CBS reporter Nancy Cordes saw a “nearly all-white crowd” at Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington, DC, as she (at least an off-camera female voice) demanded of two black women who weren't afraid to attend: “I'm noticing that there aren't a lot of minorities here today. Why do you think that is?” One of the women shot back: “They're probably over there with Al Sharpton.”
Appearing on the Late Show on Monday night, NBC anchor Brian Williams bizarrely asserted “we're still enjoying the fruits really of the Clinton economy,” claimed Tea Party activists who say “we want our country back” want it back “from the Trilateral Commission” and ridiculed their presumed hypocrisy as he insisted “you see a lot of signs, ‘Federal Government Out of My Social Security.’"
The Weekly Standard highlighted a striking change in views from Time’s Joe Klein who fretted an Obama Iraq speech “will not be remembered as vividly as George Bush's juvenile march across the deck of an aircraft carrier." But on the May 4, 2003 Face the Nation: “That was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day.”
Democratic New York Congressman Anthony Weiner’s theatrical temper tantrum rant on the House floor Thursday night, against supposed Republican obstructionism, animated cable news on Friday and Friday night ABC and NBC elevated it to legitimate news as they imputed great meaning to it as genuine frustration with congressional gridlock.
With author Christopher Hitchens out promoting his new book, ‘Hitch 22: A Memoir,’ I was reminded of four summers ago when the British-born foreign policy hawk gave the finger to Bill Maher’s audience for derisively applauding put-downs of then-President George W. Bush.
Botched bomber Faisal Shahzad's failure to achieve the “American dream” may have been an important motive for his terrorist act, CBS's Bob Orr contended Wednesday night: "personal financial pressures may also have pushed Shahzad to act. He became a U.S. citizen just a year ago, but he has not realized any American dream. He quit his job, lost his house, and was separated from his family."
With Katie Couric's drawing him out, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg agreed the Times Square car bombing was likely “homegrown” as he proceeded, in an interview excerpt run on Monday's CBS Evening News, to speculate it could have been placed by “somebody with a political agenda who doesn't like the health care bill or something. It could be anything.”
CBS’s Bill Whitaker showcased an admitted illegal: "Gerardo, who asked us to conceal his identity, crossed illegally from Mexico to Arizona four years ago. With the new law he knows there's a greater chance he’ll be arrested and deported...He has a daughter, a state job, a home which his an American born partner Jessica is packing up, fearing they might have to flee."
At the White House Correspondents Association dinner Saturday night, President Barack Obama mocked CNN’s Rick Sanchez for saying Iceland is “too cold” for a volcano, a remark launched into the blogosphere by NewsBusters and which prompted Sanchez, who insisted he was joking, to put NB post author Matthew Balan at the “very top” of his “List U Don't Want 2 Be On.”
NBC’s Andrea Mitchell played clips from two left-wing comedians, as she asserted: “It's now gone beyond protest to threats of a boycott, as Arizona becomes a laughing stock to some.” Viewers then heard a joke from Saturday Night Live about “fascism” followed by The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart: "It's the same thing free black people had to do in 1863.”
