Congress

On Friday's Real Time on HBO, host Bill Maher was again aiming crude personal insults at GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz -- this time likening him to a "rat" and to convicted pedophile Jared Fogle of Subway restaurant fame -- and Republicans, this week recommending that the GOP give up on winning the presidential election because the "teabagger" Congress is so effective at being "…

There’s a saying, attributed to Woody Allen, that “showing up is 80 percent of life.” Dahlia Lithwick suggested in a Tuesday piece that showing up might be even more important for Merrick Garland if he wants to become a Supreme Court justice. Lithwick semi-seriously wrote that if “by the end of September of 2016” Senate Republicans still haven’t given Garland a hearing, he “should simply suit up…

Former Reagan administration official Bruce Bartlett joined the opening panel on MSNBC’s All In Thursday night and put forth the notion that Republicans in Washington and particularly Congress are responsible for the rise of Donald Trump by creating an “authoritarian, fascistic attitude that we're going to get stuff done.”

The boy who cried “Wolf!” eventually had a serious credibility problem. Now, according to Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall, so do anti-Donald Trump conservatives as a result of the right’s frequent over-the-top allegations regarding President Obama. Marshall thinks it’s fair for conservatives (or anyone) to call Trump a “demagogue and potential strongman,” but argued in a…

While discussing President Obama’s appointment of D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward emphasized on Fox News Sunday that while Garland would provide a fifth vote for liberals in cases before the Court, but was someone who’s “not really partisan in anyway.”

NBC Meet the Press host Chuck Todd clearly brought the Tim Russert tactics to his interview with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who bizarrely claimed his career has been dedicated to preventing obstruction. Todd played a 2005 Reid clip: “The duties of the United States Senate are set forth in the Constitution of the United States. Nowhere in that document does it say the Senate has a duty to…

Plenty of conservatives would concur with Daily Kos writer Mark Sumner that Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump is a fascist. They certainly would not agree with Sumner’s belief that the GOP as a whole has become increasingly aligned with fascism “since at least 1994.” Sumner contended in a Sunday article that beginning in “the time of the Gingrich,” Republicans “realized they could…

On the regular "Shields and Brooks" on Friday's PBS NewsHour, it was another case of a liberal analyst and a faux-conservative agreeing with each other as allegedly right-leaning New York Times columnist David Brooks gushed over U.S. Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, calling him "an excellent choice," a "model of judicial restraint," and "a man of both amazing integrity and capacity to be…

On Wednesday night, the top English broadcast networks and Spanish-language network Univision failed to cover news that the Justice Department had finally confirmed that a gun in possession of the now-captured Mexican drug lord El Chapo was linked to the scandal-ridden Operation Fast and Furious.

The “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC on Thursday night insisted President Barack Obama’s latest Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, is nothing but a “moderate” and personally pleaded with Republicans to consider placing him on the Court. While two networks mentioned comments made by Vice President Joe Biden back in 1992 about Court appointments, none of them made light of the…

Appearing on Wednesday's Wolf show to discuss President Barack Obama's nomination of Judge Merrick Garland for the U.S. Supreme Court, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin characterized Republican resistance to confirming him as not being about "principle," but "power" instead.

Anchoring an NBC News special report on Wednesday about President Obama nominating federal judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, Today co-host Matt Lauer asked justice correspondent Pete Williams: “Senate Republicans have vowed to block any nomination that comes from the President....what message is the President sending with this pick?”

Even before President Obama announced D.C. appeals court judge Merrick Garland would be his nominee for the Supreme Court on Wednesday, ABC’s Good Morning America and CBS This Morning both hailed Garland as a “moderate” leading contender for the nod.

Vox editor-in-chief Klein doesn’t often look back fondly at the good old days of the conservative movement, but he did so in a Sunday post inspired by the death of Nancy Reagan. Klein thinks conservatism was at its best in the 1980s, for which he gives considerable credit to the First Couple of the era. Klein wrote that the “political genius” of the Reagans “was to shape the pessimistic, angry…