Interviewing West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin during her 1 p.m. ET hour MSNBC show on Wednesday, host Andrea Mitchell praised his efforts to create a "bipartisan coalition for background checks" on guns, but fretted: "Nothing has taken place. It's a year since Newtown. Not even changes in the mental health law. None of the things that the NRA has supported in the past. What's the next step? What can you do?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
In part, Manchin explained: "[Gun owners] just don't trust government. They just don't think the government will stop there [with background checks]. And they say, 'Joe, I like your bill and I'm sure that's fine and that doesn't bother me, but I'm not sure I want to do anything because I'm afraid they'll try to take more.'" Mitchell sneered: "They should talk to the parents and friends and family of that high school student, the young woman who is in a coma in a hospital in Colorado after what happened last week there."
Joe Manchin
A President can deal with being disliked, even despised, by his opponents. But when he becomes a laughingstock among his own supposed supporters . . .
On today's Morning Joe, Dem Sen. Joe Manchin openly mocked President Obama's failure to communicate with Congress. Asked by Joe Scarborough whether the President is disconnected from the Senate and House, Manchin sardonically said "everybody has a different style." Queried as how often he talks to the prez by phone, Manchin sarcastically replied "I'm sure he's very busy." The panel had a good laugh at Pres. Obama's expense, until a mortified Mika Brzezinski couldn't take it anymore and demanded "Stop it. Enough!" View the video after the jump.
To say that Mika Brzezinski was "moved" by Joe Manchin's ad, responding to one by the NRA criticizing the Dem senator from West Virginia for supporting new gun-control measures, is a decided understatement.
Have a look at the ad, which Manchin debuted on Morning Joe today, then have a go at describing Mika's emotional reaction. View the video after the jump.
Cole Sear from The Sixth Sense sees dead people, and Joe Scarborough, like pretty much everyone else at MSNBC, sees racism. That’s just the way it is. On Friday, the Morning Joe crew was chatting about a recent NRA attack ad against Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) when Scarborough took issue with the image of President Obama shown briefly in the ad:
"[P]eople called me up and said, what do you think of, do you think that they may have shaded that ad to make Barack Obama look more ominous and black?"
On Tuesday's CBS This Morning, Charlie Rose and Norah O'Donnell pressed Senator Joe Manchin about a possible new push for gun control in Congress. Rose wondered how Manchin and his allies could make legislation "more palatable to those people who may be afraid of it", while O'Donnell bluntly asked the Democrat, "Are you frustrated with the NRA?"
Manchin was their only guest on the gun issue. The CBS anchors had an opportunity to provide balance by asking Senator Bob Corker about his support for gun rights. Instead, Rose and Gayle King peppered the Republican with questions about his recent game of golf with President Obama: "Do you pull out all of the stops to beat him, or do you think, he's the President – I'm going to let him win this one?" [audio available here; video below the jump]
President Obama suffered a large, embarrassing loss in the Senate on a slew of gun-control bills. If this were a Republican president, they’d be sounding the lame-duck alarms on the nightly newscasts. But most media outlets can’t do this. They were fully invested in this campaign alongside Obama, and to underscore his weakness is to acknowledge their own.
Since mid-December, the broadcast networks and cable news hosts like Piers Morgan and Joe Scarborough have relentlessly lobbied for gun control. On how many occasions did they completely shred the notion of objectivity -- of journalism itself -- and boldly engage in lobbying for gun control, using their networks as megaphones? Let’s consider a few recent moments.
When it comes to the failure of the Democratic gun control package in the U.S. Senate earlier this week, "[t]he media [have been] amplifying... with less subtlety" President Obama's gripes about the power of the NRA and a minority in the Senate supposedly scuttling the will of the American people on background checks, the Wall Street Journal editorial board noted today. But the truth of the matter, the board explained, is that Democrats have only themselves, and more specifically President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, to blame.
The Journal editorial board explained how "[t]he White House demanded, and Mr. Reid agreed, that Congress should try to pass the [Manchin-Toomey background check] amendment without" the benefit of 30 hours of floor debate which "would have meant inspecting the details" of the legislation and "opened up the bill to pro-gun amendments that were likely to pass." A simple majority was needed for such a debate, the Journal notes, a threshold they could have cleared as Reid had 54 votes for his cloture motion. So why did Reid not go that route? Because it would "have boxed Mr. Reid into the embarrassing spectacle of having to later scotch a final bill because it also contained provisions that the White House loathes," the Journal argued, adding (emphases mine):
"CNN and MSNBC, as we can see with the gun control debate are openly promoting not just gun control but the president's gun control agenda and calling it news," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell argued on the April 11 edition of Hannity, where he appeared for the popular weekly Media Mash segment. Reacting to the fact that MSNBC's Morning Joe program gave Vice President Biden an entire three-hour program yesterday to push for more gun control, Bozell added that the bias is so endemic that it must be addressed at the corporate level of media ownership, as the so-called news networks are pushing a political agenda, not relaying information and giving time for both sides of the debate.
For the benefit of his viewers at home, Fox News host Sean Hannity played clips of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) and Vice President Joe Biden praising CNN and MSNBC respectively for their biased coverage. "We appreciate your support too, this is very, very important," Manchin told the anchors of Thursday's edition of CNN's Starting Point. Mr. Vice President, thank you so much," faux conservative Joe Scarborough told the vice president as he wrapped up the April 11 Morning Joe, thanking him for a "great discussion." "No, thank you!" Biden shot back. "No, no, no, no, no. You have changed the debate in America.... The two guys that deserve, if anything gets done [on gun control] - an award here are you and Michael Bloomberg." [watch the video below]
CNN's pro-gun control bias is so bad, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin (W.Va.) thanked them for their "support" of his gun bill on Thursday's Starting Point. This came after CNN's press release begged Congress to expand background checks.
"We appreciate your support, too. This is very, very important," Manchin told CNN after co-host John Berman noted the Senator's "compromise deal" he had been working on.
Having given up on trying to persuade Americans that taking guns away from law-abiding citizens will reduce the murder rate, Democrats have turned to their usual prohibitionary argument: "Why does anyone need (an assault weapon, a 30-round magazine, a semiautomatic, etc., etc.)?"
Phony conservative Joe Manchin, who won his U.S. Senate seat in West Virginia with an ad showing him shooting a gun, said, "I don't know anyone (who) needs 30 rounds in a clip."
CNN's Don Lemon, who does not fit the usual profile of the avid hunter and outdoorsman, demanded, "Who needs an assault rifle to go hunting?"
Fantasist Dan Rather said, "There is no need to have these high-powered assault weapons."
The count of prominent Democratic Party politicians who have decided not to attend the Democratic Party's convention in Charlotte, thereby attempting to avoid direct association with the formal renomination of incumbent President Barack Obama, is up to seven. Press coverage has been sparse. One can only imagine how much media end-zone dancing there would have been in 2004 had one governor, one senator and five congresspersons chosen not to attend the Republican National Convention to renominate George W. Bush.
On Thursday, the Hill had the story about the latest declared non-attendee, who admittedly is the least surprising addition to list (internal links are in original):
At the rate things are going, it may be that the list of leading West Virginia Democrats attending the party's convention in Charlotte is going to be shorter than the list of those who aren't.
The Associated Press reported the following in an unbylined item this evening in a terse three-paragraph squib with some pretty amusing attempts at impact-minimizing verbiage (bolds and numbered tags are mine):