Tag Archives: MSNBC

legal news, national news, political news

Change the federal judicial system? Please, no

What is it with some American politicians?

A court ruling or two doesn’t go their way and they want to toss aside one of the basic tenets of our federal government? They want to elect federal judges, make them stand for “retention” if they make a decision that upsets some of us?

That’s the view of a leading so-called “conservative” U.S. senator who’s also running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Take it away, Ted Cruz of Texas.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/ted-cruz-chris-matthews-supreme-court-119891.html

Cruz jousted this week with MSBNC’s Chris Matthews over the setup of the federal judiciary. Cruz doesn’t like the two recent Supreme Court rulings that (a) upheld the Affordable Care Act and (b) legalized gay marriage in the United States.

The junior senator from Texas now thinks Supreme Court justices should stand for retention to enable voters a chance to decide if they want them to keep their jobs.

Matthews, not surprisingly, went semi-ballistic — which is part of his shtick. He brought up the Bush v. Gore decision that settled the 2000 presidential election. The Supreme Court voted 5-4 to stop the Florida recount. Texas Gov. George W. Bush was leading by 537 votes at that moment over Vice President Al Gore. Gov. Bush was awarded Florida’s electoral votes, which were enough to elect him president of the United States by a single electoral vote.

The five Republican-appointed justices’ overruled the four dissents cast by the Democratic-appointed justices. Politics? Gosh, do you think?

Conservatives hailed that decision. And why not? It was all done according to precisely the manner allowed by the U.S. Constitution. Some of us might not have liked the outcome, but that’s how it goes. The justices made the call.

Cruz didn’t object then, Matthews reminded him.

The nation’s founders set up a system in which the federal judiciary is intended to be free of political pressure. The president appoints judges and Supreme Court justices, who then are subject to approval by the Senate. They get lifetime jobs and, therefore, are able to rule according to how they interpret the Constitution.

This idea that we should now subject justices to the political will of the people is simply not in keeping with what the founders intended when they wrote the Constitution.

Political conservatives, such as Sen. Cruz, keep harping on “original intent.” Well, the founders’ “original intent” was to separate the judicial branch of government from the political tug-of-war that exists in the legislative and executive branches.

Cruz said he is “reluctant to call for elections,” and said it “makes him sad.” He added that he has made that call because “a majority of the justices are not honoring their judicial oaths.”

Yes they are, senator.

Let’s leave the judicial system alone.

political news

Fox dumps Palin … imagine that

The Fox News Channel says it has parted company with Sarah Palin, the former half-term Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee.

But it hasn’t. Not really. Palin will continue to get guest spots on Fox. She’ll get to have her voice heard. She’ll also be free to appear on other news and commentary outlets — have you put her on your speed dial, MSNBC?

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/sarah-palin-dumped-by-fox-119357.html?hp=l2_4

She remains a hot commodity among TEA party conservatives. She speaks their language, whatever that is.

But she also has become a political circus act. The reality TV appearances haven’t delivered any broader appeal. The drama involving some of her family members has created more snickers and ridicule than any politician should want. Her bombastic rhetoric has become tiresome and, frankly, quite repetitive.

However, in this age where public policy intermingles with pop culture, Sarah Barracuda will remain among us.

U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona chose Palin to run with him in 2008, seeking a “game-changer” in the race for the presidency. Her selection might have changed the game, all right, but not necessarily in the way Sen. McCain expected or hoped — especially as American began hearing the things that flew out of her mouth. Remember the “death panels”? And those amazing stumbles while being interviewed by what she calls the “lame-stream media”? Priceless.

As Politico reports: “When Palin was at her zenith, she made frequent appearances, and Fox installed a camera at her house. But executives consider her less relevant now, and her appearances were sometimes hampered by the vast time difference with Alaska.”

Is she going away? Not any time soon. If ever.

 

military news, national news, political news

‘Don’t vote for me if you’re worn out by war’

Wow!

Lindsey Graham today offered the most compelling campaign argument against his own candidacy I’ve ever heard.

The South Carolina Republican, who’s running for his party’s 2016 presidential nomination, said it flat out. “Don’t vote for me if you’re worn out by war.”

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/244022-graham-dont-vote-for-me-if-youre-anti-war

Well, senator, no worries there.

What he told “Morning Joe” on MSNBC is that he’s going to be the “war candidate.” He plans, if elected to the presidency, to send more troops into Iraq; he also plans to send troops into Syria; he plans to enlist Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey and whichever other regional ally will join, to help American troops defeat the Islamic State and then keep the peace.

Oh, how long will they be there? “A long time,” he said.

There’s no exit strategy. No timetable. No end to the bloodshed.

Get ready for battle, he warned.

Oh, if you’re tired of fighting a war, don’t vote for me, he said.

No-o-o-o-o problem. You’ve got a deal, Sen. Graham.

 

media news

Fox News’s power is overrated

I want to share this link with readers of this blog.

It comes from Jack Schafer, senior media writer for Politico. com and it offers an interesting analysis of the power that Fox News has — or doesn’t have — on the rest of the media and the voting public.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/fox-news-liberals-118235.html?hp=t1_r#.VWNDQFLbKt8

Schafer’s analysis is most interesting in that he relies heavily on the thoughts of a known political conservative — Bruce Bartlett — to make the case that Fox’s actual power overrated.

Bartlett has served as a key policy guy for Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and remains devoted to his political principles. He believes Fox is hindering his party’s effort to advance and to return to the White House. Fox News, he contends, is appealing to the narrowest wing of the GOP.

Schafer notes an element of Fox’s strategy that I found quite interesting: “One thing Bartlett gets absolutely right in his critique is how Fox seized on the repeal of government censorship of the airwaves (also known as the Fairness Doctrine and the equal-time rule) to create a news outlet that would cater to the country’s underserved conservative audience. You don’t have to be a Fox fan to credit the network with reintroducing ideological competition to the news business, which began to fade at the midpoint of the 20th century.”

I don’t watch Fox News routinely. Maybe I should. It leans away from where I lean; I suppose the older I get the more vulnerable I feel when my blood pressure elevates as the veins in my neck start throbbing. For that matter, I am having trouble watching MSNBC these days, but for a vastly different reason: MSNBC’s predictable liberal slant has become boring.

Schafer takes note of “reliably liberal” New York Times columnist Frank Rich’s assessment of Fox News: “The median age of a Fox viewer is 68, eight years older than the MSBNC and CNN median age, and its median age is rising. ‘Fox is in essence a retirement community,’ Rich writes, and a small one at that! ‘The million or so viewers who remain fiercely loyal to the network are not, for the most part, and as some liberals still imagine, naïve swing voters who stumble onto Fox News under the delusion it’s a bona fide news channel and then are brainwashed by Ailes’s talking points into becoming climate-change deniers,’ he writes.”

The bottom line is that Fox News isn’t the political juggernaut its viewers think it is.

This is a most interesting analysis. Take a look.

 

political news, State news

Here we go again, Gov. Perry

Rachel Maddow is no fan of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

There. I’ve stipulated what many folks know already about the liberal commentator for MSNBC.

That all said, she noted Friday night that Perry is about to break another “glass ceiling” for Republican presidential candidates. He’s about to become the first candidate under felony indictment to seek his party’s presidential nomination. He’ll make his announcement on June 4.

The Texas Tribune has posted a fascinating analysis on the pluses and minuses of a Perry presidential campaign.

http://www.texastribune.org/2015/05/15/case-and-against-perrys-2016-campaign/

You remember the indictment, yes? A Travis County grand jury indicted Perry in 2014 on charges of abuse of power and coercion when he tried to get the Democratic Travis County district attorney to resign after she pleaded guilty to drunken driving; if she quit, he’d then let the DA’s Public Integrity Unit have the money appropriated by the Legislature. She didn’t quit. So Perry vetoed the money.

The grand jury said that sequence constituted an indictable offense.

Hey, that doesn’t matter. He’s going to run for the presidency a second time, hoping that all will be forgiven from his first — and disastrous — run for the White House in 2012; he actually lasted only a few days into 2012, as he dropped out of the race in January of that year.

Will the indictment hold him back? Will it matter to GOP voters who are looking for a right-wing darling to embrace as an alternative to squishy moderates such as Jeb Bush, Rob Portmand, John Kasich, Lindsey Graham or Chris Christie? All of those guys — and the others who already have declared their intentions to run or are about to declare them — will seek to paint themselves as hard-core conservatives.

Perry, though, is the real thing … he says.

He’s got this chink in his conservative armor, however. It’s immigration. You see, as the governor of a border state for a bazillion years, he has this idea that we really ought to have immigration reform. He also favors something akin to President Obama’s DREAM Act, which grants amnesty to illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States by their parents, when they were children. And … he also favors granting in-state college tuition waivers to those very illegal immigrants.

That area is where I happen to agree with the former governor.

The rest of it? No thanks.

Plus, he’s got that indictment matter to settle before he thinks about taking the presidential oath on Jan. 20, 2017.

Something tells me it won’t come to that.

 

national news, political news

Well, that clears it up: Jeb wouldn't go to war

Jeb Bush has set the record straight … I think.

He now says he wouldn’t have gone to war in Iraq if he and the rest of the world knew then what we know now — which is that Saddam Hussein didn’t possess weapons of mass destruction.

Does that clear it up for you? The former Republican Florida governor — and likely GOP presidential candidate — surely hopes so.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/05/14/jeb-bush-clears-air-on-iraq-war-stance-says-would-not-have-authorized-invasion/?intcmp=latestnews

He went from “yes I would” go to war, to “mishearing” the question from Megyn Kelly of Fox News, to “misinterpreting” the question to now reversing himself completely.

MSBNC’s Rachel Maddow — and I’m acutely aware that she is no fan of any of the Republicans running, or thinking of running, for president — pointed out an important element of the botched answer to a simple question. She said Thursday night that Jeb Bush, whose brother George W. Bush, invaded Iraq in 2003, should have been aware that the question would come and he should have had his answer down pat.

He didn’t. He either hasn’t done his homework on the nuts and bolts of running for president, or doesn’t quite understand how the media work. Reporters are going to ask him repeatedly about the Iraq War and whether it was a good or bad idea for the United States to invade another country.

Jeb Bush remains one of the frontrunners for the GOP nomination, whenever he declares his candidacy.

I actually want him to do well as the nomination campaign ramps up.

But, oh man, he must stop fumbling the questions everyone in America knows he’s going to get.

media news

Fox News owns up to mistake … well done

Regular readers of this blog know that I am not a fan of the Fox News Channel, the network that proclaims itself to be “fair and balanced … and unafraid.”

I’ve determined that a news organization that must declare it is “fair and balanced” usually is neither.

But the other day, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith did something quite commendable.

He manned up and said the network erred in a report from Baltimore about an alleged shooting of a man by police.

http://www.politicususa.com/2015/05/04/fox-news-forced-apologize-starting-riot-false-baltimore-shooting-report.html

The field reporter said he saw an officer shoot a man. The police department issued a statement that said the incident didn’t happen. The field reporter, Mike Tobin, thought he saw what he reported.

In the words of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry: Oops.

Smith then went on the air to say the network messed up. It gave incorrect information and broadcast it to its audience.

There’s been some chatter out there about the incident and whether Fox is prone to reporting such errors regularly. I don’t know the answer to that.

One can quibble with how a network — be it Fox, CNN, MSNBC or any of the broadcast networks — spin their coverage, depending on your point of view and your own bias.

But when a network misreports something that it says actually happened, then takes it back, well, that’s part of taking responsibility.

We’re all human. And humans make mistakes.

Fox News’s correspondent made one. The network apologized for it.

I accept the apology.

 

national news

Sharpton charged with racial discrimination? Oh, my!

Who in this world ever saw this one coming?

Al Sharpton, the rabble-rouser turned civil rights activist has been accused of discriminating against black-owned companies. Sharpton has earned much criticism over many years for a variety of issues, but this one caught me by surprise.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/02/24/lawsuit-accuses-comcast-al-sharpton-of-discriminating-against-black-owned-media/

A lawsuit alleges that Comcast and Time Warner discriminated against black-owned companies and then paid Sharpton and other civil rights activists significant sums of money to “whitewash” the practices of the media giants. The suit also names the NAACP in its complaint. I cannot even catch my breath after reading this.

Sharpton’s fiercest critics have leveled “race-baiter” charges against him. Indeed, the head of the National Action Network burst onto the national stage by alleging some New York City police officers brutalized a young African-American woman, Tawana Brawley. He leveled despicable allegations against several officers — naming them publicly — in defense of Brawley.

Well, it turned out young Tawana made it up. She wasn’t sodomized, as she had contended. The officers sued Sharpton for defamation of character — and won! Sharpton to this day has not apologized for his role in this terrible story. But he managed to shed the infamy he earned from that event and has become a civil rights icon of sorts. He shows up everywhere, taking up for those who have been victimized by those who commit acts of racial discrimination. Now we have this matter with which Sharpton must contend.

According to the Washington Post: “The lawsuit, seeking $20 billion, was filed in Los Angeles federal court Friday by Entertainment Studios, a television company founded by black producer and comedian Byron Allen and the National Association of African-American Owned Media (NAAAOM). The complaint, which comes as regulators mull a $45-billion merger between Comcast and TWC, alleges that Comcast has refused to do business with Allen and other black media executives.” Sharpton, of course, denies the allegation.

His MSNBC “Politics Nation” talk show, which he has hosted since 2011, already has been suffering from poor ratings. Whether he remains on the air is up to the network, of course.

But back to my original question: Who saw this one coming? Not me. Something deep down there is telling me Sharpton’s TV career is on the ropes.

International news

Fighting a war by fighting poverty

1 Comment

Having already criticized a State Department spokeswoman for suggesting that job creation should be a strategy in fighting the Islamic State, I am struck by the amazing outrage by right-wing media over her comments.

I hope I stipulated clearly that I wouldn’t join the right-wing hysteria in questioning President Obama’s commitment to destroying ISIL. Others have done enough of that already. Some of the comments are contained in the link attached to this blog post. Take a look. They’re pretty wild.

http://mediamatters.org/research/2015/02/17/right-wing-media-attack-obama-for-tying-terror/202548

Media Matters, a left-wing media watchdog website, has produced a most interesting video showing President Bush offering strikingly similar advice in 2002, at a conference in Monterrey, Mexico.

While the comments of State Department flack Marie Harf have drawn considerable condemnation, it fascinates me that President Bush said more than a dozen years ago, “We fight against poverty because hope is an answer to terror. We fight against poverty because opportunity is a fundamental right to human dignity.”

Perhaps Harf’s comments got blown out of proportion, and weren’t viewed in the totality of the message she sought to deliver on MSNBC’s “Hardball” show with Chris Matthews. I regret not digesting fully all of what she said, which included comments about the administration’s intention to keep killing terrorists as the war on terror rages on.

I just caution, though, that war remains the dirtiest business that humankind ever conducts. It must be fought hard and it must be fought with the intent to defeat the enemy. There can be no doubt about our enemy’s intentions on the current battlefield — and there should be no doubt about our own intentions.

If working quietly with nations that produce terror cells to alleviate the root cause of people taking up arms against the United States and our allies is part of an overall strategy that includes waging all-out war, then by all means let’s proceed.

Let’s never lose sight of the undeniable fact that we’re dealing with a nasty enemy, as Presidents Bush and Obama both have understood.

 

International news, national news

That's the ticket: Find jobs for ISIL terrorists

What in the world is the State Department thinking?

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told Chris Matthews on MSBNC’s “Hardball” talk show that the United States cannot win the war against the Islamic State by killing them, that we need to help them find jobs.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/02/17/state-department-spokeswoman-floats-jobs-as-answer-to-isis/

Holy crap!

Here’s how FoxNews.com reported it: “‘We’re killing a lot of them, and we’re going to keep killing more of them. … But we cannot win this war by killing them,’ department spokeswoman Marie Harf said on MSNBC’s “Hardball.” “We need … to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs, whether –‘

“At that point, Harf was interrupted by host Chris Matthews, who pointed out, ‘There’s always going to be poor people. There’s always going to be poor Muslims.'”

I’m not going to buy the notion that some critics of the Obama administration say about the president going soft on terrorists.

However …

This idea that we need to focus on job creation while waging war against these monsters is nuts in the extreme.

Harf did add that there’s “no easy solution.” She said American military operations would continue to kill ISIL leaders. But she said, “If we can help countries work at the root causes of this — what makes these 17-year-old kids pick up an AK-47 instead of trying to start a business?”

How about, Ms. Harf, we soft-pedal the job creation and push the pedal to the metal on our efforts at killing the bad guys?

War is a supremely unpleasant endeavor, but we’d better continue fighting it as if we intend to win it.