Journolist

Derek Hunter

Rejecting Science: When The Study Doesn’t Match the Liberal Agenda, Liberals Ignore the Study

by Derek Hunter

To say environmentalists are immune to reality is an understatement. When anyone dare question their conclusions, their deeply held “religious” beliefs, they are immediately attacked as a heretic, or worse, a shill for whatever industry they are trying to destroy. The soundness of the science, and the lack of such on their part, is irrelevant, it’s agenda uber alles. They find someone involved in what goes against their view who they can play “6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon” with and connect to whatever industry/organization they’re trying to destroy and claim that discredits everything contrary to their orthodoxy. But every once in a while something so beautifully karmic happens…That’s what this is about.

Bisphenol-A (BPA) is a chemical used to harden plastic so it can be used in the countless ways it helps improve countless millions of lives. As it is a chemical, it was only a matter of time before the extremist environmentalists started talking of the “dangers” of it to human beings. Ironically, charges of this nature are always led by people who have no concern of human beings. They are the same type of people who effectively banned the mosquito killing agent DDT. That ban has led to millions of avoidable deaths around the world from malaria. While the banning of BPA wouldn’t lead to deaths, it’s banning wouldn’t save any lives either. But it would put a lot of people out of work.

But work, jobs, livelihoods of individuals has no place in the environmental extremist agenda. They’ve replaced what was known to kill malaria carrying mosquitos with nets to sleep under. So instead of eliminating the problem they’ve reduced the problem…during sleep hours. Malaria’s largest number of victims are infants and children who don’t have the wherewithal to swat mosquitos away when they land on them, and since no one can live their whole life in a net, their exposure risk is high.

The book from which the religion of modern environmentalism sprang is “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson. In many ways it is the Bible of that movement. And even though it has been discredited, the “Silent Spring” model still serves as the modus operandi of the environmentalist cult. Ban first, ask questions later. That’s what they were trying to do with BPA.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Utopia…

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John Nolte

WeinerGate: MSM Ignores Trifecta of Sex, Politics, and a Rising Political Star

by John Nolte

With the exception of Jonathan Allen and Ben Smith of Politico, who both deserve credit for covering the Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) story we broke here at the Bigs on Friday night, the mainstream media’s silence on this objectively important story has been deafening. And now that 24 hours have passed since the story originally broke, there’s simply no way to blame the MSM’s lack of interest on the holiday weekend.

After all, this isn’t just any story. Regardless of how it all eventually breaks, what we have here is either the story of a high profile, recently married New York Congressman who’s seriously considering a Mayoral run in Manhattan, tweeting his “junk” to a young woman two decades his junior — and lying to the media about it. Or we have a story involving a high-profile Congressman’s Facebook and Twitter account being hacked with pornographic pictures.

So ask yourself: how does the MSM justify all but ignoring something so juicy? And then if you’re still not convinced of the story’s newsworthiness, remind yourself that these events are not unfolding in one of those odd, square-shaped states our journalist-class fly over every once in a while. This is a New York story that involves the trifecta of politics, sex, and a rising political star. Furthermore, the icing on the cake is Bill and Hillary Clinton. Last July, in a ceremony officiated by former President Clinton himself, Rep. Weiner married Hillary’s top aide, Huma Abedin.

Now, please don’t bother to answer any of the above questions. They were rhetorical and answered by the “D” after Rep. Weiner’s name. Naturally, the hacking of a Facebook account connected to one of the best known and most outspoken Democrats in Congress is a bonafide story … unless you’re afraid of where that story might lead. And if you’re interested in what a WeinerGate story looks like when a news outlet is terrified afraid of where it might lead, read this.

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Rick Amato

Did Mexican Government Call It An ‘Active War’, Or An ‘Act Of War’?

by Rick Amato

In my previous column I wrote that Congressman Darrell Issa said the Mexican government has called Projects ‘Gun Runner’ and ‘Fast and Furious’ an “act of war”.  After being flooded with numerous media inquiries the Congressman’s office contacted me and said the actual words he used were  “an active war” -not “an act of war”- and he was referring to the Mexican war on drugs not, not Projects Gun Runner and Fast And Furious.

After listening to the audio from our interview several times I must say I find it indistinguishable.  You can listen to the You Tube below and decide for yourself.

You Tube: Darrell Issa interview

The Washington Post is reporting that the words ‘act of war’ were used in a previous interview conducted with California talk show host Rick Roberts a few weeks ago.  Either way over 2500 weapons were inexcusably allowed to walk, two Border Agents are dead, the DOJ is stonewalling Issa’s subpoena requests, and the Congressman should be applauded for his efforts to find out who made the decision behind Projects ‘Gun Runner’ and ‘Fast and Furious’.

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John Nolte

MSM Uses Palin’s Own Children as Political Weapons Against Her

by John Nolte

In their ongoing crusade to target and silence decent, everyday Americans as racists, some in the MSM love to use the term “dog-whistle” in order to ascribe racial motives to words like, say, “basketball.” Well, lately I’ve been hearing a dog-whistle of my own — a dog-whistle of the journ-o-list variety that tells me that in their relentless campaign to destroy Sarah Palin and undercut her as a serious political force, the MSM is preparing to up the ante when it comes to using the Governor’s own family and children as a political weapon against her.

First, a little background…

Why the Media Whips Up the Palin-Fury

Watching the MSM react to Governor Palin over the last few years has been an illuminating crash course in Alinsky 101. Like elite, elbow-patched community organizers, the media collectively targets, polarizes, demonizes and intentionally creates a perpetual storm of personal drama around the Governor in the hopes of exhausting even those of us who support her. I call it whipping up the Palin-Fury.

This is a common tactic from the Left, but one we usually see played out in the streets with the idea being to so toxify the atmosphere that decent people give up the fight and go home just to get away from the awfulness of it all. The last few months of ugly and relentless pro-union protests in Wisconsin — though a failure for the left — were a textbook example of this. However, when it comes to Governor Palin, what we’re seeing is this tactic practiced by almost every so-called “objective” news outlet in America.

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John Nolte

Trig’s Crew: Wonkette Unifies Right and Left to Declare Children Off-Limits

by John Nolte

The Internet phenomenon that is Trig’s Crew (Twitter tag #TrigsCrew) might represent the most potent example of the power of online activism we’ve seen yet. In a matter of hours, citizen activists rallied around the righteous cause of condemning a vile Wonkette attack against Governor Sarah Palin’s three-year-old son, Trig with astonishing results.

Best of all, and contrary to Andrew Sullivan feeling all “queasy,” this was not a “Palinista” uprising.  (Heads up: When it comes to Trig Palin, Sullivan is nothing more than Wonkette with professorial elbow patches.) Decent people of all political stripes, including some in the media, put partisan politics aside over this — and it was a beautiful thing to behold. Better still, organized under their hash tag, a group of citizen activists discovered the small “d” democratic wonder of Twitter and effectively learned how to politely, firmly, and publicly fight for something they believed in.

Personally, I’m not a boycott person, but that’s my right. Others have a right to boycott, and brother, did Trig’s Crew put on a boycott. All on their own, they organized a list of Wonkette advertisers, tweeted them directly with a request that they pull their ads, and kept track of those who did and didn’t. Within hours, it was obvious a tidal wave was brewing and by the next day it was just as obvious that it had hit. As of this writing, over 30 advertisers agreed with Trig’s Crew and pulled their ads from Wonkette. Seemingly, and in record time, the dismantling of a fairly mainstream, left-wing snark-site seemed probable.

Like the Tea Party, Trig’s Crew has represented the very best of mainstream America as they engaged in an inspiring First Amendment online debate with dignity and decency. So commendable is their behavior, that Slate’s Dave Weigel obviously had to dig pretty deep to come up with this single tweet — one of thousands — in order to manufacture something (which required some back-filling in the form of a later update) that might tarnish the whole movement as “jumping the shark.” Obviously, this is the MSM-Alinsky-Tea Party-Playbook all over again — where a single and unique negative out of an ocean of positives is intentionally amplified to unfairly brand the kind of grassroots campaign elites always find so threatening.

Whatever.

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John Nolte

Twitter Power: Mock the MSM and Watch Them Launch Phony Attacks against Sarah Palin

by John Nolte

The other night, a funny thing happened on the way to an idea… With an absurd attack against Sarah Palin, the MSM proved a point I was going to make about the potent power of Twitter better than I ever could. But, first, a little background.

Let me see a show of hands. How many of you sit home frustrated by MSM bias, lies, misinformation and double standards?

Wow. That many.

So my idea was to write an article encouraging people (meaning, you) to sign up for a Twitter account and help us to smoke out MSM bias — to urge you to tweet about it and  sound the alarm online whenever you see it. It’s a ridiculously simple process and not only will you feel better, but word will spread and the culprits will know you’re spreading that word. The idea most certainly isn’t to get the hopelessly corrupt media to stop being hopelessly corrupt. If plummeting circulation rates and embarrassing ratings can’t get them to change their ways, nothing will. But more people policing the MSM and spreading the word on Twitter is a beautiful thing, good for America — and what better way to expose them than through the art of mockery? For example…

The MSM has set for themselves a Sarah Palin Standard whereas any perceived mistake the Governor makes becomes an instant part of the noisy MSM narrative. The idea, obviously, is to destroy her. And yet, when she hits a grand slam like she did with her speech in Madison Saturday, the coverage pales in comparison to, say, when the MSM spends 10 days blaming her for those heinous murders in Tucson.

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John Nolte

Who Got to Chris Matthews?: ‘Hardball’ Defense of Breitbart Memory-Holed

by John Nolte

Chris Matthews strayed from the liberal talking points today. But don’t worry, it only happened for a little while. Two hours, in fact, before he was back to his old self, lashing out irrationally at conservatives. We’re not sure where Matthews’ original bout of intellectual honesty came from, but we’re pretty sure that some sort of JournoListy Intervention occurred to get him back on message.

ChrisMatthews

For those of you who don’t know (and according to the latest ratings, that’s most of you), Matthews does a 5pm “Hardball” on MSNBC that repeats at 7pm. Today, during the 5pm hour, Matthews had as his guests hardcore leftists Joan Walsh of Salon.com and former Governor Howard Dean. The issue at hand was Shirley Sherrod’s promise to sue Andrew Breitbart. Well, that wasn’t the real issue at hand. The idea was to beat holy hell out of Breitbart, but things didn’t exactly go according to the JournoListy Playbook.

Believe it or not, Matthews defended Breitbart.

In the early part of the 5pm segment with Walsh and Dean, there appears to be some confusion over whether or not Matthews was aware of the fact that Breitbart posted two excerpts of Sherrod’s speech as opposed to the whole 35-plus minutes. But later in the segment — and this is important — after this discrepancy is cleared up and the full excerpt in question has been aired for Matthews and the “Hardball” audience (this, according to Newsbusters), a fully informed Matthews still defends Breitbart making the crucial and oft-ignored point that… (more…)

David A. Keene

JournoList: Bias Leads to Recklessness

by David A. Keene
Politicians on the losing side of an issue or argument tend to look for a way to change the subject or redirect the debate to put their opponent on the defensive.
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In today’s politically correct world, liberals invariably try to change the subject by charging as loudly and as widely as possible that their opponents are racists. Thus, opponents of ObamaCare were racists, the Tea Partiers are racists, Andrew Breitbart is a racist, and Fox News or anyone to the right of, say, Nancy Pelosi is a racist.

It is possible that a few of the folks who throw such charges around actually believe that everyone who differs with them is racially motivated, but most play the race card because it seems to work. This cynical willingness to exploit racial hatred for political or ideological purposes comes through most clearly in the e-mail traffic among the liberal journalists who frequented and perhaps plotted strategy on Journolist, the now happily defunct listserv e-mail discussion group recently outed by Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller.

Ezra Klein, a former Howard Dean campaign walker currently employed by The Washington Post, had hosted an e-mail discussion group among as many as 400 liberal journalists, hacks and academics who during the course of the 2008 presidential campaign actively discussed how to promote Barack Obama and smear his critics.

Those who were a part of Journolist are today attacking Carlson for publishing “off-the-record” conversations among friends that were never intended to see the light of day. It’s a curious defense from men and women who in the course of their daily employment regularly violate the privacy of those about whom they write, but even a cursory reading of what Carlson has thus far published explains why they are so upset.

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John Nolte

From JournoList to Shirley Sherrod: The Left’s Default Response Is Fascism

by John Nolte

CNN Anchor to Shirley Sherrod: Would you like to see [Andrew Breitbart's] site to be shut down?

Shirley Sherrod: “That would be a great thing. Because I don’t see how that advances us in this country.”

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Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA on JournoList: “I hate to open this can of worms,” he wrote, “but is there any reason why the FCC couldn’t simply pull [Fox's'] broadcasting permit once it expires?”

Why so fascist?

As a proud dues-paying member of The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, here’s a little peek behind the curtain to take home with you over the weekend…

Never once, not even in private — not even as the entire corrupted media was savaging Sarah Palin’s family and reporting on the status of a private citizen’s plumber’s license — not even as the whole of the MSM was spreading lies told by the Congressional Black Caucus about the Tea Party hurling racial slurs — not even after reading what we already knew to be true on JournoList — and not even now as we watch all the hypocritical sanctimony surrounding Shirley Sherrod drip from the same MSM lips that refused to broadcast videos proving the Tea Party had been defamed by members of Congress — never once have I heard a fellow Vast Right-Wing Conspirator even hint at the idea of silencing, quieting, or shutting down the other side. (more…)

Publius

Tuesday Open Thread: JournoList Edition

by Publius

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!

ezra-klein1

Andrew Breitbart

JournoList: …Yes, But the Reporters at Pravda Weren’t Such Insufferable Assholes

by Andrew Breitbart

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:

Obama Press

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…)

Publius

‘JournoList’ E-mails Show Media Plotting to Kill Stories about Reverend Jeremiah Wright: Daily Caller

by Publius

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.

liberal media bias

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…)