Conservatives & Republicans

Facts are such inconvenient things. Especially financial facts and figures. On Tuesday, Rebecca Shabad at the Hill composed a 34-paragraph report entitled "Washington is ready to spend." Really? When have Congress or the White House not been ready to spend? Oh, I get it. She really means that they're getting ready to spend more. How much more? Readers will search in vain for anything beyond a…

A recent Gallup poll found that 31 percent of Americans self-identify as social liberals, and that an equal percentage call themselves social conservatives -- the first time since Gallup began conducting such surveys in 1999 that conservatives haven’t outnumbered liberals. On Tuesday, pundit Michael Tomasky seized on this development as an indication that Republicans no longer will be able to use…

On Friday's World News Tonight, ABC's David Muir avoided mentioning the critics as he reported on the Obama administration removing Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Instead, Muir spotlighted how "President Obama [told] us back in December his plans to restore diplomatic ties with the Cuban government," and that during a January 2015 visit to the island country, "the children of…

Friday's Morning Edition on NPR did its best to try to promote the liberal cause of expanding Medicaid in Texas. Wade Goodwyn lined up six soundbites from pro-expansion talking heads, versus only two from former Texas Governor Rick Perry, an opponent. Goodwyn played up that "in hating the Affordable Care Act, the state is leaving on the table as much as a hundred billion dollars of federal money…

CNBC Washington correspondent Richard Harwood and the co-hosts of CNBC’s Squawk Box briefly discussed during Friday’s show the age difference between Hillary Clinton and Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio that included Harwood knocking Rubio for “look[ing] like a schoolboy” compared to Clinton.

Wrapping up a live interview with Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Friday’s MSNBC Live, anchor Thomas Roberts invited the left-wing congressional leader to attack Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio: “...we have the sound from the interview that Marco Rubio gave, where he painted a pretty broad brush in a characterization about those for and against marriage equality.…

In a Tuesday post for Slate, lefty pundit Marcotte explored the religious right’s fascination with (and perhaps exploitation of) the Duggar family and how it might change in light of the Josh Duggar sexual-abuse scandal. “The Duggars' [religious] extremism elicited admiration and maybe a little envy among the ranks” of Christian conservatives, Marcotte commented, “but perhaps now Republicans will…

Willie Geist wondered out loud what would happen to a Republican candidate who had written that women fantasize about being raped--and Joe Scarborough questioned whether he would he still be in the race. But when it's a candidate for the Dem presidential nomination who had written those words, well, that's a different story. On today's Morning Joe, when Scarborough raised the matter of Bernie…

Old stereotypes die hard — especially the ones which have long been false. The June 1 cover of The New Yorker Magazine depicts the Republican Party's current crop of declared and undeclared 2016 presidential candidates as an all-white-boys affair, showing seven of them in different locker-room postures, with Hillary Clinton peeping in through a window. How is this possible, you ask? Where are…

Paul J. Weber of the Associated Press made his liberal slant clear in a Wednesday article detailing how a pro-traditional marriage bill failed to pass in the Texas state legislature. Weber played up the supposedly "divisive efforts by Texas Republicans to defy the U.S. Supreme Court if same-sex marriage is legalized." He clearly labeled the proponents of the bill as conservatives, but failed to…

The Big Three's morning newscasts on Wednesday and Thursday all covered the breach of an online IRS system by hackers that compromised the personal information of 100,000 taxpayers. However, none of the programs mentioned President Obama by name during their reporting, nor did they revisit any of the other problems or scandals involving the agency in recent years. CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly…

In an interview with newly announced Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Thursday’s Good Morning America, co-host George Stephanopoulos tried to put the former Pennsylvania senator on the spot: “Rand Paul had something interesting to say about ISIS this morning.” A clip followed of Paul declaring on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Wednesday: “ISIS exists and grew stronger because of the…

Following Rick Santorum’s announcement Wednesday that he will mount a bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, CBS and NBC largely punted on news of a seventh Republican candidate entering the field with a combined 37 seconds of airtime on their Wednesday evening newscasts. Over on the Spanish-language networks, however, the coverage was even less as there was zero mention of Santorum…

Last Friday, author and historian Garry Wills, who blogs occasionally at the New York Review of Books site, praised Michelle Obama for challenging, in her recent Tuskegee University commencement address, conservatives’ complacency about race in America. Specifically, Wills approved of the first lady’s “breaking all of the four rules of racial discourse the right wing now wants to enforce.” “The…