Conservatives & Republicans

Eager to provide supposed “fact-checking” of the Republican presidential debate, on Thursday, MSNBC NewsNation host Tamron Hall declared: “But to Carly Fiorina's moment regarding Planned Parenthood. While that comment was applauded by conservatives, a lot of that Twitter traffic was also...people fact-checking her on that statement.”

Apropos of Wednesday night’s Republican debates, Esquire’s Charles Pierce worried that political reporters may be treating the race for the party’s presidential nomination as if it were a Brad Thor novel rather than a highly consequential real-world event. “How do you cover a campaign in which 15 candidates are running on the basis of things that simply are not true…that simply do not exist?”…

Either Nicholas Riccardi at the Associated Press is woefully ignorant, or he set out to deliberately mislead readers about the impact of Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush's tax plan. I'll report the details; readers here can decide for themselves. Riccardi's "analysis," contained in his Sunday morning writeup covering the tax proposals of Bush, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, contained the…

At the top of the 9 a.m. ET hour on NBC’s Today, co-host Tamron Hall slammed the Republican presidential debate as being like a bad reality show: “...a friend of mine said it was like The Real Housewives with Andy Cohen, because they were just pitted against each other.”  

In an interview with actress Emily Blunt on Thursday’s NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie downplayed the celebrity’s recent swipe at Republicans with an anti-American joke: “You recently became an American citizen....You made a joke the other day, saying you watched the Republican debate and you joked, ‘What was I thinking?’ And some people took that the wrong way.”

Despite a strong debate performance Wednesday night, on Thursday’s NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie lectured Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina on her business record: “I know you have gotten into the reasons for your dismissal from Hewlett-Packard....in politics, and you know this well, if you're explaining, you’re losing.”

It's one thing for conservatives to concur that Carly Fiorina was outstanding at last night's debate.  But to hear a string of superlatives about Fiorina coming from committed liberal Mika Brzezinski was breathtaking. Over the course of today's Morning Joe, a stream of praise for Fiorina flowed from Mika, capped by this: "my God, I have never seen anyone like her. Ever."

In the late hours of Wednesday night after the Republican debate, MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews was in his element as he whined about the 2016 GOP candidates being “very ideological tonight” and targeted the Cuban-American heritage of Senators Marco Rubio (Fl.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.) for thinking that “they still are fighting a Cold War” and “treat[ing] Obama like he’s Castro.”  

In CNN’s post-debate coverage early Thursday of their 2016 Republican debate, CNN political commentator Michael Smerconish praised Carly Fiorina as possessing “a public speaking gift,” but lamented that she didn’t smile enough during the debate and should “loosen it up a little bit.”

Near the end of the first hour of the CNN Republican Debate, co-moderator Dana Bash fretted to numerous 2016 candidates about the possibility of a federal government shutdown over a conservative effort to defund Planned Parenthood that included her hounding Governor Chris Christie (N.J.) whether or not he would “support the shutdown.”

Closing out Wednesday’s NBC Nightly News, liberal correspondent and MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell played the role of Ronald Reagan biographer in using the late former president to attack the current Republican presidential field and ruled that Reagan’s “message was infused with sunny optimism” and represents “the flip side of today's angry rhetoric.”

From its "Don't read this story, it's boring" headline to its obfuscating content, today's coverage at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, of the Census Bureau's 2014 report on income and poverty in the United States was all about ensuring that readers know as little as possible about the declining incomes and disheartening increases in officially-defined poverty seen during the…

Wednesday's New Day boosted Jimmy Fallon's anti-Dick Cheney crack from hours earlier on NBC's Tonight Show. Fallon spotlighted how Bernie Sanders was "concerned about what he called 'war talk' coming from the Republicans," and added, "Yeah, 'war talk' – or, as Dick Cheney calls it, 'phone sex.'" The CNN morning newscast included the line in a video round-up of late night shows' jabs at…

The stage for tonight’s prime-time Republican presidential debate will be occupied by businesspersons, U.S. senators, current and former governors, and, in Jeet Heer’s words, a “genial fanatic,” whom you probably know better as retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson. Heer opined in a Wednesday article that Carson “combines extreme ideas with a comforting, trust-inducing persona” and explained that…