Mitt Romney

For the second time in less than two weeks, Andrew Sullivan's ignorance was revealed on national television.

Following George Will and PBS's Gwen Ifill on ABC's This Week last month, MSNBC's sole conservative commentator S.E. Cupp assisted Sullivan with looking like a total moron on HBO's Real Time Friday (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Last week Bill Maher warned Mitt Romney supporters, "Black people know who you are and they will come after you."

On HBO's Real Time Friday, the host said that Republicans reacted to Obama's victory Tuesday like they "just found out that their wife is f--king a black guy" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

David Frum blames the media for Mitt Romney's loss. Not the liberal media, of course--we are talking David Frum, after all. No, Frum blames the conservative media, or as he calls it, "the conservative entertainment complex."

Frum touted his upside-down take on the media during a Morning Joe appearance today while promoting his instant e-book, "Why Romney Lost." Joe Scarborough liked the line so much he asked Frum to repeat it. Frum refused to name names, saying he does so in his book, but do we doubt whom he was targeting? View the video after the jump.

On Thursday night, the Associated Press unveiled a bizarre new standard of disclosure and non-disclosure in sexual harassment allegations.

In a story on a sexual harassment complaint against Joseph Rogers, the CEO of Waffle House, AP reporter Kate Brumback would not name the accuser, since "The Associated Press does not identify alleged victims of sexual harassment." But it does somehow find it relevant and worth disclosing the unrelated information that the alleged sexual harasser made donations to Mitt Romney in 2011 and 2012:

This is a man whose ego has become so inflated, he needs crowbars to get his head through doorways.

On his radio show yesterday, Ed Schultz paused from his repeated spiking of the football in response to the election to make an unintentionally revealing remark about MSNBC, where he hosts a primetime cable show on weeknights (audio) --

Jay Leno made a very interesting joke Wednesday night.

On NBC's Tonight Show, the host said the stock market plunged earlier in the day because Mitt Romney pulled his money out (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Should Republicans unilaterally disarm in the media-bias wars?  Joe Scarborough seems to think so. Arguing that it distracts Republicans from performing the political blocking-and-tackling needed to win elections, Scarborough has called on Republicans to "stop blaming the media."

Saying "let's makes this personal," Scarborough cited as an example of the supposed distractions to which he was referring the controversy over the tape Morning Joe aired in September from a Romney campaign stop.  Readers will recall that the clip seemed to show Romney asking the crowd, which had been chanting "Romney!", to change to "Romney/Ryan."   But Scarborough suggested just the opposite: that the crowd had been chanting "Ryan!" and that Romney asked them to change to "Romney/Ryan."   View the video after the jump.

As NBC anchor Brian Williams appeared as a guest on Wednesday's The Late Show on CBS, host David Letterman charged that Republican political strategist Karl Rove "lied to" and tried to "frighten" the electorate in 2012, referring to the former George W. Bush strategist as a "tubby little weasel." Letterman:

Bob Schieffer poured cold water on President Obama's victory during CBS's post-election coverage on early Wednesday morning: "He's not going to have a mandate here. The President has been re-elected, but nobody's put the stamp of approval on his program. I mean, when the vote is this close...he's going to have a very, very difficult time."

Schieffer repeated these same points on Wednesday's CBS This Morning, and pointed out that the incumbent liberal "almost lost the popular vote...so people are going to step back, and they're going to say, why should I cooperate with him?"

Shortly after 1:00 a.m. during MSNBC's election night coverage, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell ridiculously claimed that Democrats are more tolerant of Mormonism than Republicans and blamed the "Bible-thumping side of the Republican party," which he asserted is "where anti-Mormon feeling resides," for political analysts discussing Mitt Romney's Mormon religious beliefs, in spite of polls showing Republicans more inclined to accept a Mormon President than Democrats. O'Donnell:

Turnabout is fair play, judging from the coverage ABC News has given GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's October 30 campaign event which he used to collect money, clothing and food for the victims of Hurricane Sandy.

The first article the network produced on the donation effort was entitled "Aid Organizations Prefer Cash to Canned Food" and criticized the "hastily organized storm relief" as a problem for relief organizations, which "will take canned goods and supplies, but they'd much rather have cash."

The film "SEAL Team Six" came under fire for being an Obama-booster just before the election. Its Obama-supporting producer Harvey Weinstein gave credibility to those charges when he lauded the President and took shots at Mitt Romney and John McCain on CNN on Monday night.

"I didn't have to do anything to remind anybody about the decision that Barack Obama made to pull the trigger on Osama bin Laden," Obama-donor Harvey Weinstein told CNN. Host Piers Morgan teed him up by calling the drama "quite overtly political in the most magnificent propaganda-style way." [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Stop the presses! Stop the presses!

Dan Rather, the former CBS Evening News anchor who presented a forged document on the air about President George W. Bush weeks before the 2004 elections, said on MSNBC's Morning Joe Tuesday, "Something in my gut tells me that it’s going to be a good day for Romney" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

During a November 6 chat with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell in which he handicapped the election, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) argued that Republicans had done themselves no favors by both having as many debates as they did in the primary season and turning those debates over to liberal journalists for moderating. "If you were going to have the debates, let them be sponsored by the Heritage Foundation or let them be sponsored by the Republican National Committee."

For her part, Mitchell was visibly upset by this charge and shot back that various state Republican Party organizations had co-sponsored those debates. "But they were controlled by the news media," Barbour reminded her. "But I am accepting your point," Barbour conceded, that the lengthy, debate-laden primary season hurt Romney's ability to campaign for independents' votes. [watch the video below the page break]

Good Morning America's George Stephanopoulos and analyst Matt Dowd on Tuesday offered one more day of doom and gloom for the Republican presidential ticket. Discussing the prospect of Mitt Romney winning Virginia, Stephanopoulos insisted, "But it's not even enough. He really has to sweep the whole east coast." (Of course, the east coast includes states such as Maine and Massachusetts, areas he doesn't need to win.)

Dowd, who has worked for both Democrats and Republicans, piled on: "[Romney has] a very narrow path to an electoral college victory...It's as if he has to draw an inside straight in this campaign today in order to win this tonight." For emphasis, he added, "He has got to do all those things and the path is still narrow for him to win this."

Whether Mitt Romney becomes the 45th president or not, Politico's Jonathan Martin insists that the Republican Party is on the verge of a looming crisis. Sticking with the same overgeneralized racist narrative, it is basically a 'fact' at this point that the GOP's conservative ideology and a lack of diversity will ultimately lead to its downfall.

Conversely, the Democratic Party is poised to dominate in future elections. Nevermind that we heard this before in 2006 and 2008, with Clinton acolyte James Carville forecasted 40 years in the wilderness for the GOP. No, Martin insists that demography is destiny, and the GOP is bound to shrivel electorally as older white conservatives die off the voting rolls:

In an interview with senior Romney advisor Ed Gillespie on Tuesday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer ripped into an ads run by the Governor's campaign in Ohio about the auto industry: "The reaction was swift and unanimous, Ed. They were painted as misleading by independent fact-checkers. Ohio newspapers said they were an exercise in deception, a masterpiece of misdirection, and Chrysler and GM called them inaccurate and campaign politics at its cynical worst." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Lauer jabbed: "How could this happen to the guy who is the son of a car-maker and the guy who is supposed to have the business resume?" Gillespie defended the ad regarding Chrysler expanding Jeep production in China: "...the ad is accurate. The head of Fiat came out and said that they were going to open production in China for Jeep. That's what the ad says, and that's accurate."

CBS Late Show host David Letterman took a swipe at George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and the highest court in the land Monday.

In the middle of his opening monologue, Letterman joked that the recount would begin on Wednesday followed by the Supreme Court giving the election to Romney on December 18 (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

In his day job at New York magazine, political writer John Heilemann is throwing cold water on Romney victory hopes. “What's true, however, is that two or three weeks ago, Mitt Romney and his people were fully convinced, and not entirely without reason, that victory was within their grasp. The reality now, though, is that this is no longer true.”

As victory eludes Romney’s grasp, beware the “ferocity” of the Romney voters who “despise Obama,” for it will be “breathtaking, and perhaps not a little scary”: 

“Bin Laden is Dead and GM is Alive!”  That slogan emanating from Vice President Biden, which has resonated in states, like Ohio, which could decide this upcoming election.  But Gov. Romney’s call from late 2008 to send Detroit into managed bankruptcy would have saved the auto industry as well, according to expert Edward Niedermeyer. 

Niedermeyer wrote today in The Wall Street Journal that:

Rapper Jay-Z while performing at an Obama campaign rally in Ohio Monday substituted the name "Mitt" for the word "b-tch" in the lyrics to his song "99 Problems."

Before doing so, he told the crowd he didn't get it vetted by the campaign (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary, file photo):

This week's New York Times Sunday Review wasn't as loaded with bias as last week's edition, but did feature a political cri de couer by Times favorite Drew Westen, Emory University professor and left-winger, "America's Leftward Tilt?"

Westen really went out on a limb:

The presidential election is now a close contest, but barring an Electoral College tie, someone is going to win, someone is going to lose, and both sides will have to make sense of it all.

In the quadrennially important swing state of Ohio, one of the Toledo Blade's featured front page stories on Sunday wondered if Mormonism would shape Romney's policy. Following an endorsement of Obama last week in which there was no mention of the president's beliefs, religion editor Timothy Knox Barger's penned a 2,500 word piece that resorted to scare tactics and conjecture.

Among them was a seemingly legitimate concern that Romney might try to impose a ban on certain things that he's known to abstain from himself -- like coffee for instance.

The New York Times leaned "Forward!" for Barack Obama's reelection in its campaign coverage over the weekend. The front of the paper's Saturday Election 2012 section featured a large photo from an Obama rally of a volunteer handing out flags at a fairground rally in Hilliard, Ohio on Friday. The caption noted "A crowd of 2,800 showed up to see Mr. Obama."

Meanwhile, campaign reporter Ashley Parker estimated on Twitter Friday night that 25,000 people attended a Romney rally in West Chester Township in Ohio. But those strong turnout figures for Romney, which suggested high levels of enthusiasm in a crucial state, were buried in the very back of Parker and Michael Barbaro's Sunday story from the campaign trail.

Fox proved once again that it has anything but a conservative bias.

As NewsBusters warned in September, the hit series The Simpsons on Sunday totally trashed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his supporters two days before Election Day (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):