Victorious Obama Exposed "Party of No"
Anchor Katie Couric: "Chip, did the President, in a way, accomplish what he needed to do today?"
Correspondent Chip Reid: "Well, he really did, Katie. What he really wanted to do was convince the American people, and more importantly, wavering Democrats in Congress, that the Republicans are the party of no, they won't compromise, and he now has no choice but to move ahead with Democrats alone."
- Discussing Obama's health care "summit" on the February 25 CBS Evening News.
"Unfortunately...Health Care Is Being Held Hostage"
Co-host Maggie Rodriguez: "Deadlines keep getting missed for passing health care. Obstacles keep mounting. Will your husband ever give up on trying to find a compromise?"
Michelle Obama: "Yeah, we can't afford to keep - to give up. Not in this country...."
Rodriguez: "Unfortunately at the moment, though, health care is being held hostage by partisanship."
- Excerpt of taped interview shown on CBS's The Early Show, February 22. [Audio/video (0:28): Windows Media [1] | MP3 audio [2]]
For Health Care Summit, GOP Kept "Crazies in the Closet"
"The Republican strategy was 'Don't show your ugly faces tonight.' Today they kept all the crazies - all the crazies were in the closet....Michele Bachmann was not allowed to show up today. Joe Wilson from South Carolina was not there in evidence....[After clip of Republican participants using similar language] Look at these terms! 'Start over,' 'clean sheet of paper,' 'scrap the bill,' 'step by step,' repeated like robotics....This is what it must be like at those North Korean assembly meetings where they all get together before the Dear Leader."
- MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Hardball, February 25. [Audio/video (1:44): Windows Media [3] | MP3 audio [4]]
Empathizing with Pelosi, Badgering Alexander
"How long are you willing to wait for the ideas [from Republicans]? The President seemed to make it clear that time's up....Are you frustrated so many bills have been stalled in the Senate? Almost 300 bills passed by the House that are sitting, languishing in the Senate?"
- Elizabeth Vargas to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on ABC's This Week, February 28.
"Are you going to, are the Republicans going to offer some amendments and play ball?...Why not be part of the process? Why not take what you consider to be an imperfect bill and at least attach some proposals that you support?...How are we going to fix Congress and empower Congress to be able to pass the sweeping kinds of changes that we need in the country?"
- Vargas to Republican Senator Lamar Alexander, a few minutes later on the same show.
ObamaCare a "Very Centrist, Leaning Conservative" Option
"We actually already have a Republican bill, and it's the one that Obama has proposed. Almost all of the ideas in this, even though not a single Republican in Congress now supports it, came originally from Republicans....The idea that this is a Democratic bill, you know, that this is some left-wing plot, some government takeover that they're going to ram through the Senate, is the part that's the problem. This is a very centrist, leaning conservative health care reform bill."
- Huffington Post political reporter Ryan Grim during the 3pm ET hour of MSNBC Live, February 24. [Audio/video (0:40): Windows Media [5] | MP3 audio [6]]
Touting Victims of "Unconscionable" Debt-Foe Bunning
Anchor Diane Sawyer: "Republican Senator Jim Bunning still has Congress under blockade. For another day, he's kept thousands of unemployed workers from getting their benefits and forced some highway construction projects to stop...."
Reporter Jonathan Karl: "Joung Moon, an unemployed microbiologist in Texas, says no unemployment check will mean she will have to move out of her house."
- ABC's World News, March 2, just two business days after the authorization to send out unemployment checks expired.
Correspondent Dana Bash: "Meanwhile, in the real world, that stalemate is having a devastating effect on people like Madonna Alvarez."
Madonna Alvarez, taking small box out of her backpack: "This cardboard box that we will be living in."
Bash: "A single mother of three who was laid off last year, she says her unemployment check is blocked until Congress passes the extension."
Alvarez: "I'm just trying to pay my house. That's it. That's the only thing that I don't want to lose."
- CNN's Campbell Brown, March 2. [Audio/video (0:28): Windows Media [7] | MP3 audio [8]]
CBS's Bob Schieffer: "It's another example, Maggie, of why there is so much anger and disillusionment out in the country about Congress and the Senate and about it's inability to get anything done....I mean it's unconscionable what has happened here....This is about politics. It is not - it was not about anything of substance."
Co-host Maggie Rodriguez: "That is infuriating."
- CBS's The Early Show, March 3. [Audio/video (0:42): Windows Media [9] | MP3 audio [10]]
Obama's Massive Stimulus = "Major Accomplishment"
"The Senate is taking up a jobs bill this week. $15 billion. When it started at the White House, it was $200 billion. The House passed a $185 billion version. There was a deal for $85 billion. We're down to $15 billion now. But do you think there needs to be another stimulus, federal stimulus, like this? Is $15 billion enough?"
- ABC's Terry Moran to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) on This Week, February 21.
"Big fanfare this week. The Obama administration fanned out across the country - 'The stimulus worked.' The President made speeches, sounded a little frustrated that people don't get it, at least polls show, that they don't understand there were tax cuts and things like that. What did they do wrong? They're playing defense on what was one of their major accomplishments."
- Moran to Governor Ed Rendell (D-PA), later on the same show.
"Aren't We Better Off" with Obama?
"When you say the country's not better off than it was $1.8 trillion ago - when the President took office the Dow Jones was about 8,000; it's above 10,000 now. The GDP was declining at about six percent; it's rising at about six percent right now. We were talking about the possibility of a Great Depression; most people aren't talking about that anymore. So, aren't we better off?...Had the administration not taken some of the steps it did take, though, might not that unemployment figure, be at 12 or 13 percent?"
- NBC's Matt Lauer to former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Today, March 2.
Cuban-American Conservative Rubio = "This Coconut"
"Almost anybody that's been around too long, there's so much 'no' attached to it, that you almost need that blank piece of paper. That's the new model, like, you know, this coconut Rubio down in Florida....Marco Rubio. He's running against Charlie Crist, who I think has done a great job."
- MSNBC and CNBC contributor Donny Deutsch on Headline News's Joy Behar Show, February 22. "Coconut" is a term used to attack dark-skinned conservatives as being brown on the outside but white on the inside. [Audio/video (0:24): Windows Media [11] | MP3 audio [12]]
"I said 'coconut' meaning simple, goofy, bananas...wasn't even aware it could be a racially charged word."
- Deutsch in a Twitter posting [13] the next day (ellipses in the original).
MRC's Keith Olbermann Floor Mats = CPAC "Violence"
"Republicans are playing with gasoline and matches, because they are taking the legitimate anger at double-digit unemployment, foreclosures, et cetera, and fusing it with a very dark anger that we saw today at the [CPAC] convention, with all these displays of violence, with what you described about the stomping on you and others on the floor, with the pinatas of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, and even a punching bag of John McCain."
- Arianna Huffington on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, February 18, referring to video shown earlier of the MRC's humorous floor mats showing pictures of Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews with the phrase: "Stomp Out the Liberal Media [14]."
Times Touts Pro-Obama "Coffee Party," Denigrated Anti-Tax Tea Parties in '09
"Fed up with government gridlock, but put off by the flavor of the Tea Party, people in cities across the country are offering an alternative: the Coffee Party....'I'm in shock, just the level of energy here,' said the founder, Annabel Park, a documentary filmmaker who lives outside Washington. 'In the beginning, I was actively saying, "Get in touch with us, start a chapter." Now I can't keep up. We have 300 requests to start a chapter that I have not been able to respond to.'"
- New York Times reporter Kate Zernike's March 2 story [15] on the newly-launched "Coffee Party" movement, begun by Park, who worked for Obama's presidential campaign in 2008.
"Although organizers insisted they had created a nonpartisan grass-roots movement, others argued that these parties were more of the Astroturf variety - an occasion largely created by the clamor of cable news and fueled by the financial and political support of current and former Republican leaders."
- New York Times reporter Liz Robbins in the paper's first report on the Tea Party protests, April 16, 2009 [16], nearly two months after the movement began.
Reagan Would Try Dick Cheney for "War Crimes"?
"If Ronald Reagan were President, he would try Dick Cheney for war crimes."
- Family Guy's Seth MacFarlane on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, February 19. [Audio/video (0:59): Windows Media [17] | MP3 audio [18]]
Babbling, Uneducated and Barely House-Broken
"When the Buddhist monks scrutinize two-year olds to find the reincarnation of the dude who just died,and then choose one of the toddlers as the sacred Lama - sorry, but thinking you can look at a babbling, barely house-broken, uneducated being and say that's our leader doesn't make you enlightened. It makes you a Sarah Palin supporter."
- HBO's Bill Maher on Real Time, February 26.
Typical Liberal Media Tweet
"Rush Limbaugh is really a loathsome racist."
- Washington Post reporter/blogger Ezra Klein in a February 24 Twitter posting [19].
No Refuge from Liberal Propaganda
"I can't believe the three of you are in here drinking while the GOP is out there denying global warming."
- Line delivered by "Nora Walker," played by actress Sally Field, on an episode of ABC's Brothers and Sisters, February 21.
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