In an interview with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush on Thursday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer used attack lines from deputy Obama campaign manager Stephanie Cutter to question the honesty of Paul Ryan's vice presidential nomination acceptance speech: "[She] said, 'Forty minutes of vitriol and half a dozen previously debunked attacks.' Was it an honest speech or was it just a campaign convention speech?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
This is the same Stephanie Cutter who in July made the wild accusation that Mitt Romney was a felon. In an interview with Cutter shortly after that outrageous comment, Lauer failed to even mention the remark, let alone challenge her on it.
2012 Republican Convention
By Kyle Drennen | August 30, 2012 | 10:46 AM EDT
By Noel Sheppard | August 30, 2012 | 10:02 AM EDT
Bill Maher made a truly disgusting comment on NBC's Tonight Show Wednesday.
After host Jay Leno asked who he thought the mystery guest speaker would be at the Republican National Convention in Tampa Thursday night, Maher quickly replied without any hesitation, “George Zimmerman” (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):
By Tom Blumer | August 30, 2012 | 8:35 AM EDT
Ezra Klein, the "former" head of the Journolist news coordination conspiracy (given the evidence of coordination seen during the Republican convention, it's hard to believe it hasn't continued in some form), rolled out a graphic yesterday at the Washington Post which he touted as "the one graph you need to see before watching" the Republican convention.
To show would be to give it more attention than it deserves. Its core contention, delivered via the lefty-driven Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, is that "Tax Cuts, Wars Account For Nearly Half of Public Debt by 2019." They could have changed the title to "we're going to blame Bush for eight more years." Some of Klein's clanking follows the jump; I'll deal with the "Blame Bush's tax cuts" mantra after that (the "wars" claim has been addressed several times before, and is just as dumb):
By Matt Hadro | August 30, 2012 | 3:00 AM EDT
CNN's Piers Morgan cast Paul Ryan's pro-life record on the "extreme" end of the GOP and brought up Todd Akin to emphasize the party's gender gap, but his Republican guest would have none of it early Thursday morning at the Republican Convention.
"What about Paul Ryan's positions on social issues like abortion? He's pretty right-wing, to the more extreme end of the party. Are you concerned that that will be perceived as anti-women?" Morgan inquired.
MSNBC's Schultz and Sharpton Falsely Claim Janesville Plant Closed Under President Bush to Slam Ryan
By Matt Vespa | August 30, 2012 | 1:52 AM EDT
During MSNBC's August 29 GOP Convention coverage, Ed Schultz and Al Sharpton made patently false remarks during their post-speech commentary of Rep. Paul Ryan. Congressman Ryan was slammed concerning statements he made about the closure of the Janesville General Motors plant. Rep. Ryan reiterated that President Barack Obama promised to keep the plant open, but then shut it down. The left-wingers went rabid and supported the false narrative that the plant was closed by George W. Bush.
Sharpton said if you want "an eloquent person [Ryan] that does not tell the truth, this was a great performance."
By Matthew Balan | August 30, 2012 | 1:01 AM EDT
Minutes after Paul Ryan finished his RNC speech on Wednesday, MSNBC's Chris Matthews slammed the Republican vice presidential candidate for supposedly ignoring blacks during his "very constricted, very negative, very nasty speech," and suggested that he was directing the address to racists: "It's clear that Paul Ryan was talking to people who think about rights as something...produced by Thomas Jefferson, ignoring the people for whom the rights only came in the 1960s."
Matthews added that "for some reason, they never mentioned those things, because they're talking to people - let's be honest about this - who didn't feel – the benefit, at all, from those civil rights, and I think that's very important to point out." [audio available here; video below the jump]
By Matt Hadro | August 30, 2012 | 12:44 AM EDT
ABC's analysis of Paul Ryan's RNC address included former Democratic operative George Stephanopoulos citing an a-mail from a "top Democrat" slamming the integrity of Paul Ryan's speech.
Stephanopoulos noted "we saw how much this crowd loved it" before immediately adding "I got an e-mail from a top Democrat saying the speech was audacious in its dishonesty." He added in his own words that the speech was "brazen in some of these claims."
By Geoffrey Dickens | August 30, 2012 | 12:23 AM EDT
On NBC’s live Wednesday coverage of the GOP convention both Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw used Condoleezza Rice's speech to paint the GOP delegation as close-minded on immigration, education reform and Barack Obama’s background. Right after the former Secretary of State's speech, Williams snarked: "Portions of that speech could have been delivered at next week [DNC] gathering in North Carolina. Some candid talk to tepid applause on immigration." He then added that Rice made the "rare utterance at a GOP convention of the American truism that zip code determines education in our country."
For his part, Brokaw took a shot at the GOP crowd as he chided: "What was so striking to me was one other line that she had: 'It does not matter where you come from it matters where you are going.' Well to a lot of delegates, on this floor, it does matter where President Obama came from. Because they've been very critical of his Kenyan father, who had a different faith than many of them would embrace and they've raised lots of questions about where his ultimate loyalty is." (video after the jump)
By Matt Hadro | August 29, 2012 | 11:31 PM EDT
Instead of airing Latina Governor Susana Martinez's speech at the Republican National Convention, ABC chose to host liberal Univision anchor Jorge Ramos who had dire words for the Republican Party.
"I think Republicans have a real, real challenge trying to get Latinos. Because just a few words in Spanish from Susana Martinez over principle is not enough," warned Ramos while ABC showed video of Martinez speaking. "[I]if they insist on talking about immigration, they're going to lose even more of the Hispanic vote," he also said.
By Ken Shepherd | August 29, 2012 | 11:28 PM EDT
This afternoon, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell got his hands on excerpts of the remarks that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was preparing to give this evening. Bound and determined to find racism where it doesn't exist, O'Donnell did not disappoint. Taking to the air on Martin Bashir's eponymous program, O'Donnell laid out his case that McConnell's crack that the president "has been working hard to earn a spot on the PGA tour."
That's just plain racist, even if by two or three degrees of separation, O'Donnell explained. The long and short of it: When you think Obama at the PGA, you think of Tiger Woods, and when you think of Tiger Woods, you think about his cheating on his wife. [You can watch the Breitbart video embedded below page break.]
By Matt Vespa | August 29, 2012 | 11:22 PM EDT
Last night, Yahoo! News Washington Bureau Chief, David Chalian, slandered Romney by saying that the Republican nominee and his wife, Ann, were "happy to have a party with black people drowning." These remarks were made during ABCNews.com's webcast of their coverage of the RNC convention. As a result, Mr. Chalian has been fired by Yahoo!, but some liberal journalists aren't happy about it.
Gwen Ifill of the taxpayer-subsidized Public Broadcasting System (PBS) tweeted this today.
By Matt Hadro | August 29, 2012 | 9:10 PM EDT
When CNN's Piers Morgan brought up the Todd Akin controversy in his interview with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Bachmann lashed back that "you're reading directly off the Obama talking points."
"What about all the fury last week over Todd Akin?" Morgan asked Bachmann, in a move out of the Democratic playbook. "Because you and he and Paul Ryan all got together with the Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act and he obviously came a cropper last week. What do you think of what he said?"