Tax Cuts Over Fighting Cancer; Bush "The Toxic Texan"; The Up Side to Rioting: Making People Address the Racial Divide
1) Since Lt. Shane Osborn had to use all his physical
strength to save his plane, National Review's Kate O'Beirne professed
she was "grateful that there wasn't a female pilot at the
controls." But ABC's Cokie Roberts wasn't interested in that and
instead celebrated how the navigator was a woman.
2) Bush "did do well here," ABC's George
Stephanopoulos conceded before cavalierly asserting: "We'll never
know if it could happened earlier if he hadn't been so hard line."
3) George Bush cut funds to fight cancer which afflicts
kids in order to give "hundreds of millions of dollars of tax cuts to
his cabinet," the Wall Street Journal's Al Hunt charged.
4) ABC's World News Tonight led into a piece on how the
Bush administration has suspended adding anything to the endangered
species list by highlighting a sign near President Bush's ranch which
called him "the toxic Texan." Barry Serafin concluded that the
rule change "has given critics one more reason to brand the Bush
administration as anti-environment."
5) The up side to rioting. It's one of the
"uncomfortable truths," declared ABC's Aaron Brown from
Cincinnati, that "it took riots to make people here understand how
deep are the racial divisions and it took rioting for people to feel the
urgency required to close those divides."
6) Chris Matthews conceded on C-SPAN that his wife, WJLA-TV
anchor Kathleen Matthews, has influenced their teenage sons to be
politically liberal.
7) Don Hewitt of 60 Minutes refused to defend Dan Rather
for attending a Democratic fundraiser, denied 60 Minutes is liberal and
said he believes in "sense" and "nonsense." But he
revealed that his view of "sense" follows the liberal line:
"I have always believed that if you get the NRA out of the
way..."
1
The EP-3
crew would probably all be dead if the pilot were a women, National
Review's Kate O'Beirne daringly pointed out on CNN's Capital Gang,
but ABC's Cokie Roberts was only interested in celebrating how the
plane's navigator was a woman.
On Saturday's Capital Gang, National Review
Washington Editor Kate O'Beirne observed: "I must remind some of my
friends, who dream of a gender-blind military, what we've now learned is
that Lieutenant Osborn had to use every ounce of his considerable strength
to save that plane and crew. And I know I found myself grateful that there
wasn't a female pilot at the controls who might not have been able to do
it."
The next morning, on ABC's This Week, Cokie
Roberts interviewed the plane's pilot, Lt. Shane Osborn, at Whidbey
Island Naval Air Station. He recounted his harrowing experience: "At
that time we called up the navigator and said what's the closest field,
maybe we'll be able to get this on the deck and it happened to be
Lingshui in Haianan Island."
Roberts excitedly piped up: "Navigator's a
woman!"
Osborn: "Yes. Lieutenant j.g. Kauffman."
2
For the
second straight week, ABC News analysts and reporter George Stephanopoulos
scolded President Bush for taking a "hard line" toward China.
During the This Week roundtable Stephanopoulos conceded that Bush
"did do well here" in getting the crewmen released, but then he
added a caveat:
"He did do well here. Listen, he succeeded.
It's Easter. Everyone is home, everyone is safe. It's a win no matter
how it happened. We'll never know if it could happened earlier if he
hadn't been so hard line."
3
Emotion
ahead of reality as government spending equals caring. On Saturday's
Capital Gang on CNN Al Hunt, Executive Washington Editor of the Wall
Street Journal, took this cheap shot at George W. Bush's budget
priorities to the groans of fellow panelists Bob Novak and Kate O'Beirne:
"George Bush goes to Atlanta last month and
he gets teary-eyed, he cries because he's at a cancer ward with kids.
And then he cuts the program. Now I'm sorry. He did, he did. He cut it
by $55 million. At the same time he has a budget that gives hundreds of
millions of dollars of tax cuts to his cabinet."
I'm sure the American Cancer Society would
appreciate Hunt donating all of his tax cut to them.
While you can always pick out one program that
may be cut, the big picture on health research is that Bush's budget
hikes spending by the National Institutes of Health by 13.5 percent.
4
After
highlighting how some people hung a sign near President Bush's Texas
ranch which called him "the toxic Texan," ABC's Peter Jennings
warned that "Mr. Bush wants to severely restrict the ability of
environmental groups to get rare plants and animals put on the endangered
species list." In the subsequent story, Barry Serafin acknowledged
how the Clinton administration had stopped adding species to the list
years ago and how the Bush team says "lawsuits are swamping
science," but he nonetheless concluded: "The proposal to change
the rules on vanishing species has given critics one more reason to brand
the Bush administration as anti-environment."
On the April 13 show, Jennings explained over
video of a banner hanging off a water tower: "Now some of the
national news today. Environmental activists from Greenpeace hung a banner
from a water tower near the President's ranch in Texas. It said, 'Bush,
the Toxic Texan -- Don't Mess with Earth.'"
Jennings used that as a launching point:
"We also learned this week that Mr. Bush wants to severely restrict
the ability of environmental groups to get rare plants and animals put on
the endangered species list."
Barry Serafin began his relatively brief story
which did not feature any soundbites: "Most of the more than 1,200
species on the endangered list got there because of legal pressure by
outside groups. But the Bush administration says lawsuits are swamping
science, that biologists, not judges, should be setting priorities for
protecting endangered species. The Fish and Wildlife Service faces 75
lawsuits involving 400 species. Officials say as of now, every cent of the
service's $6.3 million endangered species budget this year will be spent
on dealing with such suits.
"The same concerns were expressed within the
Clinton administration, which stopped adding species to the list last year
because of the time and money needed to address legal challenges.
"Environmental organizations say the change
sought by the Bush administration would gut the Endangered Species Act and
leave compliance to Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who has argued in the
past that the act was unconstitutional. The proposal to change the rules
on vanishing species has given critics one more reason to brand the Bush
administration as anti-environment. Barry Serafin, ABC News,
Washington."
Maybe the left-wing environmentalists
wouldn't be so successful at branding Bush as
"anti-environment" if ABC News refrained from publicizing their
gimmicks and thus having viewers see Bush being labeled "toxic"
before a story on a very rational policy decision.
5
Violence
isn't great, but on the up side, ABC reporter Aaron Brown argued on This
Week, it's making people "feel the urgency required to close"
the racial "divides."
Before an interview segment with Kweise Mfume
of the NAACP and Keith Fangman, head of the FOP in Cincinnati, ABC's
This Week played a taped piece by Aaron Brown from the city rocked by
rioting after a police officer shot and killed a black man. Brown
rationalized the riots as he promoted the "uncomfortable truth"
that they will make the community face racism, an "urgency" that
he regretted had passed the last time there was up an uprising in the
1960s.
Brown asserted: "In a week of
uncomfortable truths, none has been more uncomfortable than this: It took
riots to make people here understand how deep are the racial divisions and
it took rioting for people to feel the urgency required to close those
divides. Three decades ago this city was also rocked by race riots. For a
while then race was an important issue. But the neighborhoods destroyed
then were remain scarred today, the urgency passed. And there are many
people here, black and white, who worry that history again will repeat
itself."
Brown delivered the same theme in his Friday,
April 13 report for World News Tonight: "It has been three decades
since this city has focused so much on race. It was not what happened
Saturday night, the 15th black man killed by police in recent years, that
has caused the attention here and from the Justice Department as well. Not
the shooting, something else."
Reverend Damon Lynch: "I'm not sure that at
15 we would have had the attention to this that we now have. It took the
violence."
Brown: "That violence sometimes works is an
even more striking admission when it comes from the chief of police."
Brown to Cincinnati Police Chief Tom Streicher:
"Had there not been violence, would there be the same urgency to
address the problems that there is now?"
Streicher: "Well, I think the obvious answer
to that is no."
Brown didn't bother to note that 12 of the
15 were armed and in one incident the suspect had already killed an
officer.
Before the April 15 This Week interview
segment and Brown polemic, viewers heard the ABC announcer assert over a
matching graphic on a pre-commercial bumper: "70 percent of routine
traffic stops involve African-Americans, who only make up 17 percent of
the driving population."
The on screen graphic featured this credit --
"Source: NAACP."
How gullible is ABC News? The statistic is
preposterous. Traffic stops involving blacks may exceed their percentage
of drivers, but 70 percent? Maybe in some cities with a high black
population, but in much of America, where few blacks live, police officers
could not pull over blacks if they wanted to and thus in many states
whites must make up nearly 100 percent of all those stopped.
6
A
liberal journalist is influencing two future reporters at home? Appearing
on C-SPAN's Washington Journal on Friday morning, Chris Matthews of
CNBC/MSNBC's Hardball, conceded that his wife, a Washington, DC TV
reporter, has pushed his teenage sons to the left politically.
During the April 13 C-SPAN show, host Brian
Lamb showed viewers snapshots of Matthews with his two sons, Michael 18
and Thomas 15, from their recent two-week trip to Asia with their father,
which included stops in Thailand and Vietnam. As viewers looked at one
photo, Matthews explained: "Michael, he's been the big liberal sort
of in the family, although he went a little further than liberal in the
last election. I can't give away how he voted, but you can guess. Thomas
is just as liberal as he is now. I mean they are real, real, I mean,
instinctive liberals."
Lamb revealed his personal knowledge of Chris
Matthews's wife's politics, suggesting: "Mother's having an
influence?"
Matthews: "I can't say what Kathy's
politics are or I'll pay dearly, but you may be right."
Those who watched Hardball during Chris
Matthews's absence for his trip may recall that Kathleen Matthews filled
in for a couple of nights.
Kathleen Matthews is a reporter and anchor for
the Allbritton Communications-owned ABC affiliate in Washington, DC, WJLA-TV
channel 7.
To see what Kathleen Matthews looks like so
you can learn if you recognize her, go to: http://www.wjla.com/wjla.hrb
then click on "Kathleen Matthews" in the "ABC 7 News
Team" list on the right.
7
Don Hewitt,
Executive Producer of CBS's 60 Minutes, refused last week to defend Dan
Rather for attending a Democratic fundraiser, denied 60 Minutes is liberal
or conservative, argued that those two terms are "ridiculous"
and that he believes in "sense" and "nonsense." But he
revealed that his view of "sense" follows the liberal line:
"It makes no sense to me that there are 200 million handguns in
American cities. I have always believed that if you get the NRA out of the
way, decent reasonable Americans would figure out a way to respect the
Second Amendment and get guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't
have them."
Hewitt's comments came during appearances to
plug his new book about his years running 60 Minutes, Tell Me a Story: 50
Years & 60 Minutes in Television. The April 3 CyberAlert detailed how
in a C-SPAN Booknotes interview Hewitt disclosed he voted for Nixon,
Reagan, Clinton and Gore, conceded he knew at the time that Bill Clinton
was lying on his show in denying an affair with Gennifer Flowers, revealed
James Carville sobbed during the taping: "Oh I love them, I love
those people, I love them so much." And he noted how Dan Rather
"likes" Bill Clinton. Go to:
http://archive.mrc.org/news/cyberalert/2001/cyb20010403.asp#4
MRC analyst Brad Wilmouth caught Hewitt's
latest appearances and comments.
-- From FNC's The O'Reilly Factor on April
12:
Bill O'Reilly: "Liberal bias, Dan
Rather, Democratic fund-raiser."
Don Hewitt: "I'm not here to defend Dan
Rather."
O'Reilly: "No, no, but there is a liberal,
there is a perception on the part of millions of Americans that the
network news is liberal."
Hewitt: "I'm not here as a PR guy for the
network news."
O'Reilly: "But you think that's a bad
perception, right?"
Hewitt: "I didn't, no, I think that they
are what they are. You perceive it that way."
O'Reilly: "I don't."
Hewitt: "I'm not sure anybody else does. I
think maybe you do. But I'm not here to defend that. Look, let me tell
you about 'liberal' and 'conservative.' I finally decided those
two words are ridiculous. I don't use them anymore. I don't know
what's liberal and what's conservative. I know what makes sense to me
and what doesn't make sense to me. It makes perfectly good sense to me
that hunters should have rifles. It makes no sense to me that there are
200 million hand guns out in the streets of America right now you can't
get rid of."
O'Reilly: "That's just common
sense."
Hewitt: "Okay, that's sense. I only work
on what's sensible and what's nonsensical."
-- On CNN's Larry King Live the night
before, April 11, he elaborated on how he considers the NRA position to be
"nonsense" after he insisted 60 Minutes is not liberal:
Larry King: "Is 60 Minutes a show with a
point-of-view?"
Hewitt: "No, no point-of-view."
King: "So those who criticize that you're
liberal or you're conservative-"
Hewitt: "We're not liberal. I'm not
liberal. First of all, I finally decided to get rid of those two words,
'liberal' and 'conservative.' I don't know what they mean anymore.
I mean, I've come down to 'sense' and 'nonsense.' It makes sense
to me, it's got nothing to do with conservative or liberal, it makes sense
to me that hunters be allowed to have rifles. It makes no sense to me that
there are 200 million handguns in American cities. I have always believed
that if you get the NRA out of the way, decent reasonable Americans would
figure out a way to respect the Second Amendment and get guns out of the
hands of people who shouldn't have them."
He's not liberal but the first
"nonsense" that pops into his mind is the position of a
conservative group. --Brent Baker
>>>
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