‘The Romney/Ryan budget is painful for Americans,” head Debbie Wasserman Schultz said on that same Fox News program.

Her comments are tame compared with what other Democrats have said, including President Obama, who called Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget “thinly veiled social Darwinism” that would “impose a radical vision on our country” and that is “antithetical to our entire history.”

So what do Democrats have to offer instead? Nothing.

The Senate hasn’t produced a budget since 2009 and refuses to this year, which means that once again the red-ink hemorrhaging federal government will be operating without any spending guidelines. Obama’s budget plan was so ludicrous that not one House Democrat would vote for it.

The Democrats’ refusal to govern hardly ends here.

The country faces monumental problems — a national debt crisis, an entitlement crisis, an energy crisis, to say nothing of the lingering economic crisis.

by OutloudOpinion.com For more Podcasts visit www.outloudopinion.com

On Fox News's The Five Monday, Greg Gutfeld took issue with this saying, "I think someone must have pumped sand and water through Damon’s head because he certainly exudes enough natural gas to power a small city" (video follows with transcript and absolutely no need for additional commentary):

GREG GUTFELD: So Matt Damon is making an anti-fracking movie. Yay! John Krasinksi will star, no doubt also an expert on this cruel practice that extracts natural gas. Boy, I hope he makes goofy faces like he does on “The Office.” Adorable.

But like every film these days it's just a remake. In the spirit of destroying an industry it harkens back to “The China Syndrome,” that shrill antinuke screed from the ’70s. If you think culture doesn't shape politics, remember that nuclear power is still recovering from that celebrity-driven smear. Which means you can blame Hollywood for our dependence on oil right now.

So why hate fracking? Isn't it just a horizontal windmill shattering rocks instead of birds? Well, the greenies hate it because it works. Yeah, a funny thing happened on the way to Solyndra: fracking put us toward a path towards energy independence making the green efforts look kind of silly.

And Matt knows we can't have that. Then America wouldn't be the bad guy anymore. This one fact alone would eliminate the only major villain in today's movies. True, with drilling there can be environmental side effects. But there are environmental side effects to everything, including film making. Research has shown that the film industry pollutes like mad thanks to the idling trucks, special effects and set construction. But that’s Hollywood, so never mind.

Anyway, I think someone must have pumped sand and water through Damon’s head because he certainly exudes enough natural gas to power a small city.

‘You say you won’t cut benefits for any of those heroes who are returning,” Michael O’Machearley of Wilmington, Ohio, whose son was killed in Iraq, said to Romney during Mike Huckabee’s Fox News candidate forum in Atlanta on Saturday. Then he asked, “Will you increase them?”

Romney didn’t address boosting government-funded veterans’ assistance. But meeting with vets in South Carolina several months ago he floated a real solution — “private-sector competition” in which “each soldier gets x-thousand dollars attributed to them, and then they can choose whether they want to go on the government system or the private system and then it follows them,” as in Florida’s school voucher program.

by OutloudOpinion.com For more Podcasts visit www.outloudopinion.com

On its website Thursday night, the Los Angeles Times hailed “MSNBC's Ed Schultz: A rare liberal success in broadcasting.” The subhead said Schultz “has been raising his ratings while talking about the issues of the poor and middle class working people.”

As usual, reporter Alana Semuels had to creep around the dominant ratings numbers of Fox News. In the ratings after the Times celebration was posted on Thursday night , Bill O’Reilly typically crushed Schultz by almost 3 to 1 (2.9 million to 1.1 million) and by more than two to one among the prized demographic of 25-to-54 (632,000 to 267,000). But Semuels tried to tout Ed’s year-to-date tally:

This year through early February, Schultz's nightly viewership has averaged 608,000, a 60% increase from his ratings during the same period in 2010, according to Nielsen. He's surpassed Cooper, who airs in the same time slot, though he has more than a million fewer viewers than O'Reilly, who also airs at 8 p.m.

If Thursday is any measure, when the gap was almost two million viewers, “more than a million” sounds like pro-MSNBC spin. Here’s how Semuels began:

Flip through the radio dial any given afternoon and you might hear an angry-sounding white man railing against the government, Congress and dastardly politicians.

No, not Rush Limbaugh.

This one criticizes Congress for not giving more help to the poor, the government for cutting off unemployment benefits, and politicians for pledging to dissolve unions. Ed Schultz has, over the last two years, made a niche in radio and on TV by talking about the poor and middle class, solidly gaining in ratings while more and more Americans lost jobs, benefits and middle class status.

Again, how badly does Limbaugh crush Ed Schultz in Radio Land? The Times really knows how to grade on a curve. Wouldn’t it laugh if someone tried to say the Orange County Register was a “conservative success” when it can only dream of the LA Times circulation?

Then Semuels found the radio expert to further their take that Schultz is a beacon of marketing intelligence:

"Schultz has very intelligently aligned himself with the interests of large groups of people in this country who have not been spoken for," said Michael Harrison, the publisher of Talkers, a website and magazine that follows talk radio.

There's a rise in "liberal" broadcasting because there are more poor people looking for someone who talks to them, Harrison said.

Semuels even puffed up Schultz for the way he dresses and recreates:

But there's also something very working-man about him that seems to draw in viewers who might otherwise be watching sports. He starts the day in sweat pants and doesn't change into a suit and tie until just before the TV broadcast. He likes to fish and hunt, and fishing pictures are posted on the wall in his office next to broadcast awards.

Schultz likes talking to working people. He's taken the show all over the country — to Ohio and Wisconsin, Oregon and Minnesota — to draw attention to issues facing the working class. His disciples call themselves "Ed Heads."

"He's kind of a rock star among some of our members," says Liz Shuler, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO.

Wouldn’t it be fun to take a poll of rank-and-file union members and see if Schultz beats O’Reilly there? Then the Times went for the official corporate spit-and-polish:

"This is a guy who understands how to connect with real people," said Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC.

Griffin hired Schultz after running into him at a [Barack Obama] White House news conference. In what Griffin calls a "tornado of a meeting," Schultz pitched a show to Griffin, who had never thought of hiring the then-radio host.

Since Schultz went on the air in 2009, Griffin has twice moved the show to better time slots — first from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., and then in October to 8 p.m., in prime time, the spot once anchored by MSNBC star Keith Olbermann.

"Right now, Ed will succeed because he's in the bull's eye of so many issues," he said.

Schultz is certainly an easy bullseye in Bill O'Reilly's or Rush Limbaugh's sights.
 

On Saturday's Fox News Watch, FNC contributor and conservative talk radio host cited a letter released last Monday by NewsBusters publisher and  Media Research Center president Brent Bozell which called on the media to give more attention to President Obama's attempt to force religious institutions to provide contraceptive coverage to their employees, even if these institutions object on religious grounds. (Video below)

Crowley cited numbers on how little attention had been given by the broadcast networks and CNN as of Monday, and credited the MRC with coaxing more attention to the issue from the media:

Brent Bozell at the Media Research Center did extraordinary investigative research into what the broadcast networks and the cable networks were doing on this issue. And what he found was that ABC and NBC did not cover this story for a full 16 days, CBS covered it only after 10 days, and CNN mentioned it briefly when the original decision came down, and then not again for 10 days.

She continued:

Once he publicized this, then the networks were forced to cover it. Fox was covering it relentlessly, and it became a huge issue, and it actually forced the White House to change their tack on this.

Below are both video and a transcript of the relevant portion of the Saturday, February 11, Fox News Watch on FNC:

JON SCOTT: So the White House backtracked from its original position. What about the way they did so, Monica? Is that going to solve the controversy?

MONICA CROWLEY: Well, I'm not sure that it solves the controversy, but I will say this is the power of the media. Brent Bozell at the Media Research Center did extraordinary investigative research into what the broadcast networks and the cable networks were doing on this issue.

And what he found was that ABC and NBC did not cover this story for a full 16 days, CBS covered it only after 10 days, and CNN mentioned it briefly when the original decision came down, and then not again for 10 days. Once he publicized this, then the networks were forced to cover it. Fox was covering it relentlessly, and it became a huge issue, and it actually forced the White House to change their tack on this.

SCOTT: And compare that with the Susan G. Komen controversy. That was a private organization, a fundraising organization that had decided  it didn't want to give some, I mean, a minuscule amount of its money to Planned Parenthood. And, according to the media, the earth was falling down.

KRISTEN POWERS: Well, that's because all their friends cared about it, you know, I mean, it gets into a situation where it's like everybody they know is talking about it, so it must be the most important thing that's happening in the world. And, yeah, the coverage of it was relentless, and then you have this issue, which is a major issue that affects so many people, and they really weren't interested in it.

But what I would say is I don't think it was just the Brent Bozell thing. I think it was that a lot of liberal Catholics came out, you know, and E.J. Dionne and Mark Shields and, you know, people who support Obama on pretty much everything saying this is not okay.
 

In the latest edition of National Review (dated February 6), comedy writer Rob Long knocks the political shtick of Stephen Colbert. He says Colbert causes a certain kind of “LOL” or laughing out loud – “mostly, they’re not laughting. They may be smiling wryly, or nodding in agreement, or noting in a subdued fashion the wit behind the statement, but they’re not laughing out loud. They’re agreeing.”

In short, they're awarding Clever Points, which is different than guffawing. Long finds the whole shtick "geriatric" in tone:

Stephen Colbert – and his partner on Comedy Central, Jon Stewart – hew to a fairly predictable lefty line. It’s not MSNBC left, or The Nation left – though they earn a lot of LOLs from that crowd, no doubt. It’s more along the lines of the Good Taste Left – NPR, The New Yorker, that sort of thing. Which is why the whole idea has a certain geriatric quality to it. What Colbert is trying to do, or his pompous persona that represents, to his LOLing viewers, a sharply etched blend of the entire lineup of Fox News, is mock the primary process and the idea of Super PACs especially.

Oh, my aching sides…

Long then explained Colbert's "Mitt the Ripper" ad — that if Romney believes corporations are people, he's a serial killer. He's not amused:

Look, if this kind of thing is funny to you, then don’t let me stand in your way. Go ahead and LOL all you want. But notice, if you would, that you’re not actually laughing. No one has caused those involuntary explosions of breath to burp unexpectedly from deep inside you. Nothing snuck up on you. It’s exactly what you expect from Stephen Colbert. He’s a liberal pretending to be a conservative – you can tell that instantly, because he’s playing a moron – and all conservatives are morons, see? – and he’s rich enough to set up a real super PAC to mock arcane campaign-finance rules and the current Republican front-runner.

It’s not funny. It’s what we call “NPR funny.” And predictably, the Good Taste Liberals are eating it up. The rest of us, not so much.

As for Comedy Central shows, Long wrote he preferred Tosh.0, which makes him actually LOL.

First Sarah Palin tells Fox News that “the worst thing that the GOP establishment can do is marginalize Ron Paul and his supporters.” Then that sentiment was echoed by Sen. Jim DeMint, speaking on The Laura Ingraham Show, when he warned that it would be to the party’s detriment to ignore Paul and his supporters. DeMint even gave permission for Paul to use the senator’s voice in a radio ad.

In the two Republican contests so far, Paul consistently won about 20 percent of the vote. Polls show that even in South Carolina, which is not considered hospitable territory for the Texas congressman, he is expected to take about one-sixth of the vote. It is very likely that he will reach the Republican convention with the second-highest number of delegates.

Yet, large portions of the Republican party seem torn somewhere between reading him out of the party entirely and hoping that Paul and his supporters will quietly fade away.

Brought to you by OutloudOpinion.com

After falling in the polls under a barrage of big-money attack ads from opponent Mitt Romney, and stumbling on a bad campaign ad of his own over Romney’s record at Bain Capital, Gingrich surprised many with his best debate performance yet.

He soared in the Fox News/Wall Street Journal debate Saturday by getting back to basics: articulating the elements of the Reagan Revolution. No wonder he got the first standing ovation ever at a debate.

by OutloudOpinion.com For more Podcasts visit www.outloudopinion.com

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich had a rather testy exchange with Fox News's Juan Williams during Monday's debate in South Carolina.

After Williams accused the former Speaker of the House of being racially insensitive when referring to Barack Obama as "The Food Stamp President," Gingrich said, "The fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history. Now, I know among the politically correct you are not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

JUAN WILLIAMS, FOX NEWS: Speaker Gingrich, the suggestion you made was about a lack of work ethic, and I gotta tell you my email account, my Twitter account has been inundated with people of all races, who are asking if your comments are not intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities. You saw some of this reaction during your visit to a black church in South Carolina.

[Audience boos]

We saw some of this during your visit to a black church in South Carolina where a woman asked you why you refer to President Obama as The Food Stamp President. It sounds as if you are seeking to belittle people.

[Audience boos]

NEWT GINGRICH: Well, first of all, Juan, the fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history. Now, I know among the politically correct you are not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable.

[Audience applause]

Second, you are the one who earlier raised a key point. There's a, the area on I-73 was called by Barack Obama a corridor of shame because of unemployment. Has it improved in three years? No. They haven't built the road, they haven't helped the people, they haven't done anything.

[Audience applause]

So, one last thing. So here's my point. I believe every American of every background has been endowed by their Creator with the right to pursue happiness, and if that makes liberals unhappy, I'm going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn some day to own the job.

[Audience applause]

Despite his likely respect for his former Fox colleague, it was nice to see Gingrich do this.

As NewsBusters has been reporting for months the media are going to constantly bring race into the discussion to assist Obama's reelection.

The folks on MSNBC immediately following this debate basically said all the contestants lost because of racism.

As this is going to be a consistent media theme the next ten months, it is incumbent upon on the candidates to smack this blatant dishonesty down whenever it surfaces.