The liberal media continue their effort to spin the Obama administration right out of trouble. On Saturday’s Today, NBC brought on John Harwood, CNBC’s chief Washington correspondent, to provide some analysis of the three scandals that rocked the administration last week. Harwood, with help from co-anchor Erica Hill, attempted to make the discussion about the Republicans and their shortcomings rather than the White House’s failings.

Hill brought up the fact that some senior Republicans, such as Newt Gingrich, have cautioned the party about not going after Obama too aggressively over the scandals. Harwood agreed, adding that the party does not have a wide enough base. He then chastised Republicans: [Video below. MP3 audio here.]
 

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Beyond the usual “Members of Visible Minorities,” “Sex,” “Aboriginal Peoples” and “Persons with Disabilities,” was a field I had never seen on a job application before.
It asked, “Do you identify as a sexual minority (e.g. lesbian, gay, bisexual, two-spirited, queer or transgender)?”.

CNN's scrutiny of the Obama administration's scandals has fallen sharply from last week. From 7 a.m. through 2 p.m. ET on Monday, CNN spent about as much time on Obama's "triple trouble" of controversy as it did on Saturday's Powerball-winning ticket.

CNN spent 12 full minutes reporting that one single ticket won the $590 million Powerball jackpot over the weekend, and had yet to be claimed. In comparison, three Obama administration scandals merited about the same coverage, 12 minutes, 21 seconds. Yet over three minutes of that coverage focused on the President's rising approval ratings amidst the controversies.

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Approved leaks only, please!

From Big Government:

The Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General published a new report (PDF) Monday that confirms former U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke leaked a document intended to smear Operation Fast and Furious scandal whistleblower John Dodson.

The DOJ IG said it found “Burke’s conduct in disclosing the Dodson memorandum to be inappropriate for a Department employee and wholly unbefitting a U.S. Attorney.”
[...]
In addition to Burke’s involvement in leaking the document, emails the IG uncovered show senior officials at the Department of Justice discussed smearing Dodson.

One of those was Tracy Schmaler, the Director of the Department’s Office of Public Affairs, who resigned her position at the DOJ after emails uncovered through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request showed that she worked with leftwing advocacy group Media Matters for America to smear whistleblowers and members of Congress and the media who sought to investigate DOJ scandals under Attorney General Eric Holder.

So far I’ve read nothing about the administration going after any reporters who ran with this particular leak.

President Obama’s going to be angry when he learns about this on the news tonight.

**Written by Doug Powers
Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Perhaps no other IRS official is more intimately associated with the tax agency's growing scandal than Lois Lerner, director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division. Since admitting the IRS harassed hundreds of conservative and Tea Party groups for over two years, Lerner has been criticized for a number of untruths—including the revelation that she apparently lied about planting a question at an American Bar Association conference where she first publicly acknowledged IRS misconduct.

"I mean, nobody's been more outraged by the reported conduct here than the president of the United States," said Carney.

 

Submitted for your consideration is a May 15 post on CNN's Global Public Square (GPS) blog by Sahar Aziz headlined "Muslims to Tea Party: Welcome to our world"

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View the full article]]> Mon, 20 May 2013 19:11:39 +0000 213ae43d829187e7fe3d5486acd61976 http://www.bluecanada.ca/index.php?/page/index.html/_/oped/senior-obama-adviser-president%e2%80%99s-precise-location-during-and-after-benghazi-attack-%e2%80%98largely-irre-r20550 **Written by Doug Powers

This is “what difference does it make” v2.0:

WALLACE: With due respect, you didn’t answer my question. What did the president do that night?

PFEIFFER: He was kept — he was in constant touch that night with his national security team and kept up-to-date as events were happening.

WALLACE: You say the national security team, but he didn’t talk to the Secretary of State, except for the one time when the first attack was over. He didn’t’ talk to the Secretary of Defense. He didn’t talk to the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs. Who was he talking to?

PFEIFFER: He was talking to his national security staff, his National Security Council, the people who keep him up-to-date about these things as they happen.

WALLACE: Was he in the Situation Room?

PFEIFFER: He was kept up-to-date throughout the day.

WALLACE: Do you not know if he was in the Situation Room?

PFEIFFER: I don’t know. I don’t remember what room the president was in on that night. That’s a largely irrelevant fact.

Maybe Obama was in the living room learning what happened on the news just like the rest of America. That seems to be the pattern.

Pfeiffer said questions about where Obama was and what he was doing during and after the attack are offensive. The White House didn’t seem to think Obama’s exact location was irrelevant during the Bin Laden raid.

Team Obama will dodge the “where was Obama in the hours and days after the Benghazi attack” question forever. The day after the attack he was in Las Vegas raising money. The day after that Obama was in Colorado raising money and looking forward to another opportunity to… you guessed it — raise money:

Beyoncé and Jay-Z are hosting the President in New York—your chance for two spots on the guest list ends at midnight: OFA.BO/X4goCa

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) September 14, 2012

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

View the full article]]> Mon, 20 May 2013 18:20:32 +0000 14e00b86c1d3e234d8d2c1d028c3431b http://www.bluecanada.ca/index.php?/page/index.html/_/oped/terry-jones-plans-to-burn-2998-korans-on-911-r20549 He’s back!

View the full article]]> Mon, 20 May 2013 17:45:29 +0000 ab35ea26ceda8869cba98ab7b3a20f08 http://www.bluecanada.ca/index.php?/page/index.html/_/oped/the-virginia-gop-blows-it-r20553 Continue reading →

View the full article]]> Mon, 20 May 2013 17:30:06 +0000 f76151ed593ba2caaf2b1defe422c53c http://www.bluecanada.ca/index.php?/page/index.html/_/oped/msnbc-dutifully-demonizes-conservative-black-gop-politician-%e2%80%98he-might-make-todd-akin-look-like-a-r20547

Now that the race for Virginia’s next governor has kicked into high gear, NBC News’ Chief White House Correspondent has decided to be partisan and sharply criticized the Republican ticket.

On his May 20 edition of The Daily Rundown, the MSNBC anchor hammered the GOP’s nominee for Virginia Lieutenant Governor, African-American pastor E.W. Jackson, as extreme and someone who “might make Todd Akin look like a moderate.” "Can the GOP win in 2013 with a ticket of candidates who are best known for being very conservative and very outspoken on social issues?" Todd rhetorically asked before playing several clips of Jackson in a manner worthy of a liberal attack ad. [See video after jump. MP3 audio here.]

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The Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General published a new report Monday that confirms former U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke leaked a document intended to smear Operation Fast and Furious scandal whistleblower John Dodson.

We’ve made catechesis nice. It’s all about the sacraments and being nice and the church and being nice and peace and justice and being nice and forgiveness and hugs and being nice. That’s all very nice… but there is another aspect to the gospel which we’ve quietly forgotten. We’ve forgotten that part about, “If anyone would be my disciple he must take up his cross and follow me.” Or that part which says, “The world will hate you as it has hated me.” or “Broad is the way that leads to destruction, but narrow is the gate and few there be that find it.”So our children aren’t dumb. They grow up and they figure that if it’s all about being nice that you don’t have to go to church to be nice. You can be nice without church. You don’t have to be Catholic to be nice. You can be a nice Methodist if you want. So if they want to be nice they just go along being nice without church, and they believe that because that’s actually what we taught them even when we didn’t know that is what we were teaching them.Because we never told them it would be difficult and that it would require discipline and that they should have some backbone and determination if they were going to make it in the spiritual life, they learned that lesson, and therefore when it did turn out to require a little bit of grit and determination and difficult things like confession and self discipline and prayer–they went scooting off because they thought it was all about being nice and praise and worship songs that made you feel good and a warm comfy sermon from Father about loving each other more. That’s what they thought it was. That’s what we taught them it was, and when it turned out that being a Catholic required some backbone and self sacrifice and dedication they were disappointed like we are all disappointed when our expectations are shattered. Never mind that they were false expectations to start with.

Jeffrey Lord at the American Spectator has reviewed the White House logs looking for a relationship between meetings listed there and the timeline found in the Inspector General's report on the targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups issued last Tuesday. Lord's work represents yet another example of alternative media scooping a lazy or negligent establishment press.

What Lord has found (single-page print version) is that President Barack Obama met with the President of the National Treasury Employees Union Colleen Kelley, on March 31, 2010. The NTEU is "the 150,000 member union that represents IRS employees along with 30 other separate government agencies." The Inspector General's report, blandly titled "Inappropriate Criteria Were Used to Identify Tax-Exempt Applications for Review," indicates that the IRS, in Lord's words, "set to work in earnest targeting the Tea Party and conservative groups around America" the very next day. Lord's work is a mandatory read-the-whole-thing item. Excerpts follow the jump (bolds are mine):

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Court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist -- and raise the question of how often journalists have been investigated as closely as Rosen was in 2010. The case also raises new concerns among critics of government secrecy about the possible stifling effect of these investigations on a critical element of press freedom: the exchange of information between reporters and their sources.

And par for the course, of course:

- A brief history of slimy Dem snoops and dumpster divers.

- Barack “The Silencer” Obama’s Gangland Assault on Free Speech.

- Obama’s war on watchdogs and whistleblowers.

- Obama’s campaign bully brigade rides again.

- Bully boys: A brief history of White House thuggery.

The idea was “consensual adultery”,’ explains Gay Talese, a celebrated New York writer and ‘participating observer’ at the retreat, whose bestselling 1980 book about the sexual revolution, Thy Neighbour’s Wife, put Sandstone on the map for many Americans.

‘The theory is that if both parties know what the other is doing, or thinking of doing, it can be understood and perhaps condoned without it being a cause of divorce. They were re-defining “‘sin”’.’

When I tracked down Barbara Williamson this week, now 74 and running a wildlife sanctuary in Nevada, she told me they had personal motives, too — though many would regard them as utterly misguided.

Their quest for this perverse Utopia started in 1968 when — inspired by Atlas Shrugged, the libertarian thinker Ayn Rand’s novel about industrialists who drop out of an oppressive society — Williamson gave up his electronics firm and his wife threw in her insurance sales job.

When a reporter makes an assertion about someone else's beliefs or motivations, he or she is supposed to offer something up as evidence, say a direct quote, something that person has written, or even something someone else close to him or her has said.

Politico's Josh Gerstein offered nothing of the sort in his coverage of Eric Holder's "you can't touch me" attitude, though he provides plenty of evidence to support my characterization of Holder's outlook. Gerstein, without a shred of support, wrote the following in describing what he believes Republicans and conservatives are trying to accomplish in pursuing the myriad scandals in the Obama administration which have burst forth during the past two weeks, along with others, including but not limited to Operation Fast and Furious, which occurred during the Obama administration's first term (bolds are mine throughout this post):

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As NewsBusters has been reporting this week, even comedians that have been almost universally squeamish about telling jokes about Barack Obama have begun to do so with all the scandals now surrounding this White House.

Jumping on the bandwagon Saturday was political satirist Andy Borowitz who published a piece deliciously titled "Obama Denies Role In Government":

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Dr Rekha Daver, who heads the gynaecology department of the state government-run JJ Hospital in Byculla, believes computerisation is the main reason. "Most hospitals have to report their numbers online to the government or local municipal corporation website. The 44% increase is most likely due to computerised reporting," said Dr Daver. As per the government rules, the hospitals have to upload their statistics by the fifth of every month.

“Marketplace” is a popular nightly public-radio business newscast distributed on hundreds of NPR stations by Public Radio International. But the anchor, Kai Ryssdal, wasn’t about to interview former Bush defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld without demanding apologies for the "Bush wars" in a book interview for “Rumsfeld’s Rules.”

Forget the business-show rules. It was Bush-bashing time. Ryssdal began: “Let’s start with this one. It’s easier to get into something, you say, than get out. And I can’t help but wonder where we would be in this country today if you guys had been thinking of this one ten years ago.”

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Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft has details:

PROTEST THE CORRUPTION – PROTEST THE CRIMINAL OBAMA IRS

Thanks to Barack Obama the Tea Party is once again outraged and motivated.

The Tea Party Patriots on behalf of Tea Party, Patriot groups, 9/12, liberty activists, and the American people, we are calling for anyone and everyone to protest the IRS’ complete abuse of power on Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at noon local time.

More info from Tea Party Patriots here.