NBC Anchor Rips GOP Budget: “Where Is the Empathy?”
Co-host Ann Curry: “The Center of [sic] Budget and Policy Priorities...says 62 percent of the savings in your budget would come from cutting programs for the poor, that between eight and ten million people would be kicked off of food stamps, that you would cut Medicare by $200 billion, Medicaid and other health programs by something like $770 billion. Where is the empathy in this budget?... Do you acknowledge that poor people will suffer under this budget-”
Representative Paul Ryan: “No. No.”
Curry: “-that you have shown a lack of empathy to poor people in this budget?”
— NBC’s Today, April 10. Ryan’s budget blueprint [1] would actually increase Medicare spending by 70% over the next ten years and Medicaid and other health spending by 31% over the same time period. [Audio/video (1:04): Windows Media [2] | MP3 audio [3]]
“Does Mitt Romney have to redefine himself now? Is there a window of opportunity to define himself against the charges that he’s out of touch, and that by endorsing the Ryan budget, it is a prescription for American decline?”
— Co-host Charlie Rose to John McCain on CBS This Morning, April 4.
MSNBC Anchor Shills for Obama from Inside White House
“We’re going to be looking at the accomplishments of this White House as it pertains to women and the economy. We have clearly a lot of work still to do and many challenges before us. And the key is to talk about them, address them and overcome them as soon as possible, but also to celebrate what has been done, especially in the past few years by this administration.”
— MSNBC’s Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski moderating an April 6 White House Forum on Women and the Economy attended by President Obama, who thanked her for her efforts.
CNN Blasts “Hissy Fit” by Judges “Deranged by Hatred of the President”
Anchor Wolf Blitzer: “How out of the ordinary is it that a federal appeals court judge like this one would make such a demand of the Department of Justice, a three-page single-spaced letter explaining what the President has in mind?”
CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin: “Totally extraordinary and totally inappropriate. This was a judicial hissy fit, and what the President said was entirely appropriate and entirely within his rights as an American citizen to express his opinions about this law.”
— CNN’s Situation Room, April 4, talking about a judge seeking clarification after President Obama’s remark that the Supreme Court ruling his health care law unconstitutional would be “an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically-elected Congress.”
“I think what these judges have done is a disgrace....That was a perfectly appropriate comment by the President and it just shows how some of these Republican judges are just deranged by hatred of the President.”
— Toobin on CNN’s Starting Point, April 5.
CBS Analyst Denounces “Smug” Scalia as ObamaCare “Bully”
“Smug justice. I admit I lost my temper on Wednesday. The arguments in the Care Act cases may be funny to Justice Antonin Scalia, the bully that he is, but they aren’t funny to the single father who will avoid bankruptcy because of the law, or to the millions of others who will benefit from the Medicaid expansion or from the provision that allows young people to stay longer on their parents’ health care plans.”
— Andrew Cohen, “chief analyst and legal editor for CBS Radio News,” in #7 of “13 Final Thoughts About the Health Care Arguments” posted March 30 at TheAtlantic.com [4].
Can’t Imagine Any Legal Argument Against ObamaCare
“I agree with many constitutional scholars who think, actually, that the statute is going to be upheld, because there really isn’t much of an argument on the other side....It’s hard to articulate why this Supreme Court, given the precedents that exist that support the power of Congress over interstate commerce, how the Court would explain striking down this statute.”
— Former longtime New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse on CBS This Morning, April 7.
Chris “Totally Unprepared” for ObamaCare’s Potential Demise
“Did you see this coming? Would you be surprised if they strike it down?...Were you surprised that this was even a prospect? I was totally unprepared because of the way people talked. I always thought, intellectually, it might be a problem, but I never heard it discussed politically as a prospect, that they actually might get his major achievement just ripped off the books.”
— MSNBC’s Chris Matthews talking to NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd on Hardball, March 29. [Audio/video (0:44): Windows Media [5] | MP3 audio [6]]
If Only Stupid Public Realized How Great ObamaCare Is
“The history of big social legislation like this is that there is this period before it kicks in, before people get used to the benefits, where there’s a lot of anxiety....There’s a lot of anxiety in the public, but there’s not a sense of all the good things that could come.”
— New York Times correspondent Matt Bai on ABC’s This Week, April 1.
“On health care — that’s partly a failure of communication, it seem to me. How do you go a year and a half where so many Americans don’t even understand the benefits of this legislation when they apply to them?”
— New York Times columnist Tom Friedman on NBC’s Meet the Press, April 1.
Bob Babbles About Republicans “Against Birth Control”
“Mr. Vice President, I want to ask you about this whole thing that’s blown up about contraception....The way it’s kind of shaken down, it seems to have sort of gotten Republicans off talking about the economy, and sort of campaigning for —against birth control, in some funny kind of way. What’s your take on that?”
— CBS’s Bob Schieffer to Vice President Biden on Face the Nation, April 1.
Bob Schieffer: “Do you think it’s good politics, though, for Republicans to be sort of campaigning against birth control. I mean, I take your points on the Catholic side of it.”
Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich: “Nobody is campaigning — this is a canard. Nobody is campaigning against birth control.”
— Later on the same program.
Even When Romney’s Right, the Media Insist He’s Wrong
ABC’s David Muir: “While the President was pushing that Buffett Rule, it was Mitt Romney pushing something else: This number, aimed squarely at women.”
Mitt Romney: “92.3 percent of the people who have lost jobs have been women. His failures have hurt women.”
Muir: “Now the non-partisan group PolitiFact saying that number right there is ‘mostly false,’ arguing the President can’t be held responsible for the job picture the day he took office.”
— ABC’s World News, April 11.
“We cannot fault the RNC’s math, as the numbers add up. But at this point this figure doesn’t mean very much. It may simply a function of a coincidence of timing — a brief blip that could have little to do with ‘Obama’s job market.’ If trends hold up over the next few months, then the RNC might have a better case. But at this point we will give this statistic our rarely used label: TRUE BUT FALSE.”
— Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler in an April 10 blog posting [7].
Andrea Begs Hillary to Run Again...
NBC’s Andrea Mitchell: “She says she’s out of politics, but she’s the most popular woman in America, according to Gallup, for the tenth year in a row. Meryl Streep recently delivered what sounded like a nominating speech for Clinton.”
Meryl Streep: “But if you want a real world leader and you’re really, really lucky, this is what you get.”
Mitchell to Clinton: “There is a growing expectation that you will run for President.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “Well, Andrea, that is-”
Mitchell: “Why not?”
— Exchange shown on the April 2 NBC Nightly News.
...And Cues Her Up to Bash Rush
Andrea Mitchell: “Rush Limbaugh, in this campaign, did he go beyond anything that we have previously experienced in the way he attacked a civilian? A young woman who had just spoken out?”
Hillary Clinton: “Well, I try very hard to stay out of the politics, so let me put the campaign and the implications to one side. That’s for others to comment on.”
Mitchell: “But as a women’s leader?...And as a mother?...Chelsea was on a panel with Sandra Fluke at the 92nd Street Y and she said, ‘Rush Limbaugh attacked you when you were 30. He attacked me when I was 13.’”
— Interview excerpt shown on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports, April 2.
ABC’s Climate Change Panic: “10,000 Deaths a Year”
“The rising temperatures may create ideal conditions for more severe thunderstorms and tornadoes....It’s feared these extreme temperature fluctuations can endanger a whole year’s crops....A Harvard study revealed that even small increases in summer temperatures, as small as two degrees, had a direct link to shorter life expectancy for seniors with chronic medical conditions....Researchers predicted a tiny heat spike could result in 10,000 additional deaths a year.”
— ABC’s Sam Champion on the April 9 World News, reporting on how March was unusually warm in the U.S. However, worldwide temperatures in March [8] were up only .11º Celsius, after declining a similar .11º Celsius in February.
AP Chief Sings Obama’s Praises at Media Lunch
“As President, he inherited the head winds of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. He pushed through Congress the biggest economic recovery plan in history and led a government reorganization of two of the big three auto manufacturers to save them from oblivion. He pursued domestic and foreign policy agendas that were controversial to many, highlighted by his signature into law of the most comprehensive health care legislation in history....We’re very honored today to have the man currently holding the office and aspiring for it for another term. And, with apologies to Al Green, my new favorite singer.”
— Dean Singleton, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Associated Press, introducing President Obama April 3 at the American Society of News Editors convention.
Opinions of “Most” Journalists Still a Mystery?
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg: “The journalists today don’t do what journalists did [back in the Cronkite era], which was keep their opinions to ourselves....”
Co-host Barbara Walters: “There are journalists where the whole thing is how opinionated can you be?...But, most of us, do not — you don’t know whether we’re Republicans or Democrats or exhibitionists.”
— Exchange on ABC’s The View, April 9. [Audio/video (0:37): Windows Media [9] | MP3 audio [10]]
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PUBLISHER: L. Brent Bozell III
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