Cable Television

Politifact: Harry Reid's '30 Percent of Women Served' Planned Parenthood Claim Is a 'Pants on Fire' Lie
By Tom Blumer | August 5, 2015 | 10:21 PM EDT

Call the "Ripley's Believe It or Not" people.

Politifact, the alleged fact-checking site which has for years almost invariably insisted on calling obvious truths stated by Republicans and conservatives "Half True" at best and often worse, while taking flat-out lies by leftists and pretending they contain some element of truth, has issued a "Pants on Fire" rating on Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's outrageously false claim last week that Planned Parenthood is "the only health care that a significant number of women get," specifically contending that this is the case for 30 percent of women.

Lefty Writers Bid Farewell to Jon Stewart, the ‘White Savior’ Who Battled ‘Sewage Monster[s] Formulated By Fox News’
By Tom Johnson | August 2, 2015 | 11:09 AM EDT

Arthur Chu, best known as one of the all-time biggest money-winners on Jeopardy!, is also a writer who frequently contributes to Salon. In a Thursday article, Chu saluted departing Daily Show host Jon Stewart for, among other things, keeping him sane during his college days. Unfortunately, recalled Chu, back then America as a whole had lost its mind.

Meanwhile, in the August issue of Vanity Fair, James Wolcott gave props to Stewart for “all that he’s been through on our behalf, subjecting himself to a radiation bombardment of mostly right-wing idiocy."

Vox Writer: Mainstream Media Finally Seeing That GOP Is Prone to ‘Ever-More-Absurd…Showdowns and Tantrums’
By Tom Johnson | July 31, 2015 | 2:29 PM EDT

David Roberts has penned a tale of two media, dealing first with how a profusion of conservative outlets has pulled the Republican party to the right -- the subject of a recent Harvard study -- then pivoting to analyze the mainstream media’s belated (and still incomplete) awakening to the GOP’s “radicalism.”

“One of the longstanding critiques of mainstream media on the left,” wrote Roberts in a Thursday article, “was that reporters in the Beltway ‘Village’ failed to grasp modern conservatism and wrote about it in such a way as to sand down and mute its extremity…[T]here are still plenty of mainstream political reporters who cling to the both-sides illusion to this day…But as the far right sends the Republican Party through an ever-more-absurd series of showdowns and tantrums, the illusion is fading.”

O'Reilly Discusses 'Black Lives Matter' Funding, Including Soros and Supporters Jay-Z and Beyoncé
By Tom Blumer | July 29, 2015 | 11:04 PM EDT

On his Tuesday night show, with the help of Kelly Riddell of the Washington Times, Bill O'Reilly of Fox News described how the "Black Lives Matter" movement sustains itself. The rest of the press wants readers, listeners and viewers to presume that it is a self-sustaining, grass-roots movement. It isn't.

O'Reilly also noted that megastars Jay-Z and Beyoncé, numbers 28 and 29, respectively, on the Forbes list of top-paid celebrities, are supporting the movement, which describes itself as "grass-roots" but is really the ultimate in Astroturf. Also at the end of this post, following up on one I did on ESPN's Stephen A. Smith last week, I have posted Smith's original six-minute radio-show rant on how selective and tyrannical the movement is.

Goalposts Moved: Reporter Asks For Proof Hillary's Private-Server Classified Emails Caused 'National Security Harm'
By Tom Blumer | July 26, 2015 | 10:00 AM EDT

Veteran journalist John Harwood, according to his Twitter home page, covers "Washington and national politics for CNBC and the New York Times."

Saturday morning, despite all of his experience, Harwood tweeted a question (HT Twitchy) so naive that a freshman journalism student would have been embarrassed to ask it:

AP's Lederman Really Believes That Obama Got 'Three-Quarters of a Loaf' in Iran Deal
By Tom Blumer | July 25, 2015 | 10:41 AM EDT

I'm virtually certain that he wouldn't dream of it, but the Associated Press's Josh Lederman seriously needs to consider correcting two extremely embarrassing paragraphs he wrote in his coverage of President Obama's appearance on Jon Stewart's Daily Show earlier this week.

At the 15:03 mark of the Comedy Central video following the jump, Obama treated Stewart as if he's a legitimate journalist, telling him that "It's not your job to focus on the three-quarters of a loaf or half a loaf that we get. Your job is to point out what we still haven't gotten." Actually, after enduring the video, it seems far more correct to say that Stewart's job was to make it look like he was challenging Obama by giving him a bit of grief several minutes earlier about the still-scandalous situation at the Veterans Administration, and then to give him a virtual open mic the rest of the way. But I digress.

Professor: Stewart, Colbert Could Have Taught Obama That Conservatives Are ‘Immune to the Force of Reason’
By Tom Johnson | July 24, 2015 | 5:45 PM EDT

One year ago, a British newspaper published a list of President Obama’s ten favorite television shows (the top three, in reverse order: Breaking Bad, The Wire, and M*A*S*H). Not on the list was The Daily Show, on which Obama guested yet again this past Tuesday, but Penn State's Sophia McClennen thinks that if Obama had been more of a TDS fan, he long ago would have realized how irrational his conservative opposition was.

In a Friday article for Salon, McClennen asserted that Stewart and Stephen Colbert “had insight into U.S. politics Obama never seemed to understand. ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘The Colbert Report’ were one of the main sources of truth telling about U.S. politics and the nature of the Republican Party before and during the Obama presidency.” Those programs, wrote McClennen, illuminated “the twisted thinking, hubris, disdain for large segments of society, and closed-mindedness that forms the common, core mind-set of Fox viewers.”

Fiorina Rejects Tapper's 'Rape/Incest' Bait, Attacks Hillary Clinton's Abortion Extremism
By Tom Blumer | July 23, 2015 | 3:18 PM EDT

The press's favorite abortion questions usually have nothing to do with the 700,000-plus terminations of preborn babies' lives which take place each year in the U.S. (Note: The real figure is likely quite higher, because reporting is voluntary.) Especially when the person interviewed is a Republican or conservative, abortion questions focus heavily on the fewer than 1% of all abortions which are performed because of rape and incest. This is the equivalent of a news organization focusing all of its attention on a single house fire while an entire city a few miles away burns out of control.

2016 GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina had no interest in playing this game with Jake Tapper on Tuesday. In the process, she put on a clinic which should be mandatory viewing for any Republican or conservative who is in or wants to have a career in politics.

Jay Sekulow Sets the Record Straight on Obama's Laughable Denial of IRS Targeting
By Tom Blumer | July 22, 2015 | 11:18 PM EDT

Earlier today, Geoffrey Dickens at NewsBusters noted how the Big Three morning network news shows on NBC, ABC, and CBS failed to cover President Barack Obama's denial that the Internal Revenue Service ever went after Tea Party and other conservative groups in his appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Specifically Obama said that "it turned out no ... the truth of the matter is there was not some big conspiracy there ... the real scandal around the I.R.S. right now is that it has been so poorly funded."

Following the lead of the Associated Press, whose Josh Lederman completely ignored Obama load of IRS-related horse manure, the same crowd which spent years screaming about how "Bush Lied" about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — he didn't lie, period; even the left has to agree, thanks to the New York Times, that it's no longer arguable — has remained notoriously silent about Obama's claim.

Now ESPN's Stephen A. Smith Is Catching Flak for Insisting That 'All Lives Matter'
By Tom Blumer | July 21, 2015 | 7:31 PM EDT

ESPN analyst and reporter Stephen A. Smith, apparently in reaction to seeing anyone who dares to say the words "all lives matter" in succession getting mercilessly attacked, pushed back hard today against the censorship and intimidation of the "Black Lives Matter" crowd in three tweets. The first: "Where is all the noise about #BlackLivesMatter when black folks are killing black folks?" The second: "There's nothing wrong when a presidential candidate says 'All lives Matter'!" The third: "I'm a black man. Of course I know #BlackLivesMatter. You can't boo a presidential candidate just b/c he says 'all lives matter'."

Only in the la-la land of the perpetually aggrieved would someone saying that "All lives matter" be interpreted as really meaning that they don't genuinely believe that black lives matter. But, as would be expected, Smith, who is black, is catching flak for this, just as he did when he went on the air and ranted against those who blame all of their woes in life on racism in May of last year. That video will appear at the end of this post. 

Perry Turns Planned Parenthood Fetal Body Parts Scandal Back on MSNBC's Halperin
By Tom Blumer | July 17, 2015 | 12:09 AM EDT

As usual, much of the press has responded to scandalous behavior by leftist sacred cows by making the story about Republicans criticizing the actions instead of the scandal itself.

On the one hand, are we really supposed to believe that only pro-lifers are horrified by the evidence that Planned Parenthood, aka Planned Parthood, sells the body parts of aborted preborn babies? Gosh, I hope not. So it's more than fair to turn the question around on anyone who tries to isolate the objections in that way. Mark Halperin at MSNBC tried that on Rick Perry, asking him, "Why are you so troubled by this video?" — as if the former Texas governmor is the one with a problem.

Maddow Producer: ‘Baffling’ That GOP Doesn’t Understand It’s Dumb to Play Up Hillary’s Wealth
By Tom Johnson | July 16, 2015 | 6:00 PM EDT

The New York Times reported last weekend that one line of attack American Crossroads and other Republican-leaning groups are likely to use against Hillary Clinton is that she’s far too wealthy to relate to average Americans. Regarding such criticism, Steve Benen says, in effect: Bring it on.

Benen, a producer for MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and the primary writer for the TRMS blog, argued in a Monday post that the rich-and-out-of-touch charge won’t stick to Hillary the way it did to Mitt Romney because “Romney was extremely wealthy while pushing a policy agenda that would benefit people like him,” whereas Hillary’s economic program would help those nowhere near as well-off as she is.