The Mother Jones blogger contends that Obama’s immigration action “is politically pretty brilliant. It unifies Democrats; wrecks the Republican agenda in Congress; cements the loyalty of Hispanics; and presents the American public with a year of Republican candidates spitting xenophobic fury during primary season. If you're President Obama, what's not to like?”
Mother Jones
Blogger Kevin Drum: Thanks to Obama, GOPers Running For President Might Sound Like ‘Xenophobic Maniacs’
By Tom Johnson | November 22, 2014 | 11:44 AM EST 
By Tom Johnson | November 7, 2014 | 12:36 AM EST
The Mother Jones pundit writes that Attkisson used to be “a pretty good, hard-nosed investigative reporter,” but adds that as she developed ties to conservative activists, “her reporting became…detached from reality....Her descent seems to be complete.”
By Tom Johnson | November 4, 2014 | 11:29 AM EST
Kevin Drum and other pundits take the press to task for misleading Iowa voters by, in Drum's words, pushing a “charade” that Republican Senate contender Joni Ernst is a “pragmatic centrist.”
By Tom Johnson | August 21, 2014 | 12:39 PM EDT
The Obama administration is in the doldrums, and not only because it’s August. Is it that the president has a short attention span, or that he’s insufficiently ideological, or have Republicans just worn him down? Three lefty pundits opined on the issue earlier this week.
In a Tuesday New Republic piece, Georgetown history professor Michael Kazin identified “Obama’s sober mistrust of ideology and partisanship” as an obstacle to progress and urged Obama to go beyond “pragmatism” (emphasis added):
By Tom Johnson | August 16, 2014 | 7:01 AM EDT
This week, three of the most prominent liberal bloggers agreed that when it comes to criticizing presidents of either party about their vacations, people really need to, as one of the bloggers put it, “STFU.”
Do they have a point, or should the appropriateness of presidential vacations be evaluated on a POTUS-by-POTUS basis? Check out their thoughts and comment if you’d like.
By Tom Johnson | August 14, 2014 | 6:26 AM EDT
Liberals like Chris Mooney of Mother Jones agree that today’s Republican party is “environmental[ly] retrograde,” but often acknowledge it wasn’t like that a few decades ago. For example, as Mooney noted in a Tuesday post, a GOP president, Richard Nixon, established the EPA.
Mooney reports, however, that in the early 1990s the party as a whole grew distinctly more hostile towards environmentalism. He touches on several possible explanations, including a backlash against the newly elected vice president, Earth in the Balance author Al Gore, as well as a theory that after the Soviet Union collapsed, environmentalists succeeded Communists as major objects of conservative fear and hatred.
Mother Jones Writer Touts Study That Says Conservatism May Have Made Sense During the Pleistocene Epoch
By Tom Johnson | July 16, 2014 | 7:15 AM EDT In a hit record from 1974, a girl repeatedly told a suitor, “I don’t like spiders and snakes.” Presumably no one back then thought the song had any political overtones, but forty years later a post on the Mother Jones website has suggested that the girl’s remark meant she probably was a right-winger.
MoJo science writer Chris Mooney reported Tuesday on a recent paper that claims conservatives have, in his account, “a ‘negativity bias,’ meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments” (including huge spiders). He asserted that righties’ extreme wariness leads them to support “a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns.”
By Tom Johnson | July 10, 2014 | 5:48 AM EDT
Washington Monthly blogger Ed Kilgore has found some people he thinks conservatives hate even more than they hate President Obama: the thousands of Central American children trying to enter the U.S. at its border with Mexico. After all, righties are merely obsessed with making Obama at least as unpopular in his second term as George W. Bush was in his, but they want to “immediately ship [the] children back across the border in cattle cars,” or maybe just shoot them. But Obama's apparently so much more compassionate than Bush.
From Kilgore’s Wednesday post (emphasis added):
By Tom Johnson | July 5, 2014 | 2:09 PM EDT
Many of the claims made for, and sometimes by, Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign were amazingly lofty, hyperbolic, or both, even by political standards. Remember the columnist who speculated that Obama might be “a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being…who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet”? Remember Obama’s own “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”?
In a Wednesday post, Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum asserted that back then, at least two persons weren’t riding the Obama wave. One was Drum himself, who felt conservatives made Obama out to be much more messianic-sounding than he was. Drum thought the Obama of ’08 was a typical Democrat who gave “soaring speeches” because “[t]hat's what presidential candidates do.” Now, however, Drum sees that “millions of Obama voters really believed all that boilerplate rhetoric.”
By Tom Johnson | June 22, 2014 | 9:36 PM EDT
Many years ago, Stephen Colbert asserted that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” Chris Mooney of Mother Jones wants to make sure you understand that mathematics (a well-known subset of reality) does, too.
This past Friday, Mooney, author of books including “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science – and Reality,” posted a piece about a new book by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg which posits, in Mooney’s words, that “mathematics isn't simply about the calculations involving, you know, numbers; rather, it's a highly nuanced approach to solving problems...[M]athematics means glimpsing the entire structure of a problem, so that you can figure out how best to attack it, and so that you'll know how reliable your ultimate answers will be.”
By Tom Johnson | June 14, 2014 | 6:43 AM EDT
Newt Gingrich hasn’t been an elected official in more than fifteen years, but according to Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum, Gingrich’s vitriolic approach to politics during his years in the House of Representatives remains influential via Fox News. (Even though Gingrich stars on CNN.)
Piggybacking on an Andrew Sullivan blog post in which Sullivan alleged that watching Fox News was “like slipping into an alternative universe” where “hysteria is the constant norm,” Drum wrote on Thursday that Gingrich “brought conservative politics to a truly new, truly unprecedented level of toxic rancor,” and that Fox News is now “the ongoing, institutional expression of Gingrichism.”
Kevin Drum: Hard to Blame Obama for Tuning Out the Constant Anger ‘Ginned Up’ by ‘Insane’ Tea Party Republicans
By Tom Johnson | June 7, 2014 | 10:13 PM EDT
The belief that President Obama is aloof and detached is found on both the left and the right; the major difference between the two sides on that topic is that liberals don’t always see those qualities as negative.
Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum wrote in a Friday post that he finds it “almost impossible to blame” Obama for “tak[ing] the long view and ignor[ing] all the childish nonsense” generated by both the superficial mainstream media and “the insane tea-party style of no-compromise governing adopted by the modern Republican Party.” Drum says he hopes against hope that the media – the GOP apparently is hopeless -- will join Obama in “act[ing] like an adult.”