The corruption of the Juicebox brigade starts to get exposed today. We’ll have more thoughts on this later, but only one theory makes sense: the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein MUST be a GOP plant. Creating a listserve where mainstream journalists could expose their leftist bias? Brilliant! (We’ve seen it…it really is the Rosetta Stone of media bias.) Kudos to you, Mr. Klein!

July 19, 2010

(BALTIMORE, MD) NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous issued the following statement today after learning of the resignation of Shirley Sherrod of the United States Department of Agriculture:

“Since our founding in 1909, the NAACP has been a multi-racial, multi-faith organization that– while generally rooted in African American communities– fights to end racial discrimination against all Americans.

We concur with US Agriculture Secretary Vilsack in accepting the resignation of Shirley Sherrod for her remarks at a local NAACP Freedom Fund banquet.

Racism is about the abuse of power. Sherrod had it in her position at USDA. According to her remarks, she mistreated a white farmer in need of assistance because of his race.

We are appalled by her actions, just as we are with abuses of power against farmers of color and female farmers.

Her actions were shameful. While she went on to explain in the story that she ultimately realized her mistake, as well as the common predicament of working people of all races, she gave no indication she had attempted to right the wrong she had done to this man. (more…)

Journalists love whistleblowers. Just not when the whistle is blown on them.

Journalists love transparency.  As long as they’re not the ones being exposed.

No steadfast journalism rule is unbendable when it comes to justifying and protecting the racket that is modern journalism, specifically, political journalism in the United States today. The ends justify the means for the Democrat Media Complex. They lie when they claim to be objective. They lie when they claim to be unbiased, because these so called “truth seekers” are guilty of engaging in open political warfare. And when the whistle is blown, they simply double down. “Journolist” — like Media Matters, but more insidious, if that’s possible — is an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle, technology and “the masses” uncovered the conspiracy:

Talk radio and the Internet have allowed outsiders the ability to challenge a multiple generational shift from journalism being about the story, to journalism being crafted toward a partisan end. From Newsweek killing the Lewinsky story to the Swift Boat veterans (until the undermedia pressure got too big) to the Dan Rather implosion to the open attempt to keep the Al Gore masseuse story under wraps to the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter debacle to the Van Jones admission of missing the story to the networks ignoring the ACORN video footage to the media playing up trumped up charges of racism in the Tea Party — while ignoring exculpatory evidence — to the mother of all media-as-political weaponry: the non-vetting of candidate Obama, the mainstream media has shown that it is in an ideological death spiral. And the ground is right here. (more…)

JournoList scandal is back and prepare for it to be a driving force in the news for quite some time. The Daily Caller published an article tonight indicating they’ve obtained emails from the JournoList and the initial details are as damning as we expected when the list-serv, founded by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein in 2007, surfaced with the Dave Weigel kerfuffle last month.

Snippets from the article below, but make sure to read the whole thing at the Daily Caller and return to Big Journalism early and often as we unpack the details that emerge and track the fallout from this seminal event in the history of left-wing media bias. It’s unclear exactly what the Daily Caller has, but there’s certainly no indication from this article they’ve already laid all their cards out on the table.

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.” (more…)

Correction: While Ms. Sherrod did discuss withholding help from a white farmer, it was not during her tenure with the USDA

***

This morning, we broke video of a USDA official, Shirley Sherrod, recounting for attendees at an NAACP awards dinner how she withheld help from a white farmer seeking the agency’s help in saving his farm.

Fox News is reporting that Ms. Sherrod has resigned. From Fox:

“There is zero tolerance for discrimination at USDA, and I strongly condemn any act of discrimination against any person,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a written statement. “We have been working hard through the past 18 months to reverse the checkered civil rights history at the department and take the issue of fairness and equality very seriously.

Sherrod explained in the video that, at the time, she assumed the state or national Department of Agriculture had referred the white farmer to her. In order to ensure that the farmer could report back that she was indeed helpful, she said she took him to see “one of his own” — a white lawyer.

“I figured that if I take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him,” she said.

The video clip was first posted by BigGovernment.com. The clip is dated March 27 from an NAACP Freedom Fund banquet.

So, the USDA has issued a statement. We’re still waiting to hear from the NAACP.

(more…)

Sometimes you hate being right.

In chapter 4 of our book, The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency, we make the point that Team Obama would try to pull a fast one when it comes to Obamacare’s individual mandate that everyone reading this blog post needs to buy health insurance, or be subject to a penalty payable to your good friends at the IRS.

We first made this argument in a column we coauthored with Senator Orrin Hatch in the Wall Street Journal back in January. Now this issue has suddenly exploded back into the news.

For months, Team Obama has been saying that the individual mandate is authorized by Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce found in the Commerce Clause. We explain in the book why that argument is a loser in court, and that the White House would have to pull a bait-and-switch and suddenly argue that the mandate is a tax (violating Obama’s promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250K per year).

Looks like we were right. In their first filing against the multi-state lawsuit challenging Obamacare, Team Obama is now arguing that the individual mandate is… a tax.

(more…)

The Federal Communications Commission’s bid to reengineer the nation’s broadband regulatory regime is exposing some fissures in the fragile net neutrality coalition, as a collection of minority groups Monday warned the commission against its controversial reclassification bid.

In a letter to the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate energy and commerce committees, the groups–seventeen in total, including 100 Black Men of America, the Japanese American Citizens League and the Minority Business Enterprise Legal Defense and Education fund–urged congressional action to clarify the scope of the FCC’s authority as it relates to broadband regulation.

“In light of the FCC’s recent adoption of a Notice of Inquiry on broadband classification, we … have concerns about the unintended implications that such efforts could have on the state of broadband deployment and adoption across the country,” an advanced copy of the letter read.

Recent studies have warned the FCC that tinkering with the broadband regulatory regime could, in addition to retarding investment and innovation, upend the nation’s economy, killing upwards of 600,000 jobs and shrinking the nation’s aggregate economic output by $80 billion.

(more…)

The dysfunction within the ranks of Washington D.C. Democrats is growing worse.

On the left, there is the president of the United States, trying to secure continued funding for troops in battle and to protect an education reform program. On the far left, House Democrats are attempting to stuff domestic pork into the war spending bill and they want funds from one of the president’s signature programs to pay for it.

It’s set up a stare down of the left versus the far left.  And they all blame the Republicans.

It would make for good political theater if it didn’t involve troops in harm’s way or spending even more money we don’t have to benefit Democratic campaign funders like the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association.

President Obama has gone as far as to threaten a veto if the teachers union bailout comes at the expense of “Race to the Top,” the president’s competitive grant program that awards money to states with the boldest education reforms.

But Democrats can only blame themselves for the mess they’ve made.  They’ve allowed Big Labor to use its muscle to inject pork into a bill of critical importance.  They are using key legislation as vehicles to pass ideas that are less palatable, such as increased spending on an assembly line-like failing public education system.

(more…)

From the Wall Street Journal:

In Atlanta, Timothy Baker, a 40-year-old unemployed warehouse worker, says his money-making strategy has been to walk picket lines for $8.50 an hour for the Southeastern Carpenters Regional Council. “It’s something to do until you find something better.”

While many big unions, including the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, frown on using nonmembers in picket lines, “we’re not at all ashamed,” says Jimmy Gibbs, director of special projects for the Southeastern Council. “We’re helping people who are in a difficult situation.”

For four hours at the recent Mid-Atlantic carpenters’ union protest in D.C., about 50 picketers-for-hire—some smoking cigarettes, reading the paper, or on their phones; a few leaning on canes—walked in a circle outside the McPherson Building. The place is home to a Starbucks, a spa and offices. “Some days, the beat is very good,” said James Harff, chief executive officer of Global Communicators LLC, a public-relations concern, tapping one foot in his second floor office. Other days, he can hardly hear himself think.

“Low Pay! Go away!” and “That Rat Gotta Go!” the union stand-ins chanted as other workers banged cow-bells and beat on a trio of empty plastic buckets. Eric Williams, a 70-year-old retiree who said he needs extra cash to buy groceries, wore a sign saying that Can-Am Contractors, a nonunion Maryland drywall and ceiling concern, “does not pay area standard wages & benefits.”

(more…)

The NAACP’s resolution condemning the Tea Party movement for being explicitly racist is a betrayal of the organization’s historic importance to our country. It saddens me as the chairman of a civil rights organization that is the spiritual grandson of the NAACP that they have allowed their name and their tradition to be pimped by politicians who are worried about keeping their jobs in 2010.

As a student of history, particularly African-American history, I know that the racial pendulum often swings dramatically. In less than two decades after the Civil War, African-Americans would go from being represented in halls of congress and state legislatures all across our country into the neo-slavery of segregation.

While historians often condemn Southern Democrats and Northern white Republicans for this travesty, few have acknowledged the excesses of the Reconstruction period (1865-1876), perpetuated by some African-American leaders and their white patrons. America has come a long way in terms of race relations, and America does not want to turn back.

(more…)

Let me make one thing very clear, my Mother, Elizabeth Thomas West, was a lifetime membership holder with the NAACP. Therefore growing up in our home I clearly understood the mission and vision for this organization. It was a mission and vision that enabled me to have the pride in myself and the heritage of my parents, grandparents, and extended family. It was a mission and vision that, to me, fostered a desire to excel beyond the standard and have a commitment to excellence regardless of skin color.

However, something has happened to that mission and vision, something horrific and inconsistent with the principles and values I recalled emanating from the “ole school” black community. Somewhere along the way victimization mentality has taken root in the black community resulting in astronomical unemployment rates, high incarceration rates, appalling murder rates, breakdown of the black family, and embarrassing teen pregnancy rates.

And in the light of all these negative socioeconomic indicators the NAACP decides that the preeminent focus of their national convention would be on issuing a resolution castigating the Tea (Taxed Enough Already) Party movement as racist. Even Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee of Texas was so compelled as to state that the Tea Party is filled with Klan members…..but we will get to the Congressional Black Caucus a bit later.

Instead of maintaining its mission and vision, the NAACP has now become the “useful idiots” (a term coined by Vladimir Lenin) for liberal racism. They have made themselves into a political hack job organization which now seeks to maintain the liberal progressive socialist control of the 21 century plantation. It is on this new economic plantation where the liberals seek to enslave the black community in order to maintain a devoted, monolithic, voting electorate.

(more…)

Correction: While Ms. Sherrod made the remarks captured in the first video featured in this post while she held a federally appointed position, the story she tells refers to actions she took before she held that federal position.

***

Context is everything.

In this piece you will see video evidence of racism coming from a federal appointee and NAACP award recipient and in another clip from the same event a perfect rationalization for why the Tea Party needs to exist.

But first the context:

For the past week, Americans who consider themselves aligned with the Tea Party movement have suffered the indignity of being falsely labeled racist by the NAACP and their pro-bono publicity managers, the main stream media. The constant calls to “repudiate the racists from your ranks” have not only been insulting, but have also served to force a false standard upon America’s fastest-growing and most vibrant political movement that no other group could ever live up to nor would ever be asked to live up to.

While the media has chosen to do the Democratic Party’s bidding in allowing for the NAACP to negatively and falsely brand the millions strong, loosely affiliated tea party phenomenon as “racist”, the moral indignation over race and racism has taken center stage in a summer of economic and political discontent.

The NAACP, an undeniable weapon in the Democratic Party’s arsenal, was more than happy to exploit this nation’s sensitive racial schism for possible political gain. The Democratic Party and the NAACP, needless to say, are playing with fire.

From the beginning of the Tea Party movement, the Left, its aiders and abettors at MSNBC, the NY Times and other reliable left of center propaganda venues, raised race as the driving force behind the movement, even though the evidence was never there. MSNBC even egregiously cut off a black protester’s head in a photograph of a man carrying a gun to a rally in order to discuss that anti-black racism was rearing its head in America.

(more…)

Today’s Daily Express (London) opens with a stark reminder that there are consequences to the foolishness being crammed down on you now — and which will be voted upon in the Senate, we are told, at the end of this month.

BRITAIN faces years of blackouts and soaring electricity bills because of the drive toward green power, a leading energy expert warned last night.

A growing obsession with global warming and “renewable” sources threatens the stability of our supply.

Derek Birkett, a former Grid Control Engineer who has a lifetime’s experience in electricity supply throughout Britain, warned that the cost of the crisis could match that of the recent banking collapse.

And he claimed that renewable energy expectations were now nothing more than “dangerous illusions” which would hit  consumers hard in the pocket.

Yes. In fact, I just detailed this, with an emphasis on this particular UK canary in the coalmine of Obama’s energy, economic and environmental policies, in a book whose title may now come into a clearer focus: Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America.

Coal, nukes, anything that works is shrugged off on the promise of building massive, mind-bogglingly expensive and wildly insufficient offshore windfarms, instead. Of course we will, dear. Worse, here we have an aggressive war to actually close down existing electricity generating capacity in precisely the same vein Obama is fighting in court to impose what the first judge to hear it called an irrational and economically devastating moratorium on offshore drilling. So, Power Grab opens almost as a more fleshed-out warning of the sort found in today’s coverage:

(more…)

How bad are things in Detroit?  Not a single person stepped forward to run for the Detroit school board.  Facing extinction, citizens thought better than jumping aboard a sinking ship.

And it’s with good reason.  A story just released by EAGtv shows that parents have lost confidence in the adult-focused system and its elected leaders.

Detroit Public Schools are among the worst in the country.  Dismal student performance, unions run amok and radical activists, like By Any Means Necessary, using the public schools as a platform for their socialist agenda.  Glenn Beck featured this socialist on his Fox News show, when the moron pontificated about the virtues of the Soviet Union during the “National Day of Action to Defend Public Education” March 4th.

(more…)

*Recently Jonah Goldberg as the question:  When Did the Rules Change? Today, I offer this explanation . . .

American politics today is said to be rather partisan.  Perhaps we do live in what could be called The Divided Era of American politics.  Although, it should be noted that we have lived in far more partisan eras such as the time Federalists and Anti-Federalists engaged in a far more fearsome battle than today with noble results.  But even if we do live in The Divided Era, perhaps the most important dynamic driving American politics today is not a philosophical divide between Republicans and Democrats, or between Conservatives and Liberals.  The dynamic driving politics today is the simple belief that government is so far out of control as to completely defy common sense.

Recently, I spoke to someone who told me he was a Democrat years ago when he lived in Pennsylvania.  Until recently, he thought of himself as a moderate Republican.  Now, however, he has been having thoughts that he is a “right winger.”  I asked him what in particular was making him think that way.  The answer was simple: government spending beyond rationality.

Note the issue driving him was not a fight over spending priorities as we used to know.  It was not a question of guns or butter nor a tension between education funding and law and order.  His concern was that government spending was so far past what common sense could justify.   Countless Americans think just like that former Democrat turned potential right winger because of examples like this:

• Obama says that he inherited a trillion dollar deficit (not true) – yet he forged ahead with a trillion dollar “stimulus” spending bill which featured far more spending than stimulus.
• One day Obama says we must get spending under control yet the month before he pushed a new trillion spending program – the Health Care Bill.
• Nancy Pelosi claiming that unemployment checks create jobs.
• Nancy Pelosi claiming that millions of dollars for condoms should have been in the stimulus bill because that spending would have a stimulus effect.
• Nancy Pelosi demanded the passing of the Health Care Bill so we could “see what was in it,”
• Obama saying “my policies that got us out of this mess,” and, of course
• Trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see adding to a national debt already 5 or 6 times larger than yearly federal revenue.

On a more local note of irrationality, there is city manager of a town of 36,000 people near LA making $800,000 per year while the police chief of that same town makes nearly 50% more than the police Chief of Los Angeles – a city more than 100 times larger!  When asked about it, the City Manager “was unapologetic, saying he could earn just as much in private business.”

(more…)

Today, in 1979, the Sandinista’s took control of Nicaragua. There are people who will never get that time back. Some Americans, like Sen. Chris Dodd, have a lot to answer for…

No. You really can’t make this up.

In their quest to find new members, unions are searching high and low—but especially high.

A couple of months ago, some pot (as in marijuana) workers in California unionized with the United Food & Commercial Workers (UFCW).  As Big Government blogger, Bret Jacobson noted then, it sort of makes sense:

Now you can Super Size it and smoke a spliff without ever crossing a picket line.

But, just to show that unions are down with the times, the UFCW is taking the next step:

The 200,000-member United Food and Commercial Workers, Western States Council, on Wednesday announced its support for Proposition 19, the initiative to legalize marijuana in California.

(more…)

You would have thought that the three separate entries I dedicated to exposing the lies yesterday in this article and video by the progressive propagandists at Think Progress, I would have said all there is to say.

But there is more… and it is shocking.

Remember “Activist 2,” the Saint Louis Team Party infiltrator, that claimed “I’m a proud racist, I’m white?”

It seems that Think Progress used a clip from this video, a video entitled “Proof that the Tea Party is not racist.”

The guys at SharpElbows.Net thwarted this infiltrator, heavily documenting his attempt to mingle with Tea Party protesters in Saint Louis.

Think Progress misrepresented everything this video and the Tea Party stands for, and against.

(more…)

At Thursday’s ribbon-cutting ceremony on the side of a new battery manufacturing plant being built in Holland, Michigan President Obama proved yet again that his smashmouth politics knows no limits.

Using $150 million of Obama’s “stimulus” bill money, Compact Power – a South Korean company – is building the plant in Holland and will eventually create 300 jobs there.  The math indicates that’s about $500,000 a job.

The good folks of Holland wanted to celebrate the choice of their town by Compact Power, a South Korean company.  They invited two political celebrities: President Obama and Republican Cong. Pete Hoekstra, who is running for Michigan governor this year.  The town of Holland is in Hoekstra’s district (in fact, it’s his home town.)

Acknowledging Hoekstra – who was sitting within arm’s reach of the president – Obama first took a cut at him: “There are some folks who want to go back, who think that we should return to the policies that helped to lead to this recession,” he said. “Some of them made the political calculation that it’s better to obstruct than to lend a hand. They’ve said no to tax cuts; they’ve said no to small-business loans; they’ve said no to clean-energy projects.”

And then Obama’s backswing with the slash” “Now, that doesn’t stop them from being at ribbon cuttings, but that’s okay, you know.”

(more…)