Latest Blogs

Chris Matthews on Tuesday's Hardball gave viewers a preview of what's going to happen on MSNBC the next five months any time a poll comes in showing Mitt Romney leading President Obama. "In North Carolina a new PPP poll has Romney up by two - that’s not good" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

If Attorney General Eric Holder’s goal was to minimize broadcast network news coverage when he chose late Friday evening to announce a criminal investigation into how damaging national security secrets were released to the New York Times, the media have certainly played along. Holder announced the investigation after the East Coast feeds of Friday’s ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts. While…

How much power does the president actually possess? That is a question at the heart of most debates about the federal government. Declaring war, writing executive orders, legislating, allocating taxpayers' money and even influencing what your children learn and eat are just a very small sample of subjects hotly under dispute right now.

The BuzzFeed Website carried an article on Monday based on an interview with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in which he said that his father, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan would have a difficult time getting nominated by today's “ultra-conservative” Republican Party in a “hyper-partisan moment.” The only problem is that Bush never used the words “ultra-conservative” or “hyper-partisan”in…

MSNBC's Martin Bashir asked a deliciously ironic question of one of his guests Tuesday that I'd like to take the liberty of answering for Americans across the fruited plain. "Does Mitt Romney believe we are all imbeciles who can’t be bothered to check the facts?" (video follows with commentary):

At the top of his Tuesday MSNBC morning show The Daily Rundown, NBC chief White House correspondent and political director Chuck Todd cited the Romney campaign's refusal to release a list of top fundraising bundlers as evidence that "if he wins in November, Romney could very well be the least transparent president in a generation." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump] Todd…

Shortly before the close of her Jansing & Co. program today, MSNBC morning anchor Chris Jansing informed viewers of 90-year-old comedienne Betty White's visit and photo-op with President Obama in the Oval Office on Monday. Jansing made it sound as though White's visit was a simple apolitical courtesy call before the nonagenarian actress gave a speech at the Smithsonian, and it may well…

In a rural area where “The economy sucks when it’s good,” natural gas drilling could have gone a long way. Could have, until environmental extremists and regulators got in the way. That’s what happened in Wayne County, Pa., just a few years ago when “corporations offered struggling farmers lucrative leases for mineral rights” but a documentary filmmaker and government prevented the drilling…

CNNMoney mustn’t pay very well, because writer Steve Hargreaves is moonlighting as a PR flack for the International Energy Agency. At least, that’s the impression given by his June 12 article on the IEA’s 700-page "sharply-worded" report that called for an additional $36 trillion of clean energy investment by 2050.  According to Hargreaves, IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven doesn’t…

LONDON -- One of many things left out of the film "The Iron Lady" was Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's warnings on the effects a single currency would have on the economies of European nations. Thatcher's premonitions place her among the great political prophets of all time. On the single currency, Peter Oborne, a columnist for the London Daily Telegraph, writes, "Mrs. Thatcher foresaw with…

The news that the House Oversight Committee will vote next week on whether to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, for refusing to turn over subpoenaed documents in the Fast and Furious investigation, was met with silence from the Big Three (ABC, NBC, CBS) network news shows. There was no mention of the Holder hearings on Monday’s evening news shows or Tuesday’s morning…

Norah O'Donnell spun the recent controversy over national security leaks in the Obama administration's favor on Tuesday's CBS This Morning, touting that "the Justice Department...points out that they have launched six cases since 2009 to investigate these leaks. And interestingly...that is more than all previous administrations combined." O'Donnell also forwarded the White House's talking…

Is recent Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, who was freely elected over and over to the U.S. House of Representatives and then elevated by his peers there to the speakership, anything like the right-hand man in a Latin American dictatorship? That's the comparison reporter William Neuman made on Tuesday, on possible successors to ailing Venezuelan dictator (merely called "…

Another Tuesday, another out-of-nowhere attack by New York Times reporter Adam Liptak on the Supreme Court, as it waits to hear a case important to liberals. With a vital decision looming on Obama-care, Liptak last week wrote a front-page story on the results of an unusual poll question from the Times asking people what they thought of the Supreme Court. Liptak linked the public's alleged…