I Fought a Liberal, and the Liberal Lost

A liberal gossip-monger and blogger took issue with my handling of last week’s post on the Dolnick family’s nepotism scandal at the New York Times. He claimed that the Dolnicks’ abuse of power and debasement of journalistic ethics had nothing to do with the pernicious sanctimony and moral degeneracy so typical of the liberal elite.

Never one to shy away from a fight, I responded with my own comments to his blog posts on the subject, correcting his erroneous interpretation events as well as his grossly distorted caricature of my views and opinions.

When I beg to differ, I do so vehemently. We engaged in a spirited exchange. Charge and counter-charge ensued, but with my superior command of the facts and evidence I soon bested my foe. You can follow our conversation here.

Washington Post Publisher Issues Mea Culpa

Katharine Weymouth, publisher of the Washington Post, apologized in an open letter to readers for the proposed pay-for-play arrangement with healthcare lobbyists that we reported on last week:

I want to apologize for a planned new venture that went off track and for any cause we may have given you to doubt our independence and integrity. A flier distributed last week suggested that we were selling access to power brokers in Washington through dinners that were to take place at my home.

While Weymouth’s apology is commendable, her contention, later in the open letter, that the plan did not reflect what she “had in mind” and, furthermore, that it did not have her approval seems difficult to believe. Can she possibly be so completely negligent in the administration of her own business that a consultant hired by her specifically to dream up unconventional income-raising techniques would launch such a venture without ever running it past her? And if he did do something so outrageous and manifestly stupid, why hasn’t he yet been fired?

In reality, isn’t Weymouth just apologizing, as the Onion might put it, for having been caught telling the truth–for having made painfully clear what everyone already ought to know about the way influence and power really function in Washington?

Why Doesn’t the Washington Post Just go Ahead and Solicit Bribes on the Front Page?

Mike Allen at Politico reports that the Washington Post has launched a pay-for-play scheme for health care lobbyists seeking favorable treatment in the paper’s pages and access to the Post’s many inside contacts among the Obama cabal. Even ethically challenged Washington lobbyists are revolted:

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to “those powerful few” — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it’s a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”

The offer — which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters — is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

If this is what the Post needs to do to survive, it should do America a favor and die.

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Happy Independence Day, everyone. Happy birthday America!

Ethical Cesspool at NYTimes

86 the Mainstream Media brings to light a story entirely typical of the hypocrisy one has come to expect from the despicable and dishonest New York Times.

Quoting 86 the MSM: “Several blogs we follow have been howling about sleazy behavior at the oh-so-high-brow New York Times Book Review. Lynn Dolnick, a member of the ruling Sulzberger family and a director of the Times corporate board, appears to be receiving more than her share of deference from the supposedly independent editors of the book review. They’ve gone into overdrive promoting a mediocre biography of an art forger by Lynn’s husband Edward Dolnick, even though everyone from The Chicago Tribune to the New Yorker says that another new book on the same subject–totally unmentioned by the Times’ book reviewers–is far better.”

Even in the Book Review section, the Times is an ethical cesspool. What this incident makes clear is that the Times is just a business like any other, run for the benefit of its owners. Regardless of its pretensions to objectivity and cultural distinction, it is nothing more than a corrupt, dishonest, self-dealing relic whose time has come and gone. Luckily, the once mighty Times is now a money-losing disaster of company whose stock is as worthless as its editorial opinions. The internet and the unfiltered voice of the people are finally poised to slay the beast. The day is nigh, and it cannot come a moment too soon.

Gallup Poll Finds More Americans Believe Democrats “Too Liberal”

Gallup reports in a newly published poll that the percentage of Americans who consider the Democratic party “too liberal” is on the rise.

Quoting Gallup: “Most major demographic and attitudinal subgroups show at least a slight uptick since 2008 in perceptions that the Democratic Party is too liberal. The increasing perception of the Democrats as too far left comes as President Obama and the Democrats in Congress have expanded the government’s role in the economy to address the economic problems facing the country. Additionally, the government is working toward major healthcare reform legislation and strengthening environmental regulations.”

One can only hope that this poll shows the winds of change are blowing in the right direction. Remember, as de Tocqueville said, “The American Republic will endure until the politicians realize that they can bribe the people with their own money.”

Polar Bear Expert Ostracized by Global Warmists

From our friend Christopher Booker at Hannity Forums:

According to the world’s leading expert on polar bears, their numbers are higher than they were 30 years ago

Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.

This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN’s major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week’s meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group.

Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.

Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.

He has also observed, however, how the melting of Arctic ice, supposedly threatening the survival of the bears, has rocketed to the top of the warmists’ agenda as their most iconic single cause. The famous photograph of two bears standing forlornly on a melting iceberg was produced thousands of times by Al Gore, the WWF and others as an emblem of how the bears faced extinction – until last year the photographer, Amanda Byrd, revealed that the bears, just off the Alaska coast, were in no danger. Her picture had nothing to do with global warming and was only taken because the wind-sculpted ice they were standing on made such a striking image.

Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week’s meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor’s, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: “it was the position you’ve taken on global warming that brought opposition”.

Dr Taylor was told that his views running “counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful”. His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – was “inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/c…-warmists.html

Well, well, well.

I guess we don’t want to hear the opinions with which we don’t agree, huh?

Seems we don’t need the bill in Congress after all.

Sam Donaldson Wishes Press “More Skeptical” of Obama Agenda

You know the White House press corps has laid down and died when you need liberal Sam to point out their sloppy work. From the roundtable discussion at ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos:

STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, George, I’ve always been struck by how — and it’s not too strong a word, how obsessed the President and White House are, with Fox News.

GEORGE WILL: Well, it’s the discordant note in an otherwise harmonious chorus. That’s why. Look, three love affairs in history, are Abelard and Eloise, Romeo and Juliet and the American media and this President at the moment. But this doesn’t matter over time. Reality will impinge. If his programs work, he’s fine. If it doesn’t work, all of the adulation of journalists in the world won’t matter.

STEPHANOPOLOS: Some studies have found the President has gotten an abnormal amount of coverage had coverage his personal life, personal style, celebrity coverage.

BILL KELLER, NEW YORK TIMES: Well. First of all, he’s a fascinating life story. So, the personal side gets covered. Of course, it’s the first obviously African-American family in the White House. But, you know, don’t confuse attention with love. I mean, here is a new President who has promulgated one, huge, ambitious program after another. So, of course, he gets a lot of big, page-one headlines. But I don’t think, at least up until now, it’s been unskeptical or uncritical. Read our business columnists on his approach to the deficit, his quasi-nationalization of the auto industry. He’s getting examined pretty microscopically.

STEPHANOPOULOS: How is the White House press room doing?

SAM DONALDSON: I think it’s doing okay. I mean, they’re going to come to life as the public gets more skeptical-
[loud laughter, led by Stephanopoulos, from the other panelists]

Sanford and Sin

Clay Waters at TimesWatch.net has an excellent article on the Grey Lady’s double standard in dealing with the Sanford Saga:

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s confession of adultery gives the Times another chance to round up recent (and not so recent) stories of Republican misdeeds and controversies and suggest they spelled doom for the party.

What happened to the live-and-let-live attitude that the Times displayed during the Lewinsky scandal? Gone like the wind.

Waters asks if the shadow of Sanford will continue to darken the GOP’s prospects in the coming election cycle. If the Times has it’s way, it will. But if we keep to our principles: low taxes, fiscal responsibility, faith, and family, we will prevail!