Conservatives & Republicans

Ed Kilgore (at Talking Points Memo) and Mark Kleiman (at the Washington Monthly) agree that the Republican party has a serious racism problem but differ on what the GOP could or will do about it.

Edelstein gripes in New York magazine that “the native population are portrayed as invaders of our sacred space instead of vice versa,” and that “the people [Chris] Kyle shoots always represent a ‘savage, despicable evil,’ and the physical and mental cost to other Americans just comes with the territory.”

On Thursday’s CBS Evening News, correspondent Jan Crawford reported on former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s resignation from a number of corporate and nonprofit boards ahead of a possible campaign for president in 2016 but also found time to lament about the challenge the GOP primary could present for Bush. “Now, the challenge of Bush is going to be running a center right campaign for the…

Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who died on Thursday, is predictably being lionized today by USA Today's Aamer Madhani "as (a) giant in political rhetoric," and by others elsewhere in similarly glowing terms. Madhani goes on to characterize the three-term Empire State chief executive's 1984 Democratic Convention speech in San Francisco as "what is widely considered one of the finest pieces…

On the heels of news that Republican majority whip Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana may have addressed a white nationalist group founded by David Duke, New York Times reporter Jeremy Alford did his best to smear today's Republican Party by linking it to the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan: "Much of David Duke’s ’91 Campaign Is Now in Louisiana Mainstream." Guilt by association is popular…

Call the Ripley's Believe It or Not people. Have smelling salts available. What follows will surely be one of the more unusual things you've seen or heard this year. In the midst of his otherwise odious Silicon Valley race-hustling shakedown effort, Jesse Jackson said something that made sense — so much sense that the rest of the press, which usually hangs on every word of his nonsensical…

Chris Megerian at the Los Angeles Times, in a report first published online on Tuesday, had a difficult time trying to downplay the fact that Democrat and leftist mega-donors outspent their Republican and conservative couterparts by an overwhelming margin during the past election cycle. But Megerian made the best of it, giving readers the impression that David Koch, of the supposedly evil Koch…

Peter Dreier, who teaches at Occidental College, writes that “for decades, the NRA has fought every effort to get Congress and states to adopt reasonable laws that would make it much less likely that people like was [Ismaaiyl] Brinsley would be able to obtain a gun.” Dreier claims that even though the NRA’s “arguments are bogus,” it “has the money, and a small but committed hard core of members,…

Each of the network morning shows devoted some time on Wednesday to looking back at the biggest news stories of year and, while they certainly could not have included every story in the allotted time, they all failed to spend even a few seconds on topics such as Jonathan Gruber, pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, President Obama’s unpopularity, and the Hobby Lobby case to name a few. In…

The liberal New York Times and the Washington Post went into hyperdrive, Wednesday, devoting a combined 3800 words and three front page stories to a scandal involving Republican Congressman Steve Scalise. 

Earlier this evening, Clay Waters at NewsBusters noted the New York Times Editorial Board's blistering attack on Gotham's finest. The Times editorial insisted that the NYPD has "squandered" its presumptive respect in its treatment of Mayor Bill de Blasio since a bi-racial grand jury's December 3 decision not to indict officers on the scene in July when Eric Garner died on Staten Island. This is…

The Esquire blogger opines that the GOP is “the Political Party Of Dorian Grey. Steve Scalise is the public face. But, up in the corner of the attic, there's a portrait of the rotting, decomposing corpse of Strom Thurmond.”

Between Monday night and Tuesday morning, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC covered the news that a golf outing by President Obama at a course in Hawaii forced a Army to move their wedding location after planning to have it on the 16th tee.  While they covered the news, each network made sure their were plenty of laughs and golf-related puns throughout their 12 minutes and 4 seconds of…

The American Prospect’s Paul Waldman claims that right-wingers’ “belief in tax cuts doesn't rest on the practical effects. That's an argument that's meant to appeal to everyone, since it concerns something (growth) that just about everyone thinks is good. But the real source of the conservative support for tax cuts is moral, not practical. They believe that taxes are inherently immoral.”