Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer has had a really bad year.
He failed to get other left-wing donors to join his crusade to make climate change the No. 1 election issue. Then he wasted nearly $75 million backing liberal candidates. Four out of the seven politicians he and his NextGen Climate Action group backed lost. And the few races where liberals won owed little or nothing to Steyer’s bizarre and sometimes inaccurate campaign ads.
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.”
Yesterday, I received an email from the Democratic National Committee informing me that they had a "Cyber Monday surprise" just for me.
How nice. All I had to do was click on the link to store.democrats.org. After the jump, readers will see the store's apparent "best sellers," raising a quite obvious question: Does anyone think the press would ignore analogous items on sale in a GOP store?
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):
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.
After the 2012 campaign, liberal journalists swarmed around Republican Party chair Reince Priebus offering what was called an “autopsy” on every way Republicans failed, with a special emphasis on more outreach to minority voters. Democrats and their media enablers painted a picture of demographic doom for an aging white Republican base.
Two years later, Republicans made dramatic gains among minority voters. In House races across America, Republicans won 50 percent of the Asian vote to 49 percent for Democrats. Republicans won 38 percent of the Hispanic vote in House races. Gov. Sam Brownback drew 47 percent of Hispanics in Kansas, and Gov-elect Greg Abbott pulled in 44 percent of Hispanics in Texas.
When it comes to political prognosticating, Chuck Todd in 2014 erred repeatedly as he imagined Democratic victories and Republican missteps with conservative legislation. On August 1, the Meet the Press host appeared on the Daily Rundown and speculated, "If November comes and goes and Democrats hold the Senate and break even in the House, I think we’re going to look back at the month of July as the month Republicans lost their shot at the Senate."
Well, if this doesn't beat all.
Based on excuses provided by 63 people (35 percent) out of a "smallish sample" (I'll say) of 181 nonvoters, the Washington Post's Christopher Ingraham whined on Wednesday (HT Twitchy) about how "scheduling conflicts with work or school" kept people from voting last Tuesday. This alleged problem calls for solutions like "requiring employers to allow flexible scheduling on voting days," "making election day a national holiday," and/or "requiring eligible citizens to vote." Even if you buy the "I was working" excuse — which I don't — Ingraham acts as if other means of voting don't exist, when of course they do.
The Esquire blogger Charles Pierce laments that Kansans gave their Republican governor another term even though his “extreme applications of conservative economics” have made the state “a basket case.” Kansas is apparently a "state full of clodhopping, drooling yahoos."
Chuck Todd, NBC News Political Director and moderator of Meet the Press, just released his latest book “The Stranger: Barack Obama In the White House” chronicling the Democrat’s first six years as president. While much of the book details the numerous political battles the administration was engaged in, three excerpts from the book are quite striking. Not only does Chuck Todd concede that MSNBC is openly leftist, the NBC host writes that “perhaps most frustrating to Team Obama was that even their allies weren’t always allies.”
On Tuesday, NBC Nightly News channeled President Barack Obama from the day after the midterm elections and pointed to the low voter turnout for the election that saw Republicans gain control of the United States Senate as well as make additional gains in the House of Representatives.
In a news brief, anchor Brian Williams highlighted the latest turnout estimate for “last week’s wave election for the GOP” as being “very bad” at “36.3 percent.” Williams noted that it would be the lowest in both “the modern era” and “since 1942, when a unified and preoccupied nation” was engaged in World War II when only 33.9 percent came out to vote.
Following a story on campaign spending ahead of the midterm elections on October 30, CBS News congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes filed a similar report on Tuesday night’s CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley with the topic focusing specifically on the “dark money groups” that are not required to disclose their donors.
In setting up Cordes’s story, anchor Scott Pelley pivoted from a report on corruption and brutal crackdowns by the authoritarian Communist regime in China to saying that “[w]ell, government even in America is becoming murkier because of campaign finance laws that have become nearly a free-for-all.” When the report ended, he hailed it as “insight from Capitol Hill” from Cordes.