Here, you are urged and encouraged to run your mouths about something important.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Video: Texas Reporter Scolded by Obama

WFAA Television (Dallas, TX) reporter Brad Watson made a trip to Washington, D.C. and was granted an interview with Barack Obama at the White House. Obama's reaction at the end of the interview, which consisted of mildly tough questions, provides some insight into why the liberal media is so loath to challenge Obama at all. Here, Watson only lightly challenges the president but Obama scolds him after the interview was over. Odds are good, he expected that part to be left on the cutting room floor.

Looks like another open-mic moment courtesy of a Dallas reporter who actually had the gall to ask Obama some legitimate questions.

Via The Blaze:

AFL-CIO Union Backing Cop Killer

Mumia Abu-Jamal is on death row for the murder of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981. Abu-Jamal is also revered by Bill Ayers and Van Jones. The former had a photos of the cop killer plastered to his office door and the latter produced a record album that featured Abu-Jamal. Now, the American Federation of Teachers Union (AFT) in California has expressed support for the death row inmate. AFT rolls up under the AFL-CIO but another union - the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) - is disgusted with the AFT and is confronting them.

FOP President Chuck Canterbury has written a scathing letter to AFT. Here is that letter via Big Government:

National-Fraternal-Order-of-Police-letter-to-Weingarten



After reading this, I began thinking about how many of the cops in Wisconsin sided with the protesters. The police and protesters shared a common bond; each belonged to a public sector union. However, this story would seem to indicate the potential for an equally divisive issue. The vast majority of union supporters are planted firmly in the leftwing ideology. A significant percentage of leftists support Mumia Abu-Jamal's release.

This could be both a microcosm and a precursor to much larger problems in the world of the left and unions.

Here is the record album Van Jones's Ella Baker center produced. It is narrated by Abu-Jamal and Van Jones even appears on it.
**CONTENT WARNING**



Read it all.

Al Gore's New Ally: Charles Manson

Right now, somewhere, Al Gore's face is planted firmly in his palm. His Global Warming / Climate Change crusade has been backfiring on him in a major way for some time now. First, there was climategate, then the visual of the Copenhagen summit was one of record snowfall. The world seems to continue experiencing record lows. Then came the divorce with Tipper and a slew of other embarrassing - and inconvenient - truths started to reveal themselves to Al's detriment. It appears that Mr. Gore has a new supporter now.

Via Daily Mail:
Crazed cult leader Charles Manson has broken a 20-year silence in a prison interview coinciding with the 40th anniversary of his conviction for the gruesome Sharon Tate murders - to speak out about global warming.

The infamous killer, who started championing environmental causes from behind bars, bemoaned the 'bad things' being done to environment in a rambling phone interview from his Californian jail cell.

'Everyone’s God and if we don’t wake up to that there’s going to be no weather because our polar caps are melting because we’re doing bad things to the atmosphere.

'If we don’t change that as rapidly as I’m speaking to you now, if we don’t put the green back on the planet and put the trees back that we’ve butchered, if we don’t go to war against the problem...' he added, trailing off.
If a man with a swastika tattooed to his forehead is behind Al Gore, how far behind would Hitler himself be?

This endorsement is destined for the 'endorsement I don't need file.'

Gore continues to go down in flames.

h/t Hot Air

Glenn Beck's Source Attribution Problem

First, an article was posted at the Daily Caller website on April 18th that cited claims by multiple bloggers that Glenn Beck habitually uses videos and materials without giving credit to his sources. One of the people quoted in the article is Andrew Breitbart, who actually admitted that Beck doesn't seem to cite the lesser known sources much. It also goes on to say that Beck has a heavy reliance on material from other sources. That's true but Beck's strength is taking those sources and connecting dots with them.

Via the Daily Caller:
Publisher Andrew Breitbart has seen a number of his stories surface on various Beck media properties over the past few years. While he describes himself as “grateful for the many times he has credited me and my sites,” Breitbart says that “sometimes he also uses other peoples’ work without crediting them, making it appear as though it were his own. But especially since adopting ‘The Truth Has No Agenda’ slogan – and trying to deliberately re-position himself as the pious conscience and judge of many of those he took content from – he has exposed himself to his new motto’s unforgiving standard.”

By any standard, Beck seems unusually reliant on the work of others, and unusually reluctant to credit it. In an interview with TheDC, Roger L. Simon, CEO of Pajamas Media, suggested that Beck has committed the journalistic equivalent of a notorious crime. “It is not a question of just doing it right the majority of the time. It is a question of doing it right always,” Simon said. “Doris Kearns Goodwin is forever a fraud in my estimation because she has been caught plagiarizing once. If you rob a bank once, you still robbed a bank.”

A remarkably large number of conservative writers say they feel robbed. During the March 18 airing of his television program, for example, Beck ran a portion of video created by a Chicago-based blogger who calls himself Rebel Pundit. The blogger, who does not publicly reveal his name, says he was initially pleased to see Beck running his video, which featured left-wing protesters demanding amnesty for illegal immigrants. He was soon shocked, however, to see that Beck’s staff had obscured the watermark logo of his website, RebelPundit.com, from the tape.
Beck responded to this article by mocking the charges (video below). I don't think that was a good way to go about it; these are the people in the trenches who are leading the movement he claims to champion. The people who are wanting to be cited are those that do a lot of hard work and if Beck's staff took a video from a blogger known as Rebel Pundit and scrubbed the guy's website from the video, that's just wrong. If you have a one hour show with 5 hours of material, it can sometimes get dicey. It's hard to cite all of your sources and doing so at every turn can take away from the quality of the broadcast but that reality doesn't apply to scrubbing a website from videos. Such things appear on the screen and do not detract from the broadcast if left alone. It actually takes more work to scrub the logo than to leave it alone.

Here is Beck's response to the piece in the Daily Caller. Note he references the article as appearing on the USA Today blog, which likely picked up the DC article and ran it. Beck comes off looking small here for mocking those who just want credit for their work. In this segment, he's clearly attempting to smear those with a grievance by painting their charges as ridiculous. Note too that he very quickly says his staff didn't 'scrub' any videos. If they scrubbed a website logo from videos submitted by bloggers, Beck may have lied about that. Perhaps that's why he spent such little time talking about that charge.

Via Verum Serum:

Accuracy in Media
American Spectator
American Thinker
Big Government
Big Journalism
Breitbart
Doug Ross
Drudge
Flopping Aces
Fox Nation
Fox News
Free Republic
The Hill
Hope for America
Hot Air
Hot Air Pundit
Instapundit
Jawa Report
Jihad Watch
Mediaite
Michelle Malkin
Naked Emperor News
National Review
New Zeal Blog
NewsBusters
Newsmax
News Real
Pajamas Media
Politico
Powerline
Rasmussen
Red State
Right Wing News
Say Anything
Stop Islamization of America
Verum Serum
Wall Street Journal
Washington Times
Watts Up With That
Web Today
Weekly Standard
World Net Daily

Blog Archive