Religion

On Saturday’s Good Morning America on ABC, during a discussion of the Ground Zero mosque and the possibility of Koran burning in Florida by Pastor Terry Jones, after anchor Dan Harris brought up the naive liberal expectation that President Obama would be able to improve relations with the Muslim world because of his family connections to Islam and his inaugural speech reaching out to Muslims, ABC…

Imagine for a moment you were the editor of a magazine owned by the Washington Post and Newsweek. Would you a day before the ninth anniversary of 9/11 publish an article with the following headline:The Talibanization of AmericaViewed from Pakistan, the rise of U.S. Islamophobia looks depressingly familiar. Seems rather inflammatory hours before such a solemn day in America, don't you think?Yet,…

Fire doesn't melt steel--and a Florida pastor apparently isn't capable of burning a Koran without a plot by Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich behind him . . . On The Ed Show this evening, guest Karen Hunter, responding to a leading question from host Schultz, went deep conspiracy theory, saying she "wouldn't be surprised at all" if the "fingerprints" of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich were "all over"…

Washington Post staff writer Anne Kornblut used her question at a White House press conference on Friday to worry that, despite Barack Obama making it a "priority," anti-Muslim "suspicion" still existed in America. She queried the President, "Nine years after the September 11th attacks, why do you think it is that we are now seeing such an increase in suspicion and outright resentment of Islam,…

Chris Matthews on Thursday accused Sarah Palin of aiding and abetting Pastor Terry Jones, the man threatening to burn Korans on Saturday's ninth anniversary of 9/11.For days, Matthews and his colleagues on MSNBC have been calling upon Republicans to speak out against Jones.On Wednesday, the former Alaska governor did exactly that at her Facebook page and at Twitter. But this wasn't enough for…

Talk about your strange bedfellows . . . Both Pat Buchanan and Donny Deutsch have advocated the arrest of Pastor Terry Jones to prevent his possible burning of Korans and the danger to US troops such act would threaten.   The paleo-conservative and the New York liberal made common cause on today's Morning Joe.  They were outnumbered by Mika Brzezinski, Dan Senor and John Heilemann, all of…

CNN offered a sneak preview of their upcoming Parker-Spitzer program on Wednesday's Anderson Cooper 360 with the new hosts, pseudo-conservative Kathleen Parker and "Client Number Nine" Eliot Spitzer agreeing that the "well-spoken" Imam Feisal Rauf changed few minds with his recent interview. The two also forwarded their network's charge that "Islamophobia" is growing in the U.S.Anchor Anderson…

As the ninth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, and Americans fret about a Pastor they never heard of burning Korans to commemorate the event, people on both sides of the political aisle should be asking a serious question: did the media negligently create this controversy?After all, Terry Jones has a tiny, 50 member, non-denominational church in Gainesville, Florida. Should some unknown Pastor -…

On Wednesday's Rick's List, CNN's Rick Sanchez tried to connect the overwhelming opposition to the planned Ground Zero mosque to a Florida pastor's "Burn a Koran Day" event. Sanchez asked former New York Governor George Pataki, "Do you feel in any way that some of this backlash...led by some fine gentlemen like yourself...has kind of paved the way for that controversy, and if so, do you feel…

CNN's Deborah Feyerick played up Imam Feisal Rauf's apparent credentials as a "moderate" Muslim during a report on Wednesday's American Morning. Feyerick omitted using sound bites from Rauf's critics, and only briefly mentioned his controversial remarks about on CBS's 60 Minutes about the 9/11 attacks and his reluctance to condemn Hamas.The CNN correspondent's report led the 6 am Eastern hour,…

Howard Dean on Tuesday accused Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Laura Ingraham of being part of a "significant hate wing of the Republican Party." Chatting with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC's "Countdown" about the Florida pastor that wants to burn Korans on the upcoming ninth anniversary of 9/11, Dean said, "I think the Republican Party has become the party, this really started back with Richard Nixon…

Good Morning America's Dan Harris on Monday slipped in an aside about Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck that seemed to link the two conservatives to both violence against Muslims and a Florida minister's plan to burn on the Koran on 9/11. Harris asserted, "It is but a preview of the anger we'll be seeing on the upcoming ninth anniversary of 9/11, now just five days away, which will include an event in…

On Tuesday's American Morning, CNN's Kiran Chetry used General David Petraeus's denunciation of a planned Koran burning by a church to blast the church's pastor for any subsequent deaths of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan: "Are you willing to have the blood of soldiers on your hands by this demonstration?" Chetry also lectured Pastor Terry Jones over his apparent lack of "refined" Christianity.…

She's the heir to the House of Maverick - the Republican the liberal media establishment can love, who's just as embarrassed by those icky conservatives as any network anchor or newspaper columnist. Like her senator and erstwhile presidential candidate dad John, Meghan McCain is a willing weapon for the media to use against her fellow Republicans. But unlike "the Maverick," there's little…