Conservatives & Republicans

This past Friday, a Planned Parenthood clinic in Washington state was set on fire. Fortunately no one was hurt. Unfortunately, these few and far between acts of violence committed by lone wolves give the left ammo to make their case that the pro-life side is really pro-death. That’s exactly what Ana Kasparian, one of the hosts of the Young Turks, a popular left-wing talk show on Youtube, did in…

Democrats' current and potential candidates for their party's 2016 presidential nomination continue to complain about various aspects of the economy. They continue to make no connection between their complaints and the fact that Democrat Barack Obama has been in the White House for over six years. Obama has for the most part operated either under the conditions created by the 2009-2010 Congress…

The debate rages on as to whether Donald Trump represents the essence of the Republican party. Very broadly speaking, conservatives say he doesn’t and liberals say he does. One liberal, Michael Tomasky, claims that Trump, despite his left-of-center positions on several fiscal and economic issues, nonetheless embodies the “two qualities more than any others [that] have driven conservatism in our…

At the New York Times, a Thursday report by Alan Blinder and Tamar Lewin, with assistance credited to two others, originally identified Rowan County clerk Kim Davis, the center of national attention who has been jailed over her refusal to issue marriage licenses containing her name to homosexual couples, as a Republican. (The press has been mighty quiet about acknowledging that Ms. Davis would be…

Does Donald Trump’s popularity among Republicans indicate that a big part of the GOP base is more authoritarian than it is conservative? Yes, suggested Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas in a Friday post. “The crazies don't really care about any conservative platform, they just want someone to reflect their own bigotries and xenophobia, all the while telling the weenies to fuck off…

Gordon Gekko of Wall Street would be a popular choice of liberals for the 1980s movie character who best illuminated the supposedly ugly truth about the Reagan era, but he’s not Andrew O’Hehir’s choice. In a Monday analysis of the films of the late Wes Craven, O'Hehir stated that Freddy Krueger, from Craven’s 1984 movie A Nightmare on Elm Street, was “the most potent pop-culture signifier of the…

Friday's CBS Evening News stood out for not covering Hillary Clinton's interview with NBC's Andrew Mitchell. The newscast didn't even mention the former first lady during their 2016 election coverage. Instead, Scott Pelley played up how Donald Trump "seems to stumble a lot, but never seems to fall" – specifically, his confused answers on foreign policy during an interview with conservative radio…

Apparently at least two of the Beach Boys are Republicans, but when Daily Kos's Mark Sumner used a GOP/surfing metaphor, it didn't mean “catch a wave and you’re sittin’ on top of the world.” Rather, as Sumner sees it, the party is heading for a wipeout. “For decades, Republicans have been thriving on a theme of Me-firstism and an insistence that it's the sworn duty of every American to fear…

Bringing some humor to the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal and 2016 election, NBC’s Jimmy Fallon joked during his on monologue on Thursday’s Tonight Show about Anthony Weiner and another gaffe by Vice President Joe Biden that had him once again including China as part of North America. 

At the top of Thursday’s CBS Evening News, anchor Scott Pelley proclaimed that the jailing of Rowan County, Kentucky Democratic Clerk Kim Davis “could be the last front in a losing battle against same-sex marriage” as she had been refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing gay marriage on June 26.

The press's failure to tell the public how seriously the U.S. economy is struggling is not the most egregious exercise in reality avoidance we've seen during the past several months. The willful denial of Iran's intent to destroy Israel and its Western enemies, the refusal to acknowledge the inherent institutional ugliness of Planned Parenthood, and the failure to accurately characterize Hillary…

The CBS Evening News bid farewell on Thursday to Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal as the newscast, unlike ABC and NBC, dodged news that longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills testified before the House Select Committee on Benghazi plus word late Wednesday night that a former staffer who helped set up her private e-mail server would invoke his Fifth Amendment by not testifying before Congress.

On the heels of President Obama and Senate Democrats achieving the minimum threshold on Wednesday to preserve the Iran nuclear deal, the “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC applauded during their evening newscasts the “unstoppable” “done deal” that had Secretary of State John Kerry taking “a victory lap.”

In his standup-comedy days, Steve Martin did a joke about imposing the death penalty for parking violations. Michael Tomasky suggests that the House Benghazi committee has a similarly disproportionate penalty in mind for Hillary Clinton over Emailgate: wrecking her presidential campaign. Tomasky acknowledged in a Wednesday column that Hillary “screwed up this email business,” but asserted that…