Floyd Reports

While the mainstream media are still overwhelmingly intent on seeing Barack Obama reelected as President, a number of journalists and news organizations are apparently having second thoughts. Or at least they are willing to examine the claims and representations that the Obama administration continues to put forth. This has been the surprising case regarding Obama’s State of the Union address in late January and the budget that he proposed in mid-February. Hopefully this may mark a turning point in how the media allow themselves to be used by the Obama administration, but don’t count on it. More likely it is isolated incidents of self-respect, and an acknowledgement that they can differentiate between normal political spin and outright lies.

The double standard still could not be more clear. During the many Republican debates there has been a constant effort to get the candidates to provide sound bites for Democratic ads during the general election, calling each other liars and flip-floppers, moderates, liberals, influence peddlers, and plutocrats. The ABC New Hampshire debate in which George Stephanopoulos spent a substantial amount of time on the burning issue of whether or not states have the right to ban contraception seemed like a Saturday Night Live skit in how it attempted to make the candidates appear radical. But now it looks more like coordination with the White House in preparation for their battle to make contraception a “free” entitlement for all under ObamaCare.

President Obama rarely faces such questions. He has been able to largely stay above the fray, managing the news flow, picking softball interviewers like NBC’s Matt Lauer before the Super Bowl, and ABC’s Diane Sawyer a few days before that. But what is new, and has the ability to change the dynamics, is that some of the loyal left in the media have begun to actually directly challenge Obama’s claims and narrative. Not enough of them, but it is starting to happen.

There are still hard-to-believe spectacles such as the Super Bowl on February 4 that played like an infomercial for the reelection of President Obama, in front of an audience estimated at 110 million people. But what is new is that within a day of the President’s State of the Union (SOTU) address, the Associated Press (AP) and The Washington Post were both out with detailed refutations of some of Obama’s signature claims—claims to do with the auto industry, the green energy industry, job creation, the size and scope of government under his term in office, Afghanistan, tax fairness, energy production, and relations with Israel.

During halftime of the Super Bowl was the much talked about two-minute Chrysler ad, with Clint Eastwood, calling it “halftime in America” and seeming to endorse a second Obama term, while suggesting the President was in the middle of a great accomplishment, namely saving America’s auto industry and with it the city of Detroit, Michigan.

Read More at Gulag Bound.

This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country – the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age. There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.

He didn’t have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

He was successful. He attacks all of us and he attacks all of our institutions. The place where he was, in my mind, the most successful and first successful was in academia. He understood pride of smart people. He attacked them at their weakest, that they were, in fact, smarter than everybody else and could come up with something new and different. Pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it because they’re smart. And so academia, a long time ago, fell.

And you say “what could be the impact of academia falling?” Well, I would have the argument that the other structures that I’m going to talk about here had root of their destruction because of academia. Because what academia does is educate the elites in our society, educates the leaders in our society, particularly at the college level. And they were the first to fall.

And so what we saw this domino effect, once the colleges fell and those who were being education in our institutions, the next was the church. Now you’d say, ‘wait, the Catholic Church’? No. We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic, sure the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it. So they attacked mainline Protestantism, they attacked the Church, and what better way to go after smart people who also believe they’re pious to use both vanity and pride to also go after the Church.

After that, you start destroying the Church and you start destroying academia, the culture is where their next success was and I need not even go into the state of the popular culture today. Whether its sensuality of vanity of the famous in America, they are peacocks on display and they have taken their poor behavior and made it fashionable. The corruption of culture, the corruption of manners, the corruption of decency is now on display whether it’s the NBA or whether it’s a rock concert or whether it’s on a movie set.

The fourth, and this was harder, now I know you’re going to challenge me on this one, but politics and government was the next to fall. You say, ‘you would think they would be the first to fall, as fallible as we are in politics,’ but people in political life get elected by ordinary folks from lots of places all over the country where the foundations of this country are still strong. So while we may certainly have had examples, the body politic held up fairly well up until the last couple of decades, but it is falling too.

Is the media really trying to convince us that someone other than Satan himself has taken over America? It didn’t start with Obama, but we could at least begin to take our country back by being rid of Obama next election.

So Santorum gives a speech in 2008 insulting Satan and that’s a problem? A current president who pronounces us no longer a Christian nation, parties with notorious anti-semites and detests the Prime Minister of Israel—none of that is worthy of mention?

Obama’s latest War on Goodness is his assault on the Catholic Church. He won’t let up until we abandon our current faiths and consecrate ourselves to the Church of State. He thinks we’re all Obamadans now.

In Obamanutz: A Cult Leader Takes the White House, I laid it all out for you—how the left has nearly destroyed America by taking over our institutions. We have Bill Ayers-approved agendas in our public schools. The entertainment industry is a mere front organization for Satan himself (with the exception of country music). Our pop culture has putrified to the degree that a significant percentage of our population was busy worshipping a dead, alleged pedophile as young Neda lay dying in the streets of Tehran.

Let’s just hope Santorum isn’t your average Republican and won’t buckle under pressure and apologize to Lucifer for his offensive comments.

Read  More at Canada Free Press

Over the past thirty years, a strange thing has happened on the path to the presidency. With the advent of the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the proliferation of media outlets, potential presidential nominees can no longer control or establish their image in the minds of the public.

This is particularly true of someone whom the public does not know. Barack Obama was a virtual unknown when he decided to run for the White House in 2007. But he had three major characteristics that worked in his favor: 1) he was of African-American descent; 2) as Joe Biden put, it he was “clean and articulate”; and 3) he was a liberal Democrat. He thus became the darling of the mainstream and entertainment media and nearly all the cable news outlets as well as many websites. This set the stage for the image which settled into the minds of the majority of the public.

This image was of not only a candidate who could deliver a good speech, but also of a person who had a positive vision for America, had the interest of the people at heart, and because of his unique racial background could heal the age-old racial wounds in the country. Obama did little beyond read his teleprompter-assisted speeches, which were full of inane platitudes, and hold his own in debates to achieve this lofty image in the minds of the people. The overall media, Hollywood, and the entertainment press did the rest.

It is vital that presidential candidates, particularly in the Republican primary process, understand the vital importance of not allowing the overall media/entertainment cabal to establish their image in the minds of the public. The vast majority of this group is hostile to any Republican, but in particular to conservative candidates.

This is particularly important for anyone who is not well-known to the public and has not been on center stage for many years.

Read More at American Thinker.

During the week that ended Sunday, Newt Gingrich held eight campaign events and Mitt Romney held nine. Rick Santorum held 15 events last week, and that may ultimately explain why Santorum continues his otherwise inexplicable surge in the Republican presidential race: He is simply out-working his opponents.

Ever since Iowa, where he famously visited all 99 counties before surging to an upset win over Romney in the final week before the Jan. 3 caucuses, Santorum has consistently appeared at more public events than either of his chief GOP rivals. Excepting only the last weekend of January — when he returned home to get his tax returns and stayed to visit with his ailing 3-year-old daughter — Santorum has almost always held more events each day than either Gingrich or Romney. Some days, Santorum appears at more campaign events than the other two combined. Monday, Santorum did two events in Ohio and two in Michigan. Tuesday, he traveled to Arizona for two more events, and today he will speak at a Tea Party rally in Tucson before tonight’s debate in Mesa (8 p.m. Eastern, CNN).

The national media, while spending the past week hopping from one Santorum-related “controversy” to another, have paid little attention to the former Pennsylvania senator’s unsurpassed diligence as a candidate. If all you knew about the Santorum campaign was what you learned from the media, you might be excused for believing that he has surged to the top of the Republican presidential field because (a) he’s a scary religious kook, and (b) so are GOP primary voters.

Day after day, ever since it became clear that Santorum is the last man standing between Romney and the Republican nomination, a drumbeat of hostile media coverage has followed Santorum everywhere. When he described President Obama’s allegiance to radical environmentalism as a secular “theology,” this was seized on as evidence that Santorum was questioning Obama’s professed Christianity. After draining the last ounce of outrage from that controversy — which they had, of course, created — the media then evidently decided that the public should be alarmed because of something Santorum said at a Catholic university four years ago. His August 2008 remarks during a speech at Ave Maria University in Florida, to the effect that Satan was especially targeting the United States for destruction, were a banner headline all day Tuesday on the Drudge Report, and even so staunch a conservative as Rush Limbaugh said, “Santorum will have to deal with it. He’ll have to answer it.”

It should not be necessary to explain the recording and transcript of Santorum’s Ave Maria speech did not make its way into the media by mere happenstance, but was in all likelihood unearthed by opposition researchers for some other campaign. The shadow of suspicion would naturally fall on Romney’s well-funded operation, but one cannot rule out the possibility that Obama’s own re-election campaign was responsible, because there is good reason to believe that Santorum’s rise in the GOP field has alarmed Team Obama.

Read More at American Spectator