By Tom Blumer | January 2, 2016 | 2:19 AM EST

On Wednesday, Nate Cohn at the New York Times, who by some accounts is being anointed the next Nate Silver of polling, made a clumsy and despicable attempt to inject race into his political "analysis" of the Donald Trump phenomenon.

Cohn's tediously long writeup, which made Page A3 in the New York version of the Old Gray Lady's print edition on Thursday, attempted to identify and characterize Donald Trump supporters. Apparently troubled by finding that Trump's support crosses into a number of groups with whom Republican presidential candidates have usually fared poorly, he felt the need to go far afield for evidence of something sinister. Thus, he attempted to correlate the level of current support for Trump's presidential candidacy to regional levels of racism as seen in Google searches. That's right, Google searches — 9-12 years ago.

By Tom Johnson | December 31, 2015 | 5:06 PM EST

If Paul Waldman had wanted to put the main argument of his Monday American Prospect column in Obamaesque terms, he might have written that conservative opponents of political correctness have gotten bitter and are clinging to their supposed right (and maybe even their duty) to act like jerks.

“For today's Republican, if people think you're a jerk then you must be doing something right, and the political correctness charge has become an all-purpose answer to criticism of any sort,” contended Waldman. “You say my beliefs are abominable? Take your political correctness and shove it! It's a way to pose as a brave truth-teller, even if all that's actually happening is that people are pointing out that you're a brave crap-teller.”

By Curtis Houck | December 31, 2015 | 12:01 PM EST

With New Year’s Eve upon us, NBC’s Today dedicated a segment in its 9:00 a.m. hour on Thursday to looking back at the year in news, politics, and entertainment. Not surprisingly, the liberal network made no mention of the Planned Parenthood baby parts video scandal, Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server, the Clinton Foundation scandal, and Benghazi to name just a few.

By NB Staff | December 31, 2015 | 12:43 AM EST

Appearing on Wednesday’s edition of The Kelly File, MRC President Brent Bozell and Fox News contributor Judith Miller made the case to fill-in host Sandra Smith that Donald Trump’s recent pledge to begin airing millions of dollars in television ads is not exactly necessary given the fact that the liberal media have been giving Trump a lion’s share of their 2016 election coverage. 

By Tom Blumer | December 30, 2015 | 11:50 PM EST

Liberals and "progressives," who are supposedly big on dealing with "root causes," are apparently not interested in the root cause of their now-acknowledged problem of sexual harassment and abuse in their ranks.

At Acculturated.com, Carrie Lukas, managing director of the Independent Women’s Forum, contended that "liberals treat women worse" than do others in positions of power on the ideological spectrum because of "The Bill Clinton Effect" — an effect with so much staying power that "progressives" still won't dare mention its obvious impact, or even the Clintons' names.

By Tom Johnson | December 30, 2015 | 9:14 PM EST

If you’re looking for the ultimate contradiction in terms, it’d be hard to top “Christian narcissist.” Nonetheless, David Masciotra alleged in a Tuesday Salon piece (originally published on the left-wing site AlterNet) that “conservative evangelical Christianity” somehow “encourages narcissism,” and that this unholy communion explains Donald Trump’s relatively high level of popularity on the religious right.

“In order to appeal to evangelical voters, candidates…have to project narcissism and selfishness,” asserted Masciotra. “Having perfected his personality through years of reality television performance, Trump is able to successfully sway evangelicals to his side, despite his lack of Christian credentials, because narcissists take comfort in each other.”

By Curtis Houck | December 30, 2015 | 2:51 PM EST

While the left constantly goes after conservatives for any and all rhetoric they view as inciting violence, they almost never follow their own prescriptions and that was certainly the case on Tuesday night as MSNBC’s The Last Word featured liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson warning that Trump has marked the end of the Republican as he’s been “driving a truck bomb into the middle of the Republican Party.”

By Tom Blumer | December 30, 2015 | 12:48 PM EST

Establishment press pundits often wring their hands over how supposedly far to the right the Republican Party and conservatives in general have moved since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, that flaming moderate, to the point of claiming that Reagan would never be accepted by today's "wingnuts." They seem to actually believe this amusing nonsense.

In a classic example demonstrating where the real ideological shifts have taken place, the New York Times Editorial Board on Saturday expressed its wish to impose a $15-an-hour minimum wage on the entire nation. That really isn't a surprise to those who have seen so-called "progressives" move ever further to the left and out of the realm of common sense in recent times. But it might surprise many readers that the Times advocated a minimum wage of zero — that's right, expressed as "$0.00" for emphasis — in January 1987, during Reagan's second term.

By Tom Blumer | December 29, 2015 | 11:46 PM EST

Just one week after CNN's Don Lemon shut down a guest who dared to raise the issue, there is now an agreement across the ideological spectrum that if Hillary Clinton is going to use her husband Bill as a campaign surrogate and go after her opponents' real or imagined sexism, then, as the headline at liberal Ruth Marcus's Monday evening Washington Post column says, "Bill Clinton's sordid sexual history is fair game."

Meanwhile, a Wall Street Journal editorial, while citing Marcus's column, agrees: "if Mrs. Clinton wants everyone to forget about Bill’s harassment of women, she ought to stop playing the sexism card, or drop Bill as surrogate, or both."

By Curtis Houck | December 29, 2015 | 8:00 PM EST

A week after he cut the mic of conservative guest Kurt Schlichter for bringing up Bill Clinton’s history of sexual misconduct, CNN host Don Lemon found himself trying to shut down another guest during Monday’s CNN Tonight when conservative radio host and CNN GOP debate co-moderator Hugh Hewitt argued that Donald Trump should use his Twitter account to educate millennials on the former President’s past.

By Mark Finkelstein | December 29, 2015 | 6:41 PM EST

Judging by Nicolle Wallace's performance on today's With All Due Respect, it looks like establishment Republicans are going full bore against Ted Cruz. Here was Wallace talking about her personal experience with Ted Cruz: "I worked with him on the [2000 Bush/Gore] recount in Florida, and the recount was sort of ground zero for the biggest egos in both parties in the whole country, and he rose to the top in terms of hubris and egomania."

Co-host John Heilemann was flabbergasted: "you're saying that among all of your colleagues in the recount effort, that he was the biggest ego?  Is that really what I heard you say? Wow! That is an incredible thing to say."

By Curtis Houck | December 29, 2015 | 3:46 PM EST

During his latest phone-in interview Tuesday morning, Donald Trump appeared on NBC’s Today where co-host Savannah Guthrie attempted to convince Trump that former President Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs (and specifically what occurred with Monica Lewinsky) were merely “alleged” and thus might not be fair to bring up in a campaign involving Hillary Clinton.