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Variety reported that at a recent Hollywood dinner, Meryl Streep offered a speech of praise to fellow actress Emma Thompson  — with phrases like “she’s practically a saint” and “she’s a beautiful artist” – and she then trashed Walt Disney as a “gender bigot” and a supporter of an anti-Semitic group. Over at Forbes, Scott Mendelson is reading the tea leaves, and implying that Streep was…

NBC Nightly News anchor has labored mightily to build a personality outside his newscast, “slow-jamming” the news with Jimmy Fallon in late night, guest-hosting “Saturday Night Live,” yukking it up with David Letterman and Jon Stewart. He had the prime-time gig on "Rock Center" -- which few people watched. Most people still don’t know who he is. The Pew Research Center found last summer in…

Big changes come to Community, and an ass crack bandit.

On the front page of Thursday’s New York Times, reporter John Schwartz clumsily compared a very prim Fifties sitcom with the reality-show polygamist Kody Brown, who just won a court ruling in Utah in favor of their four-wife life as displayed on the TLC reality show "Sister Wives."  “In their first interview since the decision in that case, they presented a family whose polygamy is more ‘…

In the age of the perpetual campaign, it's never too early to push GOTV efforts, and in a Wednesday blog post, Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas did just that, exhorting his readers to get their fellow Democrats to register and, of course, to vote in this November's midterms. "Bottom line," wrote Kos, "if our people turn out, we win. It really is that simple. There are more of…

With Republicans tying themselves in knots over the Democrats' destructive, but superficially appealing, demand that unemployment benefits be extended to two and a half years, I return to my suggestion that Republicans stop playing defense and go on offense. For every issue that MSNBC loves to prattle on about, gloating that it will cost Republicans this or that demographic, there's an…

CNN's senior legal analyst doesn't think Benghazi is a scandal, but he is ready to dig Chris Christie's political grave over "Bridgegate." On Wednesday's AC 360 Later, Jeff Toobin remarked, "It's all over for Chris Christie. This is it. I'm sorry, totally." He added of Christie's controversy, "I mean, this is devastating. Forget it." [Video below the break. Audio here.]

"Obama approval ratings turn around," exulted the msnbc.com landing page headline for Traci G. Lee's January 9 story, "Positive start to 2014 for Obama: poll." Lee set about spinning the results of the latest Quinnipiac Poll, which shows President Obama sitting atop a 41 percent approval rating, up from a low of 38 percent in December, but still a net negative approval rating. Lee used the…

On Thursday's NBC Today, political director Chuck Todd reveled in the wall-to-wall media coverage of the bridge closing controversy surrounding New Jersey Governor Chris Christie: "Welcome to the NFL....he has gotten a lot of benefit by being sort of this Republican rising star in the New York City media markets, so he gets a lot of access to media attention, access to national media. And so he…

Hollywood tolerated John Milius until he did the unacceptable. He made a pro-U.S., pro-gun action movie attacking the USSR during the height of the Cold War. That crossed a line for the writer/director responsible for some of the most memorable films from his era, including Apocalypse Now, Dirty Harry and, of course, Red Dawn.

The same network evening news shows that ignored vindictiveness by the Obama administration during October's government shutdown were up in arms Wednesday over New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's "Bridgegate" and the possible tarring it could give his image. NewsBusters already counted 17 times more network coverage of Christie's controversy than of Obama's IRS scandal in the past six months…

As he ended his PoliticsNation show on Wednesday, January 8, MSNBC's Al Sharpton praised Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan for issuing guidelines pushing for schools to reduce "harsh punishment" of students, which the MSNBC host labeled a "national problem," and griped about black students disproportionately receiving discipline.