In addition to his hours-long Twitter tirade on Wednesday attacking God-fearing people for offering their “thoughts and prayers” in reaction to the San Bernardino, Think Progress contributing editor Igor Volsky capped off his day on the 11:00 p.m. Eastern edition of MSNBC’s All In where host Chris Hayes gave him the floor to pontificate about how “all we hear from these people is thoughts and prayers” and no action against the NRA.
Religion
By Curtis Houck | December 2, 2015 | 11:31 PM EST
As if they didn’t have any shame already, the far-left New York Daily News tabloid gave readers on Twitter a sneak peek of its Thursday cover in which it lashed out at God-fearing people as “cowards” for praying in the wake of the San Bernardino, CA shooting when, in their minds, “God isn’t fixing this.”
By Matthew Balan | December 2, 2015 | 6:06 PM EST
Wednesday's CBS This Morning raved over the new movie Spotlight, which touts the work of the investigative reporters at the liberal Boston Globe who chronicled the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston. Gayle King gushed, "Gosh, that movie was so good." She later labeled the movie "very powerful." Fill-in anchor Kristen Johnson asserted that the new release was "such a fantastic movie."
By Mark Finkelstein | December 2, 2015 | 7:17 AM EST
UPDATE: Later in the show, Scarborough quoted from this item on the air. Wallace sarcastically commented "Finkelstein likes me a lot." Video clip at foot.
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If Nicolle Wallace wants to attack Donald Trump, there's nothing wrong with that. And the way she "pre-tweeted" Trump's counter-attack on her, saying she was too stupid to keep her job at The View, was actually rather witty.
But on today's Morning Joe, Wallace made a bad mistake. Rather than focusing her fire on Trump, she attacked the millions of decent Americans who support him. According to Wallace, Trump is "tapping into the most sinister sentiments in the country." Joe Scarborough pushed back, pointing out that Wallace's own father is an avid Trump fan. "My father is listening to his dark angels," replied Wallace.
By Matthew Balan | December 1, 2015 | 4:23 PM EST
CNN's Gary Tuchman, on Monday's Anderson Cooper 360, played up that to "the perpetual sadness of the employees" of a New Jersey abortion facility, "their building is a target." He also let the center's executive director and communications director smear all pro-lifers as potential terrorists. Cooper set the tone of the report with a graphic that ran during his lead-in, which showed pictures of pro-life demonstrators with the caption: "Threats, Violence, And Security."
Amanda Marcotte: ‘Terrorism’ the ‘Logical End Point’ of Conservative ‘Deep Sense of Entitlement’ to Women’s Bodies
By Tom Johnson | December 1, 2015 | 12:56 PM EST Anyone fascinated by strident pro-choice rhetoric finds that Marcotte seldom disappoints in that regard. In a Monday Salon piece pegged to the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shootings, the lefty pundit asserted that “terrorism…is the logical end point of [the pro-life movement’s] deep sense of entitlement over others’ bodies,” and that the movement “has been built on a lie: That it is about ‘life,’ when it’s clearly a movement of religious prudes who want to sneer at women they think are sluts.”
Marcotte added that “a movement built on a lie is bound to be one that’s wicked and dishonest in all its tactics, and that is what we see with the anti-choice movement. People who are willing to lie to get their way are not going to apologize and grow a conscience just because some people get killed for their lies…This shooting should be a reminder that the pro-choice side is the moral one, and not just because you never have to worry about some pro-choicer shooting up a crowd under the delusion of religious righteousness.”
By Brad Wilmouth | November 30, 2015 | 5:54 PM EST
As Monday's CNN Newsroom with Carol Costello devoted a segment to whether political rhetoric against Planned Parenthood's practices inspired an attack on a Colorado Planned Parenthood office, host Costello began by asserting that GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina had "falsely" claimed that the abortion provider "was guilty of harvesting a live baby's organs" as the CNN host wondered if such "rhetoric" is "fueling" violence.
And Daily Beast contributor Dean Obeidallah took aim at Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Dr. Ben Carson as he made charges of politicians "legitimizing hate," and charged that most extreme language comes from the right more than the left.
By Brad Wilmouth | November 25, 2015 | 1:47 PM EST
On Monday's CNN Tonight, during a discussion of Islamophobia with liberal CNN commentator Charles Blow and right-leaning CNN commentator Buck Sexton, host Don Lemon played a clip of a Saturday Night Live parody exaggerating the views of right-leaning Americans toward Syrian refugees, and then asserted that "it's not far from what some of the candidates are saying."
By Michael McKinney | November 25, 2015 | 1:10 PM EST
Tuesday Night on The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly and Bernie Goldberg discussed the ‘morality play’ created by NBC's Harry Smith on the Syrian refugee crisis, complete with Bible verses, as was previously documented on NewsBusters. Smith had tried to compare the Japanese internment with the refugee crisis. Bernie set fire to the idea when he said, “He [President Roosevelt] only interned Japanese Americans, and let's emphasize they were Americans, because they weren't white."
By Curtis Houck | November 25, 2015 | 7:47 AM EST
Following in the footsteps of Monday’s CBS This Morning, the CBS Evening News featured on Tuesday a segment sounding the alarm on opposition to the U.S. accepting Syrian refugees with the comparison that those Syrians who have settled in the U.S. are facing “another brewing problem” in those opposed to their settlement (after having survived the horrors of the Assad regime).
By Tom Blumer | November 24, 2015 | 11:31 PM EST
As we head into the Christmas shopping season, yours truly regrets to inform readers that the relative frequency of late-November media mentions of the "Christmas shopping season" is at the lowest level in all of the years I have been tracking it — probably meaning that it's at an all-time low, period.
This is Year 11 of an effort which began in 2005. Each year has involved Google News searches on "Christmas shopping season" and "holiday shopping season" (both terms in quotes). In the past few years, after Google News merged its archive with its regular one-month news results, I've made sure to only search on the past month. As seen in the graph which follows, this year's result is down to one "Christmas" mention for every 16.5 "holiday" mentions:
By Tom Blumer | November 24, 2015 | 9:49 PM EST
There are plenty of problems with the government's "no-fly list," and especially the plans by some congressmen and senators to abuse it. That said, it appears, almost three years later, to have gotten one name right.
In late 2012 and early 2013, leftists like Chris Hayes at MSNBC, Glenn Greenwald and Kevin Drum at Mother Jones were upset that Saadiq Long, a U.S. Air Force veteran who was living in Qatar, had been put on the no-fly list. After making a stink, Long's name was apparently removed so he could fly into Oklahoma to see his ailing mother, only to see his no-fly listing reinstated so he couldn't leave. He returned to Qatar, but only after taking a bus down to Mexico City and flying from there. End of story? Hardly, as PJ Media's Patrick Poole reports: