It's a New Dawn in America!

Stuff you won't read in the Los Angeles Times (or anywhere else):

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn (yes, she whose favorite political philosopher is Mao Tse Tung), on how the Obama campaign used video messages to control the media during the election in order to avoid talking to the press:

“It was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters. Just put that out there and make 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 and it did not always make us popular with the press. But we, increasingly by the general election, very rarely did we communicate to the press anything that we didn't absolutely control.”
Senior Advisor to Barack Obama David Axelrod telling George Stephanopoulos on ABC that the White House doesn’t consider Fox News to be a real news organization and that ABC and others “ought not to treat them” as if they are a news organization.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel saying on CNN that Fox is not a news organization [because it] has a perspective. …And more importantly is to not have the CNN’s and the others in the world basically be led and following Fox…” 

(Source: Gary Bauer, End of Day report). 

It's a new dawn, it's a new day, callooh callay....

The Ugly Side of the Democratic Party

Barack Obama promised to bring change to Washington, and that he has. But I don't think it's the change people (who fell under his spell) were expecting. Here's some insight into the latest happenings:

Now, let me say something about the census, because it is related to [Rebublican Senator Judd] Gregg’s decision not to join this administration. The media hasn’t focused on this yet, but it is a big issue you will hear a lot about in the days ahead.

One of the Commerce Department’s most important functions is to oversee the census that takes place every ten years. The census is used primarily to allocate the number of congressional representatives for each state in the House of Representatives (which determines votes in the Electoral College), and it is also used to determine the funding formulas for most federal programs that send tax dollars back to the states.

For obvious reasons, this is a highly sensitive political issue, and for that very reason this job has always been entrusted to the career civil servants in the Commerce Department. But after Gregg was announced as Commerce Secretary, the Obama team yanked the census out of the Commerce Department and decided that we should trust it to the tender mercies of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

For those of you who may not know, Rahm Emanuel is a brass-knuckles, hyper-partisan operative from, of course, Chicago. He was one of Bill Clinton’s key “fixers,” and served as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006, when many good conservatives were smeared with disgusting negative attack ads.

We were told that the census was moved from the Commerce Department because we just couldn’t trust the Republican Judd Gregg to handle it properly. Well, I don’t know anyone in Washington who questions Judd Gregg’s integrity. I think his statements above speak volumes about the man. The same cannot be said about Emanuel, and there are well-known stories about his vindictiveness that would send chills down your spine.

The decision by the Obama team to pull the census out of Commerce and give it to Rahm Emanuel is extraordinarily revealing of the hardball, partisan tactics these folks are willing to use in order to make sure our side never wins another election. If the administration does not reverse itself on the census, Republican leaders are threatening to go to court. But it’s no wonder that Judd Gregg felt like he couldn’t be a “team player” in this crowd [Gary Bauer, End of Day report, 2/13/09].