Thursday evening’s episode of the Glenn Beck Program will likely go down in the history books as one of the very few (if not only) recorded instances of another human being exposing President Obama’s myriad personal and professional inconsistencies in such a detailed and profound way. In fact, viewers might even consider burning themselves a DVD copy to serve as a record of what historians will one day prove.
On Friday, The Blaze will provide more details on the president’s past deeds and associations, along with an additional clip from Beck‘s Thursday’s broadcast. Until then, ask yourself the following question: Do you know anybody like Obama?
Busy day today, but I wanted to share the latest Firewall with you. In it, Bill looks at the silliness regarding Romney “dog on the car roof” story and “Obama ate a dog,” and explains why it matters. First, because it illustrates in bright, neon colors yet another example of mainstream media hypocrisy: the New York Times disapprovingly mentions the Romney story 56 times, but dismisses Obama’s self-confessed chow-down on a Chow as a distraction. Typical.
But his larger point is the more important one: Obama eating dog meat, in addition to all the other elements of his early life, shows how he just isn’t one of us. Not in the silly sense of being a “sekrit Mooslim” or the equally nonsensical birther fantasies, but that the sum total of his life experience leaves him unable to understand or empathize with his “fellow” Americans. While Bill focuses on Obama’s early life, I’d toss in his collegiate years and his life in Chicago within the echo chamber of Socialist community organizing and leftist academia. Bill Clinton feeling our pain, he isn’t.
Occupy Wall Street plans to come back with a bang in less than ten days when it unleashes its May Day General Strike that could blockade the bridges and tunnels necessary for New York City to function.
“On May 1, 2012, autonomous direct action groups within Occupy Wall Street, as a part of the global mobilizations for general strike and economic non-compliance, will block one or more Manhattan-bound bridges or tunnels to protest the shameful opulence of the 1%.”
In addition to the planned transit blockade, Occupy is rallying factions across the country in solidarity with general strikes around the world: “For the first time, workers, students, immigrants, and the unemployed from over 115 U.S. cities will stand together for economic justice.”
The global breadth of the protests comes alongside recent Occupy efforts to tie itself to a long history of protest and social upheaval, including the NYC Fiscal Crisis of 1975:
“Last fall, when Occupy Wall Street blocked the Brooklyn Bridge for several hours, we were acting within a long line of protest in New York City that stretches back to the so-called Fiscal Crisis of 1975, which much like now, was a bank led assault against working people. In the summer of 1975, striking hospital employees, including doctors and nurses, blocked the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge was even blocked by thousands of laid-off police, the very people who act as the guard dogs of the 1%.”
Occupy-affiliated websites have also begun to highlight the history and significance of New York’s Union Square, which is currently the makeshift daily headquarters of the movement after they were evicted from their Zuccotti Park encampment.
The storied Marxist-activist past of Union Square is unknown to most New Yorkers (and the rest of America) but shows that the Occupiers have added a knowledge of history to their organizational tactics and digital media savvy. According to OccupyWallSt.org, Union Square,
“started being used for political rallies soon after notable Labor Day marches in the 1860s (the traditional spring festival of May Day became International Worker’s Day to many after the 1886 Haymarket incident in Chicago), but … it is really only in the beginning of the 20th Century when the use for political demonstrations really began.” Specifically, the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) starts to have a lot of events.”
It also appears that the Occupiers may use a dual-pronged approach on May Day, as some major labor unions have applied for and received a legal protest permit to walk from Union Square to Battery Park at the bottom of Manhattan.
But that legal protest activity by no means precludes the possibility of disruptive illegal protest– even so-called “Black bloc” tactics— from defining the May Day General strike. The Occupiers themselves point out that:
“both the Brooklyn Bridge and the Holland Tunnel were shut down during protests of the shooting death of Sean Bell. But this May 1, we will create the biggest shut down the city of New York has ever seen.”
Where is this all going? What purpose does the general strike serve in the broader context of the Occupy movement?
When David Brock applied for tax-exempt status for Media Matters for America, he told the IRS exactly who his group would be fighting against: businesses, wealthy Americans and conservative Christians.
“Media Matters for America (MMA) believes that news reporting and analysis by the American media, with its eye on profit margin and preservation of the status quo, has become biased,” read the group’s application, obtained by The Daily Caller, “It is common for news and commentary by the press to present viewpoints that tend to overly promote corporate interests, the rights of the wealthy, and a conservative, Christian-influenced ideology.”
Treasury Department documents — 88 pages that The Daily Caller obtained through a public records request to the IRS — reveal for the first time how the organization described its mission while applying for coveted 501(c)(3) non-profit status.
Media Matters has made no secret of its adherence to progressive principles, but flagging Christianity as having undue influence in media is the latest revelation about the group’s treatment of religion. (RELATED: Complete coverage of Media Matters for America)
The Democratic-aligned ARCA Foundation specifically supplied Media Matters with a $50,000 grant in 2006 “to support a Religious Broadcasting Project to expand the monitoring and fact checking of religious broadcasts,” TheDC reported in February.
Another search revealed a large number of articles critical of perceived “Islamophobia.”
The American media are dominated by conservatism and should be called out for that bias, Media Matters claimed in its tax-exempt application.
“The domination of media’s coverage of news by a single ideology betrays the public trust and weakens our democracy,” the group wrote. “MMA has been established to identify occurrences of excessive bias in the American media, educate the public as to their existence, and work with members of the media to reduce them in order to ensure that the public receives news coverage and information that is not only accurate but free from domination by a particular world view.”
Media Matters relied on a survey it commissioned in 2004 to back its claims of conservative media bias. “[D]espite longstanding conservative complaints of liberal media bias,” read an inaugural press release supplied to the IRS, “a plurality of the American electorate today believe that conservatives have more power and influence in the media today than do liberals.”
Conversely, a 2011 Gallup survey showed 60 percent of Americans saw bias in the media, with 47 percent of respondents saying the media are “too liberal.” Only 13 percent said the media are “too conservative.”
Those data have seen little change since Media Matters’ arrival in 2004, when 48 percent of those polled perceived liberal bias while just 15 percent perceived conservative bias.
Media Matters was eventually granted its tax-exempt status and classified as an educational charity.
Six juveniles — the youngest 11, and the oldest 17 — nearly boxed in Dallas Watts, a 78-year-old man from East Toledo.
Mr. Watts was on his way home from the nearby Gas Express Mart at Starr Avenue and White Street about 4:45 p.m. Saturday when the boys approached him.
One pointed at Mr. Watts and said, “take him down,” the victim recounted in an interview Monday.
Mr. Watts, carrying home two small bags of pork rinds to dole out as treats to his three dachshunds, looked at the youth and said, “Why you picking on me?” Mr. Watts recalled. “Remember Trayvon. Why you picking on me?”
The boy, again, allegedly told his friends to “take him down.”
Toledo police charged two children — the 11-year-old and a 17-year-old — with robbery, Sgt. Roy Kennedy said.
The boys on Monday were ordered held in detention at the Lucas County Juvenile Justice Center, prosecutor Lori Olender said.
At one point, the victim recalled being lifted from the ground so one of the boys could “drop-kick” him in the chest.
One boy, he said, put his foot on the back of the victim’s neck, with another shouting, “Kill him.”
While Mr. Watts was down the boys kicked him, over and over, shouting, “[Get] that white [man]. This is for Trayvon. . . Trayvon lives, white [man]. Kill that white [man],” according to a police report.
“The only reason I mentioned Trayvon, that was my defense,” Mr. Watts said. “Don’t pick on me. I am not your enemy.”
So to anyone yet left in America that expects the lame stream media to present just the facts, you have been in a coma over the past 100 years. The so-called journalists have given up their role of the check and balance to the government, instead they kneel down and lick the boots of their masters, the obamas, the democrat party, the leftists, the communists, the NWO…
The leftists, unions, communists and marxists have been at this since Woodrow Wilson and FDR, see below:
TWO GEORGE SOROS EVENTS AIM TO REMAKE THE FINANCIAL ORDER AND THE MEDIA — SO WHERE’S THE REPORTING?
FILE: Billionaire financier George Soros speaks at a Reuters Newsmaker event in New York on Sept. 15, 2010.
Apparently, megalomaniacs need schedulers.
Just ask George Soros. The left-wing billionaire is helping fund two major conferences that start on the same day, in two different locations just a three hours apart by car. Two liberal events packed into one long weekend. God created the world in six days. Apparently, Soros, who sees himself as “some kind of god,”needs just a long weekend to start remaking today’s world in his image.
The emphasis of both conferences is a familiar one to American voters – change. Soros wants to begin changing the global economy in one event. In the other, his flunkies want to “Change the world. Change the media.”
Now that is change you can believe in. Sadly, those who actually report the news must believe in it because they sure as heck aren’t reporting on Soros or either event. And that’s even though staffers or even executives from Reuters, the Financial Times, NPR, PBS, The Washington Post and other major media outlets are speaking at one event or the other.
The first gathering in Bretton Woods, N.H., is an economic conference Soros once described as “a grand bargain that rearranges the entire financial order.” In October 2009, Soros committed $50 million to the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). A week later, the glib lefty investor wrote a column calling for a new Bretton Woods event, to recreate the one that helped design the post-WWII economy. Only he wants this one to knock America down a peg or three.
Now, it’s been a little over a year later and the group he funded is making King George’s wish come true – bringing together a whole slew of important people to discuss how to change the global economy. In Soros speak, that means “establish new international rules” and “reform the currency system.”
The announced speakers include a lot of prominent lefties, globalists and economists on the board of the organization he has throwing the event – more than two-thirds of the overall total have ties to Soros. To underscore their connection to history, INET is hosting the conference at the Mount Washington Resort, the very same hotel that held the first gathering.
INET Executive Robert Johnson defended his event in a March 31 interview with Lou Dobbs. Johnson, a former managing director at Soros Fund Management, who is on the Board of Directors for the Soros-funded Economic Policy Institute, avoided saying “Soros” despite Dobbs mentioning Johnson’s boss several times. In his last response, he tried to rationalize the Soros connection, by saying “I have a group of funders including George Soros.” With $50 million, Soros alone makes a pretty big group. Of course, Soros will also be speaking in Bretton Woods about “The Emerging Economic and Political Order.”
Just down the road in Boston, a Soros-funded media conference is trying to manipulate that emerging order as well. Close to 350 left-wingers from a variety of organizations are gathering there for the National Conference for Media Reform.
That “change the world” conference includes two commissioners from the FCC, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Bernie Sanders, four Democratic representatives, the head of Columbia University, and assorted left-wing journalist types, from Salon’s Glenn Greenwald to disgraced former MSNBC host David Shuster, who now works for a Soros-funded investigative operation.
The rest of the list reads like a “Who’s Who” of left-wing organizations and talking heads, including the president of PBS, a senior vice president with American Public Media, an Al Jazeera English executive, the president of the Newspaper Guild – CWA and Washington Post columnist Rob Pegoraro. Many others have Soros connections, such as: Common Cause, which has been going after conservative Supreme Court justices who have some connection to the Koch brothers. Common Cause seems immune to similar investigations of their own gravy train.
Columbia Journalism Review’s Dean Starkman. He is chief of the review’s “The Audit” section and a 2006 Katrina Media Fellow with the Open Society Institute, the primary Soros charitable foundation.
Free Press, which is holding the conference. Free Press has received more than $1 million from Soros since 2003 and has 18 presenters pushing for things like “strong public media” or an extremely expensive national broadband plan they quaintly describe as “universal access to communications.”
Think Progress’s Koch-hating Lee Fang. Think Progress is a project of Democrat John Podesta’s Center for American Progress, which was founded with Soros money. Fang is on the panel for: “Real Issues vs. Astroturf: Confronting the Koch Brothers,” and makes the laughable claim “this is not about liberals versus conservatives” when the entire goal of the left is to shut down the Kochs to defund the right.
Everywhere you they go in Boston, they’ll be making more left turns than NASCAR. It’s an event filled with lefties dissatisfied that the news media aren’t even more liberal, and their goal will be to make that happen. Whether it’s “Beyond Pronouns: Creating Real Stories About Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming People” or pushing for illegal immigrant rights, the conference is a predictable liberal take on pretty much everything.
But the over-arching theme is getting government to fix the media. Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, whose school also includes the well-known and partly Soros-funded Columbia School of Journalism, is one of several speakers advocating for increased government funding for media. He called for federal funding of the media in a 2010 Wall Street Journal piece with the terrifying headline: “Journalism Needs Government Help.” Bollinger pushed for the creation of a public media that combines NPR, PBS and Voice of America. He also wants to “end to the regulation of ‘indecent’ language and images in broadcast programming” and return to the Fairness Doctrine.
Two other speakers, Free Press founder Robert McChesney and co-author John Nichols, have been pushing for $35 billion a year to fund media. Though their solution has gone from $20 billion a year for three years to $35 billion indefinitely, they are consistent in wanting U.S. media to be more like it is in Europe and oppose the “fantasy of a free-market solution.”
That’s not surprising. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who is speaking at both conferences, is wildly critical of people who support free markets, or what he calls “free market fundamentalists.” Free markets are directly in opposition with the Soros-funded group think that sees Big Government as merely a starting point for Ever Bigger Government.
This weekend, we get two visions of taxpayer-funded solution, only most in the news media are too short-sighted to see them.
Dan Gainor is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture. He writes frequently for Fox News Opinion. He can also be contacted on FaceBook and Twitter as dangainor.
(Orlando Sentinel) — A tip to Crimeline has led to the arrests of two men in a brutal beating that occurred a week ago in the Midway community east of Sanford.
Julius Ricardo Bender, 18, and Yahaziel Isaac Israel, 19, face charges of attempted first-degree murder, burglary with assault or battery and armed burglary.
The victim, a 50-year-old Winter Springs man whose name has not been released, is on life-support at Orlando Regional Medical Center.
Deputies were called to the area of Lincoln Street and Beardall Avenue about 6:30 p.m. March 26 to investigate a report of a man being beaten, Seminole County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Heather Smith said.
They found the victim in the woods on the north side of Lincoln Street.
According to arrest affidavits:
A witness told deputies he heard someone screaming for help and saw two men pull the victim from his vehicle. He said he watched as one man held the victim and the other beat him in the head with a hammer.
After they dragged the victim into the woods, the men drove away in his sport utility vehicle, which was later found abandoned about a half-mile away on Garbo Jack Lane.
During the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Barack Obama won the votes of African-Americans and affluent whites by a landslide. Hillary Clinton, however, had the edge working class whites and Hispanic voters early on. Clinton stayed alive on Super Tuesday by winning the Hispanic vote by 2-1, giving her victories in California, New York, and New Jersey. Obama’s campaign scored a major victory when New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson endorsed him in late March.
The New York Times reported, “As the nation’s only Hispanic governor, Mr. Richardson could become a champion for Mr. Obama among Hispanic voters, who have been an important voting bloc for Mrs. Clinton in the primaries thus far.”
Bill Richardson and Barack Obama
Richardson was born William Blaine Richardson III. He attended prep school at Middlesex, known for educating the WASP elite in New England. His paternal grandfather was a WASP, and his paternal grandmother is Mexican. His maternal grandfather is from Northern Spain, and his maternal grandmother is Mexican. If anyone is a “white Hispanic,” it is William Blaine Richardson III.
While occasional media profiles of Richardson mention his background, he is always described as Hispanic or Latino. They never question whether he is really Hispanic or explain how “complicated” classifying Latinos is, much less describe him as a “white Hispanic.”
Geroge Zimmerman
It is worth contrasting the media’s treatment of Richardson’s ethnicity with their treatment Trayvon Martin shooter George Zimmerman, whose father is white and mother is Peruvian.
The media almost initially called Zimmerman white, and it fit into their narrative of white racism holding down Hispanics. However, after Zimmerman’s father sent a letter to the Orlando Sentinel (and major conservative news sites like Breitbart.com and Drudge Report linked to the letter), they stopped referring to Zimmerman as white. The New York Times and Reuters began referring to him as a “white Hispanic.” Virtually the rest of the media followed suit. If you put “white Hispanic” and “Zimmerman” into a Google News search, over 1,200 stories pop up. If you put in “white Hispanic” excluding the word “Zimmerman,” there are about 50 stories, but a closer look shows that every single one of them is indirectly referring to Zimmerman, or else the two words are next to each other as a coincidence (e.g., “Asian, white, Hispanic, or African American.”)
The New York Times used the phrase “white Hispanic” only five times before Zimmerman, and never to describe someone who is half-Hispanic and half-white. The Times‘ standards editor Phil Corbett defends their use of the term by noting, “There are no absolute, clear-cut rules on this. People often treat white, black and Hispanic as three parallel categories, but it’s not always that simple.”
This is true. Hispanic is a linguistic category, to describe people who come from Spanish-speaking countries. However, groups like The National Council of La Raza (the Race) have turned it into a ethno-racial group, while lobbying Hispanics to receive racial preferences in education, hiring, and government contracts. In practical terms, this usually means someone who is of mixed Spanish and Southern Amerindian descent. George Zimmerman certainly looks like that. As Ann Coulter blithely put it, “[n]ot being a race-obsessed liberal, I don’t particularly care, but it’s indisputable that Zimmerman is brown. I saw his face carved on the side of a Mayan temple in the Yucatan.”
Corbett acknowledged that the Times rarely uses the term “white Hispanic,” but the people at the Times say this is because “[o]ur guidelines say we mention race or ethnicity if and only if it’s pertinent to the story. Given that this is being investigated as a possible civil-rights case and has stirred protests in part because of concerns about racial elements, it seems clear that race and ethnicity are pertinent.” This may justify mentioning Zimmerman’s race, but it does not explain why they decided to use “white Hispanic.”
In an attempt to try to downplay the fact that he is Hispanic, or even a “white Hispanic,” many media outlets are reporting stories on how “complicated” Zimmerman’s ethnicity is. The Associated Press ran a story, “Florida shooter’s race a complicated matter.” The reporter interviews an old neighbor of the Zimmermans who said she did not remember “seeing the family carrying out any traditional Peruvian cultural activities.” Do you imagine William Blaine Richardson III engaging in many Mexican cultural activities while boarding at Middlesex?
The Washington Post reported in an article entitled “In Trayvon Martin shooting, background of George Zimmerman can confound” that “[l]ooking at Zimmerman’s photograph made Darren Soto, a Florida state legislator, think he might be Latino. But he just as easily might have been Italian or French, he thought.”
If I saw William Blaine Richardson III with no other data, I would never have guessed he is Hispanic. The same can be said of Obama advisor and former La Raza VP Cecelia Munoz, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Charlie Gonzales, and plenty of other Hispanic leaders whom I never hear referred to as “white Hispanics.”
Personally, I don’t care about whether not George Zimmerman is white or Hispanic. However, so long as the New YorkTimes and other media outlets run puff pieces about Hispanic honor students and sob stories about white racism against Hispanics, then they should not turn Hispanics who they believe are racistcriminals into whites.
Who is responsible for the current economic malaise? If you ask Bill Whittle, it’s Obama’s pals like David Axelrod, Harry Reid and Tim Geithner, some of the many Merchants of Despair. These merchants are costing taxpayers trillions and creating deep national divides based on class and race. Will the despair continue for another four years? Find out.
In Tom Wolfe’s bestselling novel“Bonfire of the Vanities,” a liberal New York prosecutor who yearned for a “Great White Defendant” got his wish when a wealthy stockbroker named Sherman McCoy ran over a black teenager in a case of questionable self-defense. The prosecutor, left-wing racial activists and a sensationalist media fed off each other, leading to a state of pure hysteria where the facts were all swept aside.
Wolfe wrote “Bonfire” in the wake of the Tawana Brawley and Bernie Goetz affairs, and it seemed prescient during the hysterics brought against Dominique Strauss-Kahn and three members of Duke’s lacrosse team. While the prosecutors in the Zimmerman case are — if anything — under-zealous, the media and left-wing racial activists are setting up George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer who killed a black teenager named Trayvon Martin, as a “Great White Defendant.”
To briefly recap the case: In February, Zimmerman encountered Martin walking through Zimmerman’s Sanford, Florida neighborhood. Zimmerman believed (rightly or wrongly) that Martin appeared suspicious and called the police. He followed Martin and a dispute arose that culminated in Zimmerman shooting an unarmed Martin. A witness told the police that Zimmerman was on the ground and screaming for help when he shot the teenager. When the police found Zimmerman, he had a broken nose and wounds on the back of his head.
Because it’s unclear exactly what occurred in the skirmish, the Sanford Police did not immediately press charges against Zimmerman, though they did not fully exonerate him either. State prosecutors will convene a grand jury investigation to determine whether to charge Zimmerman on April 10.
Ever eager to exploit tragedies, Al Sharpton, the NAACP and the usual grievance-mongers have descended on Florida. Louis Farrakhan has tweeted “No Justice, No Peace” and demanded “retaliation,” one way or the other. The New Black Panther Party has issued a bounty on Zimmerman’s head, and Spike Lee has tweeted Zimmerman’s home address.
MSNBC’s Karen Finney went further, accusing Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum of “reinforce[ing] and validat[ing] old stereotypes that associate the poor and welfare as criminal behavior with African Americans and people of color. … In the case of Trayvon, those festering stereotypes had lethal consequences.”
Then, in order to rally his base, President Obama decided to inject himself into the controversy by calling for national “soul searching.”
There are over 14,000 murders in the United States every year. All of these deaths are tragic, so why is Martin’s death dominating the headlines and getting a comment from the president of the United States? Because liberals think Martin’s killing fits their narrative of a racist America. In their minds, a black teenager who was walking through a white neighborhood was racially profiled by a white vigilante who killed him, and the white criminal justice system is too racist to be concerned.
In its initial reports, the Associated Press reported that a black teenager had been fatally shot by a “white neighborhood watch volunteer.” ABC news initially reported that Martin was shot “in the Retreat at Twin Lakes, which is a predominately white neighborhood.”
But George Zimmerman is no Sherman McCoy. For starters, he is not white. After being almost exclusively described as “white” in the media, his father wrote a letter to The Orlando Sentinel describing his son as a “Spanish speaking minority with many black family members and friends.”
Despite the fact that the community is gated, the Retreat at Twin Lakes is far from a bastion of white privilege. According to The Miami Herald, “Census figures report that the neighborhood is actually only 49% white, while it is 23% Hispanic, 20% African American and 5% Asian.” The Orlando real estate site Real Estate Wall lists the neighborhood’s housing prices as ranging from $70,000 to $120,000.
But these inconvenient facts haven’t stopped liberals and the media from continuing to push their narrative of racial strife. The other day, NBC Latino contributor Stephen A. Nuño argued that even when a Hispanic kills a black person, the problem is white racism. He said that Zimmerman’s ethnicity is “inconsequential to the problem we face,” which he described as “a country whose gears are oiled by white privilege.” Yet if whites are so privileged in this country, why do Zimmerman’s family members and lawyers go out of their way to insist he is not white?
Reuters, The New York Timesand hundreds of other news outlets now call Zimmerman a “white Hispanic,” a term that they have rarely, if ever, used before. The media would never refer to Barack Obama as a “white African American” or something along those lines. As Robert VerBruggen noted in National Review, “If a plain-vanilla white guy shot Zimmerman, he’d be considered just ‘Hispanic.’”
Call me old-fashioned, but I want a colorblind justice system. If the evidence does eventually show that Zimmerman was not justified in killing Martin, he should be punished to the full extent of the law, regardless of whether he is Hispanic or white. Unfortunately, if the media’s campaign of misinformation continues, it’s hard to see how the truth will ever come out.
Nov 29, 2011- 5:04 - Former Rep. Tom Tancredo on the importance of border security and how the candidates will approach the issue.
BASHIR: STOP GINGRICH’S FOOD STAMP RHETORIC BEFORE SOMEONE GETS KILLED
MSNBC host Martin Bashir rarely misses an opportunity to dramatize and string-together current Republican happenings with obscure incidents from the past. Example. On Friday Bashir made the arguably far-fetched comparison linking the murder of a black British teenager in 1993 to Newt Gingrich calling President Obama “the most effective food stamp president in American history.”
Former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo discusses the extent of the investigation into the Department of Justice.
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