Culture/Society

As the immigration reform debate heats up in Washington, liberals seem to think that they have a free rein to say whatever they want against people who are skeptical of the proposals on the table.  That’s exactly what happened on this afternoon’s broadcast of Now with Alex Wagner, with MSNBC contributor and former Democratic National Committee communications director Karen Finney charging that the “crazy crackers on the right” would doom the GOP in this immigration debate. 

Yes, Finney used a derogatory, racist term for white people in a segment in which Republicans were chided for allegedly dehumanizing Hispanics with terms like "illegal immigrant" and "anchor babies." Of course, Finney, a board member of abortion lobby group NARAL Pro-Choice America knows a thing or two about dehumanizing innocents.

Leave it to MSNBC’s openly gay host Thomas Roberts to not let facts get in the way of a good story in service of pushing a pro-same-sex agenda.  On the January 29 edition of MSNBC Live, Roberts brought on a gay couple from Kentucky to promote their efforts to obtain a  marriage license in the Bluegrass State.

Roberts, who has segments nearly every day promoting gay marriage, began this segment in his typical biased manner:

On the January 28 edition of his afternoon MSNBC program, Martin Bashir brought on liberal Democratic strategist Julian Epstein to talk about the left-wing’s favorite topic of late gun control.  As the interview progressed, Epstein made a comparison of the firearms industry to Big Tobacco, attacking firearms manufacturers for their role in sponsoring youth sporting events and publications like Junior Shooters.

This whole narrative was spawned from a ludicrous Sunday New York Times piece that basically said instructing kids in safe gun-handling is hazardous to their health.  As my NewsBusters colleague and MRC Times Watch director Clay Waters wrote today:

On the January 25 broadcast of MSNBC’s The Cycle, 9/11 Truther and liberal commentator Touré Neblett “thank[ed] God” that abortion was there to save him from unwanted fatherhood with a girlfriend who was "just not the one."  "[I]n some ways that choice saved my life," the MSNBC host insisted in his closing commentary, seemingly remorseless for how that choice cost an innocent human being his or her life.

Noting that last Tuesday marked 40 years since the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade,  Touré argued that there’s “something undeniably misogynist about the impulse to deny a woman's dominion over her own body and limit her ability to shape her life – and impose another sense of morality on her.”  So, when did respecting and protecting innocent life become “misogynist”?

Californians will be surprised to learn that the income-tax increase voters approved in November was, according to Doug Ferguson at the Associated Press (HT Steven Greenhut at Reason.com), "the first tax increase in the state since 2004." I had no idea that residents of the once-Golden state have been so lucky in avoiding any tax increases of any kind for so long. (/sarc)

It would appear that Ferguson, in his coverage of golfer Phil Mickelson's mea culpa for having the nerve to observe that California's onerous taxes might lead him to make difficult decisions which might even include retirement, meant to write that California has seen no statewide income tax increase in nearly a decade. But that isn't what he wrote. Maybe I should cut the AP reporter some slack because he's on the sports beat, and in context, one could see that he was probably only referring to income taxes. But I won't, because of the final excerpted sentence seen after the jump (bolds are mine):

The Washington Post’s Metro columnist John Kelly has climbed aboard the gun control train once again. Usually Kelly's writing is non-controversial non-political fare about local Washington, D.C. history, but this week, his columns turned political. For Inauguration Day, he turned his column into a screed to attack out-of-towners for being dismissive of the District of Columbia's lack of voting representation in Congress.

Two days later, Kelly turned his pen to pushing for more stringent gun regulations, recounting the horrific story of Judith Cox, a housewife who killed her four children, then turned the gun on herself, on Valentine's Day 1964.

The scary-looking "military style" AR-15 has been the target of the hyper-emotional left in the media ever since the Newtown shooting.  Most notably, Piers Morgan tried to take conservative commentator and CNN contributor Dana Loesch to task for owing one.  Last night, Dan Rather said on Morgan's show that,"there is no need to have these high-powered assault weapons."

But as it turns out, an AR-15 is an eminently sensible firearm for home defense, particularly for young women as Celia Bigelow and Aubrey Blankenship of American Majority Action explain in a January 23 piece at National Review Online:

During PBS’ coverage of the 2013 Inauguration, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, Gwen Ifill, and Yale University’s Beverly Gage seemed to have forgotten what the definition of liberal is within the context of Obama’s second inaugural address.  In fact, Gage said that this wasn’t an “endorsement of collective liberalism,” and Shields called it more “humanitarian.” 

The non-taxpayer subsidized liberal media has been more honest. Today’s New York Times said Obama offered a “liberal vision.”  Slate’s John Dickerson, who infamously called for Obama to destroy the GOP, called the 44th president’s address “a liberal love letter.”  ABC finally figured out that Obama is a progressive liberal.

Liberal Obama-backing musician James Taylor has no clue about what the president's latest executive orders on gun control entail, but insists that we need to “sacrifice” some our freedoms to keep America's children safe.  Taylor made these remarks in an impromptu interview with The Daily Caller’s Nicholas Ballasy shortly after the inaugural ceremonies yesterday:

As Barack Obama enters his second term, his inaugural address delivered today, showed an undeniably strong shift to the left.  The mentions of climate change and gay rights were much more overt, and was music to the ears of liberal media cheerleaders. One such commenter, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, seized on the occasion to hail the president for noticing that we’re on the “frontier of climate disaster.”

Hayes was adamant that we’re at zero hour on this issue:

During the monologue of Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, host Maher joked about wanting to see Texas Governor Rick Perry trying to defend himself from a killer using prayer, as he excoriated the Republican governor for suggesting that more religion could help reduce violent tendencies in people.

As he brought up the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, and opposition to the left's proposed new gun laws, Maher went after the Texas governor:

According to Lena Dunham, HBO’s “Girls” television show needs a third season to explore new sex positions. 

Writer and actress Lena Dunham appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Thursday to discuss her recent Golden Globe awards earned from her work with “Girls.” 

"The far left is making [the average American gun owner and NRA member] a villain for abiding by your Second Amendment rights," and they're finding willing accomplices in supposedly objective journalists like Bob Schieffer, Brent Bozell argued on the January 17 edition of Fox News Channel's Hannity. The Media Research Center president was reacting to a soundbite in which the CBS anchor compared the political challenge of President Obama taking on the NRA to defeating the Third Reich in World War II.

"Surely passing civil rights legislation as Lyndon Johnson was able to do, and before that, surely defeating the Nazis was a much more formidable task than taking on the gun lobby," Schieffer noted on January 16 shortly after President Obama's press conference on gun control. "This is a turning point in this country.," Schieffer insisted, concluding, "Unless we figure out a way to make sure that something like Newtown never happens again, we're not the country that we once were." [watch the full Hannity "Media Mash" segment below the page break]

On Thursday's CBS This Morning, Charlie Rose and Norah O'Donnell granted staunch gun rights supporter Michael Bloomberg a platform to blast the NRA as "stupid", and brush aside gun-owning Americans as a radical minority. O'Donnell set up the New York City mayor to accuse the gun rights group of being under the thumb of gun manufacturers.

The CBS anchors also took a more subdued approach to the Bloomberg segment, compared to their contentious interview of NRA President David Keene just minutes earlier. Co-anchor Charlie Rose led the segment with a softball question to the billionaire politician [audio clips from the Bloomberg interview are available here; video below the jump]:

Norah O'Donnell barely contained her contempt for NRA president David Keene during an interview on Thursday's CBS This Morning. O'Donnell confronted Keene over a new ad that ripped President Obama's support of gun control and referenced the armed Secret Service protection for Sasha and Malia Obama: "The NRA put out this ad in which you mentioned the President's kids....Why is it not off-bounds to use the President's kids or anybody's kids in a political ad?"

Keene tried to explain the intent behind the ad, but the anchor interrupted him mid-answer. The outrage in her voice was unmistakable [audio available here; video below the jump]:

Despite CNN waging a crusade for gun control over the past month, and host Piers Morgan drawing attention with his incessant activism and bullying of his opponents on the gun issue, CNN’s own poll shows that support for some gun control measures has dropped over the past month.

CNN.com reported on its poll Wednesday: "According to the survey, 56% support a ban on semi-automatic guns, but that's down from 62% in a CNN poll taken in the days after the shooting at Sandy Hook. The same is true for a ban on high-capacity ammunition clips - 62% in December, down to 58% now - as well as a requirement for all gun owners to register their firearms with the local government - 78% last month, down to 69% now."

Bob Schieffer somehow topped Chris Matthews during CBS News's special coverage of President Obama's gun control press conference on Wednesday, as he became the worst caricature of a foaming-at-the-mouth cheerleader for the chief executive. Schieffer lauded "one of the best speeches I've ever heard him [Obama] deliver", and compared Obama's  new gun control agenda to Lyndon Johnson's push for civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

The CBS veteran even went so far to liken the President's cause to the ten-year hunt for 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden and the difficult endeavor of winning World War II [audio available here; video below the jump]:

As news outlets, notably MSNBC, CBS, and CNN, all tout gun control, it’s hard not to accuse these news outlets of exploiting tragedy to promote a left-wing political agenda when a new Washington Post/ ABC News poll shows that gun control isn’t a top political priority with the American people. 

Examining the results of a new Washington Post poll, the Post's Chris Cilizza in his The Fix blog noted today that Americans believe the national debt and the federal government's chronic deficit spending are greater issues than gun regulation.  In fact, only 28 percent of Americans, including a paltry 41 percent of Democrats, feel the gun control issue requires urgent attention:

Today's Washington Post editorial clings to the liberal anti-gun rights view that only the government should have access to "military weapons," by which of course they mean semiautomatic "assault rifles" like the AR-15. Of course, government corruption and incompetence has long been an avenue by which criminals have obtained weapons, the Fast & Furious gunrunning scandal being an instructive case in point.

But alas, the drug-running scandal was curious missing from the January 11 editorial in which the Post argued that in addition to an assault weapons ban, the U.S. government needs to crack down on international gun-smuggling, particularly on the Mexican border:

On Friday's CBS This Morning, Bill Plante refreshingly spotlighted how firearms are used to protect the lives of ordinary Americans. Plante noted how the National Rifle Association "Tweeted a story...about Melinda Herman, a Georgia woman who shot an intruder in self-defense as she waited with her two children in a closet....She fired at the man multiple times with a .38 caliber handgun."

The two other Big Three morning shows failed to mention this story during their coverage of the current gun control debate. ABC's GMA actually minimized the air time they devoted to the issue. News anchor Dan Harris gave just one news brief to the next meeting of Vice President Joe Biden's gun violence task force:

Former Democratic Governor Ed Rendell channeled Piers Morgan on Friday's Now with Alex Wagner program on MSNBC. Rendell even upped the ante, claiming that there was a positive side to the Newtown, Connecticut massacre – that it boosts liberal efforts for stricter gun control [audio available here; video below the jump]:

Thursday's CBS This Morning trumpeted Piers Morgan's "crusade against gun violence in America", and gave the CNN host four and half minutes to spout his pro-gun control views unopposed. Morgan endorsed implementing something akin to the "really draconian" firearms regulations that the U.K. passed after the 1996 Dunblane massacre.

Despite denying that he wanted to take guns away from Americans, the British anchor repeatedly called for complete bans on "assault weapons" and handguns, along with high-capacity magazines [audio available here; video below the jump]:

With Lauren Thompson

The Newtown massacre spurred another round of calls for gun control, with a bill banning “assault weapons” emerging in the senate and the president threatening to take as yet unspecified executive action.

To be sure, Vice President Biden is meeting with entertainment industry representatives to discuss the violence ubiquitous on film and in video games. Given the cozy relationship between Democrats and Hollywood, those talks should produce nothing but photo-ops.

While the media were quick to point out how Garden State Republicans were quick to criticize the House Republican leadership for not calling a vote on Sandy relief before the expiration of the 112th Congress, you probably haven't heard about how a potential Democratic challenger to Chris Christie has gotten into hot water for saying the Republican governor "prayed a lot" for the devastating natural disaster to boost his popularity.

That comment came a few days ago from New Jersey Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D), in what seems to be another attempt by some Democrats in exploiting tragedy. While local New Jersey news outlets and some national  publications have reported the story, it seems that thus far ABC, CBS, and NBC have ignored this in their evening new coverage last night:

On Monday, far-left director Michael Moore went on an anti-Catholic bender at an awards presentation, and also targeted "those who would deify Reagan and Pope John Paul II" as somehow to blame for "the deaths of thousands of people...because of their bigotry."

The New York Post's Page Six on Wednesday spotlighted how the Occupy Wall Street-supporting filmmaker served as a presenter at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards. Moore gave the Best First Film award to fledgling director Armond White, who made a documentary about the radical activist group ACT UP.

CBS This Morning's slant towards gun control emerged again on Tuesday as they reported on the upcoming meetings of Vice President Joe Biden's task force on new firearms regulations. Despite a graphic spotlighting how "activists on both sides" were ready for a "fight" on the issue, the morning show only featured pictures of pro-gun control demonstrations, including one of a far left Code Pink protester disrupting a recent NRA press conference.

Anchor Charlie Rose also asked CBS News political director John Dickerson an eyebrow-raising question regarding the passage of federal gun control legislation in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut [audio available here; video below the jump]: