Carly Fiorina

It’s no secret that the nation is preparing for a GOP tidal wave with significant conservative victories in the Senate and House next Tuesday. The election has essentially focused on domestic economic policy. Conservative candidates have been gaining ground with a popular job growth/lower taxes/revive the economy mantra.

But desperate liberal Democrats have suddenly shifted the focus from the economy to divisive social issues like abortion and gay rights, and the mainstream media have been more than willing to give them a platform. Media personalities like Matt Lauer, Rachel Maddow and Eleanor Clift are loudly voicing concerns over the future of gay marriage and the legal status of abortion.

(Video below the fold)

Apparently one of the most pressing issues in the California senatorial race is whether or not Sarah Palin is "too extreme." Good Morning America's Robin Roberts on Friday pressed Carly Fiorina twice on that issue, insisting on knowing why the former Alaska governor hasn't been campaigning for the Republican.

She demanded, "We know that Sarah Palin has visited California recently, but she was not campaigning for you. Why not Sarah Palin? Is she too extreme for you?" The co-host followed-up: "Down in Florida, Charlie Crist had an ad campaign saying Sarah Palin is just too extreme for some Republicans."

Barbara Boxer has not appeared on GMA during the 2010 campaign season, so there's been no opportunity for the show's host to grill the Senator on supporters such as director Rob Reiner, who recently compared the Tea Party to Nazis. [MP3 audio here.]

Video after the break.

New York Times readers were greeted Sunday morning by the American Left's new feminism wherein it's not only acceptable to demean conservative women, it's desirable.

The architect of this truly bizarre neo-feminism, Ms. Maureen Dowd, proudly wrote in her October 17 column, "We are in the era of Republican Mean Girls, grown-up versions of those teenage tormentors who would steal your boyfriend, spray-paint your locker and, just for good measure, spread rumors that you were pregnant":

When is it OK for a politician to slam a shot to show she's a regular gal? Easy: when she's a Dem.  If she's a Republican?  Well, that's a shot of entirely different sort. She's a wasted drunk.

Just ask Ed Schultz.  On his show this evening, the MSNBCer took Carly Fiorina to task for taking a shot of tequila on the campaign trail.  Schultz slammed the California Republican senatorial candidate as "drunken" and "wasted."  

Should Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, GOP candidates for Governor and Senate in California, respectively, be worried by recent CNN/Time poll numbers showing both trailing by sizable margins? In short: no, not really.

That's because Time/CNN seem to have stacked the deck by significantly overestimating the number of Democrats likely to vote in this year's strong anti-Obama electorate.

According to the Weekly Standard's Jay Cost, the Time/CNN poll seems to think that Democrats will have more of their voters this year than in their banner 2008 year. Cost examined the Time/CNN numbers, compared them to exit polls from previous elections, and concluded - accurately, I believe - that the poll significantly oversampled Democrats.

On Monday's Rick's List, CNN's Jessica Yellin leaned against California Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina as she compared one of her ads against that of her opponent, Senator Barbara Boxer. While Yellin acknowledged that Boxer's ad was "negative," she also  complimented it as "very effective." The correspondent went on to label Fiorina's commercial "mean" [audio clips available here].

Substitute anchor Brooke Baldwin discussed the California Senate race with Yellin 17 minutes into the 3 pm Eastern hour. Baldwin first noted that the San Francisco Chronicle declined to endorse either candidate in the race, for in their view, "[i]t is a dismal choice between an ineffective advocate for causes we generally support and a potentially strong advocate for positions we oppose." She then asked the correspondent, "[I]s that more of a slap in the face at Boxer or Fiorina?"

Yellin replied that it affected the Democrat more: "For Boxer, by far- I mean, it's fairly stunning that...a Democratic-leaning newspaper...their op-ed page tends to be left-leaning- would not endorse the long-term Democrat in the state is very, very bad for Barbara Boxer. I mean, their conclusion there is essentially that Boxer, they think, is ineffective. Carly Fiorina, they argue, is too conservative, so they're not endorsing."

The news that it could be a good year for women electorally did not cheer up the likes of MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Bloomberg's Margaret Carlson and the Politico's Jeanne Cummings, because it turns out it's only going to be a good year for women on the Republican side like Nikki Haley, Meg Whitman, and Carly Fiorina or as Carlson put it: "It's not a compassionate women year." [audio available here]

Matthews, on Monday's Hardball, invited on Carlson and Cummings to take a look at "gender politics" and found that it could be a good year for women, just not the kind of women they like, in other words the more conservative momma grizzly types that Sarah Palin supports. Cummings even bemoaned that a loss of the House could result in "one giant blow to women" in that it "could take down the Speaker, Speaker Nancy Pelosi" who was "a real shining star for the achievements and the rise of women in government."

The following is the full segment as it was aired on the August 30 edition of Hardball:

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post implied that Friends of Abe had raised money for California GOP candidates, which is not the case. We apologize for the mistake.

In the giant morass of Hollywood leftism, there is a small - but growing - group of conservatives doing its best to sway the utter one-sidedness of celebrity politics.

The group, known as the Friends of Abe, includes a number of well-known A-list personalities, some of them renowned for their outside-the-mainstream (in their line of work) politics. Kelsey Grammar, Gary Sinese, Dennis Miller, and Jon Voight among them.

But though the group is small, secretive, and far less influential than its political-professional counterpart (the rest of Hollywood), "conservative frustration with the Democratic control of Washington might be helping them flourish," according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Former Democratic operative George Stephanopoulos on Thursday attacked Republican Carly Fiorina for opposing the current unemployment plan in the Senate. The Good Morning America host derided, "And are you running for the wrong job? How do you create jobs in the Senate if you don't pass legislation?"

Stephanopoulos also recycled the California candidate's June 9 joke about Democratic opponent Barbara Boxer's hair. Citing the nearly month-old gaffe, he challenged, "I have to ask you about what everybody saw right after the primary, that hair comment, off-mic. Why not apologize for that?" [Audio available here.]

At first blush, it seems as if this item might be one to file under "It Takes One to Know One." That would be wrong; the circumstances are too different.

Carly Fiorina took what she thought was a private swipe (which might not even have been a swipe at all, as noted at the end of this post) at Barbara "Don't Call Me Ma'am" Boxer's hairdo as being "so yesterday." The comment was captured by a live microphone.

The Washington Post's Robin Givhan writes widely-read columns on fashion, and has all the time in the world to consider the temperance, or lack thereof, of her critiques before they are published.

Given Givhan's situation and history, the WaPo fashion editor's characterization of Fiorina as a "style bully" (HT to Ann Althouse) is especially galling. If anyone has a track record of style bullying, it's Givhan, whose targets unsurprisingly are often conservatives and Republicans.

Sticking to the hair-raising subject at hand, the Media Research Center documented Givhan's given tendencies in an April 15, 2005 item:

In 1992, the feminists in the media rejoiced at what they called “The Year of the Woman,” when ten Democratic women (and one Republican) were running for the Senate in the aftermath of Anita Hill’s unproven sexual-harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas. Just two years before, seven Republican women (and two Democrats) ran. But the media yawned.

In 1992, the evening newscasts aired 29 stories exclusively devoted to women Senate candidates. In 1990, there was one...on election night. In 1992, the morning shows interviewed women Senate candidates on 26 occasions. In 1990, there were zero interviews.

This was all about the party affiliation. When the liberals Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein both won primary elections from the U.S. Senate in California in 1992, Time reporter Margaret Carlson almost levitated in ecstasy. “There was a rush, an exultation, that surpassed any political moment I have ever known -- better even than Geraldine Ferraro's vice-presidential candidacy."  

Americans learned something interesting about the priorities of the New York Times Tuesday: its editors believe a political candidate pushing an employee three years ago is more important than a candidate calling his campaign rival a Nazi last week.

Such seems apparent from the Times' choice to report California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman's alleged employee shoving incident in 2007.

By contrast, the Gray Lady has still not informed readers that Democrat gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown last Tuesday likened Whitman to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

As NewsBusters reported Saturday, Brown said the following to KCBS radio's Doug Sovern:

None of the three broadcast evening newscasts had even a few seconds last night for video of Democratic Congressman Bob Etheridge physically grabbing and yelling at an unidentified student attempting to ask him whether he supports President Obama’s agenda. But last Thursday, after Republican senate candidate Carly Fiorina was caught making a flip remark about Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer’s hair, ABC’s World News ran a full report on that “caught on tape political moment.”

Worth noting: Back on June 10, George Stephanopoulos was sitting in for Diane Sawyer. But last night, Sawyer was back in the anchor chair.

In introducing last week's report from correspondent Jonathan Karl, Stephanopoulos touted the Fiorina flap as “the latest caught off guard, caught on tape, all too candid political moment.” The Etheridge scuffle would surely fit that same standard, but ABC’s World News had no time on Monday to mention that embarrassment for the Democrats.

Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, on this weekend's syndicated The McLaughlin Group, slighted conservative pro-life women everywhere when she applied California Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina's "so yesterday" description of Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer's hairstyle to women who hold anti-abortion views in the Republican Party. Clift, in a segment about the primary victories of both Fiorina and GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman began actually crediting Sarah Palin as "Saint Sarah" for the wins as she claimed that the former Alaskan Governor is "emboldening conservative women" and "reshaping the religious right" but then went on to question if pro-life women candidates could win statewide races in California because their views would be seen as "so yesterday." Incidentally, The Washington Times' Monica Crowley had to correct Clift as she pointed out her liberal spin wasn't even entirely accurate as Whitman is, in fact, "pro choice." [audio available here]

The following exchanges were aired on the June 12 edition of The McLaughlin Group:

With Americans heading to the polls in less than five months, the liberal media have once again adopted their typical strategy of depicting every Republican candidate as being a far-right extremist.

Such was on display in this weekend's syndicated "Chris Matthews Show" when the host began the second segment by saying, "This week's primaries proved again that this anti-Washington year may usher in Republicans who owe a lot to the far-right."

Matthews then played a clip from his upcoming special "Rise of the New Right," saying after its completion, "Well, Tea Parties have had some luck with conservatives who have beaten establishment Republicans this year. This past Tuesday night, for example, Nevada Republicans chose a Tea Party candidate to go against Harry Reid. And she's not shy about her extreme views like killing Social Security and Medicare."

After a brief clip of Sharron Angle speaking at a Nevada debate, Matthews said, "And even mainstream Republicans like Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina who won nominations this week in California have bent to the right in reaction to pressure from the hard-right."

Matthews then showed a Whitman ad wherein she was talking tough about illegal immigration followed by a Fiorina commercial that had the nerve to use "that tried and true conservative line 'The Democrats are soft on terrorism.'"

The host then asked New York Magazine's John Heilemann, "That's very hard-right talk; is that the smart talk to win an election in California?" (video follows with more transcription of this discussion):

California's Democrat gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown on Tuesday called his Republican rival Meg Whitman a Nazi.

You probably didn't hear about this because America's media largely ignored it. 

By contrast, the press had a field day when Republican senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina made a comment about Barbara Boxer's (D-Calif.) hair that was picked up by an open microphone Tuesday evening.

Why the double standard?

Consider your answer as you read what Brown told KCBS radio's Doug Sovern (h/t NBer Gary Hall):

As of this Friday, NBC's Today show has yet to mention the Joe Sestak scandal, (as noted by the MRC's Tim Graham in this Media Reality Check) however they did find time to poke fun at Republican California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina making fun of Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer's hair in an open mic moment. On Thursday's Today, they ran the clip of Fiorina's gaffe three times, even leading the show with it in the opening teaser with co-anchor Meredith Vieira exclaiming: "Ay Carly! California Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina caught on an open mic making a joke about her opponent's hair."

Interesting to note that the reporters and producers at the Today show care more about a GOP Senate candidate mocking a Democrat's hairstyle than the White House attempting to manipulate a Senate race in Pennsylvania with a job offer.

The following takes on the Fiorina vs. Boxer open mic incident were aired on the June 10 Today show:

During the 11AM ET hour on MSNBC, anchor Contessa Brewer discussed open mic comments made by senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina with Huffington Post writer Ryan Grim and remarked that the California Republican has "the 'Mean Girls' mentality" and "comes off like that Lindsay Lohan movie 'Mean Girls.'"

Hall was referring to Fiorina making fun of Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer's hairstyle on air before a television interview on Wednesday. Grim completely agreed with Hall's assessment: "Oh yeah, absolutely. It makes her look terrible. It doesn't put her in a very good light." Though he added: "But it's not something so extreme that it's going to annihilate her."

Earlier, Grim actually observed that Fiorina "really did dodge a bullet here." He explained: "...what she said isn't going to disqualify her from election. It makes her look a little bit silly, a little bit petty, but it's not going to be something that destroys her candidacy or her career like you had with somebody like Helen Thomas a week or so ago."

Appearing on the 10:00 p.m. edition of MSNBC’s Countdown show on Tuesday to discuss the day’s primary election results, Chris Matthews expressed his delight that Orly Taitz – a prominent member of the birther movement that pushes the bizarre theory that President Obama was not really born in America – won the Republican nomination for secretary of state in California, and expressed his hope that the fringe candidate would drag down the Republican ticket in the state. Matthews celebrated what he termed a "malignancy" within the Republican party as he openly rooted for Taitz to hurt the GOP:

Keith, we`ve got good news tonight. And that`s the probable nomination of Orly Taitz in California for secretary of state. This is a true malignancy on the Republican party. She will bring down the other two candidates for high office out there. She`ll probably bring down Carly Fiorina, and may well bring down Meg Whitman because she is unacceptable to any reasonable voter.

Matthews went on to advise that California Democrats "tie her up like a witch at the stake":

It is tribalist, it`s malignant, and I believe if I were a Democratic officeholder out there or had anything to do with the Democratic party with Jerry Brown`s campaign, I would tie her to them like a fencepost. I would tie her up, I should say, like a witch at the stake. This is a malignancy.

Matthews went on to reiterate that he thought that Taitz’s current success in California’s Republican party was "wonderful news":

Despite the silence from left-leaning feminists concerning the disgraceful treatment Sarah Palin is getting from the media, some female Republicans are speaking out against what they believe are "sexist attacks" from America's press.

Makes one wonder when leading female Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi will step up to the plate and defend a hard-working, successful woman despite her political leanings. 

As reported by The Hill moments ago (photo courtesy BBC):

On July 1, my colleague Tim Graham accurately reported how the replacement of the sadly departed Tim Russert with Tom Brokaw brought a strong liberal tilt to "Meet the Press."

On Sunday, Brokaw shamelessly proved Graham's point by actually offering a McCain-bashing television ad that Democrats should air in the fall in order to get Barack Obama in the White House.

Speaking with RNC Victory 2008 chair and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, and Obama's national co-chair, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri), Brokaw actually said the following (video of some of this interview added below the fold):

On Monday’s CBS "Early Show," co-host Harry Smith talked to John McCain supporter Carly Fiorina and Barack Obama supporter Senator Claire McCaskill about the respective economic plans of the presidential candidates: "Bear market blues. Wall Street returns from the holiday as gas prices set another new record. Can either candidate calm America's fears?" At one point, Smith asked Fiorina: "How do we do all of this stuff? And we're not making more money, the tax rolls are not growing, the coffers are not full. We're just talking about deficit -- if nobody's going to get taxed, isn't this just going to be deficit city?" (audio available here)

While Smith did not feel the "coffers" were "full," at least not full enough for him, in reality, government tax revenue has tripled since 1965 and since the Bush tax cuts took effect in 2003, corporate income tax revenue has reached its highest level in over 20 years.

Smith began the segment by touting a new CBS poll: "The economy remains a major issue for voters as we head into the fall elections. In fact, a recent CBS News poll shows 78% of Americans think the economy is in bad shape." Considering the "Early Show’s" declaration of a recession last week it’s easy to understand such poll results.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer pressed McCain campaign adviser Carly Fiorina about oil companies "awash in record profits" on Tuesday’s "The Situation Room." The CNN host used ExxonMobil as an example five different times in his questioning. "...ExxonMobil has got these billions and billions of dollars in record profits. They can afford to not necessarily get additional tax cuts."

After Fiorina outlined McCain’s proposal to lower the federal business tax rate at the beginning of the segment, which began 14 minutes into the 5 pm Eastern hour of the CNN program, Blitzer took a persistent stance in asking if the reduction in taxes included "big oil." First, the CNN host asked, "Would that reduction of the tax rate also include, as Obama says, ExxonMobil and the other big oil companies, who are awash in record profits?"