Appointments

CNN and New Yorker pundit Jeffrey Toobin considers Antonin Scalia “a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor.” The late SCOTUS justice, asserted Toobin in the New Yorker, “lived within the sealed bubble of contemporary conservative thought” and “devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy…

Liberal Alan Colmes, apparently miffed at people who have criticized President Barack Obama for not attending the funeral of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, asserted earlier today that GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz would not be there. Colmes got it wrong. Cruz was there, and it was known for quite some time that he would be there. Colmes, since the words "I'm sorry" are apparently…

Senate Republican plans to delay Barack Obama getting another justice on the Supreme Court could be driven by only one thing -- racism! Well at least that’s what the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin implied, when they collected a bunch of quotes from angry Obama supporters for a front-page February 18 story headlined: “Blacks See Bias in Delay on a Scalia Successor.”

Few people in modern history have fulfilled their oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution" more than the late Justice Antonin Scalia. He was so well respected that the Senate voted 98-0 in 1986 to confirm him. These days it would be difficult to get a unanimous vote in support of Mother's Day. 

Chris Matthews gave guest Harry Reid (D-Nevada) a softball interview tonight wherein the Senate Minority :eader blamed Republicans on a lack of comity in the world's greatest deliberative body and insisted Democrats had always opposed extreme delay-and-deny tactics for presidential judicial nominations. Although this is patently false, Matthews didn't challege his assertions.

New England Cable News touts itself as "the nation's largest regional news outlet" and it just may have set a record this week for most double-takes by viewers watching one of its broadcasts. Among its offerings is a weeknight program on politics called Broadside, hosted by veteran journalist Sue O'Connell, who is also co-publisher of the South End News and gay-friendly Bay Windows.   

On Thursday, both NBC’s Today and ABC’s Good Morning America censored any mention of the controversy swirling around President Obama’s decision to skip the funeral of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia scheduled for Saturday. To its credit, CBS This Morning offered a full report on widely criticized move.

Some analysts have pointed out that it’d be risky for Republicans to preemptively block anyone President Obama nominates to succeed Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, but that approach wouldn’t necessarily end when Obama leaves office. Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman believes that if in 2017 a Democrat becomes president but GOPers retain sufficient power in the Senate, they’ll just…

MSNBC's Chris Hayes is usually right less often than a stopped clock, i.e., fewer than two times a day. But he might get lucky if by some miracle he's right about something else today because of the matter discussed in this post. After the Obama administration announced that President Barack Obama will not attend Saturday's funeral for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a staunch Catholic,…

In a desperate attempt on Wednesday’s NBC Today to hype supposed divisions in the Republican Party over opposition to President Obama nominating a successor to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, correspondent Andrea Mitchell enthusiastically proclaimed: “Even as a handful of Republican senators are now breaking with their leaders and saying the Obama nominee should at least get a fair hearing…

ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today on Wednesday avoided the uncomfortable fact that Barack Obama has totally flip-flopped on whether ideology should be considered for a Supreme Court nominee. Only CBS This Morning highlighted the hypocrisy and shifting positions of Democrats. Reporter Jan Crawford played a clip from 2006 in which then-Senator Obama was supporting a filibuster.

The “big three” networks ABC, CBS, and NBC all made sure to weigh in Tuesday night on President Barack Obama’s comments hours earlier about his desire to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the late Justice Antonin Scalia and spun them as Obama “plan[ning] to follow the Constitution” against “the Republican roadblock” in the Senate. 

The View’s Whoopi Goldberg on Tuesday furiously denounced fellow co-host Joy Behar for suggesting that the family of Antonin Scalia might know of a conspiracy theory to kill the justice. Goldberg went ballistic at her fellow panelists on the show for speculating on such possibilities, condemning, “We don't actually know what happened! This just happened over the weekend. Let's hold off before we…

Few in media can rival Rachel Maddow's ability to project earnest indignation over the apparent perennial willingness of Republicans to engage in politics. On her MSNBC show last night, Maddow twice mentioned the possibility of a constitutional crisis in the wake of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's death, since President Obama says he intends to nominate a judge to fill the vacancy and…