Daily Archives: February 13, 2012

Economy, Europe, Politics

Today’s Special, Daniel Hannan At CPAC

Listen to the advice from someone who has been there. Where ‘there’ is the place where President Obama is taking this country. This video shows what this writer, and I’m not alone on this point, was saying about the Obama administration two years ago.

Essentially, they are heading the country southbound in the northbound lane. And instead of advising him to turn around, they’re telling him to speed up. And before too long, this great country will be in the same shape as Greece, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, and the rest of them.

Hon. Daniel Hannan, Member of European Parliament

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U6v0pZ9f6k

2012 Election, Politics, Venezuela

Capriles To Run Against Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez

State governor Henrique Capriles won Venezuela’s first-ever opposition presidential primary Sunday by a wide margin with 62% of the vote. 30 percentage points ahead of Zulia state Gov. Pablo Perez. Venezuela’s election is October 7, 2012.

“He’s going to be the candidate who can get us out of this giant hole we’re stuck in,” said Carmen Gloria Padilla, a 66-year-old telephone company employee who voted for him.

Some of Capriles’ supporters said they think he has a good chance of winning over Venezuelans who otherwise might lean pro-Chavez because he campaigned on issues instead of personal attacks, promising solutions to problems including a 26% inflation rate and one of the highest murder rates in Latin America.

Chavez remains a hero to many of his supporters and ‘maintains a visceral connection’ to a significant segment of the poor in Venezuela. To woo the suffering poor, Chavez is campaigning on increasing government spending on new social programs that offer cash benefits for the poor, public housing, and transportation infrastructure.

Where have I heard this before? The vacuous socialist political Left, otherwise referred to as the Obama administration.

Link: Venezuela’s opposition chooses youthful governor to challenge Chavez in presidential election

Middle East, United Nations, War On Terror

al-Qaida Wants Syria Next

al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahri called on Muslims to support Syrian rebels. Good work on that Arab Spring thing President Obama. Syria on one side, Egypt on the other, and Israel the ‘monkey in the middle.’ Only in reverse.

Now, after weeks of slaughtering their own people, the United Nations (aka Useless Nations) and the Arab League call for a peacekeeping force. One small problem with that. There first has to be peace to keep. And right now Syrian President Bashar Assad has his tanks in the cities shooting his citizens.

As an aside, have you noticed the citizens throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the military who are shooting bullets. Know why that is? The people are not allowed to have guns. Only the military and police may have guns. Syrians, same as in Egypt, are not allowed to own guns. I bet they wish they had the right to keep and bear arms. They sure could use it.

Today Sen. Leiberman and others are calling for the administration to support the Syrian ‘rebels’ covertly and overtly with weapons so they can not only defend themselves, but can have some chance of overthrowing the Assad regime.

That’s an interesting proposal. But how about thinking that one through. Do you want al-Qaida or the Muslim Brotherhood in charge of Syria?

That’s what happened in Egypt. You can’t deal with Syria effectively enough without including Iran, the puppet master of terror in the Middle East. And not without coming out publicly to explain the end game of who or what will be in charge after Assad.

But that takes leadership.

Link: In complicating move, al-Qaeda backs Syrian revolt

Media, Politics

Liberal Groupthink And Media Matters

A look from the inside of Media Matters. Where the media hatchet jobs come from, and what the stenographic mainstream media and the Obama administration does with it. Simply put, if you are not part of the liberal community, and you are an effective communicator, you become the target of Media Matters.

Never willing or able to counter the political Right on the issues, they do it the Chicago way. Eliminate the competition in any other way possible.

This is the first in a Daily Caller investigative series on Media Matters For America, a George Soros funded media company, and its founder David Brock.

Some nuggets in this issue . . .

  1. Media Matters has to a great extent achieved its central goal of influencing the national media. Founded by Brock in 2004 as a liberal counterweight to “conservative misinformation” in the press, Media Matters has in less than a decade become a powerful player in Democratic politics.
  2. The group’s effect on many news organizations has already been profound. “We were pretty much writing their prime time,” a former Media Matters employee said of the cable channel MSNBC. “But then virtually all the mainstream media was using our stuff.”
  3. The group scored its first significant public coup in 2007 with the firing of host Don Imus from MSNBC. Then came Lou Dobbs at CNN.
  4. It was Media Matters that orchestrated much of the opposition to Beck. “We called it ‘fingerprint coverage,’” explains one former staffer, “where you know it was the result of your work.” As an example, he cites the left-wing group Color of Change, co-founded by the controversial former White House “green jobs” czar Van Jones, which received much of the credit for pressuring advertisers to drop their sponsorship of Beck’s show. But in fact, he says, Media Matters developed the campaign that cowed Beck’s sponsors.
  5. Stories about Fox News were especially well received by MSNBC anchors and executives: “If we published something about Fox in the morning, they’d have it on the air that night verbatim.”
  6. Reporters who weren’t cooperative might feel the sting of a Media Matters campaign against them. “If you hit a reporter, say a beat reporter at a regional newspaper,” a Media Matters source said, “all of a sudden they’d get a thousand hostile emails. Sometimes they’d melt down. It had a real effect on reporters who weren’t used to that kind of scrutiny.”
  7. Media Matters has been in regular contact with political operatives in the Obama administration. They also began a weekly strategy call with the White House, which continues, joined by the liberal Center for American Progress think tank. Jen Psaki, Obama’s deputy communications director, was a frequent participant before she left for the private sector in October 2011.
  8. Eric Burns, then president of Media Matters, had focused much of its considerable energy on the Fox News Channel.  Fox, he said, “is a political organization, and their aim is to destroy a progressive policy agenda.”  Less than a month later, in language that could have been copied directly from a Media Matters press release, White House communications director Anita Dunn leveled almost precisely the same charge, dismissing Fox as “more a wing of the Republican Party.”

There is plenty more on this story, right HERE.