On his final Hardball before polls open for the 2014 midterm elections, MSNBC Chris Matthews groused about how an anti-Bruce Braley ad by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was "dangerous."
Bruce Braley
Matthews Suggests GOP Senate Candidate Joni Ernst ‘Has Talked About Killing Politicians She Doesn't Agree With’
By Curtis Houck | October 24, 2014 | 6:13 PM EDT During his MSNBC show on Thursday night, Chris Matthews discussed a soundbite of Iowa Republican Senate candidate Joni Ernst stating her stance on the Second Amendment from two years ago and interpreted it as “pretty radical” to the point that “[s]he has talked about killing politicians she doesn't agree with.”
First, here is what Ernst actually said (which was uncovered in a Huffington Post story from Wednesday): “I have a beautiful little Smith & Wesson, nine millimeter, and it goes with me virtually everywhere, but I do believe in the right to carry, and I believe in the right to defend myself and my family, whether it's from an intruder, or whether it's from a government should they decide that my rights are no longer important.”
By Curtis Houck | October 14, 2014 | 10:55 PM EDT
Following a segment that aired on Sunday night’s NBC Nightly News on President Obama’s unpopularity ahead of the midterm elections, the evening news program with two more midterm election segments on Tuesday. Both segments, however, were not without liberal bias, as one segment promoted the “close” Kentucky Senate race and the other discussed three Senate races to watch that present “big hurdles” for a Republican Senate majority.
By Tom Johnson | October 1, 2014 | 12:32 PM EDT
Charlie Pierce at Esquire complained that Democrats refuse to make the case that “the Republican party has thrown its marbles gleefully to the four winds,” which among other things means that “crackpot” Joni Ernst has a good chance to win a Senate seat.
"She shouldn't be allowed into the United States Senate on a tour, let alone as one of its 100 members," he wrote. "This is more than just a message sponsored by the Committee To Not Electing [sic] Morons."
Fineman: Iowa Farmers More 'Educated' Than Elsewhere In Country; Points to Social Liberalism of Hawkeye State
By Ken Shepherd | September 17, 2014 | 9:04 PM EDT Iowa's primary industry is agriculture, but Iowa farmers are more "worldly," "educated," and "sophisticated" than their counterparts elsewhere in the United States, according to the Huffington Post Media Group's Howard Fineman. While he didn't explicitly make the connection, the inference is that red-state, socially-conservative farmers were not so intelligent.
By Geoffrey Dickens | August 19, 2014 | 10:12 AM EDT
The indictment case against Republican Governor Rick Perry, that even liberals have described as “weak,” is just the latest GOP controversy that the networks have jumped on to taint Republicans in this midterm election year. In the 2014 campaign season, the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks have filled their programs with one GOP scandal after another. Congressman Trey Radel’s drug possession, the “kissing congressman” Vance McAllister’s affair, Oregon GOP Senate candidate Monica Wehby’s alleged stalking of an ex-boyfriend and of course Governor Chris Christie’s Bridgegate were all controversies these networks made sure their viewers heard about.
But curiously, there have been other political scandals the networks have chosen to either bury or outright ignore. It just so happens the politicians in trouble, in those cases, are Democrats.
By Ken Shepherd | June 9, 2014 | 10:50 PM EDT
Reporting a new poll out on the Iowa Senate race on this evening's program, Hardball host Chris Matthews seemed a bit befuddled that a Tea Party conservative who grew up on a farm, Joni Ernst, is actually leading a Democratic lawyer Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) who waded into a muck a few months ago with an elitist-sounding crack about Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) being a "farmer from Iowa who never went to law school."
Twice Matthews mentioned Ernst's memorable ads in which she mentioned how she castrated pigs when she was growing up on a farm and tied that in to her pledge to cut pork in Washington, D.C. Of course, Matthews failed to make that connection for his viewers and twice mentioned the hog castration as though it were some odd disqualifier in a state the chief industres of which are agriculture and food processing (particularly pork). [Watch the video and read the transcript below the page break]
By Tom Blumer | March 26, 2014 | 10:33 AM EDT
Here's an example of a gaffe which the left-loving press can't ignore — at least online.
Democratic Congressman and U.S. Senate candidate Bruce Braley of Iowa spoke of the mortal dangers the nation faces if Republicans win back the Senate in November at a trial lawyers' fundraiser in Texas in January. Among those dangers is the near certainty that "a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school" will be put in charge of the Senate's Judiciary Committee. That "farmer" happens to be five-term Hawkeye State GOP Senator Chuck Grassley. Jennifer Jacobs at the Des Moines Register's Iowa Politics Blog appears to have filed the first establishment press report on Braley's belittling, and revealed an important point which others covering the story are conveniently ignoring (bolds are mine throughout this post):