Government shutdown

On Monday, the hosts of NBC's Today eagerly played clips of Saturday Night Live bashing Republicans over the government shutdown. In the morning show's 7 a.m. ET half hour, fill-in co-host Tamron Hall played a clip of SNL host Miley Cyrus doing a parody music video blaming the GOP for the shutdown and gushed: "I think she [Cyrus] might become a member of the five-timers club. You know, the group…

 Who does George Stephanopoulos work for? ABC News or the Democratic Party? In a This Week Interview on Sunday, the former operative to Bill Clinton foisted the blame for the government shutdown on John Boehner and House Republicans. During the 13 minute interview, Stephanopoulos repeatedly started questions this way: "The Democrats say...The Democrats, including Senate Democrat Harry Reid, have…

MRC’s Dan Gainor passed on a nominee for wacky-weed blog of the weekend. Salon.com posted an article Saturday titled “White America says ‘Let the Fire Burn’: What the Philadelphia firebombing of 1985 can tell us about the culture of white rage that led to the shutdown.” For the young people, in 1985, a radical-left black group called MOVE had repeated bouts of violence with police. After…

“After the President vetoed several spending bills, not one story blamed him for the shutdown, but nearly two dozen declared the GOP culpable. Furloughed workers and other ‘victims’ were featured in half the stories.” Sound familiar? That’s from a 1996 Media Research Center study on the battle between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. Yes, the current shutdown showdown is deja vu all over again in…

Public-broadcasting fans love to proclaim that PBS and NPR are bravely “independent” of the government. But sometimes, the facts suggest a close symbiotic relationship. Terence P. Jeffrey of CNSNews.com reports that on the first day of the government shutdown, the Daily Treasury Statement revealed no money for clinical trials for cancer, but the administration awarded $445 million to the…

It’s becoming quite apparent the American people aren’t as concerned about the government shutdown as the Democrats and their media minions would like people to be. On the CBS Late Show Friday, when host David Letterman asked the studio audience if they were worried about the shutdown, they collectively said “No” (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Sometimes the left approaches satire in its ongoing propaganda campaign to make the partial government shutdown seem worse than it is. Take Amanda Marcotte's October 1 Slate article "Government shutdown: From WIC to the panda cam, seven ways the shutdown will hit women hardest," no doubt a continuation of the whiny "war on women" meme only idiots fall for. My favorite paragraph in Slate's list…

Republicans are godless anti-government zealots responsible for a federal government shutdown that will literally kill people, MSNBC's Martin Bashir charged in the closing "Clear the Air" commentary on his Friday, October 4 program. But in a not-so-clever twist, the ever-sanctimonious Bashir -- who has a penchant for selective Bible-thumping to push liberal agenda points -- sought to enlist the…

It seems a metaphysical certitude the Obama-loving David Letterman didn't expect this response. During the opening monologue of CBS's Late Show Thursday, when the host asked the audience, "How many folks signed up on the ObamaCare," not one person responded (video follows with commentary):

On Thursday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams introduced a full report on cancer research at the National Institutes of Health being stopped under the government shutdown: "And there are the millions who are feeling the impact of this shutdown very close to home and across this country, including some for whom this standoff feels very much like a matter of life and death for them." In…

In a piece filed today, Associated Press reporter Bob Christie and his editors provided a textbook example of how to use loaded language to tilt coverage while still being entirely accurate with the facts. Covering a controversy in Arizona over the federal government’s closure of the Grand Canyon National Park and the state government’s attempts to keep it open, Christie painted the conflict as…

Are you happy now, Republicans? You went and forced the president to cancel his trip to Asia and with it an important foreign policy overture. That's the message Time magazine is sending readers with Michael Crowley's October 4 post, "Shutdown Dents Vital Obama Foreign Policy Goal," which was plugged on the Time.com front page with a photo of a frowning President Obama given the teaser headline…

On Friday afternoon, CNN's Don Lemon blamed the government shutdown over ObamaCare for "not really helping" the mentally ill woman killed by police on Capitol Hill on Thursday who needed "health care." "[T]his woman is in obvious need of mental health, and that means health care. And so what they're doing in Washington is not really helping her, is it?" he asked psychotherapist Wendy Walsh who…

Appearing as a guest on Thursday's PoliticsNation, during a discussion of the government shutdown, MSNBC's Krystal Ball characterized congressional Republicans as "tak[ing] the whole government hostage," and "threaten[ing]" the "constitutional balance." After host Al Sharpton fretted over the operation of FEMA and the National Hurricane Center during the government shutdown, Ball responded: