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On Friday night's NBC Nightly News, reporter Kelly O’Donnell and producer Shawna Thomas brought out more tweets addressed to its “Dear Congress” hashtag. It’s a little fun now to see what other tweets these Twitter correspondents are posting. A “MrKristoff” was quoted for tweeting “@johnboehner Enough already. Stop claiming to speak for American people & start Listening. #DearCongress”.…

Republicans are godless anti-government zealots responsible for a federal government shutdown that will literally kill people, MSNBC's Martin Bashir charged in the closing "Clear the Air" commentary on his Friday, October 4 program. But in a not-so-clever twist, the ever-sanctimonious Bashir -- who has a penchant for selective Bible-thumping to push liberal agenda points -- sought to enlist the…

As NewsBusters reported Tuesday, George Will has joined Fox News. In his first comments on the network, Will said on Friday's Special Report, "The President’s rather enjoying this [shutdown], and if the emblematic statement of the first Obama term was 'A crisis is a terrible thing to waste,' this term defined after just nine months is 'A crisis is a beautiful thing to create'” (video follows…

If Republicans were smart (I know, but stay with me) their focus during the Obamacare debate should have been less on blocking its implementation and more on a page they might have taken from the Democrat's playbook, which is to rally the country to its side by use of sentimentality and the threat of impending doom. The good news for Republicans is that there's still time. It's a sure bet…

The political stalemate leading to the so-called shutdown of the federal government has shown with devastating clarity how official Washington is consumed with symbolism over substance. The symbolism begins with the word shutdown itself. Despite the noise and fury in Washington, the vast majority of Americans haven't noticed any change in their daily lives because most of the federal…

It seems a metaphysical certitude the Obama-loving David Letterman didn't expect this response. During the opening monologue of CBS's Late Show Thursday, when the host asked the audience, "How many folks signed up on the ObamaCare," not one person responded (video follows with commentary):

On Thursday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams introduced a full report on cancer research at the National Institutes of Health being stopped under the government shutdown: "And there are the millions who are feeling the impact of this shutdown very close to home and across this country, including some for whom this standoff feels very much like a matter of life and death for them." In…

The Morning Joe crew, along with much of the liberal media, has lately been ringing the debt-ceiling alarm, saying that a failure to raise the debt ceiling by October 17 would cause a default that would devastate the U.S. economy. But on Friday’s Morning Joe, CNBC’s Michelle Caruso-Cabrera stepped onto the set and took a wrecking ball to the wall of hysteria surrounding a possible default.…

In a piece filed today, Associated Press reporter Bob Christie and his editors provided a textbook example of how to use loaded language to tilt coverage while still being entirely accurate with the facts. Covering a controversy in Arizona over the federal government’s closure of the Grand Canyon National Park and the state government’s attempts to keep it open, Christie painted the conflict as…

Are you happy now, Republicans? You went and forced the president to cancel his trip to Asia and with it an important foreign policy overture. That's the message Time magazine is sending readers with Michael Crowley's October 4 post, "Shutdown Dents Vital Obama Foreign Policy Goal," which was plugged on the Time.com front page with a photo of a frowning President Obama given the teaser headline…

On Friday afternoon, CNN's Don Lemon blamed the government shutdown over ObamaCare for "not really helping" the mentally ill woman killed by police on Capitol Hill on Thursday who needed "health care." "[T]his woman is in obvious need of mental health, and that means health care. And so what they're doing in Washington is not really helping her, is it?" he asked psychotherapist Wendy Walsh who…

CBS This Morning has a long established history of conducting softball interviews of liberal/Democratic guests, while unleashing on conservative/liberal ones. But on Friday, the morning newscast surprisingly hounded Rep. Nancy Pelosi on the ongoing government shutdown. Obama supporter Gayle King repeatedly pressed Pelosi about "people [who] are just saying...work it out....both sides have to be…

(UPDATE: See Chad's response to Washington Post's Sarah Kliff at the end of this post.) If what Reason's Peter Suderman is reporting is correct — and he certainly appears to have done the kind of digging you would expect conscientious journalists to do — the establishment press's lionization of Chad Henderson the Fantabulous Obamacare Enrollee is about to fall apart. Suderman spoke at length…

Appearing as a guest on Thursday's PoliticsNation, during a discussion of the government shutdown, MSNBC's Krystal Ball characterized congressional Republicans as "tak[ing] the whole government hostage," and "threaten[ing]" the "constitutional balance." After host Al Sharpton fretted over the operation of FEMA and the National Hurricane Center during the government shutdown, Ball responded: