Republican Tells Anti-Jewish Joke at Campaign for a GOP Gubernatorial Candidate - Then Runs for Virginia Senate

10th Congressional District Republican Committee Chairman John Whitbeck.
(Youtube Capture)

GOP official runs for Virginia Senate after telling anti-Jewish joke at Cuccinelli event (via Raw Story )

A Republican official who called attention to himself earlier this year for telling an anti-Semtic joke at a campaign event for former gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli announced this week that he would be running for Virginia Senate. “So you…

Reid, Democrats Trigger ‘Nuclear’ Option: Filibusters on Most of President's Nominees Eliminated

The so-called 'Nuclear Option' has been detonated  by Senate Democrats, neutralizing the ability of Republicans to filibuster presidential nominees.  The vote removes key leverage from Senate Republicans who have tried to stifle President Obama at every turn.  The ability of Republicans to use Senate rules to pander to the Tea Party and troll for right-wing votes has been vastly reduced. Over Two hundred years of political precedent is vanquished and the power of the ruling party has been drastically increased. However, the vote could spell disaster for Democrats if the Republicans ever regain control of the Senate.

Senator Harry Reid campaigning for Barack Obama in November of 2008.
(Photo: Brian Finifter)

By Paul Kane, Updated: Thursday, November 21, 12:51 PM
The partisan battles that have paralyzed Washington in recent years took a historic turn on Thursday, when Senate Democrats eliminated filibusters for most presidential nominations, severely curtailing the political leverage of the Republican minority in the Senate and assuring an escalation of partisan warfare.

The rule change means federal judge nominees and executive-office appointments can be confirmed by a simple majority of senators, rather than the 60-vote super majority that has been required for more than two centuries.

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Democrat's Broken Promises on Minimum Wage: Suddenly Making Noises About the Minimum Wage Yet Know Congress Won't Cooperate - Are They Serious Or Just Pulling Our Chain?

If President Obama and his party didn't even try to deliver on their 2008 campaign promise of a minimum wage hike when they had the White House and both houses of Congress on lockdown in 2010 and 2011, what does their sudden rediscovery of the minimum wage mean now, when they know they can move nothing through Congress?  Are they and their sheepdogs, the so-called “progressive Democrats” just yanking our chain again?

NYC Rally To Raise The Minimum Wage, Oct. 2013
(Photo by The All-Nite Images)

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
As a presidential candidate back in 2007 and 2008, Barack Obama promised to ram a hike in the minimum wage through Congress by 2011. Like the president's promises to renegotiate NAFTA and enact labor law reforms to make union organizing possible again, it wasn't one of those high profile pledges he repeated at every opportunity in front of every audience. He didn't have to, that's not the way it works.

If you're a right-leaning Democrat nowadays, here's how it works: you make those kinds of promises before small audiences of labor and poor folks. From that point, it's the job of your sheepdogs, the Democrat “progressives” campaigning for you to keep the herd of your base voters in line by putting those words in your mouth a lot more often, and with a lot more emphasis than you actually place upon them. Promises are promises, after all, and promises made by the wealthy and powerful to the poor and powerless are worth exactly nothing.

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Governor Christie: Given 'Free Ride' by Big Media Because He's 'Entertaining' - Meanwhile His Right-Wing Policies Are Ignored

The November 18 cover of Time magazine about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie caused a stir because of this line of text: "The Elephant in the Room." Many saw that as a swipe at Christie's weight, as well as a feeble pun about Republicans. But the bigger problem with the Time piece, as with so much of the coverage of Christie, is more fundamental: The real elephant in the room is that Christie has an actual record of governing a state, and yet journalists seem almost totally uninterested in discussing it.

Media Advisory: FAIR
There is no doubt that Christie is a media darling (Extra!, 5/11). On Meet the Press (11/10/13), Time's Mark Halperin said:

"Chris Christie is someone who is magical in the way politicians can be magical, like our last three presidents. People like having them on TV. He's a good talker. He won."

The actual Time article, while not crediting Christie with magical powers, presented him in glowing terms. Christie "has run the Garden State with combustible passion, blunt talk and the kind of bipartisan dealmaking that no one seems to do anymore," Michael Scherer writes. "He's a workhorse with a temper and a tongue, the guy who loves his mother and gets it done."

To Time, the Christie story that matters is how he can get the conservative base of the Republican Party to support him. Pushing the major political parties to the "center" is a well-worn, bipartisan media pattern; it's what caused much of the press enthusiasm for John McCain in 2000 and 2008 (Extra!, 7/08). But as Jonathan Martin of the New York Times (11/11/13) wrote, "The more the news media and the establishment cheer on Mr. Christie, the more grassroots activists--especially members of the Tea Party--resent it."

This framing prioritizes criticism of Christie from the right. As Time put it:

"Like McCain and Romney before him, Christie is wide open to attack from his right. He opposes gay marriage, but in October he called off a legal fight to block same-sex unions in New Jersey, earning the ire of Christian conservatives who promptly complained of "serious" concerns about Christie's 'reliability.'"

So Christie, after successfully blocking marriage equality in New Jersey for years with his veto, eventually gave up what increasingly appeared to be an unwinnable legal battle--that's what Time means by Christie being "wide open to attack from his right."

But what about other policy outcomes in the state Christie governs? Christie made the rounds of the Sunday chat shows on November 10 after winning a landslide election, as seemingly every journalist made clear. But the journalists avoided Christie's record as governor, instead focusing squarely on whether Christie is right-wing enough to win the Republican presidential nomination. "Can you play in places like Iowa and South Carolina?" asked ABC This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos.
On NBC's Meet the Press, David Gregory wondered: "Mitt Romney told me here last week that you could save the Republican Party. Does it need saving and are you the guy to save it?"

(Photo: Bob Jagendor)

Gregory did at one point mention an actual policy issue, noting that the Wall Street Journal editorial page had deemed Christie's economic record "the biggest area of disappointment." But that was the exception, despite the fact that there's plenty to examine.

New York Times reporter Kate Zernike (10/30/13) wrote one of the few pieces that focused on Christie's actual record. She noted that Christie, who won election in 2009 attacking Democrat Jon Corzine's budget gimmicks,

"has relied on the same kind of short-term strategies, diverting money for things like affordable housing and property tax rebates to balance the budget, and tapping funds intended for development of new sources of energy to keep the lights on in state buildings."

Zernike added that

"Christie has issued more debt for transportation projects than any of his predecessors. Overall spending has risen 14 percent, and while state surpluses nationwide are growing, New Jersey's has shrunk to its lowest percentage in a decade. The state's bond rating is among the worst in the country."

And while Christie touted the state's private-sector jobs record on all of the Sunday shows, none of the reporters interviewing him thought to bring up the state's dismal jobs performance Compared to other states, New Jersey ranks near the bottom--with the 41st highest unemployment rate, and the 44th worst job growth record (Daily Beast, 11/11/13).

As media portrayals stick with the "moderate" storyline, The Nation's John Nichols (6/3/13) had a different, more factually based analysis:

"Christie is no moderate. He's a social conservative who opposes reproductive rights, has defunded Planned Parenthood and has repeatedly rejected attempts to restore state funding for family planning centers. He has vetoed money for clinics that provide health screenings for women, including mammograms and pap smears. He vetoed marriage equality.

(Photo: Bob Jagendor)

"Christie's consistent when it comes to reading from the right's playbook. The governor announced early in his tenure that he was pulling New Jersey out of a regional carbon emissions reduction program, and then declared his intention to scale back the state's renewable energy targets."

Christie, Nichols added, has a record very much like controversial Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker:

"Christie is at his most militant when it comes to implementing the austerity agenda associated with the most conservative Republican governors. There's a credible case to be made that he is 'doing a Scott Walker on New Jersey,' as a Garden State headline suggested in early May, after the governor proposed gutting civil service protections. Christie makes no bones about his admiration for the Wisconsin governor, whose anti-labor crusade inspired mass protests, a recall attempt and miserable job-creation numbers."

But those serious issues remain off the corporate media radar as they lavish praise on the supposedly straight-talking, bipartisan Republican governor. "There is no doubt that Christie's personality is the dominant feature of his political style," as Washington Post reporter Dan Balz  (11/4/13) put it. The same goes for the way media are covering Christie--which is surely exactly the way he likes it.

Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

David Gregory's Curious History of the Tea Party

By Peter Hart
During his interview with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney (11/3/13), NBC Meet the Press host David Gregory offered up this fanciful account of the Tea Party movement's origins during a discussion about internal GOP fights:

Look, the reason there is a Tea Party right now goes back to President Bush. I actually think it goes back to the beginning of a more robust security state after 9/11; the government expands to deal with security. There's also Medicare Part D. There's a lot of government spending, and then there's ultimately the bailouts, which conservatives start to rebel against. And then President Obama continues that.

This is the kind of rhetoric Tea Party figures like to trot out when critics note that a movement that claims to be concerned about government spending was sure quiet (or nonexistent) during the Bush years. But Gregory arguably manages to take it one step further by linking the right-wing movement to a critique of the national security state and Medicare Part D.

NBC Meet the Press Host, David Gregory interviews Mitt Romney. 

Which Tea Party movement is this?
As a refresher: The movement really geared up in the wake of comments by CNBC host Rick Santelli (2/19/09), who was outraged by government plans to offer help to distressed homeowners (i.e., not the Wall Street bailouts). His call for "tea party" protests against policies to help these "losers"–issued just a month after Obama's inauguration–resulted in the first wave of such protests. Glenn Beck, then a host at Fox News Channel, took up the cause too. Some of the most visible examples of Tea Party activism were the "town hall" protests against what would eventually become the Affordable Care Act. The Tea Party "brand" was adopted by many well-known, well-connected figures in the Republican Party, like Dick Armey.

What did they all want? It wasn't always clear; as Steve Rendall and I wrote (Extra!, 5/10), the movement is full of political contradictions that media often failed to explore, but

there's one consistency they ignore in painting Tea Partiers as wholesome adherents to small government, constitutional principles and so on: the movement’s singular and often racialized loathing of Barack Obama.

Corporate pundits have spent years coming up with more flattering descriptions of the Tea Party than what they most clearly seem to represent.  New York Times columnist Tom Friedman said they  "began as a protest against Republicans for being soft on deficits."   His colleague David Brooks wrote that the "Tea Parties are right about the unholy alliance between business and government that is polluting the country." Someone should alert the Koch Brothers!

Newsweek's Jon Meacham  once wrote that the Tea Party could be good for everyone, since it was about "the recovery of the spirit of the American Founding." Time's Michael Crowley suggested the movement was animated by disgust with Wall Street; they believe that "Washington and Wall Street are in bed together, colluding for power and profit at the expense of the little guy."  He also argued that Tea Partiers are about calling out "an elite Washington–New York establishment that lies to the public to cover for policies that enrich the wealthy and strengthen the powerful."

This is a remarkably charitable view of an obviously right-wing movement that began just as soon as a black Democrat took office. That's not to say that all Tea Party activists are motivated by a racialized loathing of Barack Obama; but to suggest that the Tea Party exists to express dissatisfaction with both major parties and the national security state, and that Obama's presidency just so happened to coincide with the rise of this movement, stretches even the most active imagination.

Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.