Conservatives & Republicans

With his continued rise in the 2016 Republican presidential polls, the liberal media has circled back to attacking Marco Rubio over his personal finances with the latest attack pieces coming on Wednesday’s editions of the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News as both minimized the fact that Rubio was exonerated by a Florida ethics commission back in 2012. 

“Cocooning” in the sense of staying at home rather than going out is not a political term, but Jeet Heer suggests that conservatives are prone to a sort of ideological cocooning, eschewing non-conservative media to the point that it can be hard for them to “engage with reality at all.” In a Wednesday article, Heer argued, “Distrusting the mainstream media as too liberal and putting their trust…

Can you imagine the liberal outrage if a Republican called a prominent African-American Dem candidate "Chauncey Gardiner," the simple soul from the Peter Sellers film Being There? The cries of racism might well cost such a hapless Republican his job.  But don't expect James Carville to pay any price. On today's With All Due Respect, Carville said that a frustrated Bush "can't believe that…

On Wednesday's New Day, Jamie Gangel broke CNN's routine of hounding Republican/conservative guests with a mostly non-confrontational interview of Jeb Bush. Gangel only mildly pressed the GOP presidential candidate on the issue of his recent move to target competitor Marco Rubio: "You went after him [Rubio] for missing votes. But he hit back, and some people think he got the better of the moment…

In what was already a big night for conservatives on Tuesday with election wins in Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, and Virginia to name a few, voters in Houston, Texas overwhelmingly rejected a pro-transgender measure dubbed “the bathroom ordinance.” Not surprisingly, that did not sit well with The New York Times as it lamented the loss for the “equal rights ordinance.”  

As part of their 2016 coverage on Tuesday night, both ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News took shots at Dr. Ben Carson for his “hardline conservative” stances on issues like abortion when other “issues” like “political experience” will be one that “he will have to address” as the campaign moves along. 

Wednesday is the thirty-sixth anniversary of the seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran, Iran. Moreover, it is the thirty-fifth anniversary of what D.R. Tucker calls “one of the great tragedies in American history”: the election of Ronald Reagan as president. (The two events are, of course, related.) Tucker asserted in a Sunday post that “Reagan’s election nearly destroyed this country”…

One day after he pitched a softball to President Obama by asking him if criminal justice reform was “your defining moment” as the country’s first African-American President, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt returned with part two on Tuesday’s newscast by touting Obama’s “pointed jabs” and “candid assessment” of the 2016 Republican field.

As is so often the case with such stories, one can tell how favorable or disappointing a government report on the economy was by whether a story about it is still present at the Associated Press's "Top Business News" page several hours after its release. Today's news from the Census Bureau on September's factory orders and shipments, released at 10 a.m., was extremely disappointing. Thus, it is…

In a friendly exchange with Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell on Tuesday, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell tried to tee up the Obama administration cabinet official to slam Republican presidential frontrunner Ben Carson on abortion: “...a pediatric neurologist who does not get involved with care for women's reproductive systems....says that life begins with conception, no…

New York Times congressional reporter Carl Hulse delivered a balanced column Tuesday recounting why reformist, Tea Party-minded conservatives have aligned against more traditional Chamber of Commerce Republicans. But it was marred by Hulse's contemptuous tone ("the anti-chamber crowd") and labeling habits, with Hulse making not one, not two, but six references to "hard-right" conservatives in a 1…

On Tuesday, all three network morning shows happily touted President Obama attacking Republicans at a Democratic fundraiser Monday night over GOP presidential candidates objecting to CNBC’s biased debate. At the top of NBC’s Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie proclaimed: “The Republican candidates, briefly unified, splinter again over their debate demands as President Obama takes a swipe, mocking…

Who said it? "Get rid of all this corporatism, this corporate welfare . . . I would love to have the government stop this corporate welfare--that's what I want . . . This is a huge racket that's wrecking the country."  Did you guess Bernie Sanders? Probably not because you read the headline. Yet no one could be blamed for thinking it was Sanders. But indeed, it was Charles Koch, who said it in…