Campaigns & Elections

In a Fox News Sunday interview so painful to watch readers are advised to consider taking headache medicine before viewing, Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz tried to make the case that the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's handling of emails containing sensitive and classified national security information and her use of an undisclosed private email server is a…

On Meet the Press today, host Chuck Todd asked Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders what he thought of the idea of a consumption tax on soda. Sanders' answer, laded with his standard "massive wealthy inequality" argument, led Todd to believe that Sanders might also be against cigarette taxes. No, those taxes are fine, Sanders said, but given that "cigarettes are causing cancer ...…

George H. W. Bush pooh-poohed “the vision thing.” Bernie Sanders wouldn’t have a presidential campaign without it. True, the Vermont senator is not known for his grasp of policy minutiae, to which Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas says, in effect, so what? Kos implied that Sanders has caught a lot more flak for his vague answers than Republicans do when they routinely “promis[e] …

New York Times reporter and reliable Democratic Party defender-Republican attacker Jackie Calmes valiantly defended that most reviled organization, the Internal Revenue Service, from unfair Republican attacks, under a battle-tinged headline in Friday’s edition: “I.R.S. Supporters Fight Back Against Republican Offensive.” She played the “reduced budget” card as an excuse for agency incompetence.…

Buyer beware: Not all studies of media bias and favoritism are equal. The liberal site Vox recently ran this headline. “Study: Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, gets the most negative media coverage.” The only problem? No human actually read the media coverage. They dumped thousands of stories into a computer algorithm, and got answers within minutes.

In lieu of a story on the 2016 election, Saturday's CBS Evening News featured a full report promoting the United Kingdom's travel advisory for Mississippi and North Carolina in light of religious liberty laws and gushing over President Barack Obama's town hall in London that featured "an emotional statement of personal identity" from a transgender person.

On Friday, the New York Daily News broke the news that "The head investigator for the state Board of Elections probed the 2014 fundraising efforts by (New York City) Mayor de Blasio and his team on behalf of the (New York State) Senate Democrats and found enough 'willful and flagrant' violations to warrant a criminal referral to the Manhattan DA’s office." The story has attracted virtually no…

Republicans may have to do some world-class needle-threading to come up with a presidential nominee who can win in November. New York magazine's Kilgore believes that even if such a candidate exists, it’s not the “hammer-headed movement conservative” Ted Cruz. “Unity candidates are reassuring and have a knack for making you see your own reflection in their soft and soulful eyes,” wrote Kilgore…

How crazy left does a president have to be, if Barack Obama isn’t considered “progressive?” According to Comedy Central host Larry Wilmore the United States hasn’t had a progressive president since Lyndon Johnson. That wasn’t good enough for his guest, actress Susan Sarandon, who insisted you had to reach all the way back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

We're all familiar with Godwin's Law: in an argument, the first person to mention the Nazis automatically loses. We're going to have to come up with a companion concept for the Washington Post: call it the Cambodian Corollary. Wapo's editorial of yesterday, "Softening on Trump? Remember this" reflects the paper's apparent worry that people will take a second look at Trump in light of his…

Good Morning America reporters on Thursday offered a fawning town hall forum to Hillary Clinton, full of softball questions about Saturday Night Live and hot sauce. (No queries on Benghazi or the e-mail scandal were allowed.) The 29 and a half minutes of air time were so stilted that the fawning even invaded the weather report. At the end of the half hour, Robin Roberts ended a segment and turned…

Americans For Prosperity won a huge court victory in California Thursday against that state's hard-left vindictive attorney general, Kamala Harris. Naturally, the national press is doing what it does when it doesn't want to cover a story: letting the Politico cover it and then pretending that this suffices. Harris demanded that AFP provides the section of its not-for-profit Federal Form 990…

CBS and NBC's evening newscasts on Friday were too busy covering the sudden death of pop musician Prince to set aside any air time to the Democratic governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, taking executive action to restore the voting rights of over 200,000 felons inside the commonwealth. Both CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News led with the Prince story. Together, they devoted nearly 11 and a…

NBC Nightly News on Friday returned to hyping the new bathroom law in North Carolina. Hallie Jackson zeroed in on President Obama's slam of the "transgender bathroom ban," as she put it, during a trip to the U.K. She also spotlighted Donald Trump's "criticism" of the legislation, and underlined that "Trump's considered one of the more LGBT-friendly Republican candidates," even though he "hasn't…