Joseph Stalin

A guest on the MSNBC cable channel on Thursday, May 11 -- who had once worked for the KGB intelligence agency -- compared President Donald Trump and his clashes with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the disdain former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had for his own secret service.

The arts and literature pages offer no respite from the New York Times political thrust. Lisa Birnbach hung out with actor Mark Ruffalo, perhaps best known for his role as The Hulk in the series of Avengers superhero movies, for her front-page Arts story, “The Actor’s Activist, Onstage.” Ruffalo is participating in a politicized revival of Arthur Miller’s obscure anti-capitalism play “The Price…

Another result of the Trump administration: It has made die-hard anti-Communists out of the New York Times. After Trump accused fake news purveyors of being an “enemy of the people," the Times talked about the depredations of international communism on its front page Monday, if only to compare Trump to Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.  Andrew Higgins' dispatch was headlined “Phrase With a Venomous…

CNN went completely off the rails during Sunday’s Reliable Sources, as host Brian Stelter and his guests labeled President Donald Trump an authoritarian dictator with reckless abandon. After opening the program by calling Trump’s comments about the media “poison,” Stelter turned the floor over to CNN reporter Carl Bernstein who declared, “There's a history of what ‘enemy of the people,’ that…

New York Times former Editorial Page editor Andrew Rosenthal, who never met a Republican he couldn’t call a racist, made one of his sporadic appearances at nytimes.com on Wednesday with “Donald Trump’s Big Idea: Don’t Blame Me” when he casually linked Trump to two of the most notorious mass murders in recent history with the smarmy observation that Trump had been named Person of the Year by Time…

During the second presidential debate Sunday, GOP nominee Donald Trump declared that he would appoint a special prosecutor to look into the Hillary Clinton e-mail situation because he felt the original outcome was suspect. Clinton soon after remarked that she was glad someone like him wasn’t in charge, to which Trump replied that she would be in jail. From there CNN went off the deep end with…

Earlier today, Tim Graham at NewsBusters covered a poll done by an Associated Press-led partnership which found that, in AP's words, "Just 6 percent of people say they have a lot of confidence in the media, putting the news industry about equal to Congress and well below the public's view of other institutions." The poll noted that "Nearly 90 percent of Americans say it's extremely or very…

Appearing on the Monday edition of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, New York magzine writer-at-large Frank Rich denounced the letter written by numerous Republican presidential campaigns to media organizations concerning the format of future debates as “fascistic” and written by “scared little children” but “seem[s] to have been drafted by Stalin.”

Friday's CBS Evening News featured a previously unaired portion of Scott Pelley's softball interview of President Obama on his recent meeting with Pope Francis. The Vatican noted on Thursday that "there was a discussion on questions of particular relevance for the Church...such as the exercise of the rights to religious freedom, life and conscientious objection" – a reference to the Catholic…

In a report aired on Monday's NBC Today from the Sochi Olympic games, correspondent Stephanie Gosk toured the Russian capital: "Moscow evokes powerful images. The Kremlin, Soviet leaders, the Red Army. But beyond the Cold War symbols, this city of 10 million people is a modern bustling metropolis..." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump] Later in the segment, Gosk described…

On his latest "Real Time with Bill Maher" show on HBO over the weekend, Bill Maher went where no comedian wants to find himself -- the dead zone of awkward silence from an audience. Maher and his guests were talking about textbook bad hire/turncoat Edward Snowden seeking asylum in Russia and a WikiLeaks tweet praising this allegedly "democratic country" under Putin. (Video after the jump)

"[I]t’s important to remember that [Pete] Seeger, once an avowed Stalinist, was a political singer devoted to a sinister political system--a position he held long after the Soviet experiment drenched itself in blood and collapsed in ignominy." With lines like that, the Daily Beast's Michael Moynihan might find himself crossed off a few Christmas card lists and curiously uninvited to some…

Via Breitbart, we learn that the Independent Film Channel (IFC) has a new sitcom in the works they’re touting/warning is the "most violent sitcom ever made." It’s called Bullet In The Face. Then comes the politics. In addition to the “unrestrained shootings, peppered with wildly offensive language, IFC is apparently concerned that the use of a crucifix as a backscratcher and dialogue…

Comparing conservatives to Hitler is old-and-busted. The new hotness, if you ask Martin Bashir, is comparing them to Stalin. A few months ago, you may recall, Bashir compared Rick Santorum to the long-dead Soviet dictator. Now it's the state of Florida, more specifically, the conservative Republican Rick Scott, who is getting the honors. "Why is the Sunshine State in the midst of a purge that…