On Sunday, ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos previewed Barbara Walters’ upcoming “Most Fascinating People” special set to air on Sunday night by playing a clip from Walters’ interview with conservative donor and businessman David Koch. Fill-in host Martha Raddatz introduced the clip of the interview by hyping “one of the more controversial parts of that legislation, provisions dramatically easing restrictions on the amount of cash individuals can donate to campaigns. One of the biggest Republican donors, reclusive billionaire, David Koch. Democrats love to hate him.”
2014 Congressional
By Mark Finkelstein | December 10, 2014 | 8:23 AM EST
Who were those guys on Morning Joe today—two Feinstein staffers? Nope, they were Mark Halperin and Jeremy Peters, making like Dem aides in defending the report on the CIA that Dem Senator Diane Feinstein released yesterday.
Halperin, head of Bloomberg Politics, had the chutzpah to claim that the report was not "political." Peters of the New York Times then chimed in to say that in releasing the report, the Senate conducted itself in a "very sober" way.
By Geoffrey Dickens | December 8, 2014 | 6:07 PM EST
The campaign's worst-kept secret was uncovered when the Kansas City Star, on Sunday, reported that Democrats had financially backed so-called independent candidate Greg Orman in his race to unseat Republican incumbent Senator Pat Roberts. The facade that Orman was an independent was kept up, throughout the campaign, by supposedly skeptical political reporters at ABC, CBS and NBC, even after Democratic candidate Chad Taylor had dropped out in early September.
By Ken Shepherd | December 8, 2014 | 5:24 PM EST
Democrat Mary Landrieu might have stood a better chance of victory had she run on touchstone liberal Democratic issues.
That was the argument of a Louisiana political science professor whom Time magazine turned to for comment in its post-mortem of the senior Louisiana senator's landslide loss on Saturday to Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy.
By Jeffrey Meyer | December 8, 2014 | 11:59 AM EST
On Saturday night, Senator Mary Landrieu (D-La.) lost her bid for reelection to Congressman Bill Cassidy (R-La.) by nearly 12 points and some liberals decided to blame her defeat on white racists who hate President Obama. Appearing on MSNBC’s The Rundown with Jose Diaz-Balart on Monday morning, Aisha Moodie-Mills of the Center for American Progress insisted that “the reality, and every single poll shows this, is that Democrats have completely lost the south because white people are running away from Barack Obama and this African-American man who is occupying the White House.”
By Mark Finkelstein | December 8, 2014 | 9:15 AM EST
Michael Tomasky is not content to argue, in the wake of Mary Landrieu's defeat, that Democrats should write off the South as politically unfriendly territory. In his Daily Beast item of today, Tomasky goes to great lengths to trash the region in the ugliest of terms.
"Reactionary, prejudice-infested, fetid, reject[ing] nearly everything that’s good about this country, just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment," is how Tomasky slurs most of the South, saying "almost the entire region" is as he describes it.
By Jeffrey Meyer | December 7, 2014 | 12:31 PM EST
On Sunday, CNN’s Inside Politics spent several minutes hyping the supposed headache Tea Partiers could give GOP leadership despite the Republican Party winning their 54th Senate seat following Saturday’s runoff in Louisiana. During the discussion, Robert Costa of The Washington Post insisted that Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is trying “to govern responsibly and he wants to set the party up for major gains in '16. And that started in 2014 by pushing back the Tea Party and it starts now by making sure that all the passions and eagerness in the House don't overtake the party.”
By Randy Hall | December 3, 2014 | 6:54 PM EST
Clashes between leaders in the Democratic Party are rarely reported by the press, which regularly points out even the slightest disagreement among Republicans as a sign that the GOP is crumbling before our very eyes.
That wasn't the case on Tuesday, when New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsal asked if ObamaCare is destroying the Democratic Party because that “redistribution scheme has angered and alienated working-class and middle-class Americans.”
By Jeffrey Meyer | December 1, 2014 | 2:45 PM EST
On December 11, the continuing resolution currently funding the federal government will expire and that seemed like the perfect opportunity for the folks at National Public Radio to speculate about a possible GOP-caused government shutdown. Appearing on NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday, December 1, Steve Inskeep and Cokie Roberts went to great lengths discussing how the Republican Party could shut down the federal government. Even though Roberts conceded that a shutdown was unlikely, the NPR correspondent did her best to repeatedly play up how the GOP wants to “to keep the option open all the time.”
By Tom Blumer | November 28, 2014 | 10:51 AM EST
Sometimes, one has to remember that op-ed writers don't always get to pick their headlines, though I would hope that they're allowed to register their objections. So it's not clear that Los Angeles Times guest blogger Joel Silberman is responsible for the headline at his Monday blog post about how, or even whether, to deal with relatives who disagree with you politically on Thanksgiving.
But Silberman's resume indicates that he would probably have been comfortable with the headline used: "What to do if your crazy right-wing uncle comes for Thanksgiving." Excerpts and some background on Silberman follow the jump (bolds and numbered tags are mine; links in final two excerpted paragraphs are in original):
By Tom Blumer | November 25, 2014 | 11:33 PM EST
An Associated Press story late this afternoon has New York Senator Chuck Schumer saying the darnedest things, with only a tiny bit of pushback from reporter Charles Babington.
In the wake of a midterm election rout which saw Republicans win at least eight Senate seats, increase their House majority, and take gubernatorial races in at least three deep blue states (MD, MA, and IL), Schumer now says that Democrats erred in pushing passage of the Affordable Care act, aka Obamacare, at the supposed expense of economic issues. Hey Chuck, that's because the Keynesian clowns in the Obama administration thought they had the economy totally under control in 2009 thanks to the stimulus plan.
By Tom Blumer | November 24, 2014 | 12:10 PM EST
Demonstrating that serving as the Palace Guard for Dear Leader is a 24-7-365 enterprise, Zachary A. Goldfarb, policy editor at The Washington Post, somehow felt the need on Sunday morning to critique the Saturday Night Live opening skit which appeared the previous evening.
Twelve hours after the skit was first broadcast, Goldfarb, whose whose full archive going back to August indicates that he has not written a WaPo item for Sunday publication in the past four months, nitpicked a comedy skit for — oh the humanity! — failing to distinguish between an "Executive Order" and "executive action" (bolds are mine):