gdp's Comments

Big Journalism : Media Matters' Malicious Accusations of anti-Semitism Directed at Glenn Beck

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 03:38:34 +0000

It's funny because I've been watching Glenn Beck for more than a year now and never once has he mentioned that Soros is Jewish. Not once. Until this article I honestly had no idea what faith the man followed, nor did I care and nor did it matter.

Big Government : The Next Bubble to Burst: Higher Education?

Sun, 8 Aug 2010 17:09:56 +0000

I say let this bubble burst. I currently work for my alma mater-- an ivy league institution that has been living on public largess for as long as recorded history. Private universities don't pay real estate tax on their property, don't pay any taxes at all, as far as I know. Their tuition has more than doubled in the fifteen years since I graduated. When I found out from a current undergrad that he is now paying more than $1400 per credit hour, I almost fainted. In addition to the tax-exempt status of these institutions, many like my own are quick to use eminent domain to snatch up still more property to expand their campuses, increase their enrollment and, thus, rake in more tuition payments. The endowments of the largest private universities run into the billions, yet they still hike tuition annually even when the economy stagnates and falters. Cripes, Harvard has a whole office and team of investment managers dedicated to investing their endowment. When the derivatives markets took a nose dive a couple years back, major universities were among the biggest losers and, in my opinion, deservedly so. As many of the respondents have commented before me, there are scarce few degrees in the undergrad curriculum that translate into jobs that pay enough to justify the staggering loans the average middle-class family needs to take out to afford it. For parents with more than one child planning to enroll in college, this can be downright crippling. While most universities offer grants to make up the difference between the tuition cost and what a student can afford to pay, they usually do so after squeezing every last available penny from the parents and, of course, making the student take out the maximum allowable amount in loans. In my case my tuition for four years totaled more than $100K, of which loans covered about 40%, my parents covered another 20%, with the difference taken up by grants and work study employment. A few respondents above have noted meeting undergrads without even basic critical thinking skills and I can attest to this fact. That's what happens when a school is so focused on matriculation rates and getting its graduates into good graduate schools than in training its students to think. The mean GPA at these schools is often higher than a 3.0. At my esteemed alma mater it was 3.3 or a B-plus. The effect of all this grade inflation is a devaluation of the undergraduate diploma to about the cost of the paper on which it's printed.

Big Government : Breitbart: Enemy of the Left with a Laptop

Wed, 4 Aug 2010 22:51:37 +0000

Guess what? I watched the full video. I know the story about how Mrs. Sherrod helped the Spooners save their farm. And I know all about the Spooner's testimonial-- they talk about it in detail in the CNN clip I provided in the link, so I don't need you explaining it all to me. None of this changes the fact that the audience laughed out loud at her 'stick-it-to-this-superior-acting-whitey' moment. Mr. Jealous never retracted his admonition regarding the audience behavior. Nor does this change the fact that Mr. Jealous and his organization were the only ones who had the full video, yet he still decided to toss Mrs. Sherrod to the wolves based on his perception from not even watching the entire 2-minute 36-second clip that Mr. Breitbart posted. And honestly, what does your claim to blatant racism in the '60s have to do with anything here? The event she describes happened in 1986, not 1968. You might as well have said blatant racism existed in the 1860s for all the relevance it provides.

Big Government : Breitbart: Enemy of the Left with a Laptop

Wed, 4 Aug 2010 07:19:03 +0000

First, Mr. Breitbart didn't remove a thing from the clip he posted. The clip came to him without the introduction to set up the time frame. Hence the error in the text intro, and thus the correction that reads: 'Correction: While Ms. Sherrod made the remarks captured in the first video featured in this post while she held a federally appointed position, the story she tells refers to actions she took before she held that federal position.' This correction has been on both the video clip intro text and the text of the original post at least since July 20-- a day after it was first posted and the first day I visited to view it. Secondly, trying to equate taking 'a long time talking' with an attitude of implied superiority is a pretty weak argument. Some people talk more slowly. Some people talk in a roundabout way. Does that mean they think they're better than the person to whom they're speaking? This claim does nothing to prove that Mr. Spooner came to her for help from a position of anything but desperation. In the interview with Roger Spooner and his wife[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQgJsVw-3Vo ], they only ask him about his perception of Mrs. Sherrod. Nobody ever asks him if he had any racist attitude toward Mrs. Sherrod when he first met her. Nobody ever asks him, 'So, when you first met Mrs. Sherrod, did you come to her with an air of superiority?' Lastly, if you watch the clip, when she first explains that this white farmer needed help and was coming off all 'superior' the only thing you hear from the audience is someone saying 'that's right' when Mrs. Sherrod claims that she 'knew what he was doing.' No laughter here. The audience doesn't laugh until she says, 'what he didn't know was that while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me, was I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him.' Your interpretation of the clip doesn't even jibe with that of NAACP president Ben Jealous who, in his repudiation of Mrs. Sherrod, wrote: 'The reaction from many in the audience is disturbing. We will be looking into the behavior of NAACP representatives at this local event and take any appropriate action.'

Big Government : Breitbart: Enemy of the Left with a Laptop

Wed, 4 Aug 2010 06:22:59 +0000

From the hubby's 'white man and uncle toms' comment to their Pigford boondoggle to this, these Sherrods are just the gift that keeps on giving. Please sue Mr. Breitbart, Shirley. Please! Lord only knows what else would come out during the discovery phase of that trial but it sure will provide plenty of entertainment.

Big Journalism : Who Watches the Watchdogs II: Did the JournoListas Get to Howard Kurtz?

Wed, 4 Aug 2010 06:01:20 +0000

Add the name Howard Kurtz to the long list of perpetrators in this attempted smear of Andrew Breitbart. What a clown. Matthews got it right in the first segment and even backed up his claim with the video evidence, meanwhile Howard Dean makes himself look like a complete ass by trying to argue with him. Walsh offers a qualified admission that the redemption is there, but somehow not long enough. Matthews even gets it right in the second segment, but instead of defending AB, he leads Walsh and Vogel (some diversity of guests he chose for these segments, eh?) into claiming that AB and the Big staff were amateurish for not removing the redemptive moment. These three stooges go so far as to suggest that they maybe Breitbart and company didn't even watch the clip they posted and if they did, they didn't understand it. For those of you who like to read, I absolutely skewered Joan Walsh in response to her Salon article about these Hardball sessions. I had to break it into two parts because Salon only allows 1000 words per comment. part 1: http://letters.salon.com/opinion/walsh/politics/2... part 2: http://letters.salon.com/opinion/walsh/politics/2...

Big Government : Breitbart: Enemy of the Left with a Laptop

Wed, 4 Aug 2010 05:15:51 +0000

Absolutely. That these adjectives keep getting repeated over and over in just about every MSM article written about the topic is disgustingly misleading. The clip is a snippet. An excerpt. Aside from the words from her speech added over the top of the screen, nothing else was done to it. Furthermore, this article implies that Sherrod's much-touted 'redemptive moment' was omitted on the clip Andrew posted. Just because the USDA and Obama administration didn't take the time to watch it until the end before canning her doesn't mean it wasn't there.

Big Government : Who Got to Chris Matthews?: 'Hardball' Defense of Breitbart Memory-Holed
Mon, 2 Aug 2010 19:02:53 +0000
I love the way Walsh tries to squeeze in that NBPP story at every opportunity. At least Chris Matthews had the sense to shut her up about it and stick to the story at hand. Imagine the field day that the left would have had if, instead of angry looking Black Panthers standing outside of polling places, it was a couple of angry looking rednecks with Aryan nation tattoos. See what sort of 'non-story' they would have made of it then. Walsh is a joke. Just look at the way she excused Sherrod's racism on CNN's Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz to get an idea of the kind of crazy she is: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2010/0... Better yet, follow the story from Matt Lewis' point of view: http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/07/25/joan-wals...

Big Government : Who Got to Chris Matthews?: 'Hardball' Defense of Breitbart Memory-Holed
Mon, 2 Aug 2010 18:47:35 +0000
Same here, Greasy. I'd been aware of Mr. Breitbart through those ACORN tapes but never visited this site until this latest incident. Once I started seeing how the left (especially MSNBC) was spinning the story, I've become a regular visitor. It makes me wish I'd visited during the ACORN controversy because the same accusations ('heavily edited', 'selectively edited', 'doctored', etc.) were leveled against Mr. Breitbart back then. As if all those ACORN people were snookered into giving advice to a pimp and his prostitute on how to set up a house of ill-repute filled with underage foreign prostitutes. I didn't believe the claims of the mainstream media then, and after this Sherrod incident I sure as hell don't believe them now.

Big Government : Who Got to Chris Matthews?: 'Hardball' Defense of Breitbart Memory-Holed
Mon, 2 Aug 2010 03:26:39 +0000
Exactly. Just to prove my point, here are links to the episodes from July 20, 2010 of Hardball, Countdown, and Rachel Maddow. First comes Hardball where, to his credit, Chris Matthews includes Sherrod's redemptive moment yet then goes on to accuse Mr. Breitbart of lying and gets Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post and Michelle Bernard of whatever it is she’s from to do the same. 'You know, that‘s not journalism. I mean, it‘s lying, is what it is,' says Robinson, 'And I think we ought to call it for what it is.' Matthews jumps on the timeline issue, noting that Sherrod is recounting an incident from 24 years ago and before she was a USDA official. That a correction had by that point already been posted to the original clip and text intro here on BG, is seemingly irrelevant. He makes a big case out of this error, implying that it was an intentional misrepresentation by saying: 'And the dishonesty, the deceit, the evil of this Web site [BG] is to put this out as if it‘s something she did while she‘s on watch as a government official under the Obama administration so they can tag Obama with this.' video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmOYl0_sz6o transcript here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38343790/ns/msnbc_tv-... Then on Countdown, Lawrence O'Donnell presents the video to first exclude the redemptive moment, interjects a quick run-through of the narrative in his own words, then adds the redemptive portion from Breitbart’s clip, in fact mentioning that it was from the 'same video that Breitbart posted'. Then comes a quote from Sherrod in which she explains the turning point moment we just saw from Breitbart’s clip. O'Donnell then presents a further excerpt of her redemption taken from 'the full speech' released that day by the NAACP, prefacing the clip with, 'Here is part of the video that Mr. Breitbart did not want you to see and did not post on his website.' Note that this extra bit adds nothing more substantially that the redemptive moment from the Breitbart clip didn’t already include. Rich versus poor not just black versus white, yadda yadda yadda. video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXeHTLP8GLg transcript here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38341971/ns/msnbc_tv-... Finally, Rachel Maddow presents the video cut up just as O’Donnell did in the previous hour. She stops the clip at Sherrod’s confession ‘So, I didn‘t give him the full force of what I could do.’ Like Chris Matthews two hours earlier, Maddow corrects the already-by-then-corrected timeline to point out that Sherrod was describing an incident from 1986 when she was not an employee of the USDA. She then presents the Spooner family’s testimony and their defense of Sherrod before airing the redemptive moment. Since Maddow is focused primarily on criticizing Fox News’ handling of the story, Andrew Breitbart’s name never comes up. Yet the mainstream media has been characterizing Breitbart, Fox News, and BigGovernment as more or less the same entity in this incident since the get-go, so the effect is still the same. One gets the impression that Mrs. Sherrod’s turning point moment had been deliberately spliced out, at least on the Fox News programs. video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptbuIme-iCc transcript here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38343831/ns/msnbc_tv-... To be honest, Maddow might have a point about the way Fox handled the story. I don’t watch any of their news programs and find it quite likely that they played up the racism aspect of Sherrod’s story and ran with that without paying any attention to the redemptive moment that was in Mr. Breitbart’s original clip. However, by this point the NAACP and USDA were guilty of exactly the same offense and both had offered their recriminations of Mrs. Sherrod’s seemingly racist attitudes. What would one expect Fox to do at that juncture?

Big Government : Breitbart at Uni-Tea Philadelphia: Lambastes Media For Ignoring Truth Behind ‘N-Word’ Story

Sun, 1 Aug 2010 22:04:19 +0000

Like a parrot. Racist! Ca-caw! Ca-caw!

Big Government : Breitbart at Uni-Tea Philadelphia: Lambastes Media For Ignoring Truth Behind ‘N-Word’ Story

Sun, 1 Aug 2010 21:00:50 +0000

There you go again, spouting assumptions without any facts to back yourself up. You should know by now thatany sentence that starts with the words 'The media reports...' is automatically up for careful examination. Unfortunately a google search for 'tea party attendance' numbers fails to pull up any neutral sources (if there is such a thing for such data in this case) aside from maybe Connecticut's Norwich Bulletin which notes that attendance at a rally in Hartford in February of this year seemed to triple from the year before. Excuse me for not taking the numbers posted at such established outlets as newsjunkiepost.com,rightwingnews.com, huffingtonpost.com, or talkingpointsmemo.com at face value. Either side will either over- or under-report attendance to suit their agenda.

Big Government : Breitbart at Uni-Tea Philadelphia: Lambastes Media For Ignoring Truth Behind ‘N-Word’ Story

Sun, 1 Aug 2010 20:32:07 +0000

Andrew Breitbart impresses me more with every speech he gives, and this is probably his most inspiring one yet. This man is the progressives' greatest fear and they have good reason to be shaking in their shoes right now. To the left's dismay, his logic is impeccable and his methods are completely sound. He understands the power of new media and wields it with an expertise his opponents can only dream to acquire. Unlike his opponents, he realizes that the information age has pretty much rendered deception obsolete. The ease of collecting and distributing multiple sources of video evidence is just one part of it. Transcripts are posted for just about everything. Digital thumbprints make photo editing virtually impossible to pass undetected. Posting a reward for proof to claims of the racist slurs allegedly flung around during last November's health care vote was brilliant. So too is his logic that even word-of-mouth from witnesses after the fact would have spread like wildfire and torn the tea party movement asunder. Of course, progressives will only counter with the thread-worn assumption that all tea partiers are racist-- even the blacks, Hispanics and other minorities in attendance. What should trouble the left more than anything else, though, is Mr. Breitbart's purity of purpose. He is their gadfly. With every issue he raises the accusations against him from the left never stick and they are forced to resort to their usual memes of racism, edited material, and truth distortion without ever offering any credible truth to back up their claims. Until the progressive movement learns to drop its double-talk, sleight-of-hand, and baiting tactics, he will continue to gain supporters and can count me as one of them.

Big Journalism : What Kind of Journalist Would Cheer a Defamation Plaintiff?

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 19:49:26 +0000

'It is noteworthy that I've not heard one word from the Obama Administration, the NAACP or Sherrod condemning the audience for their applause that came about after she had told of her prior racism against an innocent man.' Actually, the first response from the NAACP in which they condemn Sherrod, they do mention the audience: [ http://biggovernment.com/publius/2010/07/20/naacp... ] Note the part where Ben Jealous wrote: 'The reaction from many in the audience is disturbing. We will be looking into the behavior of NAACP representatives at this local event and take any appropriate action.' and 'We thank those who brought this to our national office’s attention, as there are hundreds of local fundraising dinners each year.' To which Mr. Breitbart should respond, 'You're welcome.'

Big Journalism : Breitbart to Newsweek: ‘I’d Like To Speak with Sherrod in Private’

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 17:39:42 +0000

Well said, Tom. I've been making this claim since I first viewed the 2:36 clip back on July 20. Unlike the bobbleheads in the mainstream media, I actually took the three minutes out of my life to both *watch the original clip* and *read the attached intro* written by Mr. Breitbart. He clearly explained that his focus was directed at the hypocrisy of the NAACP resolution against so-called 'racist elements' in the Tea Party movement. The target wasn't Sherrod. If it was, why would he include her turning point moment at the end of the clip? Joan Walsh, when posed this question on Hardball, had the nerve to arrogantly claim that Mr. Breitbart and the folks at BigGovernment simply didn't understand what it was they were posting. Keep thinking that way, Joan, and see where it gets you. Furthermore, by the time I first viewed the clip Mr. Breitbart had already posted a correction at the top of the article indicating the error in the text intro on the video. So within twenty-four hours after posting he had already clarified that Mrs. Sherrod was not a USDA employee at the time of the incident she is describing. Not that this had any effect on his original intent-- to show the audience response to Mrs. Sherrod's discriminatory attitude at the beginning of her story. Mr. Breitbart, like any responsible journalist, offered a correction as soon as his error became apparent. Compare this to the week and a half that it took the mainstream media pundits to finally admit that the original clip posted by Mr. Breitbart actually included Mrs. Sherrod's change of heart to the white farmer's plight. Or the week that it took for Anderson Cooper to admit that he should have questioned Mrs. Sherrod's accusations against Mr. Breitbart. My respect and admiration of Andrew Breitbart has grown tremendously with each passing news cycle since this issue came to light. He's maintained an extraordinary level of control to avoid getting sucked into the name-calling and baiting that has been the progressive stock and trade. His claims are the only ones that stand up to any careful evaluation and it is my belief that he and BigGovernment have gone a long way in establishing their reputation as a credible and vital journalistic resource.

Big Government : Who Got to Chris Matthews?: 'Hardball' Defense of Breitbart Memory-Holed
Sat, 31 Jul 2010 06:18:48 +0000
I only saw the 7pm version of this last night under the assumption that this was the same episode that ran two hours earlier. To learn today that Matthews ran two 'editions' of this story and that the first one included that blowhard Howard Dean blows my mind. He made Dean look like a bumbling imbecile in the first clip (not a difficult feat, I'll admit) with his confession that he never even saw the original clip here before spouting his idiotic opinions on the story. When I first learned about this story on Glenn Beck on July 20, I took the time to visit this site to view the video clip. I mean, it was less than three minutes long. Dean's bullshit excuse that all he saw was the truncated version on FOX makes him look like a total chump. 'You sound like Chris Wallace' he says as Matthews presses the point that the exculpatory evidence was included in the original clip. Walsh's claim that news outlets clipped the video further to support their aims is absolutely true. MSNBC did exactly that on all their evening shows. They cut out the 'redemptive moment' when airing the clip they claimed AB posted, then added in the redemptive moment with the claim that they received it from the NAACP. This all happened on 7/20 on The Ed Show, Hardball, and Countdown. Then on Wednesday or Thursday Chuck Todd, sitting in for Olbermann, even clipped the video to prove that the audience didn't laugh at her racist statements, in the attempt to invalidate AB's claim for originally posting the clip. He purposely didn't show the section where she mentions deciding just how much help she was going to offer where the audience guffaws are impossible to ignore, instead showing the portion right after that where she mentions how she had always been helping black farmers keep their land and was now faced with helping a white farmer keep his land. Joan Walsh is a complete fool. Firstly, note in the second edition that she says Sherrod ultimately helped the 'black farmer'. Funny slip, that, and she says it twice. Then comes her brilliant reasoning as to why AB left in the 'redemptive moment'-- that he and the folks here 'didn't understand what they saw'. What an arrogant ass she is. At least Vogel offers up the fact that AB posted the entirety of what he received from his anonymous source, even though he later suggests that AB and the BG staff didn't watch the whole clip. If they didn't, then who the hell put the text of her speech on the screen? Did it just magically appear? Please. In the redux, notice how Matthews decides to emphasize the intro text to the clip and the erroneous statement that Sherrod had discriminated against the white farmer as a USDA official. Walsh mentions this in her first spiel and Matthews runs hard with it, as it's probably the only aspect that could work in Sherrod's favor. He calls this 'the most damning thing he did' ignoring, of course, the fact that a correction was placed above the original clip before I even got around to watching it on the evening of 7/20. News media make corrections to errors in their stories all the time-- it's part of the journalistic process. Just look at page two of any New York Times. Furthermore, this original assumption only serves to support AB's claim that he didn't have access to any more of the original Sherrod speech than what he posted. He was working with what he had, and none of it indicates when or in what capacity she was working when she was confronted by the white farmer. This whole episode only serves to emphasize the complete tool Matthews is and how wrapped up he is in the progressive agenda. He showed a hint of real journalistic skill in the first session, only to negate it all two hours later. Priceless stuff.

Big Government : Sherrod: Breitbart Wants Blacks to Be Slaves Again

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 21:44:24 +0000

I'd say more the score is more like five or six points for Mr. Breitbart. To quote Tony_Costine from a reply he posted here: 'He showed her speech, showed the NAACP clapping and laughing, showed Obama throw her under the bus, showed Obama pick her up from under the bus, dust her off and giver her a Coke, and now he's showing how unhinged she and her friends are.' To all the above, I'd add that he's showing us the way that mainstream media is twisting and turning this whole charade. From the almighty NY Times on down to the lowliest blogs, everyone is sticking to the talking point of describing a snippet of a speech as 'heavily edited' or 'doctored'. The implication being, of course, that Mr. Breitbart and/or BigGovernment not only cut a larger snippet down to the 2-minute 36-second clip that wound up triggering this whole mess (inexplicably leaving in the part where she explains her redeeming 'turning point'), but that perhaps they rearranged the video or altered the audio on it, as well. Call a snippet a snippet. The only 'editing' on this clip is the 20-second text intro and the text overlay of the actual words spoken by Ms. Sherrod. MSNBC has been propagating the outright lie that the clip Mr. Breitbart posted purposely didn't include Ms. Sherrod's 'turning point moment' (thus proving to their viewers that this was a right-wing smear tactic). This fiction was first spread on Olbermann who only showed the first minute or so of the 02:36 clip, then claimed to get the rest (with her revelatory moment) from the NAACP website. I nearly screamed when I saw this. MSNBC added another chapter to their rewrite last night, when Chuck Todd, to counter Mr. Breitbart's claim of the original intention for posting the clip, made the suggestion that there was no laughing or positive audience response to Ms. Sherrod's racist remarks. When Todd aired the clip to 'let the viewers decide', they purposely showed only the first twenty seconds, stopping it right when she says '...but he had come to me for help'. 'No laughter here' was their evaluation. That Breitbart guy must be hallucinating the audience laughter he claims to be hearing. If only they had played the next eleven seconds when she explains 'I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him,' their 'Breitbart-is-hearing-black-racism-in-his-head' schtick would be exposed for the nonsense that it is. The enthusiastic laughter is clearly evident. The MSM is a joke, but these simpletons at MSNBC take the cake. In this digital age, where all the evidence can be easily examined, they think they can easily propagate their lies. The only real doctoring of the clip that I've seen is the selective editing by MSNBC in order to vilify Mr. Breitbart and FOX News. I also love how every left-wing talking head has to bring up Glenn Beck as the bogeyman in this whole situation, still not realizing that Mr. Beck only aired the tape a day after she had been fired nor that he defended her from start to finish. Beck being a recovering alcoholic identified with her 'turning point moment' as he put it, and excoriated the USDA, NAACP, and Obama administration for jumping the gun to fire her without having reviewed any of the facts, without having viewed the last fifty seconds of the Breitbart clip (from about 01:45 or so), let alone her entire speech. This most recent CNN appearance by Ms. Sherrod only reveals that she's not as enlightened as she appeared in the original clip. Her labeling of Mr. Breitbart and FOX as racists is evidence of that alone-- she still seems to harbor deep resentment. This clip really gets going at about 03:13 when she rolls her eyes, wags her head and starts ranting-- the woman is clearly coming unstuck. The right can only hope that she stays on the air because she is making herself look worse and worse with every appearance. Combine these appearances with the evaluation of her entire speech by Bozell in Media Matters (!!) and score for Mr. Breitbart just keeps getting higher.

Big Government : NAACP Blames Fox and Breitbart For The NAACP's Overreaction to Shirley Sherrod Video

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 04:17:27 +0000

You sum it up pretty succinctly as far as I see it. But even the incomplete clip that was originally posted shows she had remorse for feeling discriminatory based on the farmer being white. It cuts off before she goes into any extended detail, but there was enough for me to see she had those feelings. She claims the plight of the farmer was about poor versus rich, not black versus white. Now the conspiracy theorists are arguing that the shortened clip had the positive audience reaction to her initial claims of racism edited in. Yeah, right. As far as I can tell, Breitbart found it on YouTube-- he didn't post it himself.

Big Government : NAACP Blames Fox and Breitbart For The NAACP's Overreaction to Shirley Sherrod Video

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 03:46:20 +0000

Again, this story is being twisted and spun by the left to make it look like this site misled the public with a highly edited clip taken out of context. It is my belieft that the original 2:36 clip which, according to Mr. Breitbart, was the only part of this speech he had access to, was posted not to depict Ms. Sherrod as the racist. Instead, it was her audience at the NAACP meeting that comes off as racist. Playing the whole story in its entirety doesn't change this fact. When she explains her reluctance to help this white farmer who was coming off all 'superior', her listeners' approval is easy to discern. Yet when she explains her personal revelation that the real problem she was tackling was an economic one and not a racial one, the crowd is silent. All of this is clear in the original clip posted. The spin machine of the msm has twisted it to look like an attack against a 'closet racist' when, in fact, it is an exposure of racial bias of this NAACP audience. It was a counter to their claims made against the 'racist elements' supposedly tainting the Tea Party movement. If Mr. Breitbart wanted to edit this to make her look like a racist, why would he have included her revelatory conclusion? This clearly wasn't put up to get Ms. Sherrod fired. The fact that she was only points to the knee-jerk reaction of her higher-ups who were too lazy to look into the story in any detail before dropping the ax on her. Granted, I'm writing this assessment based on the assumption that the clip currently featured here was the original one posted. If, in fact, a shorter version without her 'moment of clarity' revelation was first posted and replaced by the 2 minute 36 second one currently up, that blows my theory out of the water. In fact, Olbermann's show tonight made this very claim-- that this site didn't include the rich/poor vs. black/white part of her assessment. They only showed the first minute or so, claiming that Mr. Breitbart edited it so we wouldn't see her reaching this turning point moment. Then they aired the second part, claiming they got it off the NAACP site, to make it appear that viewers of this site had been maliciously manipulated. I do find it funny that Mr. Jealous claims to be snookered when his organization was the only one with access the entirety of her speech. So quick to play the victim in this whole mess, he avoided all the information he needed to make a measured assessment, first condemning her behavior then placing blame on Fox News, this site, and Mr. Breitbart for the egg in his eye.

Big Government : Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism–2010

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:40:29 +0000

The spin on this issue has started building up to tornado-like proportions. According to her own accounts, Ms. Sherrod was called not once, not twice, but three times yesterday by someone in the office of the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, under clear and stated pressure from the Obama administration, to resign from her USDA position since this video clip went up. In her own words (paraphrased here), she was told this video would be all over Glenn Beck and they wanted to cut her loose, apparently to prove that they don't harbor racist administrators. The video didn't appear on Mr. Beck's show until this evening, after her resignation and after she appeared on CNN to explain the situation. As Beck showed today, the video clip, while clearly an edited section from a much larger speech, essentially depicts a 'turning point moment' for Ms. Sherrod-- in which she realized that the plight of farmers was as much if not moreso between the poor and wealthy as between blacks and whites. As we learned today from both Sherrod and Eloise Spooner-- the wife of the white farmer she depicts in the story-- Ms. Sherrod *did* help this farmer keep their farm, traveling to Albany, GA on multiple occasions to help counsel them. Mrs. Spooner credits Ms. Sherrod for saving them from bankruptcy, going so far as to call her a 'lifelong friend'. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is claiming to have exerted no pressure on Tom Vilsack or the USDA, despite the conversation Ms. Sherrod claims to have had in her car with the USDA official (I think she mentioned the name Sheryl Cook [sp?]). I tried to find this woman's name on the USDA website but could only find the name of the Deputy Secretary, Kathleen A. Merrigan. Anyway, the left as represented by MSNBC is claiming that this is a hatchet job from Fox News, this site, and right wing columnists, to point out another questionable member of the administration, a la Van Jones. They are crying that the video had been fiendishly edited and manipulated by Mr. Breitbart to paint her as a 'closet racist'. Simply viewing the entire clip above diffuses this argument. If he were trying to paint Ms. Sherrod as a racist, why would Mr. Breitbart include the last minute of it in which she reveals her 'turning point moment' so eloquently? No, they're trying to deflect the argument away from the truly revelatory aspect of this video clip-- not the story that Ms. Sherrod tells but, rather, the audience's response to it. To quote Mr. Breitbart himself, 'Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups’ racial tolerance.' When she portrays her racially-influenced begrudging response to a white farmer asking her for help, there is applause and agreement. However, when she admits her change of heart, that this is a poor vs. rich problem rather than black vs. white problem, there is palpable silence from her audience. There is no editing of this clip beyond the fact that this is an excerpt. It's not missing any points in between the 00:00 and 02:36 marks. In the attempt to back up their claims, Olbermann tonight goes so far as to edit out the last ninety seconds themselves, then adds the last ninety seconds as a separate clip claiming that they got it from the NAACP site, adding the boldfaced statement that 'this is the part of the video that Mr. Breitbart didn't want you to see'. WTF??? This is absolutely disgusting. As the Tea Party movement is being painted with the 'racist' brush by the NAACP and left wing media outlets, clips like the one above reveal the hypocrisy of that 'resolution' they voted on last week. For a group like the NAACP to attempt to pressure the Tea Party leadership (whoever that is) to admit a racist element within their organization is, if you'll pardon the expression, a pot/kettle argument.. This whole Tea Party=racist claim really has me steamed. Over the past two weeks I've watched the entire MSNBC cast of characters attempt to back this claim with the flimsiest of evidence. Last Friday when Shultz attacked Hannity's claim that there were no racist signs at the Tea Party rallies, the photo and video he provided as evidence (and proposed sending across the street for Hannity's enlightenment) were laughable. The definition of 'racism' has been watered down to include just about anything. Obama as the Joker from 'The Dark Knight'? Racist! Obama as a socialist? Racist! Claims that Obama is not a US citizen? Racist! Sorry, but just because a claim is ludicrous doesn't automatically qualify it as racist. I spent a lot of time this weekend searching Google's image cache for 'racist tea party signs' and came to some stunning conclusions that I'd love to share, but that's an argument for another place and another time.