Radio

Something tells me this isn't an argument that Supreme Court justices will hear this week.

Unhinged MSNBC circus clown Ed Schultz continues to unintentionally help conservatives, making a claim to a caller on his radio show Monday that was inane even by the epic standards for inanity established by Schultz. (audio clip after page break)

Give the man credit, he keeps setting new standards for delusion.

It was only weeks ago that liberal radio host Thom Hartmann was offering the most novel theory yet for the US-led invasion of Iraq, that it was a Rube Goldbergesque plot to privatize Social Security. (audio clips after page break)

On March 7, Newsweek assistant culture editor Marlow Stern went after "right-wing actress" Patricia Heaton of ABC's "The Middle" in an article headlined "Patricia Heaton's History of Outbursts:Sandra Fluke No Anomaly."  He complained "right-wing actress Patricia Heaton unleashed a Twitter tirade against Fluke. But Heaton, best known for playing the caring, cerebral housewife Debra Barone on the hit CBS television sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, is no stranger to controversial political statements." He didn't interview her. He just "exposed" her.

Nine days later, Stern is lauding hard-left actress Susan Sarandon as "brilliant" and "masterful," and setting her up to make outrageous left-wing attacks on Rush Limbaugh and "the wacky GOP." Despite this, she is not labeled as a liberal: "The seemingly ageless actress is, at 65, also not afraid to speak her mind." Stern didn't so much ask questions as offer please-trash-them softballs:

On Friday’s Stephanie Miller show, the host was typically adoring Obama’s snarky remarks about how the conservatives are flat-earthers when it comes to the awesome potential for green energy solutions. The forward-thinkers and the scientific minds hand over a half-billion dollars to Solyndra, apparently.

Unfortunately for Miller, her sidekick Jim Ward (who does impressions), completely lost his cool and said Obama’s critics “should test the alleged laws of gravity by jumping out of a plane without a parachute.” It’s another Playtex bottle of the milk of human kindness from liberal talk radio.

Happen to notice if a state senator named Obama was there too ...?

Freshly-minted MSNBC weekend host and purported Tulane academic Melissa Harris-Perry revealed on Al Sharpton's radio show Tuesday that she was in the audience at Trinity United Church of Christ for Rev. Jeremiah Wright's incendiary sermon on the Sunday after the 9/11 attacks. (audio clip after page break)

Dear Mr. Roberts,

As the chairman of Comcast, you have a responsibility to your shareholders and the public to produce programs which follow a basic standard of civility.

Unfortunately, MSNBC anchor Ed Schultz regularly doles out hate-filled, venomous rhetoric which has reached a boiling point. MSNBC should not give Mr. Schultz a platform to spew such hate.

On Monday, liberal radio talker Randi Rhodes ripped into the South, including a wish that it would secede again. She played clips of HBO interviews of Southerners done for Bill Maher and complained "Bobby Jindal even converted from Hinduism -- Nikki Haley, too -- in order to be acceptable to the conservative South in Louisiana and uh -- [about a five second pause] Georgia! I mean, that is crazy that in order to be acceptable to the party you have to, you know, pretend that you've given up your religion!"

Haley is governor of South Carolina, not Georgia, and her family are Sikh, not Hindu. Jindal converted to Catholicism in high school, so it's a little tough to argue it was all political calculation. Haley and her husband attend a Methodist church but she also was married in the Sikh faith out of respect for her parents. Liberal outlets like NPR have raised questions about the sincerity of her conversion.

Andrea Mitchell is no newbie to journalism. In fact, in 2010, she was given the Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism by the National Press Foundation. She's in good company with Brit Hume and the late Tim Russert among previous recipients of the award. But alas, the MSNBC anchor displayed no "excellence in journalism" with her brief, softball interview today with Robin Morgan of the liberal Women's Media Center.

Mitchell brought Morgan on to discuss her group's petition drive to request the FCC to ban Rush Limbaugh from the airwaves. The WMC's argument is that Limbaugh engages in "hate speech" which is not in the "public interest" and hence cause to push him off the air. Below the page break I've listed in bullet points the questions Mitchell posed to Morgan, which, as you can see, are all softballs meant to advance Morgan's talking points:

Imagine different lines of work for Mitt Romney and other Republicans, Ed Schultz asked his radio show guests and listeners on Friday.

The responses spoke volumes about Schultz, his guests and listeners. (audio clips after page break)

In the second half of his second hour today, Rush Limbaugh followed up on a phone call from a "Victor in Atlanta." Vince is concerned that many Americans like him, even though they want a different president, are "zapped out of enthusiasm."

Rush took Vince's call as an opportunity to look at the Sandra Fluke controversy of the past week and use its results as an indicator that enthusiasm for defending conservatives and conservative principles against the hate-filled left is as great as ever -- great enough to not only defeat the attempt to marginalize him but to force the left and the leftist establishment press to at least for the moment go into strategic retreat and to temporarily clean up its act (bolds are mine):

Updated at bottom of post | This morning, NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell sent letters to Jay Farner and David Friend, the presidents of Quicken Loans and Carbonite, respectively, addressing the hypocrisy of how their companies pulled out of the Rush Limbaugh program over comments for which the conservative talker has since apologized, even as they continue to advertise on the programs of hateful left-wing radio hosts.

For example, Carbonite continues to advertise on Ed Schultz's radio program, although he maliciously slammed conservative author Laura Ingraham in May 2011 as a "right-wing slut" and "a talk slut."

Continuing her network's anti-Limbaugh drumbeat today, MSNBC's Tamron Hall interviewed a little-known feminist activist by the name of Shaunna Thomas of the equally unfamiliar group UltraViolet, which is campaigning to deprive Rush Limbaugh of all of his sponsors. UltraViolet, apparently, is famous for pushing the specious and ultimately discredited claims about a supposed anti-abortion clinic bias by the iPhone 4S's speech recognition software.

To her credit, Hall noted that liberals like Bill Maher have said equally if not more offensive things than Limbaugh and not been called out on it, citing a tweet by none other than former White House aide Austan Goolsbee. "What do you make of this back and forth of, well he did it, but so did he?"

In a March 5 post in which she deemed Rush Limbaugh's Saturday apology to Sandra Fluke as insufficient to be rewarded by her holiness, Washington Post "On Faith" feature editor Sally Quinn pounded her electronic pulpit yesterday, condemning Rush's audience for being complicit in Limbaugh's sin of daring to bombastically criticize the Left (emphases mine):

Oh look, another unhinged left winger who other liberals will ignore while they continue their feigned indignation against Rush Limbaugh.

This time it isn't Maher or Olbermann or Matthews or Schultz or any of the usual suspects who warrant nary a glance from their ideological brethren when they spew hate that if uttered by anyone right of center would warrant immediate formation of a media lynch mob. (audio clip after page break)

Today NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center (MRC) president Brent Bozell launched a new website: IStandWithRush.org, where visitors can sign a petition denouncing "attempts by radical left-wing organizations and the media to censor Rush and his commonsense conservative message."

Rush apologized for his initial comments, "but the Left won't accept the apology" and "won't be satisfied until all of Limbaugh's advertisers pull the plug on his show," Bozell noted, before detailing a litany of instances where liberal talk show hosts like Mike Malloy and left-wing comedians like Bill Maher used misogynistic and venomous invective to trash conservative women in politics. You can watch that video embedded below or at IStandWithRush.org, where we encourage you to sign the petition.

On Thursday's All Things Considered, Julie Rovner, NPR's resident ObamaCare flack, claimed that the U.S. Senate rejecting an amendment protecting religious liberty was "closer than the 63 percent majority that supports the contraceptive coverage requirement" from the federal government, according to the poll from the liberal Kaiser Family Foundation. The organization is an oft-used source for Rovner.

The group obtained the 63 percent figure by asking a question that omits the religious liberty component to the firestorm: "In general, do you support or oppose the new federal requirement that private health insurance plans cover the cost of birth control?" A Pew Research Poll from mid-February included that issue, and found that 48 percent supported an exemption for religious groups, versus 44 percent in support of the mandate.

Former Catholic seminarian and left-wing radio host Bill Press took to his eponymous program today and devoted significant attention to the death of conservative blogger and author Andrew Breitbart. It was not all positive, although he did feature guests who had kind things to say about Breitbart's impact on Internet journalism.

"Raised a Catholic, I was taught the great phrase 'Necal [sic] nisi bonum*' you don’t say anything about the dead unless you’re saying good things about the dead. Well, then I should say nothing about Andrew Breitbart because I can’t think of one good thing to say about him." [MP3 clip here]

If you heard a loved one fulminate like this, you'd be morally obligated to initiate a medical, substance abuse or psychiatric intervention.

Liberal radio host Thom Hartmann unleased the latest moonbat conspiracy theory on his radio show Monday in response to a caller disparaging government (audio) --

Ed Schultz prides himself on all the time he's spent in Wisconsin over the last year, acting as bellicose cheerleader for its public-sector unions.

Alas, much of that time was wasted as shown by Schultz ignoring or not catching a blatant falsehood about Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker from Leo Gerard, president of United Steelworkers (audio after page break)

When has a liberal reached the realm of the truly unhinged? When reined in by Ed Schultz.

This happened yesterday on Schultz's radio show when one of his producers, James "Holmy" Holm, let loose with yet another memorable rant, this one about Virginia Republicans pushing a law that would mandate an ultrasound before an abortion (audio) --

Julie Rovner, NPR's on-staff shill for ObamaCare, filed an unashamedly one-sided report on Friday's Morning Edition about the controversial Obama administration mandate that forces religious institutions to include coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, sterilizations, and birth control.

Rovner turned to only two individuals for her pro-mandate report: Peggy Mastroianni, general counsel at the federal government's own EEOC, an organization which recently got slapped down in a unanimous Supreme Court decision concerning the rights of houses of worship in hiring and personnel matters; and Sarah Lipton-Lubet, a lawyer for the notoriously far-left American Civil Liberties Union, who until May 2011, worked for the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Rights.

On Tuesday, NPR somehow thought a poll commissioned by abortion behemoth Planned Parenthood on the controversy over an ObamaCare birth control mandate was newsworthy enough to play up on its website. But later in the day, on All Things Considered, a show that reaches millions in the U.S., the media outlet spotlighted how the "new polling...suggests most voters, including Catholics, support the measure."

Correspondent Scott Horsley noted the "survey released today by Public Policy Polling," but completely failed to mention Planned Parenthood's name during his report. Horsley also highlighted a disturbing strategy from the pro-mandate camp without: "Supporters of the new policy are belatedly trying to refocus attention in a more popular direction, away from religious freedom and towards women's health care."

Is a Planned Parenthood poll really newsworthy? On Tuesday, NPR spotlighted a PPP poll commissioned by the abortion giant which found that a majority apparently supports a federal government mandate on birth control that violates the religious liberty of Catholic institutions. The network also trumpeted how "the poll...suggested that Mitt Romney...could pay a price at the polls" for opposing the mandate.

Writer Frank James began his article for NPR.org, "Poll: Majority Of Voters Support Birth-Control Mandate," by pointing out that the ObamaCare regulation was "controversial." But he didn't acknowledge that the poll was "done on behalf of Planned Parenthood" until the second paragraph, and left out any kind of ideological label for the left-wing organization.

Update (18:46 EST): CBS has since changed the headline to "Controversial Voting Legislation Passes In Virginia Senate."

"'Jim Crow' Voting Legislation Passes in Virginia Senate," a CBS news headline on a Washington D.C. CBS news website alarmed readers tonight.

The AP/CBSDC story, filed at 10:33 p.m. Eastern on the website for CBS Radio's new all-news station WNEW, reports on the passage of a strict voter ID law in the Virginia State Senate. As we've noted previously, the Washington Post has reported, uncritically, Virginia Democratic legislators' Jim Crow comparisons, but it appears that CBS News is taking the Washington Post's bias even further (see screen capture below page break):

And no, he wasn't talking about golf clubs.

A liberal says what Ed Schultz said on his radio show Wednesday, other liberals shrug it off as just an opinion, albeit one oozing the odor of the Second Amendment. (audio after page break)

In other news, Al Sharpton rejected criticism that he makes his living as a race-baiting grievance-monger. Suffice it to say, uncomfortable truths do not sit well with this man.

Responding to Mitt Romney saying he's "not concerned about the very poor" because of the decades-old government safety net, Sharpton swung into action on his radio show with a claim that is delusional even by Sharpton's expansive standards (audio clip after page break) --

The former Tip O'Neill staffer-turned-political analyst who'd never heard of congressional insider trading until President Obama mentioned it in last week's State of the Union  insists he is unaware of the Bush Derangement Syndrome of many on the Left during the former president's tenure in the Oval Office. What's more, that's not his bias talking, it's just objective reality.

"There's a real level of national hatred of the president that I hadn't seen before. Certainly not under Clinton or under Dubya," MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews argued on WMAL radio's Morning Majority program this morning. "The hatred, the Hitler mustaches, all that stuff, I haven't seen that before," Matthews added, prompting co-hosts Mary Katharine Ham and Bryan Nehman to incredulously retort that, no, in fact, the Left used Hitler comparisons against the former president.

A report carried at CBS News in St. Louis from Jim Anderson of the Illinois Radio Network (IRN), which appears to be a private entity, tells readers that a research study (summary; PDF of relevant chapter) published by the Institute of Government and Public Affairs (IGPA) at the University of Illinois has identified "a combination of tough policies (which) could bring the state into fiscal balance by the end of the decade." To be clear, the end of the decade is seven years and eleven months from now.

Predictably, the "tough policies" include "maintaining increased income tax rates after they are scheduled to expire." On the spending side, what IGPA describes as "extreme austerity" means "keeping the growth rate of all spending down to 2.1 percent per year." Those who would rather not look at IGPA's detail can be forgiven, because the opening paragraph of the linked chapter above, which IRN did not cite, gives away the researchers' detachment from reality:

American Public Media (formerly American Public Radio) says that its "Marketplace" program "focuses on the latest business news both nationally and internationally, the global economy, and wider events linked to the financial markets."

Okay. One would expect, given the track record of leftist and communist movements and causes in ruining economies and creating unspeakable human misery, that if "Marketplace" were to do a segment on, say, Saul Alinsky, that it might note his antagonism towards free-market capitalism, and how damaging his "Rules for Radicals" recommendations have been in practice. Instead, those listening to yesterday's Alinsky segment got nothing but pap and misdirection orchestrated by a far-left labor prof: