Tag Archives: MSNBC

national news

Shooting shatters 'profile'

When news broke of the shooting at the Marysville, Wash., high school, and it was known that the shooter was a student, one of my first thoughts became: What kind of loner/outcast would do such a horrible thing?

Then the second shock arrived. The shooter was a freshman at Pilchuck High School who was popular with his peers, an athlete and a young man who’d just been named homecoming prince.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/washington-school-gunman-was-homecoming-prince/ar-BBaYo33

Then I watched a former FBI profiler, Clint Van Zandt, tell MSNBC that this case arguably is the most “baffling” he had seen, given that Jaylen Fryberg was the quintessential non-stereotype we’ve attached to individuals who do these kinds of horrifying deeds. Van Zandt essentially said you could throw the profile book out the window.

Fryberg killed himself after shooting another student to death and injuring four others, three of them critically.

The argument will rage once again over how this young man obtain possession of the weapon he used to bring such destruction to the school just north of Seattle.

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We’re going to hear from gun-owner advocates that no laws could have prevented this from happening. Gun-safety advocates will argue the opposite.

And look and listen for the National Rifle Association — among others — to proclaim that the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment is so sacrosanct that to touch any part of it would render it utterly meaningless.

Interestingly, Washington state voters are going to decide a referendum on the state’s ballot that expands background checks to include all gun purchases.

It’s fair to ask: Would such a provision have kept the weapon out of Jaylen Fryberg’s hands? Probably not.

It also is fair to ask: Do such laws make it just a little harder for nuts to obtain guns … and do they infringe on legitimate gun ownership?

“Yes” to the first part. Absolutely “no!” to the second.

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What say you, Col. North?

Allow me to stipulate right off the top that I am acutely aware that the source of this blog post is an admittedly progressive pundit who routinely criticizes conservatives on her nightly TV talk show.

However, the point made here is a valid one.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/oliver-north-and-maximum-absurdity

Many Americans are steamed over the terms of the deal that brought about the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. One of them — are you ready? — who’s really angry about it is former Marine Corps Lt. Col. Oliver North, the former principal character in another hostage-release deal that, um, drew a lot of attention to a Republican president.

As it is stated in the link attached here, it is almost beyond comprehension that this guy, of all people, would have anything to say at all publicly about a deal that involves “negotiating” with enemy agents. He was involved up to his armpits in precisely such a deal. It brought shame and, yes, scandal to President Reagan’s administration. He also was actually convicted of a crime, although his conviction was overturned on appeal.

Still, for Ollie North to weigh in … well, there’s your benchmark for absurdity.

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Here comes 'impeachment' talk

Wait for it. Here it comes. Are you ready for it?

Some talking heads in both the left- and right-wing media are talking about impeachment as it regards the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

Oh … brother.

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/208264-gop-senator-obama-faces-impeachment-push-if-more-prisoners-leave-gitmo

Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — who knows a thing or two about impeaching a president of the United States — now warns that President Obama could face impeachment if he releases any more prisoners from Guantanamo Bay without consulting first with Congress.

The United States turned over five Taliban detainees in exchange for Bergdahl. The exchange reportedly took place without the White House advising Congress of it in advance, under federal law. Republicans are outraged — outraged, I tell you — that they weren’t so advised.

The White House has apologized for what it calls an “oversight.” That hasn’t stopped the uproar.

Sen. Graham — himself an Air Force reserve lawyer — once helped prosecute President Clinton during the 42nd president’s 1998 impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate. The Senate acquitted the president and Republicans ended up paying dearly for it politically at the next election.

Some left-wing media pundits — notably MSNBC’s Ed Schultz — believe Republicans are waiting for the results of this year’s mid-term election before commencing impeachment proceedings against Barack Obama. The idea, according to Schultz, is that the GOP could gain control of the Senate and tighten their grip on the House, particularly with tea party Republicans winning elections across the country.

I’m hoping Schultz is just hyperventilating and will calm down once he catches his breath.

We’ll need to get some answers to questions about Bergdahl’s release and, just as importantly, his capture five years ago. Was he AWOL? Did he abandon his post? If he did walk away, should the Army court-martial him? Let’s sort all that out first.

As for the release, the president and the Pentagon brass were determined not to leave an American behind once we leave the Afghanistan battlefield. Bowe Bergdahl was the lone U.S. service member being held captive. The brass felt it was worth it to exchange five Taliban officers for Bergdahl.

Did they do it by the book? That, too, remains to be determined definitively.

Good grief. Let’s can this impeachment talk until we get all the facts on the table.

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Where's the fairness?

Good journalism — be it print or broadcast — relies on relatively few basic tenets.

Accuracy is one. Thoroughness is another. So is fairness.

And fairness requires that you seek out both sides of a dispute, such as one that recently erupted in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Chairman Darrell Issa, a Republican, shut down a hearing as the ranking Democrat, Elijah Cummings, sought to pose a question of Lois Lerner, an Internal Revenue Service official at the center of a controversy that some folks want to turn into a full-blown scandal.

The IRS has been criticized for its vetting of conservative political action groups seeking tax-exempt status. What the right-wingers don’t acknowledge, of course, is that the IRS does the same thing to liberal groups.

Back to journalism’s fairness tenet.

The Rev. Al Sharpton — a liberal MSBNC talk show host — interviewed Cummings the other day to get his side of the story. One liberal would “interview” another liberal.

Meanwhile, Issa was making the rounds on the Fox News Channel to give his version of events. Conservatives were “interviewing” a conservative.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=848447285170595&set=a.290068127675183.91261.280920811923248&type=1&theater

My strong preference would be for Cummings to talk to the Fox guys and Issa to talk to the MSNBC guys. Let the liberal news/commentary network get the other side’s version of a controversy and have the conservative network get the liberal’s version of events.

That’s one way to define — if I can borrow a phrase — a “fair and balanced” approach to journalism.

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Obama says O’Reilly ‘unfair’? Shocking!

Imagine my surprise when I saw the story in which President Obama said Bill O’Reilly was unfair in his interview just prior to the Super Bowl.

Just kidding. No surprise there.

http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/02/03/22560607-obama-says-fox-newss-oreilly-absolutely-unfair-in-extended-interview?lite

O’Reilly is the noted Fox News Channel blowhard who fancies himself a serious broadcast journalist. He is no such thing. He is a commentator, a guy with lots of opinions on lots of issues — and someone who is totally unafraid to express them, even while he is interviewing a Very Important Person, such as the president of the United States of America.

My takeaway from the pre-Super Bowl interview is that O’Reilly is love with the sound of his own voice and doesn’t care to hear what others have to say. He has demonstrated that countless times in the many years he has been on TV.

Obama noted also that Fox has been “unfair” in its coverage of his administration, which of course should come as no surprise either.

Yes, I know the pendulum swings widely in that regard. Liberal-leaning MSNBC has been none too kind to Republican officeholders and would-be officeholders. The folks at that network are shills for the left, just as O’Reilly and his Fox brethren are shills for the right.

And that brings me back to my favorite TV “news” slogan, which is how Fox proclaims itself to be the “fair and balanced” network.

A news network that keeps saying such things about itself usually is neither.

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Harris-Perry issues real apology

There are non-apology apologies. You know them when you hear them.

They’re the statements where the individual seeking to atone for a mistake says this:

“If I offended anyone, then I am sorry for those remarks.”

The implication, of course, is that the individual isn’t apologizing to those he or she did not offend.

The reverse of that are the real apologies, those heart-felt mea culpas that come from deep within, from the heart, or the gut. That’s what I heard Saturday from Melissa Harris-Perry, the MSNBC talk show host who took part in a discussion that got way out of hand.

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2014/01/04/nr-msnbc-host-apology.cnn.html

The discussion was a year-end review of political events of 2013. Harris-Perry flashed a picture of 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, with their grandchildren. One of the kids is an African-American infant adopted by one of the Romneys’ five sons and his wife. The panel went to great lengths over the next few moments to poke fun at the Romneys and singled out little Kieran Romney for ridicule. They were trying to make some ridiculous statement about Republicans’ outreach to the minority citizens.

The response from many circles, not just from conservatives, was ferocious. Harris-Perry was called down correctly by many pundits across the nation for the tastelessness of the segment.

She acknowledged it — all of it — Saturday morning while issuing an apology that turned tearful. And yes, the emotion sure looked real to me.

Harris-Perry did the honorable thing by going on the air to apologize. It’s been said, of course, that the more honorable thing would have been to refrain from saying those disgraceful things in the first place.

Well, we’re all human. We’re all fallible. She made a mistake. She apologized for it in its entirety without qualification.

As for Gov. Romney, he has accepted her apology and wants to move on, as he said this morning on Fox News Sunday. If it’s good enough for Mitt Romney, it’s good enough for me.

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MSNBC jokesters toss a bomb at Romney clan

MSNBC went over the line.

With both feet.

Check out this link, taken from CNN.com, about a disgraceful display of bad taste exhibited on MSNBC, having to do with Mitt Romney’s family and the presence of an infant sitting on the former Republican presidential candidate’s knee.

http://thehill.com/video/in-the-news/194168-lemon-slams-msnbc-for-romney-grandson-joke

MSNBC talk-show host Melissa Harris-Perry is an interesting, intelligent individual who hosts a weekend show on the cable network. For the life of me I cannot fathom why she allowed this discussion making fun of Mitt Romney’s adopted grandson, an African-American infant named Kieran, to make some point about the Republican Party’s difficulty with minority voters.

I’ve long held to the belief that one should not poke fun at family members, or make fun of people’s appearance or the sound of their name. For the network to use a baby to make a cheap political point simply is beyond disgusting.

As the commentators noted on this CNN link, adoption should be saluted as something wonderful and grand. That’s all should have mattered when MSNBC showed the photo of Mitt and Ann Romney with their grandchildren.

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MSNBC’s Martin Bashir had to go

Martin Bashir, the fire-breathing left-wing commentator for MSNBC, has resigned from the network over remarks he made about former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Good bye and good riddance.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/12/04/21760779-msnbc-host-martin-bashir-resigns-over-palin-remarks?lite

Let me stipulate something now that I’ve made that statement. I happen to agree with most of Bashir’s political philosophy, which he would reveal without apology on his weekday afternoon talk show. What I find objectionable about the man was his occasionally crass commentary about those with whom he disagrees.

Such as Sarah Palin. In November, Bashir took Palin to task for remarks she had made that equated the national debt to slavery. I, too, thought Palin’s analogy was a bit of a stretch. Bashir took the opportunity, however, to detail on the air some of the torture that slaves actually endured, such as being forced to eat human excrement.

He then suggested Palin should do the same.

Bashir apologized for his remarks shortly afterward. Now, though, he has left the network.

Fine. See you later.

Bashir has been fond of criticizing — correctly, in my view — the over-the-top criticism of President Obama by his critics. He has called for civil discourse among political foes. His call for collegiality among opponents is worthwhile.

However, he destroys any moral high ground on which he could stand by making statements such as those he spewed out about Sarah Palin.

Don’t misunderstand me here: I dislike Palin’s politics intensely. I, too, have been hard on her in the past and will keep speaking out in strong terms in the future when it believe she is wrong — which is just about all the time. Bashir’s disgraceful commentary, though, went far beyond the bounds of decency.

I’m glad he quit.

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Alec Baldwin gets hosed; Martin Bashir survives

I’ve already declared my disgust with two MSNBC hosts, Alec Baldwin and Martin Bashir.

Baldwin needed to get fired for his hideous outburst against a photographer in which he yelled a homophobic slur against the man. It was disgraceful, disgusting and thoroughly degrading. MSNBC decided to ax his 9 p.m. (CST) show that aired each Friday. So long, Alec.

Then he fired back at the network for what he said is uneven treatment of his transgression and that of Martin Bashir, another MSNBC talking head.

Bashir did something that also was vile and disgusting. While offering a comment one afternoon on his show, he referred to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a “world-class idiot,” and then said she should be degraded with feces and urine. Bashir challenged Palin’s assertion that the national debt is akin to slavery; he made some point about the kind of torture and degradation that slaves endured, which included being soiled with human feces and urine.

Bashir went on the air shortly after his hideous rant and apologized. Palin said she accepted his apology.

He’s still offering his commentary … on the air.

Baldwin said the network is being unfair because it fired him for his spontaneous outburst, which occurred off camera, while keeping Bashir on the job for reciting a scripted critique of a one-time elected official.

Doesn’t Baldwin have a point here? Martin Bashir’s ghastly rant, it could be argued, was more egregious, given that it was a pre-meditated act.

Why, then, aren’t both men banished from the same network?

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Memo to Alec: Watch your foul mouth, young man

This has been a tough week for TV news personalities masquerading as broadcast journalists.

First, it was Lara Logan of CBS’s “60 Minutes” being forced to take “administrative leave” for a botched news segment on the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya; four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, died in the firefight. Logan and her producer trotted out a security analyst who told “60 Minutes” he was there when it happened, except that he really didn’t get there until the next day. His credibility came into question after the report that was highly critical of the State Department’s reaction to the tragic event.

See ya, Lara.

Now it’s MSNBC’s turn to wipe the egg off its face. It had hired actor/comedian Alec Baldwin to do an hour-long show every Friday night. Baldwin is known for a lot of things. Yes, he’s a talented actor. He’s also capable of doing some great comedy sketches.

Baldwin also is a loudmouth with a hair-trigger temper.

http://tv.msn.com/tv/article.aspx?news=841043

Seems that that Baldwin got into an altercation with a photographer recently and spit out some highly inflammatory names to the fellow. He let loose with an anti-gay slur, preceded by an extremely vulgar adjective.

Hey Alec. You should know that the world is listening to every word you say. Dude, you’re a star and as such, you are not immune from prying eyes and ears. Two words need mentioning here, man: social media.

MSNBC has pulled Baldwin’s show. He says a leading gay-rights organization, GLAAD, and Andrew Sullivan, a noted columnist and author — who happens to be gay — had a hand in “killing” his show.

So what if they did?

He behaved reprehensibly and, as a symbol of a network devoted to news and commentary, he becomes one of the faces of the network.

Alec Baldwin had to go.

One final word of advice, although it will be ignored: Keep your mouth shut, Alec.