Scarborough Upbraids His Panel of Pundits Over President-Select

Lately, Joe Scarborough has shown signs of softening the conservative image that he made while serving in Congress. I suppose that working at MSNBC would have that effect on most anyone, by osmosis alone. The slime oozing from Keith Obermouth is sure to get on everything at MSNBC and innocent people are probably contaminated daily.

But in this piece, Joe has his say and the fellow pundits are practically speechless, except for a lame attempt by Mike Barnicle to defend his once-great profession.

You can see it here:

Journalism Lives!

I guess Sean Hannity is wrong. Journalism is not dead! At least, not quite.

AlSaliybiyyah posted the following video on YouTube and included these comments:

The Obama campaign whined about WFTV being "unprofessional" when it dared to dish out some tough questions to Vice President hopeful, Joe Biden.

The Obama spokesperson issued this statement about the interview:

"There's nothing wrong with tough questions, but reporters have the very important job of sharing the truth with the public -- not misleading the American people with false information. Senator Biden handled the interview well; however, the anchor was completely unprofessional. Senator Biden's wife is not running for elected office, and there are many other stations in the Orlando television market that would gladly conduct a respectful and factual interview with her."

"This cancellation is non-negotiable, and further opportunities for your station to interview with this campaign are unlikely, at best for the duration of the remaining days until the election."
Category: News & Politics

The Orlando-Semtinel: “Obama campaign cuts off WFTV after interview with Joe Biden”

E-Mail Barbara West: barbara.west@wftv.com

We Learn More Aout the Palen/Gibson Interview

We are learning more and more about the Gibson/Palen interview and it looks worse and worse for ABC and Mr. Gibson. Mark Levin has the transcript of the complete interview, including the portions edited out of the broadcast version. There were several statements and answers given by Mrs. Palen that showed her to be more confident, decisive and knowledgeable, particularly relating to foreign affairs, than the impression left from what we saw on our TVs.
The following are excerpts from the transcript at The Mark Levin Show. The parts that are in bold were edited from the broadcast version of the interview.

GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

PALIN: I agree that a president’s job, when they swear in their oath to uphold our Constitution, their top priority is to defend the United States of America.
I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.

GIBSON: Do we have a right to anticipatory self-defense? Do we have a right to make a preemptive strike again another country if we feel that country might strike us?

PALIN: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend.

GIBSON: What insight does that give you into what they’re doing in Georgia?

PALIN: Well, I’m giving you that perspective of how small our world is and how important it is that we work with our allies to keep good relation with all of these countries, especially Russia. We will not repeat a Cold War. We must have good relationship with our allies, pressuring, also, helping us to remind Russia that it’s in their benefit, also, a mutually beneficial relationship for us all to be getting along.

Sarah Palin on Russia:
We cannot repeat the Cold War. We are thankful that, under Reagan, we won the Cold War, without a shot fired, also. We’ve learned lessons from that in our relationship with Russia, previously the Soviet Union.
We will not repeat a Cold War. We must have good relationship with our allies, pressuring, also, helping us to remind Russia that it’s in their benefit, also, a mutually beneficial relationship for us all to be getting along.

GIBSON: Would you favor putting Georgia and Ukraine in NATO?

PALIN: Ukraine, definitely, yes. Yes, and Georgia.

GIBSON: And you think it would be worth it to the United States, Georgia is worth it to the United States to go to war if Russia were to invade.

PALIN: What I think is that smaller democratic countries that are invaded by a larger power is something for us to be vigilant against. We have got to be cognizant of what the consequences are if a larger power is able to take over smaller democratic countries.
And we have got to be vigilant. We have got to show the support, in this case, for Georgia. The support that we can show is economic sanctions perhaps against Russia, if this is what it leads to.
It doesn’t have to lead to war and it doesn’t have to lead, as I said, to a Cold War, but economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, again, counting on our allies to help us do that in this mission of keeping our eye on Russia and Putin and some of his desire to control and to control much more than smaller democratic countries.
His mission, if it is to control energy supplies, also, coming from and through Russia, that’s a dangerous position for our world to be in, if we were to allow that to happen.

We know, of course, that the comments above were edited out for the sake of brevity and continuity, but it is unfortunate that the same comments portrayed Gov. Palen to be more articulate and informed than we might have known from this interview otherwise. Anybody remember Robert Bork or Clarence Thomas or Miguel Estrada? They had similar unfortunate press coverage a while back.

Scorned by the MSN, McCain Realizes It's Over

Sen. McCain surely can’t be surprised by the way the media has abandoned him for the Obamessiah. He was once the darling of the press when he was a “maverick” and criticized and attacked his Party regularly. It seemed sometimes that McCain could only be roused to indignation by fellow Republicans and the NYT loved it. We’ve seen, however, that the moniker of “maverick” only applies to those on the Right who go against the policies of their own side. When was the last time you heard Joe Lieberman called a “maverick” and praised for his independent thinking? Or Zell Miller?

Now that that infatuation is out of the way let us hope Mr. McCain comes to realize the fickleness of the MSM and where their true affections lay, and comes to fully embrace his real base. Now, that would be change I could believe in.

McCain Turns Sour on His Onetime Media `Base' as Election Nears

By Heidi Przybyla
Sept. 2 (Bloomberg) -- The longtime love affair between John McCain and what he once called his ``base'' -- the national news media -- is on the rocks.
McCain's campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, yesterday lashed out at what he deemed ``offensive'' and ``demeaning'' coverage and questions from reporters after McCain's running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, confirmed her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant.
[…]
Schmidt's criticism is the latest example in the unraveling of what was once a fond relationship between the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and the media. Starting in the 2000 Republican primaries, the Arizona senator became a media sensation by chatting up the press in the back of his ``Straight Talk Express'' campaign bus. The national press corps freely mingled with McCain for hours on the bus, with no topic off limits.

Hysterics in the Heartland

Bob Kravitz is a sports writer for the Indianapolis Star. He decided to exercise his First Amendment right in his column today and made a complete ass of himself in the process (which is his right).

In an article titled “I won’t be an ugly American” Kravitz tries to portray well-documented civil rights abuses, government oppression and slaughter of millions in Communist China with some mostly inaccurate perceptions of failures here to live up to American ideals. Instead of simply saying that, as a sports writer at the Olympics, he intends to stick to sports and stay clear of politics he precedes to list for us some of what he sees as moral equivalents of some of the well-known abuses of the Chinese people perpetrated by a despotic totalitarian government and instances of what he sees as American hypocrisy and arrogance.

He asks rhetorically “Are there issues in China? Absolutely.” He mentions political prisoners and dissidents, the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence and the recent earthquakes in Sichuan Province. But, you know, we Americans don’t have much room to talk do we? The civil rights marches in the 60s, for example, are not much different than government tanks rolling against peaceful demonstators resulting in the death of untold numbers of students. And what about the riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention? The killing of students at Kent State is perhaps a nearer equivalent, but all these examples were instances of our failure to live up to the American ideal, not examples of institutional government oppression. We, as a nation, have repented of our sins.

While acknowledging “terrible human losses” under Communist rule in China (estimates are upwards of 75 million, Mr. Kravitz, and the numbers keep rising!), we have the shame of slavery (the end of which came about only after fighting the bloodiest war of our country's history) and internment of Japanese citizens in WWII (an arguable decision by a Democrat president) and the “epic failure to help the Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans.” How many billions of dollars have been spent on relief for Katrina victims? Indiana just suffered some of the worst flooding in the history of our state, yet Hoosiers helped each other and got to work rebuilding and repairing the damage with little help from the feds. Snow storms in the Upper Plains last winter were devasting but the rugged sons of pioneers similarly took care of themselves and the rest of the country barely heard mention of the catastrophe. The “epic failure” that followed Hurricane Katrina was more about incompetence and corruption of local government, not to mention lack of personal responsibility, than indifference in Washington. Displaying even greater depths of ignorance and moral derrangement Kravitz continues his assault on sanity:

[T]here are different definitions of human rights in different parts of the world.
We look at the lack of press freedoms, the restrictions on child-bearing and the lack of an independent legal system as outrageous examples of an authoritarian government that doesn't cherish the individual.
They look at our lack of universal health care, our soaring unemployment and the lack of a cradle-to-grave government-sponsored safety net as human rights violations.

I think I see a pattern here. Mr. Kravitz has apparently been drinking the Kool-Aid. He didn’t blame the 9-11 attack on the CIA or repeat the canards “Bush Lied, People Died” and “No Blood for Oil” but he may as well have.

Let's Celebrate Earth Day with NRO

Iain Murray has posted a piece on National Review on-line just for festivities today. It is another critique of Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth," but makes some novel points, especially regarding Mr. Gore's honesty. After reading this piece would be a good time to take another look at the reviews of Al Gore's movie written after its opening, noting the uncritical praise, admiration and hyperbole of virtually the entire MSM.

Gorey Truths
25 inconvenient truths for Al Gore.

By Iain Murray

With An Inconvenient Truth, the companion book to former Vice President Al Gore’s global-warming movie, currently number nine in Amazon sales rank, this is a good time to point out that the book, which is a largely pictorial representation of the movie’s graphical presentation, exaggerates the evidence surrounding global warming. Ironically, the former Vice President leaves out many truths that are inconvenient for his argument. Here are just 25 of them.

Read the entire article here.