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On the day celebrating the American colonies’ separation from Great Britain, Hawaii is relatively quiet in contrast to the continental United States, where fireworks light up neighborhoods across the country. In Hawaii, July 4 is not a joyous occasion for some residents. This is because July 4 is also the day a group of businessmen self-declared the Islands to be the Republic of Hawaii in 1894, before imprisoning Queen Liliuokalani. Later, July 4, 1960, was chosen as the day the 50th star was added to the U.S. flag.

FULL TITLE: Obama, whose administration prosecuted and spied on reporters, claims Trump is very bad for criticizing newsrooms Former President Barack Obama is right when he says his administration’s attacks on the press can't be compared to President Trump's current crusade against the news media. The Obama White House was far worse for press freedoms. The former president spoke Friday afternoon at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, urging students to get involved in the November midterm elections. He dedicated a good deal of his address to drawing contrasts between his administration and the administration of President Trump. It was...

Former President Barack Obama acknowledged that Breitbart News changed the media narrative during the 2016 election. “You know … Bannon and Breitbart did something pretty interesting. Now, they didn’t create a whole new platform but they did shift the entire media narrative in a different direction — in a powerful direction,” Obama said, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Obama made his remarks during his Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago after stopping by a panel discussion on the “Responsibility of Powerful Online Platforms.” He urged people attending the session to “solve” the shifting media climate and turn it back in a...

Time reporter Zeke Miller was at a Teaism cafe near the White House Wednesday around noon when President Barack Obama came in for a surprise visit. Miller started broadcasting Obama’s visit on Periscope with his smartphone. A peeved Obama ordered Miller to stop filming–and Miller obeyed.

How desperate is the media for Scott Walker attack pieces? So desperate it’ll pick up material from a third-rate Gawker blog that even most of the left thinks is a joke and run with it. The Daily Beast has retracted an article from one of its college columnists that claimed that the Wisconsin governor’s budget would cut sexual assault reporting from the state’s universities. The post, published Friday, cited a report from Jezebel that wrongly interpreted a section of the state budget to mean that all assault reporting requirements were to get cut altogether. In fact, the University of Wisconsin...

"....Scott Walker as a political performer is pretty uninspiring. He doesn't have George Bush's pretzel-mouthed Texas charm or Sarah Palin's hockey Mom magnetism. He can't fall back on an ethnic American dream parable like the one Marco Rubio can run on. He's just a doughy, finger-pointing white guy of the type the Republican Party has been churning out to fill state assembly seats or run in back-bench congressional districts seemingly since the beginning of time. He's exactly the kind of politician the modern Democratic Party is set up to beat...."

When Scott Walker pronounced himself agnostic about President Barack Obama’s patriotism and Christian faith, it must have seemed like a clever formulation. “I’ve never asked him, so I don’t know,” he said. And about Obama’s Christianity: “I’ve never asked him that.”Walker quickly found his pitch unequal to the presidential big leagues. His argument can’t be generalized into a rule. I have never met Billy Graham, for example, but I’m pretty sure what he believes. As political attacks go, this one is particularly heavy-handed—the equivalent of saying: As far as I know, my opponent is not a swindler and a degenerate....

Gov. Scott Walker refuses to let the media dictate the conversation. “There has been much discussion about a media double standard where Republicans are covered differently than Democrats, asked to weigh in on issues the Democrats don't face," the potential GOP presidential candidate wrote Wednesday in an op-ed for USA Today. "As a result, when we refuse to take the media's bait, we suffer." The Wisconsin Republican's commentary comes on the heels of comments made by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who questioned whether President Obama “loves America” during a private dinner featuring Walker. Since then, the media...

"....In Walker's defense, Tim Graham of the Media Research Center (“Exposing and Combating Liberal Media Bias”) offers this exegesis: “Walker, the son of a Protestant minister, hears the question very differently: asking if someone is a Christian is a very personal question, asking whether someone has committed themselves to Jesus in their heart. It’s like asking if he knows how often Obama prays. His reluctance to answer for someone he doesn’t know is not a ‘No.’ " Nice try, but the political context of the question was clear and it’s the one Milbank mentioned: the conviction that “Obama is a...

".......But even when prompted with the facts, Walker — in Washington for the National Governors Association meeting — persisted, saying, “I’ve actually never talked about it or I haven’t read about that,” and, “I’ve never asked him that,” and, “You’ve asked me to make statements about people that I haven’t had a conversation with about that.” This is an intriguing standard. I’ve never had a conversation with Walker about whether he’s a cannibal, a eunuch, a sleeper cell for the Islamic State, a sufferer of irritable bowel syndrome or a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. By Walker’s logic,...

"..........On Vox last week, Jenée Desmond-Harris blamed many of America’s ills on “unconscious racism,” which, she suggests, is “also known as implicit bias.” There is a regnant idea in America, Desmond-Harris contends, that is “so deeply entrenched that many of us aren’t aware that we hold it — that white is better than black.” This point was echoed by Nicholas Kristof in Saturday’s New York Times. Directly addressing “white men,” Kristof submitted that because all human beings are “prone to the buffeting of unconscious influences,” “bias remains widespread in ways that systematically benefit both whites and men.” In both cases,...

My take on Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker as a presidential candidate is that he’s enviably capable of having it both ways: an acceptable-to-the-GOP-establishment figure who’s also exciting to the conservative base because (a) his blue-state context makes him look more radical than would similar positions and behaviors in a red state, and (b) his electoral record in Wisconsin gives him an electability argument based on confrontation rather than compromise or outreach. But even before officially announcing a presidential run, Walker’s showing signs of stepping on his own image of relative ideological moderation (essential to his Establishment acceptability and MSM approbation)...

It’s all fun and games until someone gets smacked down The Washington Post’s Robert Costa and Dan Balz interviewed Scott Walker yesterday. Of everything they had opportunity to ask, they chose to ask Walker whether he thought Obama was a Christian. How Walker’s opinion on the matter is remotely relevant or newsworthy is unclear to normal people, who expect the press to do that whole “truth to power” thing. Walker, seemingly unamused by the obscure religion question, responded appropriately, saying he “didn’t know.” [BIG SNIP] Because Walker did not play by their rules, he was isolated (rhetorically isolated, anyway) from...

The 2016 presidential campaign might’ve just witnessed the most outlandish question posed to a potential candidate yet Saturday. In an interview with The Washington Post’s Dan Balz and Robert Costa, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was asked whether he believes Barack Obama is a Christian. Walker immediately responded with, “I don’t know,” which served as the Post’s headline for the reporters’ hard-hitting examination of the possible 2016 contender. Walker went on to clarify his response in the interview. “I’ve actually never talked about it or I haven’t read about that,” Walker said, in a voice Balz and Costa noted was “calm...

"..................Remember way back in the Spring of 2008, when Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes asked Hillary three times if she believed that Obama was a Muslim? She said no twice, but after the third time she hedged her bets and said “As far as I know.” The media and blogospheric reaction was to clutch pearls, hyperventilate and accuse Hillary of stoking rumors that Obama was indeed a Muslim. Last night, two hacks from the Washington Post recycled the trick. The difference is this time Twitter exploded:............."

What Rudy Giuliani did this week was stupid. What Scott Walker did ought to disqualify him as a serious presidential contender...... And Walker, just a few seats away, said . . . nothing. Asked the next morning on CNBC about Giuliani’s words, the presidential aspirant was spineless: “The mayor can speak for himself. I’m not going to comment on what the President thinks or not. He can speak for himself as well. I’ll tell you, I love America. There are plenty of people, Democrat, Republican, independent, and in between who love this country.” But did he agree with Giuliani? “I’m in New...

Just saw a local Miami tv station using video from the government web site with an "interview" of Obama, where he spews some crap about how his goal is to outline for the nation how he is going to make sure things are fair, now that we have "made it through the crisis". I nearly spit my coffee out. We are not out of a crisis. My point is that these kind of videos are NOT a proper use for news....and I expect that if a REPUBLICAN president put out this type of "interview", the media would ignore it....on the...

A veteran White House reporter says President Obama went on a “profanity-laced” tirade during an off-the-record meeting with journalists sometime in the past year. ABC News reporter Ann Compton, who retired earlier this year, told C-SPAN that she witnessed Mr. Obama’s anger — and colorful vocabulary — firsthand. “I have seen in the last year Barack Obama really angry twice. Both were off-the-record times. One, profanity-laced where he thought the press was making too much of scandals that he did not think were scandals. Another where he took us to task for not understanding the limits he has with foreign...

According to retired ABC News journalist Ann Compton, Barack Obama has launched into "profanity-laced" tirades against the press in off-the-record meetings with reporters. In a C-SPAN interview, Compton also derided the President for leading "the most opaque" administration of "any I have covered." The journalist, who retired in August after a 40-year career, revealed to C-SPAN's Brian Lamb: "I have seen in the last year Barack Obama really angry twice. Both were off the record times. One, profanity-laced where he thought the press was making too much of scandals that he did not think were scandals." She explained, "And I...

An anchor for Fox Business Network who used to work for CNBC told viewers that her superiors at the network "silenced" her reporting on Obamacare, telling her she was "disrespecting the office of the president" by pointing out that Obamacare's math didn't add up. Daily Caller: Fox Business Network anchor Melissa Francis said she was “silenced” by CNBC when management told her she was “disrespecting the office of the president” by reporting about Obamacare. Francis highlighted Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber’s comments about the “stupidity” of American voters and the administration intentionally misleading the public about what’s in the law and...