Video

RNC Chairman Michael Steele shot back at CNN’s Wolf Blitzer after the anchor tried to smear conservatives with racism on Wednesday’s Situation Room. The CNN anchor pointed out a racist sign at a Tea Party, and Steele replied, “Don’t hold up one person as an example of behavior by everyone.” The RNC chairman also rebuked Blitzer after the anchor pointed out the GOP’s dearth of minorities in Congress [audio clips from the segment are available here].

Before he introduced Steele, Blitzer played a clip from former President Jimmy Carter, who attributed “overwhelming portion of the intensely-demonstrated animosity towards President Barack Obama” to racism. He then asked the RNC chairman for his take on the Democrat’s remarks. Steele replied that Carter was “just dead wrong....I am, like a lot of Americans, concerned and disagree with the President’s policies and approaches from the stimulus spending to this health care strategy. Am I a racist because I disagree with that? I don’t think so.”

Michael Moore, the man of many hats - documentary filmmaker, political scientist and now, singer.

Moore has been making the rounds to promote his new movie, "Capitalism: A Love Story." On NBC's Sept. 15 "Jay Leno Show," Moore appeared and was asked what was wrong with capitalism.

"Capitalism is actually legalized greed," Moore said. "There's nothing wrong with people earning money, starting a business, selling shoes. That's not what I'm talking about. We're at a point now Jay, in this country, where the richest 1 percent, the very top 1 percent have more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined."

ABC and NBC on Tuesday night joined the effort to undermine the anti-Obama tea party participants by smearing them as racists as ABC framed a story around the proposition “some prominent Obama supporters are now saying” the opposition to Obama is “driven, in part, by a refusal to accept a black President,” while NBC anchor Brian Williams touted how “former President Carter spoke up and spoke out about” the supposed racism. Williams alleged “a certain number of signs and images at last weekend's big tea party march in Washington and at other recent events have featured racial and other violent themes and President Carter today said he is extremely worried by it.” (MP3 audio of Williams, Video below)

With “OUT OF LINE?” on screen beneath what appeared to be pictures from the August town halls, ABC anchor Charles Gibson set up the piece from Dan Harris who recited a litany of liberal presumptions:

They've waved signs likening President Obama to Hitler and the devil, raised questions about whether he was really born in this country, falsely accused him of planning to set up death panels, decried his speech to students as indoctrination and called him everything from a fascist to a socialist to a communist. And all that was before Mr. Obama's speech was interrupted by a Representative who once fought to keep the Confederate flag waving over the South Carolina state house. Add it all up, and some prominent Obama supporters are now saying that it paints a picture of an opposition driven, in part, by a refusal to accept a black President. (MP3 audio, Video below)

Over the last several weeks, no one has been the target of the left-wing media and blogosphere more than Fox News host Glenn Beck, even more so than his radio host counterpart Rush Limbaugh.

Although conservatives have decried the daily ad hominem attacks, some voices on the left are starting to realize that's not an effective strategy for championing their cause, especially when it comes to the hot-button issue of the day, health care.

And that is really starting to bother Air America host Lionel - that is the daily repetitive nature of attacking Glenn Beck and/or Rush Limbaugh by giving a litany of complaints about what they said, as he laid out in a nearly three-minute tirade on his September 14 Air America radio show.

So what if his network is drawing a larger audience than its combined competition? So what if one of his newest shows has drawn unprecedented numbers for a start-up that airs at 5 p.m.? According to Newsweek's Howard Fineman, Fox News President Roger Ailes is tarnishing his own personal reputation.

It could just be sour grapes for Fineman, who is affiliated with rival network MSNBC and was appearing on that network's "Countdown" with fill-in host David Shuster, but he attacked Fox host Glenn Beck and the 9/12 protestors he helped inspire.

"Well, he can - he can pretend to cry all he wants on the stage and call himself a televangelist," Fineman said of Beck on MSNBC's Sept. 14 "Countdown." "He is not into uniting the country, from everything I've seen. He is making a boatload of money dividing the country. When you say with no real evidence whatsoever that the president of the United States hates white people, you aren't behaving in the spirit of 9/12, you're behaving in a spirit that we thought we've gotten rid of at the end of the civil war and the end of the second civil rights movement. So, you know, he can cry the crocodile tears all he wants. That doesn't seem to be what he's actually doing."

This is a notion that hasn't really gotten any traction anywhere yet, but could Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C. be a viable 2012 presidential election candidate? 

The hosts of Fox Business Network's "Happy Hour," Eric Bolling, Rebecca Diamond and Cody Willard, contemplated that possibility on their Sept. 14 show, which comes on the eve of a vote on a "resolution of disapproval" on Wilson for calling out "You lie!" as President Barack Obama spoke to a joint-session of Congress Sept. 9.

"First off, House Dems appear set to censure South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson for shouting ‘you lie' at President Obama during last week's health care speech, but Wilson is not backing down," Diamond said. "He told Fox News Sunday he will not apologize to the House tomorrow. Instead, he is turning this - all of this into a fund-raising campaign, claiming he has raised $1 million since the outrage incident last Wednesday. So we are asking, ‘Hit or Miss' on whether Democrats risk turning Representative Wilson into a viable conservative candidate for 2012."

Interviewing Barney Frank this morning on proposals to regulate the financial markets, MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan seemed set on appeasing the notoriously rude representative.  Ratigan had surely seen the video of Mark Haines' CNBC interview of Frank back in June, and was determined not to suffer the same fate, in which Frank ripped off his earpiece and ended the segment short.

Even before posing his first question to Frank, Ratigan began by laying a sop at the great man's feet: "I know you're working very hard on this legislation.  And before we begin, I had a lot of folks come to me and say listen, make sure you thank the representative for his efforts to try to deal with this.  You are dealing with an incredibly complicated problem with a variety of issues.  So I wanted to pass along the appreciation of your efforts before we begin this conversation."

His tribute to Frank didn't spare Ratigan a reprimand when later on he dared to get in a word edgewise.  So Ratigan naturally concluded the interview . . . by apologizing to Frank for having interrupted him.

Entrapment n. In criminal law, the act of law enforcement officers or government agents inducing or encouraging a person to commit a crime when the potential criminal expresses a desire not to go ahead. The key to entrapment is whether the idea for the commission or encouragement of the criminal act originated with the police or government agents instead of with the "criminal."

It's turning into quite the morning for NBCers to defend the left on Morning Joe . . .

First, Chuck Todd flatly rejected the notion that the MSM failed to adequately report on Van Jones, suggesting coverage would have been a waste of time.  Later, Norah O'Donnell came on and suggested that the video of the ACORN employees giving advice on how to evade the tax laws in setting up a brothel with young illegal aliens "might be viewed as entrapment." [H/t FReeper mimaw.]

I've been trying to give Chuck Todd the benefit of the doubt when it comes to classifying him as part of what Rush would call the state-controlled media. But that indulgence was strained to the breaking point on Morning Joe today when Todd flatly rejected the notion that the MSM had under-covered the Van Jones story and suggested that delving into his background would have been a waste of MSM time.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: You say this has been a Republican obsession, ACORN. It certainly hasn't been an obsession in the media. Mike Allen said the mainstream media was slow on the Van Jones story, also slow on this [ACORN] story. Is that a fair charge?

CHUCK TODD: You know, no . . .

You might have figured this was coming, that when dust settled from the Sept. 12 march on Washington, D.C., the brain trust at MSNBC would attempt to frame it as negatively as possible.

And MSNBC's resident left-wing curmudgeon-in-training David Shuster didn't disappoint. The former host of the canceled "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" took a report from the Huffington Post debunking attendance figures and attempted to belittle the event. The story focused on an old photograph that had been circulating on some minor conservative blogs showing a huge crowd for the Sept. 12 march.  

Shuster asked Washington Examiner columnist and author of "The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money" if some conservative blogs were going to circulate a phony photo, why should the movement have any credibility? But Carney didn't take the bait and instead showed that MSNBC and other mainstream media outlets were committing a similar offense.

At the end of Monday's World News, ABC played a new Tom DeLay-focused promo for Dancing with the Stars, featuring a twirling and swirling former House Majority Leader. The new season will premiere on Monday, September 21.

The announcer, over brief video of DeLay doing a solo dance act that is better seen (watch the accompanying video of the promo) than described: 

For the first time ever, the Republican hammer moves to the left. Tom DeLay is Dancing with the Stars. Live, three-night premiere, next Monday, 8, 7 Central, on ABC.

 

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) appeared on MSNBC around 3:40 p.m. EDT today to defend Rep. Joe Wilson's (R-S.C.) claim that President Obama was lying about Democratic health care reforms not ensuring "public option" coverage of illegal immigrants. [MP3 audio available here]

King explained at length about Democrats voted down Republican amendments to put in place an enforcement mechanism to check the legal status of public option applicants.

Of course at the end of his interview, Shuster was unmoved, sticking to his guns that Joe Wilson "was lying" and insisting that Republicans were more interested in making political hay out of the illegal immigration question than safeguarding taxpayers from subsidizing illegal immigration:

Not everyone at the NBC Universal umbrella of networks got the gag order memo about the Sept. 12 march on Washington, D.C.

Rick Santelli, who has been a target of the Obama White House and is credited with being the inspiration for the 2009 tea party movement, spoke out about how the media ignored the march. But, a year after the fall of Lehman Brothers, he was making the larger point that the government's intervention to thwart a financial crisis had been an ineffectual and potentially dangerous maneuver at the expense of taxpayers.

"I think this one-year anniversary is great, but I think it's great for another reason," Santelli said on CNBC's Sept. 14 "Squawk Box." "I think someday we'll learn that we didn't need to do very much, that time heals all wounds and you don't have to go broke in the process."

Video of Baltimore ACORN activists willing to help a pimp and prostitute work out a tax shelter for a brothel is a "devastating" indictment of the liberal activist group, Media Research Center President Brent Bozell pronounced on the September 11 "Hannity." [MP3 audio available here]

"It shows the power of the Internet. It doesn't matter anymore that [Big Three broadcast networks] ABC and NBC and CBS aren't covering it. The world now knows about it because people go in there and show them the truth," Bozell noted, adding that it proves what conservatives have been saying that ACORN "is a suspect organization [subsidized] with millions of taxpayer dollars."

Bozell also discussed the controversy involving Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), who yelled "You lie!" at President Obama during last Wednesday's speech before Congress:

About a year ago, then-Senator and Democratic nominee Barack Obama managed to seize control of the issue of taxes from the Republican Party by promising lower taxes for "95 percent of Americans."

But today it's a drastically different situation. Obama's $787-billion stimulus has been passed into law and the administration is taking on higher deficits, which will only increase if a Democrat health care reform bill passes. It looks as though the president's hand will be forced and he will have to raise taxes. That's begs question - where were the media on this a year ago?

CNBC's Erin Burnett asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner at a CNBC made-for-television town hall on Sept. 10 if taxes would be raised. Geithner dodged the question, but Burnett interpreted the dodge to mean yes, as she explained on NBC's Sept. 13 "Meet the Press."

Maybe there's a reason why the media have either denigrated or completely ignored the Sept. 12 march in Washington, D.C. - they were highly critical of their job performance as well.

Aside from protesters taking on CNN reporter Lisa Desjardins, as NewsBusters Matt Sheffield pointed out, there were also other pockets of backlash against media evident at the march, which were captured on video (pardon my shoddy camera work).

The march that preceded the rally in front of the U.S. Capitol took place on Pennsylvania Avenue, from Freedom Plaza to the West Lawn of the Capitol went directly in front of the Newseum, a building erected that supposedly honors those deemed the most important practitioners of the First Amendment - the news media. Marchers chanted, "Shame on the press," as they passed the colossal 250,000-square-foot building dedicated to the press situated between the White House and the U.S. Capitol on Pennsylvania Avenue. (0:17)

Friday night on his HBO show, Bill Maher tried to discredit critics of President Barack Obama, including those concerned about his talk to school children, by smearing them as racists – before he pointed to a Drudge Report headline, “POLL HELL: OBAMA NEGS RISE,” as somehow an example of the ways “some of the right-wingers are always dropping subliminally racist messages.”

Maher first took up Congressman Joe Wilson's “you lie” shout at Obama: “To heckle a President, to shout in the middle of a speech, would he have done that if it was a white President? I don't think so. I think this is a southern guy who thinks 'I can do whatever I want when it's a black guy speaking.'”

Moments later on Real Time, Maher raised “the folks who did not want the President of the United States to speak to their children. No one who is sane would think the President was going to make a partisan speech to school children. And yet, there's something about that,” recalling “I grew up in an all-white town in northern New Jersey” and “I remember hearing parents talk when I was a kid, you know, they didn't want black people just talking to their kids. That's what this reminded me of.”

"Most people in their right-thinking mind know that the Tenth Amendment is a bunch of baloney." [audio available here]

That according to brilliant constitutional scholar MSNBC's David "biased in favor of facts" Shuster, who matter-of-factly insists the "general welfare" clause in Article 1 of the Constitution "unambiguously authorizes" social welfare spending like "social security, Medicare, veterans' care, etc."

Shuster made his comments today shortly after 4:30 p.m. EDT in reaction to Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R), who recently suggested that Tenth Amendment grounds could be a means of opposing as unconstitutional certain Democratic health care proposals.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) has climbed nearly 45 percent since hitting a March 9 low. The S&P 500 (S&P) is up nearly 53 percent. And the NASDAQ (NASDAQ) has soared a whopping 61 percent since the March bottom.

But that rally has some analysts shaking their heads. Art Cashin, a CNBC regular who also makes frequent appearances on CBS and NBC news programs to offer insight on the financial markets, was skeptical. He told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Sept. 11 he got some of his money out of the market and got burnt, but is still scratching his head over the rally.

"Away from that, I'm still somewhat skeptical about this," Cashin said. "I've been wrong, got out too early, certainly. I took some money off the table as I told you, about a week and a half, two weeks ago. Didn't take it all off, um, may take some more off if they keep going."

Noting how the Palmetto State "has a history of rowdy politics" and that Rep. Joe Wilson (R) has made himself  "the latest in a legendary line of South Carolina politicians who appeared to revel in renegade behavior,"  the Washington Post's Philip Rucker and Ann Gerhart turned to South Carolina Democratic operatives Don and Carol Fowler to smear Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) in their September 11 front-pager entitled "The Gentlemen From South Carolina."

Rucker and Gerhart turned to the husband-wife couple -- he was a Clinton era DNC chairman and she is the current South Carolina state Democratic chairwoman -- to practically tag-team in slamming Wilson. Rucker and Gerhart also acknowledged some Palmetto Democrats' brushes with political infamy before cuing up Don Fowler to quip that he thinks "it is something in the water."

Yet nowhere in their story did Rucker and Gerhart note Don Fowler's gaffe from August 2008, when, on a flight from the Democratic Convention, he made an inappropriate joke involving hurricane victims in New Orleans (video embedded above at right):

Jake Tapper has distinguished himself within the White House press corps as someone consistently willing to pose probing questions to the president and his aides.  But on today's Good Morning America, ABC's chief White House correspondent used a particularly unflattering metaphor for Rep. Joe Wilson and his decision to go on Fox News to defend himself.  As a clip of Rep. Wilson on last night's Sean Hannity show rolled  . . .

JAKE TAPPER:  Although Wilson apologized to the White House for his lack of civility, he quickly took to the limelight of conservative media like a moth to a flame.

Update (16:35 EDT): Thanks for watching and be sure to tune into "Hannity" on Fox News tomorrow night around 9:30 p.m. EDT. Mr. Bozell is scheduled to be on for two segments.

Media Research Center President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell will appear on the Breitbart.tv's "The B-Cast" via Skype today at 4:15 EDT. He will be discussing last night's speech by President Obama to the Congress.

You can watch by clicking the link here or by watching the embedded video feed below the page break:

 

Talk about an empathetic doctor, someone who really feels her patient's pain . . .

On her MSNBC show this afternoon, here's how Dr. Nancy Snyderman described her reaction to Rep. Joe Wilson's "you lie!":

"It was a gut punch to me."

Snyderman was kibitzing Pres. Obama's health care speech to Congress with NBC chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd.

At least he didn't call them "clean and articulate" . . .

Joe Biden has given the latest, best example of the adage that "a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth."

Appearing on Good Morning America today to talk up Pres. Obama's health care speech to Congress, the veep praised his boss for debunking various supposedly false assertions, including "how we're going to insure illegal aliens."  Biden was just about to move on when, realizing his crime against political correctness, he revised his remark: "undocumented aliens," quoth the VP.

What's 16-17 million uninsured among 300 million Americans?

Apparently not much to President Barack Obama, who slipped a not-so-subtle change to a statistic he had cited previously different during his Sept. 9 address to a joint session of Congress. The president pointed out there are "more than 30 million American citizens" who are having difficulty obtaining health insurance (emphasis added).

"We are the only advanced democracy on Earth - the only wealthy nation - that allows such hardships for millions of its people," Obama said. "There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage. In just a two year period, one in every three Americans goes without health care coverage at some point. And every day, 14,000 Americans lose their coverage. In other words, it can happen to anyone."

While none of the other cable networks experienced any technical delays leading into Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., CNBC - the business arm of NBC Universal's cable empire didn't quite get there on time.

Boustany was cheated out of a little over a minute and a half giving his response on CNBC. However, its sister network - MSNBC, and the major cable networks caught up with the Republican response to President Barack Obama's Sept. 9 speech to a joint session of Congress.

Instead, viewers were treated to "The Kudlow Report" host Larry Kudlow and CNBC Washington correspondent John Harwood, reflecting on the president's speech. It is worth noting that Harwood earlier this week called parents that were opponents of the president's Sept. 8 school address weren't "smart enough" to raise their kids.

Of all the Obama cheerleaders in the MSM, could there possibly be one more devoted than Dr. Nancy? On her MSNBC show today, Snyderman bemoaned to a White House aide that the push for ObamaCare had been "going so well" till it was hijacked by rumors, innuendoes and "lies."

Snyderman was chatting with White House advisor Melody Barnes, who didn't seem to take the possible defeat as hard as did her host . . .

Since hitting their lows back in March, financial markets have rallied in the wake of last year's financial crisis. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) is up 43 percent since March 9. But can it last?

It could be all given up with this rate of government spending according to CNBC "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer. Cramer, responding to a viewer e-mail on his Sept.8 program, explained what a higher national debt would mean to the average citizen and investors in the near and long term. He said expect the market to go down and higher taxes eventually.

"I know that this is going to mean our taxes are going to go way up," Cramer said. "I have to tell you this eventually means this market will come down. It is in when what I call the out years, not to worry about it yet."

"[I am] against this most monstrous of all meddling on the part of authority: the meddling with the subsistence of its people. . . . [One must] manfully . . . resist the very first idea, speculative or practical, that it is within the competence of government . . . to supply the poor with necessaries. . . . To provide for us in our necessities is not in the power of government. It would be a vain presumption in statesmen to think they can do it." -- Edmund Burke, 'Thoughts and Details on Scarcity', 1795.

Jon Meacham strikes me as a knowledgeable man. Surely the author of a well-regarded biography of Andrew Jackson knows his history.  Ignorance thus cannot explain how the Newsweek editor could with a straight face describe Barack Obama as "the real Burkean in American politics right now."  Yet on today's Morning Joe, Meacham effectively depicted Obama as the bearer of the torch of the man often described as the father of modern conservatism . . .

 

Dan Gainor, the Vice-President of Business and Culture for the MRC, appeared on the September 8 edition of Fox Business Live to discuss the media's failure to report on President Obama's green jobs czar Van Jones, who resigned late Saturday night.

Gainor stated that the mainstream media "absolutely ignored" the Jones stories. He detailed: