Justin's Political Corner
From the 02.13.2013 edition of FNC’s Fox and Friends:Gretchen Carlson: Higher Minimum Wage May Be “Bad For Small Businesses.” On Fox & Friends the morning after the president’s State of the Union address, co-host Gretchen Carlson claimed “[Obama] also wants to increase minimum wage, and of course, that would be great for people who are working at those jobs, but possibly bad for small businesses who have to pay higher wages.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 2/13/13]
For more on Fox’s baseless attacks on minimum wage, click here and here.
h/t: MMFA
(via Think Progress: RNCTV’s Latest Sexist Attack Against Hillary: ‘Face Lift, Perhaps?’)
Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy took a shot at outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday morning, speculating that she underwent a face lift in the last two weeks. In a quick headline roundup, Doocy quipped that Clinton’s new website featured her “glamorous new face,” while Fox showed a side-by-side comparison of her website photo and a photo from Clinton’s exasperated testimony at the Senate’s hearing on the Benghazi attacks.
Is this the face of presidential ambition? Days after retiring as Secretary of State, somebody has launched a website for her, showing off this glamorous new face. Face lift, perhaps? Well, that’s fueling rumors about a run for president in 2016, but her aides say it’s simply a way for fans and the media to reach her.
Typical FNC.
The right-wing media falsely reported that Alabama-based utility companies were turned away in New Jersey for hurricane disaster relief because they use non-union labor. However, multiple Alabama utility companies mentioned in these media reports say the claims are “rumors” and simply “not true,” and New Jersey utility companies have also denied that non-union working crews have been turned away.
Local Alabama news station WAFF was quoted in multiple right-wing news reports after it claimed that three utility crews from Alabama were not allowed to help with storm aid in New Jersey because they were non-union. Predictably, Fox News picked up the report almost immediately. During the November 2 edition of Fox & Friends, the hosts asserted that non-union crews were not allowed to help in New Jersey hurricane relief, and frequent guest Charles Payne added that this is “one of the more despicable aspects of what we are seeing”:
Following this report, Drudge linked to other right-wing websites making similar claims under the headlines “Non-union crews turned away from NJ…” and “‘No Red Tape’?”:
Later on Fox, host Gretchen Carlson issued a minor update explaining that many of their viewers had in fact seen Alabama crews working in New Jersey.
WAFF, the source of the original reports, has since updated its post about these claims. It continues to report claims from an Alabama-based Decatur Utilities employee that his crew was presented with documents by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) that required union affiliation in order to provide disaster relief. However, WAFF clarifies that Decatur Utilities’ general manager said crews “were not turned away but were made to believe that affiliating with the union was a requirement to work.”
NorthJersey.com further noted that New Jersey utility companies were accepting all offers of help, regardless of union status:
Non-union crews should not be concerned about coming to New Jersey to help bolster the efforts of New Jersey utility companies, officials said today.
“We are accepting any available resource,” said Karen Johnson, a spokeswoman for PSE&G.
“We are working with our union and have non union crews participating in our restoration efforts,” said Ron Morano, a spokesman for JCP&L. “We continue to accept support from out of state utility companies and contractors.”
h/t: MMFA
Fox News remembers 9/11 by attacking President Obama for not mentioning God in his presidential proclamation.
Fox Co-Host Gretchen Carlson noted that Obama has “called for a moment of silence, but has not called for the word God.” Fox News’ Steve Doocy added: “On this most somber of days, get this. Does the President of the United States call on people to pray for those lives lost? No.”
For starters, Fox News’ claim is blatantly false…a lie, if you will: Obama’s proclamation actually calls on “God’s grace.”
And, to add a bit of hypocrisy to this latest Fox News lie: George W. Bush didn’t include the word “God” in his 2006, 2007 and 2008 presidential proclamations on 9/11. But, you didn’t hear Fox attacking him for ‘ignoring God.’
(via reallyfoxnews)
MMFA: Fixed Noise’s Fox and Friends Mocks US Olympic Team For Sporting “French” Headgear
Fox & Friends contributed several minutes of their Wednesday program to mocking the United States Olympic team uniform which includes a “French beret.” While suggesting that the wearing of berets is unpatriotic, the co-hosts seemed to forget that most of the United States military wear berets until receiving emails from their viewers pointing out this fact.
On NBC’s Today, American company Ralph Lauren unveiled the design for the United States Olympic team opening ceremony uniforms, which are topped off with a navy blue beret with red and white stripes. Fox mocked the decision to top the uniform off with a “French” hat.
Not only did they fail to mention that the United States military wear berets as part of their uniforms, but that the 2002 Olympic uniforms for the Salt Lake City Olympics also featured powder blue berets.
Transcript:
KILMEADE: Women are everywhere. We’re letting them play golf and tennis now. It’s out of control.
CARLSON: You know what? You know what.
KILMEADE: She’s out.
CARLSON: You read the headlines. Since men are so great. Go ahead. Take them away.
KILMEADE: All right. Finally.
CARLSON: Take them away.
KILMEADE: OK.
CARLSON: Go ahead.
KILMEADE: Leaving an all male crew.
CARLSON: In all your glory, go for it.
From the 06.14.2012 edition of FNC’s Fox and Friends: =
Fox & Friends Drops The Veil, Produces Four-Minute Anti-Obama Attack Ad
Fixed Noise = GOP Subsidiary.
While Fox & Friends has long been a home for some of the most vicious, misleading, petty, anddishonest attacks on President Obama, they crossed a new ethical line today by producing and airing what is essentially a four-minute anti-Obama attack ad.
The video - opening with the text “Fox & Friends Presents” — played lines from Obama’s past speeches mixed with commentary from unidentified speakers and graphics purporting to show that Obama has broken the promises he’s made since his 2008 campaign. The graphics were accompanied by loud, epic, scary music played over grainy video footage.
The show (and both FBN and FNC) regularly acts as the communications arm of the GOP, attacking Democrats, promoting Republicans, and broadcasting GOP talking points, sometimes word for word. Co-host Gretchen Carlson has repeatedly advised GOP candidates how to promote their ideas in order to defeat their Democrat opponents.
Conservative Fox News contributor Dick Morris is asserting that the news media “ruined” President George W. Bush’s presidency because coverage of the Iraq war was “too harsh.”
During a Wednesday morning segment with Morris, Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy pointed out that Arthur Brisbane, ombudsman for The New York Times, recently complained that the paper had been more critical of President George W. Bush while he was in office than it had been of President Barack Obama.
“It’s terrific that he said that,” Morris explained. “There are two factors that make the media liberal. One is that the reporters are liberal. But the other fact is that the media tends to react to what it last did badly. So for example, it was relatively mild toward Bush during the early years of his administration after 9/11, and then it over compensated by being too harsh during the Iraq war.”
From the 04.25.2012 edition of FNC’s Fox & Friends:A 2003 study by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) found that 71 percent of guest on U.S. television news programs were pro-war, while only 3 percent were against the Iraq war — a ratio of almost 25 to 1.
During the April 19 edition of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly hosted a segment attacking this week’s episode of Glee for featuring a storyline about a transgender teenager struggling with her gender identity. O’Reilly was joined by Fox & Friends’ Gretchen Carlson and Judge Jeanine Pirro.
Throughout the segment, O’Reilly and Carlson criticized Glee for encouraging “dopey kids” to experiment with homosexuality and possibly identify as transgender, comparing LGBT youth to smokers and “drug-fueled” celebrities.
O’Reilly and Carlson’s fear-mongering is reminiscent of last years Fox News meltdown over Chaz Bono’s appearance on Dancing with the Stars. Back then, medical professionals widely condemned the idea that transgender people on television could cause kids to identify as transgender.
From the 04.19.2012 edition of FNC’s The O’Reilly Factor:
h/t: MMFA
Regular viewers of Fox News know that Fox is no fan of public education, which they often claim is “indoctrinating” children to liberal viewpoints. Fox & Friends, in fact, regularly runs segments about education alongside a graphic reading, “The Trouble With Schools.”
Today, Fox & Friends began their show by hosting a conservative author to claim public schools “subvert American exceptionalism” and promote liberal “propaganda,” then ended the show by gleefully hosting a college professor who teaches his students how the government “plunder[s] people.” In other words, Fox is saying that “liberal” viewpoints being taught in the classroom is “propaganda” … but conservative viewpoints in the classroom are important.
In the first half of the show, co-host Gretchen Carlson interviewed Kyle Olson, author of a book called Indoctrination: How “Useful Idiots” Are Using Our Schools to Subvert American Exceptionalism. Olson is also a regular contributor to Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government blog and the conservative Townhall.com, although Carlson didn’t mention that. Olson claimed to have found a “real agenda” to get “teachers’ personal philosophy into the classroom.” He and Carlson found it sinister that students would be learning about the words “strike” and “collective bargaining” in class (emphasis added):
CARLSON: Preschool teachers using words like “strike” and “collective bargaining” in vocabulary lessons? Our next guest says this is just the tip of the iceberg. He studied dozens of lessons plans [sic], and he found thousands of examples of teachers using the curriculum to promote their own liberal political agenda.
[…]
OLSON: I’m the father of a kindergartener, and so this — looking at what was going on in schools is very important to me. And so I started looking at the curriculum, lesson plans, textbooks, videos that are being pushed in public schools, and what I found is a real agenda to get the teachers’ personal philosophy into the classroom.
CARLSON: So one of the things you found was union language to preschoolers, the talk of strike and collective bargaining?OLSON: That’s right.
CARLSON: I mean, even most seniors wouldn’t understand what that is.
OLSON: That’s it. That’s the perfect example. What happened in the city of Chicago was, there’s a preschool teacher, preschooler. Again, I’m the father of a kindergartener, so I’m thinking, “Preschooler, you know, how could a preschooler relate to this?” But there’s a teacher in the city of Chicago, she went up to Madison, Wisconsin to protest against Scott Walker and collective bargaining reform and everything. She took pictures there. She took them back to her classroom. She read her students a book called Click Clack Moo: Cows That Type and then she taught them the vocabulary lesson that you mentioned, “strike,” “collective bargaining,” and “negotiate.” And you just think, you know, these are examples that high schoolers should be learning about, if at all, but yet, they’re being pushed at very early ages.What’s most troubling is that both Carlson and Olson seem to suggest unions and collective bargaining, integral parts of American labor history, shouldn’t be taught in classrooms at all, even in high school. The pair went on to be equally appalled by the notion that other students learn about environmental protection, incarcerations rates, and the existence of AIDS, all of which Olson views as evidence of a subversive “agenda.” They were particularly troubled by the fact that Maryland high school students are required to be “environmentally literate” in order to graduate, which Fox has freaked out about before.
In last night’s blogpost by Big Journalism’s Smearer-In-Chief Dana Loesch, she (like the other right-wingers whining about it) falsely claims that country music singer and staunch Conservative Republican Hank Williams, Jr. “was silenced by the Obama bootlickers at ESPN for having courage to speak out against Obama.”
ESPN was fine when their Las Vegas radio affiliate joked about, and seemingly advocated for, the rape of Sarah Palin just a few weeks ago.
From my perspective, Williams didn’t call Obama “Hitler”; rather he made an exaggerated comparison to the political conflict between Obama and Boehner. (Perhaps a more appropriate analogy would have been Reagan and Gorbachev.) It seems that progressives are doing more to call Obama “Hitler” with their accusations than Williams implied with his remark. Of course, only Williams himself can clarify that. Regardless, ESPN yanked him from tonight’s broadcast. By the way, what’s with progressives’ new sensitivity over comparing a president to Hitler?
Williams’s job would likely be safe had he done what Mike Tyson did on an ESPN radio affiliate and joked about Palin rape.
Typical for lowlife blogger Loesch to misrepresent the facts for her fanbase who believe that “those Liberals are persecuting us Conservatives.” She has been waging a war on ESPN for its supposed “Liberal Bias.” ESPN isn’t Liberal-biased or Conservative-biased, you factless Breitbart hack! Bocephus was (and won’t be) NOT silenced or blacklisted, unlike the Dixie Chicks for criticism of Bush and his corrupt Administration during the run-up to the Illegal Invasion of Iraq, who got blacklisted and boycotted by a huge majority of the core fans of Country music.
Here’s the real no-spin facts on Hank Williams, Jr. being yanked from at least last night’s ESPN Monday Night Football telecast (and possibly for good) featuring the Peyton Manning-less Indianapolis Colts vs. the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (which the Bucs won 24-17):“While Hank Williams, Jr. is not an ESPN employee, we recognize that he is closely linked to our company through the open to Monday Night Football. We are extremely disappointed with his comments, and as a result we have decided to pull the open from tonight’s telecast.”Although he is well within his rights to say bullcrap like that, he also is subject to being reprimanded or even fired by ESPN. I say that it is time to drop him completely.
TMZ.com reported that Bocephus’s “Obama to Hitler” comparison comment “was misunderstood and distorted.”
Williams Jr. says, “Some of us have strong opinions and are often misunderstood. My analogy was extreme – but it was to make a point. I was simply trying to explain how stupid it seemed to me - how ludicrous that pairing was.”
He continues, “They’re polar opposites and it made no sense. They don’t see eye-to-eye and never will. I have always respected the office of the President.”
Williams Jr. adds, “Every time the media brings up the tea party it’s painted as racist and extremists – but there’s never a backlash – no outrage to those comparisons… Working class people are hurting – and it doesn’t seem like anybody cares. When both sides are high-fiving it on the ninth hole when everybody else is without a job – it makes a whole lot of us angry. Something has to change. The policies have to change.”
I still ain’t buying that apology.
