Excuses wearing thin for Obama, media pals

Steve Huntley at the Chicago Sun Times ...

Have you heard the news? President Obama inherited an economic mess from the Bush administration.

You say that's hardly news? But it's been the message sounded over and over by the White House. Top Obama adviser David Axelrod said on one of the Sunday news shows, "He walked in the door, we had the worst economy since the Great Depression." In San Francisco, Obama talked of being "busy with our mop." White House heavy hitter Rahm Emanuel used the worst-economy-since-the-Depression line on a public TV news show.

You'd think it's October 2008, the final month in the Obama presidential candidacy, rather than October 2009, nine months into the Obama presidency. Yet the Obama White House is in full campaign mode -- maybe because it needs to mask the shortcomings of the Obama presidency. ...

The MSNBC blast against the chamber appears to dovetail with what the Politico newspaper reports is a White House and Democratic effort "to marginalize" the business organization. That echoes the administration assault on the Fox News Channel: It says Fox isn't a news organization.

The White House trying to dictate who's a news organization. Democrats out to gut a business group. Obama media allies damning Americans as racist, unpatriotic and treasonous. Is this the America Obama promised when he campaigned to end the cynical and divisive politics of the past?

Watch out Steve, you could be found floating in the Chicago River with that attitude.

FoxNews Channel is not the real target, and the rest of the media need to wake up to the crosshairs on them, too

Donald Sensing argues that the media are being set up to insure they toe the Obama line.

I am not persuaded that they need to be whipped into line no matter what Obama does. They are his natural allies, his public megaphone, his willing accomplices.

And if they should stray occasionally and cross an invisible line, and get slapped by Team Obama they will fall back into line like a battered wife come back to her abusive husband not just once but for a lifetime.

The UN is bigoted against Isreal

Andrea Mitchell: I Would Not Classify George Soros as "Left-Wing"....Wait, Did She Just Say George Soros Isn't Left-Wing?....

Via WeaselZippers

Andrew Breitbart exposes the racism of the MSM

Breitbart discusses a phone conversation he had with a Washinton Post reporteress Carol D. Leonnig and her racist, demeaning views of black people. Bush called it the "soft bigotry of low expectations." He was much too nice, its simple racism.

Click on the link in the headline for the PJTV video.

Democratic election fraud in Troy, NY: a follow-up.

For the next time somebody tells you that Democrat/ACORN/WFP election registration fraud does not equal election fraud, feel free to point this story coming from Troy, New York, where the one led seamlessly to the other. Feel free to also point out that it doesn’t take all that much to flip some races:

Thirty-eight forged or fraudulent ballots have been thrown out — enough votes, an election official admits, to likely have tipped the city council and county elections in November to the Democrats. Candidates would have been able to run both on the Democratic and Working Families Party lines in two weeks, and that could have given the Democrats the general election.

A special prosecutor is investigating the case and criminal charges are possible. New York State Supreme Court Judge Michael Lynch ruled that there were “significant election law violations that have compromised the rights of numerous voters and the integrity of the election process.”

And from Atlas Shrugs on the same topic ...

The Working Families party, Democrats, forged voter applications (absentee ballots) and voted in their name. Votes were cast by Democrats using voters' names. Thirty-eight forged or fraudulent ballots have been thrown out, according to records at the Rensselaer County Board of Elections in Troy, N.Y. Enough votes, an election official admits, likely to have tipped the November election to the Democrats.
...
"Someone took my signature and voted with it and I felt extremely violated," Suozzo told Fox News. He is a soft-spoken 28-year-old environmental engineer who says he never saw, let alone signed, the Working Families Party Absentee ballot application that carried his supposed signature. He was flabbergasted that someone would vote for him and submit it.

"The whole thing seems dirty to me," Suzzo said. "You wonder how often this happens and people don't get caught."

He says he did not have any type of medical procedure, adding "I haven't been to the hospital in years."

"I feel that I was gypped," Boomhower said, ruefully. "I didn't get to cast my vote on my own."

Boomhower, a 28-year-old home health care worker, says three men came to her door asking her to sign a ballot application. It wasn't until after the election that a private investigator brought her the news that an absentee ballot indeed showed she had voted, when she actually had not.

"I can't believe they thought they would get away with this," she says angrily, noting that the false claim that she was in Boston could have jeopardized her job. "I don't want to see this get tossed aside," she told Fox News.

Michael Ward, whose ballot said he was taking care of an elderly parent, said "I got one parent left, and he lives in Albany and takes care of himself."

What the Limbaugh Quote Hoax Really Tells Us

This is what scary about the people surrounding Obama allied with the people in the media. We are literally risking our lives. Remember, the Left represented by Ayers had serious discussions that, come the revolution, they would have to kill 25 million Americans.

Listening to the contemporary American left’s views of the rest of us is increasingly like listening a paranoid schizophrenic slip farther into delusions that they are surrounded by malevolent people. Just as we have to worry that the schizophrenic might act on their delusional beliefs and strike out violently against the evils they imagine, we have to be increasingly worried that leftists will strike out against the rest of us based on their delusional fantasies about what we non-leftists believe.

And make no mistake about it, leftist do harbor dark delusions about non-leftist. The fact that so leftists many fell completely for the Limbaugh quote hoax proves it.

The first rule of a good con or hoax is to appeal to the preconceptions and prejudices of the mark. The scammer weaves a story shot through with details that the scammer knows the mark already believes to be true. Conversely, this means that you can determine what a mark actually believes by observing what cons and hoaxes they fall for.

Watching so many serious journalists and leftist political figures fall for the fake Rush Limbaugh quotes tells us something very frightening about what leftists believe true about non-leftist America. I say, “frightening,” because we evaluate the level of threat that others poise based on our understanding of the amorality of their beliefs. Then we rationalize the harshness of the methods we are willing to employ against them based on our threat assessment. We are much more willing to use draconian methods against people we view as extremely evil than we are against people we judge less evil. As a nation, we were willing to employ much more draconian methods to defeat Fascism than we employed to fight anyone else. The same basic principle applies to our internal conflicts as well. The more extreme and dangerous we view our political and social opponents, the more tolerant we become of extreme measures to oppose them.

Given this, what does it portend for American non-leftists that a wide and powerful swath of the American left apparently believes it quite credible that a major media figure with an audience in the tens of millions looks back fondly on slavery and approves of political assassination? What draconian methods could those leftists rationalize using if they really believe they are fighting people with such values?

As I have written before, immersion in fantasy is a defining aspect of leftism. As they move progressively towards the left pole of the political spectrum, the realities become more and more immersive while becoming more and more detached from reality. At the far end of the spectrum, the leftists become delusional to the point they believe they are trapped in a gotterdammerung struggle of good versus evil that justifies any action they might take in fighting that struggle. When dangerous fantasies once the providence of the 5% most radical left become accepted as true in the 40% just left of center, the rest of us are in great danger.

So we have to ask: Just how seriously deluded is the mainstream American left that they believed it credible that Limbaugh actually said the things attributed to him in the fake quotes?

Let’s be clear about what they believed Limbaugh actually said:

I mean, let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.

You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray [the confessed assassin of Martin Luther King]. We miss you, James. Godspeed.

How can anyone believe that a mainstream American figure would believe such things much less speak them aloud? As a practical matter, how do they imagine that a celebrity such as Limbaugh, who is one of the most recorded people in America, managed to keep these quotes hidden for long? Why isn’t there audio or video of him making these or similar statements? How has he managed to be on the air for 20+ years without making more than these two slips?

Only someone seriously immersed in a deep fantasy about Limbaugh’s beliefs would swallow such quotes without checking them or thinking about the practical possibility of Limbaugh making such statements without every person in the world knowing about it within the hour. More troubling, not only would they have to believe that Limbaugh thinks that way but that his audience does as well.

They fell for the hoax because their fantasy about the evil of non-leftists tells them that most non-leftists think this way. They didn’t need to check on the provenance of the quotes anymore than the rest of us need to check an assertion that the sun came up in the east this morning. It was just that obvious to them.

So, we come back to the main question: What methods could these deluded leftists justify using against the rest of us if they really believe we hold such beliefs and values inherent in the fake quotes? What couldn’t they justify doing to drive such people from politics or even the nation itself? We even have to ask what level of violence could they justify using against us?

This isn’t about Limbaugh. They clearly view Limbaugh as just the most visible manifestation of tens of millions of Americans pining for the good old days of slavery. Make no mistake. They aren’t just targeting Limbaugh as someone so evil that they can justify any extremity in fighting him.

They are targeting the rest of us as well.

Health insurance lies.

I have heard all sorts of stories of insurance companies that won’t pay for necessary treatment. Many of these tales of woe end up with someone who was denied care dying. An alternative tale is someone with insurance having their claim denied because of some obscure “loophole” and going bankrupt.

Lots of these tales are told by the Obama administration and the Liberal media (but I repeat myself) in either so-called “news” reports, in editorials or in carefully chosen letters to the editor.

Well, I call bullshit on these stories.

Why?

Because I have some personal experience with these issues. I have health insurance through my employer. It is not a “Cadillac” plan. You know, the ones negotiated by the auto workers costing over $20,000 per year. It’s just a good average plan with an annual deductible that allows me to go to any hospital or doctor and the insurance company will pay most of the bill after a co-pay.

So in the last 10 years I have had open heart surgery to repair a failed valve in my heart. I have also just come back from John Hopkins hospital for cancer surgery. So I have undergone two major hospitalizations and surgeries in less than a decade. And no issues at all with the insurance company not paying for my hospitalization and treatment.

Furthermore, I know quite a few people and no one that I know has had treatment declined or denied by their insurance carrier because of the insurance company decided to screw them … or for any other reason for that matter. The fact is that the insurance companies have been particularly good about paying for my medical procedures, the lab tests, the numerous x-rays, the various CAT scans and the drugs that I have been required to take.

So if insurance companies were looking for a candidate to deny coverage because they wanted to fatten their profits, I would be in there as a prime suspect for their green eyeshade sleuths that – if you believe their detractors – are looking to deny their customer’s claims.

I wanted to tell my story because no one likes insurance companies. Let’s face it, you pay them and hope never to use their product. You can’t show you policy off to your friends like an i-Phone and their costs keeps going up. But I don’t believe for one minute that health insurance companies are in the business of denying health care to sick people … unlike, for example the State of Florida, which may be the first in the nation to establish Death Panels for the sick elderly. From the SunSentinal.com ...

Florida health officials are drawing up guidelines that recommend barring patients with incurable cancer, end-stage multiple sclerosis and other conditions from being admitted to hospitals if the state is overwhelmed by flu cases.

The plan, which would guide Florida hospitals on how to ration scarce medical care during a severe flu outbreak, also calls for doctors to remove patients with poor prognoses from ventilators to treat those who have better chances of surviving. That decision would be made by the hospital.

The flu causes severe respiratory illnesses in a small percentage of cases, and patients who need ventilators and are deprived of them could die without the breathing assistance the machines provide.

Thanks to Rush Limbaugh for bringing to our attention that CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, NPR, the Washinton Post and the NY Times will not.

Gregg: U.S. could be on path to a 'banana republic' situation

“You talk about systemic risk. The systemic risk today is the Congress of the United States,“ the Ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee told CNN Chief National Correspondent John King, “that we’re creating these massive debts which we’re passing on to our children. We’re going to undermine fundamentally the quality of life for our children by doing this.”

“Now you can’t blame that on [former President] George [W.] Bush,” Greg said, noting that using the Obama administration’s projections the budget deficit for the next ten years is $1 trillion per year. And Gregg said that during the same ten-year period, public debt as a percentage of gross domestic product would increase from 40 percent - which Gregg called “tolerable but still too high” - up to 80 percent.

The figures, Gregg told King, “mean we’re basically on the path to a banana-republic-type of financial situation in this country. And you just can’t do that. You can’t keep running these [federal] programs out [into the future] and not paying for them. And you can’t keep throwing debt on top of debt.”

“Standards of living will drop if we keep this up,” Gregg also said.

Scozzafava Calls the Cops

The election contest in New York's 23rd district is in turmoil because of the Tea Party movement. It appears that the Republicans have nominated a person who appears to be running on the Democrat platform. From the Weekly Standard ...

Tonight, Dede Scozzafava, the Republican candidate for the November 3 special election in the 23rd congressional district, spoke to about 100 Republicans at the Lewis County GOP dinner at the Elks Lodge 1605. After a dinner of turkey, mashed potatoes, and stuffing, Scozzafava fended off criticism that she wasn't as conservative as third-party candidate Doug Hoffman and urged her supporters to vote for her in order to keep her Democratic opponent Bill Owens from serving as a rubber stamp for Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama's agenda in Washington. It was a fairly typical evening--until the speech ended and someone with Scozzafava's campaign called the police. On me.

For the details, read the whole thing.

Here's some detail from Dump Dede.

“Scozzafavva is pro gay-marriage, pro abortion, and supported by an ACORN affiliated and directed political party. All three of these disqualify her from receiving our support. I’ve told Dede this, and every Republican leader in the 23rd Congressional District knows this. I’ll give you a couple of other examples of how bad her record of liberal activism is. In this most recent session of the Assembly, on the votes she cast in the Assembly, we gave her a 15% rating. The very liberal Speaker of the Assembly, who comes from the most liberal part of Manhattan has a 10% rating. She’s hardly any different from him!”

An Independent is running, and running well.


The Republican establishment is in danger of committing suicide if it ignores the people of this country, if it ignores the Tea Party activists, if it follows Newt Gingrich off the cliff.

A personal note on Newt. He was one of my heroes years ago. He is an excellent polemicist. But in person I found him to be arrogant and condescending. Perhaps it was the question I asked, perhaps he had a bad day, but my taste of Newt - up close and personal - turned me off. And his most recent political moves have confirmed my earlier impressions; he's not the leader for the future.

Obama Justice Department Demands Political labels for Racial Purposes.

Via Glenn Reynolds "Instapundit" ...

HMM: “Voters in this small city decided overwhelmingly last year to do away with the party affiliation of candidates in local elections, but the Obama administration recently overruled the electorate and decided that equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the Democratic Party. The Justice Department’s ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their ‘candidates of choice’ – identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.” If this is an accurate report, it will only strengthen claims that the Department of Justice has been politicized under Eric Holder, particularly as the decision was “made by the same Justice official who ordered the dismissal of a voting rights case against members of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia.”

From the Washington Times:

KINSTON, N.C. Voters in this small city decided overwhelmingly last year to do away with the party affiliation of candidates in local elections, but the Obama administration recently overruled the electorate and decided that equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the Democratic Party.

The Justice Department's ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their "candidates of choice" - identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.

The department ruled that white voters in Kinston will vote for blacks only if they are Democrats and that therefore the city cannot get rid of party affiliations for local elections because that would violate black voters' right to elect the candidates they want.

What????? That reasoning is so mind numbingly convoluted it makes my hair hurt.

Stephen LaRoque, a former Republican state lawmaker who led the drive to end partisan local elections, called the Justice Department's decision "racial as well as partisan."

"On top of that, you have an unelected bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., overturning a valid election," he said. "That is un-American."

The decision, made by the same Justice official who ordered the dismissal of a voting rights case against members of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia, has irritated other locals as well. They bristle at federal interference in this city of nearly 23,000 people, two-thirds of whom are black.

Obama Justice says that in a small town of 23,000 people, two thirds of whom are black, they need party labels so that black voters will know which Democrat to vote for.

CNBC, Reuters fall for climate hoax

In a dramatic shift, the Chamber of Commerce announced Monday that it is throwing its support behind climate change legislation making its way through the U.S. Senate.


Only it didn’t.


An email press release announcing the change is a hoax, say Chamber officials.


Several media organizations fell for it.


A CNBC anchor interrupted herself mid-sentence Monday morning to announce that the network had “breaking news,” then cut away to reporter Hampton Pearson, who read from the fake press release.


Pearson quickly followed up with a second report saying the “so-called bulletin” was an “absolute hoax.” Smelling a rat, CNBC’s Larry Kudlow demanded to know whether the White House had been involved.


In a story posted Monday morning, Reuters declared: “The Chamber of Commerce said on Monday it will no longer opposes climate change legislation, but wants the bill to include a carbon tax.”


Reuters updated the story to acknowledge the hoax, but it was too late: The Washington Post and the New York Times had already posted the fake story on their Web sites.

Read the whole thing. Those layers of fact checkers must be lying down on the job. Plus they WANT this so bad.

What If Ayers’ ‘Joke’ About Writing Dreams Is On the Press?

The evidence that Bill Ayers was the ghjost writer for "Dreams of my fathers" continues to grow ... including a statment by Bill Ayers.

These oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers. “Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together,” another Hyde Park neighbor pointed out. “It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both.” In the end, Ayers’ contribution to Barack’s Dreams From My Father would be significant — so much so that the book’s language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers’ own writing. Even the caveat at the beginning of Dreams, in which Barack points out that he uses invented dialogue, embellished facts, composite characters, inaccurate chronology, and pseudonyms to create an “approximation” of reality, resembles Ayers’ defense of the inaccuracies in his memoir Fugitive Days. In the foreword to his book, Ayers states that the book is merely a collection of his personal memories and “impressions.” … Thanks to help from the veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Books.

There's lots more. Read the whole thing including the lengthy comment by Jim Anderson.

Big Media Doesn’t Like Tea Partiers, Example #12,456 by Publius

Times Says It Will Cut 100 Newsroom Jobs

A death by 100 cuts.

I'm not surprised that the other members of the family are not asking for "Pinch's" head. First, they probably agree with is policy. Second, there is no way out. For the old grey whore there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

But don’t call them socialists!

Via Glenn Reynolds ...

AMY BURKE OF THE CINCINNATI 912 PROJECT sends a picture from the Organizing For America pro-Obamacare rally in CIncy. But don’t call them socialists!

Is Obama a fool? Yes, if one gives him the benefit of the doubt

Paul Mirengoff at Powerline debates a question that has been puzzling me ever since Obama began his run for the Presidency, and has become more pressing since he was elected.

Charles Krauthammer opines ...

[W[hen the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and "reset" buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever or even serious behind it. It is amateurishness, wrapped in naivete, inside credulity. In short, the very stuff of Nobels.

And Paul Mirengoff believes that ...

If Obama believes that the thuggish, autocratic, expansionist Russian regime is more sinned against than sinning in relation to the U.S., then he is anti-American. If he doesn't believe this but elects to act as if it were the case, then he is a fool.

I have come to the conclusion, based on the people he surrounds himself with, people epitomized by the Reverend Jeremiah "God Damn America" Wright and Pentagon bomber Bill Ayers, that he genuinely hates this country. No one wants to believe that of the President so no "responsible" commentator is willing to say it, but it must be said.

Oh, I neglected to mention Obama communications director Anita "my favorite political philosopher is Mao Zedong" Dunn. These people are not reformers, they are revolutionaries in the mold of Lenin and Stalin.

Extreme shepherding

Should a white woman win a beauty contest at a Black University?

The answer appears to be "no" according to her fellow students.

Who's the racist?

 

We report, you decide.

The AP Carries Al Sharpton's Jock Strap; A Thrill Runs Up Their Leg.

Powerline notes that the AP (and the rest of the MSM) has a shameful history of covering up their anointed race hustlers and charlatans, even of they incite murder. The AP deserves to wear a white robe and pointed hat.

The AP averts it bigoted eye from what really happened:

At Gavin Cato's funeral, Sharpton criticized the Jewish community and thereafter organized a series of massive, angry demonstrations. He declared that Cato's death was not merely the result of a car accident, but rather "the social accident of apartheid." The contentious activist then challenged local Jews--who he derisively characterized as "diamond merchants" --to "pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house" to settle the score. Finally he claimed, without proof, that the Jewish driver had run over the Cato child while in a drunken stupor.

Stirred in part by such rhetoric and false accusations, hundreds of Crown Heights blacks took violently to the streets, pelting Jewish homes with rocks, setting vehicles on fire, and shouting "Jew! Jew!" The riots continued for three days and nights. Sharpton's response: "We must not reprimand our children for outrage, when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system." Five days after the original car accident that had triggered the violence, Sharpton led 400 shouting protesters through the heart of the Crown Heights Jewish community, shouting "No justice, no peace!"

And

1995: When the United House of Prayer, a large black landlord in Harlem, raises the rent on Freddy's Fashion Mart, Freddy's white Jewish owner is forced to raise the rent on his subtenant, a black-owned music store. A landlord-tenant dispute ensues; Sharpton uses it to incite racial hatred. "We will not stand by," he warns malignantly, "and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business." Sharpton's National Action Network sets up picket lines; customers going into Freddy's are spat on and cursed as "traitors" and "Uncle Toms." Some protesters shout, "Burn down the Jew store!" and simulate striking a match. "We're going to see that this cracker suffers," says Sharpton's colleague Morris Powell. On Dec. 8, one of the protesters bursts into Freddy's, shoots four employees point-blank, then sets the store on fire. Seven employees die in the inferno.

You have to go to the much maligned Internet to find out what the AP does not want you to recall. Powerline comments ...

The best one can say of Sharpton is that he doesn't commit murder himself, he only incites it. Lucky Al! He is never personally present when the blood starts to flow. And yet the Associated Press is happy to run interference for him.