Congress

Imagine if a Republican congressperson called Illinois' senior senator Dick Durbin "Dick Turban" in not one tweet, but two (Durbin has been given the nickname by several center-right pundits and commentators; but as far as I can tell, no national Republican politician has used it). Does anyone think it would take the establishment press over 15 hours (and counting) to report it? Late Monday…

After former President George W. Bush failed to make the cut in the New York Times' photo collection of the march commemorating Selma, the Times on Monday showed its idea of political balance. It led the paper with yet another hammering of an incompetent, ultraconservative Republican Congress, while another front-page report critical of Hillary Clinton was hidden under a mild headline and…

CNN's Carol Costello badgered Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat on Monday's CNN Newsroom over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress. Costello played up how "some say the relationship between Israel and the United States has become partisan for the first time ever," and asked Mayor Barkat if he agreed. The anchor later asked her guest, "Couldn't you argue that Benjamin Netanyahu…

One of the most discussed articles of the past week was Matthew Yglesias’s Monday piece in Vox contending that this country’s combination of a presidential system and increasing ideological polarization is a recipe for eventual political breakdown (the article was headlined “American democracy is doomed”). New York magazine’s Chait thinks Yglesias overlooked something important. Chait argues that…

NBC and ABC barely covered the possible corruption case against Democratic Senator Robert Menendez on their Friday evening newscasts. Together, the two networks set aside 49 seconds of air time to news briefs on Senator Menendez being "the subject of a corruption investigation over jet trips he took on the private plane of a Florida eye doctor," as Lester Holt put it on NBC Nightly News.

In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry infamously stated, in connection with an Iraq War spending resolution, that "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it." Democratic Congresswoman Corrine Brown of Florida has done her own John Kerry imitation. She was against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress earlier this week, and…

On Friday, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell observed that the Republican-led Benghazi investigation gained credibility in the wake of the Hillary Clinton email scandal that it uncovered: "Well, the Benghazi investigation by the Select Committee was viewed by many as overkill. That it had all been cleared up back two years ago. And the fact is that some people, certainly the partisans for Hillary…

The Monday editions of ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News aired news briefs on the announcement that Maryland Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski will retire. They both failed to label Mikulski a liberal and heaped only effusive praise on her. On ABC, anchor David Muir hailed the announcement as “the end of an era in Washington” for the 78-year old “longest serving woman in Congress” …

CNN State of the Union substitute host Dana Bash certainly lived up to her last name when it came to grilling Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) over the Department of Homeland Security funding and asking if the “conservative wing” of the Republican Party was too centered on principle and “chaos” instead of the “reality” of governance. Bash started the interview off by insinuating that everyone is…

Introducing a one-sided report on Monday's NBC Today that featured no criticism of President Obama, co-host Savannah Guthrie proclaimed: "Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived ahead of a controversial speech to Congress tomorrow. And that visit at the invitation of Republicans is threatening to further strain the Obama administration's relations with Israel."

On Friday evening, the Big Three networks continued their blackouts on the Thursday revelation that the Treasury Department's deputy inspector general, Timothy Camus, is conducting an "active investigation" into the "potential criminal activity" at the IRS over Lois Lerner's supposedly missing e-mails. Instead, ABC's World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News all devoted full…

The Fiscal Times is a generally strong and informative online publication. That said, it has occasionally exhibits symptoms of what could be seen as either serious leftist bias, quite disappointing ignorance, or both. One such example arrived in my email box early this morning. It contained the following headline and opening tease for a story about the food stamp program:

At the Associated Press late Thursday morning, Ken Dilanian, the wire service's intelligence writer, did a marvelous job of covering up the essence of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's Worldwide Threat Assessment testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The trouble is that if he were doing his job as our Founders anticipated he would when they gave the nation's press…

The Associated Press's headline at Alan Fram's coverage of the controversy over the existence of an Obama administration contingency plan if it loses the Halbig v. Burwell case pending at the Supreme Court may be among the most inchoherent ever: "GOP CLAIMS PAPER SHOWS FED AIDES' PREPS FOR HEALTH LAW LOSS." "Paper"? What is in question is an alleged 100-page contingency plan should the Court…