Mere minutes after New Jersey governor Chris Christie said during a press conference on Thursday that he was firing deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly for lying about her role in closing lanes of the George Washington Bridge, many online posters compared the Republican official's swift action with the utter lack of movement by president Barack Obama, who has yet to terminate anyone in his administration, even if that person is embroiled in scandal.
Several comments included barbs aimed at the “mainstream media” for reporters' wall-to-wall coverage of the Christie scandal while allowing Obama officials to avoid any punishment. “To confused journalists, what @GovChristie is doing right now is called 'leadership,'” noted @derekahunter. “Google it, then look at the White House & feel shame.”
Eric Holder
As he ended his PoliticsNation show on Wednesday, January 8, MSNBC's Al Sharpton praised Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan for issuing guidelines pushing for schools to reduce "harsh punishment" of students, which the MSNBC host labeled a "national problem," and griped about black students disproportionately receiving discipline.
On the Thursday, November 14, PoliticsNation, MSNBC contributor Goldie Taylor asserted that Republicans who are pushing Attorney General Eric Holder's impeachment are a "Bozo caucus" who are "fanning the flames of hatred and bigotry."
Host Al Sharpton raised the possibility of "racial elements" as he posed the question:
(UPDATE, 11:40 a.m.: AmberAlert.gov is working again.)
In yet another news story which has bubbled up through social media and the blogosphere and which will test the establishment press's willingness to ignore obvious news, the Obama adminstration's Department of Justice under Attorney General Eric Holder has taken AmberAlert.gov offline.
To the extent that it interrupts what DOJ has identified as one of the three components of its national AMBER strategy for "a Coordinated AMBER Network," the move could make locating and saving missing and exploited children more difficult. Meanwhile, the 83% of the government which isn't shut down includes the following:
The Washington Post is reliably liberal on just about every major political issue. But there are exceptions, and its stand for school vouchers programs as a way to lift disadvantaged kids out of a failing public school monopoly is one of them.
So it's not too surprising that the paper devoted an editorial on Monday to criticizing the Obama/Holder Justice Department for a lawsuit it's filed that is putting a halt -- temporarily at least -- to school vouchers in Louisiana. Even so, the newspaper has dropped the ball on bringing the public's attention to the underlying story. Aside from the September 2 editorial, the paper has virtually ignored the development in its news pages, with the only mention of the underlying controversy being reported in the August 25 paper in a national news roundup. Here's that item -- an AP brief -- in its totality:
Attorney General Eric Holder's decisions about where not to apply prosecutorial resources -- illegal aliens, "medical marijuana" -- have created big fans at MSNBC. At the Maddow Blog, MSNBC's Steve Benen hailed how "Eric Holder steps in, digs in, and breaks out."
To Team Rachel, Holder "seems wildly underrated" and is "one of the more accomplished attorneys general in recent memory," as in one of the most liberal:
Late last week the Obama/Holder Justice Department filed a lawsuit in federal court which could hold up school vouchers for disadvantaged, predominantly African-American, kids in Louisiana. The school vouchers could "impede the desegregation process" in the state's public schools, the Justice Department reportedly claims in the lawsuit. For his part, as the Associated Press reported, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) denounced the lawsuit as "shameful" and complained that the president and his attorney general were "trying to keep kids trapped in failing public schools." What's more, the leader of the Black Alliance for Educational Options has also criticized the lawsuit.
Yet a search of Nexis found no stories about this lawsuit by any of the Big Three broadcast networks. The story was completely omitted from the pages of The New York Times, and Sunday's Washington Post only briefly covered it by running a short AP news brief on page A3. In an editorial yesterday, the Wall Street Journal slamming the Obama/Holder DOJ, noting that "90% of the beneficiaries" of the voucher program would be black:
On Wednesday at CBSnews.com, Sharyl Attkisson reported that "Three more weapons from Fast and Furious have turned up at crime scenes in Mexico."
A Google News search at 10 a.m. on ["Fast and Furious" guns] (typed exactly as indicated between brackets, past 7 days, sorted by date, with duplicates) returned 26 relevant items. Very few (to be noted later) are from establishment press outlets.
On Friday, Eric Holder's Department of Justice gave the memory-hole treatment to wildly inflated statistics released last October about the number of cases and the amount of money involved in DOJ's mortgage fraud enforcement efforts.
Bloomberg News reporters who had discovered that the original numbers were suspect had been getting stonewalled for months in their efforts to get answers to their queries, and finally got them through the document-dump route. The differences are stark.
A recent poll shows that more than eight out of ten non-white voters are fine with their state government requiring a photo ID at polling places. Yet, that fact was completely omitted from a front-page Friday New York Times story by Charlie Savage and Adam Liptak which dutifully praised Obama Attorney General Eric Holder's push to gum up Texas's voter ID law in federal courts.
Additionally, it seems that the MSNBC crowd is on board with voter integrity laws as well. Sixty-five percent of respondents, who described themselves as "very liberal to liberal," thought that showing an ID before voting was a "good thing." So, this isn't a legitimate issue. It's only relevant in the liberal boardrooms of America's news media.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced today that the Obama/Holder Justice Department would request a federal court to put a hold on plans by the State of Texas to put into effect new voter ID laws. The Wall Street Journal's Devlin Barrett has a short article on the development, "Holder Targets Texas in New Voting-Rights Push," published shortly after the announcement at 10:05 a.m. Eastern time.
Barrett failed to directly quote any opponents of Holder's move, but did not that "The move is likely to anger conservatives who have long argued that the law has outlived its usefulness and punishes certain states—particularly in the South—based not on their current conduct, but on their past." But when it came to promoting the article on social media, a Journal social media staffer gave Twitter followers a decidedly pro-Holder spin, pitching the story thusly:
This week, George Zimmerman prosecution witness Rachel Jeantel informed America that "n--ga" isn't racist as long as it ends with an "a" and not an "er."
Defying this rule Friday was Salon culture critic Rich Benjamin who actually asked, "Is Holder the president’s conscience? Or his Inner N--ger?"