If you thought schlockumentary filmmaker Michael Moore went too far last week when he called for pictures of the slaughtered Sandy Hook Elementary School children to be released, you ain't seen nothing yet.
On CNN's Piers Morgan Live Tuesday, Moore actually said that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) wouldn't have dropped the assault weapons ban from pending gun control legislation if his grandchildren had been gunned down at school (video follows with transcript and commentary):
New host, same loopy logic. Ed Schultz is gone from his weekday MSNBC slot, but the show's name lives on until Chris Hayes comes on board next month. Sitting in for Schultz tonight was the never-at-a-loss-for-words Michael Eric Dyson.
Discussing Elizabeth Warren's latest Senate hearing stunt, on the minimum wage, Dyson gushed "wouldn't that be great" if the minimum wage were raised to $22 per hour? Yeah, great . . . if you'd like unemployment to soar into the stratosphere, as lower-skilled workers were priced out of the market. African-Americans would be particularly hard hit. View the video after the jump.
Schlockumentary filmmaker Michael Moore on Tuesday called Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) a "weenie" for dropping the assault weapons ban from pending gun control legislation.
Appearing on CNN's Piers Morgan Live, Moore also told viewers that they needed to say to Reid, "Who the hell do you think you are? This is our country," and send ten million email messages to him in revolt (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):
Many millions of Catholics around the world were joyous with the naming of a new pope – a holy man from the Third World, no less. Even in choosing his name, Pope Francis is emphasizing a devotion to the poor, and a humility in his clothing and manners.
The liberal media should be lapping this up. There was an accurate recounting of the global rejoicing, especially in Argentina. There were hopeful words about his pastoral modesty. But as the day came for the Pope to be installed, the natural secular liberal nastiness toward the oldest Christian faith bubbled up in demands for “tolerance” and women’s liberation.
NewsBusters reported Monday that a new Pew Research Center study determined that 85 percent of MSNBC's airtime is commentary or opinion and not straight news.
Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said of this on Fox News's O'Reilly Factor Tuesday, "That study tells me that the sun rises in the East: everybody knows that MSNBC is all opinion" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said Tuesday that America is "headed the way of Cyprus."
Such was said on Fox News's Special Report near the end of a discussion about the state of California retroactively collecting taxes and interest after a court struck down a pro-business initiative established years ago.
Looks like this could be a rocky transition for Ed Schultz and MSNBC.
Ever since Politico reported "The Ed Show" would move from primetime weeknights on MSNBC to the network's barren weekends, bumping up against scarcely watched programming that consists mainly of reality shows set in prison, Schultz has insisted the shift is not a demotion. (Audio clips after page break)
This afternoon The Hill's Alexander Bolton and Jonathan Easley opened their story "Reid guts Senate gun control bill," with the Nevada Democrat's admission that Sen. Dianne Feinstein's assault weapons ban has at most 40 votes, while 51 are needed for passage and 60 to end cloture. Democrats, you may recall, control 55 seats in the upper chamber of Congress, including the two held by left-leaning independents. This admission shows just how unwilling red-state Democrats are to sign on to an assault weapons ban, especially one that most certainly go down in flames in the Republican-controlled House.
But in reporting the same development, the AP's Alan Fram waited until the fifth paragraph to get to the cold, hard truth that Senate Democrats are gun-shy on pushing a new weapons ban:
When the guilty verdict was handed down in the Steubenville, Ohio rape trial, on Sunday, CNN's Candy Crowley and Poppy Harlow painted the convicted rapists in sympathetic tones. Harlow emoted: "I've never experienced anything like it, Candy. It was incredibly emotional -- incredibly difficult even for an outsider like me to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believe their life fell apart."
Crowley pondered: "You know, Paul [Callan], a 16-year-old now just sobbing in court, regardless of what big football players they are, still sound like 16 year olds. The other one, 17. A 16-year-old victim. The thing is, when you listen to it and you realize that they could stay until they're 21, they are going to get credit for time served. What's the lasting effect, though, on two young men being found guilty in juvenile court of rape, essentially?"
The initial sympathetic verdict coverage given to actual rapists stood in stark contrast to the harsher treatment CNN gave to the admittedly ignorant and offensive comments about rape, made by GOP candidate Todd Akin, during the 2012 campaign. (video after the jump)
A CNN headline during Tuesday's 11 a.m. hour of Newsroom asked, "Should Bush officials be tried for war crimes?" CNN legal analyst Lisa Bloom argued that the U.S. should submit to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court for the mass murder of Iraqis that far exceeded the 9/11 atrocities.
Bloom downplayed the 9/11 terror attacks in the face of the Iraq War. When anchor Ashleigh Banfield noted that America responded to 9/11 with force and not in a "sanguine" manner, Bloom compared it to the Iraqi casualty count: "And that was 4,000, not 100,000, not 10 years." [Video below the break. Audio here.]
As NewsBusters previously reported, HBO's Bill Maher said Friday that liberals could lose him because of the combined federal and state income taxes he now pays as a California resident.
Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh had some fun with this Tuesday saying, "It's amazing the things liberals do not know" (transcript follows with commentary):
The liberal media’s attempt to paint Republicans as a party in crisis continues, this time with fresh ammunition from the Republican National Committee’s “Growth & Opportunity Project.” The recently-released report provides a critical review of what went wrong in the 2012 election cycle and how the party can improve its effort to win future elections.
On Monday’s PBS NewsHour, the taxpayer-subsidized PBS network brought on Susan Page from USA Today and Stuart Rothenberg of The Rothenberg Political Report to rip into the Republican Party. Or, as anchor Gwen Ifill put it, the guests were there “to talk about how deep the party's fissures go.” [Video below. MP3 audio here.]
Just how superficial is ABC? On Monday and Tuesday, the network allowed a mere 20 seconds to "outrage" over a plan by the European Union that would have seized ten percent of the money Cyprus residents had in their bank accounts. ABC's World News skipped the story entirely, as did Monday's Nightline. Good Morning America on Tuesday offered 20 seconds. In contrast, the program devoted over five minutes to important topics, such as the newest season of Dancing With the Stars.
NBC and CBS both showcased more coverage. On Monday, Nightly News's Brian Williams featured the story in a full report. Describing the potential default of Cyprus as a "banking crisis," he explained, "European leaders decided to take a chunk of that bailout money directly out of the bank accounts of everyone in the country." Displaying interest not seen on ABC, Williams added, "It was a shocking move heard around the globe today and the fear on the Mediterranean island rippled through world financial markets today."
Monday night's CBS Evening News followed CNN and ABC to the ugly decades-old accusations against Pope Francis from his time in Argentina. CBS featured the same critic of Pope Francis that ABC did on Sunday. CNN, meanwhile, was the only one of the three networks to seriously question the accusations.
"There are still questions, though, about the Pope's relationship with Argentina's former government, a military dictatorship that kidnapped and killed thousands in the '70s and '80s," reported fill-in anchor Bob Schieffer. CBS centered the story around Francis' accuser, with only one quote in his defense. [Video below the break. Audio here.]
Allen Pizzey readily identified Pope Francis as a "conservative" on Tuesday's CBS This Morning, but failed to give an equivalent ideological label to Vice President Joe Biden and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who attended his installation Mass in St. Peter's Sqaure. Pizzey spotlighted the apparent "stark contrast" between the new pontiff and the two liberal politicians, whom he described as being "pro-choice and support[ing] same-sex marriage."
The correspondent also omitted that the American delegation to the Mass at the Vatican included a pro-life officeholder – New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez.