Michael Simon, who headed the 2008 Obama presidential campaign’s targeting and analytics team, has joined CBS Radio, the Tom Taylor Now radio industry e-mail newsletter reported last week. Taylor relayed how “Simon worked on the Obama campaign and later in the administration itself. He also started the ‘data science consultancy’ named HaystaqDNA.” Tagline on HaystaqDNA’s Web site: “We pioneered the predictive analytics that helped the Obama campaign make history.”

“At the very top of my naughty list” for the year, the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes announced on the Christmas Day edition of FNC’s Special Report with Bret Baier, are “the mainstream media.” Hayes cited how “the coverage of President Obama and Hillary Clinton in particular this past year has been abysmal,” pointing to the failure to correct Obama’s “unequivocally wrong” assertions about Guantanamo and how, re Benghazi, “the media basically celebrated the fact she had won a victory over those mean and evil Republicans.”

Headline atop the page two “Voices” column in Tuesday's USA Today by Trevor Hughes, the Denver-based correspondent for the newspaper: “How I came to decide to buy a gun.” “After months of soul-searching, I’ve decided to buy a handgun,” Hughes began, later making an obvious point so many journalists would prefer to avoid: “You don’t see terror attacks in this country on areas where there’s lots of armed men and women. Instead, it’s those soft targets that get hit.”

Demonstrating there’s no space between liberal politicians and major media figures – once they feel free in retirement to express their true views which guided their news judgments during their careers – long-time ABC News correspondent and anchor Charlie Gibson on Wednesday afternoon dismissed the relevance of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails or Benghazi: “I don’t think there’s anything to Benghazi and I don’t think there’s anything to the e-mails.”

A promo run at the end of last week’s Fargo, to plug tonight’s (Nov. 9) new episode on FX, showed Ronald Reagan, in 1979, shaking hands at a campaign stop as a character out of his earshot declared: “I’m not shaking his hand.” Asked why not, the man explained: “Because the man made a movie with a monkey. It wouldn’t be dignified.”

Comedian Amy Schumer got a surprise during Saturday Night Live when the Manhattan audience didn’t display much enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton. In her monologue, she set up a series of jokes by relaying how “I just met Hillary – yeah, I was pretty psyched about that.” After a smattering of applause, she noted her disappointment with the audience: “A little discouraging, the amount of applause.”

Proving he’s a liberal first and a comedian second, Stephen Colbert, who had a very friendly session last Friday with socialist Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, was more hostile on Monday night to the political positions of Republican presidential contender Senator Ted Cruz, whom he described as “far right.” Colbert pushed him to match Ronald Reagan by agreeing to raise taxes and offer amnesty before challenging him on gay marriage.

Three days before CNN’s Republican presidential candidates debate, Jake Tapper, the moderator of it, predicted at least one of those on stage will try to distract from the real issues by attacking him. “I anticipate that at some point somebody is going to take a shot at me as the straw man, as the stand-in for the media writ large,” Tapper forecast Sunday morning from the site of the debate, the Reagan Presidential Museum and Library.

At the end of an interview with Vice President Joe Biden centered around the loss of his son, Beau, CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert made clear where his political interests lie as he cited Thomas Jefferson is imploring the liberal Democrat to join the presidential contest. After Biden recalled how his mother told him “everybody’s equal,” Colbert chimed in: “There’s another person who said that and that’s Thomas Jefferson and this is why I think people want you to run for President.”