Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber

From the Atlantic wire:

The Players: Glenn Beck, a conservative provocateur who has a burgeoning news site called The Blaze ; Andrew Breitbart, a conservative provocateur who’s run his own news site Breitbart.com and conservative-slanted Big aggregation network.

The Opening Serve:  Glenn Beck hasn’t been shy about voicing his opinion on Newt Gingrich ever since the former Speaker of The House began to surge in the polls. We noted he played a little bit of gotcha journalism with Gingrich, but Beck took it a step further and went on Fox Business this past weekend to air his grievances:

If you have a big government progressive, or a big government progressive in Obama… ask yourself this, Tea Party: is it about Obama’s race? Because that’s what it appears to be to me. If you’re against him but you’re for [Newt Gingrich], it must be about race. I mean, what else is it? It’s the policies that matter.

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Picture Perfect

From U.S. News & World Report:

Both the New Yorker and Newsweek featured profiles on Rep. Michele Bachmann recently.  As Robert Schlesinger points out on the Thomas Jefferson Street blog, the New Yorker profile connects Bachmann with some controversial views on American slavery (an issue that has caused problems for the Bachmann campaign before). The Newsweek profile isn’t exactly kind to the presidential candidate either. However, it is the cover of the magazine that is catching the most attention.

On it, the camera has captured Bachmann looking wide-eyed and surprised above the headline “Queen of Rage.”

I guess, Mr. DeMille, that Botox Batshit Bachmann wasn’t ready for her closeup.

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Weiner Roast

From WBEZ91.5:

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) may have brought the scandal over digital dalliances upon himself, but the media’s coverage of the story from the moments after he sent that errant tweet has been orchestrated almost entirely by one person: conservative blog entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart.

Breitbart, the other famous guy at the center of this scandal, has made the scandal a national fixation.

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The Amazing Race-Baiter

From JOE CONASON at Salon:

Former USDA official Shirley Sherrod, a dedicated public servant innocent of the prejudice and misconduct falsely imputed to her, deserves justice. As soon as the White House and Tom Vilsack restore her job, with an appropriate apology, they will begin to remove a stain of cowardice from their administration. But while that may be all the government can do, it isn’t sufficient to close this case.

Real justice, as I suspect Sherrod would agree, also requires due process for Andrew Breitbart, the Internet impresario who framed her on his Big Government website. In these circumstances, that means a fair, thorough and tough examination of the media fraud that launched his operation last year: the ACORN tapes, whose misuse by Breitbart closely parallels his behavior in the Sherrod affair.

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Fraud Chicken

From THE BRAD BLOG:

Unreleased raw footage reviewed by AG Jerry Brown’s investigation was obtained from Rightwing activists O’Keefe and Giles in exchange for immunity from prosecution

Contradicting MSM coverage,  O’Keefe ‘never claimed he was a pimp,’ ‘did not act as a journalist’…

Echoing the recent report of the Kings County, NY, District Attorney who completed a five-month probe finding “no criminality” seen in video tapes secretly taken of low-level ACORN and ACORN Housing workers last year in New York, California’s Attorney General has now reached a similar conclusion regarding videos recorded in three different cities in the Golden State last Summer, according to a report released today which finds the workers “committed no violation of criminal law.”

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Get Outta Here, Boys, Ya Bug Me!

From David Weigel at THE WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT:

On Monday morning, Joseph Basel and Robert Flanagan, both age 24, dressed up as telephone company workers and walked into the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.). Inside the office, waiting for them, was James O’Keefe, the 25-year-old conservative activist who posed as a pimp in 2009 for a series of undercover videos that badly damaged the national community organization ACORN. As Basel and Flanagan clumsily worked on the phones, O’Keefe was recording them for a reason that remains unknown. When the “repairmen” and accomplices were asked for ID, they gave themselves up and were arrested.

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