Congressman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Fox News's Sean Hannity had a very entertaining debate about taxes Monday evening.
When Hannity told the Congressman he pays 60 cents in taxes on every dollar he makes, Rangel said, "It means that you need yourself a good accountant" leading Hannity to marvelously reply, "Charlie, if I used your accountant I'd be on the verge of getting in trouble in Congress."
Reporters at the Washington Post need a refresher already on the November elections. Obama beat Romney 51-47; Senate Democrats gained two seats, up to 53; House Democrats gained eight seats, but still trail 234-201. Somehow, the Post says this is a “shellacking.” That’s a word Obama used more accurately after the wave election of 2010, when the Republicans added a historic 63 seats.
In Friday’s Post, reporters David Nakamura and Rosalind Helderman discussed whether Republicans would move toward the center on immigration: “Months after GOP leaders began signaling that the party would shift positions on immigration in response to their shellacking in the November election, Republicans are still working out their stance.” The Post website carried a similar line from an AP article:
Last month, when the Republican Governor of South Carolina named GOP U.S. Representative Tim Scott to the U.S. Senate, the “first African American U.S. Senator from the South since Blanche Bruce of Mississippi in 1881” according to The State newspaper, thus becoming the only black -- Democrat or Republican -- in the Senate, ABC’s World News didn’t mention it.
Fast-forward to Wednesday night, and ABC anchor Diane Sawyer suddenly found it newsworthy that the Democratic Governor of Massachusetts appointed an African-American to replace new Secretary of State John Kerry, trumpeting: “Look closely at this picture. That is William ‘Mo’ Cowan of Massachusetts. He will be heading to Washington, DC soon and straight into the history books.”
In what has become a daily theme, once again, MSNBC is pushing a one-sided discussion on gun control. Speaking on Monday, January 28 with Dan Gross, the President of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, and Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), host Thomas Roberts continued to lobby for congressional action for strict gun control. Naturally, Roberts failed to bring on a pro-gun rights advocate nor to feature one in a subsequent segment.
Roberts began the segment by hyping a New York Times article describing:
Some gun groups were seeking to, quote, introduce children to high powered rifles and handguns while invoking the same rationale of those older, more traditional programs that firearms can teach life skills like responsibility, ethics, and citizenship.
Here's something I discovered in the course of preparing a column which will appear elsewhere. It appears to speak to the lengths to which Barack Obama's administration and his campaign went to avoid having any kind of bad economic news appear before the fall elections.
By July of last year, the increase in food stamp program participation in the 42 months since Obama took office exceeded the increase seen during George W. Bush's entire eight years. But "somehow," the last monthly report issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture before Election Day didn't reflect that reality. It turns out that USDA made an almost unheard-of substantial upward revision to reported July participation on December 7 in its second -- not its first -- post-election report. It is not at all unreasonable to believe that the original understatement was designed to ensure that Mitt Romney and other Republican candidates would not be able to capitalize on that grim comparative milestone, and that the revision delay until the second post-election report was designed to minimize the deception's visibility. The establishment press should have caught this, and didn't -- or worse, someone caught it and didn't care to report it.
As NewsBusters readers know, one of my great pleasures is pointing out the staggering stupidity of Bill Maher.
My hero came through once again on HBO’s Real Time Friday telling Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), “You really actually should be the Speaker because Democrats got a million more House votes” (video follows with transcript and commentary):
A common media theme since the Republicans took over the House of Representatives in January 2011 has been that former President Ronald Reagan and former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill were great legislative partners despite being from different parties.
Syndicated columnist Pat Buchanan threw some cold water on this notion on PBS’s McLaughlin Group Friday saying, “There’s a lot of myth about Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan working together. They did not" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
The media's hatred of the Tea Party knows no bounds.
On Sunday's syndicated Chris Matthews Show, the Huffington Post's Howard Fineman said, "The Tea Party people are not here to legislate. They're here to demonstrate" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
Sure, we've all blanked on a person's name. But how we handle it can reveal how we feel about the person in question.
On the MSNBC Live show he was hosting during today's 11 AM ET hour, Thomas Roberts, blanking on Michele Bachmann's name, referred to her as "what's-her-face." View the video after the jump.
Double standards on race and religion in the New York Times. The paper's liberal concerns about racism in voting patterns or separation of church and state, so prevalent when discussing white conservative voters in southern states, were markedly absent in Monday's report by Steven Yaccino from Chicago on candidates lining up for the congressional seat vacated by the resignation of Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., amid worries that a white candidate might win it: "In Race to Fill Jackson's House Seat, Candidates Court Chicago's Black Clergy."
Strangely missing from NBC's look back on the 2012 campaign were gaffes and controversial statements from the Obama-Biden campaign. Friday's Today featured a mini-blooper reel of GOP mishaps on the campaign trail, but made no mention of Democratic controversies.
In its lengthy string of highlights from the 2012 campaign, Today included Mitt Romney's infamous "47 percent" remarks along with Rep. Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" meltdown. Today said nothing, though, of Biden's controversial "chains" comments or Obama's "you didn't build that" remark.
Following Susan Rice’s abrupt withdrawal from being considered for Secretary of State, NBC's Andrea Mitchell felt it important to sneer that Republican opposition to Ms. Rice was racially motivated.
Speaking on MSNBC’s The Cycle Thursday afternoon, Mitchell’s immediate analysis of Rice’s withdrawal was that, “this is not going to help Republicans at all, the fact that a woman and a woman of color has been forced out of a confirmation process even before she was nominated.” Andrea Mitchell must have forgotten that four years ago, Republicans in the Senate confirmed an African-American woman named Condoleezza Rice to be Secretary of State. But that wouldn't fit the liberal narrative NBC and MSNBC continue to peddle that Republicans have racist motivations behind their objections to Rice’s nomination to Secretary of State. [See video below page break. MP3 audio here.]