Campaigns & Elections

Prospective 2016 Democratic presidential contender Gov. Martin O'Malley decided to close out 2014 with an announcement that he would be commuting the death sentences of four Maryland death-row inmates who were in a virtual state of limbo -- eligible for execution but unable to be executed due to the state lacking an appropriate protocol for lethal injections.  Reporting the story in the January…

Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who died on Thursday, is predictably being lionized today by USA Today's Aamer Madhani "as (a) giant in political rhetoric," and by others elsewhere in similarly glowing terms. Madhani goes on to characterize the three-term Empire State chief executive's 1984 Democratic Convention speech in San Francisco as "what is widely considered one of the finest pieces…

On the heels of news that Republican majority whip Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana may have addressed a white nationalist group founded by David Duke, New York Times reporter Jeremy Alford did his best to smear today's Republican Party by linking it to the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan: "Much of David Duke’s ’91 Campaign Is Now in Louisiana Mainstream." Guilt by association is popular…

Chris Megerian at the Los Angeles Times, in a report first published online on Tuesday, had a difficult time trying to downplay the fact that Democrat and leftist mega-donors outspent their Republican and conservative couterparts by an overwhelming margin during the past election cycle. But Megerian made the best of it, giving readers the impression that David Koch, of the supposedly evil Koch…

The Esquire blogger opines that the GOP is “the Political Party Of Dorian Grey. Steve Scalise is the public face. But, up in the corner of the attic, there's a portrait of the rotting, decomposing corpse of Strom Thurmond.”

The staff "conservatives" at The Washington Post are throwing the kitchen sink at the Ted Cruz wing of the Republican Party again on the Post editoral page on Tuesday. In his columm, former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson dismisses conservatives (like Cruz) who favor so-called “apocalyptic showdowns” with Obama on his executive-power trips. Gerson concluded by talking 2016: "Those who judge a…

President Obama sat down with Steve Inskeep, host of NPR’s Morning Edition, for an interview that aired on Monday, December 29 and was repeatedly tossed softball questions from the lefty reporter throughout their conversation. Inskeep began the discussion by asking President Obama “Since your party's defeat in the election, you have made two major executive actions — one on immigration, one on…

In a Talking Points Memo piece, Ed Kilgore opines, “Even if the supply side of theocratic impulses in America is abating a bit, the demand side will boom” because of “a large and noisy Republican presidential nominating fight in which Christian Right resources will be a fiercely contested prize.”

Republicans, remarks blogger Hunter, are “now fairly certain that having frothing crazy people running for president is what doomed them the last time around. But they won't stop…The Republican base—and I mean the frothy ones, the ones that show up in tricorner hats and demand the government get out of their Medicare—lives for these primaries.”

Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer has had a really bad year. He failed to get other left-wing donors to join his crusade to make climate change the No. 1 election issue. Then he wasted nearly $75 million backing liberal candidates. Four out of the seven politicians he and his NextGen Climate Action group backed lost. And the few races where liberals won owed little or nothing to Steyer’s bizarre…

During a discussion on Wednesday's Hardball about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's reticence to speak out on pressing political issues and her tendency to eschew spontaneity in favor of carefully crafted, calculated statements, panelist Michelle Bernard did raise the point that Clinton has tended to evolve over time to be what she thinks her audience wants her to be. As an example, she…

Mark Halperin claims that the MSM has an "anti-Clinton bias." That might send the blood pressure of a Newsbusters reader rocketing.  But before downing a diuretic, consider what he and John Heilemann had to say on their Bloomberg TV show today. Halperin and Heilemann were riffing off the New York Times report that Hillary's State Department permitted a rich Ecuadorian woman to enter the US after…

Appearing on Wednesday's NBC Today, Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd spun former Florida Governor Jeb Bush announcing that he was "exploring" the possibility of running for president in 2016 as a boost for the candidacy of Hillary Clinton: "By the way, the big Jeb Bush announcement helps Hillary because it'll scare Democrats and rally them around Hillary even more."

On Tuesday, former Republican Governor of Florida Jeb Bush announced that he is considering running for president in 2016 and that night liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne predictably had a field day with the announcement. Appearing on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on Tuesday night, Dionne proclaimed “the irony here is, it`s almost a delicious irony, is that Jeb Bush,…