Conservatives & Republicans

Eric Lichtblau and Alexandra Stevenson made the front of the New York Times by taking pains to make a major donor to Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, sound suspicious, even sinister, digging up unflattering (and irrelevant) details and finding two liberal Democratic congressmen to criticize him.

Vaccine skeptics have a well-deserved reputation for not caring about facts, but according to American Prospect blogger Paul Waldman, many right-wing anti-taxers resemble anti-vaxxers in terms of their shaky grasp of reality. “All the GOP presidential candidates are lining up to receive the wisdom of Arthur Laffer as they formulate their economic plans,” wrote Waldman in a Friday post. “This is…

In a Friday American Prospect piece (originally published on Wednesday in the Washington Post) WaPo columnist Harold Meyerson suggested that even though the South didn’t win the Civil War, its mean-spirited ideas, racial and otherwise, now drive the Republican party. Meyerson asserted that today’s GOP “is not just far from being the party of Lincoln: It’s really the party of Jefferson Davis. It…

Sean Hannity tore into the latest liberal media double standard on the Thursday edition of his Fox News Channel show as the liberal media has sought to play up Republican presidential candidate and Senator Rand Paul’s temper but remain silent on Hillary Clinton’s well-known anger issues of her own. Using numerous examples and quotes from officials in the Bill Clinton administration, Hannity and…

Libertarian-leaning Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has announced for president, and the media is locked and loaded, with Jeremy Peters reporting that "Paul Gets the TV Spotlight and Turns It on Interviewers in Testy Encounters." Peters, who recently used the vaccine issue to smear conservatives as opposed to "modern science" on the Times' front page, made it clear that going after his…

Are we talking Frequent Flyer Miles, Hillary's record of "success" in such places as Benghazi, Syria and Yemen, or just what? On today's With All Due Respect, Bloomberg's Melinda Henneberger claimed that when it comes to foreign policy, none of the Republican presidential hopefuls "can possibly come up to the level of the former Secretary of State."  Host John Heilemann had teed up the question…

The nation’s leading English-language television networks aren’t the only ones giving presidential candidate Rand Paul a hard time.  Spanish-language networks Univision and MundoFox have also been battering the Kentucky senator in their initial coverage of his presidential aspirations.

Sarah Wheaton touted the new "gender-neutral" bathroom at the White House as "the latest in a series of symbolic steps the Obama administration has taken to work the priorities of the LGBT community into its broader themes of inclusiveness and tolerance" in a Thursday item on Politico.com. Wheaton played up how "the newly designated restroom is an example of how the administration has been…

Newly-declared 2016 presidential candidate Rand Paul took a shot at the media during a Wednesday campaign appearance in Milford, New Hampshire. An unidentified reporter asked the Kentucky senator about a recent interview he did with the Associated Press that centered on the controversial issue of abortion. Paul replied, "Why don't we ask the DNC: Is it OK to kill a 7-pound baby in the uterus?"

As the Big Three networks were touting President Obama's claim that climate change affects the health of children – including that of his own daughter – on Wednesday, their morning and evening newscasts have yet to report on the politician's criticism of many Christians during a Tuesday prayer breakfast. Mr. Obama underlined that "on Easter, I do reflect on the fact that as a Christian, I am…

When it comes to false media narratives, the typical right-winger should be more concerned with the plank in his own eye than with the speck in the eye of a liberal. That, minus the allusion to the Sermon on the Mount, was the essential argument from Heather Digby Parton in a Wednesday column. Parton sees Rolling Stone’s debunked, retracted University of Virginia rape story as one component of…

After all three networks declined to label Senator Rand Paul a conservative during their morning news shows, on Tuesday night ABC’s World News Tonight broke ranks and labeled him a “mainstream conservative” on issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and tax cuts. Fellow networks CBS and NBC continued to not use the conservative label and stuck to labels such as “Republican” and “libertarian.”

New Republic staff writer Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig has clearly run out of defenses for the conduct of those involved in the disgraceful, scandalous journalistic malpractice which gave rise to the now-retracted and thoroughly discredited "A Rape on Campus: The Struggle for Justice at UVA" at Rolling Stone. So here's her last refuge: Conservatism deserves some of the blame, because Sabrina Rubin…

In a Tuesday post, The Nation blogger Dave Zirin argued that it’s politically unseemly for Gov. Scott Walker to root publicly for certain Wisconsin sports teams, including the University of Wisconsin basketballers, who came up just short in last night’s men’s national title game against Duke. Zirin claimed that it’s “almost flagrantly irresponsible” for the media to publicize Walker’s support of…