This post started as part 3 in my series this month, “How fake is CNN? At least this fake.” (Most recent entry here.) Because of CNN’s fake Trumprussia story that they had to retract. And because of Project Veritas catching that CNN producer who agrees that CNN’s coverage of Trumprussia is “mostly bullsh*t” with “no proof”.

But V spared me the trouble, with his post earlier. So the news here is that Sharyl Attkisson, the wonderful journalist, has a new book out – The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote. Here she discusses it with Tucker Carlson:

Attkisson: Democrats, Republicans and the media Establishment have exempted themselves from the normal journalism rules…because they see Donald Trump as such a big threat. They would say, a Hitler-esque threat. That means they don’t have to follow the normal rules of journalism in this case. I think it’s more of a threat to the system of favors, money and access that has been developed [with] the political establishment.

Carlson: So it’s not just a conventional left-right thing, where they’re liberal, Trump is conservative, they hate him. There’s something different going on.

Attkisson: Washington survives on a system…of access and money where people have spent decades paying in to certain politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, to make sure certain political hearings don’t happen, to make sure certain laws have provisions written in. All of the sudden, overnight, all that access they’ve bought, all the hard work they’ve done as lobbyists and so on, is almost worthless – if Trump’s reality of Washington comes into play. And nobody seems to like that.

…I liken it to the situations that must be in North Korea. If you have a TV and can watch the news, it’s gonna be a version that’s approved and put out by the State. In some respects, we are getting an artificial reality created by people putting out narratives…If you’re like me, there’s very little that I see reported on the news that I instantly believe without doing my own checking because so many formerly-reputable news organizations have been proven to be 180 degress wrong, not just a little bit wrong… reporters doing things that wouldn’t be allowed in journalism school, but doing them now with impunity.

Just to follow up on part 1 about CNN openly staging a fake protest that they’d wanted, here’s a nifty list.

Like all such lists, it suffers from being anecdotal and agenda-driven. And (in this case) badly mis-titled. Some (hi rusty 😉 ) won’t like it that the list comes from Cernovich.

But I’m interested in what’s in it. I have seen most of these instances myself, at one time or another. I think it’s silly to trust CNN. If people ask me why, here are some of the examples I’d point to.

• The time CNN warned that it’s somehow illegal for ordinary citizens to look at the leaked DNC and Podesta emails. (It isn’t. So, look all you want.)
• The time they had a camera man pose as a random guy on the street and broadcast his pro-Hillary rant.
• The time CNN lied that Loretta Lynch had “recused herself” from any decisions on the Clinton e-mail investigation. (She didn’t. She should have.)
• The time(s) CNN spread the fake “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” meme. (Shot of an entire CNN panel doing it.)
• The time CNN, broadcasting from a studio with blue screen and fake wind, pretended it was on-location in the Gulf War.
• The time CNN claimed that Muslim terrorist bombings in Europe are done by “false flag” right-wingers.
• The time Jake Tapper told a Navy Seal he was interviewing, that his all buddies had died for nothing.
• The time CNN let a guest claim that “rogue cops shoot black people for sport”.
• The time a CNN anchor expressed joy at Sarah Palin’s children being assaulted.
• The times that CNN edited #BlackLivesMatter activists, who were calling for rage and violence, to make it appear as if they were somehow peaceful.
• The time a CNN anchor praised a cop-killer as “brave and courageous”.
• The time CNN had 2 reporters in the same parking lot in Phoenix and faked it, split-screen, to pretend they were in different locations.
• The time they did a voter focus group and openly stated the precise words that they wanted a certain voter to say next.
• The many times CNN cut a guest’s satellite feed if they strayed too far from CNN’s preferred narrative.
  • The guy they cut for mentioning Jesus.
  • The time they cut Bernie Sanders after he jokingly referred to CNN as Fake News.
  • The time they cut a guest for mentioning Wikileaks.
  • The time they cut a reporter who started talking about Hillary’s negatives or “vulnerabilities”.
• The way that, when CNN cuts a guest who strayed too far from their preferred narrative, they pretend it’s somehow accidental.

The list is incomplete of course. It didn’t even get around to some stuff like:

• CNN’s Fake War Propaganda, like Bana Alabed.
• Their brazen shifts in tone for partisan reasons.
• Their eagerness to report anti-Trump leaks, even when said leaks are anonymously sourced and, well, WRONG.
• Their frequent reporting of fake/hoaxed hate crimes.
• CNN’s endless Fake News in 2016 about “Hillary is ahead in the polls” and “Hillary is a lock to win the election”.

And more that I could probably find, if I searched GP archives.

Here’s a story that I’m late in mentioning; in part because I never saw it on CNN. 175 people are involved in a class-action lawsuit against CNN for racial discrimination.

(I apologize, if you have problems with the Daily Wire link. On my computer, it’s OK with an ad blocker. But without an ad blocker, DW eats all the computer’s resources, slowing things to a crawl. The story was also at Newsbusters and Breitbart.)

DW says this story gets even less coverage than the 13 people suing Fox News for racial discrimination.

“The lawsuit against CNN, meanwhile, claims the company’s Atlanta headquarters is rife with racism,” The New York Post wrote on April 27.

Minority employees had to endure bigoted remarks such as “It’s hard to manage black people” and “Who would be worth more: black slaves from times past, or new slaves?,” according to a complaint by former workers Celeslie Henley and Ernest Colbert Jr. filed in Atlanta federal court.

Colbert Jr. also claims he was paid thousands less than white colleagues as a manager at the affiliated Turner Broadcasting System.

Henley, a former CNN executive assistant, says she was fired in 2014 for complaining that black employees were being paid less than white counterparts.

Writes The Hollywood Reporter: Unlike the lawsuit against Fox News, the one against CNN and sister companies is much broader, claiming among other things that African-Americans receive lower performance ratings in evaluations, that there are dramatic differences in pay between similarly situated employees of different races and that the promotion of African-American employees is blocked by a “glass ceiling.”…

According to The New York Post, The New York Times is also being sued for racial discrimination:

The Times plaintiffs claim in a suit filed last year by New York lawyer Douglas Wigdor that “the Gray Lady” prefers to hire white employees to help target a white audience.

“Unbeknownst to the world at large, not only does the Times have an ideal customer (young, white, wealthy), but also an ideal staffer (young, white, unencumbered with a family) to draw that purported ideal customer,” a complaint states.

Staffers from the staid broadsheet charge that Times CEO Mark Thompson, hired in 2012, created an “environment rife with discrimination based on age, race and gender.”

These stories are from April and May. If you know anything more recent, please update us in the comments.

CNN carefully stages some “good” Muslim demonstrators:

CNN thinks it did nothing wrong or unusual.

The group of demonstrators that was at the police cordon was being allowed through by officers so they could show their signs to the gathered media. The CNN crew along with other media present simply filmed them doing so.

First of all – NO. Believe your own eyes, watch the video! CNN poses and directs the people in the shot. CNN doesn’t “simply film” them.

Second, is it normal for CNN to pick and choose which tiny group of demonstrators they will over-report on, to fit CNN’s pre-determined political script? I think they’re saying it is.

Their refutation doesn’t refute. CNN fakes a non-event, then explains in essence, “Oh that’s what we normally do. What’s the problem?”

UPDATE: There’s also that time Don Lemon posed his own co-worker as a random, man-on-the-street Hillary supporter (though Lemon disclosed it afterward).

The CNN reporter propaganda artist above is Becky Anderson. Her piece makes a point that we all WISH were true: Large numbers of Muslims rejecting the terrorist losers. Too bad it isn’t.

Yet another story that should be all over the media, but I haven’t seen it much. (If you have, let me know.)

Why wouldn’t it be covered? I find that it reflects great discredit on the Establishment (both political parties, Deep State and Controlled Media). As I started to say yesterday, they have ways to decide what you’re going to hear about. For as long as they can, they will bury stories that don’t fit their agenda.

To review some background:

• Under the 4th Amendment, the government isn’t supposed to spy on U.S. people without a court-ordered warrant.
• “The FISA Court” is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 “to oversee requests for surveillance warrants against foreign spies inside the United States by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.” (Wiki)
  Note, foreign.
• But FISA Court hearings are secret and only the government and the court judge are present, like a kangaroo court. The adversarial system is abandoned.
• As such, FISA tends to be very lenient to the government. Over time, they have created a secret body of law that gives the government sweeping powers to do domestic warrantless surveillance under an alleged “special needs exception” to the 4th Amendment.
• One example – In 2013, Edward Snowden leaked a FISA order that requires phone companies to provide a daily, ongoing feed of everyone’s phone call data to the NSA. Super invasive!
• Even so, FISA isn’t toothless and doesn’t approve everything – as you shall see. They need to preserve respectability, at least in their own eyes.
• FISA judges are appointed solely by the Chief Justice of the United States. In this regard, Establishment Republicans control the FISA court.

That’s just background. Now for the news, as reported by John Solomon and Sara Carter at Circa.com.

Under President Obama, the NSA secretly conducted years of surveillance and searches on Americans that not even the secret, super-lenient FISA Court would approve.

The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community…

The Obama administration self-disclosed the problems at a closed-door hearing Oct. 26 before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that set off alarm…

The normally supportive court censured administration officials, saying the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier amounted to an “institutional lack of candor” and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a recently unsealed court document dated April 26, 2017.

The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans.

Circa has reported that there was a three-fold increase in NSA data searches about Americans and a rise in the unmasking of U.S. person’s identities in intelligence reports after Obama loosened the privacy rules in 2011.

Officials like former National Security Adviser Susan Rice have argued their activities were legal under the so-called minimization rule changes Obama made, and that the intelligence agencies were strictly monitored to avoid abuses.

The intelligence court and the NSA’s own internal watchdog found that not to be true…

The American Civil Liberties Union said the newly disclosed violations are some of the most serious to ever be documented and strongly call into question the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to police itself…

RTWT. Naturally, the NSA is scrambling to reassure people that it has fixed the problem. Riiiiiiiight. And Susan Rice didn’t lie and none of the surveillance data was ever misused against Obama opponents or improperly unmasked. Riiiiiiiight.

To people who understand civil liberties and limited government, all this is a huge deal that shows how far out of control the U.S. “intelligence community” (Deep State) has gotten. Chris Farrell at Judicial Watch compares it to President Lincoln’s suspension of habeus corpus during the U.S. Civil War.

Where is the Special Counsel on this?

Or the media coverage? Bush’s NSA did some illegal surveillance in the 2000s – and in 2005, was duly slammed by The New York Times. A large kerfuffle. “But that was then.” It served the interests of someone powerful – someone in deep alliance with, or control of, The New York Times – to weaken Bush. Not so much with Obama, eh?

See the FISA Court’s declassified order spanking the Obama administration, here. By the way, note how large sections of the relevant law and dockets are blacked out, showing how the FISA system has created secret law that the citizens aren’t supposed to know about. That’s horrible.

Also from Circa: Comey’s FBI was neck deep in the abuses.

The FBI has illegally shared raw intelligence about Americans with unauthorized third parties and violated other constitutional privacy protections, according to newly declassified government documents that undercut the bureau’s public assurances…

The People Who Brought You Obamacare and the IRS Scandal are now working on a plan to put every American’s health records under bureaucratic surveillance.

The federal government is piecing together a sweeping national “biosurveillance” system that will give bureaucrats near real-time access to Americans’ private medical information in the name of national security, according to Twila Brase, a public health nurse and co-founder of the Citizens Council for Health Freedom.

The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response is currently seeking public comment on a 52-page draft of the proposed “National Health Security Strategy 2015-2018” (NHSS).

“Health situational awareness includes biosurveillance and other health and non-health inputs (e.g., lab/diagnostics, health service utilization, active intelligence, and supply chain information), as well as systems and processes for effective communication among responders and critical health resource monitoring and allocation,” the draft states.

But as long as this isn’t “telling me what I can do in my own bedroom,” liberals won’t care.

Back in October 2010, blogger Tigerhawk recalled what one of his Princeton classmates, who was originally from Romania, said about the nature of life under socialism:

One recurring tool of socialist tyranny is the capricious enforcement of unworkable laws.

He quoted the passage in making a point about the “capricious enforcement” which was an inevitable feature of the unworkable mess better known as Obamacare.

But two and a half years later, it’s evident that observation could just as easily have been applied to our byzantine tax code, our environmental regulations, and even laws pertaining to press freedoms under the Obama administration.  As Dan wrote earlier today, the only folks who are surprised by any of these scandals are the ones who haven’t been paying attention to what has been going with our government since January 20, 2009.

In the case of the Obama administration, though, it’s not strictly capricious enforcement, but selective enforcement, always with a partisan goal in mind.  The IRS targeting of the Tea Party and conservative organizations is appalling, but one would have to be naive not to believe, as ABC’s Trey Hardin noted today, that it wasn’t authorized by someone in the West Wing.  Hardin observed (audio at the link):

I will tell you this on the IRS front. I’ve worked in this town for over 20 years in the White House and on Capitol Hill and I can say with a very strong sense of certainty that there are people very close to this president that not only knew what the IRS were doing but authorized it. It simply just does not happen at an agency level like that without political advisers likely in the West Wing certainly connected to the president’s ongoing campaign organization.

And it’s not just the IRS.  Earlier today it came out that the EPA waived fees for leftist organizations and leftist journalists who requested information, but not for conservative ones:   “Conservative groups seeking information from the Environmental Protection Agency have been routinely hindered by fees normally waived for media and watchdog groups, while fees for more than 90 percent of requests from green groups were waived, according to requests reviewed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.”  Yes, this would be the same EPA that has classified carbon dioxide as a pollutant, making the mere act of exhaling potentially troublesome.

A coincidence?  I think not.  This is the same administration committed to picking winners and losers on most matters.  Hence, it should surprise no one that while oil companies are prosecuted for the deaths of eagles and other protected species, the bird-killing wind farms are naturally given a pass.   Clearly, some energy companies are more equal than others.

It’s the same with journalists.  Just a day after the AP snooping scandal broke, the administration is playing favorites again.  Jake Tapper has gained a reputation as one who can be counted on to ask tough questions of the White House with greater frequency than the reporters at most of the other lamestream news organizations.  Well, today Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection is reporting that the White House played Jake Tapper by selectively leaking one e-mail with the apparent aim of creating a diversion in the reporting about the Benghazi cover-up.  Jacobson writes: “Like I said, this entire diversion of leaking a single email out of a chain of emails to Tapper was simply meant to put critics of the administration back on their heels and to provide an excuse for White House defenders to throw around words like ‘doctored.'”

And so what else do we see today?  Well, all of a sudden the administration’s lackeys in the press such as Hilary Rosen are now out expressing their sympathy for poor Jay Carney.  I guess they’re afraid of ending up as the subject of a DOJ snooping scandal or an IRS investigation or a selective leak.

1. It’s a presidential election. It’s not close; the Democrat has way more popular support. A few of his dumb zealots break into Republican headquarters to spy needlessly. No person is injured, but it’s still unacceptable. The more so, because the president and his crew then lie to obstruct official investigations.
2. A Republican president was recently re-elected. A philanderer and “family values” hypocrite, he has an affair with his White House intern. It would have no public significance, except that it becomes a subject of testimony in lawsuits over his other affairs. And he lies about it, under oath. He, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, has now lied to a court.
3. A Democrat president must deal with a certain Third World dictator who has attacked four neighboring countries over a period of two decades, costing hundreds of thousands of lives. World intelligence agencies, and Republican leaders in Congress, are nearly unanimous that the dictator would be happy to launch yet another war, has been developing nuclear weapons, and may have nukes already. Acting on that consensus, the Democrat president gets legal approvals from Congress and the U.N. to invade (along with 40 other nations) and remove the dictator. The invasion works, but at a cost of several thousand American lives (including the occupation, afterward). It turns out that the dictator only had chemical weapons, plus some nuclear weapons research (no nuclear bombs, yet). That’s embarrassing, but multiple official investigations clear the President of any intentional wrongdoing.
4. A Republican administration pushes thousands of guns into Mexico, causing the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans. Republicans claim the administration only did what the previous Democrat administration did. But that is not true: the previous operations had controls to minimize deaths and maximize the intelligence-gathering on Mexican drug cartels, controls that the Republican effort abandoned (for reasons unknown). The GOP Attorney General does everything he can to obstruct Congress’ investigation, and eventually is found to be in contempt of Congress. He does not resign.
5. It’s a presidential election. It is going to be close; the Republican incumbent, plagued by four years of economic failure, is not way ahead. But he has been successful, he claims, in fighting terrorism. A month before the election, Islamist terrorists attack a U.S. consulate and kill an American ambassador, plus three others. The Republican administration had warnings and permitted the attack to succeed (through negligence or perhaps for reasons unknown). They lie to the American people about it, implying that it was not a terrorist attack, that they could not have stopped the attack, that the attack was somehow really a protest caused by a YouTube video that nobody ever heard of, etc. The lies work: the Republican wins re-election.

(more…)

Perhaps the appeal of Twitter is that often pith makes the point better than a well-crafted, thoughtfully argued essay.  Last night, Glenn Reynolds, whose Instapundit blog, proudly produces pithy commentary on the events of the day linked this tweet from Ari Fleischer:

Irony: Bush Admin accepted CIA talking points on WMD. CIA was wrong. O Admin altered CIA TPs on Benghazi. CIA was right.

Highly doubt we’ll see as much scrutiny of the Obama administration’s altering the talking points than we will of the Bush Administration’s acceptance of such points.

Odd how some accused Bush of lying for accepting the CIA talking points, as if the fault lay in his office and not in the erring agency.

Interesting how so few bother to inquire into the Obama administration’s decision to alert the CIA talking points, as if the fault lay in the ether for the erring administration officials.

Rand Paul’s filibuster ended yesterday, after 13 hours. Neither Bruce nor I were clear on how to turn off GP’s post that was counting it, so…it’s gone. We executed it (so to speak). But where did America end up?

• Before: A poll showed that fully 41% of Democrats think the president should be able to order pre-emptive drone strikes on American soil without review or oversight (that is, “on his own” in the poll’s wording).
• After: The Democrat-led Senate has refused to pass this resolution, “Expressing the sense of the Senate against the use of drones to execute Americans on American soil”.

I think that means: according to the Senate, if Obama decides that you are a “suspected terrorist”, he could execute you and your family in a drone strike on your home. At least, the question is open. Obama’s America, Forward!

UPDATE (from the comments): heliotrope informs us that Senator Paul has just received a letter from Attorney General Holder, writing that the president does NOT “have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on an American soil.” That’s better.

UPDATE: Republican senators McCain and Graham are clueless as ever, while liberal comedian Jon Stewart praises Rand Paul, sort of.

Perhaps like me, you’re enjoying this great new TV show I just found on C-SPAN2 called Mr. Paul Goes to Washington where my favorite Senator is currently filibustering President Obama’s nominee to head the CIA, John Brennan. As I write this, he’s currently about to ring in his sixth hour. The goal of Senator Paul’s soliloquy is, as he has stated several times since I’ve been watching, simply to elicit one thing: A straight-forward answer to the question, (to paraphrase) ‘Does the president believe he has the legal authority to execute through drone strike non-combatant citizens on American soil?’

Brings up a very interesting point: For eight solid years, we heard screeching and gnashing of teeth from the Left about how George W. Bush wants to kill us all and eat our babies and of course shred the Constitution through wars based on lies and the horrible PATRIOT Act. But in the end, who is it who’s actually standing up for these ideals? Well, so far I’ve seen Senator Paul in exchanges with Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Pat Toomey. Odd, don’t you think, that it’d be these ‘Tea Party right-winger knuckle-draggers’ who are actually doing the work that the Bush-haters allegedly wanted done while the leaders of their nominative party are lining up with their president in his expansion of Bush’s ‘unitary executive’ policies?

Clearly it’d be expecting waaay too much for the addlepated adherents to the Bush-is-Satan school of political thought to recognize the irony of the situation, let alone find that realization a great opportunity for self-reflection. Sad, that.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HHQ)

NB: I had originally written the paraphrase of Sen Paul’s question as “power” to execute. Clearly that’s within the president’s power, but I’ve clarified (I hope) by changing my original post to read “legal authority”, which I think is likely more to his point.

Americans aren’t happy with the status quo in Washington and yet what we saw yesterday was America returning to the status quo.  President Obama has been reelected, albeit with fewer votes — and a lower percentage of the popular vote — than he won in 2008.  Democrats appeared to have strengthened their majority in the Senate.  Republicans hold the House.

He owes his more decisive electoral vote majority to his razor-thin victory in Colorado, Ohio, Virginia and (as appears likely at press time) Virginia.  The margin in Ohio is even narrower than it was in 2004 when George W. Bush won the state on his road to reelection.

The incumbent’s biggest legislative accomplishment, Obamacare, remains unpopular.  The debt has increased more in his first term than it had in his predecessor’s two terms.  He ran an aggressively negative campaign and didn’t really focus on any issues.  He does not have the same mandate he had four years ago.

I have to say I’m surprised.  Just watching the president and his opponent these past few days, one seemed energized and confident, the other angry and downbeat.  You would think the more confident man would win.  Mitt Romney drew larger crowds.  The base seemed more energized.

Perhaps, it was as Charles Krauthammer put it last night on FoxNews that Mitt Romney wasn’t the best candidate to articulate the conservative message.  Perhaps, it was that he did not do a good job of outreach to the Hispanic community.  Perhaps, those hundreds of millions of dollars in negative ads really did do the trick.  Or maybe Hurricane Sandy caused wavering Obama supporters to return to their man.  Up until the storm hit, Mitt had the momentum.  And it stopped.

Or perhaps, the legacy media, in failing to cover Obama’s various failures and scandals, won the election for him. (more…)

If the legacy media covered President Obama instead of covering for him, California would be in play in tomorrow’s contest.  Our media simply fail to report so many stories which might tarnish the image of the Democratic incumbent.  Just today, one day before the election, numerous conservative bloggers have noted, in the words of one such blogress, “CBS has just released new footage of Obama declining [on September 12] to call the [Benghazi] attack terrorism when pressed, saying it’s ‘it’s too early to tell’“.

They should have released that clip a lot earlier; it would have given credence to the claim Mitt Romney made in the second debate, a claim that Candy Crowley, the moderator, challenged.

It’s not just Benghazi.  It’s Obama’s telling his supporters that “voting is the best revenge.”  And the media not making that front page news.  It’s the failure to cover Hurricane Sandy like they covered Hurricane Katrina.  It’s their failure to cover the Fast & Furious gunrunning scandal.

They may yet help push Obama across the finish line tomorrow, but at the cost of their own credibility.  Distrust in media has reached an all-time high.  Earlier today in the Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel called political reporters the real “the loser in this election cycle“:

Reporters who push Obama for actual answers, meanwhile, find themselves scorned by their peers — as we discovered the hard way when our White House reporter dared ask Obama an unapproved question during a presidential statement in the Rose Garden. Months later, longtime Newsweek correspondent Jonathan Alter confronted us on the street and became apoplectic, literally yelling and shaking and drawing a crowd, over the exchange. His complaint: our reporter was “rude” to Obama.

Yep. Good reporters occasionally are impolite, especially to people in power who refuse to answer legitimate questions about their own policies. We don’t hire for table manners. We hire for persistence and toughness and the ability to spot a story among the fluff. We’re traditional that way. It’s the legacy media that have changed. (more…)

Earlier this afternoon, when perusing Instapundit, I noticed how many stories Glenn Reynolds and his co-bloggers were covering that were both damaging to President Obama and have been all but ignored by the legacy media.

In the interest of making people aware of these stories, I share the links below.  Can you imagine the coverage these stories would get if they were about Republicans or a Republican president?

There are advantages to being on an outmoded e-mail system, particularly if you are a conservative.  AOL gives me a constant insight into what the liberal media are covering and this story led the news that comes with your e-mail:

Yesterday, Bruce offered both the details of the attack on our consulate in Benghazi and a list of questions the White House refused to answer, questions, it appears, journalists for the “three major TV new networks” are failing to ask.

Summarizing the three elements of the scandal, John Hinderaker finds it

. . . hard to imagine how any newspaper could ignore, or even try to downplay, a story of this magnitude. Yet, if you rely on the New York Times for information, you know little about the battle of Benghazi, and nothing at all about the explosive account that emerged on Friday, fueled in part by the anger of the father of one of the dead American operatives.

John notes that the so-called paper of record “trying to ignore the charge that the Obama administration rejected calls for help from embattled troops on the ground in Benghazi” and asks if “the Times [is] always so reluctant to cover a foreign policy scandal in the last days of a presidential campaign”.  Read the whole thing.

Given this does seem a perfect image of the White House press corps:

(H/t: Former left-leaning lesbian on Facebook.)

Doing my morning blog-read, found the same article linked on one conservative-leaning web-site (Drudge) and on two conservative/libertarian blogs (Instapundit and Powerline), yet neither AOL nor Yahoo! mentions it.  It’s a story with a similar theme to one which surfaced the last time a Democrat ran for reelection and the Washington Post did pick up on it, but a search (without quotation marks for “Obama fundraising web” and “Obama fundraising internet” yields nothing on their site at 9:20 PST (12:20 GayPatriot blog time).

This morning, the New York Post is running a report about absence of safeguards on the Obama campaign’s web-site:

The Obama re-election campaign has accepted at least one foreign donation in violation of the law — and does nothing to check on the provenance of millions of dollars in other contributions, a watchdog group alleges.

Chris Walker, a British citizen who lives outside London, told The Post he was able to make two $5 donations to President Obama’s campaign this month through its Web site while a similar attempt to give Mitt Romney cash was rejected. It is illegal to knowingly solicit or accept money from foreign citizens.

Walker said he used his actual street address in England but entered Arkansas as his state with the Schenectady, NY, ZIP code of 12345.

“When I did Romney’s, the payment got rejected on the grounds that the address on the card did not match the address that I entered,” he said. “Romney’s Web site wanted the code from the back of card. Barack Obama’s didn’t.” (more…)

Last July, frustrated that our friends in the legacy media shunned scrutinizing the record of President Obama, I created the category, “Where’s the Scrutiny?”  The Democrat has become accustomed to a press which downplays news which threatens the image he has crafted and refrains from asking him particularly tough questions.

The president, Michael Barone observed, “suffered” last night

 . . . from his lack of scrutiny from mainstream media. As I like to say, there is nothing free in politics, but there is some question about when you pay the price. In this first debate Obama paid the price for the hands-off treatment he has received from mainstream media. His talking points, advanced by his spokesmen in the confidence that they will not be seriously challenged, were refuted by an energized and articulated and well-informed Mitt Romney. He stood there petulantly and pathetically, nonplussed by the fact that his flimsy talking points were effectively challenged.

And Romney was unfazed about doing the work the legacy media never does, exposing the president, as Michael Walsh put it

. . .as the Primo Carnera of his day, the mob-owned heavyweight champ who won a series of fixed fights — until he finally found himself in the ring against an opponent who didn’t fear him, and who was more than happy to whale on him, especially once Romney figured out that Obama couldn’t hurt him. Meanwhile, Obama kept looking over at Mitt with a “I can’t believe you know all this stuff” look on his face, while periodically casting beseeching glances at moderator Jim Lehrer, hoping to be saved by a bell that never came.

Mitt Romney, as per this tweet included in William A. Jacobson’s roundup, finally provided, in a national forum, the scrutiny long absent in coverage of this president:

(more…)

The subhead to William A. Jacobson’s post on “The Obama Tape” pretty much summarizes the meaning of this whole kerfuffle as it provides A timely reminder that we still don’t really know Obama.

Barack Obama, report the Daily Caller’s Tucker Carlson and Vince Coglianese in releasing the video that their journal obtained, “gave the speech in the middle of a hotly-contested presidential primary season, but his remarks escaped scrutiny.”  He gave a shout out to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright even after that prejudiced pastor “had told The New York Times that he would no longer be speaking on the campaign’s behalf because his rhetoric was considered too militant.”

Not only does he give a shout out to racist pastor, but he also manifests a patronizing attitude toward the poor:

We can’t expect them to have all the skills they need to work. They may need help with basic skills, how to shop, how to show up for work on time, how to wear the right clothes, how to act appropriately in an office.

Interesting that the Obama camp senses this could be damaging to their man, with Democrats, using “comments from reporters speculating” about the video, “quickly” working to dismiss the story before they  had even seen it.

No wonder.  According to Glenn Reynolds this is “video proof” of what Stanley Kurtz says we already know (but which I would add the legacy media dismiss or downplay):

So here’s Obama proudly advertising his relationship with Reverend Wright, and even imitating Wright’s divisive rhetoric on Katrina. Is anyone surprised? Essentially, every excuse Obama used to explain away his relationship with Reverend Wright during campaign 2008 was a lie. . . . (more…)

In the month of September, the conservative (and Spanish-language) media (and from a few rogue reporters at ABCNews) reported a number of stories about President Barack Obama all showing his disinterest in or ambivalence toward governing. And yet, outside those pockets at ABC and occasionally on CNN), our legacy media all but ignored (or otherwise downplayed) these stories which called Obama’s competence into question.

By the end of the month, a number of pundits and bloggers, including a Democratic pollster, commenting on the media’s negligence, had scored them for promoting the president’s reelection and undermining the national interest, with Charles Krauthammer suggesting the media should just “relocate to Chicago” given that they’ve all but become “‘an auxiliary of the Obama campaign”.

In both interviews with and news reports about Obama, authors, journalists in Spanish-language media, a late night talk show host and those occasional “rogue” reporter, revealed a man more focused on his reelection than on the job to which he was elected four years ago.  And our friends in the legacy spent more time following up on Mitt Romney’s supposed “gaffes” than they did on these very real examples of Obama’s incompetence:

• The release of the Bob Woodward book showed Obama disinterested in the give-and-take that is part and parcel of negotiating with Congress.
• The president jetted off to a campaign event in Las Vegas the day after the attacks on our embassy in Cairo and the murder of our ambassador in Libya.
• In an interview with David Letterman, Obama failed to identify the amount of the national debt.
• He dissembled on immigration reform in the Univision townhall, blaming Republicans for his failure when his party controlled Congress for the time period in question (his first year in office); Obama neither introduced such reform legislation nor did he provide a framework within which Congress should work, nor did he press Congress to act.
• In that same townhall, the Democrat “falsely claimed that the [Fast and Furious] program began under President George W. Bush.”  There has been almost no legacy media followup on the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report on the gunrunning scandal, a report which calls into question the managerial competence of Attorney General Holder and reminds us that some in the administration did not cooperate with investigators. (more…)