As if there was any doubt about the media being nothing more than an extension of the Obama campaign:

A READER AT A MAJOR NEWSROOM EMAILS: "Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for O is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. People cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working." I asked permission to reprint without attribution and it was granted.

The Anchoress hears it also to no one's surprise.

If you recall, several weeks ago Charlie Gibson used a doctored quote when interviewing Sarah Palin.

Gene Johnson of the Associated Press was the person (I hesitate to use the term journalist at this point) who purposefully truncated the quote to make it mean something entirely different, and so I contacted his superior, and noted he had clearly violated APs code of ethics by doctoring the quote.

After a period of silence, I asked the AP "In what way is altering a subject's quote to change the entire context of the quote, and present an entirely false interpretation of what the subject clearly said, not at odds with the Associated Press' ethics policy?"

The response?

"the remark could be interpreted in different ways"

Yes, when you allow persons to slice and dice quotes until they sound like what the media wants the victim to sound like, it certainly can.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:37 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
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Obama/Sulzberger '08:

Though these facts are a matter of public record, the New York Times, in what can only be explained as a willful disregard of the truth, failed to research this story or present any semblance of a fairminded treatment of the facts closely at hand. The paper did manage to report one interesting but irrelevant fact: Mr. Davis did participate in a roundtable discussion on the political scene with...Paul Begala.

Again, let us be clear: The New York Times -- in the absence of any supporting evidence -- has insinuated some kind of impropriety on the part of Senator McCain and Rick Davis. But entirely missing from the story is any significant mention of Senator McCain's long advocacy for, and co-sponsorship of legislation to enact, stricter oversight and regulation of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- dating back to 2006. Please see the attached floor statement on this issue by Senator McCain from 2006.

To the central point our campaign has made in the last 48 hours: The New York Times has never published a single investigative piece, factually correct or otherwise, examining the relationship between Obama campaign chief strategist David Axelrod, his consulting and lobbying clients, and Senator Obama. Likewise, the New York Times never published an investigative report, factually correct or otherwise, examining the relationship between Former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson and Senator Obama, who appointed Johnson head of his VP search committee, until the writing was on the wall and Johnson was under fire following reports from actual news organizations that he had received preferential loans from predatory mortgage lender Countrywide.

Therefore this "report" from the New York Times must be evaluated in the context of its intent and purpose. It is a partisan attack falsely labeled as objective news. And its most serious allegations are based entirely on the claims of anonymous sources, a familiar yet regretful tactic for the paper.

We all understand that partisan attacks are part of the political process in this country. The debate that stems from these grand and sometimes unruly conversations is what makes this country so exceptional. Indeed, our nation has a long and proud tradition of news organizations that are ideological and partisan in nature, the Huffington Post and the New York Times being two such publications. We celebrate their contribution to the political fabric of America. But while the Huffington Post is utterly transparent, the New York Times obscures its true intentions -- to undermine the candidacy of John McCain and boost the candidacy of Barack Obama -- under the cloak of objective journalism.

I'm not sure of Goldfarb's last claim. When was the last time anyone thought the Times practiced objective journalism?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:36 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Should we take Marc Ambinder's critique of the Barack Obama/William Ayers story seriously, when he knows so little about it that he can't even spell the terrorist's name properly?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:45 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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(h/t Instapundit)

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:29 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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As much as we in the blogosphere love to the describe nonsensical utterings of journalists, pundits, and talking heads as "self-parodying," it is rare that national news outlets truly earn that as well as the Washington Post editorial board has done with their editorial lamenting the demise of the D.C. gun ban and the passage of a House Bill that seeks to normalize D.C. citizen's rights along the lines of those recognized throughout most of the rest of the country.

The hysteric and unsigned op-ed, Open Season on the District, is really quite a wonder to behold.

THE U.S. SENATE represents the last, best hope to stop the mindless push to enact a dangerous gun law in the District. And stop it the senators must.

That "dangerous gun law" would bring the district's gun laws in line with the majority of gun restrictions in the United States, areas that have far less gun crime that historically have far less gun crime than D.C. a fact the editors purposefully avoid mentioning.

The House voted yesterday to adopt a measure that would gut the District's gun laws and that goes far beyond the Supreme Court's finding this summer of an individual right to bear arms. The bill would prohibit the District from requiring that weapons be registered -- the most reasonable and benign of measures. It would allow ownership of semiautomatic handguns and rifles and would place no age restriction on gun possession. And it would effectively strip the District of the ability to enact any regulations that could be seen as unduly burdening gun ownership. If even registration is seen as unduly burdensome, that leaves little room and little hope for other reasonable provisions.

Weapons registration, far from being "reasonable and benign," is recognized as a prelude to confiscation, and historically been used as such around the world. As a result, registration is very unpopular in the United States and is shunned in most cities and states.

Likewise, semi-automatic handguns and rifles are by far the most popular firearms purchased and owned in America today. The Post editorial board, like many who have a visceral dislike of firearms and little or no practical experience with them, either confuses semi-automatic weapons with machine guns (fully automatic weapons), or seeks to confuse and alarm the uninformed reader.

As for the comment on age restrictions, that is a purposeful deception verging on outright fabrication by the Post, and demands a correction. By Federal law, citizens must be 18 to possess handguns or handgun-only ammunition, and 21 to purchase handguns in the United States. It is true person of any age may possess a long gun (shotgun or rifle), but must be 18 by federal law to purchase one. The applicable law was designed so that minors can possess (hold, use) a firearm to participate in shooting sports. Clearly, the Post is engaging in fear-mongering to scare their readership to adopt their fear-based point-of-view.

The bill is not only a slap in the face to home rule, it is an affront to common sense and safety. How are police supposed to trace guns used in crimes if they are unregistered?

This is a pair of non-sequiturs.

"Home rule" does not excuse governments on any level in the United States from violating the Constitution, and that includes the District of Columbia. Somehow, I rather doubt the Post would venture forth with the home rule argument if the subject in question was the restriction of their First Amendment freedoms to engage in deceptive editorializing.

The registration of a firearm is irrelevant in tracing a weapon actively being used in crime, and once such a gun is confiscation the serial number is used for an ATF trace, currently used in every state, including the vast majority of those without gun registration.

How are they to protect lawmakers, dignitaries, visitors, workers and residents when guns are treated like any other product to be bought and sold with no restrictions?

Again, the "no restrictions" claim is more than hyperbole, it is a purposeful, calculated lie, as the federal laws alluded to above make clear.

As for protecting Americans and visitors, we've been doing precisely that throughout the rest of the United States for several hundred years with most areas suffering a far lower gun-related felony crime rate than D.C., this is another misleading question based upon a false assertion.

While many gun rights advocates tout their bona fides as law-and-order types, they apparently have no trouble ignoring the testimony of scores of police chiefs and law enforcement officers across the country who believe that sensible regulation saves lives.

Of course many police chiefs view gun restrictions favorably. Their primary and most immediate concern is to keep their officers alive, and if forced to admit it, their secondary concern is to minimize legal risk to teh department. A disarmed citizenry poses a lower risk to the police both legally and practically, and minimizes the chances of police being successfully sued in court for wrongfully killing an armed citizen. As police know they cannot be sued for failing to prevent crimes, they would much rather have their officers encounter disarmed victims at a crime scene than show up to find an armed and agitated citizen standing over a dead rapist or armed robber.

It doesn't mean that their preferences are better for anyone than themselves.

And never mind that even Justice Antonin Scalia, among the most conservative jurists in the land, went out of his way in District of Columbia v. Heller to note that a constitutional right to keep and bear arms and reasonable government regulation -- including registration and a ban on assault weapons -- are not mutually exclusive propositions.

Another non-sequitur. Scalia's opinion as a SCOTUS justice is not designed to be a law unto itself. His job is to interpret laws and determine if they meet Constitutional standards. The author of this editorial can just as easily argue that Scalia's opinion in Heller would support H.R. 6842, the very law this editorial so obtusely and emotionally argues against.

The drafters and supporters of this bill have done what many thought was impossible: They've made Justice Scalia look like a liberal.

Again, hyperbole that does not advance their argument, but which perhaps further advances the argument that they are finding it difficult to base their opposition on anything other than gut-level fears.

The National Rifle Association championed the bill, and House Democratic leaders caved in to its demand that the bill be brought to a vote after the organization threatened to withhold endorsements of conservative Democrats in tight races this year. Conscientious senators of both parties must now stand up to these intimidation tactics and prevent a dangerously bad bill from becoming law.

Unlike the editors of the Post, who have decided that they will attempt to tell you how to think, I'll do what they will not.

Here is the full text of House Resolution 6842, otherwise know as the National Capital Security and Safety Act. Read it for yourself.

Note that the law merely extends Second Amendment rights commonly held in the rest of the 50 states to citizens of Washington, D.C, and abolishes a patently silly D.C. law that arbitrarily labeled nearly every magazine-fed firearm machine guns.

And once you've read the law, and noted how the Post has chosen to misrepresent it, wonder how you can ever trust them to objectively report or editorialize on any subject, ever again.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:53 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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It is now becoming abundantly clear that Barack Obama, in a meeting with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, tried to undermine his own country's negotiations with Iraq during his July visit to Baghdad. Even the Obama campaign can't deny it because there were multiple witnesses to the exchange.

So once again, conservatives begin raising the question: Why is the mainstream media ignoring this story? They're treating it like they treated the John Edwards affair story, which they ignored until they no longer could. But this is much more serious. The Democratic nominee for president of the United States attempted to scuttle a crucial status-of-forces agreement between the U.S. and the government of Iraq. He blatantly urged the Iraqis to stop negotiating with the Bush Administration and wait until the next president – presumably him, at least as far as he's concerned – takes office.

[snip]

Why is the mainstream media ignoring the story? Well, first and foremost, because they want Obama to win the election. But it goes deeper than that. They're ignoring the story because they don't see anything wrong with what Obama did.

I'd love to give you more but that would violate fair use guidelines, so go here to read the rest.

Barack Obama illegally interjected himself into U.S. foreign policy and blatantly attempted to undermine a sitting President, secure in the knowledge that the Justice Department will not charge him with a law that hasn't been enforced in over 200 years, and knowing that the media doesn't care.

Want media attention?

Have some half-wit bail bondsman, head-wound patient, or strung-out meth junkies thrown in jail for threatening to kill Obama, even though not a single one of them could be considered a serious threat.

You'll get coverage in every major national and international news outlet for days as they fall all over each other to report that these isolated incidents are an example of how average, inbred racist rubes (Americans) cannot stand the thought of a Halfrican-American President.

But when Obama meddles in affairs that touches the lives of 140,000 soldiers—white, black, brown, yellow, and red—in a combat zone, purely for his personal political advantage?

Dead silence.

Not. A. Word.

It's a matter of priorities, folks. They want to protect Barack Obama, no matter how many Americans he endangers.

But who is going to protect us from him?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:40 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Air America talk radio host Randi Rhodes, last seen here almost a year ago when she claimed she was assaulted, before it was exposed that the culprit who knocked out her teeth was her own liver acting in self defense, is back in the news again.

Rhodes asserted Sarah Palin was a potential child molester, and sadly, no, I'm not kidding.

Rhodes is the same Air America host that recently claimed John McCain was treated well by the North Vietnamese that tortured him, and he has a lengthy history of other embarrassing rants that make liberals look like mean-spirited, ignorant fools... kinda like Obama's latest ad against McCain over email.

I'm not surprised at all that Rhodes would chose to stay in the gutter as that is very much her shtick. But is she really the among the best liberal talk radio has to offer?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:20 PM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
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The willingness of the press to lie to undercut Sarah Palin is really getting obscene:

Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans."

The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself. But it is widely agreed that militants allied with al-Qaeda have taken root in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.

Anne E. Kornblut, just stop.

Unless Kornblut buried the lede, Palin said precisely nothing about Saddam Hussein or his government at all or any roll they may have had in 9/11. Kornblut simply made that up, because she wanted Palin to say that.

When Palin referenced "...the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans," is was an obvious reference to al Qaeda in Iraq, an offshoot of the parent al Qaeda organization that plotted and executed the 9/11 attacks, and while still funds and loosely controls the failing Iraqi branch.

And the parent organization is not happy with the branch office:

Al Qaeda's senior leadership has lost confidence in its commander in Iraq and views the situation in the country as dire, according to a series of letters intercepted by Multinational Forces Iraq earlier this year.

The letters, which have been sent exclusively to The Long War Journal by Multinational Forces Iraq, are a series of communications between Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda's second in command, Abu Ayyub al Masri, al Qaeda in Iraq's leader, and Abu Omar al Baghdadi, the leader of al Qaeda's Islamic State of Iraq. These letters were intercepted by Coalition forces in Baghdad on April 24, 2008. One of the letters written by Zawahiri is dated March 6, 2008.

[snip]

"The letters confirmed our assessment that Al Qaeda has suffered significant damage and serious reverses in Iraq, including widespread rejection of [al Qaeda in Iraq's] indiscriminate violence, extremist ideology, and oppressive practices," General David Petraeus, the Commander of Multinational Forces Iraq told The Long War Journal. "Even Zawahiri recognized that [al Qaeda in Iraq] has lost credibility in Iraq."

Sarah Palin was obviously addressing the living al Qaeda terrorists that soldiers would face in Iraq, no the ghosts of a regime long dead. How biased or simply dishonest does a reporter have to be to twist that?

Here's a novel concept: why don't reporters limit themselves to reporting facts.

Or is that simply too much to ask for a media more interested in selecting a President than electing one?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:15 AM | Comments (21) | Add Comment
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Sure, I can understand Fox News wanting to laugh at CNN for not being able to spot a Photoshopped picture of Sarah Palin's head on another woman's gun-toting, bikini clad body as a fake...

...but if they are going to mock the incompetence of other news organizations for not spotting a obvious fake, then should we let Fox off the hook for letting the description of the weapon she is holding as an "AK-47" stand, when it is decidedly not?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:53 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews have been relieved of their anchor duties at MSNBC:

MSNBC tried a bold experiment this year by putting two politically incendiary hosts, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, in the anchor chair to lead the cable news channel's coverage of the election.

That experiment appears to be over.

After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.

The change — which comes in the home stretch of the long election cycle — is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel's perceived shift to the political left.

Frankly, I haven't watched Matthews or Olbermann during their stints as anchors, so I can't pretend to tell you with any certainty why they were pulled, but based upon why I know of them prior to their anchor duties, I would not be surprised if their was a perception of open Obama partisanship in their coverage that damaged MSNBC's credibility as a news organization.

I can tell you that news of the end of their run is helping create something of a Rorschach test exposing the biases of the political blogosphere. Simply scan the responses to the news of their dismissal and you'll see what I mean.

Of particular interest — from my perspective, anyway — was how some of the most radical leftist sites seemed to take their removal as a personal affront.

MSNBC may have tilted left as a business decision, but I wonder how carefully they calculated the downside of courting a politically-motivated audience that takes policy and programming so personally. Such a relationship may be advantageous if the network and audience remain on the same page, but such devotion is fickle as well as intense, and it appears that if a network deviates from the exact kind of coverage the audience prefers, then the backlash will be both intense and immediate.

By responding to the replacement of Matthews and Olbermann with such ferocity and anger towards MSNBC, the liberal audience may very well have dissuaded future forays into more liberal programming by MSNBC or other broadcasters.

Why should broadcasters take a programming risk, if the upside is minimal, and the downside can be so adverse?

By responding with such venom, the far left netroots have let their anger get the better of them once again.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:58 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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The LA Progressive post attacking Sarah Palin as a racist and a sexist that has been swallowed unquestioningly by the dimmer lights of the progressive blogosphere is the work of one Charley James.

Who is Charley James?

James is a far left-wing blogger that views radical activist web site Democracy Now! as "one of the few news and public affairs programs delivering real news"... perhaps not that surprising for the kind of person shocked that some damnable Americans in progressive Canada didn't appreciate his "Bush Lied/They Died" tee shirt.

James, who has been blogging at The Political Curmudgeon since June of this year, claims to be an independent investigative journalist, and I have no doubt that he is.

Why, just check out his unimpeachable fact-checking methodology:

To verify what friends were writing, I called the St. Paul MayorÂ’s Office (615.266.8510) where I was directed to the police (651.291.1111). A PR woman for the cops said I had to talk to the Secret Service (612.348.1800), which refused to answer any questions but asked for the spelling of my name before telling me to call Homeland Security (202.282.8000) where repeated calls were not returned. I tracked down the cell phone number of the St. Paul convention office of the Republican National Committee where the man who answered claimed to have no idea what I was talking about, helpfully suggesting I call the police before suddenly asking how I got the number. Ring around the rosy.

It was like trying to get an answer from Dick CheneyÂ’s office. Translation: The e-mails were accurate.

This stellar journalist uses the long-validated "Olbermann method" of confirmation, where the inability to collect evidence to the contrary proves the worse rumors about your enemies are true.

So by all means, when Charley James writes that Sarah Palin is a racist that hates Eskimos, don't let the fact that she's been married to one for the past 20 years get in the way.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:35 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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A hot microphone, a revelation of dishonesty, and the violation of a long-held gentleman's agreement destroyed the credibility of the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan today, and may have changed the complexion of the American news media forever.

Noonan published an article just this morning labeling Sarah Palin as "a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy."

This same afternoon on MSNBC after a segment with NBC's Chuck Todd, Republican consultant Mike Murphy and Noonan were captured on still-live microphones ridiculing McCain's running mate.

Every indication is that the raw video was leaked directly from an increasingly partisan MSNBC to liberal blog Talking Points Memo.

With that leak, Noonan's credibility as a columnist was severely damaged if not destroyed, a fact she seems to realize even as she becomes the first casualty as a long held gentleman's agreement among journalists to overlook each others biases, faults, mistakes and lies has been ripped apart. The media now no longer looks after their own, and naked partisanship is now the order of the day.

After being exposed, Noonan wrote that she was "mugged by the nature of modern media," which is both absolutely true and utterly irrelevant.

Noonan revealed herself a hypocrite, and MSNBC, a network that has abandoned all illusions of objective journalism in favor of naked advocacy for Barack Obama and an exclusive allegiance to partisan politics of the far left wing of the Democratic Party, shattered a common courtesy between journalists, in order to tear another journalist down for a minor temporary gain.

All bets are off now, all gentleman's agreements dead.

Welcome to the real world, kids.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:32 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Brian Ross of ABC News is letting his political biases show in a most unseemly way.

Ross' article, Another Controversy for Sarah Palin, attempts to undermine the Republican Vice Presidential candidate by insinuating there is still some some controversy surrounding Palin's firing of the Wasilla Police Chief more than a decade ago.

Says Ross in his lede:

Gov. Sarah Palin is already facing ethical questions over her firing of the Alaska public safety commissioner, and now she faces questions over the firing of a longtime local police chief.

Now faces?

The lawsuit filed in 1997 by the police chief, Irl Stambaugh, was dismissed by the judge, as Palin had every right to replace him and other town officials. As a matter of public record, other officials were also pushed out of office on Palin's reform pledge, but Ross inexplicably refuses to mention their firings. Ross seeks to frame resolved history as a current scandal, and then tie it the dismissal of public safety commissioner, Walter Monegan, roughly a decade later.

This is dishonest advocacy journalism at it's most naked, and ABC News owes Sarah Palin a retraction and an apology.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:20 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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