This is the news thread. Talk about whatever is news to you.

Media bias.

One side says it exist and happens all the time. This side disagrees with the “mainstream: media for the most part. The other side says it doesn’t exist, that it’s a myth. This side mostly agrees with the “mainstream” media. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? And could it be both are to some extent?

The situation in the last couple days in Egypt and elsewhere has brought the differences the two sides have over media bias to light yet again. I have a few things here for your consideration.

The first piece.

From the Washington Examiner

“We’re still learning more details about the events leading up to and surrounding the attacks by Islamic radicals on the U.S. consulate in Libya and embassy in Egypt, but the media has already agreed on one thing: Mitt Romney is the political loser.

“Unless the Romney campaign has gamed this crisis out in some manner completely invisible to the Gang of 500, his doubling down on criticism of the President for the statement coming out of Cairo is likely to be seen as one of the most craven and ill-advised tactical moves in this entire campaign,” opined Time’s Mark Halperin.

That instant conventional wisdom is a pretty fortunate turn of events for Obama, given that it diverted focus from his administration’s bungled handling of the entire situation and the failure of his broader foreign policy posture.”

Read more here

Now the second.

From The Right Scoop

“Open Mic Catches Press Coordinating Questions For Romney”

Read more here

And finally, this.

From National Review

“So if a presidential candidate gives remarks about a foreign-policy crisis, you’d be forgiven for thinking that in the Q&A held immediately afterward, reporters would ask him about . . . foreign policy. But when Mitt Romney took questions today after talking about the situation in Libya and Egypt, the dominant theme of the questions was all about process and politics. Here are the seven questions asked:”

“3. “The world is watching. Isn’t this itself a mixed signal when you criticize the administration at a time that Americans are being killed? Shouldn’t politics stop for this?””

Read more here

Is this bias?

That question number 3 bothered me a lot. I don’t recall GWB getting a break because Americans were dying. Why should Obama?

As you can see from the questions, they were all designed to make Mitt look bad. We also know they were coordinated amongst media members. Doesn’t this go beyond reporting to something else, maybe a Journolist kinda thing? It certainly seems like bias to me.

What’s in the news today that you’d like to talk about?

I found this disturbing.

From Reuters

“Gunmen attacked U.S. consulate offices in Libya’s eastern city of Benghazi on Tuesday, and fought with security forces in protest against a U.S. film they say is blasphemous, a security official said.

He said a fire was burning inside the consulate and that staff had been evacuated.”

Read more here

It also seems to have been coordinated with a similar protest in Egypt. I can’t help but doubt that the date chosen to do this was a coincidence.

Reports this morning are saying the US Ambassador to Libya has been killed along with 2 others.

From the Washington Post

“U.S. Ambassador to Libya John Christopher Stevens and at least two other embassy staffers were reported killed Tuesday in an assault on the American consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi.

Wire services and reporters on the ground said Libyan government officials confirmed that Stevens and the others were fleeing the consulate when a rocket-propelled grenade struck their vehicle. Al-Jazeera’s correspondent in Bengazi said the bodies of the dead had been taken to the Benghazi airport.”

Read more here

Also troubling has been the bungled response by the White House.

From Politico

“The Obama administration is disavowing a statement from its own Cairo embassy that seemed to apologize for anti-Muslim activity in the United States.

“The statement by Embassy Cairo was not cleared by Washington and does not reflect the views of the United States government,” an administration official told POLITICO.

The U.S. embassy in Cairo put out a statement early Tuesday that apologized for an anti-Muslim film being circulated by an Israeli-American real estate developer.”

Read more here

This is the thread for news and politics. Talk about whatever you’d like.

As for me……

As I’m sure you are aware, today is the 11th anniversary of the tragic events of 9-11-01. For that reason I’m giving you a link in case you’d like to watch the 11th Anniversary Ceremony from the 9-11 Memorial. It’s a live webcast starting at 8:30AM.

Watch it here

From the website 911memorial.org

What news is on your mind today?

Here’s what continues to be on mine, and millions of other Americans.

From the WSJ

“Don’t be fooled by the headline unemployment number of 8.1% announced on Friday. The reason the number dropped to 8.1% from 8.3% in July was not because more jobs were created, but because more people quit looking for work.”

“How many people are out of work but not counted as unemployed because they hadn’t sought work in the past four weeks? Eight million. This is the sort of distressing number that turns up when you look beyond the headline number.”

Read more here

So how do you get a drop when the numbers are this bad? Easy. Fuzzy math. Here’s how.

Drop the labor participation rate, AGAIN!

From ZeroHedge

“Curious why the unemployment rate dropped from 8.3% to 8.1%, even as just 96,000
jobs were added? The labor participation rate declined from 63.7% to 63.5%,
the lowest since 1981.”

Read more here

Add in some seasonal and birth numbers fudging,

“Happy by the headline establishment survey print of 133,245 which says that the
US “added” 163,000 jobs in July from 133,082 last month? Consider this: the
number was based on a non seasonally adjusted July number of 132,868.
This was a 1.248 million drop from the June print. So how did
the smoothing work out to make a real plunge into an “adjusted” rise?
Simple: the BLS “added” 377K jobs for seasonal purposes. This
was the largest seasonal addition in the past decade for a July NFP print in the
past decade, possibly ever, as the first chart below shows. But wait, there’s
more: the Birth Death adjustment, which adds to the NSA Print to get to the
final number, was +52k.
How does this compare to July 2011? It is about 1000% higher: the last B/D
adjustment was a tiny +5K! In other words, of the 163,000 jobs “added”, 429,000
was based on purely statistical fudging.”

Read more here

And voila’, a lower rate, just in time for the election. Funny how that worked out huh? Next time you hear Obama say we need to move “forward”, just remember that we’re standing on a cliff.

What’s news to you today? Tell us about it.

I read this today and I’m glad that someone will finally be held accountable. The family of Border Agent Brian Terry deserve justice. I hope they can finally get that in some small measure, although more accomplices are still out there. And still armed, thanks to our Justice Department’s stupidity and flawed policy ideas.

From NBC

“Mexican police have detained a man accused of fatally shooting a U.S. Border Patrol agent almost two years ago in Arizona in a botched U.S. operation to track guns smuggled across the border, the government said Friday.

Federal police detained Jesus Leonel Sanchez Meza on Thursday in Sonora state, which borders Arizona, where agent Brian Terry was shot dead in December 2010, the Public Security Ministry said. The Mexican Attorney General’s Office plans to extradite Sanchez Meza to the United States, the ministry said in a statement.”

Read more here

Good morning. What’s news to you today?

I found this interesting. I guess this is what they mean by “controlling the message”.

From National Review

“Conservative talk-show hosts who came to Charlotte to interview political figures are furious. For the first time in anyone’s memory, Radio Row — the designated set of booths available to visiting talk-show hosts — has seen restrictions placed on its use by Team Obama. DNC staffers at Radio Row will book leading Democrats for slots on conservative stations but then cancel the appearances an hour or so before broadcast “because you’re not our audience.”

Roger Hedgecock, a former mayor of San Diego now hosting a nationally syndicated talk show, decided to pack up and leave Charlotte early because “we were blocked from getting any guests that mattered. It was a complete freeze.” Larry O’Connor of Breitbart Radio told me, “It was the most bizarre act of censorship. These shows paid large fees and spent thousands on equipment setup and they couldn’t do their programs because of interference.”

Read more here

Talk about whatever news you think is news. As for me……

I’d like to pick up from the story I mentioned yesterday about God and any mention of Jerusalem being the capital of Israel being removed from the DNC platform. After the uproar, they decided to add the language back in at the President’s request. Which caused a whole new uproar.

From CNN

“Democrats voted to update their party’s platform Wednesday evening at their convention to include a reference to Jerusalem being the capital of Israel, as well as the insertion of the word “God,” neither of which was included in their platform this year but was in previous platforms.

President Barack Obama himself intervened regarding the Jerusalem language, a senior Democratic source told CNN, adding, that he thought the original draft was “a strong statement and he didn’t want there to be any confusion about his unshakeable commitment to the security of state Israel.”

Read more here

The video in the above link  doesn’t have the vote of the delegates in it’s entirety. You need to see the whole thing here to see the obvious division this is causing. Note the lady at the 2:39 mark who tells the chair to just push it thru, “they’re gonna do, what they’re gonna do”. What they were gonna do was fix the delegate vote. It had already been decided. A fixed election. Shocking right? Or not.

From C-SPAN

Now that you’ve watched that video, here’s another from Debbie Wasserman Schultz denying the booing and division ever happened. 🙄

Who are you gonna believe? Debbie, or your lying eyes and ears? Division? What division?

Even Anderson Cooper isn’t buying it.

News? Politics? Your choice. What’s on your mind?

Note from Aj

OK. I’m trying to clean things up a bit in regard to the links I put up. You know, trying to make it easier on the eyes. Let’s see how it goes……

Picking up from yesterdays post, it appears that the reports of God being removed from the DNC platform were correct. Why would they feel the need to do that? Let’s ask.

From Washington Examiner

“Sen. Dick Durbin D-Ill. lashed out at Fox News’ Bret Baier this evening, after Baier asked him why the word “God” was taken out of the Democratic platform.”

“Durbin again refused to answer the question, demanding that if Baier was “trying to draw some conclusion that the Democrats are godless,” he need to present “evidence.”

Continue reading

OK, he won’t answer, he seems a little touchy about it.  Let’s try somebody else…. How about the Minister of Propaganda  Robert Gibbs,  Ooops, I mean White House Spokesman. 🙂

From The Hill

“Robert Gibbs, a senior adviser for President Obama’s campaign, ducked questions on Tuesday regarding whether or not the word “God” was deliberately left out of the Democratic Party platform.

“There’s talk throughout the platform about faith and religion and I think that’s what’s important,” Gibbs told CNN.

The platform, released late Monday, does not include the word “God,” although it does refer twice to freedom of religion and religious tolerance.

Continue reading

Gee, for two guys who usually love to talk to the press and their cameras, they seem pretty shy about this topic.

Good morning!

Here’s today’s daily news and politics thread. As always, you decide what to discuss, and what’s news to you.

I just finished (it’s long) reading this. It’s a rather scathing indictment of Obama’s role in the housing crisis and the flawed policies and beliefs of he and others that led to it. Required reading in my mind.

http://dailycaller.com/2012/09/03/with-landmark-lawsuit-barack-obama-pushed-banks-to-give-subprime-loans-to-chicagos-african-americans/

“President Barack Obama was a pioneering contributor to the national subprime  real estate bubble, and roughly half of the 186 African-American clients in his  landmark 1995 mortgage discrimination lawsuit against Citibank have since gone  bankrupt or received foreclosure notices.

As few as 19 of those 186 clients still own homes with clean credit ratings,  following a decade in which Obama and other progressives pushed banks to provide  mortgages to poor African Americans.

The startling failure rate among Obama’s private sector clients was  discovered during The Daily Caller’s review of previously unpublished court  information from the lawsuit that a young Obama helmed as the lead  plaintiff’s attorney. [RELATED: Learn about the 186 class action  plaintiffs]

Since the mortgage bubble burst, some of his former clients are calling for a  policy reversal.

“If you see some people don’t make enough money to afford the mortgage, why  would you give them a loan?” asked Obama client John Buchanan. “There should be  some type of regulation against giving people loans they can’t afford.”

Banks “were too eager to lend to many who didn’t qualify,” said Don Byas,  another client who saw banks lurch from caution to bubble-inflating  recklessness.”

Read more at http://dailycaller.com/

This is our Daily News/Politics thread. Talk about the news, politics, post a link, whatever you like. I’ll start it off.

The Obama campaign will not be pleased. This has to sting a bit, and it should.

From the Daily Caller,

“President Barack Obama was greeted with fleeting applause and extended  periods of silence as he offered profuse praise to soldiers and their families  during an Aug. 31 speech in Fort Bliss, Texas.

His praise for the soldiers — and for his own national-security policies — won cheers from only a small proportion of the soldiers and families in the  cavernous aircraft-hanger.

The audience remains quiet even when the commander-in-chief thanked the  soldiers’ families, and cited the 198 deaths of their comrades in Iraq and  Afghanistan.

The audience’s reaction was so flat that the president tried twice to elicit  a reaction from the crowd.

“Hey, I hear you,” he said amid silence.

The selected soldiers who were arrayed behind the president sat quietly  throughout the speech.

CNN and MSNBC ended their coverage of the speech before it was half-over.

Read more:  http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/31/obama-speech-to-soldiers-met-with-silence/#ixzz25EZy4SCm

His chilly reception probably has something to do with this.

From CNSNews

“Is the U.S. Army headed in the right direction?

An internal Army survey that was conducted in 2011 and published this year discovered that only 26 percent of active-duty Army officers say yes–and that one of the two main themes cited by those who say no is that the Army is now adversely impacted by “political correctness” imposed by both outside policymakers and senior Army leaders.

Read more: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/internal-army-poll-only-26-officers-say-army-headed-right-direction-political

And this as well. This one really bothers me. It appears the President’s office is autopenning his signature in letters to fallen soldiers. That’s pretty bad. These people gave all in service to this great country. The least they could do was actually have Obama take a few minutes from his schedule and send them a personally signed letter. Just poor taste.

From PJ Media,

“Karen brought a copy of the form letter they were sent following their son’s death.

It’s a form letter.

It was signed by an electric pen.

That’s not all. Karen Vaughn reached out to the parents of the other SEALs killed in that crash. Their letters were all the same. Form letters – signed by an electric pen.”

Read more: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/08/obama-honored-fallen-seals-by-sending-their-parents-a-form-letter-signed-by-electric-pen/