Conservatives & Republicans

The Daily Beast's Dean Obeidallah denied the existence of Islamism as an ideology during a segment on Monday's CNN Newsroom. Obeidallah, responding to conservative commentator Erick Erickson applauding Saturday Night Live's draw Mohammed skit as "a perfectly humorous way to point out the absurdity of radical Islam's refusal to let people draw Mohammed," wildly claimed that "the [SNL] writers'...…

Today, Bloomberg TV's Mark Halperin inadequately apologized for his conduct and line of questioning during an April 30 interview of GOP presidential candidate which came off as rude and racist to many who saw it — well, basically because it was. As Tim Graham at NewsBusters noted on Sunday, and as will be seen in the video following the jump, Halperin engaged in a "prove-you're-a-Cuban" line of…

On Monday's New Day on CNN, the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza asserted that there was no wrongdoing in former President Bill Clinton helping his brother-in-law, Tony Rodham, get a job with former DNC head Terry McAuliffe (who's now the governor of Virginia): "Bill Clinton was not in office. It doesn't seem to conflict with her [Hillary Clinton's] job as secretary of state. If Bill Clinton helped out…

After being pressed by NBC's Late Night host Seth Myers and Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd about failing to purchase the domain name CarlyFiorina.org, Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina cleverly hit back by buying SethMeyers.org and ChuckTodd.org. On Monday's Today, trying to deflect from the GOP contender outsmarting their colleagues, the hosts searched for another unclaimed…

Chuck Todd should have been ready for this, but he wasn't. Just a few days days ago, on the very network at which Todd toils, "Late Night" comedian Seth Meyers thought he would be cute and embarrass GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina over not registering the CarlyFiorina.org domain, thereby allowing a critic to take it and use it as a platform for criticizing her tenure as H-P's CEO.…

According to columnist Eric Alterman, prominent journalists tend to realize that most Republicans are “ideological extremists” whose agenda, dictated by “the super-wealthy,” warps our politics. The problem, he added, is that the news stories those journalists write don’t reflect that realization. Instead, argued Alterman in a piece for the magazine’s May 18 issue, “even our best reporters feel…

One of the more simultaneously annoying and alarming developments on college campuses these days is how the idea of "microagressions" has regained visibility after four decades of previously well-deserved obscurity, largely under the establishment press's radar. Almost no one in "the real world" would know what microaggressions are if it weren't for stories and critiques at center-right media…

Edmund Burke wrote that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” To American Prospect blogger Paul Waldman, “change” for conservatives means living to fight another day by conceding battle after battle to liberals. “Much of the history of the United States,” wrote Waldman in a Friday post, “is a slow but inexorable movement in a progressive direction,…

The faltering religious right would be well served to borrow a strategy from gay activists, but it almost certainly won’t, contended The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky in a Friday column. In Tomasky’s telling, the gay-rights movement in the 1980s alienated many because it could be self-righteous to the point of belligerence, but eventually “the leaders of the movement saw that it was more…

Jon Stewart of The Daily Show is no stranger to trashing conservatives, while hiding behind the guise of a court jester. This time, he set his set the tone of his show with a game he called “Let's get rid of Ted Cruz." Stewart showcased a clip of CNN’s Dana Bash asking Sen. Cruz to provide examples of Obama’s racial tension. This was apparently so preposterous that the Daily Show host pretended…

In a Monday blog post, Michelle Goldberg suggested that the takeaway from Carly Fiorina’s presidential candidacy is that Republicans may be as cynical as they are dumb. For Goldberg, the cynicism is two-pronged. One prong is the hope that Fiorina will attract the same sort of “anti-feminist” voters that Sarah Palin did. The other is that she’ll be able to needle Hillary Clinton in a manner that…

CNN's Chris Cuomo made an eyebrow-raising argument about the First Amendment in a Wednesday post on Twitter. Cuomo replied to a post that decried that "too many people are trying to say hate speech (isn't equal to) free speech," and claimed that "it doesn't. hate speech is excluded from protection. don't (sic) just say you love the constitution...read it."

Some pundits have speculated that the Baltimore riots may benefit Republicans in next year’s elections. On the other hand, Walsh, of Salon and MSNBC, thinks that the unrest has yielded an opportunity for liberalism. In a two-part series, Walsh argued that one lesson of Baltimore is that Democrats' Bill Clintonesque center-left “approach to race, crime and inequality” has proved inadequate, and…

When it came time to cover the news from Tuesday that Mike Huckabee had announced his entry into the 2016 Republican presidential field, ABC and NBC largely yawned at this story by devoting a combined 48 seconds of airtime to Huckabee on their Tuesday evening newscasts.