Biased Media

Facts Are Stubborn Things – Obama Inserted Berwick By Royal Decree

Published by Papa Giorgio

I thought this was supposed to be the most “transparent” Presidency. (I will post at the end what this story brings to mind.) In this video you will see this biased view explained here coming out from Bernard Whitman and also note Obama again inserting a czar in order to usurp proper protocol:

Dems Inaccurately Claim GOP Blocked Berwick Nomination, Media Happy to Play Along

The Times reported:

Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, said the “recess appointment” was needed to carry out the new health care law. The law calls for huge changes in the two programs, which together insure nearly one-third of all Americans.

Mr. Pfeiffer said the president would appoint Dr. Berwick on Wednesday. Mr. Obama decided to act because “many Republicans in Congress have made it clear in recent weeks that they were going to stall the nomination as long as they could, solely to score political points,” Mr. Pfeiffer said.

[….]

The Daily News echoed:

Berwick supporters scoffed at GOP complaints and accused them of stonewalling.

“Republican lockstep stalling of Don’s nomination was a case study in cynicism and one awful example of how not to govern,” said Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). “Republicans screamed that these federal programs were in trouble, then tried to deny the Administration the capable guy the President had chosen to oversee them.”

The Globe printed Kerry’s statement, and noted that “Obama…blamed Republicans for forcing his hand.”

President Obama Attacks Congress for Delaying His Nominees — Is He Right?

President Obama said in a statement that “It’s unfortunate that at a time when our nation is facing enormous challenges, many in Congress have decided to delay critical nominations for political purposes.”

[…]

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., echoed the president’s suggestion, saying that “Republican lockstep stalling of Don’s nomination was a case study in cynicism and one awful example of how not to govern.”

[…]

But Republicans were not delaying or stalling Berwick’s nomination.

Indeed, they were eager for his hearing, hoping to assail Berwick’s past statements about health care rationing and his praise for the British health care system.

“The nomination hasn’t been held up by Republicans in Congress and to say otherwise is misleading,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, which would have held Berwick’s hearing.

Grassley said that he “requested that a hearing take place two weeks ago, before this recess.”

Berwick’s nomination was sent to the Senate in April, and his hearing had not been scheduled because he was participating in the “standard vetting process,” a Democratic aide on the Senate Finance Committee told ABC News.

But speaking not for attribution, Democratic officials say that neither Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., nor Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, were eager for an ugly confirmation fight four months before the midterm elections.

[…]

You can argue – and White House officials and Senate Democrats are, in fact, doing so – that Democrats were delaying Berwick’s hearing and the vote on his nomination because Republicans were going to play politics with it.

But a) that’s not the same as delaying or obstructing his nomination and b) some might argue that there’s also something to be said about combating policy arguments with better policy arguments.

This reminds me of all the times the Democrats said bush was cutting veteran benefits, when in fact he was increasing them. How? Because they would call for a 6-billion dollar increase in the proposal, but the Republicans and Bush would say their budget could only cover, say, 4-billion dollars. The net increase was 4-billion, but all you read in the papers and heard on MSNBC was that Bush cut 2-billion dollars in veteran benefits. Here is the comparison between Bush and Clinton in regards to veteran benefits, you tell me if the media was as mainstream as some purport?

CNN Middle-East Correspondent Canned

Published by Papa Giorgio

WND has the story:

241 dead Americans and their families would disagree.

Fadlallah, Lebanon’s top Shiite Muslim cleric who was once regarded as the spiritual leader of Hezbollah, has a long history of supporting terrorism against the U.S. and Israel. He was accused, for example, of masterminding the 1983 U.S. Marine barracks bombing. Although he had strenuously denied any connection to the attack, he continued to publicly support anti-American and anti-Israeli attacks.

He also supported the seizure and hostage-taking at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and has been known to praise Palestinian suicide bombings.

He has said of America, “In its policy that aspires to impose hegemony on the world is an evil with no good in it.”

News media reports claim that in recent years Fadlallah drifted away from radical Islamist politics and has espoused policies of moderation.

However, media watchdog HonestReporting.com points out that he praised the Palestinian shooting massacre of eight Israeli students at a Jerusalem yeshiva on March 6, 2008, and has praised Iran’s efforts to build long-range missiles as the “pride of the Islamic world” in 2008.

Just last week, Reuters reported that when asked what he needed by a nurse at the Lebanese hospital in which he was being treated, Fadlallah replied: “For the Zionist entity to cease to exist.”

Fadlallah also has engaged in Holocaust denial.

In a March 2008 interview with Al-Manar TV Fadlullah stated, “Zionism has inflated the number of victims in this holocaust beyond imagination. They say there were six million Jews – not six million, not three million, or anything like that. … But the world accepted this [figure], and it does not allow anyone to discuss this.”

Fadlallah survived several assassination attempts, including a 1985 car bombing near his south Beirut home that killed 80 people. During Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon, Fadlallah’s residence was bombed and reduced to rubble by Israeli warplanes. Fadlallah was not at home.

Nasr, meanwhile, has a history of controversial remarks on terrorism, WND has learned.

In 2006, while serving as CNN’s senior editor for Arab affairs, Nasr stated in an online CNN interview that “terrorism for one person is a freedom fight for another.”

“So, you know, if you think about it, ‘terrorism’ is a subjective term depending on which side you are on,” Nasr continued.

Nasr previously worked for the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, a brainchild of Lebanon’s former President Bashir Gemayel. At the time of the LBC’s founding in 1985, the pro-Western Gemayel was leader of the Lebanese Army.

See also: “Don’t be fooled” by tributes to “moderate” Hizballah cleric

YouTube Bias (BigPeace Import)

Published by Papa Giorgio

The below is about the above video, take note that the following is from Big Peace:

Here’s an update on Youtube’s removal of Latma-TV’s English-subtitled “We Con The World” video – the parody of the politically correct posturing in the original “We Are The World” song. The Latma video parodied the singers as  “Flotilla terrorists” singing about their propaganda tactics. The original English-subtitled video had over 3 million hits, before Youtube removed it due to a complaint of copyright violation on behalf of Warner/Chappell Music Inc. Versions with Hebrew subtitles can still be seen at Latma-TV channel here and within the Latma-TV weekly newscast.

The URLs of the removed videos were:

  1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNVeu-Iya34
  2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOGG_osOoVg
  3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQ66qEl-fqo
  4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KUcv452KbU

When Youtube removed the links to the English-subtitled video, they effectively stopped the then 3-million plus viral distribution just as it was  expanding, eliminating potentially millions of other views (see the classic analysis on viral marketing projections by Alan L. Montgomery of Carnegie Mellon University).

Latma-TV  sent a formal request to Youtube to put the parody video “We Con the World” back up. The producers received an email back on June 18, stating the video would be back up in 10-14 business days. July 9 will be “day 14,” so the deadline is near for Youtube’s staff to make the judgment that the English-subtitled video was a legitimate parody – and therefore protected under the “Fair Use” provision in the US copyright law.

Watch this space for updates as we count down to July 9.

Meanwhile – as a comparison – you can view two satirical parodies, both from the Left’s perspective, of the “We Are The World” song that were NOT  removed from Youtube.

NASA’s Islamization & Mainstream Media

Published by Papa Giorgio

  • Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program in the New York Times: 0.
  • Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program in the Washington Post: 0.
  • Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program on NBC Nightly News: 0.
  • Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program on ABC World News: 0.
  • Total words about the NASA Muslim outreach program on CBS Evening News: 0.

    • Elana Kagan Quotes (approvingly) Natioanal Socialist (nazi) Economist

    Published by Papa Giorgio

    This is an important post by Libertarian Republican. It shows how Left usually is. They were the racists in the Civil War (separatists and segregationists), they were the eugenicists/Nazi’s of the 20′ through WWII, they were the people standing in front of schools not wanting black kids in the same school as their kids, and they elected a black nationalist President. So the following on Kagan should come as no surprise:

    One of the longest standing and most respected conservative journals Human Events, recently uncovered some shocking information on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. She repeatedly cited a 20th century European Marxist-turned-Nazi Werner Sombert in her college thesis paper…

    [….]

    and now…

    • Kagan and her citing of Marxist/National Socialist Werner Sombart in her college thesis paper = zero mainstream media coverage.

    Here is a larger portion of the Human Events article:

    …During World War I, however, Sombart endorsed Germany’s “heroic” war against the “capitalist spirit” represented by England. In 1934, Sombart published Deutscher Sozialismus, which advocated the “total ordering of life” as an expression of the German Volksgeist, or “national spirit.”

    …In the introduction to her 1981 thesis, Kagan addresses a question famously asked by Sombart: Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus? — “Why is there no socialism in the United States?”

    “The Socialist Party of the United States could not lay claim to the kind of pure proletarianism that Sombart considered essential to any socialist movement; indeed, most of the party’s members did not even consider this a worthy goal,” Kagan wrote on Page 3 of the thesis. “But the American socialists ‘failure’ to build a movement that even resembled Sombart’s idealized notion of a class-conscious party . . . did not render their party any less significant. Nor did such a failure render their party any less successful. In the first two decades of the twentieth century the American socialist movement, whose very existence Sombart refused to consider, grew if not by leaps and bounds at least by inches.”

    In the final pages of her thesis — To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933 — Kagan returns to Sombart’s theories, writing: “Why, in particular, did the socialist movement never become an alternative to the nation’s established parties? In answering this question, historians have often called attention to various characteristics of American society that have militated against widespread acceptance of radical movements. These societal traits — an ethnically divided worked class, a relatively fluid class structure, an economy which allowed at least some workers to enjoy what Sombart termed ‘reefs of roast beef and apple pie,’ — prevented the early twentieth century socialists from attracting an immediate mass following. Such conditions did not, however, completely checkmate American socialism.”

    Even before he embraced National Socialism, Sombart’s socialist theories reflected an anti-Semitic tendency that identified Jews with capitalism, a theme explored in his 1911 book, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (“The Jews and Economics,” which was published in a 1913 English translation titled, The Jews and Modern Capitalism). In his 1915 book Handler und Helden (“Merchants and Heroes”), Sombart praised the “heroic” German character, contrasting them with “Trading Peoples,” especially Jews, whose “commercial” habits Sombart depicted as prevailing among the English.

    The influence of Sombart, who died in 1942 at age 78, was scornfully cited in Friedrich Hayek’s famous 1944 book The Road to Serfdom. In Chapter 12 of that book — “The Socialist Roots of Nazism” — Hayek said that Sombart “had done as much as any man to spread socialist ideas and anticapitalist resentment of varying shades throughout Germany.”

    Hayek also mentioned this in note #13 in the first chapter of The Road to Serfdom:

    • Historian of the development of capitalism Werner Sombart (1863-1941) was perhaps the last of the historical school economists. Hayek would view his move from left-wing socialism toward anticapitalism of the fascist variety as exemplifying a natural tendency.

    Verum Serum Points To Obama’s Own “Wag the Dog”

    Published by Papa Giorgio

    …Of course it’s obvious why BP would want to minimize the problem. They are on the hook financially for the clean-up and their reputation as a “green energy” company is taking a severe hit. But recall that the President claims to have his boot on BP’s neck. The only comparable motivation for the Obama administration is politics.

    Granted politics are always an issue where Presidents are involved, especially with the midterms approaching. But in this case there seems to be ample reason to conclude that politics is wagging the dog on the Gulf spill. When Katrina hit, the media went overboard with stories of everything up to murder (and just short of cannibalism) in flooded New Orleans. This time around, the media–with the exception of Rolling Stone, Mother Jones and now PBS–are being far too reticent to investigate the government’s response.

    …(read more)…

    Oh God… Not Again!

    Published by Papa Giorgio

    From NewsBusters:

    Chris Matthews famously felt a thrill going up his leg listening to an Obama speech. Now, MSNBC anchor Alex Witt has been similarly moved by Obamian oratory, declaring this morning “I got a few chills” listening to PBO’s “very powerful” speech on immigration.

    Some old videos confirming why the left would get a “chill” up their leg:

    Cartoonist (John Cole) Asks for Sense in 2nd Amendment, Here It Is: Original Intent (Sharpton Audio Added)

    Published by Papa Giorgio

    May I first say I enjoy John Cole’s art and he is included often in my Sunday Toons and he isn’t always biased as he is here.

    The above cartoonist mentions the following at his blog:

    And I’m still waiting for a common sense explanation of how the convoluted grammar in the Second Amendment (“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”) lays out the right for everyone (who isn’t a convicted felon, etc.) to own a gun.

    I will supply him with some original intent:

    1) There is no contrary evidence from the writings of the Founding Fathers, early American legal commentators, or pre-twentieth century Supreme Court decisions, indicating that the Second Amendment was intended to apply solely to active militia members.

    2) In his popular edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1803), St. George Tucker (see also), a lawyer, Revolutionary War militia officer, legal scholar, and later a U.S. District Court judge (appointed by James Madison in 1813), wrote of the Second Amendment:

    The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government.

    In the appendix to the Commentaries, Tucker elaborates further:

    This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty… The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Whenever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. In England, the people have been disarmed, generally, under the specious pretext of preserving the game: a never failing lure to bring over the landed aristocracy to support any measure, under that mask, though calculated for very different purposes. True it is, their bill of rights seems at first view to counteract this policy: but the right of bearing arms is confined to protestants, and the words suitable to their condition and degree, have been interpreted to authorise the prohibition of keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game, to any farmer, or inferior tradesman, or other person not qualified to kill game. So that not one man in five hundred can keep a gun in his house without being subject to a penalty.

    Not only are Tucker’s remarks solid evidence that the militia clause was not intended to restrict the right to keep arms to active militia members, but he speaks of a broad right – Tucker specifically mentions self-defense.

    “Because ‘[g]reat weight has always been attached, and very rightly attached, to contemporaneous exposition,’ the Supreme Court has cited Tucker in over forty cases. One can find Tucker in the major cases of virtually every Supreme Court era.” (Source: The Second Amendment in the Nineteenth Century)

    (William Blackstone was an English jurist who published Commentaries on the Laws of England, in four volumes between 1765 and 1769. Blackstone is credited with laying the foundation of modern English law and certainly influenced the thinking of the American Founders.)

    There is much more here: Original Intent and Purpose of the Second Amendment

    Take note there is another aspect to this cartoon that seems to go unnoticed in Mr. Cole’s creative mind. It is this:

    • Forty children under age 5 die annually from drowning in water buckets at home.
    • One hundred fifty children under age 5 die from fires they start with cigarette lighters.
    • Mechanical locks diminish the effective value of guns because they require that a gun be unloaded, yet thousands of children are saved each year by adults who use loaded guns to defend themselves and their families against home intrusion.

    (Dated Article, but point stands)

    Here are some easy to understand points/faqs (many more available):

    • Guns used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense. Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year — or about 6,850 times a day.1 This means that each year, firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.
    • As many as 200,000 women use a gun every year to defend themselves against sexual abuse

    Where is this in his cartoons? Which is why I wrote this on his blog:

    Your drawing draws the slimmest of deaths. There are many more persons saved by the stopping of a criminal. So the drawing should be a tombstone with writing on it that would go something like this: “Here lies another criminal who was killed in the action of committing a crime against which an innocent person feared for her life.”

    HotAir h/t – 90% OF Al Sharpton’s radio listeners applaud decision:

    To Be A Terrorist, Or Not To Be – That Is The Question

    Published by Papa Giorgio


    NewsBusters give a bit of history on this:

    Fox & Friends invited me on air today to discuss how The Washington Post could run a small obituary on left-wing domestic terrorist Dwight Armstrong and describe in the headline only as a “Vietnam War protester.”…

    Every other newspaper obit I found had the B-word (“bombing” or “bomber”) in the headline. In the New York Times, Margalit Fox had a strong opening:

    Dwight Armstrong, one of four young men who in 1970 bombed a building on the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, killing one person and injuring several others — a political protest that, gone violently wrong, endures in the national memory as an act of domestic terrorism — died on June 20 in Madison….