Campaigns & Elections

On Monday, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell hosted her 12 p.m. ET hour show live from a Hillary Clinton campaign event, happily announcing: “I'm Andrea Mitchell live on the trail in Nashua, New Hampshire for President Clinton's first official public campaign event for his wife Hillary. Speaking moments ago here in Nashua, New Hampshire, a state that has been very good to the Clintons.”

The network morning shows on Monday hyped Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of Donald Trump’s attacks, instead promoting the “popular” Bill Clinton. On Good Morning America, Cecilia Vega enthused, “Bill Clinton has enormously high popularity numbers. But even with all of these attacks coming from Trump, her campaign and Hillary Clinton herself calls him their secret weapon.” 

On Monday, all three network morning shows touted Barack Obama planning to take unilateral executive action to restrict gun rights and worried that Republicans were already strong critics of the presidential power grab.  

Since last night, Matt Drudge has teased his link to CNN's coverage of Hillary Clinton "heckler" Katherine Prudhomme O'Brien with the following headline: "Clinton heckled in NH by rape survivor." The headline at CNN's story by Dan Merica is quite different: "NH GOP lawmaker heckles Hillary Clinton over Bill Clinton's sex scandals." The headline difference is not unusual. What is unusual is that…

Mika Brzezinski has let the cat out of the MSM bag. On today's Morning Joe, Mika admitted that the press corps covering Donald Trump can't be objective about him: "it's like their skin is crawling." Brzezinski said reporters "ooze with a lack of objectivity" when covering Trump, adding "you can sort of see it in their kind of like smiling, sort of slyly and uncomfortably and almost snarkily…

At the end of his Rand Paul interview on Sunday, Meet the Press host Chuck Todd asked a bit of a softball. Was Paul frustrated with the media’s obsession with Trump? No kidding, Chuck. Sen. Paul said “I do have a frustration....that we’re being led by the nose and the news media is led by the nose to think that somehow Trump is going to win this because of these polls.”

In his most recent Washington Post column, Fareed Zakaria, who also works at CNN, told readers that "working-class whites" can no longer handle the fact that they're not an "elite group" any more, and that this loss of status explains an alarming increase in suicide in their ranks. Supposedly, these people support Donald Trump because his "Making America Great Again" is about putting them back on…

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…

A time-honored tactic in political TV ads is to use contrasting degrees of photographic exposure, one bright and snappy for your candidate and a darker hue, sometimes even going to old-fashioned black-and-white, for your opponent. On December 29, at the Washington Post's Wonkblog, Max Ehrenfreund cited a conveniently timed "study" which looked at 2008 ads produced by and on behalf of GOP…

The rich are "horrible people" -- at least those who lean to the right -- declares economist turned pompous New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in Friday’s “Privilege, Pathology and Power.” The text box: “Can we survive rule by self-centered billionaires?” (Liberal billionaire activist George Soros had no comment.) Krugman channeled opportunistic moralism, citing “science” to confirm his…

On Saturday's Good Morning America, co-host Dan Harris suggested Hillary Clinton "may actually have been right" about Donald Trump turning up in ISIS videos. And during the subsequent segment, reporter Mary Bruce said Hillary "predicted" Trump "would" be used in ISIS videos. There's only one hitch: Hillary hadn't "predicted" what ISIS "would" do. On December 19th, during a Democratic debate,…

On Wednesday, Nate Cohn at the New York Times, who by some accounts is being anointed the next Nate Silver of polling, made a clumsy and despicable attempt to inject race into his political "analysis" of the Donald Trump phenomenon. Cohn's tediously long writeup, which made Page A3 in the New York version of the Old Gray Lady's print edition on Thursday, attempted to identify and characterize…

If Paul Waldman had wanted to put the main argument of his Monday American Prospect column in Obamaesque terms, he might have written that conservative opponents of political correctness have gotten bitter and are clinging to their supposed right (and maybe even their duty) to act like jerks. “For today's Republican, if people think you're a jerk then you must be doing something right, and the…

Closing out 2015 on the Thursday morning newscasts, NBC’s Today churned one of its most fawning pieces on President Obama as NBC News correspondent Ron Allen reviewed Obama’s top photos by White House photographer Pete Souza while hushed, soft piano music played in the background.