Tuesday, April 03, 2012
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Mike Huckabee Fights Back
Scrapping with Glenn Beck and the Club for Growth back to back isn’t the smartest way to bolster one’s conservative credentials during primary season, but that’s exactly what Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee did this week.
The FOX News host went after the anti-spending group Club for Growth on his Tuesday radio show. Huckabee said he was defending potential GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, who earned the Club’s ire for supporting universal health care in the late 90s, and more recently, for bashing free trade. But moments into his radio segment, it was clear that Huckabee was out to settle a score.
“According to that group, I’m also a tax-loving socialist. During the 2008 election they cherry-picked some factoids out of context from the deals I had to make from a ninety percent Democratic Arkansas legislature,” Huckabee said on his show. “Under their criteria the things that Ronald Reagan had to do as governor and as president probably would have made him a tax-loving socialist unfit for the White House as well.”
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Glenn Beck bites NPR sting video
Guess who’s raising serious ethical questions about conservative James O’Keefe’s sting video that shook up NPR’s management? Right-wing icon and self-described "rodeo clown" Glenn Beck.
Yes, Glenn Beck.
Beck’s website The Blaze, of all places, examined O'Keefe's unedited video of NPR executives caught in the sting and found grossly misleading edits.
As video editor and producer Pam Key at the Blaze reveals:
- Schiller’s liberal-ness has been greatly exaggerated. His controversial description of the tea party movement as “xenophobic…seriously racist people” turns out in the raw video to be quoting an unnamed Republican ambassador, not himself as he appears to be in the edited version.- the video actually undermines news accounts that NPR executives thought they were meeting with representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood.
- The impression that Schiller thinks liberals are more educated than conservatives also is undermined in video that O’Keefe omitted. Video Schiller turns out to be reluctant to criticize the education of conservatives and another NPR executive, Betsy Liley, aggressively defends the intelligence of Fox News viewers, despite goading from the impersonators.
- Schiller’s anti-Republican sentiments captured on the edited video leave out the raw video of him speaking favorably about the GOP, his own Republican heritage and his belief in fiscal conservatism.
- Schiller goes in to greater persuasive detail of how In the raw video, however, Schiller explains the risk to local stations in more detail and why NPR is doing “everything we can to advocate for federal funding.”
- After saying the public radio network would be better off "in the long run” without federal funding, Schiller's unedited remarks say more about how smaller NPR member stations, particularly in rural areas, probably would “go dark” to NPR without federal help.
That, by the way, raises a point that does not get enough attention, in my view: the value of government support for public radio and TV that supports our shared, common American culture.
That includes NPR's value in covering overseas news and other important news beats that commercial broadcasters might rather overlook in their pursuit of Charlie Sheen and Lady Ga Ga.
Since I usually am appalled by Glenn Beck’s avoidance of facts that might get in the way of a good paranoid rant, I happily salute The Blaze for its diligent pursuit of truth,accuracy and fair play, at least in this instance. I'm not alone. The Blaze is drawing praise from such unlikely sites as the Columbia Journalism Review.
Now, I wonder, will Beck on his Fox News show demand that O'Keefe appear for a live interview to explain himself? I’ll be waiting.
Glenn Beck On Fogel Family Massacre
This report by Glenn Beck on the the Palestinians’ massacre of a Jewish family on the West Bank gets it right — and he is the only major media figure who has. The silence of the rest of the media is a tribute to the success of the Islamic jihad in America in preventing the truth about Islamic Nazism from being told lest teller be accused of Islamophobia. Regarding the rest of the press, Mark Steyn as usual has written the last word: ”Dead Jews Is No News”:
On Friday night, twelve-year old Tamar Fogel came home to find both her parents, Ruth and Udi Fogel, two brothers Yoav (11) and Elad (four), and her three-month old sister Hadas murdered in their beds. They had had their throats cut and been stabbed through the heart.
That’s not shocking: There is no shortage of young Muslim men who would enjoy slitting the throat of a three-month old baby, and then head home dreaming of the town square or soccer tournament to be named in their honor.
Back in Gaza, the citizenry celebrated the news by cheering and passing out sweets.
That’s not shocking, either: In the broader Palestinian death cult, there are untold legions who, while disinclined to murder Jews themselves, are content to revel in the glorious victory of others.
And out in the wider world there was a marked reluctance to cover the story.
And, if not exactly shocking, that was a useful reminder of how things have changed even in a few years. On 9/11, footage of Palestinians dancing in the streets and handing out candy turned up on the world’s TV screens, and that rancid old queen Arafat immediately went into damage-control mode and hastily arranged for himself to be filmed giving blood. This time round there was no need for damage-control, because there was no damage: The western media simply averted their eyes from their Palestinian house pets’ unfortunate effusions. The Israeli Government released raw footage from the murders, but YouTube yanked the video within two hours. The hip new “social media” are developing almost as exquisitely refined a sense of discretion as the old Social Register.
