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<p>After some perfunctory remarks of condolence, Obama commenced with what the Associated Press described as a "blistering warning to congressional Republicans."</p> <p>"I cannot remember a time when one faction of one party promises economic chaos if it can't get 100 percent of what it wants," reported AP's Jim Kuehnenn. This was straight out of the Obama playbook. He was referring to those who want to defund the Obamacare monstrosity. Their plan would fund (SET ITAL) everything (END ITAL) in the government, except Obamacare.</p>

Unabashed, sneering, surreal lefty propaganda isn't selling.  America's least-watched "major" cable "news" network has continued its ratings slide this summer, falling off a cliff within the key 25-54 demographic.  I put "news" in scare quotes because MSNBC is not a news outfit, by its own president's admission, and according to empirical independent studies.  The network's numbers are way down across the board and have sustained especially dramatic erosion during the key primetime hours: MSNBC continued its rough 2013 in the ratings, continuing to lose significant audience from 2012. The problems were particularly prevalent in primetime, with some shows losing close...

MSNBC obliterated the notion of separating cable-news hosts and their political activism when the network brass gave Rev. Al Sharpton a nightly show two years ago. It was just another day at the office when Sharpton held a rabble-rousing rally for Trayvon Martin in the afternoon and then covered it on his show hours later. But Saturday's rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial celebrating the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's March on Washington was the most dramatic conflict of interest yet. Sharpton organized the rally (with Martin Luther King III), and MSNBC aired huge chunks of it...

Bizarrely, racism in America is no longer mainly about race. Sure, race is involved in a peripheral manner, but racism has mainly become an excuse, a dodge, a way to escape responsibility. When a black liberal is criticized, he cries racism. When liberalism fails, liberals cry racism. When the Democrat Party gets in trouble, liberals cry racism. It has become the ever present background noise of politics, like birds chirping in the forest. Racism does still exist and always will, but once the Democrat Party joined the GOP in being opposed to racist policies, appealing to racism became a...

Joe Scarborough and the Morning Joe panel expressed ubiquitous shock and outrage at George Zimmerman’s tour of a factory that made the gun he used to kill Trayvon Martin, arguing that the action should cause those lionizing Zimmerman as a “hero” to think twice from now on. “There’s a certain faction of the American political system that has embraced George Zimmerman as a hero,” Scarborough said Monday morning. “I said from day one, during the trial, that it was going to be hard to convict this man. That doesn’t mean that many on the far right need to embrace this...

"Why do they seem so determined to also make it racial?" So asks Joy-Ann Reid, the managing editor of The Grio, a web magazine owned by NBC News whose mission is to "focus on news and events that have a unique interest and/or pronounced impact within the national African Americans audience." The "they" in question are conservatives and journalists asking, among other things, why President Obama hasn't inserted himself into this case the way he did in the Trayvon Martin tragedy. The irony-impaired Reid was asking that question about a heinous murder in Oklahoma, where, according to police, an Australian...

Rachel Maddow has joined in in the left-leaning-media boycott of calling the Washington Redskins by its official name, instead awkwardly referring to the team as the “R-Word” throughout a recent segment. The MSNBC host called the actual name of the team “painfully racist.” Maddow picked up on Samoan congressional delegate Eni Faleomavaega’s practice of referring to the team as the “R-Word.” (Faleomavaega has been on the forefront of the push to force the team to change its name.) Maddow also referred to the Redskins as the “Washington R-Word NFL team,” the “Washington, D.C., football team,” and once as “the Washington...

MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry -- the same TV commentator who said Americans need to stop raising kids as if they belong to individual families -- had an extraordinary explanation for why the city of Detroit sought to declare bankruptcy last week: not enough government. "This is what it looks like when government is small enough to drown in your bathtub, and it is not a pretty picture." She says budget-cutting Republicans threaten to transform all of the U.S. into Detroit. What? Detroit has been a "model city" for big-government! All Detroit's mayors since 1962 were Democrats who were eager to...

If Tom Wolfe were writing The Bonfire of the Vanities today, he'd need a scene in the Grand Havana Room in New York City. It's an Olympian den fit for what Wolfe called "Masters of the Universe" -- the super-rich gods of finance who today go by "the one percent." Taking up the penthouse floor of 666 Fifth Ave., the Grand Havana Room is a private, by-invitation-only cigar club and four-star restaurant. Through its windows, you can see the toiling salary men 39 floors below as they scurry about like ants, some furtively smoking in doorways, ever fearful of Nanny...

The central criticism of the George Zimmerman trial is that there was one. It was simply impossible to convict him of anything beyond a reasonable doubt. The central criticism of the coverage of this trial was that there was any. How did this story merit consideration as national news? Why was the death of Trayvon Martin a thousand times more newsworthy than any other person shot on an American street? Answer: because Al Sharpton and other race-hustlers wanted it that way. Liberal journalists loved to suggest that the lives of young blacks in America are worth less than white lives....

The narrative. Two words we hear often in cable news. What’s the narrative (insert network) is pushing today? This week? This month? So as breaking news, big news—Boston bombings, Cleveland kidnapping, Oklahoma tornado—subsided as May turned to June, the narrative (outside of the scandal of the week) is now about an event that actually appears on a schedule ahead of time…as all the cable networks are now counting the hours down to tip-off of the Trayvon Martin trial. Headline News (HLN) showed producers and execs alike that owning coverage of one trial can be the difference between 2nd (behind Fox)...

Our favorite new GOP bomb-thrower, E.W. Jackson, is anti-yoga and anti-evolution, but he believes in trickle-up—yes, up—economics. National Review’s Betsy Woodruff reports that The Man Who Would Be VA Lt. Gov. says yoga puts you at risk of Satanic possession. … Jackson also doesn’t belive in evolution. Why? Because monkeys can’t talk. Defeat that with your so-called “logic.” …

Like a zombie that just won't stay dead, pretentious left-wing talking head Keith Olbermann has somehow managed to find a way to befoul Americans' living rooms once more. Thankfully, unless you are a baseball junkie, you won't have to witness his bloviations since Olbermann is scheduled to serve as a host for the Turner Broadcasting System's coverage of post-season Major League Baseball playoff games. The move is a logical one for Olbermann, who began his television career as a sportscaster for almost 20 years before venting his venom on politics for the liberal MSNBC and Current TV channels. According to...

Reporting the breaking news on Wednesday's NBC Today that President Obama had named U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to be national security advisor, chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd portrayed Rice as a victim of Republican attacks: "Rice, who had become a Republican punching bag during the whole Benghazi controversy....this is a bit of a defiant move by the President to his Republican critics." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump] Later on his 9 a.m. ET MSNBC show, The Daily Rundown, while discussing GOP opposition to Rice's promotion – and her nominated replacement as U.N. ambassador,...

Just when you thought the folks at MSNBC couldn't go any lower in defending the current White House resident, someone there stoops to new depths. On the Martin Bashir show Wednesday, the host actually said that investigating the scandal at the Internal Revenue Service is a racist Republican attack on "the black man in the White House" (video follows with fuller transcribed highlights and commentary):MSNBC's Bashir: Investigating the IRS is a Racist Republican Attack on 'Black Man in White House' After playing a clip of Mitt Romney making a joke about his birth certificate, Bashir said, “That was the moment...

MSNBC continues to disparage the scandals that have plagued the Obama administration the last few weeks. On Sunday’s Weekends with Alex Witt, the host brought on former Democratic staffer Jimmy Williams and former RNC chairman Michael Steele to reluctantly discuss the scandals once again. Of course, rather than focus on the substance of the controversies, Witt fell back on the concern that she and many others in the liberal media have often expressed: “[D]oes this have the potential to derail the president's second-term agenda?” The president’s agenda is always the victim of these scandal investigations in the minds of the...

For a second night on Thursday, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell on his The Last Word show tried to blame NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre for inspiring the ricin-tainted letters recently sent to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Barack Obama. The MSNBC host teased the show: Well, turns out that when the NRA says that President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg are enemies of the Constitution, some very crazy people actually believe that. O'Donnell began the show by playing clips of LaPierre from the NRA convention in Houston criticizing Bloomberg and Obama. After updating viewers of the letters sent...

There are moments in politics when an argument is advanced that is so surpassingly stupid or dishonest that it momentarily freezes your brain. Welcome to former DNC Communications Director Karen Finney's IRS twilight zoneMSNBC Host Finney: "Everybody Knew About This [IRS] Investigation Long Before The Election"According to Finney, the fact that Mitt Romney didn't make a huge deal out of the IRS targeting scandal last year is somehow proof that the whole thing is essentially a non-story and wasn't buried until after the election.  Where to begin?  As a fellow panelist incredulously points out, the revelation of IRS abuse wasn't...

Apparently the folks at MSNBC have decided that the Benghazi investigation is merely a political ploy by the GOP to hinder Hillary ClintonÂ’s presidential ambitions in 2016. Instead of addressing the substantive issues that potentially resulted in a cover-up surrounding the attack, MSNBC anchors and pundits have been going out of there way to protect the Obama administration and smear Republicans. Doing her duty to defend team Obama on Martin Bashir May 10 program, soon-to-be MSNBC host and former DNC Communications Director Karen Finney laid the blame for the dead in Benghazi on, who else, congressional Republicans: But I believe...

It really is amazing how liberal media members regularly make false statements on national television with total impunity. Consider MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell who twice on HBO's Real Time Friday arrogantly claimed that the Obamas' federal income tax rate was "in the high twenties" (video follows with transcribed lowlights and commentary): Lawrence O’Donnell: Obama’s Tax Rate ‘In the High Twenties’; Nope! Try 18.4% In a discussion about the federal budget, Pete Hegseth, the CEO of Concerned Veterans for America, said, “We missed some opportunities by not arguing for the simplification of the codes that Mitt Romney and President Obama and everyone...