In an outrageous ad aired on the local Washington D.C. NBC affiliate WRC-4, Virginia Democratic state senate candidate Jennifer Wexton – running to replace newly elected Virginia attorney general Mark Herring – made a shocking comparison between violent rapists that she once tried as a prosecutor to "Tea Party Republicans" in the Virginia legislature. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
After describing women being assaulted and "traumatized again by facing the criminal in court," Wexton made this declaration: "...as a prosecutor I put violent offenders in prison. In the Virginia Senate, I'll fight just as hard against Tea Party Republicans who would take away a woman's health care and her right to choose, even in cases of rape and incest."
Tea Parties
Attempting to build his national profile, Al Sharpton "took up residence on the West Side (of Chicago) in November and began hosting ... (weekly) town halls as part of an effort to find solutions to the city’s outsize homicide rate among young black males."
Rebel Pundit at Breitbart News reports that a Thursday meeting in the city's Hyde Park area not far from President Obama's Chicago home didn't exactly turn out the way Sharpton would have liked. There was even talk of having "Tea Party" meetings "like Republicans do." Sharpton doesn't need to worry too much, though, because Chicago's establishment press has ignored what happened. Shamefully, so have a couple of smaller publications which apparently prefer bland misdirection over substantive reporting. Excerpts from the Breitbart report follow the jump (bolds are mine):
Talking to NBC's David Gregory for the Meet the Press web-based feature Press Pass on Sunday, Israeli journalist Ari Shavit launched into a rant against the strong bond between conservatives in Israel and the United States: "In recent years, we've seen too much of an alliance between Tea Party Israel and Tea Party America. I want to bring back that alliance between progressive America and progressive Israel." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Shavit's hand-wringing was prompted by Gregory observing: "...my sense of many American Jews is that they are not as firmly rooted – their Jewishness is not as rooted in Israel as it was a generation ago....They feel more disaffected or separate from Israel....the foreign policy and national security concerns of Israel are all-encompassing and are no longer as resonant with younger Jews in America."
Tis the season for liberals to bash conservatives as miserly Scrooges or, worse, as anti-Jesus, all because they endorse cutting back social welfare programs.
In his December 17 post, "It’s Conservatives Who Really Want Christ Out of Christmas," Daily Beast contributor Dean Obeidallah attacked what he insists is, "the glaring hypocrisy of the right" (emphases mine):
Leading off Thursday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams declared: "It's war. A private battle blows wide open in public as the most powerful Republican in Washington says he's had enough, coming out swinging against members of his own party." Moments later, he hailed House Speaker John Boehner's "rare outburst of candor mixed with anger and frustration" at conservatives critical of the new budget deal in Congress. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Williams contemptuously observed: "His problem has been the rise of the Tea Party faction, the newly arrived and highly motivated members who do not go along or get along with the wishes of the leadership....Now they've gone after a budget deal that represents real compromise and keeps the country running. The Speaker today decided he's had enough and he said so."
On Monday's All In on MSNBC, during a discussion of whether the Tea Party has helped conservatism, host Chris Hayes accused the Tea Party of being "reckless" in several ways, including "with people's lives," as he contrasted the GOP and Democratic bases, while MSNBC's Karen Finney asserted that GOPers only agree on "how much they hate Barack Obama."
Hayes began the discussion as he posed:
Things got testy between Joe Scarborough and Howard Dean on today's Morning Joe over the issue of the Dem party moving left. In a particularly unkind cut, Scarborough accused Dean of spouting "Carl Bernstein nonsense," while Dean tried to shut Scarborough down, bleating "blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Adding spice to the mix, Mika Brzezinski made clear her great regard for lefty Senator Elizabeth Warren, saying she'd make a "formidable" presidential candidate.
The fracas was detonated by a discussion of a Wall Street Journal op-ed by a centrist Dem group called "The Third Way," which argued that following proposals from Warren and far-left, newly-elected NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, would be electorally "disastrous" for Dems. That in turn engendered a New York Times article about infighting among Dems, reporting among other things that Warren is using "hardball" tactics to intimidate banks supporting The Third Way. View the video after the jump.
Just when I complimented my friends at The Salt Lake Tribune for being authentic for owning the cause of anything other than Mormon and Republican in Utah, they have to go and act like their journalistic editorial standards trump their politics – which is, of course, nonsense.
When the Media Research Center in Washington, D.C., cited dozens of reports and editorials issued by the Tribune painting Utah Senator Mike Lee negatively throughout the drama over the shutdown of the federal government, the Tribune balked.
The Daily Beast on Monday produced a shrill attack on the Tea Party titled “How the Tea Party’s Apocalyptic Politics Are Destroying the Republican Party.” Author Joe McLean announced his premise in the subheading: “Tea Party leaders view themselves as modern prophets of the end of times, ratcheting up their rhetoric to prove that Obama is evil and God is on their side.”
What followed was an attempt to demonize Tea Party leaders as the sort of apocalyptic prophets who most people consider crazy. McLean painted a picture of wild-eyed, dangerous right-wing fanatics through lines like this:
Sometimes it’s convenient for a journalist to misinterpret someone else’s words in order to push his or her own narrative, and that was clearly what happened on Saturday’s edition of Weekends with Alex Witt on MSNBC. Alex Witt and various guests spent a good deal of time discussing Sen. Ted Cruz’s Friday appearance on The Tonight Show, and Witt seemed to take issue with this Cruz sound bite:
"I mean, I think the biggest divide we have is not between Republicans and Democrats. It is between entrenched politicians in both parties in Washington and the American people."
Armed with evidence compiled by NewsBusters senior editor and Media Research Center director of research Rich Noyes, MRC president Brent Bozell sent letters to members of the boards of directors of two prominent newspapers in Utah, demanding that they offer their readers fair and balanced coverage of U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R). You may recall that both the Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News savaged the Tea Party conservative senator for his attempt to defund ObamaCare.
"Your paper can no longer claim that Sen. Lee’s strategy was out of proportion or radical," Bozell wrote Ellis Ivory, chairman of the board of directors for the Deseret News Publishing Company. "Already the nation is seeing ObamaCare for the disaster that it is" with "more than 3.5 million... losing existing health insurance plans as a result of ObamaCare," the MRC founder noted, adding:
Trying to deflect from the political damage ObamaCare has done to Democrats, on Monday's NBC Today, White House correspondent Peter Alexander hyped GOP divisions: "...the Republican Party is facing a war within....Republicans have an issue over defining their brand, an ideological civil war of sorts." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
In an interview with former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin following Alexander's report, co-host Matt Lauer sought to stoke that supposed "civil war": "[Governor Chris Christie] called the shutdown of the government and that strategy hatched by Ted Cruz and members of the Tea Party a 'monumental failure.' If you look at the results of the [New Jersey] election, isn't the message to the Tea Party that the middle ground, not the far right, is the most fertile ground for upcoming elections?"