thinkprogress
ThinkProgress: Page 2
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Andrea Nill of ThinkProgress misleads about Joe the Plumber immigration comments at tea party - 07/06/09
The Houston tea party featured an appearance by Joe the Plumber, who said the following:
I believe in making sure our country is safe first. I believe we need to spend a little more on illegal immigrants. Get them the hell out of our damn country and close the borders down. We can do it. We’ve got the greatest military in the world and you’re telling me we can’t close our borders? - That’s just ridiculous.
Amanda Terkel of ThinkProgress' despicable smear of Sean Hannity - 06/24/09
In a post about white supremacist radio host Hal Turner being arrested by the FBI earlier today for making threats against judges, Amanda Terkel of ThinkProgress (run by the Center for American Progress) says (thinkprogress.org/2009/06/24/hal-turner-arrest/):
As the Nation has pointed out, Turner has ties to Fox News’ Sean Hannity. In fact, Hannity has “offered his top-rated radio show as a regular forum for Turner’s occasionally racist, always over-the-top rants.” Hannity would also reportedly offer Turner “encouragement” to overcome his cocaine habit and “homosexual leanings.”
Bolding added...
Lee Fang of ThinkProgress misleads about Obama citizenship issue - 06/23/09
Discussing a bill that would require presidential candidates to provide a birth certificate showing they're eligible, Lee Fang of ThinkProgress offers a volley of misleading statements at thinkprogress.org/2009/06/23/gop-birther-bill:
Andrea Nill /ThinkProgress misleads about California immigration (Micheal Savage) - 06/23/09
Andrea Nill of ThinkProgress offers a discussion of Michael Savage using hyperbole and, rather than admitting that he's correct to a good extent she makes several misleading statements (wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/06/23/california-immigration-michael-savage).
Casey Sanchez/SPLC, Frank Sharry, Andrea Nill/CAP smear FAIR over non-existent connection (Dave Bennion) - 06/17/09
From a FAIR press release (link):
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has launched its most irresponsible attack to date against the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The SPLC claims that Shawna Forde, the alleged killer of a little girl and her father during an Arizona home invasion, had ties to FAIR. Although no association exists -- or ever has -- between Ms. Forde and FAIR, the SPLC and organizations advocating mass amnesty and open borders have used this tragedy to fuel their on-going smear campaign against FAIR and other immigration policy organizations in order to...
Clueless: Lee Fang of ThinkProgress doesn't even understand how liberals play the race card (Steele comments) - 05/27/09
Lee Fang of the Center for American Progress' ThinkProgress site offers "Days After Steele’s Racist Attack On Obama, C-SPAN Airs Video Of Steele Denouncing Racism" (thinkprogress.org/2009/05/27/steele-racism-malcolmx) about two recent sets of comments made by RNC chairman Michael Steele. The first set is discussed here; the second here. See both links for the context. Of the first, Fang says:
...last week, Steele employed the same "rotten" racist stereotypes to attack President Obama. ThinkProgress reported that Steele suggested that Obama won the presidency because of his race. “He was not...
Michael Steele: Obama wasn't vetted because of his race (Ali Frick /ThinkProgress, Ben Smith, Marc Ambinder) - 05/22/09
Guest hosting for Bill Bennett earlier today, Michael Steele said the following:
The problem that we have with this president is that we don’t know [Obama]. He was not vetted, folks. … He was not vetted, because the press fell in love with the black man running for the office. “Oh gee, wouldn’t it be neat to do that? Gee, wouldn’t it make all of our liberal guilt just go away? We can continue to ride around in our limousines and feel so lucky to live in an America with a black president.” Okay that’s wonderful, great scenario, nice backdrop. But what does he stand for? What does he believe...
Low-wattage radio, TV hosts say dumb things about Mexicans and swine flu; leftwing attacks in order to support illegal activity - 04/30/09
Jason Linkins of the Huffington Post offers "Swine Flu A Mexican Immigrant Conspiracy: Conservative Media (VIDEO)" (huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/30/swine-flu-a-mexican-immig_n_193707.html), linking to a Media Matters for America video apparently containing instances of conservative radio and TV hosts discussing the issue of Mexicans - speci
John Nichols /The Nation pushes bogus flu pandemic preparedness issue; distraction from Obama admin, Dem failures - 04/27/09
John Nichols of The Nation offers "GOP Know-Nothings Fought Pandemic Preparedness" (link). Sens. Arlen Spector and Susan Collins fought the addition of around $900 million for flu pandemic preparedness to the stimulus plan. Now, Nichols is disreputably trying to tie that into the current possible flu crisis, and he's getting some help from his friends (link).
Yet, the issue is bogus for various reasons: neither Spector nor Collins oppose spending on preparedness, they just didn't want it in a bill that was supposedly about stimulating the economy rather than just about everything the Dems and...
ThinkProgress now openly acting like White House PR department - 04/13/09
ThinkProgress - the very low-wattage blog run by the Obama-linked Center for American Progress - has, of course, been strongly pro-Obama since he won the election. However, the post "Obama: Stimulus transportation projects ‘under budget,’ ‘ahead of schedule’" [1] by Faiz Shakir is more like a press release or something you might find on Page D-8 of an 70s-era copy of Pravda or in 1984:
Today, President Obama and Vice President Biden will appear at the Transportation Department along with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to celebrate the 2,000th transportation project funded by the stimulus...
GOP still struggling with asking tough questions (Eric Cantor campaign against Dems on House floor) - 04/08/09
Patrick O'Conner of the Politico offers "Cantor's strategy: Ambush Democrats" (link) about a plan from House Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor in which more experienced legislators take to the House floor to berate less-experienced Democratic House members over various issues:
ACORN doesn't need to sabotage the tea parties, they're doing a bang-up job on their own - 04/06/09
The latest news from deep inside Galt's Gulch - home to the last 300 organizers of the tea parties - is that ACORN is trying to sabotage the "parties" [1]. There's certainly the possibility that they might be doing that, but they don't need to for at least a couple reasons:
McCain lashes out over leading on immigration "reform" and not getting "Hispanic vote"; not a moment of clarity - 04/03/09
All that pandering in vain takes a toll, and John McCain can't keep things bottled up for long. From this:
John McCain sounds angry and frustrated that, despite the risks he took in pushing immigration reform, Hispanic voters flocked to Democrat Barack Obama in last year's presidential contest. McCain's raw emotions burst forth recently as he heatedly told Hispanic business leaders that they should now look to Obama, not him, to take the lead on immigration.
What follows is he said, she said hearsay. Whatever he said and however he said it, don't worry: the GOP will be back to pandering in no...
Why Matt Corley of ThinkProgress is a lightweight (Marty Peretz Mexico comments) - 03/28/09
A few days ago, Mickey Kaus released excerpts from Ezra Klein's hitherto secure mailing list for "liberals", Journolist (link, closed group at groups.google.com/group/journolist/topics). The first message is from Chris Hayes in which he calls Marty Peretz of the New Republic a "f***ing racist" for this post [1]:
Well, I am extremely pessimistic about Mexican-American relations, not because the U.S. had done anything specifically wrong to our southern neighbor but because a (now not quite so) wealthy country has as its abutter a Latin society with all of its characteristic deficiencies:...
ThinkProgress lies for Obama (Cliff Kincaid on knowing where Obama was born) - 02/28/09
On the 26th, Cliff Kincaid appeared at CPAC and said among other things:
back there in the 1980s at least we knew that our president was born in the United States
The ThinkProgress blog - run by the Barack Obama-linked Center for American Progress then lied about what he said, uploading a video with that quote under the false title "Cliff Kincaid Says President Obama Not Born in US" (link).
Obviously, saying we don't know where Obama was really born and saying that he wasn't born in the U.S. are too very different things. This shouldn't come as much of a surprise: both ThinkProgress and CAP...
The Star Spanglish Banner and Barack the Magic Negro tear up the RNC chart - 12/29/08
The latest way for the MSM and the Democratic Party to portray the Republican Party as home of knuckle-dragging racists was, ultimately, self-inflicted by Chip Saltsman, a candidate to be chair of the RNC. Saltsman is a former head of the Tennessee Republican Party who managed the Mike Huckabee campaign and who recently distributed a Christmas CD containing parody songs, including some from Paul Shanklin which are "controversial". To a good extent, the two songs I've reviewed are only controversial because they were made so. Unfortunately, that's not a full defense of Saltsman's actions...
Shock: Michael Chertoff used cleaning company that employed illegal aliens - 12/10/08
Michael Hsu of the Washington Post offers the latest in that newspaper's attempt to undercut our laws: "Cleaning Firm Used Illegal Workers at Chertoff Home", link. The Maryland cleaning service used by Michael Chertoff of the Department of Homeland Security has been fined almost $23,000 for failing to check the IDs of its workers, some of whom were illegal aliens. The Secret Service checked the IDs of the workers who visited Chez Chertoff, but those didn't involve immigration checks. Which is pretty stupid, but unless I missed it there's no indication that any of those who cleaned Chertoff's...
New smear: Palin didn't know Africa was a continent or the three countries in NAFTA - 11/05/08
[IMPORTANT UPDATE BELOW]
An unnamed John McCain aide supposedly told Carl Cameron of Fox News - a tool if there ever was one - that Sarah Palin didn't know that Africa was a continent instead of a country. The aide also told him that she didn't know which countries were in NAFTA. Needless to say, this comes on the heels of a long line of smears against Palin, and it's almost assuredly a smear as well. She obviously knows about Canada, and she also obviously knows about Mexico. There's the slight possibility that she thought that some of the countries that are in Central America were in North...
Joe Biden enraged by semi-tough but worthless questions; Jill Biden then cancels appearance - 10/25/08
I have yet to see two things: Idiocracy and the interview Barbara West of WFTV-Channel 9 conducted with Joe Biden earlier today [1]. I suspect those two things are related.
Washington Post: America's finest source for bad reporting (Palin "slashed" funds story) - 09/02/08
The Washington Post recently published a blog post about Sarah Palin (in their words) "slash[ing]" funds to a non-profit group. Except, what they got from the state of Alaska alone was over three times what they got from all government sources combined in 2006. Let's take a look at the WaPo's "downstream", the three-eyed fish who gobble up what the WaPo sludges out.
Jeff Bercovici, ThinkProgress spread anti-Rush Limbaugh smear (Antonio Villaraigosa) - 05/06/08
Yesterday on his show, Rush Limbaugh said this about an event where he ran into Bill Clinton and someone else:
I shook his hand, he left, comes back, the mayor of Los Angeles, I thought it was a Secret Service agent, maybe a shoeshine guy. Turns out he gives me his card, I said, "Oh, my gosh, it's the mayor of Los Angeles." I stood up, I said, "Hello, Mr. Villaraigosa."
The evil airheads at ThinkProgress claim this is an "Ethnically-Charged Insult" (thinkprogress.org/2008/05/06/media-limbaugh-villaraigosa), when in fact it appears to have another explanation. I don't know whether Rush has...
SPLC's "The Year in Hate" misled about FBI hate crime statistics - 03/31/08
Earlier this month the Southern Poverty Law Center - a group indirectly linked to the Mexican government - released a report entitled "The Year in Hate", which continued their attempt to shut down debate about immigration matters. Per the AP:
Covert White House propaganda for Senate immigration amnesty bill? - 06/02/07
The previously mentioned NYT article about the backlash against the Bush/Senate amnesty bill contains a very interesting paragraph which, naturally, the NYT didn't follow up on:
White House officials said [the backlash] had led them to engage the blogosphere in a concerted way for the first time, posting defenses on liberal and conservative sites.
One would think that if White House representatives had been engaging the blogosphere, I would have heard about it. I know that Hugh Hewitt interviewed Tony Snow, and I make a habit of never visiting RedState, but that's the only two possibilities I...
NAU apologists - 11/24/06
[List below updated 12/11/07]
Recently, Rep. Tom Tancredo was quoted as saying this:
"People have to understand what we're talking about here. The president of the United States is an internationalist... He is going to do what he can to create a place where the idea of America is just that – it's an idea. It's not an actual place defined by borders. I mean this is where this guy is really going... I know this is dramatic – or maybe somebody would say overly dramatic – but I'm telling you, that everything I see leads me to believe that this whole idea of the North American Union, it's not...
Think Progress deletes another comment, again! - 08/01/06
All thoughts must be sanitized and correct in the fine sparkling world of Think Progress, and the latest example comes from the thread "Malkin: Outrage About Qana 'Manufactured,' 'If It's Not Qana, It's Something Else... It's Beauty Pageants'".
Lonewacko banned from ThinkProgress, QAndO - 06/19/06
To keep you up-to-date with my bannings:
1. I'm blocked from leaving comments at ThinkProgress. Here's the last comment I left there, which was removed (twice!):
Interesting factoid: Nativo "Larry" Lopez - one of the organizers of the recent illegal immigration boycott - was booted off the Santa Ana schoolboard because of his views on Spanish. He not only supports bilingual education, he reportedly wants to make Spanish the official language of California.
Think Progress, Ezra Klein, AP downplay organizers of illegal immigration marches - 04/13/06
[See the update below]
ThinkProgress - a site associated with the Clinton-associated Center for American Progress - downplays the organizers of the recent illegal immigration marches in this one sentence post.
Bush uncovered: he doesn't know what country he runs - 04/04/06
The Los Angeles Times' offers a four(!)-screener from Peter Wallsten entitled "Immigrant Issues Are Personal for Bush" (link).
I believe the best way to characterize it is as a lame attempt to further divide Bush from his base. The subtext of the article is that the latter are opposed to illegal immigration because - quite unlike Bush - they're opposed to Hispanics or Mexicans.