Conservatives & Republicans

After Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's stunning primary defeat Tuesday night, the broadcast networks Wednesday morning wrung their hands over the loss and fretted that immigration reform, which Cantor supported, was doomed. On NBC's Today, political director Chuck Todd declared: "...this, by the way, means immigration reform during the rest of the Obama presidency, the idea that…

The right wing relies on extremist murderers like Las Vegas shooters Jerad and Amanda Miller! At least, that’s what Michael Eric Dyson told his audience when he filled in for Ed Schultz on Tuesday evening’s The Ed Show. Dyson spent the first sixteen minutes of the show blasting conservatives and the Tea Party for their evil rhetoric that he claimed "cultivated the very environment in which…

According to an article last Sunday in the online magazine Salon, there's a new intellectual dynamic duo in town: French economist Thomas Piketty and American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who've become media superstars almost simultaneously over the past few months thanks to Piketty's book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" and Tyson's TV series "Cosmos." Writer Paul Rosenberg…

Desperate to tie David Brat's shocking defeat tonight of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in Virginia's Republican Congressional Primary to something other than voter resistance to illegal-immigrant amnesty, some on the left are already implying that Cantor's Jewish faith had something to do with the result. The fact that the seven-term Congressman has, as far as I can tell, never gotten grief…

Leave it to MSNBC to exploit a shooting by a pair of deranged extremists to push the notion that violence is on the rise as a racist reacting to having a black man in the Oval Office. That's what MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell did in a segment of the Tuesday edition of her MSNBC program, asking political consultant and former Attorney General Eric Holder spokesman Matthew Miller if the shooting was…

Tip for liberal journalists: If you’re going to try to smear conservatives every time some homicidal nut shoots innocent people, it’s a bad idea to cite the Southern Poverty Law Center. When Floyd Lee Corkins tried to shoot up the conservative Family Research Council in 2012, he later admitted he targeted the conservative organization because the SPLC listed the FRC as a “hate group” for it’s…

On Monday's NBC Today, fill-in co-host Willie Geist posed an ominous question to viewers: "How would you feel if you saw someone walk into a store or restaurant with a rifle strapped to his or her back?" Teasing an upcoming story on the topic, he proclaimed: "It's perfectly legal in one state, sparking quite a controversy this morning, we'll explain." [Listen to the audio or watch the video…

In a video segment (HT Twitchy) entitled "How Low Can You Go?" on MSNBC's "Last Word," which the network's web site corrected as this post was being drafted, substitute host Ari Melber, filling in for Lawrence O'Donnell, is seen bemoaning the resignation of a Democratic legislator in Virginia. An accompanying visual originally showed a map of North Carolina. Apparent the answer to the map's…

In a Sunday post, Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman charged that a combination of unyielding ideological extremism and efforts to prevent many who might oppose said extremism from voting mean that the Republican party’s creed has “really beg[un] to resemble fascism.” Longman noted that the DNC recently announced a campaign designed to find and register likely Democratic voters and…

In a Monday National Journal column about how many Democrats are allegedly saying they have "quit" on Obama — claims I find quite hollow, given that no one asserting this has yet had the guts to go on the record — Ron Fournier quotes "a senior White House official" with a head-shaking take on the Veterans Administration scandal. Specifically, "Questioning why the Veterans Affairs Department…

Sarah Palin called out her liberal/Democratic critics in a Twitter post on Monday for firing the "1st shot in the real 'war on women.'" Palin zeroed in on an excerpt from Hillary Clinton's new book Hard Choices, where the former first lady asserted that she refused to attack the then-Republican vice presidential candidate, mere hours after John McCain named her as his running mate. Mrs.…

Both Time and the Wall Street Journal have reported that Bowe Bergdahl, the soldier released by his Afghan captors in exchange for five hardened Gitmo terrorists — or, in the alternative universe of the Los Angeles Times, five guys aged 43 to 47 who "are pretty old now" — will not contact his parents (WSJ's headline says he "has declined to speak to his family"). That news broke several hours…

The seething anger at seeing the Obama administration being raked over the coals by critics of the Bowe Bergdahl exchange of five hardened terrorists for a soldier who left his post, including many Democrats and most prominently his fellow unit members, was apparently too much for the editorial board at the New York Times. On Thursday, they let loose with a poorly sourced and hastily drafted…

The belief that President Obama is aloof and detached is found on both the left and the right; the major difference between the two sides on that topic is that liberals don’t always see those qualities as negative. Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum wrote in a Friday post that he finds it “almost impossible to blame” Obama for “tak[ing] the long view and ignor[ing] all the childish nonsense”…