Conservatives & Republicans

Hunter contends that right-wingers feel that the left is “out to get” them, and that they “consider…breaking the law itself to be a noble thing, when done in service to conservatism, which is why the various Fox News talking heads spoke of armed standoffs at the Bundy Ranch in approving tones and with references to the Founding Fathers.”

Yesterday's government report on the economy's growth, which told us that the nation's gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 2.6 percent during the fourth quarter, sharply underachieved analysts' expectations of an annualized 3.0 percent to 3.6 percent. The stock market clearly reacted negatively to the downside surprise. Bloomberg's take at the end of the day: "U.S. stocks fell Friday…

Even Charles Babington at the Associated Press, for once not the completely beholden Administration's Press, seemed to be having a hard time buying what Democrats at a meeting in Philadelphia were selling. Unfortunately, he decided to let Joe Biden's direct contradiction of his party's congressional delegation's sunnyside-up stance on the economy go unreported. In a video carried at the Weekly…

The nation’s major broadcast networks continued their blackout on Friday morning of not covering the U.S. Senate’s passage of the Keystone XL oil pipeline with zero mentions on their morning newscasts. Following the Senate’s passage of the bill on Thursday by a bipartisan margin of 62-to-36, the networks passed on even devoting a news brief to the topic during their Thursday evening news…

Ed Kilgore comments that Walker may have an “especially seductive” appeal to the Republican base given that “he won over and over again in Wisconsin without compromising with conservatism’s enemies. Indeed, he behaved almost like a liberal caricature of a conservative villain…Walker tells [right-wingers that] they…can win by confrontation, not compromise or outreach, and his three victories are…

The U.S. Senate took the step Thursday of approving the Keystone XL oil pipeline in a bipartisan fashion by a margin of 62-to-36, with nine Democrats joining 53 Republicans to pass it for the first time after failing to do so under the previous Congress.  When the major English and Spanish language networks aired their Thursday evening newscasts, however, the news of the bill’s passage was…

Hardball host Chris Matthews used a panel discussion about President Obama's attorney-general nominee Loretta Lynch on his Wednesday program as a convenient opportunity to slander conservative Republicans as seeking to repress the vote of Democratic constituencies in major cities.

On her Thursday MSNBC show, host Andrea Mitchell was aghast at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreeing to speak before a joint session of Congress during an upcoming U.S. visit without consulting the Obama administration: "The White House is furious, furious at Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu and also a little bit angry at Speaker Boehner for inviting Netanyahu to speak before Congress, to a…

On Wednesday, the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley was the lone network evening newscast to cover the confirmation hearings of Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch before the Senate Judiciary Committee and while that was the case, it was not without bias. Even though CBS News congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes featured numerous soundbites from Senate Republicans questioning Lynch, she…

Filling in for John Heilemann on the Monday edition of Bloomberg’s With All Due Respect, Campbell Brown took a shot at House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for “whining about President Obama” in an interview that aired Sunday on CBS’s 60 Minutes. Following a clip from the interview, Brown first credited Boehner for “holding a very diverse, you know, House…

On MSNBC's PoliticsNation on Tuesday, host Al Sharpton touted liberal Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank making a "bold prediction" about the remainder of Barack Obama's presidency: "...you wrote, quote, 'If the economy continues on its current trajectory, as most expect, he'll leave office a popular president and leave the 2016 Democratic nominee with a relatively easy past to victory.'"

Tuesday marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and, naturally, the event attracted plenty of media coverage. In addition to each of the three major networks devoting segments to it on their evening newscasts, both The Washington Post and The New York Times published stories on the topic.  Over on cable, CNN covered it multiple times throughout the day for a total of 10…

In a reversal of a key proposal from his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama moved on Tuesday to drop the plan to tax 529 college-savings accounts after outcry from members of both parties and a direct appeal on Air Force One from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). When it came to the networks covering this backtracking by the President on this deeply unpopular idea…

Appearing on MSNBC's Morning Joe on Tuesday, Huffington Post reporter Sam Stein worried that the Clinton political machine would be unable to compete with funding from Charles and David Koch during the 2016 presidential campaign: "I mean, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton will be scratching lotto tickets, I think, for the next week just trying to catch up with the $889 million that the Koch…