Author Archives: David Preiser (USA)

Compare and Contrast: BBC North Korea Edition

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We hear all the time that Fox News is a Right-wing propaganda outlet, the publicity arm of the Republican Party. Therefore, we’re expected to think, one should expect Fox News to report on any given issue from a Right-wing perspective.

With this in mind, I invite you to compare and contrast this Fox News report on China’s attempt to deal with the current crisis with North Korea:

China Raises ‘Concern’ Over U.S. Plan to Hold Joint Military Exercises With South Korea

…with this BBC piece on the same story:

China works to ease North-South Korea tension

The Fox News piece opens with this:

China made its first official protest over plans by the U.S. and South Korea to hold joint military exercises involving the aircraft carrier USS George Washington in the Yellow Sea on Sunday.

But Beijing’s protest, in a statement from the Foreign Ministry Friday, was noticeably more restrained than when the U.S. announced similar plans, involving the same aircraft carrier, in July.

The statement also appeared to offer all sides a face-saving compromise, by implying China did not oppose exercises outside its “exclusive economic zone,” a term of international maritime law that generally extends 200 nautical miles from a country’s coast.

Here, China is portrayed as ceding ground to the US and South Korea’s flexing muscle as a warning to North Korea. It goes on to say that Hu Jintao is coming to Washington in January, and doesn’t want this distraction, which means that China is more concerned about focusing for the time being on its own economic goals regarding the financial problems of the US.

The BBC, on the other hand, starts with this:

China’s Foreign Ministry has begun working to ease tensions on the Korean peninsula, holding a series of talks with Washington, Seoul and Pyongyang.

Officials said their priority was to avoid a recurrence of Tuesday’s violence, which saw North Korea fire artillery shells at a southern island.

The South responded by announcing that joint military exercises with US forces would begin on Sunday.

Pyongyang said the drills were pushing the region to “the brink of war”.

The US and other powers have repeatedly urged Beijing – Pyongyang’s only ally – to use its influence to defuse the crisis.

This makes it seem as if China is the voice of reason, while South Korea is trying to drag the US into escalating tensions. There is no mention in the entire piece of Hu Jintao’s upcoming trip to Washington. However, the BBC does see fit to make a sexy set of graphics depicting the relative sizes of the armed forces of the North and South.

I’ve said many times that China doesn’t want war to break out, because the inevitable result of that will be a total collapse into chaos, during which hundreds of thousands of half-starved, half-mad North Koreans will flood into China. There’s already too much civic unrest in many parts of China, and this is the last thing they want. Not that the BBC’s audience would know much about this, as this concern is almost never mentioned. Instead, it’s just a vague “stability in the region” kind of deal. But that’s why China has been propping up the mad North Korean regime for so long. They could have helped to put the squeeze on the leadership any time they wished, and had they done so, the regime would have collapsed by now. Instead, they work to maintain the horror show status quo, ensuring that millions of North Koreans are kept in darkness, poverty, and near-starvation. Not that the BBC would ever blame them for it.

If this did happen, however, I would suggest to China that they’ve got plenty of available empty housing for far more than the entire population of North Korea, thanks to their phony construction boom. BBC audiences will be forgiven for not knowing this, as the BBC has censored any news of China’s looming real estate bubble. Next time you see yet another BBC piece enthusing over China’s building schemes, remember this.

But back to the comparing and contrasting. Clearly these two reports approach the story from nearly opposite angles. Therefore, if Fox News is by default Right-wing, then the BBC must be approaching the story from the Left. One has it that China is backing off trying to stop the US and South Korea from a little saber rattling, while the other portrays China as a calming influence against South Korean and US aggression.

The BBC, then, approaches the story from the perspective that China is the good guy here. No mention that China is trying to maintain the status quo for their own benefit, and that this crisis has continued largely because of them. If Fox News has a Right-wing perspective, then an opposite view must be from the Left.

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The BBC’s Censoring of News on the Gulf Oil Spill

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I’m sure everyone remembers the BBC’s tireless, seemingly non-stop coverage of the Gulf Oil Spill a few months ago. It was declared the greatest natural disaster in the history of the US, with unfathomably dire environmental consequences. We all saw the footage of the soiled pelicans and turtles, and worried about shrimp and scallops. The occasional tear was also shed for what this disaster would do to the local economy, specifically the Louisiana coast and New Orleans, which had previously been devastated by George Bush’s failure to…er…by Hurricane Katrina.

As time went on, the various failures of the Obamessiah Administration kept cropping up in the news. The Administration’s inept handling of the clean-up effort, including being even less competent than Bush when it came to getting around the Jones Act and allowing foreign countries to send in ships to help out, started gaining attention. Then there was the fact that He ignored a pre-approved, pre-existing plan to burn off some of it, and then waited too long to react in general. Even we noticed here that He took nine days to even make a real public appearance about it, forcing himself to cut short yet another vacation. The BBC never said a word.

In fact, it got so bad that the people of Louisiana thought the President handling things worse than Bush did with Katrina. Meanwhile, the BBC was telling you about some silly anti-British sentiment because the President kept saying “British Petroleum” and one or two locals said something in anger in front of a BBC camera.

Naturally, once the media started carping about the President’s handling of the problem (even JournoListas were unhappy), Mark Mardell was there to support Him. At first, of course, Mardell declared that the real reason that people were upset was because the President wasn’t acting dramatically enough for the stupid proles. Then, when He gave a more ponderous performance, Mardell eagerly lapped it up:

It was a measured, sober speech of quiet power, the speech of a president projecting absolute command, if not empathy. But the last quotation says much: a strong, very American invocation of the country’s might and optimism, its ability to muster its strength and overcome.

It was intended to rally a people who were rather feeling he’d not gripped this crisis.

A less sycophantic view would be that it was an empty series of platitudes, with more fluff than substance. But not to a believer like Mardell. Soon enough, word got out that the Obamessiah Administration was colluding with BP to block media access to certain areas of the clean-up. Nobody was sure why, although the most obvious reason was to make sure nobody found out just how screwed up the whole situation was. The BBC, of course, censored that news, as they did for just about any problems the Administration was having. The only thing the BBC audience was allowed to know was that the President wasn’t making enough great speeches to please the unwashed masses, but He sure was taking responsibility and would make BP pay.

At one point, the President appointed a commission to study the spill, to find out what went wrong and recommend a course of action. Unsurprisingly, it was full of environmentals and policy wonks, with nearly all of them already having set opinions against the oil industry. Some of the commissioners were expressing their opinions on the matter – all anti-oil – even before the proceedings began. It was rigged from the start, but instead the BBC dutifully reported the White House talking points about it.

In between vacations and photo-op luncheons, the President found time to place a six-month moratorium on off-shore drilling. At the time, this was hailed by Greenpeace and the BBC as a much-needed action, necessary until we learned more about the dangers of off-shore drilling, put more safety measures in place, etc. The message was that off-shore drilling is bad, m’kay, and the President did the right thing for the environment and to save us all.

This ban cost thousands of jobs, and killed plenty of business and tax revenue for the region the President was supposed to be saving and protecting. As it was supposedly based on science and real danger, nobody objected too much, and the Gulf Coast, already devastated by Bush…er…Katrina, would suffer further hardship.

However, it turns out that this ban was done for ideological reasons and not based on science or technical expertise. In fact, we’ve since learned that the spill wasn’t all that bad. Even though it was visually very sexy, it seems that the damage was exaggerated. The media played a large role in this, including the BBC, and one has to wonder if this is in part due to the Obamessiah Administration’s collusion in blocking media access to key areas.

And what a shock: an independent investigation has found that the White House altered part of an Interior Department’s report to make it appear that a group of scientists and engineers approved of the drilling ban:

“The White House edit of the original DOI draft executive summary led to the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer-reviewed by the experts,” the IG report states, without judgment on whether the change was an intentional attempt to mislead the public.

So the ban, which cost thousands of jobs, and harmed the already precarious economy of the Gulf Coast region, was done for purely ideological reasons, and not based on science. Justin Webb told us that this President would bring science back and wouldn’t deny it based on ideology. Turns out this, just like so many of Webb’s other pronouncements on the President back when he was the BBC’s North America editor, simply isn’t true. Utter silence from the BBC, as usual.

The BBC aided and abetted the White House Narrative, in part by censoring key information. This was all done for purely ideological reasons, and not based on science or the facts.

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An Irrational Fear of God at the BBC

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The BBC, along with the rest of the Left-leaning media, has from almost the very start tried to portray the Tea Party movement as a far-right, extremist movement. At first, their main Narrative was that racism was the primary motivating factor behind the movement, with a generic anti-government theme as window dressing. When the movement which the BBC at first ignored, then played down, kept growing far beyond their expectations, the next Narrative was that it was a primarily Christianist movement. This of course was intended to lead the audience into thinking that the Tea Party supporters were clearly off the deep end, as all good Liberals know that anyone who self-identifies as a Christian is halfway towards extremist beliefs anyway. The recent offerings from various BBC-enabled comedians on such programmes as Have I Got News For You and Radio 5 are proof of this mindset.

As we got closer to the mid-term elections in the US (to which the BBC reacted as if it was the second-most important election in human history), the BBC made all sorts of efforts to portray the Tea Party movement as extremist and Christianist as possible. The staggering number of times they mentioned Christine O’Donnell and the fact that the BBC only once mentioned Marco Rubio and Col. Allen West until about a week before the election (and then only in passing, with no features at all) betray the BBC’s biased agenda for what it was.

A few days before the election, the World Service’s “Heart and Soul” programme gave us an installment entitled “God and the Tea Party” (Oct. 27 podcast). Here, Matthew Wells went to Kentucky to speak to a number of Tea Party supporters. Without exception, no matter how much they professed their Christian beliefs and their attitude that the US was a “Judeo-Christian country”, based on Judeo-Christian values, all of them equally expressed their desire for government to stay out of people’s lives and stop the taxing and spending (Note to bigots at the BBC: If someone makes an effort to include the Jews, they’re not the bogeyman you’re looking for). Yet, Wells kept pressing each of them to express their Christianist goals anyway, as if they all harbored a secret desire to turn the US into the Christian equivalent of Saudi Arabia. Then Wells gave a good portion of the segment to far-Left journalist and think-tanker, E.J. Dionne, who said that yes, they’re all extremist Christianist, but don’t worry because the far-Right Christian movement is not going to last long.

At one point, despite what the people themselves told him, Wells stated that conservative, Christian social issues are “at the heart” of the Tea Party movement.

In August, Mark Mardell had the same thoughts, wondering if the Christian Right wasn’t really at the heart of the Tea Party movement. Again, he asks this in spite of everything they keep telling him. It’s as if he suspects it’s all a big smoke screen. Mardell could always be counted on to find the outlier that fits this agenda and let that color everything.

Then, of course, there’s Glenn Beck, whom the BBC kept trying to portray as being a leading light of the movement, even though he’s actually a social conservative who tried to jump on the bandwagon, and did not come from the heart of the movement itself. There is a wide overlap between conservative Christians and supporters of the movement, but that’s all it is. Beck’s big rally in Washington, DC was for the former, not the latter. And let’s not forget Sarah Palin. The Beeboids sure haven’t. I’m sure the screener of her new reality show is already making the rounds, and they’re having a great laugh while at the same time being slightly afraid.

With this whole Social Conservative Christianist Narrative in mind, how does the BBC explain the fact that now several Tea Party organizers have written an open letter to the Republican Party leaders in Congress, telling them to lay off the social conservative issues and focus on stopping the taxing and spending?

I’m reproducing the full letter below. Read it, and decide for yourselves whether or not this matches the BBC Narrative across their spectrum of broadcasting, or what I’ve been saying for the last 18 months.

On behalf of limited government conservatives everywhere we write to urge you and your colleagues in Washington to put forward a legislative agenda in the next Congress that reflects the principles of the Tea Party movement.

Poll after poll confirms that the Tea Party’s laser focus on issues of economic freedom and limited government resonated with the American people on Election Day. The Tea Party movement galvanized around a desire to return to constitutional government and against excessive spending, taxation and government intrusion into the lives of the American people.
The Tea Party movement is a non-partisan movement, focused on issues of economic freedom and limited government, and a movement that will be as vigilant with a Republican-controlled Congress as we were with a Democratic-controlled Congress.

This election was not a mandate for the Republican Party, nor was it a mandate to act on any social issue, nor should it be interpreted as a political blank check.
Already, there are Washington insiders and special interest groups that hope to co-opt the Tea Party’s message and use it to push their own agenda – particularly as it relates to social issues. We are disappointed but not surprised by this development. We recognize the importance of values but believe strongly that those values should be taught by families and our houses of worship and not legislated from Washington, D.C.

We urge you to stay focused on the issues that got you and your colleagues elected and to resist the urge to run down any social issue rabbit holes in order to appease the special interests.

The Tea Party movement is not going away and we intend to continue to hold Washington accountable.

Here’s a link to a PDF file of the letter, with all signatories.

After more than a year of careful observation, the BBC has figured out that the Tea Party movement has mostly been busy trying to transform the Republican Party (Scott Brown in MA was an anomaly to them, a sign of nothing to come, apparently). But their bias makes them think it’s for an entirely different reason. Why, it’s almost as if they had a story they wanted to tell and went out there and told it, in spite of everything they learned from the very people about whom they were supposed to report.

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Matt Frei’s Musings Are A Riot.

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Matt Frei mused during the violent student riots on Wednesday about what he saw as a relevant problem with higher education costs in the US.

Could UK students’ rage find echo in US?

Frei realizes there’s a disparity between the amount of money over which at least one student attempted manslaughter, and the amount required to attend a top US school. However, he doesn’t seem to understand the situation in the US, even though he actually states the problem himself.

Until now, Americans have tolerated this tuition-for-debt pact because they could expect to earn healthy salaries once they entered the job market. But graduates are standing in ever-longer lines for jobs that no longer exist.

The first sentence is more or less accurate. It’s not entirely true that absolutely everyone ends up in debt, as there are a variety of forms of means-tested grants for state schools, and all universities have various scholarship opportunities, not to mention the myriad other private and non-profit organizations which give out annual awards. All of that obviously exists to make up for the lack of a universal free ride in the US, which is one point any US student angry about tuition fees would not have in their favor. At least the UK students have that claim of unfairness. But that gets right to the heart of the problem, and why Frei misses it completely.

Frei is right that there’s a problem with jobs available for new graduates. In fact, as I’ve said before, there’s a looming higher education bubble in the US. But he seems to think that now students ought to be paying less for degrees for jobs that don’t exist, as opposed to the idea that maybe there’s no reason to get certain degrees in the first place.

Liberal Arts colleges will find that they have to shift their programs to more practical, career-path degrees, rather than the current, more abstract degrees. In addition, many schools are poorly run, and seem to exist primarily to enroll as many students as possible and milk them for all they’re worth, and don’t seem to care if they ever graduate. Does that sound familiar? Then there are the for-profit institutions which entice people to go into debt for their useless degrees. The US Government is already going after them, and the free market will take care of the rest.

The BBC covered the riots from a position of sympathy with the cause. That was evident from the way everyone who condemned the riots was asked if they at least understood the anger behind them, as if the BBC took the position that the cause itself was just, and the person condemning violence still needed to acknowledge this. Violence over free education for the next generation of (insert joke about useless bureaucrat coordinator here)? Is the public sector supposed to provide more jobs for these people? Will violence be justified if not?

So what about the next generation of doctors and lawyers those students were warning would disappear without free education? I don’t know about doctors, but there are a whole lot of law students in the US who were led down the garden path. There’s definitely a shortage of jobs for law graduates, and many law schools are in trouble. In fact, there’s some talk of the current law school system – in which students take on astronomical debt in the hopes of landing that high-paying associate position – as being unsustainable.

And there’s that BBC shibboleth again. If the cause of free education – or, in the US, lower priced – is worthy of violence, who is going to pay for all of it? If all those graduates can’t get jobs, what’s the point? How will they then pay taxes to cover the next generation? Matt Frei and the BBC aren’t interested. They’re stuck in juvenile divine right mode. As ever, the realities of sustainability escape them. This is a huge US story which has direct relevance to current events in the UK, yet the BBC doesn’t see it.

So Matt Frei, too, muses about violence for the wrong reason. He thinks that higher education prices should be lower so that students can continue to get useless degrees for which there is no work.

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BBC Mid-Term Election Epilogue

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Check out this election wrap-up by Matt Frei and Katty Kay, who co-anchored the BBC’s coverage of the second-most important election in human history. Their bias is there for all to see. Frei’s personal bias and unwavering support for the President gets even more outrageous in his blog post.

Their first point is about all the money spent on the campaign. I completely agree – as do most people in the US – that it’s gotten ridiculous, but Matty and Katty reveal their political bias here. The only names mentioned in association with high spending are Republican multi-millionaires who spent their own cash, both of whom lost their races. Katty calls this “divine retribution”, although Matty quickly corrects her editorializing. But two things are missing from their comments.

Ted Koppel actually pointed out to Katty on Tuesday night when she was whining about this issue that her comparison to British elections are completely unfair because the campaigns are of drastically different lengths. British general elections go for a few weeks, while the US production can start as early as anyone likes and seems to go on for 18 months at least these days. I don’t like it any more than Katty does, but that’s how it is. Then there are the dramatic differences in both geography and media outlets. Several states are larger than the entire area of the UK. Statewide candidates (for Governor and Senator) have a huge amount of ground to cover, and in some states have a large number of local media outlets to hit and local newspapers in which to buy a seemingly endless stream of full-page ads. This would cost far more money that the UK spends even if the election campaigns lasted the same amount of time. So they’re making a completely false analogy.

Secondly, notice that Matty and Katty do not mention the tens of millions George Soros spent on his pet organizations, nor the fact that Comedy Central donated several hours of free air time and got sponsors to spend a huge amount of cash on St. Jon Stewart’s “March to Restore Smugness”. Which seems to have been an epic fail on a much larger scale than any individual race. But the BBC has been totally silent on that, as it confuses the Narrative.

When Matty and Katty fret about gridlock, notice that Katty is concerned only that there will be no progress on her pet issues towards the Left. When she talks about making progress on the issues of energy and climate change, she is of course not concerned about progess in a non-Left direction.

Both Beeboids speak with great sympathy for the President, which really goes beyond analysis betrays their personal emotions. At one point, Frei tells the same lie he puts forth in his blog post, that the President is always admitting His mistakes and taking responsibility. In fact, his blog post opens with this:

President Obama is no stranger to contrition. At the beginning of his term, he didn’t shy away from saying that he had messed up, screwed up, made mistakes and so on. But he was apologising about the small stuff from a position of supreme confidence. The buck stops with me, he was fond of saying serenely, confident that the buck wouldn’t give him too much trouble.

Oh, really? Let’s remind ourselves of certain things the BBC censored from their reporting.

When it became glaringly obvious that the public was not happy with what ObamaCare was going to do to the country, the President took the same line of defense that the BBC and the EU mandarins took when the Irish voted against Lisbon: they just don’t understand it well enough. When the President accepted blame for people being upset, He said that it was His fault for not explaining it well enough. This isn’t the same thing as admitting an actual mistake. We heard the same thing from Him during His audience with St. Jon Stewart two weeks ago.

As recently as Sunday, the President was singing the same song:

“Making an argument that people can understand,” Mr. Obama continued, “I think that we haven’t always been successful at that. And I take personal responsibility for that. And it’s something that I’ve got to examine carefully … as I go forward.”

This is not the talk of a man capable of contrition, nor of one who will feel “chastened” by the election results.

In fact, any time there has been a mistake with His Administration, His first instinct is to blame someone else. Problems with the clean-up effort for the BP oil spill? Distract by blaming Bush for it in the first place. People unhappy with the Stimulus? Blame Republicans for not letting Him spend even more money. Caught up in a controversy over a criminal act by the Governor in His home state? Lie and say He hasn’t been involved. Air Force One causes an outcry by buzzing lower Manhattan near Ground Zero just to please a few wealthy donors? Blame somebody else. Can’t get every single bit of legislation rammed through Congress fast enough? Don’t admit it’s a mistake to be so impetuous at a crucial time: blame Fox News instead.

Where’s the contrition? Where’s the willingness to admit mistakes? It doesn’t exist. Matt Frei still has such huge respect for Him that he just imagines it does.

As for Matty and Katty fretting over gridlock in Washington, Katty does just barely admit that the President “doesn’t find it very easy to reach out to the other side”. Where were you in 2008, Katty? Oh, that’s right – back then the BBC was telling us that He was going to be bi-partisan and end the awful politics of Washington.

Instead, immediately after the taking office, the President was in a meeting with Republican leadership about His Stimulus Plans for Us. When Republicans complained about it, He dismissed them by saying, “I won”. This is not the attitude of someone willing to work together with anyone. But the BBC censored that news.

I guess Katty Kay should have encouraged her colleagues to take her own advice and not placed the President on a pedestal, as doing so makes it very difficult to report when He gets things wrong.

She didn’t say it in this clip, but on Tuesday night Katty couldn’t shut up about the one person not holding or running for any office: Sarah Palin. Here’s a little something from Katty herself which reveals her struggle with Palin Derangement Syndrome:

‘Katty, tell me they think Palin’s crazy’

In the blog post itself, Matt Frei still gets it wrong about the President’s efforts in closing Guantanamo Bay.

On day one, President Obama signed the bill to shut down Guantanamo Bay, using his left hand. “Get used to it!” he said. “I am a lefty.”

Wrong. It wasn’t a bill, but an Executive Order. Frei actually was closer to the truth in his Diary post from the time, when he said that the President expressed his “intention to close” Guantanamo within one year “with a flick of a pen”. Of course, we all know how well that’s working out for Him.

Frei also claims that, during the transition period before taking office, the President assembled His team “in a flash”. Also not true. Even the Washington Post was worried about how long it was taking Him, more than a month after He took office. I may make a mistake or misremember something I should have checked, but I’m not paid 100 grand a year to do this, nor do I have any research staff to help me.

This is the bias anchoring BBC World News America every night of the week, from the people whom you are expected to trust for news on US issues.

Somebody Doesn’t Like the BBC

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Last month, B-BBC reader La Cumparista made the following comment on David Vance’s post about a BBC interview with a Man Booker Prize nominee:

I would really like Howard Jacobson to win the Man Booker prize this year. Has he had much publicity on the BBC?

Jacobson is listed with the others on BBC news briefs about the authors on the short list, but only Peter Carey got a special feature, presumably because he had won twice before. I don’t recall Jacobson getting the attention of the other authors by the BBC when they did their special report from the black-tie gala event of the announcement.

In any case, I now have a copy of Jacobson’s winning book, The Finkler Question, in my hand. The story opens up with a passage that is very relevant to this blog. The BBC studiously avoided mentioning this in either of their brief interviews of him as one of those on the short list.

The relevant passage begins on Page 6, when Treslove, the non-Jewish character (one of the trio of friends around whom the book is focused), is mugged while walking home one night. It describes the incident which launches the book’s journey to explore what it means to be Jewish in England today:

He passed the BBC, an institution for which he had once worked and cherished idealistic hopes but which he now hated to an irrational degree. Had it been rational he would have taken steps not to pass the building as often as he did. Under his breath he cursed it feebly – ‘Shitheap,’ he said.

A nursery malediction.

That was exactly what he hated about the BBC: it had infantilised him. ‘Auntie’, the nation called the Corporation, fondly. But aunties are equivocal figures of affection, wicked and unreliable, pretending to love only so long as they are short of love themselves, and then off. The BBC, Treslove believed, made addicts of those who listened to it, reducing them to a state of inane dependence. As it did those it employed. Only worse in the case of those employed – handcuffing them in promotions and conceit, disabling them from any other life. Treslove himself a case in point. Though not promoted, only disabled.

Indeed.

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Today Is Also a Referendum On the Media.

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Today, Nov. 2, the US is holding mid-term elections to choose who is going to represent them in the House of Representatives, the Senate, and selected State capitals. Judging from the wild-eyed Katty Kay in the video DB posted below, it’s also clearly the second-most important election in human history.

The main question on so many people’s minds since even before the BBC dared ask it is: Why are all these people motivated against the President and His Plan For Us?

BBC North America editor Mark Mardell believes that this is going to be a verdict on the President. He coyly poses it as a question, of course, but we all know what he’s thinking as this is the line he and all of his colleagues have been pushing for some time now. As we saw from the President’s audience with St. Jon Stewart, they wonder what more He could have done, why don’t we appreciate what He’s done for us, why the masses don’t understand how He’s already saved us. And of course, why do they hate the black man?

While the President should accept the brunt of the criticism (He may have been anointed elected with a mandate for “Change”, but it was obviously taken too far, and at the wrong time, not to mention the endless string of foreign policy errors), the Tea Party movement is as much a rebellion against Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, and the mainstream US media and assorted comedians and Hollywood types as it is against the President Himself.

We’ve all been through the economic arguments of why ObamaCare was the wrong massive debt increase at the wrong time, but Pelosi and Reid were more responsible for it than the President was. Contrary to what the BBC and their fellow travelers keep telling you, there are economists besides JournoLista Paul Krugman or David Blanchflower, and hundreds of them believe that both ObamaCare and all the excessive, debt-increasing spending plans of the Democrats are the wrong policy at the worst possible time. They’re also the ones who are going to let the Bush tax cuts expire at exactly the wrong time. So the Democrat-led Congress is on trial today as well.

Not only that, but the Republican Party is also being served notice today. Everyone talks about how the Tea Party movement is attacking the President and Democrats, but we’ve drawn blood from the Republican establishment first. In Alaska and Florida, for example, the incumbent Republicans lost the nomination when the people got fed up, and have unfortunately chosen to run as spoilers against the Tea Party-backed nominee instead. Many of the vox pops we hear from Tea Parties say that the excessive spending and debt began under Bush, and they’re just as sick of the Republican establishment who went along with it.

But in addition to the President and the political parties, there’s another element against which so many people are rebelling: the media. This includes edgy comedians and Hollywood dopes.
Watch this video and mark how much the statements you hear match what comes out of the mouths of Beeboids. Then you’ll know why we’re so angry, and what we’re really voting against today.

When Bill Maher says that we’re too stupid to be governed, he’s got it backwards. In reality, we’re too smart. If enough of us are, today’s election will reflect that.

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Voter Fraud in 2010: Where are the BBC reports this time?

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Three weeks before the presidential election of 2008, Newsnight hired far-Left political activist Greg Palast to do a couple of video reports (which can be viewed here and here) about voter fraud in the US. This was a strategically-timed effort to create suspicions in the minds of the public in case Sen. McCain won the election. The BBC could raise the specter of 2004, and point to Palast’s “investigations” as evidence that this election was stolen by racist Republicans who didn’t want a black man as President. This time around, the margin of fraud in individual election races is going to have to be much larger than usual in order for people to trust the outcome. But this time around, the BBC has been utterly silent.

UPDATE 5 Nov.: Meirion Jones has kindly responded in the comment thread and pointed out a serious error I’ve made. I was wrong about him thinking that the Republicans stole the election in 2004. He thought it was stolen from Al Gore in 2000. That’s my sloppiness, for which I apologize.

But seriously, I do want to thank him for taking the time to address this, even though he denies being a co-conspirator of Greg Palast. I define that as someone who works together with another person on projects for a specific cause. Mr. Jones has worked with Palast in the past, and it’s that relationship which leads to Palast being featured on Newsnight.

As for ACORN’s voter fraud, my point that both Jones and Palast deny that their activities are intended to or have had any effect on election outcomes still stands. Would whichever defender of the indefensible who alerted Jones to my post please pass this along to him. Thank you.
Newsnight producer Meirion Jones is a co-conspiritor of Palast’s, having worked with him previously on an investigation of voter fraud in Florida in the 2004 elections (this wasn’t mentioned in the report, nor did the BBC admit on air to Palast’s activist assocation with Robert Kennedy, whom they show as an independent voice – so the BBC’s dishonesty is there for all to see). Jones and Palast are convinced that Bush stole that election, so Newsnight hired Palast to do these reports, produced by Jones.

Needless to say, both reports were made with the intent to convince you that only Republicans engaged in voter fraud, usually with the goal of preventing poor black people from voting. In the second report, Palast actually whitewashes the now defunct ACORN, even going so far as to say that, while ACORN had been indicted for and a couple people convicted of voter fraud, there was no evidence that they actually influenced an election. Palast’s report also took the standard far-Left activist/denier’s line that all registered voters that were purged from the rolls for breaking various rules were in fact innocent. He provided no evidence for this.

I commented on it here at the time, and sent a complaint in to the BBC. Meirion Jones actually responded, and after exchanging a couple of emails it was clear that he believed that Bush stole the election, and that ACORN engaged in voter fraud for kicks, with no intent to affect the outcome of an election. He couldn’t offer any valid reason why they would do such a thing if it wasn’t to effect election outcomes. I knew at the time that if there was ever any evidence of voter fraud from the Democrats in future elections, the BBC would keep shtum, because of their political bias.

Now that we’re having the second-most important election in human history (to judge from the hysteria at the BBC), I’m still waiting for the BBC to make a single report about the increasingly widespread Democrat voter fraud going on now.

Below the fold are several stories the BBC doesn’t want you to know about.

Poll Watcher Witnesses Misconduct in Houston

This is eyewitness testimony to voter fraud in the form of a poll worker casting votes on behalf of voters, captured by True the Vote and aired exclusively at PJM/PJTV.

The above link also includes evidence that some faculty at the University of Texas in Brownsville is going to take students directly to the polls for early voting. The leader of this illegal act is Selma d. Ysanga, Associate Professor of Educational Psychology and Leadership, and founder of Texas Counselors for Social Justice. Anyone care to guess which way they are directing their students to vote? Ysanga’s email to her colleagues includes this little fascist gem:

Starting tomorrow, tallies will be taken by college for student, faculty, and staff voter turnout. Let the College of Education lead the way!

Bucks election board to hear GOP allegations of absentee-voter fraud by Democrats

A petition seeking the hearing asserts that a Democratic program intimidated some voters into needlessly, and sometimes fraudulently, applying for absentee ballots. The Democrats then flooded the county elections office with the applications, hoping that many fraudulent forms would go undetected, the petition says.

Democrats have accused Republicans of demonizing a legal get-out-the-vote campaign in an effort to disenfranchise voters. They say that of more than 600 absentee-ballot applications rejected as defective by the Republican-controlled elections board, more than 80 percent bear the names of Democrats.

Notice that these are the same kind of fraudulent voter registrations that Palast claims were purged from the rolls for purely racist and political reasons. Where’s the BBC now? Looking under Christine O’Donnell’s bed for a Harry Potter costume, probably.

Did Harry Reid Commit Voter Fraud?

Leader of the Senate and co-architect of ObamaCare and the Democrat agenda against which the Tea Party movement is motivated, Democrat Harry Reid is facing a serious challenge from Sharon Angle (barely mentioned by the BBC in between full-length features about Christine O’Donnell, who is challenging nobody even remotely important). Apparently Reid is offering free food and Starbucks gift certificates in exchange for votes. Where’s Greg Palast now?

Significant Election Complaint Filed in Nevada

The complaint alleges scores of union tactics designed to undermine the integrity of the voting process and intimidate voters.

Specifically, the complaint notes that union officials are busing in union workers, leading them to the polls, deterring or preventing the union member from going to unobserved polling locations set up in Las Vegas, etc.

Raul Grijalva ally committing voter fraud in Yuma County

The group responsible for this is the racially-oriented Mia Familia Vota. Of course, we recently learned from Beeboid Andy Gallacher that it’s a perfectly natural instinct to vote with one’s own kind – when they’re not white – so it’s cool. However, this particular racially-oriented group has it’s Arizona headquarters at the same address as the SEIU. This is the same White House-connected union trying to influence the election in Nevada.

Grijalva’s opponent, Ruth McClung, is supported by the Tea Party. And she’s a rocket scientist. Put that in your biased pipe and smoke it, BBC.

Where is Newsnight now? Where is any mention of this voter fraud by Democrats – including the top dog in the Senate? Instead, the BBC is continuing with the White House propaganda about the Tea Party movement. Tomorrow will be interesting.

UPDATE: Voter Fraud in Minnesota

Crow Wing County Voter Fraud

On Friday, October 29th, 2010, a member of the Minnesota Freedom Council witnessed apparent voter fraud occurring at the Crow Wing County Courthouse in Brainerd, Minnesota. Upwards of 100 residents from a local group home for mentally disadvantaged individuals were brought into the County Courthouse to cast absentee ballots. The witness reported that supervisors were telling voters to cast a straight Democrat ticket. There was even a report of a voter prematurely leaving the voting both and a supervisor casting the ballot for the voter.

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Sometimes Racial Voting Is Approved by the BBC

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The BBC approves of voting for one’s own ethnicity: when it’s Mexicans doing it.

Border politics in Texas ahead of the mid-terms

I know I’m late in getting to this, but it’s been a long week. In any case, at the beginning of the clip (just after the intro voice over) listen to what the candidate on the stage says: “…we need workers…” Remember that for later.

Andy Gallacher is in a town where both the Democrat and Republican candidates are Mexican-American. The Democrat (the guy who says we need workers) says it’s an honor to be elected to serve, and diversity is what makes this country great. We’ve all heard that before.

Gallacher talks about how the race of candidates matters, but asks, since both candidates are of Mexican descent, how do the voters feel now? He gets a couple of Mexican-American vox pops to say that issues are more important than race. What a shock.

For what seems at first like no reason, Gallacher then speaks to a Mexican-American academic who says his research shows that, regardless of what they say beforehand, most people vote for the race in the end. The Beeboid even helpfully says, “for their own kind”. In stark contrast to all BBC reporting about white people, either in the US or UK, this is presented as a good thing. Hispanics need Hispanic representation. Never mind any non-Hispanics living in the area. If one non-white ethnic group has the majority, then it’s important for someone of that ethnicity to represent them in government.

I say it seemed at first there was no reason for Gallacher to bring in this academic to talk about racial voting because both candidates are of the same ethnicity. So why talk about whether or not the voters will vote for a Hispanic candidate? It’s a moot point.

Then we got to the part where he talks to the Republican candidate. Horrifyingly, he’s wearing a US flag pin on his lapel. He says he’s proud to be an American, while still being proud of his heritage. But for him, American comes before Mexican, as one is his cultural background and the other is his country. He also has lighter skin, no ethnic mustache, and no trace of the Mexican accent like his Democrat opponent does.

So he’s presented to the viewer after the academic who speaks of racial voting because he’s clearly a traitor to his race. He doesn’t talk about diversity, so he is no good. The subtext here is that the Mexican-American voters will and should vote for the candidate who is more proud of the Mexican part than the American part.

Remember the beginning of the clip where the Democrat said in his speech that “we need workers”? Of course he’s talking about the racial politics of illegal immigration. When he spoke of diversity to Gallacher, he was spouting the same old theme we heard a few months back on the BBC that it was racist to be against illegal immigration. Of course the qualifier “illegal” is absent now, as it always is when advocates speak. The Democrat doesn’t care about the law: he cares only about his race. When he’s talking about “diversity”, he means we should grant amnesty to people who look like him. How bringing in more of the same will lead to diversity is beyond my tiny little brain.

The Republican doesn’t talk that way. Or at least isn’t encouraged to by the Beeboid.

The thing is, there’s racial politics everywhere in the US. Right here in New York, former mayor (African-American) David Dinkins endorsed the non-white candidate for State Senate in the Democrat primary in my neighborhood. Here’s his reason:

I grew up in Harlem where we taught that New York City is a melting pot. Well I don’t agree with that. I have always said that we are a gorgeous mosaic. We have as many separate ethnic identities as the United Nations. That’s why we have a parade about every hour and a half. But it is important, it is so very important, particularly for the people of this district who vote on Tuesday to recognize how important it is to understand that the city is changing. Most people in the city are going to look more like us than others and that’s just a fact. It is not a bad thing. It is frankly a good thing.

Imagine if Giuliani had said the equivalent. The BBC would be all over it. Not only that, but Espaillat’s opponent was a Jew. You’ll never hear from the BBC that anti-Semitism is common in the African-American and Hispanic communities. And NYC isn’t a border town, so it’s inaccurate to portray the racial angle in that Texas town as being due to its proximity to the border. The fact that they’re Mexicans is obviously connected to the border, but not the racial angle in the abstract.

But the BBC approves of racism when it’s not white people doing it, so never mind.

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It’s The Policies, Stupid.

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Now that we’re approaching the mid-term elections in the US, the BBC has been ramping up the rhetoric against those who don’t approve of the President’s policies. In fact, to hear it from the BBC, it’s not His policies at all, but rather evidence of bad attitudes, inadequacies, and racism among His opponents.

In the last few days, BBC North America editor Mark Mardell has told us that it’s not the President’s fault at all, because the unwashed simply can’t relate to His intellectual behavior. When critics say He’s aloof and people don’t feel like He hears them, it’s not that His policies and statements clearly go against what most of the public wants and believes, but that He just hasn’t communicated the message in a dumbed-down enough fashion for the masses to understand.

Mardell has made other posts highlighting the “anger” of people dissatisfied with the current Government’s policies, as has Katie Connolly, which is an easy trick to disqualify those voices from the start. When someone is presented as angry, that context automatically reduces their credibility. The thing is, it was okay for people in the US to be angry when Bush was in charge; the BBC never looked for nefarious forces underlying that anger. Yet they do spend an extraordinary amount of effort trying to make it seem to their audience as if racism and extremism are the only things which would compel someone to oppose the President. It’s never because of His and the Democrat leadership’s policies. It’s just “the economy”, which is of course not His fault as it was inherited from George Bush. Does that sound familiar?

This Narrative is spread across the spectrum of BBC broadcasting, from BBC World News America to Newsnight to HardTalk to The Culture Show (h/t Oliver on the Open Thread).

Of course, it’s only natural that the BBC would take this position, because they can’t understand why anyone would oppose anything He and the Democrats have done. Even Matt Frei is concerned that the Coalition Government in Britain is taking a “gamble” with these austerity measures, as opposed to the spending and debt-increasing policies of the US President.

The problem is that the BBC has focused almost entirely on the vox pops angle. Mardell and other Beeboids have been traveling around the country talking to various people about their personal feelings. The only other views presented are from Washington Post or Time elite (JournoList) media figures, who, unsurprisingly, support the BBC’s Narrative.

So I believe it’s important to inform people about something the BBC has almost completely ignored: the policies themselves.

I’m sure everyone will remember just how much time and effort the BBC spent promoting ObamaCare (called “Health Care Reform” by the White House and the BBC). Can anyone recall the BBC spending so much time on the domestic policy of a foreign country? Yet, now that many of the predictions of its opponents (including myself) are coming true, there’s total silence from the BBC. It was the announcement of the ObamaCare plan which lit the fire under the Tea Party movement well over a year ago, which was played down as racism, even though the same people were opposed to it back when it was called HillaryCare. Was it racism when Clinton was President?

At the time, many of us knew that this wouldn’t work as advertised, and that it would harm the economy. We’re seeing that now. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office even says that ObamaCare “discourages work” because it gives people an incentive to stay unemployed. Does that sound familiar?

ObamaCare is about to hit small businesses with higher costs over health care, so much so that at least one business owner is opting to give all his employees a raise of $3000 pa ($250 a month) instead of taking a bath, because the Affordable Care Act supporters promised us that private insurance was going to be “affordable” at last. Principle Financial, one of the country’s largest providers, is getting out of the business altogether because of costs. Are they racists? That was one of the primary talking points of ObamaCare, about which the BBC spared no effort in reminding you.

Unfortunately, it has actually increased costs already. The BBC chose to censor that news. Is
one of the top health care organizations in the country now run by racists? There’s also the question of whether or not it violates the Constitution by forcing people to purchase a product from specific, government-approved vendors, health insurance in this case. Several states are challenging the law, including Florida. Are they all racists?

And it’s not just ObamaCare. Other things the President has said and done have caused harm, and the citizens have taken notice. For example, just a couple weeks after He was inaugurated, the President scolded companies for having conventions in Las Vegas, and told them not to go there. Earlier this year, he made a similar scolding comment about how it was wrong to go to Vegas when people ought to be paying their bills instead. It’s no surprise that these careless statements have compounded the pressures of a struggling economy on the city, as well as the state of Nevada. Unemployment is over 15%, and the people are not happy. Senator Harry Reid, one of ObamaCare’s chief architects (the President had little input Himself: it was created by Congress and “experts”) is fighting against a newcomer to keep his seat because of it. Is Nevada racist now? In 2008 they weren’t, 55% – 43%.

The other chief architect of ObamaCare, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, is also getting hit. Even Democrats are making campaign ads positioning themselves against her and her policies. Are all these Democrats racist now? Do they not blame the current Administration’s policies for harming the economy and damaging our future?

People are calling for reform and reining in government spending everywhere. Even in New York where, while writing this, I got a robo-call featuring former New York City mayor Ed Koch – a lifelong Democrat – telling me to vote for someone who has signed on to the New York Uprising Reform pledge. The call was paid for by the Republican Party, but if Ed Koch is in on it, things must be bad. He supported The Obamessiah during the election, and called Sarah Palin “scary”. How much more BBC-approved can you get? Is Ed Koch a racist now? Are we all racists now? Or is it about the actual policies?

The BBC wants you to think it’s the former, and not the latter, because they are ideologically biased in favor of His policies, and cannot accept that His Administration has made poor decisions, so they color their reporting accordingly.

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