How The American Journalism Profession Is Destroying The First Amendment and Our Democracy

One of the once great things about this country was the First Amendment and the freedom of press guaranteed by it. A free press helps offset the political ambitions and freedom encroachments of politicians by keeping their actions in the sunlight of visibility, disclosure, and scrutiny, i.e. it helps keeps politicians honest.

Unfortunately, we for the most part do not have an unbiased, free press anymore in this country but not in the way you think. Most people, when they think that the free press has been suppressed, consider many of the actions of Presidents like Obama, who was one of the worst Presidents when it came to undermining the free press guarantee of the First Amendment:

• He went after and prosecuted more whistle blowers than every other President combined.
• He spied on journalists who he thought was an enemy of his views and efforts without proper cause or warrants.
• His administration fought tooth and nail, more than any other President, to block legitimate and legal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
• His administration even tried to illegally charge a legitimate news gathering organization, the Associated Press, an outrageous sum of money for a FOIA request.

All of these acts undermined freedom of the press in the traditional way. But unfortunately, freedom of the press has been undermined over recent years not by politicians but by the press industry and journalists themselves. For the most part, and especially at the national level, news organizations have gone from reporting the facts, realities, and news in an unbiased way to shaping those facts, realities, and news in a very biased way. 

When journalists lose their integrity and ethics, the bedrock of their industry and profession, they undermine the First Amendment as much as some shady politician who is trying to get by with shady and unethical behavior. How far have journalists fallen down the integrity scale in Americans’ minds? In a recent Gallup poll:

• Only 20% of those polled said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in television news.
• 45% said they had very little or no confidence in television news.
• Newspapers do not do much better with 23% saying they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers while 40% saying they very little or no confidence in newspapers.
• Ironically they both did better than Congress whose ratings were most abysmal among all major American institutions.

Consider the following election related stories on how journalists have “earned” these sorry reputations for trust and integrity:

• Erick Erickson, writing for the Maven website documented the following instances during the election season where journalists got the story mostly wrong, either intentionally or unintentionally, in his article, “Where Do We Go When Journalism Fails Us?”
• His first example involves the state of Georgia where former Georgia Secretary of State and Republican, Brian Kemp, probably won the race for Governor in that state.
• National reporters and journalists reported that Kemp tried to close predominantly African American voting locations which forced black voters to travel far distances by driving or walking to voting locations in mostly white neighborhoods which in turn discouraged black voters.
• Nice story but wrong since it was not Republican Kemp closing these voting locations but it was the Democratic county commissioners and the Democrat controlled local board of elections that closed those locations.
• They/local Democrats had hired a consultant who recommended closing some voting locations to be in line with the Americans With Disabilities Act requirements.
• In addition, the locations that were closed were ALL in mostly Republican precincts, not Democratic and black precincts.
• As you can see, the national press got just about every detail of this story wrong.
• The Associated Press told the story of a woman in Georgia who was supposedly denied the right to register to vote because, as required by state law, the name she put down on her voter registration form did not exactly match the information on her driver’s license, it was missing a hyphen, and thus, her voter registration application was denied.
• The AP then went with this story nationwide.
• But the truth is that she was not allowed to register because she was ALREADY registered to vote. 
• Despite the screw up, the Associated Press never retracted or amended this incorrect article.
• The Associated Press also reported that 53,000 Georgia voters had their voter registration paperwork held up and classified as “pending voter” and that the majority of those tied up were from minority voters.
• This made it look like there was a massive minority voter suppression effort underway.
• In reality, 75% of those on the pending list had submitted registrations with bogus Social Security numbers.
• And 23% had been on the voter registration list from 2014 and had had their names re-submitted by the the voter registration efforts of the black Democratic candidate running for governor.
• Thus, at least 98% of those 53,000 on the pending list did not have their voting rights suppressed, they either were duplicates or had submitted bad information themselves. realities that the Associated Press never mentioned.
• The national press also ran stories that accused Republican Kemp, as Georgia’s Secretary of State, of kicking minority voters off of voting registration lists to improve his chances of becoming governor.
• But the reality is that he was prohibited under state law from doing an such thing, the voting registration lists are maintained by local voting officials, they are the only ones allowed to remove people from voting lists because of death, felony conviction, or deemed incompetent.

The article correctly points out why the national media in these cases were more interested in building ratings and readership than reporting the truth and they themselves abused the freedom of the press trust that they should have protected with integrity and ethics: “Local media in Georgia got these stories right while national outlets flubbed them. They distorted the facts and got basic facts wrong. The national reporters wanted to build narrative arches with protagonists and villains instead of just giving people the facts. As local news outlets rely more and more on national reporters or fade away, more stories like these will be reported and even more people will distrust the press.”

2) But it is not just bad, biased reporting of election stories that made the press look bad, their polling results also bring into doubt their integrity. Remember back in the 2016 Presidential election how almost every media poll showed Hillary winning the election? 

One reason they may have all been so wrong is that maybe, like CNN did, they purposely over weighted their polling sample with Democrats/liberals which skewed the results to Clinton. The one conclusion that many people drew, given the bad confidence levels of the press in Americans’ minds, is that CNN wanted to shape the election and make it look like a Clinton victory was a done deal. That in turn would depress and suppress Trump voters and possibly add a bandwagon effect for Clinton, i.e. if CNN says she will win I might as well vote for a winner.

Could this same intentional skewing of poll results, in an effort to affect elections, also happened in the recent midterm elections, as pointed out by an article by Dick Morris:

• In 40% of the pre-election polls in the most closely watched Senate and governor races, the polls picked the wrong winner.
• In other words, you could have done almost as good a job on average by flipping a coin in picking winners, 50%, than the major news and polling organizations did with their much more sophisticated efforts.
• And even when the polls picked the right winner, in 60% of the time they were more than three points wrong in the number of votes the winner got despite their polling methods.
• The results would be less suspicious if the wrong predictions were more or less equal between Democrats and Republicans. 
• But these results were also skewed in that 75% of the major polls indicated that Democrats were doing better than what really happened while only 25% doing better than finally happened, a more than random difference.
• According to Morris: “Of the nine major polling firms, eight showed Democrats doing better than they actually did and only one — Trafalgar — showed Republicans doing better than it turned out.”
• The NBC/Marist poll was the worst polling effort, overestimating Democratic vote totals by 6.8%.

Given that the press constantly favors Democrats and liberals in their biased reporting and given that the press and their polling partners constantly overestimate the chances of Democrats and liberals in elections prior to voting, it should not be a surprise that Americans who cherish the First Amendment and the freedom of the press guarantee that it provides have a very low and dubious view of the integrity and confidence that the journalism profession has today. The journalists in this country have been entrusted with a very important component of our democracy and sadly, they flub that responsibility every day of their working lives.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

June, 2017, Part 8, Political Class Insanity: CNN Rigs The News and Illinois Enters Into Financial Hell

As we do every month, we review the latest idiocy, lunacy, ineptness, and general insanity from the American political class. We are getting started as little late this month since we needed to review the latest global warming.climate change insanity from the likes of Al Gore, culminating in our review of the 26 reasons why it was appropriate and necessary for Trump to pull us out of the Paris Climate Agreement:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2017/06/june-2017-part-4-i-am-global-warming.html

But let’s quickly get into this month’s political class insanity because over the past month or so there has been a lot of it was Washington implodes into a useless pile of incompetence:

1) While the political class has done very little to protect and enhance our freedoms over recent years, the so-called free press in this country have not done much to enhance freedom and truth either. We have previously reported on how the free press has become just as corrupt, just as partisan and just as useless as the political class when it comes to truth in reporting and high integrity journalism:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-perversion-and-death-of-unbiased.html

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-perversion-and-death-of-unbiased_29.html

It seems nothing has changed since these posts from last September, at least when it comes to CNN, which was once known as Cable New Network and then became the Clinton news network while the unabashedly campaigned for a Hillary Clinton victory and they have no further degenerated down into simply the Comedic News Network:

• According to Kristie McDonald, writing for the eHeadlines website on June 11, 2017, CNN in England was caught setting up a fake news story shortly after the latest terror attack in that country.
• CNN personnel were on the streets of London for what they wanted to make look like an anti-terror protest, led by Muslims apparently to show that not all Muslims are sympathetic to Islamic terror attacks.
• But thanks to the reality that everyone with a smartphone also has a video camera, video footage taken by regular people, and posted on YouTube, showed how CNN personnel were staging the rally, not reporting on the rally.
• The person shooting the video reports that there are “more press than anyone else.”
• The Muslim women supposedly protesting the terror attacks were getting their posters and flowers from the CNN personnel, i.e. this was a staged protest for the CNN cameras not a real protest.
• Once the women get their CNN provided props, they cross the street for the filming of this “news” story.

When corrupt politicians lie and cheat and have no integrity, it has always been the important responsibility of the news media and press to call them out on their lies and shenanigans. When the pores are the ones creating false truths and trying to influence views rather than report on facts and realities, our democracy is in very sad place, thanks in this instance of heinous reporting to the Comedic News Network.

The video of the setup to the fake news story can be viewed at:

http://eheadlinespolls.com/breaking-more-footage-leaks-of-cnns-staged-muslim-anti-terror-protest-video/

2) Earlier in this month’s insanity series we reported on how state politicians around the country have so badly screwed up the fiscal integrity of their state’s financial situation, allowing state governments’ unfunded liabilities to soar well over $1 TRILLION. The obvious conclusion is that politicians around the country, be they at the state, local, or Federal level have no ability, no will, or no knowledge on how to operate an effective budget process, incurring $20 TRILLION in debt at the Federal level and trillions of dollars in debt at the state, county and local level.

And at some point these financial insanities will come home to roost. It will then require state government to raise taxes, cut benefits, or eventually declare bankruptcy, all options that are ugly but highly likely to be unavoidable.

And the leading indicator in that race to fiscal ugliness, according to Nancy Hayes, writing for the Joe For America website on June 19 2017, is the state government of Illinois:

• According to a recent comment by an Illinois state government official, “We are in massive crisis mode, this is not a false alarm.”
• The state government has over $15 billion in unpaid bills on this books.
• The state government has not had a budget in three years.
• It is likely to be the first state government to have its bonds downgraded to junk quality in the very near future.
• A judge recently ruled that the state government is in violation of its own consent decrees and previous judicial orders, putting further pressure on its shaky financial situation.
• In desperation, the governor recently ordered the state legislature back into session to address the financial mess, telling everyone “to get serious and get to work.”
• As with the financial and heaving taxation and regulatory mess in California, people are leaving the state of Illinois with 22,000 leaving in 2015 alone.
• In Chicago, the epicenter of bad fiscal planning by local politicians, over 6,000 people left that city in 2015.
• The Tax Foundation claims that the state of Illinois has some of the highest property tax and other taxes in the nation, probably a leading factor in why both residents and businesses are leaving Illinois for better tax treatment elsewhere, causing Illinois to have 90,000 fewer manufacturing jobs today than in 2008.
• Chief Executive magazine ranked Illinois 48th out of 50 states relative to the ease of doing business in Illinois with taxation ranking the state as 50th out of 50.
• And as if the $15 billion in unpaid bills today is not enough of a headache, the unfunded pension liabilities of the state retirement systems is over $111 billion.

Given the sad state of financial affairs, the already high taxes, the out migration of residents and businesses because of the high taxes, what do Democrats in the legislature want to do? You guessed it, raise taxes. Let’s just throw another few gallons of gas on that fiscal fire, idiots. I what you have been doing for decades got you to where you are today a disaster, why would you want to continue to the same thing over and over again, raise taxes?

It is usually at this point where we cite our favorite Einstein quote: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” And the fiscal ineptness of Illinoi politicians have gotten them the following insanity distinction relative to the rest of the country:

What does it look like when a government and the politicians that operate it have no idea how to operate a fiscally sound budget? It looks like today in Illinois:

• The state Transportation Department will stop any and all road work by July 1 unless budget conditions change.
• The Powerball lottery system may dump the state out of its system since the state cannot and has not paid lottery winners for a while now.
• If the state is judicially forced to pay out what was settled in previous court cases and consent decrees, within a few weeks, the state will be paying out more in payments than it receives in revenue, leaving no money for schools, domestic violence shelters, ambulance services, etc.
• State Comptroller Susan Mendoza, the government official responsible for managing the state government’s cash flow and financials said it best:“I don’t know what part of ‘We are in massive crisis mode’ the General Assembly and the governor don’t understand. This is not a false alarm.” 

What a flipping, political insanity mess. And keep in mind that a lot of this problem developed while the economy was in a growth mode over the past eight years. Imagine what happens when the next recession sets in and Illinois has fewer taxpayer and fewer businesses to offset the recession’s impacts. 

Truly insane but quite possibly coming to a state or Federal government to you very soon. Illinois is the proverbial canary in the coal mine, a coal mine that Federal and other politicians have dug for us all.

That will do it for today’s insanity. Very sad, very depressing, very pathetic and very dangerous: politicians screwing our financial state and CNN screwing up our freedom of the press state. More insanity to follow.

When The Press Gets Political, The Politicans Get Lazy, The Country Gets Cynical

One of the most critical institutions required in a democracy is a strong, vigorous, unbiased, and free press. While ordinary citizens are often too busy just trying to get through their hectic days to keep politicians in line, an active free press should step into that void to make sure that politicians and the government entities they are operating are doing so in an efficient, fair, effective, and non-criminal manner.

And for many years, decades, and centuries, that was the case in America. From the early pamphlets in Revolutionary times through people like Mark Twain and up to Woodward and Bernstein and their Watergate investigations, the press has kept democracy and integrity alive in the halls of government.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be many Woodwards, Bernsteins, Twains and others of their ilk today. Different news agencies today seem to take sides in the political tugs of war, favoring their side over the other side, as opposed to presenting both sides in an unskewed, unbiased manner. As a result, major political misdeeds across a large variety of sins often go unreported by many news outlets lest they shine an unfavorable light on their “side” of the political spectrum.

We will discuss this denigration of news reporting and journalism today, concentrating on how the so-called mainstream press always seems to side with the Democrats in general and particularly our current President. If Woodward and Bernstein were still in their hey day of investigative journalism, they would be smacking their lips at the scandal buffet: the IRS blocking First Amendment rights of conservatives, the destruction of IRS internal emails in violation of laws, the Justice Department impeding first Amendment rights of journalists, the NSA and other government entities shredding the fourth Amendment rights of ordinary citizens, the scandal of the Benghazi murders and cover up, the unconstitutional military involvement of the U.S. in the Libyan civil war, the supplying of Egypt with military equipment in violation of established law blocking such actions after a military coup, and on and on and on.

The scandals are endless but the reporting is just a trifling when it comes to most of today’s news outlets reporting bad news about Democrats. There are Pulitzers prizes to be won, the tree of scandal has a bumper crop of low hanging fruit but still the transgressions of Democrats and Democrats’ actions and quotes often get little sunshine from their friends in the press. 

And if the press is going to allow politicians of any type to get away with greed, ineptness, cronyism, illegal actions and such, then you can rest assured that the politicians of this era will do just that. And maybe that is why government operations do not work properly today, why politicians get very wealthy once they get into office, why no issues ever get resolved, and why the country continues to sink into a state of disrepair and less and less freedom.

Before we discuss the many examples of Democrats getting air cover and free passes from the mainstream press, let me state up front a few political facts about myself:

• I have been voting in national elections since 1972.
• During that whole time, I have never voted for a Republican for President.
• Up until 2010, I had never voted for a Republican for any national office.
• For a while, while living back in New Jersey, I was officially registered as a Democrat.

That should prove that the following insanity is not a witch hunt or hatchet job on Democrats. But what it does show is that Democrats are just as obnoxious and disgusting as any other type of politician, they just do not get the press coverage from the mainstream press for their misdeeds as Republicans or other do.

The following insanity is based on an August 19, 2014 article written by Geoffrey Dickens who was writing for the Newsbusters website. Newsbusters does a really good job of pointing out the bias and skewed reporting that often goes on by main stream media outlets, outlets that are supposed to be journalistically neutral but are much more often than not favoring the Democrats when it comes to news coverage.

Ask yourself how much you have been told by the mainstream media of these pretty distressing scandals by Democratic politicians in addition to the ones we listed above:

- Did you know that Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is accused of illegally funneling campaign funds to his granddaughter? That this issue was raised by a formal investigation by the Federal Elections commission or that Reid ended up repaying at least some of the funds as a result of the investigation?

You probably do not know about this incident since ABC, CBS, and NBC gave it absolutely no news coverage, according to the Newsbusters article, despite the fact it involved the Senate Majority Leader.

- Did you know that Democratic Governor of Illinois Pat Quinn allegedly used an anti violence state government budget as his own private slush fund? Did you know that his use of the funds is under criminal investigation by both the FBI and state agencies? 

You probably do not know since ABC, NBC, and CBS news gave it no coverage despite it involving major corruption potential in one of the biggest states in the union, the home state of the current President.

- Did you know that Democratic Senator John Walsh had to drop out of the Montana Senate race after it was found that he had plagiarized major portions of his master’s thesis while at the Army war College?

- Did you know that current Democratic U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu broke campaign funding laws when she billed the American taxpayer $3,200 to fly 400 miles round trip within her state of Louisiana to attend a campaign fund raiser luncheon? While CNN reported on her lawbreaking, ABC, NBC, and CBS devoted zero news time on the transgression.

- Did you know that earlier this year New Jersey Democratic Congressman Rob Andrews resigned from Congress to take a job with a Philadelphia law firm and spend more time with his family? Or did he really leave Congress to dodge allegations that for years he violated House Of Representative rules and Federal law for allegedly using campaign funds to pay for personal trips to Scotland and Los Angeles and for using a graduation party for his daughter to illegally raise campaign cash? 

You probably do not know about the shenanigans since only CBS covered the alleged transgressions for 88 seconds within a larger 60 Minutes piece. None of the three major network news organizations gave this scandal a single second of coverage.

- Did you know that on March 26 the FBI raided the offices of three Democrats across the country? One of them, California Democratic State Senator Leland Yee, was arrested on theft, bribery and extortion charges. The Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) reported Yee was “tied to Chinese gangster Raymond ‘Shrimp Boy’ Chow and convicted Hillary Clinton bundler Norman Hsu.” The IBD went on to explain that Yee was “An outspoken advocate of gun control, Yee conspired to traffic in high-powered weapons in exchange for campaign cash, the FBI affidavit says.”

You probably did not hear about this scandal since while ABC’s Amy Robach, on March 27 edition of ABC’s Good Morning America, only talked about it briefly, never mentioning the Democratic party affiliation of Yee: “And a California lawmaker who pushed for gun control has been arrested in a gun trafficking scheme. State Senator Leland Yee is fighting those charges.”

There was nothing about Yee on CBS and NBC.

- Did you know that on March 28, California and Democratic State Senators Rod Wright and Ron Calderon joined Yee in being suspended by the California State Senate, forced to resign by Democratic Governor Jerry Brown? Wright is waiting sentencing in a voter fraud case while Calderon was caught “taking $100,000 in bribes, lavish trips and no show jobs for his kids in exchange for legislative favors."

There was absolutely no coverage by any mainstream news network.

- Did you know that as a part of same March 26 FBI raid that arrested California’s Yee, Demcoratic Charlotte Mayor Patrick Cannon was also arrested for accepting bribes? The IBD reported that Cannon, a friend of the President, allegedly took more than $48,000 in bribes, including $20,000 in cash from an undercover agent, who actually delivered the bribe inside a briefcase in the mayor’s office. 

During another payoff, Cannon placed the bribe money near his ear and fanned the bills, according to the Federal complaint. 

Big Three bews network coverage included:

• A 12 second mention by ABC’s Amy Robach on the March 27 Good Morning America, during which Robach failed to name Cannon as a Democrat: “Mayor Patrick Cannon accused of accepting more than $48,000 in bribes and then soliciting another million in bribes.”
• NBC’s Brian Williams on the March 26 Nightly News offered a 37 second report, in which he never disclosed Cannon’s party affiliation. 
• CBS never ran a story on Cannon.

- Did you know that on April 28 the Chicago Tribune reported that Illinois Democratic State Representative Keith Farnham was charged with “using both and state-owned computers to trade hundreds of images and videos depicting child pornography and engage in graphic online chats in which he allegedly bragged about sexually molesting a 6-year-old girl?"

Mainstream news coverage: 0 stories

We could go on and on but you get the idea. The Newsbusters article also covered the following Democratic politician misdeeds in detail that you can research for yourself:

• Democrat (Bruce Baley) Running for U.S. Senate in Iowa Insults Farmers. Big Three news network coverage: 0 stories
• Democratic Congressman (Bennie Thompson) Calls Clarence Thomas an “Uncle Tom.” Big Three coverage: 0 stories
• Democratic Candidate (Marie Strumolo Burke) for Mayor in New Jersey Uses the “N Word.” Big Three coverage: 0 stories

But we should not be surprised by this non-reporting. When a Demcoratic Congressman from Georgia publicly worried that the island of Guam was going to tip over in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the mainstream press ignored this idiocy. When a Texas Congresswoman asked out loud if the Mars Rover vehicle would be driving past the spot on the moon where Armstrong and Aldrin had landed, the mainstream press ignored this ignorance. When a Democratic Congresswoman from California exclaimed that 500 million Americans were applying for first time unemployment benefits every week, the mainstream press glossed over her highly deficient math skills.

Again, I am not out witch hunting Democrats. But it is pretty obvious that the main stream media has really been biased when it comes to not reporting negative news stories about Democrats. When Republican Vice President Dan Quayle misspelled tomato long ago at a school spelling bee, the mainstream press went crazy. When President Obama misspelled respect at an Aretha Franklin concert, no mention was made. This is just one example of the protection racket our journalists have devolved into.

When the press becomes the protector of politicians, of either party, rather than the investigator of politicians, democracy suffers, liberty suffers, and politicians more easily get away with the insanity that they have been doing over the past few decades. Thus, while this blog has always maintained that we are living through the worst set of politicians this country has every seen, it is partly because 1) the mainstream press has allowed them to get away with their lack of integrity, their greed, and their incompetence and 2) we have also taken “sides,” encouraging the press and journalists of our time to be what they are today: biased, lazy, and a tool of government and the political class.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Today's News Outlets: Where Freedom of The Press and Integrity Has Been Replaced By Conflict Of Interest, Part 1

“No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.” Tom Stoppard

We will use this quote from a Mr. Tom Stoppard as the backbone of our discussion today regarding freedom, democracy, and the continuing decline of an unbiased press in this country. It seems that many people believe that their source of news today is always correct, it is their political opponents’ sources of news that are biased and prejudiced and misleading.

If you are a conservative or Republican, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and others hate your views on life and politics and purposely show you and your opinions in the most negative light possible. If you are a liberal or a Democrat, Fox News, conservative talk radio, and others are the devil themselves and not to be believed.

As a result, we have ended up in a place in our history where reality is tainted by the news or press outlet from which you receive your news. Which is a dangerous place to be since if we all do not have a generally common sense of reality, there is no way that we can come together as a country to fix the major issues of our reality today. A favorite quote of mine goes as follows: “There is only one reality, it is just that everyone has a different perception of reality, that is the problem.” And the skewed reporting of our current news outlets makes those perceptions ever wider apart.

Growing up I do not remember such a disconnect across different sources of where you got your news and information from. Walter Cronkite was not much different in presenting facts and realities than Huntley and Brinkley. News and facts were just that, facts. On Sunday morning news shows there were differing viewpoints debated but you knew that was the case. Today, it seems that every day is a Sunday morning news show as different views and opinions are advanced under the disguise of just presenting the facts.

Consider some recent events that prove my point. It seems we have allowed the free “press” in this country to take sides and when the press in a democracy takes sides, truth and reality take a back seat to politics:

1) Consider some facts from a Washington Post article from June 13, 2013:

• ABC News President Ben Sherwood is the brother of Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a top national-security adviser to President Obama. 
• The news director at CBS, David Rhodes is the brother of Benjamin Rhodes, a key foreign-policy specialist in the Obama administration. 
• CNN’s deputy Washington bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Tom Nides, who until earlier this year was deputy secretary of state under Hillary Rodham Clinton.
• White House press secretary Jay Carney’s wife is Claire Shipman, a veteran reporter for ABC. 
• NPR’s White House correspondent, Ari Shapiro, is married to a lawyer, Michael Gottlieb, who joined the White House counsel’s office in April.

These are not low level political class/press and news organizations connections. These are people working in the White House at high levels who are related to executives and other high level people in the press. The opportunity for conflict of interest is high. 

Now, I  am not accusing anyone of anything here. But consider the scandalous environment that this administration has created:

• The Benghazi coverup.
• IRS targeting First Amendment rights of American citizens.
• Electronic eavesdropping, Fourth Amendment rights violations, and invasion of privacy by government snooping that would have been unheard of just months ago.
• Spying on members of the press by the current Presidential administration.
• Voting irregularities in the last election.
• Unparalleled cronyism.
• The unfolding of the Obama Care disaster, the worst piece of legislation ever written.
• The addition of over $5 TRILLION to our national debt in just over four years of this administration.
• The failure to write most of the rules and regulations for the Dodd-Frank legislation that was passed three years ago.
• Failure after failure of economic stimulus programs such as Cash For Clunkers.
• Fast and Furious gun running.
• Many, many other failures and scandals.

You get the idea, we are living in an era of unbridled government failure, economic idiocy, the trampling of personal rights, and other major scandals. Woodward and Bernstein would have had a field day if Nixon was doing all of these things. 

But there apparently are very few Woodwards and Bernsteins in today’s press. From this buffet of scandals we get nary a peep from most members of the press. Instead, one is left to wonder if the stench of scandal is ignored because at the last family picnic or over dinner at home last night, conflict of interest became a reality. Just a thought.

By the way, for those of you are appalled that I would even suggest that family members in this administration are using family ties to suppress press coverage of the Obama scandals, ask yourself this: 
if Obama was a Republican and there were high level family connections between his staff and executives at Fox News, Rush Limbaugh’s show, etc., you would be livid that the press was not doing its job of covering these scandals because of family conflicts. Right?

2) Let’s review another situation that was and is ripe for massive conflict of interest. The Atlantic recently wrote an article in which they identified 21 journalist professionals from the media that left their press industry jobs to work for the Obama administration, a sample of which are listed below:

• Linda Douglass, who was once a spokesperson for Obamacare, was a former Congressional correspondent for CBS and ABC, as well as a writer/editor at National Journal. She was also a traveling press secretary for the Obama campaign.
• Rick Stengell was the former Managing Editor of Time until he became the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the State Department.
• Shailagh Murrau, of the Washington Post, left the Post to join the Obama administration as Vice President Biden’s communications director. 
• Warren Bass was once  Deputy Editor of the Washington Post’s Outlook section is now a top official in the State Department.
• Geoff Morrell gave up a career in journalism at ABC News to work as a spokesman at the Defense Department.
• The Washington Post’s Stephen Barr left his position as writer of the Federal Diary column to join the Labor Department as a high ranking public affairs official.
• Rosa Brooks was a former Los Angeles Times op-ed columnist who advised Michelle Fluornoy at the Defense Department before becoming a professor at Georgetown.
• Peter Gosselin was an LA Times reporter who became the Chief Speechwriter for former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. 
• Beverley Lumpkin was a former Justice Department reporter/producer for ABC and CBS and a reporter at the Associated Press. She left journalism to work for the Project on Government Oversight and joined the Department of Justice as a Public Affairs Official
• Rick Weiss was a former Washington Post science reporter who joined the Center for American Progress. He is currently the communications director and senior policy strategist for the White House Office of Science and Technology.
• Anesh Raman was an international/Middle East correspondent at CNN who left to send mass emails for the Obama re-election campaign
• Eric Dash was a New York Times reporter before joining the Treasury Department’s public affairs division.
• MSNBC producer Anthony Reyes left to work for the U.S. Treasury’s public affairs/new media office.

Now, I am not accusing any of these people of slanting their previous news reporting, distorting facts, leaving out facts, etc. to promote this administration’s aims and policies. However, I do find it very interesting that all of the people listed in the article are from what we would call left leaning, Democrat party favoring news outlets: the Washington Post, the New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, etc. None of these people come from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity’s shows, conservative blogs, etc.

Again, there is no evidence of actual conflict of interest. However, as we have said many times in this blog in previous posts, the appearance of conflicts of interest are just as bad as actual conflicts of interest and you cannot help but think that there was a quid pro quo on behalf of the left leaning news outlets, their former employees, and this administration, giving the results above.

This ends the first half of our discussion on the hypothesis that today's news outlets' integrity has been replaced by conflict of interests. More to follow tomorrow including the scandalous cover switching of Time magazine.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now:http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

Poiticians Say The Darnedest Things...And That Is Not A Good Thing

In the late 1950s, Art Linkletter hosted a television show called “House Party.” One of the regular segments of the show was Mr. Linkletter having casual conversations with young kids and enjoying what these kids had to say, with the catch phrase, “Kids say the darndest things” coming out of these funny discussions.

We parodied this concept in a previous post, using the funny and inane quotes of our politicians as replacement comedic stand ins for Mr. Linkletter’s kids:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2010/10/politicians-say-darndest-things.html

We are going to try that parody again today with the latest verbal insanity that has come out of the mouths of our so-called leaders recently.

1) Let’s start with a recent quote from the U.S. Attorney General, you know, the head law enforcement officer in the entire country, the person who is supposed to go after ALL kinds of criminals regardless of who they are and regardless of what law they broke:

"I am concerned that the size of some of these [banking] institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy"

In other words, our banks are so big and so involved with our economy that the people who operate them possibly operate outside of the law, given their positions and the wealth of their financial institutions. Under this inane logic: cheat on your taxes for a few thousand dollars, go to jail. Contribute heavily to the Great Recession, screw the entire mortgage industry, drive the housing market into the ground, help spike record setting and persistent unemployment, destroy trillions of dollars of wealth, financially support incumbent politicians to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign donations, and never get prosecuted, for past misdeeds or future misdeeds.

There truly are two sets of rules in this country, one set for ordinary Americans and on set for politically connected Americans.

2) Nancy Pelosi is always good for an inane quote, with the following previous post containing some of her best work:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2010/12/nancy-pelosi-comedy-central-or-syfy.html

But her recent quote at a pres conference contains two major, hysterical statements:

“Our whole budget is what $3.5 trillion. So, when we talk about reducing spending, we certainly must, and we certainly have–$1.6 trillion in the previous Congress, $1.2 of it in the Budget Control Act. But spending is also related to tax cuts. Tax cuts are spending. Tax expenditures, they are called. Subsidies for big oil, subsidies to send jobs overseas, breaks to send jobs overseas, breaks for corporate jets. They are called tax expenditures. Spending money on tax breaks. And that’s the spending that we must curtail as well.”

Two pieces of insanity:

A) I find it hilarious that she thinks that Congress and the Federal government has reduced spending. If you go to the White House’s own budget spreadsheet,

 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals),

Federal government expenditures will increase 66% from 2007, the year she became Speaker of the House, to 2017, the year after President Obama leaves office.

In that time period, no year over year decrease in the Federal budget has occurred or is assumed by the Obama administration to occur. So where she gets these numbers is not in this reality that most of us live.

B) I love her line, “tax cuts are spending.” Tax cuts are not spending, spending is spending, tax cuts are tax cuts. I think what she is trying to say is that tax breaks to various entities are something that need to be curtailed but gets all fouled up, as usual, in explaining things in a straight forward manner, leaving doubt that she really knows what she is talking about. “Tax cuts are spending,” hilarious.

The video of her trying to explain this whole mess can be accessed at :

http://www.theminorityreportblog.com/2013/03/07/pelosi-tax-cuts-are-spending-wtf/

3) Donna Brazile is a Democrat campaign specialist, she is one of the ranking unelected Democrats in the country, and she ran Al Gore's presidential campaign. She was close to many in the Clinton White House. She is a ranking, powerful Democrat operative. She is often on CNN and other networks doing commentary and political positioning for the Democrat Party.

But apparently she is also confused and bewildered. She recently sent out the following Tweet to her Twitter followers:

Donna Brazile ✔ @donnabrazile
What's on your menu? Just got off the phone with my health care provider asking them to explain why my premium jumped up. No good answer!

But Ms. Brazille there is a good answer and that answer is Obama Care, the massive and fatally flawed piece of legislation that you and other Democrats rammed down the country’s throat. Apparently she is good at political wrangling but very bad at understanding the reality of the Obama Care legislation: it stinks and will fail dramatically.

Its thousands of pages of regulations and legalese is starting to tear the country and the economy apart and she is just coming out of her ignorance cloud to these facts. Like U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill, who recently came out of her ignorance and trance about what Americans knew for a long time regarding the obscene groping being done by TSA employees, it is so cute when the political class finally open their eyes to the reality of their actions and try to cope with their new awareness. Ms. Brazille joins this crowd with this Tweet.

4) The next quote out of the political class is actually a little scary from a freedom perspective. Journalist Bob Woodward has had a long, distinguished career as a professional journalist. His truthful writings and extensive research back in the 1970s helped bring down the corrupt Nixon Presidency. Of all the members of the current media industry, his integrity and unbiased reporting makes him one of the few super stars in the news industry.

Which makes the following quote that much more distressing, that a high ranking member of the Obama Presidency would actually openly threaten a member of the media for simply reporting the facts and reality of the current political environment:

"I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying that Potus [Obama] asking for revenues is moving the goal post. I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim."

When the President of the United States allows his staff to threaten leading members of the press, especially as blatant as this, freedom and democracy are truly under threats and attack. This is a quote that is not inane or funny, it is a threat to liberty.

5) The President also got into the silly and out of touch quote business this past week with the following statement:

“We don’t have an immediate crisis in terms of debt.”

I would beg to differ:

• The current national debt is about $16.7 TRILLION which places an individual debt responsibility of about $53,000 on every American, including kids and infants. Thus, a family of four would have a family debt share of over $212,000.
• Since Obama has come into office, the national debt has gone up over $5.5 TRILLION. Thus, his Presidency has added over $17,000 to every American’s share of the debt in just five years.
• One major credit rating agency has already downgraded the Federal government’s credit rating and others have threatened to follow suit unless the government gets its spending under control.
• Under Obama’s budget vision, many additional TRILLIONS of dollars will be added to the national debt in the following years.
• Even if the government confiscated the wealth of every “rich” American and somehow applied it to the national debt, it would only pay a small fraction of the current debt burden.
• When, not if, if the interest on U.S. Treasury bonds goes up, the percentage of annual tax revenues that will have to be diverted to just servicing the national debt will skyrocket.

Yes, Mr. President, we indeed do have a debt crisis, a crisis that is suppressing economic growth, keeping unemployment high, burdening future generations with a debt load they got nothing in return for, and destroying freedom.

Even if we do not have a debt crisis, which we do, it still makes no sense to spend and waste taxpayer money in the thousands of ways that the Federal government does today. Federal entities and programs are often redundant, inefficient, unnecessary, and riddled with criminal fraud, all of which unnecessarily increase our debt. In either case, the President is certainly out of touch with financial and economic reality with this quote.

Yes, politicians say the darnedest things. They do not understand basic finance and economics. Darn, sometimes it appears from their statements that they do not understand basic math. They do not understand what their policies will result in until they are personally groped, either by the TSA or their insurance providers. They openly wonder if some Americans are above the law because of their business positions. And possibly worst of all, they have no qualms about browbeating upstanding journalists, threatening freedom of the press in the process.

Linkletter’s kids were cute, funny, and insightful. Washington’s kids/politicians are far from cute, far from funny, and quite ignorant of the reality that is America today.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w