Posts Tagged ‘MainStream media’

President Obama when signing the freedom of the press act had an interesting omission, and I don’t mean the lack of questions being allowed. I’m talking about what Jennifer Rubin noted:

Has Obama done anything about the suppression of media critics in Egypt (other than prepare a lucrative financial package for the Egyptian government)? Has Obama made this a priority with any thugocracy? No. And when signing a bill in the name of someone who elevated and personified the freedom of expression, Obama at least could have departed from his campaign to delete the name of our enemies from the public lexicon.

It’s not that odd a lot of information get suppressed in the war on terror and the worldwide war against Jews. A few examples:

Item: The “right of return

Yet still the Palestinians fled their homes, and at an ever growing pace. By early April some 100,000 had gone, though the Jews were still on the defensive and in no position to evict them. (On March 23, fully four months after the outbreak of hostilities, ALA commander-in-chief Safwat noted with some astonishment that the Jews “have so far not attacked a single Arab village unless provoked by it.”) By the time of Israel’s declaration of independence on May 14, the numbers of Arab refugees had more than trebled. Even then, none of the 170,000-180,000 Arabs fleeing urban centers, and only a handful of the 130,000-160,000 villagers who left their homes, had been forced out by the Jews.

Well it’s not like Arabs were mistreating their own at this time, oh wait:

No wonder, then, that so few among the Palestinian refugees themselves blamed their collapse and dispersal on the Jews. During a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June 1949, Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East office in Cairo and no friend to Israel or the Jews, was surprised to discover that while the refugees

express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. “We know who our enemies are,” they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes. . . . I even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a welcome to the Israelis if they were to come in and take the district over.

Sixty years after their dispersion, the refugees of 1948 and their descendants remain in the squalid camps where they have been kept by their fellow Arabs for decades, nourished on hate and false hope. Meanwhile, their erstwhile leaders have squandered successive opportunities for statehood.

You don’t see much of this talked about in history but it was years ago. Hey it’s not like Arabs are still driving “Palestinians” out of their homes; oh wait:

Hamas police wielding clubs beat and pushed residents out of dozens of homes in the southern Gaza town of Rafah on Sunday before knocking the buildings down with bulldozers, residents said.

Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers said the homes were built illegally on government land. Newly homeless residents were furious over Palestinians on bulldozers razing Palestinian homes.

For years, Palestinians have criticized Israel for destroying houses, mostly because they were built without permits issued by the military. Now, Rafah residents complained, their own government, run by the Islamic militant Hamas that seized power in Gaza in July 2007, has done the same.

Funny how this doesn’t rate a big story in the papers. And that doesn’t even count the young Arab American who given the chance to denounce the idea of genocide of Jews in Israel declared herself “for it
Well even that isn’t the same as violence threatened in America; oh wait again:

With Draw Muhammad Day drawing closer, death threats have been leveled (warning, exceedingly bad language through link) against Dan McLeod, creator of the Facebook group that urges people to draw a picture of Islam’s prophet. The threats are made in one of the group’s discussion pages with the label “F*** that Person who Celebrate this Day” (edited for language and removed all-caps).

I’ve already declared that I will not be drawing Muhammad. I will not be buffaloed into doing what I wouldn’t normally do one way or the other. I will be doing my own protests in my own style on that day.

But I will publicly declare as a believing Roman Catholic that Muhammad is a false prophet and that Muslims are are wrong in declaring Christ a prophet he is the son of God and no amount of beheading or outrage will change that fact. The difference between us I am secure enough in my beliefs to make my points in argument and let God sort out who is right and wrong on this issue in the end. Our Islamic friends are so insecure in their beliefs that they hide their uncertainly behind the sword or their silence in the face of the sword. If their argument had weight then they wouldn’t be afraid of Christian Churches in their midst, they wouldn’t have a bounty on the head of a priest that they can’t out argue and they wouldn’t be burning the houses of cartoonists.

That is all.

…it’s a sign of weakness in a swing district. In this he is reporting and repeating DCCC spin:

Public Policy Polling, a North Carolina firm, released a survey Monday showing Republican candidate Tim Burns leading Democratic candidate Mark Critz by only one point, 48 to 47. I noticed some conservative blogs reporting that Burns had “moved into the lead,” but that result actually represented a six-point bump for Critz and only a four-point bump for Burns since the last poll.

Somehow the Susquehanna poll showing Critz with a 6 point lead last week doesn’t fit into the template here.

The plan seems to be that if Critz wins it becomes a bellwether of how the republicans can’t win the races this year. The hotly contested senate race of national importance is apparently no excuse.

This is called laying the groundwork. And Todd & the Post are not the only players:

They blame the establishment, the insiders, the Beltway types, the incumbents—the people who are in charge. They tend on the whole to direct their ire at Democrats, because right now Democrats tend to be in positions of power. But for the most part their dissatisfaction is not ideological. They want someone who can make things better. And someone different is a start.

No matter what happens in tomorrow’s primaries—no matter who wins or who loses—this will be the message that voters are sending. Seriously. It won’t be about the Tea Party, or a progressive resurgence, or some new level of partisan polarization. It’ll be about plain old change.

although he underplays the ire at Democrats Newsweek’s Romano makes a point, if anyone read Newsweek they might even agree.

And it isn’t just today it has been throughout the cycle:

By preferring someone else to him, Pennsylvania Republicans had “forced out” Sen. Specter, Mr. Milbank said. If he loses to Mr. Sestak on Tuesday, will Mr. Milbank say Mr. Specter was “forced out” by Pennsylvania Democrats?

Will Ms. Vieira wonder out loud if a Specter defeat indicates the Democratic party “doesn’t have room for moderate voices?”

Will Mr. Matthews declare that Mr. Specter was the victim of a “Stalinesque purge?”

Meanwhile Brinkley sees the Dems playing the expectations game and talks about some strong reinforcements:

Lee is a “Gold Star Mother” whose son, a Navy SEAL, was killed in a 2006 firefight in Iraq. She praised Burns as “a candidate who understands and will uphold the Constitution and who recognizes the sacrifices our troops make.”

In the battle for Pennsylvania’s 12th District, Lee is one member of a veritable of army of volunteers fighting to elect a Republican to the seat held for more than three decades by the late Democrat John Murtha. For weeks, volunteers have stuffed envelopes, manned phone banks and walked precincts, and today they’ll make the final push to get their voters to the polls in a special election that many observers are calling a crucial test of whether the GOP can win back the House of Representatives in November.

I’ve met Debbie Lee twice, she is a powerful advocate. The question is will she be enough?

not only because of GOP star of the year Scott Brown’s appearance on his behalf but because of a of a new twist.

Pittsburgh TV station WPGH has suspended the latest ad for Democrat Mark Critz for making false claims. The ad by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee falsely claimed that Republican Tim Burns supports a 23 percent national sales tax and wants to ship jobs overseas.

Dave Weigel notes that Democrats stand behind the claim and the ad remains up in other markets:

…they stand by the arguments in their ad, which are based on Burns’s support of the Fair Tax and his signing of Americans for Tax Reform’s taxpayer protection pledge. Democrats tell me the ad will remain on the air on other TV stations in Pittsburgh and Johnstown, which serve Pennsylvania’s 12th District

they are blaming this on the station’s conservative ownership. I wonder if they will claim factcheck.org is another bunch of biased conservatives too?

But this ad is quite misleading because it fails to mention that the FairTax proposal would also repeal the federal income tax entirely and do away with the Internal Revenue Service. It would also eliminate gift, estate, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare and self-employment taxes. But anyone viewing the DCCC’s ad could easily conclude that Burns favored slapping a 23 percent sales tax on top of all existing taxes, which is not true.

Usually it would be an issue if factcheck disputed the ad but as Robert Stacy points out:

Well, of course, the Democrats aren’t backing down. They’ve got the MSM to cover their asses and pretend that the Fair Tax represents a “national sales tax” over and above current federal taxes. Of course, they don’t want to deal with the facts.

What is even more interesting and something I’ve touched on before is how a race that didn’t get much national attention when the newest polls showed Burns up by as much as 6 points last month in a heavily democratic district has suddenly become a “must win” for Republicans in a district they haven’t won in 38 years UPDATE: The previous sentence originally said 70+ years, that was misleading, the current 12th district is made up of two additional districts that haven’t elected a republican in 70+ years. In the 12th district that last republican to win was John Saylor in 1972, that’s my bad. when the latest poll give Critz an advantage As Sean Trende points out:

there are over sixty districts represented by Democrats with better Republican performances than PA-12. The Republicans’ path to 218 seats doesn’t necessarily run through this district – in fact, I don’t think their path to a 1994-esque 230 seats necessarily runs through this district.

This is basically extending the Morning Joe spin of yesterday to pretend if the democrats win that the tide of opinion has turned. We all know what the real question is: Can Burns manage to pull it off even without the presence of a Sicilian with a fedora?

One of the things that tends to drive me nuts about the left is how they tend to cry tolerance but have an issue showing any. A great example comes up in the story about the fall of MSNBC.

MSNBC is the network of progressives and for progressives. Yet, there is nothing progressive about the network’s employees being terrified to speak up for fear of losing their jobs. Progressives also like to think of themselves as the people who ‘have a heart.’ Thus, there is nothing progressive about making fun of a difficult and terrible experience of youth acknowledged by one who has suffered from the event, even if she happens to be the wife of a former president you don’t like. It’s mean – and it contributes absolutely nothing to the political dialogue.

One of the reasons why the Scott Brown election seemed such a relief was the almost unspoken rule in Massachusetts that seemed to exist where people who where people of a conservative bent felt pressured to keep their mouths shut in the face of other opinions for fear of being called racist, sexist, bigoted. On our jobs, at public events, etc to be conservatives publicly was to be looked down on, a second class citizen, a “redneck” or at the very least very impolite.

Some of us were too outgoing to keep quiet, some didn’t give a damn (fluffy Hussein and all that) but most people are polite and just want to live their lives without trouble.

The Scott Brown election and the dynamics in Washington changed things now not only are conservatives not cowed but they have found that their voice resonates nationwide.

Until this media wide problem is corrected they will not only be distrusted but deserved to be distrusted.