Conservatives & Republicans

A terse, five-paragraph June 14 Associated Press report on the results of San Antonio's mayoral election the previous day gave no indication of the party affiliation or political outlook of the winner or loser. Readers could only determine that the winner, Ivy Taylor, became "the first African-American elected to the post," which of course had to mean that the handpicked candidate to succeed…

The Associated Press, although it has apparently removed the primary photo involved from where it was posted last night at its APimages.com web site, is showing no remorse over having published what it has now admitted are five photos of 2016 Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz containing "guns seen on a wall in the background so that it appeared a pistol was pointed at Sen. Cruz’s head…

The screencap shows New Yorker editor David Remnick, on today's Morning Joe, raising his hand to proudly plead guilty to condescending to Donald Trump, whom he had just called a "comical blowhard" in regretting that he was "conceivably a player" in the presidential race. Mika Brzezinski is no fan of The Donald on the issues, so give her extra credit for sticking up for his relevance to the race…

The Associated Press currently has a photo for sale at its APimages.com site showing a graphic of a gun pointing at Ted Cruz's head. It has been there since early Saturday evening. It would appear that Charlie Neibergall, the person who snapped this photograph, had to patiently wait for the "right" moment to take the photo in question.

Michael O’Donnell is eager to push back against the belief that Reagan ranks with Franklin Roosevelt as a great 20th-century president. In his review of H.W. Brands’ Reagan: The Life in the Washington Monthly’s June/July/August issue, O’Donnell wrote that “Roosevelt saved the nation from an existential threat (the Great Depression), while Reagan merely steered it out of a funk (the 1970s).…

Group loyalty is a big part of politics on both sides of the fence, but as far as lefty pundit Marcotte is concerned, it’s become so inflated on the right that it often crowds out crucial things like “basic common sense.” In a Friday Talking Points Memo column, Marcotte asserted that “conservatives are going way too far with this knee-jerk tendency to believe ‘their’ people can do no wrong and…

On Friday's New Day, during a discussion of why violence by Muslims is more likely to be labeled as "terrorism" in contrast with racially motivated violence like the Charleston church massacre, CNN co-anchor Chris Cuomo at one point claimed that "bigotry" in part makes people more likely to attach the word "terrorism" to violence by Muslims. After guest and University of North Carolina Professor…

Imagine if any Republican president in the past fifty years had said the following: "I get letters, people say, you are an idiot -- (laughter) -- and here’s what you didn’t do, and here’s the program that is terrible, and all kinds of stuff. But this gentleman, he said, I voted for you twice but I’m deeply disappointed. And it went on and on, chronicling all the things that hadn’t gotten done."…

Pundits occasionally opine that someone or other is the face of a given political party. Paul Waldman of The Week implies that Donald Trump would be a fitting choice as the Republican party’s face, presumably drawn by a cartoonist, since Trump is “a walking caricature…created from everything Republicans believe” about matters such as money and patriotism. “Trump is the essence of contemporary…

Reacting to the media coverage thus far of the deadly church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, Fox News contributor Bernard Goldberg joined Thursday’s O’Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel and eviscerated the liberal media for having “a long, detestable history” of using instances of innocent lives being senselessly lost “as an opportunity to bash conservative media.”

Anger, sadness, and disgust have been nearly universal responses to Wednesday night’s apparent act of racist terrorism in Charleston, S.C., but Jeb Lund doesn’t think such reactions make sense coming from conservatives. In a Friday screed, Lund argued that the Charleston shootings shouldn’t have surprised anyone, given that “American movement conservatism has already made these kinds of killings…

O’Reilly Factor host Bill O’Reilly engaged in a heated battle with South Carolina Democratic Representative Todd Rutherford on Thursday evening over Ruthford’s dubious claims that he made hours earlier about how the alleged gunman in the deadly Charleston church shooting had sought guidance from “things like Fox News” as it supposedly offers “hate speech.” The roughly three-minute exchange…

In a Thursday item on NBC News's web site, Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, and Andrew Rafferty asserted that "just like the issue of gay marriage, the Pope and the Catholic Church have gone from being wedge issues that benefitted the GOP in 2004 to ones that now favor Democrats." The three journalists cited Associated Press's reporting on Pope Francis's new encyclical on the environment, and concluded…

Appearing with journalist Carl Bernstein on Wednesday’s CNN Tonight to promote the upcoming episode of CNN’s The Seventies on Watergate, former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather decried the Republican Party’s “strong turn to the right” and blamed the size of party’s 2016 field on the Watergate scandal and the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.