Senior WH offcials urge other networks to disregard Fox News, Boast we "control" news media; A Banana Republic?

1) White House Urges Other Networks to Disregard Fox News: Senior Obama administration officials took to the airwaves Sunday to accuse Fox News of pushing a particular point of view and not being a real news network. The White House is calling on other news organizations to isolate and alienate Fox News as it sends out top advisers to rail against the cable channel as a Republican Party mouthpiece.  Top political strategists question the decision by the Obama administration to escalate its offensive against Fox News. And as of Monday, the four other major television networks had not given any indication that they intend to sever their ties with Fox News.  But several top White House officials have taken aim at Fox News since communications director Anita Dunn (Remember her from yesterday? The Mao sympathizer.) branded Fox "opinion journalism masquerading as news" in an interview last Sunday.  White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told CNN on Sunday that President Obama does not want "the CNNs and the others in the world [to] basically be led in following Fox."  Obama senior adviser David Axelrod went further by calling on media outlets to join the administration in declaring that Fox is "not a news organization."  "Other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way," Axelrod counseled ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "We're not going to treat them that way (emphasis mine)."  People, this is about as serious as it gets. I cannot stress enough the dangerous waters we are in here.  But by urging other news outlets to side with the administration, Obama officials dramatically upped the ante in the war of words that began earlier this month with Dunn's comments.  …The White House stopped providing guests to "Fox News Sunday" after host Chris Wallace fact-checked controversial assertions made by Tammy Duckworth, assistant secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, in August.  Dunn said fact-checking an administration official was "something I've never seen a Sunday show do."  "She criticized 'Fox News Sunday' last week for fact-checking -- fact-checking -- an administration official," Wallace said Sunday. "They didn't say that our fact-checking was wrong. They just said that we had dared to fact-check."  …Fox News senior vice president Michael Clemente said: "Surprisingly, the White House continues to declare war on a news organization instead of focusing on the critical issues that Americans are concerned about like jobs, health care and two wars. The door remains open and we welcome a discussion about the facts behind the issues."  …Fox News contributor Karl Rove, who was the top political strategist to former President George W. Bush, said: "This is an administration that's getting very arrogant and slippery in its dealings with people. And if you dare to oppose them, they're going to come hard at you and they're going to cut your legs off (emphasis mine)."  See: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/10/18/white-house-escalates-war-fox-news-1925819282/ More on this…[Axelrod] shrugged off News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch's remark to shareholders last Friday that since the White House began criticizing Fox News commentators their ratings have risen.  "You know, I'm not concerned. Mr. Murdoch has a talent for making money, and I understand that their programming is geared toward making money," Axelrod said. "The only argument Anita was making is that they're not really a news station. ... It's not just their commentators, but a lot of their news programming. It's really not news. It's pushing a point of view." CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC - Nooooo, THEY’RE not pushing a point of view.  And: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9BDLVC82&show_article=1 2) White House boasts: We 'control' news media Communications chief offers shocking confession to foreign government TEL AVIV – President Obama's presidential campaign focused on "making" the news media cover certain issues while rarely communicating anything to the press unless it was "controlled," White House Communications Director Anita Dunn disclosed to the Dominican government at a videotaped conference.  "Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn't absolutely control," said Dunn.  "One of the reasons we did so many of the David Plouffe videos was not just for our supporters, but also because it was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters," said Dunn, referring to Plouffe, who was Obama's chief campaign manager.  "We just put that out there and made them write what Plouffe had said as opposed to Plouffe doing an interview with a reporter. So it was very much we controlled it as opposed to the press controlled it," Dunn said. The arrogance of these people knows no bounds… See: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=113347 3) Study: Obama foes aren't race-driven Racism is not a factor driving conservative opposition to President Barack Obama, according to the results of focus groups conducted by Democracy Corps, a Democratic organization, released on Friday.  Nevertheless, members of the conservative base of the GOP said they believe the president is pursuing a “secret agenda” designed to push the country toward socialism.  “This is a pretty dominant view in the Republican Party,” said Democratic strategist James Carville, who worked on the report.  Rather than attributing their dislike of Obama to race, participants in the focus groups, which were a project of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, said that their disaffection was borne out of a sense that the president was orchestrating an effort to steer the country away from its “founding principles.”  “They want him to fail,” said pollster Stan Greenberg. “It’s not just a political motivation, it’s an ethical imperative given what they think Obama’s goals are.” Well, no kidding!  See: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/28399.html 4) Gregg: U.S. could be on path to a 'banana republic' situation WASHINGTON (CNN) – A leading fiscal mind on Capitol Hill and a one-time Obama Cabinet pick sounded the alarm Sunday over the projected long-term financial challenges the country faces. “This deficit is driven by us,” New Hampshire Republican Sen. Judd Gregg candidly said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union when asked about the federal government’s projected $1.42 trillion operating deficit for the 2009 fiscal year. “You talk about systemic risk. The systemic risk today is the Congress of the United States,“ the Ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee told CNN Chief National Correspondent John King, “that we’re creating these massive debts which we’re passing on to our children. We’re going to undermine fundamentally the quality of life for our children by doing this.” “Now you can’t blame that on [former President] George [W.] Bush,” Greg said, noting that using the Obama administration’s projections the budget deficit for the next ten years is $1 trillion per year. And Gregg said that during the same ten-year period, public debt as a percentage of gross domestic product would increase from 40 percent - which Gregg called “tolerable but still too high” - up to 80 percent (emphasis mine). The figures, Gregg told King, “mean we’re basically on the path to a banana-republic-type of financial situation in this country. And you just can’t do that. You can’t keep running these [federal] programs out [into the future] and not paying for them. And you can’t keep throwing debt on top of debt.” “Standards of living will drop if we keep this up,” Gregg also said. After repeated promises from the White House that the final health care reform bill will be deficit neutral, Gregg said a Democratic plan to avoid otherwise automatic Medicare cuts without having a funding source for the projected expense of $250 billion over the next decade was “gamesmanship.” ..At one point earlier this year, Gregg, who is not seeking re-election to his Senate seat in 2010, was President Obama’s choice to head the Commerce Department. But the fiscal hawk removed himself from consideration because of differences with the new administration on several policy issues. See: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/10/18/gregg-u-s-could-be-on-path-to-a-banana-republic-situation/ 5) LEAKED NETWORK MEMO REVEALS: Obama Controls Your Television Set (news on the “I-Participate” Campaign) On September 10th of this year the Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF) posted a press release informing the world that “from October 19-25, more than 60 network TV shows [will] spotlight the power and personal benefits of service,” and that this “unprecedented block of TV programming is the first wave of a multi-year ‘I Participate’ campaign.” …Doing the work the Kamikaze Media (many of whom are participating in this event rather than digging for the story) refuses, and with the help of Big Government’s Dana Loesch, Patrick and Stage Right have discovered that when it comes to this White House – whether it’s the NEA conference calls or EIF’s iParticipate programming — all roads funnel into one place: online volunteer portals, including Serve.gov, where if you plug in “health care” all kinds of Planned Parenthood openings pop up along with a video dispelling those ugly “myths” knocking ObamaCare. There’s scarier stuff, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise. *cough*Trutherism*cough* We’ll start with Stage Right. Next week, tens, if not hundreds of millions of Americans, will be urged through the (ab)use of public airwaves to log on to the EIF iParticipate site and volunteer. Stage Right will give you a preview of what the unsuspecting and well-intentioned, including your children, will find. If you’re thinking it’s all about “Meals on Wheels,” think again. From there, Patrick Courrielche will describe how this EIF initiative fits into a broader White House plan, including the push to politicize the NEA, to redefine “art” as “service” and engage an all too compliant news, entertainment, and artistic community to start a volunteer army through these online portals. First the NEA, now the EIF… Starting to notice a pattern? See: http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jjmnolte/2009/10/15/leaked-memo-reveals-the-white-house-has-control-of-your-television-set/ 6) READY TO REVOLT: Oath Keepers pledges to prevent dictatorship in United States: Group asks police and military to lay down arms in response to orders deemed unlawful …Launched in March by Las Vegan Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers bills itself as a nonpartisan group of current and retired law enforcement and military personnel who vow to fulfill their oaths to the Constitution. …An incident earlier this year in rural Iowa, not inside the Washington Beltway, motivated Rhodes to start Oath Keepers. He questioned why the Iowa National Guard planned to use residents of a small town to participate in training on door-to-door searches for weapons. The Guard said the training was to help soldiers who might be asked to carry out similar searches in Iraq or Afghanistan. But for Rhodes, it looked like preparation for a future declaration of martial law. It reminded him of the response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 when police officers reportedly confiscated legally owned firearms. What the government called emergency response after the levees broke, Rhodes saw as the imposition of martial law. See: http://www.lvrj.com/news/oath-keepers-pledges-to-prevent-dictatorship-in-united-states-64690232.html 7) UK's Lord Monkton on Copenhagen Climate Treaty MONCKTON: I have read that treaty. And what it says is this: That a world government is going to be created. The word "government" actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to Third World countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, "a climate debt," because we have been burning CO2 and they haven't and we've been screwing up the climate. We haven't been screwing up the climate, but that's the line. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government is "enforcement." RUSH: Way back a long time ago -- it was after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall came down -- I said, "Folks, the environmental movement, radical environmentalism is the new home of displaced communists." Here's Lord Monckton. MONCKTON: How many of you think that the word "election" or "democracy" or "vote" or "ballot" occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right! It doesn't appear once. So at last the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement and took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year because they'd captured it. Now the apotheosis is at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He's going to sign. He'll sign anything. He's a Nobel peace laureate. Of course he'll sign it! See: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_101909/content/01125110.guest.html 8) U.S. sponsors plan to restrict free speech Joins Egyptians in proposal to United Nations Human Rights Council A proposal sponsored by the Obama administration at the United Nations that purports to seek protection for "freedom of opinion and expression" actually is a call for a worldwide crackdown on freedom of speech and a mandate for nations to ensure "that relevant national legislation complies with … international human rights obligations" – a clear threat to the First Amendment, according to critics.  The resolution was submitted recently by the United States and Egypt. It was approved by the U.N. Human Rights Council as a first step in its process through the international organization.  It demands that all nations condemn and criminalize "any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence."  Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation told WND the issue is not about free speech at all but about installing international precedents to stifle any criticism of Islam. See: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=112886 9) China: Strange Bedfellow or Sleeping with the Enemy? …The good news is that China appears to represent huge opportunities for countries and companies worldwide for many years to come.  The bad news is that the Chinese government, while working feverishly to tap Western brain-power, engineering and technical expertise, routinely thumbs its nose at U.S. and other Western initiatives aiming to preserve world peace. Case in point, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao on Thursday pledged to strengthen his nation’s association and cooperation with Tehran, giving indications to the West that his nation would not support sanctions aimed at Iran over its nuclear program. So, while America strives to support Chinese growth, China is playing footsy with nations that cry “Death to America.” That’s not only bad news, it’s sad news for all of us in the West as we become ever more dependant – financially and economically – on the whims of players who embrace the success of capitalism, but only to the point that they can play by their own rules. See: http://www.ien.com/ienblog.aspx?id=152554