NY TIMES PROFILE: ‘WHY I JOINED THE TEA PARTY’

I was surprised by this one. The NYT did a story on Tea Party members and I detected no lies or distortions. It's probably just an anomaly. We are given the story of two rather normal working folks that are bothered by events and what they have been doing about it.


h/t; Breitbart TV

The Unspoken Agreement Between the NYT and Its Readers

Good News / Bad News

The bad news is that your congressman does not represent you. Not many denizens of the right blogosphere will see this as a news flash. But I thought I’d flesh it out with some facts. OpenSecrets.org reports that in 2008 14,808 lobbyists gave 3.3 billion dollars to members of congress. Thus far in 2009 13,426 lobbyists have given 2.5 billion to members of congress. Victorian Brits used to say, “You must do the queen’s bidding if you take the queen’s pence.”
Earlier this week the New York Times ran a story about lobbyists paying for congressional travel and junkets, Here are a few relevant paragraphs:


“While lobbyists are not supposed to pay for a lawmaker’s travel, for example, Mr. Sensenbrenner’s $14,708 trip to Liechtenstein and Germany in 2009 was organized by a nonprofit group whose president is a lobbyist. It was underwritten by European companies that, in many cases, lobby in the United States.

“The rules are filled with odd contradictions. Lobbyists themselves are not allowed to pay for trips, but their corporate clients can. And lobbyists are permitted to give huge sums to nonprofit groups that can sponsor travel. They can also travel to destinations and meet the lawmakers once they get there, though they cannot go on the same plane.


“The companies finance much of this travel indirectly, getting around the spirit of the rules by giving money to nonprofits, some of which seem to exist largely to sponsor trips. In fact, the rules may have had the unexpected effect of obscuring who is actually paying for a lawmaker’s junket.

“Many of the trips are sponsored by organizations with ideological and policy agendas, rather than commercial interests. Most of those rely, at least in part, on corporate financing to underwrite trips for lawmakers.


“Don Bonker, is a Washington lobbyist, whose firm, APCO Worldwide, has served as a registered agent for the German government.


“. . . and that the trips had been approved beforehand by the House ethics staff.”

I hope my readers caught the funny part where the Times writer referred to the spirit of the law being gotten around. He’s smart enough to write for the NYT but can’t see the obvious spirit of the law that is smack in front of his face. The spirit of the law is to allow members of congress to take large value gifts from lobbyists while having a weak fig leaf of a law to try to hide behind. Basically the spirit of the law is the opposite of what the Times writer implies. But the owners and advertisers of the NYT are the pimps and prostitutes that the writer is attempting to cover for.
The good news is that, even though your congressman could not care less about your interests when legislating, if you have enough money you can own a member of congress, They are up for sale. Just come up with their price and you can own one or more. This is America and if you get lucky and somehow become a multimultimillionaire you too can participate in the miracle of cash enhanced representative government. And you can fly your very own congressman to Liechtenstein and proudly display him for your family and friends.

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics: This Story Has Them All

I watched the panel discussion on Stephanopoulos’ Sunday morning show. George S. and most of the panel kept referring to to a new NYT/CBS poll. They kept quoting numbers for approval of the president’s unwritten plan that were wildly higher than any I have heard. A story at Patterico’s Pontifications today analyzed the methodology of the poll. The poll is pure BS and gun smoke and basically a fraud. Here are a couple of quotes from the post by Karl at Patterico.

“This is what propaganda looks like:
“Americans overwhelmingly support substantial changes to the health care system and are strongly behind [72%] one of the most contentious proposals Congress is considering, a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
“Bruce Kesler points out that — in traditional NYT/CBS fashion — the sample is badly skewed:
“According to the actual poll data, of the 73% of respondents who said they voted in 2008 only 34% voted for McCain and 66% for Obama. The actual vote was 48% McCain.
“This is a good example of why reading a poll is as much art as science, because the first problem is the percentage who say they voted in the 2008 election. In reality, no more than 62% of eligible voters cast ballots last year. Accordingly, the poll has sampled a lot of adults who were ineligible to vote… or, as often happens, respondents lied about voting. In such cases, the lie tends to skew in favor of the winner.
“Does that mean the sample might be more valid than Kesler suggests? Not in this case. In this poll, the sample identified as 27% liberal, 37% moderate, and 29% conservative. In contrast, last week’s Gallup Poll showed Americans identify as 21% liberal, 35% moderate, and 40% conservative.”


And there is another big problem with the poll that automatically skews the results toward the direction the NYT apparently demanded:

Of those somehow chosen for the sample, “16% was temporarily out of work, and another 10% was not in the market for work. Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg tells us that those who have been unemployed within the past year (or have an immediate family member in that category) are the most supportive of a government takeover of the US healthcare system. So a sample with much higher unemployment than the national average tells us something about the skew here also.”

This morning Diane Sawyer said about ABC, "I know that our network has worked very, very hard to be completely- completely responsible and fair and serious about big issues." The relish with which most of the ABC employees endlessly repeated the results of this poll leads me to believe that either they are going to tell us that health care is not one of the big issues or Sawyer is a liar.

This Is the Kind of ThingThat Would Embarass Obama

From the tasty Onion:

"Media Having Trouble Finding Right Angle On Obama's Double-Homicide
"WASHINGTON—More than a week after President Barack Obama's cold-blooded killing of a local couple, members of the American news media admitted Tuesday that they were still trying to find the best angle for covering the gruesome crime.
"I know there's a story in there somewhere," said Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, referring to Obama's home invasion and execution-style slaying of Jeff and Sue Finowicz on Apr. 8. "Right now though, it's probably best to just sit back and wait for more information to come in. After all, the only thing we know for sure is that our president senselessly murdered two unsuspecting Americans without emotion or hesitation."
"Added Meacham, "It's not so cut and dried."
"Since the killings took place, reporters across the country have struggled to come up with an appropriate take on the ruthless crime, with some wondering whether it warrants front-page coverage, and others questioning its relevance in a fast-changing media landscape.
""What exactly is the news hook here?" asked Rick Kaplan, executive producer of the CBS Evening News. "Is this an upbeat human-interest story about a 'day in the life' of a bloodthirsty president who likes to kill people? Or is it more of an examination of how Obama's unusual upbringing in Hawaii . . . "
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"The New York Times newsroom is reportedly still undecided on whether or not to print a recent letter received from Obama, in which the president threatens to kill another helpless citizen every Tuesday and "fill [his] heavenly palace with slaves for the afterlife" unless the police "stop the darkness from screaming."
""President Obama's letter presents us with a classic journalistic quandary," executive editor Bill Keller said. "If we print it, then we're giving him control over the kinds of stories we choose to run. It would be an acknowledgment that we somehow give the nation's commander in chief special treatment."
"Added Keller, "And that's just not how the press in this country works.""

It Seems That The NYT Was Covering Up For Obama AndACORN

Warner Todd Huston has a post at Stop the ACLU about all of this. He has interviewed the ACORN whistle blower. He finds the story more complicated than originally reported. The new wrinkle is that the Times was also trying to protect itself financially. Read all of Huston's post. But it remains pretty much accepted that the NYT covered up a major story that could have cost Obama the election. Here's a little quote from the whistle blower, Moncrief, "The article she is referring to was the last one she wrote on ACORN in which they report that ACORN’s own lawyer Beth Kingsley released that Project Vote and ACORN were basically shared staff, the same things… so they couldn’t tell whether the money that was being spent for the C3 was actually being used for C4 activities. And of course she mentioned that the Obama campaign denied all ties with ACORN. At the time she had the information, she had the donor list, she had the donor list since August and she had got evidence from myself and other whistleblowers that there had been a meeting that had taken place between the Obama camp and ACORN. None of that stuff was printed."

Careful, Or The MSM Might Find Out About This

If we're careful the NYT will never stumble across any of this.

Why Does the NYT Have a Junk Bond Rating?

A White House spokesman said, "I don't know if the Times' junk bond rating is causing a lack of reporting or whether their lack of reporting has caused their junk bond rating."

Hat Tip/Ace of Spades

"Cold Cash" Jefferson Loses and NYT Cries 'Foul'

This is NewsBusters.org written by Tim Graham

Controversial Rep. Bill Jefferson (D-Louisiana), the congressman who notoriously hid tens of thousands of dollars of federal sting money in his freezer, lost his House seat in a shocker Saturday in an election delayed by Hurricane Gustav. Anh "Joseph" Cao, a 41-year-old Republican, will be the first Vietnamese-American in Congress. Obviously, this happened with next to zero national media attention, just as Rep. Jefferson was re-elected in 2006 after the freezer revelations without much national media attention. Will they report this ethnic first now?

Reporter Adam Nossiter in the New York Times suggested that the system failed, that a black-majority district failed to work as it was designed. Nossiter found that the problem was a surge of white voters angered by corruption charges:

The upset victory by the lawyer, Anh Cao, was thought by analysts to be the result of a strong turnout by white voters angered over federal corruption charges against Mr. Jefferson, a black Democrat who was counting on a loyal [read: black] base to return him to Congress for a 10th term....

Attacks on Free Speech

From NRO

October 3, 2008 12:00 AM

Free Speech for Me, Not for Thee
The left has learned to like some chill with its free speech.

By Rich Lowry

Barack Obama has already brought change. He’s ended the “chilling effect.”

Any restrictions on speech — real or imagined — were once inevitably deemed to have a “chilling effect” on people who would otherwise exercise their First Amendment rights if they weren’t so frightened by the possibility of running afoul of the law. Claims of a “chilling effect” were the most reliable weapon in the American Civil Liberties Union’s absolutist campaign against, say, even the most common-sensical laws against obscenity.

But the politics of free speech has been subtly shifting. Opponents of the ACLU on the Right are increasingly worried about overreaching rules against “hate speech” defining legitimate opinions as out of bounds. Meanwhile, the same people who forever decry the country’s imminent descent into the dark night of fascism are now comfortable regulating political speech in federal law and banning speech on college campuses. The Left has learned to like some chill with its free speech.

Enter the Obama campaign, which reflects the new ethos. It twice issued “Obama Action Wire” alerts for activists to call a Chicago radio station and try to shut down appearances by two Obama critics, writers Stanley Kurtz and David Freddoso. No “chilling effect” here. CNN and the Chicago Tribune reported on the effort to silence Obama’s detractors, but mostly by way of noting the Obama camp’s tech-savvy mustering of its supporters.

When an outside group ran TV ads pointing out links between Obama and the former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, the Obama campaign asked the Bush Justice Department — yes, that Bush Justice Department, the fount of all evil — to open a criminal investigation.

The Obama campaign’s effort dovetails with the work of an outfit called Accountable America, run by a former MoveOn.org operative. It is devoted to threatening conservative donors with legal action and exposure of any embarrassing details of their private lives if they give money to groups running ads against Obama. The New York Times account says the group hopes to create “a chilling effect,” but the phrase is used non-pejoratively.

Liberal editorial boards have apparently lost their former zest for the First Amendment. Consider this approving sentence from a New York Times editorial: “The wholesale descent into Swift Boat campaigning has been blocked — for now — by a federal judge in Virginia.” It was written about a judge denying an injunction against the Federal Election Commission sought by a pro-life group running radio ads attacking Obama. The group thinks the First Amendment protects political speech; unfortunately, the courts disagree.

But the Times goes beyond mere legalities. It asserts with no evidence that the group’s advertising is “lies,” then urges the FEC to “be vigilant for what will inevitably be fresh attempts to mislead voters with fresh lies.” Here’s a newspaper charging a governmental agency with policing and shutting down campaign ads it doesn’t like.

It’s all just a taste of what’s to come if Obama wins and Democrats have even bigger majorities in Congress, emboldening them to try to crush their antagonists once and for all. “Hate is not a family value” was a popular bumper sticker on the left during the 1990s. Now, the left has embraced hate as, if not a family value, the organizing spirit of its long assault on George W. Bush, and anyone else in the way, from Joe Lieberman to Sarah Palin.

America’s partisan politics has always featured its share of rancorous abuse, but there’s something rancid at the heart of the new, blog-driven left that believes its bullying childishness has led the way out of the wilderness. This spirit will inevitably seep into an Obama administration. Whatever Obama’s professions of his commitment to cross-partisan understanding, he’s never confronted the left of his own party and has always been willing to engage in hardball when it suits his purposes.

Little Keith Olbermanns will surely be burrowed throughout his executive branch, eager to chill the speech of the “worst people in the world.”

The Surge and the NYT

Good post from The Jawa Report http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/



September 03, 2008
Then & Now: NYT Got the Surge Wrong...Again, and Again, and Again

Here's the NYT two days ago: U.S. Hands Off Pacified Anbar, Once Heart of Iraq Insurgency

Barack Obama could not be reached for comment, but did release a statement saying that making such foreign policy decisions like that required for the surge to be implemented was "above his pay grade."

Noted foreign policy strategists and military experts Maureen Down, Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Nick Kristof and the all-knowing ed board itself have plenty of crow to eat. Good job by Eric Posner at the Volokh Conspiracy for rounding these gems up:

The only real question about the planned "surge" in Iraq — which is better described as a Vietnam-style escalation — is whether its proponents are cynical or delusional. -- Paul Krugman, NYT, 1/8/07

There is nothing ahead but even greater disaster in Iraq. -- NYT Editorial, 1/11/07

What anyone in Congress with half a brain knows is that the surge was sabotaged before it began. -- Frank Rich, NYT, 2/11/07

Keeping troops in Iraq has steadily increased the risk of a bloodbath. The best way to reduce that risk is, I think, to announce a timetable for withdrawal and to begin a different kind of surge: of diplomacy. -- Nicholas Kristof, NYT, 2/13/07

W. could have applied that to Iraq, where he has always done only enough to fail, including with the Surge -- Maureen Dowd, NYT, 2/17/07

The senator supported a war that didn't need to be fought and is a cheerleader for a surge that won't work. -- Maureen Dowd, NYT, 2/24/07

Now the ''surge'' that was supposed to show results by summer is creeping inexorably into an open-ended escalation, even as Moktada al-Sadr's militia ominously melts away, just as Iraq's army did after the invasion in 2003, lying in wait to spring a Tet-like surprise. -- Frank Rich, NYT, 3/11/07

Victory is no longer an option in Iraq, if it ever was. The only rational objective left is to responsibly organize America’s inevitable exit. That is exactly what Mr. Bush is not doing and what the House and Senate bills try to do. -- NYT Editorial, 3/29/07
We tried to warn these partisan liberal Democrat hacks that history has a strange way of making fools of such pinheads and their "commentary" during wartime. We were right. The NYT was wrong, along with their candidate Barack Obama and Joe Biden. McCain was right when Bush was wrong, and that's the bottom line.

Farking morons. Will these incorrect opinions and disinformation be corrected en masse on the corrections blotter, NYT? Pinch? Keller? Hoyt? Anybody listening over there?

Let this be the evidence you trot out when people tell you the NYT is the "paper of record." It sure is - a record of EPIC FAIL.

ht: Insty