What Media Bias? Part 178: the Unfolding Journolist Scandal

This just gets worse and worse for the left by the day – these are the supposedly unbiased people who will just bring us the facts:

LAURA ROZEN: People we no longer have to listen to: would it be unwise to start a thread of people we are grateful we no longer have to listen to? If not, I’ll start off: Michael Rubin.

MICHAEL COHEN, NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION: Mark Penn and Bob Shrum. Anyone who uses the expression “Real America.” We should send there ass to Gitmo!

JESSE TAYLOR, PANDAGON.NET: Michael Barone? Please?

LAURA ROZEN: Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich (afraid it’s not true), Drill Here Drill Now, And David Addington, John Yoo, we’ll see you in court?

JEFFREY TOOBIN, THE NEW YORKER: As a side note, does anyone know what prompted Michael Barone to go insane?

MATT DUSS: LEDEEN.

SPENCER ACKERMAN: Let’s just throw Ledeen against a wall. Or, pace Dr. Alterman, throw him through a plate glass window. I’ll bet a little spot of violence would shut him right the (Expletive Deleted) up, as with most bullies.

JOE KLEIN, TIME: Pete Wehner…these sort of things always end badly.

ERIC ALTERMAN, AUTHOR, WHAT LIBERAL MEDIA: (Expletive Deleted) Nascar retards…

The leftist bias of the MSM has been so pronounced for a couple decades now that only leftists and MSMers were willing to deny it with a straight face. At this point, however, you just have to be stupid to not admit it.

And the thing is, if they would just admit it, the issue would go away – what bothers people about the MSM is not the bias, but the pretense that there is no bias. As usual, the cover up is worse than the underlying crime.

An Un-Named Republican Would Beat Obama

This is gonna leave a mark:

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…

Ouch! That that’s a sharp slap to the face – and quite gratifying to see it happen. The people are fully awake, now, to the terrible error we made in November of 2008.

Out and About on a Wednesday Morning

The Village Voice is displeased with me. I guess I should feel bad about it, but I don’t.

Was yesterday’s extension of unemployment benefits the last bit of stimulus we’ll see? It could be – going to be very hard to shove through a lot of additional spending next year, even if Democrats do manage to hold on.

City bankrupt? Then privatize everything. Everything? Yes, everything. Guess what? The world does not come to an end when you do… (H/T: Mish’s)

Sarah Palin, victim of MSM smears, takes note of the Journolist scandal. It is quite juicy, you know? Just exactly what we’ve been on about for years in MSM bias.

Good riddance to the establishment GOP.

Barack Who?

‘Rat’s deserting the sinking ship – from Jason Emby at 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.”…

This is the President of the United States – there is always room in the schedule for him…unless he’s become political kryptonite in your State.

It took 18 months for Obama to wreck himself. That has got to be some kind of Presidential record.

GOP With a 9 Point Lead in "Generic Ballot"

From Rasmussen:

Republican candidates now hold a nine-point lead over Democrats on the Generic Congressional Ballot for the week ending Sunday, July 18, the widest gap between the two parties in several weeks.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 45% of Likely Voters would vote for their district’s Republican congressional candidate, while 36% would opt for his or her Democratic opponent…

Meanwhile, after weeks of being slandered by Reid, Angle clings to a slight lead and over in Connecticut the ain’t-got-a-chance Republican candidate seems to be gaining some support.

All in all, still a very good year to be a Republican.

Shirley Sherrod, My Deepest Apologies

Here is the full video. The passage which was at issue yesterday is still disturbing in the clear approval of racist sentiments by the crowd at the event – but on viewing the whole video, it can only be said that Ms. Sherrod has been the victim of an injustice – and an injustice which I played a part in. I make no excuses, I was wrong and I will never make a judgment based upon a partial video ever again.

The problem of race in America is gravely exacerbated by the current trends in our politics. It is not at all helped by the way the NAACP is spreading lies about racism in the TEA Party movement – this is horrible, and continues to put the NAACP outside the pale of decent society. Until that group utterly retracts all claims of racism on the part of the TEA Party and apologizes to the millions of Americans they insulted, there can be association between decent people and the NAACP.

But none of that is Ms. Sherrod’s responsibility – and, indeed, she was not only treated unjustly by the editor of the video, but by the NAACP which had the full video and yet threw Ms. Sherrod to the wolves, apparently so they can better preserve their slander of racism in the TEA Party movement. There is shame enough for all involved in this, and only Ms. Sherrod is coming out of it with her dignity unimpaired.

UPDATE: Gateway pundit finds this very disturbing fact:

Mary Frances Berry admitted this at the Politico:

Professor of American Social Thought and History, U. Penn. :

Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats. There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans. But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November. Having one’s opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness.

Breitbart claimed yesterday that he has more – we’ll see what he comes up with. It would not at all surprise me to find some iron-clad evidence of overt racism at the NAACP, given the way the crowd approved of racist sentiments in the video above. This doesn’t change the fact of the injustice to Ms. Sherrod, but we’re clearly on to something here.

What Media Bias? Part 177; the Journolist Edition

Ed Driscoll notes how the media attempted to control the Jeremiah Wright story during the 2008 campaign:

At the Daily Caller, Jonathan Strong rummages through the JournoList and describes how documents from mid-2008 “show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright:”

It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign…

…Watching this all at home were members of Journolist, a listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists. The tough questioning from the ABC anchors left many of them outraged. “George [Stephanopoulos],” fumed Richard Kim of the Nation, is “being a disgusting little rat snake.”

Others went further. According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage...

The Jeremiah Wright story should have finished Obama’s campaign. There was no way around the fact that Wright is a racist and an anti-American and that Obama was exceptionally close to him for 20 years. To turn it about, had a Republican been discovered in as close accord with a white, racist pastor, that would be all she wrote…the MSM would have been all over it, and Republicans would have turned in fury on the miscreant. But that is not what happens when a liberal Democrat is involved.

As soon as Obama emerged out of the morass of the early primaries and caucuses, it became a firm desire on the part of the MSM that Obama be elected President. Who he was or what he was actually about was irrelevant – he’s black and has impeccable liberal credentials. That is all that mattered – and, indeed, all that still matters in the MSM. In their view, it was a requirement that America elect Obama, and nothing was going to be allowed to stand in the way of this consummation. Certainly not something as minor as the truth.

When the Wright story could no longer be entirely suppressed, it became necessary to control the damage, and that is just what the MSM did. Obama’s speech on race – was used a pivot; once that was done, the MSM just relentlessly hit upon the theme that the story was over; Wright was done and was no longer relevant.

And this is what the MSM will always do with a threatened liberal. They don’t care about truth; they don’t care about America; they don’t care about the people…all they care about is that their world view be validated by liberal politicians running the show. Keep that in mind as you watch their coverage of any story – at the back of it will always be the coordinated message to protect the left.

What to do With Unemployment Benefits

Obama is up on his class-warfare soap box, trying to make some political hay and maybe save a Democrat or two in November:

President Barack Obama will call on Republican lawmakers to stop blocking an extension of unemployment benefits as the Senate prepares to take up the issue again this week…

He condemns us for running up deficits for years but now not being willing to run up a little more for unemployment benefits. Meanwhile, his side was complaining about not paying as you go for 8 years, but now that its time for Democrats to actually set a priority, they are all in a huff that we’re calling them on their own campaign rhetoric. In other words, Obama and his Democrats are just doing the usual, dishonest thing and attempting to sow hatred and division, as that provide their slight hope for staving off electoral catastrophe.

It won’t work as planned – the people are on to this scam and while I’ll bet that a very large majority want unemployment benefits extended, no one who has even half a brain (this would exclude liberals) realizes that its simple common sense to take the money out of current accounts rather than just piling up more debt. If Obama and his Democrats press this issue in public debate, it will backfire on them as badly as ObamaCare, Cap and Trade and border security have.

Buy what should we – meaning, we Republicans – do? After all, at the end of the day we don’t want people without any money at all. On the other hand, who among us hasn’t mentally figured out that if the only jobs available pay less than, as much as or even 10 or 20% more than unemployment, then it would be wiser to remain on unemployment rather than taking the new job?

Remember, if unemployment pays me $250 a week, it would probably take a job paying $350 a week just to make it worth the bother and expense. And with unemployment at 14% here in Nevada, there aren’t a lot of jobs out there paying $8.75 an hour or more. Extend those benefits for two years (as they have been for some people), and you can see the pickle we’re in – where does it end? Or do we just steel ourselves to paying unemployment benefits until a person hits retirement age?

My solution is this – taking money from TARP, stimulus, Department of Energy or some equally worthless and counter-productive government entity, we should extend unemployment benefits. But for anyone who has been unemployed for 6 months or longer, continued benefits require them to present themselves for work with their local government, 5 hours a day, 5 days a week (they do need time to job hunt, so not 8 hours a day). The local governments are free to employ them as they see fit – picking up trash, cleaning graffiti, what have you. Don’t show up, unemployment benefits are terminated.

The concept here is to incentivize the taking of new employment, even if it doesn’t pay all that much. Better to be at work in a regular job than be forever cleaning up trash or doing other grunt work for the city or county. And if there really is just no work at all (as is the case in some localities), then at least some useful work gets done for the area, and the people on unemployment retain their self respect – they are not just taking hand outs, but working hard for the community which is helping them during hard times.

People with a sense of honor and dignity would gladly show up for such work; lay abouts who just want to sit there collecting unemployment would be out of luck. Its a good thing for all concerned, as far as I can see.