Does someone in the legacy media finally get it?

Yet, the American public’s astonishing decision to pick someone with so little experience (a few years as the Junior Senator from Illinois, and before that, a “carreer” as a community organizer) as President of the United States underscores just how alarmingly expertise is discounted — or equated with elitism — in our increasingly democratized era, and just how thoroughly colorful personal narratives overshadow policy arguments and actual knowledge.

See the answer below.

You’ve got to love the coverage of today’s announcement regarding bringing the 9/11 terrorists to trial in New York. I’ve been reading a bit of it and this paragraph, in a Reuters story headlined New York split over plan to try September 11 plotters caught my attention.

Several security scares since 2001 — a 2007 steam pipe explosion and earlier this year a low flying plane trailed by a fighter jet flying over the Statue of Liberty for a photo shoot — have created panic among still jittery New Yorkers.

I added the bold, just in case you didn’t see what I saw.

Are you kidding me? A “low flying plane”? Uh, could you be a little more specific? It was one of the aircraft that becomes Airforce One when the President is on board.

As for the rest of this travesty, that will have to wait for later for comment.

It’s been less than a week since the story of Gerald Walpin first broke.

President Obama says he has lost confidence in the inspector general who investigates AmeriCorps and other national service programs and has told Congress he is removing him from the position.

Obama’s move follows an investigation by IG Gerald Walpin of Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, who is an Obama supporter and former NBA basketball star, into the misuse of federal grants by a nonprofit education group that Johnson headed.

Walpin was criticized by the acting U.S. attorney in Sacramento for the way he handled an investigation of Johnson and St. HOPE Academy, a nonprofit group that received hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grants from the Corporation for National Community Service. The corporation runs the AmeriCorps program.

It’s a rotten fish of a story that stunk from day one and has been sitting out in the sun ever since. It was quickly noted that the firing may have been illegal under the Inspectors General Reform Act passed last year and co-sponsored by then Senator Barack Obama. The act requires the President to give Congress 30 days notice prior to removing an IG outlining the cause of the dismissal.

Byron York noted one of the first questionable actions in the scandal.

On Wednesday night, after the White House counsel’s office called AmeriCorps inspector general Gerald Walpin on his cell phone to tell him he had one hour to resign or be fired, Walpin sent an extensive e-mail account of the call to the man who had phoned him, Norman Eisen, the Special Counsel to the President for Ethics and Government Reform.

Here is that email:

My email responds to your telephone call to me while I was in a car driving on a highway, at about 5:20 p.m. I have now reached a destination and therefore can write you this email.

In your telephone call, you informed me that the President wishes me to resign my post as IG of CNCS [Corporation for National and Community Service, which includes AmeriCorps]. You told me that I could take no more than an hour to make a decision.

As you know, Congress intended the Inspector General of CNCS to have the utmost independence of judgment in his deliberations respecting the propriety of the agency’s conduct and the actions of its officers. That is why the relevant statute provides that the President may remove the IG only if he supplies the Congress with a statement of his reasons–which is quite a different matter than executive branch officials who serve at his pleasure and can therefore be removed for any reason and without notification to Congress.

I take this statutorily-mandated independence of my office very seriously, and, under the present circumstances, I simply cannot make a decision to respect or decline what you have said were the President’s wishes within an hour or indeed any such short time. As you are aware, I have just issued two reports highly critical of the actions of CNCS, which is presently under the direction of the President’s appointee and, I am advised, someone with a meaningful relationship with the President.

Chairman Solomont and I have had significant disagreements about the findings and conclusions contained in these reports. It would do a disservice to the independent scheme that Congress has mandated–and could potentially raise questions about my own integrity–if I were to render what would seem to many a very hasty response to your request.

I heard your statement that this request that you communicated on behalf of the President and the timing of our reports and disagreement with the CNCS Board and management are “coincidence,” as you put it on the phone, but I would suggest there is a high likelihood that others may see it otherwise.

I suspect that, when presented with the circumstances I have just discussed, the President will see the propriety of providing me additional time to reflect on his request. If however he believes that my departure is a matter of urgency, then he will have to take the appropriate steps toward ordering my removal, without my agreement.

Gerald Walpin

The scandal was just beginning. Confronted with the questionable nature of the actions put in motion to remove Walpin even some Democrats began to ask for a better explanation. The White House issued a new, if delayed and lame, reasoning.

President Barack Obama removed a government agency’s internal watchdog last week and plans to fire him in part because he was “confused” and “disoriented” at a meeting last month, the White House said in a letter to Congress Tuesday night.

The letter came after several senators, including key Obama supporter Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), expressed concern that Obama skirted the requirements of federal law in the terse explanation he gave Congress about his reasons for removing the inspector general of the Corporation for National and Community Service, Gerald Walpin.

“Mr. Walpin was removed after a review was unanimously requested by the bi-partisan Board of the Corporation,” Obama ethics counsel Norm Eisen wrote in a letter to senators Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Me.), with a copy directed to McCaskill. “The Board’s action was precipitated by a May 20, 2009 Board meeting at which Mr. Walpin was confused, disoriented, unable to answer questions and exhibited other behavior that led the Board to question his capacity to serve.”

I’d like to call Bull Shit on that. Mr. Walpin was removed because he was messing with a big Obama supporter. Like with his Illinois Senate run, the solution was to get rid of the opposition.

On Monday Mr. Walpin appeared on The Glenn Beck Program.

Mr. Walpin believes, and I agree, that explanations offered so far are baseless.

Gerald Walpin, who until last week was the inspector general for the Corporation for National and Community Service, told FOXNews.com that part of Obama’s explanation was a “total lie” and that he feels he’s got a target on his back for political reasons.

“I am now the target of the most powerful man in this country, with an army of aides whose major responsibility today seems to be to attack me and get rid of me,” Walpin said.

I particularly like his response to the president.

“It appears to suggest that I was removed because I was disabled — based on one occasion out of hundreds,” he said, adding that the administration is grasping at “non-existent straws” to explain its actions.

“I would never say President Obama doesn’t have the capacity to continue to serve because of his (statement) that there are 56 states,” Walpin said, adding that the same holds for Vice President Biden and his “many express confusions that have been highlighted by the media.” Obama mistakenly said once on the campaign trail that he had traveled to 57 states.

More? Yes, there’s more. Byron York has remained on the story.

Norman Eisen, the White House Special Counsel to the President for Ethics and Government Reform, met with investigators on the staff of Republican Sen. Charles Grassley at Grassley’s offices this morning. The investigators wanted to learn more about the circumstances surrounding the abrupt firing of AmeriCorps inspector general Gerald Walpin. According to Grassley, Eisen revealed very, very little, refusing to answer many questions of fact put to him. And now Grassley has written a letter to the White House counsel asking for answers.

More on Senator Grassley’s letter:

At today’s meeting, Sen. Grassley’s staffers wanted to know more about the White House review. “Unfortunately,” Grassley writes in a letter just sent to White House counsel Gregory Craig, “Mr. Eisen refused to answer several direct questions posed to him about the representations made in his letter.” Grassley says that since Eisen refused to answer the questions in person, Grassley would submit a dozen of them in writing. Here they are:

1) Did the [Corporation for National and Community Service] Board communicate its concerns about Mr. Walpin to the White House in writing?

2) Specifically, which CNCS Board members came forward with concerns about Mr. Walpin’s ability to serve as the Inspector General?

3) Was the communication about the Board’s concerns on or about May 20, 2009 the first instance of any communications with White House personnel regarding the possibility of removing Mr. Walpin?

4) Which witnesses were interviewed in the course of Mr. Eisen’s review?

5) How many witnesses were interviewed?

6) Were any employees of the Office of Inspector General, who may have had more frequent contact with Mr. Walpin than the Board members, interviewed?

7) Was Mr. Walpin asked directly during Mr. Eisen’s review about the events of May 20, 2009?

Was Mr. Walpin asked for his response to the allegations submitted to the Integrity Committee by Acting U.S. Attorney Lawrence Brown?

9) What efforts were made during Mr. Eisen’s review to obtain both sides of the story or to afford the Office of Inspector General an opportunity to be heard?

10) In addition to the claim that Mr. Walpin was “confused” and “disoriented,” the letter also says he exhibited “other behavior” that led to questions about his capacity. What other behavior was Mr. Eisen referencing?

11) If the initial and primary concern had to do with Mr. Walpin’s capacity to serve for potential health reasons, why was he only given one hour to decide whether to resign or be fired?

12) If Mr. Walpin’s telecommuting arrangements since the beginning of this year were a major concern, then why was Mr. Walpin not simply asked to stop telecommuting?

Good questions. They deserve some answers. Don’t expect the legacy media to ask for them. I don’t think you’ll hear about this when the All Barack Obama reports from the White House, and you won’t hear about it from the other alphabet news channels. In fact, outside of Fox News, conservative talk radio, and the blogosphere, you probably won’t here much about it at all.

That can’t be allowed to happen. While this is primarily about Mr. Walpin, it also is an indicator of just what type of politician President Obama has turned out to be. Not a surprise to many of us, but a big shock to the rest of the country.

ADDED: Michelle Malkin (no surprise) has been all over this story.

While most of the attention is on the ongoing protests in Iran, and the blogospheric coverage it is receiving, there are other stories that deserve to be covered and followed.

The Real Cost of Health Care Reform

It is consistently sold under the guise of saving “us” money, but in fact the costs would be staggering. How staggering? How about $4 Trillion dollars. Thats $4,000,000,000,000.00!

Yesterday, the CBO estimated that the current Democratic Senate health care bill would increase the defict by $1 trillion over 10 years while leaving 30 million uninsured, forcing the White House to distance itself from the legislation. While liberals have tried to emphasize that the CBO provided only a partial analysis of the draft legislation from Ted Kennedy’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, a more comprehensive analysis of the legislation will only serve to drive the bill’s ultimate cost higher. For instance, because it was only working with a draft of the bill that had holes in it, the CBO did not estimate the costs associated with increasing Medicaid elgibility to 150 percent of the poverty level, or the full cost of providing subsidies to individuals with incomes at up to 500 percent of the poverty level to purchase insurance through state-run exchanges. Once this is taken into account, liberals are right that the final CBO estimate will reflect more people being insured, but the cost of the legislation will go up as well.

Related to that, but with a disturbingly different twist, is the sales job the Obama administration is doing on health care with the uncritical support of the MSM.

Obama’s ABC Infomercial

This story has many on the right re-naming ABC as the All Barack Channel. It fits.

First the story as reported on Drudge:

On the night of June 24, the media and government become one, when ABC turns its programming over to President Obama and White House officials to push government run health care — a move that has ignited an ethical firestorm!

Highlights on the agenda:

ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House.

The network plans a primetime special — ‘Prescription for America’ — originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.

The Director of Communications at the White House Office of Health Reform is Linda Douglass, who worked as a reporter for ABC News from 1998-2006.

Michael Laprarie writing at Wizbang comments:

It seems that the Obama Administration is prepared to bias the debate about single-payer health care not only with disinformation, but by working with the mainstream media in order to deliberately block efforts to present alternative solutions to our health care problems. Perhaps this is a lesson learned from the Clinton White House, which welcomed the debate over HillaryCare because they thought they would easily win it.

One missing element in all of this is any sort of opposing view, as Gaius points out.

They are apparently calling this a “debate”. But when only one side is presented, it is not a debate, it is a lecture. Or worse, propaganda.

This is also some very, very expensive free airtime for Obama. ABC is giving away the air time – and its credibility as a news organization.

[...]

They are not even trying to disguise that they are completely in Obama’s pocket anymore. That’s more than a bit worrisome.

Indeed it is. Michelle Malkin says, “ABC News should be required to register as a federal lobbyist.”

AllahPundit makes this point:

I’m honestly surprised, although it makes a certain sort of ruthless sense: If, as many righties have speculated, The One’s trying to ram through as many Great Society programs as he can before the political pendulum swings back to the center, the media might as well drop all pretense of objectivity and go for broke too.

There is much more on this story, but I’ll leave you with this link to a lighter look at the Sneak Preview of ABC’s Infomercial for Socialized Medicine from Doug Ross.

There’s one other story that deserves mention, but I’ve run out of time this morning. That is the firing of IG Gerald Walpin. This story deserves a lot of attention, something I’ll have to take care of when I return this afternoon.

I’m glad I grabbed the screen cap when I did. If you go to the story now you will see a picture of an off shore oil rig. Earlier it looked like this:

The story discusses the finding by a three judge panel that, “the Bush-era Interior Department failed to consider the effect on the environment and marine life before it began the process in August 2005 to expand an oil and gas leasing program in the Beaufort, Bering, and Chukchi seas.”

AP and/or Yahoo should have stuck with the original picture. It tells the story pretty well. Of course there may be a photo editor looking for new employement today.

What do these two stories have in common?

Iraqi police say female suicide bomber kills 35 (AP)

and

US military deaths in Iraq war at 4,243

Give up?

Yahoo’s news feed shipped both with the same picture.

This is the Reuters picture that they used.

The text accompanying the photo:

U.S. Army Spct. Veona Lobado (L) and sister Nancy Lobado-Hale are reunited at a ceremony welcoming U.S. Army soldiers returning from duty in Iraq at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, Colorado February 12, 2009. About 280 soldiers from the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division returned following their 15-month deployment to Iraq.

So why is that the photo they decided to use with those stories?

The law, as I understand it, uses differing burden of proof depending on the nature of the offense. From the strict implications of “beyond a reasonable doubt” to the lesser “based on the preponderance of evidence”, there is a new standard that is being used in the Tasergate investigation.

It’s the same burden of proof used by the AGW crowd: We have no proof, but “it’s likely” you’re guilty anyway.

Bill “Beldar” Dyer explains how the defense works:

Instead, Branchfire has piled a guess (that the Palins wanted Wooten fired, rather than, for example, counseled, disciplined, or reassigned) on top of an inference (that when the Palins expressed concern to Monegan about Wooten, they were really threatening to fire Monegan if he didn’t fire Wooten) on top of an innuendo (that Gov. Palin “fired” Monegan at least in part because of his failure to fire Wooten) — from which Branchflower then leaps to a legal conclusion: “abuse of authority.” Branchflower reads the Ethics Act to prohibit any governmental action or decision made for justifiable reasons benefiting the State if that action or decision might also make a public official happy for any other reason. That would mean, of course, that governors must never act or decide in a way that makes them personally happy as a citizen, or as a wife or mother or daughter, and that they could only take actions or make decisions which left them feeling neutral or upset. This an incredibly shoddy tower of supposition, and a ridiculous misreading of the law.

Confederate Yankee sums up what I am calling the “Gore Standard” this way:

Alaska Democrats hell-bent on lynching Sarah Palin for Dear Leader Obama all but promised a guilty verdict before their investigation into Tasergate began, but the best they could come up with was a unilateral fact-free declaration that amounts to “Sarah Palin abused power because I was hired to find that Sarah Palin abused her power, even though my own report contradicts that. BUGS! BUGS! BUGS!!!“

Expect the left and the compliant press to use the Gore Standard quite often in the days remaining before the election. Be scared by how this standard will be abused in a Democrat administration.

Hugh Hewitt titles his post If This Is True, Obama Has A Serious Problem. Perhaps he should have said, If This Is True and TOM* Doesn’t Give Him Yet Another Pass, Obama Has A Serious Problem.

He links to this story at NewsBusters by Warner Todd Houston.

Barack Obama played the “me too” game during the Friday debates on September 26 after Senator John McCain mentioned that he was wearing a bracelet with the name of Cpl. Matthew Stanley, a resident of New Hampshire and a soldier that lost his life in Iraq in 2006. Obama said that he too had a bracelet. After fumbling and straining to remember the name, he revealed that his had the name of Sergeant Ryan David Jopek of Merrill, Wisconsin.

Shockingly, however, Madison resident Brian Jopek, the father of Ryan Jopek, the young soldier who tragically lost his life to a roadside bomb in 2006, recently said on a Wisconsin Public Radio show that his family had asked Barack Obama to stop wearing the bracelet with his son’s name on it. Yet Obama continues to do so despite the wishes of the family.

Do read the entire NB story to see the transcript of the interview with Mr. Jopek.

Houston says, “Obama’s use of this soldier that fell in the line of duty is tainted by his ambition and callousness. And the media is letting him get away with it.”

Kim Priestap writes at Wizbang, “So will we see this picked up by the mainstream media? Not a snowball’s chance in hell.”

Once again Hope and Change are revealed to mean “I Hope you won’t notice that I’ll do anything to Change my title to Mr. President”.

*TOM — The Old Media

It is great to get up in the morning and see a fine display of journalistic balance. </snark>

(Click for bigger view)

This is a view of my Google feed reader this morning in a folder I have labeled Elections. Sixteen headlines visible without scrolling, thirteen stories about the Obamessiah, one “Today on the presidential campaign trail”, and two on John McCain – one of those about the veterans group working against McCain.

So, here is journalistic balance — In A Nutshell:

AP expands on their original plan and has decided that it now owns all words and the alphabet.

Bloggers Must Pay For Using Words (AP*)

AP* spokesperson Kutoffyernose Spiteyerphace announced the daring new plan at a news conference earlier today.

“It has become increasingly clear that in today’s business climate companies must look at new and innovative ways to increase revenue. Let’s face it,” Spiteyerphace said, “paying people like Christopher Newton and Jamil Hussein isn’t cheep.”

While some details remain to be worked out, the basic plans asserts ownership of, “all letters, words, and phrases.”

According to Spiteyerphace, “As we were looking at our business plan we realized that we are really in the word business. People have been using words for years and we have been denied our fair share of the revenue.”

When asked about the “Fair Use” provision of U.S. Copyright law (Chapter 1, § 107) which states in part, “[T]he fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.” Spiteyerphace responded, “Clearly the federal government owes us for those 49 words. I expect a check very soon.”

*Another Planet

Michelle Malkin says that the AP owes her $132,125. Thanks for the link, Michelle (The currency of the blogosphere) and welcome to her readers.

One of the ways to see how much attention a story is getting is to notice the number of times it comes across the feed reader. For example, in the last two days there has been eight stories, mostly duplicates, about Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz.

In contrast, this story about the withdraw of 4000 troops from Iraq has come across once.

The US military on Thursday announced the withdrawal of another 4,000 troops from Iraq next month as violence across the country hit a four-year low.

Of course it’s nothing but straight reporting. [/ sarc]

The military said it was pulling out troops deployed as part of a controversial “surge” of forces in February 2007.

It must be painful to report good news.

The US military said that last week had seen the lowest level of violence in four years across Iraq, but gave no casualty figures.

Figures maintained by the independent website www.icasualties.org show that the number of US fatalities so far this month was 19, the lowest average since the American invasion in March 2003.

I wonder how much coverage this will get throughout the day.

NBC has pulled back from their original position regarding airing ads by Freedom’s Watch. They informed the group that they will accept the spots.

NBC reversed course Saturday and decided to air a conservative group’s television ad thanking U.S. troops.

The ad, by the group Freedom’s Watch, asks viewers to remember the troops during the holiday season. NBC had refused to air the ad because it guides viewers to the Freedom’s Watch Web site, which NBC said was too political.

But in a statement issued Saturday evening, NBC said:

“We have reviewed and changed our ad standards guidelines and made the decision that our policy will apply to content only and not to a referenced Web site. Based on these amended standards the Freedom’s Watch ad will begin to run as early as Sunday.”

My guess? They felt the heat. Good.