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The Talk Shows March 8th, 2015 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. ; former Gov. Mike Huckabee, R-Ark.MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.; Lewis.FACE THE NATION (CBS): Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Tim Scott, R-S.C.; Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C.; Benjamin Crump, lawyer for the family of Michael Brown, the unarmed black 18-year-old shot to death by a white police officer in Ferguson.THIS WEEK (ABC): Mayor James Knowles of Ferguson, Missouri;...

I pushed the envelope of citizen-journalism a little further this week by introducing myself to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Maraniss. According to Maraniss, his research for Barack Obama: The Story took him to Hawaii, Indonesia, and Kenya. Unfortunately, he did not have the time to Google search me or review any of the five books, multiple blog posts, YouTube videos, or hundreds of websites that feature my take on young Obama's ideological extremism. Ironically, Maraniss got awfully close to confirming the details of my 1980 Christmas break debate with young Obama -- a debate that reveals just how radical Obama...

David Maraniss, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Barack Obama: The Story, is getting testy. And it is not hard to understand why. The Washington Post diva spent the last four years on his career book, released it in the heart of a heated re-election season, got the kind of exposure a Kardashian would envy, and now finds the book heading for the remainder racks weeks after its release. Oy vey! As of this writing, the book ranks 1,696 on Amazon's bestseller list. By contrast, Edward Klein's unfriendly Obama tome, The Amateur, has outsold just every book this summer not centered on...

In his book, Barack Obama: The Story, David Maraniss is remarkably detailed about things that have nothing to do with The Story (Betty Davis' opinion of a film, how a letter was handled in Kenya, what President Johnson said to Bill Moyers) but is inexplicably incurious about many things that are very important to The Story. Maraniss, in an interview on the June 18 Today Show, stated that Barack Obama's book, Dreams from My Father, was "literature," adding, "There's a big difference between memoir and biography." So big a difference that Ben Smith of Buzzfeed counted "38 instances in which...

"I'm not writing it as a fact-checker. I'm writing it as an historian," griped David Maraniss on CNN about the first volume of his new book, Barack Obama: The Story. "Other people for ideological reasons are pouncing on that part of what my book is, but in fact I'm trying to tell the truth." In fact, Maraniss is less an historian than a predictably liberal Beltway journalist, one whose own ideology consistently subverts the truth. The distortions are many and significant. In his account of each phase of Obama's early life -- Hawaii, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago --...

I was sitting out at lunch the other day reading David Maraniss's new book, Barack Obama: The Story, when I came across a passage that gave me pause. Maraniss excerpted the passage from an article, "Breaking the War Mentality," that Obama had written in 1983 for a Columbia University publication called the Sundial. What caught my attention was that the passage in question read better than I remembered. I returned to my office after lunch, checked a digitized copy of the article, and then double-checked a PDF of the original print edition. I was right. The passage had been edited...

“I will never forget my own mother, as she fought cancer in her final months, having to worry about whether her insurance would refuse to pay for her treatment,” Mr. Obama said in 2009, as he campaigned for passage of his health care program. Ms. Scott’s research suggested that Mr. Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, was covered by health insurance at the time, and was instead denied disability coverage that would have helped to pay expenses that were not covered by insurance.

David Maraniss has no use for "birthers." In a recent interview, he dismissed their beliefs as "preposterous" and wonders why they cling to them, since "every fact and document leads in another direction." Yet the one core belief that has united the birther community -- if there be such a thing -- is that Obama dissembled when he talked at both the 2004 and 2008 Democratic Conventions about his parents' "improbable love" and "abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation." Birthers have known for years that there was no Obama family, that the couple never lived together, that Obama...

Liberal historian and Barack Obama biographer David Maraniss is almost beside himself that people everywhere are talking about his new book Barack Obama: The Story. While most authors would be overjoyed at the amount of free publicity that Maraniss is receiving, the veteran author is almost distraught that conservatives are talking about the book in a way he didn't intend--to debunk many of the lies and half-truths that President Obama told about his young adulthood in his autobiography, Dreams From My Father. As conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh noted during his radio program on Wednesday, Maraniss is “in crisis”...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Let's see. David Maraniss. David Maraniss has this book on Obama, and he's upset. Maraniss is not happy over how the right wing is using his book. What Maraniss is doing -- and I don't think he realizes it because he's angry at what's happening. He's angry at the reaction to his book. What he's doing is pointing out all the things in Obama's autobiographies which are not true. He talked about Obama's great basketball talents in high school yesterday that Obama wrote about in his book. It turns out he wasn't a special player. Maraniss is...

"Exclusive: Jack Cashill notes Maraniss book puts lie to O's 'improbable love' claim"Excerpt....In all the talk about David Maraniss’ new book, “Barack Obama: The Story,” the chattering classes seem to have overlooked the most significant of Maraniss’ revelations, namely that the story on which Obama based his 2008 candidacy is “received myth, not the truth.” “My parents shared not only an improbable love,” said Obama famously in his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote, “they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation.” This concept of multicultural romance shaped his persona and his campaigns. At the 2008 Democratic Convention in...

As I wrote yesterday, the media loves being lied to by Barack Obama. As we all know, the furor over a sitting President caught telling 38 falsehoods in his self-penned biography would be unquenchable were we talking about a president with an R after his name. Not to mention the lies Obama told the media about his relationship with Bill Ayers and his membership in the socialist New Party. But as you'll see in the clip below, Obama biographer David Maraniss, who found no less than 38 falsehoods in Obama's bio, is determined to downplay Obama's lying:

Hussein Onyango, Barack's grandfather, wasn't really imprisoned and tortured by the British. The father of his Indonesian stepfather, Soewarno Martodihardjo, wasn't killed by Dutch soldiers in the fight for independence. Regina, a friend at Occidental who Obama writes about as a symbol of the authentic African-American experience turns out to be based on Carolina Boss, who is white. Regina was the name of her Swiss grandmother. Obama projected a racial incident onto his New York girlfriend that he later told Maraniss had happened in Chicago. Obama wrote that he broke up with his New York girlfriend in part because...

Bill Clinton he was not. When it came to smoking pot, the teenage Barack Obama had rules. You had to embrace "total absorption" or face a penalty. When you smoked in the car, "the windows had to be rolled up." And he could horn his way in, calling out "Intercepted!" and grab the joint out of turn. Best-selling author David Maraniss' "Barack Obama: The Story" describes the future president's teenage antics, notably his copious marijuana smoking, details of which were published early Friday by Buzzfeed. While the book won't be released until June 19, vast sections of it were already...

Obama and His Pot-Smoking ‘Choom Gang’ Email 0 Smaller Font Text Larger Text | Print Unlike Bill Clinton, Barack Obama never tried to say he didn’t inhale. In his 1995 memoir “Dreams of My Father,” Obama writes about smoking pot almost like Dr. Zeus wrote about eating green eggs and ham. As a high school kid, Obama wrote, he would smoke “in a white classmate’s sparkling new van,” he would smoke “in the dorm room of some brother” and he would smoke “on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids.” He would smoke it here and there. He would...

Ever since the 2008 campaign, many voters, and some journalists, too, have felt they know Barack Obama's life story. In fact, the story they know is the one Obama told them. Obama's first memoir, "Dreams From My Father," published in 1995, has become the semiofficial record of his life. But it is not the complete record of his life. It's partially fictionalized, with composite characters who Obama has always acknowledged were created to make the story read better. It focuses on a few themes Obama wanted to present to the public about himself. And, as with any memoir, it is...

It only took nearly six years for the media to begin vetting President Obama’s past. Today, Vanity Fair released an excerpt from a new biography of Barack Obama by David Maraniss. The excerpt discusses Barack Obama's first love affair, with a white Australian woman named Genevieve Cook. It's a telling examination of who Obama was as a young man -- and it shows a self-absorbed "internationalist" with delusions of grandeur. Photo credit Vanity Fair. The book itself sounds like an ode to Obama. Maraniss writes, “At age 20, Obama was a man of the world … He could not be...