During an interview with Cable News Network anchor Carol Costello on Monday, American Baptist Bishop Paul Morton -- who declined an invitation to attend a pastors' meeting with Donald Trump in New York City -- refused to assert that the GOP front-runner in the 2016 presidential race is not a Christian.
“As a Christian, as a kingdom representative, I care how you treat people,” the senior pastor of the Changing a Generation Full Gospel Baptist Church in Atlanta/Decatur, Georgia, stated.
In his new book “Good Profit,” Charles Koch said that in 2014 alone he received 153 death threats. That’s more than one every two and a half days.
Charles Koch, one of the conservative billionaire Koch brothers often maligned by the left and the news media, released his book “Good Profit” on Oct. 13. It outlines the business model he and his brother used to create and sustain Koch Industries, where Charles is CEO.
On Monday, CBS This Morning aired an exclusive interview with conservative billionaire Charles Koch and reporter Anthony Mason repeatedly played up how his money has “bought him influence, it has also bought him disdain. You’ve effectively made yourself a target.” Mason repeatedly questioned Koch’s decision to donate millions of dollars to conservative candidates and wondered “[d]o you think it's good for the political system that so much what’s called dark money is flowing into the process now?”
Reduced to a daily podcast after his MSNBC show was cancelled in July, liberal Ed Schultz spent the first minute and a half of his Tuesday podcast basking in the departure of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker from the 2016 Republican field and slamming Walker as “a freaking loser” and “embarrassment” who lacks “the academic credentials or the intelligence to be president of the United States.”
I noted on Sunday how former Associated Press reporter Philip Elliott, writing for Time Magazine's Time.com website, joined the Scott Walker pile-on brigade criticizing the Wisconsin Governor's reasonable — arguably to a fault — position that he doesn't personally know whether Barack Obama is a Christian.
A separate post by Elliott, which covered a weekend retreat hosted by Charles Koch, originally carried a headline so obviously outrageous that it should never have gotten past him (though, to be fair, he may not have been responsible for creating it) or Time's editors (if they exist) for more than a few minutes after it appeared. Readers will see that headline after the jump (HT Mary Katharine Ham at Hot Air):
Strange new respect? Two days after the New York Times labeled real estate mogul and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump a racist on its front page based on thin evidence, the Times is suddenly treating one of his Twitter pronouncements as newsworthy, with Ashley Parker devoting an entire story to Trump's tweet. Perhaps because he's attacking his fellow GOP candidates as "puppets" of the libertarian Koch Brothers, themselves a frequent target of the Times.
A movie dramatization of the Stanford prison experiment opened this weekend, but if you believe Andrew O’Hehir, that’s not the first time the 1971 psychological study has been restaged in some manner. O’Hehir asserted in a Saturday piece that over the past few decades, “the Republican Party has been the subject, willing or otherwise, of a version” of the Stanford experiment, with the result that the GOP is now “a xenophobic, all-white party of hate that seeks to roll back not just the Civil Rights movement and feminism, but the entire Enlightenment.”
Four Aprils ago, polling showed Donald Trump in or near the lead in the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. In a Wednesday column, Heather Digby Parton suggested that Scott Walker could wind up as the Trump of this election cycle: the guy who peaked when he wasn’t even an official candidate.
Parton admitted that she’s never understood why so many Republicans think Walker’s great or why so many Democrats believe he’d be a tough opponent, given that he supposedly “makes epic gaffes over and over again.” In any event, she argued that now he’s hurt himself badly by going hard-right on immigration, thereby displeasing libertarian conservatives like Charles and David Koch who “tend toward a more moderate stance” on the issue and, of course, donate megatons of money to political causes.
Wednesday night must have been “Attack The Koch Brothers” night over on Comedy Central as both of the network’s late night hosts, The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart and The Nightly Show’s Larry Wilmore, eagerly tore into the libertarian businessmen for pledging to spend $889 million on the 2016 elections to help elect conservative candidates. Both Stewart and Wilmore opened their nightly programs by viciously attacking the Koch brothers with Stewart making a sex joke to smear them as “going to want something in exchange for spending the gross national product of many countries on one election cycle? And is the thing they want control over the levers of our democracy or would they settle for hand jobs?”
On Monday's Morning Joe, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough prompted hippie icon Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills, and Nash fame to promote his new song about the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Nash wildly contended that "what happened with...almost, the execution of Michael Brown, we had to say something." He also took a shot at a regular boogeyman for MSNBC: the Koch brothers.
It’s a day that both conservatives and liberals never thought would happen. An MSNBC host on June 23 actually took time out of his program to thank one of that network’s favorite bogeymen: David Koch.
Although he softened the blow by insisting that he still held to Sen. Harry Reid’s criticism of David Koch and his brother Charles (Harry Reid called the two “un-American,” and accused them of leading a “cult”), Lawrence O’Donnell, host of MSNBC’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” had to admit that he was thankful for how much the conservative donor has given to hospitals.
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When it comes to big money in politics, there’s only one name the broadcast networks dwell on – the Koch brothers.
Billionaires David and Charles Koch are major contributors to both conservative and Republican causes. Democrats are “placing them at the center of their midterm election strategy,” according to Daniel Schulman, a senior editor at the George-Soros funded Mother Jones.