Conservatives & Republicans

On Monday's Anderson Cooper 360, CNN's Drew Griffin hounded David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress over his insertion of outside footage into his undercover videos that targeted Planned Parenthood's sale of aborted babies' organs and tissue. Griffin underlined to Daleiden that "the problem people are having is, that this is not an aborted child...that does seem very deceptive to me."…

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…

Promising to air “all sides” in their ongoing series “Voices Against Violence,” Monday’s CBS Evening News featured its second installment with gun control activist Andy Parker, who used the occasion to blast the “cowards” at the National Rifle Association (NRA) for “blocking...sensible gun legislation.”

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.”

In 1988, the Year of Dukakis, Rep. Peter Kostmayer (D-Penn.) told Congressional Quarterly that his party’s advice for liberal interest groups was, “Just shut up, gays, women, environmentalists. Just shut up, and you will get everything you want after the election. In the meantime, just shut up so we can win.” (They didn’t win.) These days, believes lefty pundit Marcotte, it’s the Republican…

After tape rolled of Black Lives Matter demonstrators repeatedly chanting "pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon," you might have thought a BLM leader would either apologize, or at least seek to miminize the incident as the excesses of an irresponsible and unrepresenative few. But no.  On today's Melissa Harris-Perry show, after just such video was played, BLM leader Monica Dennis issued not one…

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…

As I noted on Friday, the New York Times has become the de facto head cheerleader for Truth, the movie which purports to tell the story behind CBS News's 60 Minutes report on President George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard service in the early 1970s aired in September 2004. The Old Gray Lady has hosted a TimesTalk video in which one of the film's lead actors, Robert Redford as Dan Rather,…

The New York Times has not merely climbed aboard the bandwagon of Truth, which exalts the fraudulent September 2004 CBS 60 Minutes report about President George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard Service. It's now serving as the film's de facto lead apologist. The most recent example demonstrating how deeply in the tank the Old Gray Lady has gone is Stephen Holden's Thursday film review…

On Friday, Salon featured two articles taking fire to presidential candidate Ted Cruz. Authored by Heather Digby Parton, one piece was titled, “Paranoid Rise of the Militant Right: Inside the Growing Threat of Domestic Extremism” and examined the Department of Justice’s new focus on domestic extremists, and the author zeroed in on right-wing extremism. The second was written by Simon Maloy, who…

Rupert Murdoch is in a pickle, and the famously abrasive lefty writer Taibbi is loving every minute of it. In a Tuesday article for Rolling Stone, Taibbi portrays Murdoch as “desperate… because he senses his beloved audience of idiots” abandoning Fox News in favor of Donald Trump, “a onetime Fox favorite who is fast becoming the network's archenemy.” Taibbi argues that Fox News must routinely…

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…

Joe Scarborough swung a double-edged sword on today's Morning Joe, swiping simultaneously at his MSNBC colleague Chris Matthews and at radio host and debate panelist Hugh Hewitt. The subject was Marco Rubio, with Hewitt calling him "the most dynamic speaker the Republican party has seen ever, since Lincoln."  "Since Lincoln," asked Scarborough incredulously—"do you have a tingle going up your leg…