Obama Corruption
Media Bias: WJLA-TV Fires Veteran Anchor – Cites misconduct for Negative Report on Obama
Infuriating! The media slammed Bush at every opportunity and there wasn’t a problem. Now that a reporter says something negative (and true) about Obama and the Dems, he gets fired. I hope he SUES them for every cent they have!! The MSM is such a joke.
WJLA-TV fires veteran anchor Doug McKelway, cites insubordination, misconduct
By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 17, 2010
washingtonpost.com
excerpt:
WJLA-TV has fired veteran anchorman Doug McKelway for a verbal confrontation this summer with the station’s news director that came after McKelway broadcast a sharply worded live report about congressional Democrats and President Obama.
McKelway was placed on indefinite suspension in late July after his run-in with ABC7’s news director and general manager, Bill Lord. In a letter to McKelway this week, the station said it was terminating his contract immediately, citing insubordination and misconduct.
Amid the ongoing BP oil spill in July, McKelway covered a Capitol Hill demonstration by environmental groups protesting the influence of oil-industry contributions to members of Congress.
In his piece, McKelway said the sparsely attended event attracted protesters “largely representing far-left environmental groups.” He went on to say the protest “may be a risky strategy because the one man who has more campaign contributions from BP than anybody else in history is now sitting in the Oval Office, President Barack Obama, who accepted $77,051 in campaign contributions from BP.”
After a brief taped segment updating efforts to cap the BP well, McKelway added that the Senate was unlikely to pass “cap-and-trade” legislation this year, because “the Democrats are looking at the potential for huge losses in Congress come the midterm elections. And the last thing they want to do is propose a huge escalation in your electric bill, your utility bill, before then.”
LINK: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/16/AR2010091606645.html
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )ThoughtCrime: DC Reporter Suspended for Accurate Report on BP’s Donations to Obama
Unbelievable!!! They called his reporting the facts ‘partisan’ because it wasn’t kissing up to Obama. Think of all the horrible, negative things that were said about Bush (whether they were the truth or not) and no one seemed to care if the reporting was biased against Bush. This drives me crazy!! I’ve never seen a president get more of a pass than this one! The MSM is disgusting!
Thoughtcrime: D.C. Reporter Suspended for Accurate Report on BP’s Donations to Obama
Posted by Robert Bluey
WJLA-TV, a Washington, D.C. ABC affiliate, suspended reporter Doug McKelway following his alleged “partisan” comments at a liberal rally on Capitol Hill marking the three-month anniversary of the Gulf oil spill. Video of the broadcast tells a different story.
Apparently facts are now “partisan.”
McKelway stuck to the truth about BP’s political contributions and pending cap-and-trade legislation, newsworthy subjects given that the event’s organizers were lobbying to “pass legislation to end America’s addiction to oil and urged lawmakers to donate campaign money raised from the oil industry to the clean-up efforts in the Gulf.”
According to the Washington Post, it was McKelway’s supposedly controversial comments on July 20 that led to his suspension. Anonymous sources at the station are now accusing him of “insubordination” in an apparent attempt to fire him.
McKelway’s live report began with a factually correct statement about BP’s donations to President Obama. McKelway accurately noted that Obama received $77,051 from the BP employees, information verified by the Center for Responsive Politics.
When McKelway asked one of the event’s participants to comment on it, Ted Glick of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network acknowledged it was a problem for Obama. The rally was organized by left-wing groups Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and Public Citizen.
At the end of the live segment, McKelway talked about the prospect of cap-and-trade legislation in the Senate, a topic related to the rally, which urged lawmakers to “take immediate action to pass climate and energy legislation.”
Nevertheless, the Washington Post, quoting anonymous sources, indicated McKelway’s report crossed the line. The newspaper reported:
According to several of McKelway’s colleagues, the newsman’s reporting may have lapsed into partisan territory when he commented live on the air about the oil industry’s influence in Washington, particularly its contributions to Democratic politicians and legislators.
This is absolutely absurd. The Post’s decision to use anonymous sources to smear McKelway was bad enough, but reporter Paul Farhi also wrote a subjective description of the broadcast instead of simply stating the facts. The newspaper’s own reporters engage in flagrant partisan behavior on a daily basis.
WJLA’s station manager and news director declined to comment on the personnel matter. McKelway isn’t talking either.
Based on what we know — and discounting the questionable and anonymous sources in Farhi’s story — it appears this is a classic case of the mainstream media silencing those who report inconvenient truths about this administration. McKelway is a veteran newsman who has consistently strived for balance in reporting. Unfortunately, in a news environment like Washington, D.C, liberals don’t always like the facts. In this case, McKelway appears to have suffered the consequences.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 2 so far )A Rather Angry America
We’re sick of Obama!! It’s time for a revolution!!!!!
A Rather Angry America
August 7, 2010 – by Victor Davis Hanson Share
Unemployment is still high, growth low, deficits huge. States are cutting out everything from streetlights to paving. Public pensions are exploding everywhere.
A class war looms between retirees who want their sweet-heart obligations honored, and strapped, poorer taxpayers who feel about those bloated payouts as they do their underwater mortgages.
What Did You Expect?
In a progressive culture, where ads blare hourly about skipping out on credit card debt, shorting the IRS, and walking away from mortgages, did the public employee unions really think they were exempt from a Chrysler-like renegotiation?
In the age of Obama, there is no real contractual obligation: everything from paying back bondholders to fixing a BP penalty is, well, “negotiable.” When the money runs out, the law will too. Law? There is no law other than a mandated equality of result.
The Talkative Crowd
On the Internet recently appeared the pictures of the JournoList bunch, who at least between themselves gave up their usual pretense that the media was unbiased. With all due respect (confession: I was briefly mentioned by the list as someone that the racist card might work on in connection with the illegal immigration debate), they appear to the eye as a sort of nerdish group.
They remind me of what we used to call the “wimp table” at a pretty tough Selma High around 1970. It was there that the high school’s handful of geeks, toadies, and picked-upon used to eat, under the protective eye of yard-duty teachers. The assumption was that with a few steps further onto the grounds, the entire sorry bunch was fair game for every bully on campus. And that sad outfit filters, disseminates, and arbitrates our news? Most from their writing and appearance seemed either neurotic overachievers or twenty-something bloggers who confuse calling someone something with erudition.
Up Is Down
No wonder aristocratic golf became needed presidential relaxation, the old first lady hysteria over things like Nancy’s china cooled when Michelle hit the Costa del Sol, and Guantanamo became A-OK. The news now for these guys is sort of like writing boilerplate race/class/gender oppression papers for a Yale undergrad gut class.
Populism Is Now Bad?
In contrast, the proverbial people seem angry. A book will have to be written explaining how in 19 months Obama blew a 70% approval rating and is headed for under 40% — something that took Bush six years. A handful of judges nullified what millions voted for in Arizona and California, apparently on the premise that wanting federal immigration law enforced, and seeing marriage as a traditional bond between a man and woman as it has been for 2,500 years in the West, was bigoted, analogous to the racism of the Jim Crow South, and thus in need of judicial intervention.
A guy in Bakersfield might think it prejudicial that a gay judge struck down an amendment to the Constitution passed by a majority of voters and opposed by the gay lobby; a guy in DC would think the guy in Bakersfield prejudicial for coming up with that preposterous conclusion.
Meanwhile, in our postracial age, race is everywhere: Charles Rangel, who won’t follow the tax laws he writes, whines about an “old-English, Anglo-Saxon procedure.” Maxine Waters (under the cloud of insider bank influence peddling) and the Black Caucus (recipient of federalized GM donations) cite racism as the source of their ethical dilemmas (at least Larry Craig did not cite gay-bashing and Duke Cunningham reverse discrimination and Chris Dodd ageism and the late John Murtha girthism).
A mass murderer at a beer distribution center (so much for Van Jones’s assurances that such mayhem was a white thing) is portrayed on the airwaves as an aggrieved victim of racism lashing out. Not a word about the shattered lives of those gunned down and their families. Welcome to the post-racial Obama age — with much more to follow. (Nemesis gives no quarter: once Barack Obama years ago went down the patronize-and-use-Rev.-Wright path, the payback was only a matter of when, not if.)
History Is Negotiable
We sent our first delegation to the services marking the bombing of Hiroshima. Fine, but will we do the same with the Philippines, Manchuria, South Korea, and all the other places where the Imperial Japanese Army by early 1945 was killing on average well over 5,000 a day in its occupied co-prosperity sphere? To understand why Hiroshima, understand 50,000 American casualties, 100,000 Japanese dead, and 100,000 Okinawan dead at the conclusion of Okinawa ten weeks earlier, and then multiply it by a factor of 10 for the upcoming Japanese homeland invasion.
The Rising
At home, a huge mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan will rise up before the new World Trade Center (maybe Bruce Springsteen can do a sequel to “The Rising”?). To suggest this is bad taste is bigoted. To suggest that we don’t know the where, how, and why about the funding, or why a self-proclaimed ecumenical group of Muslims wants to build ties by picking this provocative spot, or who exactly is behind the idea (or where exactly the promoter now is) is the worst sort of Neanderthal right prejudice.
No problem. We can assure the 3,000 dead that their passing was marked by the enlightened harmony of a mosque preempting a new tower. What we do know is that in about a year, all over the Middle East, al-Qaeda videos will have photo-shopped “strong horse” posters and CDs of the ruins of 9/11 in the shadow of a towering mosque, with the accustomed boilerplate about how Atta et al. knocked down the looming towers in order to have Islam’s shrine rise up in their place. It all sort of reminds one of the nasty reception the president’s envoy on Islamic outreach just got from a Muslim audience in India. He was “shocked” at his reception — or translated into Valley Girl parlance: “Like, I can’t believe this is happening to me.”
I don’t think the polls quite capture the present public anger, which is not abating. Everything seems to channel into a general furor: Michelle’s movable feast from Costa del Sol to Martha’s Vineyard; the president suing Arizona and counting on a judge to nullify the public will, as part of a larger effort either by judicial nod or administrative fiat to get amnesty for 15 million future voters who will reciprocate at the polls; politicians bragging about handing out another $100 billion of someone else’s money here, another $200 billion there; the constant assumption that popular expression is retarded, and those who go to a tea party rally, vote to enforce immigration law, want to see marriage as it has been for millennia, want to cut federal spending, or are tired of identity politics are Palinesque clingers.
The Best and the Brightest
The common denominator? If one were to survey the elite campuses around 1975 and talk to those in law school, poly sci, or the humanities, then imagine them 35 years later as our elite leaders in government, the media, the universities, the foundations, and the arts, one could pretty much expect what we now have.
The present symptoms that characterize both our popular culture and current governance — shrill self-righteousness; abstract communalism juxtaposed with concrete pursuit of the aristocratic good life; race/class/gender cosmic sermonizing with private school and Ivy league for the kids; crass and tasteless public expression; a serial inability to take responsibility for one’s actions; the bipartisan mega-deficits; the inability to cut pensions and social security for the baby boomers — from the trivial to the fundamental, all derive from a bankrupt cohort that came of age in the sixties and seventies.
We see the arrested adolescence and hypocrisy that come from that sermonizing generation, whether in Al Franken’s puerile face-making, the ideologically driven suicide at Newsweek, the steady destruction of the New York Times, John Kerry’s tax-avoiding yacht, the Great Gatsby Clinton wedding, Michelle on the Costa del Sol, Nancy Pelosi’s jet, Tim Geithner’s tax skipping, or the constant race-card playing of a Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters. Yes, one walk across the Yale or Stanford campus circa 1975, and one could see pretty clearly what sort of culture that bunch would create when it came of age and was handed power. If that is reductionism, so be it.
LINK: http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/a-rather-angry-america/?singlepage=true
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )The Obsolescence of Barack Obama
AMEN!!!!! Hopefully people are finally coming to their senses!!
The Obsolescence of Barack Obama
By FOUAD AJAMI
Wall Street Journal
Not long ago Barack Obama, for those who were spellbound by him, had the stylishness of JFK and the historic mission of FDR riding to the nation’s rescue. Now it is to Lyndon B. Johnson’s unhappy presidency that Democratic strategist Robert Shrum compares the stewardship of Mr. Obama. Johnson, wrote Mr. Shrum in the Week magazine last month, never “sustained an emotional link with the American people” and chose to escalate a war that “forced his abdication as president.”
A broken link with the public, and a war in Afghanistan he neither embraces and sells to his party nor abandons—this is a time of puzzlement for President Obama. His fall from political grace has been as swift as his rise a handful of years ago. He had been hot political property in 2006 and, of course, in 2008. But now he will campaign for his party’s 2010 candidates from afar, holding fund raisers but not hitting the campaign trail in most of the contested races. Those mass rallies of Obama frenzy are surely of the past.
Senior Economics Writer Steve Moore asks whether the President is finished as an agent of change.
The vaunted Obama economic stimulus, at $862 billion, has failed. The “progressives” want to double down, and were they to have their way, would have pushed for a bigger stimulus still. But the American people are in open rebellion against an economic strategy of public debt, higher taxes and unending deficits. We’re not all Keynesians, it turns out. The panic that propelled Mr. Obama to the presidency has waned. There is deep concern, to be sure. But the Obama strategy has lost the consent of the governed.
Mr. Obama could protest that his swift and sudden fall from grace is no fault of his. He had been a blank slate, and the devotees had projected onto him their hopes and dreams. His victory had not been the triumph of policies he had enunciated in great detail. He had never run anything in his entire life. He had a scant public record, but oddly this worked to his advantage. If he was going to begin the world anew, it was better that he knew little about the machinery of government.
He pronounced on the American condition with stark, unalloyed confidence. He had little if any regard for precedents. He could be forgiven the thought that America’s faith in economic freedom had given way and that he had the popular writ to move the nation toward a super-regulated command economy. An “economic emergency” was upon us, and this would be the New New Deal.
There was no hesitation in the monumental changes Mr. Obama had in mind. The logic was Jacobin, the authority deriving from a perceived mandate to recast time-honored practices. It was veritably rule by emergency decrees. If public opinion displayed no enthusiasm for the overhaul of the nation’s health-care system, the administration would push on. The public would adjust in due time.
The nation may be ill at ease with an immigration reform bill that would provide some 12 million illegal immigrants a path toward citizenship, but the administration would still insist on the primacy of its own judgment. It would take Arizona to court, even though the public let it be known that it understood Arizona’s immigration law as an expression of that state’s frustration with the federal government’s abdication of its responsibility over border security.
It was clear as daylight that there was a built-in contradiction between opening the citizenship rolls to a vast flood of new petitioners and a political economy of redistribution favored by the Obama administration. The choice was stark: You could either “spread the wealth around” or open the gates for legalizing millions of immigrants of lower skills. You could not do both.
It was canonical to this administration and its functionaries that they were handed a broken nation, that it was theirs to repair, that it was theirs to tax and reshape to their preferences. Yet there was, in 1980, after another landmark election, a leader who had stepped forth in a time of “malaise” at home and weakness abroad: Ronald Reagan. His program was different from Mr. Obama’s. His faith in the country was boundless. What he sought was to restore the nation’s faith in itself, in its political and economic vitality.
Big as Reagan’s mandate was, in two elections, the man was never bigger than his country. There was never narcissism or a bloated sense of personal destiny in him. He gloried in the country, and drew sustenance from its heroic deeds and its capacity for recovery. No political class rode with him to power anxious to lay its hands on the nation’s treasure, eager to supplant the forces of the market with its own economic preferences.
To be sure, Reagan faltered midway through his second term—the arms-for-hostages trade, the Iran-Contra affair, nearly wrecked his presidency. But he recovered, the nation rallied around him and carried him across the finish line, his bond with the electorate deep and true. He had two years left of his stewardship, and his political recovery was so miraculous that he, and his first mate, Secretary of State George P. Shultz, would seal the nation’s victory in the Cold War.
There is little evidence that the Obama presidency could yet find new vindication, another lease on life. Mr. Obama will mark time, but henceforth he will not define the national agenda. He will not be the repository of its hopes and sentiments. The ambition that his would be a “transformational” presidency—he rightly described Reagan’s stewardship in these terms—is for naught.
There remains the fact of his biography, a man’s journey. Personality is doubtless an obstacle to his recovery. The detachment of Mr. Obama need not be dwelled upon at great length, so obvious it is now even to the pundits who had a “tingling sensation” when they beheld him during his astonishing run for office. Nor does Mr. Obama have the suppleness of Bill Clinton, who rose out of the debris of his first two years in the presidency, dusted himself off, walked away from his spouse’s radical attempt to remake the country’s health-delivery system, and moved to the political center.
It is in the nature of charisma that it rises out of thin air, out of need and distress, and then dissipates when the magic fails. The country has had its fill with a scapegoating that knows no end from a president who had vowed to break with recriminations and partisanship. The magic of 2008 can’t be recreated, and good riddance to it. Slowly, the nation has recovered its poise. There is a widespread sense of unstated embarrassment that a political majority, if only for a moment, fell for the promise of an untested redeemer—a belief alien to the temperament of this so practical and sober a nation.
Mr. Ajami is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Akin Calls Obama Administration on Propaganda Website
Akin Calls Administration on Propaganda Website
July 28, 2010
From Congressman Akin’s Web Site:
WASHINGTON, DC – Congressman Todd Akin (MO-2), today sent a letter to Secretary Sebelius expressing opposition to partisan ideological content on the official HealthCare.gov website. Fifty-three other members of the House of Representatives joined Akin in signing the letter.
Akin’s letter cites examples of bias in the HealthCare.gov website and calls on the Department of Health and Human Services to “act as a responsible steward of taxpayer dollars and remove all factual inaccuracies, misleading statements, and subjective one-sided information, while adding essential consumer education information, whether positive or not.”
The PDF of the letter is here. The text of the letter to Sec. Sebelius is below.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )July 28, 2010
The Honorable Kathleen Sebelius
Secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
200 Independence Avenue, S.W.
Washington, DC 20201
Dear Secretary Sebelius:
We are writing to express our opposition to the content, or lack thereof, that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has placed on HealthCare.gov, the new web portal established under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).
While we have supported similar web portal proposals to be used as consumer information and transparency tools, we never envisioned it as a way to use taxpayer funds to promote political ideology masquerading as “facts.” We take issue with the Administration’s claim during a meeting with Republican staff on July 7, 2010, that the content chosen for the web portal was simply for “consumer education,” as so far the information presented is all one-sided. We are concerned that HHS is misusing its regulatory powers to influence the debate, and we believe it is not HHS’ proper role to limit information to only what the Administration sees as positive benefits of PPACA, while leaving out key information that will have dramatic effects on the lives of Americans.
We provide the following examples as evidence of our claim:
Ø The banner at the top of every page says “health care is getting better,” which is a purely subjective statement.
Ø Information about Medicare Advantage plans is noticeably absent. The only information listed under “Find Insurance Options” is information on Medigap plans (like the kind AARP offers), Medicaid, state-based options, and local facilities that provide “reduced priced care”. American seniors who want to learn “more about insurance for benefits that are not covered by Medicare” deserve to know all of their options.
Ø The warning label that pops up for insurance searches in 45 states says, “A quick note about individual insurance: Unless you live in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont, or Maine, be aware that the current marketplace creates several challenges for the consumer.” The five states listed are those with guaranteed-issue laws. The statement is certainly biased against states (and insurers) that do not mandate guaranteed-issue. While it is true that coverage may not be guaranteed through the individual insurance market, the webpages that contain this statement fail to contain any follow up statements about other available options in these states or why the state has chosen to not mandate guaranteed-issue.
Ø Under the timeline provided by the Administration, there is a graphic of a briefcase overflowing with money, labeled “Stopping Overpayments to Big Insurance Companies” accompanied by a slide titled “Addressing Overpayments to Big Insurance Companies and Strengthening Medicare Advantage.” Not only is the graphic biased and over the top in its vilification of insurers, but it also fails to be accompanied by information from CMS’ Actuary warning that more than half of seniors will lose access to their Medicare Advantage plans due to over $200 billion in cuts under PPACA.[1]
Ø The website claims, under the “Strengthening Medicare” tab “The life of the Medicare Trust Fund will be extended to at least 2029, a 12-year extension…” This statement is completely false, as these new Medicare cuts are not being used to improve the program’s solvency, but instead are being used to offset the massive new entitlement spending and government programs. According to CMS’ Actuary, “in practice, the improved HI financing cannot be simultaneously used to finance other Federal outlays (such as the coverage expansions) and to extend the trust fund, despite the appearance of this result from the respective accounting conventions.”[2] The truth is either you’re extending the life of Medicare or you’re paying for the bill. You can’t claim both and CBO agrees.[3]
Items that were noticeably left off the HealthCare.gov web portal but certainly fall under the definition of “consumer education” include:
Ø No references to tax increases (among other negative aspects of PPACA) on the timeline.
Ø No warning that consumers should stay away from high-costs plans or be subject to the “Cadillac Tax.”
Ø No mention that there will not be enough funding for the new high risk pools to run through 2014 – as both CBO and CMS’ Actuary have found.[4],[5]
Ø No warning under the “Understand the New Law” tab that over 51% of employees will be in plans without “grandfathered” status, as employers will be forced to change their plans to comply with PPACA.[6]
Ø No information about private entities that offer assistance in picking a personalized plan, such as certified state-licensed independent insurance agents and brokers.
Ø No information about providers that still take Medicaid and/or Medicare.
Ø No information about, or restrictions being placed on, Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs), Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs), etc. through PPACA.
Therefore, we respectfully request that HHS act as a responsible steward of taxpayer dollars and remove all factual inaccuracies, misleading statements, and subjective one-sided information, while adding essential consumer education information, whether positive or not.
We appreciate your attention to this issue and look forward to your prompt response.
Yours truly,
/s/
Arizona Sheriff: ‘Our Own Government Has Become Our Enemy’
Amen!!
Arizona Sheriff: ‘Our Own Government Has Become Our Enemy’
Monday, August 02, 2010
By Penny Starr, Senior Staff Writer
(Correction: As initially posted, this story inaccurately said that Pinal County was contiguous with the Mexican border. It is in southern Arizona, but not on the border.)
(CNSNews.com) – Pinal County (Ariz.) Sheriff Paul Babeu is hopping mad at the federal government.
Babeu told CNSNews.com that rather than help law enforcement in Arizona stop the hundreds of thousands of people who come into the United States illegally, the federal government is targeting the state and its law enforcement personnel.
“What’s very troubling is the fact that at a time when we in law enforcement and our state need help from the federal government, instead of sending help they put up billboard-size signs warning our citizens to stay out of the desert in my county because of dangerous drug and human smuggling and weapons and bandits and all these other things and then, behind that, they drag us into court with the ACLU,” Babeu said.
The sheriff was referring to the law suits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the U.S. Department of Justice challenging the state’s new immigration law.
“So who has partnered with the ACLU?” Babeu said in a telephone interview with CNSNews.com. “It’s the president and (Attorney General) Eric Holder himself. And that’s simply outrageous.”
Last week, U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton placed a temporary injunction on portions of the bill that allowed law enforcement personnel during the course of a criminal investigation who have probable cause to think an individual is in the country illegally to check immigration status. The state of Arizona filed an appeal on Thursday with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Our own government has become our enemy and is taking us to court at a time when we need help,” Babeu said.
Babeu and Sheriff Larry Dever of Cochise County Ariz., spoke by phone with CNSNews.com last week about the May 17 ACLU class-action lawsuit, which charges the law uses racial profiling and named the county attorneys and sheriffs in all 15 Arizona counties as defendants. The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit on July 6, charging the Arizona law preempted the federal government’s sole right to enforce immigration law.
“If the president would do his job and secure the border; send 3,000 armed soldiers to the Arizona border and stop the illegal immigration and the drug smuggling and the violence, we wouldn’t even be in this position and where we’re forced to take matters into our own hands,” Babeu said.
Dever said the federal government’s failure to secure the border and its current thwarting of Arizona’s effort to control illegal immigration within its borders has implications for the entire country.
“The bigger picture is while what’s going on in Arizona is critically important, what comes out of this and happens here will affect our entire nation in terms of our ability to protect our citizenry from a very serious homeland security threat,” Dever said. “People who are coming across the border in my county aren’t staying there. They’re going everywhere USA and a lot of them are bad, bad people.”
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), about 250,000 people were detained in Arizona in the last 12 months for being in the country illegally. Babeu said that that number only reflects the number of people detained and that thousands more enter the country illegally each year.
The CBP also reports that 17 percent of those detained already have a criminal record in the United States.
Both Babeu and Dever said they want to remain involved in the legal battle over the law, which many experts predict will end up being decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Dever has hired an independent attorney to represent him in the ACLU case and his attorney has already filed a motion of intervention in the DOJ lawsuit so the “(Dever) will have a seat at the table.”
A Web site also has been launched by the non-profit, Iowa-based Legacy Foundation to raise money for the Babeu’s and Dever’s legal defense.
Both men said they believe the outcome of the case has national significance.“For us, this is a public safety matter and a national security threat,” Babeu said
LINK: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/70324
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Many Local Democrats Put New Black Panther Leader on their Payrolls
It’s amazing what the Democrats can get away with!!
Many local Democrats have put New Black Panther leader on their payrolls
Dave Gibson
In May, it came to light that Norfolk Mayor Paul Fraim paid the former (?) local head of the New Black Panthers, Michael Muhammad (aka Michael Miles) $4,500, for services performed on his 2010 reelection campaign.
I spoke with Fraim’s campaign director, Sandra Brandt, who informed me that Muhammad was hired to distribute literature.
Having,myself, worked on several local and statewide campaigns, I found that strange. Ordinarily, distribution of campaign materials (lit drops) are done by volunteers. It simply makes no sense to spend the campaign’s resources on something that can be done for free (often by the candidate’s family, friends, or even by the candidate himself).
Furthermore, $4,500 is a princely sum indeed, for such a menial task.
When I pressed Mrs. Brandt on the issue, she finally conceded that Mayor Fraim “needed to reach out to the black community.”
So, the best representative they could find is a man known for his racist, anti-Semitic tirades, and calls for violence at Norfolk City Council meetings?
For years, Muhammad, who once called Fraim a “cracker,” has publicly bemoaned an alleged undue Jewish influence on this country, and once even hinted at his support for seeing Norfolk set ablaze.
At a November 2000 city council meeting, shortly after a black man died in police custody, Muhammad pointed to the sunset above the Norfolk skyline and said: “I see how much it resembles fire…Looks good to me.”
In the last ten years, Muhammad has been criminally charged more than 30 times. In 2001, he was convicted of violating an order of protection, as he was stalking Republican House of Delegates candidate Winsome Sears.
In addition to Mayor Fraim’s campaign, Muhammad has worked on campaigns for the following Virginia elected officials:
-State Sen. Ralph Northam (D-Norfolk)
-Del. Paula Miller (D-Norfolk)
-Del. Johnny Joannou (D-Portsmouth)
-Del. Kenny Alexander (D-Norfolk)
-City Councilman Paul Riddick (D-Norfolk)
-City Councilman Randy Wright (D-Norfolk)
-Commissioner of Revenue Phil Kellam (D-Virginia Beach)
Unconcerned with Muhammad’s history of racism, Sen. Ralph Northam told the Virginian-Pilot: “He made sure people knew I was a good candidate and was instrumental in getting people to the polls.”
At least for Democrats, it seems that only election results, not character, matters.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Documents Show MSM Plotting to Kill Stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright
It’s disgusting, but we knew it all along! I just don’t know how we combat such dishonesty and bias in the MSM. Our country is definitely in trouble since we can’t trust the ones who are supposed to be giving us the facts!!
Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright
By Jonathan Strong – The Daily Caller 07/20/2010 |
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.
The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public – to dissociate himself from them. Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”
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.
In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”
Michael Tomasky, a writer for the Guardian, also tried to rally his fellow members of Journolist: “Listen folks–in my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy in whatever venues we have. This isn’t about defending Obama. This is about how the [mainstream media] kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people.”
“Richard Kim got this right above: ‘a horrible glimpse of general election press strategy.’ He’s dead on,” Tomasky continued. “We need to throw chairs now, try as hard as we can to get the call next time. Otherwise the questions in October will be exactly like this. This is just a disease.”
(In an interview Monday, Tomasky defended his position, calling the ABC debate an example of shoddy journalism.)
Thomas Schaller, a columnist for the Baltimore Sun as well as a political science professor, upped the ante from there. In a post with the subject header, “why don’t we use the power of this list to do something about the debate?” Schaller proposed coordinating a “smart statement expressing disgust” at the questions Gibson and Stephanopoulos had posed to Obama.
“It would create quite a stir, I bet, and be a warning against future behavior of the sort,” Schaller wrote.
Tomasky approved. “YES. A thousand times yes,” he exclaimed.
The members began collaborating on their open letter. Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones rejected an early draft, saying, “I’d say too short. In my opinion, it doesn’t go far enough in highlighting the inanity of some of [Gibson’s] and [Stephanopoulos’s] questions. And it doesn’t point out their factual inaccuracies …Our friends at Media Matters probably have tons of experience with this sort of thing, if we want their input.”
Jared Bernstein, who would go on to be Vice President Joe Biden’s top economist when Obama took office, helped, too. The letter should be “Short, punchy and solely focused on vapidity of gotcha,” Bernstein wrote.
In the midst of this collaborative enterprise, Holly Yeager, now of the Columbia Journalism Review, dropped into the conversation to say “be sure to read” a column in that day’s Washington Post that attacked the debate.
Columnist Joe Conason weighed in with suggestions. So did Slate contributor David Greenberg, and David Roberts of the website Grist. Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, helped too.
Journolist members signed the statement and released it April 18, calling the debate “a revolting descent into tabloid journalism and a gross disservice to Americans concerned about the great issues facing the nation and the world.”
The letter caused a brief splash and won the attention of the New York Times. But only a week later, Obama – and the journalists who were helping him – were on the defensive once again.
Jeremiah Wright was back in the news after making a series of media appearances. At the National Press Club, Wright claimed Obama had only repudiated his beliefs for “political reasons.” Wright also reiterated his charge that the U.S. federal government had created AIDS as a means of committing genocide against African Americans.
It was another crisis, and members of Journolist again rose to help Obama.
Chris Hayes of the Nation posted on April 29, 2008, urging his colleagues to ignore Wright. Hayes directed his message to “particularly those in the ostensible mainstream media” who were members of the list.
The Wright controversy, Hayes argued, was not about Wright at all. Instead, “It has everything to do with the attempts of the right to maintain control of the country.”
Hayes castigated his fellow liberals for criticizing Wright. “All this hand wringing about just
how awful and odious Rev. Wright remarks are just keeps the hustle going.”
“Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians — men, women, children, the infirmed — on its hands. You’ll forgive me if I just can’t quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama’s pastor,” Hayes wrote.
Hayes urged his colleagues – especially the straight news reporters who were charged with covering the campaign in a neutral way – to bury the Wright scandal. “I’m not saying we should all rush en masse to defend Wright. If you don’t think he’s worthy of defense, don’t defend him! What I’m saying is that there is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable,” Hayes said.
(Reached by phone Monday, Hayes argued his words then fell on deaf ears. “I can say ‘hey I don’t think you guys should cover this,’ but no one listened to me.”)
Katha Pollitt – Hayes’s colleague at the Nation – didn’t disagree on principle, though she did sound weary of the propaganda. “I hear you. but I am really tired of defending the indefensible. The people who attacked Clinton on Monica were prissy and ridiculous, but let me tell you it was no fun, as a feminist and a woman, waving aside as politically irrelevant and part of the vast rightwing conspiracy Paula, Monica, Kathleen, Juanita,” Pollitt said.
“Part of me doesn’t like this shit either,” agreed Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent. “But what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals.”
Ackerman went on:
I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.
And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.
Ackerman did allow there were some Republicans who weren’t racists. “We’ll know who doesn’t deserve this treatment — Ross Douthat, for instance — but the others need to get it.” He also said he had begun to implement his plan. “I previewed it a bit on my blog last week after Commentary wildly distorted a comment Joe Cirincione made to make him appear like (what else) an antisemite. So I said: why is it that so many on the right have such a problem with the first viable prospective African-American president?”
Several members of the list disagreed with Ackerman – but only on strategic grounds.
“Spencer, you’re wrong,” wrote Mark Schmitt, now an editor at the American Prospect. “Calling Fred Barnes a racist doesn’t further the argument, and not just because Juan Williams is his new black friend, but because that makes it all about character. The goal is to get to the point where you can contrast some _thing_ — Obama’s substantive agenda — with this crap.”
(In an interview Monday, Schmitt declined to say whether he thought Ackerman’s plan was wrong. “That is not a question I’m going to answer,” he said.)
Kevin Drum, then of Washington Monthly, also disagreed with Ackerman’s strategy. “I think it’s worth keeping in mind that Obama is trying (or says he’s trying) to run a campaign that avoids precisely the kind of thing Spencer is talking about, and turning this into a gutter brawl would probably hurt the Obama brand pretty strongly. After all, why vote for him if it turns out he’s not going change the way politics works?”
But it was Ackerman who had the last word. “Kevin, I’m not saying OBAMA should do this. I’m saying WE should do this.”
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