Conservatives & Republicans

On today's Morning Joe, liberal Republican Nicolle Wallace sought to slough off a Politico article reporting that Jeb Bush is losing the influential "Laura Ingraham primary." Claimed Wallace, who served as Jeb's press secretary when he was governor of Florida, Ingraham "hates everybody.  She always hates the Republicans more than the Democrats at this point, too." Wallace even suggested that…

While reporting on Monday’s NBC Nightly News with the latest from the Iranian side of the international talks in Switzerland over their nuclear program, Ann Curry smeared U.S. conservatives by likening them to radical hardliners in Iran’s Islamic regime: “As in the U.S., Iran has conservatives who don't trust the other side and they are ready to pounce if they believe negotiators give up too much…

On Sunday on CNN's State of the Union, Dana Bash, while interviewing Texas Senator and GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz, attempted to compare his alleged lack of experience to that of Barack Obama when he declared his candidacy in 2007. It did not go well for her. It's a mystery why Bash might have thought that Cruz wouldn't have an answer for her faux concerns, but he did, and he hit her…

New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin hit the New Hampshire hustings for his condescending Page 1 story, "Bush and Walker Point G.O.P. to Contrary Paths." Martin made it clear where those paths lead: Either up to the sunny moderate climes of colorful diversity with Jeb Bush, or down a dispiritingly white conservative lockstep path with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. In Martin's condescending take…

On their Monday evening newscasts, the major broadcast networks kept up their attacks on the State of Indiana for having enacted a religious freedom law that aims to protect individuals from government infringement based on their religious beliefs. While ABC, CBS, and NBC mentioned that there are those supporting the law, their coverage continued to veer off in a slanted direction against the law…

It’s fair to say most conservatives aren’t big fans of Jon Stewart, but according to TV critic Sonia Saraiya, Trevor Noah, Stewart’s successor as host of The Daily Show, is in for an even nastier response from the right, much of it having to do with his skin color. Apropos of Comedy Central’s Monday announcement that Noah, a biracial South African comedian, will take over for Stewart sometime…

UPDATE, March 31: This morning in an email, the AP's Lederman pointed me to a Saturday afternoon "Big Story" item time-stamped the day before the report to which this blog post below links. For whatever reason, that earlier "Big Story" item has more detail than what appears, despite the Sunday time stamp, to be Lederman's original report posted at the AP's national site. In that "Big Story" item…

On Monday, the Washington Post's Sandhya Somashekhar zeroed in on the "unabashed approach" of Carafem, Washington, DC's latest abortion center, which, in her words, "reflects a new push to destigmatize the nation's most controversial medical procedure by talking about it openly and unapologetically." Somashekhar, the liberal newspaper's "social change" reporter, spotlighted how the upstart "aims…

Early on Monday's NBC Today, fill-in co-host Willie Geist hyped "the growing debate over a controversial law that critics call anti-gay....[who] say it permits businesses, among other things, to refuse service to same-sex couples on religious grounds." Correspondent Gabe Gutierrez followed: "This morning a huge backlash against Indiana's new Religious Freedom Restoration Act and Governor Mike…

On Monday's New Day on CNN, Daily Beast's John Avlon likened Indiana Governor Mike Pence's defense of his state's new religious freedom law to George Wallace's fight for racial segregation. Avlon asserted that Republican politicians "don't want to say they're in favor of bigotry. So what you get is that incredibly awkward stonewalling by Mike Pence." He added that "this puts him in the same…

One of the first rules of genuine comedy is that to be funny, a joke or skit needs to have some basis in truth. On that primary measurement, the cold open on "Saturday Night Live" last night failed miserably on so many fronts, it's hard to know where to begin. Its most offensive aspect is its portrayal of a Democrat inflicting violence on three Republicans to the audience's pleausre. It is…

In Chicago, incumbent Mayor and longtime Democrat fixture Rahm Emanuel floated the idea of renaming one of its airports after President Obama. After all, according to Emanuel, both of Chicago's major airports, O'Hare and Midway, are "named after battleships." No they're not, as will be seen after the jump. The Chicago Tribune's Bill Ruthhart failed to recognize Emanuel's startling gaffe until…

In a Sunday blog post on the New York Review of Books site, historian Wills, who’s written extensively about both the United States and Catholicism, rebuked conservative Catholics who’ve “suggested that [Pope Francis] is not truly Catholic,” asserting that such critics of the pope “are right to be in a panic. They are not used to having a pope who is a Christian. They call Francis a radical…

Andrea R. Jain bemoaned how a "growing number of individuals and institutions oppose yoga, and actively encourage fear of it" in a Thursday item on Quartz, an online magazine from the parent company of The Atlantic. Despite passing mentions of opposition from evangelical Christians, such as Southern Baptist leader Albert Mohler, the Indiana University-Perdue University Indianapolis professor…