The National Rifle Association has learned a powerful lesson. That lesson is that they are not the all powerful group they thought they were whose members jump at their mere request. Whether or not they will retain this lesson for use in the future however? That will remain to be seen.
In recent months the NRA has made no secret their overt desire to endorse Senator Harry Reid in Nevada’s Senate race. Claiming to be a “single issue” group that only cares about the second amendment, they touted Reid’s record on gun rights as justification for this potential endorsement. What they were not ready for however was the backlash from their members who had quite a different opinion of Senator Reid.
What the NRA learned is that vast swaths of their membership were not single issue voters. They learned that their members were lovers of the whole Constitution. And as word of the potential endorsement spread the pushback was becoming obvious and even threatened the organization’s ability to raise money. The NRA will, of course, deny this. They will say that they were having no problem at all getting funds to flow to their coffers. But the fact of the matter is that long time supporters of the gun right’s group who regularly dropped checks in the mail every time the NRA sent a fund raising letter were tossing these requests in the garbage. Members were also calling, writing and emailing the NRA in numbers that I have been told shocked those at the top.
Two weeks ago I wrote an article which was humorously titled, “The NRA, Poop Creek And A Missing Paddle.” But the subject matter was no laughing matter as I laid out the current position of the NRA and their plans for a Reid Endorsement. What I learned by writing that article is that what I thought was common knowledge came as a shock to many.
I was accused by some of having a political axe to grind against the NRA, even of being a member of one of several gun rights organizations, and was further accused in many emails of lying about the NRA having had glowing reviews of Mr. Reid. A simple search of the world wide web however debunks any such accusations. The vast majority of responses however were outright surprise. So many people wrote me telling me how they were going to be watching the NRA to see if they would go through with their not so veiled threats to endorse Reid over Angle.
Well, there is good news to report. The NRA has backed off. We Tea Partiers demanded it and they blinked.
This news broke late last week and it was a result of phones ringing off the hook and inboxes being filled to the brim with American patriots giving the National Rifle Association a piece of their minds.
You have got to be freaking kidding me. Mr. I Was The Nation’s Number One Illegal Alien Amnesty Champion Before I Was Against It/Mr. Call Me Maaaaaverick Except When I Need The Right To Get Re-elected is attacking his erstwhile friends in the “Eastern press” for creating the impression that he is a desperate political opportunist clinging to entrenched incumbency.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Monday blamed the “Eastern press” for planting the idea he has changed his positions on key issues in recent months.
McCain dismissed the notion that he has tacked to the right on matters such as immigration and climate change in order to beat back a primary challenge from former Rep. J.D. Hayworth.
Asked by Politics Daily about comments his close friend and colleague Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) made about his move away from edgy past positions because “John’s got a primary. He’s got to focus on getting reelected,” McCain responded, “Lindsey knows that I don’t change in my positions.
“I have not changed in my positions. I know how popular it is for the Eastern press to paint me as having changed positions,” he said. “That’s not true. I know they’re going to continue to say it. It’s fundamentally false. Not only am I sure that they’ll say it, you’ll say it. You’ll write it. And I’ve just grown to accept that.”
Straight talk from my non-Eastern blog about McCain’s motion sickness-inducing, election-year lurches on immigration and climate change speaks for itself:
His latest McLame-est excuse for supporting TARP? He was “misled.” Via the Arizona Republic:
Under growing pressure from conservatives and “tea party” activists, Sen. John McCain of Arizona is having to defend his record of supporting the government’s massive bailout of the financial system.
In response to criticism from opponents seeking to defeat him in the Aug. 24 Republican primary, the four-term senator says he was misled by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
A couple of days ago, President Obama said that he’d take a dip in the Gulf of Mexico to prove to America that the water in the Gulf was safe for swimming in the wake of the oil leak. He also said that there would be no press allowed in the area for his swim because the last time he took his shirt off with reporters around he ended up on a magazine cover that now doubles as wallpaper in Chris Matthews’ dressing room.
But maybe the White House didn’t want any press photographers around because the wrong angle would give away the fact that Obama wasn’t in the Gulf at all.
If Glenn Beck said he swam in the Gulf but was actually in the Bay, it would be splashed all over Media Matters by now. A good portion of the media didn’t care to do as much geographic parsing as they no doubt would have if they were writing about Bush:
Reuters: Obama swims in Gulf, says beaches open for business
AFP: Obama, daughter swim in Gulf in act of reassurance
The president’s dip happened away from the media. The White House released an official photo, but The Associated Press does not publish such handout images. According to the White House, the Obamas swam off Alligator Point, which is in Saint Andrew Bay, not the Gulf.
Swimming in the Bay instead of the Gulf was actually a wise move, because at the same time Obama was swimming in the Bay to prove it was safe to swim in the Gulf, eight miles away, a man who was swimming in the actual Gulf drowned.
Naturally, TOTUS 1 and TOTUS 2 accompanied the president to Florida in order to let Americans know that the Gulf is open for scripted rhetoric:
As often as I can, I watch Fox News’s 6 p.m program, and my favorite part of that program is the contributions of Charles Krauthammer.
Charles normally dissects an issue with precision and accuracy. But not today, on August 5. He posed the issue whether a congressman was right to say we need to amend the 14th Amendment to deal with the problem of anchor babies. Krauthammer made the mistake of not reading the Amendment before discussing it. So did all the other participants in the discussion.
Krauthammer correctly stated that “we should not amend the Constitution to deal with such a small problem.” He missed the opportunity to point out that the congressman, like much of the American press and punditry, are asking the wrong question and therefore getting the wrong answer.
Let’s read the document, and see where that leads. The first sentence of the 14th Amendment says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States….” Who gets to say who are “subject to the jurisdiction”?
Skip to the last sentence of the Amendment. It is a clause that appears in many of the Amendments. “The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
There you have it, in the plain language of the Constitution itself. Congress can define by statute who is “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. It has long since done so with regard to children born to diplomatic personnel. A child born of Japanese diplomatic personal who is born in a D.C. hospital is Japanese at birth, not American. Why is that so? Because Congress wrote a law that says so.
Congress can solve the anchor baby problem immediately by a statute. It simply has to say that a child born of a Mexican citizen who has paid a ”coyote” to get smuggled into the U.S., and risked death in the deserts of the Southwest to get to an Arizona hospital is not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. It can further resolve the problem by ending all preferences for all known relatives of a prior anchor baby to come into the U.S.
Families don’t need to be “united” in the U.S. They will be just as united back in Mexico, or any other nation from which pregnant women engage in “citizenship tourism.”
Those who favor open borders, where anyone who can sneak into the U.S. is entitled to all privileges of Americans, favor the anchor baby route to make this so. After all, it’s for the children. And they add, we shouldn’t mess with the Constitution.
But the Constitution is in no danger, and both mothers and babies will be in less danger, if Congress simply writes a law to deal with the problem. And the 14th Amendment gives Congress that very power.
The British press is naturally outraged that Shimon Peres dared suggest that the British political establishment was pro-Arab and anti-Israel, and that MP’s cowardly courted Muslim votes first. Peres has already been forced to apologize for his understatement. And an understatement it is, coming in the same week when British PM David Cameron visited Turkey, a Muslim country that has over 10,000 political prisoners, and continues to occupy Cyprus– yet his only mention of human rights was to condemn Israel for defending itself against a Turkish provocation.
So first let’s look at what Peres actually said, because everyone in the British press from the Daily Mail to the Telegraph, are paraphrasing what he said, rather quoting or than linking to the original interview.
Peres: Our next big problem is England. There are several million Muslim voters. And for many members of parliament, that’s the difference between getting elected and not getting elected. And in England there has always been something deeply pro-Arab, of course, not among all Englishmen, and anti-Israeli, in the establishment. They abstained in the [pro-Zionist] 1947 U.N. Partition Resolution, despite [issuing the pro-Zionist] Balfour Declaration [in 1917]. They maintained an arms embargo against us [in the 1950s]; they had a defense treaty with Jordan; they always worked against us.
Morris: But England changed after the 1940s and 1950s. They supported us in 1967, there was Harold Brown and Mrs. Thatcher [who were pro-Israeli].
Peres: There is also support for Israel today [on the British right].
There’s more to it, but aside from Peres’ quip about anti-semitism, this is the significant part. Yet there’s absolutely nothing here that can be factually denied. MP’s do cater to Muslim voters, even at the expense of Englishmen. If the British political establishment sells out its own people for Muslim favor, is it any surprise that it does the same to Israel?
The same British press that constantly bashes Israel has predictably tried to spin this as the President of Israel attacking England, as opposed to the England’s political establishment. What Peres actually said, is that England panders to Muslims because of a large Muslim population, and that it has a history of opposing Israel. Again, both are unarguably true, and Peres’ statements are a mild version of the story.
For a much stronger quote on the topic, we can go back to the first US Ambassador to Israel, back to 1948.
“Facing (Ernest) Bevin across the broad table, I had to tell myself that this was not Hitler seated before me, but His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs… By this time he was in full swing and turned his attack upon the Jews. What extraordinary demagoguery! Banging his fist on the table, at times almost shouting, he charged that the Jews were ungrateful for what Britain had done for them in Palestine…”
From the Diary of James G. McDonald, My Mission to Israel, Page 25
Mind you, this is an American diplomat comparing the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to Adolf Hitler… in 1948.
Most people think of the news media differently than the participants in it think of themselves. While most people think that the job of newspapers, news radio stations and television newscasts is to report on events, those on the other end of the wire, the printing press and the cable, think that their job is not to report, but to advocate.
The high cost of producing a widely read newspaper, a television station or a radio station, has traditionally limited ownership and injected the owner’s biases into the outlet. But the rise of a professional media class in America has made the owner’s views almost redundant, in the same way that unions have ensured that every business they work for will be used to serve the interests of the Democratic party. While some reporters may still report, overwhelmingly the members of the professional media class do not report, they advocate.
That is why the rise of the internet has only accelerated media bias, as advocacy journalists are less worried about owners and working for a single outlet, and instead focus on maintaining political solidarity with their professional colleagues. A journalist no longer thinks in terms of working for the same newspaper for 20 or 30 years. He knows that by then there probably won’t even be any newspapers. A month from now he’ll be in a different outlet. Two months from that, he might be printed in three others, one of them a media blog. Three months from now he may be doing video blogs for Time Magazine. The unstable nature of the market means that the journalist is less concerned with the owners, and much more with his professional standing with the colleagues who will hire him or recommend him for jobs. And today professional standing means political reliability, just as it did in the Soviet Union.
Jornolist is only one of the more public revelations about that private political solidarity, which these days determines the content of the news we are allowed to read. That boys and girls media club serves as an unofficial union in an unstable marketplace that is bounded not by accomplishment or educational credentials, but by pulling together for a common political cause. Whether it was plotting to bring down Bush or raise up Obama, to push nationalization of health care or internationalization of national security– that unofficial fraternity and sorority of advocacy journalists has turned media bias into their reason for being. They have turned into the definition of what a journalist should be.
The difference between a reporter and an advocate, is that the former reports on events, while the latter uses events as props in his message. Where a reporter tries to learn what happened, the advocate tries to understand how he can use that event in his narrative. The advocate has less in common with the reporter, than he does with an ad executive.
I’ve been flagging the MSM newspaper bailout campaign for the last two years (chronology recap here). The clamor for big government to rescue old media has not died now.
The latest? Columbia University president Lee Bollinger doing the Chicken Little routine in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Really:
We have entered a momentous period in the history of the American press. The invention of new communications technologies—especially the Internet—is transforming the human capacity to speak, perhaps as monumentally as the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. This is facilitating the largest and fastest expansion of global economic growth in human history. Free speech and a free press are essential to a dynamic economy.
At the same time, however, the financial viability of the U.S. press has been shaken to its core. The proliferation of communications outlets has fractured the base of advertising and readers. Newsrooms have shrunk dramatically and foreign bureaus have been decimated. My best estimate is that there are presently only a few dozen full-time foreign correspondents from the U.S. covering all of China, despite the critical importance of that nation to our future.
Both the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission are undertaking studies of ways to ensure the steep economic decline faced by newspapers and broadcast news does not deprive Americans of the essential information they need as citizens. One idea under consideration is enhanced public funding for journalism.
Bollinger goes on to assert that “trusting the market alone to provide all the news coverage we need would mean venturing into the unknown—a risky proposition with a vital public institution hanging in the balance.” As if life without NPR and PBS would be catastrophic.
Newsalert responds: ” Lee Bollinger makes over a million dollars a year and is a director of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. If Lee Bollinger and his wealthy friends wants to fund investigative research : there’s nothing stopping them.”
As I wrote back in December 2008 in opposition to newspaper moochers:
How “free” can a “free press” be if it is leveraged with government funding? How free would they be to criticize other corporate enterprises seeking local, state, or federal help to keep them afloat in hard times? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? A press beholden to the ruling class – a press that cannot stand on its own two feet and the strength of its products — is a press better off dead.
Does anyone recall the first weeks of Barack Obama’s presidency? He was everywhere on the media all the time.
His constant use of TelePrompters became an instant joke, suggesting he could not say anything unless it was scripted. Indeed, listening to him try to speak without them is a painful process of a very slow selection of words and very long pauses in between.
After his first press conference he stopped holding them until 309 days later when he addressed the oil spill in the Gulf. It was such a lame performance that his advisors apparently thought a speech from the Oval Office, his first, would make up for that. It didn’t.
In this age of 24/7 news coverage, Barack Obama has managed to make himself ubiquitous to the point of complete inanity.
So, I have a bit of advice for him: Shut up, Barack.
The seas have not ceased to rise because you were elected (as promised) and the Earth has not “healed itself.” Indeed, it is bleeding oil at a prodigious rate, confounding BP’s engineers, all graduates no doubt of the Acme School of Oil Drilling.
What have we learned about Barack Hussein Obama? If George W. Bush was considered an amiable dunce, Obama has demonstrated to everyone he is the worst kind of ideologue, totally tone deaf to the Voice of the People.
When nearly a million Americans showed up in Washington, D.C. on September 12th last year to protest Obamacare, his communications advisor, David Axelrod dismissed them saying, “They’re wrong.”
Axelrod was on all the network and cable news shows the day following his Oval Office appearance defending a speech that essentially said we don’t know what we’re doing, but we blame BP. The good news is that the president has finally found someone else to blame other than George W. Bush for his own ineptitude and incompetence.
In case you haven’t noticed, Obama’s approval ratings in the polls are in the low 40s and heading south. There is a hard core of about 30% who support Obama no matter what he does or doesn’t do.
In an article by the Editor-in-Chief of CNSnews, Terence P. Jeffrey, he noted that “The middle class is abandoning President Barack Obama, according to data released by the Gallup Poll. The only income bracket among which a majority still says they approve of the job he is doing as president are those earning $2,000 per month or less.”
Anyone still making a living comparable to achieving the American Dream has long since abandoned the great Community Organizer with the exception of union members. When you lose the middle class, you have lost the great engine of the American economy.
With the exception of the growing legion of government workers, the unions had been losing members for years. They were held in generally low esteem and their destruction of General Motors and Chrysler bears out their parasitic relationship with business and industry. Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s support from teacher’s unions suggests why our educational system has been in the toilet for decades.
Every time Obama opens his mouth, his approval falls.
“This is punishable by prison. This is a felony.” – Rep. Darrell Issa
Joe Sestak
29 May 2010: Due to the recent equivocations from the Obama White House and the apparent unwillingness by the mainstream media to investigate this matter, the majority of Americans are unaware of the seriousness of the Obama administration’s alleged actions involving Joseph Sestak. If proven, the reported actions of the Obama administration are clear violations of three federal laws[i]. The impact and fallout from documented violations, as well as the refusal of the Holder Justice Department to appoint a Special Counsel to investigate this matter, have the potential to eclipse the Watergate scandal of the early 1970’s – it is that serious.
The crime
In an attempt to retain as much political control over Congress during the 2010 midterm elections, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel dispatched William Clinton and lawyer Doug Band to meet with senatorial candidate Joseph Sestak who was running against Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania. In exchange for dropping out of the race, Sestak was offered a position with the administration. It was reasoned that should Sestak accept, Specter would be unopposed in the primary and have a much better chance of retaining his senatorial seat. The meetings reportedly took place in June and July of last year.
Based on open source reports stemming back to February, it is apparent that Sestak had no idea that such overtures are illegal as he readily admitted the meeting and job offer in a February 18, 2010 interview with Philadelphia TV newscaster Larry Kane (documented here).
The overture made to Joseph Sestak is not the first time the Obama administration attempted to alter this year’s Senate races by promising employment to opponents posing serious challenges to Obama allies. It is, however, garnering the most attention. The first known incident involves Andrew Romanoff, a Democratic challenger from Colorado running against Senator Michael Bennet. The Obama administration offered Romanoff a position in the administration if he canceled plans to run for the Democratic nomination against incumbent Senator Bennet as detailed in this Denver Post article dated September 27, 2009. As in all cases involving possible criminal activity, such documented multiple instances show a continuing course of conduct and intent.
The cover-up
Recalling the days of Watergate, it is important to understand that it was obstruction of justice charges that ultimately brought down the Nixon administration. Obstruction of justice can take on different forms, including but not limited to obfuscations, equivocations, denials, as well as lack of cooperation with investigative bodies. So far, the White House has failed to cooperate or provide any specific answers to questions posed by lawmakers. The Holder Justice Department has also declined to investigate.
The Timeline
June/July 2009: White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel dispatched William Clinton and lawyer Doug Band to meet with senatorial candidate Joseph Sestak who was running against Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania.
I have plied the magic arts of public relations since I left journalism in the late 1960s. There was no difficulty making the transition. PR is a form of journalism insofar as it packages information, but it adds the element of advocacy. The objective is the maintenance and protection of a good reputation and good will.
By contrast, the media’s natural instinct is to go for the kill. Bad news sells and there is always plenty of bad news.
I built my PR practice telling clients that they must tell the truth. The worst kind of PR person is the one who is so eager to “spin” the story they forget that telling lies always, always, always comes back to bite them and their client.
I tell you this as someone who has watched the BP oil spill story unfold with the same fascination that a reticulated python has for a prey that is about to become dinner.
The irony is that BP, taking a page from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, avoided its mistakes. BP went out of its way to be as open to questions and to provide as much information as it thought it reasonably could. I have no doubt that BP lawyers immediately advised its management to keep its mouth shut, say as little as possible.
Lawyers always advise clients to say nothing. PR people always advise them to get out in front of the public as quickly as possible with a statement, followed by an endless series of advisories.
No one has said a word about the fact that no oil company has ever had to cap a deepwater well at such depths. Just consider how many ways BP has tried thus far.
I have a friend who, after graduation from West Point and service, spent fifty years in the oil industry. He began as a petroleum reservoir engineer and later as an oil and gas attorney.
In a discussion of the event with him, he said, “No one yet has noted that BP drilled into a monstrous oil and gas reservoir; a reservoir which could replace much of our imported foreign oil. Such a well dwarfs the best Saudi wells.”
That’s a major part of the story and that is why the oil spill is so large.
There appears to be enough oil out there under the Gulf of Mexico to free the United States from having to import 60% of the oil it uses, but only if the federal government lets oil companies drill for it. This applies to all our oil reserves, on-shore and off.
When it comes to bad PR, there is seldom anything worse than the photos of oil-drenched birds struggling for life. Here, though, is the other side of the story that is rarely reported by the mainstream press, so hats off to the St. Petersburg Times PoliFact.com.
“The latest independent reports estimate the number of birds killed by wind turbines at 100,000 per year.
The National Rifle Association has learned a powerful lesson. That lesson is that they are not the all powerful group they thought they were whose members jump at their mere request. Whether or not they will retain this lesson for use in the future however? That will remain to be seen. 
In recent months the NRA has made no secret their overt desire to endorse Senator Harry Reid in Nevada’s Senate race. Claiming to be a “single issue” group that only cares about the second amendment, they touted Reid’s record on gun rights as justification for this potential endorsement. What they were not ready for however was the backlash from their members who had quite a different opinion of Senator Reid. 
Two weeks ago I wrote an article which was humorously titled, “The NRA, Poop Creek And A Missing Paddle.” But the subject matter was no laughing matter as I laid out the current position of the NRA and their plans for a Reid Endorsement. What I learned by writing that article is that what I thought was common knowledge came as a shock to many. 
You have got to be freaking kidding me. Mr. I Was The Nation’s 
A couple of days ago, President Obama said that he’d take a dip in the Gulf of Mexico to prove to America that the water in the Gulf was safe for swimming in the wake of the oil leak. He also said that there would be no press allowed in the area for his swim because the last time he took his shirt off with reporters around he ended up on a 
Charles normally dissects an issue with precision and accuracy. But not today, on August 5. He posed the issue whether a congressman was right to say we need to amend the 14th Amendment to deal with the problem of anchor babies. Krauthammer made the mistake of not reading the Amendment before discussing it. So did all the other participants in the discussion. 
Congress can solve the anchor baby problem immediately by a statute. It simply has to say that a child born of a Mexican citizen who has paid a ”coyote” to get smuggled into the U.S., and risked death in the deserts of the Southwest to get to an Arizona hospital is not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. It can further resolve the problem by ending all preferences for all known relatives of a prior anchor baby to come into the U.S. 
The high cost of producing a widely read newspaper, a television station or a radio station, has traditionally limited ownership and injected the owner’s biases into the outlet. But the rise of a professional media class in America has made the owner’s views almost redundant, in the same way that unions have ensured that every business they work for will be used to serve the interests of the Democratic party. While some reporters may still report, overwhelmingly the members of the professional media class do not report, they advocate. 
Does anyone recall the first weeks of Barack Obama’s presidency? He was everywhere on the media all the time. 
I have plied the magic arts of public relations since I left journalism in the late 1960s. There was no difficulty making the transition. PR is a form of journalism insofar as it packages information, but it adds the element of advocacy. The objective is the maintenance and protection of a good reputation and good will. 
