Quick critique: good message, so-so execution. I like that it works with the Mute button pushed, but, good grief, who thought of that flickering visual effect? That practically forces you to look away. And can we please find a substitute for the ominous music in the background? I’m convinced that kind of music probably now has a Pavlov’s dog effect on voters: Ominous Music=Another Political Ad I Don’t Want to Watch.

That said, the underlying theme is decent, as I pointed out. It’s a good counterpoint to the Bain baloney; it neutralizes it by pointing out the president has his own “public equity” track record to defend. (The Romney campaign seems to be particularly good at this kind of “neutralizing” — remember the dog stories?)

My view doesn’t appear to be shared by the crew on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show, however. They could barely contain their snickers after viewing the ad (and showing it to millions–huzzah for the Romney camp!). Okay, so judging…art…is subjective.

Not so subjective is judging double standards. And one was on full display when former Washington Post writer Carl Bernstein (of Watergate coverage fame) suggested that the ad just exacerbates Romney’s problem of being perceived as an “opportunist instead of going for a record of consistency.”

Okay, so let’s say Romney has, in fact, exploited opportunities to craft his political career. How does that differ from Obama? Moreover, how does exploiting the negatives of the Solyndra type deals differ from the “opportunism” of Obama trying to exploit the possible negatives of Romney’s Bain deals?

Oh, Bernstein thinks there’s a “huge difference” of political opportunism between Romney and Obama.

When pressed further on this point by Romney adviser Dan Senor, Bernstein says — listen closely, it’s somewhat covered by crosstalk — it’s a matter of “scale.” Yup, he is serious. (NOTE: the relevant portion starts around the 12:05 mark. Try as I might, I could not seem to clip the video and embed only that part; you also need to sit through an ad before the reel starts rolling.)

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As a woman in the United States, I do see a partly unintentional cultural war on my gender everywhere I turn. However, this isn’t one orchestrated by the Romney campaign. It’s one that’s deeply embedded in our culture and fueled by the media itself, the entity which often claims to champion “women’s rights.” I can’t walk through Target anymore without being bombarded with sleek magazine covers of airbrushed women who represent our cultural expression of beauty. Magazines and television shows subliminally say to women that we are not beautiful if we don’t meet the impossible standards set by our culture. They say, “You’re not pretty enough, buy this makeup,” or “you’re not thin enough, lose 20 pounds.” In short, they’re saying “you’re not perfect enough.”

I’m sick of hearing from Cosmopolitan that I’m not beautiful or thin enough. It’s insulting and degrading. Sure, the media also places standards upon men, but they are far less restrictive. In magazines and television everywhere, women face an onslaught of superficially-based warfare.

While there has been significant pushback against the plethora of airbrushing and superficial standards for women in our culture today, it’s still present. The long term effects of these standards still weigh heavily upon women. We are told by the shiny magazine covers that we must be perfect, thin, and beautiful to be “accepted” in society. As women everywhere try to achieve these standards, we constantly come short because we are seeking something we will never achieve. The “perfect” body, face, etc. is an impossible-to-attain social construct. As a result, thousands of women struggle daily with body issues, low self-esteem, and even eating disorders. Additionally, when the image of female perfection is so superficial, women are often not taken seriously because our worth is appearance-based.

In short, “beauty” is synonymous with “ability.” I can say for a fact that it is much easier to succeed as a woman if you are considered attractive. It should not be that way. This is a symbolic statement that says women should be judged based on appearance, not merit or character. America is supposed to be a meritocracy, not a nation where image is somehow a golden ticket for success.

iving as a conservative woman in the United States is even more difficult. While the National Organization for Women (NOW) will charge into battle for liberal women like Sandra Fluke or causes like abortion and birth control, they remain silent in the face of blatant attacks on conservative women. Recently, a video emerged of union members hitting a piñata with South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s face on it because of her unease with the labor movement. NOW and other feminist groups had nothing to say on the issue. Talk about being warriors for women’s rights, huh? Then, a sexually explicit photoshopped image of conservative pundit S.E. Cupp appeared in Hustler Magazine, bashing her for her “dumb ideas” such as defunding Planned Parenthood. Hustler publisher Larry Flynt responded to the wave of complaints by defending the article and saying, “that’s satire.” Again, from feminist organizations: nothing. At least several liberal women such as Sandra Fluke have come out in S.E. Cupp’s defense. Conservative women like S.E. Cupp, Nikki Haley, and myself do not receive a defense from feminist organizations (not that we need it anyway) simply because of our political stances. It is an example of another liberal double standard. NOW and other liberal women’s groups are liberal ideologues who are pursuing a liberal agenda under the guise of gender equality.

For liberal women’s groups, the answer to the “War on Women” is taking legislative and political action to support Planned Parenthood, extend abortion, increase the distribution of birth control, etc. Once again, if that’s their weapon of choice, I don’t plan on carrying anytime soon. However, for all women, not just conservative women, there is another solution to the cultural assault on women’s images and the lack of a liberal defense. We need to be the women who are so often neglected in the media: real women. We need to be women of character who hold family values while still fighting for respect from the media. We need to be examples for our sisters, friends, and children. Gender should not determine our place in society.

Culture changes slowly, but it does change. That change begins with us. Our place should be determined not based upon the media’s impossible standards or a liberal feminist ideology. It should depend on merit. I am beautiful, but not because the media tells me I am. I’m beautiful because I value myself no matter who tells me otherwise. I’m a woman, I’m conservative, and I will not take this anymore.

“Without getting too nasty about a white woman here, apparently a single white woman, no mention of spouse or partner of any kind, no male around the house there, that’s the group he’s going for…”

What on earth does he mean by “without getting too nasty about a white woman here?” Was he trying to bait his guests, both African-Americans, into suggesting that there’s a subtle racist undertone to the ad? Is he saying that single women as heads of household are loathsome? Or is he implying that Mitt Romney is loathsome for targeting them?

I have no idea. I’m stumped. Please feel free to offer your explanations. To his guests’ credit, neither of them went anywhere near the “nasty about a white woman” bait, whatever it was intended for.

In this two-and-half minute snippet (after the MSNBC ad finishes), the “nasty” comment occurs near the end at 2:21. You can see the full five minute segment, which ended up as a Matthews rant against PAC spending and lack of transparency, at the Hardball site.

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Well…THIS is what is going on, the Associated Press has over-weighed it survey toward Democrats. The next two charts come directly from the AP survey document.

That “none of these number may seem a bit high, that’s because it is. I assume they mean people who are members of minor parties. In the 2008 presidential election, minor parties earned 1.42% of the vote. Does the AP really believe that Americans will vote minor parties at a rate 12x larger than they did four years ago?

When you add up the Independents and None of these its comes to 31% Democrat/ 22% GOP/ 46% other, or Democrat +9

When pushed the respondents to the AP poll showed their political leanings:

I will use the totals that AP shows in bold above. However if one totals the Democratic numbers reflected in the chart above it ads to 51% not 49% (the GOP number is correct).

When you include the “leaners,” the respondents are 49% Democrat/37% GOP/14% neither or Democrat +12. Compare those party preferences to Gallup or Rasmussen and the bias becomes evident:

Putting aside the fact that one skews Democrat and the other GOP, both Rasmussen and Gallup reflects a smaller difference party affiliation preferences than either of the two versions of the AP Poll.  With the heavier weighting toward Democrats it is no surprise that the Associated results show Obama way ahead, while the other two show a much closer race and a Romney lead.

Which split is correct? Lets compare them to the results of the past two elections:

The 2008 Election was a wave election for the Democrats, the Mid-Terms were a wave for the GOP. My friend Ed Morrissey (the official research geek of the conservative blogisphere) wrote in a post on Hot Air the giant Democratic wave of 2008 resulted in a D+7 turnout and the 2010 GOP wave resulted in neither party getting a turnout advantage.

One could make a case for the Gallup D+4 as the number is in between ’08 and ’10. You could even make a case for the Rasmussen number if you assume the negative feeling about Obama’s performance will motivate  more people to switch parties and/or more Republicans to show up at the polls.

However there is absolutely no excuse for the Associated Press splits…well there is one excuse, they could trying to skew the result toward Barack Obama.

Jeff Dunetz is Editor/Publisher of the political blog “The Lid” , contributor to the Breitbart sites and PJM Tattler, as well as the political columnist for a weekly newspaper called The Jewish Star. Please visit his site “The Lid” for more reporting and commentary (and while you are there click on an ad or hit the tip jar).

ABC and Univision announced a joint venture yesterday, the contents of which should serve as a wake-up call to conservatives, and should sound an alarm to conservative media outlets.   According to ABC News:

ABC News announced this morning that it plans to join forces with Univision News to create a multiplatform news, lifestyle and information programming service aimed at U.S. Hispanics.

Both organizations promised in a statement to provide “uncompromising coverage of current events with a unique perspective” with the around-the-clock, English-language television network and digital platform. Both will cater to the country’s more than 50 million Hispanics with programming focused on news, lifestyle and culture. The television network will be staffed by journalists from ABC News and Univision News.

A website, mobile and social media content are expected to debut this summer. The yet-to-be-named television channel is expected to launch in 2013. Editorial coverage will focus on the issues most relevant for U.S. Hispanics, including the economy, jobs, health care, immigration, education, politics, entertainment, health and wellness and more.

This is huge, and a win-win for both networks.  Both networks tap into the nation’s fastest growing demographic in a complimentary manner that enhances each company’s business models.

ABC gets its own Spanish-language news operation, thus catching up with NBC/Telemundo/NBC Latino.  Furthermore, ABC gets to build upon its successes within English-language dominant Hispanics, such as Ugly Betty, the casting of telenovela stud William Levy on this season’s Dancing With The Stars, and the global success of ESPN Deportes. 

Despite all that, Univision is the big winner here.  Until now, Univision’s growth and sustainability has depended (almost) exclusively on a steady influx of non-English speaking, non-assimilated, non-cultured immigrants.   Today, Univision has set itself up for the demographic long game.  By partnering with ABC, Univision is able to hold onto the children of their core viewers (who faithfully tune in to Sábado Gigante, and the telenovelas, and Jorge Ramos’ newscasts).  Essentially, there is now no outgrowing Univision.

We’ve always known that the mainstream media is playing the Institutional Left’s long game, and they have now secured a venue with which to mainstream the immigration grievance narratives that are the backbone of Univision News (lest anyone have lingering doubts, I give you Exhibits A and B).

Fox Latino is not the answer, as it bears a closer resemblance to People En Español than to an actual news outfit.  MundoFox is still a ways away, and still a question mark…especially with regard to its news division. 

Thus, the question needs to be asked:  How serious are conservative media outlets when it comes to countering the memes and narratives of Hispanic mainstream media?  I can’t even begin to frame the effect of an unabated Univision/ABC venture on the electoral landscape…not just in 2012, but in 2016, and beyond. 

It’s time to wake up.  Clear Channel, Salem, TRN, NewsCorp…I’m looking right at you.  All of you. 

Crossposted at El Tercer Riel (The Third Rail).  You can follow me on twitter @BonillaJL. 

Cross-posted at El Tercer Riel (The Third Rail).

The left-wing media want you to – and it appears some of the reporters and opinion-writers for the mainstream media do too.  An example that seems to have crossed a new line was Sunday’s edition of 60 Minutes, in which veteran reporter Bob Simon framed the plight of Arab Christians in the West Bank as a problem caused by Israel.  The laughably one-sided report shoehorned a number of freighted implications into its 14-odd impressionistic minutes, including this bumper-sticker point made by one of the interview subjects:

Mitri Raheb:  Christianity started here. The only thing that Palestine was able to export so successfully was Christianity…  Christianity has actually on the back a stamp saying, “Made in Palestine.”

The correct bumper-sticker – if we’re using Greco-Romanized names (like “Palestine”) –  would read “Made in Judea” (Latin: Iudaea), which is what the Roman rulers called the region during the first century of Christianity’s spread.  A series of lengthy points could be made on this head, but the bottom line is that no entity called “Palestine” existed at the time of Christ.  There is no basis for crediting such a non-existent entity with the spread of Christianity. 

I doubt many would begrudge Palestinian Christians their natural pride in being native to the Holy Land.  Today’s Palestinian Arabs are descended mostly from peoples who were not indigenous to the Holy Land at the time of Christ or the early spread of Christianity.  But the Palestinian Arabs of today are nevertheless thoroughly Levantine in culture and heritage, and can rightly point to the importance of the Middle East in the early spread of Christianity, and the fact that the faith went East and South as well as North and West.

That said, however, there is no entitlement from sympathy or sentiment to rewrite history.  In the mishmash of implications from the Simon piece, meanwhile, another is the “false equivalence” idea that Jews and Muslims, between them, are imperiling Christians.  Simon interviews an Israeli journalist who offers this perspective:

Ari Shavit, one of Israel’s most respected columnists, believes Christians have become collateral damage.

Ari Shavit: I think this is a land that has seen in the last century a terrible struggle between political Judaism and political Islam in different variations.

Bob Simon: And the Christians are being squeezed in the middle between the Jews and the Muslims?

Ari Shavit: Absolutely.

Unfortunately, this narrow, simplistic formulation comes off as a cynical attempt to pander to a sort of superficial Christian sympathy.  We are not invited to examine either proposition – “political Judaism” or “political Islam” – and in fact, in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian Arab dynamic, both characterizations fall apart on examination.  It takes little reflection, in any case, to recognize that there is no settled definition to which these expressions apply.  They are nothing more than vaguely parallel-sounding proto-ideas, packaged to imply a joint, morally equivalent menace to Christians.

As to whether there is actually such a parallel, the Simon piece tells us nothing. It leaves out entirely such elements as numbers, demographic facts, and policy information.  It makes no reference to the fact that in the entire Middle East, there is a single nation whose population of Christians has been increasing, rather than dwindling, and that is Israel.  Indeed, Israel’s Christian population grew faster between 1995 and 2008 than the Jewish population, and is up more than 300% from its level in 1948.

Simon also left out the fact that by far the biggest exodus of Christians from Jerusalem and the West Bank occurred during the Jordanian occupation period from 1948 to 1967.  In the West Bank, the Christian population declined from 59,160 in 1945 to 42,494 in 1967.  In Jerusalem only, the Christian population was nearly 13,000 in 1910.  By 1946 it had increased to over 31,000, but by 1967 it was down to under 13,000 again (largely due to Jordanian restrictions on Christian daily life). 

Since 1967, the total Christian population in the West Bank as a whole – Judea and Samaria – has increased again to over 51,000 in 2007.  (In Gaza the number is between 2,000 and 3,000, and was never high.)  This does not mean that Christians haven’t left the Palestinian territories in recent years; some have – mainly in the educated middle class – and Christians undoubtedly endure unequal treatment under the Palestinian Authority, and are sometimes subjected to violent attacks.  But the overall trend is upward from the nadir of 1967.  As the JCPA study indicates, the drop in the percentage of the Palestinian population represented by Christians is due to the increase in the much larger Muslim population, which has more than doubled from about 1.15 million in 1967 to 3.77 million in 2007.

Are Christians emigrating from the West Bank because of the security wall built by Israel to stop terrorists, and the checkpoints administered for the same reason?  The Simon piece doesn’t make that explicit claim – very possibly (given his specious exchange with Israeli ambassador Michael Oren) so that Simon could then say that he never made such a claim.  But the parade of images on the topic of Christians in the Holy Land is heavy on checkpoints and the security wall.  Clearly, the synoptic video scan of the wall from every window of a Bethlehem apartment is not a rhetorically meaningless artistic choice.  The 60 Minutes segment wants us to see the wall and the checkpoints as “the problem” for Palestinian Christians.  We are led to draw the seemingly obvious conclusion.

Fact-deficient segments from 60 Minutes are hardly a novelty, but to my eyes, the Bob Simon piece hits an unusual level of tendentious impressionism.  One thing Simon did make sure to do, however, was include a reference in his segment to the Kairos** Palestine “Moment of Truth” Document, a manifesto issued in 2009 by Palestinian Christian activists (and signed by supporters from various nations) on their situation in the Palestinian territories.

This choice, in light of the rich and varied history of Christians in the Middle East over the last two millennia, and Simon’s thin and perfunctory depiction of them, is informative.  The Kairos document is somewhat Christian in tone, emphasizing forgiveness and restoration, but it contains some problematic passages.  The first two (there are a number of them) occur in the letter introducing the manifesto, which is signed by supporters from various nations.  In the second paragraph of the letter we find this declaration (emphasis added):

In this historic document, we Palestinian Christians declare that the military occupation of our land is a sin against God and humanity, and that any theology that legitimizes the occupation is far from Christian teachings because true Christian theology is a theology of love and solidarity with the oppressed, a call to justice and equality among peoples.

The third paragraph contains a sentence that can only be off-putting to most American Christians (again, emphasis added):

[The document] seeks to be prophetic in addressing things as they are without equivocation and with boldness, in addition it puts forward ending the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and all forms of discrimination as the solution that will lead to a just and lasting peace with the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Al-Quds as its capital.

Appealing to American Christians on this basis is a losing proposition.  Regardless of how they feel about the current political situation, most American Christians recognize Jerusalem as the capital of ancient Israel, a Jewish city that was the seat of King David and the site of the First and Second Temples.   Jerusalem is the subject of a number of Old Testament prophecies, some of which have yet to be fulfilled, and is therefore an enduring link between the Hebrew people and God.

Whether one agrees with it or not, this belief is a widespread reality.  For millions of American Christians, it is anti-Biblical revisionism to give Jerusalem a different name (Jerusalem means “foundation of peace”; “Al-Quds” means “the holy”) and propose to separate it from Israel.  But it is also anti-historical revisionism to pretend that Israel and the Jews did not have their signature – transformative – relationship with the city.  All generations for the last 3,000 years have known the city as Jerusalem, and considered it important and unique, because of the ancient Hebrews who made their capital there.  The Roman emperor Hadrian’s attempt to rename the city “Aelia Capitolina,” following the Bar-Kokhba revolt in the AD 130s, didn’t take – few today are even aware that he made it.

Bob Simon makes no effort to investigate these matters, and certainly makes no explicit case either way.  He merely presents individual Palestinian Christians who speak as if the Israelis are interlopers, and whose sentiments, if one digs down, are different from those of American Christians.  His segment suggests, without explicitly saying, that a religiously justified animosity toward Israel is to be regarded a “Christian” point of view.

Leftward-trending evangelicals?

A method used increasingly to foster the impression that support for Israel is without a Christian foundation is to slip into the discussion the idea that Jesus was something other than a Jew.  Some Christians are at the forefront of this effort.  One of the closest associates of the Kairos Palestine group is Sabeel, a Jerusalem-based Christian foundation promoting the Palestinian Arab cause as defined by the political left.  Sabeel and its leaders get a lot of left-wing media coverage in the United States (e.g., here, here, and here).  Sabeel describes itself as an “ecumenical liberation theology center,” and offers a frequent forum for theologians to make points like “Jesus was a Palestinian” and a “Jesus was community organizer.” This gambit is given a pass by Sabeel’s Christians supporters in America.

Since it is integral to Christian doctrine that Jesus was a Jew – a descendent of David, subject to the Law of Moses, and heir to the Old Testament’s prophetic promises to the Jews – and that he is, in fact, the Messiah promised to all mankind through the Jews, there is really no room for the alternative notion of Jesus as something else.  If Jesus wasn’t a Jew, then he cannot be the Messiah or the foundation stone of the Church, the Body of Christ.  Christian belief cannot accommodate this revision and continue in force.

But for many American Christians, “liberation theology” itself sets off alarm bells and points automatically to radical left-wing politics.  Most evangelical Christians (as well as conservative Catholics and denominational Protestants) view claims like Sabeel’s not as a form of new and possibly interesting “information,” but as anti-Biblical – and anti-historical – revisionism.  There is no doubt that some Christians embrace liberation theology and radical left-wing political ideas, but there is also little support for the idea that this wing of American Christianity is supplanting more traditional evangelicals, or is becoming more influential with Christians as a whole.

This wing is presented by the media, however – in approving tones — as an important social force and voice for Christianity.  The New York Times, for example, published an editorial in November 2011 entitled “The New Evangelicals,” which argued that a “sizable portion of evangelicals” had left the political right and embraced a “new kind of Christian social conscience,” identified as the political themes of the left.  (See here, here, here, here, and here as well.  This Columbia Journalism Review post from 2007, on the other hand, shows some interesting critical research and journalistic self-awareness.)

The NYT editorial relied on soundbites from the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, along with a rather kindergartenish subtraction exercise, using percentages put together by a Pew Forum study.  Regarding the latter, the editorial does a little bait-and-switch, concluding that 24% of the US population – in other words, a set that includes all Christians, such as mainline Protestants and left-wing Catholics, but also includes Jews, Muslims, other beliefs, and atheists – “don’t think of themselves as part of the religious right.”

That could well be an accurate assessment, if a derivative and unproven one, but it’s not information about evangelicals per se.  Nor does it strike me as anything new.  Mainline Protestants and leftist Catholics – particularly their ecclesiastical leadership; not as much their congregations – have been on the left side of many social and international issues for decades.

The New Evangelical Partnership, meanwhile – whose leader, Richard Cizik, is a fellow of George Soros’ Open Society Institute – has taken the name “evangelical” from the multiple, differing traditions of Christian evangelicalism (useful discussion here), and is not representative of the evangelical congregations and social ideas most Americans associate with the term.  Ministries like those of John Hagee, Pat Robertson, Focus on the Family, the Trinity Broadcast Network, and hundreds of non-denominational evangelical churches across America, are what we think of when we imagine evangelical Christians.

That definition does not encompass the evangelical traditions in some of the formal denominations, such as Lutheran, Methodist, Anglican, and Catholic – and the important thing to take away is the real, if inconvenient fact that not all who describe themselves as “evangelical” are representative of each other.  The Evangelical Lutheran denomination, for example, is a formal church of longstanding and differs in a number of ways – both doctrinal and explicitly political – from the mass of self-confessed born-again American evangelicals.

Such is the case with the New Evangelical Partnership, which is Protestant and embraces some of the traditions of evangelicalism, but by no means those of the majority of American evangelicals, who tend (see the Pew study above) to be Baptist, members of small, non-Mainline denominations, or simply non-denominational.  For simplicity, I will call this latter group “traditionalist evangelicals,” using the term essentially as defined in another 2005 Pew study cited below.

The New Evangelical Partnership (NEP) is a sympathetic group for the MSM, however – along with groups like Evangelicals for Social Action – precisely because of its political views.  The NEP made waves in September 2011 with an “Open Letter to America’s Christian Zionists,” in which it took traditionalist evangelicals to task for their support of Israel (emphasis added):

Not to put too fine a point on it, we wish to claim here that the prevailing version of American Christian Zionism—that is, your belief system—underwrites theft of Palestinian land and oppression of Palestinian people, helps create the conditions for an explosion of violence, and pushes US policy in a destructive direction that violates our nation’s commitment to universal human rights. In all of these, American Christian Zionism as it currently stands is sinful and produces sin.

As numerous Jewish and non-religious sites pointed out, the “open letter” appears also to suggest that Israel, along with American Christian Zionists, is calling down God’s wrath on her head, perhaps in the form of a nuclear attack by Iran.  It is worth presenting the entire passage to convey the flavor of this warning, with its evocation of old, hackneyed themes in the West about the Jewish people uniquely bringing destruction on themselves (emphasis added; some spelling corrected):

We are not Old Testament prophets, nor do we pretend to see the future. But we have seen enough to claim that the occupation practices of the modern state of Israel are a direct violation of the most basic biblical moral principles. It is immoral to steal anything, including people’s land, homes, and vineyards. It is immoral to dehumanize people, as occurs daily at Israeli checkpoints. It is immoral to choke people’s freedom and deprive them of their dignity. And it is foolish, a violation of every lesson of history, to think that through sheer intimidation and superior military power a people can be subjugated indefinitely without rising up in resistance or attracting more powerful allies who will do so on their behalf. God gave humanity a recognition of justice and a nearly endless capacity to resist injustice. It is wired into our nature, and the Palestinian people and the neighboring countries have it just like everyone else does.

We genuinely fear that someday someone or some nation inflamed with resentment at the seemingly eternal Israeli subjugation of the Palestinian people will “make your land desolate so no one can live in it” (Jeremiah 6:8). That sounds like a nuclear bomb. Have you heard of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? While in the Middle East we heard from Palestinian leaders a current commitment to pursue their cause nonviolently. We applaud that commitment. We see it as an extraordinary one under the circumstances. We fear that it cannot last forever, for no people will allow itself to be ground into the dust indefinitely. What are you doing to end their suffering and bring justice to them?

We will leave it to God to sort out with the Jewish people of the modern state of Israel the very complex terms of his covenant with them. But we cannot remain silent about the vast array of American Christians who support the most repressive and unjust Israeli policies in the name of Holy Land and a Holy God. We charge that you bear grave responsibility for aiding and abetting obvious sin, and if Israel once again sees war, we suggest that you will bear part of the responsibility. Christians are called to be peacemakers (Matthew 5:9), but by offering uncritical support of current Israeli policies you are actively inflaming the Middle East toward war—in the name of God. This is appalling; it is intolerable; it must stop!

As Elder of Ziyon notes, the letter goes to great lengths to dilute the connection of the Jewish people with Israel, and undermine the idea of Israel as an inheritance from God, while leaving out a great deal of relevant material from the Old Testament.  This is a valuable investigation, since we are talking here about Christian exhortation.

The promises associated with Israel are integral to the Christian understanding of God, and if they are dismissed or rejected, there can be no remaining, distinctively Christian message.  If one does not believe that God made specific, accountable promises to the Jews – including promises about Israel and Jerusalem – and does not believe that Jesus, in his death and resurrection, was the fulfillment of the greatest of those immutable promises, then the original and age-old meaning of “Christianity” evaporates.  There is no particular point in Jesus in that case; he is just another famous religious leader, better known and more widely followed than most.

This is definitely a different view of Christianity from that held by a majority of American Christians, and different as well from the doctrinal statements of all the world’s major denominations.  Rasmussen does an annual poll at Easter in which it asks respondents to state things like whether they believe Jesus is the son of God and whether they believe he rose from the dead, and in the last three years, 77-78% of Americans polled believed these things (see here, here, and here).  This could not be the case without the context of the Old Testament account of God’s dealings with, and prophetic legacy to, the Jews, which prophesied and foreshadowed the supernatural characteristics of the Messiah’s existence and purpose.

That traditionalist evangelicals are, in general, unpersuaded by NEP’s and other similar views – as indeed are many in other Christian groupings – is evident in the trends of polling and study data.  In December 2011, blogger Rachel Alexander did a useful comparison of the beliefs registered by evangelical leaders and those of America’s general evangelical Christian population, and came up with a series of disparities.  Leaders tended to evince a greater percentage of revisionist or left-wing views, while their congregations differed significantly, embracing those views to a dramatically lower extent.  (Note: the percentage of respondents holding left-wing views was higher among the leaders, but as Alexander’s links show, there was still a healthy percentage of leaders with the views more traditionally associated with American evangelicals.)

The MSM likes to present the views of left-leaning leaders as a growing trend, and to quote such leaders suggesting that the ideas they prefer are the “real” Christianity.  But ultimately, this hoped-for shift is not one the MSM has the power to broker or bridge.

The depth and breadth of Christian support for Israel in America

If traditionalist evangelicals went by common media themes, they might think their numbers were being outstripped in the rate of growth by left-wing evangelicals.  But as regards support for Israel, as well as conservative views on social issues (and general affinity with the right), the evidence of this is more overhyped than real.  In terms of general political affinities, for example, exit polling during the 2010 election showed 77% of white evangelical poll respondents voting Republican – an overwhelming majority, and one that had risen since 2004.

Regarding Israel, traditionalist evangelicals remain the Christian group most overwhelmingly supportive of the existence and security of the Jewish state.  In this, they are more like their fellow Americans in general than like members of the evangelical (or general Christian) left.  In 2005, a Pew study found that 52% of all evangelicals supported Israel when asked to contrast their support for Israel versus the Palestinians, and of that number, 64% of “traditionalist evangelicals” – the largest evangelical subgroup – supported Israel.

A poll taken in late 2011 showed general US population support for Israel to be where it has been in for decades, in the 60-percent range.  Looking back at the 2005 Pew study, meanwhile, 63% of white evangelicals (and 51% of black evangelicals) believe the modern state of Israel is a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.   The study also indicated that 55% of white evangelicals considered their views on the Middle East influenced by religious beliefs.

A 2008 poll found that 82% of all American Christians – both Protestant and Catholic – believe they have a moral obligation to support the Jews and Israel.  In a survey of Americans done in early 2011, Wenzel Strategies found that 80% of born-again Christians disagree that Israel is an “aggressor nation”; 71% believe the US should be “very concerned” about Israel’s national security; and 66% say the US will be judged by God according to how we treat Israel.

The news remains good for Israel supporters when the growing evangelical-Latino demographic is considered.  A Pew study in 2007 found that 62% of Latino evangelicals in the US support Israel, a percentage almost identical to that of traditionalist evangelicals overall.  Younger Christians in general are also pro-Israel.  In March, Forbes contributor Stephen Richter pointed out that among all young (under-35) Americans, the majority support for Israel is driven by the overwhelming support of younger Christians.

These sentiments are not a record of the past but the beliefs of today among traditionalist evangelicals, as well as among many American Christians of other denominations.  John Hagee’s organization Christians United for Israel (CUFI), founded in 2006 with less than 10,000 members, now reports having 950,000, of whom the majority are evangelical Christians.  (Jennifer Rubin reported yesterday that in the first 24 hours after the 60 Minutes segment aired, CUFI members sent more than 29,000 complaining emails to CBS.)  But CUFI is merely the largest of dozens of American Christian organizations dedicated to supporting and engaging with Israel, from the evangelical Friends of Israel and Christian Friends of Israel USA to Catholics for Israel, Anglican Friends of Israel, Methodist Friends of Israel, and tattooed Texas Pentecostal bikers roaring up to the Western Wall on their Harleys to show their solidarity with the Jews.

The MSM and left-wing media sites may seek to magnify the importance of the evangelical left and its sentiments about Israel, but for most American Christians, the posture of the evangelical left is not a representative reality.  Recent studies confirm that the traditional commitment of American evangelicals to Israel is thriving, and that in most denominations there is a robust element not only supporting Israel, but rejecting the anti-Israel policies pursued by some of the church leadership (e.g., in the Methodist and Presbyterian churches).

Media Matters: Born to oppose “Christian bias” in the media

There is another dimension where the media intersect with Christians and Israel, and although I don’t assess that it has direct relevance to the Bob Simon segment, it is clearly a related phenomenon, and one requiring examination in the overall context.

Earlier this month, author M.J. Rosenberg, a fellow at the leftist watchdog organization Media Matters, was forced to resign his position after – among other things – repeatedly accusing American Jews who support Israel of being “Israel-firsters,” a dual-loyalties allegation popular with the Nazi leadership of Hitler’s Germany.

Rosenberg isn’t the only Media Matters fellow with an anti-Semitism problem.  Eric Boehlert is another.  Media Matters and the Center for American Progress (CAP) came in last year for criticism from the Simon Wiesenthal Center for their bloggers’ often vitriolic lapses into the language of anti-Semitism.  (As RedState and American Thinker, respectively, note, Media Matters and CAP share fund-raising operations and receive funding from George Soros.)  Around the same time, former AIPAC spokesman and Clinton-administration official – not a conservative Republican –  Josh Block took Media Matters and CAP to task for their bloggers’ anti-Semitic expressions, and was promptly “expelled” from the Truman National Security Project for trying to suppress “open debate” through intimidation and “character attacks.”

As Michelle Malkin highlighted in February, meanwhile, Media Matters and CAP have for some time had a standing weekly appointment in the White House.  (Michelle’s centerpiece is the original Daily Caller article on the topic, but her additional links are worth reviewing as well.)

This context of rabid anti-Semitism and regular White House access sets the stage for a revelation from CBN reporter Erick Stakelbeck this past weekend that Media Matters’ charter document indicates an anti-Christian bias.  In its Form 1023 application for non-profit status, Media Matters made this statement in the section on organizational description (the passage is edited by CBN):

Media Matters for America (MMA) believes that news reporting and analysis by the American Media…has become biased. … It is common for news and commentary by the press to present viewpoints that tend to overly promote…a conservative, Christian-influenced ideology.

Notably, Daily Caller reporter Vince Coglianese tells Stakelbeck that the public mission statement at the Media Matters website omits this motivational reference – perhaps for fear of alienating a notoriously Christian public, much of which would consider the charge that the American media have a Christian bias to be the most ridiculous thing they have ever heard.

Traditionalist evangelicals will not be surprised that an organization dedicated to opposing “Christian bias” in the media has also been called out repeatedly for anti-Semitism.  That there is a unified “theory of themage” working itself out through at least some left-leaning media organizations is increasingly evident.

It is important not to tar all left-wing media with the same brush; some do a commendable job of seeking balance, fairness, and decorum in their coverage of Christians, Jews, and Israel.  Honest disagreement, expressed vigorously and explicitly, is clearly legitimate.

But the emerging pattern of media outlets in the US simply repeating ideas formed from revisionist “liberation theology” and revisionist “history” is a dangerous one.  The rote repetition of Palestinian activists’ themes is a case in point.  Gerald Steinberg of NGO Monitor (quoted at the Jennifer Rubin link) characterized the Bob Simon piece in just such terms:

The 60 Minutes segment uncritically adopted the standard Palestinian narrative of suffering and victimhood promoted by church-based NGOs that work closely with the Palestinian political leadership. … Bob Simon’s segment simply repeated … immoral positions without any independent analysis.

The American public is already wary and suspicious of the MSM, and that includes many Christians and supporters of Israel.  With the Bob Simon segment on Sunday, 60 Minutes has placed itself in the category of media outlets retailing impressionistic themage that misrepresents both Christianity and Israel.  The Simon piece, justly called by critics a “hatchet job” on Israel, could have been put together by Sabeel itself, and might as well have been.

This is perilous territory for CBS.  If the network cannot distinguish its themes from those of Palestinian activists, its distinction from a fringe “attack” organization like Media Matters – and from other avowedly partisan media outlets – will grow fatally fuzzy.  The evidence of a particular kind of unified themage – one that misrepresents Christianity and seeks to undermine Israel – is out there, hovering over the infosphere.  The ones who need to check six are the mainstream media.

* Yes, a neologism I created for this piece.

** In Christian theology, the Greek term “kairos” refers to a time of crisis or precipitation: “the appointed time in the purpose of God” when something of eschatological significance happens, requiring a response from man (such as the birth of Jesus Christ).   Christian groups from all backgrounds and creeds invoke the concept of kairos and use it in their organization names. 

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Don’t misunderstand – the GSA and other federal agencies should be held accountable for this and other unethical abuses of the public’s money. As The Heritage Foundation’s Morning Bell outlined on April 19, and again on April 23, this is only one of many publicly egregious wastes of taxpayer money in the bureaucracies in D.C. But when it comes down to it, $820,000 is not even a drop in the bucket of fraud/waste/abuse/duplicity. Here are some of the other, more easily ignored abuses:

First off is simple abuse that is acceptable for the well-connected politician but disgraceful and/or illegal for anyone else – small change, but ultimately emblematic of the systemic corruption in the federal government. Case in point is how former Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY) gets a pension and other benefits for the rest of his life, despite resigning in disgrace. President Obama, following in the footsteps of his predecessors, is almost certainly using taxpayer dollars for campaign trips – illegal, but obviously acceptable under both parties. Senator David Vitter (R-LA) was busted for solicitation, but never spent time in jail. He will get a pension and other monetary benefits, same as Weiner.

Antithetical to many conservatives is looking hard at unproductive defense spending. However, the Defense Department is rife with abuse. For example, last October a report by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) outlined how major defense contractors who paid civil fines or settled for amounts of $1 million or greater still received over $500 billion in contracts in the last 10 years. Another report, this one from The Commission Wartime Contracting, estimated that between $31 billion and $60 billion had been lost to poor oversight and/or fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan during our time in those nations.

Outside of fraud, simple inefficiencies abound in the Defense Department. This Forbes piece notes that approximately $100 billion had been spent on weapons programs that were either never used or eventually canceled – all after significant investments. In an informal conversation with a friend who is a military auditor, I was told that a number of contractors take a contract and take a percentage off the top. They then subcontract to another company, which takes a percentage off the top. This subcontractor then subcontracts to another company, and takes a percentage off the top. Finally, several levels down, the contract actually gets fulfilled.

Duplication of federal programs is something that has come to light in the last 15 months. A pair of Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports in 2011 and 2012 found, according to Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), “hundreds of billions” of dollars in duplication in the federal government. ABC News reported that the GAO found many programs were not tested for actually accomplishing their stated goals, and the same applied to a number of tax loopholes, credits, etc. (Several aspects of the 2012 report can be found at the first link, including examples of duplication and the report’s Executive Summary.) Here are some of the juicier parts of ABC’s article:

• GAO found the Department of Defense could save up to $460 million every year by undertaking a “broader restructuring” of its military health care system.
• The military came in for special scrutiny: over $10 billion on defense-wide business systems every year; $49 billion in military and veterans health services; and at least $76 billion since 2005 in urgent processing systems for the military.
• Fifty-eight billion dollars at the Department of Transportation [was spent] for over 100 separate surface transportation programs.
• [A]lmost $1 trillion in government-wide tax expenditures listed by the Treasury Department, some of which the GAO found “may be ineffective at achieving their social or economic purposes.”
• [T]he government has neglected to investigate numerous programs, making the expenditure of some funds not only redundant but wasteful. For instance, only five of 47 job training and employment programs surveyed by the GAO had been studied to evaluate whether outcomes were the result of the program itself or another cause altogether.
• “Little is known about the effectiveness of most programs,” the watchdog observed.
• That point also applies to domestic food assistance, where “little is known about the effectiveness of [11 of the 18 programs] because they have not been well studied,” the GAO said. In fiscal year 2008, for example, the government spent $62.5 billion on those 18 programs.

Of course, no critique of the federal government’s spending habits is complete without highlighting simple stupidity. In fiscal year 2011, improper payments totaled $115 billion in, over three percent of the federal budget. According to a press release from Rep. Todd Platts (R-PA): “An improper payment could be an incorrect payment, an over- or under- payment, and could include a payment to an ineligible recipient, a payment for an ineligible service, a duplicate payment or a payment for a service not received.” Medicare and Medicaid represented over half of these improper payments; in Fiscal Year 2010 alone Medicare cost the taxpayers $48 billion in improper payments.

To be fair, $115 billion is less than what was spent on improper payments in fiscal year 2010… but the $115 billion did not account for many agencies that simply fail to report improper payments. According to Platts: “Although not all agencies are required to report improper payment estimates, some agencies that are required to report do not do so.  The most significant agency failing to report is the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), although both the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the DOD – Office of Inspector General has found that the DOD is at a high risk for improper payments.

The simple fact of the matter is that while Congress and much of the media focuses on the President’s unnecessary and wasteful $52 million gas manipulation task force, or the GSA’s junket, hundreds of billions of dollars are slipping through the system. Perhaps Congress should focus on stopping these abuses of the taxpayer dollars, instead of intentionally misdirecting the attention of the American people to what amounts to literally cents on the dollar of the “fraud, waste, abuse and stupidity” (to quote Senator Coburn) so prevalent in our ever-growing, ever-expensive federal government.

Dustin Siggins is an associate producer with The Laura Ingraham Show and co-author with William Beach of The Heritage Foundation on a forthcoming book about the national debt. The opinions expressed are his own.

Via RCP:

Chris Matthews: Let me ask you about something which is not in the polling, but I want you as experts — Barack Obama is the first African-American president, okay. Is there going to be a reluctance on the part of the voters and the political community that talks politics as we get into November about dumping the first African-American president? Is there going to be something that just wretches people? ‘Wait a minute here, this guy is going to knock out the first guy who got aboard?

Follow the link, where you’ll see Howard Fineman arguing that Obama is held to a higher standard because of his skin color, and you’ll watch as Chuck Todd posits that a Republican To Be Named Later backed out of the race for that very reason.

I respectfully submit that we witness, yet again, the absolute validation of Andrew Breitbart’s final thesis, to wit: that the ambiguous themes of “Hope” and “Change” were really nothing more than ideological beards for the class warfare and racial strife at the heart of Obama’s ideology and subsequent governance.  May I remind you that John McCain run the kind of “submission to history” campaign that Obama so easily crushed in 2008, and which Matthews seems to evoke.

Given the self-evident lack of accomplishment of this regime, there is nothing more left to offer or sell to the American electorate.  There is nothing left but guilt projection.  Whether it’s the fake #WarOnWomen or the economically risible Buffett Rule, the intended result is the same…to shame us into submission.  And now this.  Having abandoned all hope, the leg thrill has now yielded to the guilt trip.

Not only is this tactic useless, but it lacks any factual or historical basis.  May I remind you that after an equally disastrous term, New York City passed judgement on its first African-American mayor.

Bear in mind that New York’s electorate is much more forgiving (and progreeeeesiiiive) than that of the nation as a whole.  Given those realities, I don’t see too many people buying into this phony race guilt meme.  If this is what the media is going with at this juncture, I’m liking our chances.

A Spanish-language version of this post is available at El Tercer Riel (The Third Rail).

I know the many wits and wags will do a *marvelous* job of coming up with a caption.

Have at it!

President Obama must believe he can’t close the deal with Latinos, because during his Friday interview on Univision he resorted to lying about Mitt Romney’s stance on racial profiling. Obama implied that Romney’s approval of the Arizona illegal immigrant was an indication that he approved of racial profiling. What he was actually doing was trying to deflect attention away from how bad his administration has been for the Hispanic community.

Host Enrique Acevedo asked Obama if he would make immigration reform a priority during the first year of a second term:

Per the Daily Caller:

John Stossel was so frustrated with his job at ABC News that he “begged” Fox News to hire him in 2009. “It sucked there,” Stossel said of his former employer. He reveals the rift in his new book, “No, They Can’t: Why Government Fails–But Individuals Succeed.”

Stossel added:

They were hostile to these ideas that have made us prosperous and I consider so important. I mean, they tolerated me for years. I got good ratings, so they put the stuff on. They sort of held their nose and put it on. But by the end, they were saying, ‘Ah, you’re predictable Stossel. You use libertarian economics all the time. I don’t want to watch that.’ … I was not offered a job by Fox. I went over and begged, ‘Please, hire me, I cannot stand it anymore.’

Stossel’s skepticism of government and his storytelling approach about free-market economics have made him a rock star in conservative and libertarian circles. He currently hosts “Stossel,” a one-hour weekly Fox Business Network show and other specials on Fox News.

The book is Stossel’s latest attempt to debunk the myths that government can solve America’s problems. He tackles everything from crony capitalism and federal regulations to teachers’ unions and gun control.

“Our instinct is to believe in the central planners,” Stossel said in the interview. “It was nuts in the Obama election. It was like he was a magic politician who was going to do these things.”

Yet despite government’s failures, the left never retreats. President Obama’s class-warfare rhetoric, Stossel conceded, is a current example of how liberals shape the narrative.

“I live in the shallow media world,” Stossel said, “and on a subject like that, shallow wins.”

Mika & Joe?

Shh…don’t tell. I watch a lot of MSNBC. I flip it on in the morning to catch Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski’s Burns and Allen routine and then lazily stay on that channel when I check news throughout the day, only switching to Fox for their excellent six o’clock news hour.

So I see a lot of MSNBC promotional ads, the ones supposedly put together by the great director Spike Lee, all buttoned up with the network’s signature “Lean Forward” slogan. These promo spots always leave me with one of two reactions: laughter or head-scratching befuddlement, of the “what were they thinking?” variety.

Laughter—well, who can forget Rachel Maddow standing in front of the Hoover Dam gushing about how it’s only big government that can do projects such as this, not the private sector. Could any reasonable person watch that ad without thinking about how it would take decades to finish a similar project today as contractors navigated a sea of government red tape—that’s if the project could be done at all in the face of probable environmentalist opposition spearheaded by, well, folks like Rachel Maddow? Bad subtext, MSNBC. Maybe that’s why we don’t see that promo so much anymore.

And then there’s Chris Matthews. His older promo ending with the words “American exceptionalism” always reminded me of the same hushed yet vacuously reverent tone used by The Graduate’s Mr. McGuire when sharing career advice with Dustin Hoffman’s Ben Braddock: “plastics.” Try as he might, Chris Matthews has a hard time sounding deep, with his staccato, “just one of the guys” delivery. 

One of the latest Matthews promos has him talking about how Americans pulled together during the war effort (World War II), and we need to do so now. Great idea, Chris! Let me give you my son’s Air Force address so you can send him and his buds a care package and maybe lead the charge in supporting our troops.

Lawrence O’Donnell has done a few promos chiding us for not being open enough on immigration – it’s what made this country great! – and how the use of phrases such as “class warfare” is nothing more than propaganda shielding the wealthy from doing their fair share (I paraphrase). He’s also talked about the GI Bill (what is it with the World War II references?) and how its critics decried it as welfare, something Politifact has claimed is “mostly false.”

Now, Tamron Hall and Andrea Mitchell have joined the promo cavalcade, with Hall complaining about those who use the military as pawns—she comes from a military family, apparently—to advance their views. It used to “upset” her, now it just makes her “sad.” Or so she tells us standing in front of a military jet.

Andrea Mitchell, meanwhile, thinks it’s a “real scandal” that people in this country want to keep folks from voting when we should be encouraging people to participate.

What do all these spots have in common? They’re all, for the most part, rebukes. This country used to be great, they seem to say, but now, well, we hate immigrants, don’t want people to vote, we use the military as pawns, and we can’t seem to wrap our heads around doing our “fair share.”

Nobody likes a nag, so it bewilders me why these promos might be considered a lure to reel viewers in. When I voiced this sentiment on Facebook recently, however, one of my liberal “friends” chimed in to say he loved their promos and thought of them as a “dog whistle,” that is, something likeminded animals hear and respond to. If so, that tells us a lot—liberals are attracted to schoolmarmish scolds reproaching them for not being good citizens and admonishing them to change their ways.

Hmm…maye not. My guess is that those who come running when this “whistle” is blown don’t view themselves among the sinners who need reprimanding but, rather, among the saved, whose job it is to shake their fingers at the rest of us.

____

Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

A venture involving Keith Olbermann blew up in someone’s face? You don’t say. Guy is like workplace napalm.

— Mike Ashmore (@mashmore98) March 30, 2012

@algore thanks for taking my advice and starting noise again saw u fired Keith olberman. If u need a replacement I’m available

— Jose Canseco (@JoseCanseco) March 31, 2012

So..@limbaugh is still on the air and @KeithOlbermann is gone. @mmfa ROCKS

— Bob Hicks (@Lemming_Watcher) March 30, 2012

RT @RBPundit: How much of a douche do you need to be to get fired by the company that still employs Cenk Uygur? Seriously.

— Melissa Clouthier (@MelissaTweets) March 30, 2012

Just how unbearable is Keith Olbermann if Current TV decided to go with the guy that’s gonna blow his paychecks on hookers?

— Daniel Grittner (@Boywhiz88) March 30, 2012

@KeithOlbermann FYI- no current postings on Monster.com for pasty 53 year old drama queen anchors in the $1m+ salary range.

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 30, 2012

Where do you go after being fired by Current TV?Baby monitors?

— Donald E. Ferguson (@DonnyFerguson) March 31, 2012

Firing @KeithOlberman appears to be part of Current TV’s strategy for having people know it exists.

— Zachary Hutchins (@Z_Hutch) March 30, 2012

BREAKING statement from Current TV: “We discovered it was cheaper to have no one watch Spitzer instead of having no one watch Olbermann.”

— John Nolte(@NolteNC) March 30, 2012

Future headline: “iTunes has dropped Keith Olbermann’s free podcast”

— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) March 30, 2012

John Hawkins is a professional writer who runs Right Wing News and Linkiest. He’s also the co-owner of the The Looking Spoon. You can hear more from John Hawkins on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, G+, You Tube, & at Pajamas Media.

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**UPDATED MONDAY MORNING**
THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
Baldwin/McCullough *LIVE* – Hr 1/Hr 2

Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. Cee Lo Green (as Mediaite reported today) caused a bit of a mild disturbance when news got out that he would be performing his hit single “F— You” in front of President Obama for a fundraiser– uncensored. The event occurred last night, and Green did eventually start singing “Forget You” instead, but not before giving the audience the finger while asking, “Can I curse?” McCullough asks, “Is it too old fashioned to say that this is less than dignified?” From your perspective: 888.340.3373.

2. Stephen Baldwin attended the RED CARPET premiere of the Hunger Games, and let’s just say he was surprised…

Brought to you tonight in part by:
Are you looking to make a major difference in the success you can experience in business, promotion, marriage, or life? Then you owe it to yourself to discover the secrets of Dani Johnson and her transformational seminar First Steps to Success. These events sell out quickly, and many come away getting promoted, starting businesses, or earning a 6 or 7 figure income for the first time in their lives. Dani Johnson… committed to your TOTAL SUCCESS check out First Steps now!

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

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**UPDATED MONDAY MORNING**
THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
Baldwin/McCullough *LIVE* – Hr 1/Hr 2

Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. Ok Kevin McCullough’s lovely bride didn’t think it was really all that important for Rush to apologize to Ms. Fluke (With the exception of the names and connotations themselves.) In other words on PRINCIPLE The Lovely Bride agreed with the assessment of El Rushbo. She even agreed in concept to his statement for accountability and tracking (shoot the videos and put them on the internet) — from a free market principle. If the tax-payers pay for it, we have the right to know what is done with it. But on this overly heated, mildly off-putting, and very distracting topic… What exactly ARE you allowed to call someone who forces someone else to pick up the tab for their over-heated sex life? From your perspective: 888.340.3373.

2. Stephen Baldwin wonders if it might not be time to just toss God, morality, decency, and values from politics all together… It seems like that’s what the nation wants. Thoughts: 888.340.3373.

Brought to you tonight in part by:
Are you looking to make a major difference in the success you can experience in business, promotion, marriage, or life? Then you owe it to yourself to discover the secrets of Dani Johnson and her transformational seminar First Steps to Success. These events sell out quickly, and many come away getting promoted, starting businesses, or earning a 6 or 7 figure income for the first time in their lives. Dani Johnson… committed to your TOTAL SUCCESS check out First Steps now!

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

Official: US seeks end to Egypt NGO case in days

By MATTHEW LEE
Associated Press

RABAT, Morocco (AP) — A senior U.S. official says the Obama administration is in “intense discussions” with Egypt to resolve the legal case against 16 American democracy advocates that has badly damaged ties between the countries “in the coming days”

The official, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity due to the delicacy of the matter, said Saturday that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had raised the matter twice in person with Egypt’s foreign minister – once in London and once in Tunis – in the past three days and that other senior U.S. officials are actively involved.

The administration has been calling for the case to be resolved for weeks in a manner that allows seven of the implicated Americans who have been barred from leaving to leave the country.

Please note that the words “hostages”, “crisis”, “Carter”, and “SCOAMF” were carefully omitted from the AP’s crack reportage.

Which is why Americans regard the Associated Press with roughly the same level of disdain as they had for Pravda during the Nikita Khrushchev era.

Hat tips: BadBlue.com. Image: via Asian Conservatives.

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**UPDATED MONDAY MORNING**
THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
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Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. In a nation as blessed as the United States of America, why is it/or does it just seem this way, that the left it less naturally enthusiastic about supporting the military? What is your take on it? Kevin McCullough has some first person stories to relate and has drawn some observations as it relates merely to the film release this weekend of ACT OF VALOR. From your perspective: 888.340.3373.

2. If there is time a disturbing new trend is worth discussing: Girls who ask the internet if they “think I’m pretty.” Why so helpless. Why such a sad route to solving the problem and what are they actually attempting to satisfy? Thoughts: 888.340.3373.

Brought to you tonight in part by:
Are you looking to make a major difference in the success you can experience in business, promotion, marriage, or life? Then you owe it to yourself to discover the secrets of Dani Johnson and her transformational seminar First Steps to Success. These events sell out quickly, and many come away getting promoted, starting businesses, or earning a 6 or 7 figure income for the first time in their lives. Dani Johnson… committed to your TOTAL SUCCESS check out First Steps now!

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

Share

**UPDATED MONDAY MORNING**
THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
Baldwin/McCullough *LIVE* – Hr 1/Hr 2

Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. Whitney Houston DEAD at 48. What is the measure of a life well lived? Two very personal WWII vets gone in the past two weeks that had immeasurable impact on KMC’s life can be contrasted by comparison… Plus breaking developments. 800.345.9622.

2. How do you feel about the fact that President Obama tried to force his view of contraception on people of religious convictions. Thoughts: 800.345.9622.

ALSO: We’re BACK! CPAC 2012… we report…!

Are you looking to make a major difference in the success you can experience in business, promotion, marriage, or life? Then you owe it to yourself to discover the secrets of Dani Johnson and her transformational seminar First Steps to Success. These events sell out quickly, and many come away getting promoted, starting businesses, or earning a 6 or 7 figure income for the first time in their lives. Dani Johnson… committed to your TOTAL SUCCESS check out First Steps now!

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

Obama Retreats on Contraception

My first thought was, “Surely the Journal knows better than this.  Why would they headline this story as if Obama had, in fact, backed off on the mandate?  What are they, USA Today?”

The headline doesn’t reflect reality.

As Ed Morrissey pointed out yesterday, Obama has merely shifted the basis for the mandate.  The insurance companies – I use that term loosely – will be required to provide “free” contraception services to the insured who work for Catholic employers.  This means that the premiums paid by Catholic employers will fund contraception services.  And the overall mandate to purchase the insurance will continue.

I expected better of WSJ.  I expect the editors to recognize the significance of distinctions like this, and refrain from using headlines that bolster a counterfactual narrative.  Obama has not retreated.  He has moved laterally and reset the defenses for the same strategic position.

And in fact, he has done more than that.  I referred above to using the term “insurance companies” loosely, because Obama has just made crystal clear that “insurance” is not what we will be paying for under ObamaCare.  With actual “insurance,” the insured cannot expect to line up for “free” goodies mandated – arbitrarily, and at any time – by the government.  An insurance contract is finite and specific.  The insured pays a premium; the insurer makes defined pay-outs in the case of a contingency.  In most cases, for the average person, the contingency is a major personal setback of some kind:  an auto accident, the house burning down, being diagnosed with cancer.

If the federal government can step in and arbitrarily require a company to provide things for “free” that were previously elective, premium-based services, then it is no longer an insurance company.  We are not buying insurance from it; we are simply participating in a mandatory government program whose features can be changed at any time, regardless of what we or the “insurers” want.  There is no contract.  There are only the one-sided decisions of bureaucrats and future presidents.

This Obama move is the opposite of a retreat.  It’s a decision to reveal the future to us, and to insist on remaining on course for it.

Yet on their news pages (as opposed to the opinion pages), the mainstream media are stuck in the old mode of interpreting political events in a single dimension, as if all other things remain equal, and a rhetorical “retreat” from a president means the same thing it usually has in the past.  We see this in numerous aspects of their coverage.  They keep putting out stories in the same old narrative ruts, as if we have a business-as-usual political situation.  The president’s people say he has changed his mind on the contraception mandate; in the shallowest of political terms, that can be seen as a “retreat”; and no care is taken to frame the overriding reality that Catholic employers will be required to pay for “insurance” programs that distribute contraception to their employees.

That is not a change of heart, it’s a significant broadening of the state’s control, undertaken at the drop of a hat – and we have a huge mainstream media apparatus that simply does not frame what’s going on in realistic terms.  The clear implications of the Obama decision were widely discussed across the conservative blogosphere yesterday, and even on some MSM opinion pages.  But in their news reporting, the MSM characterized what had happened – falsely – as a retreat by the president.

Are they idiots?  Are they all “in the tank” for Obama?  It may feel good to excoriate them in these terms, but I see it differently in the case of at least some of the MSM.  There is no doubt that a significant segment of the MSM has the same peculiar worldview as Obama and his advisors, and takes care to frame everything in the terms of that worldview.  But that doesn’t necessarily explain the behavior of the entire MSM.

Please note:  I am speaking here of how “straight news” is framed in the news pages or broadcasts.  Various opinions may be expressed on the editorial pages, but it matters greatly how the MSM attempt to reflect reality, which is what we all tacitly accept they are doing in “straight news” reporting.  This reporting comes, over time, to write the narratives in our heads about what is going on in the world.  And I have never seen reality so reflexively misinterpreted in the retailing of “news.”

What I perceive is a sort of “capture”: the MSM being stuck in a retrograde narrative about American political conditions that no longer obtains.  We are not in the old political conditions today.  We have not had a federal budget for more than 1,000 days.  That’s extremely abnormal.  The 2010 election was a large-scale repudiation of the sitting president and his policies, but the new Congress is gridlocked, unable to exercise its proper role in the separation of powers.  President Obama, besides presiding over a network of executive agencies larger and more powerful than any previous president had at his disposal, is a deliberate political “divider,” constantly – constantly – making divisive appeals to one constituency and rhetorically “flaming” another.  No president has behaved in anything close to this manner since FDR in the mid-1930s.

This president is not Bill Clinton, or even Jimmy Carter; he is not Lyndon Johnson or JFK.  He and his administration have broken with America’s trademark political mindset of gradualism and respect – however grudging at times – for the people.  So why is the narrative by which his administration’s actions are explained the same one the MSM has used for decades?  Why is this administration being interpreted on the same terms as its predecessors, when its actions and perspectives, in both domestic and foreign policy, are so very different?

I’m not sure I have an answer for that.  But the outcome is consistent.  The longer we go in this presidency, the less relation MSM headlines have to reality.  If you asked a random sample of journalists at WSJ what the practical effect of Obama’s “retreat” on the contraception mandate would be, I’m betting more than 50% of them would get it right.  The Catholics are still stuck with paying for contraception services.  But the misleading headlines march on of their own accord, even at WSJ.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

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THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
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And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. What if there was a single moment in which one of the Presidential candidates pretty much LOST the race because of a very poor choice of words? What if that person had the infrastructure to win the nomination? But what if we knew that that single phrase was going to kill off any hope for someone to run a thoughtful campaign against Obama? Well I think Mitt Romney pretty much did all of that and more this last week… The great con being that Mitt just had a stupid use of words. But Obama’s policies have actually wrecked this nation beyond recognition, especially the very poor. 800.345.9622.

2. Best selling author Steve Brown says God gives us three free sins… which ones are they? Why does it matter?  Thoughts: 800.345.9622.

ALSO: We’re BACK! CPAC 2012… make your plans to join us!

Are you looking to make a major difference in the success you can experience in business, promotion, marriage, or life? Then you owe it to yourself to discover the secrets of Dani Johnson and her transformational seminar First Steps to Success. These events sell out quickly, and many come away getting promoted, starting businesses, or earning a 6 or 7 figure income for the first time in their lives. Dani Johnson… committed to your TOTAL SUCCESS check out First Steps now!

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

What most people don’t consider investigative reporting is the use of selective facts that support an ideology and agenda in an attack on someone to reach a preordained conclusion. An example of that sort of reporting was recently found in a Rolling Stone hit piece on LTG William Caldwell. The author had enjoyed success in being instrumental in the removal of another general (Gen. Stanley McChrystal) based on an article he’d written. His later piece on LTG William Caldwell, however, was a classic example of the genre of “investigative reporting” that is becoming more and more common – selective facts, poor research, an agenda all working toward a particular conclusion.

The article was roundly panned as atrocious work as the blogosphere took it apart piece by piece and trashed it.

Another example of that genre has popped up on the radar screen in a Salon hit piece on Rep. Buck McKeon. Why a hit piece and not, as Salon tries to characterize it, an investigative report? Several reasons. First, the “investigative reporter” is hardly someone who fits the definition of an objective reporter as outlined above.

When you read the Salon article here, you’ll see the author of the article’s bio at the bottom.

Lee Fang is an investigative journalist in the Bay Area.

Is he? Again, the implication of the short bio is he’s an objective reporter who has pursued a story lead and what you read in the article above is an objective assessment of the gathered facts leading in connect the dot fashion to a logical conclusion.

But as it turns out that’s not at all who Lee Fang is.

However, unfortunately, you have to leave Salon and go elsewhere to make that determination. Salon certainly isn’t forthcoming with the details.

We find the truth in an interview with a Santa Clarita CA radio station, KHTS, where the host introduces Fang thusly:

Lee Fang (pronounced Fong, pictured at left) is a freelance journalist and the senior investigator for United Republic, a nonpartisan group dedicated to ending the corrupting influence of special interest money in American politics.

Nonpartisan?

United Republic?

While you may sympathize and even agree with the premise of the group, calling something founded by MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, Huffingto Post’s Paul Blumenthal and former Free Press founder Josh Silver a nonparitsan group is like calling James Carville an independent. There is a definite ideological agenda at work there and in essence, Lee Fang is the opposition research guy.  And this isn’t his first stop on the “advocacy journalism” side of things.

That’s not quite a “freelance journalism” is it?

Another tidbit from the radio interview:

Lee Fang: Right now we’re just looking at Chairmen of important committees in Congress so we’ve looked at Armed Services, we’ve looked at Energy and Commerce and on the Senate side we’ve looked at Banking and Finance.

Really? Just the “Chairmen”? The ranking members on the House committees, who are essentially the opposition co-chairs and still wield enormous power on the committees, don’t merit a look? Of course, in the House, those ranking members are all Democrats. Only on the Senate side have has he claimed to have looked at a Democrat.

As to the facts, here’s the basic claim of the article:

Recent disclosures reveal that a federal lobbyist with ties to Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., the senior member of the committee overseeing the Pentagon, provided financial support to McKeon’s wife, who is seeking a seat in the California Assembly this year. As defense industry lobbyists scramble to head off looming cuts in the Pentagon budget, they are looking for new ways to ingratiate themselves with McKeon.The contribution, reported here for the first time, appears to be an effort to circumvent federal campaign limits. Federal campaign disclosures show that Valente has already maxed out in donations to Rep. McKeon this cycle, having given $2,500 to his campaign for Congress. And the contribution came within a day of Valente’s donation to Patricia’s campaign for the California Assembly.

Valente’s lobbying firm, Valente and Associates, reported over $1.4 million in fees last year. The firm represented at least one company, 3Leaf Group, a government contractor specializing in human resources, that sought help from Valente on issues relating to the Defense Authorization bill. McKeon, as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was the principal author of that legislation.

Valente did not respond to a request for comment. But his so-called 527 campaign entity, the Fund for American Opportunity, gave only one contribution to a state politician in all of 2011: Patricia McKeon.

Craig Holman, a lobbying expert with Public Citizen, says that the donation to McKeon is part of a larger pattern of influence peddling in Washington: “The objective is to throw as much money as possible at the feet of the lawmaker; that includes at the feet of his family as well.”

McKeon’s staff, specifically Alissa McCurley, responded to a request for comment from KHTS:

First, contrary to Mr. Fang’s inaccurate assertion, Patricia was not the only state candidate to receive a donation from the Fund for American Opportunity. If you click on the link in the article, you will see several state candidates listed on the group’s 6-month contribution report. Secondly, again contrary to Fang’s false assertion, Mr. Valente has not maxed out to Congressman McKeon. In fact, Mr. Valente has not contributed to Congressman McKeon’s “McKeon for Congress” campaign committee at all.”

“Investigative reporter?” Two of the most basic and supposedly damning “facts” are incorrect? Those two “facts” are the main support for Fang’s implication that McKeon is rotten. McCurley correctly labels the piece as more one of “opinion” than fact. And given the above, it certainly seems to be assertion masquerading as factual reporting. If the author can’t get those two basic facts correct, then why should anyone believe anything else written?

The attempt to smear is clear. In fact, again in the radio interview, Fang has to admit that there’s nothing illegal in any of McKeon’s activity:

KHTS: I’m reading the article and I’m saying to myself is there anything illegal or just inappropriate?

LF: I talked to some McCain-Feingold experts, that’s the campaign finance law on the books, and they said in this case there’s no evidence of illegal conduct.

So why all the innuendo, inaccuracies and implications? Because there’s an agenda at play here and this is how ideological advocacy works. Spin something to appear in the best light which advances your cause, whether the facts supporting it are there or not. But this is certainly not “investigative reporting”.

Again, you may agree with the United Republic goal, but when a major publication hides the fact that someone it bills as an “investigative reporter” works for an ideologically driven activist group and that the article is an extension of that group’s activist focus, then you are doing your readers a disservice. This isn’t “investigative reporting”. This is advocacy “journalism” in its purist form. You’d think the editors of Salon would have known that and put a disclaimer in Fang’s bio.

Instead, they either chose to deceive by omission even while questioning the ethics of others or they didn’t do their job.

~McQ

Twitter: @McQandO

So, is Adelson’s money buying Newt’s support of Israel?

Not hardly. One of my readers did a little research and sent me a few helpful links. (Thanks!)

Look at this article from 1998 in the San Francisco Jewish Weekly, titled Resignation of Newt Gingrich means Israel is losing a friend. For those of you readers who can’t do difficult math, that article was written more than 13 years ago, which means Sheldon Adelson’s money played no part in Newt’s opinion on Israel. So far, the best the Forward can come up with is Adelson’s money contributed to Gingrich’s group in 2006. Whoops. That’s eight whole years after we read this:

A Jewish Democratic politico said of Gingrich’s pro-Israel credentials, “I don’t think Newt is acting. I’d like to say he’s full of it, but he isn’t. Yes, he was trying to out right-wing the right-wing Jews, but he’s a true believer. Livingston may say what AIPAC wants to hear, but it’s not in his kishkes. He’s not a true believer.”

Really? A Democrat called Gingrich a right-wing Israel supporter in 1998?

But wait. There’s more! In 1998, Gingrich also called Jerusalem “the united and eternal capital of Israel”

Oh, pshaw. There must be some way Adelson’s money influenced Gingrich’s opinion. Maybe he’s so rich, he has a secret time machine and he went back in time to convince Newt to support Israel?

Or maybe Newt’s been a supporter of Israel for decades. (Also, Newt is pretty damned close to getting the Yourish.com cherished Master of Juvenile Scorn™ designation.)

Speaker Newt Gingrich said today that the White House was trying to blackmail Israel by pushing it toward the negotiating table, but President Clinton said he was only trying to bring about fruitful talks on Mideast peace.

”It’s become the Clinton Administration and Arafat against Israel,” Mr. Gingrich said at a news conference. ”The Clinton Administration says: ‘Happy birthday. Let us blackmail you on behalf of Arafat.’ ”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The Forward itself discussed Gingrich’s ties to Israel in the 1990s (buried, of course, in page two of an article using the Gloom-and-Doom Machine profiling his ties to Adelson). On the first page, they date the Adelson-Gingrich relationship back to 2007. This, kiddies, is how you get away with saying that your article is objective because it mentioned the recent and more distant relationships. It is also what is known as “slanting.” But the most important takeaway here is just what I wrote the other day: The only reason the liberal media is jumping all over the Gingrich-Adelson relationship is because Adelson is a Jew who is supporting a conservative Republican, rather than the liberal media-slash-Jewish establishment’s approved causes–which would be liberal Democrats.

Haim Saban influencing Bill Clinton? Not a problem. Sheldon Adelson is contributing to Newt Gingrich’s campaign? OMG, he’s a conservative, somebody stop him!1!!

Your objective media, exposed.

Cross-posted.

ON THE KEVIN McCULLOUGH SHOW:

1. THE HEADLINE ITEMS:
Ok, generally speaking the amount of money someone’s honey wants to spend for those quiet moments–are none of anyone’s business. But what if the person doing that paid on average $500 per piece for more than 100 pieces of the naughty nighty collection, is married to a person lecturing the American people on how greedy they are? When she and her hubby only gave 1% of their income to actual charity in the same year? Ok, now we gots to talk! kmcradio@gmail.com

2. THE PRACTICAL DILEMMA:
Because what we need more of in this world is how to make the dissolution of a permanent bond “easier” and more “peaceful. PLUS Finally: Ever wanted to spy on your teen-aged driver? Be honest! Your replies: kmcradio@gmail.com.

3. THE GOD THOUGHT:
The God Thought: “Without the sovereign hand of God Himself, nothing touches our lives. Do we discern His hand at work, or do we see things as mere occurrences?”

Also able to be heard via a snappy smart phone listening app for the AFR Radio Network at that same time each night 8pm EST. Download Apple’s iTunes AFR’s app here. Android and other smart phones may download here.

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THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
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Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. Despite all the political angst for the Presidential primary to take place in Florida in just two days and counting, this week was a seriously bad week for another group of people: Public Educators. On three occasions — ruthless, and unwarranted suspensions being handed down for either silly reasons, or ones made up all together. Why would public educators, who seem to have their hands full with genuinely underperforming students, seem to focus on such trivial, irrelevant, and inane things? 800.345.9622.

2. President Obama claimed this week that Roe v. Wade would help women like his daughters to someday be able to achieve their dreams. What EXACTLY did that mean? Even just following the President’s train of direct thought, doesn’t it imply greater LACK-OF-RESPONSIBILITY? Thoughts: 800.345.9622.

ALSO: We’re BACK! CPAC 2012… make your plans to join us!

Are you looking to make a major difference in the success you can experience in business, promotion, marriage, or life? Then you owe it to yourself to discover the secrets of Dani Johnson and her transformational seminar First Steps to Success. These events sell out quickly, and many come away getting promoted, starting businesses, or earning a 6 or 7 figure income for the first time in their lives. Dani Johnson… committed to your TOTAL SUCCESS check out First Steps now!

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

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**UPDATED MONDAY MORNING**
THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
Baldwin/McCullough *LIVE* – Hr 1/Hr 2

Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. The media, the entertainment complex, the news journalism spheres, the universe of politics, and just about every other sector of life has wrapped themselves in the phenomenon that is Tim Tebow. But this week, some other prominent Christian athletes i.e. Kurt Warner gave interviews and made statements to the effect that Tebow was wearing his faith on his shoulder and that he should more or less shut-up and let his play speak for itself. However Rick Reilly of ESPN/Sports Illustrated detailed many items about Tebow that the public knew nothing of. So why are some of the faithful dogging him, while many of the secular masses are embracing him? Does God care about Tim Tebow? Should America? 800.345.9622.

2. Yesterday was Friday the 13th. In 2012 there will be three of them, all exactly 13 weeks apart. Do you alter your plans for Friday the 13ths? Do you think there could be ANYTHING to them?

Are you looking to make a major difference in the success you can experience in business, promotion, marriage, or life? Then you owe it to yourself to discover the secrets of Dani Johnson and her transformational seminar First Steps to Success. These events sell out quickly, and many come away getting promoted, starting businesses, or earning a 6 or 7 figure income for the first time in their lives. Dani Johnson… committed to your TOTAL SUCCESS check out First Steps now!

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

Now we have Newsright – a “news registry” company which the Washington Post says aims “to convert unauthorized websites, blogs and other newsgathering services into paying customers.”  Let’s hope they learn from Righthaven’s mistakes and actually take Fair Use into account instead of just trying to bully bloggers out of existence.

The fact that about half of Newsright’s staff are lawyers makes that hope seem kind of futile, though.

How will Newsright’s service work?  NewsRight’s president and CEO, David Westin explains,

when an item is read on a browser, it sends a signal to the database in San Francisco that attaches the origin of the item, what website it appeared on, and the geographic area. Every time the item is used, the data is gathered and sent to publishers. The code attached to the piece specifies the publisher, keywords, dates, and the author. It’s up to the publisher as to what they assign the code to. Initially most items were assigned to the complete document, but increasingly publishers are attaching once to the headline, once to the lead, and once to the text. This has the advantage of giving more nuanced reporting.

This, like SOPA, is a fairly bipartisan issue. Lefty David Sirota sums up blogger concerns well in this video.

“What I worry about is that it ends up being used as a financial weapon against those voices out there who are citing that information in order to challenge it, scrutinize it, and question it. That you can imagine a situation where let’s say a blogger is out there, or an independent journalist is out there citing, excerpting pieces of a widely cited, let’s say a New York Times story or other news publication story and debunking it, showing where it’s wrong. And that news organization doesn’t like that. Then that news organization calls up that independent journalist and says ‘You have to pay us for the privilege of excerpting our story.’ Now if that is allowed to stand you’ve potentially created the situation where the democratic, small-d freedom of questioning and challenging what’s in the public square incurs an undue financial penalty.”

All of these efforts are to solve the problem of the legacy media trying to navigate and survive in a new media world. But instead of following the Hollywood model of enforcing digital rights management in ways that make their product less useful to consumers, they might consider trying something completely different. An amusing comment from Marcus Carab at the Techdirt article provides one example:

Dear AP – for a tenth of what you are spending on all these lawyers, you could have set up a premium news service with banks of additional quotes & photos that didn’t run in the articles, early access to some stuff, etc. and offered it to all these same bloggers. Sincerely, An Actual Business Model

Romney, the son of a politician, has been running for office, holding office or thinking about running for office for more than two decades. “Just level with the American people,” Gingrich growled. “You’ve been running … at least since the 1990s.”

For some reason, Romney can’t do that. Or at least it seems like he can’t. His authentic inauthenticity problem isn’t going away. And it’s sapping enthusiasm from the rank and file.

Goldberg is right, but the underlying theme that voters need to be reminded of is that during so many important debates fromhealthcare, jobs, Wall Street Reform, confirmations, recess appointments, to taxes the culprits to invoke cloture or side with the Democrats typically are the same:  Senators Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe,  and Scott Brown–the trifecta of RINOs. All from the northeast, too.  See where I’m going with this?

Frankly, Romney, who the mainstream liberal media would like to see win the nomination, has yet to unite the GOP base.  His used car salesman pitch simply rubs people the wrong way.  We’ve seen this over and over again–even John McCain pointed this out and won in 2007′s primary–and now supports him–that should speak volumes to my point.  Romney has always been dogged by this and this is why we have such a large ‘Not Romney’ camp on the right side of the aisle.

The GOP is also paying the bitter price for not having anyone in line to succeed GW Bush.  The party’s internal tug of war will be an historical teachable moment and prepare the party for future elections.  The one saving grace is that, while the Democrats have Hillary, they have no one to succeed her at this point in time.  I say Hillary because she seems to be the only power broker left untarnished by Obama–even though she is an Alinsky kinda girl.

Additionally, the GOP presidential candidate will have a two-pronged mission as the nominee:  to beat the MSM and Obama.  However, enlightened voters now know for sure the media is mostly state-controlled, Obama was never vetted, and that his radical leftist ideology drives his policies, appointments, and regulations out of the mainstream.

Furthermore, the MSM needs Romney to offset Obama.  The formula is quite simple:  RomneyCare is to ObamaCare as Obama’s rhetoric is to Romney’s rhetoric all of which cancel each other out according to how the media sees it.

I’m not buying the media hype over who can beat Obama.  The primary is the primary and the game changes in the general.  Voters are more inclined to vote with their wallets.  We have gas prices averaging at almost $4 per gallon across the country, skyrocketing food prices, record foreclosures, record number of people on food stamps, high unemployment, ObamaCare, crippling regulations, and much more.  So if the MSM thinks that the historic 2010 midterm GOP wave was a whim, think again.  The Right accomplished its key mission of splitting the Congress so that Obama’s agenda could not be rammed through anymore.  Would we have liked the Senate, sure, but in 2012, the job will be finished.  My point is that who do we really want in the Oval Office?  A northeastern Republican who disavows the GOP or not.  We already have someone who does not have the consent of the governed.  Are we really going to take that risk again?

Finally, Romney has always touted RomneyCare as a great model for all the states to implement, but the reality is, the only person who implemented RomneyCare was Obama and now we have ObamaCare.  No thanks.

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And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. The center of the political universe for the next four days is right here Manchester, New Hampshire, and that’s where Baldwin/McCullough come to you live tonight. Ron Paul’s supporters lining the streets on one side, Mitt Romney’s on the other, and after parties with Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich. Lawrence O’Donnell, Frank Luntz, Ed Morrissey, wandering the streets and we trust our studio as well. 9-11pm EST tonight don’t miss the hilarity of the most overblown serious primary in the nation… unless you’re from the Granite State, and in that case, thanks for the hospitality!

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

The controversy surrounding the show has spread beyond the Florida conservative group which began it. Just this week, as Jim Hoft reports, WordPress took down the blog Bare Naked Islam, which had been calling for the show’s cancellation. (Though the reasons cited by WordPress don’t specifically include a reference to the show.) They were also getting attacked from the Left, as PETA blasted them over one woman’s decision to give up her ten year old dog.

Lining up on the opposite side of the aisle, hip hop artist Russell Simmons took the side of the show, being joined by Mia Farrow. He called for a boycott of Lowe’s, (though I’m not sure what that’s supposed to accomplish) and bought advertising time during the broadcast himself.

So has the show benefited in the form of higher ratings amid all the Sturm und Drang, as I speculated it might earlier this month? The premier episode actually did fairly well, with more than 1.7 million viewers and a .9 overall rating, though it dropped nearly 50% over the next couple of weeks. The impact on the ratings from these stories seems to be… not so much.

TLC’s ‘All-American Muslim’: Controversy Does Not Equal Ratings

It would appear members of the conservative Florida Family Association are among the few actually paying attention to TLC’s All-American Muslim.

The reality series about Muslim families living in suburban Detroit, which lost advertising from Lowe’s and other brands after FAA condemned it as propaganda, is languishing in the ratings.

Only five episodes into its first season, the series ranked 78th among Sunday’s cable broadcasts for Dec. 11. With only 908,000 viewers and a 0.3 rating among adults 18-49, it’s being easily outperformed by series like History’s American Pickers, Discovery’s Moonshiners and its latest lead-in, Little People Big World: Holiday Surprise.

We’re still waiting for the confirmed numbers for the last episode, but the trend lines don’t seem to indicate that all of the shouting over the subject matter is causing viewers to come back in droves.

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**UPDATED MONDAY MORNING**
THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
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Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. The issue of “Tebowing” is now causing public high school student athletes to be suspended for a minimum of one game each at one high school on Long Island, NY. Others are also being suspended nationwide. What is it about this act that causes such consternation amongst the public educators in America? 800.345.9622

2. The passing of Christopher Hitchens has caused a couple of interesting questions to roll around KMC’s noggin all week. 1. What do you believe Hitchens believes now? And 2. If he could tell us one thing what do you think it would be? The death of America’s foremost atheist even has some questioning whether he might even be in heaven. What do you say? 800.345.9622

BONUS: Baldwin gives us his perspective of Howard Stern taking Piers Morgan’s place on America’s Got Talent…

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

Radio Podcast Archives
TV Podcast Archives

*Find The Kevin McCullough Show on our newest affiliate of the month: WCSO-FM – Columbus, Mi
(including the cities of: Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Starkville, Mississippi.)

ON THE KEVIN McCULLOUGH SHOW:

1. THE HEADLINE ITEMS:
The final debate from Sioux City Iowa was one for the memories. Best and worst moments for the night and what it all means in our topic A section on the Kevin McCullough Show tonight. Why Ron Paul is DONE! Bachmann may be on her way back. Perry is positioning well, and Romney and Newt both lost ground! kmcradio@gmail.com

2. THE PRACTICAL DILEMMA:
Culturally speaking the death of Christopher Hitchens is the most important news story of the past 24 hours. Why it mattered so much. Why there is so much meaning in it. And what even Hitchens himself would be forced now to admit. A special look back at the man who claimed God was not great. Your replies: kmcradio@gmail.com.

3. THE GOD THOUGHT:
“7 Ways to Apply the 7th Spiritual Law: 1. Certainty of Salvation” CONTINUE: “God Thought” on facebook!

Also able to be heard via a snappy smart phone listening app for the AFR Radio Network at that same time each night 8pm EST. Download Apple’s iTunes AFR’s app here. Android and other smart phones may download here.

Nevertheless, by camping out in New Hampshire — where independents can vote in the Jan. 10 GOP primary — Huntsman has managed to work himself up to third or fourth place in polls there, assisted by preposterously generous coverage from the liberal media. Yet it is impossible to imagine what the pundits call a “path to the nomination” for Huntsman, and his only obvious purpose in the 2012 campaign is to suck up debate time that might otherwise go to actual Republican candidates.

You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that Huntsman has been adopted as the pet GOP hopeful on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. If there is a “Huntsman bubble,” Joe Scarborough is the guy blowing on the nozzle to inflate that bubble:

MSNBC has in recent weeks become the daily venue for one of the most bizarre reality shows on cable TV: Morning Bromance, starring Joe Scarborough as a man helplessly smitten with “Republican presidential candidate” Jon Huntsman.
When he isn’t blowing air-kisses at Huntsman, Scarborough is citing every possible media blurb about Huntsman as ratification of the former Utah governor’s make-believe campaign. Joe is to Jon what 11-year-old girls are to Justin Bieber, or what Chris Matthews is to Barack Obama. If Scarborough hasn’t yet announced his leg-tingles for Huntsman, it’s only because the MSNBC host wants to save his final orgasmic gush for the eve of the New Hampshire primary, where some polls show Joe’s teen-idol candidate in third place behind Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. …

Click here to read the rest.

Perhaps the next edition can provide kids with a full accounting of the Occupy-related illnesses, vandalism, rapes, deaths, and other criminal violations — and a related pop quiz on John Nolte’s Occupy arrest rap sheet.

The kids deserve the whole truth. The teachers unions’ Alinsky brigade won’t give it to them.

However, while Scholastic continues its love affair with OWS, it also has a hypocrisy problem (yes, go figure).  Seems Scholastic senior editor, Natalie Smith, who wrote this OWS puff piece dated well after this gem of a photo, conveniently forgot that her company is a $1.9 Billion publicly-traded company on the NASDAQ exchange.  Smith writes:

The Occupy protesters argue that large companies like those on Wall Street are making too much money while millions of Americans are struggling just to put food on the table. The protesters say they want average Americans to have more job opportunities and share in companies’ prosperity. They want their voices to be heard.  (emphasis mine)

What Smith fails to report is that Scholastic is in quite good shape financially:

In fiscal 2011 operating income was $100.7 million on revenue of $1,906.1 million, primarily reflecting lower sales of educational technology relative to a year ago, when the Company benefited significantly from the federal stimulus program, as well as increased strategic spending on digital initiatives in the children’s book business. Free cash flow was $120.5 million, which exceeded net income, compared to $171.6 million a year ago, which reflected that year’s strong educational technology sales. The Company also returned $176.4 million to shareholders in the form of share buybacks and dividends in fiscal 2011.

Last year we celebrated the 90th Anniversary of the founding of Scholastic. From the launch of a single classroom magazine in 1920, Scholastic has grown to become the world’s largest publisher and distributor of children’s books and a leader in educational technology and children’s media.

Ah, yes, the sweetness of a capitalistic economic system, vision, ingenuity, and success.  Scholastic has been able to grow due to the very capitalistic system OWS condemns.  It’s mind-boggling, to say the least, how Scholastic can support a movement that validates and teaches children class warfare, lawlessness, and lewd behavior.  But then again…

Now the youngest members of society are under the gun again. This time the attack on childhood is subtler and coming from an august source. Sesame Street, the decades-old PBS show that once taught children to count and spell, is now raising the specter of hunger among its young and impressionable viewers. It is also explaining how when mommy and daddy run out of food, the nanny state can help restock the family larder. CNSNews reports:

A ‘food insecure’ Muppet is helping to promote a national ‘Food for Thought’ campaign that teaches poor families to seek out nutritious food and to eat on the taxpayers’ tab.

At the National Press Club on Thursday, Lily the Muppet—who worries about her family not having enough money to feed her properly—pitched free food at school:

‘Sometimes we can’t always afford to buy all the food that we need,’ Lily said. ‘I mean, but we’ve been finding lots of ways that we can get help.…Yeah, for example, at school I get a free breakfast and a lunch … part of the meal plan.”

The article goes on to quote Rev. Douglas Greenaway of the National WIC (Women, Infants and Children) Association, who not only praised ‘Food For Thought’ but allowed as how the campaign “is really a deficit reduction strategy, and we hope policymakers will take notice of that.”

The good reverend didn’t elaborate on how spending taxpayer money, never mind how beneficent the goal, reduces the deficit. Maybe he was channeling Obama Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who intriguingly proclaimed that food stamps create jobs.

Lily’s message, meanwhile, is being circulated in schools, hospitals, and food assistance programs via a multimedia campaign. Included among the instructional tools is this video, complete with a smarmy music track and testimonials by parents, many of them on the verge of tears.

That many American families are struggling to make ends meet right now is undeniable. So is the grim fact that poverty levels are at a record high across the nation. But if instilling fear in young children is part of the liberal solution to this problem, count me out.

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• First Lady: Childhood obesity is a “national security threat”
• Undercover footage shows beatings, worse at Britain’s Muslim schools
• New poll: Most Americans oppose First Lady’s new childhood nutrition law
• Is more government intervention the answer to the problem of childhood obesity?
• Federal nutrition bill would curb school bake sales
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• School bake sales hazardous to your children’s health but not Dorito’s? More Big Brother shenanigans

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**UPDATED MONDAY MORNING**
THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
Baldwin/McCullough *LIVE* – Hr 1 – 12.10.11
Baldwin/McCullough *LIVE* – Hr 2 – 12.10.11

Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. Gingrich takes the floor of tonight’s debate, leading the most recent rounds of polls, across the board, should the candidates attack. Speaking of attack – did you notice what Navy did to Army for the 10th year in a row today? And speaking of the Navy did you see what has begun to happen? Somehow the Secretary of the Navy has started naming ships after people who described their time in the service as “The two worst years of my life!” What the heck? 800.345.9622

2. So a certain host from this broadcast has a big brother who was forcibly removed from an airliner this week… causing us to ask the question, what is it in human nature that causes us to so badly buck simple instructions from real authority? I mean… all he had to do was turn the stupid phone off… so simple. But something tugged at him so as to not. Where do you think that impulse comes from? 800.345.9622

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

Radio Podcast Archives
TV Podcast Archives

*Find The Kevin McCullough Show on our newest affiliate of the month: WCSO-FM – Columbus, Mi
(including the cities of: Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Starkville, Mississippi.)

ON THE KEVIN McCULLOUGH SHOW:

1. THE HEADLINE ITEMS:

The legendary actor Robert Duvall makes his debut on the Kevin McCullough Show. What does this superior craftsman think of the scrappy Tim Tebow? He’ll share his opinion. On football, life, and films Robert Duvall joins us today exclusively… don’t miss it! kmcradio@gmail.com

2. THE PRACTICAL DILEMMA:

It was a great honor to be part of the Liz Claiborne “Time to Talk” conversation day about the issue of Domestic Violence. On today’s show CNN Anchor Christi Paul sits down to discuss. Your replies: kmcradio@gmail.com.

3. THE GOD THOUGHT:
“7 Ways to Apply the 7th Spiritual Law: 1. Certainty of Salvation” CONTINUE: “God Thought” on facebook!

Also able to be heard via a snappy smart phone listening app for the AFR Radio Network at that same time each night 8pm EST. Download Apple’s iTunes AFR’s app here. Android and other smart phones may download here.

Share

**UPDATED MONDAY MORNING**
THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH PODCAST:
Baldwin/McCullough *LIVE* – Hr 1 – 12.03.11
Baldwin/McCullough *LIVE* – Hr 2 – 12.03.11

Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide:

And tonight, watch right here:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. After and enjoyable Thanksgiving weekend off with our families, and lots of boiler happiness its back to the jawboning on Baldwin/McCullough and Stephen is ticked (or maybe just confused) about the soap-opera-like-ness of Election 2012. Cain is out, who gets his vote? Does it matter that he left without any evidence indicting him of wrong doing? And if he were a democrat it wouldn’t have mattered at all… is THAT fair? 800.345.9622

2. A nine year old gets suspended for saying a teacher is cute… ON GROUNDS of sexual harassment. Doesn’t such a ridiculous action lessen the importance of what sexual harassment in real cases? 800.345.9622

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .