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How Sarah Palin changed the game (barf alert)
NY Daily News ^ | March 12, 2012 | Richard Cohen

Posted on 03/13/2012 7:14:38 AM PDT by lowbridge

The movie portrays Palin as an ignoramus. She did not know that Queen Elizabeth does not run the British government, and she did not know that North and South Korea are different countries. She seemed not to have heard of the Federal Reserve. She called Joe Biden “O’Biden,” and she thought America went to war in Iraq because Saddam Hussein, not Al Qaeda, had attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.

At the same time, she was a liar. In the movie, she was called exactly that by McCain’s campaign chief, Steve Schmidt, who came to realize that one of Palin’s great talents was to deny the truth. When confronted, she simply shuts down and sulks off.

Palin objects to this characterization, but the movie has been endorsed by too many of Palin’s top campaign aides to put its veracity in doubt.

(Excerpt) Read more at nydailynews.com ...


TOPICS: Editorial; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: palin; sarahpalin
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To: lowbridge
(Article) At the same time, she was a liar. In the movie, she was called exactly that by McCain’s campaign chief, Steve Schmidt ....

Oh, he quotes and relies on Steve Schmidt. That's all we need to know -- relying on a guy who's a known hazard to other people's back health, and a prominent exponent of Mitt Romney's Children of the Corn.

You really didn't need the barf tag. All you need to do is put "Richard Cohen" in the title line, and we'll all recognize the cat vomit.

21 posted on 03/13/2012 11:32:36 AM PDT by lentulusgracchus
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To: Resettozero
Thank you for your note.

Under current conditions, to win a libel lawsuit is very difficult but not impossible. Most of the time people who win a lawsuit are either major cases involving multimillion dollar lawsuits or private figures about whom a newspaper recklessly screwed up a story. For example, one of my former newspapers almost printed the wrong mug shot by switching a minor criminal's photo with an accused murderer of very similar names, and if that hadn't been caught at the last minute we all would have been in REALLY deep kimchi.

My job got saved because I kept a page proof that ordinarily would have been thrown away which proved that the page, as I had approved it, did **NOT** have the wrong photo and the photo got switched later in the process. I learned (to the undying frustration of my family and subsequent editors since then) never, ever, ever, to throw **ANYTHING** away that might have the remotest possibility of being needed later.

That's a concrete example of what it means to avoid “reckless disregard for the truth.” Newspapers, when they screw up (and they all do, since there's no way to print tens of thousands of words every day without mistakes) need to be able to prove that they had a process in place to prevent the screwup.

Documenting lack of actual malice is more complicated and it doesn't apply to the sort of case we're discussing. It's more of a situation excusing unintentional screwups for which a newspaper can't be shown to have intended any deliberate harm and in fact printed a quick correction or retraction or clarification to fix the problem.

22 posted on 03/13/2012 12:03:19 PM PDT by darrellmaurina
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To: kcvl
[Your quoted source]
McCain accused authors John Heilemann and Mark Halperin of painting an unfair portrait of the campaign, and he said that the movie would inevitably do the same.

Check into Mark Halperin's family connections, his "red diapers", and his enmeshment in the Clinton political apparatus, and you'll recognize a political hit piece of the first water.

Read up on his whole malodorous family, beginning with his traitorous father who was up to his eyes in the "Pentagon Papers" hit on American policy and Richard Nixon, and you will get a stinkload of their ideologically-committed nastiness.

23 posted on 03/13/2012 12:44:13 PM PDT by lentulusgracchus
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To: darrellmaurina

Your responses are valuable to me because they come from a newspaperman who has first-hand experience. Again, thank you.

I see things differently though. It’s been more than a decade since I’ve written a news report for any broadcast medium. All I know is that, even then in the ‘90s and especially from the ‘60s through the ‘80s, I could never have gotten away with writing or saying “So-and-so is a liar” without dealing with terminal consequences if anyone noticed and complained.

That fact that the writer of the article in this thread wrote what he wrote proves to me his intent was to harm Palin if not her family members. He didn’t just (unintentionally) mix up her picture with Julianne Moore’s.


24 posted on 03/13/2012 1:12:05 PM PDT by Resettozero
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To: lentulusgracchus

He was born in 1965 in Bethesda, Maryland, the red-diaper baby of hard-Left-connected controversial foreign policy specialist Morton Halperin. This fact reveals an entire Left-spin universe in which Mark grew up exposed to his father’s comrades and radical ideas.

Morton Halperin today is Senior Vice President of the left-wing Center for American Progress (CAP) and Director of the Open Society Policy Center established by eccentric billionaire international financier George Soros.

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=10987

In 1966, a year after his son Mark was born, Halperin during testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee urged that the United States should diplomatically recognize the Communist People’s Republic of China and seek its admission to the United Nations

In February 1993, President Bill Clinton’s administration announced the appointment of Morton Halperin to the new position of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Democracy and Peacekeeping. Halperin withdrew his name from consideration in January 1994, his nomination stalled by both Republican and Democrat U.S. Senators who refused to consent to so radical a nominee.

Halperin was for many reasons too controversial to win Senate confirmation. He had advocated unilateral nuclear disarmament of the United States, publication of most U.S. military secrets, and an end of all clandestine activities by the U.S. against the Soviet Union and its colony in Communist Cuba.

Morton Halperin during the mid-1970s befriended Philip Agee, a former-CIA-agent-turned-Communist who publicly identified hundreds of purported American Central Intelligence Agency agents. At least one of these agents, Athens station chief Richard Welch, was murdered shortly thereafter. Halperin flew to Europe to help Agee find safe haven after Great Britain expelled him. In the U.S., Halperin opposed legislation to punish the outing of U.S. undercover agents as Agee had done. Halperin has described the CIA as “the subverter of everybody else’s freedom.”

Halperin, as Director of the Washington, D.C. office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in this era also defended the right of The Progressive magazine to publish secret details it had obtained of how to make an atomic bomb.

In 1976, Halperin accused the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of “murdering” Black Panther leader Fred Hampton.

Morton Halperin in February 2002 became Director of the Open Society Policy Center and has worked closely ever since with its creator, eccentric billionaire international financier George Soros, who committed tens of millions of dollars in 2004 to a variety of efforts to defeat President Bush. One of these Soros-funded political efforts is the Center for American Progress (CAP), launched in summer 2003, one of the “Seven Sisters” pillars of the left’s “Shadow Government.”

CAP is also known as “the official Hillary Clinton think tank,” described by Horowitz and Poe as “a platform designed to highlight Hillary’s policies and to enhance her prestige as a potential presidential candidate.”

According to a March 1, 2004 report by Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation, Halperin and Soros handpicked the President of CAP, former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta. Morton Halperin today is Senior Vice President, second-in-command at CAP, where his son David is a Special Adviser on Campus Outreach. During the years 1997-2000, David Halperin worked as a speechwriter for President Clinton and the National Security Council. Among the Clinton White House email records that mysteriously disappeared when sought by investigators were ones to and from David Halperin, some of which might have involved his father.

During the 1992 campaign, Halperin violated journalistic ethics by providing to Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos a copy ABC had obtained of Mr. Clinton’s youthful “I loathe the military” letter written to his ROTC commander, according to Tom Rosenstiel’s book about ABC Strange Bedfellows. Halperin thereby gave candidate Clinton days of advance warning to prepare his response before facing reporters’ questions about this letter Clinton had no reason to believe still existed.

Having helped Clinton win, Mark Halperin then covered the President-elect’s transition to power and “was assigned to White House coverage for the first two years of the Clinton administration.”

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=10987


25 posted on 03/13/2012 2:00:35 PM PDT by kcvl
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To: lentulusgracchus

A Left-Wing Plant at ABC News

Cliff Kincaid — November 1, 2004

Writing in Front Page magazine, Lowell Ponte charged that Mark Halperin of ABC News is the son of veteran left-winger Morton Halperin, the side-kick of billionaire leftist George Soros. Ponte calls him “the red-diaper baby of hard-Left-connected controversial foreign policy specialist Morton Halperin.” That’s significant, Ponte noted, because Mark Halperin wrote the infamous memo telling the media to go hard on George Bush during the final weeks of the campaign

The Soros connection also helps explain why so many in the media have gone easy on Kerry’s connection to Soros, who is spending millions of dollars to put the Democrat in the White House. So easy in fact that Kerry has never been asked to explain whether he agrees with the Soros agenda of legalizing hard drugs and turning America into a version of “Needle Park.”

We emailed Halperin’s political unit at ABC News for his response to Ponte’s charge. Ponte’s story has been up on the Internet for several days without a denial of the family connection. Mark Halperin, of course, is not responsible for who his father is, but this connection is definitely relevant in this presidential campaign season because of Morton Halperin’s role with the fat cat Soros. Writing in The Nation magazine, Robert Dreyfuss revealed that Morton Halperin began discussions with Soros in 2002 about creating a new far-left think tank. Halperin, then head of the Soros Open Society Institute, brought former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta into the discussions. Podesta was made president of what became the Center for American Progress and Halperin became Senior Vice President.

http://www.aim.org/media-monitor/a-left-wing-plant-at-abc-news/


26 posted on 03/13/2012 2:03:29 PM PDT by kcvl
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To: lentulusgracchus

Heilemann Falsely Claims GOP Becoming ‘Whiter,’ ‘More Blue Collar’ and ‘Less Well-Educated’

By Noel Sheppard | March 03, 2012

On HBO’s Real Time Friday, New York magazine’s John Heilemann trotted out the same old tired and completely false cliches about the GOP that Americans are going to hear ad nauseum for the next eight months.

“The Republican Party is becoming just truly is becoming a whiter, more blue collar, more populist, less well-educated party” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

http://newsbusters.org/people/john-heilemann#ixzz1p27F66hu

New York Mag’s John Heilemann Makes Three-Way Gay Joke About Santorum
By Brad Wilmouth | January 05, 2012 | 09:28

Appearing as a guest on Wednesday’s The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, New York magazine’s John Heilemann - also an MSNBC analyst and formerly of The New Yorker - made a gay joke about GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum as he described the competitive election in Iowa

http://newsbusters.org/people/john-heilemann#ixzz1p27fKZbb

Heilemann: Obama’s ‘Hope’ in 2008 to be Replaced by ‘Fear’ of Republicans in 2012
By Noel Sheppard | July 24, 2011

Forget about 2008’s “Hope and Change” mantra.

New York magazine’s John Heilemann said on this weekend’s “Chris Matthews Show” Barack Obama’s message in 2012 will all be about “fear” of the Republican candidate, and the President will spend $500 million on negative attack ads against his opponent to instill it (video follows with transcript and commentary):

http://newsbusters.org/people/john-heilemann#ixzz1p280FOca

Andrea Mitchell, John Heilemann Scold GOP 2012 Hopefuls for Disagreeing with Obama’s Israel Policy

By Alex Fitzsimmons | May 20, 2011

In lockstep with Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who scolded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “please don’t speak to my president that way,” MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell cautioned of the “political pitfalls” for Republican presidential candidates who dared to challenge Barack Obama’s speech on the Middle East.

On the May 20 edition of “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” NBC’s chief foreign affairs correspondent warned against criticizing the Democratic commander-in-chief and bewailed the “angry reception” he’s received over his desire to see Israel surrender territory it acquired in the six-day Middle East war of 1967.

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/people/john-heilemann#ixzz1p28G2Epc

NY Mag’s Heilemann: Obama’s Got More Talent In His Little Finger Than All GOP Candidates

By Noel Sheppard | April 02, 2011

The liberal media are on a full-court press to make the entire GOP presidential candidate field look hapless and unelectable.

Doing his part Friday was New York magazine’s John Heilemann who on “The Chris Matthews Show” said the Obama campaign thinks their guy has “more talent in his little finger than any of these Republicans” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/people/john-heilemann#ixzz1p28Nlp1W


27 posted on 03/13/2012 2:12:16 PM PDT by kcvl
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To: kcvl

Sincere thanks, from those of us who missed these first time around. Going to dig into the links now.


28 posted on 03/13/2012 2:50:09 PM PDT by Resettozero
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To: kcvl
Thanks for looking that up -- I backtracked to where I'd seen it the day before yesterday myself, but then I'd lost my breadcrumbs (in my constant purging and searching for more headspace on this old, 4-gig box) and couldn't find it.

That is the very clarifying article I was looking for.

And people will never see this stuff, because (as Sarah fans are justly lamenting) the LSM has all of these sources walled off now, thanks to the JournoList and its successor, and to certain unaccountable actions Matt Drudge has taken in downplaying hot stories about the dragons of the Obama political machine.

29 posted on 03/13/2012 10:38:44 PM PDT by lentulusgracchus
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To: kcvl
(Your source article) So easy in fact that Kerry has never been asked to explain whether he agrees with the Soros agenda of legalizing hard drugs and turning America into a version of “Needle Park.”

In the Sixties, a couple of relevant songs referred to "MacArthur Park" and to "Itchycoo Park". I once read an article about the stoners and junkies of Switzerland, who had their little park where they hung out. They were so few compared to the whole country, but spectacles like that defame an entire nation. We, of course, had Washington Square in New York (which I saw in 1971, with the druggies enjoying themselves), and I think it was Golden Gate Park in San Francisco that served the same function on the Left Coast. I didn't go there when I passed through San Francisco 22 years later.

30 posted on 03/13/2012 10:43:42 PM PDT by lentulusgracchus
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