Public supported National Public Radio (NPR) posted a report on March 17 during its “All Things Considered” radio show that warns its listeners that “patriot groups” are dangerous and are apparently increasingly prone to attacking government officials and facilities. Oddly the two examples it uses to prove its case have no ties whatsoever to any “patriot groups.”

Headlined, “Hostility Against Federal Workers Troubles Officials,” NPR blames “patriot groups” on these attacks and worries that “anti-government hate groups” are on the “upsurge.” And what does NPR use to prove its case? Nothing but the say so of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center and a misconstruction of two recent attacks on government facilities by disturbed individuals.

NPR ominously begins its report with this:

Three attacks on U.S. government employees this year, along with an upsurge in anti-government hate groups, have officials in Washington concerned about the safety of federal workers.

The piece goes on to report that this sort of violence is a “troubling trend” and lays it all at the feet of “patriot and militia groups.”

NPR then tries to prove its case by discussing the two most recent sensational attackers on government facilities; Joe Stack and John Patrick Bedell.

Joe Stack, a disturbed man who crashed his small plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas back in February, was not known to have any ties to any tea party group, any “patriot” group, or other right-wing groups. His manifesto reads like a confused communist rant with hate for the U.S. government and George W. Bush liberally sprinkled throughout. But NPR lumps this nut in with the right with claims that they are all dangerous to government officials and facilities.

NPR similarly uses as proof of these dangerous patriots the disturbed actions of John Patrick Bedell who opened fire on officers near the Pentagon on March 4. Bedell was an anti-war protestor, heavy marijuana user, and exhibited paranoia for which he refused to seek medical help. Bedell also has no known ties to tea party groups, any political organizations, or NPR’s frightening “patriot groups.”

Yet NPR put forth both of these sick-minded men as examples of “patriots” that have become dangerous and unstable. If NPR wasn’t saying so why include them in this report?

Naturally for its “expert” on dangerous patriots NPR turns to Mark Potok, the director of the liberal Southern Poverty Law Center. As always, Potok cites claims of a “huge growth in the so-called patriot movement that includes militias out there.” Not that NPR offers any actual proof other than Potok’s say so, of course.

“We’ve seen in particular a huge growth in the so-called patriot movement that includes militias out there,” Potok says. “And I think that some of the violence that we’ve seen, such as the Pentagon shooter and the IRS, are at least in some way a reflection of that rage.”

Potok says there are now more than 500 patriot and militia groups active in the U.S., more than triple the number in 2008.

Again, NPR trots out Potok to warn of those evil, evil right-wing patriots and tries to back his claims up with two crazy people that have no ties at all to those same right-wing patriot groups that are being blamed for this “upsurge” in violence.

What NPR doesn’t tell you is the sort of people that work wt. the SPLC. Chip Berlet, for instance, is one of those people. Berlet has all sorts of extremist, left-wing associates (like anti-American billionaire financier George Soros) and is a member of other far left organizations such as the Socialist Workers Party. Here is an entry on Berlet in discoverthenetwork.org nestled in a page about the left-wing Tides Foundation:

Berlet is a senior analyst for Political Research Associates, and has had affiliations with the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Friends Service Committee, the Christic Institute, the Socialist Workers Party, the National Lawyers Guild, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

To show how unbiased SLPC’s Chip Berlet is, he once wrote that, “right-wing foundations and think tanks support efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable.” Not too biased there, eh?

Discoverthenetwork.org also has a page on the SPLC itself.

So, for its expert on those monstrous patriot groups, NPR turns to a group that has ties to the Socialist Workers Party, George Soros, and the anti-Christian ACLU and then expects us to think such an organization should be accepted as an unbiased news source! Apparently NPR does expect us all to accept as gospel its left-biased report on how dangerous those “patriots” are, but I hope America is more skeptical than that.

Remember folks, our tax dollars support NPR.

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Brooke Fox of Seattle’s MOVIN, 92.5 FM radio show “The Ladies Room” wants to know who would be worth risking jail just so you could punch them out. Such violence. Of course, the question is what would have happened if a conservative radio show host had made this Twitter post?

On her Twitter feed on February 17, Miss Fox asked the question “Fill in the blank ‘I would be willing to go to jail for the opportunity to punch out ____!’” The next day she answered the question by posting a few names of celebs she apparently wouldn’t mind punching out. That list included Zach Efron, Ann Coulter, Kanye West, Octomom, Kate Gosselin, and John Mayer.

I guess it’s OK when a liberal radio talker wants to commit violence on people they don’t like. But the whole of the media establishment would have raised up in righteous indignation if a conservative yacker had made such an idiotic Twitter post. Should it have been a conservative, that radio host would have been on every TV and in every newspaper in the country and would likely have been suspended or even fired. He’d have been said to be pushing a “hate crime.”

But our Miss Fox is a left-winger, so she gets a pass. For her the Old Media is silent. Just more of the double standard the Old Media employs.

CLICK HERE to see image of Twitter feed

(H/T www.orbusmax.com)

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Now every Sunday at 6:00 pm PT hosts Babe Huggett and Warner Todd Huston discuss and examine current political events, put them in historical context and follow trends to their logical conclusions through a conservative, Christian viewpoint. Scheduled guests will enjoy their own feature interview segment. Phone in comments from listeners always welcome!

On Tonight’s Episode of Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Conservatism

Date / Time: 1/03/2010
6:00 PM Pacific/8:00 PM Central/9:00 PM Eastern

Category: Politics Conservative

Call-in Number: (347) 237-4040

Our featured alpha and omega guest of the Twelve Days of Christmas, Selwyn Duke, will help us finish up the 2009 Christmas Season with a look at the meaning of January 6th as the Epiphany, as Twelfth Night and what he thinks the year ahead will hold for us with the wise guys in Washington, DC.

Or CLICK HERE for the show website.

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“I think I’ve got it—the hate in America and where it’s coming from. Rush Limbaugh’s effort—aborted by his fellow investors, it seems—to buy the St. Louis Rams has given me the insight…

So the hate: I think people have a natural instinct to want to declaim, to inveigh, denounce, opine, and show-off to great rhetorical effect. It’s as natural as dreaming of playing major league baseball (it is, speech for speech’s sake, like baseball, a man’s thing). People (men) just want to hear themselves talk….

And the people who do it well, the only people who do it with any formality and structure, are conservatives. The art of this—the formal discipline of rhetoric taught in classrooms for generations—has fallen out of fashion in our era. Except, that is, on right-wing radio and on Fox News. It is the mesmerizing thing about all of these conservatives, not just the bile, but the cadence.. conservatives practice old-fashioned big-breath talking, long oom pa pa flights of castigation and censure and reproach and excoriation and threat and blame and denunciation in which meaning takes a back seat to verbal skill and style….

Losing out on the pure joy of owning an NFL team—as close as you get to being a true potentate in America—Rush may be facing a level of personal disappointment that few of us can truly appreciate, but he’s not weeping. Instead he’s blissfully self-dramatizing, channeling his pain into a great rhythmic flow which blocks out the sound of anybody else.

This, I think, is the root of hate speech: The conservatives talkers have shown many fragile people how to use rhetorical effect—repetitions, rising and falling pitch, tempo, structured breathing, metonymy, synecdoche, and a variety of tried-and-true tropes (“our country over 200 years old now”), combined with passionate enmity —to achieve a little place in the sun….

Source

The writer above is Michael Wolff, a journalist. He is a former columnist for New York magazine and currently is the media columnist for Vanity Fair magazine as well as a television commentator on CNBC. As such he appears pretty eloquent. I guess that makes him a practitioner of hate speech too. He clearly hates Rush. From his argument above, it would seem that his hatred of Rush has quite deranged him. I wonder has he realized that his criticism of Rush would apply equally well to Obama!

The source of some of the the libels against Rush has now been tentatively identified. It is a super-”correct” NYC law firm — Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP — with far-Left connections and which has been a big donor to Obama. It has a specialty in sports-related matters. Lying is apparently part of that specialty. Being truthful is not part of “correctness”, it would seem. Let’s hope Rush takes them on in the courts.

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, DISSECTING LEFTISM, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . List of backup or “mirror” sites here or here — for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is “down” or failing to update. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

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Glenn Beck’s sobbing secrets revealed: A little Vicks Vaporub gets the tears flowing

(A video of Beck dabbing on Vicks Vapor Rub) This was too funny to pass up. We’ve known all along that Glenn Beck is a two-bit phony. Now we see how Glenn Beck gets himself properly weepy for the cameras: A little Vicks Vaporub.

The whole scene reminds us that Beck practices his schtick over and over before he performs. Which means he’s gotten real good at working up those tears and choking up to say, “I love my country — but I fear for it!”

Did C&L, and the rest of the unhinged, actually think Beck was going out and getting weepy and crying for real? What part of “entertainer” do they not get? Oh, sorry, forgot. They forget the entire concept. Which is why people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’reilly, and Glenn Beck are pretty much well known and their ratings are doing well, while folks like Keith Olbermann, Rachael Maddow and…..well, they are pretty much the only left side biggies, and their ratings are barely there. Remember Air America? Even in their heydays, they still were barely generating ratings, and couldn’t generate ad revenue.

There are also others on the right, such as Neal Boortz, Mark Levin, and Laura Ingraham. All doing quite well, thank you very much. Even Mark Savage (who I cannot stand,) does very well, because he mixes entertainment in with his anger. The left has Ed Schultz, …….. well, that is it, and he is barely making it. OK, Alan Colmes, who I do find interesting, but, not very entertaining, and does marginally well on radio.

Pandagon: Great Caesar’s Ghost—everything about this on-air tool is a lie…so does this mean that Vicks Vapo-Rub will get product placement or endorsement on Beck’s show?

Again, it is entertainment. Rush admits it. Most right side talkers will say the same. They understand that the audience must be entertained to keep them interested and coming back. What do these liberal nincompoops think actors do, cry for real? Right side talkers discuss more than just politics, and laugh quite a bit. Even Savage, as angry as he gets, laughs, while left siders start ranting and raving and getting angry. Boortz gets cranky, then laughs about it, and reads some silly news. Laura does silly sound effects. Rush is constantly laughing. And well he should, because his ratings generate excellent ad revenue. Air America had to be propped up like the NEA.

The left will never learn the lesson that radio and TV punditry must be entertaining to fully succeed. They should listen to the Brad And Britt Show from Burlington, NC. Entertaining. Slightly liberal. Successful. But, they aren’t angry enough for the left to push for nationwide exposure to create a fail situation.

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Supposed conservative talk show host, Michael Smerconish, let President Obama lie repeatedly in last week’s celebrated one-on-one interview. Obama laid his lies right out there and Smerconish didn’t say a word. But the talk radio host isn’t the only one to sit back and let this president get away with it. In fact, not a single soul has confronted President Obama on these out right lies that he’s made a staple of his snake-oil sales pitch for heatlhcare “reform.”

Early in the interview, Smerconish asked Obama about the fear many Americans have that deep down he really wants a single payer, socialist healthcare system, a government takeover of our healthcare. Here was the president’s reply.

Now, as far as health care goes, I’ve consistently said I would love the private marketplace to be handling this without any government intervention. The problem is it’s not working. What we’re seeing is about 14,000 folks lose their health insurance every single day. We are seeing health care inflation go up about twice as fast as regular inflation. Businesses are being crippled by it. Small businesses especially have almost no access to the marketplace because they’ve got no leverage with insurance companies.

So all we’ve said is let’s keep the private system intact, but let’s make sure that people who right now can’t get health insurance — about 46 million — that they’re able to buy into the market. And number two, let’s have some consumer protections to make sure that those of us who have health insurance don’t end up getting a bad deal because we didn’t read the fine print and we think that we have coverage; when we finally get sick and we need it, it turns out that we’re vulnerable because insurance companies aren’t operating in the interests of their customers.

Actually, the president lied several times here.

Let’s start with the first line. Obama claimed he’s “consistently said” that he wants the private marketplace to handle America’s healthcare. This is an outright lie. What he has said is that he wants to eliminate that marketplace. He also said that he does, indeed, want a single payer plan and that he expected to have one up and running at the end of his first term.

In fact, here he is, in his own words, telling audiences that he wants to eliminate private healthcare plans.

Yet, Smerconish allowed him to say that he’s “consistently said” that he wants the private sector to do a good job with healthcare? It’s just a flat out lie.

Then there is the other lie that Obama has made a constant talking point.

let’s make sure that people who right now can’t get health insurance — about 46 million — that they’re able to buy into the market.

There is no 46 million Americans that are somehow barred from buying healthcare insurance. It is a flat out lie and it is one he’s “consistently said” over and over again. It is also one that the Old Media has consistently allowed him to spout without ever challenging him.

The truth is that large numbers of these uninsured are only temporarily uninsured while they change jobs. Also, 20 percent are uninsured by choice — young people who don’t want to pay insurance for healthcare they won’t use, for instance — and another 25 percent are eligible for current government programs but just haven’t bothered to enroll for whatever reason, whether ignorance of the programs or simple disinterest in them. On top of that are the millions of illegal aliens that government lumps into this number and it is easy to see that this so-called 46 million uninsured is a very misleading figure, indeed.

Yet, Obama uses this liar’s statistic nearly every time he hawks his government takeover of healthcare and I have yet to hear him challenged on this demonstrably false statistic.

So, why do they let this president get away with it? Why do they never confront him over his obvious lies? I wish I could say.

(Cross posted at HealthcareHorseRace.com.)

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Mark Lloyd, newly appointed Chief Diversity Officer of the Federal Communications Commission, has called for making private broadcasting companies pay licensing fees equal to their total operating costs to allow public broadcasting outlets to spend the same on their operations as the private companies do.

Private companies need to make profits. Therefore they will carry programming people want to hear: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, etc. In addition to economically breaking the kneecaps of these companies, Lloyd wants to funnel their money into public broadcasting, which is financed coercively and therefore couldn’t care less what people want to hear.

Like all liberal bureaucrats, Lloyd is as authoritarian as he is greedy:

“Federal and regional broadcast operations and local stations should be funded at levels commensurate with or above those spending levels at which commercial operations are funded,” Lloyd wrote. “This funding should come from license fees charged to commercial broadcasters. Funding should not come from congressional appropriations. Sponsorship should be prohibited at all public broadcasters.”

Along with this money, Lloyd would regulate much of the programming on these stations to make sure they focused on “diverse views” and government activities.

“Diverse views” refers to the entire spectrum from left-wing propaganda to more left-wing propaganda. How many El Rushbos has NPR produced?

In addition to “diversity,” tyrannical bureaucrats will also use “localism” to stifle speech that undermines their rule.

“Local public broadcasters and regional and national communications operations should be required to encourage and broadcast diverse views and programs,” wrote Lloyd. “These programs should include coverage of all local, state and federal government meetings, as well as daily news and public issues programming.”

Don’t live in South Florida? Then Rush isn’t local. You get to listen to the local water board meeting instead.

Lloyd also believes in diversity of ownership, which would mean denying broadcast licenses to Caucasians based on their race.

Once we allow government to become massively too large, it’s only a matter of time before the wrong people get behind the wheel and steer our republic over the cliff into totalitarianism. This is happening before our eyes.

On tips from Puffdaddy and AmericanToTheCore. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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A group of minority broadcasters asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner Monday for financial assistance akin to the aid that has been extended to the financial and auto industries. …

The broadcasters appeal follows a proposal sent in May to Mr. Geithner by a group of influential House members asking for a minority broadcaster support program, bridge funding, or government-backed loans.

The House letter was signed by House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D., S.C.) and a group of key committee chairmen, including Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D., Mass.) Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D., N.Y.) and Oversight Committee Chairman Edolphus Towns, (D., N.Y.).

We’re used to the government stealing our money and using it to play favorites in what was once a free market. But here’s the ominous part:

Research from the Internet advocacy group Free Press says minorities own just 7.7% of full power commercial radio stations and 3.2% of full power commercial TV stations.

Minority broadcast ownership also is an issue important to Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Michael Copps, who was acting chairman of the agency earlier this year.

Look for radio stations to be licensed on a racial basis in the future. Equal representation based on race would be as absurd in media ownership as it would be in the NBA. But then, equality won’t be good enough, because some animals are more equal than others — namely those who have been “historically underrepresented.” It’s all part of our new “post-racial politics.”

On a tip from nancz. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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How do you think conservative talk radio has affected the Legislature’s work?
The Republicans were essentially threatened and terrorized against voting for revenue. Now [some] are facing recalls. They operate under a terrorist threat: “You vote for revenue and your career is over.” I don’t know why we allow that kind of terrorism to exist. I guess it’s about free speech, but it’s extremely unfair.

Ed Morrissey:

Maybe Bass should embed with our forces in Iraq or Afghanistan to get a sense of what terrorism really means. On second thought, the men and women on the front lines have it bad enough.
And while we’re looking at that exchange, what happened to Patt Morrison, the LA Times reporter? Did Morrison not feel that answer worthy of a follow-up — like, “Are you seriously equating dissent with terrorism?” Or better yet, “Have you lost your mind?” Morrison appears more interested in promoting Bass than actually conducting an interview.
Beware the politicians who consider dissent terrorism. They’re either idiotic beyond belief, or tyrants waiting for an opportunity. Bass might just be both.

Van Helsing:

Normally, Democrats take the side of terrorists, righteously defending them from those who would subject them to oppression. But terrorism doesn’t always find favor with our current rulers. For example, expressing the view that our taxes are high enough without being sent even further through the stratosphere is a form of terrorism fiercely condemned by California Assembly Speaker Karen Bass.

After the pesky First Amendment has followed the Tenth into the trashcan, the Department of Homeland Security will devote itself to dealing firmly with this terrorist threat. When the airwaves are rid of terrorists pleading for tax relief, it can move on to the Internet.

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