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.
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.”
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 Sunday night, ABC’s Barbara Walters hosted her annual 10 Most Fascinating People program which featured billionaire businessman and conservative donor David Koch as one of the “most fascinating people of 2014.” A preview of the interview aired during Sunday morning’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos portraying Koch as “one of the biggest Republican donors, a reclusive billionaire, David Koch. Democrats love to hate him.” During the full interview, Walters expanded on the liberal attacks against Koch but also detailed the hundreds of millions of dollars he has donated to philanthropic causes over the last several decades.
On Sunday, ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos previewed Barbara Walters’ upcoming “Most Fascinating People” special set to air on Sunday night by playing a clip from Walters’ interview with conservative donor and businessman David Koch. Fill-in host Martha Raddatz introduced the clip of the interview by hyping “one of the more controversial parts of that legislation, provisions dramatically easing restrictions on the amount of cash individuals can donate to campaigns. One of the biggest Republican donors, reclusive billionaire, David Koch. Democrats love to hate him.”
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.
D.R. Tucker alleges that Christie’s opposition to cap-and-trade shows he’s a "slave" of the Koch brothers and “no longer a man in any real sense of the word.”
What set Tucker off was Christie’s opposition to New Jersey’s rejoining a regional cap-and-trade program, supposedly because Christie doesn’t want to displease righty anti-cap-and-trade groups such as the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity
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.
An article appearing in the Wednesday print edition of the New York Times (“In Wichita, Koch Influence Is Revered and Reviled”), reporter Carl Hulse traveled to the hometown of businessmen and libertarian donors Charles and David Koch in Wichita, Kansas.
Much to the dismay of the newspaper that has an obsession with peddling Democratic attacks on the Koch brothers, Hulse was unable to find anyone besides three progressive activists that had anything negative to say about them. Instead, he found that the Koch brothers are held in high regard in the community where, among many generous donations, the Wichita State University basketball arena was renamed the Charles Koch Arena in 2003 after he gave $6 million to have it completely renovated. Here’s more from Hulse: