They were trying to sell access to the Obama White House, Democrats in Congress, and even their own reporters. But they’re right-wing, isn’t that right, you tea-smoking hippies?

She’s still a far-left, liberal troll, but I’ll say this for her, she’s being consistent on this:

Gibbs: “… But, again, let’s–How about we do this? I promise we will interrupt the AP’s tradition of asking the first question. I will let you [Chip Reid] ask me a question tomorrow as to whether you thought the questions at the town hall meeting that the President conducted in Annandale—“

Chip Reid: “I’m perfectly happy to—”

Helen Thomas: “That’s not his point. The point is the control–”

Reid: “Exactly.”

Thomas: “We have never had that in the White House. And we have had some, but not– This White House.”

Gibbs: “Yes, I was going to say, I’ll let you amend her question.”

Thomas: “I’m amazed. I’m amazed at you people who call for openness and transparency and—”

Gibbs: “Helen, you haven’t even heard the questions.”

Reid: “It doesn’t matter. It’s the process.”

Thomas: “You have left open—”

Reid: “Even if there’s a tough question, it’s a question coming from somebody who was invited or was screened, or the question was screened.”

Thomas: “It’s shocking. It’s really shocking.”

Gibbs: “Chip, let’s have this discussion at the conclusion of the town hall meeting. How about that?”

Reid: “Okay.”

Gibbs: “I think—“

Thomas: “No, no, no, we’re having it now–”

Gibbs: “Well, I’d be happy to have it now.”

Thomas: “It’s a pattern.”

Gibbs: “Which question did you object to at the town hall meeting, Helen?”

Thomas: “It’s a pattern. It isn’t the question—”

Gibbs: “What’s a pattern?”

Thomas: “It’s a pattern of controlling the press.”

Gibbs: “How so? Is there any evidence currently going on that I’m controlling the press–poorly, I might add.”

Thomas: “Your formal engagements are pre-packaged.”

Gibbs: “How so?”

Reid: “Well, and controlling the public—”

Thomas: “How so? By calling reporters the night before to tell them they’re going to be called on. That is shocking.”

The left screamed bloody murder when Bush dared to have some people pre-screened before any big engagements, and yet they don’t seem to have a big problem with Obama doing it. They bashed us for years because we pointed to precedent by saying “Clinton did it, too”, ignoring the fact that when we said that, we were pointing out that they didn’t have a problem when Bubba J did it at the time, so they shouldn’t have had a problem when Bush did it. Now the shoe is, once again, on the other foot and, once again, they’re ok with it.

See, it’s not the process they have a problem with, it’s the party the person doing it belongs to. That simple, really. It’s called hypocrisy, and if our friends on the left majored in anything in college — besides Advanced Socialism, assuming they went at all — it’s Hypocrisy 101.

Update: Just a coincidence:

In the stage-managed event, questions for Obama came from a live audience selected by the White House and the college, and from Internet questions chosen by the administration’s new-media team. Of the seven questions the president answered, four were selected by his staff from videos submitted to the White House Web site or from those responding to a request for “tweets.”

The president called randomly on three audience members. All turned out to be members of groups with close ties to his administration: the Service Employees International Union, Health Care for America Now, and Organizing for America, which is a part of the Democratic National Committee. White House officials said that was a coincidence.

Lucky for Obama, huh?

Decent article from Roger Ebert about the difference between our youth and the youth of today. He laments the problems in this day and age and compares it to when we were kids, then goes on to say that he doesn’t know what happened or what the solution is.

What happened is liberalism, Mr. Ebert. Every problem we face in America today — illegitimacy, illiteracy, divorce rates, crime rates, poverty rates, social and moral decay, etc. — can be traced right back to 1960s, far-left radical liberalism, the notion that the world owes you a living and that government should take care of you from cradle to grave. The notion that the rich in this country aren’t real people who’ve busted their behinds all their lives to get where they are today, and therefore should have their money and property taken from them and given to the less fortunate. The notion that we can tax our way to prosperity. The notion that there is no such thing as a bad law or a bad regulation. You get the idea. It all started in the 1960s, and until far-left liberalism is finally dead and buried, America’s problems will not go away.

You want to know what the solution is, Mr. Ebert, it’s not more liberalism, it’s less liberalism. But I don’t expect for someone who backed Obama the way he did to actually get that.

A couple of links for you to ponder over this morning. The first is from the liberal Huffington Post, where a liberal columnist wants Obama to intervene in Honduras. The second is a Reuters article that quotes Obama himself as saying the coup in Honduras is “illegal”.

Notice anything? I did. Both articles, at best, are claiming things that are simply untrue or, at worst, omitting facts that don’t jive with their agenda.

This wasn’t a coup in the technical or traditional sense. It was a court-ordered, Congress-backed removal of a law-breaking president. It’s not an overthrow of democracy, but a preservation of it. Naturally, the left wants to see it crushed.

Isn’t it funny how the left refuses to stand up for democracy in Iran, but they’ll stand up for commie dictatorships in our own backyard? The left loves to beat the drums of war in support of their favorite dictatorships, but won’t support — even for a second — a war when it is actually in this nation’s national interests.

These people are steering the Great Ship America into dangerous waters. And I mean that in every way possible. Economic policy, tax and spending policy, domestic policy, foreign policy, you name it. These are children who don’t know what they want, only that they want it now, and they’re willing to do great damage in order to get it. They simply cannot be trusted to pass this country to the next generation in better shape than when they found it. In fact, it’s debateable at this point as to whether this country will be worth saving once these people have left the stage.

Heh.

Lyndsey Graham (RINO-SC) does NOT speak for this Party, and shouldn’t even attempt to.

That is all.

Unbelievable.

Remember, this is the kind of kook stuff the left is trying to teach here in this country!

I thought dissent was patriotic? I guess that applies only if you’re an anti-war liberal nutjob:

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

Isn’t it funny that one can commit treason against the planet, but not the United States? I mean, the same paper that carries this insanity-laced column is the same paper that violated national security by publishing secret information in the war against terror. That’s all fine and dandy, I guess, but we dare not oppose global warming, because that’s serious business! Pfft.

Look, Krugman points out the usual “facts” that watermelon* environmentalists like Gore keep repeating, and have been repeating, since they first realized that the environment was their ticket to power and wealth. There’s no truth to any of it. They’ve been wrong on everything they’ve ever said about the environment! They’ve never been correct on a single thing! And yet they want us to just blindly hand over our liberties and our money to them simply because they think they are good people.

They bully people who dare to disagree with them, yet claim that they are the true victims. It’s unbelievably. It’d be funny if it weren’t so serious. Global warming (or climate change, whatever the nuts wanna call it) is just a giant hoax so that people like Gore can get rich and have power. That’s all it is, that’s all it ever was, and that’s all it ever will be. Mankind simply does not have it within his power, short of a global nuclear war, to change the climate of this planet.

(*Watermelon = “green on the outside, red [commie] in the middle”)

Not sure if anyone has a problem with this:

For the past five months, White House aides and friends of the Obamas have been quietly visiting local churches and vetting the sermons of prospective first ministers in a search for a new — and uncontroversial — church home. Obama has even sampled a few himself, attending services at 19th Street Baptist on the weekend before his inauguration and celebrating Easter at St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Now, in an unexpected move, Obama has told White House aides that instead of joining a congregation in Washington, D.C., he will follow in George W. Bush’s footsteps and make his primary place of worship Evergreen Chapel, the nondenominational church at Camp David.

I wouldn’t call it an unexpected move, because there is a precedent here. Most modern-day presidents have done almost the exact same thing. In Reagan’s memoirs, for example, he said they stopped going to public churches because he felt the danger he brought along with him (assassination attempts, terrorist attacks, etc) and the media spectacle his attending always created was unfair to others in the congregation, who wanted nothing more than to worship in private and in peace. So he had church services in the White House. The article mentions some other examples of this:

The challenge of being part of a church community but also praying in peace has long been a problem for Presidents, according to historian Carl Sferrazza Anthony. “McKinley hated having people staring at him while he read Psalms, sang hymns, put money in the collection plate or took communion,” he writes in America’s First Families. “By the 1920s, getting a presidential family in and out of church was a production. Secret Service agents had to cordon off a clear path from the curb to the church entrance before the Coolidges arrived … [and] they were swiftly escorted to their third-row pew.”

So I don’t see the problem here, if in fact there is one. Unless Reverend Wright is officiating, this is nobody’s business.

We conservatives told you, over and over again, that it was coming. Liberals scoffed, pointing out that Obama promised that everyone except the rich would get a tax cut. Well, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the One was lying through his teeth:

White House senior adviser David Axelrod said the president won’t rule out a health care reform bill that includes a middle-class tax hike.

“The president had said in the past that he doesn’t believe taxing health care benefits at any level is necessarily the best way to go here. He still believes that,” Axelrod told me on This Week, “But there are a number of formulations and we’ll wait and see. The important thing at this point is to keep the process moving, to keep people at the table, to the keep the discussions going. We’ve gotten a long way down the road and we want to finish that journey.”

I pressed Axelrod on whether Obama will draw a line in the sand and veto any bill that funds health care reform with tax hikes for people making under $250,000 a year — despite a pledge Barack Obama made during the 2008 presidential campaign not to raise taxes on the poor and middle-class.

“One of the problems we’ve had in this town is that people draw lines in the sand and they stop talking to each other. And you don’t get anything done. That’s not the way the president approaches us. He is very cognizant of protecting people — middle class people, hard-working people who are trying to get along in a very difficult economy. And he will continue to represent them in these talks,” Axelrod said.

“But they’re also dealing with punishing health care costs, and that’s something that we have to deal with.”

We’re talking about Democrats, here. When they say they won’t rule something out, that means they’ve already decided in favor of it. When it comes to tax increases, they never met one they didn’t like. So you can bet that before the year is out, your taxes will be going up. And up. And up.

There’s no other way Obama is going to pay for all these pet projects of his. The Treasury is broke, especially after his massive spending spree. It’s rapidly getting to the point where we won’t be able to borrow any money, because our debt has gotten so high and creditors — like China — see us a risky investment.

Obama wants to have socialized health care (I don’t care what he calls it or how he dresses it up, that’s what he’s shooting for) and a host of other things paid for by the American taxpayer. We’re talking trillions of dollars in extra spending, and he’s going to sit there and tell us he won’t raise taxes? Spare us, please, Mr. President. Tax increases are his plan. They always have been and, as a liberal Democrat, they always will be. It’s in their DNA. They never think “Gee, maybe we should cut spending first.” Like a Pavlovian dog, their reflexive instinct is to raise taxes across the board, be it income taxes or other, less noticeable, ones (like cigarette taxes, energy taxes, alcohol taxes, etc.).

Others commenting:

Hot Air
Instapundit
Wizbang