“Shirley Sherrod” on The Daily Caller

I don’t know about you, but when I take a long vacation, I like to turn off my phone, leave home and see the world. When Keith Olbermann takes a vacation, he holes up in his apartment, Tweets unceasingly and becomes so angry about minor political squabbles that he then has to come back into the office to lecture us about it on air. It’s like the saying goes: A blowhard’s work is never done. (more)

Who is making this stuff up? (more)

WASHINGTON — The White House formally apologized on Wednesday to a black civil servant who was fired for making racially tinged remarks that were taken out of context, just hours after top aides to President Obama pressed Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to reconsider his decision to dismiss her. (more)

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Wednesday he had apologized to Shirley Sherrod and offered to rehire her at the USDA, after firing her on Monday for remarks that were interpreted to be racist but were later deemed to have been taken out of context. (more)

On Wednesday’s Today show, Matt Lauer, Ann Curry and Savannah Guthrie left the impression that Fox News’s criticism of Shirley Sherrod was the reason she lost her job at the Agriculture Department, with Lauer, in his interview with Sherrod, charging: “I don’t know who to blame here, Miss Sherrod. I mean the, the, the activist who put forward this garbage in the first place has an agenda. We shouldn’t be surprised by that. The cable news network that, that played this garbage on and on and talked about it, has an agenda. We shouldn’t be surprised by that.” But Lauer and NBC News, itself, revealed they have their own agenda, by failing to report, as the MRC’s Rich Noyes pointed out, that Fox News didn’t mention the Sherrod story until she had already left her job. (more)

House Minority Leader John Boehner on Wednesday criticized the decision by conservative media personality Andrew Breitbart to air only a small portion of the video showing USDA official Shirley Sherrod making racially charged remarks earlier this year, which led to her firing. (more)

Washington (CNN) — White House aides said Wednesday they do not expect President Barack Obama to call Shirley Sherrod, the black former USDA employee who resigned after a video clip of her discussing a white farmer surfaced earlier this week. (more)

Mark Twain warned us: Confession is good for the soul, but it’s bad for the reputation. (more)

Journolist update: Liberals wished death on FOX News, Rush Limbaugh — Targets of Journolist respond with disproportionate maturity — Democrats will add billions to the deficit today — Maine solves the public pension problem (not really) — Umpteenth bad poll comes out showing Washington is getting a helluva makeover in November — The USDA’s disastrous image problem  (more)

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in an early morning statement Wednesday that he was reconsidering his decision to fire Shirley Sherrod, a USDA official from Georgia, over racially tinged remarks, after the White House weighed in late Tuesday in support of such a move.  (more)

A Department of Agriculture official who was forced to resign Monday over racially tinged comments accused the White House of pushing her out before they had fully understood her comments or even seen them in their full context, as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People withdrew their condemnation of the woman and called on the administration to reconsider her firing. (more)

A textbook tactic of statist radicals in America is the systematic character assassination of their enemies as racists. Loathe to engage their intellectual opponents in a real discussion of the issues, lest the radicals should be perceived for what they are and lose the fight to bring America under their heel, they prefer instead to slander their opponents, to intimidate and shout them down, and to destroy their credibility with whatever lies or twisted propaganda they can muster in a never-ending witch-hunt. (more)

WASHINGTON — A black employee who resigned from the Agriculture Department over racially charged comments at a Georgia NAACP meeting says her remarks are being intentionally misconstrued by conservative groups stoking racial tensions. (more)

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People President Benjamin Todd Jealous said late Monday he was “appalled” by the actions of U.S. Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod, who resigned earlier in the day after video surfaced of her speaking at an NAACP event about discriminating against a white farmer seeking government help. (more)

Days after the NAACP clashed with Tea Party members over allegations of racism, a video has surfaced showing an Agriculture Department official regaling an NAACP audience with a story about how she withheld help to a white farmer facing bankruptcy — video that now has forced the official to resign. (more)