03/14/17

The End of Taxpayer-funded Public Broadcasting?

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

The liberal media have always had an advantage over conservative media because of their billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies. But now, if the Trump administration has its way with the budget, the liberal media may be reduced significantly in size.

“Public Radio and Television Stations Face New Threat of Budget Cuts” is the headline over a Wall Street Journal article about proposed Trump administration budget cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and public broadcasting. These cuts “are being considered to offset the Trump administration’s proposed increase in defense spending,” the paper said.

Almost $13 billion has been spent by Congress on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) since 1969.

The Heritage Foundation’s “Blueprint for Balance: A Federal Budget for 2017,” proposes the complete elimination of the CPB, saving the taxpayers $445 million in fiscal year 2017. The CPB funds public radio and TV.

Accuracy in Media, the oldest media watchdog group, has long argued for the elimination of taxpayer subsidies for public television and radio. “There was a time when non-commercial public broadcasting may have offered an alternative that people couldn’t find elsewhere,” we pointed out back in 2005. “With the rise of cable television and talk radio, however, U.S. taxpayer underwriting of television and radio is no longer needed. The public should not have to subsidize public broadcasting through tax dollars or tax breaks.”

Since then, many more options have become available, including Internet-streaming television services such as Roku, which enable consumers to bypass cable and satellite TV.

Earlier this year Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) introduced two bills, H.R. 726 and H.R. 727, to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio (NPR). In a statement he declared, “With the national debt nearing a staggering $20 trillion, the government cannot continue to subsidize private organizations that are more than capable of being fully privately-funded. This is not about content, as CPB certainly airs some quality programs; the point is that it is perfectly capable of standing on its own two feet and not on the financial shoulders of the American taxpayers.”

Examples of biased public radio and TV programs are numerous. In his December 16, 2016 AIM Center for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) report, “Ken Burns: Student of History—or Left-Wing Gasbag?,” writer Arne Steinberg documented how PBS documentary creator Ken Burns is “a significant cog in the left-wing propaganda machine,” based on his service to the Democratic Party and opposition to Donald Trump.

The Heritage Foundation’s Hans A. von Spakovsky drew attention to this year’s scheduled participation by PBS vice president Toby Chaudhuri in a “partisan gathering intended to organize political resistance to Donald Trump and Republican legislators.” The anti-Trump event was titled “The Rise Above Conference.” Sponsors included the Southern Poverty Law Center and the ACLU.

Speakers included Dawn Laguens of Planned Parenthood on “Activism 201: Sustaining a Movement,” and Mark Schauer of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee on “The Reality of 2018 and the Hope for 2020.”

Having served as deputy press secretary to Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, Chaudhuri worked with President Obama’s administration on “race-based initiatives and democracy and governance projects around the world for the U.S. State Department.” He also worked for then-Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY).

After word of his participation in the anti-Trump event leaked out, PBS issued a statement saying that Chaudhuri had been notified last year that his employment was ending and that he was due to leave PBS prior to the controversial partisan event. “His participation in this event was not approved by PBS,” it said. “His role as described would be a violation of our commitment to nonpartisanship.”

Chaudhuri had served in the position of Vice President for Strategic Communications and National Partnerships at PBS.

With the new federal budget proposal scheduled for public release on Thursday, one can anticipate that officials at public broadcasting will be putting on their non-partisan faces, in order to avoid proposed cuts. We at AIM have heard this song many times before.

The media will play their familiar roles, as The New York Times is already out with a story about how Trump is proposing to “slash” areas such as public broadcasting, and how poor people will suffer as a result.

Perhaps Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire who underwrites the operations of the Times, can pick up the projected decline in funding for public broadcasting.

The largest stockholder in the paper, Slim’s net worth is $50 billion, according to Forbes. He could easily fill the void of $445 million that would be eliminated in taxpayer subsidies for public TV and radio. Or perhaps another billionaire, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, could write a check.

Then, of course, there’s always George Soros.

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

06/4/16

NPR Corrects Hiroshima Story, Sort Of

By: Roger Aronoff | Accuracy in Media

I was reminded recently of the quote, sometimes attributed to Mark Twain, sometimes to Winston Churchill, that “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” One version of the quote can be traced back to Jonathan Swift in 1710.

National Public Radio (NPR) recently aired a story in which they made an egregious error concerning the number of people killed as a result of the Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown in Japan in 2011. The story was told in the context of President Obama’s apology at Hiroshima for America’s role in ending World War II—a war that the U.S. entered after being bombed by Japan at Pearl Harbor.

The NPR reporter said, “Japan is quite pacifist, as you know, given its experiences with nuclear war and with nuclear energy. It was just five years ago that Fukushima’s power plant melted down, which killed tens of thousands in Japan.”

NPR later added a correction at the end of the transcript of the story on its website, and they removed seven words from the audio. Those seven words were, “which killed tens of thousands in Japan.” But the words are still in the written transcript on the page.

This is their correction:

“[POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: An earlier version of the audio of this story mistakenly referred to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant accident causing ‘tens of thousands’ of deaths. The large death toll was caused by the earthquake and tsunami, not the nuclear accident. The incorrect reference was removed for subsequent airings of the broadcast and on our digital platforms.]”

This story played to millions of people across the globe who were tuned in to NPR. Maybe one one-thousandth of that number, if that, will ever see the correction. And again, those who read the transcript will still see the original mistake.

The point of that error was to provide support for President Obama’s argument that we need to rid the world of nuclear weapons, and that even nuclear power plants pose an unacceptable risk. After all, the U.S. has been the only nation to use atomic bombs, when we dropped them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The Oliver Stone view of the world is that it was unnecessary, and that Japan would have surrendered anyway because they feared a Soviet invasion. Yet it was widely believed by military and diplomatic experts at that time—and, I would argue, to this day—that it saved hundreds of thousands, maybe even a million Americans, who would have otherwise died invading Japan in order to force them to surrender.

Claudia Rosett wrote a column about President Obama’s recent speech at Hiroshima, and the message he sent. Since he never said the words, “I apologize,” most media stories highlighted the angle that there was no actual apology. But the weight and the meaning of his full speech was in and of itself an apology.

“What’s missing from Obama’s ‘logic’ is the reality that mankind—no matter what Obama says at Hiroshima—is unlikely to un-invent nuclear weapons,” writes Rosett. “The practical question is how to minimize the chances that they will be used, and the main question for an American president should be how to ensure they are not used against the U.S. and its allies. It matters whether it is Britain that has the bomb, or North Korea.”

But President Obama doesn’t want responsible nations to have nuclear weapons. He argues that all nations should shed “the logic of fear” and get rid of their nuclear arsenals. “How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause,” said President Obama in his speech.

How easily, too, NPR justifies a throwaway correction for what is a major factual error.

NPR needs to figure out a better way to correct a story. They should have announced the correction on the air, and made the change within the transcript, with an asterisk—rather than count on the very few people who might read the correction at the very end of the transcript—in order to fulfill their journalistic obligation.

Some news reports do speculate that there will eventually be deaths of people who will get cancer as a result of Fukushima. That may be true. But as Accuracy in Mediareported with regard to the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union, those reports are likely to be greatly exaggerated.

NPR got their shot in. The lie traveled halfway around the world, but the correction sits as a little noticed blurb at the end. The correction should have included the fact that there were no known deaths as a result of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown.

Roger Aronoff

Roger Aronoff is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and a member of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi. He can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Roger Aronoff.

09/2/15

Media Nervous Over Hillary Sting Videos

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

You know an event is potentially damaging to Hillary Clinton or other top Democrats when Dana Milbank of The Washington Post shows up. Hence, Milbank’s attendance at Tuesday’s James O’Keefe news conference on Clinton campaign violations of federal election law was an indication that the Democrats are concerned. This time, despite video evidence of top staffers for Hillary accepting cash from a known foreign national, most of the media reaction was vintage Milbank. “Is this a joke?” the media wanted to know.

In fairness, Milbank’s questions seemed mild, when compared to some of the other media reactions.

The joke question came from Olivia Nuzzi of The Daily Beast, with other liberals joining in and wondering what the press conference was all about. The law says that foreigners are strictly prohibited from contributing to U.S. political campaigns, and O’Keefe had dramatic evidence of the campaign law violation. Thevideo was played on a television screen for all to see.

Looking for some reason not to pay attention to the facts, some in the media seized upon the small amount of money that was used to pay for the Hillary campaign merchandise in question.

This was not the only media reaction, but it seemed to be one of the most popular. “James O’Keefe Targets Clinton Campaign For Legally Selling A T-Shirt,” was the dishonest headline over an article attacking O’Keefe published by Media Matters, the pro-Hillary and George Soros-funded group. This article set the tone for the pro-Hillary contingent in the press.

However, the great number of journalists who showed up was an indication that, when it comes to Hillary, nobody really knows how serious the law-breaking will get. O’Keefe suggested that more evidence against the campaign is yet to come.

Milbank may be in a quandary about what to do with Hillary, who is dropping in the polls against the socialist career politician Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and leaving the Democratic presidential field open to other candidates, most notably Vice President Joe Biden, a notorious plagiarist. (In Biden’s case, Media Matters had also defended him, insisting the plagiarism wasn’t as serious as some knew to be the case).

Milbank’s modus operandi in the past has been to ridicule conservatives who provide evidence of corruption by top Democrats such as Hillary and Barack Obama. For example, he attacked those who investigated Obama’s relationship with communist Frank Marshall Davis. He showed up at an AIM conference to write an article distorting the findings of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi, which investigated Hillary’s role in covering up the terrorist attack that killed four Americans.

Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist has written that Milbank “serially exaggerates or distorts what he writes about. It’s just what he does.”

But those distortions won’t suffice when the video evidence itself can be seen by millions, telling the real story that some in the media try to conceal. As Project Veritas emphasized, the video shows Molly Barker, the Director of Marketing for Hillary Clinton’s national campaign, knowingly breaking campaign finance law by accepting a straw donation from a foreign national.

O’Keefe, who almost single-handedly took down the Alinskyite ACORN organization, has also investigated Planned Parenthood and National Public Radio. He wrote the book, Breakthrough: Our Guerilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy, and has targeted Republican politicians in the past as well.

His reputation meant that O’Keefe’s Project Veritas Action news conference at the National Press Club was packed, with at least seven television cameras there to record the proceedings.

Washington Post reporter David Weigel conveyed the message from the Clinton campaign that the event was much ado about nothing. But at least he did an advance story about the video and got the Clinton campaign response.

Los Angeles Times reporter Evan Halper played the story to the advantage of the Hillary campaign, insisting that the video somehow missed its target. It was “Hardly the stuff of a Pulitzer Prize,” he insisted. He found it newsworthy, and somehow relevant to the issue of federal law violations, that the journalist from The Daily Beast had treated the video as a joke.

The “joke” response said more about the lack of seriousness from The Daily Beast than it did about O’Keefe’s video. Making matters worse, Olivia Nuzzi of The Daily Beast seemed proud of the fact that she didn’t grasp the seriousness of the election law violations, highlighting her “Is this a joke?” responses on her Twitter account.

O’Keefe may have the last laugh, as he repeatedly emphasized that more videos are coming, and that other Hillary officials may be in them and forced to resign. Reporters in attendance, anxious to dismiss these charges, seemed nervous about this prospect. They repeatedly pressed O’Keefe to spill more details about other undercover operatives he may have in the Clinton and other campaigns. He told the media they would just have to wait.

It was nervous laughter from the press, as they couldn’t figure out what other damaging evidence O’Keefe’s crew may have against the Democratic presidential candidate.

In a message to his supporters, O’Keefe noted, “Since at least 1996, Hillary and her husband Bill have been accused of accepting foreign contributions to further their political ambition. Back then, it was China accused of funneling massive amounts of money into the Clinton campaign and the DNC [Democratic National Committee]. The State Department investigated the matter. Three Americans were convicted of crimes, one of whom, Johnny Chung, admitted that $35,000 of his contributions came from the Chinese military. But Bill and Hillary got off clean.”

Not all media were prepared to laugh this all away. In his story about the O’Keefe news conference, Alan Rappeport of The New York Times seemed to admit that O’Keefe had struck gold, noting, “Foreign donations are a sensitive subject for the Clintons, as their family foundation has been under scrutiny for accepting money from overseas while Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, and recent State Department emails showed that former President Bill Clinton tried to get permission to give paid speeches in North Korea and the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

One question is whether the illegal transactions captured in the Project Veritas video are part of a pattern of illegal conduct. The media will just have to wait. Maybe their laughter will die down in the wake of more videos being released.

Asked why the major media don’t do these kinds of undercover investigations and the job falls on him and his staff, O’Keefe dismissed the significance of liberal media bias and said that he thinks journalists are more motivated by a desire to protect their access to candidates like Hillary. In other words, reporters have to flatter the candidates with fawning coverage.

But it’s increasingly difficult to portray Hillary in a favorable light. At the campaign event where the video of the illegal contribution was recorded, Hillary had told the crowd that she would “stop the endless flow of secret, unaccountable money that is distorting our elections, corrupting our political process, and drowning out the voices of our people.”

A reporter seeking to maintain access to a candidate like this, caught in scandal after scandal, is something that is destined to truly become a joke.

07/29/15

America’s Enemies Are Laughing at Us

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Time magazine is out with a colorful and glossy “Inside the New Cuba” special edition, featuring smiling Cuban kids wearing Communist garb on the cover. Page 64 has a photo showing “Cuban fans” holding up “their national flag” at a baseball game. It turns out that the really happy Cubans are those who have been defecting from the island “paradise,” as Time magazine calls the prison camp country.

Credit goes to Christine Rousselle of Townhall.com for covering these defections. They seem to be developing into a regular feature, with Rousselle providing regular updates about additional defections.

So far, eight players from the Cuban men’s field hockey team, four rowers from the Cuban national team, and two members of the Cuban soccer team have defected.

The defections completely undercut the chapter of the special Time magazine issue on Cuba that is titled, “The Big League Next Door,” which speculates that normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba could “stop Cuba’s top talent from fleeing…” This chapter is written by Robert Siegel, senior host of National Public Radio, and Eyder Peralta, an NPR reporter.

Washington Nationals infielder Yunel Escobar defected from Cuba when he was 21. The Washington Post covered his story in a May 7 article, noting:

Escobar’s love of baseball was fueled by television broadcasts and video games, both forbidden in Cuba. He paid to watch MLB games and favorite players such as Alex Rodriguez, Roberto Alomar, Omar Vizquel and fellow Cuban Livan Hernandez on a TV with a hush-hush antenna at a friend’s house. He also grew to love Ken Griffey Jr. because of a video game he played often in secret. A friend had smuggled in a console and charged the equivalent of 50 cents per hour to play.

The entire story is worth reading and there are many touching moments, such as the story of when Escobar spent two days at an immigration detention center in Miami “and kissed the ground when he was released.”

These are the immigrants we should welcome, since they have developed an appreciation of the struggle between freedom and totalitarianism. They want to enjoy and celebrate American freedom, not distort and transform the country into a Third World welfare state of cheap labor for corporations and paid-for votes for the Democratic Party.

In the Time magazine version of Cuba, we are told in the section, “Scenes from the Revolution,” that Fidel Castro “promised to clean up the government, restore democracy and civil liberties, and promote social justice.” Nothing is said about whether he fulfilled those promises.

By contrast, we are told that his predecessor, Fulgencio Batista, was a “ruthless dictator” who ran a system characterized by “economic and social inequality and a corrupt government.” The implication is that Castro changed all of that for the better.

A caption on a page of pictures of Cuban cowboys on the communist island informs us that “Before Castro nationalized all farms, almost three quarters of Cuba’s arable lands was owned by fewer than 3,000 individuals and corporations, many of them American, while most farmworkers were renters.” One of the Cuban cowboys proclaims, “It is no longer of Communism or no Communism. It belongs to us.”

You mean communism works after all? That seems to be the message of this special Time magazine Cuba edition.

It’s completely absurd but this is what passes for serious journalism. It reminds me of the old Ronald Reagan joke, reportedly told to Mikhail Gorbachev, about two men walking down a street in Moscow, when one asks, “Is this pure communism? Have we passed through the stage of socialism and reached pure communism? The other replies, “Hell, no. It’s gonna get a lot worse.”

Ben Lewis wrote an article, “Hammer & tickle,” noting that “Communism is the only political system to have created its own international brand of comedy.”

These days, Oleg Atbashian makes fun of the Marxists and their apologists on a regular basis, on his “People’s Cube” website. One of his latest offerings is the new poster featuring the “Rebel without a gender.” The People’s Cube proclaims, “Che is dead, long live Conchita: a new rebel icon.”

His tribute to the Museum of Communism in Prague is a lot of laughs, as he displays some of the posters from the old communist days, such as the one announcing that communist women would have burnt their bras like their sisters in the West, “if there were any in the shops.”

Another communist poster said: “Sometimes there was no toilet paper in the shops. Luckily there was not much food, either.”

Meanwhile, believe it or not, the comedian Jack Black is being featured in a video campaign from the group Global Zero to sell the Iranian nuclear deal. He previously starred in such films as “Shallow Hal,” “School of Rock,” “Nacho Libre,” and the Kung Fu Panda films.

A comedian as the face of the Iranian nuclear deal? This is where the laughing begins to die down.

The Iranians and their Russian sponsors are the ones laughing at us now.

So are the Cuban Communists.

They may lose some people through defections, but they get an embassy on American soil where they can base their spies and recruit agents inside the U.S. government.

02/20/15

No “Major Scandal” in Obama Administration?

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

David Axelrod’s book tour is off to a rollicking start, with perceived attacks on Hillary Clinton’s upcoming presidential run, and an absurd comment about the ethics and integrity of the administration he served so loyally, and continues to do so.

Axelrod, former senior advisor to President Obama, recently asserted something so patently untrue that it demands a response. “And I’m proud of the fact that, basically, you’ve had an administration that’s been in place for six years in which there hasn’t been a major scandal,” he pronounced at a University of Chicago event.

The Washington Post leapt in to defend Axelrod’s claim by pointing to how President Obama’s approval ratings did not shift in the wake of the potential scandals he has faced since taking office. “It could be that scandals don’t have a lot to do with how Americans rate the president,” writes Hunter Schwarz for the Post.

It could also be that the liberal media, along with academia, determine what is classified as a “scandal”—and then refuse to report on scandals which don’t meet their own predetermined criteria. In this case, any lies, corruption, abuses of power, financial payoffs, or associations with unsavory characters or organizations that involve President Obama or anyone in his administration are never to be treated as a scandal.

The ongoing incestuous relationship between the Obama administration and the media often tilts in favor of the administration, leaving many scandals uninvestigated, minimized, or outright ignored. For example, both CBS News president David Rhodes and former ABC News president Ben Sherwood have siblings working for the administration. CNN’s deputy Washington bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Tom Nides, a former Obama staffer under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And David Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager, joined Bloomberg News, while MSNBC hired Axelrod.

President Obama even joked in 2013 that “… David Axelrod now works for MSNBC, which is a nice change of pace since MSNBC used to work for David Axelrod.”

With so many members of the elite media in bed with the administration, Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan’s 2011 observation that “the current administration has not yet suffered a major scandal, which I define as a widespread elite perception of wrongdoing” becomes essentially meaningless. Nyhan said that a scandal becomes a scandal “once the S-word is used in a reporter’s own voice in a story that runs on the front page of the [Washington] Post.”

If Axelrod is using the same criteria, then, of course, President Obama probably can be considered scandal-free. But a real scandal involves actual administration wrongdoing or lies, regardless of the “perceptions” dished out by the media.

Axelrod’s comments ignore the presence of a number of real scandals which the mainstream media, including The Washington Post, continue to report on as phony—including but not limited to:

Benghazi:

The deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya in 2012 were greeted with a concerted public relations campaign by the Obama administration blaming the attacks on a protest inspired by a YouTube video, as revealed in the smoking gun Ben Rhodes email. (Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor to President Obama, is CBS’ President David Rhodes’ brother.) The media, including David Kirkpatrick of The New York Times, continue to dispute key facts of the case such as al Qaeda’s involvement, have championed erroneous Congressional reports, ignore evidence of a cover-up, and have generally covered for the administration by promoting the idea that this is one of many “phony scandals.” The interim report of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi details the various failings and scandals related to Benghazi.

IRS scandal:

The IRS targeted conservative groups applying for non-profit status from 2010 to 2012. In what some see as an attempt to influence elections, the IRS began requesting inappropriate information disproportionately from conservative groups and then delaying their approval, generally chilling free speech throughout the country. Lois Lerner, at the heart of the scandal, has refused to testify before Congress, pleading the Fifth Amendment. The media continue to argue that President Obama is not connected to this scandal, but it can be tied directly to the White House. The President has tried to assert that there isn’t a “smidgeon” of corruption at the IRS.

Fast and Furious

The Obama Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) encouraged gunwalking across the Mexican border of thousands of weapons, resulting, ultimately in the murder of border agent Brian Terry. An ATF whistleblower, John Dodson, spoke out in 2011 about the problems with the ATF’s decision to let guns go to Mexico. As I wrote about in 2011, Fast and Furious was a scandal that no longer could be denied, but the media continued to do so. Sharyl Attkisson recounts in Stonewalled, “But as outrageous and remarkable as the allegations are, most of the media don’t pick up on the story. They’re steering clear.” As I wrote, the scandal “involves some 1,500 guns, about 1,000 of which ended up in Mexico, and a Border agent…who was murdered with weapons found near the scene of the crime in Arizona. The weapons were among 57 linked to Fast and Furious which have been tied to at least 11 violent crimes in the U.S., including the Terry murder.” Like Benghazi, Fast and Furious resulted in real deaths—but the media continue to ignore or downplay this scandal.

Veterans Administration

Following revelations in 2014 that there was widespread Veterans Administration falsification of health care wait times, and that certain locations had created secret waiting lists for veterans, the media finally declared this a scandal. But it’s not Obama’s scandal, it’s a Veterans Affairs scandal. Hunter Schwarz writes for the Post that “It was a very significant scandal, to be sure, but perhaps not one that people laid directly at Obama’s doorstep.” The Washington Post’s Fact Checker Glenn Kessler recently referred to this one as a scandal, noting that only eight people have lost their jobs so far as a result of this veterans care debacle, not 60 as the Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald said last week on Meet the Press. But as I have argued, there were really two scandals at the Veterans Administration at the time: health care wait times and the disability benefits backlog.

Solyndra

Solar panel business Solyndra received more than half a billion dollars as part of the administration’s green energy program, before going bankrupt. Its executives took substantial bonuses before the layoffs began. And, a Solyndra investor was also a major bundler for Obama, demonstrating a conflict of interest when the administration refused to turn over more documents as part of a Congressional investigation. And yes, the Post reported on its front page that the Obama administration had asked the company to “delay announcing it would lay off workers until after the hotly contested November 2010 midterm elections that imperiled Democratic control of Congress.” But NPR ran an article last year victoriously announcing that “Now that the loan program is turning a profit, those critics are silent”—as if that had anything to do with the crony capitalism of the Solyndra scandal.

Obamacare

Obamacare is an ongoing debacle of premium increases and high deductibles coupled with crippling regulations. It leads to less, not more, health care access. While the focus has been on errors made within the “Obamacare rollout,” the media continue to champion exaggerated statistics regarding the alleged 10 million who have received health insurance under President Obama’s signature legislation. In reality, this program marks a rapid increase in Medicaid, and many enrollees are part of a “substitution effect” by which people who previously had insurance have switched to Obamacare. The subsidies, which the media casts as essential to the law, are under dispute in the courts, and increase the burden on the American taxpayer. Even Politifact called President Obama’s false assertion that Americans could keep their health plan if they liked it the 2013 “Lie of the Year.” Meanwhile, the complicit media finds every chance it can to champion this legislation’s “successes.”

This list just scratches the surface. Executive overreach has become standard fare, whether on immigration or environmental regulations. The Obama administration’s penchant for controlling leaks, a lack of transparency, and a war on journalists has been noted by the likes of former Washington Post executive editor Len Downie Jr. who said “The [Obama] administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration leaks,” and New York Times reporter David Sanger who said, “This is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.” James Risen of the Times added that the Obama administration has been “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.”

The administration’s Middle East policies have been a disaster, if not scandalous. Just look at the growing threat from the Islamic State (ISIS) and other radical jihadist Muslim groups. More than 200,000 have been killed in Syria, Libya has become a jihadist playground, described by former CIA officer Bob Baer as “Mad Max,” and Yemen, as recently as September held up as example of where Obama’s foreign policy is working, has seen a coup by Iranian backed jihadists. And looming over all of this is the unfolding, outright appeasement of an Iran with nuclear aspirations.

What unifies all of these scandals and lies is how our news media have looked past all the administration’s corruption, treating, these occurrences as discrete, minor grievances, gaffes—or even conservative or Republican political maneuvering. This means that the constant lies by the administration, and President Obama himself, can be made with impunity. The media simply will not hold President Obama, or any of his associates who might tarnish his reputation, accountable.

12/31/14

A Somber View

Arlene from Israel

Very somber, my friends. The situation in the world is not worrisome – it’s terrifying. Consider:

In an interview with NPR, President Obama said that Iran could become a “very successful regional power” if it agrees to a nuclear deal. He said things must move slowly but he wouldn’t entirely rule out the possibility of opening a US embassy in Tehran before his term ran out.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/obama-iran-could-be-a-very-successful-regional-power/

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WHAT? There is nothing on the table in negotiations with Iran at the moment that is serious enough to prevent Iran’s nuclear advancement. The Iranians – a threat to the world – are running rings around an eager Obama.

In fact:

“A commander of Iran’s widely feared Basij paramilitary corps has inadvertently confessed that the Tehran regime aims to build up an arsenal of nuclear and chemical weapons.

“Abdul Reza Dashti, the head Basij commander in Bushehr – a city on Iran’s Persian Gulf coast that contains the Bushehr nuclear power plant, one of the regime’s key installations – had been addressing the fight against ‘foreign influences’ in Iran when he made the admission, according to a report by the official news agency IRNA.”

http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/12/29/iranian-paramilitary-commander-reportedly-admits-tehrans-goal-of-achieving-atomic-and-chemical-weapons/

And see this article by Jonathan Tobin, editor of Commentary, on the Iranian situation:

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/12/08/iran-cheating-debunks-biden-kerry-boasts-nuclear-arak/

~~~~~~~~~~

Obama is worthless on this because of his own orientation, motivation. But where is everyone else? This is the stuff of nightmares.

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Then, as if there isn’t enough with the Iranian situation to prevent peaceful sleep, there is the on-going situation at the UN Security Council. Not nearly as troubling as Iran, but, yes, troubling, on several scores because of diplomatic implications, not legal ones.

Jordan has submitted a draft PA resolution to the Security Council.

Originally, Kerry had hedged on whether the US would veto such a proposal. It was clear that he was looking for revisions that would soften its terms, so that he wouldn’t have to veto it. But what has happened instead is that Jordan strengthened the terms, with the approval of the Arab League.

The current version calls for a complete end to Israel “occupation” within three years, with a Palestinian state to be established within the “June 1967 borders” (sic) and East” Jerusalem to be the Palestinian capital.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/new-palestinian-bid-calls-for-e-jerusalem-capital-just-solution/

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As for “East Jerusalem,” there is no such thing. There is one city of Jerusalem. What is meant, in actuality, is all of Jerusalem past the Green Line, which includes northern and southern parts of the city as well as eastern. This is sometimes referred to as “Arab Jerusalem.” It most certainly is not “Arab” today, as there are many Jewish neighborhoods in this part of the city. What is more, the Old City is in the eastern part of the city, as is the Jewish cemetery at Mt. of Olives – the oldest Jewish cemetery in the world, with 150,000 Jewish graves.

Credit: Keep Jerusalem

The division of the city came about at the end of the War of Independence in 1949, when Jordan (illegally) held part of the city, and an armistice line was drawn. It is the only time in Jerusalem’s 3,000 year history that Jerusalem was divided, and it became “Arab” only because Jordan rendered it Judenrein. Prior to the Jordanian occupation, the heart of Jewish residency was to be found in this part of the city.

Jerusalem will never be divided again.

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And as to “occupation,” my friends, they can use this loaded buzz word all they wish. Israel is not an occupier in Judea and Samaria. It is Israel that has legal rights there. The corollary point to be made here is that the land in no way “belongs” to the Palestinian Arabs. There has never been a Palestinian state.

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The behind the scenes politicking on this resolution issue are convoluted.

At this point Kerry will veto if necessary (the “strengthening” of its terms made this more likely), but he prefers not to. He had implored Abbas to wait to call a vote until after the Israeli elections on March 17. His reason is infuriating: a fear that what is happening in the UN will push the Israeli electorate to the right.

Abbas said yesterday that the vote would be called in “a day or two.” And the most interesting questions have to do with why Abbas chose to ignore Kerry and move ahead anyway. It’s clear that he’s not afraid to figuratively bite the (US) hand that feeds him – this tells us a good deal about loss of American influence.

I will suggest something that is counter-intuitive on the surface but is actually reflective of the way Abbas has consistently conducted himself: Abbas does not want to win here. We must conclude this if he is willing to buck the US, secretary of state. Had he waited, he might have said to Kerry, look, I did as you asked, now don’t veto. Abbas does not want a state, with the concomitant burdens it implies. Nor, I would imagine, does he think he could hold on to a state for more than a week or two before Hamas pushed him out.

Abbas wants to squeeze Israel and garner PR. Part of that PR involves showing the world how the poor Palestinian Arabs suffer setbacks in their heart-wrenching efforts to achieve self-determination.

Another possible motivation for Abbas: this may give him the excuse to go to the International Criminal Court, something he’s been threatening to do. This remains to be seen – as that too may be just a ploy.

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With this, there is one other factor at play. The Security Council consists of 15 members: five permanent – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States -and 10 others who rotate every two years. Only the permanent members can veto a resolution. For a resolution to pass, nine votes are required. Right now, Abbas does not have those nine votes.

But here is the catch: The terms of the temporary members is up at the end of the year. As it happens, nations not supportive of this resolution – such as Lithuania and South Korea – will be replaced by nations hostile to Israel – such as Malaysia and Venezuela. Then the chances of getting nine votes in favor would be greater. It has been suggested that this would strengthen Abbas’s position – he would be able to say that most of the Security Council is with him because his cause is just even if the US is not.

But Abbas seems bent on not waiting for this transition in membership. Again, we must ask why.

Since Abbas does not want to win anyway, this may be a way to allow Kerry to save face: he will not have to veto if there are not nine votes in favor.

Commentator Michael Freund, however, has another idea. He refers to what is going on in the UN as “a diplomatic terror attack.” No, he agrees, they don’t want to win: What they want is a rationale for “resistance,” since they can say they’ve tried diplomacy and it doesn’t work.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/FUNDAMENTALLY-FREUD-A-diplomatic-terrorist-attack-at-the-UN-386085

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I hope all my readers are still with me.

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Before closing I want to share a couple of painful, but hardly surprising, insights into the true nature of the Palestinian Arabs:

Last year, two Palestinian Arab terrorists who were involved in throwing rocks that killed Asher Palmer and his infant son Jonathan (when the rocks made Asher lose control of his car) were convicted of murder. This was a much welcome landmark decision. It was followed recently by a court decision requiring one of the terrorists, Ali Saada, to pay a hefty fine as compensation to the Asher family.

Now Issa Karake, a PA Minister in charge of “prisoner affairs” has complained about this, saying that this delegitimizes “the national resistance against the occupation.” (Emphasis added)

http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=13544

In other words, he approves of killing innocent babies.

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Last Thursday evening, Avner Shapira and his daughter, Ayala, 11, were driving in the Shomron, when a firebomb was tossed at their car. Avner yelled at his daughter to get out of the car. Had she not, she would have been killed, as it went up in flames. As it was, she was very seriously injured – with third degree burns over more than half of her body and damage to her respiratory system.

Where does it end? My thoughts when this happened were murderous, I confess. This child, whom her mother described as very intelligent in a special way, was on her way home from a special math class.

Her father, who was mildly injured, protested that such attacks are not criminal in nature, but acts of war, and should be treated as such:

”We have an enemy who is trying to annihilate us and states this day and night. It’s not the IDF’s fault, rather [it’s the fault of] the security establishment which treats these acts as criminal. Criminals that need to be caught and made to stand trial as if you can stand trial during a war…it is a case of us or them; they want to kick us out of here.” (Emphasis added)

http://www.timesofisrael.com/security-forces-arrest-2-in-firebomb-attack-that-injured-israeli-girl/

Ayala, who was burned in the face, has before her the prospects of months of hospitalization and many surgeries to do reconstruction.

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Within a day or two, the firebomb perpetrators were picked up by the Shin Bet in the Arab village of Azzoun in Samaria. They are both teenagers, and one, at 16, is under age. They told of hiding in the bushes at the side of the road, waiting for a car to approach, throwing the firebomb and then running back to their village.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4608327,00.html

They will not be handled with sufficient severity, I am afraid – although I always wait to be surprised. It is not clear which of the two actually tossed the bomb.

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Let us circle around for a moment: if Freund is correct about diplomatic terrorism, then the PA loss in the Security Council will be used to strengthen the rationale for the sort of horrors I’ve just described.

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And yet at a bare minimum, Kerry – who will oppose certain UN gambits by Abbas – thinks we should negotiate with the PA, never mind how violent the nature they’ve exposed is. In fact, I believe if he does veto, he’ll then come to Netanyahu and say we have an obligation to sit at the table with Abbas to negotiate since he “saved” us.

See the article below that describes Abbas’s refusal to cooperate with the US last March in an arrangement that would have pressured Israel and moved a “deal” forward.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mahmoud-abbas-is-again-insisting-on-failure/2014/12/29/6119435e-8f87-11e4-a900-9960214d4cd7_story.html?wpmk=MK0000203

This look at Abbas’s perennial insistence on failure reinforces the speculation that he also wants to fail now in the UN.

But it leaves us pondering what Kerry’s game is, since he KNOWS that Abbas is not truly on board for a two-state deal. I will leave speculation aside here, but none of this is reassuring in the slightest.

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The good news – this is who we are:

Israel has made the world’s largest per-capita contribution to halt the spread of Ebola in West Africa, Part of the $8.75 million pledge is committed to UNICEF, for care of children stricken with the disease. In addition, Israel has sent into West Africa fully equipped clinics and medical specialists.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/1.634360

The IDF recently saved the life of a Palestinian Arab baby with heart problems, who collapsed while on the way to Jordan for medical treatment. A medical helicopter airlifted him to Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, thereby saving his life.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4608295,00.html

Sometimes it’s not hard to wonder if we are nuts. But I have concluded we most certainly are not. We can stand proud.