Chris Rock Dedicates Entire 10 Minute Oscar Monologue to Race Jokes

Comedian Chris Rock was under a lot of pressure to "speak truth to power" in his second turn as host of the 88th Annual Academy Awards. The lack of black actors and actresses nominated has dominated Oscar coverage again this year, with pledges from Will and Jada Pinkett Smith and Spike Lee to boycott and the Academy to change the racial makeup of its members. Rock reportedly even rewrote his…
Alexa Moutevelis

CNN Guest Repeats Discredited Claim GOP Rep Scalise Spoke to KKK

Appearing as a guest on Sunday's CNN Newsroom with Fredricka Whitfield to discuss Donald Trump declining to condemn former KKK leader David Duke in a CNN appearance earlier in the day, Jason Johnson of TheRoot.com not only repeated a discredited claim that Louisiana Republican Rep. Steve Scalise spoke to a white supremacist group in Louisiana in 2002, but he even gave the impression that Scalise…
Brad Wilmouth

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Trump Is Like Lonesome Rhodes

Perhaps Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of the far left The Nation, had the Oscar ceremonies tonight on her mind when she appeared this morning on ABC's This Week. She compared Donald Trump to Andy Griffith's character of Lonesome Rhodes in the movie "A Face In The Crowd" and even cited the fictitious scene which she thinks/hopes translates into real life when Lonesome mocked the television…
P.J. Gladnick

ABC’s GMA Devotes Only 22-Second Brief to Shooting Death of Rookie Cop

On Sunday morning, ABC’s Good Morning America chose to devote only a tease and scant 22-second news brief on the tragic shooting death of a rookie police officer in a Washington D.C. suburb and instead devote over half the hour-long newscast to previewing the Oscars later that day on ABC.
Curtis Houck

Vice-Chair Gabbard Resigns From DNC; AP Buries the News in a Timeline

The simmering feud between the Democratic Party establishment and leftists who believe that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has acted more like "Democrats Nominating Clinton" than a genuine political party presenting viable alternatives to Hillary Clinton, visibly erupted today. This morning, Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard resigned her position as Vice Chair at the DNC and…
Tom Blumer

Will: Dems Depend on ‘Public Employee Unions’ for 'Their Livelihood'

Amidst all the discussions of the jockeying back and forth in the 2016 presidential race, Washington Post syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor reminded conservatives on Fox News Sunday of how the Democratic Party’s liberal base has been eroded and now largely has become almost desperately dependent on the votes of minorities and government works that all belong to public sector unions.
Curtis Houck

Blogger: ‘White Racism’ Correlates With ‘Republican Loyalty’

If New York magazine blogger Chait had expressed metaphorically his argument about the relationship between racism and the conservative movement, it might have gone something like this: Conservatism is a perfectly presentable, structurally sound wooden house, but a lot of conservatives are termites. In a Thursday post, Chait himself wrote, “While conservatism has [a] perfectly non-racist basis…
Tom Johnson

Barely News: Dem Turnout in South Carolina Down Sharply from 2008

532,000 people voted in the South Carolina Democratic Party presidential primary in 2008. In this year's primary, completed yesterday, only 370,000 did. In the meantime, the state's pool of eligible voters increased by about 8 percent. Thus, turnout in this year's Democratic primary in the Palmetto State, down by just over 30 percent in absolute terms, was down by about 35 percent on a…
Tom Blumer

Report: MSNBC 'Intends to Part Ways' with Melissa Harris-Perry

Paul Farhi at The Washington Post reports: “MSNBC intends to part ways with host Melissa Harris-Perry after she complained about preemptions of her weekend program and implied that there was a racial aspect to the cable-news network's treatment, insiders at MSNBC said.” On Friday, The New York Times reported that Harris-Perry refused to report for work Saturday after her program was pre-empted…
Tim Graham

Mitchell Touts Claim Reagan Dems Back Trump Due to Wallace Resemblance

In an otherwise dull and abbreviated evening of live coverage on Saturday night dedicated to the South Carolina Democratic Primary, MSNBC host/NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell touted the argument an anonymous former Democratic governor that Reagan Democrats were actually ardent backers of segregationist George Wallace: "The Reagan Democrats, many of them were George Wallace Democrats, and…
Curtis Houck

FNC's Rivera: GOP Has a 'Suicide Complex,' 'Have to Be a Nut' to Win

Appearing as a guest on Friday's The O'Reilly Factor, FNC correspondent Geraldo Rivera declared that "you've got to be a nut to get the Republican nomination," and that Republicans "have a suicide complex" as he responded to host Bill O'Reilly recalling that Hillary Clinton's campaign has already started characterizing GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump as a "nut."
Brad Wilmouth

Obama Again Breaks 2008 'Signing Statement' Promise; Press Yawns

In August 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama pledged, as paraphrased in a New York Times story, "not to use signing statements to undermine legislation passed by Congress," and "called Mr. Bush’s frequent use of such statements an abuse of his power." On Wednesday, Obama issued another signing statement — there have now been over 30 during his presidential tenure — to put a thumb in…
Tom Blumer

Chuck Todd: 'No Impact' If Hillary Charged with Email Misdemeanor

"Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, fellow Americans: Vice-President Elizabeth Warren will be delivering the Inaugural Address here today, because President Hillary Clinton has been, uh, unavoidably detained . . ."  On MSNBC's coverage of the South Carolina primary this evening, Chuck Todd actually said that if Hillary Clinton is charged with a misdemeanor concerning her emails, it will…
Mark Finkelstein

Donald, Ronald, and Ahhnold: American Culture's Teflon Candidates

What Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger and others - with names like Al Franken (of Saturday Night Live) , Sonny Bono (of Sonny and Cher), Fred Grandy (of The Love Boat) and Ben Jones (The Dukes of Hazzard) have in common is something that is as hard for their ordinary political opponents to understand as it is obvious. Every one of these people entered their political careers as…
Jeffrey Lord