Former Democratic Party VP nominee, and now sitting Senator of Virginia, Tim Kaine noticed an op-ed by local Tea Party activist Jonathan Decker calling him out for an alleged Obamacare carve-out meant just for Congress and their staffs. He swung and missed, and the Roanoke Times covered up his miss in a shocking display of journalistic bias.

It all began when my friend, and colleague, Jonathan Decker wrote this op-ed for the Roanoke Times. The parting shot that got the Senator’s attention, and earned his ire, were these words:

Shame on Senator Kaine for believing Virginia residents are incapable of seeing through this ridiculous claim. It’s bad enough that Senator Kaine is personally enjoying taxpayer-funded health care when the law says he should be paying his own premiums. His bald-faced denial makes it so much worse.

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Tim Kaine took a swing at the young Tea Party activist, only, the problem is, he hit a foul ball and struck out!

How did he miss so badly? The good Senator actually made the claim that 150 million Americans get their insurance through the Obamacare exchanges. Phil Kerpen schooled the Senator on his foul ball, and the tweet went viral:

It was clearly a foul ball, but the Senator must have thought this was golf, because he asked for, and was granted, a mulligan by the Roanoke Times, who stealth edited the Senator’s op-ed. Once again, this was caught by Kerpen.

The editors decided that the foul ball was a hit after all, by deleting the gross error. Only, there is no “away” in the internet, so the attempt to give the Senator a mulligan was itself a strike-out. You can clearly see, Kaine was claiming that 150 million Americans were on the Obamacare exchanges.

What is a paper to do when it is caught with its thumb on the scale in favor of one partisan side over the other?

THIS

Not only did the Senator want a mulligan, now THE WHOLE PAPER needed one!

This happened after Corey Stewart called them on the stealth edit (see below) and Decker and Kerpen issued a response to the Senator’s op-ed.

The two end their response with this paragraph:

Thanks in part to President Trump’s tweets on the subject, it is no longer a secret that Congress receives a bailout from Obamacare via a corrupt scheme to masquerade as a small business. If Congress is unsuccessful in repealing Obamacare before September 30, let’s hope President Trump will end Congress’s Obamacare bailout and finally force politicians like Kaine to learn firsthand what it’s like to pay for Obamacare without subsidies.

The whole thing caught the attention of The Federalist, which wrote in part:

Kaine quoted an Office of Personnel Management official as saying that “Members of Congress will not receive anything that is not available to the public,” when in reality, as Decker lays out in the piece, Barack Obama illegally directed OPM to restore “employer contributions” for lawmakers and congressional staffers averaging $12,000 a year, which Congress takes advantage of by having the House and Senate falsely file themselves as small businesses with the DC Small Business Health Exchange.

But the next day, after all this fuss, the piece magically reappeared, sans the deleted bits and any editorial explanation for either the edit of the original or for why it had been taken offline.

Journalistic integrity may play a backseat to partisan leaning in some venues, but be assured, when you try to call a mulligan after you strike out, the real umpire, the internet, will still call FOUL!