Over the past week or so, I have seen numerous postings on Facebook and a number of stories on CNN about a North Carolina pastor who somehow seems to have forgotten about the biblical injunction to love your neighbor”:

I figured a way out, a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers, but I couldn’t get it past the Congress,” Pastor Charles L. Worley can be seen telling his Providence Road Baptist Church congregation in the video, which had more than 250,000 YouTube views by Tuesday.

“Build a great big, large fence – 50 or a 100 miles long – and put all the lesbians in there,” Worley went on to say in his May 13 sermon at his Maiden, North Carolina, church. “Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals, and have that fence electrified so they can’t get out. Feed them. And you know in a few years, they’ll die out. You know why? They can’t reproduce.”

Does this guy really believe that only homosexuals can produce homosexual children?  (That would be news to my heterosexual Mom and Dad.)  Even those trusting in the efficacy of “reparative therapy” don’t favor herding gay people into concentration camps.

As CNN and our Facebook friends focus on — and rightly condemn — Mr. Worley, I wonder where these folks were when other crackpots were preaching hate from their pulpits.

It is sick that members of Worley’s flock would stand by their pastor, preferring his word to the biblical command to love your neighbor.  His congregation though is only one of many.  But, he’s not the only pastor preaching hate.  It would be nice to see CNN expose those on the Christian left who seem incapable of accepting that some of their neighbors merit affection.

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Lori builds on my point:

The anti gay preacher is a loon and so is Wright. The media are all over this very inconsequential preacher (that conservatives sure think is flakey and hateful), but they were mum about Wright, who preached hating whites and hating America. It’s not just anti gay hate that needs to stop, it all needs to stop.

“CNN’s ratings problems just keep getting worse“:

The network had its lowest-rated month in over a decade in April. That prompted stern warnings from the top that CNN has to improve its numbers.

Yet Tuesday brought the dispiriting news that CNN had its lowest-rated week in primetime in a staggering 20 years last week. Just 395,000 people tuned in to watch Anderson Cooper and Piers Morgan. The total day numbers were not much better: CNN had its third-worst week since 1997.

About CNN & those shiny objects.

Given the small size of CNN’s primetime audience, I wondered last week whether we should fret too much about the “news” network’s bias.  Still, it does make good sport to take note of their bias.

Last night and again this afternoon, while catching CNN during the cardio portion of my workout, I once again found the network exploring an issue raised by the Obama campaign (though, this time, with surprising even-handedness).  Still, they were covering the specific topic the Democrats wanted to discuss, Mitt Romney’s record at Bain, rather than the broader inquiry we should be making — into Obama’s record in Washington.

Last week, I recall seeing lengthy discussion at CNN of Mitt Romney’s adolescent antics.  And that week, the Romney campaign wanted to talk about the debt the federal government has racked up since Obama took office.  Did CNN cover that story with any depth?

This got me wondering whether or not CNN chooses (more readily) to cover those issues the Obama campaign wishes to discuss and downplay those issues pushed by his likely Republican opponent.

I will not have time today to investigate this hypothesis as I’m about to rush out to hear one of the few grownups in Washington speak at the sacred shrine of freedom in Simi Valley.  As time allows this week, I will try to check the CNN website to see if their programs tend to follow Obama administration talking points.

Over at Breitbart.com, John Nolte wonders what conservatives should do given the readiness of the legacy media to investigate the private lives of certain individuals who put Obama’s record in the spotlight or support his opponent:

So desperate is the media to Palace Guard for their Precious One that everyday Americans who dare ask Obama a question he flubs, appear in a Romney campaign ad, or donate to a pro-Romney super PAC, are now considered fair game.

But if this is the new MSM standard, what are those of us in New Media to do? In a perfect world we wouldn’t be faced with this question because in a perfect world the media has integrity and would never even consider attacking and intimidating private citizens.

Read the whole thing.

Should conservatives now start investigating the private lives of these journalists?

No, not their personal lives, but should at least inquire into their ideological affiliation.  They do seem to be working in tandem with the Obama campaign.

We should at leas be asking them to indicate whether or not they have communicated and/or collaborated with that campaign, the Democratic party, its various auxiliaries and allies — and should investigate to the best of our abilities their ties to such outfits.

“Isn’t it fair,” asks Jim Geraghty on Friday, “considering the poor job the press did in examining much of” Barack Obama’s life, to ask if the Democrat “is just a fundamentally different man than the image that was presented to the country in 2008?”

Interesting how so many of our friends in the legacy media back then didn’t spend much time investigating the image of the candidate produced by his campaign.

On Facebook, a number of my conservative friends have expressed disappointment that Mitt Romney has repudiated the idea of campaigning on “Barack Obama’s 20-year association with Jeremiah Wright“.

I think the presumptive Republican nominee is right on this one; Ed Morrissey explains:

The best argument against Obama will be Obama’s record, and every moment spent by the Romney campaign or major outside PACs talking about anything other than the core issues of the 2012 campaign — jobs, economy, deficits, debt, and Iran — play into the distraction strategy that Team Obama is desperate to use.

Read the whole thing.  Morrissey also reports how the super-PAC that had considered running ads about that relationship dropped the idea.

In this video, Charles Krauthammer offers a similar view, but still managed, as reports Noah Glyn who embedded it on National Review’s The Corner, to eviscerate “President Obama, Jeremiah Wright, and the media“:

This is not to say that Romney shouldn’t attack Obama, but should focus his attacks on the Democrat’s record in office, particularly his failure to keep his promises about lower deficits and a booming economy.

After summarizing a nearly forty-year-old Life magazine account of Israel “on the occasion of its 25th birthday in May 1973″, Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, asked Monday in the Wall Street Journal, “Would a mainstream magazine depict the Jewish state like this today, during the week of its 64th birthday?”

Unlikely. Rather, readers would learn about Israel’s overwhelming military might, brutal conduct in warfare and eroding democratic values—plus the Palestinians’ plight and Israeli intransigence. The photographs would show not cool students and cutting-edge artists but soldiers at checkpoints and religious radicals.

Why has Israel’s image deteriorated? After all, Israel today is more democratic and—despite all the threats it faces—even more committed to peace.

The media’s darker portrayals of Israel notwithstanding, the American public continue to hold the Jewish State in high regard, with a March Gallup poll finding that the “large majority of Americans continue to view Israel favorably, while far fewer say they view the Palestinian Authority or Iran very or mostly favorably“:

In addition, more than 60% of Americans “say their sympathies are more with the Israelis than with the Palestinians”, with 19% saying their sympathies are with the Palestinians and the same percentage with both sides or neither.

Considering the media bias against Israel, these numbers are particularly impressive. It is instructive to note that even as Republicans only manage to capture about one-fourth to one-third of the Jewish vote, 78% sympathize more with the Jewish State than with the Palestinian Arbs. Barely half (53%) of Democrats hold similar sympathies. (more…)

. . . since nobody seems to be watching.

CNN Hits Lowest Primetime Demo Rating at 9 PM In 15 Years:

Last night was a typical, boring Tuesday, with little earth-shattering news to drive TV viewers to cable news. It was also May sweeps, with the season finale of “NCIS: LA,” “America’s Got Talent” on NBC and “Dancing With the Stars” on ABC drawing an astonishing 39 million viewers between them at 9 PM.

Unfortunately for CNN, “Piers Morgan Tonight” was the apparent victim of the busy night, drawing only 39,000 viewers 25-54 at 9 PM. To say those ratings are anomalous would be something of an understatement. That is the lowest 9 PM weekday demo rating for CNN since at least 1997. While the ratings were an outlier, it was a fairly normal edition of “PMT,” with Morgan hosting. Guests included Jane Lynch and “The man with the golden voice” Ted Williams.

“Like General Motors during the late 1970s,” observes Ed Driscoll, commenting on the “news” netwwork’s lousy numbers,

CNN is attempting to sell an obsolete paradigm to an American public that knows better — (more…)

In the forty-seven years since Mitt Romney pulled his last high school prank, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has grown up quite a bit, donating a large portion of his income to charity and performing myriad acts of kindness, helping neighbors, looking out for people in need.

You would think that a journal supposedly interested in gleaning information about a candidate’s adolescent behavior might also want to investigate his actions as an adult.  In his piece on tales of Romney’s youth, Mark Hemingway notes that one “of the major sources for the Post’s Romney scoop is a former Obama campaign volunteer“.  Why not turn to journalists from the Boston Globe?

In their biography of Romney, Globe correspondents Scott Hellman and Michael Kranish report how Romney and his family pitched “in to help in ways big and small. They took chicken and asparagus soup to sick parishioners. They invited unsettled Mormon transplants in their home for lasagna.”

In The Daily, we learn more about Mitt Romney’s good deeds:

One cold December day in the early 1980s, Mitt Romney loaded up his Gran Torino with firewood and brought it to the home of a single mother whose heat had been shut off just days before Christmas.

Years after a business partner died unexpectedly, Romney helped the man’s surviving daughter go to medical school with loans for tuition — loans he forgave when she graduated.

And in 1997, when a fellow church member’s teenage son fell seriously ill, Romney sprinted to the hospital in the dead of night, where he kept vigil with his terrified parents.

Stories like these — tales of long hours spent with grieving families, financial assistance to those in need and timely help given to strangers whether asked for or not — abound in the adult life of the Republican presidential candidate.

(Via HotAir headlines.)  Wonder why the Washington Post was more interested in tales of Mitt Romney’s adolescent antics than the “timely help” he provided to strangers in more recent years.  One would think the stories of what a man makes of himself as an adult help better to define his character than the pranks he pulled as a teen.

“In an interview during his Senate race” in 2004, reported Lois Romano of the Washington Post in 2007, “Obama said he admitted using drugs because he thought it was important for ‘young people who are already in circumstances that are far more difficult than mine to know that you can make mistakes and still recover.’”

Now, to be sure, Mitt Romney grew up under far more fortunate circumstances than Mr. Obama, but one wonders that if the legacy media had investigated something troubling in that latter’s past, they would have spun it as the Democrat spun his cocaine use.

Mitt Romney may or may not have given his high school classmate a haircut (in a bullying manner).  He has long since stopped pulling adolescent pranks.  Given his stable marriage and an adulthood filled with abundant acts of kindness for individual in need, Mitt Romney has quite obviously become a better person these past 47 years.  So too has Barack Obama since his high school years.

Had the Washington Post bothered to report Mr. Obama’s adolescent antics, one wonders if they would have covered it as they covered his cocaine use, stressing his ability to recover from mistakes — and casting his process of maturing as an example for young people to follow.

In recent days, the president’s strategy for reelection has become pretty clear; he means to distract voters from the anemic recovery as well as his unpopular health care overall, the nation’s debt and the impending insolvency of entitlements (not to mention his absence of solutions for the last two) by dangling bright shiny articles in front of a compliant media.

“If voters decide the 2012 election based on Obama’s economic record,” observes the editors of the Washington Examiner, “he will lose.  And so the liberal media, as in love with him as ever, is helping him parade shiny objects to distract voters from that record.”

They want to make Mitt Romney appear so weird and out-of-touch that come November, voters will pinch their nose and vote for Obama only to spare us four years of Romney.  And so far, thanks in large part to a legacy media remarkably incurious about the failure of the Democratic Senate to vote on a budget for over three years or the Treasury Secretary’s acknowledgement that the administration has no plan to address the nation’s debt crisis, the Obama distraction strategy appears to be working.

This has led New York Times columnist Ross Douthat to ask “what this successful maneuvering is actually gaining the White House“:

The weaknesses it’s trying to exploit are real enough: the country is moving leftward on many social issues, and Romney’s mix of squareness and weirdness — the moneyed background, the Mormonism, the 1950s persona — makes it relatively easy to portray him as culturally out of touch.

But this would be a bigger problem for Republicans if the 2012 campaign were taking place amid prosperity and plenty.

In the end, people will likely look to their pocketbooks and realize how their purchasing power has declined over the past four years.  And they might just start getting tired of the endless distractions coming from our supposedly even-handed media that they may just tune them out.

Before our friends in the legacy media run after the next bright shiny object, they may want to talk to that boy who cried, “Wolf,” one too many times.

When, in the greatest poem written between the publication of Virgil’s Aeneid and Dante’s Divine Comedy, the wormy Unferth reminds Beowulf of his youthful braggadocio, the eponymous hero questions his accuser’s sobriety, noting that he an his friend Breca made those errors of judgment, “being but boys in our time of youth” (my translation).

Playing Unferth’s part, the Washington Post, Ed Morrissey reports, ”Despite demonstrating zero curiosity over Barack Obama’s college transcripts to check on just how brilliant the academic actually was, the Post now has a big expose on Mitt Romney’s high school career as … a practical joker“.  And following the great Geatish hero’s lead, Romney has apologized, acknowledging his youth: “Back in high school,” he said in a radio interview, “I did some dumb things, and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize for that” (via Ed).

Asking if  ”a decades old high school story is really ‘news’,” Jennifer Rubin offers:

When long investigative pieces on Obama’s last three years (i.e. his presidency) start appearing on the front pages of newspapers, maybe the press has justification for going back decades to explore his opponent’s childhood. But so long as gobs of potential, substantive stories on Obama go unreported, you have to wonder why time and resources are spent on his opponent’s high school years. No wonder conservatives are suspicion of mainstream media.

Indeed.

Just as Beowulf questioned Unferth’s competence to ask question questions, so do we wonder at the Post’s competence to cover presidential elections in an even-handed manner.

UPDATE:  Jim Geraghty wonders about the absence of comparable Post coverage on Obama’s youthful indiscretions: (more…)

When, writes Michael Barone, “you get the Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls and the Politico/George Washington University Battleground poll all showing Mitt Romney leading Obama by 1 point, an Obama victory seems far from inevitable.”

Some polls, however, don’t show a contest nearly that close.  Yesterday, Allahpundit wasn’t all that worried about a Reuters survey that put

Obama up seven on Romney nationally — thanks chiefly to a sample with a 12-point Democratic tilt (excluding leaners). Elections guru Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard had a laugh over it on Twitter earlier and noted that even in a poll this blue, O’s job approval stands at just 50 percent.

Not a good sign for the president if his approval stands at just 50 percent in a poll with a greater sample than the electorate that turned out in November 2008.

Seems that our friends in the media may well want to great the impression that Obama’s reelection is, well, inevitable.

Finding bias in AOL headlines is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. Take a gander at this screenshot of their home page Sunday night at 8:21 PST:

And who might that former governor be? None other than Howard Dean, also a former Democratic presidential candidate and former chair of the Democratic National Committee.

AOL dresses up a fierce partisan in the most banal terms as if he is just your average run-of-the-mill former governor, rather than someone with a long record of harsh attacks on Republicans, accusing them of “bashing” any number of groups, including women.

The headline may be accurate; Dean is indeed a former governor.  But identifying him as such is most misleading.  Not all former governors say they “hate Republicans and everything they stand for.”

Maybe the editors at AOL find Mr. Dean to be just a mainstream former governor.

May build on this post later.  Was just at a brunch where a very intelligent man refused to accept that Sarah Palin had a record of accomplishment as Governor of Alaska.  Why is it that some Democrats (and a few Republicans) refuse to acknowledge — or even familiarize themselves with this woman’s record?

Is it because she is a woman?

I mean, when John McCain tapped her as his running mate, she enjoyed a 75% approval rating . . . among Alaska Democrats.  When Katie Couric interviewed the then-Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, the CBS News anchor didn’t once ask her interlocutor about her record.  Or what she had done to win support among Democrats as well as Republicans.

Do these folks just assume that a woman can’t stand up to a corrupt political establishment and effect real reforms?

Democratic-generated complaints notwithstanding, there was nothing wrong with George W. Bush highlighting his leadership in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks as he campaigned for reelection. He was reminding us of how he had handled his job, uniting the nation at a challenging time. And since he was asking us to keep him on for another term, it was entirely appropriate to provide a record of his accomplishment.

Similarly, there is nothing wrong with Obama reminding us under his watch, Navy SEALs got Osama bin Laden.  We got it done under his watch.  He has every right to take credit for it.

He may be, as Glenn quipped earlier today, overplaying it a bit. And to borrow the metaphor the blogmeister used, the man who scores the touchdown has every right to spike the ball to celebrate his score.  Only he should also acknowledge the man who threw the pass as well as the coach — as well as the other members of the team — who helped him into scoring position.  In other words, Obama may have been in position to score the kill, but he did it as part of a team.

And that team didn’t just include Democrats.  Under Mr. Obama’s Republican predecessor, the team (to stay with the metaphor) moved the ball down the field [See UPDATE below].  The team didn’t score points against Republicans, but against enemies of the United States, enemies shared by both parties.

In other words, it’s one thing to campaign on his own accomplishment, quite another to suggest your opponent wouldn’t have done the same thing.  As 2010 CPAC blogger of the year Ed Morrissey puts it:

Obama would be on firm ground to highlight that victory in the war on terror, as he does in his tedious “Forward” campaign video. Implying that Romney would have let Osama bin Laden go under those circumstances is, as [Arianna] Huffington says, despicable.

Yup, even that liberal blogress condemned the attack ad: (more…)

You can almost see the president pulling the trigger himself. . .

UPDATE: Here’s why I changed the title:

The White House approves of the Republican congressional campaign committee’s plan to sell a photograph of President Bush — taken hours after the September 11 attacks — to raise money for the GOP, a move Democrats call “nothing short of grotesque.”The White House photograph shows Bush aboard Air Force One, talking to Vice President Dick Cheney on the afternoon of September 11.

UPDATE: But, there’s this from the Washington Post:

President Bush’s day-old reelection advertising campaign generated criticism and controversy yesterday, as relatives of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strikes charged that television commercials using images from the attacks were exploiting the tragedy for political gain.

In December, we reported (along with other conservative bloggers) that a Media-hyped global warming “skeptic” was no such thing.

Wonder if Yahoo! (who led with a story about said supposed skeptic) will similarly hype this story about a global warming alarmist recanting:

Environmental scientist James Lovelock, renowned for his terrifying predictions of climate change’s deadly impact on the planet, has gone back on his previous claims, admitting they were ‘alarmist’.

Lovelock admits he “made a mistake”:

The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. . . .  We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear cut, but it hasn’t happened.

The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world

[The temperature] has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising – carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that.

He told MSNBC that “he now thinks he had been ‘extrapolating too far.’”  (MSNBC link via Instapundit.)  Well, at least MSNBC has reported the story.  Wonder if other left-leaning media outlets will do the same.

Until the rise of Sarah Palin, the legacy media largely respected an unwritten rule of respect for prominent politicians:  their children were off limits.   Yeah,  they’d been whittling away at that standard for years, particularly with the progeny of particular Republicans.

Well, now since they’ve decided that a Republican’s progeny are fair game, why not his ancestors?

CNN, reports the Washington Examiner’s Charlie Spiering dispatched correspondent Gary Tuchman to Mexico to report on a “polygamy haven” frequented by Mitt Romney’s grandfather.  Also on that network, a former drinking buddy of mine weighed in on the matter:

I think that it ought to be off limits,” Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition noted last night to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, reminding Cooper of the history of polygamy in President Obama’s family as well.

“If polygamy is important to CNN,” muses Spiering, “why haven’t they sent correspondents to Indonesia to talk with Obama’s second-cousins about the history of polygamy in their family?”

Kudos to one CNN anchor who dared challenge a Democrat who brought up the issue of Romney’s progenitor’s polygamy.

Sobering, yet important video to wake you up from your Monday morning stupor….

(background on video at this link)

-Bruce (GayPatriot)