The Associated Press is classy, indeed. They can’t even keep sniping at Sarah Palin out of a story announcing the blessed birth of her grandson. Ah, but wait, it gets even more annoying because not only did the AP snipe at Palin in its first birth announcement story, once called on it the AP went back twice to rearrange the piece rewriting history to make it seem as if they never sniped at her in the first place.

Initially, the AP attacked Palin in its very first paragraph saying that daughter Bristol’s pregnancy was the thing that caused Palin’s candidacy to “go downhill.” At 7:20 PM the AP gave us this: (Bold my emphasis)

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Skewz.com has put together its top 5 predictions for how political communications under the Obama presidency will be changed in 2009.

Now, in some ways, I can see where the Skewz team is coming from seeing as how they are in that Internet bubble, but I think that their assumptions of Internet domination of politics is a bit overblown. Still, I think in many ways the predictions are right if not quite as strong as presented nor as immediate.

Here are their predictions and my replies to them:

1. Blogging Gets Issue-Specific : The 2008 election re-enforced and validated the need for candidates to have a strong outreach program to the blogosphere to amplify their message. While it’s apparent that bloggers are becoming more important and tightly linked to campaigns, the increasing number of blogs is pushing many bloggers to become “issue specific” as a way to differentiate themselves. For example, rather than being just a “right” or “left” blog, specific topics such as crime, the housing crisis, government bailouts, poverty, etc. will dominate. In addition, day-to-day issues such as crime and poverty will become more relevant to larger portions of the electorate.

I think this is less a reaction to “differentiation” among bloggers, more an act of going with what one knows based on the growing legitimacy of the medium. Over the year 2008, Blogs have become a legitimate news source and this has spurred even more people with specific fields of knowledge to feel confident that they won’t merely be laughed off with their blogging efforts. Smart people with detailed knowledge and a passion to debate the issues have migrated to blogs in great numbers over the year. And with the growth of social networking sites like Twitter and FaceBook — all of which rely heavily on linking to stories on news media and blogs — the Internet has really come into its own as an “official” news source. Witness the recent survey that shows a far grater number of people than ever before saying the Internet is their news source.

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It’s like handing a sheriff’s badge to Don Knotts. Like entering Gary Coleman in a Mr. Universe contest. Like expecting Michael Moore not to lie. In today’s laugher, the Associated Press is presenting John ‘François’ Kerry as a tough guy out to bring the law to the new Barbary pirates.

Seriously. Stop laughing.

The AP sternly informs us that, “As a young Navy swift boat commander in Vietnam, Senator John F. Kerry was no stranger to the perils of hot pursuit in combat.”

I am SURE them thar pi-rates is a shakin’ in their boots. The tough guy is after ‘em!

But, just like John ‘François’ Kerry always does, there is “nuance” in his seeming braggadocio. (my bold)

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The Palestinians raise their kids to hate Jews. The Israelis have endured decades of acts of terror against their own children and have generally acted with forbearance in reply. The UN has been vehemently and irrationally anti-Israeli since day one. The questions of “right of return” and the “two state solution” have dogged international politics for a long time. And what is the Timesonline worried about? Are they worried about the safety of Jewish children. Are they concerned of the improvement in quality of life for Palestinian children? No, none of that. The Times is worried that all this will hurt poor Barack Obama and his wonderful plans for a foreign policy that will at last bring us peace in our times.

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Eli Pariser, the delusional Nutroot kingpin of MoveOn.org, has been allowed a few column inches of space in the Washington Post to reveal his hope for some Obama hope-n-change, and his op ed is a doosie, for sure. Headlined “Will He Bring Change.gov We Can Believe In?,” Pariser gives voice to his most hopiest of hopeiness that Obama is the True One that they all hope he is. All joking aside, this is a pretty revealing op ed for its utter inability at introspection or, on the other hand, its complete lack of honesty — I’m not sure which.

In fact, Pariser’s very first paragraph reveals his own extremism, an extremism that he pretends doesn’t exist (that being the lack of introspection, or the cynical attempt at covering the truth to which I was alluding).

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In another of a never ending line of self-congratulatory but quickly fading news paper journalists, Newark Star-Ledger writer Paul Mulshine has bravely taken it upon himself to warn us all that we’ll miss him and his kind when they are gone. By his kind, of course, he means print journalists.

Mulshine assures us all that, Mencken-like, he feels that the masses are idiots that cannot even pronounce pundit much less spell it well enough to become citizen journalists on the Internet. He is certain that without the assistance of professional journalists we lowly citizens will never be able to find out what’s going on in our local governments. This is because, he says, bloggers won’t take the time and haven’t the ability to, “sit through town-council meetings and explain to you why your taxes will be going up.”

Of course, he is completely wrong. Left and right there are many such bloggers doing just that on a daily basis.

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TV News 4 in Detroit did an excellent expose on a few union bosses that routinely rip off the unions and the auto makers they work for with fake time cards and paid for but unworked overtime pay.

One of the bosses, Ron Seroka, a union job security officer, takes off half a day nearly everyday to go home to lounge around the house while he is on the clock. Seroka punches in at the plant at 6AM every single day and is home by 11:30 AM for some nice leisure time at home. Yet he gets a steady 10 hours pay every single day despite the fact that he is rarely at work.

Seroka’s union boss is even worse. Union chairman Jim Modzelewski buys beer on a daily basis while on the clock and clocks himself in for overtime pay hours before he even wakes up to go into the plant. TV 4 found that after he punches in, he typically leaves for a beer run mere hours later. Again, all this is on a daily basis. He is also paid overtime pay on a daily basis as he sits home drinking his daily beer. With over 2,500 hours of overtime, Modzelewski made a six-figure salary last year. TV 4 also discovered that Modzelewski even played in a bowling tournament while on the clock — as at overtime pay, too!

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To some conservatives, what North Dakota Republican Party Chairman Gary Emineth told The Hill last week is proof of the arrogance of an out-of-touch Republican Party. Emineth says he is being misunderstood, but his words were badly chosen regardless.

The Hill quoted Mr. Emineth concerning the selection of the next Republican National Committee Chairman. Mr. Emineth has made a special request during this process, one that has not been contemplated in the past. He is circulating a petition to have all six candidates for the position of RNC Chairman appear before the entire 168 member RNC committee to take questions from the whole body during this deliberation.

Usually there is a debate between the candidates — and there will be one this time as well on January 5 — at which all the committee members attend. Questions for the candidates during this debate are asked by a single moderator, so the general membership does not get the opportunity to ask their own questions. Since the candidates for RNC Chair do not take questions from any member that wishes to ask one this is what Emineth is challenging. Emineth says that there should be a venue where the majority of the committee members can ask questions of the candidates.

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The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has launched a wonderful little feature that will run until Barack Obama takes the oath of office next month. They are calling it “Dear Mr. Obama” and it is a heartwarming exercise in child indoctrination and brainwashing. The Post-Gazette will be publishing letters from local students to Obama asking him for all sorts of global warming fixes, Iraq war enders, and big government programs.

Sadly, it appears that the government schools these kids have been subjected to have failed to teach their charges about anything like the American system, federalism, even science seems neglected. But they SURE taught their kiddies that government is there to spend, spend, spend, that government is to be treated like our collective parents, and that the war in Iraq is obviously an evil venture. Obviously.

And, yes little kiddies, The One, your very own Obamessiah, is flying to the rescue like a super hero. Cue the theme music — I’d suggest the theme to 2001, like Elvis used, is appropriate for the sentiment here. The Obamessiah has entered the building!

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The Wall Street Journal recently had an interesting article on the extremely high percentage of teacher’s strikes in the State of Pennsylvania. The Journal noted that Penn. teachers account for an astonishing 42% of all teacher walk outs in the nation.

This, apparently, despite the fact that Pennsylvania’s teachers are some of the highest paid in the nation.

The strikes take place despite the state’s ranking in the top 20% nationwide for teacher salaries in 2006-2007 — the most recent data available — with an average of $54,970. Those paychecks go even further when adjusted for the state’s cost of living compared to top-spending school districts in places like California.

The Journal notes that 37 states have passed various laws that limit or eliminate teacher walk outs but union bigwigs in Penn. have succeeded in burying all attempts to implement such laws in the Keystone state.

What we have here, of course, is an example of a culture of striking that has arisen in the state. Despite that teachers in Penn. have little legitimate reason to be responsible for nearly half the teachers strikes in the nation, these strikes have become a common response to unions not getting their way. That combined with lax rules that facilitate the ease of resorting to walk outs as a first reaction to union talks stalling, we find the culture of constant strikes has developed.

This is also the sort of ultimate logic of unionism and why it has a corrosive effect on the workplace.

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Imagine there’s no religion, it’s easy for The New York Times to do — even in a Christmas Day editorial that somehow forgets that Christmas is about Christ’s birth. In fact, the NYT decided that this Christmas was its opportunity to wallow in worse-than-ever sentiments and to bemoan that this year’s Christmas isn’t as good as it used to be. Oh, they tried to dress it up a bit by saying it is great to have a Christmas that gets us back to basics and also by slipping in some global warming clap trap, but it is still a lament that we all have it so darn bad these days.

The Christmas Day editorial starts off surmising that “you may be wondering about the carbon equation of a Christmas tree,” though it is a bit amusing to see them make such a silly assumption. I’d rather bet that even most environuts weren’t thinking about their Christmas carbon footprint when they awoke that morning! But, not the NYT. They are all worried that those old Christmas lights are going to cause the end of the planet as we know it!

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Barack Obama’s pick for Secretary of Labor is his first gift to labor unions. Hilda Solis is quite a union extremist and has already promised to push the misleadingly named employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) once she takes over her new role in the Obama administration.

A recent Wall Street Journal report reveals that Solis, a California Congressman, has been in the back pocket of unions since she first ran for Congress.

Barack Obama’s pick for Secretary of Labor — Hilda Solis — brings impeccable big labor credentials. The California Congresswoman first rode to power with labor backing against a fellow Democrat, has voted with the AFL-CIO 97% of the time, and got three-quarters of her campaign contributions from unions.

But the WS Journal rightfully worries that Solis will also try to gut the Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS). In recent years the OLMS has tightened financial disclosure rules on the unions, an effort that is responsible in just one case for catching hundreds of thousands of dollars being illicitly spent by Tyrone Freeman, the head of the California office of the Service Employee International Union.

Union watchdogs fear that Solis will reverse these stricter reporting rules allowing unions to more easily get away with criminal misallocation of funds. And this gutting of the OLMS is precisely what unions have been pushing for. Obama owes the unions for their multi-million support campaign they waged for him during the past elections, so it would seem a natural payback for his administration to acquiesce to these union demands.

So, the man that claimed to want to clean up Washington and bring “change” will be the one responsible for giving criminal unions the cover they so desperately need to indulge in all the criminal behavior they want to indulge in.

That’s some kind of change.

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A very Merry Christmas to every reader of my RedState diary. Thanks for reading my poor attempts at opinion, thanks for all the fantastic comments, and here’s to a great 2009.

We are, of course, taking the day off to be with friends and family, but if you have time, please do peruse the archives.

So, Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah and may your days be merry and bright.

MSN TV reporter, Dave Lake, has decided in his infinite wisdom that Tina Fey ridiculing Governor Sarah Palin is the top TV moment from the 2008 TV season. Aren’t you surprised that making fun of Sarah Palin has become the top TV moment? I mean, it’s incredible that the liberal media has decided that out of the entire TV season, this is the top moment! I’m SHOCKED, to say the least. (Don’t worry, I won’t run out of sarcasm any time soon)

From his blurb on the main page of the TV Year in review section I think we can see why Mr. Lake is a reviewer and not himself a TV writer. Let’s just say that his “humor” fell flat.

I Can See Tina From My House: The year’s most singular TV moment was Tina Fey’s return to “Saturday Night Live” as Republican vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin. Fey, who was never known for her impressions while on the show, nailed the voice, mannerisms and spirit of the Alaska governor, propelling the show to its best ratings in 14 years. An appearance a few weeks later by the actual Sarah Palin fell flat, much like her bid for the White House. (NBC)

The appearance by the “actual” Sarah Palin “fell flat”? Says who? It was one of SNL’s highest watched episodes all year. It would seem, rather, that the whole rest of the SNL season fell flat compared to the ratings that Sarah Palin brought the show!

And, I’m sorry, how did Fey “nail” the Governor’s “spirit”? That would presuppose that Sarah Palin is as stupid as Fey attempted to make her seem. One has to point out that Fey did not get elected to the highest office a state has while Sarah Palin did.

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Mitch Potter of the Toronto Star is the quintessential example of a self-hating European, I must say. He is a journalist that sides with those who advocate the destruction of his own culture just so he can puff himself up that he “gets it” and he does this willingly ala the useful idiots of old. In his latest pretense at journalism, Potter takes such glee indulging his Bush derangement syndrome (BDS) that he ends up accepting the terms of what “insult” means among Muslim hatemongers and terrorists and employs that as a weapon against Bush and the USA. It does not occur to this writer at all that we should scoff at what they think is an insult because he accepts their cultural concepts in place of our own.

First of all, the Toronto Star gives our Euro-weenie the exalted status of “Mitch Potter, Europe Bureau,” though it would have been better grammatically — less clumsy at least — to say he is “Mitch Potter, European Bureau,” but be that as it may. What strikes us at first glance is Potter’s penchant for the insufferable style of too many “reporters” in today’s world of woefully untalented journalists. That would be the appalling practice of the one sentence “paragraph.”

Evidently, the idea here is that readers are too stupid to read a paragraph more complicated than a single sentence or two. It is the idea that too many words grouped together is too taxing for the moron reader to withstand. So, these reporters give us annoying short bursts of words in clipped sentences that deter any sense that craft is something the writer is attempting to serve.

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Each year, with the onset of Christmas, we are treated to another gauzy, fluff piece about how great Kwanzaa is by yet another PC spewing newspaper columnist. This year, among many others, we find aggrandizement such as the Progressive’s “Kwanzaa is more relevant than ever in recession,” the Chattanooga Times Free Press with their titled, “Common ground,” or the one from the Providence Journal headlined, “Christmas, Kwanzaa and Hanukkah brighten even the darkest season of the year.”

Several years ago, the Houston Chronicle got in the act with a piece by Leslie Casimir titled “Learning about Kwanzaa from the holiday’s creator.” This one, though, was a bit off the usual track of the how-great-is-Kwanzaa theme because this particular piece celebrated the inventor of the faux holiday, Maulana Karenga, himself. So, instead of merely celebrating this manufactured holiday Casimir amazingly made a hero of the rapist, race monger and violent thug who created it!

Casimir waxed all a glow about how wonderful Maulana Karenga is and her column followed a gullible parent who, with kid in tow, went to see the man at a local community center.

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-By Warner Todd Huston

On the ball. That’s what the experts at The New York Times are, alright. They are the arbiters of all that’s fit to print, remember? The ones that know all and see all, dontcha know? They are the ones with all sorts of advice on foreign policy, we must point out. So, it’s a bit hard to fathom how The New York Times printed a hoax letter, supposedly from Bertrand Delanoe, the mayor of Paris, France, taking the State of New York to task for turning to the ditzy Caroline Kennedy to fill Hillary’s Senate Seat.

That’s right, The New York Times got scammed by a fake letter. Worse, they didn’t even follow up to confirm the authenticity of the letter that arrived in their inbox via email. Someone at the Times just read the email then published the letter. And now they are apologizing for the negligence.

The Associated Press is reporting that the faux letter called Caroline’s Senate bid “appalling” and “not very democratic.”

“What title has Ms. Kennedy to pretend to Hillary Clinton’s seat?” the letter in Monday’s editions said. “We French can only see a dynastic move of the vanishing Kennedy clan in the very country of the Bill of Rights. It is both surprising and appalling.”

Once word got back to Paris, the Mayor’s staff asked for a retraction and apology.

For its part The New York Times says that they didn’t bother to verify that the letter actually came from the Mayor of Paris. They said that they had violated their own practices.

It sort of boggles the mind, though, that anyone would imagine that a Frenchman would be all up in arms against a Kennedy!

Anyway, I guess we will soon be seeing splashy stories gleaned by the emails in The New York Times email inbox about male enhancement, and no doubt a deep investigation of Mbeke M’Butto who is a secretary of a very rich African general that only needs you to send $1,000 so that he can send you $10,000. Now THAT is a deal!

Yes, it’s all the professionalism that’s fit to make print with The New York Times.

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We have to start this posting with some questions to each of you dear readers out there. Do you like your vote to be secret? Free of coercion? Known only to you? Well, so does Obama’s new appointment for Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis (D-El Monte, CA). She agrees with you and every other democracy-loving citizen that when it comes to her ballot, she wants it to be a secret one. She’s 100% for her own votes remaining secret from prying eyes.

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From the diaries by Erick.

**VIDEO below fold**

CNN has a segment that they call “CNN Student News” that is supposed to highlight the news of the day for the kiddie set. Pursuant to that, in a December 15 segment, CNN floats a question asking if Michelle Obama (or any First Lady) should get a government salary just for being First Lady?

But, what we really ended up with is a slight to those same students to whom CNN was ostensibly relating the news. No where in the report was there any talk of the Constitution in particular nor the law in general as the CNN anchor cajoled the kids into viewing with awe the “work” of the First Lady and in fostering in them a feeling that First Ladies should be paid for this “work.”

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In a day when their industry is cratering, in large part because of their own actions, the United Auto Workers (UAW) is whining to president to be Barack Obama that “unfair labor rules” need to be retracted once he takes office.

The UAW is asking Obama to revisit the conditions that the recent Bailout is dependent upon whereby the union is forced to revisit its practices to look for cutbacks and concessions. In essence, the UAW is trying to convince Obama that the union should not be held accountable for its actions of dragging the US auto makers down the tubes.

“We are disappointed that,” President Bush, “has added unfair conditions singling out workers,” Gettelfinger said. “We will work with the Obama administration and the new Congress to ensure that these unfair conditions are removed, as we join in the coming months with all stakeholders to create a viable future for the U.S. auto industry.”

No, Mr. Gettelfinger, Bush is saying nothing at all about “the workers.” He is pointing at YOU, Mr. Gettlefinger, you and your union thugs. It is YOUR fault that the auto industry is falling apart, not “the workers.”

The UAW is playing the role of Vinnie Barbarino from that horrible 70s sitcom Welcome Back Kotter. When people mention fraud, graft, and corruption, the UAW is saying “what, who, where?” and pretending it doesn’t see any. Then, when the matter is pressed, the UAW looks to blame everyone but itself.

This is why there should never be a bailout for the auto makers. Nothing. Not a penny. The unions need to be heavily pressured or there will never be any way for the auto industry to make a competitive come back.

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