Itz News to Me

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that 71% believe that reporters try to help their favorite candidates with favorable coverage….

Fewer than 1 in 6 believe that reporters are even trying to be unbiased. That doesn’t leave a whole lot of people willing to buy what they’re selling…

Three guesses as to which candidate they believe is being shown the most favoritism…

Popularity: 3%

Obama cited his great-uncle’s part in the liberation of Auschwitz (now corrected to Buchenwald after getting busted for stretching the truth yet again), in his Memorial Day remarks….The question that the media needs to ask, but won’t of course: was your great-uncle a “typical white person” like your grandmother?

Popularity: 7%

More and more stories like this are surfacing, and men are starting to take notice…and righteous offense.

There’s a big thick line between women achieving equality of the sexes and adopting an unsubtle outright anti-male attitude. That line was crossed some time ago, and I’m pretty sure that the feminists who thought/think it’s funny aren’t going to like it when the men inevitably begin to seriously push back against the anti-male bias prevalent today.

Advertisers and the mainstream media will soon enough find out that women aren’t the only ones with their hands on the household wallets. When enough of them start to feel the pinch, maybe they’ll rethink their attitudes. I’m not holding my breath though…

Popularity: 8%

…so says David Lightman of McClatchy Newspapers….

Never mind that Obama is a neo-Marxist…

Never mind that Obama thinks that I’m a bitter, gun-loving, Jesus-nut too stupid to figure out things for myself…

Never mind that Obama wouldn’t even be a U.S. senator were it not for the fact that he was the last man standing after scandal eliminated a rival that would have easily dusted him in an actual election…

Never mind that he doesn’t have a single legislative accomplishment to show for his time in the U.S. Senate….

Never mind that he can’t bring himself to actually denounce the idea that the U.S. brought 9/11 on itself or that the government created AIDS to kill colored people…(He only denounced what he called “controversial statements.” He never specified which statements. His lawerly parsing wasn’t an accident.)

Never mind that he thinks I am gullible enough to believe he belonged to a church for twenty years and had no idea what they stood for…

Never mind that he thinks it’s OK to hold fundraisers at the home of an admitted domestic terrorist…

Never mind that he’s involved in corrupt land deals with enemy agents and political fixers….

Never mind that he thinks people who wear flag pins are false patriots…

Never mind that his wife is a bigot of the first order…

Never mind that his first instinct, when he got in political trouble, was to throw the grandmother who loved and raised him under the bus…

Never mind that he is unable to make the distinction between having a difference of opinion and planting a bomb…

Never mind that he is the favorite candidate of Hamas and the Iranian regime…

I haven’t even gotten to the color of his skin because I could care less. Unlike Obama and Lightman, I judge people on the content of their character. I have seen Obama’s character and found it sadly lacking.

I could go on for pages, but why should I? After all, according to both Obama and David Lightman, the only reason I wouldn’t vote for him is because I’m clinging to my fear and dislike for “people who don’t look like me.”

Too bad neither of them would ever have the courage to say it to my face.

Popularity: 9%

For all the current talk about problems within Republican ranks, the truth is that when it comes to outright fraud and corruption, nobody does it like Democrats. From mafia-controlled unions to backroom politics, the biggest local “machines” such as the infamous Tammany Hall which controlled New York politics have always been Democratic. But that was the past you say. Lots of people and organizations have unsavory pasts that they’ve moved beyond. True. It’s just the Democrats aren’t one of them.

Witness New Jersey. In what at first blush seems just another local politician gone bad story, the money quote is literally the last sentence in the article:

More than 100 public officials in the state have been convicted on federal corruption charges in the last five years.

How many? More than 100. Convicted. Not charged, convicted.

If there had been more than 100 Republicans convicted across the country in the last five years, the media would be pounding on them day and night. But there hasn’t been a peep about New Jersey. Why? Because they’re Democrats. And the silence is deafening. Where are 60 Minutes, Dateline NBC, 20/20, the New York Times, or the Washington Post on this story? An entire state subverted by corrupt party politics at every level right down to the school boards, and no one thinks that’s national news?

Media defenders always conveniently ignore how many stories don’t get run because of media bias. There’s no bias? Really. Then defend this….

Popularity: 16%

The New York Times has had enough 9/11. Today’s edition contains an article with complaint after complaint from locals who just wish the whole thing would go away. How fitting…and how politically convenient…

First, let’s dispense with the basic point: that six years is far too long to commemorate 9/11. Hey guys, ever heard of Pearl Harbor Day? It’s closing on 70 years later and it’s still on the calendar. So where’s the article about Pearl Harbor Day fatigue? Answer: you’ll never see one. Ever. Why? Because Democratic victories in upcoming elections don’t depend on people forgetting Pearl Harbor Day.

It’s a measure of just how far the NYT is willing to sink that they are resorting to this sort of propaganda. For that’s what this article is: an attempt to neutralize the Democratic weakness on national security issues by trying to erase 9/11 from the public consciousness. Nothing more and nothing less. Move along. There’s nothing to see here. So what if Democrats have a long history of weak-kneed appeasement of threats to this country, dictators and thugs both at home and abroad. There are no threats on the horizon to worry about, right? Right? 9/11? What 9/11?

Just another reminder of who’s side they’re really on….It’s not yours or mine or even this country’s. It’s all about naked political power. They want it, and they’re willing to do anything to achieve it. I don’t question their patriotism, because there’s no question that they have none.

UPDATE: Over at Classical Values, Eric has found an even more embarrassing divide between what the NY Times is and isn’t willing to commemorate: Princess Diana’s death. Hey guys: she wasn’t American, she wasn’t even in line for the British throne….She was just a foreign celebrity, but the NYT goes wall-to-wall for the anniversary of her death while the more recent deaths of nearly 3,000 of their neighbors is just “annoying.”

Popularity: 16%

If you had any illusions that the Democrats actually meant what they said about “cleaning up Congress,” you should be ashamed of yourself. The political party that virtually invented the local party machine and is in bed with mafia-controlled unions across the country disingenuously claimed that they were dedicating themselves to changing the Washington culture which virtually ensures that only the friends of those in power benefit from the actions of Congress.

If you need proof, look no further than the corrupt activities of Dianne Feinstein, who has funneled millions of dollars in contracts to herself via her position overseeing appropriations. Is it surprising that corruption on this scale isn’t leading the evening newscasts or splashed on front pages across the country? Not if you know anything about how the major media protect their own - and the Democrats are just that…

Popularity: 34%

Mickey Kaus posted today about new polls that show the “generic” ballot polling question showing a much smaller Democratic advantage than in previous polls. Does that mean that the race is tightening or does it mean something else?

The answer: It means that the polls were intentionally slanted all along, and now they’re moving closer to where they should have been all along.

I’ve watched this phenomenon in 2002, in 2004 and now again we have it in 2006: the “late Republican surge” which suddenly tightens races which were previously advertised as sure-bets for Democrats. It defies logic that three elections in a row would suddenly and inexplicably have the exact same phenomenon occur at the exact same time in the election cycle.

Except that it’s not so inexplicable. Polling firms are commissioned by media organizations which are inarguably liberal bastions who want to put forth a certain point of view in the months leading up to an election. They want the Republican base demoralized and the Democratic base optimistic, and producing polls that show the popularity of the Democratic talking points is a sure way to achieve that goal (along with slanting coverage of stories, etc.). So in order to keep the paychecks coming, the polling firms dutifully produce the polls - and the results - that their employers request.

But then it comes to election time. If the polls were consistently way off on Election Day, who would ever again pay attention to them during the interim periods? The desired effect of simultaneously attempting to suppress Republican turnout and increase that of Democrats would disappear overnight. So how do you go about reconciling the knowingly inaccurate results leading up to the elections with the actual polling results?

It’s simple: Just say that there was a “late Republican surge!” Since polls are always snapshots in the rearview mirror, then they can never be expected to accurately keep up with the surge as it continues through Election Day. So pollsters can always argue that Republicans magically picked up momentum that their most recent poll couldn’t pick up because it hadn’t happened yet!

Voila! Everything is explained and no one is the wiser for the game that they played all along, and everyone gets to keep collecting their paychecks….Except they’ve gone to this well so often that you could have bet money in Vegas that this was going to happen this year too…

I’m not buying it, and neither should you…

Popularity: 27%

In an blatantly political attempt to slam the Bush administration days before the mid-term election, the NY Times has made the screw-up of all time (at least from their side of the political aisle): in the course of an article so slanted it practically lies down sideways, they inadvertantly made the case that the Iraq had the know-how to build a nuclear weapon and were in a position to disseminate it to others.

Every Democrat in the country (except Joe Lieberman) has made a living preaching that there was no WMD threat from Iraq, and that Bush made up the war for some kind of blood-for-oil scheme that involved Halliburton, big corporations, and Satan himself. But now comes news that the Iraqis’ nuclear knowledge was so advanced that it might have been used to propel Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

Kind of blows the whole “no WMDs” argument out of the water just a few days before the election, doesn’t it? Makes Joe Wilson out to be both a fool and liar, doesn’t it? Makes the Democrats look awfully foolish for making political hay out of what they have always known was a house of cards in an attempt to score some short-term political points at the expense of national security…

Couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people…

Popularity: 45%

For all the recent talk about conservative anger at Republicans, the media hasn’t uttered a peep about the civil war breaking out in the Democratic ranks over the Ned Lamont candidacy in Connecticut.

As evidenced by postings of this kind, the failure of the Democratic party elite to back Lamont in a meaningful way is creating a backlash amongst the party faithful which may have implications for voter turnout not only during the upcoming mid-term elections but into 2008 and beyond.

For years the media have turned a  blind eye to these sorts of internecine conflicts between special interest groups within the Democratic Party, but if these conflicts result in Republicans being able to eke out wins in this year’s elections would you say that the lack of media attention to these growing problems have been a net positive or negative for the party they are trying to protect with their silence?

Popularity: 43%