A thought: if President Bush was held accountable for anything that went wrong during Hurricane Katrina, shouldn’t President Obama be held accountable for the IRS scandal?

Bush was held accountable for matters outside his control. In fact, the Democrats and the media (redundant) effectively used the tragedy of Katrina to poison his second term. This despite the fact that Louisiana’s governor and New Orleans mayor were both incompetent boobs who botched things.

As Kimberly Strassel noted in her Friday column, Obama and his campaign created the poisonous atmosphere that encouraged rank partisanship at the IRS.

Leave it to MSNBC, the most race obsessed news outlet in America, to find a racial angle to the scandals.

His last line is a bit muddled, so:

“It’s going to be very very difficult for us to erase some of the things they’ve embraced,” he added. “They simply want this to be a figment of his pigmentation.”

Bernard Goldberg:

…Too many Washington journalists see everything through a prism of politics. Benghazi isn’t about the death of four Americans … it’s about the future of Hillary Clinton. The IRS scandal isn’t about the abusive use of federal government power … it’s about how the GOP will use it to score political points.

But even if you play by these rules, why isn’t the story on page one of the New York Times about how Democrats in the Obama administration may have been going after conservative groups … for political gain?

Why isn’t the Benghazi story framed in a way that questions Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s political spin? Is she trying to stay out of trouble precisely because she wants to run for president? Was Mr. Obama more concerned about winning re-election, running in part on the phony premise that he had al-Qaeda on the run, than he was in admitting early on that al-Qaeda was responsible for the attack in Benghazi? Is he now more concerned about his reputation than … well, than anything else?

Victor Davis Hanson on Obama’s selective leak investigations

…when the Obama administration wants the public to appreciate its unheralded and successful accomplishments, it leaks classified information that imperils national security (did the Taliban really need to know the precise units and their methodology of operation that took out bin Laden?) — and leaks so much that former defense secretary Bob Gates is said to have been reduced to threatening John Brennan with “shut the f*** up!” Yet one wonders whether the administration tapped the phones of David Ignatius or David Sanger on rumors that by some strange happenstance they got the classified information about the most intimate moments of Obama as commander-in-chief and protector of the realm and wrote quid pro quo paeans despite the national-security implications?

Ditto the televised dramatics of the Obama team huddled around consoles as they saw the raid against bin Laden unfold in real time — a photo opportunity not repeated when live feeds from Benghazi began coming in about the al-Qaeda attacks. Certainly, that evening when Americans were on the defensive rather than the offensive, nobody deemed it necessary to bring in the photographers to capture the Obama team in mediis rebus. Translated into Animal Farm terms: All leaks bad — except some. All hands-on-operations are televised — unless they go badly. Give classified information to reporters — if they are cooperative.

Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters

“CBS News President David Rhodes and ABC News President Ben Sherwood, both of them have siblings that not only work at the White House, that not only work for President Obama, but they work at the NSC on foreign policy issues directly related to Benghazi.”

So stated political consultant and media commentator Richard Grenell on Saturday’s Fox News Watch (video follows with transcript and commentary):

For the record, Ben Sherwood’s sister, Dr. Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, is the Special Assistant to Barack Obama.

Virginia Moseley’s husband, Tom Nides, is the Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources.

As for David Rhodes’ brother Ben, he is Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communication.

As ABCNews.com reported Friday, Rhodes was a key player in revising the White House’s Benghazi talking points last September:

In an email dated 9/14/12 at 9:34 p.m. — three days after the attack and two days before Ambassador Rice appeared on the Sunday shows – Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes wrote an email saying the State Department’s concerns needed to be addressed.

“We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation. We thus will work through the talking points tomorrow morning at the Deputies Committee meeting.”

After that meeting, which took place Saturday morning at the White House, the CIA drafted the final version of the talking points – deleting all references to al Qaeda and to the security warnings in Benghazi prior to the attack.

Stephen Hayes broke this story last weekend. Finally the mainstream media is catching up. You have to hand it to ABC for gall for calling this story an “exclusive.”

Hayes had the exclusive a week ago and they ignored it.

Politico also has the story.

So Hicks was demoted for not toeing the Obama party line. That earned a big yawn, actually, a non-mention in the LA Times, which ran Benghazi on page three and focused largely on the politics.

(The LA Times had a front page story about how the testing procedure for Mexican police was controversial. That issue has been troubling me for weeks. They also had a story about unions objecting to a possible sale of the Times to the Koch brothers, claiming it could make the paper partisan. Ha.)

Let’s recall the scandal ginned up by the Democrats in 2007 over Bush’s firing of seven US Attorneys, all of whom serve at the will of the president. (President Clinton fired all 93 of them upon taking office in 1993 without a peep.)

The Democrats and the media (forgive my redundancy) made a huge deal of this, which ultimately led to the resignation of the nation’s first Latino Attorney General, Alberto Gonsales.

The charge was that Bush had politicized the DOJ.

Yesterday, Hicks alleged that word came from the top of the State Department not to talk to a GOP Congressman on a fact-finding tour of Benghazi. They even assigned lawyers to babysit him.

So who is being accused of politicizing Benghazi? Rhetorical question.

…with the CBS brass. But cover the Benghazi scandal aggressively? That’s flirting with advocacy. Ha!

Guy Benson at Townhall

The biggest Benghazi-related story that took place outside of the House Oversight Committee’s hearing room today is this item in Politico, regarding CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson.  She’s the reporter who famously drew White House officials’ profane ire over her unapologetic pursuit of the Fast & Furious scandal story; now she’s apparently facing searing criticism from another source: Her own bosses.  Why?  Because she’s been covering the Benghazi story too aggressively.  Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you media bias:

“Attkisson, who holds a third-degree black belt in taekwondo, takes a fighting stance when she feels she’s being stonewalled. Which is exactly what she thinks the White House has done to her on Benghazi,” Farhi writes. But from where Attkisson is sitting, there are actually two Goliaths, one of which is almost entirely absent from the Post profile. The second Goliath is CBS News, which has grown increasingly frustrated with Attkisson’s Benghazi campaign. CBS News executives see Attkisson wading dangerously close to advocacy on the issue, network sources have told POLITICO. Attkisson can’t get some of her stories on the air, and is thus left feeling marginalized and underutilized. That, in part, is why Attkisson is in talks to leave CBS ahead of contract, as POLITICO reported in April. Farhi mentions “internal conflicts” in the final paragraph, though he seems to dismiss them. The “internal conflicts” are indeed real — Attkisson is still eyeing an exit, according to sources — and provide important context for today’s piece. Today, CBS News is celebrating Attkisson’s commitment to the Benghazi story. It’s good press. But that support is an aberration.

Apparently these blabbermouths have not heard of Psalms, which Romney was quoting.

Vanity Fair, trying to stick up for Obama, writes:

Barack Obama receives ample flak from critics who say that he is too buttoned-up and reserved to thrive in an office that historically has required its fair share of cajoling, socializing, and even arm-twisting.

But a thorough examination of the photo archives of White House photographer Pete Souza reveals quite the opposite: Obama can, in fact, be remarkably laid-back. His body language in the Oval Office, the Situation Room, and other top Cabinet-level meetings indicates a man who is ready to let it all hang loose. He’s often in shirtsleeves, with his feet up, and frequently will be the only member of a meeting with a knee on the table. Below, a photographic investigation of the “lean-back” president.

Do these media clowns think they can pass off a non sequitur with some cute photos of the prez? Socializing, arm twisting etc. — the elements of political leadership — are not the same as leaning back in a chair.

Obama has been repeatedly criticized by Democrats and Republicans alike for not engaging with Congress. In fact, when he finally breaks down and does some of the dirty work of politics, it makes news as a “charm offensive.”

Special treat: the caption on image 11 says, “George Washington, in the form of a portrait by Rembrandt Peale, looks across at Obama as he meets with his counselors on February 24, 2011.”

Actually, George is looking off to the left of frame, as if he’s averting his gaze at Obama.

Don’t expect to see this story on the network news.

A citizen with a gun stopped a knife wielding man as he began stabbing people Thursday evening at the downtown Salt Lake City Smith’s store.

Police say the suspect purchased a knife inside the store and then turned it into a weapon. Smith’s employee Dorothy Espinoza says, “He pulled it out and stood outside the Smiths in the foyer. And just started stabbing people and yelling you killed my people. You killed my people.”

Espinoza says, the knife wielding man seriously injured two people. “There is blood all over. One got stabbed in the stomach and got stabbed in the head and held his hands and got stabbed all over the arms.”

Then, before the suspect could find another victim – a citizen with a gun stopped the madness. “A guy pulled gun on him and told him to drop his weapon or he would shoot him. So, he dropped his weapon and the people from Smith’s grabbed him.”

Walter Russell Mead on “gentry liberals”:

If Maureen Dowd’s evisceration manqué of President Obama’s gun control strategy in the New York Times is any indication, Ms. Dowd is in the wrong line of work. She doesn’t understand American politics. She doesn’t know how votes are gained and lost, she doesn’t know what presidents do or understand what powers they have, and above all she doesn’t understand how politicians think.

Column writing is dangerous work and long success in the game can lead to the stifling of that Editor Within who keeps you from looking too stupid in print. A rich self esteem, fortifed by decades of op-ed tenure and dinner party table talk dominance, has apparently given Ms. Dowd the confidence to believe that she is a maestro of political infighting, a Clausewitz of strategic insight and a Machiavelli of political cunning rolled up into one stylish and elegant piece of work. From the heights of insight on which she dwells, it is easy to see what that poor schmuck Barry Obama can’t: those 60 votes on gun control were his for the taking, if he was only as shrewd a politician as Maureen Dowd.

The President needs to get his hands dirty, our genteel and accomplished op-ed writer advises the ex-community organizer and Chicago pol. He needs to get real, get down in the dirt, muck around with the senators and exercise raw power. Don’t make empty gestures and don’t give up, she advises him: fight! fight! fight!

Perhaps because she fears that the President is too stupid to understand what she means, or simply out of her benevolent desire to show her readers just what brilliant political insight looks like, she vouchsafes us some examples. Here’s how she sees the President twisting the arm of North Dakota Democrat Heidi Heitkamp:

Sometimes you must leave the high road and fetch your brass knuckles. Obama should have called Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota over to the Oval Office and put on the squeeze: “Heidi, you’re brand new and you’re going to have a long career. You work with us, we’ll work with you. Public opinion is moving fast on this issue. The reason you get a six-year term is so you can have the guts to make tough votes. This is a totally defensible bill back home. It’s about background checks, nothing to do with access to guns. Heidi, you’re a mother. Think of those little kids dying in schoolrooms.”

If only Lyndon Johnson had understood the art of political pressure as well as Maureen Dowd. “You work with us, we’ll work with you.” It’s… brilliant! Reminding her about her six year term… if that doesn’t swing her around, nothing will. “You’re a mother…” This is a set of brass knuckles no one could resist. The NRA must be thanking its lucky stars that a bumbling amateur like Barack Obama is in the White House instead of the arch-politician Maureen Dowd; Heidi Heitkamp would have been putty in her elegantly manicured hands.

This is a politician getting down to what the New York Times editorial page seems to think is a particularly fetching set of brass knuckles: reciting liberal talking points one after another in rapid fire sequence. That’s hardball, that’s brass tacks at least in the mind of Maureen Dowd, a woman who on the evidence of this column could and would teach her own grandmother to suck eggs.

But lest anyone miss the full range of her strategic insight, Dowd gives us another example. This is how she tells us that Obama could have won over one Republican Senator:

Tom Coburn, the Republican senator from Oklahoma, is one of the few people on the Hill that the president actually considers a friend. Obama wrote a paean to Coburn in the new Time 100 issue, which came out just as Coburn sabotaged his own initial effort to help the bill.

Obama should have pressed his buddy: “Hey, Tom, just this once, why don’t you do more than just talk about making an agreement with the Democrats? You’re not running again. Do something big.”

Don Corleone should put it this well. This is how minds are changed, votes are swayed and history is made. Use your male bonding skills for the power of good: “Press your buddies,” liberals, a bright new future awaits.

Dowd still has one Big Idea to share with us: the masterstroke that would have turned it all around and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat:

Couldn’t the president have given his Rose Garden speech about the “shameful” actions in Washington before the vote rather than after?

Yes! Presidential eloquence, better timed.  That would have done the trick. Those mangy Republicans and cowardly blue dog Democrats could never have resisted that nuclear weapon of American politics, a well timed Rose Garden speech. (Ms. Dowd also suggested that the President make some gun control speeches in blue states represented by GOP senators; a somewhat more practical suggestion but one unlikely to sway any votes.)

The Times apparently thinks it has readers who find columns like this either useful or diverting, so we say nothing about whether this is the caliber of political thought that ought to appear at the Newspaper of Record. But the paper may want to recalibrate its intellectual void detectors just a bit; it is hard to read anything this vapid without questioning the judgment of everyone involved.

One interesting thing about Ms. Dowd’s description of “hardball” political tactics is just how dainty and genteel her brass knuckle suggestions actually are. A speech, an appeal to reason: there is nothing here about lucrative contracts for political supporters, promises of sinecure jobs for politicians who lose their seats, a “blank check” for administrative backing on some obscure tax loophole that a particular politician could award to a favored client; there’s not even a delicate hint about grand jury investigations that can be stopped in their tracks or compromising photographs or wiretaps that need never see the light of day. Far be it from Ms Dowd to speak of or even hint at the kind of strategy that actual politicians think about when words like ‘hardball’ come to mind. Ms Dowd speaks of brass knuckles and then shows us a doily; at some level it speaks well of Ms. Dowd as a human being that even when she tries she seems unable to come up with an offer someone can’t refuse…

Megan McArdle explains to the likes of MoDo that politics isn’t like TV.

…The American President and The West Wing are not searing portrayals of effective political management.  They’re drama.  The first question a dramatist asks is not “Is this how it really works?” but “Is it entertaining?”  And the second is “Can the audience understand this in less than thirty seconds?”  Veracity is way, way down the list.  If you want a clue to how realistic it all is, consider that Aaron Sorkin awarded Jed Bartlett the Nobel Prize in Economics.  Then go interview some Nobel Prizewinning Economists and ask yourself whether a single one of them would have the desire, or the ability, to run for president.  

Jed Bartlett doesn’t win policy debates because of his amazing tactical skills, his overpowering arguments, or the sheer persuasiveness of his granite-faced brand of urbane folksomeness.  He wins them because Aaron Sorkin is a liberal and he wants Republicans to lose on the major issues.  Unfortunately for liberals, Tom Coburn and John Boehner don’t have their lines faxed over from Hollywood every morning.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite vast differences with President George W. Bush on ideology, style and temperament, President Barack Obama has stuck with Bush policies or aspirations on a number of fronts, from counterterrorism to immigration, from war strategy to the global fight against AIDS.

Even on tax policy, where Bush advocated lower tax rates for all and Obama pushed for higher rates on the rich, Bush’s tax cuts for the middle class not only have survived under Obama, they have become permanent.

Obama inherited from his predecessor two military conflicts, a war on terror and a financial crisis. He also inherited, and in time embraced, the means with which to confront them.

On Thursday, Obama will attend the dedication of Bush’s presidential library in Texas, a tableau that will draw attention to two distinct men — a Republican and a Democrat from different ends of the political spectrum, political foils with polarized constituencies.

Indeed, Obama ran for president in 2008 as the anti-Bush, critical of the war against Iraq and of the economic policies of the preceding eight years.

But in his more than four years of governing, Obama has also adopted or let stand a series of Bush initiatives, illustrating how the policies of one administration can take hold and how the realities of governing often limit solutions…

Bush had every mistake exaggerated by a Democrat-leaning news media.

Obama has most mistakes ignored by same.

Now that the Boston bombers turned out not to be white, Tea Party or militia nuts, the news media twits are trying themselves in knots trying to be reasonable.

Powerline has a great post on the subject. Here’s a taste:

This piece in The Atlantic is a good exemplar of the mushy liberal commentary that has proliferated in recent days. Authored by one Megan Garber, it is titled: “The Boston Bombers Were Muslim: So?” Before taking a close look at Ms. Garber’s article, let’s advise The Atlantic not to put away that headline. It could come in handy so often. “The Cole Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The Embassy Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The First World Trade Center Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The September 11 Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The Madrid Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The London Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The Shoebomber Was Muslim: So?” The Underwear Bomber Was Muslim: So?” “The Fort Hood Shooter Was Muslim: So?” “The Beslan Child-Murderers Were Muslim: So?” “The Times Square Bomber Was Muslim: So?”

Bob Stock comments

Rule #1: If, say, a cell of some ideologically motivated, foreign-trained jihadists launch a deadly attack and kill some innocent kids as part of a long-running global conspiracy, the best response is for us to simply go about our business as if nothing happened — if we change our laws or way of life, they win! The less we know about these terrorists, the better. Above all, we MUST NOT PROFILE over what must surely be just a few bad apples.

Rule #2: If, say, a lone, insane, suicidal nutcase shoots up a school, breaking dozens of existing laws in the process, the best response is to call for sweeping national cultural changes, dig deeply to discover the root causes for the acts of a madman, and above all, scapegoat millions of law-abiding gun-owners through punitive new regulations with no other purpose than to simply PUNISH them for their COLLECTIVE GUILT.

Wait, what?

Yesterday, someone on the radio said he hoped there would be no repeat of the rash of anti-Muslim hate crimes after 9/11.

Was there such a rash or is it just an urban myth?

Looking at the FBI stats for hate crimes in 2002, a year I chose because 2001 was three-quarters over when the Twin Towers were destroyed.

Some highlights:

• A review of the 7,459 single-bias hate crime incidents showed that 48.8 percent were racially motivated, 19.1 percent were based on a bias against a religious group, 16.7 percent were motivated by a bias against a sexual orientation, 14.8 percent resulted from an ethnicity/national origin bias, and 0.6 percent were based on a disability bias.
• Eleven of the hate crime victims in 2002 were murdered. Four of these murders were associated with a racial bias, four with a sexual-orientation bias, two with an ethnicity/national origin bias, and one with a religious bias.
• A breakdown of the data regarding victims in single-bias incidents [I guess that means only one bias, which would exclude beatings of black gay men, for example] revealed that 49.7 percent were victims of racial bias, 18.0 percent were victims of religious bias, 16.4 percent were victims of sexual-orientation bias, 15.3 percent were victims of ethnicity/national origin bias, and less than 1 percent were victims of disability bias.

Let’s jump ahead to 2011 stats: of the 1,480 victims of an anti-religious hate crime:

• 63.2 percent were victims of an offender’s anti-Jewish bias.
• 12.5 percent were victims of an anti-Islamic bias.
• 5.7 percent were victims of an anti-Catholic bias.
• 4.4 percent were victims of a bias against groups of individuals of varying religions (anti-multiple religions, group).
• 3.4 percent were victims of an anti-Protestant bias.
• 0.3 percent were victims of an anti-Atheist/Agnostic bias.
• 10.5 percent were victims of a bias against other religions (anti-other religion).

Bernard Goldberg on the media non-coverage of the trial of Kermit Gosnell, accused of killing newborn infants, in some cases joking about their size, “This one’s big enough to walk me to the bus stop.”

That’s from the grand jury report, which you can read here. It includes photos that should upset anyone.

Reserved media seats for Gosnell trial

…Here’s part of what the grand found: “This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors.”

This is not a column about abortion, late term, partial birth or otherwise. It’s a column about how far too many journalists will go to protect their interests. How could the same people who can’t get enough of Jodi Arias and who turned Casey Anthony into a household name, ignore such a story? Why isn’t this page one news all over the country?

For openers, survey after survey show that most reporters are far more liberal than the American population at large and far more likely to support abortion rights. Yes, we all know that professional journalists shouldn’t let their personal views intrude on their judgment, but who’s kidding whom?

Then there’s the part about how liberals in general and journalists in particular never gave much credence to the partial birth abortion argument. It was, they figured, just one more right-wing delusion.

But as Kirsten Powers put it in a piece for USA Today, “Planned Parenthood recently claimed that the possibility of infants surviving late-term abortions was ‘highly unusual.’ The Gosnell case suggests otherwise.

“Regardless of such quibbles, about whether Gosnell was killing the infants one second after they left the womb instead of partially inside or completely inside the womb — as in a routine late-term abortion — is merely a matter of geography. That one is murder and the other is a legal procedure is morally irreconcilable.”

Recently in Florida, a woman representing the state’s Planned Parenthood organizations, testified against a bill that would require abortionists to provide medical care to babies who survive attempted abortions. She was asked: “If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion, what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?” The woman from Planned Parenthood replied: “We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family and the physician.”

And this brings us to another reason the so-called mainstream media have shown virtually no interest in the story: President Obama shares that woman’s view on partial birth abortion, a term I’m sure he would not use.

When he was an Illinois state senator he said the issue should be left to women. But he went even further, voting against a bill that would have protected babies born alive after botched abortions, claiming (many say falsely) that there were already laws on the book to cover that possibility.

On February 29 2012, National Review Online published a piece by Patrick Brennan that came to this conclusion:

“Obama’s record as a state senator was not merely pro-choice, but radically pro-abortion. His voting record indicates that he does not believe infants deserve protection even once they have emerged from the womb if they are deemed to be below the age of viability, and he did in fact, three times, vote to keep a form of infanticide legal.”

As I say this is not a column about abortion. Reasonable people may disagree on abortion, though I suspect, each side sees the other side as anything but reasonable. This is a column about how corrupt the mainstream media have become. This is a piece about journalistic malpractice.

Lex Booger comments at The Corner:

TRAYVON!!

A “white hispanic” kills a black teenager in a possible case self-defense — and it makes every magazine cover in the grocery store check-out lane.

The Trayvon sparks “wider questions” with lessons for all of us to learn… we are supposed to wear our hoodies in solidarity.

Black guy murders between 8 and 100 black infants … and no story.

This should be front page news. When Rush Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke, there was non-stop media hysteria. The venerable NBC Nightly News’ Brian Williams intoned, “A firestorm of outrage from women after a crude tirade from Rush Limbaugh,” as he teased a segment on the brouhaha. Yet, accusations of babies having their heads severed — a major human rights story if there ever was one — doesn’t make the cut.

Kirsten Powers on the story that wasn’t told.

FYI, Obama, as an Illinois state senator, voted against a Born Alive Infants Protection Act. Perhaps he should have, ahem, “made it a little harder for our kids to get decapitated at birth.”

Infant beheadings. Severed baby feet in jars. A child screaming after it was delivered alive during an abortion procedure. Haven’t heard about these sickening accusations?

It’s not your fault. Since the murder trial of Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell began March 18, there has been precious little coverage of the case that should be on every news show and front page. The revolting revelations of Gosnell’s former staff, who have been testifying to what they witnessed and did during late-term abortions, should shock anyone with a heart.

NBC-10 Philadelphia reported that, Stephen Massof, a former Gosnell worker, “described how he snipped the spinal cords of babies, calling it, ‘literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.” One former worker, Adrienne Moton, testified that Gosnell taught her his “snipping” technique to use on infants born alive.

Massof, who, like other witnesses, has himself pleaded guilty to serious crimes, testified “It would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.” Here is the headline the Associated Press put on a story about his testimony that he saw 100 babies born and then snipped: “Staffer describes chaos at PA abortion clinic.”

“Chaos” isn’t really the story here. Butchering babies that were already born and were older than the state’s 24-week limit for abortions is the story. There is a reason the late Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called this procedure infanticide.

Planned Parenthood recently claimed that the possibility of infants surviving late-term abortions was “highly unusual.” The Gosnell case suggests otherwise.

Regardless of such quibbles, about whether Gosnell was killing the infants one second after they left the womb instead of partially inside or completely inside the womb — as in a routine late-term abortion — is merely a matter of geography. That one is murder and the other is a legal procedure is morally irreconcilable.

A Lexis-Nexis search shows none of the news shows on the three major national television networks has mentioned the Gosnell trial in the last three months. The exception is when Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan hijacked a segment on Meet the Press meant to foment outrage over an anti-abortion rights law in some backward red state…

Remember when bums were called bums?

Mark Steyn:

He who controls the language shapes the debate: In the same week the Associated Press announced that it would no longer describe illegal immigrants as “illegal immigrants,” the star columnist of the New York Times fretted that the Supreme Court seemed to have misplaced the style book on another fashionable minority. “I am worried,” wrote Maureen Dowd, “about how the justices can properly debate same-sex marriage when some don’t even seem to realize that most Americans use the word ‘gay’ now instead of ‘homosexual.’” She quoted her friend Max Mutchnick, creator of Will & Grace:

“Scalia uses the word ‘homosexual’ the way George Wallace used the word ‘Negro.’ There’s a tone to it. It’s humiliating and hurtful. I don’t think I’m being overly sensitive, merely vigilant.”

For younger readers, George Wallace was a powerful segregationist Democrat. Whoa, don’t be overly sensitive. There’s no “tone” to my use of the word “Democrat”; I don’t mean to be humiliating and hurtful: It’s just what, in pre-sensitive times, we used to call a “fact.” Likewise, I didn’t detect any “tone” in the way Justice Scalia used the word “homosexual.” He may have thought this was an appropriately neutral term, judiciously poised midway between “gay” and “Godless sodomite.” Who knows? He’s supposed to be a judge, and a certain inscrutability used to be part of what we regarded as a judicial temperament. By comparison, back in 1986, the year Scalia joined the Supreme Court, the chief justice, Warren Burger, declared “there is no such thing as a fundamental right to commit homosexual sodomy.” I don’t want to be overly sensitive, but I think even I, if I rewound the cassette often enough, might be able to detect a certain tone to that.

Nonetheless, Max Mutchnick’s “vigilance” is a revealing glimpse of where we’re headed. Canada, being far more enlightened than the hotbed of homophobes to its south, has had gay marriage coast to coast for a decade. Statistically speaking, one-third of 1 percent of all Canadian nuptials are same-sex, and, of that nought-point-three-three, many this last decade have been American gays heading north for a marriage license they’re denied in their own country. So gay marriage will provide an important legal recognition for an extremely small number of persons who do not currently enjoy it. But, putting aside arguments over the nature of marital union, the legalization of gay marriage will empower a lot more “vigilance” from all the right-thinking people over everybody else.

Mr. Mutchnick’s comparison of the word “homosexual” with “Negro” gives the game away: Just as everything any conservative says about anything is racist, so now it will also be homophobic. It will not be enough to be clinically neutral (“homosexual”) on the subject — or tolerant, bored, mildly amused, utterly indifferent. The other day, Jeremy Irons found himself musing to a reporter on whether (if the issue is unequal legal treatment) a father should be allowed to marry his son for the purpose of avoiding inheritance taxes. The vigilance…

Last month a big story broke in AGW world. A new study claimed to have determined that the earth’s temperature rose more than any other time in 11,300 years.

Such precision should raise doubts, but it was duly covered by the mainstream media:

We’re screwed: 11,000 years’ worth of ­climate data prove it. It’s among the most compelling bits of proof out there that human beings are behind global warming, and as such has become a target on Mann’s back for climate denialists looking to draw a bead on scientists. — The Atlantic, March 9th

Global Temperatures Highest in 4,000 Years The modern rise that has recreated the temperatures of 5,000 years ago is occurring at an exceedingly rapid clip on a geological time scale, appearing in graphs in the new paper as a sharp vertical spike. — Justin Gillis, New York Times, March 7th

Study: Recent heat spike unlike anything in 11,000 years “Rapid” head spike unlike anything in 11,000 years. Research released Thursday in the journal Science uses fossils of tiny marine organisms to reconstruct global temperatures …. It shows how the globe for several thousands of years was cooling until an unprecedented reversal in the 20th century. — Seth Borenstein, The Associated Press, March 7th

True face of climate’s hockey stick graph revealed The rate of warming in the last 150 years is unlike anything that happened in at least 11,000 years, says Michael Mann of the Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who was not involved in Marcott’s study. — Michael Marshall, New Scientist magazine, March 7th

True or false? False writes Ross McKitrick in Canada’s Financial Post.

…The new, and startling, feature of the Marcott graph was at the very end: Their data showed a remarkable uptick that implied that, during the 20th century, our climate swung from nearly the coldest conditions over the past 11,500 years to nearly the warmest. Specifically, their analysis showed that in under 100 years we’ve had more warming than previously took thousands of years to occur, in the process undoing 5,000 years’ worth of cooling.

This uptick became the focus of considerable excitement, as well as scrutiny. One of the first questions was how it was derived. Marcott had finished his PhD thesis at Oregon State University in 2011 and his dissertation is online. The Science paper is derived from the fourth chapter, which uses the same 73 proxy records and seemingly identical methods. But there is no uptick in that chart, nor does the abstract to his thesis mention such a ­finding.

Stephen McIntyre of climateaudit.org began examining the details of the Marcott et al. work, and by March 16 he had made a remarkable discovery. The 73 proxies were all collected by previous researchers, of which 31 are derived from alkenones, an organic compound produced by phytoplankton that settles in layers on ocean floors, and has chemical properties that correlate to temperature. When a core is drilled out, the layers need to be dated. If done accurately, the researcher could then interpret the alkenone layer at, say, 50 cm below the surface, to imply (for example) the ocean temperature averaged 0.1 degrees above normal over several centuries about 1,200 years ago. The tops of cores represent the data closest in time to the present, but this layer is often disturbed by the drilling process. So the original researchers take care to date the core-top to where the information begins to become useful.

According to the scientists who originally published the alkenone series, the core tops varied in age from nearly the present to over a thousand years ago. Fewer than 10 of the original proxies had values for the 20th century. Had Marcott et al. used the end dates as calculated by the specialists who compiled the original data, there would have been no 20th-century uptick in their graph, as indeed was the case in Marcott’s PhD thesis. But Marcott et al. redated a number of core tops, changing the mix of proxies that contribute to the closing value, and this created the uptick at the end of their graph. Far from being a feature of the proxy data, it was an artifact of arbitrarily redating the underlying cores.

Worse, the article did not disclose this step. In their online supplementary information the authors said they had assumed the core tops were dated to the present “unless otherwise noted in the original publication.” In other words, they claimed to be relying on the original dating, even while they had redated the cores in a way that strongly influenced their results.

So the authors of the study used imprecise measures to produce a supposedly precise gauge of global warming–one that conveniently supported the alarmist view.

They got called on it by AGW skeptic Steve McIntyre. They admitted:

“The 20th-century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.”

Oh? The “big news” about the last 11,300 years was based on useless data.

Now you tell us! The 20th-century uptick was the focus of worldwide media attention, during which the authors made very strong claims about the implications of their findings regarding 20th-century warming. Yet at no point did they mention the fact that the 20th century portion of their proxy reconstruction is garbage.

Michael Walsh at The Corner

Holy cow. Kathryn has already pointed out this instant-classic NYT correction, but even with the comments topping 150, I don’t think it’s received quite the requisite amount of obloquy and derision, so let me help. First, the correction to an article by Elisabetta Povoledo, datelined Vatican City:

Correction: April 1, 2013

An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the Christian holiday of Easter. It is the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, not his resurrection into heaven.

Glad they told us Easter was a Christian holiday, lest unwary readers, encountering it for the first time, think it a Hindu feast. And “mischaracterized” is letting Ms. Povoledo off far too easily. What the hell does “resurrection into heaven” even mean? And I mean hell in the sense of this passage from the Apostles’ Creed, which she might have consulted, eschatologically speaking, for a basic Catholic primer:

. . . suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died and was buried;
he descended into hell;
on the third day he rose again from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty;
from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

Since when in the history of the English language has anyone ever spoken of a “resurrection into heaven”? The phrase itself makes no sense; one resurrects from something — the tomb, Death — and then goes on to other things: “ascension,” for example, which is coming right up. As for the Assumption, that’s another miracle altogether. And don’t get me started on the confusion attending the Immaculate Conception.

They say you tend to believe what you read in the newspaper until the story concerns something you actually know about. The Times has just proven to 1.2 billion Catholics around the world that it knows nothing about their religion. Read it on all subjects accordingly.

Mark Steyn asks: “How could any expensively credentialed J-school grad type those words?

…it was false reporting. I heard the topic discussed on Red Eye and believed it because some schools would be this absurd.

But not this time.

The principal of a Massachusetts school was under siege Wednesday for a report that he had canceled the school’s annual honors ceremony because it was unfair to pupils who weren’t getting any awards.

David Fabrizio, principal of Ipswich Middle School in Ipswich, told NBC News that — contrary to a local news report that quickly spread nationally — he had, in fact, expanded the ceremony.

High-achieving pupils will still get their awards at a special ceremony, just like always, he said. All he did, he said, was move Honors Night to Honors Day, so all of the pupils could take part.

It turns out that only children receiving awards could attend Honors Night, where they got to hear messages from inspirational speakers. By opening the ceremony up to all pupils, “the kids who need the inspirational speakers” can be there, Fabrizio said.

Why do I vote GOP? Not because I love the party, but because in most cases, their policies make the most sense.

But that puts me in a minority, according to The Hill:

More voters trust the Democratic Party than the Republican Party on budgetary issues, according to the results of a new poll for The Hill — even though a strong majority actually prefer Republican fiscal policies.

The discrepancy would appear to be rooted in the GOP’s image problem, as the party attempts to recover from a bruising general election and recalibrate for a new generation of voters.

Respondents in The Hill Poll were asked to choose which of two approaches they would prefer on the budget, but the question’s phrasing included no cues as to which party advocated for which option.

Presented in that way, 55 percent of likely voters opted for a plan that would slash $5 trillion in government spending, provide for no additional tax revenue and balance the budget within 10 years — in essence, the path recommended by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) last week.

This was almost twice as many voters as opted for a proposal that would include $1 trillion in added tax revenue as well as $100 billion in infrastructure spending, and which would reduce the deficit without eradicating it.

Only 28 percent of voters preferred this option, which reflects the proposal put forth by Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) last week.

The GOP has its share of dorky candidates, but so do the Dems. The GOP doesn’t have the mainstream media rooting for them.

I quit HBO a few years ago, so I’ve never seen its show “Girls” that absolutely everybody (in NY and LA) has been yacking/tweeting/texting/blogging about.

The show’s creator and lead actor is Lena Dunham, who you may remember from that Obama campaign ad last summer.

Progressive audiences love the show because they deem it edgy. Or crude. Many progressives cannot discern the difference.

Dunham likes to parade her nude, chubby tattooed self before the cameras. She even played topless ping-pong this season. Edgy!

So it was hilarious to read the LA Times television critic, Mary McNamara, twist herself into knots about wanting to like the show despite the fact that it makes her…

• impatient in a vaguely maternal way, like when you see a lovely but irritating wild child running naked around the playground, shouting “vagina” at everyone and peeing in the sandbox
• Yes, yes, creativity expresses itself in many ways, and it’s good to know the correct terms for the female genitalia, but at some point someone needs to put that kid’s clothes back on and show her where the bathroom is.
• In this season’s penultimate episode, Hannah (Dunham) wanders the streets of New York with no pants after jamming a Q-tip in her ear. Marnie (Allison Williams) sings a terrible song in public, then has sex with her ex (also in public). Adam (Adam Driver) ends his sobriety and then, in an act some viewers considered date rape, ejaculates on his new girlfriend’s chest.

Wow, doesn’t that sound like a blast?

McNamara goes on to point out that the episodes are barely plotted and often resort to story gimmicks. Worse:

After two years of “Girls” it is still unclear what Dunham has to say about life, beyond the unsurprising revelation that it is difficult and confusing to be young. And her decision to tell her characters’ stories almost exclusively through their sexual lives is the opposite of revolutionary; young women have been reduced to the sum of their parts and partners since time began.

Well, well.

Maybe Lena Dunham has nothing to say. She just has a knack for yanking the strings of progressives looking to be edgy.

..but they sure love all the cool photo ops.

Jim Geraghty:

You don’t have to be the sharpest knife in the drawer to figure out what the U.S. media think are the most important issues before the pope:

Francis’ ascension, however, will not be without its controversies. Francis firmly opposes abortion, same-sex marriage, and contraception, the last being a particularly significant position as the Church continues to expand in Africa, where contraception is seen as a vital tool to limit the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Was there any cardinal in the mix who, upon assuming the papacy, would step out onto the balcony, and declare, “Oh, hey, abortion, homosexuality and contraception are cool now”?

A couple times a year, Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne writes a column that says basically, “The Vatican has a big problem, because lots of American Catholics don’t agree with the pope.” It never seems to cross his mind that each pope and the Vatican collectively don’t really care that lots of American Catholics don’t agree with them. Or, more specifically, they would like American Catholics to agree with them, but they’re not willing to change what they teach as right and wrong based upon what the Gallup organization says American Catholics think. They think they get that material from the Man Upstairs. You may or may not agree with that assessment of Divine leadership, but the point is that the pope and the cardinals believe it, and they’re not going to be talked out of it by some pundit.

This is an institution that weathered the storms of the schism with the Orthodox and the Protestant Reformation. They’re not going to suddenly abandon their positions in the face of criticism from Chris Matthews, Lawrence O’Donnell, or Andrew Sullivan.

U.S. investigation of Benghazi attacks ‘going painfully slowly’

Nearly six months after an ambassador and three other Americans were killed in Libya, officials still don’t fully know who was behind the assaults.

That’s the web version. Here is the print version.

U.S. investigation of Benghazi attacks ‘going painfully slowly’

Nearly six months after an ambassador and three other Americans were killed in Libya, officials still don’t fully know who planned the assaults.

Planned? As for the gist of the story, it’s non news.

Nearly six months after President Obama vowed to “bring to justice” the militants who killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, the joint CIA and FBI effort to catch the ringleaders has made little apparent progress.

Officials say U.S. authorities do not yet have a full understanding of who planned and carried out the two brief but intense assaults, nearly eight hours apart, on a lightly guarded diplomatic compound and a nearby CIA base late on Sept. 11 and early the next day.

Investigators have identified several people who were present during the terrorist attacks, but none has been definitively linked to the deaths.

“It is going painfully slowly,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), a member of the House Intelligence Committee who has been briefed on the investigation. “We don’t have access to all the people we’d like to have access to.”

Yeah, yeah yeah.

Bernard Goldberg

I’m listening to the news on television and I hear President Obama tell us that if sequestration goes through the world as we know it will cease to exist, hard times will come down on us like the proverbial ton of bricks.

No, he didn’t use those exact words but that was the message. Here’s what he said:

“Emergency responders, like the ones who are here today, their ability to help communities respond to and recover from disasters will be degraded. Border Patrol agents will see their hours reduced. FBI agents will be furloughed. Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go. Air traffic controllers and airport security will see cutbacks, which means more delays in airports across the country. Thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off. Tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find childcare for their kids. Hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose access to primary care and preventive care like flu vaccinations and cancer screenings. This is not an abstraction. People will lose their jobs. The unemployment rate might tick up again.”

All of this can be avoided, of course, if only those plutocrat Republicans would raise more taxes on their rich friends – and spare the sainted middle class the horrors of spending cuts, which aren’t really cuts when you get down to it, but decreases in the rise of spending.

Of course, Republicans are willing to eliminate the loopholes Mr. Obama is constantly telling us favor only those who fly around in private jets when they’re not loafing around in their humongous mansions. But the it’s always been done is we lower tax rates and close the loopholes. Mr. Obama, being the transformational figure that he is, wants to raise taxes and close the loopholes. Why? So he can get more money to spend on more government programs, which Democrats will use as a kind of legal bribe to get more votes for … take a guess … Democrats.

We have in office a deeply cynical man who can get away with this nonsense for just one reason: He knows he can count on the shallowness of all those Americans who adore him. Or to put it another way, President Obama succeeds because a lot of Americans are really, really dumb.

I’m pretty sure he has little respect for conservatives. But I’m absolutely sure he has no respect for the chuckleheads who think he walks on water and fall for everything he tells them. Yes, he needs their support. But no, he doesn’t have an ounce of regard for them. He knows what you know: that they’re clueless…

As you read this remember that during the Romney-Obama debates, the press corp could be heard cheering for Obama when they thought he scored a zinger.

For example Obama’s snotty remark about aircraft carriers got wild cheers.

Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen at Politico

President Barack Obama is a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.

Not for the reason that conservatives suspect: namely, that a liberal press willingly and eagerly allows itself to get manipulated. Instead, the mastery mostly flows from a White House that has taken old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting). And it’s an equal opportunity strategy: Media across the ideological spectrum are left scrambling for access.

The results are transformational. With more technology, and fewer resources at many media companies, the balance of power between the White House and press has tipped unmistakably toward the government. This is an arguably dangerous development, and one that the Obama White House — fluent in digital media and no fan of the mainstream press — has exploited cleverly and ruthlessly. And future presidents from both parties will undoubtedly copy and expand on this approach.

“The balance of power used to be much more in favor of the mainstream press,” said Mike McCurry, who was press secretary to President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Nowadays, he said, “The White House gets away with stuff I would never have dreamed of doing. When I talk to White House reporters now, they say it’s really tough to do business with people who don’t see the need to be cooperative.”

McCurry and his colleagues in the Clinton White House were hardly above putting their boss in front of gentle questions: Clinton and Vice President Al Gore often preferred the safety of “Larry King Live” to the rhetorical combat of the briefing room. But Obama and his aides have raised it to an art form: The president has shut down interviews with many of the White House reporters who know the most and ask the toughest questions. Instead, he spends way more time talking directly to voters via friendly shows and media personalities. Why bother with The New York Times beat reporter when Obama can go on “The View”?

At the same time, this White House has greatly curtailed impromptu moments where reporters can ask tough questions after a staged event — or snap a picture of the president that was not shot by government-paid photographers…

On celebrity Jeopardy, Wolf Blitzer could not name the town where Jesus was born. Even the biggest atheist would, by his age, have been exposed to “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem” a few thousand times.

Wolf ended his round $4600 in the hole, probably a record. So his idiotic comment about Marco Rubio fits right in.

And here’s are some highlights of the Wolfman (who doesn’t know) Jack. It should have ended his yapping career, but CNN is not a meritocracy.

The Chinese Communists got fooled by the Onion last year. The latest lefty egg-on-face belongs to the Washington Post.

Iowahawk

Something called “Suzi Parker” who writes something called “She The People” at something called “The Washington Post” bagged the scoop of the century earlier today, in a report originally entitled “Sarah Palin’s plan to reach ‘millions of devoutly religious people’ through al-Jazeera“:

The Sarah Palin Story is a cautionary tale about what can happen when politics and celebrity meet.

Fox News and their once-upon-a-time darling Palin recently parted ways after three years. But never fear. Palin has a new media outlet by which to share her commentary.

Late last week Al Jazeera America announced the former vice-presidential candidate would be joining their news network. Al Jazeera America recently bought Al Gore’s failing Current Media that broadcasts the Current TV channel. Ironically, Fox News recently called Al Jazeera “an anti-American terror mouthpiece.”

“As you all know, I’m not a big fan of newspapers, journalists, news anchors and the liberal media in general,” Palin told the Web site The Daily Currant. “But I met with the folks at Al-Jazeera and they told me they reach millions of devoutly religious people who don’t watch CBS or CNN. That tells me they don’t have a liberal bias.”

Whowhutwhenwhywhere HUH? LOLZ! Man, I guess there just is no end to the stupidity and gullibility of that snowbilly Caribou Barbie, and… oh. Um. Wait. I guess Suzi’s Pulitzer is on hold for the moment, since the story came from a third-rate satire site. So the Post has now updated the scoop with a new title: “Sarah Palin Tries to Stay Relevant“, with a new lede:

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that Sarah Palin planned to contribute to the Al Jazeera America news network.

Maybe a more accurate correction would have added “because we are psychologically incapable of disbelieving about any story the voices in our head tell us about Sarah Palin.”

Another proud moment for the Washington Post’s layers and layers of fact-checkers. Take a bow, Suzi! And a 500mg of Xanax.