Conservatives & Republicans

Old stereotypes die hard — especially the ones which have long been false. The June 1 cover of The New Yorker Magazine depicts the Republican Party's current crop of declared and undeclared 2016 presidential candidates as an all-white-boys affair, showing seven of them in different locker-room postures, with Hillary Clinton peeping in through a window. How is this possible, you ask? Where are…

Paul J. Weber of the Associated Press made his liberal slant clear in a Wednesday article detailing how a pro-traditional marriage bill failed to pass in the Texas state legislature. Weber played up the supposedly "divisive efforts by Texas Republicans to defy the U.S. Supreme Court if same-sex marriage is legalized." He clearly labeled the proponents of the bill as conservatives, but failed to…

The Big Three's morning newscasts on Wednesday and Thursday all covered the breach of an online IRS system by hackers that compromised the personal information of 100,000 taxpayers. However, none of the programs mentioned President Obama by name during their reporting, nor did they revisit any of the other problems or scandals involving the agency in recent years. CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly…

In an interview with newly announced Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Thursday’s Good Morning America, co-host George Stephanopoulos tried to put the former Pennsylvania senator on the spot: “Rand Paul had something interesting to say about ISIS this morning.” A clip followed of Paul declaring on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Wednesday: “ISIS exists and grew stronger because of the…

Following Rick Santorum’s announcement Wednesday that he will mount a bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, CBS and NBC largely punted on news of a seventh Republican candidate entering the field with a combined 37 seconds of airtime on their Wednesday evening newscasts. Over on the Spanish-language networks, however, the coverage was even less as there was zero mention of Santorum…

Last Friday, author and historian Garry Wills, who blogs occasionally at the New York Review of Books site, praised Michelle Obama for challenging, in her recent Tuskegee University commencement address, conservatives’ complacency about race in America. Specifically, Wills approved of the first lady’s “breaking all of the four rules of racial discourse the right wing now wants to enforce.” “The…

During a live interview with Carly Fiorina on Wednesday, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell fretted over the Republican presidential candidate’s attacks on Hillary Clinton: “She's had a lifetime, though, in public service. Going back to before she was first lady in Arkansas. She can argue that she's got a record on women's issues, from the Beijing Women's Conference to all of her work with the Children's…

The Associated Press and Stephen Braun did all they could to cover for the Clintons yesterday. First, the wire service attached the most boring headline imaginable to Braun's story about Bill Clinton's shell company shenanigans: "Bill Clinton company shows complexity of family finances." The message to subscribers, particularly the broadcast networks: "This is boring and time-consuming. Don't…

TBS host Conan O'Brien took a new comedic shot at Hillary Clinton in a Wednesday post on Twitter – specifically, six-figure speaking fees that the former first lady charges; and, along with her husband's speaking engagements, has netted the couple $30 million in 16 months. O'Brien wrote, "I'd love to have @HillaryClinton as a guest on the show, but I can't afford her speaking fee."

Wednesday's New Day shut out social conservatives from a panel discussion on Senator Marco Rubio's Tuesday remark that "if you do not support same-sex marriage, you're labeled a homophobe and a hater," and that "the next step is to argue that the teachings of mainstream Christianity – the Catechism of the Catholic Church –  is hate speech." Instead, the CNN morning show brought on a Republican…

Tuesday’s New York Times piece on how the problematic phrase “established by the state” got into and stayed in the Affordable Care Act provoked a great many blasts from lefty bloggers at the plaintiffs’ case in King v. Burwell. Two especially heated posts came from MSNBC’s Steve Benen and Esquire’s Charles Pierce. Benen, a producer for The Rachel Maddow Show and the primary writer for the show’s…

In an effort to preemptively denounce a Supreme Court ruling against ObamaCare, on Monday, the Associated Press warned of “ugly potential fallout” if health insurance subsidies in the law were struck down. The article began by fretting: “A Supreme Court ruling due in a few weeks could wipe out health insurance for millions of people covered by President Barack Obama's health care law.”

Today at Arlington Cemetery, President Obama said — not kidding — "For many of us, this Memorial Day is especially meaningful; it is the first since our war in Afghanistan came to an end." He immediately added: "Today is the first Memorial Day in 14 years that the United States is not engaged in a major ground war." At the White House's twitter account, one finds the first of those two sentences…

In the early 1990s, politicians floated the term “peace dividend” regarding a hoped-for post-Cold War reduction in the U.S. defense budget, and Pentagon spending indeed fell somewhat in the mid- and late ‘90s. Sean McElwee, a research associate at the lefty think tank Demos, argues that America now needs a post-9/11, post-Afghanistan, post-Iraq peace dividend which would allow greatly increased…