Former Democratic operative turned journalist George Stephanopoulos on Thursday and Friday threw softballs at Barack Obama, setting the President up to attack certain Americans as bigots and to trash Ben Carson. On Thursday's Nightline, the journalist asked about Donald Trump’s immigration and deportation plans. Stephanopoulos wondered, “So, what do you think when you hear people cheer for that?” Obama sneered, “I think is that there's always been a strain of anti-immigrant sentiment in America.”
Ben Carson
By Curtis Houck | November 13, 2015 | 10:48 AM EST
On Thursday night and Friday morning, NBC News tried their best to go after Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson by attempting to make a mountain out of a molehill of his relationship with a man who was convicted nearly a decade ago of insurance fraud while ignoring the ongoing investigation of Hillary Clinton over her private e-mail server.
By Mark Finkelstein | November 13, 2015 | 7:57 AM EST
"Wow . . . I'm absolutely surprised by that answer . . . Are you sure? . . . Are we talking about the same person?" That was Mika Brzezinski's stunned response after her attempt to recruit retired General and former CIA Director Michael Hayden into her campaign against Ben Carson blew up in her face on today's Morning Joe.
Referring to Carson, Mika asked Hayden "are you concerned that there's a front runner whose foreign policy sensibilities seem to lack, to say the least?" But instead of playing along with Mika's leading question, Hayden replied that, based on a long conversation he had had with Carson, all of his foreign policy instincts are "right." He said Carson asked "good questions" and is a "well-meaning, serious, bright man."
Daily Beast Pundit: Dems Finally Got Their Act Together For 1992, But ‘Delusional’ Republicans Won’t For 2016
By Tom Johnson | November 12, 2015 | 6:01 PM EST It’s often noted that Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, just as Democrats had lost five of six before that. Dems snapped out of it thanks to a Bill Clinton-led tack towards the center, but Michael Tomasky predicts that the GOP will stay to the right in 2016, thereby extending its slump.
After Michael Dukakis’s defeat in 1988, observed Tomasky in a Tuesday piece, Democrats at last could “say to themselves, OK, we’re screwed unless we change. Welfare reform? Free trade?...Whatever, man…The question for the Republicans is, is this 1988 or 1992? I think it’s 1988, because they haven’t yet lost that third one [in a row]. It’s the third one that drives it home. Especially if it’s to you know who.”
By Tom Blumer | November 12, 2015 | 10:58 AM EST
Tuesday evening, Associated Press economics writers Christopher Rugaber and Josh Boak attempted to "fact check" statements made by candidates at the just-completed Republican presidential debate.
Claiming that "The fourth Republican presidential debate was thick on economic policy — and with that came a variety of flubs and funny numbers," the two writers botched at least half of the six points they tried to make. Their most obvious economic error concerned the impact of minimum-wage increases (I will cover two others in a future post):
By Mark Finkelstein | November 12, 2015 | 7:32 AM EST
Did Mika Brzezinski just suggest that Ben Carson has a screw loose? On today's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski said of Carson "I want to be very careful with my words, but he just doesn't sound completely connected with everything."
Judging from her halting cadence, Mika clearly seemed to realize that she was treading on some very controversial mental-health ground. The lead-in to her "connected" comment was her observation "he tried to kill his mother for God's sake! . . . we have been listening to this man talk in a flat monotone tone about taking a hammer to his mother's head."
By Matthew Balan | November 11, 2015 | 6:33 PM EST
Carol Costello was true to her liberal form on Wednesday's CNN Newsroom during a segment with Rick Tyler, Senator Ted Cruz's campaign spokesman. Costello asserted that "Ben Carson didn't exactly give riveting answers" during the latest GOP presidential debate, and asked, "Why did no one challenge him on that?" She also wondered, "Is it too politically dangerous to attack Ben Carson, or to even challenge him on things that he says that don't make sense?"
By Tom Johnson | November 11, 2015 | 5:29 PM EST
Robin Williams’s first album was called Reality…What a Concept. More than one lefty blogger implied that Unreality…What a Concept would have been a fitting title for Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate.
By Mark Finkelstein | November 11, 2015 | 7:21 AM EST
Two days ago, as we reported here, Joe Scarborough and Nicolle Wallace excoriated Ben Carson, accusing him of telling "one lie after another" and "bald-faced lies."
Today, it was Mika Brezinski's turn to denounce the good doctor. On Morning Joe, Mika said "there's this slipperiness to him that nobody will just say. He's slippery. He doesn't tell the truth, and he doesn't make sense."
By Scott Whitlock | November 10, 2015 | 10:02 PM EST
At the Republican presidential debate on Tuesday, Ben Carson called out journalists “misinterpreting” his record. The candidate demanded, “We should vet all candidates. I have no problem with being vetted.” He added, “What I do have a problem with is being lied about and then putting that out there as truth.”
By Tim Graham | November 10, 2015 | 3:46 PM EST
MRC president Brent Bozell has an op-ed over on FoxNews.com about the character assassination of Dr. Ben Carson over his memoirs and how CNN’s Alisyn Camerota lectured him about being vetted.
A look at CNN's coverage of Obama's books eight years ago never found a vetting...only Obama advertising.
By Tim Graham | November 10, 2015 | 8:30 AM EST
Ken Shepherd pointed out Monday that Chris Matthews marched a hard line on Ben Carson’s memoir and the charge stories in it aren’t true: “you better damn well know they're true. Now, maybe you know you can't substantiate them right away. But they'd better be damn true, not sort of true.”
Soopermexican at The Right Scoop found Matthews jumped all over his MSNBC colleague Steve Kornacki before Friday night’s Rachel Maddow forum with the three Democratic candidates. Perhaps before the show, Kornacki dared to wonder how GOP voters might interpret the liberal-media attack, which set off Mr. Thrill Up My Leg. “Our job is to delineate the truth, and then let people react to it. You know, ‘we report, you decide’?”