Sunday, November 4, 2012

Media Bias 101: Benghazi vs. Watergate and Iran-Contra

The American Spectator Foundation   "Question: How is Benghazi different from Watergate and Iran-Contra? The obvious answer: the media. Liberal journalists turned Watergate and Iran-Contra into gigantic national scandals by their consistent, relentless pursuit of both stories; to the contrary, they are consistently, relentlessly ignoring Benghazi."
....
"The way the Reagan team reacted to initial reports on Iran-Contra is precisely the opposite of how the Obama team has responded. But even more telling are the opposite media reactions. For Iran-Contra, the media refused to be satisfied with the initial response of Meese and Reagan. Liberal reporters went absolutely bonkers, all hands on deck, a full-court press to find incriminating information. Today, under Obama, it's the exact opposite."
Hat tip to Christy Waters at Conservative Bloggers on Facebook

Saturday, November 3, 2012

Union said to be halting power repair crews is top Democrat donor; however the report is said to be in error

Washington Secrets  "The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, cited in news reports for halting nonunion repair crews from helping to restore power in superstorm Sandy's New Jersey-New York path, is one of nation's top union donors to Democrats, a group President Obama last year praised in a visit to an IBEW training Center."

WAFF48 in Huntsville, AL, worded their headline like this: Confusion causes utility crew to return from recovery effort
"General Manager Ray Hardin appeared on Fox Business Channel Friday morning saying, "We were presented documents from IBEW that required our folks to affiliate with the unions and that was something we could not agree to."

"Decatur Utilities later released a statement expanding on that, "Upon arriving at a staging area in Virginia, crews were held in place pending clarification of documents received from IBEW that implied a requirement of our employees to agree to union affiliation while working in the New York and New Jersey areas. It was and remains our understanding that agreeing to those requirements was a condition of being allowed to work in those areas." "

CBS reported the WAFF story is in error;  "Alabama power companies are denying a local TV station's report that linemen who had traveled to New Jersey from Alabama (a right to work state) to help restore power to those hit hard by Superstorm Sandy were told they could not work there because they were non-union."
"Huntsville Utilities also said their workers were not turned away and are working in storm-ravaged areas.

"Utilities from other right-to-work states have also reported their crews working in New York and New Jersey, including repair crews with Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas assisting in New York State. Florida Power & Light sent more than 860 employees and contractors to assist seven utility companies from Virginia to New Jersey."

Romney Wins in a Landslide (at Least in Israel): What it Means

Times of Israel  "The Presidential election results are in. Well, at least the votes from Americans in Israel. Not one to keep readers in suspense, I’ll reveal the most important numbers up front: Gov. Mitt Romney received 85%–85%!–of the vote; President Obama managed only 14.3%. This, according to exit polling just released by iVoteIsrael, the non-partisan group promoting and facilitating voting by U.S. citizens currently in Israel. Their statistics reveal some fascinating results. More importantly, these results have implications for the outcome of next week’s election. (Again, not to keep you in suspense: those implications favor the Republicans.)"
....
"An interesting historical note: for almost a century, every Republican candidate who received 30% or more of the Jewish vote was victorious–and it looks like Romney will win well over 30%."

Krauthammer on The choice

Charles Krauthammer  "It is common for one party to take control and enact its ideological agenda. Ascendancy, however, occurs only when the opposition inevitably regains power and then proceeds to accept the basic premises of the preceding revolution.

...."Until Reagan. Ten minutes into his presidency, Reagan declares that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” "
....
"An Obama second term means that the movement toward European-style social democracy continues, in part by legislation, in part by executive decree. The American experiment — the more individualistic, energetic, innovative, risk-taking model of democratic governance — continues to recede, yielding to the supervised life of the entitlement state.

"If Obama loses, however, his presidency becomes a historical parenthesis, a passing interlude of overreaching hyper-liberalism, rejected by a center-right country that is 80 percent nonliberal.
"Should they summon the skill and dexterity, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan could guide the country to the restoration of a more austere and modest government with more restrained entitlements and a more equitable and efficient tax code. Those achievements alone would mark a new trajectory — a return to what Reagan started three decades ago."  Emphasis added.
Political Cartoons

Remember Benghazi. POWERFUL!… Navy SEALs Release Ad BLASTING Barack Obama

TheGatewayPundit.com
"A community of Navy SEALs released an ad today blasting Barack Obama.
" “There’s a pervasive feeling across our community that he’s going to use whatever to get elected and he doesn’t really care about the men on the front lines.”

"A community of Navy SEALs released an ad today blasting Barack Obama.
" “There’s a pervasive feeling across our community that he’s going to use whatever to get elected and he doesn’t really care about the men on the front lines.” "

As long as we're discussing how Obama and the SEALs are foxhole buddies, the above post also has this: OPSEC Seeks Donations To Run Anti-Obama Ad Against Seal Team Six Movie
"The email, which links back to the website for OPSEC, a Republican-leaning group of former special operations and C.I.A. officers that has been likened to the Swift Boat veterans that swamped John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, is looking for donations of $25 or more to air its commercial during the debut of Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden on Nov. 4, just two days before the presidential election. OPSEC is not happy that major Obama supporter Harvey Weinstein's The Weinstein Company is behind the film, which, according to the New York Times, has been recut to bolster the President's role in the historic military operation.
"Seal Team Six director John Stockwell and other sources told the Times that the changes were not politically motivated but, rather, were meant to give the movie a more realistic feel. Those sources added, however, that Weinstein suggested some of the changes that were made to the film and that Meghan O'Hara, a producer who has worked with liberal firebrand Michael Moore on his left-leaning films Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko was also involved in gathering research."

More empty chairs and a media blackout of anti-Obama protestors

Legal Insurrection brings us Election Day Empty Chair Countdown – Day 3
"Today’s Empty Chair photo feast is of photo submissions that include Joe Biden as the Empty Chair Vice
President."

"Each day until Election Day we will feature a previously unpublished photo sent in by a Legal Insurrection reader on National Empty Chair Day, September 3, 2012.
"The countdown continues with 3 days to go.
"Today’s Empty Chair photo feast is of photo submissions that include Joe Biden as the Empty Chair Vice President. After all, we are electing both a president and a vice president in only 3 days."

Also from Legal Insurrection: Media blackout of black Chicago protesters marching against Obama  "Black Chicagoans from the south and west sides took their message to what they say is the source of the problem when they converged outside of a fundraiser held by Mayor Emanuel for Barack Obama and then marched to the studios of ABC News.

"Their message, “let us work in our own community,” was made all the more poignant as the ABC News crew ignored the news event outside their very studious. Not one camera was sent to cover the news that was, literally, placed at their doorstep.
"The protest, which took place Thursday evening, addressed these community members’ growing desperation as their wartorn neighborhoods are redeveloped by political cronies, evicting residents and shutting out local investors, and use union labor from outside the community to do the work. It’s a corrupt cycle of government “work” that takes advantage of the poor, evicting them, and then redeveloping the properties to benefit anyone but the community.
"In the video below, community members who say they are desperate for jobs and investment, focus their protest against liberal leadership, including Obama and Emanuel, so-called community organizations like ACORN, and unions:"

"In an earlier video published by “Rebel Pundit” Jeremy Segal, a community member elaborated on the issue the inner-city black community has with unions: they won’t hire black people. Therefore any work going to their communities for building sites, etc., shuts them out of jobs. Segal writes:"  Read more...

From 'hope' and 'change' to 'revenge'

Thomas Lifson  "Going off teleprompter yesterday, President Obama let the mask slip and revealed the ugliness at the heart of his political mission. Amie Parnes of the Hill:
"President Obama called voting "the best revenge" on Friday at a rally in Ohio."


Nobody knows the troubles I've caused...

Friday, November 2, 2012

The press builds a wall around Obama

Jake Tapper of ABC; The Benghazi Drip-Drip-Drip  "In the place of a detailed description from the Obama administration about what happened more than six weeks ago comes the drip-drip-drip of stories about the failures of the Obama administration to provide those Americans on the ground in Libya with all the security assets they needed."
Media Blackout: Why Obama Dodged the Libya Question  "When the Benghazi issue did surface, other than on Fox, it was invariably brought up by Republican guests, and then deflected by the hosts, who largely ignored new stories this week that implicated the White House in the decision not to intervene to save the life of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and other American staff.
"Here is how the Sunday shows covered the issue:"....

Benghazi a Blip on Media's Radar - Less Than 2 Minutes of Coverage on ABC, CBS; NBC Punts
"As the Big Three's evening newscasts ignored the latest in the controversy over the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya for seven straight days, their morning shows aren't doing much better. On Friday, ABC's Good Morning America and CBS This Morning together devoted less than two minutes of air time - 1 minute, 50 seconds - to the ambush that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three American military veterans."

But there is some light breaking through the media firewall: Benghazi Timeline: More Lies Exposed  Doug Ross has done a brilliant timeline of the events in Benghazi and the events in D.C. Worth cutting and saving. Sharyl Attkisson of CBS news has uncovered even more shocking details of the Administration's mishandling and mendacity about the attacks on our consulate in Benghazi. ...CBS News has learned that during the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, the Obama Administration did not convene its top interagency...

Neal Boortz; Media Bias Intensifying  "I was talking with a former newsman yesterday – a news director and news anchor. He lives way up in the frozen north, right in the middle of Obama territory. He told me that it just cannot be avoided any more – no matter how much he wanted to believe that our national press corps is truly impartial in this presidential race, the obvious blatant bias for Obama simply cannot be denied any more. The media, with exceptions, is in the tank for Obama and the news coverage has been and will be carefully calculated so as to increase the likelihood of Obama’s reelection.
Political Cartoons by Chip Bok

Does the media realize - or even care - that this is the way they are pictured?

Which women is the "war" on, anyway?

Political Cartoons by Gary Varvel

The Currency of Power; Want to understand America's place in the world? Write economics back into the plan. Also a must-read by Mark Steyn.

FOREIGN POLICY "...Australia's foreign minister and a longtime friend of the United States, observed with Aussie clarity: "The United States is one budget deal away from restoring its global preeminence." He added a caution: "There are powers in the Asia-Pacific that are whispering that this time the United States will not get its act together, so others had best attend to them." "
....

"....Mike Mullen, then chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff -- to recall Hamilton's warning about the link between credit and security. Mullen seized attention not by pointing out a danger to the fleet, but by telling CNN, "The most significant threat to our national security is our debt." "

Mark Steyn; A Vote For Obama-Biden Is A Vote For National Collapse   "And yet, mysteriously, multi-trillion-dollar Big Government Obama-style can't do anything except sluice food stamps to the dependent class, lavish benefits and early retirement packages to the bureaucrats that service them, and so-called government "investment" to approved Obama cronies.
"So you can have Big Government bigger (or, anyway, more expensive) than any government's ever been, and the lights still go out in 17 states — because your president spent 6 trillion bucks and all the country got was a lousy Air Force One bomber jacket for him to wear while posing for a Twitpic answering the phone with his concerned expression."