Conservatives & Republicans

MSNBC's Mark Halperin trumpeted the apparent power of the media on Monday's Morning Joe during a discussion about Donald Trump attacking the morning show: "The only way a Republican can win for president, I believe, is if the press favors them in coverage." Halperin then oddly claimed that Trump "had a chance to have better press coverage than Hillary Clinton. He's missing that chance. He's…

The front of Sunday’s New York Times National section was swallowed up by an essay from Texas correspondent Manny Fernandez, “A Look at What Makes Texas Texas,” a cultural cringe in 1,700 words from Fernandez. The reporter moved to Houston from Brooklyn to cover the state for the NYT, and he still seems slightly freaked by his “hard-right” neighbors and the “fear, anger and sometimes paranoia…

On Monday’s NBC Today, correspondent Peter Alexander framed Donald Trump’s adoption of various liberal policy positions as evidence of his “flexibility” as a candidate: “Trump showing plenty of flexibility on the issues, now open to a minimum wage increase after opposing it during the primaries. Shifting positions on taxes, too. His plan calls for cuts for everybody, which he contradicted last…

In a Tuesday post, New York magazine’s Chait suggested that conservatism is driven not by an elite but by its riff-raff. Chait asserted, “Whatever [the] abstract arguments for conservative policy…on the ground, Republican politics boils down to ethno-nationalistic passions ungoverned by reason,” and remarked that Donald Trump’s supporters “have revealed things about the nature of the party that…

As CBS News veteran Lesley Stahl appeared as a guest on FNC's Media Buzz on Sunday, host Howard Kurtz might have almost gotten her to admit to liberal personal biases among her colleagues as she seemed to hedge on the issue of whether there is a liberal pro-Hillary Clinton bias. After initially denying Kurtz's suggestion that "the liberal press wants Hillary Clinton to win," claiming that…

Appearing as a guest on Friday's New Day, the morning after declaring that Republicans are "detached from rational" thought on Hillary Clinton, CNN political commentator Errol Louis continued inoculating Clinton from charges of malfeasance in the email scandal as he charged that, "in the kangaroo courts of right-wing talk radio, for Donald Trump, for the Republican party," a clean report from the…

We made it a point to tune into Joy Reid's debut this morning in the MSNBC slot formerly occupied by Melissa Harris-Perry. For anyone who imagined Reid might be more fair-and-balanced than MH-P: fuggedaboutit. After an all-liberal opening panel blamed Bernie Sanders for failing to adequately address the concerns of African-Americans, the remainder of the show was one, long, hate-Trump fest. Mac…

Some on the left claim that Donald Trump is an ideological descendant of Ronald Reagan, never mind that Reagan was Mr. Conservative and Trump is Mr. Opportunist. Paul Campos, from the University of Colorado, makes a different Trump-as-heir-to-Reagan argument. In a Thursday Salon article, Campos opined that the Reagan revolution was less about right-wing views than “stupidity, celebrity, and…

Writing one of the more bizarre movie reviews one will read for Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte whined in a Friday afternoon post that the latest Marvel film morphed the “New Deal Democrat” Captain America into “a douchey libertarian” “who believe[s] it’s cool to belong to a secretive paramilitary that rejects oversight and accountability to the public.”

During a White House press conference in the 12 p.m. ET hour on Friday, President Obama was treated to a series of softball questions from reporters, who repeatedly teed him up to bash Republicans and promote his liberal agenda. Reuters correspondent Jeff Mason got the first question: “Mr. President, what's your reaction to Donald Trump becoming the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party…

Forner New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, was sentenced to 12 years in prison Monday after being convicted last year "in a $5 million corruption case alleging he traded favors to enrich himself and then lied about it." Perhaps cognizant of the fact that media watchers are looking over their shoulders, the primary dispatch and several other news stories at the Associated…

After largely ignoring Donald Trump’s liberal past throughout the presidential campaign, on Friday, with Trump poised to become the Republican Party’s 2016 nominee, NBC’s Today finally noticed “the once friendly relationship between the Trumps and the Clintons." Co-host Savannah Guthrie teased the segment: “Plus, the Clintons and the Trumps, from friends to political enemies. How the race for the…

Appearing as a panel member on Thursday's Anderson Cooper 360, CNN political commentator Errol Louis -- political anchor for Time Warner Cable News -- painted critics of Hillary Clinton as being "detached from any kind of rational reading of the facts in many cases" as he inoculated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton from possibly damaging revelations that could come from the FBI…