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42 Responses to Building a new blog
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Murphy’s invented a new media strtegy as far as I know. You invite your opponent to debate at all your scheduled stops during the week. Alert the press and insinuate your opponent is avoiding debates (even through several are already scheduled). Send some paid rabble rousers to push the “no show” theme and instigate the media to be sure they appear at this non-debate and cover not only the speech in front of 5 nursing home residents but oush the media avoidance angle.
Now we are into “Pavlov the Press Dog” experiments. How long will the media play along like Murphy’s lever pressing tools? Given the need for content is there any hope the media can recondition themselves without a Skinner Box?
Whatever someone may think about Murphy’s strategy isn’t it taking place in the vacuum created by McMahon? It seems to me that she is banking on a devalued press and on the assumption that enough voters come from the Palinesque point of, “I read all of em”. (In that case newspapers and probably meaning none of them) and use terms like “lame stream media” to cover their lack of curiosity. McMahon might get away with it but I don’t think that’s a good thing.
McMahon’s got one thing on Murphy going down the stretch: Leadership.
Compare Murphy and VP candidate Paul Ryan. Ryan at 42 is one of the ideological leaders of the GOP and admired by his peers. Like him or not Paul Ryan is not a slug. A go-along. A party line voter. He’s a leader.
Then there’s Murph. As Open Congress puts it 0 of Murphy’s proposed legislation made it into law. Most often votes with Rosa Delauro.
I have to give McMahon the edge on leadership here. With Murph we get a dyed-in-the-wool Casper Milquetoast. A follower. A reliable Blue voter. If he bring the dollars to CT that he brought to the Fifth then we can throw up our arms in defeat. Aspiring to win an election and leadership are two different things
Median Income in Litchfield County dropped 10% last years and is on pace to become the poorest in the state. Murph’s legacy?
Colin perhaps your class can discuss the Todd Akin situation.
Even though almost every major figure in the Republican party and the conservative movement has condemned him and called for him to leave the race, Democrats are now accusing Republicans of condoning rape and a “war on women” because of Missouri GOP Senate nominee Todd Akin’s clueless comments on the subject.
So it’s worth looking at how many Democrats treat the crime of rape in the real world.
As anyone with direct experience knows, whenever you find a politician, judge, or lawyer raging about the harshness of the criminal justice system, pushing rehabilitation and parole programs for child-molesters and sex offenders, rallying behind cop killers, or working to disarm or prosecute people who seek to defend themselves from becoming potential victims, it’s almost always a Democrat.
A case in point is the stance Virginia Democrats have taken against a popular state law providing for mandatory sentencing of child rapists.
In March, the Virginia state legislature overwhelmingly passed a law that imposed automatic life sentences for any adult convicted of raping a child under the age of 13. It was in response to an appalling statistic — more than half of all rapes in Virginia are committed against children under 13.
According to the bill’s sponsor, Delegate Rob Bell (R-Charlottesville), “[i]n the past two years we had 228 offenders; only 10 got life sentences. They were appallingly short.”
The figures on recidivism for this type of crime vary between 52% and 88%, depending on how the figures are calculated.
The bill passed by a large majority. Twenty-one state senators and delegates, all of them Democrats, voted no on the bill.
Included among them were Obama surrogates and supporters State Senator Louise Lucas; Delegate Mamye BaCote, a leading member of VA Women for Obama; and Delegate Scott Surovell, a member of the Obama campaign’s Truth Team. All of them are prominent in the Obama campaign’s efforts to carry Virginia, and unlike what has happened regarding the treatment of Todd Akin by Republicans, none of them has been disavowed by the campaign, much less by President Obama.
Ask yourself this question: who’s really more involved in the war on women and condoning rape? Is it Democrats who want rapists freed and women disarmed, or Republicans who want women to be able to defend themselves and want convicted rapists off the streets and in jail, where they belong?
The hypocrisy is mind-numbing.
It’s possible to find child rape and life sentences equally apalling and not support either.
It’s also possible to find Akin offensive but also find McCaskill’s position on abortion even more backward and revolting.
Honestly?
That sounds like a incredibly bad bill to me.
I applaud the legislators who had to courage to vote against it.
At what point is it expected that a politician can no longer run on what he “believes” but on what he has accomplished with his vote in Washington and his pulpit to improve our lives? What leadership and political courage has he demonstrated? Ask yourself about Murphy – are you better off since Murphy has been in Congress? If not, why promote him to the Senate?
If you subscribe to the “The Peter Principle” of government employees and you live in the 5th, promoting Murphy out of the 5th to a position of quintessential incompetence is the only way to get rid of him. It’s the organizational principle behind all public sector unions.
CM:
Hey – maybe not a clown question for the debate?
My mother-in-law often tells me that “voting Republican is voting against myself.” She’s a lifelong progressive who believes that Republicans are evil by nature (though considering that she’s also an atheist, it strikes me as being philosophically problematic that she even believes in absolute good and evil).
Below is the answer I would give her if she would allow me (which she doesn’t):
Public-sector employees get salaried with our money (via taxes). Part of the public employees’ salaries go to their unions as dues. A good chunk of those dues goes to the coffers of Democrat politicians to fund their future campaigns.
See the cycle? It is essentially money-laundering.
Now, when a public union negotiates for more money or benefits for its members, and a Democrat politician is sitting on the other side of the negotiation table advocating for the taxpayer, who’s going to lose? Nine times out of ten…the taxpayer. This must be the way of things for the cycle to continue.
By giving the union what it wants, the Democratic politician will ensure he (or she) gets what he wants. The taxpayer will always be made to pay more to keep the cycle going.
Union: If you don’t do what we want, we won’t give you campaign money.
Democrat politician: Raising taxes or allowing you to raise fees (like for public transportation) will be good for my next campaign. If I need to go to the people, I will tell them that without the tax or fare hike, essential services will be cut. That threat should scare them into giving us what we both want: more of their money.
Also, unions are a business like any other, with profit as their primary goal. A union gets more profit by collecting more dues through more members.
Eventually, a tipping point is reached (often exacerbated by an economic downturn or an over-saturation of public employees — think Greece). Then, both public- and private-sector employees are in trouble.
But union trouble comes later rather than sooner, as the Democratic politician bleeds the taxpayer dry in an attempt to save the union from any economic troubles and continue the cycle.
In the end, the taxpayer is nothing more than a host for two sets of parasites working together. Though a healthy host is required to keep the cycle going, the parasites are gluttonous creatures of habit which cannot stop their feeding — even when it seems to be killing the host (think Obama’s trillion-dollar stimulus).
And that, friends, is how a vote for a Democrat will always be a against yourself. Questions?
Jon:
A qoute from Alexis de Toqueville, 19th century French historian on his study of the new American democracy:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”
In short, bread and circuses is the end of democracy.
CM you could have a class on entitlements and
PUT ME IN CHARGE . . .
Put me in charge of food stamps. I’d get rid of Lone Star cards; no cash for Ding Dongs or Ho Ho’s, just money for 50-pound bags of rice and beans, blocks of cheese and all the powdered milk you can haul away. If you want steak and frozen pizza, then get a job.
Put me in charge of Medicaid. The first thing I’d do is to get women Norplant birth control implants or tubal legations. Then, we’ll test recipients for drugs, alcohol, and nicotine. If you want to reproduce or use drugs, alcohol, or smoke, then get a job.
Put me in charge of government housing. Ever live in a military barracks? You will maintain our property in a clean and good state of repair. Your home” will be subject to inspections anytime and possessions will be inventoried. If you want a plasma TV or Xbox 360, then get a job and your own place.
In addition, you will either present a check stub from a job each week or you will report to a “government” job. It may be cleaning the roadways of trash, painting and repairing public housing, whatever we find for you. We will sell your 22 inch rims and low profile tires and your blasting stereo and speakers and put that money toward the “common good..”
Before you write that I’ve violated someone’s rights, realize that all of the above is voluntary. If you want our money, accept our rules. Before you say that this would be “demeaning” and ruin their “self esteem,” consider that it wasn’t that long ago that taking someone else’s money for doing absolutely nothing was demeaning and lowered self esteem.
If we are expected to pay for other people’s mistakes we should at least attempt to make them learn from their bad choices. The current system rewards them for continuing to make bad choices.
AND While you are on Gov’t subsistence, you no longer can VOTE! Yes, that is correct. For you to vote would be a conflict of interest. You will voluntarily remove yourself from voting while you are receiving a Gov’t welfare check. If you want to vote, then get a job.
How easy you make it! Thanks! Now about those jobs…..
We are told by “immigrant advocates” that illegals are only doing the jobs that Americans won’t do. Let’s give the “welfaristas” those jobs: agricultural picking work, slaughterhouse work – you get the picture.
Matt Taibbi on that never-take-anything-from-government government-debt-is-bad candidate Mitt Romney (it’s long but well-worth the read):
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829
It is hard in the midst of battle for us to see, but we are winning. We ought to win the presidential election this year, and we must do everything in our power to make that happen, but the defeat of the left today is sure. The only way to lose this war is for us to quit, and we are not doing that.
Begin with the basics. Americans, overwhelmingly, are conservative. The latest Battleground Poll shows what every other Battleground Poll has shown for the last decade: Americans, by a huge majority, choose to call themselves “conservative,” even when they can choose “moderate” or “unsure” as well as “liberal.” Look at May 2012, or the twenty consecutive Battleground Poll reports dating back more than ten years in which conservatives have always been an overwhelming majority.
The Gallup Poll findings are just as stark. The last poll in February 2012 showed that conservatives outnumber liberals in every state except Massachusetts, and the one in February 2011 showed that conservatives outnumbered liberals in every single state. The one in August 2010 showed that conservatives outnumbered liberals in every state except Rhode Island; in February 2010, again, conservatives outnumbered liberals in every single state. And yet again, back in August 2009, conservatives outnumbered liberals in every single state.
Every time the question is asked, by every polling group which asks the question, and however the question is worded, the answer is still the same: conservatives dramatically outnumber liberals. Even polls limited to particular states show that this is true, like in Washington State or New York State or Minnesota. This is a salient fact in American life which separates the United States from every other nation.
The political problem which conservatives have faced reflects an elitist leftist control of the nongovernmental institutions of American life. The establishment media, for example, is not an organ of government so much as government is an organ of the media. Remove the leftist media, and how long could leftism last in America? What has been happening over the last quarter-century is the inexorable rise of a media — sometimes more akin to an underground press — which reflects accurately the conservative values of America.
Moreover, the left has proven unable to stop this rise. Rush Limbaugh, of course, is the ultimate example in broadcast media, and the boycotts, the name-calling, the smearing of Rush have all failed miserably and shown other conservatives how toothless the censors of the left are in American society. Fox News is the most popular television news network, and the leftist media is losing audience rapidly. CNN, for example, now has the smallest number of viewers in ten years.
The left controls academia, but one consequence of that domination is that very little real critical thinking occurs on American campuses — a phenomenon which is diminishing the value of leftist indoctrination passing as education. One result has been the rise of online colleges, which has raised the ire of leftists like Senator Harkin of Iowa. These are often for-profit academic institutions, which means that real market forces drive enrollment and curriculum decisions. These courses are not conservative; the courses, instead, tend to be practical and non-ideological. The education of children is also moving from public schools to home-schooling, which is rising exponentially.
What is true of the media and the educational system is true of entertainment as well: July 2012 data shows that movie audiences have dropped to a 25-year low. Television viewing in May 2012 was reported to have declined for the first time in twenty years. The tools of leftist manipulation of the conservative majority in America are losing their power.
In areas like book publishing, the brilliantly irreverent Regnery Press’s PIG series (Politically Incorrect Guide) tweaks staid and dreary leftism with sharp and clear laser beams, and the Christian Science Monitor reported in late August of this year that conservative books were dramatically outselling liberal books.
But it is not so much that conservatives are gaining control of these media of influence as it is that the left is losing control of these levers. Without totalitarian domination of education, information, and entertainment, the left has only its own disciples, which in most states are about 18% of the population; even in Vermont, such people make for only 28%. Winning these battles — the battle which we fight every day when we turn off the television set, pass up the lame tripe which masquerades as cinema today, sign up for nontraditional college learning, and buy conservative books — and not quitting means winning the war.
There is a final and fatal nail in the coffin of leftism: it has no ideas, and it scarcely pretends to have ideas anymore. Listen, when you can bear it, to the drivel from the Obama campaign. What is true of this presidential campaign is true of the whole of leftism in our land. It is sterile, vapid, and boring. The recent exchange between Anderson Cooper and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and the Newsweek editorial against Obama show just how sick even the flacks of the establishment have grown from the nausea of leftism.
We will win. Indeed, we cannot lose.
Your class I am confident will be filled Nutmeggers. Anyone paying attention knows that CT is a blue liberal state. Liberals keep abortion near and dear to their hearts, makes you wonder how people could actually vote for a “man” who voted for times for infanticide.
http://www.lifenews.com/2012/08/28/abortion-survivor-rips-obama-on-infanticide-support-in-new-ad/
” Liberals keep abortion near and dear to their hearts…”
Nope, it’s not at the top of the list. There are a lot of other issues, that affect a huge portion of the populace, that take up much time and thought. Not that women shouldn’t be able to have control over their own thoughts and bodies, but of course that part of the issue seems to get lost in the right’s smoke-screen.
Shouldn’t the sources of these various essays be included?
If “golf” and “Chicago” now are code words for black people, what does the media make of this? Very little it seems, since the offender is a Democrat.
An Assembly candidate whose campaign sent mailers using the word “negrohood” to residents in his Sheepshead Bay district apologized Wednesday – calling the racially tinged language a “typo.”
“As the candidate, I take full responsibility for this inadvertent error and I am sorry to anyone who was offended by it,” Ben Akselrod, who’s running in the Sept. 13 Democratic primary against Assemblyman Steven Cymbrowitz, said in a statement.
The Friends of Ben Akselrod sent the mailers last week, claiming that his opponent “has allowed crime to go up over 50% in our negrohood so far this year.”
Imagine if a Republican had said this!
Despicable! Mia Love’s Wikipedia Page Hijacked By Racist Left-Wing Trolls
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posted at 4:05 pm on August 29, 2012 by Matt Vespa
[ Elections ]
Mia Love
I couldn’t agree more with Howard Portnoy’s post on Mia Love’s speech at the RNC last night. She is living proof that the America Dream is still alive. However, it always amazes me how the left can’t stand people of color having conservative principles. Mia Love embodies hope and change, which isn’t bolstered by a bed of hot air. She worked for the American Dream, whereas Barack Obama and the Democratic Party want to destroy it under the thumb of a hyper-regulatory progressive state. It’s because Mia Love is black, conservative, and successful that the political left needs to smear and destroy her. She’s an aberration concerning their narrative that government is here to take care of you–ALL of you.
As Portnoy posted in his piece, Love said in her speech:
Let me tell you about the America I know. My parents immigrated to this country with $10 in their pockets and the hope that the America they heard about really did exist.
The America I now is grounded in the determination found in patriots and pioneers. It’s found in the Olympic athletes and every child who looks at the impossible and says, ‘I can do that.’ That’s the America I know.
That drives liberals crazy. As a result, the left’s hate began to flow. As reported by Twitchy today, the left-wing hate was apparent on Twitter with some of these classy folks tweeting the following:
Courtesy of Twitchy
Even more egregious was her Wikipedia page being hijacked and loaded with despicable edits that Gateway Pundit and others reported on earlier today.
Pundit posted this about the edits.
Classy…
However, what’s even more revolting was the edit calling Ms. Love a “house n*gger” for being a conservative Republican. Warning: some language may be inappropriate for younger viewers and it’s definitely Not To Be Viewed at Work.
In Andrew Breitbart’s last address to CPAC back in February, he quickly touched upon why he retweeted the hate that was sent to him via Twitter. He said it was to expose the left’s “false narrative of their innate tolerance.” I guess this awful incident is just another chapter in the annals of American liberalism. Stay classy left-wingers.
All, your messages get lost in the sauce. Tighten it up. Distill. And then I, and others, can hear you. Strive for 4 sentences. You earn more time later, if those pithy sentences work.
Um, not that I am trying to be the adjunct/host. I am merely a frustratd reader who tries hard to listen to all voices. Errr… *both voices??* (election season) And the cacophony makes me deaf. And blind, when the cacophony takes the shape of long-winded print.
What will ObamaCare do to the next Clint Eastwood?
Rachel Maddow has the answer: “he’s 81″, so what more needs to be said?
Since when did Communists not like old people?
The answer: forget about families: what good are old people to the state?
Therefore, Eastwood’s wasn’t performing; he was simply “bizarre”, even by the standards of a Gay Communist Party littered with fifth-rate millionaire actors too stoned on an endless supply of garbage roles, high-end booze and expensive drugs to care what taxes are.
Guess what, punks:
The oldest are still the wisest.
Earned wealth still speaks freely.
So, in the “wake” of Clint’s act, it is reasonable to ask:
Do you still feel lucky, punks?
Brief enough?
It’s brief, yes, and that helps somewhat. Yet now it is the gracelessness of name-calling (“punks”)that deafens me. When one makes an opposing point in a clear, concise, and gracious/respectful manner, I can hear it, I can think it over, and sometimes I can even agree with it. That, my friend, is how one wins support for one’s ideas. THAT is how one changes the mind of another. Enjoy your day, sir.
Admit it. Now you want the poetry back.
Anything but THAT. hahhhaaa
Dan Malloy’s cynical take on Information Technologists and the “Happy News” mandate as reported by Jon Lender might fit into your facts lecture.
The career of Colleen Flanagan is the new Model: Democratic Snark Agent and Malloy propoganda agent turned into Board of Regents Communication Director and a 150ish a year job for life. Not bad for 8 years removed from UConn. Hustle abd Flow. Facts are indeed contiguous things floating around the center of the spin cycle.
Don’t obsess on truth; Just remember you got here the same way the coin did.
http://www.carolbuckheit.org/2011/02/26/pr-and-politics-what-advocacy-organizations-need-to-know-about-access-to-cts-new-governor/
Ummm, Brevtity and Grace, punks was used because it’s a classic Clint Eastwood line. It’s no fun if I have to explain everything to both of you.
Last week a line was crossed, and full blown insanity manifested itself in the formerly-mainstream media. My friend JMH is a model of a temperate media consumer, but watching the coverage of the Republican convention, she could not contain her fury:
Something just snapped today, when I read about the race baiters at MSNBC not even airing any of the Convention’s minority speakers. Even if Artur Davis weren’t black, how is it a non-story, when the guy who seconded Obama’s nomination ends up with a prime time spot on the GOP Convention stage? Ditto for covering Ted Cruz, who pulled off the most spectacular extremist Tea Party upsets of campaign 2012. It’s not just MSNBC either; NBC “curated” both of them right out of “some of the notable speeches” in Tampa.
I know, I know. I know. But it’s the brazenness of it all that just stuns me, and keeps on stunning me, no matter how prepared to expect it I should be by now. Today, however, I’m also stunned by just how deep the reservoir of my own anger about it has become. It’s so blinding that I can’t even concentrate on anything else.
That was early in the convention. There was much more to be furious about as the coverage continued.
Yahoo Washington Bureau Chief David Chalian, formerly at ABC where he produced this famous and fact free ambush of Sarah Palin, mistakenly thought he was off mic when he said Ann and Mitt Romney had no problem with African Americans suffering as a result of hurricane Isaac. They’re not concerned at all. “They’re happy to have a party with black people drowning,” As it turned out, Mitt Romney headed out to flood stricken Louisiana at the close of the convention, and only after that became known did Obama cancel his fund raising plans elsewhere and head out there, too.
In fact, Obama has a history of ignoring all citizens suffering from catastrophe. In 2009 when an ice storm killed 42 and left millions of Americans without power or water or shelter, Obama hosted a lavish Super Bowl cocktail party with $100/lb Wagyu beef appetizers. Worse, as Chalian was leveling that mendacious, hate-filled charge, Obama was chatting online on Reddit with his supporters, not flying to the scene of the destruction.
On hearing Chalian was fired, PBS’s Gwen Ifill whose outrageously biased moderation in the 2008 debates set a new low, rushed to his defense:
gwen ifill ?@pbsgwen?One mistake does not change this. @DavidChalian is God’s gift to political journalism. #IStandwithDavid?11:32 AM – 29 Aug 12 · Details”
https://twitter.com/pbsgwen
Like JMH, Roger L. Simon was astonished at the degree of the media’s racism and called it pathological:
Racism is stalking the Republican Convention in Tampa. But it’s not from the Republicans. It’s from the mainstream media.
First it was MSNBC treating convention speakers Artur Davis, Mia Love, and Ted Cruz like nonpersons. And now it’s Yahoo! Washington Bureau Chief David Chalian getting caught on an ABC webcast saying Mitt Romney would be “happy to have a party when black people drown.”
Chalian, not surprisingly, was fired almost immediately when the word got out, but the climate in which he would make such an insane statement is very much alive and well. Why would anyone dream of saying such a thing in a semi-public situation if he didn’t feel safe and among friends?
The left/liberal need to think Republicans and conservatives racists is more than just projection. At this point, it is nothing short of a mental illness. It is so far divorced from reality, it has to be pathological. No longer are these people able to observe reality with anything close to impartiality. We are not in the world of politics, ladies and gentlemen. We are in the world Freud, Jung, Adler, and people bouncing off walls.
He’s right of course.
How divorced from reality is the claim that Republicans and conservatives are racists? Bgates corrects the media narrative.
41 voting members of the House of Representatives are black.
39 of them are Democrats. (Those numbers would be 42 and 40 save for the death of a Rep in March.)
Given that Democrats famously spurn color blindness to embrace affirmative action, how many of those 39 do you suppose come from majority-white districts?
Did you guess four?
Meanwhile, there are two black Republicans in the House. They were elected from districts that are 82% and 75% white, whiter than any district that sent a black Democrat to the 112th Congress. Apparently an overwhelmingly white electorate is no bar to a black candidate – so long as the overwhelmingly white electorate is also majority Republican.
Tammy Bruce offers up a plausible theory to explain the media’s insanity, insanity so widespread even the occasionally more temperate Juan Williams was shamefully swept up in it:
I knew the liberal establishment would have a meltdown swathed in violence and depravity as they realized they were being rejected, and that time has arrived. Just after last night’s RNC convention liberals wasted no time attacking the women they see as a threat. The truth of the matter, of course, is that liberals destroyed their own bizarre vision for the future with actions that most of America is now rejecting. Instead of looking in the mirror, they’ve chosen to target Mia Love and Ann Romney, two obvious conservative superstars who have appeal across the political and socio-economic spectrum.
The first indication of how vile liberals will get comes from Juan Williams who called Mrs. Romney a “Corporate Wife” last night after he speech. Talk about ‘coded phrases’! A ‘corporate wife’ is a phrase used on the left for a woman who has married for money and plays a role so she’ll continue to get money. In other words, a lying whore. Both Bret Baier and Megyn Kelly sounded shocked. Immediately after that remarkable speech last night that’s where Williams went. I then saw tweets with the same general message. This had clearly been a messaging decision prior to Ann’s speech. I don’t think they counted on the speech being as distinctive and as strong as it was.
Besides being pathological, the media approach is clearly coordinated , and understandably so given the incestuous relationships between so many in the media and the Democratic party detailed by Erick Erickson at redstate.
I wonder if any of these people have noticed that the Republican Party has more elected Hispanic Congressmen and Governors than the Democrats?
It is not an accident that the media, immediately after the Democrats started pushing out the War on Women, began running stories about the GOP’s hostility to women. It is now not an accident that the media, led by NBC and the Politico (which also partnered on that pathetic GOP primary debate), would peddle out the GOP and race stories.
It is far too much to be a coincidence that the Politico and NBC have ties, sometimes in the same bed, to Democrat and leftwing activists and then hop out of bed on the same page as the Democrats’ talking points.
Well, if they watched the convention on the networks, and not CSPAN, convention viewers might have missed Senator Marco Rubio and Governor Susana Martinez’ stirring speeches. Watch this video to see how NBC covered some yammering by Democrat shill Andrea Mitchell instead of the first three minutes of Sen. Rubio’s barnburner speech.
Quite frankly, criticism of Obama is not racism no matter that people like Lawrence O’Donnell and Chris Matthews hear dog whistles of racism in everything. (Matthews laughably went so far as to suggest he lives in D.C. and therefore has a firsthand knowledge others don’t of blacks. In fact, he is paid millions of dollars a year by NBC to spew his mad commentary and lives in a very white affluent suburb in which with 2,000 residents there are a total of 10 black residents.) So out-of control is Matthews that after the RNC wrapped up, he got into a 2 AM public verbal altercation in Tampa, asking a group of Republicans if they were at a “douchebag convention.”
Since we now know that half a million dollars in Stimulus money was funneled to MSNBC for commercials on the Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann shows, advertising Job Corps training that produced no jobs, MSNBC henceforth should be known as “The semi-official Obama Administration News Agency,” much like Al Ahram in Egypt.
Investors Business Daily’s cartoonist Michael Ramirez ran a cartoon of a dog labeled “Media” making love to Obama’s leg. Come to think of it maybe that’s a true picture, a metamorphosis that explains why so many of them hear “dog whistles” of racism that the rest of us cannot hear, drawing that notion from language that in no rational way warrants that characterization.
The media madness this past week truly was beyond parody. If you doubt me read this exchange between MSNBC’s Martin Bashir and Lawrence O’Donnell in which reference to Obama’s golfing is said to be a “racial double entendre” suggesting that he’s like Tiger Woods “famous for chasing cocktail waitresses”.
(These two cuckoos aren’t alone. If you want to see how idiotic P.C. language codes are becoming check out this historically inaccurate explanation by a highly paid Department of State official as to why terms like “rule of thumb” and “hold down the fort are racially insensitive and should be avoided. It’s impossible not to laugh out loud until you realize how much tax revenues go to pay him and others like him to peddle this ahistoric claptrap.)
As the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto reminds us:
[quote] Obama’s journalistic supporters live in a bizarre alternate reality in which a politician’s actual words mean nothing. When the president says something foolish and offensive, he didn’t say that. Meanwhile every comment from a Republican can be translated, through a process of free association, to: “We don’t like black people.”
It’s television manufacturing a virtual reality, which is to say unreality, a dangerous state of affairs. Sultan Knish has written the most brilliant essay explaining this . Here’s but a tiny sample. You really must read it all:
The people who decided to make Obama popular did so through constant repetition that translated into the peer pressure of the trend. Obama became a trending topic and everyone followed along because in an unreal world, you follow the unreal leader.
Obama is fake, his popularity is fake, but it’s also real, because fake is now the ultimate reality. The purveyors of fakeness have demonstrated their ability to transform the unreal into the real through manufactured consensus. By insisting that something unpopular was popular often enough, they made it popular. And by insisting that something popular is really unpopular, they did the opposite. [snip]
There is a very specific category of people who are uncomfortable with the way things are and for the most people these are the people who have ongoing forcible contact with realities that don’t go away when the talking head begins jabbering, the memes begin spewing and the trending topics trend. These are the people who work for a living outside the bubble, who know that external safety nets are unreliable and that they are always on the edge of something… even if they don’t always know what. [snip]
When all the bubbles of rhetoric pop, there are still the hard unpleasant realities to deal with. Bailouts and money pits can only bury them for so long. Governments sending money to banks and swapping worthless commodities that only exist in the theory of a theory only work for as long as people believe in them.
Even an unreal economy reported on by an unreal media cheering on an unreal leader can only run for so long until reality punches through the illusion, the curtain falls, the magicians scramble off the stage with rabbits and doves tucked into their pants, and everyone wakes up to realize that the dream is over and we realize that we are entering a world where the stories no longer matter and history is about to begin.
Tune out the media or find yourself either enraged or lulled into unreality — brainwashed as it were. You can watch important events on CSPAN and easily access transcripts and videos of speeches and debates online. Time to stop the insanity provided by the media intermediaries and keep your mind clear.
For some time now, professor Glenn Reynolds, known to many as Instapundit, has talked about “preference cascades” I think the insanity of the media is triggered by their sense that a preference cascade is building up in the US which will wash them and their political clients out to sea.
What is a “preference cascade”?
As described by Glenn Reynolds in a classic 2002 essay, a preference cascade occurs when people trapped inside a manufactured consensus suddenly realize that many other people share their doubts. Preference falsification works by making doubters feel isolated and alone. In a totalitarian society, the dissenter fears that if he speaks up, his will be a lone voice, easily squashed by the enforcers of the regime. When dissenters realize they are not alone, and the true strength of their numbers becomes apparent, “invincible” regimes vanish with astonishing speed.
The same effect can occur without brutal oppression, when fear of ostracism and ridicule cause people to suppress their own doubts. This kind of preference falsification requires strict discipline from the makers of opinion. Since a free society makes it very easy for individuals to change their opinions, they must be prevented from even considering such a change. Manufactured consensus is very fragile in a competitive arena of ideas, when there is no fearsome penalty for a “Fresh Air” listener who decides to switch over to Rush Limbaugh.
Why do I think the media manufactured consensus is unraveling and the cascade begun?
I see signs of it everywhere. There was the 2010 wipeout of the Democrats in Congress and statehouses. There was the massive consumer Chick-fil-A response to the boycott movement, Obama’s campaign staff has had a hard time meeting fund raising goals and filling the stands for his appearances. This week — respecting his speech at the DNC convention — they are even resorting to giving tickets to the event away free in bars.
And this: Voter ID in the polls is grossly oversampling Democrats. And even Democratic pollsters are giving away the game. Polls showing Obama in the lead are, I believe, phony as his make believe large twitter following which it turns out is mostly an online audience he paid for.
Here’s Stephen Green:
Democracy Corps – that’s James Carville and Stan Greenberg’s polling outfit – has Romney up 16 points with independents.
16 points.
Voter ID typically runs low-to-mid 30s for Republicans and Democrats alike, leaving the remainder as Independents. What’s that mean? If Carville and Greenberg have it right (and many other polls show Romney way up with Indies), it can mean only one thing: Democrats are being oversampled, and grossly.
Admittedly, voter ID is a tricky thing to measure, and trickier still to sample. But most polls I’ve seen have had D samples the same or higher than in 2008, when Black Jesus was still bringing us the hope and change and lowering the oceans and all that stuff. And they’ve R samples the same or lower than 2008, even though the GOP managed to flip 63 House seats in 2010.
The game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you from playing.
It could be just me — after all I never watch television — but my thought is that a convention that begins with a jummah call to Moslem prayer and features Sandra Fluke demanding we pay for her contraceptive costs is not going to turn this around for the President or his media friends.
As the kids say: “Wait;what?” (Albeit many are unaware of the verbal semi-colon hanging there).
I tried to listen to you. I tried hard. I did! And you did not stop,so you lost me.
Goodnight, sir.
As the Democrats kick off their convention, perhaps they should heed the old saying that you are the company you keep. If this saying is in fact the case, the President and his party have some explaining to do.
President Obama and his party have chosen to grant Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood, a prominent speaking slot at their convention this week. This endorsement of Ms. Richards and her enterprise follows President Obama’s making numerous campaign stops and running ads on behalf of Planned Parenthood. This support complements other high ranking Dems’ support of that same organization, including Nancy Pelosi’s enthusiasm over the connection between Planned Parenthood and the Girl Scouts.
This highly visible embrace and support is inconveniently timed with the release of new analysis that links numerous existing whistle-blower lawsuits — in California, Iowa and Texas — with strong statistical correlation demonstrating an anomalously solid link between Planned Parenthood’s government funding and the abortions it commits. This, of course, runs contrary to Democrat assertions to the contrary[i].
As the analysis concludes, the systemic fraud described in the whistle-blower suits is a potentially perfect explanation for the unusually high positive correlation. It is the hand that fits the glove.
If this analysis and its conclusions are correct, in Planned Parenthood the Democrats are embracing a far greater crime than mere cronyism and Solyndra incompetence. They are embracing systemic fraud and racketeering in violation of well-known federal laws.
Behold: The Democrat Party and the company it keeps.
Considering the many kinds of health care that Planned Parenthood provides, especially to the poor, have you a better organization to support?
In this highly polarized, contentious election season, the media frequently portrays the GOP as anti-woman and anti-gay. The desire of most Republicans to protect the unborn has been speciously transmogrified into hatred of women and a plot to control their reproductive systems and, ultimately, their lives.
It’s what prompted Code Pink to protest at the Republican National Convention with members dressed up as vaginas to graphically bring home what they perceive as a war on women by Republicans who they claimed want to set the clock back several decades, erase the progress made by the women’s rights movement, and relegate women to second class citizenry.
The ardent protests against Republicans and the concomitant apocryphal charges that they are anti-woman and anti-gay are par for the course. In actuality, Republicans are merely advocating for the sanctity of life and traditional marriage and do not demonstrate hatred against any group. However, to hold an opinion contrary to the leftist dogma of the day is obviously enough to spur public vilification and rampant allegations of malfeasance.
The anti-woman, anti-gay allegations Democrats use to characterize Republicans are all the more astonishing in light of the tolerance and accommodations that are conferred on Islam. While Islam is given a pass on these issues, Democrats freely malign Republicans who speak out about repressive Islamic doctrine or sharia, an ideology that is truly anti-woman and anti-gay.
It’s worth noting that the Democratic Party’s friendliness toward Muslims has prompted an extraordinary gathering in Charlotte, North Carolina, where the Democratic National Convention begins on Sept. 4. As part of the pre-convention festivities, a “Jumah at the DNC” was held through Sept. 1 by the Bureau of Indigenous Muslim Affairs (BIMA), an Islamic nonprofit headquartered in Newark, New Jersey. The Washington Times estimates that “between 500 and 1,000 participants” attended the Jumah, while 20,000 had been predicted to attend the entire three-day event.
The opening prayer was led by Siraj Wahhaj, an advocate for an Islamic state in America, a “potential unindicted co-conspirator” in the first World Trade Center bombing, and a member of CAIR. Event co-organizer Jibril Hough has ties to Islamic terrorists as the imam at a Muslim Brotherhood-owned mosque in Charlotte. That mosque is listed by the U.S. Justice Department as an “unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terror finance case in U.S. history.”
The Muslim-friendly Democrats have stayed mum on the subject of this ominous gathering in the shadow of their own convention. The silence is not surprising, given the recent Democratic response to an exposé on the infiltration of the U.S. government by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Six weeks ago, five brave members of Congress led by Michele Bachmann reported on the government infiltration and the MB goal to achieve a “grand jihad to eliminate and destroy Western civilization from within” until “G-d’s religion [Islam] is made victorious over all other religions.” Instead of registering concern about the well-documented strategy to Islamize America and impose sharia, Democrats accused the congressmen of Islamophobia and McCarthyism. Yet Democrats claim to stand for women’s rights, homosexual rights, and the separation of church and state, in direct contrast to the tenets of Islam.
The hypocrisy of the left’s defense of Islam is glaringly obvious when it comes to its treatment of women, which goes far beyond decisions about abortion and birth control. The left’s feminist sisters may think that Republicans want to repeal women’s rights, but the Koran (4:34) expressly states, “Allah has made men superior to women because men spend their wealth to support them.”
The Koran sanctions wife-beating with “[a]s for women whom you fear will rebel, admonish them first, and then send them to a separate bed, and then beat them.” Furthermore, Muslim women may be beaten for refusing sexual relations with their husbands.
Within the Islamic doctrine that Democrats are promoting and defending are provisions to devalue women by allocating half the share of women’s inheritances to men, valuing the testimony of a woman as half that of a man, and providing indemnities for death or injury of a women at half the dollar value of men. In Islam, women are ruled by male relatives — fathers, brothers, husbands — who restrict their movements, monitor their dress, and decide whom and when they will marry, the latter of which can be as young as six years of age.
A Muslim husband can divorce his wife by stating his wish to do so three times and is under no obligation to economically provide for her. He can have up to four wives and countless sex slaves, while a Muslim woman can be stoned for adultery, rape, or the appearance of impropriety.
As for homosexuality in Islam, homosexuality is considered vile and punishable by death. The applicable Hadith states that “if a man comes upon a man, then they are both adulterers,” and “[i]f a woman comes upon a woman, they are both Adulteresses[.]” “When a man mounts another man, the throne of God shakes”; “[k]ill the one that is doing it and also kill the one that it is being done to.”
No debate exists about homosexuality in Islam; the only point of contention is the punishment, which can be beheading, hanging, stoning, or throwing the person from the tallest building. These punishments are not unusual and are frequently meted out in Islamic sharia countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Somalia, and Mauritania.
It is the height of hypocrisy and irony that, although Democrats freely criticize the policies of Republicans as anti-woman and anti-gay and worry about a conservative agenda that will result in a setback of the gains enjoyed by women and homosexuals over the past several decades, they fail to address the greater threat Islamic doctrine represents. Democrats are silent about Islamic relegation of women to second-class citizenship and the life-and-death dangers it poses for homosexuals.
Clearly, the peril with Islam goes far beyond a choice on abortion and the recognition of homosexual marriage. The unlikely alliance the left has cultivated with Islam, not the left’s differences with the Republican Party, is the farthest departure from their espoused pro-women, pro-homosexual platform. As such, it represents a danger to all Americans.
Interesting. This article is attributed to JANET Levy on The American Thinker.
I’m curious — to whoever’s cutting and pasting all these essays: why not start your OWN blog?
I dig your CAPS.
Ha.
“Muslim-friendy” is na nice thing to be, but rather specific. I for one, am that, but I am also Cathloic-, Protestant-, Morman-,Jew-,Buddhist, Sikh- and atheist-friendly, which simply menas that I respect humans no matter what faith they practice, or don’t. Don’t you?
And what, in heaven’s name, is a “potential unindicted co-conspirator?” All of us? I, for one, have never been indicted on a charge of conspiracy, and perhaps you have not either, Janey. But I suppose there is still time for both of us:) Therefore, should we think of ourselves as “potential unindicted” criminals/co-conspirators? And just because its raining where I am and I’m a little grouchy, I will point out that a mosque cannot ever be indicted. Only people can. Have a nice day.
I will easily be indicted for my frequent typos, if engaging in such behavior ever becomes punishable under statute.
As Bill Clinton once again takes center stage at the Democratic National Convention, let’s amuse ourselves by screening the vilest soap opera in American history: Bill and Hillary and Huma and Anthony.
This one’s got it all: two sham marriages, sexual perversions, and national treachery at the highest level. Naturally, the “mainstream media” refuses to inform you of it, but that’s why I’m here.
If you’ve scratched your head trying to puzzle out the complex inter-relationships between these glamorous grifters, stop scratching. I’m about to unveil a Grand Unified Theory that explains why Huma Abedin, the alleged Muslim Brotherhood asset who’s the top aide of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, chose to marry disgraced ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner in an interfaith ceremony performed by matrimonial expert Bill Clinton.
America first learned of Huma Abedin in 2007, in a worshipful Vogue article titled “Hillary’s Secret Weapon: Huma Abedin Oversees Every Minute of Senator Clinton’s Day.” Featuring glossy photos of designer-clad Huma, the article rhapsodized about her “wrinkle-free” Prada suit, “flawless” skin, and “long, luxurious hair” with “bouncy waves you see mostly in shampoo commercials.”
The photo of Huma statuesquely displayed on a chair drew attention, as did the eyebrow-raising descriptions of Huma’s and Hillary’s mutual adoration. That attention intensified as Hillary became secretary of state and installed Huma as her top aide. Mumblings could be heard about the nature of their relationship and the unusual background of Huma, who grew up in Saudi Arabia.
Someday we may look back upon the intern scandals of the Clinton White House with amazement at our preoccupation with Bill, Monica Lewinsky, and cigars. The bigger scandal may have been in First Lady Hillary’s office, where Huma Abedin waltzed into her internship as a new college graduate, despite her screamingly obvious Muslim Brotherhood family ties.
Five Congress members, including Rep. Michele Bachmann, have raised concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the federal government, with special emphasis on Huma’s role at State. For their trouble, they have been hysterically accused of McCarthy-style witch-hunts, by everyone from Jon Stewart to John McCain to GOP honcho Ed Rollins.
Naturally, Barack Obama defended Huma at his annual Ramadan dinner, praising her as an “American patriot” to whom the American people owe a “debt of gratitude.” Surely, that settles it. After all, no one understands American patriotism quite like Barack Hussein Obama.
Nevertheless, despite all the elite venom hurled at Michele Bachman for unmasking Huma, the evidence against Abedin is overwhelming. Andrew McCarthy, Walid Shoebat, and Diana West have factually established that the Muslim Brotherhood is the Abedin family business, and that Huma herself worked in it for years, editing the family’s Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs.
Now, let’s pave the way for Anthony Weiner, Huma Abedin’s national joke of a husband, to make an appearance. Somewhere in 2010, the Clintons may have decided that their public embrace of Huma as their “second daughter” wasn’t quite cutting it anymore, and they needed to set up a more conventional-looking arrangement.
Enter Anthony Weiner, the bachelor congressman with a panting lust to be mayor of New York. I suggest that, in classic Clintonian fashion, a deal was struck. The Clintons would endorse Weiner for mayor if he would marry Huma Abedin.
The situation was win-win for everyone. The rumors about Hillary immediately subsided, which pleased Bill, who plans to make her president. Weiner gained the backing of the formidable Clinton machine, thereby sprinting to frontrunner status in the highly competitive mayoralty race. And Huma got to keep her top-secret security clearance at State, and look forward to the day when she could pray in the Ground Zero mosque, gazing down at the World Trade Center site as first lady of New York City.
If you don’t think the Weiner-Abedin union is a political deal, ask yourself: on what basis could it possibly be anything else? Shortly after their marriage, Weiner committed a Twitterectomy of his career, tweeting lewd photos of himself to young women around the country. But in addition to being a cheating pervert, Weiner is widely known as a nutcase, exposed in the New York Times for temper tantrums that left him unable to keep staff. And he has no money, thereby rendering him unable to provide Huma with the glamorous lifestyle she requires.
Most importantly of all, Weiner is not a Muslim. Huma’s religion allows Muslim men to marry non-Muslim women, but forbids Muslim women from marrying outside the faith. Yet Huma remained unsullied by honor killing threats from the usual Islamic enforcers; instead, the party line seemed to be that Huma’s marriage was adorable.
Even now, the outrageous Clintonian shenanigans continue. We’ve just learned that Huma, her unemployed husband Anthony, and their baby Jordan are moving into a $3.3-million Park Avenue apartment owned by a longtime Clinton crony and top Obama bundler. You and I may have to live within our means, but in Clinton World, such rules never seem to apply.
Now as Bill formally nominates Obama for a second term, both men are complicit in Hillary’s scandal that should be the shame of the nation. But what’s an historic disgrace to us is less than a shrug to them. Bill has been taking Saudi money by the barrel for years, and Obama admires the Muslim Brotherhood.
In fact, working with Hillary’s State Department, Obama has helped to install the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and throughout the Middle East, using the “Arab Spring” turmoil to empower these sworn America-haters.
And now here comes the icing on the treachery cake: Obama and Hillary reportedly have informed Iran that they’ve abandoned Israel, leaving the only Jewish State to face a nuclear Iran alone. How proud the Abedin family must be of their little girl!
Conventional wisdom has it that Hillary is a formidable contender for president, but I suspect that that may not be true. For one thing, her appearance and behavior are both falling apart, as she drunkenly carouses in public with exclusively female friends. And for another, the American public may not be so forgiving as the Bill and Hillary and Huma and Anthony saga unfolds.
Mary and I flew from Florida to Alexandria, Minnesota where I was the keynote speaker and entertainer (singer) at their “Rally for America”. As we approach another anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I caught segments of various 9/11 documentaries on TV in the hotel room.
I was struck by numerous stories of bravery and selfless acts of courage by our fellow Americans. A twenty-four-year-old man led a group of fellow employees to safety. He went back into one of the Twin Towers to rescue more, never to be seen again.
A survivor spoke of the look in the eyes of a fireman going up the stairwell as he passed him going down. The survivor said he felt that the fireman knew he was possibly going to his death. And yet, he was speedily taking two steps at a time up the stairs.
I heard about a white man in one of the towers who, upon hearing cries for help, pulled a brown man through a wall to safety. They both survived and have become lifelong friends. The incidences of Americans rising to the challenge on 9/11 are many. Some we will never know.
But there was a group of Americans on 9/11 who for the most part were ignored. I am talking about “the jumpers.” These people, like responsible adults, simply showed up for work on 9/11. Suddenly, they found themselves in an unimaginably horrific situation, having to decide whether to be consumed in an inferno or leap to their deaths. Dear Lord!
Early after the 9/11 attacks, our liberal politically correct media put an “unofficial” ban on showing “the jumpers” in their coverage. Careful not to fuel American outrage, our media is always sympathetic to America’s enemies.
Like most Americans, I remember where I was and what I was doing on 9/11. I came out of the bathroom draped in a towel after a failed attempt to take a shower. “Honey, there’s no water!” “Sorry,” Mary replied. “I forgot to pay the bill.” So there I was, annoyed because I had to drive two miles to drop a check off to the water company. That was my biggest “issue” of the day.
Meanwhile, my fellow Americans were forced to decide whether to burn or jump.
Witnesses saw a young woman high up in one of the towers at a window as flames raged behind her. She made the sign of the cross and did a swan dive out of the window.
Ponder that image when you hear liberal Democrats, progressives, and Obama’s pastor of twenty years, Jeremiah Wright, say we got what we deserved on 9/11.
Innocent Americans simply showed up for work. Remember the jumpers.
You could give your class a quick quiz on the first day Colin!
Please share these facts with others, we all need to know the truth about Islam.
1. 1968 Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed by:
a. Superman b. Jay Leno c. Harry Potter
d. A Muslim males between the ages of 17 and 40
2. In 1972 at the Munich Olympics, athletes were kidnapped and massacred by:
a. Olga Corbett b. Sitting Bull c. Arnold Schwarzenegger
d. Muslim males mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
3. In 1979, the US embassy in Iran was taken over by:
a. Lost Norwegians b. Elvis c. A tour bus full of 80-year-old women
d . Muslim males mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
…4. During the 1980′s a number of Americans were kidnapped in Lebanon by:
a. John Dillinger b. The King of Sweden c. The Boy Scouts
d. Muslim males mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
5. In 1983, the US Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up by:
a. A pizza delivery boy b. Pee Wee Herman c. Geraldo Rivera
d. Muslim males mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
6. In 1985 the cruise ship Achille Lauro was hijacked and a 70 year old American passenger was murdered and thrown overboard in his wheelchair by:
a. The Smurfs b. Davey Jones c. The Little Mermaid
d. Muslim males mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
7. In 1985 TWA flight 847 was hijacked at Athens, and a US Navy diver trying to rescue passengers was murdered by:
a. Captain Kidd b. Charles Lindberg c. Mother Teresa
d. Muslim males mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
8. In 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed by:
a. Scooby Doo b. The Tooth Fairy c. The Sundance Kid
d. Muslim males mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
9. In 1993 the World Trade Center was bombed the first time by:
a. Richard Simmons b. Grandma Moses c. Michael Jordan
d. Muslim males mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
10. In 1998, the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by:
a. Mr. Rogers
b. Hillary Clinton, to distract attention from Wild Bill’s women problems
c. The World Wrestling Federation
d. Muslim males mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
11. On 9/11/01, four airliners were hijacked; two were used as missiles to take out the World Trade Centers and of the remaining two, one crashed into the US Pentagon and the other was diverted and crashed by the passengers.
Thousands of people were killed by:
a. Bugs Bunny, Wiley E. Coyote, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd
b. The Supreme Court of Florida c. Mr. Bean
d. Muslim males mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
12. In 2002 the United States fought a war in Afghanistan against:
a. Enron b. The Lutheran Church c. The NFL
d. Muslim males mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
13. In 2002 reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered by:
a. Bonnie and Clyde b. Captain Kangaroo c. Billy Graham
d. Muslim males mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
No, I really don’t see a pattern here, to justify profiling, do you?
Colin, perhaps your students would be interested in why most of the media has put this story on the backburner. I’d love to see how this story would have been handled if the president and AG were Republicans.
After government-trafficked guns were found at the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in 2010, higher-ups all the way to the White House started scrambling to cover their tracks.
The gun-walking program known as Operation Fast and Furious came to a head two years later on June 20, 2012, when the House voted to hold the United States attorney general in contempt for lying to Congress.
The same day of the House vote, the president himself publicly stepped into the fray. Obama invoked executive privilege in order to prevent long-awaited subpoenaed documents from seeing the light of day. Not surprisingly, the state-run media downplayed Obama’s official entrance into the Fast and Furious scandal.
Now, after a 17-month-long investigation, the inspector general for the DOJ is releasing his findings. And another hearing has been scheduled for September 20 (the third time it has been rescheduled), with the IG appearing before Rep. Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee.
Fox News has already obtained certain sections of IG Michael Horowitz’s report. If this partial information is any indication of the rest of the report, it doesn’t look like the investigation will be a shining example of transparency.
The IG’s conclusion: Fast and Furious began in Phoenix, with most of the blame going to three ATF managers: Phoenix Agent in Charge Bill Newell, Supervisor Dave Voth, and Case Agent Hope MacAllister. Attorneys for all three vehemently defended their clients.
Debra Roth, an attorney for MacAllister, wrote to Inspector General Michael Horowitz that the report “fails to account for the abdication of oversight, guidance and responsibility by ATF headquarters and Main Department of Justice regarding the implementation of what is in essence a strategy to combat an international criminal enterprise.
It looks like Horowitz plans to scapegoat ATF underlings who followed orders from higher-ups at the DOJ. What about DOJ U.S. Attorney in Arizona Dennis Burke, who talked openly about “the river of iron flowing from Phoenix to Mexico”?
The report also cites “a failure in leadership and a lack of accountability and oversight up and down the chain of command.” Translation: nothing to see here — just some negligent ATF agents and their supervisors looking the other way.
“We found no evidence in Operation Fast and Furious that the ATF or the (U.S. attorney’s office) attempted at any point during the investigation to balance the risks to the public safety against the long-term benefits of identifying trafficking networks and participants,” the draft report says.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives (BAFTE) receives its orders from the DOJ. And since the president made the decision to cover for his AG, Americans can safely assume he and Holder are up to their eyeballs in Fast and Furious.
Did Horowitz find a smoking gun leading directly to the White House? Did Obama know about Fast and Furious back in 2009? What about Homeland Security’s Janet Napolitano and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton?
Maybe the IG will be able to explain Holder’s and Obama’s “under the radar role” in a plot that killed two federal agents and scores of Mexican citizens. Perhaps one of the representatives will ask Horowitz the exact location of White House National Security staffer Kevin O’Reilly. Is he still in Iraq hiding out?
Can the IG tell us when weapons possibly linked to Fast and Furious will finally stop showing up in Mexico? Recently, a cache of firearms was found there when school authorities discovered a nine-year-old boy with a fully loaded semi-automatic gun stashed in his bookbag. A police SWAT team raided the boy’s home, where they located powerful weapons — some brand-new. The packaging suggested that they came from the United States, according to David Codrea at the Examiner. Sources will neither confirm nor deny whether the guns are tied to Fast and Furious.
Will Issa then ask Horowitz why he felt it necessary to run the report by White House lawyers before making it public? Why not just let the DOJ attorneys go over it? According to Issa, because of DOJ “pushback,” Horowitz delayed the hearing a week in an effort to delete sensitive information and to allow any agencies named in his final report to refute his findings.
Congressman Issa told Greta Van Susteren he is “trying to be cautiously optimistic” and taht he hopes the report and hearing get to the bottom of who really authorized the gun-walking program.
After the last four years of this administration’s “transparency,” odds are Issa and the rest of us are going to be severely disappointed.
The reason the Fast and Furious scandal never gets off the merry-go-round is because the Obama administration is rife with corruption. Agencies like the DOJ that police an independent IG’s reports through demands to review it before the final release to the public can mean only one thing: there’s nowhere to turn for real justice.