On January 3, Media Matters for America (MMfA) linked, among others, a Big Government item by J. Christian Adams to support its mischaracterization of a Fox News segment on South Carolina’s contested voter ID law.

MMfA cherry-picked a small portion of Adams’s post, while ignoring the bulk of Adams’s argument solidly refuting MMfA’s own weak defense of Attorney General Eric Holder, thereby obscuring his criticism from their readers.

Emphasis via MMfA:

In a January 3 segment on Fox News’ Fox & Friends, correspondent Jim Angle promoted a number of falsehoods and misleading claims about voter ID laws and the Department of Justice’s action preventing one such law from being implemented in South Carolina.

Even Vote Fraudster J. Christian Adams Calls The Analogy “Silly And Constitutionally Incorrect”

Adams: Arguments “Flimsy” Since “The 15^th Amendment Is In Play When It Comes To Voting.”In a BigGovernment.com piece attacking the DOJ’s letter, J. Christian Adams wrote:

What Adams did was provide several solid arguments as to why Holder’s DOJ appears to be contesting the South Carolina law based largely upon misperceptions and fuzzy math for political reasons. Media Matters neglects to point out that Holder’s DOJ used out-dated data, grossly inflating any potential problem in South Carolina. They also repeatedly highlighted a 20% number already exposed as a math gimmick aimed at making the issue appear to be far more significant than it may actually be.

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Sydney Volanski, a 15-year-old who left the Girl Scouts of the USA and spoke out over the group directing the young members to liberal media group Media Matters for America, appeared on Fox and Friends to talk about the ordeal.

Sydney says the organization also promoted Planned Parenthood and abortion advocacy. In response she started a website, Speak Now: Girl Scouts, with the goal of exposing liberal bias within the Girl Scouts.

“Media”, the book given to the young girls which encouraged them to visit MMFA, is a publication made for those in grades six through eight that shows how they should process and understand the media messages around them. (more…)

Imagine watching Fox News one night and your high school child walks into the room and proceeds to tell you that “Fox News lies!”

That happened to Nick Benson, a Californian who had two students enrolled at Barstow High School in San Bernardino County.

“How do you know that,” Benson said he asked the boy.  “My teacher told me,” was his grandson’s response.

An editorial cartoon Barstow high school students read in "World History" class

Sure enough.  His grandson’s “World History” teacher, Jim Duarte, fed a steady dose of radical left wing propaganda to his students, disguised as classroom assignments.  It was like students were receiving their news from a slightly more sophisticated source than The Daily Show.

Last week Benson provided Education Action Group with several assignments that Duarte handed out last school year, when Benson’s grandson was in his class.

The articles and editorial cartoons students were expected to review were ridiculously slanted to the Big Labor/socialist point of view, as were the leading questions on classroom worksheets.

On one such worksheet, students read an article on how Fox News supposedly “pushed” a “falsehood” that government workers make more than their private sector counterparts. Says who? Media Matters, far-left reactionary outfit that based its public/private comparison on a “study” published by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank largely funded by Big Labor.

Duarte’s efforts to sell his personal political beliefs to students are all-too-familiar. Throughout the nation, we’ve been hearing teachers union leaders openly calling for instructors to preach pro-union and anti-American philosophy to their students, some as young as preschool age.

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There is a real class war going on in this country, and the Occupy Movement doesn’t seem to realize that they are on the wrong side of it. No, it’s not the wealth-hating, broad brush 99% vs. 1% class war that the Occupiers chant about. That so-called “war” is a merely a distraction from the real class split in America. Nope, the real deal pits American citizens on one side and on the other, safely ensconced inside the Beltway, are the Political Class.

The Political Class live in a world of wealth and power, and they don’t play by the same rules that you and I do. The Political Class operates above the law – literally, above it and lording over it. Since they make the laws, they can rewrite them to suit themselves. They pull the strings on the mainstream press establishment by playing games with information and power. As a result, the Political Class has been able to line its own pockets while much of the economy has gone to shambles.

If this all sounds a bit dramatic and dystopian, you haven’t read Throw Them All Out by Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer or seen the recent 60 Minutes segment that was based on the book’s research but independently verified and reported by CBS and Steve Kroft.

The book and TV segment ripped the mask off of Washington D.C. and showed how politicians use their resources — power and access to information — to make money. The books methodically lays out how politicians have been able to enrich themselves and keep this political brand of insider trading legal.  On 60 Minutes, they went into detail about how Republicans like Spencer Bachus and Democrats like leader Nancy Pelosi have been able to rake in hundreds of thousands or even (in Pelosi’s case) millions by having access to information that citizens do not. (more…)

My fellow Americans–and, I suppose, Canadians:

I regret to inform you that you are not the “99 Percent.”

The 99 Percent dislikes big banks, but also dislikes big government–and big messes.

The 99 Percent does not occupy property it does not own, public or private.

The 99 Percent does not steal from local businesses, does not attack police officers, does not storm national museums, and does not defecate in public.

Flyer at #OccupyWallStreet - the address for donations is a small building in Washington, DC shared by Code Pink and other "progressive" organizations

The 99 Percent does not rank people’s views based on their skin color, gender, or socioeconomic status.

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I give all but one of the GOP candidates an “F” for last night’s performance.

The very premise of the Republican presidential debate, hosted by NBC/Politico and broadcast by corporate welfare queen MSNBC proves that conservatives don’t understand the power the media is trying to exert over the next election.

It is an insult to the house of Reagan that MSNBC would try to pass itself off as a fair news organization with the eight Republican candidates giving the sneering, snobby and snide enemy a certain imprimatur of legitimacy.

The only reason the GOP is in a fighting stance in the 2012 presidential election is the Tea Party. The alternative narrative-drivers at MSNBC have spent much of the last two-plus years trying to frame millions and millions of patriotic and concerned Americans as violent, racist knuckle-draggers.

To dignify those habitual and unaccountable slanderers by appearing on that stage shows that apparently these Republicans and daily MSNBC punching bags don’t comprehend the scope of the media problem.

Barack Obama was elected due to the work of the media in 2008. Barack Obama will not cross the finish line in 2012 without the help of that same media–with MSNBC leaning forward as it pushes their wildly unpopular President from behind. (more…)

He has written about having sex with an underage girl, and claims he once threatened to kill a pregnant girlfriend unless she had an abortion. He claims to hate marijuana, but recommends heroin as the cure for suburban boredom. He mocks “Tea Baggers” and scorns “hippies.” His Russian newspaper was shuttered after a government crackdown, and he’s a regular on The Dylan Ratigan Show on MSNBC.

Meet Mark Ames, the provocateur who created the Koch brothers conspiracy theory.

Long before John Podesta’s Center for American Progress began targeting the Koch brothers for their supposed role in the Tea Party, and two years before the Kochs were cast as the villains of public sector union protests in Wisconsin, Ames had already shaped the Koch brothers meme.

Ames and co-author Yasha Levine launched the conspiracy theory–and its twin themes of drug abuse and gay sex–with a blog post (now removed) at Playboy.com in February 2009, entitled: “Backstabber: Is Rick Santelli High on Koch?” They published almost exactly the same article at their own site, exiledonline.com, as “Exposing the Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC’s Rick Santelli Sucking Koch?”

Ames and Levine alleged that Santelli’s famous “rant heard around the world” that inspired the Tea Party movement “was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger” for an “anti-Obama campaign.” That campaign, they claimed, had been planned for months before the 2008 election, and funded by “the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups.”

Ames would later explain that he had been inspired to write about the Kochs by his experiences in post-Soviet Moscow, when he edited a sensational newspaper, the eXile–described last year by Vanity Fair as “arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia” before it closed in 2008. (more…)

First Media Matters, now this.  Two Chicago professors at a Catholic University have been caught using school resources to attempt to shut down a “Tea Party” jobs fair that was being held one block away from President Obama’s birthday fundraiser.

The incident adds more fuel to the fire conservatives have been stoking for years; namely, that many U.S. universities  are just front organizations for Democrat recruitment and far left-wing political activity.  It begs the question: isn’t it time to crackdown on academic institutions that play politics and strip them of their tax-exempt status?

Dr. Midge Wilson, DePaul University

On Wednesday, Dr. Midge Wilson, Associate Dean of DePaul University’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (LAS) and Associate Professor Ann Russo, Director of the Women and Gender Studies Program, used their university email accounts to coordinate a harassment campaign against the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge, where a private political event was taking place. The event, “Jobs Bash 2011,” was a call to “people of all political persuasions – conservative, independent, and Tea Party” – to bring their resumes and ask the President to explain the nation’s high unemployment figures. DePaul students and faculty were among those that received Wilson’s 2,000 politicized emails.

In her email, Associate Dean Midge Wilson urged her list to contact the venue and shut down the event. Her subject line? “The Green Mill sucks.”

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There has been a good deal of discussion of late about whether or not the IRS should launch an investigation into Media Matters’ tax-exempt status.  In today’s part two of a three part series from FOX Business’ Elizabeth MacDonald, details of the civilian complaint filed by C. Boyden Gray demonstrate why the former White House counsel to President George W. Bush believes that Media Matters should have its tax-exempt status yanked.

Citing a pattern of “unlawful conduct,” Gray writes in his petition, which FOX Business has obtained, that the nonprofit has “executed a partisan strategy” in violation of U.S. tax law as it exists “no longer to educate the public but, rather, to declare ‘war on FOX,’” Gray says, quoting from an interview its founder, David Brock, gave to the website Politico.

Also unlawful, Gray says, is the nonprofit’s reported goal to “disrupt” the commercial interests of News Corp. (News Corp. is the parent of FOX News and FOX Business.)

Read the whole article, Former White House Counsel to IRS: Pull Media Matters’ Tax-Exempt Status.

Among the activity noted in the complaint:

• Conducting a campaign to get chain book retailers to stop selling the book, “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry”
• Advocating for legislation such as the Fairness Doctrine, which would be in violation of tax law if such activity exceeds an insubstantial amount
• Stating that it is “looking for ways to turn regulators in the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere against the network,” and intending to “focus on [News Corp. CEO Rupert] Murdoch and trying to [sic] disrupt his commercial interests.”
• Using tax-free dollars to fund the “Progressive Talent Initiative,” an endeavor “geared toward members of the Netroots community” and aimed at producing “camera-ready liberals” who can speak to the media on progressive issues

So many other examples not even mentioned in the article are readily available.

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From FoxNews:

David Brock, chairman and chief executive of Media Matters for America, told a news website earlier this year that his nonprofit is now moving to “sabotage” FOX News because it says the network is now the “de facto head of the GOP,” among other things.

Anchors and guests appearing on FOX News have said because of such statements, the nonprofit is violating U.S. tax law.

There is no indication the IRS is auditing or probing Media Matters for these alleged violations.

However, interviews with current and former IRS officials, tax lawyers and tax experts, as well as a review of Media Matters’ IRS documents and its activities indicate the nonprofit has put its tax-exempt status in jeopardy for reasons beyond those allegations.

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Politico March 26th:

“The strategy that we had had toward Fox was basically a strategy of containment,” said Brock, Media Matters’ chairman and founder and a former conservative journalist, adding that the group’s main aim had been to challenge the factual claims of the channel and to attempt to prevent them from reaching the mainstream media.

The new strategy, he said, is a “war on Fox.” [emphasis mine]

Do you think a war on Fox is where it will end? Let’s say that Media Matters succeeds and Fox News goes off the air (that won’t happen – ever – but just for argument’s sake, stay with me). Will Media Matters just pack up and go home? Is Fox News the only outlet that Media Matters covers? Certainly not. They cover Rush Limbaugh incessantly as well as make numerous posts about what happens on Big sites (like this one) and cover a whole array of other conservative outlets. The “war on Fox” is not the end, it’s the beginning.

Frankly, I don’t care that Media Matters declared a war on Fox News. I don’t care that they simply use their site as an outlet to regurgitate talking points from the White House under the guise of “fact checking” conservative media. I DO care that they do this while being considered a tax-exempt charitable organization. Media Matters enjoys a comfy 501(c)(3) status which not only is a vehicle for them not to pay taxes, it gives them a “charitable organization” status and allows others (like Soros) to give large amounts of money while being able to make a deduction on their own taxes.

This war won’t end here.

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A federal judge has reversed course and will now not restrict James O’Keefe from traveling to attend a conservative conference in California he told me on the radio recently in a story that has garnered national attention.

“Rick I will give you the breaking news story”, he said.  “I will be joining you in California on June 10th for the Eagle Forum Conference.  I have a very good lawyer named Michael Maddigan.  The judge has granted my request for work purposes.  My mission is a good mission (referring to his non-profit called Project Veritas).  There’s a lot of people we’re training now, so even if they stop me, they’re not going to stop us.”

O’Keefe said his presence at the conference falls under the category of ‘charity work’ since he will be teaching attendees ‘How To Be An Effective Citizen Journalist’ on behalf of his non profit Project Veritas.  To this he said of the mainstream media,

“They don’t do journalism, they just write down what the politicians say… they just do stenography.”…”We are redefining the genre.  We’re changing the game.”

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I have been advised that my recent characterization of Dr. Stephen Hicks was inaccurate and that he is not, in fact, a “Marxist educator.”  My conclusion was drawn upon a series of videos in which he discussed Marxism and education. Upon further research, and out of an abundance of caution, I have asked BigGovernment.com to take down my post. I apologize to Dr. Hicks.

In promotion of his excellent book, “Righteous Indignation,” Andrew Breitbart appeared on MSNBC with host Martin Bashir. At one point in the interview, I was sure Ashton Kutcher was going to jump on the set to reveal that the pathetic questions being asked were all in jest. I was half expecting Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert to jump out with him.  But alas, the bizarre, disjointed interview was no joke.

It didn’t take long for Bashir to go straight to the gutter and insinuate Breitbart had something to do with a ridiculous picture of President Obama that an Orange County Republican Party official allegedly e-mailed to her colleagues.

Breitbart responded with genuine surprise. He obviously knew nothing about the photo or the person who allegedly distributed it.

Is this the best MSNBC can do to fill air time?

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If you tuned in to Rush Limbaugh yesterday, you probably caught El Rushbo talking about Andrew’s new book.  Rush reminds us that Andrew, yes, Andrew Breitbart, “was a big lefty until he heard me.”  Me, meaning…Rush Limbaugh.

By the way, great news!  Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World has been hovering between #1 and #2 on the Amazon Bestseller’s List in Non-Fiction, and between #10 and #12 Overall. Congratulations, Andrew!!!

Check out Andrew’s list of upcoming appearances and other press coverage.

Andrew Breitbart sits down with FOX News’ Sean Hannity on April 18, 2011 to discuss his new book, “Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World,” released April 15, 2011.  It wasn’t all just book conversation though…you’ll have to watch it and see!

Check out Andrew’s list of upcoming appearances and other press coverage.

John Hawkins of RightWing News recently interviewed Andrew Breitbart about his new book.  It’s a fun interview and a great read!

I always find it fascinating when people who used to be liberal say they turned to the right. That happened with you. Can you tell us about it?

Well, it’s a cliché from the left to the right. And it’s usually a story of opportunism in those few cases where the people move from the right to the left. It’s almost embarrassing to go back into my liberal background because it was about as shallow a belief system as humanly possible. It was go-along to get-along social. It was living in Los Angeles, being young, and single, and flowing with the trendy liberal crowd.

When I started to work in Hollywood at a fairly low level delivering scripts around town, listening to AM talk radio, I at first listened to it as a novelty. But I started to have certain things in my life going on such as living in a rent controlled apartment, having listened to the Clarence Thomas hearings, the OJ Simpson trial — I just started to see trends in my personal experiences that ran so contrary to what the media narratives were. At first I was flummoxed by it and then I just started to listen to certain people on the radio who were more clear thinking than the professors that I had in college.

I remember thinking when I was in college that a lot of these known Chomsky-like, verbose high lefty thinkers made absolutely no sense but I thought that was my problem. So when I started to listen to conservative thinkers and to read conservative thinkers, there was a clarity of thought. It wasn’t muddled. It wasn’t confusing. It started to make sense at an intellectual level and tie into the values that my parents gave me when I was a young kid that I diverted from when I was in high school.

So it was basically a reconnecting with everything that my parents attempted to instill in me in my youth. It has made me sleep a lot better at night, being centered and oriented with human nature as opposed to living in a world of self loathing nihilism, trying to undo human nature, and trying to create a path towards an unrealistic utopia.

Now, you were recently banned from the front page of The Huffington Post….

Oh, the tragedy of my life.

(Laughs) It is, it is. Apparently you made some sort of ad hominem attack on Van Jones and The Huffington Post has a policy against that. It must have been in place for at least two minutes or so before you were banned. Can you talk about that?

Read the entire review at RightWing News.

Check out Andrew’s list of upcoming appearances and other press coverage.

Eric Boehlert from Media Matters  somehow manages to combine factually inaccuracy with a double fact twist in his latest attack on black farmers. Boehlert’s piece is a riff from the article I wrote this morning about the lack of a conservative equivalent of Media Matters or MoveOn.

My piece wasn’t a complaint about the general lack of coverage on Pigford but Boehlert chooses to twist it that way – so let’s address that accusation. Boehlert says….

I’m hard-pressed to think of another instance in which a media entity like Breitbart’s has invested so much time and energy promoting a single story (his sites have posted more than 100 Pigford-related items in the last year), yet only to see the story receive virtually no pick-up. Anywhere.

No pickup… Not Hot Air. Not Red State. Not Atlas Shrugs. Not Moonbattery. Not a 4000 word piece in National Review. Not Stossel’s segment on Fox News. Not a Fox News segment. (Last one came before Breitbart was on the story.)

So that’s the factual issue. It has gotten pickup, due to our efforts. Has Pigford gotten as much as I’d like? No and I’ve written about that – although the coverage DID pick up after I asked if the right-wing blogosphere was afraid of Pigford. Boehlert tries to make hay from the fact that O’Reilly, Beck, Hannity or Van Sustern have not run with it yet but as we pointed out countless times this is not a soundbite story. It’s not ready made-for-TV. I believe the documentary will have some impact on this. I should also point out that the stories been covered a number of times on radio, and that’s a better format for it.

It’s also important for the Pigford coverage in context. This is a story that is over a decade old.

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From The Washington Examiner:

Media Matters, the George Soros-backed legion of liberal agit-prop shock troops based in the nation’s capital, has declared war on Fox News, and in the process quite possibly stepped across the line of legality.

David Brock, MM’s founder, was quoted Saturday by Politico promising that his organization is mounting “guerrila warfare and sabotage” against Fox News, which he said “is not a news organization. It is the de facto leader of the GOP, and it is long past time that it is treated as such by the media, elected officials and the public.”

To that end, Brock told Politico that MM will “focus on [News Corp. CEO Rupert] Murdoch and trying to disrupt his commercial interests …” Murdoch is the founder of Fox News and a media titan with newspaper, broadcast, Internet and other media countries around the world.

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When Batton Lash and I decided to take on the Obama Administration with our strip 16 months ago, few people were willing to mock the president. Yet we both saw that this president was at times foolish, mendacious, clueless and vain. Perfect fodder for a political cartoon.

Batton and I are not so much conservatives as libertarians. We’re believers in small government because, as I outline in my political thesis, it’s the only workable form. President Obama is very much a big government fan. He has tripled the debt and deficits in his first year in office. His new budget would add another three trillion. These are things we don’t like about him. We also don’t like the lies. Which seem to be second nature to the man.

So last Sunday we turned in what we thought was a very mild cartoon mocking the first lady’s over reach of her powers. And I decided to show her eating hamburgers like Wimpy from the old Popeye cartoons to mock the fact that she tends to scold other people’s eating habits, yet every time we read about what they’re eating at the White House, it’s extreme. And to throw in a gag we used before, the President is shown eating hardly anything.

The cartoon did not get a lot of comments at first. I figured it was rather mild. I would try to be funnier next time. Little did I expect the firestorm that followed a few days later.

The propaganda wing of the Democrat party known as Media Matters for America, who is out to destroy all critics of this administration, ran an article saying the cartoon attacked the first lady’s weight and gave out our emails, encouraging people to send us hate mail. Like pigs to the trough the mainstream press jumped on the story. Yesterday morning I got up and saw it mentioned on several websites like Salon. The NY Daily News wanted to interview us. And it was on the local TV news. We started getting inundated with hate mail. But the worst was yet to come.

The Daily News article came out and basically said we were mocking her weight, which wasn’t true at all. We posted our full response on the Big Sites and my blog. Most of the emails and comments we received during the day were about us allegedly mocking her weight. And I had to set people straight over and over again. Some of them accused us of racism. Which is just the left’s way of telling you to shut up. One e-mailer suggested our cartoon was going to inspire teen suicides because we were supposedly mocking body issues.

But then they died down. As evening came, I got a message that MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell was taking us to task, calling us mentally disturbed racists. He showed our pictures. He gave out where we lived. Told people to go after us. Even mentioned Batton’s wife who had nothing to do with the cartoon.

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