2016 Congressional

Hardball host Chris Matthews twice promoted Star Wars on his show two months after The Force Awakens director J. J. Abrams and his wife, Katie McGrath, donated to Kathleen Matthews’ congressional campaign, something Chris Matthews never disclosed. The MSNBC anchor is currently facing calls to suspend his show after it was revealed that 48 of Matthews’ guests on Hardball had donated $79,050 to…

Scatology has typically been out of bounds in mainstream-media political commentary. (Not in all political commentary, of course. For example, actor John Cusack once called former actor Ronald Reagan “a criminal who used the Constitution as toilet paper.”) Nonetheless, Michael Tomasky went there in a Wednesday column trashing Senate Republicans for refusing to consider any Supreme Court…

CNN and New Yorker pundit Jeffrey Toobin considers Antonin Scalia “a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor.” The late SCOTUS justice, asserted Toobin in the New Yorker, “lived within the sealed bubble of contemporary conservative thought” and “devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy…

Some analysts have pointed out that it’d be risky for Republicans to preemptively block anyone President Obama nominates to succeed Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, but that approach wouldn’t necessarily end when Obama leaves office. Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman believes that if in 2017 a Democrat becomes president but GOPers retain sufficient power in the Senate, they’ll just…

The Economist magazine often provides valuable windows into world events. But when it comes to American politics, its reach exceeds its grasp, succumbing to the worst, self-satisfied Euro-cliches: A knuckle-dragging, ultra-conservative Republican Party vengefully attacking thoughtful, intellectual Democrats like Barack Obama. The two standards were on stark display in the January 16/22 issue,…

The New York Times' continuing hostility toward the GOP's conservative Freedom Caucus got snide in Sunday's news pages. "The Fights That Ryan Will Face as Speaker, In Plain English" was co-written by veteran congressional reporter Carl Hulse, who never hides his Democratic sympathies, certianly not in this snide, cynical "translation" of a Freedom Caucus-issued questionnaire, which converted…

Lefty pundit Amanda Marcotte grants that so-called political theater usually dovetails with the beliefs of the politicians and activists who perform it. Among the exceptions: some Republicans’ insincere, “comically overwrought meltdowns” over the Iran nuclear deal. Those histrionics, Marcotte declared in a Wednesday Talking Points Memo column, are meant “to stir up irrational fears to be harped…

In the lead-up to the King v. Burwell decision, not a few liberals claimed that most Republicans secretly wanted the Supreme Court to uphold certain Obamacare subsidies because quashing them would have caused major political hassles for the GOP. The SCOTUS ruled Thursday morning, and before noon we had examples of the updated conventional wisdom: Republicans are happy with the decision, which…

A recent Gallup poll found that 31 percent of Americans self-identify as social liberals, and that an equal percentage call themselves social conservatives -- the first time since Gallup began conducting such surveys in 1999 that conservatives haven’t outnumbered liberals. On Tuesday, pundit Michael Tomasky seized on this development as an indication that Republicans no longer will be able to use…

Mainstream pundits generally have seen the protests over Jade Helm 15 as an embarrassment to conservatives, but blogger Leslie Savan of The Nation suggested in a Friday post that looking silly now may benefit the right in the long run. The Jade Helm uproar, opined Savan, “is like Obamacare death panels, or Sharia law coming to a court near you, or fluoride in the water supply. It doesn’t matter…

Politico's Mark Caputo is reporting tonight that Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz "offered to change her position on medical marijuana if a major Florida donor recanted his withering criticism of her." Now that there's a serious charge that the congresswoman pays more attention to those who shout the loudest instead of sticking to whatever core principles she…

Kristen Welker, NBC News White House Correspondent, served as fill-in host on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports Thursday afternoon and took the opportunity to badger Congressman Peter King (R-N.Y.) over the Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists. Speaking to her Republican guest, Welker asked “some of the…

The Mother Jones blogger contends that Obama’s immigration action “is politically pretty brilliant. It unifies Democrats; wrecks the Republican agenda in Congress; cements the loyalty of Hispanics; and presents the American public with a year of Republican candidates spitting xenophobic fury during primary season. If you're President Obama, what's not to like?”

So here's the "logic" Michelle Price at the Associated Press relayed from Democratic circles in Utah in her Tuesday report on eight-term Democratic Congressman Jim Matheson's decision to leave Congress: He would have had a tough time defeating Mia Love in next year's congressional race rematch, but he's now in a better position to take on an incumbent Republican in a 2016 statewide race —…