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Throxxofvron
Posts: 10448
Incept: 2009-02-17
Hyper-Speculative Psycho-Facsistic Parabolic Blow-Off
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424....Quote:By JAMES TARANTO
Last week we noted that Jill Abramson, managing editor of the New York Times, had acknowledged her paper was "a beat behind" on the story of Van Jones, the Obama administration's so-called green-jobs czar, who among other things once signed a 9/11 "truther" conspiracy petition. Times readers did not learn about Jones until he had already become the Obama administration's former so-called green-jobs czar. Abramson pointed out that long before the Times reported the story, "it had been discussed on talk radio, Fox News and other venues."
Our conclusion: "If you want to get the news ahead of the Times, watch Fox News Channel."
On Friday, Fox delivered on Abramson's promise by scooping the Times again. Early that evening, the network sent an email alert: "Census Bureau severs all ties with ACORN after hidden-camera videos expose 4 of group's workers advising 'pimp,' 'prostitute' on subverting the law." (Here's the full story.) The Obama administration had invited Acorn (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to "partner" with the bureau as "advocates for census cooperation and participation," as the bureau described it in its Dear John letter.
Readers of Saturday's Times got only a short (225-word) report from the Associated Press, which began: "The Census Bureau on Friday severed its ties with Acorn, a community organization that Republicans have accused of voter-registration fraud." It made no mention of the hidden-camera sting--although that was because of the Times's editing. The original AP dispatch, filed contemporaneously with the Fox alert, was twice as long. Among the material the Times cut was this:
ACORN fired two employees who were seen on hidden-camera video giving tax advice to a man posing as a pimp and a woman who pretended to be a prostitute. Fox News Channel broadcast excerpts from the video on Thursday. On the video, a man and woman visiting ACORN's Baltimore office asked about buying a house and how to account on tax forms for the woman's income. An ACORN employee advised the woman to list her occupation as "performance artist."
Those two employees had worked in Baltimore (the other two were in Washington), and a story in Friday's Baltimore Sun reported that the investigators purportedly planned to traffic in child sex slaves:
The video depicts a man and a scantily dressed female partner visiting the Charles Village office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, where they appear to ask two employees about how to shield their work from state and federal tax requirements. The supposed pimp also appears to ask the employees how to conceal underage girls from El Salvador brought into the country illegally to work for him.
"If they don't have Social Security numbers, you don't have to worry about them," the employee says.
The Sun noted that the exposé, by 20-year-old Hannah Giles and 25-year-old James O'Keefe, was published on BigGovernment.com, a conservative Web site run by Andrew Breitbart, before being aired on Glenn Beck's Fox program.
It was a busy week for Beck and Breitbart. On Friday they claimed another victory when, as FoxNews.com reported, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that it was "reassigning" Yosi Sergant, its communications director. On his Sept. 1 program, Beck had aired portions of a tape from an August conference call with artists, in which Sergant exhorted them to push the administration's agenda. The call was first reported on Big Hollywood, another Breitbart site, by a participant, Patrick Courrielche, who provided Beck the tape on which Sergant said this:
I would encourage you to pick something, whether it's health care, education, the environment. There's four key areas that the corporation has identified as the areas of service. Then my task would be to apply your artistic, creativity community's utilities and bring them to the table.
Sergant also told the artists: "We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government, what that looks like legally. . . . We are participating in history as it's being made. So bear with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely and we can really work together [to] move the needle and to get stuff done."
Here is a reprint in full of the Times's coverage of the Sergant story: .
It's difficult to imagine that a Republican administration could employ an exponent of a crackpot conspiracy theory, "partner" with an apparently corrupt organization, or attempt to politicize an agency like the NEA without the mainstream media treating it as a major scandal. But with Obama in the White House? A quote attributed to the fired Washington Acorn employees sums things up nicely. The AP reported that they had advised Giles and O'Keefe that they "must be low-key about the business, or people could 'call Fox' "--not the New York Times, or CBS or NBC, or "the media," but Fox.
To be sure, Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart are advocacy journalists with distinct points of view. But the supposedly impartial mainstream media also claim to have an "adversary" relationship with the government. That they have left this field to a few upstarts suggests that they have a point of view, too--one that is, in the age of Obama, far more compliant than adversarial.
A Great American Protest Movement
"A sea of protesters filled the west lawn of the Capitol and spilled onto the National Mall on Saturday in the largest rally against President Obama since he took office, a culmination of a summer-long season of protests that began with opposition to a health care overhaul and grew into a broader dissatisfaction with government," the New York Times reports from Washington.
One cheer for reporter Jeff Zeleny, who, in atypical Times fashion bends over backward to be fair to the protesters:
On a cloudy and cool day, the demonstrators came from all corners of the country, waving American flags and handwritten signs explaining the root of their frustrations. Their anger stretched well beyond the health care legislation moving through Congress, with shouts of support for gun rights, lower taxes and a smaller government. . . .
The demonstrators numbered well into the tens of thousands, though the police declined to estimate the size of the crowd. Many came on their own and were not part of an organization or group. But the magnitude of the rally took the authorities by surprise, with throngs of people streaming from the White House to Capitol Hill for more than three hours.
The atmosphere was rowdy at times, with signs and images casting Mr. Obama in a demeaning light. . . .Still, many demonstrators expressed their views without a hint of rage.
The Times reports that "for the most part, Democrats stayed silent on Saturday." One top White House aide spoke Sunday, as FoxNews.com notes:
"I don't think it's indicative of the nation's mood," Axelrod said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "You know, I don't think we ought to be distracted by that. My message to them is, they're wrong."
"Wrong" is certainly an improvement on "un-American," "they're carrying swastikas," "evil-mongers," etc. Perhaps the White House is smarter than its congressional allies, or maybe the Democrats are figuring out that the so-called tea parties are a genuine popular revolt, one that they ignore at their peril but that they needlessly antagonize at their even greater peril.
A growing protest movement on the small-government right is remarkable development. As we've noted many times in the past, the left has had an extensive protest culture and infrastructure for decades. The right, with the exception of abortion opponents, had nothing of the sort until this year.
Yet there is a common thread between the tea partiers and the liberal protest movements of olden times--at least the two successful ones. Civil rights protesters demanded for blacks the same freedom that their fellow citizens enjoyed, and opposition to the Vietnam War would not have become a mass movement but for then-young people's desire to end the military draft. Thus in contrast to later, merely obnoxious left-wing protests, their primary focus was on individual freedom, just as the tea partiers' is.
Selling Insurance at the Point of a Gun
Bloomberg notices the same ObamaCare contradiction we noted Thursday:
The U.S. health-care overhaul proposed in Congress will do more than impose greater controls on private insurers. It will also swell their profits.
New legislation may generate 10 million more customers for Amerigroup Corp.,UnitedHealth Group Inc. and other companies that administer Medicaid, the government plan that covers the poorest Americans, according to James Carlson, Amerigroup's chief executive officer. Molina Healthcare Inc.'s Medicaid enrollment may jump by 43 percent, CEO J. Mario Molina said. WellPoint Inc., the largest U.S. insurer, may also gain. . . .
"Most of what we're reading would grow our business dramatically," [Carlson] said in an interview. "I don't think you can say that about a lot of other participants in the health-care system."
That means more revenue for an industry House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called "immoral" and the chief obstacle to covering the uninsured.
Sunday's New York Times featured an excerpt from a Times reporter's book on the economic crisis, a truly awful bureaucratic nightmare:
One afternoon in November 2006, a policeman spotted an expired license plate on Dorothy Thomas's 10-year-old Toyota Corolla as she drove through San Jose, Calif. He ordered her to pull over.
Struggling under the weight of thousands of dollars in credit card bills, Ms. Thomas was perpetually short of cash. She had not bought a $10 auto registration sticker. The officer checked his database and recognized that she had already been ticketed once before for the same thing. He arranged to have her car towed away.
"I got down on my knees and begged that officer," Ms. Thomas recalled.
As she watched her car being hauled off, she sensed that this was the beginning of a descent into a crisis from which she might not easily escape. Without money to pay the towing and storage fees, she could not extract her car from the lot, and the tab soon grew to $1,600. Without a car, she could not reach the hospital where she worked in the administrative offices, so she lost her $16-an-hour job. Without a paycheck, she could no longer pay the rent on her modest home. She moved to Oakland, where a friend lived in a beaten-down, rented house on a street they called Crack Avenue. By year's end, Ms. Thomas, then 49, was occupying a bunk at a homeless shelter, searching in vain for a job in an economy plagued by unemployment.
It's not clear what this has to do with the economic crisis, since it happened in 2006, almost two years before the financial panic hit, and at a time when, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment was 4.5% nationwide and 4.8% in California. But whatever. Our main thought is: If Dorothy Thomas thinks bureaucracy is a nightmare now, just wait till Barack Obama tries to force her to buy health insurance.
A Confederacy of Dunces
On the surface, Maureen Dowd's reaction to the Joe Wilson kerfuffle seems preposterous even by Dowd standards:
Fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!
The word "boy" occurred to Dowd in connection with President Obama, and she imputes racism to Wilson?
Yet there is this, from the Associated Press:
Wilson's official biography lists him as a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. As a state senator, he voted against a bill to remove the Confederate flag from atop the South Carolina Statehouse and move it to a monument on the capitol grounds.
"I'm proud of it and I don't want it to be made fun of or put down by people who don't understand Southern heritage," he said during the months of debate in 2000.
We don't claim to understand Southern heritage, but we do understand that a lawmaker who proclaims himself "proud" of a symbol that represents secession and slavery makes himself an easy target for accusations of racism. Even a lousy shot occasionally scores a hit: one point for Maureen Dowd.
Not Enough Bush
Steve Benen of The Washington Monthly has produced one of the most out-of-touch blog entries ever written. He complains that the Obama administration isn't complaining enough about George W. Bush:
Obama talks a great deal about the importance of taking responsibility. But there's a reasonable case to be made that, by avoiding blame for Bush/Cheney, the president is taking too much responsibility for challenges that were almost entirely his predecessor's fault.
Taking a step back to consider the year's political fights, just about every single problem this administration has faced, and continues to face, stems from Bush's failures, incompetence, and mismanagement. . . .
Most of 2009 has been a debate about those who approve of the ways Obama is trying to clean up Bush's mess and those who disapprove of the ways Obama is trying to clean up Bush's mess. The common thread should be obvious here.
How Republicans convinced Democrats to stop even mentioning Bush's name is one of the year's most effective con jobs, but it's not too late for the majority to shift back.
The former president's name is somehow considered verboten in our political discourse. Given reality, and in the interests of accountability, isn't it time to reintroduce the country to the reason they moved towards Democrats in the first place?
What planet does this guy live on? For one thing, Obama is constantly dodging responsibility for the problems he "inherited," when in truth he did not inherit anything. By running for president, he sought the responsibility he now tries to evade.
For another, while Bush has adhered to the tradition by which former presidents do not publicly criticize their successors, Dick Cheney, who as a former vice president is not bound by this tradition, has weighed into the public debate over the treatment of terrorist detainees, Obama has defended his policies, and Cheney has won every argument.
The Bush administration's domestic policies would perhaps be more difficult to defend, were Cheney inclined to do so. But it seems to have escaped Benen's notice that Obama's chief domestic initiative, a massive and likely highly destructive expansion of the federal government's role in health care, has nothing to do with any crisis he "inherited" but is entirely the product of Obama's out-of-control ambitions and the ideology of the Democratic left.
Blaming Bush might be a useful tactic if Obama had the good sense to focus on the economic crisis. As it is, it is simply irrelevant.
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DIONYSUS: " Thou hast no knowledge of the life thou art leading; thy very existence is now a mystery to thee. " -from 'The Bacchantes' By Euripides “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” -George Orwell
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Pika-steph
Posts: 54911
Incept: 2007-09-11
Live Free Or Die; US Army Est. 1775
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Well, will you look at that. Beck ripped the WSJ yesterday right along with the NYT. The WSJ only ran one or two more articles than the NYT did about any of these subjects. Now it appears instead of attacking the messenger, the WSJ is fixing to join FOX in trying to cover some real news.
Score another one for Beck.
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Stop the Looting; Start Prosecuting - http://www.FedUpUSA.org/ "The only regulation that really works is failure."--Rick Santelli
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Genesis
Posts: 131439
Incept: 2007-06-26
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Yeah, funny that...
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I don't care if it makes sense -- only if it makes money. -- Me
Bank (n): See scam, fraud and theft. Eat a bankster -- they're low-carb.
What part of "shall not be infringed" was unclear?
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Throxxofvron
Posts: 10448
Incept: 2009-02-17
Hyper-Speculative Psycho-Facsistic Parabolic Blow-Off
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I think that Beck is going to be watched by as many of His Competitors as His base for the Foreseeable Future...
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DIONYSUS: " Thou hast no knowledge of the life thou art leading; thy very existence is now a mystery to thee. " -from 'The Bacchantes' By Euripides “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” -George Orwell
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Koaj
Posts: 2071
Incept: 2009-02-03
NJ
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considering Rupert Murdoch owns the WSJ and Fox News this isnt much of a stretch recommendation
For one thing, Obama is constantly dodging responsibility for the problems he "inherited," when in truth he did not inherit anything. By running for president, he sought the responsibility he now tries to evade.
^^^i love this line
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As former Fed Governor Alan Blinder said in 1994: "The last duty of a central banker is to tell the public the truth."
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Pika-steph
Posts: 54911
Incept: 2007-09-11
Live Free Or Die; US Army Est. 1775
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Murdoch is an enigma. The WSJ has had fair to middling coverage of the financial crisis. They failed nearly as much as the NYT with regards to coverage of the Tea Parties, Van Jones, ACORN and pretty much anything else that has to do with the corruption (save for some of the financial stuff). I don't give them much better marks overall than the NYT. This sort of response to being punched between the eyes last night by Beck was NOT what I expected.
Kudos to them - let's see if they keep it up.
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Stop the Looting; Start Prosecuting - http://www.FedUpUSA.org/"The only regulation that really works is failure."--Rick Santelli
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Abn0rmal
Posts: 9261
Incept: 2009-01-10
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The WSJ and Glen Back's show are both owned by the same entity. Maybe I'm just too cynical but I expect that both shows are just as controlled by their corporate owners as everything else on TV. Is Rupert Murdoch someone we should trust?
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Pika-steph
Posts: 54911
Incept: 2007-09-11
Live Free Or Die; US Army Est. 1775
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I think you must have posted just as I did. I don't 'trust' Murdoch, he's an enigma....and the coverage of these events on Fox vs the WSJ - there's been absolutely NO comparison.
Murdoch is a ratings guy - you can't nail him down politically; he's NOT 'conservative' or 'right-wing.' He donated to Hillary's campaign. He does however, have an uncanny knack of knowing what people want. If he sees the sentiment of Americans, he gives them what they want....regardless of whether he agrees with it or not. For THAT, I give him respect. That is what journalism is supposed to be about.....not YOUR agenda - the PEOPLE'S interests!
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Stop the Looting; Start Prosecuting - http://www.FedUpUSA.org/"The only regulation that really works is failure."--Rick Santelli
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Abn0rmal
Posts: 9261
Incept: 2009-01-10
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Quote:He does however, have an uncanny knack of knowing what people want. If he sees the sentiment of Americans, he gives them what they want....regardless of whether he agrees with it or not. If he can be trusted to recognize that a market exists for the truth and to try to become even richer by providing it then that's good enough for me. |
Pika-steph
Posts: 54911
Incept: 2007-09-11
Live Free Or Die; US Army Est. 1775
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Pretty much the way I feel about him. He's truly a capitalists capitalist....and he has a good knack for putting his finger on the pulse of American sentiment.
Funny that. Murdoch gets wealthier and his media empire is the ONLY one showing growth, meanwhile the rest of the news networks and outlets are going broke.
I think that speaks volumes. Always, always, ALWAYS follow the money. In this case, it's all going to Murdoch.
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Stop the Looting; Start Prosecuting - http://www.FedUpUSA.org/"The only regulation that really works is failure."--Rick Santelli
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Doctorbob
Posts: 812
Incept: 2009-06-03
Gusher of black gold
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Murdoch is a left-winger. He makes money on both ends of political spectrum.
The left has a long histroy of controlling what appears to be right-wing media. But is it? Limbaugh not right wing; he is a politically-correct neocon sockpuppet.
Beck may be on the line of what is acceptable to the left, but he is PC also.
No one in the main-stream media on your side. They would not be there if they were not destructive.
Stop looking for heroes. But take anything from them that is useful to your cause.
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Icanhasbailout
Posts: 9939
Incept: 2009-03-10
Imaginationland
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FNC isn't trustworthy either, they just look that way compared to the rest.
If you want the news before the Times, you read reliable sources on the Internet. If FNC puts out something important, you'll know it through those sources without having to listen to Geraldo, Greta, and all the advertising.
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Tesla
Posts: 15560
Incept: 2008-04-03
State of Disbelief
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Murdoch, IMO, is a political atheist. He doesn't care who he skewers so long as it brings ratings increases.
Isn't that what we want ? A media owner who doesn't care who the story hurts ?
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"Even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked." -Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Neither the wisest Constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt." -Samuel Adams
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Pika-steph
Posts: 54911
Incept: 2007-09-11
Live Free Or Die; US Army Est. 1775
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It's what I want.
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Stop the Looting; Start Prosecuting - http://www.FedUpUSA.org/"The only regulation that really works is failure."--Rick Santelli
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Spearfoot
Posts: 406
Incept: 2008-10-08
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Quote:A Confederacy of Dunces
On the surface, Maureen Dowd's reaction to the Joe Wilson kerfuffle seems preposterous even by Dowd standards:
Fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!
The word "boy" occurred to Dowd in connection with President Obama, and she imputes racism to Wilson?
Yet there is this, from the Associated Press:
Wilson's official biography lists him as a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. As a state senator, he voted against a bill to remove the Confederate flag from atop the South Carolina Statehouse and move it to a monument on the capitol grounds.
"I'm proud of it and I don't want it to be made fun of or put down by people who don't understand Southern heritage," he said during the months of debate in 2000.
We don't claim to understand Southern heritage, but we do understand that a lawmaker who proclaims himself "proud" of a symbol that represents secession and slavery makes himself an easy target for accusations of racism. Even a lousy shot occasionally scores a hit: one point for Maureen Dowd. There's an implied assertion here that just*****es me off. Being a Southerner does not make me a racist or an advocate of slavery. Slavery is and was an abomination. I had no say in choosing my ancestors. None of us do. My great-great-grandfather and great-great-granduncle served with General Pemberton at the siege of Vicksburg, were captured when the city fell, and were imprisoned at Sandusky, where my g'uncle died. Their grandfather was a veteran of the Revolutionary War. I'm proud of them all, so which flag should I fly? The Confederate, or the Stars and Stripes? Representative Wilson has no cause for shame in being "proud" of the Confederate flag, nor of his Southern heritage. |
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