3 November 2010 >> 1992/2008: A charismatic Democrat portraying himself as a centrist is elected President.

1992-1994/2008-2010: Democratic President sheds centrist image by tacking to the left during his first two years.

1993: Democratic President fails at getting his signature healthcare restructuring bill passed. / 2010: Democratic President succeeds at getting his signature healthcare restructuring bill passed.

1994: Republicans take over the House of Representatives, gaining 52 seats. / 2010: Republicans take over the House of Representatives, gaining 60 seats or more.

1994-: Chastened Democratic President moves to the center, works with Republicans in Congress enacting several substantial bills to bipartisan acclaim, and wins re-election.

2010-: ???

31 March 2010 >> Not too long ago, taking to the streets to protest your government was considered a patriotic act.

It’s true!

But it seems that publicly airing your grievances stopped being patriotic right around noon on January 20th, 2009.

Once President Obama was sworn in, protesting became incitement to violence.

If you’ve opened up a newspaper or watched a cable news program in the past week or so, you’ve probably seen members of the media painting Tea Party activists as dangerous bigots. That’s because disagreeing with President Obama on issues like government spending and high taxes makes you a racist, you see.

What’s interesting about the media’s latest freak-out is that there were radicals a-plenty under President Bush. They protested in the streets. They talked openly about revolution and killing. But oddly, the violent imagery used by people claiming to be advocates for peace never registered with the media. They were too busy fawning over Cindy Sheehan.

Why the difference in coverage? Did the media cheerlead protests against President Bush to hurt him politically? Are they trying to marginalize the increasingly powerful Tea Party movement because they favor President Obama’s agenda?

One thing’s for sure: If there is such a thing as dangerous rhetoric, then the media is at least one president too late in reporting the story.

Don’t believe me?

Well, then let’s take a trip down memory lane... Video >>

20 January 2010 @ 8:35AM >> Two weeks ago, I wrote, “Democrats losing Ted Kennedy’s seat would be a massive political earthquake.” Well, yesterday, the once-unthinkable happened, and the deep blue state of Massachusetts elected its first Republican senator since 1972.

Today, politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle will be spinning, assigning blame, and taking credit.

Here’s my not-at-all-scientific breakdown of the factors I think went into Scott Brown’s victory over Democrat Martha Coakley:

• 30% - Opposition to high taxes and out-of-control government spending
• 25% - Backlash at the political hijinks of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid’s “get it done at all costs” tactics
• 20% - Rejection of ObamaCare specifically
• 15% - Martha Coakley being a bad candidate
• 5% - Scott Brown being a charismatic candidate
• 5% - Disappointment in President Obama’s first year
• 0% - Repudiation of Ted Kennedy’s legacy

By this measure, it’s hard to say that President Obama had nothing to do with the defeat, but in my view, his party shares more of the blame than he does personally.

4 November 2009 >> Yesterday, two states held elections for governor. Last year, both states voted to elect President Obama. Now, a year after The Ascension of The One, in both states, Republican gubernatorial candidates won handily.

In Virginia, Republican candidate Bob McDonnell beat Democrat Creigh Deeds by more than 17%.* This in a recently-trending-Democrat state that Obama carried by more than 6%. That’s nearly a 24% swing in one year.

And in New Jersey, a heavily Democratic state that Obama won by over 14% last year, Republican Chris Christie beat incumbent Democrat Jon Corzine by almost 5%. That’s more than an 18% swing.

Even before the election, White House spinners were claiming that Democratic defeats would not reflect poorly on Obama, even though the president visited both states several times to campaign for the candidates that ended up losing.

In fact, in both states, the losing Democrats aligned themselves so closely with Obama that a quick glance at their campaign materials might lead you to think that they were running to become Obama’s vice president. So if anyone was trying to make this election about Obama, it was the Democrats who lost.

But now that the results are in, expect to hear the refrain repeated: these elections had absolutely nothing to do with Barack Obama!

And if recent history is any indication, you can expect Obama to start pinning the blame on George W. Bush any time now.

(Hat tip: Jim Geraghty.)

* All figures as of this writing and subject to change as election returns are finalized.

13 October 2009 @ 6:22PM >> Months before Barack Obama formally accepted the Democratic presidential nomination, the name “Obama” was already being stamped on or sewn into objects of every type, and these objects could be purchased just about anywhere you happened to be standing. Keychains, buttons, hats, t-shirts were all readily available. I saw Obama skateboards and heard rumors of Obama bongs. Eventually, companies usually seen selling things like pewter gnomes and porcelain kittens got into the game, hawking commemorative coins and Obama dinner plates on late-night cable shows. Video >>

28 September 2009 @ 8:50AM >> Americans are aware that many reporters actively promote their own political agendas:

Results from a national Sacred Heart University survey released today reveal that many news consumers believe the media played a significant role in electing President Barack Obama and that the media continue to promote his presidency.

[...]

“A large majority, 89.3 percent, suggested the national media played a very or somewhat strong role in helping to elect President Obama,” according to a summary of the findings. “Just 10.0 percent suggested the national media played little or no role. Further, 69.9 percent agreed the national news media are intent on promoting the Obama presidency while 26.5 percent disagreed. Some, 3.6 percent, were unsure.”

And 86.6 percent said they believe the news media try to influence public opinion and that they have their own public policy and political positions. This compares to 87.6 percent in 2008 and 70.3 percent in 2003.

[...]

The study did not indicate which medium the respondents turn to for news, but it did indicate that about 38 percent say they read newspapers less frequently than they did five years ago. Nearly 68 percent said they agreed with the statement: “Old-style, traditionally objective and fair journalism is dead.”

31 March 2009 >> It’s not fit to print if Obama won’t benefit—at least not when there’s an election at stake.

The Philadelphia Bulletin reports:

A lawyer involved with legal action against Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) told a House Judiciary subcommittee on March 19 The New York Times had killed a story in October that would have shown a close link between ACORN, Project Vote and the Obama campaign because it would have been a “a game changer.”

Heather Heidelbaugh, who represented the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee in the lawsuit against the group, recounted for the ommittee what she had been told by a former ACORN worker who had worked in the group’s Washington, D.C. office. The former worker, Anita Moncrief, told Ms. Heidelbaugh last October, during the state committee’s litigation against ACORN, she had been a “confidential informant for several months to The New York Times reporter, Stephanie Strom.”

Ms. Moncrief had been providing Ms. Strom with information about ACORN’s election activities. Ms. Strom had written several stories based on information Ms. Moncrief had given her.

During her testimony, Ms. Heidelbaugh said Ms. Moncrief had told her The New York Times articles stopped when she revealed that the Obama presidential campaign had sent its maxed-out donor list to ACORN’s Washington, D.C. office.

Ms. Moncrief told Ms. Heidelbaugh the campaign had asked her and her boss to “reach out to the maxed-out donors and solicit donations from them for Get Out the Vote efforts to be run by ACORN.”

Ms. Heidelbaugh then told the congressional panel:

“Upon learning this information and receiving the list of donors from the Obama campaign, Ms. Strom reported to Ms. Moncrief that her editors at The New York Times wanted her to kill the story because, and I quote, “it was a game changer.”‘

Ms. Moncrief made her first overture to Ms. Heidelbaugh after The New York Times allegedly spiked the story - on Oct. 21, 2008.

October 21st was exactly two weeks before the election.

10 February 2009 @ 9:09AM >> Being a member of the media isn’t much different from being an Obama campaign worker. The International Herald Tribune reports:

Republicans have long accused mainstream journalists of being on the payroll of President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, a common refrain of favoritism, especially from those on the losing end of an election.

But this year the accusation has a new twist: In some notable cases it has become true, with several prominent journalists now on the payrolls of Obama and Democratic congressional leaders.

An unusual number of journalists from prominent, mainstream organizations started new government jobs in January, providing new kindling to the debate over whether Obama is receiving unusually favorable treatment in the news media.

I know it’s unfair to characterize the entire media as Obama sycophants. There are still some hard-nosed journalists out there, bravely speaking truth to power. For example, there’s Judith Warner of the “All The News That’s Fit to Print” New York Times:

The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs, and then he was being yelled at by my husband, Max, for smoking in the house. It was not clear whether Max was feeling protective of the president’s health or jealous because of the cigarette.

The other day a friend of mine confided that in the weeks leading up to the election, the Obamas’ apparent joy as a couple had made her just miserable. Their marriage looked so much happier than hers. Their life seemed so perfect. “I was at a place where I was tempted daily to throttle my husband,” she said. “This coincided with Michelle saying the most beautiful things about Barack. Each time I heard her speak about him I got tears in my eyes - because I felt so far away from that kind of bliss in my own life and perhaps even more, because I was so moved by her expressions of devotion to him. And unlike previous presidential couples, they are our age, have children the same age and (just imagine the stress of daily life on the campaign) by all accounts should have been fighting even more than we were.”

[...]

Many women - not too surprisingly - were dreaming about sex with the president. In these dreams, the women replaced Michelle with greater or lesser guilt or, in the case of a 62-year-old woman in North Florida, whose dream was reported to me by her daughter, found a fully above-board solution: “Michelle had divorced Barack because he had become ‘too much of a star.’ He then married my mother, who was oh so proud to be the first lady,” the daughter wrote me.

Now that the Obama presidency has transformed venerable news outlets like the New York Times into a poor imitations of Teen Beat, and with a former SportsCenter newscaster now Obama’s main cheerleader on the cable outlet of NBC News, I guess it’s not that bizarre to discover the Washington Post has transformed itself into a sports publication.

Why else, during President Obama’s press conference on the economy, would the Post’s White House reporter waste a question by asking:

What is your reaction to Alex Rodriguez’s admission that he used steroids as a member of the Texas Rangers?

I’ve seen more serious reporting from Perez Hilton.

I don’t know why news outlets still bother employing political reporters. I guess the only reason is that there are still a handful of people in Washington who need oversight. They’re called Republicans, and they ain’t gonna bash themselves.

16 December 2008 @ 8:56AM >> A member of the Obamamedia joins the administration:

Jay Carney is leaving Time magazine after 20 years to be Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s communications director in the White House, astonished magazine and gleeful transition sources said.

Carney’s title will be assistant to the vice president and director of communications. TIME.com’s “The Page” first reported his new job.

Carney, the magazine’s Washington bureau chief, is one of Washington’s best-known talking heads, with regular appearances on ABC’s “This Week,” “The McLaughlin Group” and MSNBC’s “Hardball.”

[...]

A Democratic official close to the selection process said Carney had already decided to do something different after the election, and Biden advisers believed Carney would bring “a fresh perspective” to their deliberations.

“It’s an adventure,” the official said. “Everybody thought it was an interesting idea and worth the risk. You never know how guys in your business are going to do in politics or the private sector.”

The official added: “There are those on the right who will see this as the embodiment of their assertions about the media and Obama, and this is just making it official.”

Carney would likely be shilling for the Obama administration whether or not his checks were still signed by Time magazine. At least now his allegiance is out in the open, and he won’t be working in the dying print news business.

20 November 2008 @ 8:43AM >> One week after admitting that the Washington Post’s election coverage showed a “tilt” that favored Barack Obama, the paper’s ombudsman discussed the importance of intellectual diversity in the newsroom:

Thousands of conservatives and even some moderates have complained during my more than three-year term that The Post is too liberal; many have stopped subscribing, including more than 900 in the past four weeks.

It pains me to see lost subscribers and revenue, especially when newspapers are shrinking. Conservative complaints can be wrong: The mainstream media were not to blame for John McCain’s loss; Barack Obama’s more effective campaign and the financial crisis were.

But some of the conservatives’ complaints about a liberal tilt are valid. Journalism naturally draws liberals; we like to change the world. I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.

Journalists bristle at the thought of their coverage being viewed as unfair or unbalanced; they believe that their decisions are journalistically reasonable and that their politics do not affect how they cover and display stories.

Tom Rosenstiel, a former political reporter who directs the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said, “The perception of liberal bias is a problem by itself for the news media. It’s not okay to dismiss it. Conservatives who think the press is deliberately trying to help Democrats are wrong. But conservatives are right that journalism has too many liberals and not enough conservatives. It’s inconceivable that that is irrelevant.”

[...]

The opinion pages have strong conservative voices; the editorial board includes centrists and conservatives; and there were editorials critical of Obama. Yet opinion was still weighted toward Obama. It’s not hard to see why conservatives feel disrespected.

Are there ways to tackle this? More conservatives in newsrooms and rigorous editing would be two. The first is not easy: Editors hire not on the basis of beliefs but on talent in reporting, photography and editing, and hiring is at a standstill because of the economy. But newspapers have hired more minorities and women, so it can be done.

Rosenstiel said, “There should be more intellectual diversity among journalists. More conservatives in newsrooms will bring about better journalism. We need to be more vigilant and conscious in looking for bias. Our aims are pure, but our execution sometimes is not. Staff members should feel in their bones that unfairness will never be tolerated.”

Bob Steele, ethics scholar at the Poynter Institute, which trains journalists, thinks editors should be doing “ongoing content evaluation of candidates and issues to provide scrutiny on photos, stories, placement of stories and what are the weaknesses and strengths of the candidates.” He also recommends “prosecutorial editing” as one way to “minimize the ideological bias and beliefs that all journalists have. It would greatly reduce the news content being skewed by beliefs.”

The Post and other news media can work harder on eliminating even the perception of bias while never giving up the willingness to follow stories that will inevitably tick off some readers.

Intellectual diversity in the newsroom is essential to the quality of the media’s product. There need to be people involved in the reporting process who challenge the assumptions of the dominant thinking in the industry.

Today, it’s clear that isn’t the case, and that’s one of the reasons for the sorry financial state of the news business.

14 November 2008 @ 7:53AM >> In the 1990s, the voters of New York City twice approved term limits for mayor and city council members.

But recently, at the behest of the city’s Nanny-in-Chief, Mayor Michael Bloomberg—the guy who wants to put a toll on the Brooklyn Bridge (and every other road into and out of Manhattan) and charge supermarket shoppers 5 cents per plastic bag—the New York City Council overrode the will of the voters and repealed term limits, allowing Bloomberg to run for a third term.

It seems that Bloomberg’s damn-the-voters lesson was learned by KGB-man Vladimir Putin:

Russia’s parliament is rushing through plans to extend the presidential term from four years to six, leading to speculation that Vladimir Putin plans a dramatic return to the Kremlin.

A constitutional amendment is to be fast-tracked through the Duma, the lower house of parliament, which will vote tomorrow on all three readings of the Bill. Deputies usually take weeks to consider legislation over three readings before passing it into law.

[...]

An unnamed Kremlin adviser was quoted in Vedomosti, a daily business newspaper, last week as saying that the reform was intended to restore Mr Putin to the presidency as early as next year. He became Prime Minister after selecting Mr Medvedev to be his successor in elections in March.

Under such a scheme Mr Medvedev, 43, would enact the amendment and some unpopular social reforms. He would then resign and call a snap election in 2009 to make way for his mentor to return.

Mr Putin, 56, would govern for two more terms of six years each, until 2021, allowing him to fulfil the Putin Plan for the social and economic development of Russia.

Mr Putin fanned the belief that he is preparing for a comeback as president by pointedly refusing to state who would be the first to benefit from a longer term.

“I support Dimitri Medvedev’s proposal. As regards to who can run for the next term and when, it is premature to talk about this,” he said after a meeting with Matti Vanhanen, the Finnish Prime Minister.

He added: “We are looking for instruments which would allow us to guarantee sovereignty, to implement our long-term plans . . . and assist the development of democratic processes in the country.”

[...]

By engineering his return to the Kremlin, however, Mr Putin will strengthen criticism that Russia is sliding into dictatorship.

13 November 2008 @ 9:12AM >> Did you hear the story claiming that Sarah Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent? Turns out it was a hoax:

It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.

Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow - the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy - is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.

And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.

Given the nature of our media, a lot more people heard the lie than will ever hear that the lie was a lie.

We just elected a president who doesn’t seem to know how many states are in the country, but for some reason, that fact received much less attention than this hoax.

A cynic might conclude that the media has a political agenda.

---

Update & Clarification: The hoax appears to be “Eisenstadt” claiming credit for the Palin leak. Apparently he is not the leaker; assuming the leaker exists, it’s someone whose identity is still not known.

So what do we know? That an unnamed person apparently told a reporter that Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent. We don’t know exact Palin quote that led to the anonymous allegation, so we can’t evaluate the context or whether Palin’s words were misinterpreted or deliberately mischaracterized.

We also know that this anonymous report got a lot more media coverage than a gaffe captured on videotape in which Barack Obama seems not to know the number of states in our country.

The details surrounding this hoax and the original report are fuzzy, whereas Obama’s goof has incontrovertible proof.

While I misinterpreted the original scope of this hoax—mea culpa—it still serves as yet another case in which the media ignores undeniable evidence of an Obama gaffe while piling on Palin for an infraction that’s anonymously sourced and of which no recording exists.

9 November 2008 @ 12:27PM >> Now that the hangovers from their post-election celebrations have begun to dissipate, members of the media can finally be honest about their coverage.

According to Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell, her paper favored Obama:

The Post provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts.

[...]

But Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Post did nothing on Obama’s acknowledged drug use as a teenager.

[...]

One gaping hole in coverage involved Joe Biden, Obama’s running mate. When Gov. Sarah Palin was nominated for vice president, reporters were booking the next flight to Alaska. Some readers thought The Post went over Palin with a fine-tooth comb and neglected Biden. They are right; it was a serious omission.

I guess it’s too much to ask for media honesty before an election.

4 November 2008 >> Although I didn’t vote for him myself, I do know there are a lot of people celebrating the symbolism of America electing its first black president. I’m happy for them. Considering that this country once counted black Americans as only three-fifths of a person, this aspect of the outcome is something about which all Americans can be proud, even if you would have preferred a different result.

Let’s hope this truly does usher in a post-racial America, one in which we move beyond the hatreds of the past and divisive policies like racial preferences. After all, if a black man can become president, do we really need laws that judge people on the color of their skin and not the content of their character?

I wish we knew more about Barack Obama’s worldview. During the campaign, we’ve seen plenty of hints, but the core of his true political philosophy has never been fully illuminated. (And for that, we can thank our selectively-inquisitive media.)

But all of this is a moot point now. Barack Obama will soon be our president. And when he is, we’ll see how he governs, and we can begin to assess his presidency.

I’m sure there will be many times when I will vigorously oppose our future president. But for tonight, my congratulations to Barack Obama and to his supporters.

4 November 2008 @ 8:16AM >> In New York State, the winner of a general election is often whoever won the Democratic primary. So by the time I get a chance to cast a vote, many elections have effectively been decided.

This year, Senator Barack Obama will win New York State. Period.

It’s a sure thing affords me a little flexibility with my vote.

I’ve never been a big fan of John McCain. Although I salute him for a life in which he’s shown more courage than most men—including myself—ever could, he’s just never appealed to me as a politician. Was his maverick persona genuine or merely designed to maximize media coverage? Senator McCain obviously knew that, as a Republican, the surest way to end up on TV is to publicly tell your own party to shove it.

I also consider the McCain/Feingold campaign finance reform law to be one of the greatest infringements on political speech this country has ever enacted. (I explain a bit why in my interview with Michael Moore.) It isn’t quite the Sedition Act, but a part of me will never forgive McCain for pushing it or President Bush for signing it. It would be a bittersweet irony if, hamstrung by rules of his own creation, John McCain were to be defeated by an Obama machine that made a mockery out of the central premise of McCain/Feingold: that by passing it, the political system would be shielded from the corrosive effects of money.

On the other hand, I can’t in good conscience vote for someone who surrounds himself with such an appalling cadre of felons, bigots and 60’s leftover leftist revolutionaries who have changed only their means, not their ends. Obama campaigned as a messianic blank slate, and the media did its best to ignore any information that might smudge up the halo. The best I can say is I hope Obama is a much better—and more moderate—man than his associations indicate. We don’t really know who we’re getting by electing Obama. But I won’t be voting for him, especially at a time when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are running Congress.

So Obama’s out.

Philosophically, the political label that matches my views the most would be “libertarian.” Unfortunately, it’s a label shared with a political party of the same name.

“Big-L” (as in the party) Libertarians seem to attract an uncomfortable mixture of conspiracy theorists, isolationists and pacifists. The Libertarian Party is the political equivalent of a Star Trek convention. Contrast that with “small-L” libertarians (as in adherents to the political philosophy) who tend the be the type of people you’ll have the most fun breaking laws with.

I consider myself a libertarian for two reasons.

First and foremost: for the betterment of the human race. True, these aren’t easy days to proclaim oneself an unashamed capitalist. But whatever governmental market distortions led to the current financial crisis, the simple fact remains that no single system has brought more material comfort to more people worldwide than capitalism.

In America today, people we consider poor have a standard of living that would’ve been thought of as middle-class a century ago. Sure, we can to do better for more people, but there’s only one historically proven way to do it: capitalism. By definition, government can’t create wealth. Only private economic activity can. The more economic activity, the faster the growth, and the richer even the poor become. The larger the share of the economy that flows through the government, the longer it’ll take for the engine of capitalism to grow poverty into extinction.

The second reason I’m a libertarian is because I believe that the individual should be afforded the maximum personal liberty in cases where no other individual’s rights are being abridged. In their private lives, people should be allowed to set whatever personal boundaries their consciences allow and require. And while I believe that people should abide by some form of moral code, it is not the function of the state to impose one person’s moral code on another. If you want to convince someone else to live by your rules, you’re free to do so in the private sphere. But government is too big a bludgeon to be used for such a function.

So, in a nutshell, that’s why I’m a (”small-L”) libertarian.

Unfortunately, the (”big-L”) Libertarian Party is a bit of a joke, repeatedly letting itself get hijacked by vanity candidates who aren’t serious about libertarianism or winning elections.

This year’s Libertarian Party candidate is Bob Barr, a former Republican who didn’t seem to be much of a libertarian until the moment he figured out he could get the party’s nomination.

When Bob Barr was last seen on the political stage, it was during the Clinton impeachment hearings. Barr, as one of Clinton’s ineffectual Republican antagonists, went on to be thought of as one of those Clinton-was-lucky-to-have-him-as-an-enemy types.

Barr isn’t the sort of candidate I’d pull the lever for in any other circumstance. But I don’t live in a swing state where voting for the Libertarian is effectively the same as a voting for Obama (who—for me anyway—fails the libertarian lesser-of-two-evils test).

The political leanings of my fellow New Yorkers has effectively reduced my vote to a protest anyway. So I might as well cast my vote in a way that most accurately reflects my political philosophy.

Which is why, this year, I’m holding my nose, voting Libertarian, and hoping that, somehow, McCain wins.

Someone has to stand between your wallet and the Democrats in Congress.

1 November 2008 >> Over at the the New York Times website, there’s a nifty little widget illustrating the paper’s presidential endorsements throughout its history.

Since 1884, Democrats have gotten 78% of the paper’s endorsements, while Republicans have gotten 19%. (A third-party endorsement in the election of 1896 accounts for the remaining 3%.)

Since the election of 1960, the paper has endorsed only Democrats.

31 October 2008 @ 9:07AM >> Already, the United States has one of the most redistributionist income tax codes on the planet:

Barack Obama’s admission that his policies would “spread the wealth around” has ignited a nationwide discussion of how progressive the tax system should be and how it should be used to redistribute income among Americans. Obama has been very successful in bolstering the conventional wisdom that the U.S. tax system does not place a significant enough burden on wealthier households and places too much of a burden on the “middle class.”

But a new study on inequality by researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris reveals that when it comes to household taxes (income taxes and employee social security contributions) the U.S. “has the most progressive tax system and collects the largest share of taxes from the richest 10% of the population.” [... T]he U.S. tax system is far more progressive-meaning pro-poor-than similar systems in countries most Americans identify with high taxes, such as France and Sweden.

Even after accounting for the fact that the top 10 percent of households in the U.S. have one of the highest shares of market income among OECD nations, our tax system is second only to Ireland in terms of its progressivity for households.

[... T]he U.S. [also] collects more household tax revenue from the top 10 percent of households than any other country and extracts the most from that income group relative to their share of the nation’s income.

Twice before, I asked: how much tax would “the rich” have to pay before it becomes fair?

I think Barack Obama and the Democrats owe us an answer. Preferably before election day.

29 October 2008 @ 8:53AM >> I thought the job of the news media was to provide information, not suppress it. I guess I’m wrong:

Let’s try a thought experiment. Say John McCain attended a party at which known racists and terror mongers were in attendance. Say testimonials were given, including a glowing one by McCain for the benefit of the guest of honor ... who happened to be a top apologist for terrorists. Say McCain not only gave a speech but stood by, in tacit approval and solidarity, while other racists and terror mongers gave speeches that reeked of hatred for an American ally and rationalizations of terror attacks.

Now let’s say the Los Angeles Times obtained a videotape of the party.

Question: Is there any chance — any chance — the Times would not release the tape and publish front-page story after story about the gory details, with the usual accompanying chorus of sanctimony from the oped commentariat? Is there any chance, if the Times was the least bit reluctant about publishing (remember, we’re pretending here), that the rest of the mainstream media (y’know, the guys who drove Trent Lott out of his leadership position over a birthday-party toast) would not be screaming for the release of the tape?

Do we really have to ask?

So now, let’s leave thought experiments and return to reality: Why is the Los Angeles Times sitting on a videotape of the 2003 farewell bash in Chicago at which Barack Obama lavished praise on the guest of honor, Rashid Khalidi — former mouthpiece for master terrorist Yasser Arafat?

[...]

Is there just a teeny-weenie chance that this was an evening of Israel-bashing Obama would find very difficult to explain? Could it be that the Times, a pillar of the Obamedia, is covering for its guy?

Gateway Pundit reports that the Times has the videotape but is suppressing it.

Back in April, the Times published a gentle story about the fete. Reporter Peter Wallsten avoided, for example, any mention of the inconvenient fact that the revelers included Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, Ayers’s wife and fellow Weatherman terrorist. These self-professed revolutionary Leftists are friendly with both Obama and Khalidi — indeed, researcher Stanley Kurtz has noted that Ayers and Khalidi were “best friends.” (And — small world! — it turns out that the Obamas are extremely close to the Khalidis, who have reportedly babysat the Obama children.)

If Barack Obama is elected, he’ll probably be the president about which the American public knows the least. The media seems only interested in conveying feelings about Obama, not facts. As National Review’s Mark Levin wrote:

Virtually all evidence of Obama’s past influences and radicalism — from Jeremiah Wright to William Ayers — have been raised by non-traditional news sources. The media’s role has been to ignore it as long as possible, then mention it if they must, and finally dismiss it and those who raise it in the first place. It’s as if the media use the Obama campaign’s talking points — its preposterous assertions that Obama didn’t hear Wright from the pulpit railing about black liberation, whites, Jews, etc., that Obama had no idea Ayers was a domestic terrorist despite their close political, social, and working relationship, etc. — to protect Obama from legitimate and routine scrutiny. And because journalists have also become commentators, it is hard to miss their almost uniform admiration for Obama and excitement about an Obama presidency.

Sure, we’ve heard about Obama incessantly, but what do we know?

We know he’s good-looking, super-cool, and he sports a spiffy halo. We know the celebrities in Hollywood love him, and European rock stars encourage Americans to vote for him on Saturday Night Live. We know that he will transcend race, even though he spent 20 years of Sundays in a racist church.

Aside from winning elections, we know that his greatest accomplishment to date has been to write two books about himself. We know he portrays himself as a moderate, but he hasn’t been on the political stage long enough to amass a record proving it. Even in his short time in the Senate, his votes have positioned himself further to the left than any other Senator.

True, the man has a voice that manages to soothe even as it commands respect. Unlike the raving lunatics and aging bomb-throwers he surrounds himself with, Barack Obama has the air of someone unflappably reasonable.

But who is Barack Obama really?

Given the lack of actual evidence backing up his supposed moderation—besides his take-my-word-for-it assurances—it is not only fair to judge Obama on the company he keeps, it’s pretty much the only way to judge him.

Perhaps that’s why news organizations like the Los Angeles Times wants us to know as little as possible about Obama’s associations. They know America would never elect a guy who keeps the company that Obama does.

26 October 2008 @ 6:48PM >> A local TV reporter in central Florida made television history the other day by questioning Saint Barack’s running mate in a manner usually reserved for Republican candidates.

And, of course, disciples of The One aren’t happy about it.

So the TV station has been cut off from all access to the Obama campaign for the duration of the election.

The Orlando Sentinel reports:

WFTV-Channel 9’s Barbara West conducted a satellite interview with Sen. Joe Biden on Thursday. A friend says it’s some of the best entertainment he’s seen recently. [...]

West wondered about Sen. Barack Obama’s comment, to Joe the Plumber, about spreading the wealth. She quoted Karl Marx and asked how Obama isn’t being a Marxist with the “spreading the wealth” comment.

“Are you joking?” said Biden, who is Obama’s running mate. “No,” West said.

West later asked Biden about his comments that Obama could be tested early on as president. She wondered if the Delaware senator was saying America’s days as the world’s leading power were over.

“I don’t know who’s writing your questions,” Biden shot back.

Biden so disliked West’s line of questioning that the Obama campaign canceled a WFTV interview with Jill Biden, the candidate’s wife.

“This cancellation is non-negotiable, and further opportunities for your station to interview with this campaign are unlikely, at best for the duration of the remaining days until the election,” wrote Laura K. McGinnis, Central Florida communications director for the Obama campaign.

McGinnis said the Biden cancellation was “a result of her husband’s experience yesterday during the satellite interview with Barbara West.”

[...]

WFTV news director Bob Jordan said, “When you get a shot to ask these candidates, you want to make the most of it. They usually give you five minutes.”

Jordan said political campaigns in general pick and choose the stations they like. And stations often pose softball questions during the satellite interviews.

“Mr. Biden didn’t like the questions,” Jordan said. “We choose not to ask softball questions.”

You can watch the interview here.

26 October 2008 @ 4:49PM >> People aren’t stupid:

Voters overwhelmingly believe that the media wants Barack Obama to win the presidential election. By a margin of 70%-9%, Americans say most journalists want to see Obama, not John McCain, win on Nov. 4. Another 8% say journalists don’t favor either candidate, and 13% say they don’t know which candidate most reporters support.

[...]

In recent presidential campaigns, voters repeatedly have said they thought journalists favored the Democratic candidate over the Republican. But this year’s margin is particularly wide. At this stage of the 2004 campaign, 50% of voters said most journalists wanted to see John Kerry win the election, while 22% said most journalists favored George Bush. In October 2000, 47% of voters said journalists wanted to see Al Gore win and 23% said most journalists wanted Bush to win. In 1996, 59% said journalists were pulling for Bill Clinton.

In the current campaign, Republicans, Democrats and independents all feel that the media wants to see Obama win the election. Republicans are almost unanimous in their opinion: 90% of GOP voters say most journalists are pulling for Obama. More than six-in-ten Democratic and independent voters (62% each) say the same.

For an industry that by all measures is in severe financial trouble, you’d think that reporters and editors would be a little more worried about the public’s perception of their output. But the media’s short-term desire to elect Barack Obama is apparently more important than their long-term credibility. That’s an exceedingly poor business decision.

17 October 2008 @ 8:51AM >> Well, as Dan Rather knows, it wouldn’t be the first time.

One of the stories used to propagate the meme of “angry Republicans” apparently has no evidence to back it up:

The agent in charge of the Secret Service field office in Scranton said allegations that someone yelled “kill him” when presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s name was mentioned during Tuesday’s Sarah Palin rally are unfounded.

The Scranton Times-Tribune first reported the alleged incident on its Web site Tuesday and then again in its print edition Wednesday. The first story, written by reporter David Singleton, appeared with allegations that while congressional candidate Chris Hackett was addressing the crowd and mentioned Obama’s name a man in the audience shouted “kill him.”

News organizations including ABC, The Associated Press, The Washington Monthly and MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann reported the claim, with most attributing the allegations to the Times-Tribune story.

Agent Bill Slavoski said he was in the audience, along with an undisclosed number of additional secret service agents and other law enforcement officers and not one heard the comment.

“I was baffled,” he said after reading the report in Wednesday’s Times-Tribune.

He said the agency conducted an investigation Wednesday, after seeing the story, and could not find one person to corroborate the allegation other than Singleton.

Slavoski said more than 20 non-security agents were interviewed Wednesday, from news media to ordinary citizens in attendance at the rally for the Republican vice presidential candidate held at the Riverfront Sports Complex. He said Singleton was the only one to say he heard someone yell “kill him.”

“We have yet to find someone to back up the story,” Slavoski said. “We had people all over and we have yet to find anyone who said they heard it.”

Hackett said he did not hear the remark.

Slavoski said Singleton was interviewed Wednesday and stood by his story but couldn’t give a description of the man because he didn’t see him he only heard him.

When contacted Wednesday afternoon, Singleton referred questions to Times-Tribune Metro Editor Jeff Sonderman. Sonderman said, “We stand by the story. The facts reported are true and that’s really all there is.”

Slavoski said the agents take such threats or comments seriously and immediately opened an investigation but after due diligence “as far as we’re concerned it’s closed unless someone comes forward.” He urged anyone with knowledge of the alleged incident to call him [...]. “We’ll run at all leads,” he said.

Thousands of people at a rally, and nobody got this on tape? Nobody except the reporter heard it?

We’re just supposed to take the reporter’s word for it, I guess.

15 October 2008 @ 9:05AM >> You might not know it, what with Fahrenheit 9/11 being released a few weeks before the 2004 election, W. being released a few weeks before this election, and a whole slew of anti-Iraq War films over the last five years, but Hollywood all of a sudden does not want to appear partisan:

[Warner Brothers] has temporarily blocked the release of the DVD version of the 1987 film Hanoi Hilton, which will feature an interview with John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, about his imprisonment in Hoa Lo prison during the war.

The film, which gave a favourable portrayal of US prisoners, will now be released on November 11 - a week after the election.

Warner Brothers’s decision is likely to raise suggestions that it did not want to aid Mr McCain’s campaign by highlighting his wartime acts. The Republican candidate, who was a Navy pilot, was tortured during his imprisonment after being shot down over North Vietnam in October 1967.

Barry Meyer, the company’s chairman and chief executive, last month attended a fundraising dinner for Barack Obama, Mr McCain’s Democratic opponent.

[...]

Ronnee Sass, a spokesman for Warner Brothers, told the New York Times: “It’s just us trying to be cautious and not affect the election one way or the other.”

13 October 2008 @ 8:58AM >> The latest media meme is that Republicans have become unhinged and dangerous at political rallies.

For some reason, the last 8 years of deranged anger towards President George W. Bush was never reported by the establishment media. Perhaps that’s because they felt it, too.

But it was an important story. I got my start in documentary filmmaking by capturing the ugly, violent passions of liberal activists. The only reason the stories I covered were unique is that the media refused to cover them. Sure, plenty of political protests got coverage, but the extremist element at those protests were ignored by the media’s presentation.

And today, you’ll find plenty of hate directed at the campaign of John McCain and Sarah Palin. But for some reason, the media has not constructed a narrative depicting Barack Obama’s supporters as angry and divisive. There certainly hasn’t been any criticism of Obama for encouraging confrontation by telling his supporters, “I want you to argue with [McCain backers] and get in their face.”

If I were a cynic, I might even conclude that the media has chosen sides in our election.

11 October 2008 @ 6:44PM >> There are some red faces in upstate New York, where absentee election ballots were mailed out with Senator Barack Obama’s name erroneously rendered as Barack Osama.

6 October 2008 @ 9:31AM >> In a report that isn’t labeled an editorial, the Associated Press contends that criticizing Senator Barack Obama for his connections to unapologetic domestic terrorist Bill Ayers amounts to racism. (Or, in the exact words of AP, pointing out the ties between Obama and Ayers “carrie[s] a racially tinged subtext.”)

The article objects to the following statement from Alaska Governor Sarah Palin:

“Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country. This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America.”

The very first fundraiser of Barack Obama’s political career was held at the house of Ayers and his co-conspirator wife Bernardine Dorhn, two of the leaders of the Weather Underground. For years, the Weathermen terrorized Americans by bombing the U.S. Capital, the Pentagon, military recruiting stations and dozens of other locations, leading to several deaths. The Weathermen also killed a guard during an attempt to rob an armored car.

In addition to kicking off his political career at Ayers’s house, Obama was also tapped to lead an organization set up by Ayers to bring his goals for radicalizing education to Chicago public schools. Ayers, you see, is one of those folks who believes that, in order to be effective, indoctrination must start a lot sooner than college. And Obama worked to further the Ayers agenda for years.

But in the eyes of the establishment media, which has taken great pains to ignore the ties between Obama and Ayers, these years-long connections amount to nothing worth exploring. If one were to judge by the volume of coverage, Sarah Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy is much more relevant to the presidential election, it seems.

As for the argument that discussing Ayers and Obama’s work for his organization is somehow “racist,” well, the AP’s logic isn’t quite clear:

Palin’s words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee “palling around” with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn’t see their America?

In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers’ day 40 years ago.

Huh? So pointing out Obama’s ties to a white terrorist is somehow racist because we’re supposed to assume that all terrorists are “dark-skinned radical Muslims”? I thought it wasn’t politically correct to assume that. If anything, the AP should be congratulating Palin for pointing out that not all nutjobs who adhere to a murderous ideology are Muslim.

It doesn’t matter, though. Apparently, any criticism of Obama is inherently racist. We’re all just supposed to shut up and get out of the way so the media’s candidate can win the election and rule without opposition.

30 September 2008 @ 9:14AM >> “A reader at a major newsroom” e-mailed Glenn Reynolds:

Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for [Obama] is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. People cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working.

If Barack Obama wins, the media will have won it for him. And if so, it will be proof that—despite a decade of seismic changes in the media landscape—the establishment media still wields tons of power. The media seems not to care that the exercise of their power in service of electing Obama comes at the expense of the media’s credibility and therefore diminishes their future power.

What other presidential candidate could have gotten away with spending 20 years in a hateful, racist church? What other candidate could have gotten away with having as a close mentor an unapologetic terrorist who spent years blowing up U.S. Government buildings?

Usually, the press hammers away at issues far more mundane than that. Just ask Sarah Palin’s family.

10 September 2008 >> In the wake of the megalomaniacal Eliot Spitzer, current New York Governor David Patterson seemed like a breath of fresh air.

How disappointing, then, that he’s been reduced to the role of the Democrats’ race-card-player-du-jour:

At the Crain’s Business Forum this morning, Paterson drew attention to a phrase used numerous times by speakers at the Republican National Convention to describe Barack Obama’s leadership experience: community organizer.

“I think the Republican Party is too smart to call Barack Obama ‘black’ in a sense that it would be a negative. But you can take something about his life, which I noticed they did at the Republican Convention - a ‘community organizer.’ They kept saying it, they kept laughing,” he said.

Paterson referred to McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin who compared her work experience to Obama’s.

“So I suppose a small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except with real responsibilities,” she said at the convention.

Paterson sees the repeated use of the words “community organizer” as Republican code for “black”.

“I think where there are overtones is when there are uses of language that are designed to inhibit other people’s progress with a subtle reference to their race,” he said.

So does that make Barack Obama’s repeated references to his former job some form of reflexive racism? Or is it acceptable for Obama to talk about his career history but not his opponents?

Any criticism of Senator Obama is a sign of racism, it seems.

10 September 2008 @ 8:16AM >> Camille Paglia, the iconic liberal feminist whose intellectual honesty routinely defies conventional wisdom, has some thoughts on Sarah Palin and her brand of feminism:

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

[...]

Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America’s pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War — long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did — which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end.

Over the Labor Day weekend, with most of the big enchiladas of the major media on vacation, the vacuum was filled with a hallucinatory hurricane in the leftist blogosphere, which unleashed a grotesquely lurid series of allegations, fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about Palin. What a tacky low in American politics — which has already caused a backlash that could damage Obama’s campaign. When liberals come off as childish, raving loonies, the right wing gains. I am still waiting for substantive evidence that Sarah Palin is a dangerous extremist. I am perfectly willing to be convinced, but right now, she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. I don’t see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it.

[...]

It is certainly premature to predict how the Palin saga will go. I may not agree a jot with her about basic principles, but I have immensely enjoyed Palin’s boffo performances at her debut and at the Republican convention, where she astonishingly dealt with multiple technical malfunctions without missing a beat. A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn’t worth a warm bucket of spit.

[...]

Now that’s the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism — a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.

5 September 2008 >> In a piece that touches on many topics—read the whole thing—Victor Davis Hanson identifies the crux of the cultural divide highlighted by the reaction to Sarah Palin:

A beautiful, confident, articulate, independent, accomplished—and conservative—woman apparently has enraged Team Obama, the mainstream media, and the entire American intelligentsia, as if they were collectively hit by a cruise missile aimed from Middle America.

When Palin talks about her present life it sounds as authentic as Biden’s showy populism came off as false. Enraged feminists are apparently the gatekeepers for less well-educated American women, who are supposed to have 0-1.5 children not 5! Their husbands must be professors, lawyers, CEOs, editors—not snowmobile champions, union members, oil workers, and fishermen—or, worse, all in one! And unlike a Pelosi, Quinn, or Clinton, Palin, God forbid, did not rely on a powerful, wealthy husband or father to energize her career. Worse still, she took no women’s studies class, never attended the Ivy League, and shoots moose. The danger is not just that Sarah Palin could win McCain the election, but she could expose the entire flimsy structure of doctrinaire liberalism as the hypocrisy—and chauvinism—it has become.

Traditional, 1970s-style feminists believe that women can do anything—even become Vice-President—unless those women happen to be conservatives, in which case apparently they’re only permitted to stay home and tend to their families.

By being a successful female politician who doesn’t rely on identity politics, Sarah Palin represents a brand of post-feminism, and to whatever extent she can succeed further, she dumps another shovelful of dirt on the coffin of old feminism.

That’s why she must be destroyed.

2 September 2008 @ 8:46AM >> I’ll be a guest this evening on It’s Your Call with Lynn Doyle discussing politics and the party conventions. The show airs with a special schedule tonight, from 8PM to 11PM, on Comcast’s CN8 news channel.