Campaigns & Elections

Once again, the NBC Politics team at NBCNews.com cobbled together what they consider the most "notable" of the speeches from last night's Republican convention. Once again, a dynamic Democrat-turned-Republican speaker was left out of the "curated" selection: Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico, a woman of Hispanic ethnic heritage. Yesterday I noted how the website omitted video of Artur Davis'…

How has George Stephanopoulos spent his week? The former top aide to Bill Clinton pushed Democratic talking points on all his guests at the Republican National Convention, continuing the practice on Thursday. After allowing that Paul Ryan "electrified" the crowd in his speech last night, the host fretted, "But it's quite a gamble, especially here in Florida, to put Medicare front and center…

In an interview with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush on Thursday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer used attack lines from deputy Obama campaign manager Stephanie Cutter to question the honesty of Paul Ryan's vice presidential nomination acceptance speech: "[She] said, 'Forty minutes of vitriol and half a dozen previously debunked attacks.' Was it an honest speech or was it just a campaign…

Ezra Klein, the "former" head of the Journolist news coordination conspiracy (given the evidence of coordination seen during the Republican convention, it's hard to believe it hasn't continued in some form), rolled out a graphic yesterday at the Washington Post which he touted as "the one graph you need to see before watching" the Republican convention. To show would be to give it more…

On his radio program Wednesday, a very frustrated Rush Limbaugh wondered aloud at what he characterized as an insufficient amount of attention to President Obama's record. He blamed the problem on Republican election consultants (including perpetual failure  Ed Rollins) and their misbegotten belief that telling the truth about liberalism will somehow disenchant unaffiliated voters. "I want to…

CNN's Piers Morgan cast Paul Ryan's pro-life record on the "extreme" end of the GOP and brought up Todd Akin to emphasize the party's gender gap, but his Republican guest would have none of it early Thursday morning at the Republican Convention. "What about Paul Ryan's positions on social issues like abortion? He's pretty right-wing, to the more extreme end of the party. Are you concerned…

Minutes after Paul Ryan finished his RNC speech on Wednesday, MSNBC's Chris Matthews slammed the Republican vice presidential candidate for supposedly ignoring blacks during his "very constricted, very negative, very nasty speech," and suggested that he was directing the address to racists: "It's clear that Paul Ryan was talking to people who think about rights as something...produced by Thomas…

ABC's analysis of Paul Ryan's RNC address included former Democratic operative George Stephanopoulos citing an a-mail from a "top Democrat" slamming the integrity of Paul Ryan's speech. Stephanopoulos noted "we saw how much this crowd loved it" before immediately adding "I got an e-mail from a top Democrat saying the speech was audacious in its dishonesty." He added in his own words that the…

Instead of airing Latina Governor Susana Martinez's speech at the Republican National Convention, ABC chose to host liberal Univision anchor Jorge Ramos who had dire words for the Republican Party. "I think Republicans have a real, real challenge trying to get Latinos. Because just a few words in Spanish from Susana Martinez over principle is not enough," warned Ramos while ABC showed video…

This afternoon, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell got his hands on excerpts of the remarks that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was preparing to give this evening. Bound and determined to find racism where it doesn't exist, O'Donnell did not disappoint. Taking to the air on Martin Bashir's eponymous program, O'Donnell laid out his case that McConnell's crack that the president "has been…

When CNN's Piers Morgan brought up the Todd Akin controversy in his interview with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Bachmann lashed back that "you're reading directly off the Obama talking points." "What about all the fury last week over Todd Akin?" Morgan asked Bachmann, in a move out of the Democratic playbook. "Because you and he and Paul Ryan all got together with the Taxpayer Funding for…

CNN contributor Roland Martin quipped on Wednesday that "I'm a black man at a Republican convention. Of course I stand out." Martin then went after black RNC speaker Artur Davis as a "political fraud." "[Y]ou can have Artur Davis, former Democrat, we don't know what he is now, with that ridiculous speech he gave last night, I call him a political fraud, he is," sounded Martin. [Video below…

While all eyes were on the Republican National Convention in Tampa and Hurricane Isaac on the Gulf Coast, the White House was quietly jacking up the price of automobiles and putting future drivers at risk. Yes, the same cast of fable-tellers who falsely accused GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney of murdering a steelworker's cancer-stricken wife is now directly imposing a draconian…

Jim Pinkerton of Fox News Watch says the MSM has a problem: groups like NewsBusters are paying attention and "nailing them" when they let their liberal bias show. Pinkerton made his comment in an interview with NewsBusters at the RNC today.  The subject was a story NewsBusters broke this morning regarding Yahoo's Washington bureau chief David Chalian, who was caught on a hot mike saying that…