Campaign Financing

Ben Carson seems to be joining the likes of Michele Bachmann and Howard Dean on the list of presidential candidates who generated a lot of early buzz but became distant also-rans well before a nominee was chosen. According to Washington Monthly blogger David Atkins, Carson’s campaign also offers yet more proof that conservatives tend to be easy marks for scammers. “The libertarian-conservative…

As Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) gradually fades among liberals after its decade-long stint atop their stack of pathologies, a newly diagnosed condition known as Completely Unhinged over Citizens United (CUCU)  is supplanting it. Even though BDS is unlikely to wholly depart from the liberal psyche, which appears to draw sustenance from its presence despite the obvious toll on left-wingers'…

Embattled 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton sat down for her latest interview on Wednesday and surprisingly, the liberal media’s questioner in Judy Woodruff of the PBS NewsHour (and Clinton Foundation donor) came prepared and hit Clinton on issues ranging from her e-mail scandal to the administration’s misjudgment of Russia’s global threat to allied super PACs attacking…

The occasional dust-ups between Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on the Morning Joe set seem largely made-for-TV. But there appeared to be some authentic antagonism on today's show on the issue of the motivations of those who oppose the Iran deal. Joe passionately condemned supporters of the deal who cynically suggest that opponents are controlled by the Jewish lobby. "Why don't you guys talk…

There’s going to be a Top Gun sequel, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous is coming back, and Bloom County has already returned. Still, suggests Esquire's Pierce, when it comes to things that have the 1980s written all over them, these days Donald Trump is the king of the mountain. In a Tuesday post, Pierce contended that Trump “was one of the purest products of the Age of Reagan, which was…

If a woman announced on live national TV that she had shoplifted an iPhone, there'd presumably be a cop at the studio door to greet her.  So why is it that someone can blithely announce on national TV that she's in the country illegally, and far from fearing any repercussions, have her views on the American presidential election respectfully solicited? It happened this morning, when MSNBC…

I noted on Sunday how former Associated Press reporter Philip Elliott, writing for Time Magazine's Time.com website, joined the Scott Walker pile-on brigade criticizing the Wisconsin Governor's reasonable — arguably to a fault — position that he doesn't personally know whether Barack Obama is a Christian. A separate post by Elliott, which covered a weekend retreat hosted by Charles Koch,…

Strange new respect? Two days after the New York Times labeled real estate mogul and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump a racist on its front page based on thin evidence, the Times is suddenly treating one of his Twitter pronouncements as newsworthy, with Ashley Parker devoting an entire story to Trump's tweet. Perhaps because he's attacking his fellow GOP candidates as "puppets" of…

During Wednesday night’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart and liberal historian Doris Kearns Goodwin repeatedly slammed the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling which Goodwin called “the most poisonous thing that’s happening in our system.” 

Nicholas Confessore and Maggie Haberman at the New York Times studiously avoided talking about Hillary Clinton's campaign spending in their front-page print edition story Thursday ("Hillary Clinton Lags in Engaging Grass-Roots Donors"). Mrs. Clinton hauled in $48.7 million, but she spent a stunning $18.7 million. As seen in a table accompanying the Times story, that's more than triple that of…

How can Judd Apatow, once ranked the smartest guy in Hollywood be so . . . ? On today's With All Due Respect, big comedy macher [credits include Lena Dunham's Girls] Apatow said it was "ridiculous that anyone thinks that rich people care about other people.  When the Koch brothers give a billion dollars, it is not out of a great concern for the masses." To his credit, Mark Halperin twice pressed…

The New York Times is still bitter over the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, which allowed businesses to give unlimited sums of money to campaigns on behalf of favorite candidates. While hailing poll findings showing alienated Americans against "the regime of untrameled momey," the NYT buried the fact that the American people care very little about the issue, compared to jobs and…

Appearing on the Thursday edition of MSNBC’s The Last Word, The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel suggested that money in politics is discriminatory toward African-Americans: “Fifty years ago, African-Americans were discriminated against by poll taxes, literacy tests. Today, the skyrocketing costs of campaigns, including the super PACs you mentioned, these billionaires, have made everyday Americans…

As CBS This Morning gave retiring Bob Schieffer a glowing send-off on Friday, the longtime Face the Nation moderator ripped the current media landscape: “Well, it's been turned upside down....we now don't know where people get their news, but what we do know is they're bombarded with information 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Most of the information is wrong and some of it wrong on purpose.”