Tag: Fox News

Federal Deficit Is Shrinking Even Faster Than Had Been Projected – But Fox Reports It As Bad News

Jon Ponder

There is good news about the economy — the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has reported that the federal budget deficit is reducing even more quickly than had been projected– so, naturally, it is being spun by Fox News as bad news:

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade reacted to a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report showing the 2013 deficit dropping by $200 billion by lamenting that the report might discourage further austerity measures…

Kilmeade reacted to this news with calls for increased austerity, lamenting that the “positive news” in the CBO report might lead away from a mindset of “fiscal discipline.” Kilmeade concluded, “I just hope we still feel the urgency to get our budget in order.”

Rachel Maddow’s report follows:

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Fox Legal Expert Suggests Obama Could Be Impeached over the Sequester – Even Though It Was Voted into Law with 202 Republican Votes

Jon Ponder

Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napiltano suggested yesterday that Pres. Obama could be impeached over the sequester:

“This is almost an impeachable offense,” Napolitano [said]. “If the president is deciding how to spend money in order to hurt us, rather than in order to provide us with the services for which we have paid and for which we have hired him, he is doing the opposite of what he has taken an oath to do.”

“He has taken an oath to uphold the laws. That means make the government work. Don’t make it painful, find a way to make it work on 2 percent less.”

The former judge concluded: “That’s the way the constitution works!”

What this Fox legal expert deliberately pretends to ignore, of course, is that impeachment over the sequester would put holdovers among the 174 Republicans in the House and 28 Republicans in the Senate who voted for the sequester in the 112th Congress in a very awkward position. In particular, it would make a majority of House Republicans complicit in the president’s “crime.”

MSNBC’s Liberal Hosts Question the Obama Administration’s Drone Strike Program

Jon Ponder

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During the presidency of George Bush, Fox News operated as an adjunct to the White House political office (or was it vice versa?). That’s why, if there were Fox hosts who had concerns about the many nefarious activities of the Bush administration — breaking the international anti-torture treaty that Ronald Reagan signed or deliberately betraying the covert identity of a CIA specialist in the WMD black market, for example — they rarely, if ever, voiced their criticisms on air.

I don’t watch Fox 24/7, so I can’t say that it never happened, but if it did, questioning Bush-Cheney policies was never given the high-profile airing that concerns about the Obama administration’s drone strike program have been given by liberal hosts on MSNBC this week. This is notable because it upends the meme in the political media — of which Andrew Sullivan is a prime exemplar — that Fox and MSNBC are just obverse and reverse on the same coin.

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Dick Morris Deserved to Be Fired by FOX News for Being an Incompetent Pundit

Buck Banks

I’m not a big one for Schadenfreude but I confess to feeling a little frisson on hearing the news that Dick Morris was not getting his contract renewed by Fox News. It’s not that I wish Morris ill tidings; it’s that I want pundits to be held accountable for their incorrect forecasts… Morris’ [2012] performance earned him the title of ‘Worst Pundit of 2012’ by Pundit Tracker. That’s an impressive achievement considering all the competition. In mathematical terms, Morris was wrong 80% in his prognostications: if you had placed a dollar bet on each Morris prediction in a prediction market, you would have lost 70% of your money.

— Harry Enten, writing in the Guardian.