Political Groups

With all due respect, indeed! On the Bloomberg TV show of that name that he co-hosts with Mark Halperin, John Heilemann today reported that the current and former governors in the GOP field--Bush, Kasich and Christie--think Marco Rubio is a "punk." Clarified Heilemann: "when I say 'punk,' they have the same view that Hillary Clinton had of Barack Obama [in 2008]: line-cutter, punk, man of no…

Five items found at the Politico filed late Monday or early Tuesday reported that supporters of Bernie Sanders at the Iowa caucuses, while watching a live feed of Hillary Clinton's speech late Monday evening, began chanting "She's a liar!" The chants grew until they "took over the room," and didn't stop until Sanders campaign officials cut off the live feed being shown. This is barely news in…

Then why the hell weren't those "top journalists" shouting it from the top of the evening news and in banner headlines? . . . On today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough said "as we were leaving Iowa, I heard from a lot of top journalists who whispered "you know Bernie won." I heard that time and time again. 'You know Bernie won.'" With Scarborough asking "where is this, Bolivia in the 1930s?" and…

Joe Scarborough has denied having it in for Marco Rubio. But on today's Morning Joe, he went on an anti-Rubio rant so protracted that one segment wasn't enough to contain it. Scarborough first called Rubio the "Republican Obama," who's been marketed like a "bag of potato chips," and the "emptiest suit" in the campaign. After a commercial break, Scarborough hectored Rick Santorum, who has just…

Of all the things you can call John Heilemann, one thing you cannot is "clandestine Republican operative." So it might be a sign of just how frazzled the Hillary campaign has become that her spokesman has in essence accused Heilemann of being a GOP catspaw. On today's With All Due Respect, Heilemann pressed Clinton spox Brian Fallon as to whether Hillary would call herself a liberal. Fallon…

In the November 2000 presidential election, the Big 3 TV networks prematurely declared Democrat Al Gore the winner before the polls in those portions of the Sunshine State in the Central Time Zone had even closed. According to one post-election study, the networks' arguably politically motivated calls cost Republican George W. Bush 10,000 votes, led to the most bitter post-election battle over…

A Sunday morning report by Associated Press political writer John O'Connor acts as if the the sordid history of fiscal irresponsibility in the State of Illinois is a new development brought on by a stubborn Republican governor in just the past seven months. What hogwash. The state has had a large backlog of delinquent unpaid bills for a decade, if not longer. Five years ago, a Democratic…

In trying to explain the current situation in Venezuela, the Washington Post's Matt O'Brien, in a post at the paper's Wonkblog, also inadvertently identified two reasons why authoritarian socialist tyrants like Huge Chavez and Nicolas Maduro are able to achieve and retain power. The formula is simple: When you first gain power, garner international and media goodwill by giving stuff away, like…

This afternoon, Catherine Herridge at Fox News reported that "the intelligence community has deemed some of Hillary Clinton’s emails 'too damaging' to national security to release under any circumstances." This eighth "smoking gun" — on top of the seven an Investor's Business Daily editorial identified last week — wasn't enough to move the Associated Press Bradley Klapper from the AP's default…

With news of the death of Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane, let's borrow a line from another group of the late '60s, Buffalo Springfield: "there's something happening here." What it is ain't exactly clear, but it doesn't seem to bode well for Hillary Clinton. Today's Morning Joe featured an ominous exchange between Joe Scarborough and Mark Halperin. The notion was that a variety of sources--…

On today's Morning Joe, a seething Mika Brzezinski ripped Bill O'Reilly for his failure, during his interview of Donald Trump on last night's Factor, to defend Megyn Kelly against Trump's attacks on her. Trump has called Kelly a "third-rate reporter," a "lightweight" and "not good at what she does." Rather than challenging Trump over his criticism of Kelly, O'Reilly spent the segment importuning…

Critics who warned in 2010 that the odious Dodd-Frank law's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would become a rogue agency which would become a largely unaccountable behemoth on a mission to create problems where none exist could not have been more correct. Sadly, searches on terms relevant to one of the agency's latest controversies involving the distribution of funds in a two year-old auto-…

Despite his ongoing feud with Fox News, Donald Trump honored a previous promise and appeared on The Factor tonight. Bill O'Reilly tried a variety of tactics to convince Trump to participate in Fox's GOP debate tomorrow night. Nothing was working, so O'Reilly played his trump card, citing Christianity: "the tenet of forgiveness . . . don't you think that's the right thing to do?" Shot back Trump…

If you only read establishment press reports, you might (finally) know about the "unexpectedly" competitive race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, but you would have no sense of the deep concern within the left's ranks about their unsavory choices. Card-carrying lefty Dana Milbank, from his perch at the Washington Post, laid that near-panic bare in his Tuesday evening column.…