Sickening. Just plain sickening.

The Real Danger of Liberal Bias

It's That the Powerful Keep Winning and the Weak Keep Losing

By: Thomas Crown (Diary)  |  June 5th, 2013 at 01:33 PM  

I’m going to tell you what media bias is really all about. It’s about a dying, 10 year-old girl and a sexagenarian, politically connected trial lawyer. It’s about official malfeasance treated as human error when a Democrat is President. It’s about power and systemic corruption that is unremarkable to people offended that George W. Bush didn’t call his advisers liars to their face.

It is about Fred Baron and Sarah Murnaghan.

Fred Baron was a plaintiff’s asbestos lawyer, a prolific Democratic bundler, a man who made a great deal of money by breaking Fortune 500 companies (possibly through subornation of perjury), a personal friend of former Presidential candidate John “Baby Daddy” Edwards and of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and in 2008, a man dying of multiple myeloma. At 61, Baron had become one of the Democrats’ foremost source of trial lawyer funds, and they rewarded him with access and influence.

Politics as usual, really.

Where this story diverts from the usual depressing tale of money and influence is in the closing days of Baron’s life. Stage 5 cancer of any kind is a bad day; stage 5 multiple myeloma, as Baron (somewhat ironically, given his profession) had is a death sentence. Because Baron had the luxury of being rich, he spent a great deal on doctors to discover what the rest of us would know: he was a dead man walking.

However, his doctors believed that Tysabri — a monoclonal antibody that is used primarily to treat multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases (by killing or impeding the movement of dysfunctional white blood cells that would otherwise attack the brain) — might save Baron’s life. (The mechanism for this is more complicated, but essentially, they were hoping the drug would slow or block the cancer cells through the same mechanism that the drug worked on autoimmune diseases.)

The problem of course was that the Food and Drug Administration had not cleared the drug for use on cancer patients. The drug’s manufacturer had the drug in what are called Phase I trials — the first part of the labyrinthine approval process for a drug that makes us one of the slowest drug approval regimes among modern societies — for use in treating multiple myeloma. The drug’s manufacturer could not approve the drug’s use out of the very limited number of test patients receiving it, and the drug would be at best 5-7 years from broad market use. (Really, that would likely be its turnaround time to Phase III trials, which have a much broader number of patients.)

Fred Baron did not have five years to live.

His family mounted a public and private campaign to get the manufacturer to allow Baron to use the drug. The manufacturer balked because allowing use outside of the trials can set back or destroy your chances for FDA approval (extra mortality, illegal use, and just general persnickitiness apply).

Enter Nancy Pelosi. Through means to which we have never been privy, Ms. Pelosi got the FDA to give the manufacturer the all-clear to give Baron the drug. Baron got the drug, Baron took the drug, Baron died anyway, but his family remains grateful to the party to whom they’d given so much.

This bit of horrifying corruption was reported slobberingly by the Dallas Morning News (Baron’s hometown paper), which neatly managed to turn a private company’s obedience into the law into another dragon for Fred Baron to posthumously slay.

Sarah Murnaghan is a 10 year old girl who will die without a lung transplant. The only lung on tap is an adult lung, and HHS guidelines forbid the use of adult lungs on child recipients because of high mortality. Miss Murnaghan’s father is not a Democratic bundler. Miss Murnaghan has never brought down a Fortune 500 company through the use of mass nuisance suits.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius refuses to waive the regulation forbidding the transplant, even though Miss Murnaghan’s doctors believe she has a good chance of surviving the transplant (and no chance at all of surviving without it).

This bit of news got its only real play in conservative media.

Today, a 10 year old girl is being sentenced to death because she is not rich and is not a Democratic donor of fantastic proportions.

The stones cry out for reporting on this. Right now, the Washington Post should have reporters all over this story and the easy comparison — and they should be asking if there are other Fred Barons out there. They should be asking if there are other agencies and processes where the wealthy and powerful have been given a free pass, while the weak and poor suffer.

We know that the IRS, at least at a certain level, targeted conservatives, pro-lifers, and Israel backers for extra scrutiny. We know this because the IRS admitted it. Those same allegations, made by conservatives for over a year, were ignored by a media too compliant with the ruling party.

This is what liberal bias is like. It’s not shading, it’s not playing up the Democrats against the Republicans. It is ignoring the stink of corruption from Democrats and government in general, because they can’t be wrong. It is about systemic corruption that goes unreported.

Fred Baron’s free pass came in the lame duck days of George W. Bush, when the apparently-permanent Speaker of the House carried more sway with the permanent bureaucracy than its nominal head. Are we really to believe that this sort of thing hasn’t been repeated? We know about cronyism for Tesla and Solyndra and so many others; is that all? Shouldn’t these be questions a press corps heavily invested in Washington, D.C. is asking?

Because the stories of Fred Baron and Sarah Murnaghan should absolutely thrill a real watchdog press. Those stories tell of massive government dysfunction in drug approval; of corruption; of influence and power; of the power of the strong to work government for their own ends, while the weak are instead crushed by leviathan.

It is the corruption and politicization of every aspect of our health system in one story. It is the powerful beating the people. It is someone’s baby girl dying because he has not given Democrats money, and a 61 year old trial lawyer getting extra chances.

A rich Democrat worked the system and broke the rules to have a chance at life. A not-rich, not-Democrat is publicly told to just die already.

A real press would dedicate whole reporting desks to this. If John McCain or Mitt Romney was President today, HHS would be under constant assault (and rightfully!) for potential cronyism. Yet the national papers with the most investment in covering the Federal Government won’t even look at this.

That is the danger of liberal bias. The press is not the fourth branch of government, despite pretensions to the contrary. But it is vital to a functioning government.

The media — regardless of political preference — should be asking basic questions: Which agencies have done terrible, corrupt, wasteful and despicable things and haven’t admitted it? Which Congressmen have pulled strings for donors and broken the law? If we had a truly free press, these stories would drive coverage — and more importantly, reporting — for a year if not more.

The media were all over Duke Cunningham, and rightfully so. And they briefly covered William Jefferson because IN HIS FREEZER. But the danger isn’t stupid, easily-caught bribes. It is a government that works by breaking its rules for the powerful.

But a press that sees liberals as the good guys, and government as justice personified, can’t see this when their side is the powerful.

Now, this is made worse because media watchdogs are too close to those they cover by class and ideology. But they’re not robots. We’re not Marxists. We know that class and even ideology can be put aside.

Yet they won’t.

Liberal media bias is about small people crushed under a leviathan while the great and the good ride high on its back. It is about small stories that add up to a giant, sickening picture being systematically ignored. It is about the failure of people who think the First Amendment was crafted for their personal use not bothering to exercise it.

Someone’s baby girl will either die because she didn’t give to Democrats; or won’t, because she was the rare one whose father worked the system to shame the powerful.

How many others of the weak will suffer while the powerful who gave to the ruling party prosper? And will we ever hear about it?

Spoilers: We won’t.

Every American needs to take 1 minute to view this right-on summation of our embarrassment in the White House

 

CLICK THE LINK BELOW:

 

Congressman Delivers Epic Indictment of Obama ... in 1 Minute

Very, very disturbing. DHS targets "Militia" but ignores "Jihad". Napolitano is an enemy of any American who believes in and upholds the Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights

DHS flags tweets about 'militia,' but not 'jihad'

Exclusive: Andrea Shea King reveals latest discovery about 'terror' targeting

You can thank the Electronic Privacy Information Center for forcing the Department of Homeland Security to release its list of “keywords” that are used to by its agents to monitor you on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites.

The list, including phrases, reveals which words you probably want to avoid or else risk being flagged and eyeballed as a possible terrorist or someone who is otherwise posing threats to the United States. Words included such innocuous terms as: “Militia,” “exercise,” “cops,” “national security” and “facility.” Interestingly and of note, “jihad” was not included, nor were the words “Middle East,” “Arab,” “Muslim,” “terrorist” or “pressure cooker.” Perhaps those are on a different DHS red flag list?

The Electronic Privacy Information Center sued to obtain the list, but not before it had filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the documents contained within DHS’ 2011 ‘Analyst’s Desktop Binder,’ which, according to a Forbes report, is “used by workers at their National Operations Center, which instructs workers to identify ‘media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities.’”

Meanwhile, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., in Silicon Valley to meet with Google, eBay and Facebook representatives last week, made his views known on civil liberties, technology and privacy, telling them, “Due process is not someone who’s an elected politician deciding whether [Americans] should die or not.”

Ironically, Al Qaeda’s newest war tactic now includes social media. Call it “digital jihad,” but again, I’m not finding that phrase on the DHS list. Why is that?

As Pamela Geller wrote at her blogsite Atlas Shrugs, “Well, you can’t say we haven’t been warned.”

Quoting from an article that appeared in the May 30 edition of MEMRI, Geller posted that for the first time, the jihadi magazine Inspire was disseminated on Twitter rather than Al-Qaeda affiliated jihadi forums. The English language magazine is produced by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

From MEMRI: “The first downloadable link was posted on a Twitter account belonging to “Muhammad Al-Shammary,” who said he had received an email with English and Arabic copies of the magazine. Al-Shammary, who uses the handle @muhammad115599 and about whom very little is known, then posted the password needed to unlock the link.”

“Most of the articles in this issue focus on the Boston Marathon bombing,” MEMRI continued. “Inspire’s publishers clearly believe that they deserve credit for providing the perpetrators with the motivation and operational know-how for the attack. More importantly, AQAP uses the current issue to incite Muslims in the West to carry out similar attacks, by emulating the Tsarnaev brothers and the Woolwich attackers. Thus, one prominent feature in the issue is a message from AQAP’s military commander, Qassem Al-Rimi, who warns the American people that such attacks will continue and that their government is unable to stop them.”

But the forums continue to flourish. The Atlantic magazine reports that almost a decade in, “Al-Qaeda’s password-protected online forums continue to remain popular. Government officials in the U.S and elsewhere have spoken out against the message boards, which are used by jihadis to converse and distribute information, saying they serve as a recruiting tool for terrorists and have been used to incite violence against the West. But some U.S. intelligence officials have argued against their removal, saying they rely on them for intelligence gathering.”

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/dhs-flags-tweets-about-militia-but-not-jihad/#ptIIpoAYl9yBMV1x.99

These prognostications will certainly come to pass unless we remove this wretched, anti-Freedom, un-American, socialist administration from the White House

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

--Sir Alex Fraser Tyler (1747-1813) unverified however and suspect

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.

- anonymous

Democrats even back-stab each other!

Obama was pushed by Clintons into endorsement of Hillary in 2016

EXCLUSIVE

President Obama made a secret deal to support Hillary Clinton when she runs for president in 2016, campaign sources say, payback for the support her husband gave him in 2012.

Bill Clinton’s animosity toward Obama is legendary. A year before the last election, he was urging Hillary to challenge the sitting president for the nomination — a move she rejected.

According to two people who attended that meeting in Chappaqua, Bill Clinton then went on a rant against Obama.

“I’ve heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I’ve heard from Obama,” my sources quoted Clinton as saying. “I have no relationship with the president — none whatsoever. Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works. He’s incompetent. He’s an amateur!”

 

HUB-BUBBA: “The Amateur” says Bill Clinton’s animosity toward the president cooled only with a promised endorsement and a fawning January spot on “60 Minutes” with Hillary.

 

For his part, Obama wasn’t interested in Bill Clinton upstaging him during the presidential campaign. He resisted giving him any role at the convention.

But as last summer wore on, and Democrat enthusiasm waned, chief political strategist David Axelrod convinced the president that he needed Bill Clinton’s mojo.

A deal was struck: Clinton would give the key nominating speech at the convention, and a full-throated endorsement of Obama. In exchange, Obama would endorse Hillary Clinton as his successor.

Clinton’s speech was as promised; columnists pointed out the surprising enthusiasm in which he described the president. It also lived up to Obama’s fears, as more people talked about Clinton’s speech in the weeks following than his own.

But after his re-election, Obama began to have second thoughts. He would prefer to stay neutral in the next election, as is traditional of outgoing presidents.

Bill Clinton went ballistic and threatened retaliation. Obama backed down. He called his favorite journalist, Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes,” and offered an unprecedented “farewell interview” with departing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The result was a slobbering televised love-in — and an embarrassment to all concerned.

It is just one of the debacles that have marked Obama’s second term, from Benghazi to the IRS scandal.

While he was effective on the campaign trail, once in the Oval Office, he becomes a different person, one who derives no joy from the cut and thrust of day-to-day politics and who is inept in the arts of management and governance.

Obama has made a lot of promises — and nothing ever happened.

He once boasted that he’d bring the Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table and create a permanent peace in the Middle East. Nothing happened.

He said he’d open a constructive dialogue with America’s enemies in Iran and North Korea and, through his special powers of persuasion, help them see the error of their ways. And nothing happened.

He said he’d solve the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and put millions of people back to work. And nothing happened.

He may yet try to back out of his promise to Hillary Clinton. But as Obama’s presidency sinks deeper into scandal and inaction, the question is — will Clinton even still want his endorsement?

Adapted from the new paperback edition of Edward Klein’s “The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House” (Regnery Publishing), out this week.

Good Lord! The rampant, insidious, broad-based corruption of this entire administration is mind-boggling and far beyond precedent

EX-IRS CHIEF’S WIFE WORKS FOR LIBERAL LOBBYING GROUP…

(Breitbart) – On Friday, reports broke that Former IRS chief Doug Shulman’s wife works with a liberal lobbying group, Public Campaign, where she is the senior program advisor. Public Campaign is an “organization dedicated to sweeping campaign reform that aims to dramatically reduce the role of big special interest money in American politics.”

The goal of Public Campaign is to target political groups like the conservative non-profits at issue in the IRS scandal. The Campaign says it “is laying the foundation for reform by working with a broad range of organizations, including local community groups, around the country that are fighting for change and national organizations whose members are not fairly represented under the current campaign finance system.

CEO of Public Campaign Nick Nyhart has offered words of support for the IRS’ targeting: “There are legitimate questions to be asked about political groups that are hiding behind a 501(c)4 status. It’s unfortunate a few bad apples at the IRS will make it harder for those questions to be asked without claims of bias.”

Public Campaign gets its cash from labor unions like AFL-CIO, AFSCME, SEIU, and Move On.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/05/31/former-IRS-chief-Public-Campiagn

 

Patience America. This fraud in the White House will eventually be exposed as the left wing, socialist, Muslim-leaning coward that he truly is. And then we start dismanteling the Chicago Cabal in Washington. Throw some in jail the rest home to Chicago.

Why is the Benghazi military story still classified?

In a previous post, I wrote that even as the public learns details of what happened in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack on the American facility in Benghazi, the story of what the U.S. military did, and did not, do to aid Americans under attack remains classified. Key details about what manned and unmanned aircraft were in the region, the actions of various emergency response forces, and the deliberations of commanders from the ground up are a U.S. government secret. Pentagon officials have shared some of that information with House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon and a few others, but only in classified briefings.

Some military experts have suggested the amount of classification is excessive, but the lid remains on. So, why is so much about Benghazi classified? A few days ago I ran a theory past a well-informed Capitol Hill source.

The email I sent:

Theory: The government, including the administration and relevant members of Congress, is keeping the military details of the Benghazi attack/response classified because they don’t want to the world to know how woefully unprepared we were in that troubled part of the world until we’ve had time to fix things. After our security stance is improved, then more details can be released.

Corollary: Keeping Benghazi information classified is against the instincts of many Republicans, but they believe it is important not because they have any desire to provide cover for the president but because they were particularly appalled to discover just how disastrously ill-prepared the administration was. They also know that things could have been worse last September 11 — Cairo could have blown up, too — and are giving the administration the cover of secrecy (but not unlimited secrecy for an unlimited time) to give them room to fix the situation.

What came back was a two-part answer, part of which shot down my theory, and part of which supported it. First, some of the information that is classified is of a type that is always classified and would be classified whether Benghazi had happened or not. How many U.S. warplanes are in a given place at a given time? How long does it take for an American force to get from Point A to Point B? Where are particular weapons kept? All that is information the U.S. government does not want potential enemies to know. So, it is not as if there are reams of information that are specifically classified because they deal with Benghazi. Rather, such information is in a category that is usually classified.

The second part of the answer was very specific to Benghazi. Why wasn’t the U.S. government more prepared for what happened? For years now, the government has taken care to be especially ready for action on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Did the Obama administration let down its guard on a particularly dangerous day?

The question is particularly important to Congress because on Sept. 10, 2012, the day before the Benghazi attack, the Obama White House released a statement claiming that the government would be particularly prepared for trouble the next day. Here is that Sept. 10 statement:

Earlier today the President heard from key national security principals on our preparedness and security posture on the eve of the eleventh anniversary of September 11th. Over the past month, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan has convened numerous meetings to review security measures in place. During the briefing today, the President and the Principals discussed specific measures we are taking in the Homeland to prevent 9/11 related attacks as well as the steps taken to protect U.S. persons and facilities abroad, as well as force protection. The President reiterated that Departments and agencies must do everything possible to protect the American people, both at home and abroad.

The statement suggests that the White House was focused on domestic security, but it also specifically mentioned security for “U.S. persons and facilities abroad.” That would certainly include U.S. facilities and diplomats in Libya. But we know that American forces in Libya, and apparently elsewhere in the region, were in fact ill-prepared to respond to the Benghazi attacks. So, what was the White House talking about when it said the president himself had taken part in special planning?

“Certainly there are questions raised by this White House statement,” says a GOP aide. The aide continued:

A day before the attack, our most senior national security officials are assuring the country that we are appropriately postured to defend Americans at home and abroad against terrorist attack.  After the attack, the Defense Department’s explanation for not being able to assist more was that they were not appropriately postured.  So what posture did the President direct the military to take in the context of that September 10th meeting?  Clearly they were aware of rising tensions in the Middle East and North Africa. Why was that posture insufficient to respond, given all of the assurances the President made to the country the day before?

So why, indeed? The answer is classified. The bottom line is that detailed information about the military’s response to Benghazi is both routinely classified and evidence of how woefully unprepared we were in that difficult part of the world on that particular day. It’s an issue about which Armed Services Committee Chairman McKeon has been demanding information from the Pentagon. In a May 14 letter to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, McKeon said he wants to know more about

…the force protection and operational posture assumed by U.S. military units in the region in 2012 in anticipation of the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, any orders or instructions from higher authority mandating this posture, the origins of any such orders, the comparative force protection and operational posture assumed by U.S. military units in the region in 2005-2011 preceding the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and related issues.

McKeon had a chance to ask the Pentagon questions about those very issues — and many others — during a May 22 briefing. The answers would tell the public much that needs to be known about the U.S. military response to Benghazi. So far, though, it’s all classified.