On the June 25 edition of Hardball, fill-in host Steve Kornacki and his guests discussed the implications of Thad Cochran’s surprising upset of Chris McDaniel in the Mississippi GOP Senate runoff. The panel mocked the Tea Party’s outrage at Thad Cochran over his courting of Democratic voters in the primary.
Kornacki laughed off Chris McDaniel’s assertion that the outcome was unbecoming of the party of Ronald Reagan, explaining: “That is the same Ronald Reagan who we named the Reagan Democrats after because he cultivated all that Democratic support when he ran for President.” David Corn agreed, criticizing the Tea Party because the “Republican Party has been trying to get black people to vote for them for a long time, and finally when it happens Tea Partiers get upset.” [MP3 audio; video below]
Eugene Robinson
Sure, Mika Brzezinski is a big Fauxchohantas fan who'd love to see Senator 1/32nd take on Hillary Clinton. But regardless of her motivation, credit Mika for courageously critiquing Hillary.
In a segment on today's Morning Joe about Hillary's "dead broke" blunder, Brzezinski scolded Hillary defenders Jeremy Peters [NYT], the egregious Thomas Roberts, Eugene Robinson and Joe Scarborough. Mika accused them of being "afraid" of the Clintons, of tiptoeing around them, and of holding their fire in hopes of being granted an interview with Hillary. View the startling video after the jump.
Q. When it comes to the release of five of the worst of the worst Gitmo detainees, what does Eugene Robinson know that the Pentagon doesn't? A. That President Obama must be defended at all costs and in every circumstance.
How else to explain his mind-boggling claim on today's Morning Joe that the impact on the war of the release of five senior Taliban officials would likely be "negligible." Incredibly, Robinson was only willing to put "senior" in skeptical air quotes [see screengrab after jump]. The WaPo columnist's claim sparked controlled outrage from Joe Scarborough, and energetic disagreement even from former Obama car czar Steve Rattner. View the video after the jump.
Retiring West Virginia Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller recently slandered Republicans as racist, including, by implication, his colleague from Wisconsin, Sen. Ron Johnson. The Morning Joe crew on MSNBC tackled the controversy today, with host Joe Scarborough livid at Rockefeller's remarks and for the wealthy liberal politician's refusal to apologize.
“That’s one of the stupidest, most offensive things I’ve heard a sitting senator say. He owes Ron Johnson an apology,” Scarborough exclaimed. The former Florida Republican congressman, however, was alone in that assessment, with liberal panelist Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post defending Rockefeller, and Ezra Klein of Vox.com trying to stake out a middle ground between Robinson and Scarborough.
On the Wednesday, April 30, Hardball with Chris Matthews, guest and MSNBC political analyst Howard Fineman -- formerly of Newsweek -- mocked Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan's intent to visit impoverished areas as a plan to "introduce himself to the bro," and went on to complain that Ryan's budget "whacks away at" programs to help the poor.
At the top of her 1 p.m. ET hour MSNBC show on Monday, host Andrea Mitchell wrung her hands over "angry Tea Party protesters" who gathered in Washington over the weekend to denounce the Obama administration's politicization of the government shutdown being "whipped up" Sarah Palin and Texas Senator Ted Cruz. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Later on the program, she contemptuously remarked to The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza: "I'm really struck by Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin over the weekend at these protests saying that it's, you know, terrible to be taking advantage of veterans....who was it who started playing politics with this thing in the first place?"
Imagine that Jeff Bezos asked his vice-president for sales IT how many people had purchased products from Amazon the day before, and the veep said he'd get back to him "in a few weeks." How many nanoseconds do you think that hapless employee would last in his job?
But on today's Morning Joe, there was the Obama admin's David Simas, sporting the lofty title of Deputy Senior Advisor for Communications and Strategy, smiling insouciantly while saying that it would be a "few weeks" before the Obama admin would say how many people had signed up for Obamacare. Conclusion: either: 1. the Obama admin's information technology planning and implementation is grossly incompetent; and/or 2. President Obama doesn't want Americans to know just how few people have signed up for Obamacare--particularly in the young-and-healthy demographic, upon whose willingness to make the uneconomic choice of signing up the entire house of cards hinges. View the video after the jump.
Seems the shutdown is already frazzling folks. Though some of it might have been for show, tempers seemed to truly flare on today's Morning Joe. An on-air spat broke out, with Joe Scarborough in one corner, and Mika Brzezinski and the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson in the other.
Fed up with what he described as a "paid advertisement for Obamacare" by Brzezinski and Robinson, Scarborough insisted on giving his side of the story. He predicted that Obamacare will fail, as major employers opt to pay fines instead of providing health insurance to their employeees. That in turn will cause millions of people to be dumped into federal programs. The end result, said Scarborough, will be the disappearance of private health insurance within ten years and a complete government takeover of the program. View the video after the jump.
It really has been amazing the past few weeks watching staunchly anti-war liberals in the media supporting an attack on Syria all because Barack Obama - who happened to run on an anti-war platform! - is for it.
Take Donny Deutsch as an example, who on MSNBC's Morning Joe Friday proudly declared himself as being part of the 20 percent of the nation in favor of an attack whilst stating, "I’m shocked that the country is not lining up" behind the President (video follows with transcript and commentary):
Nothing warms the hearts of the liberal media more than a Republican who criticizes other Republicans. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, when MSNBC political analyst Richard Wolffe called retired General Colin Powell a “national treasure” on Friday’s Morning Joe.
The entire Morning Joe panel was praising the former secretary of state for speaking out against North Carolina’s strict new voter ID law in Raleigh recently – and in front of Governor Pat McCrory (R), no less. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson lamented Powell as a sort of voice crying out in the GOP wilderness:
In September 2012, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough took a shot at frequent Morning Joe panelist and guest host Mike Barnicle, griping that the liberal made his morning show a “Marxist variety hour.” That observation was justified again Tuesday, as guest host Barnicle’s all-liberal panel bashed House Republicans for the second day in a row – this time on immigration reform.
MSNBC host Thomas Roberts made perhaps the most outrageous claim, asserting that the 2012 election was the Republican Party’s “last real viable chance” at the presidency. Of course, Roberts – who reports the daily news for the Lean Forward network’s 11 a.m. hour – is supposed to be an objective reporter, but that hasn’t stopped him from making offensive remarks about Republicans in the past. [Video after the jump.]
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough scolded the media on Friday’s Morning Joe, claiming mainstream outlets acted as “lap dogs” to the Obama administration’s messaging on voter ID proposals during the 2012 election. Scarborough also pushed back against his liberal panel’s repeated attempts to connect voter ID laws to actual instances of racist voter suppression in the 1960s Jim Crow South.
The discussion came in wake of the Supreme Court’s decision Tuesday morning to overturn Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which required certain states, mostly southern, to pre-clear any changes to voting laws with the Department of Justice. Josh Green, of Bloomberg Businessweek, shared a Friday column in which he suggested the main purpose of voter ID laws were to “limit access to the polls” for minority voters. Scarborough pushed back on Green’s claims: