Bill Internicola

MSNBC's Roberts Attacks Florida Noncitizen Voter 'Purge' in Error-laden Softball Interviews with Liberal Activists
By Ken Shepherd | June 4, 2012 | 4:41 PM EDT

It's the Monday after a woefully disappointing unemployment/jobs report and the day before the Wisconsin recall looks likely to blow up in Democrats' face. You're MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts. How do you rally the Democratic base? It's as simple to turning to an old network standby: blasting those dastardly Republicans for "voter suppression" efforts.

On two programs today -- Roberts's 11 a.m. EDT MSNBC Live and filling in at 2 p.m. EDT on Tamron Hall's NewsNation -- Roberts treated viewers to softball interviews with liberal activists who bemoaned a voter "purge" in Florida.

NPR Uncritically Acts As Stenographer to Florida Democrats' Complaints of Voter 'Purge'
By Ken Shepherd | May 31, 2012 | 3:00 PM EDT

NPR's Greg Allen has dutifully joined others in the liberal media in presenting the liberal Democratic spin on Florida's efforts to remove noncitizens from its voter rolls as a heavy-handed "purge." As I noted yesterday, the so-called "purge" has amounted to just 0.02 percent of the state's voters being called to address discrepancies in their voter registration that suggest they are noncitizens.

Predictably, Allen seized on the Democrats' poster veteran, Bill Internicola, a 91-year-old Bronze Star recipient who was born in the Bronx and is, of course, a natural-born citizen. But of course Allen failed to inform listeners of NPR's Morning Edition that Internicola's citizen status was questioned by state officials perhaps because of a date-of-birth discrepancy between his voter registration and his driver's license. Noted the Miami Herald:

MSNBC's Bashir: Florida Voter 'Purge' One That 'Stalin Would Admire'; But 'Purge' Amounts to Just 0.02% of Fla. Voters
By Ken Shepherd | May 30, 2012 | 4:37 PM EDT

Comparing conservatives to Hitler is old-and-busted. The new hotness, if you ask Martin Bashir, is comparing them to Stalin.

A few months ago, you may recall, Bashir compared Rick Santorum to the long-dead Soviet dictator. Now it's the state of Florida, more specifically, the conservative Republican Rick Scott, who is getting the honors. "Why is the Sunshine State in the midst of a purge that even Josef Stalin would admire?" Bashir rhetorically asked on the way out to an ad break on today's program. The "purge," by the way, is one admitted by a Democratic official in Broward County, Florida, to be "very, very microscopic" in nature.