the South and, eventually, the world will face this monster again in the future - when North Korea is likely to have even more nuclear capability than they do today.

But China may be able to stop it.  More than any other country, China can prevail on kim jong ill (intentional misspelling) to back off.

Will they?  We damn well better hope the answer is yes.

Ken Berwitz

Investors Business Daily has an excellent editorial on the "journolist", which I have been blogging about for days - and which most mainstream media are almost comically desperate to keep you in the dark about.

Here it is.  The bold print is mine:

JournoLism's Bias

JournoGate: For those who think the growing JournoList scandal is much ado about nothing, think again. It's about secrecy and power among the left-wing media — and leads all the way into the White House.

One of the defenses put forward by those taking part in the JournoList — the secretive online discussion forum for liberal journalists and "experts" — is that it was really just a place to talk and discuss things without a lot of argument from those who don't share their left-leaning views.

But JournoList, formerly run by Washington Post journalist Ezra Klein, was much more than that. It was an attempt to secretly influence public debate in one partisan direction — toward the Democrats — and to bias the news toward both the liberal political agenda and the election of Barack Obama.

In essence, all these left-leaning journalists, an estimated 400 in all, used the JournoList site to refine their messages for maximum effect. It was an exercise in mass propaganda, getting everyone to sing from the same ideological hymnal — which explains the tedious sameness of the mainstream media's 2008 election coverage.

In short, they were fraudulently selling you political opinion and propaganda disguised as fair-minded "news."

The big questions: Did these journalists veer into outright advocacy? Did they collude with the White House before and after the election? Were they a de facto arm of the Democrats?

Sure looks that way. Among those taking part in JournoList was Jared Bernstein, an adviser to the Obama campaign in 2008 who today works as the top economic aide to Vice President Joe Biden.

In 2009, Bernstein appeared often as an unpaid "surrogate" for Obama on CNBC. He says his JournoList participation ended when he took a job with the White House in December 2008.

Well, did it? In February of this year, a group of liberal journalists and bloggers met with Bernstein at the White House. A number of them were JournoListers.

"The basic thrust of the event was to present a case for the efficacy of the Recovery Act as a part of the broader effort to convince the American people that the administration's efforts to restore the economy have been successful," wrote one of the participants, Jonathan Singer, of the meeting.

Got that? The White House was in effect enlisting the left-leaning "mainstream media" in its PR battle to sell Obamanomics to the American public. The media knew it and were willing tools.

And we don't know if this was the only instance, for Bernstein isn't the White House's only JournoList connection. As it turns out, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag also was a participant in the online group.

Nothing wrong with talking to government officials — unless you're doing so with a secret agenda, selling partisan views as objective media coverage to an unsuspecting public.

Contrary to claims now being made, JournoList wasn't an innocent Web tool, a harmless forum for discussion. It was an organized effort by one party and its sympathizers in the liberal press to secretly influence public debate and policy.

 To quote Sean Connery's character in The Untouchables, this stinks like a whorehouse at low tide.

And the attempted (and, so far, relatively successful) burial of this story by the same media whose members are part of it?  That stinks even worse.

Thank you IBD for this editorial.  May many, many more follow.

Ken Berwitz

The thoroughly corrupt, thoroughly arrogant, thoroughly disgusting charles rangel has been charged with a host of ethical violations - most of which have already been detailed in this blog over the past two years.

From Reuters (among countless other sources):

A congressional investigative panel on Thursday accused Democratic U.S. Representative Charles Rangel, former chairman of a powerful tax-writing committee, with undisclosed ethics violations.

The House of Representatives ethics committee announced the action, clearing the way for a separate panel to determine if the accusations can be proved.

Rangel stepped down under pressure in March as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee after the ethics panel, in a separate case, admonished him for corporate-sponsored trips in 2007 and 2008 in violation of the chamber's gift rules.

The ethics committee -- three Democrats and three Republicans -- has been examining for nearly two years a number of other matters involving Rangel, including his use of a rent-controlled apartment and his fund-raising for the Charles Rangel Center for Public Service in New York.

Rangel, 79, who had been a key player in President Barack Obama's overhaul of U.S. healthcare, has rejected calls to step down and is running for re-election in New York to a 21st two-year term.

Democrats, who are facing a potentially disastrous midterm election, need this slightly less than they need an advanced bowel virus.

Can you even begin to imagine how dirty rangel is if they are letting it go forward?  Maybe the political calculus is that an investigation into Rangel's affairs, which presumably could be extended beyond election day, will have less negative fallout than trying to stop it cold.

The best thing rangel can do, of course, is resign immediately.  But given the transcendental arrogance and self-importance of this man, that is extremely unlikely to happen.

Me?  I'm actually pretty happy about this.  It is long past time that rangel be held to account for his actions.

It couldn't happen to a nicer guy.....

Ken Berwitz

Joseph Farah of World Net Daily asks a very fair and very interesting question:  where are the anti-war protestors?

Here is the way he puts it:

A record 60 Americans were killed in Afghanistan in June – the most ever in the nearly decade-long war that is not winding down, but rather intensifying under the leadership of Barack Obama, the "peace candidate" in 2008.

Worse yet, U.S. soldiers, no doubt demoralized by seemingly interminable wars on two fronts, neither of which has any clear definition of victory, are taking their own lives in record numbers – 32 just last month and 145 since Jan. 1.

My question: Where are the anti-war protests? What happened to them? Do those protesters from earlier this decade think the wars are over? Or did they really not care about these conflicts in the first place? Were they only truly interested in protesting the old leadership in the White House?

For the life of me, I cannot begin to understand our objectives in either Iraq or Afghanistan any more.

Because I appreciate the sacrifice our men and women are making over there, it is with a heavy heart that I make this proclamation. But enough is enough. We have spent over $1 trillion on these two wars and spilled far too much American blood. We are obviously unwilling as a country to do what is necessary to kill the bad guys in either place, so what is the point? Isn't it time to declare victory and get out? What is the point? Can someone, anyone, tell me?

There is what Farah thinks.

What do you think?

Ken Berwitz

Weeks ago, when Alvin Greene won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate I asked, implored and begged the Democratic Party to do whatever it could, to prevent him from running a campaign.  This is not because I expect Greene to win (I most certainly don't).  It is because his candidacy is a grotesquery and an embarrassment that does neither Greene nor his party any good at all.

Well, he's still the candidate.  And now he has a campaign video.  Here it is. 

Alvin Greene’s ‘On the Scene’'

I'm asking - imploring - begging again.  Don't let this happen.

Ken Berwitz

President Obama signed an extension of unemployment benefits yesterday, apparently without a care in the world that it adds another 34 billion dollars to our already-impossible national debt.

But did he always feel this way?  Nope.  Not even within the past year.

Read Mark Knoller's blog for CBS news and see for yourself.  The bold print is mine:

Obama Changes Tune on Paying for Unemployment Benefits Extension

 

In signing the bill restoring unemployment benefits to 2 ? million Americans jobless for more than 26 weeks, President Obama is also adding $34 billion to the deficit and the National Debt.

That's the reason nearly all Republicans voted against the measure. They wanted the cost of the benefits paid for with unspent government funds or by other budget cuts.

The White House dismissed GOP concerns as partisan game-playing.

In two speeches over the last week, Mr. Obama argued that in the past, presidents and Congresses of both parties have treated unemployment insurance for what it is: an emergency expenditure.

"Suddenly, Republican leaders want to change that," he said.

He portrayed Republicans as hypocrites for demanding that jobless benefits be paid for but not applying the same standard to their call for an extension of Bush Administration tax cuts that will expire this year.

"So after years of championing policies that turned a record surplus into a massive deficit, including a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, they've finally decided to make their stand on the backs of the unemployed," the president said last Saturday in his radio/internet address.

But Republicans were quick to remind Mr. Obama what he said after signing a previous extension of unemployment benefits on November 6th of last year.

"Now, it's important to note that the bill I signed will not add to our deficit. It is fully paid for, and so it is fiscally responsible," he said.

So eight months ago, he said paying for the benefits was the right thing to do, but now he sees no need to do so.

Asked about the contradiction, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said he needed to examine what Mr. Obama said last November and would get back to this reporter. He didn't.

What a blatant fraud.

Thank you, Mr. Knoller, for the honest reporting.  I hope you still can keep your job.

And something-else you to the vast majority of mainstream media, which did not tell its readers/views about this 180 degree flipflop.

Ken Berwitz

Is Israel of value to the United States?

Robert Satloff certainly thinks so.  And given that he is a former pentagon official who is now Executive Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, that means something.

Here are excerpts from his excellent commentary and analysis, made earlier this week during an event at the Nixon Center.  The bold print is mine:

Robert Satloff – Prepared Remarks

Nixon Center debate, “Israel; Asset or Liability?”

July 20, 2010 

 

My task today is to make the case why Israel—and the U.S.-Israel relationship—is a strategic asset to the United States. In fact, I will go even further. I will argue that Israel, and the U.S.-Israel relationship, is—both in objective terms and compared to any other Middle Eastern relationship we have—a strategic bonanza to the United States. Not just an asset, but a bargain.

 

Let me make these points:

 

·        It is to America’s advantage to have a nation of friends, whose people and government are firm supporters of and advocates for American interests in the broader Middle East. I don’t think there is anyone in this room who would disagree with the contention that there is no country in the Middle East whose people and government are so closely aligned with the United States; in some countries, the people are pro-American, in others, the government, but in Israel, it is unabashedly both. Our two countries share ways of governing, ways of ordering society, ways of viewing the role of liberty and individual rights, and ways to defend those ideals. Some realists tend to dismiss this soft stuff as having no strategic value; I disagree. This commonality of culture and values is at the heart of national interest; it manifests itself in many ways, from how Israel votes at the United Nations to how its people view their role as being on the front line against many of the same threats we face.

 

·        It is to America’s advantage to have in Israel an economy that is so closely associated with ours and that is such an innovator in the IT field, in high-tech medicine, and in green technologies, like the electric car. The Obama administration made the economic health and well-being of the U.S. the pillar of its National Security Strategy. Our partnership with Israel is a clear asset in this regard—not only does Israel’s fiscal responsibility (a situation that contrasts with other U.S. allies in Europe) mean that Israel is not part of this problem, but with its high-tech economy, Israel is actually part of the solution. Indeed, the strength of our relationship helped turn Israel from an economic basket case into an economic powerhouse—and our economic partner. Just ask Warren Buffett and all the other American investors who view Israel as a destination worthy of their capital.

 

·        It is to America’s advantage to have had a close working partnership with Israel for the last thirty-plus years in the pursuit of Middle East peace. Some bemoan the peace process as “all process, no peace” and critique the strength of the U.S.-Israel relationship as an impediment to progress, not an ingredient of it. I disagree. First, I would argue that a strong Israel, with a strong U.S.-Israel relationship at its core, has been central to what we know as the peace process. And second, in historical terms, the Middle East peace process has been one of the most successful U.S. diplomatic initiatives of the last half-century.

 

In the words of one knowledgeable observer: “The peace process has been a vehicle for American influence throughout the broad Middle Eastern region. It has provided an excuse for Arab declarations of friendship with the United States, even if Americans remain devoted to Israel. In other words, it has helped to eliminate what otherwise might be seen as a zero-sum game.”

 

 

And then there is the long list of military-related advantages that Israel brings to the United States directly, by its own actions and through the bilateral relationship. I will cite just a few:

 

·        Since 1983, American and Israeli militaries have engaged in contingency planning, and Israeli facilities can be made available to the United States if needed. American forces have practiced the use of many Israeli facilities, ranging from Ben Gurion Airport to pre-positioning sites. All four U.S. armed services routinely conduct training at Israel Defense Forces facilities.

 

·        The U.S. has deployed an X-band early warning radar for missile defense on Israeli soil. This facility supplements other American missile defense assets and is available for both America’s regional missile defense architecture and our own reconfigured missile defense concept for protecting Europe from longer-range Iranian missiles. 

 

·        America began stocking war reserves in Israel fifteen years ago. Those stockpiles are hardly “minimal”—the total value is approaching $1 billion. They’re U.S. property and the Pentagon can draw upon them at any time. America has shown it is able to move military supplies from Israel to the Gulf; for example, it sent Israeli mine-plows and bulldozers to Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1991.

·        Israel can be an extremely useful location for strategic logistics or power projection in the eastern Mediterranean, and in fact the United States Navy has conducted countless port visits in Haifa in support of U.S. operations.

 

·        Israel has proven to be a prime source of effective counterterrorism/counterinsurgency tactics, techniques, and procedures, which have played a significant role in U.S. success (thus far) in Iraq

 

·        Israel has also been an outstanding innovator in the technology, tactics, techniques, and procedures of unmanned aerial vehicles, which the U.S. now relies upon so extensively in Afghanistan.

 

Add all this up: Israel—through its intelligence, its technology, and the lessons learned from its own experience in counterterrorism and asymmetric warfare—has saved American lives. And when you add to this Israel’s unique counterproliferation efforts – destroying nuclear reactors in Iraq (1981) and Syria (2007) – Israel’s contribution to our security is even greater.

 

Bottom line: do a cost-benefit analysis of the U.S. relationship with Israel over the past thirty-plus years and the U.S. relationship with its Arab friends in the Gulf. What do you find? To secure its interests in the Arab-Israeli arena, the United States has spent about $100 billion in military and economic assistance to Israel, plus another $30 billion to Egypt and relatively small change to others. Our losses: a total of 258 Americans in the Beirut embassy and barracks bombings and a few other American victims of terrorism in that part of the Middle East. On a state-to-state basis, as I have argued, that investment has paid off handsomely in terms of regional stability. Compare that with the Gulf. Look at the massive costs we have endured to ensure our interests there, the principal one being to secure access to the region’s energy resources at reasonable prices. The United States has spent more than $1 trillion—$700 billion on the Iraq war alone, according to the Congressional Budget Office—lost more than 4,400 U.S. servicemen, fought two wars, endured thirty years of conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran and a global al-Qaeda insurgency fed originally by our deployment of troops in Saudi Arabia. After all that, the Gulf region is still anything but secure. It’s when you boil it down to this very simple arithmetic that I can say that our relationship with Israel helped produce a strategic bonanza for the United States at bargain prices.

How does Israel's value stack up relative to the other countries in that region? 

Dare to compare.  And you will come to the same conclusion that Mr. Satloff does.

Then wonder, along with me, why the Obama administration has been so overtly disdainful and dismissive of such an immensely valuable ally.

Ken Berwitz

The Daily Caller has done it again.

Here is the latest installment of how a group of leftward/liberal "journalists" and academics appeared to have worked with each other to set an agenda of how the news would be reported.

Today's journolist article is a particular favorite of mine, because it confirms what I have suspected for quite some time:  i.e. keith olbermann is so objectionable a character that even people who agree with his views can't stand him.

I'm putting up the first part of Johnathan Strong's piece detailing what they said about olbermann.  You can read the rest by clicking here:

Journolisters offended by Keith Olbermann’s ‘misogynistic,’ ‘predictable,’ and ‘pompous’ show

By Jonathan Strong - The Daily Caller | Published: 1:00 AM 07/23/2010 | Updated: 10:36 AM 07/23/2010

If you were one of the 400 members of the listserv Journolist, perhaps one of the most vicious insults you could hurl at a colleague is: You’re just like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.

If the reader holds neutral — or even positive — views about the Fox News hosts, the insult may not sting. But in the cloistered world of liberal listserv enclaves, Hannityism is a cardinal sin. After all, Fox is a “dangerous,” “deranged” “cesspool” that, possibly, the FCC should be investigating.

The feelings against MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, then, must run deep.

“He’s become O’Reilly on the left– completely predictable, unfunny, and arrogant,” said Georgetown University Professor Michael Kazin in May 2009. “To my mind, what they do is no different form Hannity and O’Reilly,” said the New America Foundation’s Michael Cohen, “At least Hannity and O’Reilly engage with the other side (if mainly just to yell at them). Olbermann is just an echo chamber.”

(Cohen later elaborated he was arguing that both MSNBC and Fox News play to political extremes).

At issue was a segment Olbermann had run about Carrie Prejean, the former Miss California who stirred debate in 2009 when she defended traditional marriage.

Following the segment, the subject on Journolist was “I hate Keith Olbermann again,” and the members of the list let it rip.

The Nation’s Katha Pollitt began the group’s rant. “He and Michael Musto did this whole long riff about beauty contestant Carrie ‘opposite marriage’ Prejean’s breast implants, stupidity, breast implants, tacky clothes, earrings, breast implants. They went on and on about how she was ‘part plastic’ and pathetic.  You’d think they were celibate vegans who spent their lives zen meditating.  It was just a whole TV humiliation of her, and it made me feel sorry for her, which wasn’t easy,” Pollitt said.

Michael O’Hare, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said the segment was “about as funny as a rubber crutch. Odd when a reasonable person’s internal alarm doesn’t go off in a situation like that …’I’m going to ridicule a girl who’s obviously at her personal limits just trying to look conventionally pretty on national TV? What does that make me’?”

O’Hare even suggested friends stage an intervention for Olbermann. “If anyone on the list is a friend of Olbermann, friendship demands that you give him a head-up about this lapse,” he said.

Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor and CNN contributor, said Olbermann’s root problem is his misogyny. “I can’t take him anytime. I think to write off his mysogyny (sic) as limited to Musto is just not accurate. That very much defined much of how he talked about Clinton as well as others.”

Zelizer was referring to a series of instances during the primary campaign between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama when critics from both sides of the aisle criticized Olbermann for allegedly sexist treatment towards Hillary. Olbermann was forced to apologize.

The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman said a brutal parody of Olbermann reflected his true nature. “I hate both Ben Affleck and Saturday Night Live, but this should end all debate about the merits of Olbermann,” he said, linking to the parody.

As always, I strongly urge you to click on the link and read every word.  This is something that you don't want to miss.

But even if all you read is the above segment, it is clear that, however agreeable they are to his political positions, olbermann's leftward counterparts consider him a pompous, hateful ass.

By the way, this is another day that the Today Show, which uses every negative angle it can to go after its political bogeymen (Sarah Palin, more recently Andrew Breitbart, etc), has not so much as mentioned what is being uncovered from these journolist emails.  Nor has the New York Times:  not a word in today's paper. 

And they are certainly not alone:  the vast majority of "mainstream media" seem determined to ignore these hugely revealing email exchanges.

Then they wonder why people like me call them biased....

Ken Berwitz

Has there ever been a U.S. Senator who got more press – mostly positive press – for accomplishing less, than John Kerry?

After a quarter century in the senate, can anyone provide a list of his accomplishments?  Major legislative successes?  Try and find any.

We all know he can talk a good game, and has a great talent for getting his face in front of the cameras (in that regard, he’s right up there with Chuck Schumer).  But what has he ever done?

Ok, I’ll help out.  I can name one thing Mr. Kerry has done very consistently.  He has almost uniformly supported higher taxes and more government spending throughout his career.

So what are we to make of the fact that, while sticking us with every tax under the sun, he appears to aggressively work at not paying his own taxes?  And to make things worse, the taxes he appears to be avoiding are on an activity that only the super-rich fatcats like Kerry can afford to indulge in at all, taxes or otherwise.

From today’s Boston Herald:

Sen. John Kerry skips town on sails tax

By Gayle Fee and Laura Raposa
Friday, July 23, 2010 - Updated 2 hours ago

Sen. John Kerry, who has repeatedly voted to raise taxes while in Congress, dodged a whopping six-figure state tax bill on his new multimillion-dollar yacht by mooring her in Newport, R.I.

Isabel - Kerry’s luxe, 76-foot New Zealand-built Friendship sloop with an Edwardian-style, glossy varnished teak interior, two VIP main cabins and a pilothouse fitted with a wet bar and cold wine storage - was designed by Rhode Island boat designer Ted Fontaine.

But instead of berthing the vessel in Nantucket, where the senator summers with the missus, Teresa Heinz, Isabel’s hailing port is listed as “Newport” on her stern.

Could the reason be that the Ocean State repealed its Boat Sales and Use Tax back in 1993, making the tiny state to the south a haven - like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and Nassau - for tax-skirting luxury yacht owners?

Cash-strapped Massachusetts still collects a 6.25 percent sales tax and an annual excise tax on yachts. Sources say Isabel sold for something in the neighborhood of $7 million, meaning Kerry saved approximately $437,500 in sales tax and an annual excise tax of about $70,000.

The senior senator’s chief of staff David Wade denied the old salt was berthing his boat out of state to avoid ponying up to the commonwealth.

“The boat was designed by and purchased from a company in Rhode Island, and it’s based in Newport at the Newport Shipyard for long-term maintenance, upkeep and charter purposes, not tax reasons,” Wade told the Track.

And state Department of Revenue spokesguy Bob Bliss confirmed the senator “is under no obligation to pay the commonwealth sales tax.”

Lovely.

Kerry, who is richer than just about any one of the “rich people” he made a career of railing against, makes sure that, no matter how much $$$ Massachusetts is able to extract from those other rich people with yachts – you know, the bad ones – he won’t be paying even one red cent.  

And the idea that he has to keep his yacht in Rhode Island because of “long-term maintenance, upkeep and charter purposes” is an insult to our intelligence.  Regardless of where it was built, is Kerry’s home state of Massachusetts devoid of the capability to maintain a yacht?  Is there no charter activity in the state? 

You’ll pardon me if I stick with the assumption that Kerry did it because he wanted to save the tax money.  Not that I blame him, by the way; $437,000 sales tax and then $70,000 more each year** is a helluva lot of money.

(It must be nice to have a yacht so big and luxurious that the yearly taxes alone are about 8 times the entire household income of an average family in this country.  But I wouldn’t know.  I don’t live in that kind of world.  Do you?)

Would it be fair to point out that this arrogant tax-and-spender is happy to stick everyone else with bigger and bigger tax bills while he ducks out on paying state taxes for his rich-man’s yacht?   

Would it be unkind to point out that most other boat owners, who are not as fabulously wealthy as he is, cannot escape those taxes.  Would it be impolite to conclude that this makes Kerry a consummate “do as I say, not as I do” hypocrite?

Hmmm, tough one…..

===================================================

** This is corrected from my original blog, which erroneously claimed the $437,000 was every year, not just year one.  Thank you, free, for the heads-up.

Ken Berwitz

Andrew Breitbart, who has been Palined (i.e. mercilessly lambasted with virtually no chance to defend himself) by our wonderul "neutral" media over the past several days for putting up a video clip of Shirley Sherrod's speech to an NAACP banquet, absolutely stands by what he did.

Here, from www.politico.com, via John Johnston of www.newser.com, is why:.

Don't hold your breath waiting for Andrew Breitbart to issue an apology to Shirley Sherrod for the infamous video. Highlights from an interview with Politico:

 

·                 "If anybody reads the sainted, martyred Sherrod’s entire speech, this person has not gotten past black vs. white." (NAACP has the full video here.)

·                 “I believe that I’m held to a higher standard. If this video showed a picture of a Caucasian talking in the exact same way but talking about a black person with an audience affirming and clapping that behavior, the reporter would be getting a Pulitzer Prize right now.”

·                 “I am public enemy No. 1 or 2 to the Democratic Party, the progressive movement, and the Obama administration based upon the successes my journalism has had.”

·                 He defends the posting as “a self-contained newsworthy video that established the media standard of pointing out that the NAACP countenanced racism in its own award dinner setting. That was the point. That was the point. And the video proves it.”

As you can see, Mr. Breitbart is not backing down one inch.  That makes him either an obtuse idiot, incapable of understanding what he did wrong --- or someone who didn't do anything wrong and is being tarred and feathered by obtuse idiots posing as journalists and politicians.

Well, let's take his points one at a time and see where it leads:

-Has "the sainted, martyred Sherrod" gotten past White versus Black?  Based only on what she said immediately after the clip that Breitbart put up, the answer is yes.  Based on other things she said during the same speech, and what she said on CNN's morning show (refer to my previous two blogs), the answer is no. 

-Is Breitbart being held to a higher standard?   Would a reverse situation (i.e. a White audience responding positively to a White official talking about how she underserviced someone who needed help because of his skin color, which is what happened in Sherrod's speech before then saying it was wrong to do so) put him in line for a pulitzer prize?  On this one Breitbart is dead right about being held to a higher standard.  The pulitzer prize thing is murky because I don't know if he was being literal or figurative. If literal, he's wrong.  If figurative (i.e. he was trying to communicate that he'd be seen in a positive light by the people now attacking him), he's got a point.

-I don't know what the public enemy pecking order is, but Breitbart is stinging the Democratic Party and I think it is clear that they have him in their crosshairs big-time.

-If his point in showing the video clip was to prove Sherrod was a racist, he's busted -  because the point of her story was that she was wrong to do it.  If it was to show that the NAACP audience reacted positively when she said she screwed over a White farmer to get back at Whites for past injustices, he's right.  One look (and listen) will tell you the audience was very happy with that part of the story. 

Looking at this in its entirety, I would say Mr. Breitbart has a pretty strong case.  At the very least, he has a tenable case that neutral journalists should be presenting -- along with the tidal wave of attacks they have made on him.

So how have media handled this incident?  Do you think they've acted fairly? 

Your call.

=====================================================================

UPDATE:  I just came across a video of Andrew Breitbart being interviewed by a CBS news correspondent who either couldn't, or - I hope - declined to, shut him up.  Breitbart fully explains how he got the clip and how dishonest mainstream media have been in reporting about him.  Here it is, see for yourself:

WATCH: BREITBART STANDS BY SHERROD VIDEO

Ken Berwitz

Here, excerpted from Andy McCarthy's blog entry at nationalreview.com, is another part of the speech Shirley Sherrod made at an NAACP banquet:  the one that had a part where she seemed to speak against racism, but apparently still had plenty of it to offer her (highly appreciative) NAACP audience:

...we are to understand that Ms. Sherrod was not exhibiting racism. Instead, "taken in context," we're told, she is actually a heroic figure who has transcended the racist views that, given the terrible things she saw growing up in the South, were understandable.

 

Okay, but how come it is not incumbent on the folks who are pushing the revised narrative (and slapping Andrew around over the old one) to account for the Sherrod gem below (which begins a little after the 22 minute mark in her speech)?

 

For context: She is talking about how the evil "people with money," beginning in the 17th and 18th centuries (i.e., around the founding of our republic), created a still existing system designed to institutionalize racism against black people while simultaneously keeping poor whites and poor blacks divided. All highlighting is mine:

 

So that's when they made black people servants for life. That's when they put laws in place forbidding them [i.e., blacks and whites] to marry each other. That's when they created the racism that we know of today. They did it to keep us divided. And they — It started working so well, they said, "Gosh, looks like we've come upon something here that could last generations." And here we are, over 400 years later, and it's still working.

 

What we have to do is get that out of our heads. There is no difference between us. The only difference is that the folks with money want to stay in power and whether it's healthcare or whatever it is, they'll do what they need to do to keep that power, you know. [Applause] It's always about money, ya'll. [Applause and murmurs of agreement.] You know. I haven't seen such a mean-spirited people as I've seen lately over this issue of health care. [Mumurs of agreement.] Some of the racism we thought was buried — [someone in the audience says, "It surfaced!"] Didn't it surface? Now, we endured eight years of the Bushes and we didn't do the stuff these Republicans are doing because you have a black president. [Applause]

 

I wanted to give you that little history, especially the young people, I want you to know they created it, you know, not just for us, but we got the brunt of it because they needed to elevate whites just a little higher than us to make them think they were so much better. Then they would never work with us, you know, to try to change the situation that they were all in.

 

So, in Sherrod World, mean-spririted, racist Republicans do nasty things that "we" would never do because we have a president who, being black, is above that stuff. Still, we have-nots need to band together for "change" because a cabal of haves, desperate to keep their power, is still imposing their centuries old capitalist system of institutionalized racism — the same racism that courses through the Republican Party and surfaces on "us versus them" issues like healthcare.

 

Pardon me, but I think I'll stay off the Canonize Shirley bandwagon. To me, it seems like she's still got plenty of racial baggage. What we're seeing is not transcendence but transference. That's why the NAACP crowd reacted so enthusiastically throughout her speech.

A lot of people (me included) have been apologizing to Ms. Sherrod for jumping the gun and calling her a racist.

Between this and what I posted in the previous blog, I'm about thisclose to retracting my apology to her.

Ken Berwitz

As reported by Fred Barbash at www.politico.com:

Shirley Sherrod said she'd like President Barack Obama to reach out to her, not for an apology but for a conversation about what life is like where "the rubber meets the road."

"He hasn’t lived the kind of life I've lived," she said on CNN's morning show.

"I know he's African-American or part African-American, and many of us are not totally black in our genes. I'm one of them. But when you get down to where the rubber meets the road, I think he needs to understand a little more of what life is like at that level."

A couple of days ago I apologized for blogging that Shirley Sherrod's comments indicated she was a racist.

Now I'm not so sure.  Are you?

Ken Berwitz

Early this week, Shirley Sherrod was accused of making racist comments during a speech at an NAACP banquet earlier this year.  She was immediately fired from her job with the USDA.

Within 48 hours Ms. Sherrod was apologized to and offered her job back. 

Now she is a major cause celebre among the left in this country, a superstar.  She stands to make a fortune off of this incident.

With the above in mind, I want to show you how two supposed "journalists" characterized Ms. Sherrod's experience:.

First, keith olbermann, who came back from "vacation" (or whatever he is doing right now) to say the following:

"No matter how much of a stretch it is to compare Shirley Sherrod to Alfred Dreyfus, mistake it not: Shirley Sherrod has been to her own Devil's Island"

And then there is this comment, by the increasingly incoherent David Gergen while on Rick Sanchez's CNN left-fest:

Rick, I don't want to put her on too high a pedestal. I don't think she would want that. But I kept thinking about Nelson Mandela as I heard her story, because he had to overcome the same sort of hatred on both sides. And he became this larger-than-life figure and I think we all loved him and revered him because he was able to grow like that. And there is that quality about her story.

Er, let's review:

-Alfred Dreyfus was tried and convicted of a phony charge of treason, and then spent four years of absolute hell on Devil's Island.  He wasn't even exonerated until 11 years afterwards;

-Nelson Mandela, accused and convicted of sabotage by South Africa's apartheid regime (a real one, not like Israel), spent 27 years in jail before being released;

-Shirley Sherrod was accused of racism, convicted of nothing, fired from her job, and in less than two days was apologized to and offered reinstatement.

Is it just me, or do you also notice a slight difference here?

Want to compare these two characterizations - neither of which was challenged in the least on MSNBC and CNN, which aired them -  to how Sherrod was reported by Fox News? 

C'mon, make my day......

Ken Berwitz

Yesterday I blogged about the "journolist", a now-defunct (at least under that specific name) email venue for left wing journalists, professors, etc to talk to each other and decide how to shape the news to their partisan positions.

Let me say that again:  "journolist" was used by left wingers to talk to each other and decide how to shape the news to their partisan positions

I promised that if there were more posts about this conspiracy to manage the news (what would you call it?) I would blog about it.  Well, there is. 

So, as promised, here is the latest information being offered by Johnathan Strong, writing for Tucker Carlson's dailycaller.com.

In fairness to the web site, I am only posting the first third or so of Strong's piece.  I certainly urge you to go to the daily caller and read it all (which you can do by clicking here):

When McCain picked Palin, liberal journalists coordinated the best line of attack

By Jonathan Strong - The Daily Caller | Published: 3:09 AM 07/22/2010 | Updated: 10:19 AM 07/22/2010

In the hours after Sen. John McCain announced his choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate in the last presidential race, members of an online forum called Journolist struggled to make sense of the pick. Many of them were liberal reporters, and in some cases their comments reflected a journalist’s instinct to figure out the meaning of a story.

But in many other exchanges, the Journolisters clearly had another, more partisan goal in mind: to formulate the most effective talking points in order to defeat Palin and McCain and help elect Barack Obama president. The tone was more campaign headquarters than newsroom.

The conversation began with a debate over how best to attack Sarah Palin. “Honestly, this pick reeks of desperation,” wrote Michael Cohen of the New America Foundation in the minutes after the news became public. “How can anyone logically argue that Sarah Pallin [sic], a one-term governor of Alaska, is qualified to be President of the United States? Train wreck, thy name is Sarah Pallin.”

Not a wise argument, responded Jonathan Stein, a reporter for Mother Jones. If McCain were asked about Palin’s inexperience, he could simply point to then candidate Barack Obama’s similarly thin resume. “Q: Sen. McCain, given Gov. Palin’s paltry experience, how is she qualified to be commander in chief?,” Stein asked hypothetically. “A: Well, she has much experience as the Democratic nominee.”

“What a joke,” added Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker. “I always thought that some part of McCain doesn’t want to be president, and this choice proves my point.  Welcome back, Admiral Stockdale.”

Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation noted that Obama’s “non-official campaign” would need to work hard to discredit Palin. “This seems to me like an occasion when the non-official campaign has a big role to play in defining Palin, shaping the terms of the conversation and saying things that the official [Obama] campaign shouldn’t say – very hard-hitting stuff, including some of the things that people have been noting here – scare people about having this woefully inexperienced, no foreign policy/national security/right-wing christia wing-nut a heartbeat away …… bang away at McCain’s age making this unusually significant …. I think people should be replicating some of the not-so-pleasant viral email campaigns that were used against [Obama].”

Ryan Donmoyer, a reporter for Bloomberg News who was covering the campaign, sent a quick thought that Palin’s choice not to have an abortion when she unexpectedly became pregnant at age 44 would likely boost her image because it was a heartwarming story.

“Her decision to keep the Down’s baby is going to be a hugely emotional story that appeals to a vast swath of America, I think,” Donmoyer wrote.

Politico reporter Ben Adler, now an editor at Newsweek, replied, “but doesn’t leaving sad baby without its mother while she campaigns weaken that family values argument? Or will everyone be too afraid to make that point?”

Again, I urge you to use the link I've provided and keep reading.  The comments made by these so-called "journalists" are devastating.

How many of these people, caught in the act of discussing ways to manipulate the news by making it more amenable to the (leftward) side they belong to, are among the "journalists" who squeal like stuck pigs if you call them biased?

Is this decisive proof that they are what they're accused of?  You tell me.

Then, explain to me why almost all mainstream media are refusing to cover this huge, important story.  Can you come up with a reason other than that the journolist revelations shred their own credibility, so they are desperately trying to pretend this is not newsworthy?

Do you think it's newsworthy? 

Me too.

Go, Daily Caller, go.

Ken Berwitz

Remember when we were promised that, with Barack Obama, we would have a "post-racial presidency"?

How's that working out so far?

Victor Davis Hanson has answers for us, and they are not pretty.  Here are some of the key excerpts from his latest column at townhall.com:

Victor Davis Hanson

The New Racial Mess

 

Weren't we supposed to enter a new age of tolerance with the election of President Barack Obama?

 

His half-black, half-white ancestry and broad support across racial lines suggested that at last Americans judged each other on the content of our characters -- not the color of our skin or our tribal affiliations.

 

Instead, in just 18 months of the Obama administration, racial discord is growing and relations seem to have been set back a generation.

 

Black voters are galvanizing behind Obama at a time of rapidly falling support. White independents, in contrast, are leaving Obama in droves.

 

Indeed, race seems to be the subtext of almost every contemporary issue, from the soaring deficit and government spending to recent presidential appointments and the enforcement of existing immigration law. In times of growing deficits, white people are stereotyped as being angry over supposedly paying higher taxes to subsidize minorities, while minorities are stereotyped as being mostly on the receiving end of entitlements.

 

Why the escalation of racial tension in the supposed postracial age of Obama?

 

First, Obama's reputation as a racial healer was largely the creation of the media. In fact, Obama had a number of racially polarizing incidents that probably would have disqualified any other presidential candidate of the past 30 years.

 

His two-decade apprenticeship at Trinity Church under the racist and anti-Semitic Rev. Jeremiah Wright has never been adequately explained. Obama indulged in racial stereotyping himself when he wrote off the white lower-middle class of Pennsylvania as clueless zealots clinging to their guns, religion and xenophobia.

 

Obama also characterized his grandmother as a "typical white person" when he implied that her supposed fear of young black males symbolizes the prejudices of the entire white community. Michelle Obama did not help things when, in clumsy fashion, she indicted America as "just downright mean"-- a nation she had not been proud of in her adult life until it embraced the hope and change represented by her husband's candidacy.

 

Such campaign trash talk did not stop during the first 18 months of the Obama presidency. The race-baiting Van Jones -- the short-lived presidential advisor on "green jobs" -- should never have been appointed. Then, the president himself criticized Cambridge, Mass., police for acting "stupidly" when they arrested his friend, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.

 

Then there was the outburst of Attorney General Eric Holder, who blasted America as "a nation of cowards" for not talking more about race on his terms. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was almost obsessive in self-referencing herself as a "Latina." She also suggested that her racial background and experiences made her "wise" in a way white male colleagues could never be.

 

Recently, Obama appealed to voters along exclusionary race and gender lines -- not traditional political allegiances -- when he called upon "the young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women, who powered our victory in 2008."

 

The more the president appeals to his base in racial terms, the more his appointees identify themselves as members of a particular tribe, and the more political issues are framed by racial divisions, so all the more such racial obsession creates a backlash among the racially diverse American people.

 

America has largely moved beyond race. Tragically, our president and a host of his supportive special interests have not.

In the title of this blog, I asked whether the Obama presidency qualifies as "post-racial" or "most-racial".

There are the facts.  You decide.

Ken Berwitz

For those of you who live and die by political polls:

Barack Obama has been President for 1 1/2 years.  Democrats have run both houses of congress for 3 1/2 years.

And here, according to the latest Gallup poll, is what people think of them.  The bold print is mine:

July 22, 2010

Congress Ranks Last in Confidence in Institutions

Fifty percent "little"/"no" confidence in Congress reading is record high

by Lydia Saad

PRINCETON, NJ -- Gallup's 2010 Confidence in Institutions poll finds Congress ranking dead last out of the 16 institutions rated this year. Eleven percent of Americans say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in Congress, down from 17% in 2009 and a percentage point lower than the previous low for Congress, recorded in 2008.

Ken Berwitz

The New York Post has it right about extending unemployment benefits.  Not the Times, not the network news shows, not the other media which seem to have a limitless capacity for presenting Democratic spin as fact, but the New York Post.

Here it is, laid out plainly in today's editorial:

Digging a deeper hole

Last Updated: 4:57 AM, July 22, 2010

Posted: July 22, 2010

In extending jobless benefits this week, Democrats are trying to claim the moral high ground -- pretending they "stood on the side" of "working families," as President Obama put it, while heartless Republicans stood in the way.

 

It's rubbish. Starting with the fact that the extension -- which will let out-of-work Americans collect weekly checks for almost two years, instead of the traditional 26 weeks -- will bloat the federal deficit by some $34 billion.

 

That's right: The entire tab for stretching out benefits will simply be added to this year's shortfall, now pegged at a mind-blowing $1.4 trillion.  

 

As if it's all just play money.

 

It's not, of course.

 

Indeed, the Dems' horrifying yearly gaps are pushing the nation's total debt to dangerous levels -- and diverting ever-more-scarce capital from the job-creating private sector.

 

Which is why the national debt has become an issue in this fall's elections.

 

And it's the sole reason, in fact, why Republicans opposed the benefits bill.

 

"There's no debate in the Senate about whether we should pass a bill -- everyone agrees that we should," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday. "This debate is about whether, in extending these benefits, we should add to the debt or not."

 

GOPers say they would have backed more extensions, as they have in the past, if Dems agreed to pay for them with funds from elsewhere in the budget.

 

Actually, though, it's not at all clear that stretching out benefits ad infinitum will help the long-term unemployed.

Sure, workers struggling to make ends meet while searching for a job will be glad for the extra cash.

 

New Yorkers may even feel slighted by the new bill -- since, under federal rules, they face a 93-week limit on benefits, rather than 99 weeks, as in states with higher unemployment rates.

 

And Obama & Co. are right that out-of-work Americans at present far outnumber job openings.

 

But the answer to a job shortage is not more government handouts -- but more jobs. And at some point, anyway, endless extensions turn into permanent welfare -- fostering dependency.

 

Again, though, it's all moot -- because, good or bad, there's just no money for them. Which makes it a bit hard, we'd say, for Dems credibly to claim they're acting responsibly.

 

Indeed, all they are doing is making things worse.  

There you go.  Those are the facts, not the spin-job that has been foisted on us.

Democrats demanded that unemployment benefits be extended by spending an additional 34 billion dollars we do not have.  Republicans agreed to extended unemployment benefits, but insisted on doing it by using money that already is available - e.g. from the so-called "stimulus package" which was enacted over a year ago and much of which is currently sitting and collecting dust.  That way we don't run up more debt..

But I have a question:  since the Obama administration has relentlessly told us that the "stimulus package" has created millions upon millions of jobs, why do we need unemployment benefit extensions at all?  Heck, with so many new jobs to choose from I guess just about everyone either is, or should be, employed by now. 

Or, maybe the truth is a bit different.  Maybe the "stimulus package", like the cash for clunkers program, the Afghanistan troop surge, the nonexistent border security and so many other actions (and inactions) by President Obama and his lopsidedly Democratic congress, is a failure. 

Maybe the real reason so many have been jobless for so long is because unemployment, which was at 8.1% the day "stimulus" legislation was signed, then jumped over 10% and, a year later, is still in the mid-9's. 

When will our wonderful "neutral" media start demanding answers from this administration about why putting us almost a trillion more dollars into debt resulted in a loss of jobs, not a gain?

Or is that one of the issues the journolist bunch decided to ignore on Barack Obama's behalf?

Ken Berwitz

Have you ever heard of the journolist?  If you rely on mainstream media for your news, chances are you have not. 

The journolist was a network of left wing journalists and academics (a good number fit both categories) who created a closed society in which they communicated with each other, confidently displaying their naked partisanship, without a fear that the general public would ever find out.

Well, thanks in no small part to Tucker Carlson and his web site, www.dailycaller.com, we have found out.  And the information is appalling, even for people, like me, whose opinion of mainstream media already is in the dumpster.

It would take far more than one blog to put up all the scandalous back-and-forth hatred, envy, partisanship and disregard for even the most minimal journalistic standards these "professionals" display.  But I can give you the links. 

Here they are.  And prepare yourself for a jaw-dropping adventure into media hell.

OBAMA WINS! JOURNOLISTERS REJOICE

'Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!'

TheDC: Liberal journalists, law professor debate merits of shutting down Fox News on Journolist

TheDC: READ excerpted scans of Journolisters talking about the need to regulate Fox News

TheDC: Journolist documents show media plotting to kill unfavorable stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright

MYRA ADAMS: This tawdry tale from TheDC is a wake-up call to the country: Is our free press really free?

These, folks, are the people who give us the news.  Who shape the news.  Who - incredibly - attack Fox News as being biased.

But most of all, they are the people whose ad hominem attitudes guarantee they will misinform you to promote their point of view.

If they were conservative and/or right wing journalists, it would be front page news across the nation, and would have lead-story status on every network news show.

But they are all liberal and/or left wing.  So most mainstream media are burying this deep into the ground. 

The reason, it would seem obvious, is how many of THEIR people are included, thus how much THEIR credibility is compromised.

I'll keep an eye out for more, and I'll post it when I see it.

Ken Berwitz

Here is the letter sent by Lt. Colonel (Ret.) Allen West to Chris Landshut at the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.  No need for me to elaborate, it speaks for itself:

Lt. Col. Allen West and his wife Angela ~ Today at 2:13pm

Bill, Danielle, and Chip, at about 1210 pm today I received a call from Ms Chris Landshut, (954)739-5007  Executive Director of the South Florida Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. After reintroducing herself to me she was uncomfortable telling me of a situation that has arisen reference the nomination of Angela and myself as a South Florida Finest Couple.

She informed me that she has received complaints from certain individuals who have threatened to withdraw their support to the Cystic Fibrosis gala event if Angela and I are honored. She humbly asked if I would agree to step down and allow the event to proceed and not disrupt the support to the foundation. These individuals have called and complained to the National Foundation decrying "politicizing" of the event.

In accepting the nomination, Angela and I consented to raise $10K for the Cystic Fibrosis foundation, our opportunity to give back to our community. However, not wanting to cause the foundation to lose what I was told could be up to $200K I consented to Ms Landshut that Angela and I would step down and not participate in the event.

Bill, you are the Chairman of this gala event and therefore I would like a formal letter of apology, not to me, but rather to my wife Dr Angela Graham-West explaining this situation. I do not care how people attack me but my wife is another matter.

I know that this situation revolves around my congressional candidacy but this event has honored political figures before. I felt that our service to this Nation and local community warranted our nomination.

It has come to my attention that the McCloskey and Levy families are the donors who have threatened to withdraw support due to prodding from the wife of Congressman Ron Klein. I find this reprehensible, disgusting, despicable, and petulant....but indicative of the hideous side of South Florida politics which I condemn. There is proof of this, to include an email trail, and I would appreciate your honesty when this becomes a topic of inquiry.

I must now contact all those friends whom I had asked to assist us in raising the requisite funds and inform them of this issue. I pray you are prepared.

I hold no angst against you as the Chairman of the event, Ms Landshut, or the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. However, I am highly upset with those who would blackmail the CF Foundation in order to play politics.

Steadfast and Loyal, LTC(R) Allen B West

Here, folks, is a Black man claiming that he and his wife were asked (told is more like it ) to step down as CFF honorees, because he is a candidate for congress and some of his Democratic opponent's friends threatened to withhold contributions if the organization went through with it.

Is this true?  Are Col. West and his wife being dumped and charitable donations threatened because supporters of West's opponent, Ron Klein, care more about hardball politics than victims of cystic fibrosis?  Are the Wests mistaken?  Are they lying?

I'll wait to hear more.  And I'll be very interested to see which civil rights "leaders" and groups do and do not stand by the Wests.  

Depending on how the story plays out, their actions may tell us which they find more important; racial justice or politics.

Ken Berwitz

Did you find it odd that once USDA official Shirley Sherrod was singled out for what appeared to be racist comments at an NAACP banquet,she was dumped so fast that she didn't know what hit her?

I have to admit that, for me, the answer was no.  .

But Tom Blumer, writing for the Washington Examiner, has come up with a very, very interesting set of facts regarding financial dealings between the Sherrods and the USDA, which have dramatically changed my thinking on the subject.

I'll give you a taste, by going to the end of Blumer's article and posting the questions he asks.  I guarantee they will make you want to read the beginning so you can find out what he is referring to.  And, believe me, there's plenty to find out:

Here are just a few questions about Ms. Sherrod that deserve answers:

• Was Ms. Sherrod's USDA appointment an unspoken condition of her organization's settlement?
• How much "debt forgiveness" is involved in USDA's settlement with New Communities?
• Why were the Sherrods so deserving of a combined $300,000 in "pain and suffering" payments -- amounts that far exceed the average payout thus far to everyone else? ($1.15 billion divided by 16,000 is about $72,000)?
• Given that New Communities wound down its operations so long ago (it appears that this occurred sometime during the late 1980s), what is really being done with that $13 million in settlement money?

 Here are a few bigger-picture questions:

• Did Shirley Sherrod resign so quickly because the circumstances of her hiring and the lawsuit settlement with her organization that preceded it might expose some unpleasant truths about her possible and possibly sanction conflicts of interest?
• Is USDA worried about the exposure of possible waste, fraud, and abuse in its handling of Pigford?
• Did USDA also dispatch Sherrod hastily because her continued presence, even for another day, might have gotten in the way of settling Pigford matters quickly? 

The media and the blogosphere shouldn't be so quick to forget about Shirley Sherrod.

If you have read Blumer's entire article, you understand what these questions refer to. 

And, like me, you are probably wondering if the real reason Ms. Sherrod was so quickly and unceremoniously dumped is that a look at her past will be far more embarrassing to the administration than anything relating to her comments at that NAACP banquet.

Stay tuned.

Ken Berwitz

Ever hear of the brown berets?

In case you haven't, the brown berets are an overtly racist group that demands all Whites go back to Europe and leave the United States to Mexico.   They are left wing lunatics....who also happen to be stone cold racists.  

Watch this video (the key part starts about 1:30 in) and listen to this racist lunatic screaming "You are too White to be here", "Go back to Europe", "Go back to Europe, nazis", and other such lovely material.

Nice, huh?

Now tell me when our wonderful "neutral" media, which have spent months and months desperately trying to tag the Tea Party movement as racist, will be reporting about this bunch..

My guess is, it will be about the same time they report on the video of king samir shabazz, one of the three Philadelphia thugs who intimidated voters during the 2008 presidential election, standing on a crowded street and screaming out the most vile racial epithets, including a call to kill White babies.

But listen to them squeal like stuck pigs if you call them biased.

Ken Berwitz

Did you know that there are more professional massage therapists coming forward to accuse Al Gore of demanding some very unprofessional sexual activity?

From the National Enquirer (which seems to have cornered the market in uncovering sex scandals) we have this:

The ENQUIRER reports in an exclusive bombshell exclusive that police have investigated charges from TWO MORE WOMEN who claimed they were abused by former VP AL GORE!

The allegations come hot on the heels of an ongoing Portland, Ore., police investigation that reopened after The ENQUIRER exclusively revealed accusations by a licensed massage therapist who says Gore groped her in 2006.

The ENQUIRER recently uncovered shocking allegations, from two other massage therapists.

The first incident allegedly took place at a Beverly Hills luxury hotel when Gore, 62, was in Hollywood to attend the Oscars in 2007.

The second reportedly occurred a year later at a hotel in Tokyo.

A Beverly Hills hotel source  told The ENQUIRER:

"The therapist claimed that when they were alone, Gore shrugged off a towel and stood naked in front of her.

"He pointed at his erect penis and ordered her, 'Take care of THIS.'"

Yeah, I know this is the National Enquirer.  But if there is one thing the Enquirer seems to consistently get right it is sex scandals.

Now tell me:  if Al Gore were a Republican icon is there any doubt that the media would have been all over the allegations from when Molly Hagerty - the first accuser - came forward, right through to these new ones?  Or would the story have been buried after just one or two days, the way the Gore story was?

I know, I know.  Why even bother to say it again.

Ken Berwitz

Here is an excerpt from a just-released Quinnipiac poll on President Obama. It provides further insight into why Democrats are openly "debamafying" (intentionally removing President Obama from their re-election campaigns):

A year after President Barack Obama's political honeymoon ended, his job approval rating has dropped to a negative 44 - 48 percent, his worst net score ever, and American voters say by a narrow 39 - 36 percent margin that they would vote for an unnamed Republican rather than President Obama in 2012, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

This compares to a 48 - 43 percent approval for Obama in a May 26 national poll by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University and a 57 - 33 percent approval last July, just before the political firestorm created by opposition to his health care plan galvanized political opponents and turned independent voters against him.

In this latest survey of more than 2,000 voters, independent voters disapprove of Obama 52 - 38 percent and say 37 - 27 percent they would vote for a Republican contender in 2012.

American voters also say 48 - 40 percent Obama does not deserve reelection in 2012.

If these data are accurate - or anywhere close - it isn't very hard to see why many Democrats intend to run without invoking the Obama name.

Will Mr. Obama's standing improve between now and election day?  No one knows and no one can say.  But, importantly, this poll was conducted July 13 - 19. 

Interviewing, therefore, took place during a week when the BP oil well was capped and when the Obama camp was gloating over the "political win" it thought it had achieved by demanding an extension of unemployment benefits while (falsely) claiming Republicans were trying to prevent it from happening. 

Do these numbers look like Mr. Obama is "winning"?  I sure don't think so.

And that is why Democrats like Missouri senate candiate Robin Carnahan, and Texas gubernatorial candidate Bill White, are running campaigns that have effectively been debamafied. 

Expect more Democrats to follow.  Many more.

Ken Berwitz

Interesting 24 hours.

Yesterday we saw video of USDA Director of Rural Development Shirley Sherrod, speaking at an NAACP banquet, and telling her audience that, years ago, she did not do all she could for a White farmer in need.  She decided not to help as much as she had to so that she covered her backside, then handed him off to a White employee who she described as "his own kind". 

Her exact words (the bold print is mine):

"The first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm, he took a long time talking but he was trying to show me he was superior to me. I know what he was doing, but he had come to me for help. What he didn't know while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me was, I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him.

"I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So I didn't give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough so that when he, I assumed the Department of Agriculture had sent him to me, either that or the Georgia Department of Agriculture, and he needed to go back and report that I did try to help him.

So I took him to a white lawyer that had attended some of training that we had provided because Chapter 12 bankruptcy had just been enacted for the family farm. So I figured if I take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him."

I was fully expecting to write more about Ms. Sherrod's racism in today's blog. 

But having reviewed a large part of the overall speech (which you can see by clicking here. -- the key segment is from about 16:45 to 21:25), I conclude that Ms. Sherrod is right to claim that the purpose of her story was to show how she came to realize her job was about helping poor people regardless of their race.

So I apologize to Shirley Sherrod for what I wrote yesterday.  I did not know there was more to the video and, had I seen that additional footage, would have been singing a different tune then -- as I am now.

Unless some additional information comes my way that changes things again, I hope she is reinstated at her job.

==============================================================================

UPDATE:  Here is video of a segment on Hannity last night, in which Andrew Breitbart, who provided the tape that seemed to incriminate Shirley Sherrod, explains how he got it, why he put it on line and what he thinks about Ms. Sherrod.  I assure you that a) you will understand far more about what really happened by watching this and b) you will be surprised by what Mr. Breitbart says.

Teaser:  According to Hannity, Fox did not report this story until after Agriculture Secretary (and Democrat) Tom Vilsak - and President Obama -  had come to the same conclusion I did, and had forced Ms. Sherrod to resign. 

If true, this makes a lot of people - very especially Matt Lauer of the Today Show who gleefully used the occasion to take potshots at Fox and his assorted other conservative bogeymen this morning - out to be partisan, ignorant idiots. 

Also, Breitbart ties the Sherrod incident to the consummately disgraceful behavior of mainstream media and the NAACP, who continue to perpetuate the phony claim by four Black congresspeople that racial epithets were hurled at them at a Tea Party demonstration.

Ken Berwitz

From Jason Embry, writing for www.statesman.com:

As I reported last night on the Postcards blog, Democratic sources say President Barack Obama will be in Austin and Houston on Aug. 9 for a pair of fundraisers. And Democratic gubernatorial nominee Bill White doesn’t plan to be there.

Said White spokeswoman Katy Bacon, “That week is jam packed, and he’s not scheduled to be in Houston or Austin at all except for the night of the 12th. In August, Bill will be talking with Texans about the future of our state, laying out his plans for the same.”

The president’s approval numbers aren’t good in Texas, and Gov. Rick Perry has repeatedly sought to link Obama and White.

Earlier today I blogged that, in Missouri, senate candidate Robin Carnahan has debamafied (that's my new word for dumping Obama because of his political toxicity).  Now Texas Gubernatorial candidate Bill White is debamafying as well. 

There will be more.  Count on it.

Ken Berwitz

Suppose I told you that the United States was engaged in a war that was killing more U.S. citizens than the Afghanistan war, and had been for years? 

At this point I wouldn't blame you for being skeptical.  After all, our wonderful "neutral" media would certainly be covering something like that, wouldn't they?

Well, nope.  Not when the war is with Mexican drug cartels and human traffickers.  Because to cover that war would bring home just how important securing our southern border is and just how horrifically dangerous the administration's refusal to do so has made it for United States citizens.

Want to know more?  I assume the answer is yes, so here are excerpts from a genuinely disquieting article by Peter Raymond of americanthinker.com, which lays it all out:

July 20, 2010

Growing violence along our southern border being ignored by media

Peter Raymond

 

For most Americans the war erupting along our southern border has elicited little more than passing comments. We feel insulated and secure because of the vast distance separating our lives from the widespread civil unrest that is escalating at an alarming rate. Nearly 25,000 Mexicans and Americans have been killed since the Mexican government's declared war on the drug cartels in 2006.

Despite receiving relatively scant coverage from the national media, the humanitarian crisis along our border actually does pose a very serious threat to our national security. It is inexplicable that same news conglomera