NB Staff's blog

Today's starter topic: It's not often that you see an Obama Administration official admit to making a mistake, which is why stimulus creator Jared Bernstein's remarks on so-called "green" jobs are worth preserving. According to Bernstein, the Administration didn't realize before the stimulus money was being allocated that operating solar or wind plants doesn't really employ a large number of people. In other words, the promised green jobs turned out not to really exist.

Today's starter topic: President Obama clearly isn't a believer in the phrase speak softly and carry a big stick. He took another angry shot at the Supreme Court yesterday, warning it not to throw out his dreadful health insurance law:

"And I'd just remind conservative commentators that, for years, what we have heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism, or a lack of judicial restraint, that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law," Obama said.

Reacting angrily to selective editing by NBC that suggested racial animus by George Zimmerman, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell complained to Fox News's Sean Hannity last night that NBC News was engaged in an "all-out falsehood." The story in question was a March 27 Ron Allen report on NBC's 'Today' in which 911 audio was edited to make it sound like George Zimmerman said "he looks black" immediately after saying "this guy looks like he's up to no good."

In the actual 911 audio, Zimmerman only described Martin's race after the dispatcher asked, "And this guy: is he white, black, or Hispanic?" "To edit that out is so distorting," Hannity complained. "Sean, it's not distorting, it's advancing a falsehood, it's worse," Bozell corrected the Fox News anchor. [see video below page break]

Today's starter topic: While the verdict of the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of President Obama's signature healthcare law won't likely be known by most people until the end of June, the justices on the court very likely will know its fate later today when they meet to cast their first informal votes on the case.

In an interesting look at how voting on the Supreme Court works, the Associated Press talks to former law clerks who give details on how the process operates:

On the Tuesday edition of his radio program, an unhinged Ed Schultz railed on against conservative "pigs" that were out to get him, like our very own publisher, Brent Bozell. "You know, if these people want to fight every day, we'll fight every day. That's OK with me," Schultz pledged, insisting he was not afraid, unlike other liberals, to fight back.

Our friend Brian Maloney at Radio Equalizer has a montage of Schultz's spittle-flecked rants. We've embedded them below the page break. Be sure to visit our Clean House at NBC website to register your disgust with Schultz:

Today's starter topic: With his chances of winning the GOP nomination decreasing as time goes by, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum said in an interview that he would accept an offer to be the Republican vice presidential candidate if he were offered it by likely presidential nominee Mitt Romney:

"It took the networks nine months before one of them made a mention of" the time that MSNBC anchor and left-wing radio host Ed Schultz slammed conservative radio talker Laura Ingraham as a "slut," and it was just "one story" compared to "46 [stories] in ten days" on the Limbaugh/Fluke controversy, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell noted on the March 23 Hannity.

The Media Research Center founder and president appeared as a guest on the "Language of the Left" special to unveil some numbers that the MRC had crunched contrasting the liberal media's obsession with Limbaugh with their silence on left-wing media personalities like Schultz and HBO's Bill Maher, who called former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin a c**t. The liberal comedian donated $1 million to an Obama Super PAC, and yet the media have been silent on the matter, failing to press the president on whether his Super PAC should give the money back. Watch the full Hannity segment in the video embed below.

Today's starter topic: While the Obama Administration has refused to approve the permanent job-creating Keystone XL pipeline in its entirety, it seems that officials are much closer to giving the nod to build a high-speed train connecting Las Vegas to a town in the middle of nowhere, 100 miles away from Los Angeles. And not just approve the project, they also are poised to "loan" nearly $5 billion to the project, which happens to be connected to Nevada Democrat and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid:

Watching the Elite Eight this weekend? Sound off on this thread about college basketball or whatever else you'd like.

On Friday's Your World with Neil Cavuto on the Fox News Channel, MRC director of media analysis Tim Graham appeared to review how the media covered the politics and economic of gas prices under the Obama administration as compared to the Bush administration. Fox News ran a series of headlines showing the difference in approach -- high gas prices could doom Bush, but aren't Obama's fault, and could be a good sign.

Tim mocked Friday's headlines on the front page of The New York Times as well, which demonstrated the media urge to happy-talk President Obama to a win in the fall. [Video and transcript by Scott Whitlock below, audio here]

GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney's campaign strategy is in focus with two stories highlighting it. The first is a remark that's now become infamous by an adviser named Eric Fehrnstrom who compared Romney to the children's toy Etch-a-Sketch, stating that in the general election, Romney would become a completely new candidate and not necessarily the conservative he's presented himself as. While trying to draw in centrists is something that almost every campaign tries to do after getting through the primaries, Fehrnstrom's remarks were so blatant that they've upset many.

Speaking of Romney's general election strategy (should he indeed win the nomination), National Review's Jim Geraghty argues that the main point to it will be Romney calling President Obama in over his head as an easier way of helping people who had voted for the president in 2008 reverse their choice this time. Rather than telling such voters they're stupid, the argument goes, they should be told that Obama has had his chance but just hasn't been up to snuff.

Today's starter topic is of the non-political variety: the Sweet 16 men's NCAA basketball play starts tomorrow. What are your predictions for that round of the tournament play?

In political news, Mitt Romney won yesterday's Illinois primary. The congressional committee charged with estimating tax revenues asserted that the so-called "Buffett Rule" will do almost nothing to solve the deficits that President Obama has been racking up. Of course, this is something that conservatives have long said.

It doesn't matter if Ed Schultz donated all union speaking fees to charity as he claimed in response to a March 9 NewsBusters post, according to media critic and former CBS reporter Bernie Goldberg.

The pro-union Schultz was still obligated to tell his MSNBC viewers that he received nearly $200,000 from organized labor in 2011, Goldberg told Bill O'Reilly on "The O'Reilly Factor" last night. (video after page break)

On Wednesday, MRC director of media analysis Tim Graham was a guest on Your World with Neil Cavuto on the Fox News Channel. The subject was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s odd declaration that the latest CBS/New York Times poll showing an all-time low approval rating for Obama was “meaningless,” and he’s suspicious of polls. Fox then ran a series of Reid soundbites touting polls as a contrast.

Tim said, “The real poll that matters are elections. I’m sure Harry Reid would have told us in 2010 that polls saying the Republicans were going to take the House of Representatives were meaningless. They didn’t end up being meaningless.” (Video below the cut)

MRC President Brent Bozell appeared on the Mark Levin radio show, Thursday, to premiere a new montage of Ed Schultz's most hateful comments and attack MSNBC's double standard. Pointing out liberal journalists who have called for Rush Limbaugh's firing, but are silent on Shultz, Bozell declared, "I’ve had it with the dishonesty. I’ve had it with the shameless posturing. I’ve had it with the hypocrisy.  And it’s time to call them out on it."

Video of Schultz's foaming, unhinged rants over "bastard," "slut" conservatives can be found below. [MP3 audio here.] After Levin played the montage, which included Shultz suggesting some conservatives want to murder Barack Obama, Bozell wondered, "Have you ever heard any one of those reporters who were upset with Rush Limbaugh ever express any outrage at anything that Ed Schultz has said along the lines we just played you?"

Are left-wing hatemongers like Ed Schultz sullying the NBC brand? How do legitimate, albeit left-leaning, journalists like Matt Lauer or Tom Brokaw feel about NBCUniversal's cable news outlet, Fox News's Sean Hannity wondered during last night's "Media Mash" segment with NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell.

"You have to wonder about that. When you think of Tom Brokaw, when you think of the late Tim Russert... these are liberals... but there was almost always a level of civility, and although you could continue disagreeing with one another, it was an honest disagreement," Bozell noted. Unfortunately, "radicals that far exceed anything Tom Brokaw ever did" dominate on MSNBC. [see video below]

Our friends at MRCAction.org, a division of our parent company the Media Research Center, are urging folks to put the pressure on the White House to give back comedian Bill Maher's $1-million Super PAC donation.

For how you can join the campaign, click here. Be sure to watch the corresponding video embedded below the page break:

Three states voted yesterday in the GOP presidential primary with Rick Santorum winning the states of Alabama and Mississippi and Mitt Romney winning Hawaii. Things are more complicated than that, however, due to the fact that delegates to the RNC weren't given out on a winner-take-all basis. Thanks to his relatively close finishes in the two states won by Santorum and an additional victory in American Samoa, Mitt Romney actually came away with the most delegates last night. While Santorum and Romney did well, last night was a tough one for Newt Gingrich, who failed to win the popular vote in any of the contests. More below the break from the Washington Times:

Of all political groups, government employee unions have perhaps the greatest interest in growing government and staving off any political reforms. Many Republicans are unaware of this truth, but now it is New York Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo who is finding this out first-hand as he tries to restructure the awful mess that is the state's employee pension liability system. There are several reforms the greedy union bosses are fighting but the one they're most against is moving employees away from a defined benefit pension plan to the 401(k) plans that most Americans have. For the union 1 percenters, that is outrageous:

"There's only one person who's trying to insert the reproductive rights debate into this campaign," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell noted in the "Media Mash" segment  of the March 8 edition of Fox News Channel's Hannity.

It's Barack Obama who made this a live issue when he moved to push religious institutions to provide contraception, even if it violates their religious conscience to do so, Bozell noted.  Sure, the media know that Obama is the one waging a "war" on this issue, but they're aggressively pushing the liberal Democratic spin on the issue as a cudgel to attack Republicans, particularly social conservative ones. [watch the full segment in the video embedded  below the page break]