DAILY CALLER
Wave goodbye to the Obama media
by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel
November 5, 2012
Consider Benghazi. An American consulate is destroyed and a US ambassador murdered at a time when the president is boasting at every campaign stop that he has crushed al-Qaida. In an effort not to disrupt this narrative, the White House and the Obama campaign spend weeks claiming the incident was merely a protest over a video, rather than a real terror attack. Then intelligence surfaces showing just the opposite: The killers in Benghazi were no street mob, and Obama knew as much from the beginning.
Imagine if George W. Bush, or even Bill Clinton, had tried something like this during a re-election campaign. The howls from journalists would have been deafening, and unceasing. Instead, Obama has enjoyed every benefit of every doubt from the press every step of the way. Candy Crowley even broke character in the middle of a presidential debate to defend him. From their retirement, former presidents must be looking on in envious bewilderment.
For Obama, treatment like this is standard. Remember his last press conference? On August 20, the president made a rare appearance in the White House briefing room. (Obama has held fewer press conferences even than George W. Bush.) The first question went to Jim Kuhnhenn of the Associated Press. Here’s what Kuhnhenn asked, in full and unedited:
“Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you for being here. You’re no doubt aware of the comments that the Missouri Senate candidate, Republican Todd Akin, made on rape and abortion. I wondered if you think those views represent the views of the Republican Party in general. They’ve been denounced by your own rival and other Republicans. Are they an outlier or are they representative?”
In other words: Just how horrible are your opponents? That’s not a question. That’s an assist.
Most telling of all, nobody in the press corps seemed to find Kuhnhenn’s suck-up remarkable, much less objectionable. Reporters who push Obama for actual answers, meanwhile, find themselves scorned by their peers — as we discovered the hard way when our White House reporter dared ask Obama an unapproved question during a presidential statement in the Rose Garden. Months later, longtime Newsweek correspondent Jonathan Alter confronted us on the street and became apoplectic, literally yelling and shaking and drawing a crowd, over the exchange. His complaint: our reporter was “rude” to Obama.
Yep. Good reporters occasionally are impolite, especially to people in power who refuse to answer legitimate questions about their own policies. We don’t hire for table manners. We hire for persistence and toughness and the ability to spot a story among the fluff. We’re traditional that way. It’s the legacy media that have changed.
Earlier this year, we caught the left-wing nonprofit Media Matters coordinating with the White House to attack news organizations, among them Fox and The Daily Caller. We discovered internal Media Matters memos detailing plans to harass reporters, including at their homes. You’d think some in the media would recognize this for what it was — an attempt by politicians to subvert the press — and express outrage. You’d be mistaken.
Last month we found previously unseen video of then-Senator Barack Obama accusing the U.S. government of racism in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Even before our story appeared, liberal reporters tried to minimize and discredit it. Sam Feist, the Washington bureau chief at CNN, even boasted that his network had had possession of the tape for years, apparently unaware that some might wonder why they had never aired it.
We could go on. The point is that many in the press are every bit as corrupt as conservatives have accused them of being. The good news is, it’s almost over. The broadcast networks, the big daily newspapers, the newsweeklies — they’re done. It’s only a matter of time, and everyone who works there knows it. That may be why so many of them seem tapped out, lazy and enervated, unwilling to stray from the same tired story lines. Some days they seem engaged only on Twitter, where they spend hours preening for one another and sneering at outsiders.
By the next presidential cycle most of these people will be gone. They’ll have moved on to academia or think tanks or Democratic senate campaigns, or wherever aging hacks go when their union contracts finally, inevitably get voided. They’ll be replaced by a vibrant digital marketplace filled with hungry young reporters who care more about breaking stories than maintaining access to some politician or regulator.
All of this was probably inevitable, but it came faster than expected. Through their dishonesty the legacy media hastened their own end. Their moral authority has evaporated. So has their business model. Wave them goodbye on the way out.
Read more: http://goo.gl/RHMrz
BREITBART
Calling All Citizen Journalists
by Breitbart News
November 6, 2012
Are people are excited? Are the polls crowded? Are the lines long? Do you notice any shenanigans?
Send us a tip at our ELECTION TIP LINE (noreply@breitbart.com)
Tell us:
- Where you are, include your neighborhood/city/state.
- Let us know what the environment is like, are people enthusiastic?
- Tell us if you see any funny business.
Read more: http://goo.gl/nVqKg
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| Citizen Journalists: Legacy Media's Days are Numbered! |
NATIONAL REVIEW
Obamanomics Explained
by Alan Reynolds
November 6, 2012
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed (November 2) President Obama wrote that “in the eight years after” Bill Clinton left office, “we followed a different path. Bigger tax cuts for the wealthy we couldn’t afford. . . . The result of this top-down economics? Falling incomes, record deficits, the slowest job growth in half a century, and an economic crisis . . .” Obama had taken up that theme during the first presidential debate, arguing that “The approach that Governor Romney’s talking about is the same sales pitch that was made in 2001 and 2003, and we ended up with . . . the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”
This is a remarkably imaginative theory — albeit one that reveals appalling economic illiteracy. Who else would have imagined that the housing bust and subprime-mortgage crisis were actually caused by cutting the top two tax rates in mid-2003?
In the second debate, Obama repeated that “The last thing we need to do is to go back to the very same policies that got us there” — meaning top marginal tax rates that were slightly reduced, yet still higher than in 1988–92. Instead, he proposed, “for [incomes] above $250,000, we can go back to the tax rates we had when Bill Clinton was president. . . . That’s part of what took us from deficits to surplus. It will be good for our economy and it will be good for job creation.”
This is Obamanomics in a nutshell: Reducing the highest tax rates led to financial crisis, so raising the highest tax rates “will be good for job creation.” Huh? What sort of economics is that? Obama suggests that raising the top two tax rates will turn deficits into surpluses, which would now be good for our economy. Isn’t he the one who used to say huge deficits were a “stimulus”? In reality, of course, raising the top two rates is merely a symbolic gesture of revenge against successful people who often vote the wrong way. It would raise even less revenue (even ignoring its poisonous impact on the economy) than Obamacare hopes to collect from the same over-$250,000 group if they remain foolhardy enough to save and invest.
So, here we are facing a $536 billion tax increase on January 1 — the only “fiscal cliff” that matters — and Obama has been invoking his theory to block any medium-term solution (including the sequestration) that might ever cut federal spending below 23 percent of GDP. Instead, Obama has repeatedly insisted that he will never accept any solution to the looming tax shock that does not raise the top two tax rates. As the Wall Street Journal reports, “Some say a win for the president could spark . . . a selloff in riskier investments such as stocks. That is because . . . President Obama has said he would veto any extension of upper-income tax cuts.”
As strange as Obama’s economic theory is (the idea that lower tax rates cause crises while surpluses stimulate the economy), his perception of the facts also ignores his own Treasury Department. The Obama Treasury estimates that to “reinstate the 36 percent and 39.6 percent tax rates for upper income taxpayers” would raise only $23.1 billion in 2013. That is not even as large as Obamacare’s 3.8 percent surtax on the same “rich” taxpayers’ capital gains, dividends, interest income, and rent. Raising the top two rates offsets barely 4 percent of the tax hikes brought on by the fiscal cliff — scarcely sufficient reason to threaten to veto any bipartisan solution to the remaining $513 billion of looming tax increases.
What about Obama’s plans to raise other tax rates on upper incomes? The Obama Treasury estimates that taxing long-term capital gains at 20 percent “for upper-income taxpayers” (not counting the Obamacare surtax) would raise $5.8 billion in 2013, but lose $5.9 billion in the following two years. That adds up to less than zero. Treasury foolishly expects some small change from raising the dividend tax from 15 percent to 43.4 percent, but the resulting flight from stocks would obviously crash both the market and the economy.
Barack Obama does not understand economics and apparently refuses to listen to those who do.
Read more: http://goo.gl/3tRNa
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