Welfare
On Wednesday's CBS Evening News, in a report on Louisiana's budget battle which the piece suggested could "kill people" with cuts to Medicaid, correspondent David Begnaud seemed to think it was only important to identify the party affiliation of the Republican state legislators involved, even though the governor whom he also spoke with, John Bel Edwards, is a Democrat.
The panel of MSNBC Live With Stephanie Ruhle took a brief time-out on Wednesday from speculating about White House Chief of Staff John Kelly to take a few lazy swings at the President’s new budget proposal for the SNAP food assistance program. The proposed policy would function similarly to services like Blue Apron, with beneficiaries receiving packages of pre-selected nutritious food items. It would also reduce the current program’s budget by 30%.
On Saturday's AM Joy on MSNBC, fellow left-wing MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell joined Joy Reid so the two could fret over the Democratic reaction to the deal that reopened the federal government. After beginning their discussion by lamenting that some Democrats are criticizing their leadership over the deal -- oddly claiming that Republicans "never" criticize each other -- O'Donnell condescendingly accused Republicans of "living in a tiny intellectual space."
Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker gave his annual State of the State speech Wednesday. Naturally, Scott Bauer at the Associated Press, who has been on a seemingly singular mission to dispute and distort Walker's statements and actions during the Governor's seven years in office, treated absolutely true statements Walker made during that speech as somehow untruthful in a Thursday "Fact Check."
Will MAGA murder poor Kentuckians? That was the thrust of Wednesday’s column by Eduardo Porter, liberal New York Times reporter turned leftist economics columnist, “Path Forward In Kentucky (But Don’t Get Sick).” Under the harmless headline, Porter didn’t hedge his contempt for the cost-cutting, bringing in President Trump’s trademark slogan to smear fiscal conservatives as killers for favoring Medicaid reform in the states.
On Saturday's AM Joy, the MSNBC show at one point looked like a caricature of itself as frequent guest Fernand Armandi actually made the incendiary claim that the Republican party is a "domestic terror group," and then asserted that voters should not only vote them out, but "consider possibly afterwards locking them up." The Democratic pollster -- known for making wildly over the top statements on the show -- made his hyperbolic comments about locking up Republicans not in response to any sort of charges of legal wrongdoing, but instead in response to simply having a policy disagreement about how to handle the CHIP program.
Business and technology magazine Fast Company may have pulled a fast one over any readers unwilling to whip out a calculator when thinking about the Universal Basic Income (UBI).
A universal basic income is when a government provides a certain amount of money unconditionally, to all individuals regardless of employment status or income level.
Since Republican Sam Brownback became the Governor of Kansas, the press has been salivating at the opportunity to declare his fiscally conservative policies a failure, to the point where they believe that their failure is an undisputed truth. Really? If they're such a failure, why have the welfare rolls in The Sunflower State declined by a reported 78 percent, and why have those who have been moved off the welfare rolls into the world of productive work been so financially successful?
The front page of the Saturday Metro section of The Washington Post offered breaking news on Christian attitudes. “Christians are far more likely than non-Christians to blame poverty on a lack of effort, a poll found.”
This poll from the Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation is three months old, taken from April 13 to May 1. This is not just a poll question; it’s begging for overgeneralization, with “the poor are mostly lazy” being judged by liberals as akin to “Muslims are mostly terrorists” or “Catholic priests are mostly child abusers.”
On Sunday's PoliticsNation on MSNBC, during the show's regular "Gotcha" segment, host Al Sharpton was imagining racist dog whistles as he complained about "unmitigated, racially-tinged cruelty" from Congressman Steve King, and suggested that those who think like the Iowa Republican are "evil."
On Wednesday's New Day on CNN, during a discussion of how to pay for President Donald Trump's proposed border wall, co-host Alisyn Camerota seemed taken aback that Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King suggested shifting money from the food stamp program to help pay for the wall. Camerota fretted: "You want to take food from people that are s -- the people who are on the lowest rung in terms of the nation's safety net and their children -- in terms of food stamps, you're happy to take -- you're willing to take money from them to build the 1.6 or to give the 1.6 billion to the border wall?"
As Saturday's CNN Newsroom with Fredricka Whitfield devoted a segment to the issue of women becoming more politically active after Donald Trump became President, CNN's Jodi Enda never applied a "liberal" label to the left-wing causes supported by recent women protesters even as she asserted that the current Congress is "quite conservative."