Conservatives & Republicans

On her 12 p.m. ET hour MSNBC show on Thursday, host Andrea Mitchell was giddy over reports that President Obama was considering Republican Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval to replace the late Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court: “...the trial balloon, if you will, that came out of the Obama White House, of nominating a Republican to try to put the Republican Senate on notice, and try to back them…

Displaying a stunning double standard on Thursday’s NBC Today, host Savannah Guthrie immediately dismissed 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney calling for the release of Donald Trump’s tax returns: “Donald Trump has been very clear, I mean when he was sitting right here, he said, ‘I pay low taxes because I don't want to pay high taxes.’ Is there a bombshell there? Does it matter for Trump? Who…

The political career of California State Senator Leland Yee, a Democrat who had been running for Secretary of State, came to an abrupt end in March 2014 when the strident gun-control advocate was arrested and charged with "six counts of depriving the public of honest services and one count of conspiracy to traffic in guns without a license." Last week, Yee, who pled guilty last year to "one…

Hardly anyone would dispute the validity of the term “small-government conservative,” but “big-government liberal” is a horse of a different color, believes Steve Benen, a producer for MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show. Benen claims that while right-wingers’ preference for small government is ideologically driven, “progressives” such as President Obama look at size-of-government issues in practical…

Can you imagine if a conservative TV host interrupted a black woman journalist, instructing her to change the way she said something that was not to his linguistic liking? The cries of racial condescension and sexism would echo through the land. So will Chris Matthews pay a price in the liberal media for the way he treated April Ryan on this evening's Hardball? When Ryan, of American Urban Radio…

What a surprise it's not that ex-MSNBC action hero Ed Schultz just served up a textbook example of why Godwin's Law -- he who first invokes the Nazis in making an argument, loses -- still applies. When he's not toiling away at his new Kremlin-backed Russia Today "news" show, Schultz does a podcast weekdays that's available at YouTube and his website.  

Hillary Clinton is still sticking to her "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" strategy as the reason she won't release transcripts of her paid speeches to big banks and Wall Street firms. She can do this because outfits like the Associated Press are covering for her. The only recognition of Mrs. Clinton's problem, beyond a strategically segregated story (more on that later), is buried deep…

In back-to-back interviews on Wednesday’s NBC Today, hosts Savannah Guthrie and Willie Geist repeatedly urged Republican presidential candidates Marco Rubio and Donald Trump to attack each other. Talking to Rubio first, Guthrie pleaded: “You've got you and Ted Cruz and some of the other candidates fighting each other, and Trump sailing to victory. A lot of Republicans asking this morning, why not…

Yesterday morning, before the Republican Party's Nevada caucuses began, Nate Silver at the inexplicably hallowed FiveThirtyEight blog made a really naive and tone-deaf assumption. He reckoned that the caucuses would be a low turnout event, noting that in 2012, "only 1.9 percent of the voting-eligible population — about 33,000 people — participated in the Republican caucuses in Nevada," and spent…

Continuing to operate at full speed well past the 1:00 a.m. Eastern hour on Tuesday (10:00 p.m. Pacific), MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews attempted to analyze Donald Trump’s victory speech after winning the Nevada caucuses by comparing his interaction with supporters to the late Johnny Carson’s relationship with Tonight Show viewers.

Have you seen the GE commercial? Millenial son informs mom and dad that he has gotten a job at GE. Old-fashioned dad is enthusiastic: "proud of you, son. GE! Manufacturing!" He hands son "granpappy's" heavy old hammer. Son gently explains that rather than building "powerful machines," he'll be writing computer code. Disappointed dad: "he can't lift the hammer." Mom, with more compassion than…

Offering his initial thoughts on the NBC News projection just after midnight Wednesday that Donald Trump would win the Nevada caucuses, MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews sought to diagnose Trump’s rise as going back to before the 2010 midterm elections and resulting in a 2016 in which “Trump is the name” for the “pain” of conservatives.

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."…

Ronald Reagan’s admirers called him the Great Communicator, but to his detractors he was more like the Great Demonizer, crystallizing hostility toward groups ranging from the poor to left-wing protesters at UC Berkeley. In a Sunday post, Esquire's Pierce argued that Donald Trump has a similar talent for focusing outrage, and because of it, he’s attracting the same kind of supporters that Reagan…