Rick Perry

In a post time-stamped on Saturday at 12:16 p.m., CNNMoney.com has a story (HT Ed Driscoll via the PJ Tatler) headlined "Florida and Texas in jobs p*ssing match" (except that there's an "i" where I typed an asterisk).

Since the story has been up for at least 12 hours (maybe longer, given that the its URL is dated May 20; Update, May 22, 5 p.m.: The comments at a cached CNN Political Ticker tease for the story go back to May 20 at 4:21 p.m.), it's hard not to conclude that CNN and writer Tami Luhby like its title just the way it is.

A screen cap of the top section of the item is after the jump, so you don't have to go there if you're offended by CNN's language:

How much do the bloggers of the Daily Kos hate conservatism and the limited-government ideas that informed America's founding? They associate them with Satan...and with disease. Blogger Kevin Tully is really angry about the election returns and wondered if  "all of us, [are] being played like one huge, oxygen starved, exhausted, gullible fish?  Is the destruction of the environment and civil society absolutely necessary to maintain the "American Dream?" He suggested on Thursday that the American Dream is a deadly disease we spread globally:

The “American Dream” is a worldwide viral phenomenon - with many more potentially dire consequences than AIDS or Avian Flu. We have exported this thing from one end of the earth to the other – it’s like the gifted puppy that can never be housetrained, it grows up, still, so cute and familiar – your proud of your gift, it craps on the floor and tears down the curtains – it’s [sic] new owners overlook the crap; the dog is so cute – however, you can’t get over the crap and torn curtains when you visit.

This past weeks [sic] election was a referendum on the puppy. The rhetoric and the outcome were very predictable: The folks that are still very proud of the puppy were very persuasive and voted, most of us other folks – stayed home.

On Thursday's CBS Early Show, news reader Erica Hill used loaded liberal terms to describe a Texas pro-life event that Sarah Palin attended on Wednesday: "Palin shared the stage in an anti-abortion rights rally with Texas Governor Rick Perry."

Hill touted how despite making no announcement to make a 2012 presidential run, Palin "was looking an awful lot like a candidate," adding that the appearance with Governor Perry represented "a dream ticket for some tea party supporters." However, after playing a brief clip of Palin, Hill noted how "A just-released Associated Press poll finds of all the potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates, Sarah Palin is the most polarizing."

In an interview with Gov. Rick Perry published today, Newsweek's Andrew Romano falsely claimed that "Many Tea Partiers want to repeal the 14th Amendment, which provides for birthright citizenship." Romano then asked the recently-reelected Texas Republican, "Do you agree with them?"

Perry answered that while he believed a constitutional prohibition on birthright citizenship was "probably not" needed, he didn't address the fundamental error in Romano's premise.

While there have been suggestions by some conservatives at looking at amending the Fourteenth Amendment to ensure that children of illegal immigrants do not automatically gain American citizenship, the notion that Tea Party activists favor a full repeal of the post-Civil War amendment is a faulty liberal media meme.

Rick Sanchez, who was fired from his Rick's List program on CNN on Friday, certainly racked up a record of liberal bias, specifically bias against conservatives, during his tenure at the network. Sanchez also revealed a propensity for making on-air gaffes which made him a targets of comedians like Jon Stewart. It was the former anchor's animosity toward Stewart which directly led to his firing.

Here's the "best of Sanchez" list compiled from the Media Research Center's archives, updated from a July 22, 2010 item on NewsBusters:

Targeting Fox News and Conservative Talk Radio

In late 2008, the CNN anchor gained the 3 pm Eastern time slot of CNN's Newsroom, which would evolve into his Rick's List program. He consistently targeted conservative media outlets from that time until his firing.

ED HENRY: "Fox, Bloomberg, and National Public Radio were vying for it- all made strong cases. In the end, Fox [was] unanimously moved up to the front row, but did not get the seat Helen Thomas was in. We voted unanimously to move the Associated Press over to where Helen Thomas was because what a lot of people were missing in this whole fight was that"-
BROOKE BALDWIN: "And it is a fight"-
HENRY: "Yeah"-
BALDWIN: "Which is fascinating, for those of us who don't understand the inner workings of the"-
HENRY: "Sure, and then we can walk through the whole"-
SANCHEZ: "Well, I understand the Associated Press. I even understand Bloomberg, but don't have you to be a news organization to get that seat?"
HENRY: "Oh! Are you saying Fox is not a news organization?"
SANCHEZ: "Yeah. I'm just wondering."
-Exchange with CNN correspondents Ed Henry, a member of the board of the White House Correspondents Association, and Brooke Baldwin, August 2, 2010 [see video above]. Almost a year earlier, Sanchez hinted Fox News wasn't a "real news organization."

Rick Sanchez, who hosts his Rick's List program for two hours during the afternoon on CNN, will be taking on the network's 8 pm Eastern hour slot for several weeks between Campbell Brown's departure on Wednesday and the start of the ex-Democratic Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer (the infamous Client #9) and sometime-conservative Kathleen Parker's new program.

Sanchez will likely bring his two-year record of liberal bias to his temporary gig. Some of the worst examples from the Media Research Center's archives:

Targeting Fox News and Conservative Talk Radio

In late 2008, the CNN anchor gained the 3 pm Eastern time slot of CNN's Newsroom, which would evolve into his Rick's List program. Over the past year and a half, he has consistently targeted conservative media outlets.

"That weekend tragedy involves a man who allegedly shot and killed three police officers in cold blood. Why? Because he was convinced, after no doubt watching Fox News and listening to right-wing radio, that quote, 'Our rights were being infringed upon.'"
-From CNN Newsroom, April 8, 2009. Sanchez blamed conservative news outlets for the murder of three police officers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The November outlook for Democratic candidates may be bleak, but New York Times reporter James McKinley Jr. shook his pom-poms for Bill White, former mayor of Houston and a Democratic candidate for governor of Texas, against "rightwing politician" Gov. Rick Perry, in Sunday's label-soaked "Texas Democrat Is Striving to Make His Name Known."

On the same day Newsweek magazine anointed Gov. Rick Perry on its cover as a conservative icon, his Democratic opponent, Bill White, was slogging through small-scale campaign stops here in a Republican stronghold, needling the governor, saying he paid more attention to his career than to bread-and-butter issues like schools.

....

The match-up between Mr. Perry and Mr. White this fall promises not only to test the depth of the conservative backlash against President Obama, but also to shed light on just how Republican the state has become and whether the slim signs of a Democratic resurgence in the 2008 election were chimerical.

Conventional wisdom holds that this is a bad year to run as a Democrat in a state like Texas. Since the mid-1990s, Republican candidates have started off with a 10-point advantage just for being Republican. What's more, most political scientists and strategists say the pendulum is swinging back against the Democrats after Mr. Obama's victory in 2008.

The backlash among staunch conservatives, who are angry about the bailout of banks and deficit spending to create jobs, has given rightwing politicians like Mr. Perry a wind at their backs. Indeed, Mr. Perry has actively courted disaffected voters angry with Washington, appearing with Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck and building Mr. Perry's national profile.

MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan on Wednesday chuckled over the assertion by Rick Perry that he killed a coyote while jogging, misrepresenting what happened. After explaining that the Texas Governor shot the creature for menacing his dog, Ratigan intoned, "For the record, the Texas Wildlife Commission does not allow laser sited guns to be used in hunting as it is seen as cowardly, too easy, with a laser site, to shoot anything." [Audio available here.]

He then snidely added, "Though, this is said to be self-defense. Perry probably gets off. Although hunting coyotes with a laser sited gun is kind of like shooting a cow on the farm or maybe a moose in Alaska." First off, as Ratigan (sort of) explained, the Governor wasn't hunting.

On Tuesday's Rick's List on CNN, Rick Sanchez again hinted that Texas Governor Rick Perry is a racist. Sanchez, reacting to the distinct possibility that Perry would win the Republican gubernatorial primary, referenced a comment he made at a tea party rally in 2009: "He was talking about states' rights. States' rights is, to most people of color, a racist term" [audio clip available here].

The CNN anchor discussed the Republican primary with Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News. He asked the journalist, "Perry's going to win this thing, right?" After Slater noted how Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison lost her early lead in the polls over Perry, Sanchez responded, with some shock, "Why? I mean- you know, when he came out with his comment. Remember, you and I talked about it when he said it. I mean, he was all about secession from the union. He was talking about states' rights. States' rights is, to most people of color, a racist term, and I thought he had hurt himself. Why wasn't she able to, kind of, jump on that and use it?"

Slater explained that the typical Republican primary voter in Texas is "very conservative," and that Perry had actually won the nomination race after he had made his "states' rights" remark at the tea party. This didn't calm Sanchez, however, and he followed up by asking, "Well, but shouldn't we be frightened by that?"

A Monday New York Times story from Houston by Texas-based reporter James McKinley Jr., "Taking Texas Primary Even Further to the Right," focused on Texas gubernatorial candidate Debra Medina, whose reputation took a hit when she played coy in a radio interview with Glenn Beck on a question about 9-11. Medina responded with the thought that "the American people have not seen all the evidence there." That's flirting with 9-11 Trutherism: The idea, which has taken hold on the paranoid left, that the government under President George Bush had prior knowledge of the September 11 attacks but did nothing to stop them.    

While Medina later backtracked in a written statement, she deserves little sympathy for her initial outburst, whether it represents her true beliefs or if she was just making a cynical appeal to the paranoid right. But McKinley stacked the deck against Texas Republicans with his loaded labeling practices, tarring the party's candidates for governor as "far right."

Some days it is hard to be a neophyte far-right candidate in a governor's race, even in Texas, where Republicans vying for the party's nomination try to outdo one another to prove their conservative credentials.

According to Chris Matthews, the fact that racists have during the history of the nation invoked the rights of the states to perpetuate slavery or segregation immediately renders all proponents of states' rights -- a pillar of federalism and the American Constitution -- racist.

While Matthews and his Hardball guests on Tuesday cited names like Jim Crow and John Calhoun and compared them to Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Deborah Medina, Perry's libertarian-leaning opponent in the upcoming GOP primary, the names of the nation's founders -- who were ardent advocates of states' rights -- were conspicuously absent.

Matthews claimed to give his viewers a lesson in the meanings of "interposition" and "nullification" as they relate to the rights of the states and the Constitution. But he didn't say what they meant.

He just read a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. mentioning those terms as they related to the civil rights movement (video below the fold - h/t Liz Blaine of NewsReal).

Noted Dick Cheney-basher Chris Matthews, on Thursday's "Hardball," finally found an area of common ground with the former Vice President – his endorsement of moderate Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison over Rick Perry in the Texas governor's race. However, even a bit of praise from the MSNBC host came with a vicious shot, as Matthews sneered, "You might think an endorsement from Dick Cheney would be like a dinner invite from Uday and Qusay Hussein, but not in Texas."

After making the comparison to the brothers who infamously tortured Iraqi athletes for losing on the field, Matthews went on to ponder: "Can the torture man boost her backing from conservatives in beating secessionist governor Rick Perry?" [audio available here]

The following Matthews outbursts were aired on the October 29, "Hardball":

On Wednesday’s Newsroom, CNN’s Rick Sanchez used a recent pro-Texas secession rally in Austin to renew attention on Governor Rick Perry’s April 2009 speech to a tea party where he appeared to endorse this political view. Sanchez, along with CNN political analyst Roland Martin, later strongly hinted that Governor Perry could be painted as a racist for using “states’ rights” language.

Sanchez began the last segment of the 3 pm Eastern hour with a clip from a rally organized by the Texas Nationalist Movement, where Republican Debra Medina (who was not identified by the anchor or by the on-screen graphics) quoted from Thomas Jefferson in her plea for Texas secession: “Stepping off into secession may, in fact, be a bloody war. We are aware. We understand that the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.”

Medina is running for the Republican nomination in the Texas gubernatorial race in 2010, which pits her against Governor Perry. Despite this detail, the CNN anchor then raised the possible tie to the executive’s tea party speech:

CNN correspondent Carol Costello aired a fair report on Friday’s American Morning about the several states which passed resolutions that asserted their rights under the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and asked for viewer responses on the issue, but later stated that her “favorite [viewer] comment so far...‘asking for states’ rights is asking, you know, the children to be the parents’” [audio clips from the report are available here].

Costello began her report,  which aired just before the bottom of the 6 am Eastern hour, with the question, “should states’ rights trump the fed?” She also highlighted the premise that “the concept of states’ rights is as old as America.”

The CNN correspondent used three sound bites from Texas Governor Rick Perry’s speech to a tea party in April 2009, which was widely circulated around the Internet. She also featured clips from an Republican state legislator from Oklahoma and a constitutional law professor.

In their latest article analyzing the extramarital affairs of the deplorable Governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford, the Associated Press demonstrates once again that the word ‘logic’ has somehow become lost in translation.

In a piece entitled, Sanford’s extramarital affair a problem for GOP, the AP gleefully discusses the topic of Sanford’s misdeeds and their potential effect on the Republican Party – a valid analysis.  However, it takes no more than two paragraphs before the author dispenses with the aforementioned term ‘logic’, and decides instead to inexplicably link and attack several other GOP governors who have nothing to do with this affair.

How is it that MSNBC's Rachel Maddow toiled for years as a student before before earning a doctorate in political science at Oxford -- yet managed to avoid studying the American Civil War? 

How else to explain Maddow's commentary last Thursday in response to tea party protests nationwide against dubious tax policy and runaway government spending?

Here's what Maddow said in previewing an upcoming segment --

Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, appears to have his sights set on higher office. What is higher office if you're already governor in Texas? Of course, that would be president of Texas. The return of Confederacy in American politics as seceding from the Union comes back into Republican fashion.

Yeah, I laughed too -- "Republican fashion"? Those pundits at MSNBC make the darndest claims, don't they?