Campaigns & Elections

Wednesday is the thirty-sixth anniversary of the seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran, Iran. Moreover, it is the thirty-fifth anniversary of what D.R. Tucker calls “one of the great tragedies in American history”: the election of Ronald Reagan as president. (The two events are, of course, related.) Tucker asserted in a Sunday post that “Reagan’s election nearly destroyed this country”…

Tomorrow marks one year to the day when Larry Hogan soundly defeated Martin O'Malley protege Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown in the Maryland gubernatorial contest. Yet with O'Malley in the hot seat on the November 3 edition of Hardball, host Chris Matthews failed to ask him how this embarrassing defeat -- and Gov. Hogan's healthy job-approval ratings to this day -- might be a signal to his fellow…

One day after he pitched a softball to President Obama by asking him if criminal justice reform was “your defining moment” as the country’s first African-American President, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt returned with part two on Tuesday’s newscast by touting Obama’s “pointed jabs” and “candid assessment” of the 2016 Republican field.

Chris Matthews the politics and news junkie certainly knows better than to buy the melarkey that is the Dan Rather Memogate story as told in the new box-office dud Truth. But Chris Matthews the star-struck cinemaphile won out last night as the Hardball host treated guest Robert Redford with fawning adulation.

A liberal New York Times writer told a liberal MSNBC host that the problem with conservatives is they exist in their own ideological echo chamber. Without a sense of irony, All In host Chris Hayes on Monday night wondered, “What do you make of this sort of inward turning that we’re sort of seeing effectuated in the Republican field?” Op-ed columnist Paul Krugman complained, “Well, this has been…

In a friendly exchange with Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell on Tuesday, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell tried to tee up the Obama administration cabinet official to slam Republican presidential frontrunner Ben Carson on abortion: “...a pediatric neurologist who does not get involved with care for women's reproductive systems....says that life begins with conception, no…

It was Republican bashing all around on CBS This Morning, Tuesday. Bloomberg journalist and author John Heilemann appeared on the show and knocked the “xenophobic” Donald Trump and the “roundly mocked” Jeb Bush. Heilemann allowed that “There are people who really like the way he [Trump] talks about China, the way he talks about immigration, the kind of nationalist, some would say xenophobic”…

On Tuesday, all three network morning shows happily touted President Obama attacking Republicans at a Democratic fundraiser Monday night over GOP presidential candidates objecting to CNBC’s biased debate. At the top of NBC’s Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie proclaimed: “The Republican candidates, briefly unified, splinter again over their debate demands as President Obama takes a swipe, mocking…

Who said it? "Get rid of all this corporatism, this corporate welfare . . . I would love to have the government stop this corporate welfare--that's what I want . . . This is a huge racket that's wrecking the country."  Did you guess Bernie Sanders? Probably not because you read the headline. Yet no one could be blamed for thinking it was Sanders. But indeed, it was Charles Koch, who said it in…

Truth, the cinematic attempt to make heroes out of the agenda-driven journalists who produced and broadcast the fraudulent 2004 CBS News story about George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard service, went into wide distribution this past weekend, with utterly disastrous box-office results. Readers, in between moments savoring the film's apparent descent into oblivion — though it will almost…

Appearing on the Monday edition of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, New York magzine writer-at-large Frank Rich denounced the letter written by numerous Republican presidential campaigns to media organizations concerning the format of future debates as “fascistic” and written by “scared little children” but “seem[s] to have been drafted by Stalin.”

Those who hope that Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Mark Levin get to moderate a Republican presidential debate include Hannity himself, Ted Cruz, and Walsh. As they (almost) used to put it on Sesame Street, one of these persons is not like the others. Walsh, who recently joined The Nation after more than a decade and a half at Salon, argued in a Friday article that such a debate would benefit…

In his first interview with President Barack Obama since taking over as NBC Nightly News anchor, Lester Holt gave the President a friendly platform on Monday to promote criminal justice reform and his decision to send a small group of U.S. troops into Syria. Holt served up a fawning question to the President if he viewed it as “your defining moment” considering the fact that he’s the first…

Of course, perhaps it was only fitting since the governor's wife donated a couple thousand to Kathleen Matthews's campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives.