Congress

Two categories of news the press has studiously avoided during the Obama era came together this week, causing it to (in my view) proactively decide to ignore emotional congressional testimony which should have been front-page news almost everywhere. The first is their virtually complete disinterest in reporting on congressional hearings. The list is longer than can be recounted here, but…

Appearing as a guest on Sunday's CNN Newsroom with Fredricka Whitfield to discuss Donald Trump declining to condemn former KKK leader David Duke in a CNN appearance earlier in the day, Jason Johnson of TheRoot.com not only repeated a discredited claim that Louisiana Republican Rep. Steve Scalise spoke to a white supremacist group in Louisiana in 2002, but he even gave the impression that Scalise…

In August 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama pledged, as paraphrased in a New York Times story, "not to use signing statements to undermine legislation passed by Congress," and "called Mr. Bush’s frequent use of such statements an abuse of his power." On Wednesday, Obama issued another signing statement — there have now been over 30 during his presidential tenure — to put a thumb in…

Conservative and center-right columnists often have to do far more digging than their liberal counterparts, simply because overwhelmingly left-leaning beat journalists, aka "Democrats with bylines," provide such unbalanced reporting on current events on a daily basis. Fortunately, the Washington Post's Marc Thiessen did the necessary work by rummaging through available information about federal…

On Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher, left-wing HBO comedian Bill Maher and his all-liberal panel went after deceased conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, as Maher not only joked about the possibility that he died while watching his show, but ended up imagining him "murdering" birds and looking like Dumbledore from the Harry Potter series the evening before his passing.

Scatology has typically been out of bounds in mainstream-media political commentary. (Not in all political commentary, of course. For example, actor John Cusack once called former actor Ronald Reagan “a criminal who used the Constitution as toilet paper.”) Nonetheless, Michael Tomasky went there in a Wednesday column trashing Senate Republicans for refusing to consider any Supreme Court…

On Thursday's New Day, CNN's Chris Cuomo invoked the Constitution to former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli over Senate Republicans' refusal to consider any potential Supreme Court nominee by President Obama: "The Constitution...[is] about nominating somebody and advise and consent. It's not about delay." Cuomo added, "It would be hard to argue that part of advise and consent is the…

The Associated Press clearly hopes that most Americans still pay little to no attention to New Media. That's the only credible argument one can employ as to why the wire service's Alan Fram, in his Tuesday evening dispatch, characterized the unanimous decision of Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee not to hold hearings on a potential Supreme Court nominee this year as "extraordinary."…

As noted yesterday at NewsBusters, an enterprising individual poster at C-SPAN posted a 1992 video of then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe Biden indicating that then-President George H.W. Bush should "not name a (Supreme Court) nominee until after the November election" — and that if he did, his committee would "seriously consider NOT scheduling confirmation hearings on the nomination…

The newly heralded liberal comedy host Samantha Bee resumed her vile trashing of conservatives on Monday’s Full Frontal as she declared, among many smears, a pie chart of South Carolina Republicans to be “a NuvaRing of bigotry,” Ted Cruz “once killed an abortion doctor through prayer” and that America was crippled under Ronald Reagan’s presidency. In addition, Bee went on an extended rant…

CNN host and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria lived up to his reputation as someone who’s always willing to trash conservatives and praise liberals at the top of his Sunday morning CNN program by blasting the GOP’s “unwillingness to produce serious proposals” verus the “responsible” Democrats who “buttress their policy with real research.”

Some analysts have pointed out that it’d be risky for Republicans to preemptively block anyone President Obama nominates to succeed Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, but that approach wouldn’t necessarily end when Obama leaves office. Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman believes that if in 2017 a Democrat becomes president but GOPers retain sufficient power in the Senate, they’ll just…

The “big three” networks ABC, CBS, and NBC all made sure to weigh in Tuesday night on President Barack Obama’s comments hours earlier about his desire to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the late Justice Antonin Scalia and spun them as Obama “plan[ning] to follow the Constitution” against “the Republican roadblock” in the Senate. 

On Monday, the morning and evening newscasts of ABC and NBC failed to highlight, in their coverage of the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, that Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer’s decision to come out in support of whomever President Obama nominates flies in the face of what he said in 2007, 18 monhs before the end of the presidential term, about vowing to block any Supreme Court…