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I have no idea whether the death threats against our first black president have been bad enough that the Secret Service actually has decided to employ a food taster to make sure that he isn't poisoned, but as Tommy Christopher pointed out, if it is true, he wouldn't be the first. That didn't stop the likes of Swanson heir Tucker Carlson and his rag, The Daily Caller, along with every other right-winger on the Internet from going crazy and using it as an excuse to attack President Obama for acting like "royalty."

Here's more from Wonkette: Sequester Eliminates Position Of White House Taster, President To Starve:

Bammerz is still holding his lame ass meetings with Congressional Republicans in his latest flailing attempt to show them that he too wants to inflict as much needless pain on the vulnerable with stupid spending cuts. Apparently it was Susan Collins’ turn to have her special day with the President and as such she brought a Maine-themed feast full of shellfish and blueberry pie. However the President didn’t touch this succulent lunch, and not because he felt uncomfortable with Senator Collins bringing him a big plate of aphrodisiacs:

“Unfortunately, you know, the president can’t….He looked longingly at it..He honestly did look longingly at it, but apparently he has to have essentially a taster, and I pointed out to him that we were all tasters for him, that if the food had been poisoned all of us would have keeled over so, but he did look longingly at it and he remarked that we have far better food than the Democrats do, and I said that was because I was hosting.”

Okay it seems that we’ve learned a few things from this. First of all thanks to the President we now know that Senator Klobuchar’s “Taconite Tater Tot Hot Dish” is as gross as it sounds. Secondly: Obama has a food taster? Oh sweet Indonesian Curried Dog Stew we are never going to hear the end of this.

Sadly, despite the fact that story first came from the incredibly accurate source known as the Daily Caller and has since hit the right wing echo chamber thanks to AIM Investigative Reporter of the year Jim Hoft, it seems that the President is protected by a food taster. Why the nation’s first black president would feel compelled to employ someone meant to protect his food in this wonderful era of complete racial transcendence and political civility is beyond our comprehension, but it does automatically mean that Obama is an evil aristocratic dictator whose tyranny is only matched by his disdain for the common people. Read on...

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This story looks like it's about to get more interesting. I wonder if we're going to find out who paid the Dominican hooker to try to frame Sen. Bob Menendez. Report: Dominican Escort Now Says She Made Up Menendez Claims:

One of the women who appeared in a video last fall claiming Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) paid her for sex has now told a different story to the police in the Dominican Republic, The Washington Post reported on Monday.

According to affidavits obtained by the newspaper, the woman said she and a friend appeared in the video after being approached by a lawyer. That lawyer, meanwhile, said a second lawyer provided him with a script and paid him to find the women.

The Post report, which also cites two people “briefed on [the woman’s] claim,” does not identify the women or the lawyers by name, nor does it detail what court the affidavits were filed in, or what kind of proceeding they are related to. It is also not clear how the Post obtained the documents.

The videos referred to in the report are apparently the same ones that appeared, at least in part, on the conservative website The Daily Caller in November. The Daily Caller did not identify the women, and their faces were blurred.

The story was initially ignored by much of the press. But in late January and early February, the rumors resurfaced, in the form of an anonymously posted WordPress blog containing a shadowy tipster’s correspondence with a watchdog group, ABC News and an apparent FBI agent. The tipster said he had information that Menendez had slept with prostitutes while vacationing in the Dominican Republic, where he stayed at the home of Dr. Salomon Melgen, a Miami ophthalmologist and businessman who is both a friend and political donor of the senator’s. In late January, the FBI raided Melgen’s Miami offices, reportedly as part of parallel investigations into potential Medicare fraud and Melgen’s relationship with Menendez.

Wonkette has more here: Daily Caller’s Menendez Hooker: I Can’t Believe We Made Up The Whole Thing.

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Conservative Daily Caller founder Tucker Carlson on Sunday suggested that the reason he had been unpopular with liberals for years was because "people despise you when you wear a bow tie."

"How boring is it to wear a hoodie to work?" Carlson asked during a Fox News segment about how Americans were revolting against the tradition of dressing casually on Fridays. "If you are truly cutting edge you will wear gloves. White gloves."

One viewer in London noted that "bow tie Thursdays" were becoming popular at his workplace.

Carlson, who wore a bow tie for years while working as a host of CNN's Crossfire, noted that he could have been "pummeled" for wearing the formal necktie if he had not believed in self defense.

"People despise you when you wear a bow tie," he explained. "Not in Charleston, not in Newport, Rhode Island. There little strongholds of bow tie-philia. But the rest on the country -- especially the Big Apple -- not for the bow ties."

"I mean, if you're a Nation of Islam guy -- in fact, they would come up to me often. They were so nice to me, it was unbelievable. The Nation of the [Louis] Farrakhan guys, they loved the bow tie."

"Was your behavior better when you were wearing a bow tie?" Fox News co-host Alisyn Camerota wondered.

"Oh, no," Carlson admitted. "It was much filthier because, look, you're wearing a bow tie so nobody suspects it."

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If anyone thought it was not possible for Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson to make even bigger buffoons of themselves than they have been for years already, well, you were wrong. I've seen some pathetic stuff from both of them, but this has to take the cake if for nothing else, just the sheer desperation of pulling a stunt like this for Mitt Romney the night before the first presidential debate.

Breaking news!!! everyone... the President of the United States was caught on film talking like he's black. And saying what anyone in their right mind agreed with at the time, which is that the people of New Orleans were treated horribly in the aftermath of the hurricane damage. And oh my god... he said something nice about Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Break out the pearls and the fainting couch.

And that "exclusive" video they were hyping as never seen before... well, maybe not so much -- Drudge-Hyped Obama Video Turns Out To Be Publicly Covered 2007 Speech:

Sean Hannity, The Daily Caller, and Drudge Report spent hours hyping a racially explosive secret video of President Obama. But the bombshell clip turned out to be a public speech from June 2007 that was covered by the major networks, including FOX News, at the time.

Excerpts of the open press speech to historically black Hampton University were already easily available (and quickly discovered by reporters after Drudge teased the clip on his website hours before the “new” Daily Caller/Hannity clip even aired). But Daily Caller founder Tucker Carlson claimed the video was relevant because it contained additional ad-libbed portions that went off the prepared remarks.

Among the sinister revelations Drudge, Hannity, and Carlson cited: Obama’s use of what they considered an overly African-American cadence to his voice in front of the majority. “This accent is absurd. This is not the way Obama talks,” Carlson said on FOX. Drudge Report teased “THE ACCENT” and “THE ANGER” as scoops.

Hannity, who was a leading figure on the right in promoting Obama’s relationship with Jeremiah Wright as a story in 2008, also pointed to Obama acknowledging Wright as “friend and great leader” at the event. As was widely reported at the time, the two were close until Obama disowned him later that year over his continued inflammatory comments.

The Obama campaign dismissed the video as the work of “Romney’s allies” to distract from his 47 percent comments, although the Romney campaign denied having anything to do with the story and appeared reluctant to discuss it in any capacity.

Despite protestations by Carlson that the media ignored Obama’s speech, CNN’s Peter Hamby pointed out that FOX News aired video of the speech at the time: [...]

Hannity and Carlson accused Obama of injecting race into the much-criticized response to Hurricane Katrina. While Obama never mentioned race while discussing the disaster in his speech, he complained that the federal government was slow to waive a Stafford Act requirement governing disaster relief that required the affected area to pay some of the costs of aid that they waived after 9/11 and Hurricane Andrew. According to Obama, this reluctance “tells me that somehow, the people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much!”

Obama was hardly the only one complaining about ongoing fights with Congress and the Bush administration over the Stafford Act requirement at the time, however. Then-Congressman Bobby Jindal (R-LA) led a push the same year to revise the law to lessen its funding requirement in circumstances like New Orleans’. On the Senate side, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) pushed hard for more waivers. Sean Reilly, a member of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, echoed Obama’s complaints almost word for word for a PBS Frontline segment on the Stafford Act.

And here's more from Media Matters -- Hannity, Carlson Desperately Attempt To Manufacture "Racially Charged Rhetoric" From Obama Video:

Continue reading »

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A reporter from Tucker Carlson's conservative website The Daily Caller says that by fighting for birth control and reproductive rights, Democrats have "reduced the American woman to a sexual being."

During a Wednesday segment praising Karl Rove's American Crossroads super PAC for accusing President Barack Obama of waging a "war on women," Fox News host Sean Hannity told The Daily Caller's Michelle Fields that Democrats' plan to paint Republicans as anti-woman had failed.

"I love this ad!" Fields said of the American Crossroads attack. "Democrats love to run away from numbers and facts which is why they created this ridiculous war on women with contraception."

"And what they did was they basically reduced the American woman to a sexual being whose sole concern is birth control and cheap abortions," she added. "That is not the American woman. The real American woman cares about the economy, getting a job, helping her family, which is why this ad will be far more effective than the war on women have."

Hannity noted that "even the dog in the kennel" on the roof of Mitt Romney's car had backfired on Democrats because "Barack Obama ate dog meat" in Indonesia as a child, something that Obama revealed in his 2007 book, but The Daily Caller resurrected the story earlier this year to "push back" against the Romney story.

Regardless of Hannity's claim that the "war on women" had backfired on Democrats, the most recent Quinnipiac University poll found Obama had a massive lead over Romney among unmarried women, 60 percent to 31 percent.

(h/t: Media Matters)

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Suspended Politico reporter Joe Williams on Monday accused conservative publications like the late Andrew Breitbart's Big Media and Tucker Carlson's The Daily Caller of acting like a "schoolyard bully" by deliberately targeting him after he said GOP hopeful Mitt Romney was more comfortable around "white folks."

Speaking out for the first time since Politico suspended him indefinitely, Williams told Current TV's Bill Press that Big Media used "selective evidence" from comments about Romney on MSNBC and his Twitter account because they were in the business of "gathering scalps" from the so-called liberal media.

"It became about me and not about what I said," he explained. "And that was something that was common to a lot of what you talked about earlier: Chris Hayes, David Shuster, the list goes on. And, you know, now my name is on that list. But the problem I see here is it's not going to stop there."

"Part of the issue here is the fact that we have an organization -- we have a couple of organizations that have very clear agendas," Williams continued. "They're funded -- we don't quite exactly know how, but, certainly, they get their money to do what they do. Their agenda is quite clear. Their agenda is to make enough noise, to push back hard enough that organizations -- independent organizations, independent news organizations that have foundations, that have credibility to their name -- fold."

"Basically it's the schoolyard bully concept where if you make enough noise, if you push back hard enough, people are not going to fight back. ... They're in the business of gathering scalps."

When it comes to the comments about Romney, Williams did not seem eager to apologize.

"If I apologize for that, there are going to be many other people who have to as well because this is not a new sentiment," he pointed out, noting that the phrase "white folks" had been like waving a red flag in front of bull. "To me in my personal opinion at this point, those two words were the ones that set people off. You know, 'white folks,' 'Mitt Romney.' It's a match to a tender keg to certain segments of people who decided they want to push back on what they believe is the liberal media."

Williams also wouldn't say if he wanted to stay on at Politico.

"That's a question that we're working on," he told Press.

The Daily Caller on Monday revealed a March 30 tweet where Williams had accused Politico of an "overlay of blatant racism," calling it the "secret sauce in the Politico shitburger."

"Certainly at that point I was venting, I was spouting, I had frustrations at work, there were frustrations in some of the things that I saw that was going on on the Politico landscape," he recalled. "And I vented and in error and I vented in a public place and that was a huge mistake."

"There are a lot of frustrations in Washington, a lot of things that have racist kind of aura," Williams added. "Politico, by and large, has a lot of things to deal with, questions as far as that's concerned. Well, [minority] representation. Diversity is a problem for the entire D.C. press corps and I don't think Politico is an exception in that regard."

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Even after his reporter effectively heckled President Barack Obama during an official statement last week, Daily Caller founder Tucker Carlson says that it's inconceivable that his publication would not get a White House press pass.

"Here's the White House's mistake," Fox News co-host Bob Beckel told Carlson on Monday. "The idea that they gave The Daily Caller a White House pass is the craziest idea I've ever heard."

"We're bigger than the Chicago Tribune!" Carlson objected. "We're bigger than the Boston Globe. They can't not give us a pass!"

"Sure they can," Beckel pointed out. "All you got to do is not give one."

"Good luck with that," Carlson grumbled.

Even conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity admitted that Neil Munro's "timing was off" when he interrupted Obama's announcement about new immigration policy on Friday.

"The bottom line is he's doing what a lot of people who cover the White House aren't doing, which is pressing for answers to his questions," Carlson explained.

"Shouldn't he wait?" Hannity wondered. "If he thought it was the end of the statement, fine. It didn't seem like it was at the end of the statement."

"It's an etiquette question, but it's not the core question," Carlson opined. "The core question is, is the White House Press corps holding the president accountable for his policies and getting answers to the questions the public wants? And Neil Munro is."

"How many times has Obama been interrupted in the middle of one of his speeches by someone calling out a compliment?" he asked. "Like 13 times in the past six months. He stops and says, thank you. The second someone asks a question he doesn't like, 'Oh, it's heckling. It's an outrage.'"

(h/t: Media Matters)

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Daily Caller contributor Matt Lewis on Sunday said that his colleague, reporter Neil Munro, "did the right thing" by shouting at President Barack Obama during an official statement about immigration policy.

For his part, Munro claimed he had thought the president had finished speaking when he began yelling questions in the White House Rose Garden on Friday.

"But he kept on talking while the president was trying to speak," CNN's Howard Kurtz told Lewis on Sunday.

"A little bit about Neil Munro: He's actually an Irish immigrant himself, he was with the National Journal for a decade," Lewis explained. "He's a seasoned reporter, and I think if you put it in context, President Obama -- first of all, the policy bypasses Congress..."

"No, no, no," Kurtz interrupted. "Would you have done what he did? Was he wrong?"

"There was going to be no question and answer [after the president's remarks]," Lewis shot back. "This was the only chance he had to ask a question. The press corps should be a little bit less deferential to authority and a little more aggressive."

"He had no business interrupting the president," Kurtz explained. "This is not a question of being deferential. ... Come on."

"Where in the Constitution does it say that you can't ask questions?" Lewis asked, raising his voice. "This is protocol and it's etiquette, but it's not constitutional. He did the right thing."

"I understand you have to defend your guy, but that's a pretty ludicrous answer," Kurtz concluded.

(h/t: Mediaite)

I agree with David Pakman on the latest, desperate ridiculous thing to come from the wingnuts over at Tucker Carlson's rag, The Daily Caller, which was supposed to be the conservative alternative to The Huffington Post. Apparently their answer to try to deflect attention away from the story about Mitt Romney placing the family dog on the roof of their car while on vacation and the dog crapping itself while up there is... OMG!!! Barack Obama ate dog meat while he lived in Indonesia!!!! Aaayyyeeeee!!!

I'm not giving them a link but anyone who wants to read the nonsense shouldn't have too much trouble finding it using the search engines. As Pakman noted, they're actually feigning outrage over the fact that President Obama ate food that was indigenous to the country he was living in, given to him by his stepfather, when he was somewhere between the ages of 6-10 years old. Which is of course exactly equivalent to a grown man strapping a terrified dog to the roof of a car for a 12 hour drive to Canada.

I thought I'd seen it all with the stupid season and what conservatives will resort to when attacking President Obama, but apparently I was wrong. We've got legitimate issues to be debating like the economy, war, education, our broken health care system, the attack on the working class and income disparity among many, many other issues, and this is the sort of thing that was consuming most of the right's blogs and twitter feeds this Wednesday morning. I guess they're hoping the dog owners and animal rights groups that are upset with Mittens for the family dog fiasco are going to turn their ire to President Obama instead, as though they're too stupid to realize he wasn't responsible for his dietary choices as a small child.

You can catch David Pakman's show at his site here or at his You Tube channel.

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A broadcaster who hosts several programs that air on NPR was reportedly fired Wednesday for her participation in Occupy DC after conservative websites suggested "apparent ethics violations."

Lisa Simeone said Thursday that she was read NPR's code of ethics as she was fired as the host of Soundprint.

She also works as a freelance host on NPR's World of Opera.

"We recently learned of World of Opera host Lisa Simeone's participation in an Occupy DC group," NPR's Anna Christopher wrote. "World of Opera is produced by WDAV, a music and arts station based in Davidson, North Carolina. The program is distributed by NPR. Lisa is not an employee of NPR or of WDAV; she is a freelancer with the station."

"We're in conversations with WDAV about how they intend to handle this. We of course take this issue very seriously."

NPR had not confirmed the firing and WDAV still had her photograph on their site at time of publication,

In a video posted to YouTube in July, Simeone declared her intentions to participate in the October occupation of DC.

"I'm going to Washington, D.C. on October 6 because our moment has come," she said. "Life, peace, justice. That's what we want. That's what we're going to demand... We're not leaving. We're not just going to go there and march around with signs. We're going, we're going to sit down on that nice cold ground for however long we have to, how ever many days, however many weeks. We're going to stay and we are going to demand that our leaders listen to us."

Simeone's alleged firing comes just one day after conservative websites The Daily Caller and Fox News suggested that she had broken NPR's ethics rules by becoming an activist.

"I find it puzzling that NPR objects to my exercising my rights as an American citizen -- the right to free speech, the right to peaceable assembly -- on my own time in my own life," Simeone told WarIsACrime.org's David Swanson, a noted peace activist. "I'm not an NPR employee. I'm a freelancer. NPR doesn't pay me. I'm also not a news reporter. I don't cover politics."

"This sudden concern with my political activities is also surprising in light of the fact that Mara Liaason reports on politics for NPR yet appears as a commentator on FoxTV, Scott Simon hosts an NPR news show yet writes political op-eds for national newspapers, Cokie Roberts reports on politics for NPR yet accepts large speaking fees from businesses. Does NPR also send out 'Communications Alerts' about their activities?"

The Baltimore Sun's David Zurawik predicted that Simeone would also find herself out of a job as the host of NPR's World of Opera by the end of the day Thursday.