The Philadelphia Bulletin reports that a Pennsylvania attorney recently (3/19) told the House Judiciary Committee that the New York Times spiked a story last October which could have had a significant impact on the election had it been reported.

Heather Heidelbaugh, who represented the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee in the lawsuit against the group, recounted for the ommittee what she had been told by a former ACORN worker who had worked in the group’s Washington, D.C. office. The former worker, Anita Moncrief, told Ms. Heidelbaugh last October, during the state committee’s litigation against ACORN, she had been a “confidential informant for several months to The New York Times reporter, Stephanie Strom.”…

During her testimony, Ms. Heidelbaugh said Ms. Moncrief had told her The New York Times articles stopped when she revealed that the Obama presidential campaign had sent its maxed-out donor list to ACORN’s Washington, D.C. office.

Ms. Moncrief told Ms. Heidelbaugh the campaign had asked her and her boss to “reach out to the maxed-out donors and solicit donations from them for Get Out the Vote efforts to be run by ACORN.”

Ms. Heidelbaugh then told the congressional panel:

“Upon learning this information and receiving the list of donors from the Obama campaign, Ms. Strom reported to Ms. Moncrief that her editors at The New York Times wanted her to kill the story because, and I quote, “it was a game changer.”

Andrew Malcolm pans the Annointed One’s most recent performance in the LA Times.

Tuesday morning The Ticket examined the White House’s current political strategy and asked the question who would show up at Barack Obama’s second nationally-televised news conference that evening: the president or the senator?

The answer: Neither.

Professor Barack Obama showed up. …

And if you remember one of those required college lecture courses in the large auditorium at 8:10 a.m. listening to a droning don, and how it felt, slumped in the cushy seats having skipped breakfast for an extra 13 minutes of ZZZZ.

[T]his news conference seemed anticlimatic. At times the president appeared to be mailing in his delivery.

He made no notable news, and did so quite smoothly. Unless sticking by his guns over cutting charitable deductions is news.

And the former constitutional law professor did go on in his answers, perhaps not by accident. Holding the floor is another means of control for any president. Like males hold the TV remotes.

The result: only 13 questions in 57 minutes.

And as The Ticket noted during its live-blogging, not one single question on either war, including the one the commander-in-chief recently ordered 17,000 more Americans to march into. …

Gone from the presidential podium were the ubiquitous, much-noted teleprompters that gave rise to embarrassing suggestions that Obama needs to be fed his words to avoid Special Olympics or Nancy Reagan gaffes. In the twin teleprompters’ place? A larger teleprompter in the back of the room where no one watching on TV could see it.

The result for anyone who stayed for the entire presentation was another lengthy, somber less-than-animated sales pitch for the need to spend trillions to jump-start the economy, which he sees promising signs of already at least with one Pennsylvania company (though still not yet Caterpillar), and how we’re going to somehow move from an era of spending and greed to an era of savings by spending so much we’re gonna double or maybe triple the national debt by the time a two-term Obama would be two years into improving his retirement bowling at Sun City.

Every new president gets a couple of these gimme news conferences, even if this one did bump something as sacred as “American Idol.” But another one of these newsless news conferences, and the broadcast networks may well leave it to cable and C-SPAN in order to stimulate their own economies.

The BBC summarized other reactions, in which, most notably, will be found the common conclusion that Obama’s free pass from the press is running out of time.

Jonah Goldberg, blogging at the National Review Online, gave the president a B-grade for Monday night’s routine.

“He didn’t hurt himself, but I don’t see how he helped himself. He still seems presidential, even though he was often longwinded.

“He had some good answers and some bad, politically speaking. But it was unmemorable in the end and I’m not sure it was worth the political capital of suckingup another hour of primetime.”

That was a view echoed by former White House press secretary Mike McCurry, debating the night’s events at Politico.com.

“I think we may have seen the last ‘freebie’ tonight,” McCurry wrote. “The major networks will not give up a narrow prime-time, revenue-generating hour for an occasion whence the president rehearses a prepared (even important) message.”

Even the left-leaning Huffington Post conceded that Mr Obama was now toning things down at a time of great national concern.

“Even when the topic ventured into the realm of international relations, the president brought the discussion right back to the home front,” Sam Stein wrote.

“In what served as a crescendo to the whole event, he addressed a question on the status of Israeli-Palestinian relations by, in essence, asking the public for a bit of patience.”

Back at Politico, Jeff Emmanuel from RedState.com said both president and press left him wanting more.

“Sooner or later the press will begin asking Mr Obama why he seems almost allergic to specifics in anything he says, be it answer, speech, or policy proposal.

“This was not that night.”

Don Surber admires the fair-minded impartiality of the Bridgeport (Renamed: Connecticut) Post.

Not that after 30+ years in this business that I know anything about newspapers. I mean, after all, I do not think that the most important news story in the state of Connecticut would be the agitprop theater of federally financed lefties (ACORN takes grants) protesting executive salaries.

That involved 40 people including some from Washington. This is what they do for a living. They are professionals.

AP originally reported the reporters and news crews outnumbered the Paid Protesters 2-to-1.

The Conn Post gave this item two big pictures, a main story, and a side story.

Buried inside was a story of 300 people in Ridgefield staging a Tea Party against the entire $700 billion bailout and the subsequent $787 billion stimulus.

An actual grassroots movement was brushed off with “Tea Party’ protests spending to stimulate economy.”

The reporter assigned to the story, Eugene Driscoll, had an ironic line: “The difference here: many of the protesters were political conservatives who had never felt it necessary to take to the streets before.”

One of the classic examples.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

John Hawkins finds the Annointed One embarrassing to watch on 60 Minutes.

Many of us, that at times during our lives, have believed we could do a better job than the President of the United States, just as we thought we’d do a better job than the coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers or the network executive who greenlighted Real Chance of Love.

The problem tends to be that what looks so crystal clear from the outside, usually in hindsight, appears confusing, muddled, and difficult to fathom when you’re actually going through it.

That’s why experience matters, particularly executive experience, and it’s a big part of the reason why Barack Obama has done such a mediocre job so far.

Obama is a silver-tongued political novice who has managed to be in the right place at the right time.

Now, if you’re a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And if you’re a politician like Barack Obama, who has gotten everything he has in life by being slick and sounding confident, every problem looks like something that can just be talked away.

That tendency was on display in his Sixty Minutes interview, a ‘grilling’ which would be considered a softball interview for a Republican (”Wow, that’s a great swingset for your kids to play on. How are they liking the White House so far?”) but was still probably tougher than any interrogation Obama has received since he entered the White House. (After all, he even admitted that he gets lost in the White House “repeatedly.”)

Each time Obama got a tough question, he did what sociopathic politicians have doing for decades: he lied, dodged, and talked out of both sides of his mouth.

Read the whole thing.

People going through today’s American educational system can be assured to have been intensely trained to understand that using crude stereotypes to whip up hatred toward Jews and blacks in order to justify targeting them with public and private persecution is gravely wrong.

I can remember, though, a day back in my parochial elementary school when our nun brought in a film projector and told us all about the Holocaust. Scarcifying images of great piles of emaciated bodies being pushed into mass graves by bulldozers, of skeletons lying in piles in ovens, of the pitiful starven and emaciated survivors took the entire class of children through the emotional wringer. How could human beings do such things to other people? more than one classmate demanded indignantly in the subsequent discussion.

Then rang the recess bell. As my classmates filed down the porch steps to the asphalt school yard, the dark atmosphere of the tormented history of Europe suddenly lifted, and, to my own astonishment, first one aggressor singled out a particular class misfit for persecution, then one by one nearly all of my classmates joined in. I marveled at the time that so much enthusiasm for the accepted moral lesson could go hand in hand with a complete incapacity to generalize it.

Editors and journalists employed by major newspapers and television networks are highly paid members of America’s upper middle class community of privilege, but that does not stop them from behaving like nasty school children ganging up on vulnerable victims, or from forming lynch mobs to go after not-necessarily-in-every-case better-paid business executives.

We’ve had a disgraceful orgy of class hatred for days now directed at AIG employees who receive, in accordance with the custom of their industry, large portions of their compensation in the form of bonuses. The bolshevik quarter of the blogosphere and the mainstream media have been deliberately whipping up public indignation by using selective and inflammatory reporting and general ignorance of the bonus compensation system as a basis for stirring up group hatred aimed at Wall Street and the business community as a class.

A trader or division leader in a firm which is losing money may himself, of course, be making his firm all kinds of money, and may be more than amply exceeding his own profit targets. It is not extraordinary or astonishing in the least that in an industry in which bonuses play a major role that, even in times of negative overall earnings, firms may be obligated by contract to pay bonuses to many executives.

The press also doesn’t stop to remind the public that any responsible business organization will first pay its own employees, before it attempts to meet external obligations to creditor or stockholders, or even to Big Brother.

The press and the leftwing blogs are simply cynically manipulating the emotions of the public by relying on false stereotypes and imaginary grievances to stir up envy and hatred which they propose to use to as the mechanism for gaining public support for their own radical, pernicious, and socially and economically destructive agenda of institutionalizing class warfare in public policy.

The American socialist revolution ironically typically features the fat and comfortable bourgeoisie yelling for the blood of the harder-working, less prestigious representative of exactly the same class as himself.

The gleeful tricoteuses at the Washington Post report that the public’s “rage swells,” proud of having whipped the mob into a sufficient fury as to pose actual physical hazard to their fellow citizens.

A tidal wave of public outrage over bonus payments swamped American International Group yesterday. Hired guards stood watch outside the suburban Connecticut offices of AIG Financial Products, the division whose exotic derivatives brought the insurance giant to the brink of collapse last year. Inside, death threats and angry letters flooded e-mail inboxes. Irate callers lit up the phone lines. Senior managers submitted their resignations. Some employees didn’t show up at all.

“It’s a mob effect,” one senior executive said. “It’s putting people’s lives in danger.”

Even so-called Republicans senators, like the egregious Charles Grassley of Iowa, have been unable to resist the temptation to pick on a defenseless target. Grassley is quoted by the Politico suggesting that AIG executives entitled to bonuses should resign or commit seppuku.

American life is growing darker and more dishonest.

Matt Drudge linked this World Net Daily article discussing heavy-handed and uneven censorship by Wikipedia volunteer admins keeping Barack Obama’s entry free from negative issues.

Wikipedia, the online “free encyclopedia” mega-site written and edited entirely by its users, has been deleting within minutes any mention of eligibility issues surrounding Barack Obama’s presidency, with administrators kicking off anyone who writes about the subject. …

A perusal through Obama’s current Wikipedia entry finds a heavily guarded, mostly glowing biography about the U.S. president. Some of Obama’s most controversial past affiliations, including with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and former Weathermen terrorist Bill Ayers, are not once mentioned, even though those associations received much news media attention and served as dominant themes during the presidential elections last year. …

Wikipedia users who wrote about the eligibility issues had their entries deleted almost immediately and were banned from re-posting any material on the website for three days.

In one example, Wikipedia user “Jerusalem21” added the following to Obama’s page:

“There have been some doubts about whether Obama was born in the U.S. after the politician refused to release to the public a carbon copy of his birth certificate and amid claims from his relatives he may have been born in Kenya. Numerous lawsuits have been filed petitioning Obama to release his birth certificate, but most suits have been thrown out by the courts.”

As is required on the online encyclopedia, that entry was backed up by third-party media articles, citing the Chicago Tribune and WorldNetDaily.com

The entry was posted on Feb. 24, at 6:16 p.m. EST. Just three minutes later, the entry was removed by a Wikipedia administrator, claiming the posting violated the websites rules against “fringe” material.

According to Wikipedia rules, however, a “fringe theory can be considered notable if it has been referenced extensively, and in a serious manner, in at least one major publication, or by a notable group or individual that is independent of the theory.”

The Obama eligibility issue has indeed been reported extensively by multiple news media outlets. WorldNetDaily has led the coverage. Other news outlets, such as Britain’s Daily Mail and the Chicago Tribune have released articles critical of claims Obama may not be eligible. The Los Angeles Times quoted statements by former presidential candidate Alan Keys doubting Obama is eligible to serve as president. Just last week, the Internet giant America Online featured a top news article about the eligibility subject, referencing WND’s coverage.

When the user “Jerusalem21” tried to repost the entry about Obama’s eligibility a second time, another administrator removed the material within two minutes and then banned the Wikipedia user from posting anything on the website for three days.

Wikipedia administrators have the ability to kick off users if the administrator believes the user violated the website’s rules.

Over the last month, WND has monitored several other attempts to add eligibility issues to Obama’s Wikipedia page. In every attempt monitored, the information was deleted within minutes and the user who posted the material was barred from the website for three days.

Angela Beesley Starling, a spokeswoman for Wikipedia, explained to WND that all the website’s encyclopedia content is monitored by users. She said the administrators who deleted the entries are volunteers.

“Administrators,” Starling said, “are simply people who are trusted by the other community members to have access to some extra tools that allow them to delete pages and perform other tasks that help the encyclopedia.” …

The Wikipedia entry about former President George W. Bush, by contrast, is highly critical. One typical entry reads, “Prior to his marriage, Bush had multiple accounts of alcohol abuse. … After his re-election, Bush received increasingly heated criticism. In 2005, the Bush administration dealt with widespread criticism over its handling of Hurricane Katrina. In December 2007, the United States entered the second-longest post-World War II recession.”

The entry on Bush also cites claims that he was “favorably treated due to his father’s political standing” during his National Guard service.” It says Bush served on the board of directors for Harken and that questions of possible insider trading involving Harken arose even though a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation concluded the information Bush had at the time of his stock sale was not sufficient to constitute insider trading.

Liberals are always telling us that Barack Obama deserved to be elected president, despite his skimpy public career and lack of any record of serious accomplishment, because he is so absolutely brilliant and intelligent as evidenced by his ability to produce the kind of eloquence that sends quivers of ecstacy running down pale, flabby liberal legs.

Or is he all that brilliant after all?

Carol E. Lee, at the Politico, describes how Barack Obama’s reliance on the teleprompter, and increasingly obvious incapacity to function at all ex tempore, is proving both a physical inconvenience and an embarrassment to his faithful followers in the press.

Obama’s reliance on the teleprompter is unusual — not only because he is famous for his oratory, but because no other president has used one so consistently and at so many events, large and small.

After the teleprompter malfunctioned a few times last summer and Obama delivered some less-than-soaring speeches, reports surfaced that he was training to wean himself off of the device while on vacation in Hawaii. But no such luck.

His use of the teleprompter makes work tricky for the television crews and photographers trying to capture an image of the president announcing a new Cabinet secretary or housing plan without a pane of glass blocking his face. And it is a startling sight to see such sleek, modern technology set against the mahogany doors and Bohemian crystal chandeliers in the East Room or the marble columns of the Grand Foyer.

“It’s just something presidents haven’t done,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, a presidential historian who has held court in the White House since December 1975. “It’s jarring to the eye. In a way, it stands in the middle between the audience and the president because his eye is on the teleprompter.”

Just how much of a crutch the teleprompter has become for Obama was on sharp display during his latest commerce secretary announcement. The president spoke from a teleprompter in the ornate Indian Treaty Room for a few minutes. Then Gov. Gary Locke stepped to the podium and pulled out a piece of paper for reference.

The president’s teleprompter also elicited some uncomfortable laughter after he announced Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as his choice for Health and Human Services secretary. “Kathy,” Obama said, turning the podium over to Sebelius, who waited at the microphone for an awkward few seconds while the teleprompters were lowered to the floor and the television cameras rolled.

Obama has relied on a teleprompter through even the shortest announcements and when repeating the same lines on his economic stimulus plan that he’s been saying for months — whereas past presidents have mostly worked off of notes on the podium except during major speeches, such as the State of the Union.

Read the whole thing.

It’s understandable, I suppose. We saw during the campaign what Obama was like without assistance.

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

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Iowahawk has a few choice words for the great man from his own teleprompter.

4:04 video

In the Atlantic, James Fallows recalls an Ethics In America panel discussion on PBS in the 1980s.

First, moderator Charles Ogletree asked a former American officer who had served in Vietnam if he would, in a hypothetical situation in which he could thereby save American lives, if he would forcibly extract the necessary information from a captured prisoner using torture.

The former officer said he would, but other representatives of the US military, including General William Westmoreland, disagreed, and made opposing arguments.

Then Ogletree turned to the two most famous members of the evening’s panel. … These were two star TV journalists: Peter Jennings, of World News Tonight and ABC, and Mike Wallace, of 60 Minutes and CBS.

Ogletree brought them into the same hypothetical war. He asked Jennings to imagine that he worked for a network that had been in contact with the enemy North Kosanese government. After much pleading Jennings and his news crew got permission from the North Kosanese to enter their country and film behind the lines. …

But while Jennings and his crew were traveling with a North Kosanese unit… they unexpectedly crossed the trail of a small group of American and South Kosanese soldiers. With Jennings in their midst the Northern soldiers set up an ambush that would let them gun down the Americans and Southerners.

What would Jennings do? Would he tell his cameramen to “Roll tape!” as the North Kosanese opened fire? What would go through his mind as he watched the North Kosanese prepare to fire?

Jennings sat silent for about fifteen seconds. “Well, I guess I wouldn’t,” he finally said. “I am going to tell you now what I am feeling, rather than the hypothesis I drew for myself. If I were with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think that I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans.”…

Ogletree turned for reaction to Mike Wallace, who immediately replied. “I think some other reporters would have a different reaction,” he said, obviously referring to himself. “They would regard it simply as another story they were there to cover.” A moment later Wallace said, “I am astonished, really.” He turned toward Jennings and began to lecture him: “You’re a reporter. Granted you’re an American” (at least for purposes of the fictional example; Jennings has actually retained Canadian citizenship). “I’m a little bit at a loss to understand why, because you’re an American, you would not have covered that story.”

Ogletree pushed Wallace. Didn’t Jennings have some higher duty to do something other than just roll film as soldiers from his own country were being shot?

“No,” Wallace said flatly and immediately. “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!”

Jennings backtracked fast. Wallace was right, he said: “I chickened out.” Jennings said that he had “played the hypothetical very hard.”He had lost sight of his journalistic duty to remain detached.

As Jennings said he agreed with Wallace, several soldiers in the room seemed to regard the two of them with horror. Retired Air Force General Brent Scowcroft, who would soon become George Bush’s National Security Advisor, said it was simply wrong to stand and watch as your side was slaughtered. “What’s it worth?” he asked Wallace bitterly. “It’s worth thirty seconds on the evening news, as opposed to saving a platoon.”

After a brief discussion between Wallace and Scowcroft, Ogletree reminded Wallace of Scowcroft’s basic question. What was it worth for the reporter to stand by, looking? Shouldn’t the reporter have said something ?

Wallace gave a disarming grin, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “I don’t know.” He later mentioned extreme circumstances in which he thought journalists should intervene. But at that moment he seemed to be mugging to the crowd with a “Don’t ask me!”expression, and in fact he drew a big laugh—the first such moment in the discussion. Jennings, however, was all business, and was still concerned about the first answer he had given.

“I wish I had made another decision,” Jennings said, as if asking permission to live the past five minutes over again. “I would like to have made his decision”—that is, Wallace’s decision to keep on filming.

A few minutes later Ogletree turned to George M. Connell, a Marine colonel in full uniform. Jaw muscles flexing in anger, with stress on each word, Connell said, “I feel utter contempt.”

Two days after this hypothetical episode, Connell said, Jennings or Wallace might be back with the American forces—and could be wounded by stray fire, as combat journalists often had been before. When that happens, he said, they are “just journalists.” Yet they would expect American soldiers to run out under enemy fire and drag them back, rather than leaving them to bleed to death on the battlefield.

“I’ll do it!” Connell said. “And that is what makes me so contemptuous of them. Marines will die going to get . . . a couple of journalists.” The last words dripped disgust.

Not even Ogletree knew what to say. There was dead silence for several seconds. Then a square-jawed man with neat gray hair and aviator glasses spoke up. It was Newt Gingrich, looking a generation younger and trimmer than he would when he became speaker of the House, in 1995. One thing was clear from this exercise, Gingrich said. “The military has done a vastly better job of systematically thinking through the ethics of behavior in a violent environment than the journalists have.”

The American leftwing establishment recently erupted in outrage and indignation over the rise to political prominence of a flagrant tax cheat.

Who was it that provoked the storm of criticism? How much had he declined to pay?

Warner Todd Huston has the answers.

Poor New York Times! Neocon Bill Kristol was, well, simply too darned con. He actually defended the Bush Administration and openly sided with conservatives. A respectable NYT token conservative columnist is suppose to confine his conservatism to occasional dyspeptic grumbling about changing times, fashions, and morals, but avoid flagrant heresy on the big questions that matter: George W. Bush, the War in Iraq, and the outrageous insult to everything that’s proper and good that is Sarah Palin.

Jennifer Senior, in New York Magazine, describes the fraught quest for the Upper West Side conservative.

[N]ot to say that Times readers don’t like conservatives. They just like conservatives they can take home and introduce to their families (or maybe Paul Krugman’s family [or Michael Meeropol’s family – DZ]). David Brooks is the sort of Republican whose column a self-respecting liberal can read without wanting to hurl things in the aftermath—an Obama enthusiast, a Palin critic, a careful questioner of GOP shibboleths. He’s a vocal supporter of gay marriage and abortion rights. And he’s just as apt to be writing about culture as politics.

The Times may even have thought it’d be getting the same cuddly conservative intellectual when it hired Kristol. Like Brooks, he was a known quantity: a quotable source during the Bush I era (he was Dan Quayle’s chief of staff), the scion of New York intellectuals. But it didn’t, and the Republican party line that Kristol was peddling was an embarrassment.

Senior recommends comedian Stephen Colbert.

I won’t name names, but I can think of more than one prominent passenger on the conservative movement’s bus, who could be relied upon to broaden and grow into just such a role, becoming worthy of “strange new respect,” given the right inducements.

Honoré Daumier. Les Joueurs d’échecs, c. 1863-1867. Oil on panel. Musée du Petit Palais, Paris

According to the latest Rasmussen Poll, public support for the democrat party’s so-called Stimulus Package is now in the minority, having declined to 37%.

Like the Daschle nomination, the Stimulus Package is visibly in serious trouble, and it appears very likely that the Obama Administration will soon demonstrate all over again the hasty retreat which is already becoming recognizable as this administration’s favorite, and most relied upon, political strategy.

Barack Obama made his way upwards to the Senate, his party’s nomination, and the Presidency by a combining an attractive image with studious avoidance of commitment to any controversial position which might expose him to attack.

It was easy to carry water for the democrat party’s ultra-liberal base and special interests, as well as for the Daley machine, while keeping one’s head down, and voting “Present!” on the hottest issues back in the Illinois State Senate. It was even easier to vote with the democrat majority some of the time, and be away campaigning, in the US Senate, when decisions which might cost something needed to be made.

Barack Obama is, as time goes by, going to find it harder to hide in the White House.

He won’t always be able to backtrack quickly, and issue a mildly rueful “I screwed up” press statement to dodge the bullet and get off the hook. In the end, he is going to wind up forced to commit himself one way or another on the big decisions that matter to America and the world. And, when he produces a national or international disaster, humiliation, or defeat, he is not simply going to be able to take it back or smile apologetically to an indulgent press corps, say: “I screwed up,” and get a free pass.

Character counts in leadership, and Barack Obama has made himself a political career by substituting charm for character. The Obama magic mirror, in which admirers can see whatever they want to project upon it, was a great way to get elected, but it is never going to protect its owner for four years.

Two presidents have a problem looking for a door. Warner Todd Huston illustrates just how differently these kind of minor contretemps can be reported.