Less than a week after ABC released (and Drudge essentially spoiled) the story that we were told could “end [Newt Gingrich's] career,” the former Speaker came from behind to win the South Carolina primary by a startling 13%.  Not only did South Carolina voters ignore the latest unverifiable mainstream media report on the private life of a Republican candidate—a report that was specifically timed to inflict maximum damage—many of them likely voted for Gingrich to spite the MSM.  Exit polling suggests that Newt’s entire margin of victory was comprised of South Carolinians who decided on their candidate near or on primary day, i.e. after ABC’s story had leaked.  Those who decided after the CNN debate in which Gingrich embarrassed CNN’s John King for his liberal bias voted solidly for Newt.

Conventional wisdom is that debates don’t decide nominations, but that notion is as antiquated as the paper route. This is, after all, the media age.  It’s the era of YouTube, Twitter, and the 24-hour news network.  Fear the candidate who can beat the media at their own game, and right now, that candidate is Newt Gingrich.

Their imperfect track-records aside, the former speaker has been able to distinguish himself from Governor Romney in two crucial ways.  The first difference is in who, or what, they are campaigning against.  The foundation of Mitt Romney’s campaign is keeping a narrow focus on Barack Obama.  This isn’t a bad strategy, per se, but it doesn’t comprehensively address the problems we are facing as a society.  After all, Barack Obama is a product of the American left.  He was raised in academia, sold to us by Hollywood, and elected by the mainstream media.  The President is the tip of the iceberg, and the Republican candidate should understand that Obama is a symptom of what ails us, not the cause. (more…)

Only the mainstream media could make Newt Gingrich sympathetic on a personal level.  All you need to know about the CNN South Carolina debate happened in the first three minutes, when moderator John King began the night by questioning Newt on allegations made by his ex-wife Marianne.  Gingrich proceeded to do what he’s done best in the campaign—and better than any other candidate on the stage by a wide margin—and that’s rip into the MSM for their malignant and pathological liberal bias.  For Gingrich, a man largely known for having a sordid personal history, to spin the interview that we were told could “end his career” into a net-positive is simultaneously a mega-victory for him and a loss for the increasingly embarrassing CNN.  That is, of course, unless the media can keep the “open marriage” story alive somehow…  The standing ovation last night wasn’t just for Newt; it was for all of us who have raised awareness about the Democrat Media Complex.

Mitt Romney’s night will likely be defined by his mealy-mouthed non-answer when pressed on his reluctance to release his tax returns. I’ve been a proponent of saving anything that could be potentially useful in the general election for the general election, so up until recently I was sympathetic to Mitt’s plan to hold off on disclosing those documents until the likely event he squares off with Barack Obama.  Why not try to trade them for Obama’s illusive college transcripts?  Alas, it has become a political football, so Mitt’s probably best advised to drop them now.  My only hope is that the other candidates’ insistence Mitt releases his tax returns post haste isn’t so that they can use them to play the divisive and dispiriting Occupy-style class warfare politics we saw last week.  It’s startling that the record national debt wasn’t discussed last night, but the candidates talked about Romney’s tax docs until they were blue in the face.

Hopefully people will also remember Romney’s excellent answer when King asked what the candidates would have done differently during the campaign.  Romney delivered a witty and self-deprecating line about how he would have made sure to secure 34 more votes in Iowa and then that he should have focused even more narrowly on Barack Obama, which has been the cornerstone of his campaign. (more…)

Mitt Romney continues to display competence and confidence, but his rhetoric doesn’t soar and the base is inherently skeptical of his record, so he hasn’t quite put this thing away.

Last time I wrote about these debates, I said the vaudeville cane should have dragged Perry away, and his cerebral flatulence tonight proved me right. His inability to remember the three federal departments he would cut was easily the most awkward moment of the primary season thus far. The “SNL” staff writers are eternally grateful, I’m sure.

Herman Cain has planted his—to quote Perry—big ole flag with 9-9-9, and he’s going to sink or swim with it. In what seemed to be a heavily coached performance, Cain pivoted nearly every answer to the merits of his proposed tax plan. Cain has been arguably the most articulate candidate on the stage when it comes to having an inspirational vision for America’s future in the context of its past, and it’s beyond me why he would rather singularly focus on a specific policy (which may not pass, let alone work) than on that vision. Thankfully, it looks as though this debate will mark the moment where America began to move on from the sexual harassment claims leveled against Cain. That is, of course, unless more details emerge or another accuser steps forward…

But the winner of the debate was Newt. I mentioned last time that he’s my sleeper pick to challenge Romney, and he did a lot to improve his chances tonight.

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[UPDATED]

[WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS THE NAKED HUMAN FORM... WITH HATS]

Just over a week ago, I arrived at the Occupy San Francisco tent city on Embarcadero and Market St. to what can be best described as a sea of hippie clichés.

The attendees: young adults, a smattering of way-too-tan middle-aged folks clinging to their youth, and hobos.  The smell: skunk weed.  The vibe: chill (bro).

OSF was so filthy you could feel it in your skin, and unlike Tea Parties, where the rallies tend to have a structure with speakers and musical acts, everyone at OSF was either sitting around, standing around, walking around, or naked-bicycling around:

The space at Pee Wee Herman Park was being jointly “occupied” by the protesters and a simpatico group of bike riders known as “Critical Mass,” who have used their facebook page to fund-raise for Occupy Wall Street and glorify those who dress in Occupy protest attire.  The combination was potent.

It was a few days before Halloween, so what apparently started as a run-of-the-mill Occupy tent city had become an ad hoc costume party… Or haunted house, depending on your point of view.

This guy couldn’t bring himself to occupy a pair of BVDs? (more…)

Hours after Big Journalism reported on a death threat made against an ABC reporter covering the Occupy Oakland protest and following a week’s worth of videos at Breitbart.TV chronicling the demonstration’s descent into lawless disorder, City Hall has said that the tent city will not continue. Last night an eviction notice was issued that cited the “increasing frequency of violence, assaults, threats and intimidation.” [VIEW THE EVICTION NOTICE BELOW.]

“Hopefully there’s not a riot…”

From the San Jose Mercury News:

A letter posted on the city’s web site at 8 p.m. expresses concerns about a wide range of public health and security issues surrounding the 10-day old camp in Frank Ogawa Plaza. No moves have been made by police or other officials to dismantle the camp since the notice went up.

[...]

Citing a rat infestation, numerous fire hazards, threats of intimidation and open displays of violence, Thursday’s letter from city officials appears to be a first step toward moving the residents out of the camp.

“We believe that after 10 days, the City can no longer uphold public health and safety. In recent days, camp conditions and occupants’ behavior have significantly deteriorated, and it is no longer manageable to maintain a public health and safety plan,” reads the notice posted on the city’s web site.

A pro-Occupy blogger for the San Francisco Chronicle attributes the eviction notice
to the footage of Occupy Oakland posted at the Breitbart sites:

The whole move toward eviction seems to have been started by the selfishness of certain specific San Francisco Bay Area Media types, and perhaps with a healthy assist from Breitbart TV.

What began nationwide as a run-of-the-mill gathering of various socialists and Communists plunged quickly into bedlam: squalor, violence, public urination, fire hazards, and public sex at Occupy Oakland.  The Occupy protesters eventually banned media from the tent city and threatened the life of KGO-TV’s Amy Hollyfield, who was allegedly accosted by a man who said, “We shoot white bitches like you around here.” (more…)

In the world of Twitter, YouTube, and the 24/7 news cycle, these debates bear a much closer resemblance to a baseball season than to prize fights.  In other words, consistency is key and you can’t win it all in one night.  There are only two people who demonstrate consistency night-in and night-out, and that’s Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.

Paul is consistent only in the sense that he seems to be incapable of thinking clearly and wastes time that we could be spending getting to know the next GOP nominee.  And he’s 76-years-old.  The only reason you don’t know that fact is because none of his opponents are threatened by his candidacy enough to point it out.

Our only rock-steady debater is Mitt.  Though he’s rarely inspiring, he simply doesn’t give a bad answer and has a thoughtful response to every challenge.  Not only can he take a punch, he’s the only candidate who gets himself up for every go-round and is eager to engage.  Compare that with Rick Perry—clearly a good man and an effective Governor—who has done nothing in the past eight weeks to demonstrate that he could make his high school debate team, much less go toe to toe with Obama and then the world.  Tonight was the night where the giant Vaudeville cane should have come out to pull him off stage.

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About three miles south of Beverly Hills in the upper-middle class neighborhood of Beverlywood is Hamilton High School. An otherwise ordinary Los Angeles Unified School District-sponsored juvenile detention center, Hamilton is home to a couple of well regarded magnet programs, particularly the Academy of Music Magnet. The Music Magnet is the old stomping grounds of pop stars, Broadway talent, and even Hollywood A-listers who were drawn to a public school program that has a focus on the arts. Yet, even this rare LAUSD high school that students actually want to attend has become a casualty of the horrendous budget crises in the state of California.

Reporter Steve Lopez was dispatched to the scene to write up the various cutbacks for the Los Angeles Times. Lopez is known for being the journalist whose articles on a schizophrenic musician inspired the Robert Downey Jr./Jaime Foxx film The Soloist. Then all of a sudden, what had the makings of a compelling human interest piece on one of the handful of quintessentially Hollywood high schools quickly devolved into a sob story about how these poor teachers and students have been victimized by the dastardly Republicans and their resistance to tax hikes.

How did he do this?

First, Lopez paints a rosy picture of the school by glowingly describing a performance by the jazz band and cherry-picking quotes raving about teachers; his portrayal of Hamilton is a lot like Sean Penn’s depiction of Iraq in Team America:

As it happens, Hamilton is my local high school and I have family and friends who have graduated from the Music Magnet in recent years. To put it bluntly, many of their experiences didn’t resemble the mythical land of incredible teachers and students anxious to learn that Lopez describes. An anonymous Hamilton graduate told me she recalls students doing cocaine in the state-of the art auditorium (which was overhauled with a lavish grant to the Music Magnet)—in fact, the source recalled students showing up to class on an assortment of drugs. Faculty members were seen “celebrating” with students at cast parties after plays.

And I thought programs like these were meant to keep kids off drugs. (more…)

Stay with me here: The Boxer campaign has acknowledged that the letter we posted earlier on Boxer campaign letterhead soliciting teachers to recruit student volunteers is authentic… but they weren’t really soliciting teachers to recruit student volunteers… but they are still sorry. Prepare to have your intelligence insulted by Boxer campaign manager Rose Kapolczynski:

Because some local social studies teachers encourage students to volunteer, Boxer campaign volunteer coordinators notified a handful of schools near the campaign headquarters that the campaign was accepting volunteers. The letter did not ask teachers to solicit students to work on the campaign or to use school facilities, supplies or equipment for political purposes. The sole intent of the letter was to provide interested students with information about a volunteer opportunity. However, the letter, which was written by a volunteer and reviewed by a junior staffer, was inappropriate and we apologize. The author of the letter has been counseled and campaign coordinators will no longer conduct outreach to public schools.”

I acknowledge there’s an amount of wordplay, an amount of posturing done in a campaign, particularly when we get down to the wire in a tight race, but the hubris in this response is overwhelming, if not impressive.  The aforementioned letter begins, “As you may know, Senator Boxer is facing her toughest race yet.  With only 19 days left until election day, it’s now or never.” Later on it’s suggested that teachers can award extra credit to students who work on the Boxer campaign. Yet, according to the Boxer crew…

The letter did not ask teachers to solicit students to work on the campaign or to use school facilities, supplies or equipment for political purposes…

If this is true, then why are they apologizing?  They’ve done nothing wrong after all!

But they have done something wrong: Those responsible for Boxer’s reelection bid asked teachers to pimp out their kids for her campaign, and got caught red handed.  Now they have the audacity to play semantics games in the press and pass the blame down the chain to “a junior staffer.”

Honestly, how dumb does Barbara Boxer think we are?

Here’s the letter again:

Two weeks ago the U.K. Guardian gleefully reported that the self-proclaimed “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg, the best-selling writer on the environment, professor, and director of the Copenhagen Consensus think tank, had made a serious acquiescence to the global warming climate change global climate disruption movement that could quite possibly change the face of the entire conversation. From the article:

The world’s most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today” and “a challenge humanity must confront”, in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.

Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled “sceptical environmentalist” once compared to Adolf Hitler by the UN’s climate chief, is famous for attacking climate scientists, campaigners, the media and others for exaggerating the rate of global warming and its effects on humans, and the costly waste of policies to stop the problem.

But in a new book to be published next month, Lomborg will call for tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change. “Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century,” the book concludes.

Lomborg has a unique voice in the climate change debate because while he has always believed in man-made climate change, he doesn’t believe it’s catastrophic nor does he subscribe to the Leonardo DiCaprio/Laurie David school of thought that massive cut backs in carbon emissions is the one and only way to fix the problem. So a “U-turn” from this stance would mean that after years of studying and writing on the matter, he’s all of a sudden become an Inconvenient Truther. Having met Mr. Lomborg just last year and being a fan of his work, this report made me highly… skeptical. (more…)

In the early stages of the Shirley Sherrod controversy, the media began to craft the narrative Shirley Sherrod was the embodiment of the term “post-racial.” Then on July 22^nd on Anderson Cooper 360, this happened:

SHIRLEY SHERROD: I think he [BREITBART] would like to get us stuck back in the times of slavery. That’s where I think he would like to see all black people end up again. And that’s why…

COOPER: You think — you think he’s racist?

SHERROD: … I think he’s so vicious. Yes, I do.

Cooper, dumbfounded by Sherrod’s comments, did not muster any type of a challenge to Sherrod.

Flash forward to yesterday, and AC360 went on record to admit that he had erred by allowing Sherrod to deliver such provocative remarks unchecked, and said that he’d handle the situation differently if he had the opportunity again. Still, a good-faith Nexis search indicates that Cooper has not adequately alerted his viewership that Andrew Breitbart had in fact granted Shirley Sherrod her redemption in both the originally released footage of her speech to the NAACP audience and in his write-up that accompanied the video. We would appreciate it if he would broaden the contextual frame of the story to include that bit of information that has not been adequately conveyed by the media up until this point. (more…)

She was likened to a modern day Rosa Parks or Nelson Mandela, but the former Ag official, according to the Washington Post, was not interviewed on a single major Sunday morning talk-show following a week that can only be described as a Shirley Sherrod media frenzy.  Though the conversation on Sunday morning focused on race in America, noticeably absent from the discussion was the woman behind the controversy. Earlier this week a handful of people in the blogosphere began to speculate Sherrod would pull off a “full Ginsburg,” or become only the thirteenth person to appear on all major Sunday talk-shows on the same day since the feat was first accomplished by William H. Ginsburg in 1998.  However, this was before a clip of Sherrod suggesting Andrew Breitbart wants blacks “stuck back in the times of slavery” went viral.  Sherrod also drew extensive criticism late in the week for blasting Fox News as racist.

Considering the Shirley Sherrod interview barrage that took place last Thursday, to not see Sherrod on television Sunday morning sends a clear signal the mainstream media no longer feels allowing the public to get to know the real Shirley Sherrod advances their agenda.

Last week, Charles Krauthammer pointed out that while Sgt. Crowley got a beer summit after Obama merely (and mistakenly) said he “acted stupidly,” Shirley Sherrod got just a seven-minute phone call after she was forced to resign.  The White House and the Obama Administration who hastily relieved her of her position were already keeping her at arms length, and now the mainstream media is too.

The next time someone asks you to explain “the politics of personal destruction,” use this example: Video surfaces of a United States Congressman attacking a college student, grabbing him by the wrist, neck, and body, and assaulting another student’s camera.  The U.S. Representative refuses to immediately release the first student despite the student’s repeated pleas.  You are an official of that Congressman’s political party.  How do you respond?  You attack the publisher of a website that released the video.  Behold, from Politico’s Ben Smith:

A national Democratic Party official e-mailed around a set of talking points about an hour ago, under the subject heading, “Etheridge Gotcha Video Background.”

Democrats are seeking to raise questions about the video, which first appeared on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government, because of what’s widely viewed as the media’s mishandling of the ACORN story, which emerged without context from edited videos. In particular, party officials say the video was likely taken by a tracker for the Republican Party, which would explain the effort taken to conceal his identity.

From the talking points:

Push hard w/ blogs the lack of credibility inherent to anything Breitbart does/posts, given its role in the debunked ACORN videos:

(more…)