Worrying about President Obama's lame duck status following major Democratic Party losses in the midterm election, on Sunday's NBC Nightly News, White House correspondent Kristen Welker proclaimed: "...Republicans prepare to take over both houses of Congress, vowing to undo Mr. Obama's most treasured accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act."
2014 Congressional
By Kyle Drennen | November 10, 2014 | 1:10 PM EST
By Tim Graham | November 10, 2014 | 7:28 AM EST
USA Today media columnist Michael Wolff let MSNBC have it with both barrels in a column headlined "MSNBC Loses Election." Wolff asked “Is a vote against a political party also a vote against the network that supports it?”
He suggested the sinking fortunes of the Democrats “have been pretty accurately charted in the declining ratings at MSNBC,” which unsurprisingly fell 22 percent from their 2010 midterm ratings in the important demographic of 25-to-54.
By Tom Blumer | November 9, 2014 | 11:53 PM EST
The competition for dumbest quote I have been able to find by a leftist tonight just heated up.
Earlier this evening, I noted that Washington Post columnist David Ignatius on Thursday called President Obama "perhaps the least political president in modern U.S. history." One might think that nothing could possibly top that. Actually, I have found two which belong in the running in one long writeup at NewRepublic.com (HT to emailer "Just the Tip HQ") about Obama's chief adviser, Valerie Jarrett.
By Tom Blumer | November 9, 2014 | 10:12 PM EST
On Thursday, the first paragraph of a column by the Washington Post's David Ignatius on what he thinks President Barack Obama's foreign policy might be for the next two years contained what may qualify as the "Notable Quotable" of the year.
The first sentence was a pretty impressive failure at perception: "President Obama looked almost relieved after Tuesday’s election blowout." Look, David, even the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, noted that Obama "struck a defiant tone." But it's the second sentence of Ignatius's opening paragraph that is the side-splitter (HT Patterico):
By Jeffrey Meyer | November 9, 2014 | 4:06 PM EST
On Sunday, Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd continued to push the line that Washington is broken and despite the GOP now controlling both houses of Congress, gridlock will likely continue. Speaking to his political panel, Todd argued that both the Republicans and Democrats have “two nuclear bombs it sounds like to me. Is that a fair way to put it? That each side has potentially, and it could, gridlock comes back like that.”
By Jack Coleman | November 9, 2014 | 1:26 PM EST
Could it be that we are witnessing the well-deserved demise of a thoroughly deceitful political meme?
Among the many casualties of this year's midterm blowout for the GOP was a phrase that not so long ago was cited incessantly by Democrats and their left-wing cheerleaders in media. Post-midterm, they can't even bring themselves to utter the once-beloved phrase "war on women," as allegedly waged by Republicans.
By Jeffrey Meyer | November 9, 2014 | 12:21 PM EST
Appearing on ABC’s This Week w/ George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, Mark Halperin co-host of With All Due Respect on Bloomberg, pressed the GOP to take “take some risks” after winning control of the Senate during this year’s midterm elections. Speaking during a panel discussion, Halperin argued that the GOP runs the risk “standing up to the Tea Party caucus and talk radio” but that they must take risks “if they want to do what's good for their politics and good for the country.”
By Jeffrey Meyer | November 9, 2014 | 10:54 AM EST
On Friday night, HBO’s Bill Maher resoundingly mocked the Democratic Party’s electoral defeat during this year’s midterm election but made sure to attack the Republican Party as being motivated by race. During a panel discussion on Real Time w/ Bill Maher, Maher proclaimed that “the issue in this election was still the first black president. I really do. I think it was still resentment about his winning re-election and it was just those people who came out to vote, wanted to prove to the rest of America that they were right all along about how much Obama sucks.”
By Tom Blumer | November 9, 2014 | 10:40 AM EST
Saturday morning, Erica Werner at the Associated Press, aka the Administratino's Press, channeled her inner Nancy Cordes to play "gotcha" with Republicans who won election to the House on Tuesday.
Werner's report essentially regurgitated Cordes's petulance in the CBS reporter's question directed at House Speaker John Boehner on Thursday. Cordes identified supposedly stupid or ill-advised things some of the incoming freshmen have said in the past, while of course not identifying a single similar thing a sitting Democratic Party congressman has said on the floor of the House or in House committee hearings during their tenures. Excerpts follow the jump (bolds and numbered tags are mine):
By Tom Blumer | November 8, 2014 | 11:11 PM EST
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Aaron R. Hanlon, an infrequent columnnist at Salon, both have an excuse for Democrats' poor performance in this year's midterm elections: pervasive voter suppression.
You see, the left's new working definition of "voter suppression" — a definition which is never a subject of establishment press scrutiny — is apparently the following: "Many of the people who would ordinarily support us didn't register to vote, and many of our supporters who did register didn't bother to cast a ballot. Ergo, their vote was suppressed."
By Jack Coleman | November 8, 2014 | 6:24 PM EST
In the wake of Tuesday's epic landslide for Republicans in the midterms, the New York Times ran a brief story titled "Rising Stars in the Republican Party." Accompanying the story were six photos of victorious Republicans, starting with Joni Ernst, whose victory in Iowa wrested control of the Senate control to the GOP.
"But now that the last ballots (well, most of them, anyway) have been counted, here is a look at some of the Republicans' rising stars of the 114th Congress -- and the people who, along the way, surprised us, entertained us and, in some cases, made us squeal," wrote Times' reporters Ashley Parker and Jonathan Weisman.
By Matthew Balan | November 8, 2014 | 11:23 AM EST
On Friday's CNN Newsroom, Brooke Baldwin played up the apparent similarity between Senator-elect Joni Ernst's laugh and that of Cruella De Vil, the antagonist from Disney's 101 Dalmations. Baldwin aired a short segment on Ernst and two newly-elected Republican women in Congress. She ended the part about the Iowa politician with her comparison: "Don't forget about that laugh. Some people call it contagious; other people have likened it to this." The anchor then twice played clips of Ernst laughing at her victory rally, followed by De Vil's evil cackle.