Media bias isn’t just about how the news is covered. It’s also about what they chose to cover. If an item doesn’t fit their agenda, they breeze right on by. If it is something that fits, they stay, park their satellite trucks and cover the story endlessly.
Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV) has been under investigation by the FBI since last April.
Wall Street Journal
Lawmaker Bought Farm With CEO Who Gained From Appropriations
By JOHN R. WILKE
Rep. Alan B. Mollohan, the West Virginia Democrat whose real-estate holdings and financial disclosures have drawn federal scrutiny, last year bought a 300-acre farm with the head of a small defense contractor that had won a $2.1 million contract from funds that the congressman added to a 2005 spending bill.
The joint purchase of the farm, which sits on the Cheat River in West Virginia, is the most direct tie yet disclosed between Rep. Mollohan and a beneficiary of the federal spending he has steered toward his home state. It raises new questions about possible conflicts of interest by Rep. Mollohan and his use of such spending. House ethics guidelines warn lawmakers to avoid business deals with those who benefit from their official acts.
Rep. Mollohan is the new chairmen of the very committee that oversees the Justice Department’s budget. Now you would think this was big news, especially since the Democrats ran on a platform against a ‘culture of corruption’.
I guess it depends on what their definition of ‘corruption’ is? When asked this week about Rep. Mollahan, here is what Speaker Pelosi had to say,
“Quite frankly, I think the Justice Department is looking into every member of Congress. I always say to everybody, ‘You’re now going to get a free review of your family tree — past, present and future, imagined and otherwise,'” Pelosi said.
Remove the name Mollahan, and insert the name Tom Delay, and what do you think Nancy Pelosi would be saying?
The Culture of Corruption surrounding new Speaker Pelosi doesn’t involve just one man. Let’s not forget Rep. John Conyers ethics problems just because most of the media has. Here’s the Washington Examiner,
Pelosi should withdraw Conyersâ?? appointment as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee because he is unfit for the position and because the ethics mess simply cannot be cleaned up with such an individual leading the House committee most directly concerned with upholding the majesty of the law.
According to Captains Quarters,
The House Ethics Committee released its report on Conyers on New Years Eve, a move apparently timed to slide under everyone’s radar. It scolded Conyers for using official staff to work on his re-election campaigns and to perform personal chores for him. The latter is a breach of ethics, but the former is a violation of election law. It’s a big problem, especially for the man who would run the House committee on law enforcement.
And let’s not forget Nancy’s choice for head of the Intelligence Committee, Alcee Hastings, a corrupt federal judge who was impeached and removed from the bench before he became a congressmen. In case you were wondering, Pelosi voted in favor of his impeachment and removal. Maybe she believes in redemption? When Hastings wouldn’t fly, even within her own party, she turned to Rep. Silvestre Reyes, a guy who doesn’t know anything about the enemies we face. He doesn’t know Shiite from Shineola.
Amazing how much Nancy got worked up over even appearances of corruption by Republicans and how much tolerance she has it for members of her own team.
Even with non-stop, fawning media coverage for Pelosi this week, her poll numbers are even lower than President Bush’s. It’s all downhill from here Nancy.
The following was sent to me by a friend and thought it worthwhile to post and ponder. It is entitled: “How Long Do We Have?”
About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh , had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:
“A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government.”
“A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.”
“From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”
“The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years.”
“During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:
1. From bondage to spiritual faith;
2. From spiritual faith to great courage;
3. From courage to liberty;
4. From liberty to abundance;
5. From abundance to complacency;
6. From complacency to apathy;
7. From apathy to dependence;
8. From dependence back into bondage”Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law, St. Paul , Minnesota , points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000 Presidential election:
Number of States won by: Gore: 19; Bush: 29
Square miles of land won by: Gore: 580,000; Bush: 2,427,000
Population of counties won by: Gore: 127 million; Bush: 143 million
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Gore: 13.2; Bush: 2.1Professor Olson adds: “In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great country. Gore’s territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare…”
Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the “complacency and apathy” phase of Professor Tyler’s definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation’s population already having reached the “governmental dependency” phase.
If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegals and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.
This may seem an “extremist” and point of view, but when one considers the fact that 50% of workers in this country pay no federal and state taxes and actually receive money back each year from the govt from the earned income tax credit and child tax credit and other entitlements and welfare subsidies coupled with the fact that the most productive citizens (who liberals refer to as the “rich”- i.e. any family with a combined income of greater than about $80,000 in the top income quintile) pay an excessive and disproportionately high ammount of total taxes- about 75% of all taxes- it becomes clear that we are, indeed, half way down what Hayak refered to as the “road to serfdom.”
Will history repeat itself or will we learn from it and ensure that it doesn’t?
Add another one to the list of Kerry classics….
Washington Post
By Lois Romano
Thursday, January 4, 2007
A Complex Greeting
Nothing is ever simple when it comes to John Kerry.
The senator from Massachusetts and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, sent out 75,000 Christmas cards with pictures of trees at each season. The Kerrys gushed over their “gratitude for the beauty of these trees and the life they represent.”
But it didn’t end there.
The card came in an odd-looking envelope, one of those with a return-mail flap and instructions to send it to . . . well, to a recycling company, so “it can be made into new carpet tile.”
Carpet tile?
We want a “world without waste . . . where every product either returns safely to the soil or becomes a new product.”
So the card instructs: “1. Remove this panel and insert it along with the card into the envelope. 2. Expose adhesive strip and fold the flap over to seal the envelope. 3. Drop this mailer into any U.S. mailbox.”
Who else would send a Christmas card with a to-do list?
The Sago coal mine tragedy happened one year ago. One of the most popular Pundit Review posts of 2006 was this one, George W. Bush Caused Coal Mine Collapse. BizzyBlog’s Tom Blumer was all over this story last year, and he takes a look back.
Citizen journalist Bill Ardilino from INDC Journal is blogging from Iraq, You can read Bill’s work here and support him here.
In other embed citizen journalism news, milblogger Bill Roggio has posted The State of the Jihad: A look at the state of the major theaters, and some under the radar, in the Long War. This is a great overview of a global problem.
Matt from Blackfive has two inspirational stories today, one about the “doc” who never fell back and the other about Someone You Should Know, Sgt Bryan Anderson.
Pattericoâ??s Los Angeles Dog Trainer Year in Review 2006
Patterico, aka Patrick Frey, is one of our favorite guests on Pundit Review Radio. He is a fierce critic of the LA Times, holding their feet to the fire and forcing the paper to issue numerous corrections. His experience as an assistant district attorney in LA County shines though in his work. To listen to Patterico on Pundit Review Radio, click here, here and here
The Democrats Culture of Corruption
Some great blog posts today from Captain’s Quarters and Powerline on Nancy Pelosi’s ethical dilemma relating to recently admonished Rep. John Conyers. Here’s Captain Ed,
Does Pelosi really want to clean up Congress, or does she just want to use ethics as a partisan bludgeon? The answer will be seen in her action against Conyers now that this report has been made public. If he takes the gavel, then the Democrats simply want to use ethics as a dodge to get themselves elected.
and Powerline,
As Nancy Pelosi prepares to take the reins of the House of Representatives, she continues to face this problem: many of the “old bulls” in line for key committee and subcommittee leadership positions are corrupt. But facing a problem and facing-up to it are two different things.
Michelle Malkin’s latest Vent video takes on The New York Times, highlighting what their own ombudsman, Byron Calme, had to say about the so-called journalism at the Old Gray Lady this weekend.
This is a few days late, and I’m sure other have made a similar observation, but I found it appropriate that John Edwards launched his campaign for president with a shovel in his hands. What bothers me about Edwards is not his positions on the issues (though I disagree with most), his inexperience or even his hair, it’s the ease with which he says things like this,
As a young trial attorney in 1985, about a dead baby,
“She speaks to you through me,” the lawyer went on in his closing argument. “And I have to tell you right now â?? I didn’t plan to talk about this â?? right now I feel her. I feel her presence. She’s inside me, and she’s talking to you.”
The jury came back with a $6.5 million verdict in the cerebral palsy case, and Mr. Edwards established his reputation as the state’s most feared plaintiff’s lawyer.
And as a young politician in 2004, Edwards infamously told a Kerry-Edwards rally in Newton, Iowa,
“If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”
Charles Krauthammer, himself confined to a wheelchair, had this to say,
In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable. Where does one begin to deconstruct this outrage?
I have a hard time taking John Edwards seriously as a candidate. That is not to say he isn’t a serious candidate, just that I can’t get past his reliance on utter BS.
from the Grateful Dead, circa 1978,
Yes, that Barbara Boxer, the far left senator from California. Why am I giving Barbara her year-end props? For this surprisingly gutsy move,
Newsweek Magazine: CAIR Play?
Sen. Barbara Boxer recalled an award she recently gave to an Islamic activist because of his ties to a major American Muslim organizationâ??that critics say has ties to terrorist activities.
In a highly unusual move, Sen. Barbara Boxer of California has rescinded an award to an Islamic activist in her home state because of the manâ??s connections to a major American Muslim organization that recently has been courted by leading political figures and even the FBI.
Hot Air has more, including this depressing observation, “Now, if we could only get the Bush administration to be as tough on CAIR as Sen. Boxer is.”
Little Green Footballs says, CAIR responds predictably: itâ??s Islamophobia, spread by Jews!