Brent Scher's blog

She's clearly not even trying anymore. Today on her MSNBC program, Andrea Mitchell used words that clearly were meant to paint the Republican Party as retrograde.  After insisting that President George H.W. Bush had supported Planned Parenthood as a congressman decades earlier, she posed the question “So how has the Republican Party devolved to the point where we are now re-litigating all of this?” [video available below the jump]

The use of the word "devolved" in this context would be perfectly natural coming from the spokeswoman for a liberal interest group or a partisan Democrat, but is unfitting and inappropriate from an ostensibly objective journalist.

[Updated with video.] Where in the world was Kent Conrad? The Senate Budget Committee Chairman was supposed to appear on Thursday's Morning Joe program to dispute the idea that the Democrats are being irresponsible for not passing a budget in over 1000 days. Senator Conrad left viewers without a defensible argument, because he never showed up for the interview. [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski seemed clueless as nobody was on camera when they shot over to Capitol Hill for the interview.  The irony of the Senator not showing up for an interview to defend the do nothing Senate from being labeled as irresponsible was so clear that the liberal cable network MSNBC couldn’t help itself.  Even the left-leaning Brzezinski joked, “Maybe he’s looking for the budget.”

MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports on Monday featured the Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to bizarrely state that Barack Obama had introduced a "balanced budget." Unfortunately for Jeffery Zients and the liberal cable network, it is hard to hide the fact that the President’s proposal actually projects a budget deficit of $1.33 trillion for the fiscal year 2012, according to the Wall Street Journal.

When asked what he thought about the Republican Senate renaming the proposal ‘Debt on Arrival,’ Zients stated, “I think the President has put forward today a balanced budget.” For the country to have a balanced budget, its spending must match its revenue, and the country has not come close to that feat in some time now. Obama’s proposal marks the fourth straight year of budget deficits exceeding a trillion dollars. [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Time magazine's Mark Halperin on Thursday admitted that if Republicans were in control of the Senate, which has now gone over a thousand days without passing a budget, the liberal New York Times wouldn’t be giving them the same free pass that it is giving the current Democrats in the Senate. 

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough pondered, “What would the New York Times editorial page say about a Republican Senate that didn’t produce a budget in over a thousand days?”  Halperin, who is also an analyst for MSNBC, quickly shot back, “They would be getting creamed.”

On today’s edition of Morning Joe, MSNBC gave a significant amount of coverage to the Obama administration’s federal mandate that religious colleges and hospitals cover contraception in their health insurance plans, regardless of whether doing so would violate their church’s teaching. To no surprise, co-host Mika Brzezinski was prepared for the discussion having talked it out with her handlers in the White House. [MP3 audio here]

Brzezinski admitted that she did not fully understand the issue and was curious to know more.  So of course she went to the White House for clarity, rather than say columnist Peggy Noonan who wrote a column that the White House convinced her was “very misleading.”