“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.”

Naturally, Occupy Oakland says it’s not going anywhere but City spokeswoman Karen Boyd says the complaints have been mounting and so a confrontation seems like a very real possibility.

Moreover, a far-left government like that of the City of Oakland acknowledging that the Occupy protest poses a risk to the safety and well-being of its citizenry could encourage and embolden other cities to further investigate the various protests.

Below you’ll find a link round-up of the reports issued on Breitbart.TV.  This marks a clear victory for citizen journalists and new media, without which the true nature of Occupy Oakland would never have come to light.

***

#OccupyOakland Evicted After Reports Of Crime And Intimidation Featured At Breitbart Sites

#OccupyOakland Pot Stash Caught on Video; Mayor in Denial

#OccupyOakland Confrontations with Media Continue; Reporter Bitten by Protester’s Dog

#OccupyOakland Out Of Control: Rats, Graffiti, Vandalism, Sexual Harassment, Public Sex and Urination

#OccupyOakland Protesters Threaten Reporter; Cameras Would Be Stolen, Broken If Media Enters Tent City

Abusive #OccupyOakland Protesters Ban Media From Tent City

Freed Hikers Visit #OccupyOakland

#OccupyOakland Protesters Promote Communist, Socialist Ideals

#OccupyOakland Protester Speaks Out Against The Military; ‘Killers’ For Imperial Greed

#OccupyOakland Gets Call From ‘Comrades’ At #OccupyWallSt

I said at the time that I considered it a journalistic scandal that such an error-ridden piece appeared in Time magazine, a once-respected publication.  For instance, in the article he stated remarkably that “[i]f the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn’t say so.”  I have dubbed this scandal “Stengel-gate.”

I also considered it scandalous because of who the author, Richard Stengel, is:

The author is not only the Managing Editor for Time, but he spent two years as President and CEO of the National Constitution Center.  And even today, he works with the National Constitution Center’s Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution, whose stated mission is “to help both professional journalists and students interested in journalism understand constitutional issues more deeply.”  That is right.  He is there to help journalists understand the Constitution better.

It has been about a week and the story has even appeared on Fox News.  And yet there is apparently no correction, no retraction of the story, or even a defense of it.

So frankly in an effort to keep the heat on, I decided to explore the other end of the scandal: what on earth was he doing working at something called the National Constitution Center?

I plan to spend several days discussing that issue and to kick it off, I decided to write a letter to its current President and CEO, the man holding the position that Richard Stengel once occupied: David Eisner.

So on Tuesday night, I wrote to him directly.  You can see the letter I wrote below the fold (the format is slightly altered by wordpress itself).

I do not know if he will respond or how he will respond.  But whatever his reaction is, even a non-response, will reflect on him and his organization.  And that in and of itself is noteworthy.

——————————————-

David Eisner

President and Chief Executive Officer

National Constitution Center,

525 Arch Street

Independence Mall

Philadelphia, PA 19106

[email omitted]

Dear Mr. Eisner,

My name is Aaron Worthing, and I write to you as a concerned member of the public.  I wanted to alert you about the recent statements of one of your members that calls into question his fitness to serve at the National Constitution Center.  Specifically, I wanted to talk about Richard Stengel, who used to serve as President and CEO of your organization, and still serves on the Board of Advisors for the Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution.  This program, as you know, is designed to help journalists to understand the Constitution more deeply.  As an attorney and as a private citizen, I consider that to be a laudable goal, very much worth pursuing.

However, I am deeply concerned about what role Mr. Stengel might be playing in your organization given the shocking lack of knowledge that he has recently demonstrated in regards to the Constitution, in his work as Managing Editor of Time magazine.  On June 23, Time magazine published a cover story by him entitled “One Document, Under Siege,” discussing the Constitution and its application to four present controversies.  I was stunned to discover fourteen clear errors in that Time article and published a piece outlining those errors at Big Journalism.  Eight of those errors specifically relate to the interpretation of the Constitution and are generally obvious on the face of the document.  The most remarkable paragraph in his piece made this patently false statement about the Constitution:

If the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn’t say so. Article I, Section 8, the longest section of the longest article of the Constitution, is a drumroll of congressional power. And it ends with the “necessary and proper” clause, which delegates to Congress the power “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.” Limited government indeed.

(emphasis added.)

That is a direct quote from him, and it does not appear to be taken out of context.  I invite you to read his original piece to verify that he did actually say it.  I will admit that I could hardly believe it myself when I first saw it.

There are seven other errors that directly relate to the Constitution.  They are:

1. The Constitution is not law.
2. The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment emancipated the slaves.
3. The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment granted the right to vote to African Americans.
4. The original Constitution declared that black people were to be counted as three-fifths of a person.
5. The original, unamended Constitution prohibited women from voting.
6. The Commerce Clause grants Congress the power to tax individuals based on whether they buy a product or service.
7. Social Security is a debt within the meaning of Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Each of these claims are patently false, and the majority of them can be proven false by doing nothing more than reading the Constitution itself.  Indeed many of these points are in my opinion common knowledge.  I invite you to read the linked materials and make up your own mind on the subject.

But I wish to ask you, sir, two questions:

First, what is Mr. Stengel’s exact role in the National Constitution Center?  Specifically, does he teach others about the Constitution?

Second, does the National Constitution Center have any official statement regarding the serial inaccuracies that appeared in Time, a national magazine, regarding the Constitution?

I will note that your website states that your organization as a whole is “dedicated to increasing public understanding of, and appreciation for, the Constitution, its history, and its contemporary relevance” and therefore I have to believe that once you are made aware of these errors, you would be eager to seek that this information be corrected.

I thank you for taking the time to read this email and to consider the issues that it raises.  I eagerly await your response.

Sincerely,

Aaron Worthing

——————————

Please note that this post is expected to be cross-posted at Big Journalism and was adapted from a substantially similar post at Patterico’s Pontifications.

The complete conversation was about what others might be able to do to cause disruption within the Miller campaign, not what KTVA could do.

The American public is supposed to believe that the staff of KTVA were sitting around imagining potentially scandalous stories that others might foist upon the Miller campaign and not ideas that they, themselves were conjuring.

Instead of just taking Mr. Bever’s word for it (like so many in the media and at Soros-Funded left-wing activist organizations have), lets actually hold the statements made on the recording up to the context Mr. Bever has provided.

Look at what was said and try as hard as you can to fit these sentences into that context:

MALE REPORTER: Oh yeah… can you repeat Joe Miller’s…uh… list of people, campaign workers, which one’s the molester?

[INAUDIBLE]

FEMALE VOICE: We know that out of all the people that will show up tonight, at least one of them will be a registered sex offender.

[Laughter]

MALE REPORTER: You have to find that one person…

If they were discussing what others might do, why do they keep saying “You” and “I”? Why don’t they say “They have to find that one person…” or “They know that out of all the people…”

FEMALE REPORTER: And the one thing we can do is ….we won’t know….we won’t know but if there is any sort of chaos whatsoever we can put out a twitter/facebook alert: saying what the… ‘Hey Joe Miller punched at rally.’

FEMALE REPORTER: Kinda like Rand Paul…I like that.

Again, do you notice how the reporter says, “And the one thing we can do is…”? If she is discussing what others might do, as Mr. Bever assures us, why doesn’t she say “And one thing they can do is…”?

The answer is simple. But clearly Mr. Bever and his apologists on the left think the American people are too stupid to scrutinize their embarrassingly lame explanation.

No one believes that these reporters were sitting around discussing what “others might be able to do to cause disruption within the Miller campaign.” At least no one who is not taking a Soros paycheck believes it.

I will leave it to my colleagues at Big Journalism to give the proper attention this article is due. However, in building their ideological case, the authors point to certain “facts” about stories that first appeared here, which necessitates a few words here.

In discussing the recent Shirley Sherrod imbroglio, the authors write that Breitbart,

did not quite own up to the seriousness of the error he committed – posting a video misleadingly edited to make it appear that a black Agriculture Department named Shirley Sherrod was boasting of discriminating against a white farmer.

We did not edit, much less misleadingly edit, any of Ms. Sherrod’s remarks. We posted two excerpts from her speech, representing the sum total of the video we had. We didn’t cut anything out of her speech. Is any news organization in the future who only posts excerpts from a speech vulnerable to the charge that it “misleadingly edited” it?

At the very end of one of the video excerpt’s, Ms. Sherrod begins to explain how she later realized her initial discrimination of the white farmer was wrong. In Andrew’s article about the speech he  noted

Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help.

If we were trying to show that Ms. Sherrod was “boasting” of discrimination and were prone to editing the tape as evidence, wouldn’t we have cut that part out? Wouldn’t we have neglected to mention that she eventually did the right thing? But, the media’s focus on Ms. Sherrod is really an attempt to misdirect attention from the NAACP, who was the real focus of the article and the video excerpts.

As Andrew’s article noted:

Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups’ racial tolerance.

We all now know that Ms. Sherrod’s anecdote was part of a larger point about the need to move beyond racial prejudices. But, the NAACP audience did not know that as they heard the speech. As Ms. Sherrod recounted the first part of her parable, how she declined to do everything she could for the farmer because of his race, the audience responded in approval. By itself, that made the video excerpt newsworthy.

Indeed, the NAACP, who was in possession of the full video for months, even noted in its initial statement condemning Ms. Sherrod:

The reaction from many in the audience is disturbing. We will be looking into the behavior of NAACP representatives at this local event and take any appropriate action.

This was always the story and it is clearly an uncomfortable one for the NAACP and, obviously, the authors of the Politico article. The media would rather focus on Ms. Sherrod or Andrew Breitbart than report that leaders of a state chapter of the NAACP approved of racial discrimination.

But, the authors aren’t finished there. To further underscore their point, they return to that old lefty cliche from last year; that what you saw with your own eyes on the ACORN tapes didn’t really happen. The authors make this outright statement:

The ACORN videos were later revealed to have been misleadingly edited…

Not alleged, mind you, but “revealed,” as if the Oracle of Delphi issued a formal proclamation. And, who exactly “revealed” this “fact:” oh, yes, Democrat Attorney General Jerry Brown. Brown is a long-time ally of ACORN and is running for Governor again this year. As ACORN had traditionally been an important part of Democrat candidate’s election efforts, he might have had an incentive to find that the ACORN videos were “misleadingly edited.” In fact, at the beginning of Brown’s investigation, a local ACORN spokesman told a meeting of local democrats that he had spoken to Brown’s office and was assured:

the fault WILL be found with the people that did the video — not ACORN.

That certainly adds some interesting context to Brown’s “finding.” Of course, Brown may objectively believe the ACORN videos were “misleadingly edited.” But he isn’t a disinterested observer. Politico should have noted that, even if it would have weakened their intended point. So too, they should have noted that, from the very beginning, the full audio recording and transcript of the entire ACORN interviews were available here. I have heard many on the left say ad nauseum that the ACORN videos were “heavily edited”, but I have yet to see one concrete example of how this alleged editing altered the substance of what the videos revealed.

At the very beginning of Andrew’s article on racism at the NAACP, he noted that “context is everything.” To the authors of the Politico article, context is negotiable; simply another weapon in a reporter’s ideological tool-kit.

Sounds terrible, right? Sure, until you get the facts that Johnson doesn’t tell you. When it became clear that it wasn’t a “white nationalist conference,” Johnson tried to slither out of responsibility for his words by saying in a new post: “It’s very clear that I attributed the ‘white nationalist conference’ claim to One People’s Project; that’s what the words ‘according to’ mean.”

Busted! As if it weren’t obvious that in his original post, he was approving of and endorsing what One People’s Project said. But this is typical of Johnson’s weaselly hit-and-run smear tactics.

Meanwhile, Larry O’Connor at Big Journalism uncovered the truth about O’Keefe’s supposed participation in this conference:

1. He was not “manning a table” at the event.
2. He was not involved with the organization or operations of the event.
3. He attended the event with many of his Leadership Institute co-workers since it was right across the street from their building in Arlington, Va., and it was organized by other LI associates.
4. The organizer who is being called a “White Supremacist” is half Jewish and half Korean.
5. One of the panelist was an African-American named Kevin Martin.
6. The event was forced to move to a Georgetown University building in Arlington, not at a cross-burning.

This is what Johnson does. He has gotten a great deal of publicity for his announcement about how he parted ways with the Right, but the real story of Charles Johnson is not even that he changed his mind or his politics. Little Green Footballs today is not a political site. It’s an attack site. He has set about to destroy the most effective voices on the Right. But in fact, he destroyed himself.

In the New York Times profile of Johnson on January 24, I noted what he has been doing since late 2007: “the way he went after people was like a mental illness. There’s an evil to that, a maliciousness.” I was one of the first he went after, when he called me a white supremacist advocate in 2007 for attending a counterjihad conference in Brussels that he claimed was “neo-fascist.” When I was slated to introduce Mark Steyn at CPAC 2008, Johnson initiated an intimidation campaign. Mark Steyn told me later that Johnson had written both to Steyn and his publishers, warning them that I was “dangerous” and “crazy,” and should be disinvited from CPAC. But Steyn, a mensch, looked into Johnson’s charges and found nothing there. I introduced Steyn as scheduled, and Johnson’s later attempts at the personal destruction of freedom fighters were even less effective. He targeted Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and many others, always with the same tired lies: Racist! Fascist! Neo-Nazi! White supremacist!

And now it’s James O’Keefe’s turn. But while Johnson may fool some gullible people, his day in the sun is over. His influence and his traffic are guttersnipe low. The only ones who take him seriously anymore are the dwindling numbers of people who still listen to the dinosaur media. When Johnson was masquerading as a rational and decent voice with a circulation of 120,000 unique visitors a day, no one in big media ever paid him any mind. But since he became a turncoat and transformed LGF into a website of hate and smears, the left has come knocking like a sailor who just got paid.

Recently the Los Angeles Times did a mind-numbing puff piece on him, and the pathetic Barrett Brown of Vanity Fair wrote a sycophantic piece about this slug whom they once reviled and despised. They were trying to turn Johnson into a recruiting tool for on-the-fence moderate bloggers and spineless right wing bloggers. The message was that you, too, can be a media star! All you have to do is turn on your friends and deep-six your principles. You’ll remain invisible when you espouse rational and logical argument, but stab your allies in the back and you too will be the dahlink of the left.

But wait, it gets better. Chuck, groveling, stepping and fetching to garner favor with his new overlords of the left, fell short with the New York Times. Times reporter Jonathan Dee, who penned the piece, actually wrote responsibly. And while I don’t agree with all he wrote, Dee was fair. Robert Spencer explained: “The irrational hatred and determination to destroy others no matter what lies need to be told to do it, the paranoia, the roaring-mouse totalitarianism and cultishness, the self-obsession and self-righteous preening, the howlingly superficial thought processes — in short, every tendency we have come to know and love in Charles Johnson over the last two years is on display in this piece.”

He has been exposed again and again since 2007. No one should take Charles Johnson seriously anymore. Least of all any supporter of James O’Keefe.

The name of Obama funder and terrorist sympathizer Jodie Evans turns up twice in recently released White House visitor logs.

Buffy Wicks, center, 2008 photo by St. Louis Argus

The logs show that a ‘Jodie Evans’ met with Buffy Wicks, the Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement (OPE) on June 19, 2009. The meeting came just days after Evans’ group, Code Pink, visited the terrorist group Hamas in Gaza from May 28th to June 14th and was given a letter by Hamas to deliver to President Barack Obama.

On December 30th, the Obama administration released 25,000 records of visitors to the White House complex from the latter half of September. Mixed in those records were visits from other dates, including two by ‘Jodie Evans’ in June.

One visit is listed as a two-person meeting with Buffy Wicks in Room 146 in the Old Executive Office Building (OEOB). The meeting was scheduled at 19:02, June 16th for 10:30, June 19th by Ashley Baia, Staff Assistant with OPE. The meeting end time is recorded in the default setting of 23:59 for that day.

The record slots are blank for arrival, departure and cancellation notations, as are many of the records for visitors. There is no record of who was the second person in the meeting between ‘Jodie Evans’ and Buffy Wicks.

A week later, on June 24th, ‘Jodie Evans’ is listed as part of a group of 183 people given a “10 AM STAFF TOUR” that the log says met in the “RESIDENCE” in “WH.”

The log shows that visit by ‘Jodie Evans’ was scheduled five minutes after the tour began and was set by “VISITORS OFFICE.”

The June 24th appointment was apparently made by ‘Max Palevsky,’ a name shared by Jodie Evans’ ex-husband and current partner (it’s a California thing), on June 22nd at 17:53.

Taliban sympathizer Jodie Evans and President Barack Obama, Oct. 15, 2009

Like Jodie Evans, Max Palevsky was a bundler and donor for Obama’s presidential campaign. He was a co-host of Obama’s breakthrough Hollywood fundraiser in February 2007 along with Jodie Evans and the Dreamworks Trio.

When names of controversial associates of Obama and his administration have turned up in the visitor logs, the White House has denied that it was the controversial person and just a coincidence that similarly named people were on the list–including  ‘Jeremiah Wright’, ‘Bill Ayers’ and ‘Malik Shabazz’.

In last week’s holiday data dump, the name ‘Bertha Lewis’ turned up. The White House went on the record to deny that it was ACORN chief Bertha Lewis who visited the Obama residence in the White House. ACORN’s Bertha Lewis also denied it was her on the list.  In Big Journalism’s debut on Jan. 6 (Big Government’s sister publication), Andrew Breitbart reported about his confrontation with ACORN’s Bertha Lewis regarding her name on the White House Visitor Log.  She again denied it was her.

The White House will have a harder time denying that it was Obama funder and terrorist sympathizer Jodie Evans who twice visited the White House in June.

Last month, Jodie Evans wrote about her working with Obama’s Office of Public Engagement to coordinate communications undermining public support for Obama’s recently announced Af-Pak war strategy.

Since Obama was elected president, Jodie Evans (and Code Pink) has met with the Taliban, Hamas, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and President Obama, raising questions as to whether she is acting as a conduit for the terrorist groups to or from the president.

Jodie Evans has been quite outspoken in her her sympathies for terrorist groups that target the United States and our allies.

In a reprise of Code Pink’s aid for ‘the other side’ in Fallujah five years ago, Jodie Evans helped deliver ‘humanitarian aid’ to Hamas-controlled Gaza this past week. The trip was Code Pink’s seventh “delegation” to Hamas-controlled Gaza this year.

Jodie Evans was joined in her efforts aiding Hamas last week by Obama’s Hyde Park, Chicago friends and neighbors Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn–both former Weather Underground terrorists who waged war against the United States.

Are they circling the wagons?  The Democrat-party-front-group-acting Media Matters for America took great delight in hectoring Big Government over its report on ‘Bertha Lewis’ visiting the Obama White House.

Media Matters has ignored BG’s articles about Obama and Jodie Evans so far. Let’s see if they also try to knock this story down about Jodie Evans’ visits to Obama’s White House.

So at first I had trouble getting my words out. “I’m Andrew Breitbart,” I exhaled. Instead of hanging up, Bertha Lewis laughed like someone I would probably like in a different setting – but certainly not in this lifetime now that we are permanently and publicly tied to one another as media-based adversaries.

I knew the awkwardness of the moment would turn into trouble when I started asking her pointed questions and, sure enough, we soon we found ourselves in trouble.

“Did you go to the White House last year?” I asked.

Bertha Laughed heartily.  ”No,” she said.

“Really?” I pushed.

“No. One hundred per cent not. Not this year. Not last year. Not ever,” she stated firmly, all the while maintaining an awkward and ironic joviality that was likely born of the weirdness of our impromptu exchange. (more…)