Mike Allen

This hasn't been a good week for Politico's Mike Allen. On Monday he apologized for email that had been revealed in which he promised Hillary Clinton's PR operative Phillippe Reines two years ago that he would submit questions in advance that he would ask Chelsea Clinton.  Today, Mike Allen again apologized for drawing the wrath of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel for revealing his family vacation…

On Friday, Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post (HT Hot Air) gave "Four Pinocchios" (i.e., a "Whopper") to a statement President Barack Obama made about Senate Republicans' filibuster track record on Wednesday in a speech at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee dinner in Los Angeles. In the process, Kessler essentially delivered a rebuke to reporters who cover Obama. Every one of…

Just when it seemed that NBC's Meet the Press couldn't sink any lower, ratings for the last three months of 2013 for the Sunday morning news/interview show fell to its lowest level since the third quarter of 1992. That development has added to the speculation that liberal David Gregory might be on his way out as host. From October through December, NBC's program came in third place for total…

Joe Scarborough is frequently panned in these parts for his propensity to pummel his presumably fellow Republicans.  So it's noteworthy when the Morning Joe host goes after the left for a change. It happened on today's show, when Scarborough defended voter ID laws, saying most Americans don't think it's racist to require a photo ID when you show up to vote. and scalding the left for trying…

Imagine that FDR, in his first inaugural, instead of rallying Americans with the notion that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," had stoked the nation's unease by harping on how bad the Depression was.  If Mike Allen had been around in 1933, perhaps he would have defended FDR by writing "there was plenty of unease before the speech, so it's hard to blame the President." For that…

News organizations gotta pay the bills. Nothing's more normal than a newspaper, magazine or website—NewsBusters included—selling advertising, including ads by political or issue-advocacy groups. But somehow it felt different to have opened my morning email from Mike Allen's "Politico Playbook" and find this message [screencap after jump] at the very top: "POLITICO Playbook, presented by the…

When Politico isn’t busy sending editors to an off-the-record chat with a potentially perjurious U.S. Attorney General, it spends its time mocking a retiring conservative legislator. A panel of reporters from the Washington tabloid ganged up on Michele Bachmann on Thursday’s Morning Joe, blasting the Minnesota congresswoman as a “celebrity politician” who will become “irrelevant to politics…

Imagine that. Politico has a very negative story on our second-term president. After over five years during which the online publication has engaged in virtual non-stop fawning over the wonders of Barack Obama -- going all the way back to shortly after its founding in January 2007, when Ben Smith found someone who described him as "frighteningly coherent" -- Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei…

My alternate headline for this item: “NBC’s Today Show on Benghazi: ‘There Are So Many Issues the Country Faces. This Is One of Them.’” That dismissive attitude came from ABC News veteran Mark Halperin, now MSNBC’s senior political analyst who also toils for Time magazine, putting the burden on Republican to make an issue of Obama administration dishonesty on Benghazi.  Failing to see any…

On a day largely devoted to remembering Margaret Thatcher, one of the 20th century's greatest conservatives, would it really have been too much for Morning Joe to have had on at least one conservative guest to discuss her legacy?  Apparently, yes. Morning Joe's lineup of political guests today leaned 100% left: Jon Meacham, Al Hunt, Cokie Roberts, Sen. Tim Kaine, former Obama aides Robert…

Instead of doing the work they were supposed to be doing last night -- i.e., following their publication's mission statement, which is (or maybe was) to "turn ... reporters (i.e., themselves) loose on the subject we love: national politics" -- Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen spent over 1,800 words whining. Their disingenuous complaint: The Obama administration supposedly has insurmountable…

The mainstream media are attempting to create a self-fulfilling prophecy that Hurricane Sandy has saved Barack Obama's re-election chances. On MSNBC's Morning Joe Thursday, Politico's Mike Allen said, "You're already hearing Republicans hint that if Mitt Romney loses, that he'll blame the storm" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

You don't know whether to laugh or cry upon reading the Sunday night shots campaign Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen at Politico took at Mitt Romney and his campaign. Maybe these guys really believe that the Romney campaign is the one which still desperately needs a "last chance to move the needle in any significant way in the swing states that will decide the election," and that "Obama is…

Let's see. Who has the bigger problem with Libya and the Middle East? Is it the guy who's in charge with a foreign policy in disarray who has described the first murder of a U.S. ambassador in 33 years a "bump in the road"? Or his presidential campaign challenger Mitt Romney? If we're to believe Mike Allen, Jim Vandehei, and Politico, it's Romney, where "Romney advisers at odds over Libya"…