Congress

The “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC punted Tuesday night on news that Senate Democrats successfully blocked legislation aimed at cracking down on sanctuary cities. Doing the job the networks could have been doing, Fox Business Network (FBN) host Lou Dobbs alerted his views on Tuesday to the story that he described as “business as usual” with “Senate Republican leadership permitting…

Filling in for Jose Diaz-Balart during MSNBC’s 10 a.m. ET hour on Tuesday, NBC national correspondent Peter Alexander interrogated Republican Congresswoman Susan Brooks about the House Benghazi Committee: “So if Jeb Bush's campaign insists that his brother, George W. Bush, bears no responsibility for the 9/11 attacks – which of course were carried out by Al Qaeda, but he was president at the time…

During a discussion with Bloomberg Politics editor Mark Halperin on Tuesday’s NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie touted how Hillary Clinton had “set the table” for her testimony before the Benghazi Committee on Thursday. Halperin proclaimed: “This appearance has been looming on her calendar and her staff’s calendar with dread, thinking this could be the worst day of the year for her. It could…

During an interview that aired on Friday’s CBS Evening News, chief White House correspondent Major Garrett spoke with Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio and wondered aloud if the situation in the House of Representatives concerning the search for the next Speaker of the House signaled the “important historical meltdown of the Republican Party.”

Michael Kinsley’s second-best-known contribution to political discourse, trailing only the “Kinsley gaffe,” is his observation that “the scandal isn't the illegal behavior -- the scandal is what's legal.” In a Thursday post, Steve Benen, a producer for MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and the primary writer for the TRMS blog, sought to apply Kinsley’s wisdom to the congressional inquiry into the…

Appearing on Friday’s NBC Today, Bloomberg Politics managing editor John Heilemann saw a rapidly closing window for Joe Biden to enter the presidential race: “...if he's making a calculation on the political landscape, it's more forbidding now than it was a month ago. You've got Hillary Clinton performing well at this debate, the Benghazi Committee now kind of delegitimized. She's teed up to have…

New York Times reporter David "hard-line" Herszenhorn is making hostile labeling of conservatives a bad habit, especially in his post-Boehner reporting. The shock resignation of the Speaker of the House gave Times reporters an excuse to target the "far-right" conservatives who had supposedly hounded John Boehner out of office, and granting the speaker never a popular figure in Times-land, some…

During the 2012 election the New York Times treated Rep. Paul Ryan, currently a reluctant Speaker-elect, as fearsomely conservative. But now the paper is defending him from the "far-right" on the front page. Reporter Jennifer Steinhauer got to the labeling bias right off the bat: "Far-right media figures, relatively small in number but potent in their influence, have embarked on a furious…

We’ve time and again seen the media receive their messaging orders  - and then march off all mouthing the Leftist talking point(s) of the day.  Washington, D.C.-based talk radio host Chris Plante quotes a military friend of his describing the media not as a gaggle, but as a centipede.  Multitudinous legs in coordinated movement - all headed in the same direction.  Talk radio impresario Rush…

Is the Republican party actually two parties? In a sense, believes The Washington Monthly's Martin Longman, who contended in a Monday post that the forty or so congressmen who constitute the Freedom Caucus “are best understood in the parliamentary sense as being a party in their own right. In our system, they are still called Republicans, but in any other system they would be a minor party that…

This week, Hillary Clinton is treated to fawning tributes and softball quesions during her "town hall" forum on NBC's Today, while network reporters finger the "far right" as at fault in the surprise resignation of House Speaker John Boehner. Plus, CNN's Christiane Amanpour claims some in the GOP are part of a "war on Muslims," and ex-CBS newsman Dan Rather is sticking to his bogus story: "There…

Esquire’s Charles Pierce seemingly would like a time machine to take him back a quarter-century so he could advise the Tom Foley/George Mitchell-era Democratic party. Failing that, Pierce wishes today’s Dems would at last act on his idea to persuade the American people that the Republican party is “thoroughly, deeply, banana-sandwich loony,” thereby “beat[ing] the crazy out of [the GOP] so the…

The surprise withdrawal of Rep. Kevin McCarthy from the race for Speaker gave the New York Times an excuse to issue a series of front-page stories larded up with hostile "hard-line" and "hard-right" labels mocking the apparent chaos surrounding congressional Republicans, being held "hostage" by the party's conservative wing.

On Friday's PBS Newshour, host Judy Woodruff joined liberal columnist Mark Shields in declaring that the House GOP's conservative wing is holding the Congress "hostage," with allegedly right-leaning regular and New York Times columnist David Brooks then complaining that Tea Partiers are good at "destruction," but not "construction." Brooks further griped that, "to get elected, especially as a…