Conservatives & Republicans

Strange new respect? Two days after the New York Times labeled real estate mogul and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump a racist on its front page based on thin evidence, the Times is suddenly treating one of his Twitter pronouncements as newsworthy, with Ashley Parker devoting an entire story to Trump's tweet. Perhaps because he's attacking his fellow GOP candidates as "puppets" of…

Almost a quarter-century ago, Seal sang, “We're never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy.” These days, suggests Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, it’s awfully hard to survive in the Republican presidential race if you’re only a little crazy, now that Donald Trump “has flooded the market with a new, purer brand of Crazy that has left the other candidates scrambling and basically unable…

In an interview with Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, host Chuck Todd demanded to know why the GOP contender had been critical of the left-wing “Black Lives Matter” movement: “...you were also, in an earlier interview this week, asked about the Black Lives Matter movement. And you called it ‘silly.’ Why did you call it silly?” Todd proceeded to…

Monday’s New Day on CNN saw a continuation of the program’s defense of Planned Parenthood from its video scandal and the efforts in Congress to defund the abortion provider as co-host Chris Cuomo sparred with Republican Congresswoman Diane Black (Tenn.) about the “rush to defund” them over that he claimed “has long been legal and is certainly not cause for outrage or at least hasn't been until…

On Monday’s NBC Today, 9 a.m. ET hour co-hosts Tamron Hall and Willie Geist mourned Jon Stewart’s final week anchoring The Daily Show. Hall proclaimed: “Oh my goodness, it is the end of an era. In a few days Jon Stewart will bid farewell to The Daily Show and all of us.” Hall was particularly worried about Stewart’s absence following Thursday’s first Republican presidential debate: “What the…

One of the more outrageous chapters during presidential campaign season so far, the press harassment of 2016 GOP candidate and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in February over his statement that he "doesn't know" whether President Barack Obama is a Christian, is back. Nobody in the press seems interested in asking Obama himself how he can still profess to be a Christian and support homosexual…

The New York Times Magazine cover story by political correspondent Jim Rutenberg, "A Dream Undone -- Inside the 50-year campaign to roll back the Voting Rights Act," is a 10-part, 10,000-word doorstop (issued with the baleful threat "The first in a series") comparing current attempts to stop voter fraud as a return to Jim Crow, with particular focus on North Carolina. Rutenberg also relayed more…

Arthur Chu, best known as one of the all-time biggest money-winners on Jeopardy!, is also a writer who frequently contributes to Salon. In a Thursday article, Chu saluted departing Daily Show host Jon Stewart for, among other things, keeping him sane during his college days. Unfortunately, recalled Chu, back then America as a whole had lost its mind. Meanwhile, in the August issue of Vanity Fair…

On Thursday, Curtis Houck at NewsBusters noted how the Big Three networks and the two leading Spanish-language networks ignored the latest developments in the now 813 day-old IRS targeting scandal. As usual, only Fox News covered a congressional hearing on, in Fox's words, "the lack of accountability following the IRS targeting of tea party and other groups" as well as a federal judge's threat "…

On Friday's NBC Nightly News, Lester Holt badgered former Florida Governor Jeb Bush on the issues of race and racism. Holt underlined how "12 percent of African-Americans, 25 percent of Latinos have a favorable view of the Republican Party," and asked, "Is it a perception problem, or is this party fundamentally out of touch – tone-deaf – to minority communities?" He later played up how Bush "…

Friday's World News Tonight on ABC failed to mention that 37 out of 1,000 of Hillary Clinton's e-mails from her private e-mail server, which were released earlier in the day, contained information that is considered "confidential." Substitute anchor Elizabeth Vargas did give a 28-second news brief on the "flood of documents from the Hillary Clinton campaign" that include tax forms from between…

CNN’s New Day co-anchor Alisyn Camerota toted the line of Planned Parenthood on Friday morning concerning their baby parts scandal in a interview with video maker David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress in which the former Fox News host parroted Planned Parenthood’s denial of any wrongdoing and promoted the so-called benefits of medical research using “fetal tissue.”

Talking to the latest Republican to enter the 2016 presidential race, former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore, on Fox News’s Special Report Thursday, Associated Press White House correspondent Julie Pace worried about the makeup of the GOP field: “If you look at the 17 Republican candidates right now, there's not much diversity in terms of gender and race. What does that say to the American public…

David Roberts has penned a tale of two media, dealing first with how a profusion of conservative outlets has pulled the Republican party to the right -- the subject of a recent Harvard study -- then pivoting to analyze the mainstream media’s belated (and still incomplete) awakening to the GOP’s “radicalism.” “One of the longstanding critiques of mainstream media on the left,” wrote Roberts in a…