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On his Wednesday program, Ronan Farrow called on MSNBC’s favorite failed congressional candidate Krystal Ball to aid him in decrying both the “corrupt system of Congress” today and the “U.S. policies in the '90s” that have lead to the immigration crisis on the border. This was after the host of Ronan Farrow Daily unironically brought Jack Abramoff, a lobbyist convicted of bribing public officials in 2006, on to hype the backhanded relationships of congressmen and lobbyists.

Both Farrow and Ball teamed up to counter Republican strategist John Feehery’s defense that congressional relationships with lobbyists are evidence of  “distraction[s]” rather than of a “system” that “is necessarily corrupt.” Krystal responded by citing “new research that shows that the voices of ordinary citizens literally have no impact on our legislative process,” while Farrow switched the subject to immigration reform before Feehery could respond. [See video below. Click here for MP3 audio]

The liberal media love to hate the Koch Brothers but are far less enthusiastic about connecting George Soros’ billions to liberal policies.

On July 6, Coral Davenport of The New York Times revealed that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new regulations on power plant emissions were largely inspired by the work of environmental activists at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The broadcast networks have not mentioned the NRDC connection to the new regulations, and even the Times ignored that  liberal mega-donor Soros has bankrolled the NRDC.

In an interview with White House adviser Cecilia Munoz on her Wednesday 12 p.m. ET hour show, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell actually tore into the President's poor handling of the immigration crisis and his refusal to visit the border: "...the reality is that the White House has been slow to react. And that there is something to be said for presidential optics, if you will, for presidential appearances, that's part of leadership, is it not?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Moments earlier, Munoz tried to argue that there were "a whole host of activities" being undertaken by the administration to "make sure that we stay ahead of the situation." Mitchell interrupted her: "But you're not ahead of the situation. With all due respect, the reality on the ground is that the administration did not stay ahead of this."

Wednesday morning’s episode of The View got a bit heated when the panel decided to weigh in on the Supreme Court’s controversial Hobby Lobby ruling. Liberal guest host and former CNN legal analyst, Sunny Hostin sought to inform the audience of the “scary” and “dangerous” decision made by the Supreme Court.

Curiously enough, Sherri Shepherd offered “another opinion” and stood by Hobby Lobby by attempting to explain the strongly-held religious beliefs of the company's owners. That's when Hostin, a former ABC World News Now anchor, erupted, “No. Sherri, you are so wrong on this!”

During the barely two minutes of coverage they allotted to a House hearing on VA scandal whistle-blowers, ABC, CBS, and NBC on Wednesday morning refused to report that the VA officials who tried to silence their colleagues for reporting wrongdoing within the agency received over $100,000 in bonuses in 2013.

Coverage of the House of Veterans Affairs Committee hearing from Tuesday night totaled 2 minutes and 24 seconds with only 44 seconds of that from NBC’s Today and a scant 26 seconds from ABC’s Good Morning America. [MP3 audio here; Video below]

Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was sentenced to 10 years in prison today on fraud, bribery and related charges. In a January 2006 appearance on PBS's Tavis Smiley Show, Nagin, who in many several previous news reports had been described as a Republican who became a Democrat once he sought political office, told Smiley that he "never was a Republican" and he has been a "life-long Democrat."

As would be expected, several media outlets are failing to report Nagin's declared status as a "life-long Democrat." A particularly egregious example is at USA Today (saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes, and in case USAT makes revisions; HT longtime NB commenter Gary Hall; bolds are mine):

Has Barack Obama lost Mika Brzezinski? Wednesday morning on Morning Joe, the MSNBC co-host wondered why the President is still refusing to visit the border while in Texas. Brzezinski argued that if Obama really does have a vision, why not go down to Texas and show the Republicans lack of effort on the issue?

Of course, Brzezinski threw in the “make Republicans look bad” caveat, but she also pointed out that, because of how out of hand the crisis at the border has become, “it’s been so difficult to figure out which side has the better point on immigration.”

Media Research Center VP for Business and Culture, Dan Gainor, appeared on Fox Business' "Varney & Co." to discuss the BBC's decision to censor climate change skeptics.

On July 5, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) announced it was training journalists to ignore skeptical views on man-made climate change. Rather than condemn the BBC, American media outlets like The Huffington Post, Salon and even the Washington Post have praised the BBC for this censorship.

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MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, who is known for softball interviews with pro-abortion activists, appeared distraught during her Andrea Mitchell Reports program on Wednesday, July 9 at the chances of a Democratic bill meant to reverse the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby passing Congress. 

Speaking with Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), one of the co-sponsors of the legislation, Mitchell fretted that the bill “can get through the Senate, but it’s not going to get through Congress.” [See video below.] 

For the second day in a row, CBS This Morning reported live from Seattle as Washington State officially legalizes marijuana. The on-screen graphic for the segment promoted the "high times" sure to come. Standing in front of Cannabis City, reporter Adriana Diaz enthused, "At 12 o'clock, Tuesday, dubbed high noon, Cannabis City's owner cut police tape to symbolically mark the legal sale of recreational pot for the first time." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

The story featured celebrations and footage of an employee yelling, "Open for business! Hooray!" Only near the end of the segment did Diaz note that some people are "taking issue" with the legalization. She featured Courtney Popp, the special deputy with the Washington state patrol. Popp explained, "Ever since the legalization passed, every park you go to, every large public event, there are people openly smoking marijuana." 

Michael Eric Dyson successfully filled in for Ed Schultz on the June 8 edition of The Ed Show by continuing the tradition of blaming America’s problems on Republicans and ranting about their heartlessness. For this show, Dyson chose to focus his opening monologue on blasting “the party that claims to believe in family values and Christian charity” that also calls for Obama to tighten border security and deport illegal immigrants crossing the border.

Dyson stated that “maybe it's time for people of faith to come forward to show conservatives what true compassion means.” He completed his attack on conservative devotion to religion by asking his liberal viewers to text their answer to his poll question “is compassionate conservatism dead?” [See video below. Click here for MP3 audio]

On Wednesday's NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie attempted to link House Republican opposition to Democrat-backed immigration reform legislation to the current border crisis: "There's also this immigration reform bill that's been passed in the Senate, it's dead on arrival in the House....is it a situation where you think members of Congress would rather have the political issue than a potential resolution?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Guthrie posed that question to chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd, who replied: "I think members of Congress don't want this issue at all during the fall campaign....The regular immigration reform, totally dead. That's not going to happen at all."

Broadcast news outlets have figured out a way to end terrorism. Just stop calling it what it is. They identify terror groups like Hamas “militants” instead.

Hamas has been raining rockets indiscriminately on Israel and is blamed for the recent kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens. It’s a group the United States has designated as terrorist for nearly 17 years. Yet on evening and morning broadcasts, ABC, CBS and NBC called them “militants” and “fighters” by a 9-to-1 margin over “terrorists” (18-2).

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Leave it to MSNBC to twist the rhetoric of the Tea Party following Thad Cochran’s upset of Chris McDaniel in the June 24 Mississippi runoff. On Tuesday's Now, host Alex Wagner and David Corn of Mother Jones both strongly suggested that racism is the reason why the Tea Party objected to thousands of Democrats pushing Cochran to victory.

Wagner sneered, “This is particularly pointed for the Republican Party, not just because it's Republican versus Republican but the votes they are questioning are predominantly black votes.” She then took things up a notch, claiming that the Tea Party views black voters as illegitimate: [MP3 audio here; video below]

According to TMZ, 9/11 truther and denouncer of "radical Christianity" Rosie O'Donnell has signed a deal with ABC to once again be a permanent host of The View. In the wake of the retirement of Barbara Walters and the departures of Jenny McCarthy and Sherri Shepherd, the show has turned to the woman who once said this of America: "I just want to say something. 655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. Who are the terrorists?" 

On September 12, 2006, after token conservative Elisabeth Hasselbeck raised the threat of "radical Islam," O'Donnell spat back: "Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have a separation of church and state." On March 29, 2007, the talk show host promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories on the show: "I do believe it is the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel. I do believe that it defies physics for the World Trade Center Tower Seven, building seven, which collapsed in on itself." [See below for video and MP3 audio of O'Donnell's top five most shocking quotes.]

Less than a month after its official release date of June 10, Hillary Clinton's book, "Hard Choices," has today plunged below the Amazon Top 100 list to a humbling #102 as of this writing. Over at Simon & Schuster, the book publisher who paid Hillary a big campaign contribution in the form of a whopping $14 million advance, there is now a lot of angry finger pointing according to the New York Post's Page Six.

Just as humbling is the news that Hillary's book has been replaced at the top of the New York Times Best Seller list by Edward Klein's "Blood Feud" which is highly critical of her. To make this a trifecta of bad news for her, comes a report on a new metric, the Hawking Index, which shows that the few people who actually attempt to read "Hard Choices," don't make it past page 33. First let us look at the upset executives at Simon & Schuster as reported by Page Six:

Ronan Farrow devoted a significant portion of his July 9 show to attempting to coopt the storied heroism of Raoul Wallenberg to spin the Mexican border crisis. The MSNBC host invited the US Ambassador to Sweden Mark Brzezinski and Swedish Ambassador to the US Bjorn Lyrvall onto Ronan Farrow Daily to discuss the accomplishments of the Swedish humanitarian who saved thousands of Jewish lives during the Holocaust and the Congressional Gold Medal to be awarded to his surviving half-sister.

After the interview, Farrow turned to his two favorite liberal pundits, Karen Finney – of the canceled Disrupt news show – and Howard Fineman of The Huffington Post for their analysis about how we should take to heart the “lesson of Raoul Wallenberg” not to “turn away these people as they’re being persecuted.” [See video below. Click here for MP3]

Appearing on Meet the Press's web-based feature Press Pass, New York Times opinion editor Clay Risen told NBC host David Gregory that just as Republicans "had to be convinced" that civil rights legislation in the 1960s "was a moral issue," so too would the GOP have to convinced on the issue of "gay rights": "...a lot of people who, when it comes down to it, don't really have an opinion one way or another but maybe just had a default position against it, starting to come around and say, 'Okay, I get why this is important.'" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

The commentary was prompted by Gregory comparing the two movements: "...we even see parallels with what a lot of people think is a parallel to gay rights, to marriage rights now, a debate about what the federal government should do, the courts should do, and what states should be allowed to do themselves."

NBC News is promoting the death of NPR star Diane Rehm’s husband as a political cause. The headline Tuesday was “Diane Rehm: My Husband's Slow, Deliberate Death Was Unnecessary.”

NBC’s Maggie Fox tilted the entire story into a lobbying piece for “aid in dying,” including a pull quote where Rehm compares her husband to a poodle or a household cat:

Much like Don Quixote mistook windmills for giants and wished to do battle with them, Republicans wrongly perceive Democrats as extreme leftists and consequently work themselves into an ideological lather.

That was, essentially, one of the main points that Salon’s Paul Rosenberg made in his Saturday piece on "Tea Party phonies" pegged to the Pew Research Center’s recent study on American political polarization. Rosenberg contended, reasonably enough, that congressional Republicans as a group are far more conservative than their counterparts of fifty years ago, but also claimed strangely that congressional Democrats are, overall, no more liberal than their mid-’60s predecessors.

MSNBC host Chuck Todd assembled a panel of liberal-media veterans on his morning show “The Daily Rundown” Monday and joked that the assembled heavyweights presented “a nightmare scenario for Brent Bozell.” But what these journalists proceeded to issue was a devastating indictment of the Obama presidency and a real nightmare for this president.

Carolyn Ryan, the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, brought up “the national funk we’re in, the sort of national malaise.” The word “malaise” is never a good word to be around if you’re the president. But for Obama, who is now seen in polls as the worst president since World War II, worse than the Master of Malaise, Jimmy Carter, it’s Kryptonite.

Karma-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!

Shortly after Costco announced that it was removing Dinesh D'Souza's book, "America: Imagine A World Without Her," from its stores, it soared to #1 on Amazon.Com. Meanwhile, Costco has been licking its wounds from all the angry reactions it has received and has raised the white flag of surrender by announcing that it will be restocking that book at its stores. So not only has the Costco attempt to yank D'Souza's book utterly failed but it has also hurt its reputation with its customers as you can see in the many reviews at Amazon which slammed Costco:

Hardball host Chris Matthews made some bizarre comments about the potential Republican candidates for president in 2016 on Tuesday night. 

Speaking to Jeanne Cummings of Bloomberg News and Republican strategist John Feehery, Matthews took a swipe at Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and suggested “he's the Republicans' John Edwards.” [See video below.]

As my colleague Clay Waters noted, the New York Times finally caught up with the Washington Free Beacon's month-old scoop about an audiotape recording of Hillary Clinton chuckling as she recalled her successful 1975 defense of a man accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. Perhaps because there was no longer any plausible deniability about the existence of the story, MSNBC's Chris Matthews tonight devoted a segment to the controversy, bringing on Bernard Center founder Michelle Bernard and Salon's Joan Walsh to discuss the matter. While all three agreed that the controversy would in no way sink Mrs. Clinton's 2016 prospects, Walsh was particularly vociferous in her defense of Clinton, while Matthews and Bernard were critical of the former first lady. At one point, a testy Walsh charged Bernard with twisting the facts of the story.

"Look, Chris, it's not a fun tape to listen to, I'm not going to try to sugarcoat it," Walsh began, but this was simply a case of Mrs. Clinton doing her job. The accused rapist was simply fortunate to have in Mrs. Clinton a "good" defense attorney. But, "[i]s it laughable that you got a rapist off for raping a 12-year-old? Why is she laughing?" Matthews demanded of Walsh, who countered (emphasis mine):

On Monday evening's NBC Nightly News, host Brian Williams used a perhaps revealing verb to describe a belief held by former Soviet foreign minister and Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze, who died on Monday at 86.

It would be good to look back and learn how Shevardnadze came to say what he said a decade ago before getting to how Williams framed it. As reported in Doug Martin's obituary at the New York Times (bolds are mine throughout this post):