Conservatives & Republicans

Update : Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele followed Bernard's lead in MSNBC's noon hour by claiming the Fast & Furious investigation was "not good" for the House GOP. Video below and audio here. In an attempt to twist the Obama administration's Fast & Furious gun running scandal into bad news for Republicans, on Wednesday's The Daily Rundown on MSNBC supposed Republican pundit…

Apparently MSNBC's Thomas Roberts doesn't seem to get the importance of knowing the partisan breakdown of a poll's respondents to assessing that polls reliability. In the midst of a segment centered around President Obama's quasi-amnesty-by-fiat policy announced last week, token conservative panelist J.P. Freire poured cold water on a new Bloomberg poll that shows 64 percent of Americans…

During a panel discussion on Tuesday's NBC Today about President Obama being interrupted by a reporter during a Friday speech on immigration, even liberal pundit Donny Deutsch didn't buy veteran newsman Sam Donaldson claiming the incident was racially motivated: "Sam Donaldson in response said he thought that some of this was racially driven....I didn't see that..." Fellow panelist and Today…

On Sunday's Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC, as host Harris-Perry led a discussion of what the presidential candidates will need to do to appeal to white voters, panel member and CNBC contributor Keith Boykin asserted that Republicans have "carefully caricatured" the Democratic Party as the "party of black people," and suggested that Americans have been duped into believing that most federal…

At the rate things are going, it may be that the list of leading West Virginia Democrats attending the party's convention in Charlotte is going to be shorter than the list of those who aren't. The Associated Press reported the following in an unbylined item this evening in a terse three-paragraph squib with some pretty amusing attempts at impact-minimizing verbiage (bolds and numbered tags…

While calls for U.S. Attorney General Eric "Stonewall" Holder's resignation grow and the House GOP gears up for a contempt vote next week, it's worth remembering how we got into this mess. In two words: feckless bipartisanship. "I like Barack Obama and want to help him if I can." That was Utah GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch in January 2009, just weeks before the Senate voted on President Obama's…

If the audacious amount of gory violence and bloody sex in “True Blood” doesn’t do it for you, what about malevolent vampire “Christians?” Apparently “True Blood” vampires have a sacred text, and HBO writers admitted it’s a slanderous take on the Bible and separation of church and state. A faction of vampires called the “Sanguinistas” functioned as a demeaning allegory for traditional…

On Friday's World News on ABC, anchor Diane Sawyer cited a recently hyped quote from former Governor Jeb Bush as the Florida Republican theorized that President Ronald Reagan "would be criticized" by Republicans today "for doing some of the things that he did." As Sawyer recalled it, during a piece on former President George H.W. Bush, she asserted:

During the 1980s, despite data which even then was telling them they were wrong, it became a mantra of a desperate establishment press that the booming economy under Ronald Reagan really wasn't that impressive because so many of the new jobs created were part-time or temporary. The data was not then readily available for temps, but it certainly was for part-time vs. full-time employment. It…

Former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) on Sunday gave CNN's Candy Crowley a much-needed education on what "moderate" and "willing to work with the other side" mean in Washington today. Appearing on State of the Union, Santorum correctly informed his host that the kind of Republican she wants in office "means doing what the other side wants only doing it slower instead of doing what is necessary…

NPR rushed out of the gate on Friday afternoon to defend President Obama's announcement to "lift the shadow of deportation" from young illegal immigrants. Correspondent Frank James spun the policy change as Obama getting to "the stage in his presidency, like so many of his predecessors, where his frustration with congressional inaction has led him to act unilaterally." James cited several…

Appearing on Friday's NBC Today, Meet the Press host David Gregory advised the Obama campaign on how defeat Mitt Romney: "What the President's got to do is say, 'Hey, don't forget about George W. Bush. Things got really, really bad under him.'" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump] Co-host Matt Lauer was skeptical: "I hear him saying that all the time....do you think that…

Don't you find it odd that the word extremism seems to apply only to conservative Republicans? Terminology often drives political discourse and those who control the terms often determine the outcome. Establishment Republicans have too often been uncomfortable in their own skin. When they win elections, they sometimes seem unsure of what to do next. Democrats never seem to have this problem.…