Hurray for the Court! “ObamaCare 2, Conservatives 0!”
“‘ObamaCare 2, conservatives 0’ is the score right now. This is the second huge challenge trying to tear down the Affordable Care Act using the Supreme Court, and once again its Chief Justice, John Roberts, crushing the hopes of conservatives....Chief Justice John Roberts, a very staunchly conservative Chief Justice — he’s been very conservative on affirmative action, and on other matters — for the second time, rescuing a liberal President’s signature legislative accomplishment.”
— ABC News correspondent Terry Moran during live coverage of the Supreme Court ruling, June 25.
Anchor Wolf Blitzer: “Gloria, this is a huge win for the President of the United States....
CNN’s Gloria Borger: “You have trade legislation being approved — huge win for the President. You have this reaffirmation of ObamaCare — a key component in it, the health care subsidies — huge for his legacy....This is a huge legacy day for Barack Obama.”
CNN’s John King: “This may well be the best week of his second term....”
— During CNN’s live coverage of the Supreme Court’s ObamaCare decision, June 25.
NBC Trumpets the Wonders of ObamaCare: “Quite Literally a Lifesaver”
“Across the country, over ten million people have now signed up for health insurance under the ObamaCare law as the number of Americans without insurance creeps lower. It’s a result a lot of people didn’t expect after that rocky rollout. The ObamaCare law now directly affecting so many families who say it’s been quite literally a lifesaver.”
— NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt, June 25.
The Easiest Interview of Obama’s Presidency
Correspondent Jerry Penacoli: “Today, my chance to thank the President for the Affordable Care Act. [to Obama] You pretty much saved my finances and my life.”
President Obama: “One of the goals for the Affordable Care Act was not just to help people get insurance who didn’t have it, it was to give better protections for people who already had insurance.”
Penacoli: “I think a lot of people don’t understand that....This has nothing, for me, to do with politics. I’m just letting you know–”
Obama: “That it made a difference in your life.”
Penacoli: “That it made a difference in my life.”
— Exchange on the syndicated celebrity news show Extra, June 11.
AP: No “Deliberately Provocative” Photos — Unless They’re Anti-Cruz
“Presidential candidate Ted Cruz was shown in a series of 14 photos taken by an Associated Press photographer at a ‘Celebrate the 2nd Amendment’ event Saturday afternoon, held at a shooting range in Johnston, Iowa. Five of the photos published by AP included images of guns seen on a wall in the background so that it appeared a pistol was pointed at Sen. Cruz’s head. The images were not intended to portray Sen. Cruz in a negative light.”
— Associated Press director of media relations Paul Colford in a statement quoted by Politico June 21.
“It’s been our policy for years that we refrain from moving deliberately provocative images.”
— Colford in a January 7 statement to Buzzfeed News, explaining why the Associated Press would not distribute images of the Charlie Hebdo magazine which included cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.
Time to Topple Monuments to the Founding Fathers?
Host Ashleigh Banfield: “Thomas Jefferson owned slaves — third President of the United States — and there is a monument of him in the capital city of the United States. No one ever asked for that to come down. Is it equal?”
CNN’s Don Lemon: “No, I don’t think it’s equal because Jefferson was a figure that — who was part of the entire United States, not just the South....There may come a day when we may want to rethink Jefferson. I don’t know if we should do that. But when we get to that point, I’ll be happy to partake in that particular discussion.”
— Exchange on CNN’s Legal View, June 23.
Rolling Stone Smears: Republicans Have Made a “Virtue” of Anti-Black Violence
“The fact is, this [the Charleston church shooting] is political because American movement conservatism has already made these kinds of killings political. The Republican Party has weaponized its supporters, made violence a virtue and, with almost every pronouncement for 50 years, given them an enemy politicized, racialized and indivisible....Black people are the engine of the Democratic Party, which is the engine of bad government, which is the engine of illegitimate oppression. They are part of a vast national criminal enterprise — against which our founders gave us a special amendment as a lethal and liberating tool. To kill them is an act of rebellion, the hunting down of the criminal and the freeing of yourself and the just.”
— Rolling Stone contributor Jeb Lund in a June 19 Web piece.
Race Fraud Rachel Dolezal = More Black than Clarence Thomas
“Those of us who talk about race as a social construct, that’s — it’s more complicated. Bill Clinton is the first black president, though he didn’t claim he was black. It means that she may not be African-American, but she certainly could be black in a cultural sense. She’s taking on the ideas, the identities, the struggles. She’s identified with them. I bet a lot more black people would support Rachel Dolezal than would support, say, Clarence Thomas.”
— MSNBC contributor and fill-in host Michael Eric Dyson on The Ed Show, June 15, talking about the ex-NAACP leader in Spokane who lied about being black.
Obama Is Just “Awesome” When He Talks About Race
“I don’t necessarily think that Obama has problems talking about race. I think that he has been jumped on a lot whenever he has in the past....He gives his initial reaction, and then that ends up being polarizing because of who he is and because he is a black man. I think when he has spoken about race in a real issue, he can be great on it. He can be awesome.”
— New York Times correspondent Helene Cooper on NBC’s Meet the Press, June 21.
Bobby Jindal Flunks the Post’s Racial Litmus Test
“When Piyush ‘Bobby’ Jindal rises Wednesday to declare his candidacy for President of the United States, the conservative Republican will probably tell the story of his family’s immigrant journey to the United States, where his engineer father and his mother, a state employee, worked hard to give him a typical American childhood....Yet many see him as a man who has spent a lifetime distancing himself from his Indian roots....As the years went by and Jindal’s political star rose, many in the Indian American community became disillusioned with their native son.”
— Washington Post correspondents Annie Gowen and Tyler Bridges in a June 24 news article, “‘There’s not much Indian left in Bobby Jindal.’”
Rather Weird: It’s Reagan’s Fault We Have So Many GOP Candidates this Year
“There’s a relationship between the 2016 presidential campaign and what happened in the 1970s during the Watergate period, in this sense: What happened in the mid 1970s resulted, eventually, in the Republican Party taking a strong turn to the right with the two-term presidency of Ronald Reagan. And the Republican Party is still struggling, on the one hand, with the success of the Reagan presidencies — which by the way, I would argue, the presidency of George H.W. Bush was the third Reagan term. So, in effect, you had three Reagan terms — after the Republican Party took this strong turn to the right coming out of the 1970s. And the party is still struggling with that, which is one of the reasons that they have, what, 16 candidates and counting in the race of the primary at the beginning.”
— Ex-CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather on CNN Tonight, June 17.
Hitting George on His Clintonian Conflict of Interest
Co-host George Stephanopoulos: “How about Hillary Clinton?”
Presidential candidate Donald Trump: “What Hillary has gotten with the e-mails is, to me, scandalous. She gets a — of course, you shouldn’t be talking to me about that, in all fairness. You shouldn’t be asking me those questions, but I don’t mind.”
— Interview shown on ABC’s Good Morning America, June 17.
The Media Despise the Catholic Church’s Conservative Moral Teachings, But...
Co-host Mark Halperin: “Alright, the Pope says people are causing climate change. Now, Republicans have to decide if they should play the climate denier card and rebuke the Pope, which could hurt them with some in the religious community and possibly get them barred from heaven. How to thread that needle?...”
Co-host John Heilemann: “I think it’s insane to take on Pope Francis, not just because they might not get into heaven, if there is such a thing, but because he is super popular and also because he’s right.”
— Exchange on Bloomberg’s With All Due Respect, June 17.
“Well, don’t you love it? Pope Francis is once again rankling conservatives: this time he’s taking on guns! The Holy Father’s on a pastoral trip in Turin, and he says people who manufacture guns and weapons and call themselves Christians are hypocrites! That’s the Pope talking.”
— Host Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball, June 22.
It’s “Courageous and Brave” to Attack the Police?
“An operation like this, it’s now spanned 18 miles. It was very courageous and brave, if not crazy as well, to open fire on the police headquarters, and now you have this scene, this standoff. So you believe these are the hallmarks of more than one person’s involvement?”
— CNN Newsroom anchor Fredricka Whitfield to legal analyst Philip Holloway, June 13, talking a man who earlier that day shot at the Dallas police headquarters. Whitfield apologized the next day: “I misspoke and in no way believe the gunman was courageous nor brave.”
Right-Wing “Atmospherics” Drove Communist Oswald to Kill JFK?
“I do think you’ve got something there [in Charleston] with the atmospherics, and it’s not all one person acting alone. It’s always about something that gives moral license to certain kind of behavior....When Kennedy was killed down in Dallas that time in ‘63, I thought it was an atmosphere there, even though he [Lee Harvey Oswald] was a man on the left, and that [the city of Dallas] was on the right, it was atmospheric.”
— Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball, June 18, talking about the church shooting.
Washington Redskins Team Name as Awful as the Confederate Flag
“We see that a symbol like a flag cannot only invoke and encourage racism, and violence, and madness, and murder, and treason, but it can do something even worse. It can represent evil, and represent genocide, and the persecution, and mockery of a people because of the color of their skin. If a flag can do that, a football team name, beamed into our homes, our headphones, our minds everyday, it can represent the same kind of evil....”
— Ex-MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann on his ESPN program Olbermann, June 24.
Can We Blame Church Massacre on Fox News?
“We can never know why someone snaps, but I bet you I know where he got his news....I wouldn’t say we should be droning Fox News, but we did drone [al Qaeda leader] Anwar al-Awlaki because he inspired people.”
— Host Bill Maher on HBO’s Real Time, June 19, talking about church shooting suspect Dylann Roof.
PUBLISHER: L. Brent Bozell III
EDITORS: Brent H. Baker, Rich Noyes, Tim Graham
DEPUTY RESEARCH DIRECTOR: Geoffrey Dickens
RESEARCH ANALYST: Mike Ciandella
NEWS ANALYSTS: Scott Whitlock, Kyle Drennen, Matthew Balan, Jeffrey Meyer and Curtis Houck
INTERNS: Connor Williams, Spencer Raley