Now for a dose of MSNBC-style conservatism from Nicolle Wallace, a frequent network contributor and former White House communications director under George W. Bush. On Tuesday’s Morning Joe, Wallace trashed Tea Party members and other conservative Republicans as children while praising House Speaker John Boehner and his moderate ilk as the “grown-ups” of the party.
During a discussion about Republicans gearing up for the midterm elections, Wallace praised Boehner for caving in on the debt ceiling earlier this month:
Budget
By Paul Bremmer | February 18, 2014 | 3:42 PM EST
By Scott Rasmussen | February 18, 2014 | 12:39 AM EST
The big story about the federal budget this week was the Republican Party's struggle to deal with raising the debt ceiling. Last year's big budget story was President Barack Obama and the Democrats coming to grips with the so-called sequester, a policy gimmick that modestly slowed the growth of federal spending.
Neither of these storylines came anywhere close to dealing with reality. The two teams of Washington insiders get hung up on these side issues because they're better at symbolism than substance.
George Will on 'Climate Change' and In General: When Pols Say 'Debate Is Over,' It Really Means 'They're Losing It'
By Tom Blumer | February 16, 2014 | 10:56 PM EST On Fox News Sunday earlier today, George Will got in some tremendous rips at global warming/"climate change" alarmism.
Although Will's criticism was primarily aimed at politicians, we cannot overlook the fact that their enablers in the establishment press have made their immature "climate denier" and "flat earther" name-calling rants possible by unskeptically allowing their so-called "settled science" to be seen as explanations for Britain's recent floods and California's droughts. President Obama is pushing the drought nonsense, when it's bad man-made water policy which is to blame. Video and the relevant portion of the FNS transcript are after the jump (HT Mediaite; bolds are mine):
By Jeffrey Meyer | February 16, 2014 | 2:34 PM EST
ABC’s Jonathan Karl is usually the lone voice of reason at ABC News, but every now and then he reveals his liberal partisanship and will take a cheap shot at Republicans.
Appearing as a guest on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Karl claimed that “Ted Cruz is so hated among his Republicans…he’s going to need a food taster.” [See video below.]
By Jeffrey Meyer | February 16, 2014 | 11:07 AM EST
Candy Crowley is no stranger to injecting herself into political debates. Readers of NewsBusters will remember that her worst offense was during a 2012 presidential debate when she teamed up with President Obama to attack Mitt Romney over Benghazi.
Despite Ms. Crowley’s past offenses, Ms. Crowley continued to show her dislike of the GOP during her February 16 State of the Union program. Speaking to her panel, Crowley invoked the famous song from “The Sound of Music” to ask “How do they solve a problem like Ted Cruz in the Republican caucus in the Senate?” [See video below.]
By Paul Bremmer | February 13, 2014 | 6:16 PM EST
There was some huffing at the Huffington Post on Wednesday over House Republicans’ reluctance to pass a clean debt limit increase. Contributing writer Mitchell Bard was glad that the increase was passed, but he was incensed that the vast majority of GOP congressmen (201 of 229) voted against it. He took out his frustrations in a post titled, “Lesson From the House Debt Ceiling Vote: The GOP Is the Tea Party.”
Bard railed against those 201 Republicans: “Voting against the debt ceiling isn't ‘conservative’; it's reckless, ideological, irresponsible and not something anyone charged with governing the nation should consider.” Following that logic, Barack Obama was reckless, ideological, and irresponsible in 2006 when, as a senator, he voted against a debt limit increase.
By Jeffrey Meyer | January 13, 2014 | 11:41 AM EST
The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky has turned up the partisan hyperbole to 11. In a January 13 piece, the leftist writer claimed that, “the fight over unemployment benefits underscores the right’s extremism” with a picture of Tea Party Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) featured to illustrate his point.
The frequent MSNBC guest argued that because the GOP is demanding that for the first time in years any extension in unemployment benefits be offset by cuts elsewhere in the budget that “the party has been hijacked by extremists.” [Pro-tip: Never play a drinking game involving liberal journalists and the term "hijacking." You'll die of alcohol poisoning.]
By Ken Shepherd | January 9, 2014 | 5:29 PM EST
"Obama approval ratings turn around," exulted the msnbc.com landing page headline for Traci G. Lee's January 9 story, "Positive start to 2014 for Obama: poll."
Lee set about spinning the results of the latest Quinnipiac Poll, which shows President Obama sitting atop a 41 percent approval rating, up from a low of 38 percent in December, but still a net negative approval rating. Lee used the slight uptick in approval as a springboard to forecast that the president's economically liberal spending agenda could change his and his party's fortunes (emphasis mine):
By Noel Sheppard | January 5, 2014 | 10:08 AM EST
On CNN’s State of the Union Sunday, host Candy Crowley asked a question of Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wisc.) that should offend people on both sides of the aisle.
“If I am an unemployed American…or if I am a minimum wage worker…why would I become a Republican?” (video follows with transcript and commentary):
By Tom Blumer | January 4, 2014 | 9:36 PM EST
Here's a nice catch by Kyle Wingfield at the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
In late October, continuing a four-year pattern of making such claims, MIT's Jonathan Gruber, who along with Ezekiel "Zeke the Bleak" Emanuel is considered one of the two "architects" of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, pointed to a study which claimed that "the Affordable Care Act is working even better than expected, producing more coverage for much less money." But, as Wingfield noted in his Friday column, Gruber sang a totally different tune when quoted in the Washington Post on Thursday.
By Brad Wilmouth | December 31, 2013 | 12:49 PM EST
Appearing as a panel member on the Monday, December 30, PoliticsNation on MSNBC to help assign the annual "Revvy" awards for the year 2013, MSNBC contributor Jimmy Williams ranted that Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz is "the biggest fraud to have ever walked in the United States Senate," and went on to bizarrely claim that Cruz "wasn't supposed to be elected," even though the Texas Republican not only won the Republican runoff with over 56 percent of the vote, but even the general election by about the same percentage, beating the Democrat by 16 points.
After Sharpton asked for his choice of "biggest loser of the year," Williams began:
By Brad Wilmouth | December 30, 2013 | 5:35 PM EST
On Friday's PoliticsNation on MSNBC, host Al Sharpton asserted that Republicans "don't care" about the unemployed whose unemployment benefits are expiring and went on to accuse Republicans of having a "heartless ideology that says if you're out of work, you're out of luck."
Sharpton began the show: