Congress

MSNBC's Martin Bashir on Friday offered tax evader Charlie Rangel the opportunity to deride Newt Gingrich for being insufficiently concerned about the poor. Talking to Rangel, who was censured on the floor of the House in 2010, Bashir implored, "As someone who represents a district in New York that includes some extremely poor neighborhoods, what's your reaction to Mr. Gingrich?" Bashir made…

Some members of the liberal media commemorated Rep. Barney Frank's (D-Mass.) retirement announcement by replaying his testy response to a CNSNews.com reporter about homosexuals showering with straight men in the military. Of course, they included their own eulogies about how much the liberal congressman would be missed. A nostalgic Martin Bashir expressed his sadness at Frank's departure on…

Liberal Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank defied the conventional wisdom of MSNBC, a network he contributes to, and angrily vented in a column that Barney Frank is a "mean," "ornery" "S.O.B." In his November 30 column, Milbank derided the Congressman as "one of the most notorious bullies, known for berating staff, alienating allies and causing aides to cower in fear of his gratuitous…

Yesterday we noted how the Washington Post devoted both an A-section front-pager and a Style section front-pager to celebrating the career of Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who announced his retirement from the House on Monday. Today the Post's "In the Loop" columnist Al Kamen continued the paper's celebration with a look at  "Frank's Greatest Hits", a collection of the Massachusetts Democrat's…

NPR's Tovia Smith sang the praises of Congressman Barney Frank on Monday's All Things Considered: "Frank has proven both piercing and pithy, zinging one-liners....bold and unabashed." Smith barely included any dissenting voices in her report, playing four sound bites from the staunch liberal and his supporters, versus only two from opponents. Host Melissa Block noted how Rep. Frank is a "…

Anyone who made the easy prediction that the Associated Press would fail to bring up Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac in its fawning tribute to Barney Frank after his retirement announcement yesterday was correct. Anyone making the easy prediction that the AP would lionize him as a "gay pioneer" was also spot-on. Also predictably, the wire service's Bob Salsberg and David Espo failed to mention that…

In a testy interview on Tuesday's NBC Today, fill-in co-host Savannah Guthrie avoided asking retiring Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank about his role in the collapse of the housing market and yet the liberal Democrat still complained: "You've managed to ask all sort of negative questions.....you're four for four in managing to find a negative approach." Guthrie began the segment by…

“The first line in Barney Frank’s political epitaph,” The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes predicted on Monday’s FNC Special Report upon news the longtime liberal Democratic Congressman won’t seek re-election, will “be the housing crisis.” But that isn’t what those who decide the first draft of history considered relevant. ABC, CBS and NBC didn’t mention Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac as they…

Reporting on Monday morning that Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was not seeking re-election, CNN's political team whitewashed his controversial tenure in office with some fond words like "titan," "larger-than-life," and "teacher at heart." CNN's Joe Johns lauded Frank's skills as a teacher -- especially as the first openly-gay congressman. "He's taught this country so much about the gay…

It seems that everyone in Washington believes that there is zero chance of any kind of economic calamity befalling this nation until January 2013, even though the government is on track to stay on self-destructive autopilot until then. I do not understand how or why anyone can be that confident. Jim Kuhnhenn at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, almost gleefully…

At the Associated Press this afternoon, reporter Ben Nuckols opened his report on the completion of Occupy Wall Street's "Occupy the HIghway" march thusly: "Drenched, blistered and weary, a few dozen Occupy Wall Street protesters arrived Tuesday in the nation's capital after a two-week, 240-mile march from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan." Anyone reading Nuckols's opening statement would…

On last night's CBS Evening News, correspondent Nancy Cordes listed one and only one sticking point in the failure of the so-called "supercommittee" to reach a deal, and that was, she said, how "Republicans on the supercommittee were pushing to make the Bush-era tax cuts permanent for everyone." And only one politician, Democratic Senator and supercommitee member John Kerry, was permitted to…

CBS's Erica Hill urged "conservative activist" Grover Norquist to influence the members of Congress who have signed his no tax hikes pledge to consider raising taxes during an interview on Monday's Early Show: "There's still not a lot getting done in Washington, even with some of the compromise. So why not push those people to maybe do a little bit more?" Hill pressed the idea of compromise…

While grilling Arizona Senator Jon Kyl on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, host David Gregory tried to bolster the argument for tax increases: "The Bush tax cuts...real deficit hawks, many of them happening to be Republicans....said let them all expire for everybody. For the rich, for the middle class. If you really want to get serious about the deficit, let the Bush tax cuts expire for…