Chris Matthews asked a question Sunday that should truly offend people on both sides of the aisle.
During the syndicated program bearing his name, Matthews asked his panel, "Has President Obama put himself at political risk if the big cuts do not wreak havoc?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
Did you know that the mortgage interest deduction was a major contributor to families' distressed circumstances leading to the housing bubble? Or that George W. Bush's (really modest) tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, not the Internet bubble of the late-1990s led the nation from fiscal surplus to deficits?
The reason you don't "know" these things is that they're not true. But the Associated Press's Tom Raum thinks they are, and said so as if they are indisputable facts in an AP analysis piece (or at least I hope it was meant to be that) yesterday. In over 850 words, he also failed to note, while barely acknowleding their existence, that Republicans in the House already acquiesced to $620 billion in tax increases in return for a "whopping" $15 billion in spending cuts during the fiscal cliff deal at the end of last year. Excerpts from Raum's risible writeup follow the jump.
Political bias in the Washington Post can crop up in the most unexpected places. Take today's list of "Washington Bestsellers" on the last page of the paper's Sunday Book World mini-section. This week, Amity Shlaes's Coolidge -- a new biography which explores the conservative 30th president's tax cuts and reduction in the size of the federal government -- ranked number 3 on the top 10 list of nonfiction/general hardcover titles, one notch below My Beloved World, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor's new autobiography.
“Do you all feel that your party is somehow being held hostage?” Bob Schieffer asked Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, presumably referring to those opposed to raising taxes. Touting President Obama as the reasonable one who “has talked about kind of a ‘common sense caucus,’” within the same long-winded question on Face the Nation, Schieffer repeated his accusation: “Are people on the extreme ends of your party holding the rest of you hostage here?”
Not ten minutes later, however, with Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, Schieffer not only failed to characterize Obama as an obstinate extremist for demanding another tax hike two months after Republicans acceded to one, but he suddenly decided: “I think we are beyond arguing about who’s fault it is on how we got here.”
Memo to media reporters, from Howard Kurtz to Paul Farhi: Twitter is becoming a serious political problem for Democrats. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports Wisconsin Democratic Party spokesman Graeme Zielinski compared Gov. Scott Walker to Wisconsin cannibal/serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer on Twitter after prosecutors closed an investigation into Walker aides with no charges filed against the Republican governor.
“@GovWalker had better lawyers than Jeffrey Dahmer in beating the rap. Clear that he committed crimes,” Zielinski wrote in one of his tweets.
On Friday morning, Milwaukee County District Attorney, a Democrat, announced that an investigation into illegal campaigning and other illegal acts while current Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was the county's executive had concluded nine days earlier. Three former Walker aides, a political appointee, and two private citizens were sentenced. Two county officials pled guilty to crimes relating to campaigning on government time; two others stole money, one from a not-for-profit group and another from a county commission. One private citizen was sentenced for exceeding campaign contribution limits and laundering contributions; the other pled no contest to importuning a 17 year-old boy.
Walker himself was not charged. A top state Democratic Party official was so angry that he tweeted Jeffrey Dahmer analogies. It is pretty obvious, based on word choices he made in his related writeup, that the Associated Press's Scott Bauer, whose biased coverage of Walker has been clear for at least the past two years (previous NewsBusters posts with his tag are here), was also extremely displeased (bolds and numbered tags are mine):
NBA Hall of Famer Dennis Rodman made news this week when he travelled to North Korea to meet with leader Kim Jong Un.
Rodman made more news Sunday telling George Stephanopoulos on ABC's This Week that the Korean despot wants President Obama to call him (video follows with transcript and commentary):
Fox News Sunday today aired the first interview with the Romneys since Election Day.
In it, Ann Romney claimed it wasn't just her husband's campaign that failed to properly characterize him to the public. "I'm happy to blame the media," she said (video follows with transcript and commentary):
Iran's ambassador to the United Nations had some harsh words for George Clooney and Ben Affleck this weekend.
In a taped interview that aired on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS Sunday, Mohammad Khazaee called "Argo" weak saying, "The producer of the film that is known as ambassador of peace, as I heard, should be ashamed...I would like to invite the producer and the director of the film to travel to Iran, and when they travel to Iran, the day after they will apologize from the big nation of Iran for producing such a weak film" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
The Left and their media minions spent a good part of the past two years claiming the rich don't pay their "fair share" of taxes.
Not according to the Associated Press which shockingly published a piece Sunday titled "Tax Bills For Rich Families Approach 30-Year High":
MRC director of media analysis Tim Graham appeared on the Fox Business network Friday morning on the show Varney & Co. Host Stuart Varney began by noting that negative columns toward Obama in the morning’s Washington Post suggest the press may be turning on the president.
Graham said in the wake of Politico praising Obama for being a “puppet master” of the press corps, they might think “We don’t want to look like we’re easily manipulated, but if you actually watch the coverage this week of the sequester, you saw a lot of easy manipulation.” (Video and transcript below)
The Hollywood Reporter relayed on Thursday that “Mere days after the Academy Awards, ABC Studios has bought rights to David France’s film,” How to Survive a Plague, a hard-left documentary on AIDS activism in the Reagan years, when the Left claimed Reagan wanted them all to die off, in contradiction to the facts. They’re thinking a miniseries.
France made an odd comparison: “ABC is the network of Roots.” Perhaps then, the men with AIDS are Kunta Kinte, and Ronald Reagan is the slave master?
Did you ever mean to say "If you are shy then I have an acre of land in the Everglades." and have it come out "If you're bashful I got a snake sitting under my desk here"? I mean, those sentences are so close to being identical, and these kinds of misstatements happen all the time, right?
Well, that's what you have to believe if you're still a defender of Connecticut legislator Ernest Hewett, who said the latter on February 20 to a 17 year-old girl at a public hearing and is now saying he meant to say the former. Most press covereage of Hewett's obviously lewd remark has done an acceptable job of tagging him as a Democrat, with a notable exception being Ken Dixon at the Connecticut Post (HT Hot Air via Instapundit; bolds are mine throughout this post):
On Friday, NYTimes.com announced: “The Times is discontinuing the Green blog, which was created to track environmental and energy news and to foster lively discussion of developments in both areas.” The reality must be that people don't read it, and people simply don't find global warming a scintillating subject. So much for the notion it's the "story of the century."
Over on Andrew Revkin's "Dot Earth" blog, now an Opinion section project, he argued "From a logistical standpoint, the shutdown of Green was probably inevitable once the environment desk was closed in January." Revkin's blog may survive now due to financing through the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Revkin did attack the Times for preferring blogs about sports and fashion:
Syndicated columnist George Will made a statement on the Laura Ingraham Radio Show Friday that should make people on both sides of the aisle and both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue take notice.
"I think the President has at long last so gone over the top in his rhetoric that he’s even losing the mainstream media" (video follows with transcript and commentary):