Campaigns & Elections

[Updated w/video clip, 14:21 Eastern, July 30]Something happened on Sunday's "Chris Matthews Show" that likely shocked virtually all viewers on both sides of the aisle: the panel, stocked with liberal media members as usual, actually discussed reasons why America shouldn't pull troops out of Iraq. In fact, not only was this issue seriously debated, but some of the statements made could have come…

No matter how obscure the corner of our culture it might be covering, the MSM often manages to inject its politics. And so it was on this morning's "Today," on what had been shaping up to be a harmless feature on ventriloquists.NBC's Brian Balthazar narrated the segment, which focused on a ventriloquists' convention in Kentucky. At one point, this dialogue between a ventriloquist and his dummy…

The Washington Post 2008 campaign blog "The Trail" has an update on Cleavage-gate, a minor row that seems to have caught the paper's fashion critic Robin Givhan with a dear-in-the-headlights look while giving New York's junior senator a change to perk up her campaign's finances. As the Post's Howard Kurtz and Anne E. Kornblut note, Givhan protests that she: ...would never say the column was…

Correction (July 31 | 14:40): Colbert's wrist was broken. He injured it running around his studio before a show. I regret the error. Bob Shrum, the Democratic political strategist who has only slightly fewer losses on his resume than the Philadelphia Phillies, appeared on the Colbert Report last night to tout his book, “No Excuses: Confessions of a Serial Complainer,” err, I mean, “No Excuses:…

Scanning the columns at Townhall.com is part of my early-morning routine, and it was at about 6 A.M. today that I read Charles Krauthammer's "Obama Bombing." I marveled at how perfectly the Pulitzer Prize-winning author had captured the essence of Hugo Chavez, calling the Venezuelan thug "a malevolent clown."Krauthammer's words obviously impressed Matt Lauer, too. For barely an hour later, I was…

Newsweek’s Jonathan Darman lamented this week that the John Edwards poverty tour/publicity tour didn’t passionately grip America, that it did not immediately become a mythic event, like filthy-rich Bobby Kennedy's poverty tour in 1968. In a dramatic flourish, the young Harvard-educated whipper-snapper blames this tragedy on not-very-compassionate America: "There is something tragic about Edwards'…

Put down your coffee mugs before you continue, sports fans, for conservative columnist Ann Coulter wrote a review of Monday's Democrat presidential debate, and your computer is in grave jeopardy if fluids are nearby. In a column entitled "Obama Hails a Unicorn," Coulter first skewered the junior senator from Illinois' claim that "he couldn't get a cab in New York because he's black" (emphasis…

Americans interested in free speech got a boost Monday when the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Kevin J. Martin, came out strongly against any reimplementation of the Fairness Doctrine. As reported by the Associated Press Thursday (emphasis added): Martin, in a letter written this week to Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., and made public Thursday, said the agency found no compelling…

Liberals love to decry the Bush administration's alleged undermining of the rule of law. The lead editorial in today's New York Times, for example, demands Congress "not capitulate in the White House’s attempt to rob it of its constitutional powers."But ironically, just below the editorial appears a column by one Jean Edward Smith brazenly entitled "Stacking the Court." Far from condemning the…