Conservatives & Republicans

Today’s conservative legislators may not be as dumb as a box of rocks or so dumb it takes them an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes (HT: Rodney Dangerfield) but Daily Kos writer Hunter is willing to claim that they’re “the dumbest we've ever had. You have to credit the tea party Republicans for that one—they know what they want, and by golly if it can ooze its way into a suit and tie they'll…

Not the endorsement someone heading into the Republican primaries would normally want, but it's the one Rand Paul got.  On today's This Week [hosted by Jonathan Karl in the absence of Stephanopoulos], far-left Rep. Keith Ellison declared that on a variety of issues he is "proud to stand" with Rand Paul. Roll the video and watch Bill Kristol look on beningly as Ellison praises Paul.  Let's read…

Jason Horowitz at the New York Times thinks that Hillary Clinton shouldn't bother dealing with the press. In describing Hillary Clinton's campaign effort in Iowa, Horowitz wondered how, in "a carnival atmosphere," Hillary Clinton "gains politically from playing the freak" by deigning to take questions from the press, thus clearly suggesting that she would be better off if she didn't bother, and…

“The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.” That proverb sums up Vox editor-in-chief Ezra Klein’s Friday analysis of the policy and politics of Obamacare. In this metaphor, the dogs are ideologues on both sides who, heedless of evidence, have been barking (and snarling and growling) at each other about the Affordable Care Act. As Klein noted, “Social scientists have [determined that] the more…

Friday's New Day on CNN played up that the Hillary Clinton e-mails revealed by the New York Times "dispute the narrative that has been around for two years that she was trying to cover something up" about the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, as Alisyn Camerota put it. The CNN anchor also wondered, "Isn't this the opposite of what the GOP has been saying about her – that she...tried to keep it…

When it comes to taking questions from representatives of the legacy media, Hillary Clinton has been making herself rather scarce, and Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas thinks that’s just peachy. “The day when the political media was instrumental in getting a candidate's message out is over,” wrote Kos in a Thursday post. “Candidates now have myriad vehicles to communicate their…

Dem strategist Steve McMahon prefaced his remarks with the standard tongue-in-cheek disclaimer about not intending to hurt, by praising him, the prospects of someone from the other party. On this evening's With All Due Respect, McMahon then proceeded to gush over Marco Rubio, saying that listening to him recount his life story as the son of immigrants "melts my heart."  McMahon predicted that…

Patricia Miller ecstatically touted that the apparent "demographic free-fall" of the Catholic Church is "good news for the country" in a Thursday item for Salon. Miller bemoaned the American Catholic bishops' "outsize role in U.S. politics" in the past, given their opposition to abortion, contraception, and same-sex "marriage," and asserted that "with their flock fleeing and Pope Francis…

On Thursday's New Day, CNN's Chris Cuomo wondered if some in the 2016 Republican presidential field might be making the possible redeployment of U.S. troops into Iraq a political issue. When GOP strategist Kevin Madden underlined that "so many Republicans disagree with the President's [Obama's] approach on combating ISIS that so many of these candidates are going to want to draw as stark a…

The idea that the nation's largest cities are impenetrable Democratic Party strongholds took a serious hit Tuesday night. In Jacksonville, the nation's 13th-largest city, a Republican took back the mayor's office, unseating the incumbent Democrat who won four years ago. Predictably, the Associated Press, when it sensed that Democrat Alvin Brown might hold on in his reelection attempt, treated…

What would Donny Deutsch say if he did want to sound elitist?  Because for not wanting to sound elitist, Donny Deutsch came off an awful lot like the denizen of Manhattan and the Hamptons that he is. On today's Morning Joe, reacting to comments from a focus group of Iowa Republicans who were less concerned about Jeb Bush's policy positions and more concerned about his last name, Deutsch…

On Tuesday, I wrote that "Every day seems to bring in at least one new example of alleged journalists who are really propagandists insisting that what is obviously false is true." Today's entry into that category will be extremely hard to beat, and may well stand as one of the worst attempts at an argument ever made by a leftist hack. Before I excerpt William Saletan's column at Slate and his…

The Wednesday editions of ABC’s World News Tonight and CBS Evening News ignored the news that Republican Senator and 2016 presidential candidate Rand Paul (Ky.) launched a new marathon speech on the Senator floor hours earlier in protest of the federal government’s collection of phone records. While ABC and CBS failed to cover this story, NBC Nightly News offered a 26-second news brief on the…

Jeb Bush: genocidal Arab killer and torturer. That was the portrait of the prospective Republican presidential candidate that Joe Wilson, husband of former CIA employee Valerie Plame, has painted. Appearing on Chris Hayes's MSNBC show this evening, Wilson claimed that the "conclusion you come to," looking at his foreign policy advisers, is that Jeb's plan is "to kill all Arabs we find on the…