If you missed the debate on Saturday night, don’t be concerned. It was completely ruined by the bias of the ABC News moderators and commentators.
I have never soon two people in the media with such outright disdain for conservative views, especially on social values. Newt was the only one to call them on it.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich staunchly defended traditional marriage, describing the union of one man and one woman as the “core of our civilization,” and an institution that is worth “protecting and upholding.”
[…]Gingrich also raised the issue of bias in the news media. While homosexual activists blast discrimination against them, what about anti-Christian bigotry?
“You don’t hear the opposite question asked,” Gingrich said.
“Should the Catholic Church be forced to close its adoption services in Massachusetts because it won’t accept gay couples, which is exactly what the state has done? Should the Catholic Church be driven out of providing charitable services in the District of Columbia because it won’t give in to secular bigotry? Should the Catholic Church find itself discriminated against by the Obama administration on key delivery of services because of the bias and the bigotry of the administration?
“The bigotry question goes both ways. And there’s a lot more anti-Christian bigotry today than there is concerning the other side. And none of it gets covered by the news media.”
When questioning former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Stephanopoulos, a former senior advisor in the administration of Democratic President Bill Clinton, premised some inquiries on the assertion — offered without supporting facts — that Romney’s job-creation statistics were inaccurate.
“Now, there have been questions about that calculation of 100,000 jobs. So if you could explain it a little more,” Stephanopoulos asked Romney of the former governor’s claims about jobs created by companies he has helmed. “I’ve read some analysts who look at it and say that you’re counting the jobs that were created but not counting the jobs that were taken away. Is that accurate?”
“No, it’s not accurate,” Romney bluntly responded. “It includes the net of both. I’m a good enough numbers guy to make sure I got both sides of that.”
Stephanopoulos did not cite any analysts by name.
In another line of questioning, Stephanopoulos asked Romney if he believes “that states have the right to ban contraception, or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?”
Romney responded by questioning Stephanopoulos’ logic and his choice to raise a hypothetical situation that would never happen.
“You’re asking — given the fact that there’s no state that wants to do so, and I don’t know of any candidate that wants to do so — you’re asking could it constitutionally be done?” Romney asked, with a hint of incredulity.
Stephanopoulos, undeterred, pressed Romney again: “I’m asking you, do you believe that states have that right or not?”
Amid a chorus of “boos” from the audience, Romney again parried the impossible hypothetical.
That’s what I mean when I say the debate was not worth watching. It was a parody of a debate.
Wikipedia says: Prior to joining ABC News, he was a senior political adviser to the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign of Bill Clinton and later became the White House Communications Director for two years, before being replaced by David Gergen after political fallout from the mid-term election of 1994, in which the Republican party took over the U.S. House and Senate.
The left and media are sending out a false story about what Rick Santorum said at an Iowa event. A CBS News transcript falsely claimed that Santorum said if elected he plans to cut regulations and entitlements and he doesn’t want to “make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”
The video is below. It’s clear he did NOT say that, and he was referring to people on welfare in general, and race was not mentioned. But that doesn’t keep people like this from using it as propaganda. It’s frustrating because so many will read the false story and believe it. But that’s the purpose of the propaganda.
Here is what Santorum said in full:
“It [Medicaid] just keeps expanding. I was Indianola a few months ago, and I was talking with someone who works at the Department of Public Welfare here, and she told me that the state of Iowa is going to get fined if they don’t sign up more people under the Medicaid program. They’re just pushing harder and harder to get more and more of you dependent upon them so that they can get your vote. “I don’t want to make [pause] lives, people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”
The left is determined to paint the GOP as bigoted because even if they lose a tiny portion of the black vote, it could be enough for Obama to lose, so they lie.
Journalists are indoctrinated in J-school to view conservatives as guilty of SIXHIRB – sexism, intolerance, xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophia, racism, bigotry. While the rest of learn quantitative, marketable skills, journalists spend 4 years learning how to be biased and how to mislead the public.
Santorum is pro-family, and so he opposes welfare. Welfare is anti-family because it makes fathers optional and encourages women to have children with men who will not commit for life and will not prepare to provide for a family. The mainstream media believes that it is too much of a burden on women to insist on these antiquated sex roles – they would rather tax working fathers to subsidize fatherlessness. And if they have to drum up popular support for subsidized fatherlessness by smearing conservatives, then that’s what they’ll do. Santorum says, and I agree, that people on welfare would be better off if they were working, instead.
National Review Editor Rich Lowry and Liberal commentator Alan Colmes clashed on Fox News Monday when Lowry interjected to rebuke Colmes’ criticism of the way Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum and his wife handled the death of their infant newborn Gabriel, who lived for only two hours in 1996.
“I even think some of the dastardly characters we have in the main stream media are not going to go as low as you just have Alan,” Lowry said at one point.
The heated rhetoric began early on in the segment when Colmes said undecided voters will ultimately not stick with the surging Santorum once people “get a load of some of the crazy things he’s said and done, like taking his two-hour-old baby when it died right after child birth home and played with it so that his other children would know that the child was real.”
You have to exercise judgment when dealing with the mainstream media. They have their worldview, and they fit the facts to it.
In state after state, guns are being allowed in places once off-limits, like bars, college campuses and houses of worship. And gun rights advocates are seeking to expand the map still further, pushing federal legislation that would require states to honor other states’ concealed weapons permits. The House approved the bill last month; the Senate is expected to take it up next year.
The bedrock argument for this movement is that permit holders are law-abiding citizens who should be able to carry guns in public to protect themselves. “These are people who have proven themselves to be among the most responsible and safe members of our community,” the federal legislation’s author, Representative Cliff Stearns, Republican of Florida, said on the House floor.
To assess that claim, The New York Times examined the permit program in North Carolina, one of a dwindling number of states where the identities of permit holders remain public. The review, encompassing the last five years, offers a rare, detailed look at how a liberalized concealed weapons law has played out in one state. And while it does not provide answers, it does raise questions.
More than 2,400 permit holders were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors, excluding traffic-related crimes, over the five-year period, The Times found when it compared databases of recent criminal court cases and licensees. While the figure represents a small percentage of those with permits, more than 200 were convicted of felonies, including at least 10 who committed murder or manslaughter. All but two of the killers used a gun.
All of these numbers are completely meaningless; in any large population, there will be some crime. The only way to see what these numbers mean is to compare concealed-carry holders to the general population. Fortunately, state-level murder data are easy to find.
North Carolina has a statewide murder rate of about 5 per 100,000. Even without counting manslaughter, that’s 25 murders committed per 100,000 North Carolinians every five years. There are about 230,000 valid concealed-carry permits in North Carolina, so by pure chance, you’d expect these folks to be responsible for nearly 60 murders over five years. And yet only ten of them committed murder or manslaughter. Instead of “rais[ing] questions,” the Times has demonstrated yet again that permit holders are more peaceful than the general population.
And do you know what else is missing from the New York Times analysis? Any investigation into the number of crimes prevented by defensive handgun usage by licensed concealed carry permit holders. After all, a good journalist would want to weight the bad consequences of a policy together with the good consequences, right? That would be a fair and balanced approach that would inform the readers instead of misleading them.
Murder and violent crime rates were supposed to soar after the Supreme Court struck down gun control laws in Chicago and Washington, D.C.
Politicians predicted disaster. “More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence,” Washington’s Mayor Adrian Fenty warned the day the court made its decision.
Chicago’s Mayor Daley predicted that we would “go back to the Old West, you have a gun and I have a gun and we’ll settle it in the streets…”
The New York Times even editorialized this month about the Supreme Court’s “unwise” decision that there is a right for people “to keep guns in the home.”
But Armageddon never happened. Newly released data for Chicago shows that, as in Washington, murder and gun crime rates didn’t rise after the bans were eliminated — they plummeted. They have fallen much more than the national crime rate.
Not surprisingly, the national media have been completely silent about this news.
One can only imagine the coverage if crime rates had risen. In the first six months of this year, there were 14% fewer murders in Chicago compared to the first six months of last year – back when owning handguns was illegal. It was the largest drop in Chicago’s murder rate since the handgun ban went into effect in 1982.
Meanwhile, the other four most populous cities saw a total drop at the same time of only 6 percent.
Similarly, in the year after the 2008 “Heller” decision, the murder rate fell two-and-a-half times faster in Washington than in the rest of the country.
It also fell more than three as fast as in other cities that are close to Washington’s size. And murders in Washington have continued to fall.
If you compare the first six months of this year to the first six months of 2008, the same time immediately preceding the Supreme Court’s late June “Heller” decision, murders have now fallen by thirty-four percent.
Gun crimes also fell more than non-gun crimes.
Robberies with guns fell by 25%, while robberies without guns have fallen by eight percent. Assaults with guns fell by 37%, while assaults without guns fell by 12%.
Just as with right-to-carry laws, when law-abiding citizens have guns some criminals stop carrying theirs.
Americans overall are far less likely to be killed with a firearm than they were when it was much more difficult to obtain a concealed-weapons permit, according to statistics collected by the federal Centers for Disease Control. But researchers have not been able to establish a cause-and-effect relationship.
In the 1980s and ’90s, as the concealed-carry movement gained steam, Americans were killed by others with guns at the rate of about 5.66 per 100,000 population. In this decade, the rate has fallen to just over 4.07 per 100,000, a 28 percent drop. The decline follows a fivefold increase in the number of “shall-issue” and unrestricted concealed-carry states from 1986 to 2006.The highest gun homicide rate is in Washington, D.C., which has had the nation’s strictest gun-control laws for years and bans concealed carry: 20.50 deaths per 100,000 population, five times the general rate. The lowest rate, 1.12, is in Utah, which has such a liberal concealed weapons policy that most American adults can get a permit to carry a gun in Utah without even visiting the state.
The decline in gun homicides also comes as U.S. firearm sales are skyrocketing, according to federal background checks that are required for most gun sales. After holding stable at 8.5 to 9 million checks from 1999 to 2005, the FBI reported a surge to 10 million in 2006, 11 million in 2007, nearly 13 million in 2008 and more than 14 million last year, a 55 percent increase in just four years.
If you ever need to debate this, I recommend buying these academic studies published by the University of Chicago Press and by Harvard University Press. The former shows how crime rates dropped in the USA when Americans rescinded gun control laws, and the latter shows how crime rates rose in the UK when the British strengthened their gun control laws. Sometimes is good to have the data handy.
Want both sides? Then watch a debate on gun control
This debate is in 13 parts, featuring the two of the best proponents of legal firearm ownership – John Lott and Gary Kleck. The real sparks fly during the Q&A, so don’t miss that. (If you can’t watch the debate, then you can read this post and this post instead).
WINTERY KNIGHT 