MSNBC released two new "Lean Forward" ads last week, the latest examples of the network's echo chamber thinking. In the spots, Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow, respectively, cheered the Supreme Court's liberal decisions from the last term. The commercials brand the network as the official cheerleader of liberal causes. In one, Matthews lauded, "This is, let's joyously agree, a time of triumph. The Supreme Court has validated the President's Affordable Care Act... and it's a time for equality of marriage for gay and lesbian people."
Judiciary
By Matthew Balan | July 10, 2015 | 9:42 PM EDT
On Friday, ABC, CBS, and NBC's evening newscasts all ignored how the Obama administration issued the latest version of its abortifacient/contraception mandate under ObamaCare, which ignores multiple court rulings against it – including the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby ruling in 2014 – and again tries to force religious non-profits to fund drugs that they consider to be immoral. Instead, the Big Three programs all devoted over a minute and a half each to the ticker tape parade in New York City for the World Cup-winning U.S. national women's soccer team.
Matthews Interviews Ted Cruz on 'Hardball', Presses Him on Chuck Hagel Scrutiny, Bush v. Gore Decision
By Ken Shepherd | July 8, 2015 | 9:15 PM EDT From distorting his voting record to calling the junior senator from Texas a latter-day McCarthy, MSNBC host Chris Matthews has made pretty clear his visceral disdain for Tea Party conservative and Republican presidential aspirant Ted Cruz. Tonight, however, Cruz entered into the lion's den itself, sitting down with Matthews for an interview on Hardball.
New Republic Writer Warns Left That Roberts Court, Obamacare Ruling Aside, ‘Is Still Plenty Conservative’
By Tom Johnson | July 2, 2015 | 9:17 PM EDT In the week since the Supreme Court upheld certain Obamacare subsidies, some on the left, applying the wisdom that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” have gratefully praised majority-opinion-writer John Roberts. But now liberals need to put their warm fuzzies for the chief justice behind them and guard against “complacency” regarding the court, advised Brian Beutler in a Tuesday article.
“Nothing inspires spasms of rage on the right quite like Obamacare, which explains why the conservatives feel as if Roberts has betrayed them on a Shakespearean scale,” wrote Beutler. Nonetheless, Roberts has established his right-wing bona fides on many other matters, including “affirmative action, voting rights, [and] campaign finance regulations,” and conservatives see the Roberts court as a “useful tool” in their effort to “litigate federal regulatory laws.”
By Scott Whitlock | July 2, 2015 | 9:59 AM EDT
George Takei unleashed a racist rant against Clarence Thomas, sneering that the Supreme Court justice is a "clown in blackface." The Star Trek actor on Monday fumed in an interview with a Phoenix TV station: "[Thomas] is a clown in black face sitting on the Supreme Court. He gets me that angry. He doesn't belong there."
By Tom Johnson | July 2, 2015 | 12:31 AM EDT
Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change. Last week’s Supreme Court decisions on Obamacare and same-sex marriage. California’s new mandatory-vaccination law. What all these have in common, according to Michael Specter, isn’t merely that they’re correct, but that they’re manifestations of “rational thought.”
Three of those events, of course, were highly unpopular on the right (the vaccination issue is less ideologically clearcut) so it’s fair to say that Specter also sees them as defeats for the conservative movement, though he opines that the SCOTUS is “governed largely by conservatives” and that the pope certainly has some right-wing tendencies (“in many areas,” Specter snipes, Francis “adheres to tenth-century notions of justice”).
By Clay Waters | July 1, 2015 | 8:41 PM EDT
New York Times Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak weighed in on Tuesday's front page on two Supreme Court decisions, both favorable to conservatives. Yet in both cases Liptak led his coverage off by detailing the losing liberal arguments: "The move, which supporters of race-conscious admissions programs called baffling and ominous, signaled that the court may limit or even end such affirmative action."
By Matthew Balan | July 1, 2015 | 4:48 PM EDT
On Wednesday's New Day, CNN's Chris Cuomo again carried water for the left's social agenda as he interviewed Republican Congressman Steve King. When Rep. King contended that "no one who voted to ratify that Fourteenth Amendment gave...a thought" to the Supreme Court writing "same-sex marriage rights into that," Cuomo retorted that "you could say the same thing about race and anti-miscegenation laws." He later wondered, "How does this [decision] hurt you that it's fueling this outrage among conservatives and Christians?"
By Tom Johnson | July 1, 2015 | 11:19 AM EDT
Though both Jonathan Chait and Amanda Marcotte approve of same-sex marriage, they differed on Monday in their assessment of the case against it. Chait, of New York magazine, claimed that anti-gay-marriage arguments have been pitiful and consequently were doomed from the get-go. He declared that “preventing gay people from marrying each other serves no coherent purpose. Allowing them to marry harms nobody.”
Meanwhile, Marcotte argued in a Talking Points Memo column that same-sex marriage helps to “redefine…marriage as an institution of love instead of oppression,” and that the anti-gay-marriage forces are clinging to the idea that marriage is “about dutiful procreation and female submission.”
By Curtis Houck | July 1, 2015 | 12:28 AM EDT
On Tuesday night, the major broadcast networks refused to cover the latest news regarding the fight for religious liberty as Oklahoma’s Supreme Court ruled hours earlier that a Ten Commandments monument at the State Captiol grounds in Oklahoma City must be removed due to it being “obviously religious in nature” and “an integral part of the Jewish and Christian faiths.” While the networks ignored this story, the Fox News Channel’s The Kelly File dedicated a full segment to the decision with host Megyn Kelly explaining that it’s “what some are calling a new blow to the faithful” and possibly the start of “religiously based divisiveness.”
By Brent Bozell | and By Tim Graham | June 30, 2015 | 10:52 PM EDT
Friday’s gay-marriage mandate from the Supreme Court is merely the latest “landmark” decision on the slippery slope toward obliterating any definition of consensual deviancy. We haven’t defined deviancy down. We’ve shredded it.
Now, it’s social conservatives who have become the focus of fear, violence, and discrimination for maintaining their deeply held religious views that homosexuality is a sin and that “gay marriage” is an act of cultural deconstruction.
By Brad Wilmouth | June 30, 2015 | 9:19 PM EDT
Appearing on Tuesday's New Day, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin renewed his lambasting of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, as he asserted that Scalia's dissent on the Court's gay marriage ruling was "unprecedented in its vitriol." The CNN analyst saw the conservative justice showing "abuse and contempt" for his fellow justices. Toobin also repeated his characterization of Justice Scalia as the "'get off my lawn' justice."