On Monday, President Obama released his 2016 budget, which calls for increased spending and raising taxes, and on MSNBC’s The Cycle, so-called conservative co-host Abby Huntsman did her best to scold the GOP for opposing the tax-and-spend Obama budget. Speaking to Lauren Fox of National Journal, Huntsman proclaimed that Republicans’ “big thing is we’ve got to cut spending, this is not something we’re going to approve and that’s often why they are considered the jerks here, because they aren’t talking about entitlements, they are talking about cuts.”
Taxes
By Seton Motley | February 2, 2015 | 9:37 AM EST
The Seattle Seahawks yesterday - in a moment of profound foolishness - forsook Beast Mode for Least Mode. And it cost them the Super Bowl. But they can take ever so slight solace - the Media has been in Least Mode for decades.
This has been on prominent display throughout the Barack Obama Administration - and certainly when it comes to the Administration’s many, MANY unilateral power grabs.
First, a bit of a Constitutional primer for a Media that seems to desperately need it. Congress is the Legislative Branch. They write laws - which the President then signs. Said President presides over the Executive Branch. His many, many, MANY Departments, Agencies, Commissions and Boards are then - and only then - charged with executing the legislation Congress first composed.
By Kyle Drennen | January 28, 2015 | 11:49 AM EST
After all three network evening newscasts ignored President Obama dropping his controversial plan to tax 529 college savings accounts on Tuesday, only Wednesday's CBS This Morning noticed the development, giving it a mere seventeen seconds. Neither NBC's Today nor ABC's Good Morning America covered the White House reversal.
By Curtis Houck | January 27, 2015 | 9:19 PM EST
In a reversal of a key proposal from his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama moved on Tuesday to drop the plan to tax 529 college-savings accounts after outcry from members of both parties and a direct appeal on Air Force One from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
When it came to the networks covering this backtracking by the President on this deeply unpopular idea that even ultra liberals like Pelosi and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) opposed, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC made no mention of it during their Tuesday evening newscasts.
By Ken Shepherd | January 23, 2015 | 5:18 PM EST
Left-wing Daily Beast columnist Michael Tomasky today took to his keyboard to hack out a defense of the federal estate tax. Tomasky insisted taxation-without-respiration is "moral" and, what's more, agreeable to the Founding Fathers.
By Kyle Drennen | January 23, 2015 | 4:55 PM EST
Appearing on CNBC's Power Lunch at 1 p.m. ET Friday, the business network's chief Washington correspondent John Harwood touted President Obama's proposal to tax 529 college savings accounts: "If you want to change the distribution of income in this country, you've got to take from some to give to the other, and that's precisely what the President wants to do. Middle class families...have stagnated for a long time...while people at the top have done much better. So the administration is trying an across-the-board attempt to change that....redistribution Obama-style."
By Tom Johnson | January 22, 2015 | 9:46 PM EST
Elias Isquith contends that “after eight years of George W. Bush,” America “was in such rotten shape that Obama had little time to do more than stave off the next crisis,” but that by this past Tuesday night, favorable economic developments gave Obama “an opportunity to boast of changing the ‘trajectory’ of the country like few presidents before him and none since Ronald Reagan.”
By Kyle Drennen | January 22, 2015 | 12:56 PM EST
Introducing a segment on Thursday's NBC Today about parents saving for college, co-host Matt Lauer and the show's financial editor Jean Chatzky spent a scant twenty-four seconds on President Obama's recently announced proposal to hike taxes on college savings accounts. Lauer noted: "Talk to me a little bit about what President Obama was referring to when he gave the State of the Union address and he talked about proposing changes to 529 accounts."
By Kyle Drennen | January 20, 2015 | 1:01 PM EST
On Tuesday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer actually grilled White House chief of staff Denis McDonough on President Obama's tax hike proposal: "During the President's last press conference of 2014, he was asked how he might be able to work with the new incoming Republican-controlled Congress and he said, quote, 'The tax area is one area where we can get things done.' And now he's proposing a middle class tax cut paid for with a tax hike on the wealthiest Americans that just about everyone says cannot pass this congress. So why is he going this route?"
ABC, NBC Cheer Obama’s Liberal Proposals in SOTU Previews; ‘Going to Play a Little Robin Hood’ With Tax Hikes
By Curtis Houck | January 19, 2015 | 9:58 PM EST Ahead of President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, the networks offered previews of his speech during their Monday evening newscasts with ABC and NBC working particularly hard to paint a rosy picture for Obama with rising poll numbers and having “redefined” the “model of how to sell the State of the Union.”
By Kyle Drennen | January 19, 2015 | 12:53 PM EST
On Sunday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Lester Holt touted how President Obama's plan to "propose tax hikes for wealthiest Americans" during Tuesday's State of the Union address would be "potentially putting Congress in the position of appearing to defend the highest income earners over the middle class."
Blogger Charles Pierce: Paul Ryan’s Social Security Plan ‘Use[s] Crippled People to Scare Old People’
By Tom Johnson | January 15, 2015 | 11:01 AM EST Esquire’s Pierce deems Ryan “the single biggest fake in American public life” and declares that he “should have no more credibility on [fiscal] issues than does Sarah Palin, his predecessor in the second spot on the [Republican] ticket. Any Democratic congresscritter who seeks to make a deal with him should be drummed out of Washington. Any reporter or pundit who takes his plans for the economy seriously should be reassigned to the custodial staff.”