Liberals & Democrats

“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…

Given how much wailing and gnashing of teeth there was in the press when the old Hostess liquidated in 2012, a mid-April story at Forbes on the company's has gotten surprisingly little attention. Well, maybe it's not that much of a surprise, for reasons which will be indentified here. Readers may recall that the final straw in that drama occurred late that year when the the AFL-CIO-affiliated…

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…

You know you're in trouble if you're a liberal TV host and a reporter with the far-left Huffington Post demands you receive the same punishment as NBC News anchor Brian Williams: suspension “for six months without pay and his future cast in doubt.” That's what Denny Dressman called for in an article entitled “The Stephanopoulos Verdict: Nothing Less Than Williams Got.”

In a Thursday column, PBS ombudsman Michael Getler took NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff to task for failing to disclose a 2010 donation to the Clinton Foundation: “It is always a bad idea for a journalist to give money to a political campaign or anything even remotely connected to the activities of a politician or party, or an organization that they might cover. You just shouldn’t do it.”

In a complete non-surprise given her career track record, Hillary Clinton's definition of "cooperation" with requests to turn over whatever emails she unilaterally deigned could be seen meant giving them to the State Despartment on paper. That's lots and lots of paper, 55,000 pages in all, some of them double-sided, all seemingly part of a conscious strategy to deliberately slow down the process…

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…

On Thursday, the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley and NBC Nightly News showed no interest in informing their viewers that the State Department will soon be releasing the first batch of e-mails that Hillary Clinton turned over following the uncovering of her private e-mail server. While CBS and NBC punted on this revelation, ABC’s World News Tonight covered Clinton’s e-mails and surprisingly…

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…

You can read a lot from a person by the way she interprets polls and when it's Rachel Maddow doing the interpreting, what quickly becomes apparent is repugnant. On her MSNBC show Tuesday night, Maddow's take on the waning popularity of potential Republican presidential candidates in the states where they serve as governor conveyed more about her than the purported subject at hand.

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…

Time was, burning an American flag was a reliable way of getting on network TV, there to shock the taxpayers over their TV dinners. But these days, the network news programs don’t seem interested in American flag desecration, unless it happens in the Middle East. In the last five years, there have been only two mentions of domestic flag desecration on ABC, CBS and NBC. Both of those were on ABC.

The “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC showed no interest in covering on Wednesday night the optics of President Obama touting global warming as a “serious threat,” in a speech to graduates of the Coast Guard Academy, days after the Iraqi city of Ramadi fell to ISIS. While the networks avoided this story, the Fox News Channel (FNC) program Special Report offered a full segment on the President’s…