A CNN report broadcast on Tuesday revealed that gun released to
Mexican gangs as part of the Fast and Furious “gun-walking” operation
are continuing to show up at scenes of violence sound of the American
border. According to the CNN report, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms, and Explosives acknowledged that more weapons released into
Mexico are likely to continue surfacing in the coming years.
The latest Fast and Furious weapon to be acquired by authorities was used in a December 18 shootout in Puerto Penasco, Mexico.
CNN acquired video of the shootout, posted to YouTube, which featured
audio of the violent gun battle between Mexican gangs and authorities.
Five people were killed in the shootout, including a “senior member” of a
Mexican drug cartel, CNN’s Evan Perez reported. “The ATF has accepted responsibility for the mistakes made in the
Fast and Furious investigation,” an ATF statement obtained by CNN read,
“and, at the Attorney General’s direction, we have taken appropriate and
decisive action to ensure that these errors will not be repeated.”
“And we acknowledge that, regrettably, firearms related to Fast and
Furious investigation will likely continue to be recovered at future
crime scenes,” the statement concluded.
A once unspoken rule within mainstream reporting outlets has recently
been exposed and, lacking any other recourse, acknowledged by an honest
handful. 2013 has been a year characterized by one scandalous
revelation after the other – each had been brewing for months, even
years, before they were uncovered. Too often, journalists are consoling
themselves and exculpating their dereliction with the fantasy that some
allegations deserved to be dismissed outright only because Republicans
displayed a conspicuous level of interest in them.
The latest example of this phenomenon is positively amazing and more than a little bit depressing.
Appearing on The Steve Malzberg Show, TIME Magazine senior political analyst Mark Halperin conceded
without a hint of reluctance that conservatives’ warnings about “death
panels” within the Affordable Care Act was without merit.
Halperin began by chastising the press, as an institution, for doing
“nothing like an adequate job in flyspecking and scrutinizing the whole
law.”
“Part of the issue,” he said, “is that Governor [Mitt] Romney did not make healthcare the issue in the campaign because he had his own political problems.”
Halperin added that a thorough scrutiny of the ACA in the press would have been beneficial to liberals and President Barack Obama because it would have muted the sense of shock many are experiencing today. Hindsight is 20/20, I suppose.
Moving on to the issue of end-of-life cost controls contained within
the ACA, Halperin conceded that those provisions are and always were
part of the law. “It’s built into the plan,” Halperin insisted. “It’s
not like a guess or like a judgment. That’s going to be part of how
costs are controlled.”
“There should have been more scrutiny by all the press, including the
conservative press, of the specifics,” Halperin added. “There’s going
to be a lot of journalism done, across the board coming up, on this
issue, just as there has been now on the issue of whether people with
individual plans could keep them. There’s going to be a lot of scrutiny.
It should start now.”
This is a noble admission that cuts against interest and Halperin
should be lauded for it. But there are no laurels in store for any
member of the journalistic establishment. What Halperin is exhibiting is
a pervasive and insidious instinct within the East Coast political
media complex to abandon their roles as neutral arbiters of competing
claims whenever Republicans become too enthusiastic about any given
issue.
Journalism professor Richard Benedetto displayed this dubious instinct
in May, 2013, in the wake of a stream of embarrassing revelations about
the White House’s incompetence leading up to the deadly attack on an
American consulate in Benghazi. By displaying his concern about the
attack in 2012, Benedetto claimed, Romney had quashed any investigative
reporting.
“The former Massachusetts governor made the colossal blunder of
jumping out ahead of the president in responding to the attacks,”
Benedetto wrote. “By doing that, he made himself a key player in the
first news stories about the tragedy.”
He says that Obama escaped culpability in the press for pre-Benghazi
blunders because Romney had made himself the focus of the story.
“Several reporter questions that followed focused on whether the speed,
tone and tenor of Romney’s tough criticisms were appropriate when the
crisis was still unfolding and all the facts were not known,” Benedetto
observed.
Paul Ryan stayed on the attack today in Florida, appearing at the
retirement center The Villages, along with a special guest — his mother.
“When I think about Medicare,” Ryan told a cheering crowd, “it’s not
just a program. It’s not just numbers. It’s what my Mom relies on.”
Continuing to attack Barack Obama over the transfer of $716 billion in
future Medicare spending to fund the subsidies and Medicaid expansion in
ObamaCare. “The President raids $716 billion from the Medicare
program,” Ryan tells the crowd, “to pay for the ObamaCare program.”
Ryan then went on to slam the Independent Payment Advisory Board as a
rationing system, a message that Mitt Romney also delivered in a podcast
earlier today. “In addition to that,” Ryan continued, “he puts a board
of 15 unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats in charge of Medicare — who
are required to [cut] care in ways that will lead to denied care for
current seniors.” It’s a tough attack — and very much on point to Obama’s record on health care “reform.” “Four million seniors are projected to lose their Medicare Advantage
plans that they enjoy and they chose, today, under this ObamaCare plan.”
That is the Romney/Ryan Medicare “advantage” — the stripping of choice
for extended coverage combined with the arbitrary rationing of the IPAB
in basic Medicare. That message has to be hammered home as often as
possible. Romney obviously agrees, as he hit the exact same issues Ryan
did in The Villages:
President Obama’s healthcare law raided $716 billion from
the Medicare trust fund. And he did that to finance his takeover of the
healthcare system.
Now if that wasn’t bad enough, his healthcare law also put in place a
board of 15 unelected bureaucrats and gave them the power to make
additional cuts to Medicare without even having to get approval from
Congress. This means they could deny elderly Americans the care they’ve
worked for their entire lives – all because President Obama trusts
bureaucrats more than he trusts seniors and their doctors.
And here’s one more troubling aspect of all this: According to
independent, non-partisan scorekeepers, these cuts the President’s
people will take to Medicare won’t prevent it from going bankrupt:
Experts estimate that Medicare’s trust funds will be exhausted just
twelve short years from now.
When The Help first came out, Melissa Harris-Perry quickly became one of its most vocal critics, arguing that the film sets back black actors by reducing them to the role of maids and glossing over some of the more heinous aspects of the black domestic worker experience. Now that the film is among the buzzworthiest at the Oscars tomorrow, Harris-Perry revisited the film today on her eponymous program, reiterating that the obfuscating of serious concerns for black women in the service industry was particularly problematic.
The film, she told her audience today, “erases and then rewrites a rich and robust history in which black women never needed someone to speak for them” by making the protagonist a white woman. She explained that the real protagonist who grows as a person is white, while the black characters are there to feed her growth. In this manned, the film erased a horrid reality about the service industry at the time: “for black maids, the threat of rape was always a clear and present danger.” She clarified that she had nothing against the actresses in the film and meant it only as a criticism of Hollywood that they “would have to use their extraordinary talent” to portray maids, a role black women have had in film for decades.
Her panelists agreed– Micki McElya noting that beyond the glossing over of the rape issue, it was problematic to promote the idea that “the black woman working in a white household is there because she loves to be there” and thus doesn’t need reasonable hours or pay, and is willing to do anything. Leader of a domestic worker action network Barbara Young was actually the most sympathetic towards the film, and particularly the “humanizing relationship between the domestic worker and the child,” a point Harris-Perry agreed was positive, as it showed the capacity for compassion across classes. Elon James White, the lone man on the panel for this segment, was just as offended with “they disneyfication of this deep thing” and the idea that The Help was a black film when “it was more like a white woman’s coming of age, [but] sprinkle a little oppression over it.”
Student of Life, lover of God, Black, conservative Democrat, believer in self-responsibility, traditional values and morals, resident of New York City. Follow me on Twitter at @MrGreyGhost1.
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