Campaigns & Elections

When will the folks at MSNBC stop pretending to be journalists and just admit to being liberal hosts looking to push their political agenda? Unfortunately, the answer seems to be not soon as MSNBC host Alex Wagner laughably told her audience on November 6 that she tries to be “non-partisan on her show.” Appearing with her left-wing panel on Wednesday, the former Center for American Progress…

Political anaylst Charlie Cook bills himself as "non-partisan and independent." But on today's Morning Joe Cook  couldn't curb his enthusiasm for Chris Christie.  Cook said of Christie that there is "testosterone coming out of every more pore in his body" and that Christie's attitude "inoculates him against being called a RINO, pantywaist liberal Republican." For good measure, Cook said he…

  The three morning shows on Wednesday announced that a "crushing victory" for Chris Christie in New Jersey will force the Republican Party to "move to the middle" against Tea Party "firebrands." According to CBS This Morning's Chip Reid, Christie hoped for a big win to "show that Republicans who favor consensus over ideological purity can win – even in blue states like New Jersey." [See…

The day after suggesting that Democratic primary voters in Florida should vote for turncoat Charlie Crist to better ensure the chances of taking back the governor's mansion, MSNBC substitute host Joy-Ann Reid conducted a short and rather tense interview with Nan Rich, a former state senate minority leader. You may recall that Reid suggested yesterday it would be "toxic" for Sunshine State…

If there is to be a tidal wave of defenders of President Barack Obama's "it if it hasn't changed" revision to his original guarantee — "If you like your health insurance plan, you can keep your health insurance plan" — Ron Fournier (NewsBusters history here), who toiled at the Associated Press for 20 years and joined the National Journal several years ago, will not be among them. In 2008,…

The Washington Post, which touts itself as "an independent newspaper," endorsed Democrats in 20 out of 27 races leading up to election day in Virginia. In the three statewide races, the paper's editorial board supported liberal Democrats Terry McAuliffe, Ralph Northam and Mark Herring for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general, respectively. In 17 of 24 state delegate races, the paper…

On Tuesday's NBC Today, chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd eagerly forecasted Republican defeat in the Virginia governor's race and that all the blame for the loss would be ascribed to conservatives: "There are a lot of anti-Tea Party Republicans who think the Tea Party has done damage to the Republican Party who are going....'You've got a Tea Party that took over the Virginia…

In her closing "Clear the Air" commentary on the November 4 Martin Bashir program, substitute host and longtime Florida resident Joy-Ann Reid rewrote the political history of Republican-turned-Democrat Charlie Crist, who announced today that he will run for the governorship in the 2014 election cycle. Reid suggested that Florida Democrats should get over their suspicions about the turncoat…

Promoting his new book about the 2012 election, Double Down, with co-author Mark Halperin on Monday's NBC Today, New York Magazine national affairs editor John Heilemann offered Obama campaign spin to excuse the President's disastrous performance in the first debate against Mitt Romney: "...[Obama's] disdain for Romney, his contempt for Romney, he couldn't figure out how to deal with that. He…

Too smart to be President. Is that really Barack Obama's problem? Mika Brzezinski thinks so. On today's Morning Joe, as Mike Barnicle and John Heilemann kicked around the notion, as others have before, that President Obama doesn't much like politics and the people in it, Brzezinski piped up with a different explanation for his aloofness: he's "too smart for the job," she suggested.  View the…

I think we have the winner in the "If a Republican or conservative had said it" media bias category this year, if not this decade. In the book "Double Down" by liberal journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann (reviewed by Peter Hamby at the Washington Post on Friday), President Barack Obama, while discussing drone strikes in 2012, reportedly told aides that he's "really good at killing…

Even when it occasionally does credible work, Politifact, the website which pretends to be the ultimate arbiter of the truth or falsehood of claims made by politicians and public figures, continues to beclown itself. On Monday, Matt Hadro at NewsBusters noted the absurdity of Politifact's unchanged "Half True" assessment of President Obama's June 2012 claim — a claim made with minor variations…

Charlie Crist will formally announce his Florida 2014 gubernatorial candidacy on Monday. He served as Republican Governor of the Sunshine State from 2007 to 2011. He is now running as a Democrat. In 2010, he fell from being a prohibitive front-runner in that year's U.S. Senate race to a virtual afterthought after Marco Rubio's ascendance. In the course of a fawning writeup about Crist's…

On Bill Maher's HBO show Friday night, Democratic National Committe Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz insisted that President Obama's promise to the American people made over 20 times during a span of over two years, namely "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan," was not a lie. Maher, appeared to warm to the idea that it was a lie, but at crunch time decided…