Rand Paul Slams Media as 'Led by the Nose' of Misleading Trump Polls

At the end of his Rand Paul interview on Sunday, Meet the Press host Chuck Todd asked a bit of a softball. Was Paul frustrated with the media’s obsession with Trump? No kidding, Chuck. Sen. Paul said “I do have a frustration....that we’re being led by the nose and the news media is led by the nose to think that somehow Trump is going to win this because of these polls.”
Tim Graham
January 3rd, 2016 11:13 PM

LA Times: Hollywood Panicked Over Rerun of '#OscarsSoWhite Backlash'

The Drudge Report notes the front page of Sunday’s Los Angeles Times carries panic that all 20 best-acting Oscar nominees are going to be insufferably white again. Glenn Whipp began: “As Motion Picture Academy members cast their ballots for Oscar nominations this week, the biggest issue for many voters isn't about who might be nominated but about the diversity of this year's acting class. Their…
Tim Graham
January 3rd, 2016 2:14 PM

Zakaria: 'Self-Destructive Whites' Explain Trump's Front-Runner Status

In his most recent Washington Post column, Fareed Zakaria, who also works at CNN, told readers that "working-class whites" can no longer handle the fact that they're not an "elite group" any more, and that this loss of status explains an alarming increase in suicide in their ranks. Supposedly, these people support Donald Trump because his "Making America Great Again" is about putting them back on…
Tom Blumer
January 3rd, 2016 12:46 PM

Blogger: On the Right, Con Jobs Are Just ‘Part of the Culture’

Ben Carson seems to be joining the likes of Michele Bachmann and Howard Dean on the list of presidential candidates who generated a lot of early buzz but became distant also-rans well before a nominee was chosen. According to Washington Monthly blogger David Atkins, Carson’s campaign also offers yet more proof that conservatives tend to be easy marks for scammers. “The libertarian-conservative…
Tom Johnson
January 3rd, 2016 12:23 PM

Book on 41 Hostile to Reagan and Blames Gingrich for ‘Ugly’ Politics

Reviewing Newsweek veteran Jon Meacham’s biography of former President George H.W. Bush, Thomas J. Duesterberg observed in The Weekly Standard that Meacham portrays the 41st President‘s life through a liberal prism. For instance: “The policies of Ronald Reagan are viewed from a decidedly unsympathetic and formulaic viewpoint, which follows the consensus, left-of-center perspective.”
Brent Baker
January 3rd, 2016 10:24 AM

WashPost: Putting Black Opponent in Darker Light in TV Ads Is Racist

A time-honored tactic in political TV ads is to use contrasting degrees of photographic exposure, one bright and snappy for your candidate and a darker hue, sometimes even going to old-fashioned black-and-white, for your opponent. On December 29, at the Washington Post's Wonkblog, Max Ehrenfreund cited a conveniently timed "study" which looked at 2008 ads produced by and on behalf of GOP…
Tom Blumer
January 2nd, 2016 11:58 PM

Harris-Perry: Cops Should Back Gun Control, and Less Wives Would Die

It was a new year, but the same lament from MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry. The leftist agenda to curtail gun rights has been frustrated. On Saturday morning, the weekend host and weekday professor treated guns (not people) as the killers as she pleaded for young blacks to have a “separate kind of legal construction to address the violence that they might perpetrate in the world because they're…
Tim Graham
January 2nd, 2016 11:14 PM

Shocker: Hillary Clinton Loves to Watch 'Madam Secretary' TV Show

In December, major media outlets gushed over Barack and Michelle Obama “opening up like never before about all of their favorite things of 2015" to People magazine. A cynic could say their picks weren’t very shocking – they liked Bruno Mars and Kendrick Lamar, and movies like The Martian and Inside Out. They might have been honest picks....or they could be calculated to say “See? We’re just like…
Tim Graham
January 2nd, 2016 8:19 PM

In 'Biggest Political Moments of 2015' Chat, PBS Can't Locate Hillary

Blame the PBS NewsHour staff for a bad headline? Online, Friday’s week-in-review pundit segment was titled “Shields and Gerson on the biggest political moments of 2015.” Nowhere in that 12-minute segment did Mark Shields and fill-in pseudoconservative Michael Gerson ever discuss Hillary Clintton. So apparently the very likely Democratic nominee didn’t have a noteworthy moment last year. No e-…
Tim Graham
January 2nd, 2016 11:12 AM

NYT’s Krugman: Rich Right-Wingers 'Horrible People,' Says 'Science'

The rich are "horrible people" -- at least those who lean to the right -- declares economist turned pompous New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in Friday’s “Privilege, Pathology and Power.” The text box: “Can we survive rule by self-centered billionaires?” (Liberal billionaire activist George Soros had no comment.) Krugman channeled opportunistic moralism, citing “science” to confirm his…
Clay Waters
January 2nd, 2016 9:28 AM

ABC News: Hillary 'Predicted' ISIS Would Use Trump in Video

On Saturday's Good Morning America, co-host Dan Harris suggested Hillary Clinton "may actually have been right" about Donald Trump turning up in ISIS videos. And during the subsequent segment, reporter Mary Bruce said Hillary "predicted" Trump "would" be used in ISIS videos. There's only one hitch: Hillary hadn't "predicted" what ISIS "would" do. On December 19th, during a Democratic debate,…
Mark Finkelstein
January 2nd, 2016 8:55 AM

Bozell & Graham Column: Propaganda and 'The Danish Girl'

As night fell on Christmas Eve, National Public Radio was in its usual holy-day mode, using your tax dollars to mock the traditional Christian creed. This time they promoted an activist movie called The Danish Girl, yet another alleged “true story” about artist Einar Wegener, a married man who wanted to be a woman named Lili. An earlier NPR commercial – sorry, “underwriting announcement” – said…
Brent Bozell and Tim Graham
January 2nd, 2016 7:56 AM

NY Times Correlates Trump Support With Racism — on Google Searches

On Wednesday, Nate Cohn at the New York Times, who by some accounts is being anointed the next Nate Silver of polling, made a clumsy and despicable attempt to inject race into his political "analysis" of the Donald Trump phenomenon. Cohn's tediously long writeup, which made Page A3 in the New York version of the Old Gray Lady's print edition on Thursday, attempted to identify and characterize…
Tom Blumer
January 2nd, 2016 2:19 AM

Obama's NSA Spying on Congress Not a Story at AP — Until GOP Responds

The Wall Street Journal ran a blockbuster story Tuesday afternoon ("U.S. Spy Net on Israel Snares Congress") about how the Obama administration's National Security Agency's "targeting of Israeli leaders swept up the content of private conversations with U.S. lawmakers." In other words, the NSA spied on Congress. As talk-show host and commentator Erick Erickson drily observed: "Congress began…
Tom Blumer
January 1st, 2016 9:19 PM