Justin's Political Corner
So I already wrote about how Loesch went out with a Guy Fawkes mask to yell at the Occupy crowds outside of CPAC, despite the fact that many other CPAC attendees were engaging in calm discussions with the crowd and were easily able to travel freely in and out of the hotel.
It turns out Loesch also chased down and yelled at other Occupiers the next day.And, even worse, Loesch decided to bully a reporter for having the audacity of asking Andrew Breitbart questions about his pledge to boycott CPAC (which he quickly abandoned when offered a speaking slot). Loesch told the reporter that she wasn’t “acting like a lady” because she asked Breitbart questions:
(via Brian Tashman at RWW: CPAC: Anti-Muslim Activist James Lafferty Says He’s ‘Proud’ of Attacks against Mosques | Right Wing Watch)
The Conservative Political Action Conference panel “Islamic Law in America: How the Obama Justice Department Is Selling Us Out,” featured numerous anti-Muslim speakers including Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Ilaria Pantano and James Lafferty of the Virginia Anti-Sharia Task Force. Lafferty, whose wife Andrea runs the Traditional Values Coalition, dedicated his speech to his activism against mosques in his community and a Muslim Republican’s candidacy for the state House of Delegates.
Lafferty told the guests that “we are being outgunned by them, literally and figuratively” and claimed, “This is a spiritual war we are fighting.” At one point in his talk, Lafferty described a Justice Department “hate crimes summit” he attended. He expressed pride in the fact that most of the mosques that had been attacked were in the South.
Former presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann accused the 9th Circuit court of Appeals of “trying to undermine the will of the people” after its decision this week ruling the ban on marriage for gays and lesbians in California to be unconstitutional. And she predicts the case will go before the Supreme Court.
“The people of the state of California have the right to vote on the laws that they living under,” she told HuffPost Gay Voices shortly after she gave a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington on Thursday.
“They made a vote in 2008,” she said. “That’s when Barack Obama was running for president. And it’s amazing, really, what a decisive outcome it was, so it’s interesting, that now you find federal judges trying to undermine the will of the people. That’s what federalism is about, and that’s why you’ll see this case go to the Supreme Court.”
Bachmann, while doing radio interviews on “radio row” at CPAC, met up with Chuck Woolery, the former TV game show host, most notably of the “Love Connection,” and they shared a warm embrace as Bachmann giddily called out, “Chuck! Chuck!”
Woolery is promoting “Reset Congress,” a project that he outlines on his web site, Save Us Chuck Woolery. He, too, slammed the Prop 8 ruling, and said gays don’t need civil rights. In fact, he believes African-Americans need no civil rights.
“Majority rules,” he said, dismissing the idea that minorities need protections. “We were born with natural rights. We don’t need civil rights. [African-Americans] don’t need civil rights. They don’t need them. They have inalienable rights granted by God in the Constitution. I mean, I’m discriminated against all the time. I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me. [I’m discriminated against] because I’m old. I’m too old to get a job as a game show host. They say, well, the guy’s 71 and in five years he’ll be 76. And I’m a one per center, and I’m absolutely discriminated against as a one per center.”
Woolery, like most game show hosts, are deranged Republicans.
Although much of the attention is on the main stage at each year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, it’s the side events where the real kookiness occurs. These events can give CPAC organizers and attendees a headache as they try to walk the line between accepting certain groups under the umbrella of the conservative movement, but also trying to make it clear they don’t want to associate themselves with some of those groups’ more questionable qualities.
Take for instance a session on the dangers of multiculturalism, that included participants from the website VDARE, which has been labeled as a white nationalist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Rep. Steve King was one of those who had to walk the fine line. When questioned about the Southern Poverty Law Center’s description of his fellow panelists he first reacted by going on the offensive. “I wouldn’t be sitting up on a panel with anyone from the Southern Poverty Law Center,” King told reporters. “I’m not in a position to judge people in the fashion they seem to be so free to do.”
However, King then danced a delicate series of mental pirouettes. He explained his respect for VDARE’s top dog, Peter Brimelow, while holding back from a full-on embrace. Brimelow, he said, was not someone he’d met before the panel, though he had read his books.
The host of the event was officially the group ProEnglish, and their executive director, Robert Vandervoort. CPAC opened itself up to criticism in giving him a platform as well, given that he “was also the organizer of the white nationalist group, Chicagoland Friends of American Renaissance” according to the Institute for Research on Education and Human Rights.
Still, at least they got some thanks. Vandervoort praised the leaders of CPAC for “for standing up to the leftist thugs who wish to shut down this conference and our freedoms of speech and assembly.”
The panel discussion itself focused on the idea that multiculturalism and making accommodations for non-English speakers so they can do things like vote or get a public education, was a terrible thing for America to do.
Dr. Rosalie Porter, chairwoman of the board of ProEnglish and a former bilingual teacher who now thinks of bilingual education as an “insane idea,” said that part of multiculturalism is “the idea that every culture is equally valid, and one must never be judgmental and one must not say anything critical about a culture.”
Brimelow said bilingualism was “about the distribution of power in the society” and “the determination of the elites not to press immigrants to assimilate.”
King was late for the panel and wasn’t even on the program, but he blended right in when he showed up, calling English the language of “success” and asking why the left was “obsessed” with multiculturalism.Multiculturalism has even infected Republicans in the House, according to King. He recalled how an unnamed Republican leader wouldn’t let him be the floor manager of a bill he sponsored to make English the official language of the United States because he wasn’t an immigrant.
(via DanaBusted: Dana and Chris Loesch behaving badly at CPAC)
At CPAC today, the Conservative husband and wife duo of Dana and Chris Loesch were in a whole heap of trouble.
The far-right troublemaking duo left CPAC in order to lash out at Occupy protesters, as Adam Shriver at the St. Louis Activist Hub reports:Earlier this week, CNN suspended Roland Martin, telling Politico’s Dylan Byers in a statement:
So here’s a question. How “professional” is it for a CNN “political analyst” to chase down a crowd of Occupy D.C. protesters, yell at them about rape, and accuse them of shooting at the White House? Because that’s what Dana Loesch and her husband, Chris (also a former member of the St. Louis Tea Party), did earlier today. Here’s a screen shot of the two of them:The far less well-known Chris Loesch (founder of Shock City Studios in St. Louis) and frequent The Dana Show guest Steven Crowder clearly rapped a racial slur, the “n-word,” NOT “knickers” as they claimed.
NewsOne:Two conservative rappers, Steven Crowder and Chris Loesch dressed in powdered wigs and jumpsuits performed a pro-conservative rap, “Mr. America” in which they appeared to use the n-word before claiming that they were saying Knickers.An African American technician walked away after the pun which was clearly intended to reference the n-word judging by the following lyrics. The n-word or k-word as they would have you believe comes at 1:50 in the video.Also not surprising, considering both Dana and Chris’s past on racism and race-related issues.
Dear Chris Loesch and Steven Crowder, you BOTH better apologize for your deliberate use of the “n-bomb.”
Shona Darress has it on good information that George Soros, liberal financier, scourge of the right, quarterback of the no-huddle offensive against all that makes America great and holy—the Sultan of Slant, the Maharishi of Misinformation, the Big Bopper of Bias—is secretly controlling the flow of information at Fox News. This might come as a surprise to some of you, given Fox News’ fairly unambiguous vendetta against Soros and the progressive causes he helps support. But it is apparently the reality we must deal with, and Darress has the charts to prove it.
When I approach her booth (sponsored by the group “America’s Survival”) deep in the bowels of the Conservative Political Action Conference, and ask how she possibly came to the conclusion hinted at by her display, she quickly points to a smiling face on a poster a few feet behind her. “This, here: Sally Kohn. She’s Soros-funded.” Darress points to the next face, right below. “Jehmu Green. She’s Soros-funded.” Although Sally Kohn is, according to Darress’ literature, “the new face of Fox News,” I’ve never heard of her; Green’s role at Fox is as the token liberal on Sean Hannity’s nightly program, a position that seems to exist solely to give Hannity and his panelists someone to yell at. “They’re publicly owned,” she says when I ask how Soros came to control the country’s leading outlet for conservative news. “It’s not that they went to Fox News and said we want to buy your stock—they just did it.” The pamphlet she hands me spells it out more clearly: ”Most likely Fox knuckled under to blackmail. Soros went after Murdoch’s Empire with the hacking investigation against News of the World using the left-wing Guardian newspaper.”
Soros Derangement Syndrome goes on at CPAC.
National Rifle Association (NRA) executive vice president Wayne LaPierre told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference that “if you don’t remember anything else I say today, write this down: this is the most dangerous election of our lifetimes.” He warned that “all of our freedom, all of our rights” are at stake, asking, “Will we save America and our freedom? Will we save the Second Amendment from a second Obama White House?”LAPIERRE: If you believe in freedom, and if you’re as sick and tired of all the lies and schemes and Obama failures as I am, join us and stand up in this great fight. If you don’t remember anything else I say today, write this down: this is the most dangerous election in our lifetimes. If Obama wins, we’ll go to our graves mourning the freedoms we’ve lost. This election is all in, all of our freedom, all of our rights, and that means all of you. All in. No one sits this one out. So stand up right now and you tell me, will you defend freedom will all of your might? Come on, stand up. Let them hear you over at the White House. Will we fight to preserve our liberty and keep our nation strong and safe and free? Will we save America and our freedom? Will we save the Second Amendment from a second Obama White House?
LaPierre’s warnings were based on his reiterated claim that the White House has not pushed for gun violence prevention measures because it is engaged in a “massive Obama conspiracy” to get re-elected, and then use President Obama’s second term to “erase the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights and excise it from the U.S. Constitution.”
LaPierre promised that Obama’s purported strategy will not succeed, saying that the NRA is “all-in” for the 2012 elections and promising that “gun owners will be responsible” for Obama’s defeat. New research from the American Prospect’s Paul Waldman brings such claims from the NRA into question, demonstrating that “the NRA has virtually no impact on congressional elections.”
When LaPierre first asserted the existence of a “massive Obama conspiracy” at Florida’s version of CPAC, he was widely mocked by media figures including Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews for what Maddow called ”the insane paranoid message from the NRA this year.” Today, LaPierre offered a rejoinder to such criticisms, saying that “the media won’t win this election, gun owners will.”
h/t: Media Matters for America
(via Faiz Shakir at Think Progress LGBT: Fox Pundit Tells CPAC Crowd That Rachel Maddow Is ‘The Best Argument In Favor Of Her Parents Using Contraception’)
Cal Thomas’s attacking Maddow because she tells the truth, unlike Republican apologists over at FNC, CNN, FBN, and WSJ.
In the “closed circuit world on the right,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is often the subject of ugly denigrations. Whether it’s being mocked for her sexual orientation, her name, or even her education, right-wingers can’t get enough of slamming her.I’m glad that you played the Rachel Maddow clip because I think she is the best argument in favor of her parents using contraception. I would be all for that. And all of the rest of the crowd at MSNBC, too, for that matter.
WASHINGTON — Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said Thursday that Democrats are taking away liberty and freedom with overreaching policies, like pushing for fewer calories in food marketed toward children and energy-efficient shower heads, toilets and lightbulbs.
Children “were raised as feeders,” so they will reach for another candy bar if the calories are eliminated from the food they are given, he said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. “See what I’m up against? This is on a daily basis,” he said.
The idea that obesity needs to be ended so the country’s military can remain strong is similarly foolish, he said, mocking the idea that it takes more time and resources to train overweight enlistees.
“Just say, ‘You’re here doing push-ups until you make weight.’ Why is that so hard?”
King said he saves nine minutes every day by drilling out a government-mandated water-saving shower head, cutting his shower time down to three minutes and giving him “more time to beat up on the liberals. Toilets, too, are made more inefficient by the government’s regulations, he said.
His longest rant on energy regulations was about energy-efficient lightbulbs, which were used in Congressional offices during now-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) time as Speaker of the House.
King referred to the House office building janitors during Pelosi’s time as speaker as her “Stasi troops” — referring to oppressive secret police in East Germany until 1990 — saying they unscrewed the lightbulbs in his office to replace them with energy-efficient “curly-Q” bulbs.
“I would screw them out and send the interns out to get me some of those good Edison lightbulbs,” he said, the crowd cheering. “And those interns would come back sometimes empty-handed in tears, because they couldn’t come up with a regular Edison light-bulb.”
He said he finally decided it was “cruel and inhumane” to send the interns on that task, so he went to find “black-market” lightbulbs himself. He then was faced with a decision: buy a recyclable bag, which he at first said no to, or pay more.
CPAC — What was once a closely-watched gauge of the conservative electorate, the CPAC straw poll, will again take its place among the major events of the political season, the organizer of the 2012 edition of the Conservative Political Action Conference told me Thursday.
That will be a big change from last year, when Ron Paul supporters showed up en masse and pushed out a win for their guy in the final day of CPAC 2011.
Al Cardenas, chair of the American Conservative Union which sponsors CPAC, told me at his Thursday morning press avail that there’s no sign of a Paul ticket buy-out in 2012 (Paul isn’t even here; he sent his son, Sen. Rand Paul [R-KY], to speak on his behalf while he campaigns in Maine). That was how Paul won in 2011: his supporters bought up 1,000 or so tickets and brought in Paulites just to cast their vote.
Cardenas said that he hasn’t seen signs that any other are trying to buy the vote either. CPAC organizers have also instituted new balloting procedures they say will boost turnout, which has generally been pretty low. This year, attendees can vote with their phones and iPads, instead of just through paper ballots.
“No one’s stacking the deck this year,” Cardenas said. “It’s a wide-open process. I don’t think any of [the candidates] want to be caught with a perception that they’re trying to stack the deck and then lose the straw ballot. … The outcome will be far less predictable.”
All that according to Cardenas adds up to results that, when they’re announced Saturday, will be a real barometer of which presidential candidate the thousands of attendees at CPAC like the most.
Veteran journalists and media ethicists — including a former CBS News Washington bureau chief — are criticizing CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson for accepting an award from Accuracy in Media, a conservative group with a long history of promoting anti-gay views and conspiracy theories.
Attkisson is scheduled to accept the award in person Thursday at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.
Several longtime news experts contend Attkisson is hurting her own credibility and that of CBS by participating in the event.
“If you go out and you’ve received an award from any organization with an agenda, then any reader of your work or viewer of your work has a right to question your impartiality or your fairness,” Ken Auletta, media writer for The New Yorker, told Media Matters in an interview. “I don’t think journalists should accept awards from either right-wing or left-wing, conservative or liberal organizations, or from any other organized group that has an agenda. We’re not supposed to have an agenda. By accepting those awards or appearing, you are raising questions about your own dispassion. We have enough of those questions already about journalists.”
Ed Fouhy, a former long-time CBS News producer and one-time Washington bureau chief for the network, called Attkisson a “pawn.”
“Sharyl Attkisson is making a mistake in accepting an award from A.I.M. By doing so she becomes just another pawn in the ideological chess games being played with such intensity in Washington,” Fouhy stated. “Her acceptance helps to legitimize A.I.M., a fringe group, whose sole agenda is and has been for many years, to undermine the credibility of the mainstream media, fueled by the donations of millionaire conspiracy theorists.”
Fouhy, also a former CBS News vice president, then noted A.I.M’s past efforts against the network dating back many years:
“Reed Irvine, founder of A.I.M., and his political heirs have long made CBS News a special target in their fevered attempts to propound the myth of the liberal media. Going back to Watergate days, A.I.M. has relentlessly tried to intimidate and harass CBS News journalists. Ms. Attkisson may not be aware of that history but she should know that accepting awards from groups with political agendas, whether of the right or the left, is a bad idea.”
Robert Steele, journalism ethics instructor at The Poynter Institute, calls Attkisson’s move an “integrity risk.”
“While it’s unclear to me as to the specific role Sharyl Attkisson will play as a speaker at the Reed Irvine Awards event, there is an ethical pressure point in her participation in a conference conducted by an organization that reflects political ideology,” he wrote in an e-mail, later adding, “Sharyl Attkisson and CBS News run an integrity risk with her active participation in this awards ceremony and the conference.”
But for some observers, such as Marty Steffens — former San Francisco Examiner editor and a journalism professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism — damage can be done to the CBS brand.
“It does damage the brand to accept an award from a group that seeks to influence the news,” Steffens said in an e-mail. “Many such organizations out there seek to ‘sway’ reporters through contests and awards. Accepting in person … is never a good idea. That is to say, I don’t know the specifics here… but generally speaking is not a good idea.”
Ed Chen, former Bloomberg reporter and past president of the White House Correspondents Association, added:
“A group can dish out all the journalism awards it wants, no matter what its bias. But accepting such awards is another thing.”
Pam Fine, journalism professor at the University of Kansas and former managing editor for The Indianapolis Star, said reporters should choose the awards they acknowledge carefully.
“I believe the best policy for journalists is to accept awards from industry-recognized journalism organizations that are non partisan. These include universities such as Columbia which administers the Pulitzer Prizes, Georgia which administers the Peabody Awards and associations such as the American Society of News Editors and the Radio Television Digital News Association.
“I think journalists who accept awards from partisan groups jeopardize their credibility with folks on the other side of the equation and should think carefully about their own credibility and that of their news organizations before accepting such awards.”
Charles Davis, associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, agreed.
“I don’t think that journalists should ever accept awards or any recognition from advocacy groups. At the heart of journalism lies independence,” Davis said. “I’m not going to ever applaud a journalist for accepting an award that essentially recognizes the fact that the advocacy group likes what they reported. There are a lot of advocacy groups that hand these things over and I think that journalists should shy away from them. These are partisan advocates.”
Massive distortion extraordinaire Dana Loesch gets an “award” from the extremely dishonest right-wing partisan front group called “Accuracy In Media,” or really Inaccuracy In Media. Loesch has a history of blatant and outright distortions of the truth, is a habitual liar, has made offensive statements, and is a phony hack of a “journalist.” So it’s no surprise that she won an award from a biased organization like AIM.Loesch will be just one of many speakers at CPAC 2012, which will be held at the Mariott Wardman Park in Washington, D.C. next week.
