The Washington Post's Colbert I. King is a regular TV commentator, a Pulitzer prize winner and the deputy editor of the paper's influential editorial page. But the column he churned out for Saturday's paper amounted to little more than a lazy ad hominem attack on conservatives. Dressed up as a Father's Day column, King argued that Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh should not criticize President Obama on policy matters because Obama is a good family man and they are not. King then churned out paragraph after paragraph reciting the personal laundry of these conservatives and, in the case... continue reading
On Friday's Good Morning America on ABC, White House correspondent Jake Tapper described White House reaction to Republican Congressman Joe Barton calling BP's $20 billion escrow fund the result of a government "shakedown": "...the argument they're making, that the Republican Party is too close to corporate America.....And they've been given this great foil by Joe Barton." When co-host George Stephanopoulos wondered if the Obama administration was at all concerned about being seen as anti-business, Tapper recited the White House spin: "...they say, at the end of the day, there were inequities throughout the Bush years and they need to correct... continue reading
There's one big problem with the presentation of " The Party, In Exile ," Pamela Paul's snobby but interesting front-page Sunday New York Times Styles section piece on a D.C. garden party thrown by so-called conservatives in exile. As Karol Sheinin noted on her Twitter feed - it doesn't feature many actual conservatives. The caption under John Cuneo's illustration made the disparity clear: "Insiders On The Outside: Members of the conservative intellectual elite at a party include, clockwise from left, David Frum, Michael Oren, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christopher Hitchens, Laura Ingraham and Kathleen Parker." Of those six names, only one... continue reading
On Thursday's Good Morning America on ABC, co-host George Stephanopoulos laid blame on BP and Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen for mishandling the Gulf oil spill response but depicted the Obama administration as having done everything it could. In contrast, on the CBS Early Show, guests from both sides of the aisle gave the President a 'C' grade for his response. At the top of Good Morning America, Stephanopoulos described how BP CEO Tony Hayward would be facing a "public execution" in Thursday's congressional hearings and how Michigan Democratic Congressman Bart Stupak promised to "slice and dice" Hayward. In a... continue reading
The day after President Obama's oil spill speech - in which the President pivoted from the ongoing mess in the Gulf of Mexico to his call for ending our "addiction" to fossil fuels - ABC's World News obliged the White House's agenda with a profile of solar cell manufacturer Natcore , whose president, Chuck Provini, says he can cut the costs of solar cells (which are right now too expensive to be economically viable without government subsidies). But the problem, as ABC correspondent Dan Harris helped frame it, is that this entrepreneur was getting nothing but "blank stares" from the... continue reading
The "deeply polarized confirmation process in the Senate" has "undercut Obama's effort to significantly infuse the federal courts with more women and minorities," USA Today's Joan Biskupic fretted in a Wednesday front page article in which she refused to identify Obama's nominees as liberals as she attached the positive "diversity" patina to Obama's agenda without any regard for the irony such "diversity" is ideologically uniform. She led her June 16 story, " Push for court diversity hits snag: Partisan rancor ties up action on Obama nominees ," however, by noting the ideology supposedly pushed by President George W. Bush: "President... continue reading
The "deeply polarized confirmation process in the Senate" has "undercut Obama's effort to significantly infuse the federal courts with more women and minorities," USA Today's Joan Biskupic fretted in a Tuesday front page article in which she refused to identify Obama's nominees as liberals as she attached the positive "diversity" patina to Obama's agenda without any regard for the irony such "diversity" is ideologically uniform. She led her June 16 story, " Push for court diversity hits snag: Partisan rancor ties up action on Obama nominees ," however, by noting the ideology supposedly pushed by President George W. Bush: "President... continue reading
CNN senior political analyst Gloria Borger returned to her roots as a slanted journalist on Wednesday's Newsroom with a glowing two-part report on Ted Olson and David Boies, the former rivals in Bush v. Gore who are now fighting to overturn California's Proposition 8, which outlawed same-sex "marriage." Borger portrayed their coalition as " a script that could have been written in Hollywood ." Anchor T. J. Holmes introduced the first part of the analyst's report just before the bottom of the 1 pm Eastern hour. After noting that closing arguments had begun in the lawsuit against Proposition 8, Holmes... continue reading
A tale of two disasters: On ABC's Good Morning America this morning, weatherman Sam Champion's piece included reaction from several residents of Florida, Alabama and Louisiana to President Obama's oil spill speech, and found three outright critics and no defenders of the administration's handling of the disaster. One woman exclaimed: " What I would have liked to heard from him - that he actually had a plan ." The kindest review came from a man in Alabama who merely hoped the federal response would improve: "I think we're seeing a change in how he's handling the situation. And I hope... continue reading
On a special edition of Tuesday's Countdown show on MSNBC which aired after President Obama's address to the nation, the panel of Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman were not impressed by the President's speech, as the group complained that it was not "specific" enough and lacked details. Matthews complained that in the Obama administration, "meritocracy is going too far," and asserted that it was "ludicrous" that the President had mentioned that the Secretary of Energy has a Nobel Prize. He also recalled promising to "barf" if the President brought up the Nobel Prize again. Matthews: I thought a... continue reading