Political Groups

In his Entertainment Weekly column, horror writer Stephen King lauded the AMC program Breaking Bad for "examining the American dream: shiny and addictive on top, hollow at the core. And dark. Very dark." (Hasn’t King made millions of dollars off the "hollow" American dream?)In his December 11 piece, King ranked the program as the best on TV and gushed over the "brilliant, terrifying, shocking"…

Reminiscing about how her father would end dinner table squabbles between her and her sister, Newsweek's Katie Connolly on Tuesday rejoiced that President Obama had said "Enough!" in order to get Senate Democrats in line:Today, it sounds like the president has finally reached that point with the Senate Democrats and their increasingly aggravating health-care squabbles. He's ready to issue a…

Yesterday at NewsBusters, Geoffrey Dickens documented the furor of MSNBC's Chris Mathews over the results of an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll (PDF). Specifically, Mathews was irked that the Tea Party Movement (TPM) was viewed quite a bit more favorably than the two major political parties by those polled (VP=Very Positive; SP=Somewhat Positive; N=Neutral; SN=Somewhat Negative; VN=Very Negative;…

A breaking dispatch from the Associated Press sure makes it look like Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl (picture at top right is from his Wikipedia entry) is engaging in extortion directed at the institutions of higher education that happen to be within the city's borders. The ostensible reason for the stickup is to shore up the city's foundering pension system. It will be interesting to see how…

Tackling "The Myth That Democrats Are Soft on Crime," Newsweek's Ben Adler took to the magazine's The Gaggle blog to critique New York Times columnist Ross Douthat for his latest column. Adler praised Douthat for saying that conservatives need to "take ownership of prison reform" to "correct the system they helped build" but took strong exception to his suggestion that, even so, Democrats "still…

Managing Editor's Note: The following is a reprint of Michael Moriarty's original December 14 post to Big Hollywood. Moriarty, you may recall, played a prosecutor in the first few seasons of the long-running NBC drama "Law and Order."Well, I think I’ve been fairly calm and forgiving of "Law and Order" for about fifteen years. Living outside of the U.S. has certainly helped in more ways than one.…

The last two times I remember this happening -- with Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s and New York City Mayor David Dinkins in the early 1990s -- it at least took a few years for exasperated establishment media liberals to blame the system for a favored politician's difficulties in achieving his agenda, and to call the country and Gotham, respectively, "ungovernable." Afterwards, Ronald Reagan and…

Has anyone else noticed how chilling it has been during the past few days? Not chilly (though it's been that too). Chilling. On Monday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared, in the Associated Press's words, that "greenhouse gas emissions are a danger and must be regulated." The AP, in the item just linked, and many other news outlets carried U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and…

Editor's Note: The following was originally published December 1, 2009 at Big Hollywood, where Nolte is editor-in-chief.Don’t believe for a second that the History Channel — which should now be called The Revisionist History Channel — will be the end of Matt Damon and Howard Zinn’s cinematic ode to trashing America. The obvious next step for the adaptation of Zinn’s “A People’s History of the…

Here's another entry for the revolving door file: Politico's Jonathan Allen (pictured at right), formerly of Congressional Quarterly and former Sen. Paul Sarbanes' office, will take over as the top staffer at Debbie Wasserman Schultz's DWS PAC, according to Roll Call (h/t e-mail tipster Bob Foster). For his part, Allen, whose wife works as the communications director for freshman Sen. Kay Hagan…

Well, you can't say they aren't consistent.Two brief AP dispatches from December 2 and December 3 about Michael Toole, a Pennsylvania judge who has agreed to plead guilty to corruption-related charges, fail to mention that Toole has at least been a contributor to the Democratic Party, and appears very likely to have been a party member.This see-no-party treatment parallels local media coverage…

Imagine if you will that former Alaska governor Sarah Palin was accused of taking gift cards donated to her office for redistribution to needy constituents and using them instead for a personal spending spree.The media firestorm would swirl uncontrollably, of course, and certainly you couldn't fault the media for reporting on the ensuing criminal trial.Well, this sort of this has happened, only…

The same CBS legal analyst who...: wrote that former Vice President Cheney "is just a dick"labeled Chief Justice John Roberts "silly and condescending" and Justice Alito a "rigid starboard-facing ideologue"and blamed Karl Rove for the Valerie Plame leak despite the fact that Richard Armitage admitted that he was the inadvertent leaker of that information...is now ending his CourtWatch blog, all…

The New York Times’s Jason DeParle and Robert Gebeloff published a long Saturday report on the Food Stamp program that went into print on Sunday. This is the second of three posts on their coverage; the first went up earlier today at NewsBusters and BizzyBlog. It addressed the pair's seeming happiness with the massive increase in program participation, their apparent unhappiness that 15-16…