Thursday’s Morning Joe featured a discussion on the Iranian deal and hostages in Iran. Late into the segment, Mika Brzezinski inquired of Vali Nasr on whether he was surprised the hostages weren't part of the deal. Nasr, who served as a State Department official in the Obama administration, and Karl Vick, of Time Magazine, both expressed a lack of surprise for getting the hostages. Joe Scarborough, infuriated by the lack of suprise, began to criticize the idea of dealing with the Iranians.
Military
As Final Nail in Fact-Based Coffin Appears, 'Truth' Is Well on Its Way to Deserved Box-Office Oblivion
By Tom Blumer | November 3, 2015 | 12:59 AM EST Truth, the cinematic attempt to make heroes out of the agenda-driven journalists who produced and broadcast the fraudulent 2004 CBS News story about George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard service, went into wide distribution this past weekend, with utterly disastrous box-office results.
Readers, in between moments savoring the film's apparent descent into oblivion — though it will almost certainly be revived in left-controlled high school and college classrooms for years to come — really should read William Campenni's writeup at the Daily Signal. It puts the final stake in the heart of any attempt by anyone with an ounce of sense to claim that Dan Rather's and Mary Mapes's 60 Minutes report has any remaining credibility whatsoever. After the jump, let's have some fun looking at the movie's weekend attendance figures.
By Tom Blumer | October 31, 2015 | 11:58 PM EDT
A Friday evening story at the New York Times covered the Obama administration's decision to "try to block the release of a handful of emails between President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton."
In it, reporters Michael D. Shear and Michael S. Schmidt demonstrated that President Obama undoubtedly did not tell the truth in his interview with CBS News's Steve Kroft in a 60 Minutes episode which aired on October 11.
By Dylan Gwinn | October 29, 2015 | 5:53 PM EDT
Arizona State University, home of the Sun Devils and Alma Mater to American hero Pat Tillman, is going to have Tillman’s name on the back of the jersey of every player when they take on Oregon tonight.
By Mark Finkelstein | October 26, 2015 | 9:12 PM EDT
Can you imagine if in 2007 some conservative had dared call Barack Obama the "Little Mister" of anything? The cries of racism would be ringing to this day.
But on his MSNBC show this evening, Chris Matthews didn't hesitate to denigrate Marco Rubio as "the little Mister Firecracker of the bombs-away set." For good measure, Matthews claimed that "Cruz hates as well as any Republican in modern history."
By Michael McKinney | October 26, 2015 | 4:03 PM EDT
On Thursday, October 22, 2015, President Barack Obama signed a veto message of the National Defense Authorization Act. The NDAA establishes budgets and policies for the Defense Department, and in the last 53 years it has only been vetoed four times. Coverage of the veto signing and its significance has been rather dismal despite Obama summoning the White House press for a public signing. ABC and NBC aired nothing. Here are the brief mentions the other networks offered on the funding for our troops and their salaries, as well as benefits and training. CNN, PBS, and CBS provided brief statements on the NDAA and its planned veto by the President. Meanwhile, Fox News devoted a portion of time greater than the other networks combined.
By Tom Blumer | October 25, 2015 | 12:45 PM EDT
Those folks at the Associated Press sure are "clever."
Those looking for information about Hillary Clinton's damning email to her daughter Chelsea indicating that Mrs. Clinton knew that a planned operation by Al Qaeda — and not an Internet video — was behind the Benghazi attacks which killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others trying to save him will find nothing at all at the AP's national site in a search (not in quotes) on "Hillary Chelsea":
By Tom Blumer | October 24, 2015 | 6:07 PM EDT
The press has consumed many barrels of ink and gigs of bandwidth providing free promotion for the eminently misnamed movie Truth, thus far virtually for naught.
On Thursday, the Associated Press's David Bauder did his part to generate interest by pretending, despite obviously forged documents and a virtually complete lack of anything resembling corroborating evidence, that what Dan Rather and Mary Mapes reported in 2004 about George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard service might, as those two miscreants formerly employed by CBS still insist, be accurate.
By Mark Finkelstein | October 23, 2015 | 10:06 AM EDT
Say, Tom, maybe you could lead a movement to retroactively impeach George W. Bush . . . On today's Morning Joe, Tom Brokaw, downplayed the significance of Benghazi, suggesting instead that what we really needed was "a big congressional investigation about the decision to go to war in the first place in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist."
Brokaw also underlined that more lives were lost in terrorist attacks on the US Marine barracks in Lebanon, the USS Cole and Khobar Towers than in Benghazi. Brokaw made a point to mention that the attack on the Marine barracks happened during Ronald Reagan's presidency, but failed to disclose that the USS Cole and Khobar Towers attacks happened during the presidency of Hillary Clinton's husband. Simple slip by Brokaw, no doubt.
By Tom Johnson | October 22, 2015 | 9:52 PM EDT
Not long before Joe Biden announced that he wouldn’t run for president, he drove Esquire's Pierce up a high wall (think the Green Monster) by saying, “I still have a lot of Republican friends. I don't think my chief enemy is the Republican party…I actually like Dick Cheney, for real. I think he's a decent man."
Pierce opined that Biden’s comments on Cheney were disqualifying (“Anyone who thinks Dick Cheney is a decent man does not have the judgment to cut his own meat, let alone lead the Democratic party”) and asserted, “Decent men do not oversee the outing of covert CIA agents. Decent men do not help deceive their country into a war and then walk away with the profits… Dick Cheney is the closest thing that American democracy has produced to a Goering.”
By Matthew Balan | October 22, 2015 | 12:34 PM EDT
Tuesday's Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN revealed that "wait times inside many V.A. health facilities are growing longer, not shorter. Right now, a half million veterans are...waiting, in many cases, more than 90 days to see a doctor." Drew Griffin uncovered documents that "just this past August in Phoenix, there were more than 8,000 appointments waiting more than 90 days." Griffin pointed out that this is "the same Phoenix V.A. where last year, CNN uncovered the fact that veterans were dying while waiting for care."
By Tom Blumer | October 17, 2015 | 1:02 AM EDT
As I noted on Friday, the New York Times has become the de facto head cheerleader for Truth, the movie which purports to tell the story behind CBS News's 60 Minutes report on President George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard service in the early 1970s aired in September 2004.
The Old Gray Lady has hosted a TimesTalk video in which one of the film's lead actors, Robert Redford as Dan Rather, claims that the movie gives the offending journalists "their day in court." (Trust me, Bob. The last place they want to be is in a real courtroom; Rather found that out the hard way several years ago.)