This is what angers me most

That the media attempts to shamelessly shape things for their guy. Read the original here.

Five ways the mainstream media tipped the scales in favor of ObamaBy Rich Noyes
Published November 07, 2012
FoxNews.com

Fox News and other media outlets have projected that President Obama has been reelected to a second term. If, in celebrating his victory Obama wanted to give credit where credit is due, he might want to think about calling some of America's top journalists, since their favorable approach almost certainly made the difference between victory and defeat.

Reviewing the 2012 presidential campaign, here are five ways the media elite tipped the public relations scales in favor of the liberal Obama and against the conservative challenger Mitt Romney:

1. The Media’s Biased Gaffe Patrol Hammered Romney: The media unfairly jumped on inconsequential mistakes — or even invented controversies — from Romney and hyped them in to multi-day media “earthquakes.” Case in point: the GOP candidate’s trip to Europe and Israel in late July. A Media Research Center analysis of all 21 ABC, CBS and NBC evening news stories about Romney’s trip found that virtually all of them (18, or 86%) emphasized “diplomatic blunders,” “gaffes” or “missteps.”

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer blasted the news coverage in an August 2 column, calling the trip “a major substantive success” that was wrapped “in a media narrative of surpassing triviality.”

Similarly, when the left-wing Mother Jones magazine in September put out a secretly-recorded video of Romney talking to donors about the 47% of Americans who don’t pay income taxes, the networks hyped it like a sensational sex scandal. Over three days, the broadcast network morning and evening shows churned out 42 stories on the tape, nearly 90 minutes of coverage. The tone was hyperbolic; ABC’s "Good Morning America" called it a “bombshell rocking the Mitt Romney campaign,” while ABC "World News" anchor Diane Sawyer declared it a “political earthquake.”

None of Obama’s gaffes garnered that level of coverage. After the president in a June 8 press conference declared that “the private sector is doing fine,” the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts gave it just one night’s coverage, then basically dropped the story — nothing further on ABC’s "World News" or the "CBS Evening News" in the weeks that followed, and just two passing references on the "NBC Nightly News."

And, when Obama infamously declared, “You didn’t build that,” ABC, CBS, NBC didn’t report the politically damaging remark for four days — and then only after Romney made it the centerpiece of a campaign speech.

2. Pounding Romney With Partisan Fact Checking: There’s nothing wrong with holding politicians accountable for the honesty of their TV ads and stump speeches, but this year the self-appointed media fact-checkers attacked Republicans as liars for statements that were accurate.

For example, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter writing for PolitiFact branded VP candidate Paul Ryan’s convention speech anecdote about the closing of the General Motors plant in his hometown as “false,” even though Ryan was correct in all of his details. The slanted review became TV reporters’ talking points; the next day on NBC, correspondent Chuck Todd grumped that while what Ryan said “was technically factual, by what he left out, [he] actually distorted the actual truth.” Matt Lauer greeted Ryan the following week in an interview on Today: “There are some people who are claiming that you played a little fast and loose with the truth....”

The same thing happened when Mitt Romney talked about Obama’s “apology tour” during the final presidential debate. While in 2009 Obama had, in fact, criticized the United States as “arrogant,” “derisive” and having “too often... set [our] principles aside,” the networks said to call it an “apology tour” was “false” because, as CNN’s John Berman tenuously insisted, “even if he was critical of past U.S. foreign policy, he issued no apologies.”

Writing in the New York Times August 31, correspondent Jackie Calmes scolded that “the number of falsehoods and misleading statements from the Romney campaign coming in for independent criticism has reached a level not typically seen.” That’s not true, either; Romney’s team was, at worst, guilty of highlighting those facts that best illustrated their points (something done by all politicians), and the Obama campaign certainly put out their share of tawdry TV ads and dubious campaign claims.

But with “truth cops” who mainly policed just the GOP side of the street, the media used “fact-checking” as another club to tilt the playing field in favor of the Democrats.

3. Those Biased Debate Moderators: Upset liberals scorned PBS’s Jim Lehrer for taking a hands-off approach in the first debate on October 3, with MSNBC analyst Howard Fineman slamming him as “practically useless” for not jumping into the debate on behalf of President Obama.

Such criticism may have encouraged the activist approach taken by ABC’s Martha Raddatz in the vice presidential debate October 11, and by CNN’s Candy Crowley in the October 16 town hall debate, as both of those journalists repeatedly interrupted the Republican candidate and larded the discussion with a predominantly liberal agenda.

Crowley earns extra demerits for taking the media’s penchant for faulty fact-checking to new heights when she jumped into the October 16 town hall-style debate to validate President Obama’s claim that he called the attack in Benghazi, Libya, “an act of terror” the very next morning. Crowley endorsed Obama’s story, telling Romney: “He did, in fact, sir, call it an act of terror.”

Not according to the transcript, which had Obama only speaking generically about how “no acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this nation,” not assigning that label to the violence in Benghazi.

Wrong though she was, Crowley became a heroine to many in the liberal media; ABC's Matt Dowd, for example, cheered: “What Candy Crowley did, I actually thought, was laudable....I hope we get to do more of that in this discourse.”

Moderators are supposed to ensure both sides get a fair hearing, not pick sides. By leaping into the fray, Candy Crowley epitomized the media’s itch to tilt the scales this year — again, in Obama’s favor.

4. The Benghazi Blackout: Right after the September 11 attack in Libya, the networks proclaimed that the events would bolster President Obama — “reminding voters of his power as commander-in-chief,” as NBC’s Peter Alexander stated on the September 14 edition of "Today." But as a cascade of leaked information erased the portrait of Obama as a heroic commander, the broadcast networks shunted the Benghazi story to the sidelines.

News broke online in late September, for example, that Team Obama knew within 24 hours that the attack was likely the result of terrorism. That starkly contradicted claims from White House press secretary Jay Carney, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and President Obama himself that the attack was a “spontaneous” reaction to an anti-Muslim video posted on YouTube. Yet, ABC took nearly two days to bring this story to viewers, while CBS and NBC held off for three days.

This was, shamefully, the broadcast networks’ pattern in October: New developments exposing the administration’s failure to provide adequate security, or contradictions in their public statements, were either given stingy coverage or buried completely. The puzzle pieces revealed a disturbing failure of Obama’s national security apparatus, but the networks flitted in and out of the story, never giving it any traction.

Instead of an “October Surprise,” the networks engineered an “October Suppression” — keeping a lid on the boiling Benghazi story until Election Day. Who knows how voters might have reacted if the media had covered this story as tenaciously as they did Romney’s “47% gaffe”?

5. Burying the Bad Economy: Pundits agreed that Obama’s weakness was the failure of the US economy to revive after his expensive stimulus and four years of $1 trillion deficits. But the major networks failed to offer the sustained, aggressive coverage of the economy that incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush faced in 1992, or even that George W. Bush faced in 2004 — both years when the national economy was in better shape than it is now.

According to a study conducted that year by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, from January through September of 1992, the networks ran a whopping 1,289 stories on the economy, 88% of which painted it in a dismal, negative light. That fall, the unemployment rate was 7.6%, lower than today’s 7.9%, and economic growth in the third quarter was 2.7%, better than today’s 2.0%. Yet the media coverage hammered the idea of a terrible economy, and Bush lost re-election.

In 2004, the economy under George W. Bush was far better than it is today — higher growth, lower unemployment, smaller deficits and cheaper gasoline — yet network coverage that year was twice as hostile to Bush than it was towards Obama this year, according to a study by the Media Research Center’s Business and Media Institute.

When Republican presidents have faced reelection, network reporters made sure to spotlight economic “victims” — the homeless man, the woman without health insurance, the unemployed worker, the senior citizen who had to choose between medicine and food. But this year, with an economy as bad as any since the Great Depression, those sympathetic anecdotes have vanished from the airwaves — a huge favor to Obama and the Democrats.

Given Obama’s record, the Romney campaign could have overcome much of this media favoritism and still prevailed — indeed, they almost did. But taken together, these five trends took the media’s historical bias to new levels this year, and saved Obama’s presidency in the process.



Rich Noyes, is research director for the Media Research Center.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/11/07/five-ways-mainstream-media-tipped-scales-in-favor-obama/#ixzz2BW12oQm1

NY Magazine says using quotes are racist

Of course it must be racist, right? Cue sarcasm. NY Magazine points out again, that in the media, racism only goes 1 way: their way. Breitbart breaks it down. Read the original here.

'NY MAG': HITTING OBAMA FOR 'YOU DIDN'T BUILD THAT' IS RACIST
by JOHN NOLTE
27 Jul 2012
Breitbart.com

With Rasmussen showing Romney enjoying a five-point lead (and that's a pollster everyone in media knows is reliable, which is why they preferjuiced NBC polls), the media is now in pure panic mode. Furthermore, Obama's Media Palace Guards know that when the full context is played of Obama's revealing "you didn't build that" quote, it's absolutely devastating for Obama because the full context of those comments show the President openly ridiculing America's small business owners.

So what's a panicked media to do?

Well, at first the corrupt media lied about Obama being taken out of context. But that's a desperate lie and everyone knows it, which means the Romney campaign was comfortable to keep on keeping on with its use of the President's comments.

So NOW what's a desperate media to do?

Well, I think we all know what the media does when it's at its mostdesperate to protect Obama, don't we, boys and girls?

That's right, the corrupt media screams... RACISM!

Mitt Romney’s plan of blatantly lying about President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech is clearly drawing blood. But what makes the attack work so well is not so much the lie itself but the broader subtext of it. Watch Obama’s delivery in the snippet put together by this Republican ad[.] ...

The key thing is that Obama is angry, and he’s talking not in his normal voice but in a “black dialect.” This strikes at the core of Obama’s entire political identity: a soft-spoken, reasonable African-American with a Kansas accent. From the moment he stepped onto the national stage, Obama’s deepest political fear was being seen as a “traditional” black politician, one who was demanding redistribution from white America on behalf of his fellow African-Americans.

So desperate to reelect Obama he's unafraid to embarrass himself, that's a flailing Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine and this is the ad he's attempting to declare racist.

Sorry, Jonathan, but the only one "blatantly lying" here is you. And your vile race-baiting is equal parts hilarious, maddening, unAmerican, and just plain pathetic.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC

UK Telegraph calls shenanigans on US Media bias

Seriously, imagine if the tables were turned and it was a GOP candidate that made these claims. Read the original here.

Elizabeth Warren's 'Native American' claims: if she was a Republican, the media would call her a racistBy Tim Stanley 

Last updated: June 14th, 2012
UK Telegraph

Imagine if a Republican candidate claimed, confidently, that she was part Native American. Imagine if she had actually used that identity to have herself listed as a minority at Harvard, qualifying her for special treatment and celebration as proof of how diverse and progressive her department is. Imagine if, many years later, it turned out that her claims to Native heritage were dubious and, when pressed for proof, she offered her “high cheekbones.” Oh, and she once contributed a recipe to a Native American cookbook called “Pow Wow Chow” (that may even have been plagiarised).

Chances are, that Republican candidate would be hounded night and day by the press, branded a racist and probably be winding down her political career. Right now, she’d be sitting by the phone, praying for a call from the producers of Celebrity Apprentice (gotta pay the mortgage on that wigwam somehow).

The incredible thing is that all this has happened to a Democratic senatorial candidate called Elizabeth Warren. And not only has she been given a pass by her party, which normally treats race with the respect it deserves, but also by the mainstream media. Last night she was chatting with Chris Matthews on MSNBC and Matthews failed to mention the scandal once. If there’s any one reason why Democrats and liberals aren't showing the expected anger about this, it’s because their section of the media has declined to discuss it.

The sad thing is that Warren is, otherwise, an intelligent and credible candidate for the Senate. The product of a working-class family, this self-made academic was one of the bright sparks behind the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and is one of the leading liberal minds of her generation. She’s competing in a naturally Democratic state (Massachusetts) that turned bellwether when it elected Tea Party Republican Scott Brown. The 2012 senate race ought to be about jobs and the economy.

Alas, Warren’s bizarre posturing as a Native American (which she has pursued with all the conviction of a full blown delusion) has sapped her credibility. Race shapes a lot of the way that Democrats think about economics and social justice – and within that narrative, Native Americans were the very first minority that the Europeans oppressed on American soil. It thus ought to be not just odd but immoral that Warren would try to borrow their heritage of suffering in order to advance her political career. Worse still, the Harvard Law Journal described her as a “woman of color,” as if it was translating her claimed identity into proof that it was reaching out to African-Americans. A lot of liberals invested a lot of emotional effort into sustaining this myth. This sort of thing is just as inappropriate as Mitt Romney suddenly claiming to be the descendent of slaves.

But what is almost worse is how much the liberal media has tried to smooth the story over. They want the Massachusetts senate race to be a straightforward fight between Warren’s populism and Brown’s conservatism. And so headlines have been massaged, innuendoes have gone unreported, and only one local paper has pursued Warren with the righteousness that the issue deserves. Articles have been written expressing sympathy along the lines of “Well, we’re probably all a little bit Native American.” The Matthews softball interview is only a representative pass.

The takeaway from all of this is that racial insensitivity only matters if it’s done by a Republican. That isn’t to say that conservatives don’t deserve everything they get when they flirt with racially coded appeals (George Allen ought to be hiding in shame, not running for office again). But Democrats can have records of racist activity (the former Senate Majority Leader, Robert Byrd, was a member of the KKK in his youth), express racist sentiments towards Asians (step forward, Marion Barry) and appropriate the racial heritage of others – and no one seems to mind. When it comes to racism, the Democratic credo is “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Harassment in the 21st century...

...classy move. I wonder how Attorney General Holder will react to the Senator's request. I'm predicting that this story will just go away, and no investigation will be opened by the DOJ. Flip the ideologies, and you better believe that Holder would have hearings and investigations and arrests. At least that's my $0.02. Read the original here.
Senator Asks DOJ to Investigate SWAT-ting Attacks on Conservative Bloggers

Jun 6, 2012 6:37pm

Arlette Saenz

ABC NEWS

A number of conservative bloggers allege they have been targeted through the use of harassment tactics such as SWAT-ting (fooling 911 operators into sending emergency teams to their homes), in retaliation for posts they have written, and now Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., has stepped into the matter. He has sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder urging him to investigate the SWAT-ting cases to see if federal laws have been violated.

“I am writing with concern regarding recent reports that several members of the community of online political commentators have been targeted with harassing and frightening actions. Any potentially criminal action that incites fear, seeks to silence a dissenting opinion, and collaterally wastes the resources of law enforcement should be given close scrutiny at all levels,” Chambliss wrote in the letter.

“Regardless of any potential political differences that may exist, threats and intimidation have no place in our national political discourse. Those who choose to enter into that political discourse should not have to worry about potential threats to their or their family’s safety,” Chambliss continued. “While I am certain that local law enforcement is reviewing each of these instances, I am asking you to please look into each of these cases as well to determine if any federal laws may have been violated. Future targets of SWAT-ting, whether engaged in political speech or not, may not be so fortunate as to escape physical harm.”

ABC News spoke with two prominent conservative bloggers who were victims of SWAT-ting, a hoax tactic used by some hackers to infiltrate a victim’s phone system, often through voice over IP (VOIP) technology to make calls appear as if they are coming from a residence. The perpetrators call police to report a violent crime at that home to which the police respond, sometimes with SWAT teams.

Just after midnight on July 1, 2011, Patrick Frey, a deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles and a conservative blogger who writes under the name “Patterico,” heard a pounding at his door as sheriff’s deputies arrived to investigate a call from Frey’s home about a man who claimed he had killed his wife. But no one in Frey’s home had been killed, and no one had made a phone call to the police.

“It’s a phone call that could have gotten me killed,” Frey wrote on his blog about the incident.

Frey was cuffed by police while they woke up his wife, who was asleep in their room, and questioned her about the safety of the children. Helicopters swarmed overhead with searchlights as the sheriff’s deputies investigated.

Frey told ABC News he received email threats prior to the SWAT-ting incident.

Late last month, Erick Erickson, the editor of the conservative site RedState.com, was the victim of the same type of targeting. He had written about Frey’s case just a few days before.

Erickson sat at home in Macon, Georgia with his family while his children played outside over Memorial Day weekend when two sheriff’s deputies drove to the house after receiving a phone call about Erickson allegedly shooting his wife.

“My first thought was, ‘What have the kids done?’” Erickson said after seeing the police car outside his home. “The police officer approached me in the driveway and said it was a call about an accidental shooting. According to the 911 call, the person claimed I had killed my wife.”

Erickson, who said he has received other types of threats in the past, had alerted the sheriff’s department after Frey’s experience in case he became the victim of a similar occurrence.

The Bibb County District Attorney’s office in Georgia currently is investigating the case and could not offer comment on it. Asked who he suspected was responsible for the phone call to police, Erickson declined to speculate.

But several conservative bloggers have been vocal about who they believe is responsible for the SWAT-tings and other forms of harassment — Brett Kimberlin, a man who was convicted of a series of bombings in Speedway, Indiana in the 1980s and made headlines in 1988 when he claimed to have once sold marijuana to then-vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle.

The group of conservative bloggers organized “Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day” on May 25, during which they urged the blogging community to write about the actions of Kimberlin.

Kimberlin, who is now the director of a non-profit organization called Justice Through Music, told ABC News that he did not commit or ask anyone to conduct the SWAT-ting hoaxes that were perpetrated against Erickson and Frey.

“Of course not, it’s ridiculous. It’s totally irresponsible for them to even say this,” Kimberlin told ABC News. “There is no truth to anything about the SWAT-ting.”

But some conservative bloggers contend Kimberlin and his associates are responsible for other forms of harassment as well. Robert Stacy McCain, a contributor to the American Spectator and founder of The Other McCain Blog, wrote about Kimberlin, and shortly after, his wife’s place of employment received a phone call from Kimberlin accusing McCain of harassment. Based on Kimberlin’s ability to find his wife’s employer, McCain became concerned Kimberlin also knew the location of his home, so the McCain family relocated to an undisclosed location.

“If I was going to continue doing this story, I couldn’t do it from my home,” McCain told ABC News. ”This kind of intimidation — it’s a threat to protected first amendment expression.”

“It’s being treated as these are just bloggers playing around on Twitter, but this is serious business. It’s much more serious I think than most people now realize,” McCain said.

Ali Akbar, the president of the National Blogger’s Club, an organization established to support bloggers, recently was targeted by an anonymous website which posted the address of his mother’s home in Forth Worth, Texas, along with a picture of the house. Akbar and other bloggers believe the website, “Breitbart Unmasked,” is linked to Kimberlin.

The National Blogger’s Club recently started a relief fund to help ease the financial woes of bloggers who are undergoing lawsuits, including one lawsuit by Kimberlin against blogger Aaron Walker, and Akbar believes the anonymous post of his mother’s home address was a response to the creation of this fund.

“They decided to take this from a discussion about me trying to help some members of my club, and they tried to disable us,” Akbar said.

Akbar and his mother are cooperating with the Tarrant County District Attorney’s office regarding the incident.

Kimberlin denied he was responsible for the post, even saying that he does not maintain any online presence and said he and his family have been victims of threats themselves and accused the bloggers of constructing a “false narrative” about him.

“I don’t blog, I don’t comment, I don’t tweet on any blogs at all. This is a right-wing attack on me and my organizations and it’s a smear job. It’s a swift boat action against us,” Kimberlin said. “What they’re doing is an obstruction of justice and it’s defamatory. We’re cooperating with the authorities in this matter. They have engaged in a massive smear campaign against us that has resulted in death threats to me and my family and to others associated with us.”

The FBI has investigated a number of SWAT-ting incidents in the past. In 2009, Carlton Nalley was sentenced to nine years in federal prison after pleading guilty to offenses related to a SWAT-ting conspiracy in Fort Worth, Texas.

Marijuana, Soda, and criminalization

I know a lot of people say that marijuana is not as bad as alcohol, and there may be some merit to that. But in NYC, small amounts of marijuana will be not as regulated or criminalized as large sugared sodas? Does that seem like priorities may be a bit out of wack? If a community wants to decriminalize a certain amount of weed, that is up to them as are the consequences, both expected and unexpected. However, it piques the interest when it so closely follows the crackdown on large sodas. Read the original here.

Bloomberg Backs Plan to Limit Arrests for Marijuana
By THOMAS KAPLAN
Published: June 4, 2012

ALBANY — The New York Police Department, the mayor and the city’s top prosecutors on Monday endorsed a proposal to decriminalize the open possession of small amounts of marijuana, giving an unexpected lift to an effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to cut down on the number of people arrested as a result of police stops.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whose Police Department made about 50,000 arrests last year for low-level marijuana possession, said the governor’s proposal “strikes the right balance” in part because it would still allow the police to arrest people who smoke marijuana in public.

The marijuana arrests are a byproduct of the Police Department’s increasingly controversial stop-and-frisk practice. Mr. Bloomberg and police officials say the practice has made the city safer, but, because most of those stopped are black or Hispanic, the practice has been criticized as racially biased by advocates for minority communities.

The support expressed by Mr. Bloomberg, prosecutors and police officials is likely to carry significant weight in the Republican-led State Senate, which is the key obstacle to passage of the bill in Albany during this year’s legislative session. Mr. Cuomo has amassed a strong track record of winning passage of legislation he embraces, and the speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, joined him at his news conference Monday, indicating that the Democrat-controlled Assembly would back the measure. The Republican Senate leadership has traditionally opposed legislation it views as soft on criminals.

Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, framed the issue as one of racial justice as well as common sense, saying that the police in New York City were wasting time, resources and good will making tens of thousands of unnecessary arrests. Possession of small amounts of marijuana is a crime only if the marijuana is in public view or if it is being smoked in public, but many of the marijuana possession arrests have been occurring when the police order someone stopped to empty his or her pockets, making the marijuana visible — a phenomenon the governor called an “aggravated complication” of the stop-and-frisk practice.

“It becomes a question of balance,” the governor said of the city’s police stops. “Part of the balance is the relationship with the community. I think the N.Y.P.D. and the mayor are making efforts to work with the community.”

The governor’s announcement was cheered by lawmakers from minority neighborhoods as well as by civil rights groups, who are increasingly looking to Albany and to Washington in an effort to rein in what they see as overly aggressive tactics on the part of the Bloomberg administration.

Black leaders also cited the governor’s proposal as a rare recognition of — and attempt to remedy — what they describe as a cultural and legal double standard: that young African-American men are being arrested in large numbers for an activity — using marijuana — that is prevalent, but with less frequent legal consequences, among whites of the same age.

“Some of our police officers are making race-based discretionary decisions on who they’re going to arrest for low-level marijuana possession,” said Leroy Gadsden, the president of a branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Jamaica, Queens, and the chairman of the criminal justice committee for the statewide N.A.A.C.P. “Therefore, of course, if you’re a young, black male, even a female, you’re going to feel that you’re being targeted when you notice that your white counterparts are not being arrested for the same thing.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton praised Mr. Cuomo’s proposal as “a step in the right direction” in curbing what he described as racial profiling by the Police Department. And Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat who has pushed legislation to end low-level marijuana arrests, said, “It cannot be criminal behavior for one group of people and socially acceptable behavior for another group of people, where the dividing line is race.”

A spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg rejected the notion that the Police Department acted with racial bias in arresting people for marijuana possession.

Under Mr. Cuomo’s proposal, the state would downgrade the possession of 25 grams or less of marijuana in public view from a misdemeanor to a violation, with a maximum fine of $100 for first-time drug offenders. It is already a violation to possess that amount without putting it into public view.

In September, facing growing pressure over the marijuana arrests, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly issued a memorandum clarifying that the police were not to arrest people who take small amounts of marijuana out of their pockets after being stopped. A city spokesman said that low-level marijuana arrests had fallen by nearly a quarter since then.

Mr. Bloomberg, whose administration had previously defended low-level marijuana arrests as a means of deterring more serious crimes, said on Monday that Mr. Cuomo’s proposal was consistent with Mr. Kelly’s directive. Mr. Kelly made a rare trip to the Capitol to join Mr. Cuomo at the news conference as a way of demonstrating the city’s support for the governor’s proposal.

“This law will make certain that the confusion in this situation will be eliminated,” Mr. Kelly said, adding, “Quite frankly, it will make the application of this law much clearer.”

Mr. Cuomo said changing the law was a better approach in the long term, saying, “I think it puts the police in an awkward position to tell them, enforce some laws, don’t enforce other laws.”

“This is nice and clean: change the law, period,” the governor added.

The five district attorneys in New York City also endorsed the change in the law on Monday. The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said that half of the 6,200 people who were charged with low-level marijuana possession last year in Manhattan had never been arrested before.

“This simple and fair change will help us redirect significant resources to the most serious criminals and crime problems,” Mr. Vance said. “And, frankly, it’s the right thing to do.”

But one Republican, Senator Martin J. Golden of Brooklyn, expressed concerns. He said that the enthusiasm among some lawmakers and advocacy groups for Mr. Cuomo’s proposal was “all about stop-and-frisk,” and, citing several young people in his district who had died of prescription drug overdoses in recent months, questioned the message it would send to young people about drug use.

Noting the 25-gram threshold for Mr. Cuomo’s proposal, he said, “That’s a lot of pot, my friend.”

Churches campaigning for State?

There's so much about this that I have issue with: 

 #1. Separation of church and state, right? Why would pastors be campaigning for a specific candidate in their church? But whatever, they want to preach the word of POTUS, I guess they have the right to. 

 #2. Why is the Attorney General, the head of the US Department of Justice, anywhere near this? 

 #3. Why is the Internal Revenue Service, anywhere near this? #4. And I'm sorry, I do find it terribly ironic that preachers are going to be campaigning for the man that has turned out to be the most secular and religiously opportunistic President in recent memory. I'm sorry, but does anyone really believe that this is a faith based voting, rather than a race based vote? Either way, read the original here.

Holder to brief black pastors on campaign 2012
byJoel Gehrke Commentary Staff Writer

Attorney General Eric Holder, the IRS, and the liberal lawyers at the ACLU will brief several hundred pastors in the African American community on how to participate in the presidential election -- which the Congressional Black Caucus chair expects will help President Obama's campaign.

"We will have representatives from nine denominations who actually pastor somewhere in the neighborhood of about 10 million people, and we're going to first of all equip them with the information they need to know about what they can say and what they cannot say in the church that would violate their 501c3 status with the IRS," Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., told MSNBC today.

"In fact, we're going to have the IRS administrator there, we're going to have the Attorney General Eric Holder there, we're going to have the lawyers' organization from around the country, the ACLU -- all giving ministers guidance about what they can and cannot do," he noted.

Cleaver said they would not tell pastors which candidate to support. They will let them know who to regard as the bad guys, though (hint: not Democrats). "We're going to talk about some of the draconian laws that have cropped up around the country as a result of the 17 percent increase in African American votes," Cleaver said, describing voter ID laws as a form of Jim Crow-style "poll tax" on seniors and black voters.

The CBC chairman is confident that "President Obama is going to get 95 percent of the [African American] vote," and wants to keep that turnout high. "We want to let them know that there is a theological responsibility to participate in the political process, at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition," he said.

People wonder why Europe's economy is in the tank?

The "Do as I say, not as I do" / "Good enough for me, but not too much for thee" socialism crowd certainly doesn't help. I suppose she has as much credibility as the US's tax dodging Treasury Secretary. Read the original here.

Anger over Christine Lagarde's tax-free salary
ROB HASTINGS
WEDNESDAY 30 MAY 2012

It was called her "Let them eat cake" moment. Now Greece will be saying: "Make her pay tax".

The IMF chief Christine Lagarde was accused of hypocrisy yesterday after it emerged that she pays no income tax – just days after blaming the Greeks for causing their financial peril by dodging their own bills.

The managing director of the International Monetary Fund is paid a salary of $467,940 (£298,675), automatically increased every year according to inflation. On top of that she receives an allowance of $83,760 – payable without "justification" – and additional expenses for entertainment, making her total package worth more than the amount received by US President Barack Obama according to reports last night.

Unlike Mr Obama, however, she does not have to pay any tax on this substantial income because of her diplomatic status.

The news will intensify criticism of the former French Finance Minister following her controversial remarks on the increasingly bleak prospects for the Greek economy last week. Stating that she had more sympathy for poor African children with little education than for jobless people complaining about austerity measures in Greece, she said last week: "As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax."

Speaking to The Guardian, she added that they could "help themselves collectively" by "all paying their tax," and agreed that it was "payback time" for ordinary Greeks.

Ms Lagarde is entitled, like many diplomats, to receive her income net thanks to the 1961 Treaty of Vienna. David Hawley, a spokesman for the IMF, said: "Christine Lagarde pays all taxes levied on her, including local and property taxes in the US and France. Fund salaries, like those in most international organisations, are paid on a lower, net of tax basis to ensure equal pay for equal work regardless of nationality.

White House believes in Double Standards

I don't recall anyone being "disappointed" in the media when Abu Ghraib photos were released. I seem to recall every Democrat from LA to NYC jumping all over it as a sign that George Bush was the devil. But when it happens under their administration, now we should see "restraint". Please. Neither one of them should've happened (the incidents). Whether the photos should've been released to the public is debatable. But treat both sides equally, as opposed to the "politically bashing the wife policy". Read the original here.

W.H. 'Disappointed' L.A. Times Published Photos 'Two Years After the Incident'
1:41 PM, APR 18, 2012
BY DANIEL HALPER
The Weekly Standard

White House spokesman Jay Carney reacted to the publication of photos in the Los Angeles Times of U.S. soldiers posing with corpses in Afghanistan by saying the Obama administration is "disappointed.. [with] the decision to publish two years after the incident," according to a pool report.

Carney is suggesting, it would seem, that the photos might put at risk U.S. soldiers fighting the war in Afghanistan. And that, since the photos were taken two years ago, there would not seem to be pressing need for the Los Angeles Times to publish the photos while the soldiers are in that war theater.

Carney also blasted the photos themselves--at least, the actions of those American in the pictures. "[The] conduct depicted in those photographs is reprehensible and does not in any way represent the high standards of the US military," Carney told the press aboard Air Force One. "And the president certainly shares in the defense secretary's opinion that this should be investigated and those held responsible will be held accountable."

The spokesman said he was unsure whether the president had actually seen the photos in question, though Carney is sure that Obama is aware of the scandal.

Do as POTUS says, not as he does

Double standards, same stuff, different day. Read the original here.

OBAMA WHITE HOUSE PAYS WOMEN LESS THAN MEN, RECORDS SHOW
BY: Andrew Stiles - April 11, 2012 2:52 pm

Female employees in the Obama White House make considerably less than their male colleagues, records show.

According to the 2011 annual report on White House staff, female employees earned a median annual salary of $60,000, which was about 18 percent less than the median salary for male employees ($71,000).


Calculating the median salary for each gender required some assumptions to be made based on the employee names. When unclear, every effort was taken to determine the appropriate gender.

The Obama campaign on Wednesday lashed out at presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney for his failure to immediately endorse the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, a controversial law enacted in 2009 that made it easier to file discrimination lawsuits.

President Obama has frequently criticized the gender pay gap, such as the one that exists in White House.

“Paycheck discrimination hurts families who lose out on badly needed income,” he said in a July 2010 statement. “And with so many families depending on women’s wages, it hurts the American economy as a whole.”

It is not known whether any female employees at the White House have filed lawsuits under the Ledbetter Act.

The president and his Democratic allies have accused Republicans of waging a “war on women,” and have touted themselves as champions of female equality. Obama’s rhetoric, however, has not always been supported by his actions.

White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters last week that Obama believes it is “long past the time” for women to be admitted to the traditionally all-male Augusta National Golf Club, site of the Masters golf tournament.

But the president has demonstrated a strong preference for all-male foursomes in his frequent golf outings, a bias that extends well beyond the putting green and into the Oval Office.

“Women are Obama’s base, and they don’t seem to have enough people who look like the base inside of their own inner circle,” former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers told the New York Times.

In a 2011 article titled “The White House Boys’ Club: President Obama Has a Woman Problem,” TIME magazine’s Amy Sullivan detailed the president’s fondness for male-dominated environments.

“There’s a looseness to Obama when he’s hanging out with the boys club that doesn’t appear in co-ed gatherings,” she wrote. “The president blows off steam on the golf course with male colleagues and friends. He takes to the White House basketball court with NBA stars, men’s college players, and male cabinet members and members of Congress.”

As a presidential candidate in 2008, Obama was criticized for paying the women on his campaign staff less than the men, and far less than GOP opponent John McCain paid his female staffers.
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