Debbie Wasserman Schultz may not want you to know about it, but there’s a Democratic presidential debate on Saturday evening, and Beutler believes that the candidates therein “would be doing the country a service by placing the right wing appeal to paranoia in its proper context—and then rejecting it forcefully.”

In a Friday piece, Beutler described this week’s Republican presidential debate as “an elaborate group sermon on the importance of being afraid”; opined that the GOP candidates “have made almost no attempt to argue” that their proposals “will reduce the terrorism risk, which is so small to begin with”; and asserted that Republicans’ “position on Jihadi terrorism (that no risk is too small to ignore) is practically the opposite of their position on mass shootings in general (that no risk is worth mitigating at all).”

On Friday, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC covered the new scandal brewing inside the Democratic presidential campaign with the data breach involving the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton campaigns (plus the Sanders camp suing the Democratic National Committee), but it was the CBS Evening News that sought to downplay the story by not covering the “brewing” “family feud.” 

Appearing as a guest before MSNBC's live coverage of President Barack Obama's Friday press conference, during a discussion of Donald Trump's history of promoting birtherism against the President, MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews recalled his accusation that Trump is "playing to racists" and playing to a view that President Obama is "not one of us, he's black."

President Obama spoke off the record to news columnists, in a defensive response to Republican criticism that he has seemed passive and uninterested in the face of Islamic terror attacks against the United States. In a news story about the meeting New York Times reporters Peter Baker and Gardiner Harris revealed this damning admission from the president: "In his meeting with the columnists, Mr. Obama indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and made clear that he plans to step up his public arguments." So why was that sentence was deleted from the  version that appeared in Friday’s print edition?

The polls might currently be suggesting something else, but Mika Brzezinski's view on which Republican has the best shot at beating Hillary Clinton might surprise you.

On today's Morning Joe, Mika said "If you want someone to beat Hillary Clinton, it would be Donald Trump. Because he will do things that none of those candidates will do . . . The Democratic party has a problem if Trump wins the nomination." Mika's comments came after Chuck Todd suggested that for now, Republican voters are looking for "bold colors" [i.e. Trump], but later might become more pragmatic and turn to someone with a better chance of winning.