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Norah O'Donnell just can't stop condescending to supporters of Sarah Palin. Appearing on Morning Joe today, the MSNBC correspondent rehashed a line she has used before: that fans of Sarah Palin are just too darn busy to know what's happening in the world. According to O'Donnell, Sarah supporters don't have "30 minutes to an hour to read the newspaper."
As I reported here, O'Donnell sounded the same theme a couple weeks ago, when interviewing Palin fans waiting on line at a book-signing in Michigan. By coincidence, Jackie Seal, a high school senior and Palin supporter whom Norah had ambushed with some prepared notes, was a guest last night on Right Angle, the local TV show this NewsBuster hosts. We discussed O'Donnell's condescension, Jackie making the point that most supporters are well-informed about Palin's positions.
View the Right Angle segment after the break.
When O'Donnell began dispensing her slur on Sarah supporters, Mika Brzezinski tried to warn her of the reaction sure to come . . .
Fake but accurate rides again! The same lame defense Dan Rather used in Memogate has been trotted out on ClimateGate by Columbia Univ. Prof. Jeffrey Sachs.
Appearing on Morning Joe today, the author of Common Wealth [note play on words: your money is our money] alleged that the real victims in this scandal are . . . the number-fudging scientists. People are attempting to "Swiftboat" those poor CRU guys, sighed Sachs. For good measure, the good professor asserted that what the fudgesters did "is not a very big deal."
[Update, 9:15 pm: Video added below the fold.]
The CNN anchor led the 3 pm Eastern hour with a preview of the debate segment, as he played a video clip from Balog of a glacier in Alaska, and made his first hint that the ClimateGate scandal was going to be mentioned later: “The man who shot this video used to think global warming wasn’t real. He’s changed his mind. But leaked e-mails from prominent climate scientists tell a different story. You’re going to hear both sides.”
Before introducing both of his guests in the last segment of the hour, Sanchez played more glacier video from the photographer, as he further detailed the climate change controversy, and made another indirect reference to the ClimateGate e-mail scandal:
Ryan was pressing Gibbs over whether Desiree Rogers, the White House social secretary, essentially "invited herself" to last week's state dinner in honor of the Indian Prime Minister. Rogers has come under scrutiny for failing to have either herself or other social office staffers accompany Secret Service staffers who conducted security screenings for the dinner.
Gibbs, annoyed by Ryan pressing the matter, chided Ryan to calm down and suggesting that she was throwing a tantrum much like his son sometimes does.
I've included a partial transcript and CSPAN's video embed below the page break. Advance the embedded video above to about the 31:00 timestamp to see the relevant exchange (h/t Tim Graham):
Marriage, you see, is an anachronism that doesn't fit with how we moderns live our lives - or at least, how the important people in Hollywood live theirs.
"I know a lot of famous people," Polone said on Dec. 3 during an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Meeting." "And actually the norm is that they cheat."
Polone, who produced the 2009 movie "Zombieland," argued that it isn't fair for stars like Tiger Woods who are "in the public eye" to be "called to task for their behavior" - behavior that Polone said is "probably pretty natural behavior given what they're going through."
The real problem lies with society's idea of marriage. As a people, he said, we need to "rethink the idea of locking into someone for what one would call a lifetime marriage."
[Click here for information on how to join the MRC Action Team. You can view yesterday's Webcast in the video embed at right.]
Among other questions fielded, Bozell addressed the "why" in the perennial question, why are the mainstream media so liberal:
For years, broadcast and cable networks and even newspapers have presented Hilton's offensive blog - dubbed a "tastemaker" by the LA Times - as harmless and entertaining. In 2007, ABC's Jake Tapper called it "snarky, amusing, cool and fishy," and, in 2009, CBS correspondent Erica Hill called Hilton's commentary "a little tongue-in-cheek, maybe some snide remarks here about some perhaps not so flattering moments."
Yesterday, though, during his appearance on "The View," Hilton might have finally realized that his love affair with the media won't last forever.
The seemingly creepy fixation some MSNBC on-air personalities have with Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann just continues to persist on the cable network.
The latest installment involves MSNBC's "Ed Show" host Ed Schultz relying on a left-wing publication, The Minnesota Independent, which found a high rate of foreclosures relative in Bachmann's district relative to the rest of the state of Minnesota. Schultz, on his Dec. 2 program, contended Bachmann was spending too much time as a conservative activist and not enough time focusing on the problems of her district. But it turns out the data might not be at all accurate.
"One last page in my playbook tonight," Schultz said. "It looks like Minnesota congresswoman and ‘Psycho Talk' regular Michele Bachmann needs to spend a little bit more time riling up the right-wing nut job partiers out there and focus on her own back yard."
In a perverse advertisement currently on the its Web site, CBS is trying to cross market the crass television show "How I Met Your Mother" with the children's holiday classic "Frosty the Snowman" (and the not-so-classic "Frosty Returns").
Media Research Center President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell will appear on a live 20 to 30-minute-long Web cast starting at noon EST. You can submit a comment or question in the comments field below the video window there.
Be sure to catch the Webcast, hosted by Heritage New Media Partners, live at live.mrc.org.
It's perhaps indicative of the culture, but there has been a media obsession with the scandalous aspects of Michaele and Tareq Salahi crashing a White House State Dinner on Nov. 24.
However, the incident also demonstrated how vulnerable President Barack Obama could be to outside intruders, and that fact isn't getting the lion's share of the attention. Instead, coverage like that from NBC's "Today" show has been about reality TV and exclusive interviews. This soft focus, argued Fox News host Glenn Beck on his Dec. 1 broadcast, could have repercussions.
"Let me ask you, what's more reasonable: people walking by the Secret Service, and they're just, like, I don't know, sleeping - zzzz ... Really?" Beck said. "Or this is a publicity stunt? I don't think either of these are reasonable, but given the choice just between those two, I think I'd probably go with the publicity stunt."
There's something about these big events that cause MSNBC "Hardball" host Chris Matthews to go off script and say something seemingly ridiculous.
Matthews has publicly admitted President Barack Obama has given him a thrill up his leg after a campaign speech in Feb. 2008, and uttered "oh God," earlier this year after an Obama address to Congress, prior to the Republican response from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal earlier this year. And on Dec. 1, he referred to West Point as "the enemy camp" in coverage following a speech from Obama announcing his intentions to increase troops in Afghanistan. And, later that night - Matthews took a shot at former Vice President Dick Cheney (emphasis added).
"The president said tonight that we're fighting in Afghanistan because al Qaeda is in Pakistan," Matthews said. "Is that what this is all about? Is that why we're fighting and some are dying in Afghanistan? To deliver the message to the government over in Pakistan to fight harder against al Qaeda. It sounds more Rube Goldberg than ‘Remember the Alamo.' Also try tonight to workout whether the president's goals in Afghanistan are achievable. Are they? And of course, there's always Dick Cheney who jumped it from under his bridge to bite the president's ankle even before he made the speech tonight."