DRUDGE NOT, LEST YE BE DRUDGED

Drudge Not, Lest Ye Be Drudged

By Jerry A. Kane

Since the South Carolina primary, the Drudge Report has become a campaign surrogate for Mitt Romney, carpet bombing Newt Gingrich with negative banners, stories, and commentaries, while downplaying or omitting news and opinions that would put Romney in a bad light.

“Cherry-picked quotes, biased headlines and hyperlinks to Newt-hating op-eds in order to patch together an ugly and distorted mosaic of the former House speaker is … mercenary-style political prostitution.”—Matt Barber, blogger

Barber further contends that the “respected, highly influential news source has cast aside all journalistic integrity to shill for the liberal, GOP establishment candidate in this presidential race.”

The Drudge Report has officially jumped the shark; it’s an anti-Gingrich scandal sheet run by former Washington Times neoconservative warriors, Joe Curl and Charles Hurt.

For days Drudge trumpeted Romney’s “Gingrich was anti-Reagan” narrative while ignoring accounts of those with different recollections:

Bently Elliott, Reagan Speechwriting Director,

Peter Ferrara, Reagan Policy Analyst

Art Laffer, Reagan Economist,

Jeffrey Lord, Reagan WH political director,

Bud McFarlane, Reagan National Security Advisor,

Richard Quinn, Reagan media consultant,

Michael Reagan, Reagan’s son, and

Nancy Reagan, Reagan’s wife.

Peter Robinson, Reagan speechwriter,

When Gingrich rose from the ashes in December, it was the National Review that quelled the pain for establishment Republicans. And with his rebirth in South Carolina, the Republican establishment summoned the Drudge Report to prove its bona fides as a reliable party organ.

It’s hard to say how many venerable personalities and news sources will be forced to drop their conservative masks before the primary process ends, and Romney is declared the party nominee. But what can be said is that magnitude of the crisis will continue to increase for establishment Republicans as long as Gingrich remains a viable threat to the Romney candidacy.

Whatever you gonna do

Please do it fast

I’m still tryin’ to get used to

Seein’ the real you at last

Ohh yes I am

THE DRUDGE WAR ON NEWT

The Drudge War on Newt

From Mark America

I’d like you to take a look at DrudgeReport.  There is an all-out war on Newt Gingrich, not merely by the left-wing media, but particularly on the right side of the political divide.  Drudge has run as many as nine negative articles about Gingrich simultaneously, but he is running few negative articles about Romney, and those he does run are only half-negative, so it’s becoming clear that Drudge is trying to manipulate the outcome in the direction of a result he prefers.  I surely hope conservatives realize that nobody in media is pure, because everybody has biases.  In the case of Drudge, his “developing” take-down story in the middle of last week over the ABC News Marianne Gingrich interview story was his first attempt to ruin Gingrich’s momentum.  When within hours, that attempt failed, making it clear nobody would buy the “big smear” story. Instead, Drudge backed off and began his “death by one-thousand cuts” strategy, and this is what you are now witnessing.

Drudge has learned the lesson well over his years as the prime link aggregation site on the Internet, and indeed, it could be said the term was invented to describe his page.  The problem with Drudge, and it has always been his problem, is that he editorializes in the way he places links to stories in order to manipulate his audience.  His all-out war on Gingrich is a perfect example.  He doesn’t need to write one negative word himself.  He merely decides which stories, where they are placed, and how long they will endure in that position on his page.  A week ago, on Thursday morning, you should have noticed if you visited his site that he was still pushing the Marianne Gingrich story despite the fact that it had already been debunked, and that story persisted as the lead on his page until Thursday night’s debate.  Ordinarily, top stories are not that long-lived on Drudge, but in the case of Gingrich, they go on and on and on.

It’s also the urgency he conveys to his audience.  As I pointed out during last week’s disgraceful episode, when the Gingrich daughters responded to the trash flooding the Drudge site in red letters accompanied by his flashing light symbol, I asked whether he would now treat the antithesis involving the Newt daughters with similar urgency.  Predictably, as was my point, he did not.  This unwillingness to give equal coverage of the debunking of a story indicates a bias, and while I’m accustomed to that coming from most media sources, to see it so openly on Drudge is a bit of a gut-punch.

It’s clear that this is a strategy to take down Newt, and whether he’s coordinating with others, or simply acting out his own political preferences is impossible to determine.  Thursday morning, he continues to run a story by Elliot Abrams from back in the 1980s when Newt was critical of Reagan’s State Department, primarily, but what Drudge fails to mention is that Abrams was the assistant Secretary of State who was under criticism by Gingrich at the time.  On the article itself, you need to flip to page two to learn this by reading the biographical note about Abrams if you didn’t already know it. Most people don’t, and most people don’t make it to page two.  Abrams is also a Council on Foreign Relations player, in case you didn’t know.

What all of this makes clear to me is what I’ve long suspected:  Drudge is part of the GOP’s establishment now.  I’ve had questions about some of the stories he’s placed on his site for years, but he’s the eight-hundred pound Internet gorilla, and there’s little a small voice can say about it.  Some of you will rightly note that he couldn’t run stories that don’t exist, but I will respond that he already has.  That was the meaning of the entire sad episode of last week with the ABC NEws/Marianne Gingrich story: There was no news there, but his placement and pushing of the theme made it a story.  Whether you prefer Gingrich, or any of the others, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that Drudge is definitely displaying his bias, whatever the motive.  This is why I have a fundamental distrust of big media, left or right, and it’s also why you shouldn’t be a headlines surfer.  Headlines are frequently misleading, and until you know the guts of a story, it’s best not to form conclusions, because it is too easy to be misled.  We’re all news consumers, but as with any other outlet, be it the “mainstream media” or Drudge, or even this site, you are best always to bear in mind that well-worn but too frequently unobserved phrase: Caveat emptor.

OBAMA LIES, OMISSIONS, AND MISSTATEMENTS IN STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS

Misstatement #1

Obama:  “Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule. Asking a billionare to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes, most Americans would call that common sense.”

Fact:  Buffett’s secretary doesn’t pay $7 million, which is what Buffett paid in 2010. Also, Obama doesn’t mention that Buffett’s income had already been taxed at the corporate level. When his capital gains and corporate taxes are combined, the real effective tax rate is closer to 45%, which is much higher than his secretary’s 35.8% rate.

The nation’s top 1% of earners earns 16% of all income, but they pay 37% of all federal income taxes. 

BTW:  According to Forbes, Warren Buffett’s Secretary Likely Makes Between $200,000 And $500,000/Year. Nice work if you can get it.

I.M. Kane

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Obama’s MIS-State-MENTS of the Union 2:11 Video

INSIDER TRADING IS CHRONIC ON CAPITOL HILL

“Let’s assume for a second Brook that you’re a United States Senator. If I come into your office and I give you a shoe box with $10,000 of cold hard cash in it, and I hand it to you, that’s bribery. If we get caught, both of us are going to jail.

But if I come in to your office and instead say, “Look, I’m going to give you access to preferred IPO shares (Initial Public Offering shares) of stock, and if you buy these it’s going to net you $100,000 in a single day, that’s completely legal, and it goes on quite regularly.”—Peter Schweizer

I.M. Kane

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CNN Rediscovers Congressional Insider Trading Scandal After Obama’s Call For Ban 3:26 Video

WHY OBAMANOMICS WILL FAIL

Why Obamanomics Will Fail

By Jerry A. Kane

Obamanomics is a Marxist-based redistributionist economic philosophy that sees the federal government playing the role of the great equalizer, i.e., “tax the rich, feed the poor til there are no rich no more.”

“We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number … barely get by. Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”—Obama, State of the Union Address January 24, 2012

Obama seems to be saying that it is the duty of the federal government to even the playing field and force people to contribute to society to the best their ability and consume from society in proportion their needs, or as Marx coined, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Obama’s State of the Union brings to mind the story of the economics professor who claimed that he had never failed a single student, but he had failed an entire class once because it had insisted that Obamanomics would work if given the chance.

So the professor decided he would do an experiment with the class on Obamanomics. “All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade, so no one will fail, and no one will receive an A,” said the professor. (To attach the students with the consequences, the professor substituted grades for money.)

After the first test, the grades were averaged and all the students received a B. The students who studied hard were upset, but those who studied little or not at all were happy. When the second test rolled around, the students who had studied little studied even less, and those who had studied hard decided that they would take the free ride and studied little.

The average of the second test was a D, and no one was happy. After the third test, the average was an F. With each ensuing test, the class average decreased, but the bickering, blame, and name-calling among the students increased; and no one was willing to study for the benefit of anyone else.

When their final grades were posted, they all failed.

“If you look into the sources of poverty, you will find that most of them are derived from … wrong-headed government policies.”—Milton Friedman

In his final lecture, the professor pointed out that Obamanomics would also ultimately fail because when the reward for success is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when incentive is replaced by a handout, success goes with it. It’s that simple, the virtue of selfishness Ayn Rand called it.

“The world runs on individuals pursing their self-interest. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaucrats. … there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.”—Milton Friedman

In a nutshell the professor’s experiment proved that:

1. You can’t make the poor rich by making the rich poor.
2. For one person to get something for nothing, another person must work for nothing.
3. The government cannot give anything to anybody unless it first takes it from somebody else.
4. Wealth can’t be multiplied by dividing it.
5. When half of the people believe that they do not have to work because the other half will provide for them, the providers will eventually lose all desire to work, and that becomes the death knell for any nation.

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”—Author unknown

After flunking the 2008 midterm, Americans must pass the final this November or else the whole country fails.

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Milton Friedman: Why soaking the rich won’t work. 4:06 Video

 

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 Milton Friedman – Greed 2:24 Video

A WELCOMED DISTRACTION FOR MITT ROMNEY

A Welcomed Distraction for Mitt Romney

By Scott Ryan

Barack Obama is expected to pounce on Mitt Romney’s 14% tax rate during his State of the Union speech Tuesday night. In a Marketwatch column focusing on this topic, a discouraged Romney supporter named Michael commented that “Romney can’t get a break…”

Michael and Romney supporters like him have nothing to worry about because this expected attack by Obama is exactly what Romney -WANTS. We are in the midst of a GOP PRIMARY. If this were a general election, Mitt perhaps wouldn’t want this attack -BUT- right now it is a welcomed diversion.

A direct attack in a State of the Union speech would be an honor for Romney. It would give him special attention as though he is now recognized by Obama himself as his November opponent. Romney would HOPE this could serve as a “rallying cry” to get impressionable GOP voters to inadvertently participate in the charade.

Romney also needs a new media driven narrative to take the attention of GOP voters -AWAY- from his mortifying track record as a Governor and senatorial candidate.

Distracting the voters is what he has done for the past several months. At this point nobody wants to talk about Bain Capital yet he keeps trying to milk the non-issue for all he can. Here in Florida he continues running ads talking about the other candidates “attacking capitalism…” But he’s the only one talking about it. It’s a tactic similar to what you will see in this football video:

What you see here is a football player using theatrics to draw a penalty. After the whistle blows and the play is over, a defensive player of the Cleveland Browns, being provoked, ever so slightly pushes an offensive player (number 89 of the Cincinnati Bengals) and #89 throws himself backwards several feet, lands on his back and then does a back roll…

That’s similar to what Romney did with Newt when Newt made some comments about specific failed companies in which Bain invested. Mitt Romney runs on supposedly great business acumen. So for Newt to point out some examples where Romney failed, it is not by default an attack on the capitalist system. Romney, who has no political track record upon which to run (because it is all too embarrassing) seized upon an opportunity to create polarization. He then circumvented discussion of his political history.

This tax rate “controversy” will likely serve as the next version of the aforementioned strategy. Regardless of which GOP candidate you may support, most of us can agree it is ridiculous to contend that 14% isn’t ENOUGH to give these con artists in Washington. The answer isn’t that Mitt should pay MORE to the prodigals in Washington but rather EVERYONE ELSE should pay the same low rate as Mitt.

I can foresee the moderate Murdoch media going on a 24 hour a day campaign featuring Romney as a victim and subliminally manipulating viewers into joining the rally to Mitt’s defense… That’s the way they operate. They did it ad nauseum with the Bain non-issue turned controversy – and you can count on this being their next desperate campaign strategy.

I’ve maintained that Romney is Obama’s “dream opponent” because Romney would inoculate Obama on his most vulnerable weaknesses, having recently maintained the same positions as Obama when he was last in government.

If the Administration really makes an issue of this tax return, that is further confirmation that they are throwing Mitt’s campaign a bone with which to run.

SOUTH CAROLINA PRIMARY WAS MORE THAN A KNEE-JERK REACTION

In a recent commentary Thomas Sowell correctly argues that the message sent by South Carolinians was more than a knee-jerk reaction to Gingrich fearlessly confronting the media or his masterful debating skills.

The fundamental message is that South Carolina primary voters do not want Mitt Romney, even if the Republican establishment does. Although the GOP establishment has hyped Romney’s “electability,” a majority of primary voters remain unconvinced.

As Sowell points out, “If the bland and inoffensive moderate was in fact the key to victory, Dewey would have won a landslide victory over Truman in 1948, and John McCain would have beaten Barack Obama in 2008.”

Whoever wins the Republican nomination will have to run against both Barack Obama and the Democrat Party media. And Gingrich has shown that he can do just that.

“He has a depth of understanding of what issues are crucial, experience in how to deal with them and — almost equally important — experience in how to shoot down the petty, irrelevant and “gotcha” distractions of the media.”

Conversely, Romney’s indecisiveness “is not going to cut it in a nationally televised debate with President Obama.”

“When the Super Bowl is on the line, you don’t go with the quarterback who is least likely to throw an interception. You go with the one most likely to throw a touchdown pass.”

In other words, you go on offense and play to win.

I.M. Kane

To read the rest of Sowell’s commentary, see South Carolina message.

CLIPS FROM THE OCTOBER 1994 ROMNEY/KENNEDY DEBATE

The Real Romney? 5:05 Video

AMERICAN K-12 TEXTBOOKS PUSH MUSLIM AGENDA

American K-12 Textbooks Push Muslim Agenda

By Jerry A. Kane

According to the report “The Trouble with Textbooks: Distorting History and Religion” by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, American high school and elementary school textbooks contain countless inaccuracies such as Jesus was a “Palestinian,” the state of Israel never existed, and Muslims discovered America before Columbus.

The government in Saudi Arabia has been pouring millions of dollars into American high school and elementary school textbooks to proselytize disinformation about Christianity, Judaism, and the Middle East.

The Institute examined 28 of the most widely-used history, geography, and social studies textbooks in America and found at least 500 errors:

One book credited a “young Palestinian” named Jesus with founding Christianity.

Another book stated that ancient Jewish civilization contributed “very little” to the arts and sciences.

And another one claimed that God revealed the Koran to Mohammed.

The report claims that these textbooks are used by millions of schoolchildren in K-12 classrooms in all 50 states.

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities – but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith.—Winston Churchill, from his 1899 book The River War

I.M. Kane

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 US Textbooks: Muslims Discovered America 5:54 Video

 

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 The Trouble with Textbooks: Distorting History and Religion 4:37 Video

 

PRESS DRIPPINGS XI

After filing for bankruptcy last year, workers for the Fremont solar company Solyndra have been caught throwing millions of dollars of brand new glass tubes used in solar panels into dumpsters. Solyndra paid at least $2 million for the specialized glass, and the company still owes taxpayers half a billion dollars.

So why is a bankrupt company that owes a fortune to creditors, including American taxpayers, throwing away millions of dollars worth of assets?

Solyndra is not commenting.

While the press focuses on the tale of a disgruntled, vindictive ex-wife, the ongoing exploits of crony capitalism and the Obama administration continue.

For more on the story, see Bankrupt Solyndra Caught Destroying Brand New Parts and Solyndra Destroying Millions of Dollars in Parts, TV Station Reports.

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The Massachusetts Department of Mental Health (DMH) is trying to force a 32-year-old woman who suffers from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder to have an abortion.

Court records show that the woman had a psychotic breakdown after a previous abortion. She believed that people were staring at her and were saying that she had killed her baby. The woman also gave birth to a son after the abortion. The boy is in the custody of her parents.

Despite the apparent link between the previous abortion and the woman’s mental illness, Norfolk Probate and Family Court Judge Christina L. Harms agreed with DMH and ordered the woman undergo both an abortion and forced sterilization.

However, an appellate court overruled the forced sterilization and set aside Harm’s ruling on the abortion for an evidentiary inquiry by another court to determine whether or not the woman would have wanted an abortion if she were mentally competent.

For more on the story, see State Department of Health defends seeking forced abortion for mentally ill woman.

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Led by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), House Democrats John Conyers Jr. (Mich.), Bob Filner (Calif.), Marcia Fudge (Ohio), Jim Langevin (R.I.), and Lynn Woolsey (Calif.) want to set up a “Reasonable Profits Board” to impose a “windfall profit tax” from 50 percent to 100 percent on all surplus earnings of oil and gas exceeding “a reasonable profit.”

The proposed Gas Price Spike Act, H.R. 3784, provides no specific guidance for how the board would determine what constitutes a reasonable profit and would exclude industry representatives from serving on the board.

[P]eople helped Wesley Mouch to advance, for the same reason as that which had prompted Uncle Julius: they were people who believed that mediocrity was safe. The men who now sat in front of his desk had been taught that the law of causality was a superstition and that one had to deal with the situation of the moment without considering its cause. By the situation of the moment, they had concluded that Wesley Mouch was a man of superlative skill and cunning, since millions aspired to power, but he was the one who had achieved it.

For more on the story, see Dems propose ‘Reasonable Profits Board’ to regulate oil company profits.

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The Obama administration has ordered health plans to provide birth control without charging co-pays or deductibles. Religious-affiliated hospitals and universities must comply with the mandate by August 1, 2013.

“This ruling forces religious organizations to violate the fundamental tenets of their faith, or stop offering health insurance coverage to their employees.”

God might not be a Republican, but Satan is definitely a Democrat.

For more on the story, see Health plans ordered to cover birth control without co-pays.

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