A Fact Media Is Hiding: All EIGHT Slimbeball Bell, Calif. Officials Are DEMOCRATS

Particularly if you live in California, you have seen repeated coverage of the incredibly despicable corruption and violation of the public trust demonstrated by politicians in Bell, California.

First, the story from Newsbusters:

Eight Dems Arrested in Bell, CA ‘Corruption on Steroids’ – Not a Single Mention of Party Affiliation From Media
By Lachlan Markay (Bio | Archive)
Tue, 09/21/2010 – 15:19 ET

Today, eight city council members were arrested in Bell, California for what Los Angeles County District Attorney labeled “corruption on steroids.” Thus far, every major news outlet that has reported on the story has omitted the fact that all eight individuals arrested are Democrats.

These glaring omissions come only weeks after NewsBusters reported that of the 351 stories on the then-brewing controversy, 350 had omitted party affiliations, and one had mentioned they were Democrats only in apologizing for not doing so sooner.

ABC, CBS, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, USA Today, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and the San Francisco Chronicle all reported on the arrests today without mentioning party affiliations.

One commenter at CNN’s online story got it spot on: “I notice there is no mention of the party affiliation of the accused. I can find no mention of it in any story on the internet. This must mean they were all Democrats.”

Give the man a cigar.

Together, the eight city officials “misappropriated” $5.5 million in municipal funds. Robert Rizzo, the chief culprit, was arrested on 53 counts of various brands of corruption.

Before the scandal came to light, Rizzo had been making roughly $1.5 million per year, even though the per capita income in Bell is roughly half the national average.

Pedro Carillo, Bell’s interim city manager, released a statement on the arrests today:

Given the sheer volume of charges levied against former Bell Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo and former Assistant CAO Angela Spaccia by the district attorney, it is clear that Rizzo and Spaccia were at the root of the cancer that has afflicted the City of Bell. Also, it is a sad day for Bell that four current and two former members of the council also have been arrested. I am prepared to double down our efforts to continue to restore order, establish good government reforms, and to ensure that Bell is providing needed services to its residents.

Despite arrests in one of the most massive cases of municipal corruption in recent memory, no media outlet could bring itself to mention the officials’ party affiliations, a fact that has been widely reported since the scandal entered the national spotlight.

There was basically ONE acknowledgment that the corrupt politicians who filched MILLIONS of dollars for themselves in the form of insanely lucrative salaries and pensions – all at the courtesy of taxpayers, of course – were all in fact DEMOCRATS.  That came from The Orange County Register.  And even then, that admission only resulted from the fact that knowledgeable readers complained about the omission:

In the wake of the Bell salary scandal, our readers noticed one part of the story has been left out by virtually all media sources, including our related editorials and columns: the political party affiliations of the five city council members who not only failed to protect city coffers, but participated in what amounts to shameless, if apparently legal, self-dealing.

All five council members are members of the Democratic Party.

Jack Abramoff wasn’t even a Republican official, but by the time the mainstream media got through with the story, there was naught an American who didn’t know that Republicans were evil as a result of their reporting of the 2005-2006 story.  And the fact that a number of prominent Democrats were involved, too, somehow got little mention, of course.

This has been going on for so long, and it’s so sickening.

On October 14, 2008 – two years ago this month – I wrote an article about another galling example of media bias and hypocrisy.  I reminisced about Mark Foley – whom the Democrats and the mainstream media turned into the poster boy of everything that was wrong with the Republican Party just in time to poison the 2006 elections against Republicans.

Now, the media could have made a similar example out of Democrat Tim Mahoney, who replaced Mark Foley in the very same West Palm Beach, Florida district.  In terms of breaking the law and being a slimeball, Mahoney did far worse than anything Foley did – and just in time to be the poster boy for Democrat malfeasance in advance of the 2008 elections.  But the same media that turned Mark Foley into a household name were nowhere to be found.

And, as I predicted, two years later and nobody knows who Tim Mahoney was anymore.

Tim Mahoney spent $121,000 of taxpayer money to keep an aide with whom he was sexually involved with from talking after she threatened to sue him.  He threatened his tax-dollar-funded mistress and said to her, “You work at my pleasure.  Do you understand what that means?”

Mahoney self-righteously claimed he would be better than Mark Foley.  He was actually the guy the Democrats tasked to lead the way in the Democrats’ ethics reform package.  And yet the mainstream media couldn’t seem to find a hitch to hang a story about the guy.

Journalists couldn’t bring themselves to harm Democrats.  Because they are partisan and biased.  And they don’t report the facts, they slant them.

There’s always a ton of stories to show how pathologically dishonest, biased and corrupt the mainstream media is.  Recently, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez was fired by the network after a bizarre rant in which he demonstrated he was profoundly racist and anti-Semitic.

No wonder Obama is so favorable toward CNN; they have the same attitude toward “them Jews” that his reverend and spiritual adviser for 23 years had.  Just saying.

That Rick Sanchez racist tirade reminded me of a story I wrote about how that very same CNN anchor falsely attributed racist statements to Rush Limbaugh in a shocking act of media scapegoating:

CNN joined MSNBC in “quoting” Rush Limbaugh to effect that he is a racist.  And as a result of these “bigoted remarks,” Rush Limbaugh was thrown out of an ownership package to purchase the St. Louis Rams.

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez did the following:

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez read a disputed racist quote attributed to Rush Limbaugh about antebellum slavery on Monday’s Newsroom: “Limbaugh’s perceived racist diatribes are too many to name. Here’s a sample- he once declared that ‘slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back. I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.’”

And that certainly wasn’t all that Rick Sanchez said.  Go to the link for more, and for the embedded video of the “reporting.”

You want to talk about the racist calling the kettle “racist”?

Rush Limbaugh never said any of the things that Rick Sanchez claimed.  It was a terrible, biased, ideological, serial slandering by someone who professed himself to be an “objective journalist.”

I want you to understand.  Clearly, Rick Sanchez didn’t go after Rush Limbaugh because Rush Limbaugh is racist.  It’s RICK who is racist, not RUSH.  No, Rick Sanchez targeted Rush Limbaugh because, like most of his fellow “journalists,” Rick Sanchez is a partisan, biased, ideologue propagandist.

If the media were to report the facts fairly, accurately and honestly, the Republicans would have dominated the political landscape since FDR nearly destroyed America with the same policies that Obama is using to destroy the country today.

Prior to Obama’s being elected president, the “story” was all about how Republicans had exploded the economy.  So it should come as no surprise that 57.4% of Obama voters were unaware of the fact that DEMOCRATS had been in control of Congress for the preceding two years.  It didn’t make any sense how the Republicans could be entirely to blame for the economy collapsing if it was actually DEMOCRATS who controlled both the House of Representatives and the US Senate.  So we had one of those cases in which “if the facts got in the way of the reporting, so much the worse for the facts.”

In 2006, and again in 2008, Democrats – with the help of the mainstream media – made Republican corruption a primary issue.

Now we’ve got more corrupt Democrats than you can shake a stick at (e.g., Charlie Rangel, Maxine Waters, John Kerry, all the many Obama officials who failed to pay their taxes – particularly the Treasury Secretary and top tax enforcer Timothy Geithner – and basically the entire Democrat establishment).  Not to mention the eight incredibly sleezy Democrat officials from Bell, California, who are robbing poor citizens who earn only half the national average blind.

And those eight Bell, California Democrats are basically using the same “pension enhancement” techniques that their fellow liberal public officials in the public employee unions have relied upon to rack up some $3.35 TRILLION in unfunded liabilities.

Which is to say that Democrats have been accusing Republicans of corruption, even as they were out literally bankrupting America with their own corruption.

Tim Mahoney Affair, Democrat Hypocrisy, and Media Bias

I still remember the name of Florida Representative Mark Foley even after two years.  It’s like that line I heard over and over and over again from George Bush, Senior: “Read my lips: no new taxes.”  I still remember that one 16 years later without having to check out the accuracy of the quote.

Why do I remember that line so well?  Because it was played so many times by the media that I couldn’t get away from it.  President George Herbert Walker Bush had campaigned on holding the line on taxes, and the Democrat-controlled Congress subsequently forced him to break his promise if he wanted to accomplish anything during his administration.  And then they nailed him for it.

In the case of Mark Foley, the investigation just went on and on and on.  Democrats used the Foley story and the hoopla over Senator George Allen’s meaningless “macaca” slang to paint the Republicans as out-of-touch racist and pervert hypocrites.  And it worked pretty good.

You probably won’t remember the name “Tim Mahoney” in a couple of years.  You may well not even know about it now.  But that’s only because the same media that ginned the name of Mark Foley into a Republican witch hunt won’t do the same thing to Tim Mahoney even though he replaced Foley in the same West Palm Beach, Florida district and even though he did much, much worse.

Mahoney spent $121,000 of taxpayer money to keep an aide with whom he was sexually involved with from talking after she threatened to sue him.  Mark Foley, by the way, never actually had sex with anybody in the course of his sexual scandal.

Here is a partial transcript of the recorded exchange between Mahoney – who is married and who so self-righteously proclaimed that he would be better than the Republican he was replacing – and Patricia Allen:

MAHONEY: You’re fired. It’s correct. It’s what I believe. You’re fired. Do you hear me? Don’t tell me whether it’s correct or not.

ALLEN: Tell me why else I’m fired.

MAHONEY: There is no why else.

ALLEN: Yeah there is.

MAHONEY: No–just you’re fired because I said that you y’know … not the judge and the jury. Ok? You’re fired. D’you hear me? Call what’s her name in Anchorage, Alaska if you want to keep on thinkin’ like y’know that I’m not being fair or somehow this is a negotiation. This, this is not a negotiation. Ok? Y’know, you’re not in a position to negotiate with me on this. Ok? My position. Ok? You work at my pleasure. Do you understand what that means?

ALLEN: What does it mean?

MAHONEY: It means that you work at my pleasure. If you’re doing the job that I think that you should do, you get to keep your job. Whenever I don’t feel like you’re doing your job, then you lose your job. And guess what? The only person that matters is–guess who? Me. Do you understand that? Now this is how life really is. This is how it works.

“You work at my pleasure.  Do you understand what that means?”

It means that we Democrats can use our female staff like frivolous little sex toys, and even pay hush money with taxpayer money, and Democratic Caucus Chair Rahm Emmanuel will still come rushing to our defense.  You working at my pleasure means that you pleasure me.  And if you don’t like it, why don’t you give Sarah Palin a call.  Maybe she’ll care.  Democrats sure won’t.

That’s right.  Rahm Emmanuel and other senior Democrats have done their best to help Mahoney keep his seat:

Senior Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives, including Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), the chair of the Democratic Caucus, have been working with Mahoney to keep the matter from hurting his re-election campaign, the Mahoney staffers said.

ABC has at least run the story, though there’s little chance they will keep pounding away at it like they did with Mark Foley.  Who else has run the story?

Here’s a delicious bit of irony that underscores the sheer hypocrisy of Democrats.  Mahoney – that paradigm of virtue – was tasked to lead the way in the Democrats’ ethics reform package.

Republicans, and the kind of independents who vote for Republican candidates, are the kind of people who demand moral accountability.  When a Republican screws up, he’s usually gone pretty damn fast.  The media – and his own party – drive him out of office.  Not that that matters to the media, who continue to hound the matter as long as it is useful to their liberal friends in Congress.

If Mahoney were a Republican, we would hear the worst portions of the audio tape over and over and over again while we learned every new detail of the media investigation and any other investigation – slowly leaked out for the next three weeks to obtain maximum political damage.  And they would craft the narrative that the Republican Party degrades women and that the Party that nominated a woman for Vice President actually vilifies womens’ rights and self-respect.  But he isn’t a Republican; he’s a Democrat.

So the story will probably go the way of Democratic Rep. Jack Murtha, who falsely and repeatedly accused Marines in Haditha of war crimes who later turned out to be completely innocent.  Or Democratic Rep. William Jefferson, after FBI agents discovered $90,000 of bribe money found in his freezer.  Two years later, he is still serving, and Democrats will re-elect him for another term.  Or like Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel, who didn’t feel he needed to bother following the very tax laws he wrote for everyone else as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.  Or Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, who not only assured the stock-buying public that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be solid buys in the future just before the GSEs went belly up (Enron’s Ken Lay would have rotted in prison for doing the SAME THING had he not died first); but who also had an homosexual relationship with a Fannie Mae ececutive while he had oversight over Fannie Mae, and never bothered to disclose the relationship in spite of the clear conflict of interests.

Democrats – who routinely attack Republicans for much, much less – never seem to care about moral accountability.  And the media that hold Republicans’ feet to the fire for much, much less never seem to be willing to make them care.

Update: Mahoney has now been forced to acknoweldge other affairs, including at least one MORE case which appears to have had illegitimate or illegal finances.  Again, the real issue is the fact that 1) the Democratic Party leadership came to help this scumbag win reelection even though he’s lower than whale poop; and 2) the media demonstrates that it is a Goebbels-like propganda machine in its total hypocritical double standard over how it handled Mark Foley vs. Tim Mahoney given a sex scandal in the same district at the same time before an election.

LA Times Proves It’s Blatant Bias For Democrats

Had a very interesting story come out Friday, July 25th.

There’s little “apparently” about it: The National Enquirer has run stories that John Edwards had a “love child” with a woman named Rielle Hunter. The story begins:

Vice Presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards was caught visiting his mistress and secret love child at 2:40 this morning in a Los Angeles hotel by the NATIONAL ENQUIRER.

The married ex-senator from North Carolina – whose wife Elizabeth continues to battle cancer — met with his mistress, blonde divorcée Rielle Hunter, at the Beverly Hilton on Monday night, July 21 – and the NATIONAL ENQUIRER was there! He didn’t leave until early the next morning.

Rielle had driven to Los Angeles from Santa Barbara with a male friend for the rendezvous with Edwards. The former senator attended a press event Monday afternoon with L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on the topic of how to combat homelessness.

But a months-long NATIONAL ENQUIRER investigation had yielded information that Rielle and Edwards, 54, had arranged to secretly meet afterward and for the ex-senator to spend some time with both his mistress and the love child who he refuses to publicly acknowledge as his own.

And the details are pretty well confirmed by FoxNews.

John Edwards was in Los Angeles to do one of his poverty events, and the Enquirer discovered that Rielle Hunter had a room at the Beverly Hilton. Believing that John Edwards – whom their sources claimed was the father of Hunter’s child in December 2007 story – would show up, an Enquirer team obtained a room and laid in wait for the former Senator.

Sure enough he showed up. And when the Enquirer reporters began to photograph him and ask him questions at 2:40 A.M., Edwards – who did not have a room at the hotel he was in at nearly 3 A.M. – ran into a bathroom and called security.

So let’s just come out and acknowledge the plain fact: John Edwards is a philandering lech who had a long-time sexual affair even as his wife is possibly dying of cancer.

Okay. For many who have long-since come to believe that John Edwards was a scumbag par excellance, this isn’t so much news as it is confirmation of what they already thought.

Here’s where the story really gets interesting. The Los Angeles Times is caught red-handed trying to suppress the story:

LAT Gags Blogs: In a move that has apparently stirred up some internal discontent, the Los Angeles Times has banned its bloggers, including political bloggers, from mentioning the Edwards/Rielle Hunter story. Even bloggers who want to mention the story in order to make a skeptical we-don’t-trust-the-Enquirer point are forbidden from doing so. Kausfiles has obtained a copy of the email Times bloggers received from editor Tony Pierce. [I’ve excised the recipient list and omitted Pierce’s email address]:

From: “Pierce, Tony”

Date: July 24, 2008 10:54:41 AM PDT

To: [XXX]

Subject: john edwards

Hey bloggers,

There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.

If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don’t hesitate to ask

Keep rockin,

Tony

That will certainly calm paranoia about the Mainstream Media (MSM) suppressing the Edwards scandal. …

P.S.: Is the Times’ edict a) part of a double-standard that favors Democrats (and disfavors Republicans like Rep. Vito Fossella and John McCain)? Or does it b) simply reflect an outmoded Gatekeeper Model of journalism in which not informing readers of certain sensitive allegations is as important as informing them–as if readers are too simple-minded to weigh charges that are not proven, as if they aren’t going to find out about such controversies anyway? I’d say it’s a mixture of both (a) and (b). This was a sensational scandal the LAT and other MSM papers passionately did not want to uncover when Edwards was a formal candidate, and now that the Enquirer seems to have done the job for them it looks like they want everyone to shut up while they fail to uncover it again. …

P.P.S.: The Times apparently failed to get word of the ban to one of its bloggers in time to prevent her from shocking readers by saying she hoped the allegations against Edwards weren’t true. … 2:55 A.M. link

Another link to the cover-up story.

There are so many reasons to know that the media is WAY, WAY, WAAAAAYYY in the tank for Democrats.

You can add that to the massive media entourage – including all three elite network anchors – that accompanied Barack Obama on his foreign trip.

You remember the “wide-stance” airport bathroom arrest of Republican Senator Larry Craig? The media were all over that story after it surfaced, and had been trying to get dirt on him for months. Though he ultimately refused to resign, the constant media attention destroyed his career, and he is not running for re-election.

You remember the media frenzy over the Repulbican Representative Mark Foley scandal in Florida? It may have been the straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back moment for Republicans in the 2006 elections. The media couldn’t get enough of that one. And as much as they covered the scandal, they misrepresented it to make it sound worse than it actually was. One had to work to learn the truth that the media didn’t reveal: that Foley was not molesting boys, but rather forming friendships with congressional pages, and then contacting them with sexual advances AFTER they were of legal age. He did not solicit sex with any active page.  He has never been arrested for his conduct since his resignation.

Neither of these men had anywhere NEAR the public profile of two-time Democratic candidate for president and 2004 vice-presidential candidate Edwards.  But it didn’t matter to a media that was out to destroy Republicans and influence elections.  The media ignored the Edwards “love-child” story for months and months when they went after Republicans with zeal.

Now, I don’t mind one bit that the media exposed guys like Craig and Foley. What they did – legal or not – was wrong, and they should have been exposed.

What bothers me is the constant double-standard of a media that represents itself as being objective while it is clearly in the tank for liberals and Democrats.

On story after story, issue after issue, the media reveals its bias. It reveals it in the stories it covers, the stories that it refuses to cover, the people it interviews or refuses to interview for a given story, and the angle or topic of a story that is covered versus other possible angles. They do it all the time, unrelentingly.

Many liberals believe as they do because they have been made stupid by a media that routinely distorts the truth and misrepresents the facts. They cannot understand reality because they are constantly presented with a lie.

As much of a story as two-time Democrat candidate for president John Edward’s infidelity is, the real story is the bias of the media in refusing to fairly and objectively cover a story that would negatively effect Democrats.