2012 Presidential

The attacks on former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) were bound to increase following his strong second place showing in last night's Iowa caucuses. "Rick Santorum has Dan White-eyes," noted NPR and New York Times contributor Mark Allen this afternoon in a tweet. Dan White, you may recall, was the San Francisco Supervisor who assassinated openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk in…

Is House Speaker John Boehner an anti-Obama racist? Editorial Page editor Andrew Rosenthal all but accuses him in his Tuesday blog from Des Moines, “Nobody Likes to Talk About It, but It’s There.” (The web headline is blunter: “Republican Attacks Have Racist Undertones.”) Actually, Rosenthal is all too happy to talk about racist Republicans if it helps Democrats politically, as he did on…

CBS revealed its double standard in its treatment of Republican presidential candidates versus Democratic ones on Wednesday's Early Show, as Jim Axelrod and Nancy Cordes pressed Mitt Romney about the challenges ahead in the race the day after he won in Iowa. By contrast, then-anchor Katie Couric gushed over a "humanized" and "emotional" Hillary Clinton the day after the 2008 New Hampshire…

CNN's Soledad O'Brien tried to make race an issue on Tuesday where there was no conflict to begin with, and she continued thumping Republicans over immigration on Wednesday. O'Brien asked candidate Mitt Romney if he was simply driving Latino voters to Obama with his immigration stance, and brought up the issue again in a later interview. In her interview with Romney, O'Brien cited his…

Warning: Sweeping pontifical claims ahead from Lawrence O'Donnell. Best taken with shaker of salt. As is his wont, O'Donnell was holding forth last night during MSNBC's coverage of the Iowa caucuses, making not one but two statements of alleged fact that went beyond dubious to flat-out inaccurate (video after page break) --

On Tuesday's NBC Nightly News, correspondent Tom Brokaw asked Perry, Iowa resident Eddie Diaz: "Were you accepted right away by the community?" Brokaw explained: "Diaz is a Perry high school teacher, part of a growing Hispanic population....Eddie could go elsewhere, but he likes Perry, which he says is more moderate, politically and culturally, than the candidates realize." Brokaw touted how…

At the same time that the nation's leading networks can't call Obama a "liberal" more than about once a year, NPR's religion reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty on Monday announced Rick Santorum was "very, very conservative" on the social issues, in addition to being "very pro-life." He even -- horrors! -- home-schools his seven children. "He's Catholic. He's billed himself very much as the…

Former top Democratic operative turned journalist George Stephanopoulos on Wednesday wondered if Mitt Romney's attempt to "reassure" conservative voters would end up "turning off" moderates and independent voters in a general election. [See video below. MP3 audio here.] Interviewing the Republican presidential candidate on "Good Morning America," Stephanopoulos offered spin about…

New York Times reporter Mark Landler, with President Obama in Honolulu, filed “Obama Still Lets Surrogates Take the Lead as Gay Rights Momentum Builds” for Sunday’s paper. Like his colleague Ashley Parker did in her own Sunday Times story, Landler celebrated Obama’s oratory, but right at the beginning of his story, on the president keeping his support for gay marriage at an official arms…

It's hard to imagine the media rooting, even "cheering" for a social conservative like Rick Santorum.  But two certified MSMers claim that Santorum does have the potential to attract such unlikely support. On today's Morning Joe, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, co-authors of the best-selling Game Change about the 2008 election, both opined that Santorum, given his appealing blue-collar…

In his online chat at washingtonpost.com on Tuesday, Washington Post humorist (and former editor of the paper's Style section) Gene Weingarten pronounced on how he believed there was no argument against gay marriage, but when someone raised the subject of Rick Santorum, he replied, "I LOVE it that he is now considered a front-runner. He is a little boy. He LOOKS and SOUNDS like a little boy. I…

The results are in from last night's Iowa presidential caucuses and it appears Mitt Romney has pulled off a 7-vote victory, apparently the closest ever in the history of Iowa. Second place went to Rick Santorum, whose low-budget campaign came from nowhere to nearly first. Ron Paul took third. Exit questions: We know his showing in Iowa will be a boon to Rick Santorum but how much will the…

On Tuesday's The Daily Show on Comedy Central, as he recounted the racist newsletters that were published in the 1990s under the name of GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul, host Jon Stewart mocked other GOP candidates after clips of them attacking Paul for not taking seriously the threat of a nuclear Iran, suggesting that the candidates were not so concerned about racism. (Video below)…

During MSNBC coverage of the Republican Party Iowa caucuses on Tuesday, shortly after 8:30 p.m, MSNBC's Chris Matthews lumped "neocons" and the socially conservative Moral Majority movement in with segregationist Dixiecrats as he asserted that Republicans had picked up the "droppings" and the "effluent" of the Democratic Party, causing the Republican Party to be too "junk laden" to open their…