Tea Parties

Newly minted Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a Tea Party politician, is "raising bipartisan hackles" and otherwise being a "bad boy" in the previously collegial U.S. Senate, opined political reporter Jonathan Weisman on the front page of Saturday's New York Times: "Texas Senator Goes on Attack And Raises Bipartisan Hackles."

Clearly disturbed about Cruz's treatment of Obama's nominee for defense secretary Chuck Hagel, reporter Weisman even put a mike in front of not one but two liberal Democratic senators who likened Cruz to notorious Sen. Joe McCarthy. Well, at least Cruz is liked by what Weisman called "ardent conservatives."

On Wednesday, the New York Times published a News Analysis of the President’s State of the Union address entitled “In Age of Spending Cuts, Making a Case for Government.” While the author, Richard Stevenson, makes a correct argument for how the President is pushing for larger government despite a shrinking federal budget, he ignores how there is no actual reduction in federal spending.

In particular, there are at least seven misleading or inaccurate statements in the analysis:

Looks like liberals are still trying to peddle the discredited allegation that Tea Party members attacked black members of Congress.

The op-ed page of today's New York Times contains a column by James Sleeper, a long-time left-wing activist, now a lecturer at Yale.  The gist is the grudging respect that Sleeper came to have for Ed Koch, the former New York City mayor who passed away two days ago. Sleeper writes of how as mayor, Koch wrestled to the ground a protester who had stormed the stage as he spoke and pelted him with eggs.  Sleeper wrote that Koch's asking the audience whether they wanted the other protesters removed looked demagogic at the time, "[b]ut not so much now, with Tea Party heckling and assaults on public officials." More after the jump.

What’s more embarrassing, hateful, ignorant and racist than a “right-winger”? Not much, according to MTV. The youth oriented network’s reality show “True Life” ran an episode called “I hate the government” last Friday which detailed the lives of three “right-wingers.”

The episode description reads: “Amelia, Caleb and Andrew are three right-wingers who despise the very thing that holds our country together, the U.S. government.”

The liberal media's handling of any conservative political organization is a four-phase process, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told Tea Party News Network reporter Scottie Nell Hughes in a recent interview in the MRCTV studio. "It begins by ignoring them, and if you can make them go away that way, you're done," the Media Research Center founder noted. "If that doesn't work, then you go to phase two, which is to ridicule them. And if that doesn't work, you go to phase three, which is try to destroy them. And if that doesn't work, then you're at phase four, where you have to accept the reality that they're there."

Bozell then examined how the coverage by the liberal media evolved along that template. [see full interview below the page break]

On Monday's CBS This Morning, Norah O'Donnell seemed unsure about the extent of Tea Party's political influence. During an interview of former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, O'Donnell first indicated that the movement was a potent force: "I want to ask you...about how powerful the Tea Party is. Is the Tea Party holding back House Republicans and Speaker Boehner from agreeing to additional revenues?"

The anchor later hinted the Tea Party's power was on the wane: "FreedomWorks spent $40 million in the last election, and you had less than one-in-four of a winning record on the candidates you backed. Was it the organization, or is the Tea Party weakened?"

Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) announced Thursday that he will be trading his Senate seat in January to assume the helm of the Heritage Foundation. Covering the surprising development in its Friday edition, Politico dismissed DeMint as a mediocre politician with an undistinguished record who is moving on to captain a conservative think tank that has become "predictable, uninspiring, and often lacking in influence."

Manu Raju and Scott Wong mocked DeMint's lack of credentials in their front-page story titled, "DeMint Departure Fallout." They described him as a popular senator who has actually "accomplished very little" in Congress because he "wasn't a legislator" and having "no signature laws to his name." Of course, this betrays an inside-the-Beltway way of thinking about success in Congress. Conservatives dedicated to shrinking the size and scope of the federal government are not going to be be known for legislative accomplishments, which more often than not are about expanding the federal government's size and scope, not dismantling old bureaucracies.

During a discussion of the new film Lincoln on Sunday's NBC Meet the Press, documentary film maker Ken Burns ranted about one of the supposed lessons he took away from the movie: "Race is always there in America....Do you think we'd have a secession movement in Texas and the other places, faddish secession movement, if this president wasn't African-American?  Do you think the vitriol that came out of some elements of the Tea Party would have been at the same level had this President not been Africa-American?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Even though Republicans kept the House, CNN was trying to bury the Tea Party on Wednesday. Anchor Carol Costello asked if the movement was dead while CNN's headline proclaimed the "end of the Tea Party movement."

"Is the Tea Party dead?" Costello ridiculously asked GOP strategist Ana Navarro. She took a shot at Fox News after Bill O'Reilly blamed some liberal media for "promoting ideology," to which Costello said "You mean like Fox?" Costello apparently believes she is non-partisan. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

When CBS’s longtime Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer sits down in Boca Raton, Florida, tonight to moderate the final 2012 presidential debate, he’ll be following three journalists who became targets for criticism over how they handled their moderating duties.

Upset liberals scorned PBS’s Jim Lehrer for taking a hands-off approach in the first debate on October 3, with MSNBC analyst Howard Fineman slamming him as “practically useless” for not jumping into the debate on behalf of President Obama.

Drifting around the dial this morning, I happened on MSNBC's Weekends With Alex Witt.  Within minutes, I was stunned by two Witt whiffs, to wit:

1. Criticizing the Tea Party's lack of "diverse thinking," she asked Joe Scarborough "how much has the Tea Party damaged the Republican party?" Joe gently explained that far from damaging the GOP, the Tea Party propelled it to historic landslide victories in 2010. 2. Witt later cast the Salt Lake Tribune's recent endorsement of Barack Obama as a "surprise," ignoring the fact that in 2008, the Salt Lake Tribune endorsed . . . Barack Obama.  View the video after the jump.

Jake Sherman at the Politico is suffering from the same detachment from reality I found his colleague Anna Palmer in this morning (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog).

Palmer's piece asserted that an election win by GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney would herald the return of l-l-l-lobbyists, who have supposedly (not actually) been a rare presence in the pristine and pure Obama administration. Sherman's affliction is just as serious, if not moreso, as in an item posted Monday evening, he characterizes 2012 as a "non-Tea Party year," and seems to believe that everyone who disapproves of the job Congress has been doing must be to the left of House Speaker John Boehner. Hilarity follows the jump:

In an obituary for former Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter on Sunday's NBC Nightly News, correspondent Kelly O'Donnell summarized his shift in political allegiance this way: "Specter's views, supporting abortion rights, immigration reform, and gun control, made him too liberal for the Tea Party movement...Under assault, he bolted to the Democratic Party."

Introducing O'Donnell's report, anchor Lester Holt declared Specter to be "a longtime voice of moderation in Washington, and at times a figure of controversy." As evidence of Specter's controversial nature, O'Donnell cited him questioning the credibility of Anita Hill during a 1991 Supreme Court hearing: "Specter angered many women over the spectacle around Anita Hill, who claimed Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her."

Corrected from earlier | Time magazine managing editor Richard Stengel appeared on the September 27 Morning Joe to give viewers a preview of the latest issue of the magazine, the cover story of which is devoted to Mitt Romney's Mormon faith. At the tail end of the segment, teasing other articles in the issue, Stengel plugged Bobby Ghosh's interview with Mohammed Abdel Rahman, the son of Omar Abdel Rahman, the "blind sheikh" serving time in a federal prison for his role in aborted 1993 bombing plot targeting the World Trade Center.

"We have a great piece by Bobby Ghosh, who's been on here before about the rise of the Salafis, in the Middle East, they're the Tea Party of Muslim democracy, and that's a fantastic, insightful story as well," Stengel noted. Neither Joe Scarborough not co-host Willie Geist threw a penalty flag at Stengel's unnecessary roughness, comparing the Tea Party to radical advocates of stringent Sharia law. [MP3 audio here; video at bottom of post]

With Occupy Unmasked being released today in select theaters, this morning’s edition of CNN’s Early Start with Zoraida Sambolin invited David Bossie, producer of the film and President of Citizens United to discuss the film.  However, things got hazy towards the end of the interview where Sombolin shamelessly tried to convey the narrative that Occupy is a “peaceful” movement.

On Tuesday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams brought on political director Chuck Todd to give a "damage assessment" for Republicans in the wake of the Todd Akin controversy. Todd attempted to blame the conservative grassroots for the uproar: "...the Tea Party effect....will maybe cost Mitch McConnell a shot at controlling the United States Senate. Their own infighting has done this." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

What Todd failed to mention was that Tea Party Express and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin backed one of Akin's opponents, Sarah Steelman, in the Missouri Republican Senate primary.

Is the Tea Party on the decline or not? Don't ask the New York Times. Political reporter Michael Shear wrote in Monday's paper that "Tea Party Hopes to Gain Larger Stage in Election With Romney's Pick." The text box: "A movement already energized by a string of electoral victories." But in May, a Times reporter wrote that the Tea Party "has lost momentum." Here's Shear:

For two years, Tea Party lawmakers in the House have been the stubborn barbarians at the gate, strong-arming their often reluctant Republican colleagues by refusing to compromise on spending, taxes, debt or social policy.

Has the Tea Party truly "siphoned energy and support from violent fringe groups"? On Wednesday James Dao and Serge Kovaleski of the New York Times reported on the murderous rampage at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin: "Music Style Is Called Supremacist Recruiting Tool."

After working in the threat of "ultra-right-wing militias" (though all indiciations are that the killer acted alone), Dao and Kovaleski threw in a reference to the Tea Party as a "more mainstream alternative" to such violent domestic terrorist outfits, though there has never been violence or arrests at Tea Party rallies.

What does it take to win a Pulitzer Prize or write editorials for the Washington Post?  Hard to say [though being a liberal certainly helps], but familiarity with the basic constitutional principles upon which our country was founded is apparently not required.

On today's Morning Joe, Pulitzer Prize winner and Washington Post editorialist Jonathan Capehart apologized to Senator Tom Coburn for being unfamiliar with Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, the Enumerated Powers clause.  As you'll see from the clip, Capehart's befuddlement regarding the clause seemed to extend beyond the specific article number to the very principle that it embodies.  View the video after the jump.

Gosh, I think John Hanna and the Associated Press need to do something about their use of eliminationist language and violent imagery.

Look at how AP headlined Hanna's late morning report on the rise of conservatism in several midwestern and southern states at the likely expense of moderate incumbents (shown in full because of its brevity and for fair use and discussion purposes).

Our friends at MRCTV have a great new video that goes through a short history of the liberal media's penchant for hastily laying the blame for spree shootings and other violent attacks on conservatives. Yet time after time, when all the facts came out, we learned that it was anything but conservatives behind each and every incident. Of course, by the time all the facts came out, the media spin and speculation had already sowed the seeds of misinformation. As is to be expected, some of the worst offenders were MSNBC talent like Keith Olbermann and Ed Schultz.

My personal favorite of the ones that narrator Dan Joseph recounts is the media's rush in 2009 to speculate that suicidal U.S. Census worker Bill Sparkman was murdered by some anti-government extremists -- whipped up no doubt by the Tea Party movement -- when in fact it turns out Sparkman staged the scene of his hanging to look that way. You can watch the full video in the embed that follows the page break.

Actor James Earl Jones appeared on the public-radio show Smiley & West last weekend and discussed how he stuttered as a teenager. “There’s a certain terror I still have about confronting people.  I can’t debate, I can’t argue, I fall apart...I cannot be an activist, for instance, because of that.”

But as Brian Maloney reported, host Tavis Smiley wanted to draw his politics out. Jones quickly obliged by saying he simply cannot get enough of watching MSNBC, even though he is the voice of CNN, and agrees with the MSNBC notion that the Tea Party must be racist to oppose Obama (audio and transcript below):

In a report currently time-stamped early Saturday morning, Emily Wilkins at the Columbus Dispatch claimed in her opening sentence covering Ohio's second We The People Convention in Columbus ("Fears fuel kinship at tea party convention") that "Tea party members are alone and scared — and to them, that’s a good thing."

Well, I was there this weekend in Columbus. I didn't see "alone" or "scared," or hear anyone say that such a combination of emotions would be "a good thing. Neither did the rest of Wilkins' report, some of which follows the jump:

In the minutes following the Supreme Court’s controversial decision to uphold ObamaCare, MSNBC's Chuck Todd dismissed opposition to the law as purely partisan politics.  Todd, who is the Chief White House correspondent for NBC News has decided to suddenly become a liberal pundit now that ObamaCare was upheld by the Supreme Court. [Video follows page break;  MP3 audio here.]

Todd claims that those opposing ObamaCare represented a:

On his PBS show Monday night, Tavis Smiley welcomed liberal former Sen. Bill Bradley to discuss his political agenda, which began with repealing the Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United decisions on campaign financing. But what stood out most was Smiley ripping the Tea Party as more Republican than American.

Bradley suggested “even” the Tea Party are Americans first. “I’m just not sure that I’m persuaded,” Smiley said.

Joining the rest of the media in mourning the primary defeat of Republican Indiana Senator Richard Lugar on Tuesday, on Wednesday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams praised the "old-school moderate" who "was attacked for working to compromise with the White House" and lamented: "His defeat comes close to ending the era of centrist Republicans in the Senate."