Citing no evidence, Christian Post claims Palin accepted debate invitation (Updated)

What announcement?
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The Christian Post has published an article on its website which claims that:

Amid much speculation about whether or not Sarah Palin will choose to run in the 2012 presidential election, the former Alaskan governor has announced she will participate in a nationally televised Tea Party Republican Debate.

That would be the Sept 12 debate co-sponsored by CNN, and we reported Thursday night that an invitation to participate in the event has indeed been extended to Gov. Palin. But we know of no announcement by Sarah Palin or SarahPAC, her political action committee, indicating that she has accepted the invitation. Nor or we aware of any CNN report or TEA Party Express news release indicating that she intends to take part in the debate.

The Christian Post cites no source, nor does it provide any link to back up its claim. Is the magazine just making things up? You don't have to be from Missouri to to demand, "Show me." Yes, it is possible that that the Post and Christine Thomasos, who wrote the article, are privy to some exclusive information that the Palin team has chosen not to make public. It is also possible that neither CNN nor TEA Party Express have moved to break what would be an important story, perhaps due to some embargo. By what means, then, would The Christian Post get hold of such a story and fail to back it up in any way in its article?

If the Post can offer no evidence of an announcement by Gov. Palin that she will participate in this debate, then it calls into question the magazine's motives in making such a claim. If the intent was cast Gov. Palin in an unfavorable light should she later decline the invitation from CNN and the TEA Party, then it is more than irresponsible for The Christian Post to publish this article -- it is reprehensible. Then there's the matter of God's Commandment which deals with bearing false witness, which for a magazine claiming to offer "Unequivocal Vision, Voice & Veracity" to Christians, would be the height of hypocrisy.

If we're wrong, then we will apologize for our suspicions, and our presence will be required at Confession. But if we're right, then it's The Christian Post which owes Sarah Palin an apology and a full retraction.

Update: The Christian Post has now appended a rather unsatisfactory correction to its article:

An article on Friday, September 2, 2011, about an upcoming Tea Party debate incorrectly stated that 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, would be a participant. While the former governor of Alaska was invited to attend the debate, her camp has yet to confirm her participation. Instead, CNN confirmed that Palin will participate in the upcoming Tea Party Rally that will take place in Iowa on Saturday.

We still have problems with The Christian Post. It tries to shift the blame for its mistake to CNN. This is Journalism 101 stuff, folks.

- JP

CNN invites Gov. Palin to participate in September 12 debate

Palin camp has yet to RSVP
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CNN has extended an invitation to Sarah Palin to take part in its "Tea Party Republican Debate" scheduled for Sept. 12th in Tampa, Florida, the same city in the key state of Florida which will host the 2012 Republican National Convention. The debate will be cosponsored by Tea Party Express:

CNN's Wolf Blitzer will moderate the debate, which will feature questions from guests inside the hall as well as from people attending viewing parties around the country.

[...]

Last month, Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced he would run for the GOP nomination, joining Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, businessman Herman Cain, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman on stage in Tampa.

[...]

Invitations were extended to the eight Republicans who will appear on stage in Tampa as well as former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Giuliani declined the debate invitation, while a Palin representative has yet to respond to it.

[More]

- JP

Dan Calabrese: Why aren’t details of how Palin governed news?

These are the same people who tell us Gov. Palin is stupid.
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Noting that the corrupt media was only interested in emails
from Sarah Palin's past, and not those of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or any of the current crop of announced GOP presidential hopefuls, Dan Calabrese condemns the lamestreamers' "search-and-destroy mission" to find dirt on her, "and only her":

All the headlines offered by the egg-on-face media tell us that the e-mails were full of mundane, day-to-day governing stuff, but held no bombshells or major embarrassments.

Now, what does that tell us about what they consider to be news?

You’ve got 24,900 e-mails, many of which contain Palin’s correspondence in the course of governing her state. That’s not news. But if she said something idiotic, shallow or religious, that would be news?

Presumably the reason the media cared about the e-mails at all was that Palin might run for president, or at least they think she might. So why not give us a series of stories on the policies Palin implemented in Alaska? Wouldn’t that give us a lot of valuable insight about the kind of president she might be, if she decided to run? What could possibly be more relevant than that?

Oh. Right. Gaffes, bombshells and slip-ups. Certainly not the substantive details of how she governed.

This sorry exercise tells us more about the media than it does about Palin, although it appears the e-mails demonstrate a fair amount about Palin being engaged in the day-to-day details about governing, serious about budget-cutting and on top of the state’s operations.

[More]

What it tells us about the media, Calabrese points out, helps explain Monday night's circus disguised as a presidential “debate” and the stupid CNN questions “Elvis or Johnny Cash?” What was that all about? the explanation for such nonsense, says Calabrese, is that beyond the horse-race details of elections, today's media have no clue to how to cover the serious business of the governing of the nation. So the trivial and idiotic questions of candidates allow the media Obamabots to coast, as it doesn’t obligate them to investigate how these candidates would rise to the challenge of doing the job they are competing for.

"And these are the same people who tell us Palin is stupid," remarks Calabrese. Indeed, she was smart enough not to let herself be drawn into this particular sideshow, which we figure makes her smarter than anyone who was asking or answering the questions at this so-called "debate."

- JP

The emails: 'Your Obama-compliant mainstream media at work'

"A hard-working governor, working hard for the state of Alaska"
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William Jacobson is maintaining a linked list of headlines showing how the media is reporting as they sift through Gov. Palin's emails.

Jimmie Bise at The Sundries Shack catches an anchor in the CNN studio egging on reporter Drew Griffin in Juneau to reveal something negative about Sarah Palin:


But to the anchor's disappointment, Griffin reports that as he sifts through the emails what he was seeing is a "hard working governor, working hard for the state of Alaska." When the anchor asks if Griffen has uncovered any juicy tidbits to support the charge that Gov. Palin is thin skinned, the reporter replied that many times the governor defected criticism meant for her staff onto herself. Emails like those, Griffin says, show Sarah Palin to be quite a different person from the negative stereotype the left and many in the media have created of her.

Even the serial Palin detractors at Politico were forced to report, to their chagrin, that the media had uncovered "no big bombshells." What, not even the death threats she began to receive shortly after becoming the GOP's first female vice presidential candidate were bombshells?

- JP

Video: The Making of 'Mama Grizzlies'

Courtesy CNN:
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- JP

More Palin Bashing: How CNN Misleads With Headlines

-By Warner Todd Huston
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CNN indulged a classic left media tactic by misleading with a headline in a recent piece on former Governor Sarah Palin. The headline, if read by itself, seems to be saying that Sarah Palin delivered a "gaffe-filled message," when the truth is that her message talked about gaffes, but wasn't "filled" with them per se. The effect was that the headline made Palin look worse than the story itself did. If all one read was the headline, one would get a far different opinion of what was going on than if one read the story that went with it.

On Nov. 26, CNN delivered this headline on its Political Ticker blog: "Palin delivers a gaffe-filled message".

Think about that headline. Doesn't it say to you that Palin delivered a bunch of gaffes in her message? If all you did was read that headline, you'd think she made a fool of herself with all sorts of incorrect statements in it. One suspects that CNN fully realized this fact.

The whole story arose after an appearance that Palin did on the Glenn Beck show last week. On that show, while speaking of the shelling that the North Koreans perpetrated on South Korea, Palin accidentally said that our allies were the North Koreans. Clearly she simply had a slip of the tongue and meant the South Koreans were our allies, not the North.

How am I so sure she knew the difference? Because not only did she quickly correct herself, but she had correctly identified which Korea was which multiple times in the minutes prior to her slip of the tongue. It wasn't as if she mentioned the Koreas once and incorrectly at that. It is clear that she understands which is which.

Naturally in its report CNN forgot to mention that Palin was correctly identifying the Koreas multiple times before the gaffe.

In any case, after Palin got illicitly lambasted by the left for a simple slip of the tongue, she issued one of her famous Facebook posts in reply to her critics. In it Palin delineated many of the verbal gaffes that Barack Obama issued since he began running for president and pointed out that the Old Media never made a big deal about all these many gaffes made by Obama.

So, let's get back to that headline, "Palin delivers a gaffe-filled message."

While it is strictly true that Palin's Facebook message is filled with gaffes, it is not a "gaffe filled message" in the way that the phrase is generally used. After all if someone says that one issued a "gaffe filled message" people assume that the person issuing the message is making multiple gaffes in that message. They don't immediately assume that said message contains a list of someone else's gaffes. They assume that the message issuer is making mistakes.

This notion is, of course, what CNN hoped to promulgate. They hoped to fool people that only read headlines into thinking that Palin made multiple gaffes in a message. This headline was meant to bash Sarah Palin.

Sadly, misleading with a headline is a very common Old Media tactic. They can bash with a headline -- all the while assuming a large percentage of their readers will read just the headline and skip the story -- and still claim to be giving "the whole story" by adding a story that seems to contradict the headline.

-WTH

Warner Todd Huston is editor of Publius' Forum and a contributor to Texas for Sarah Palin as well as Big Government, Right Wing News, and a number of other websites.

CNN Uploads Wrong Photo After Pointing Out Palin Tweeted Wrong State

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Just one day after the left and their media stooges made fools of themselves by mocking Sarah Palin for her "don't party like it's 1773 just yet" comment, the elitists at CNN thought it would be a good idea to again try to characterize her as ignorant for a Twitter typo she made. But things had already gone terribly wrong at the Clinton News Network, as HotAirPundit explains:

CNN posts this story: "West Virginia senate battle," there's one problem....



Umm, that would be John Kasich in the photo, not John Raese...

[More]

Again the left is bitten by its own attack dog of personal destruction.

- JP

Video: Sarah Palin talks to CNN in Reno

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Here's Gov. Palin answering a CNN producer's questions in Reno, something the left claims she refuses to do:

Sarah Palin warned Monday that the mainstream Republican Party must embrace the core conservative principles of the Tea Party movement or disappear.

In comments to CNN at a Tea Party Express rally to kick off its fourth national tour, Palin said the Republican Party machine realizes how the Tea Party movement's "we the people" message has resonated on the political right, as well as with independents and moderates. The message emphasizes free market principles and individual and state powers instead of expanded federal powers.

"Heaven forbid the GOP machine strays from this message," said the former Alaska governor and unsuccessful Republican vice presidential candidate. "If so, the GOP is through."

Her comments, in response to the question of whether the Tea Party movement is dividing the Republican Party, showed how Palin and other Tea Party leaders are trying to galvanize the political right by bringing their supporters together with the traditional GOP structures.

[More]

- JP

Mark Levin: 'The more these people attack Sarah Palin, the more I like her'

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The Great One, F. Lee Levin weighs in on poor judge of character Oliver Stone (Ollie just loves him some Marxist dictators) and the hateful Hollyweird director's bashing of Gov. Palin on CNN earlier this week:


h/t: Timothy Donovan

- JP

Jacobson: CNN distorts already biased 60 Min./Vanity Fair poll about Gov. Palin

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At Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion, law professor William A. Jacobson exposes the latest 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll as bogus and the reporting on it in the lamestream media as grossly distorted:

The headline of the day at CNN is TRENDING: Clear majority says Palin not qualified to be president...

This description of the poll is an outright fabrication. The actual poll question had nothing to do with credentials, qualifications, or even electability. Here was the actual question: "Do you think SARAH PALIN would have the ability to be an EFFECTIVE PRESIDENT?"

Similarly distorted versions are all over the internet, in which the authors misread the actual question asked, and use it to opine on Palin's qualifications or election prospects.

[...]

Again, there is no truth to the characterization that the poll concerned qualifications or election prospects.

(added) Whether someone would be an "effective" president could turn on a number of factors, including the strength of opposition.

[...]

These Vanity Fair polls are a joke; there are few choices given to the interviewees, there is no depth of questioning, and they mix pop culture questions... in with political questions.

That said, at least accurately report the question and the context.

Which is what HuffPo did, by also noting other polls on Palin's prospects:

While the 2012 election is a long way off and poll numbers are difficult to interpret, in one recent poll of potential 2012 matchups, conducted Aug. 6-9 by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, 43% of registered voters said they would support Palin to 49% for Obama.

HuffPo more fair than CNN and Time Magazine. It has come to this.

Read Prof. Jacobson's full debunking of the ersatz 60 Minutes/VF poll here.

- JP

Just one more reason why Sarah Palin calls it 'the lamestream media'

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Another Majestic Media Moment captured by Inside Cable News:

One would think the network with the “Best Political Team on Television” could tell the difference between Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin….not to mention spell Palin’s name right…

Update: Or know that she ran for Vice President.

How's that state-controlled media working out for our liberal friends? Not very well...

- JP

Evidence? We don' need no steenking evidence!

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NewsBuster Tim Graham recalls how the national media beat itself up during the Clinton presidency "for being too quick to acknowledge when women suggested they'd had affairs or been harassed by Clinton." In retrospect the press admitted that it would need to be cautious about reporting an alleged cheating scandal without knowing the details or having compelling evidence. So why, Graham wants to know, is the media repeating unsubstantiated adultery allegations against a woman made by a blogger with a documented history of domestic violence?

Because she's a Republican? In Mark Sanford's South Carolina? Sarah Palin-endorsed South Carolina gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley has seen an unsubstantiated adultery charge spread by the Associated Press, The Washington Post, Newsday, and CNN, whose Wolf Blitzer ran to the evidence-free story on The Situation Room Monday.

Blitzer gave his lead-in to correspondent Lisa Sylvester, who mentioned, in her report:

Will Folks, who says he is a Haley supporter [!], says he decided to come forward after rival campaigns began leaking the story to the media. Folks, who resigned from the state government in 2005, before admitting a domestic violence charge, says he isn't saying anymore.

If, as Folks maintains, rival campaigns were leaking details to the media, why had no media outlet reported on the alleged affair before Folks made his accusations on his blog? The question apparently never crossed the minds of either Blitzer or Sylvester to ask. Graham comments:

Earth to CNN: it is not impressive "news judgment" to conclude "there's something in the South Carolina water" and spread this story without proof. Surely CNN wouldn't have started telling adultery stories about other Arkansas politicians on the principle "if Clinton does it, they must all do it." But then CNN compounded the offense, by psychologizing Haley as an offender:

Temple University professor Frank Farley says politics, by its nature, draws a Type T personality -- T for thrill seeker. They're natural leaders, charismatic, but there is a down side.

PROF. FRANK FARLEY: The T negative, unfortunately, is where they take risks in destructive ways, either self-destructive ways or in ways that are destructive of other people. And it's like you sometimes -- it sometimes overflows in a sense. You know, you may be this big T personality out there, a leader, changing the world, but you also have a little bit of that negative potential.

A week after the Monica Lewinsky story broke, CNN aired a self-flagellating special titled "Investigating the President: Media Madness?"

Jeff Greenfield began: "More than 200 years after the Founding Fathers risked their lives to found a nation built on the idea of freedom, after crafting the Bill of Rights, whose very first guarantee is the right of a free press to inform and educate the people, millions of those people are asking the press one question fraught with significance: What the hell are you people doing trying to find out what kind of sex the President of the United States might or might not be having?"

They didn't offer the same regrets for Nikki Haley.

CNN cannot seem to understand why the first all-news network is floundering. That it chose to run with a blogger's unproven charges -- in particular when that blogger was reported by the largest newspaper in his state to "shrug off accusations that he is paid to publish certain stories" might be a big clue for CNN as to why it is in a state of free fall.

- JP

Some DeVore supporters losing patience

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Even some of Chuck DeVore's staunchest supporters are getting impatient with their candidate's failure to climb out of the cellar in the California GOP primary for the chance to challenge Sen. Barbara Boxer in the general election.

CNN contributor Erick Erickson, who has been promoting DeVore on his website RedState.com, said on CNN's "John King USA" tonight that if DeVore doesn't manage to surge in the polls in the next two weeks, "I'll be with Carly Fiorina because Tom Campbell is that bad":

You can view a video of the segment here.

DeVore is currently running fourth in a three person race. According to the lastest Survey USA poll, Campbell gets 35 percent of the poll, followed by Fiorina at 24 percent. 23 percent are undecided, and Campbell only manages 15 percent.

Many of Fiorina's backers are calling for DeVore to drop out of the race and join Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, the National Right To Life Committee and others by endorsing Fiorina. They fear that if DeVore remains in the race, he and Fiorina will split the right-of-center vote, allowing liberal Republican Campbell to easily win the primary.

- JP

Newt Gingrich: Sarah Palin 'personifies courage'

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Interviewed at SRLC by CNN chief political correspondent Candy Crowley, Newt Gingrich had some good things to say about Sarah Palin:

"Sarah Palin is tremendously important right now, I mean for maybe 40 percent of the country, she personifies courage, clarity."

[...]

"She's attractive, she's articulate, she has energy... Watch the size of her crowds…And I think whether that translates into something bigger later or whether she's just a very significant person for the rest of her life, she is a real player, nobody should underestimate her."

[...]

"I think she has the potential to fill a niche for a very long time, particularly in an age of cable television and talk radio when you can build your particular market and your audience, and they can love you and come to your meetings and do things with you, and she's done, I think the last couple months she's been very impressive..."

The full Gingrich interview will air Sunday on CNN's "State of The Union."

- JP

Are More Palin policy speeches in the cards? 'Absolutely,' she says

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CNN Producer Peter Hamby caught up with Sarah Palin in New Orleans after her well-received speech at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. Hamby only had time to ask the former Alaska governor a couple of questions before aides ushered her into an SUV waiting to take her to the airport. Hamby inquired of the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate whether she would be delivering more policy addresses in the future:

"Absolutely," Palin told CNN in a brief interview outside her New Orleans hotel on Friday. "The more of that, the better."

[...]

Palin, emerging from the Windsor Court Hotel wearing a zip-up NASA sweater over her suit, told CNN she had a "blast" addressing the conference and promised to continue with a policy-oriented message.

"It was fun to talk to people of something of substance, like energy, that is so appreciated by these folks because they know that unless we have this energy independence, we will not be prosperous, we will not be secure," she said. "That's what I wanted to concentrate on today."

The next major appearance on Gov. Palin's calendar is a Tea Party in Boston Wednesday of next week.

- JP

Quote of the Day (March 31, 2010)

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Kara Miller:

"Once, CNN was number one in cable news, the groundbreaker, the standard by which everyone else was judged. But that was before Fox News' rise to glory - and numbers that eventually pummeled CNN... If Sarah Palin can sell a TV show as well as she sells books, CNN may want to assume the fetal position."

- JP

CNN Poll: Sarah Palin's popularity on the rise

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Results of a new CNN/Opinion Research poll released Monday show that Sarah Palin has recovered from a decline in poll numbers that followed her resignation as Alaska's governor. The survey shows that 46 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of former governor Palin.

For comparison, Joe Biden has a 47 percent favorability rating in the same poll, putting the vice president and Sarah Palin in a statistical tie, as the one-point difference is within the poll's three=point margin of error. Dick Cheney is viewed favorably by 39 percent of Americans, Joe Liebermann by 40 percent, John Edwards by just 30 percent and Al Gore by 52 percent.

The poll was conducted December 2-3 and surveyed 1,041 American adults by telephone.

- JP

Fact checking CNN's fact checking

If anyone has any remaining doubts whether CNN is totally tanked for Obama, consider that the cable news network felt the need to defend the president with a "fact check" segment analyzing a Saturday Night Live skit which lampooned Obama:



Notice how CNN points out which elements of the skit which, in the reporter's opinion, don't accurately reflect on the president's record, while it praises Tina Fey's portrayal of Sarah Palin as "spot on." Fact-checking CNN's fact-checking, Sarah Palin never said "I can see Russia from my backyard," as Fey's punchline has led many to believe. The former Alaska governor actually said that you can see Russia from Alaska, which is a fact of geography.

But CNN never worried that people who get their news from television comedy programs might be mislead by the humor technique of exaggeration until the object of its affection was the one who was in the line of funny fire. George Bush "misunderestimated"? No problem. Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house? Spot on. But Obama is a president of little accomplishment? Suddenly it's the Battle of Britain. Urgent! Call out the fact checkers! Defend The One at all costs!

CNN is the double standard bearer of cable news.

h/t: Freedom's Lighthouse

- JP

Pawlenty: Palin "a remarkable leader... a teammate"

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty told CNN's John King Sunday that he doesn't consider 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin to be his competition:

The former Alaska governor is “a friend,” Pawlenty told King, “I don’t view her as somebody who’s a competitor for anything. I view her as a teammate.”

Pressed on his view of himself relative to Palin, Pawlenty reiterated, “I view her as a friend. And I think she’s somebody who has been a remarkable leader in Alaska under difficult circumstances. I don’t know what the future holds for her.”

Pawlenty also appeared to hold no ill will over Sen. John McCain’s reported decision to pick Gov. Palin over Gov. Pawlenty for the vice presidential nod on last year’s Republican ticket.

“I’m a huge fan of Sen. McCain. I think he made the choice he felt was right for not only his ticket but for the country in the circumstances of the time,” said Pawlenty. The Minnesota Republican added that he did not think McCain made a mistake in choosing Palin as his running mate.

Pawlenty appeared on CNN's "State of the Union" program hosted by King, who is the cable network's chief national correspondent.

- JP

Now CNN Reporting on What Sarah ISN’T Doing

-By Warner Todd Huston

To show how obsessed the Old Media is over Governor Palin, now CNN has a story on its website ruminating over what Sarah isn’t doing. It seems that she can’t get away from the Old Media even by doing nothing. First they lose their minds over what she is doing, and then when she stops doing something, they go ga ga over that, too.

This time Eric Kuhn, CNN’s “Audience Interaction Producer” -- what ever the heck that is -- is all caught up over if and when Sarah will re-launch her Twitter account. “Is Palin getting ready to tweet again?,” Khun breathlessly asked on the 13th.

Listen, we all love Sarah, but is this actually news?

(CNN) – Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin changed her Twitter account on Thursday to @SarahPalinUSA, abandoning her old username @AKGovSarahPalin.

There has been much speculation about when Palin would begin tweeting again. Since leaving office in July, Palin has been silent on Twitter and has primarily used Facebook to communicate with the public.

No tweets have yet been sent from her new Twitter account.

More than 135,000 people currently follow Palin on Twitter. Those who followed her official gubernatorial account do not have to re-subscribe to her new name. Twitter users who change their names maintain their followers.

It’s like CNN is lying in wait for her every move. In fact, this hyper media attention is one of the reasons that Governor Palin stepped down as governor because this undue attention was preventing her from doing her job as governor.

I mean, come on. They are even reporting when she’s NOT doing anything. It is just a surreal situation, isn’t it?

- WTH