It’s the most important election of our lifetime. Now, more than ever before, it is important to understand what the Presidential candidates believe, what their policies are, and the differences between themselves and the current administration. The Republican National Committee knows this, yet they have decided to turn over the entire process of informing the populace to the Democrat Media Complex. Rather than answering questions about job creation, executive orders, energy, or Fast & Furious, our candidates are spending precious time on the national airwaves discussing Terri Schiavo, sugar subsidies, and the Everglades Project.

Take a look at the questions from the past debate (just the questions). Is this really helping send the message the RNC must to deliver to win in November?

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Please read Part 1 and Part 2.

Contrary to recent media reports, the Brazilian Blowout hair treatment is safe for use.

Oregon OSHA and Federal OSHA had already attacked Brazilian Blowout’s product, steering the media to focus on faulty aspects of their respective studies, and burying the truth  –  that the product does not release formaldehyde in amounts that exceed state or federal short-term or long-term exposure limits.

Enter Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D – 3 – OR).  Ontheissues.org labels him a “hard-core Liberal”, and you know what that means when it comes to anything involving chemicals or the environment.   Rep. Blumenauer sponsored nonsensical bills like HR 3311 that taxes drivers based on miles driven; a ludicrous bill to jump-start the funding of streetcars; a bill to establish under-the-radar death panels; a bill providing environmental education grants for outdoor experiences (huh?); and even one quashing free speech by attempting to ban a website promoting the perfectly safe Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump.

So Rep. Blumenauer reads about OSHA’s nonsense in the media and, because he’s a politician, doesn’t do his research, either.  Nor does he bother contacting the company to get their side of the story.   Instead, he grandstands by penning a letter to the Food and Drug Administration asking that they recall the product — a product already proven to meet OSHA standards!

I asked Rep. Blumenauer’s press secretary, Derek Schlickeisen, about this approach to policy.  His assertion was that politicians “can’t have a chemist on staff”, and thus rely on OSHA’s scientists to bring incidents like this to light.  When I mentioned that the company-funded study by Health Science Associates showed formaldehyde levels below OSHA standards, he inferred that the study held little weight because it was company funded.

Yet why is it that OSHA’s results are given any more credibility, especially when OSHA caused a panic based entirely on a faulty sample?  Are we to believe that OSHA scientists are somehow free of ideological bias?  Kermit McCarthy, one of the authors of the Oregon OSHA study, “likes” hard-core Liberal Sen. Ron Wyden according to his Facebook page.  Why isn’t his bias questioned?  If anything, a government worker is likely more biased than a private company to insert bias, because his very job depends on his work generating a result that permits the government to do something.  Otherwise, the agency’s existence, and the employee’s, have no purpose.

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This morning, Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to discuss his new book, Throw Them All Out, which has shaken Washington to its core in the past few days. The battle over insider trading in Congress has set up a confrontation between bipartisan reformers on the one hand, and defenders of the insider-trading status quo on the other.

In the course of the interview, Schweizer responded to Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-GA), chair of the House Committee on Financial Services, who is fighting calls for his resignation. As it has become clear that the insider trading scandal is not going away, Rep. Bachus has abandoned his early reticence in favor of a more aggressive defense.

Schweizer, who was joined on the show by Steve Kroft of CBS, reiterated his case against insider trading in Congress:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Bachus seems to be fighting a losing battle, as momentum for reform builds in Washington. Even Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), the ranking member on Bachus’s committee–who belatedly discovered his enthusiasm for reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when facing a serious public backlash and a tough re-election–is now calling upon Bachus to join efforts to pass the STOCK (Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge) Act.

Big Government has obtained a letter that Rep. Frank sent to Rep. Bachus urging him to support the STOCK Act–”which, I acknowledge, should have been addressed when I was the Chairman.”

Rep. Bachus’s letter to Schweizer’s publisher is posted below, followed by Schweizer’s response, and by Rep. Frank’s letter to Rep. Bachus.

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About a month ago, MSNBC hack and noted anti-hispanic racist Donny Deutsch said what the Occupy Wall Street mutants (what I affectionately call them) needed is a “Kent State moment.” That is a reference to the shooting deaths of 4 Kent State students in Ohio at an anti-war riot by the National Guard on May 4th, 1970. The photo of a screaming woman standing over one of the bodies became one of the iconic moments of the time and helped turn public sentiment to the side of the protesters.

It led to a popular song by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and all manner of public outrage.

These “Occupy” mutants would like nothing more than to repeat that, especially now that the liberal Public Policy Polling firm found their movement to be less popular than the body lice with which they are infested.

But in the age of the Internet and camera phones, that’s just not possible.

In 1970 there were just 3 television networks, filming events was rare, grainy and encumbered by bulky, expensive equipment. A photograph, like one iconic one from Kent State, had no context beyond what a writer gave it. That’s no longer the case.

Everyone has a camera, video is not in short supply, context can no longer be given extemporaneously. If and when violence breaks out from the “Occupiers,” who’ve pledged to shut down parts of major cities around the country tomorrow, they won’t be able to spin the context of their actions beyond what is already on the public record.

When a protester says “You’re going to see what a Molotov Cocktail can do to Macy’s” on camera, their intentions are clear. The continual flow of threats of violence, and acts of violence, from these mutants is well documented online. They’re proud of it. That wasn’t the case in 1970.

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Tonight, CNN and Tea Party Express co-host a debate of GOP candidates in Tampa, FL, site of the upcoming GOP convention. I’m not really sure how the ‘tea party’ is going to be represented in this debate, since the moderators are pulled from CNN, but there is no way it can be any worse than the MSNBC/Politico forum last week. In that fiasco, John Harris and Brian Williams drew deeply from lefty activists like ThinkProgress to launch attacks on the GOP candidates. It was as if the DNC had done a mind-meld with Harris and Williams (redundant, I know!), and got 90+ minutes to prospect for material for negative campaign ads.

Color me naive, but CNN is not MSNBC. Liberal, sure. But, it at least tries not to seem totally in the tank for the left, unlike Politico and MSNBC. So, I don’t think the DNC will own the same real estate in Wolf Blitzer’s brain as it had in Harris/Williams. Then again, according to news reports today, it won’t have to. Amazingly, two leading candidates for the GOP nomination, Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann, look set to take a page from the DNC and ThinkProgress playbook and attack Gov. Rick Perry for daring to speak the truth about Social Security. Below is a flier the Romney campaign is distributing in Florida.

And, yesterday, Bachmann’s campaign had this to say to Byron York:

“Bernie Madoff deals with Ponzi schemes, not the grandparents of America,” says a Bachmann adviser. “Clearly she feels differently about the value of Social Security than Gov. Perry does. She believes Social Security needs to be saved, that it’s an important safety net for Americans who have paid into it all their lives.” … “She strongly disagrees with his position on that…”

So let me get this straight; we now have TWO GOP candidates against any kind of entitlement reform? Really? We can’t begin to get out from under our overwhelming debt burden unless we tackle these auto-pilot programs. You could close every government agency and slash defense spending in half and we’re still screwed if we don’t reform Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. How can Romney or Bachmann seek to be President if they don’t understand this basic fact? I mean, its not just a theory…its math.

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I don’t watch a lot of TV, but when I do, it isn’t usually cable news. Living, as I do, in new media, I’m already generally up to speed on what they are talking about. CNBC has good financial news, even if they do conflate the health of the stock market with the state of overall economy. CNN will give you an accurate pulse of the median views of the mainstream media. Fox will give you a moderate to very slightly center-right take on the day’s events. I always had a vague sense that MSNBC was very left-of-center. Last night, that vague sense was confirmed. But, I also realized that MSNBC lives in an alternate universe.

Today, it was reported that jobless claims spiked higher…yet again. The CBO reported that, through the last 11 months, the federal government has spent almost $1.3 Trillion more than it took in. European banks are on the edge of collapse and the entire world economy balances precariously on the edge of a global depression. If the US economy hasn’t technically yet entered another recession, it is only a matter of time before it does.

The housing market is set for another downturn. The number of Americans in the labor force is at historic lows. There is no prospect for economic recovery at any point in the future. I could go on and on, but you get the point. The economy is teetering on the edge of another collapse and government debt has so suffocated us that we are flirting with a period of permanent decline.

And yet, at last night’s GOP debate at the Reagan Library (!), neither John Harris with Politico nor Brian Williams with NBCMSNBCCOMCASTGE, asked a SINGLE question about these issues. Nothing about government spending, debt or the economy. Instead, we were treated to almost 90 minutes of questions on HPV vaccines, immigration, FEMA, TSA, welfare, poverty programs (more in need after 2+ years of Obama than ever) and science. Science?!?

Seriously, do John Harris and Brian Williams need an up-to-date calendar? Are they stuck in the 90s, when the economy seemed fine and all we had to worry about were so-called ’social’ issues, ’smart growth’ and school uniforms. We thought we were fat and happy then and could afford the luxury of the ’small’ issues. We aren’t anymore, but that is all they fed us. If I closed my eyes, I don’t know that I could have told you whether this ‘debate’ was for President of the state legislature.

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“Science!”: Beyond the Pose, Mr. Huntsman, What Would You DO?

When that silver-haired Republican candidate weighs in on the ‘climate’ debate I want to stick around until the end of the video. I love that line, “Good heavens, Miss Nakamoto, you’re beautiful!”

Wait, that’s not Magnus Pyke?

Seriously. Mr. Huntsman, beyond the pose: what would you do? “Science!” is a talking point. More of a pose, really, of being the thoughtful man while its success depends on no more than Pavlovian nodding and clucking in response. Anything else ultimately arrives at the question Hunstman’s pose begs:

What. Would. You. Do.?

What’s your point? You’re down with the kidz on campus and your media base can rest easy because you’re not, you know, ‘crazy’ as you say? Or you’re going somewhere with this? Is it cap-and-trade? Kyoto? Kyoto II? Carbon (dioxide…meaning ‘energy’) taxes?

What? And after you answer that, well, without using the word “science(!)”, please then state why?

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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…)

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by economic advisor Jim Johnston about tax policy, but first, we discuss last night’s Republican debate hosted by the always one-sided MSNBC, the ridiculousness of some of the questions from Brian Williams, the lack of a focus on the issues that really matter to Americans, and discuss who walked away the winner.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Erick Erickson: Perry vs. Romney
Perry Leads
In wide field, it’s Romney vs. Perry
Why the Market Crash? Downgrade or Threat of Tax Increase?
Jim Johnston at Heartland Institute

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The hosts and guests of Coffee and Markets speak only for ourselves, not any clients or employers.

I’ve already written on the Left’s special plan for Rick Perry. No need to go into it here but in case you missed them:

• Perry Should Have a Plan against Southern Bigotry
• Remember When I said Perry Should Have a Plan?

So why are they doing it? Just know that he is an insufferable candidate: Texan, Southern, with an accent. Most grievous to their sensibilities is that he is running against President Obama. Surely the only motive to this is that he is clearly a racist. I mean why else would he be running, right?

The media doesn’t have time for Perry to come right out and say he is a neo-confederate racist, so they took the liberty of speeding things along until that time comes, courtesy of Ed Shultz. (Larry O’Connor for Breitbart.tv)

Of course, they had to get creative with the editing of Perry’s speech. For MSNBC viewers, I’m sure it went over well. To the rest of us, it was criminal, especially considering that the video clip was so altered it resembled nothing of the original meaning and content of the governor’s speech.

If you look closely at that video, you’ll notice that the sound ends after Perry says, “That big black cloud that hangs over America,” but he’s still speaking.

Want to know what he said that Schultz and MSNBC intentionally cut out?

“That big black cloud that hangs over America, that debt that is so monstrous.”

Perry wasn’t suggesting, implying, or “inferring” that the “big black cloud that hangs over America” is President Obama.

He clearly – both before the phrase “big black cloud” and after – said he was speaking about America’s debt.

Yet Schultz and his staff edited Perry in mid-sentence to make it appear the Texas governor was making a racist remark about Obama.

In any other industry in this nation, such intentionally dishonest and misleading behavior would be met with the harshest of consequences. (News Busters)

UPDATE!!

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It is a time-honored tactic of radicals to accuse their enemies of what they do in order to convert a negative into a positive, as the master of political agitation Saul Alinsky taught.

This explains the Left’s newfound interest in the lie that the Tea Party is comprised of “terrorists.”

Unless you think petitioning the government for lower spending is somehow akin to flying airplanes into buildings, you’ve got to agree with Sarah Palin, whose recent salvos on the topic are dead-on.

As President Obama and his merry band of Marxists continue driving America off a cliff, Palin (and columnist Charles Krauthammer) have been pushing back hard against the liberal talking point that Tea Party supporters are terrorists.

Her comments came after Vice President Joe Biden, Congressman Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), and their socialist buddies at MSNBC recently breathed new life into the “terrorist” smear. Because President Obama, who himself has ties to real, live terrorists, has not upbraided the vice president, we can safely assume he agrees with Biden.

Said Palin on Fox News Channel:

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“No it wasn’t deceptive, that’s what everybody’s saying about it. I saw the first version of it, and it told pretty much the whole story, of how that woman had gone through an epiphany of understanding how race works.”

Related:
Nolte: Who Got to Chris Matthews?: ‘Hardball’ Defense of Breitbart Memory-Holed (July 30, 2010)
Marlow: WaPo’s Kurtz “dishonestly suggests Matthews had gotten his facts wrong regarding Breitbart including footage of Shirley Sherrod’s redemption” (August 3, 2010)

MSNBC is taking a hard line against Sarah Palin for using the American flag to move merchandise and line her pockets. The “Lean Forward” network claims that Palin’s use of the flag in various circumstances “runs afoul” of the federal codes discouraging such displays for commercial and advertising purposes. “She drapes herself in the Stars and Stripes and makes millions of dollars in the process,” charges Martin Bashir.

You betcha. And we can only guess that when MSNBC wraps itself in the Red, White, and Blue – and it does – they’re doing it for charity.

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MSNBC is reporting that, this afternoon, Rep. Weiner will offer interviews to two TV Networks. Presumably, he doesn’t want a repeat of yesterday’s disastrous press conference. Also, presumably, he’s realized that he can’t simply “choose” to not talk about this incident. So, maybe, having exhausted all other options, he has simply decided to answer the questions directly.

There really aren’t that many that need answering. In the interest of being helpful, I’ve put together my own list of nagging questions:

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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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Apparently, the Big Labor-related death threats aren’t limited to Wisconsin.  Or to lawmakers.

This following email is just in from our friends at The Mackinac Center for Public Policy:

<start email>

“The Mackinac Center for Public Policy received numerous death threats and bomb threats in the aftermath of national publicity about a Freedom of Information Act request it sent to three public universities.

The messages were left on the Center’s voice mail Thursday night and early Friday morning, but it is unclear at this point if one or two women were responsible for the threats.

Mackinac Center President Joseph Lehman said the Mackinac Center has contacted law enforcement about the threats.

“We, along with the authorities, are doing everything necessary to protect ourselves,” Lehman said. “No threats will prevent us from showing the public how universities spend tax dollars.”

There were five messages left containing death or bomb threats. Four of them appear to be from the same caller. A fifth message was from a woman who left a death threat and, unlike the previous caller, left her name and indicated she lived in a neighboring state. It was unclear if the second caller was the same as the first caller.

A female voice said:

“Scotty Walker is dead. So are you. We know where you live.” The woman then recited the Mackinac Center’s address and said, “We are coming up to destroy you.”

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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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The appointment by President Obama of Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman and CEO of General Electric, to head the new President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness is just another sign of the commitment of the Obama Administration to “Crony Capitalism”. For over 100 years GE was known for business innovation and manufacturing excellence. But long gone are the uplifting moments in our nation’s history when company spokesman Ronald Reagan proudly exalted GE’s motto: “Progress is our most important product.”

Mr. Immelt as the newly appointed pied-piper for the future for American industry suggests, (as Immelt wrote to shareholders):

“The interaction between government and business will change forever. In a reset economy, the government will be a regulator; and also, an industry policy champion, a financier, and a key partner.”

For the last three years, Mr. Immelt has been in the vanguard for this new relationship between business and government, as a member of the Administration’s “Economic Recovery Advisory Panel”.

During the wild Congressional spending spree of the last couple of years, GE miraculously became the largest beneficiary of the government’s Troubled Asset Recovery Program (TARP) bank bailout. Although GE did not initially qualify for TARP, the company’s $18 million annual investment in battalions of Washington DC lobbyists convinced Administration regulators to push that “reset” button and extend TARP guarantees and subsidies to GE. Public records demonstrate GE Capital, the company’s massive financing arm, pocketed $120 Billion in loans from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation at interest rates of less than 1% and snatched 25% of the entire $340 billion in subsidies from “Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program” (TLGP) rescue fund.

Unlike other highly regulated financial institutions that secured Federal back-stops, including Bank of America, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase; GE was not required to curtail use of risky derivatives or pass the Fed’s liquidity “stress test” to qualify for taxpayer funding. GE was also exempted from new regulations restricting executive compensation at firms like AIG and Goldman Sachs. Mr. Immelt took advantage of GE’s special treatment to pick up $30.9 million in total compensation over the last three years, while GE shareholders suffered a catastrophic 46% loss as the company’s shares crumbled from $35 to $19.

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There is no proof yet that Christianne Amanpour is a child molester. Let that sink in for a second. Outrageous, right? Especially when simply said out of the blue like that. Yet that is how the media is treating the insanity of the left-wing progressive charge that conservatives, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party are somehow responsible for the actions of a man who had been obsessed with his target since 2007, more than two years before the Tea Party was in existence.

Amanpour, on her low-rated “This Week” program on ABC, said the following in her report of the tragic act of insanity in Arizona when a disturbed gunman open fire, killed six and wounded more than a dozen, including Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. “…But in fact the suspect in custody, 22 year old Jared Loughner, has no known ties to the tea party or any conservative group.”

It was an unprovoked, out of context slam at a group of people who had nothing to do with anything involving this act of barbarism. But it was exactly what most progressive leftists want the story to be – “forget the tragedy, forget the victims, we have to try to use this to our political advantage and blame conservatives.” After all, never let a crisis go to waste, right?

Most old media left-wing attack dog types are only implying it, but some are flat-out saying it. For example, Paul Krugman, about whom there is also no evidence of child molestation yet, blogged that while there wasn’t “yet” any proof, “…it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers.” Implicitly this means that the Democrat party is free to not take a stand against anyone using any inflammatory rhetoric because they don’t do that. Makes you wonder if Mr. Krugman has ever heard of Alan Grayson, MSNBC or many of President Obama’s own remarks.

Media Matters for America Senior Fellow (in what can only be described as watching television and complaining about it) Eric Boehlert, about whom there is ten times the evidence of being a child molester than conservatives are responsible for the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords (in case Eric can’t do math, when you multiply by zero you get zero) could not resist the urge to run to Twitter to blame the right, even though his employer managed to. (As of 3:00 am Media Matters website had no mention of the tragedy.) He took the opportunity to attack Andrew Breitbart and Sarah Palin, falling in line with all the other progressive bomb-throwers who seemingly received “Tweeting points” from a central command.  In his rage, which is pretty much a typical day for Mr. Boehlert, he forgot to do one things…condemn the act or offer any condolences or prayers for the victims whatsoever. In fact, he only wrote one tweet with the name Giffords in it, the others that mention her were retweets.

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