Congress

In the litany of network news coverage Thursday night on Pope Francis’s address to Congress, ABC’s World News Tonight largely stayed away from the Pope’s comments about abortion and traditional marriage by relegating them to vague references while CBS and NBC did their due diligence and mentioned them amidst their continued obsession over the Pope’s liberal positions.

On Thursday, the New York Post, Mediaite, and several other online outlets reported that CNN's live feed of the Pope's address to Congress caught a woman saying off-camera that she wanted to "take my shoe off and throw it at his head" – moments before the pontiff entered the House chamber. The threat was also caught on the audio of MSNBC and Fox News (though on-air personalities were also…

Hannibal’s gone, but there’s still plenty of horrifying content on television. Cox hinted in a Monday column that some of it’s on C-SPAN, courtesy of congressional Republicans. Regarding a possible government shutdown over funding for Planned Parenthood, Cox asserted, “Forget shrinking government to the size it can be drowned in a bathtub, the politicians clamoring for another shutdown want…

With college football games airing Saturday on ABC, CBS, and NBC, none of the three aired their evening newscasts for viewers in the eastern or central time zones, but the CBS Evening News was shown in the western U.S. and featured another segment hinting at a link between the Planned Parenthood baby parts video scandal and a string of recent fires at their facilities. 

Applying bogus definitions of “fascist” and “fascism” to conservatives and conservatism has long been almost a cottage industry on the left. In a Friday post that mostly riffed on Rep. Paul Gosar’s intention to skip Pope Francis’s speech to a joint session of Congress, Daily Kos writer Hunter argued that the modern conservative movement may not be fascist right now, but easily could become so. “…

Near the end of the first hour of the CNN Republican Debate, co-moderator Dana Bash fretted to numerous 2016 candidates about the possibility of a federal government shutdown over a conservative effort to defund Planned Parenthood that included her hounding Governor Chris Christie (N.J.) whether or not he would “support the shutdown.”

During the first “All-Star Panel” segment on Tuesday’s Special Report, Fox News Channel (FNC) contributor Charles Krauthammer offered blistering criticisms of Senate Democrats for their support of the Iran deal along with Senate Republicans for not invoking the nuclear option by introducing a resolution disapproving of the deal. 

Lefty pundit Amanda Marcotte grants that so-called political theater usually dovetails with the beliefs of the politicians and activists who perform it. Among the exceptions: some Republicans’ insincere, “comically overwrought meltdowns” over the Iran nuclear deal. Those histrionics, Marcotte declared in a Wednesday Talking Points Memo column, are meant “to stir up irrational fears to be harped…

To Steve Benen, Obamacare is a high-quality dress shirt that Republicans treat like a greasy rag. Benen, a producer for MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, wrote in a Friday post on the TRMS blog that even though “every GOP prediction about the Affordable Care Act has been discredited,” conservatives keep trying to use it to tarnish other measures they oppose, including the Iran nuclear deal. “If…

NPR's Jennifer Ludden's liberal bias was clear on Wednesday's All Things Considered, as she covered a congressional hearing on abortion from earlier in the day. The House Judiciary Committee scheduled the hearing in the wake of the Center for Medical Progress's release of hidden camera videos on the sale of organs and tissues from abortion babies. Ludden pointed out how "Planned Parenthood denies…

The Los Angeles Times apparently doesn't think "women who were born during botched abortions in the 1970s" are abortion "survivors," as a Wednesday article about two such women featured a title that put the term in scare quotes: "Abortion 'survivors' criticize Planned Parenthood on Capitol Hill." Marcus E. Howard led the item by hyping that "House Republicans on Wednesday fueled an already…

Democrats' current and potential candidates for their party's 2016 presidential nomination continue to complain about various aspects of the economy. They continue to make no connection between their complaints and the fact that Democrat Barack Obama has been in the White House for over six years. Obama has for the most part operated either under the conditions created by the 2009-2010 Congress…

The CBS Evening News bid farewell on Thursday to Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal as the newscast, unlike ABC and NBC, dodged news that longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills testified before the House Select Committee on Benghazi plus word late Wednesday night that a former staffer who helped set up her private e-mail server would invoke his Fifth Amendment by not testifying before Congress.

In his standup-comedy days, Steve Martin did a joke about imposing the death penalty for parking violations. Michael Tomasky suggests that the House Benghazi committee has a similarly disproportionate penalty in mind for Hillary Clinton over Emailgate: wrecking her presidential campaign. Tomasky acknowledged in a Wednesday column that Hillary “screwed up this email business,” but asserted that…