Tea Parties

When it comes to liberals standing up to indefensible rhetoric from others on the Left, the Daily Beast's Jamelle Bouie illustrates how NOT to do it. Oh, sure, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) was wrong to compare the Tea Party with the KKK but "it would be needless political correctness to dismiss the Tea Party as completely unrelated to the Klan, or at least, the reactionary currents that gave it…

Some media figures just can’t let go of the idea that opposition to ObamaCare is fueled by hatred of the president himself. On Wednesday’s The Cycle, co-host Toure engaged in some Matthewsian ranting against opponents of the health care law. Near the end of a roundtable discussion about the failures of Healthcare.gov, Toure redirected everyone’s attention to what he saw as the major issue: […

 All three networks on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning avoided discussing Congressman Alan Grayson's smear of the Tea Party as just like the Ku Klux Klan. In a new fund-raising e-mail, the controversial Democrat linked the grass roots organization to violent racists, complete with a burning cross. CBS and NBC made no mention of the attack. The reporters on Good Morning America ignored the…

Apparently PBS has decided to make like MSNBC and spend more time dissecting the Republican Party’s problems real, imagined, and/or overblown. On Monday’s PBS NewsHour, anchor Judy Woodruff announced that the program would begin “a series of conversations about where the Republican Party goes from here.” The first installment, a discussion with former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.),…

In an interview with former Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday's NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie proclaimed a "civil war" in the Republican Party and persistently urged him to blame it on the Tea Party. Instead, Cheney began the exchange by explaining: "I think the most radical operator in Washington today is the President. I think he's trying to take the country in a direction that is…

Hours after President Obama lectured Republicans about governing, CNN boosted his agenda by ordering conservatives and the Tea Party to "lighten up" on Thursday's The Situation Room. "So while the President is calling for a change in behavior and tone here in Washington, listen to this from CNN's Fareed Zakaria writing in today's Washington Post. He takes direct aim at what he calls the…

After slamming the "Tea Party radicals" who he said initiated the shutdown, CNN's Michael Holmes was admonished by his colleague Jim Acosta on Thursday. "I mean, first of all, let's be careful about using the term 'radical,' because a lot of those folks feel like they're standing on principle today, even though they didn't come out on top in this," Acosta lectured Holmes. [Video below the…

Who's going to break the news to MSNBC's Chris Matthews? Apparently, a study by Yale University -- you know, that great New Haven bastion of conservatism -- finds that folks who self-identify with the Tea Party are more literate when it comes to scientific matters than non-Tea Partiers. If and when this knowledge causes the Hardball host's head to explode, I hope the suits at MSNBC will be…

For millions of Americans, big political contests such as presidential elections and pivotal congressional hearings are still largely witnessed through the lens of ABC’s, CBS’s and NBC’s evening newscasts. According to Nielsen Research, more than 20 million viewers tuned in over the past two weeks for the Big Three’s take on the shutdown drama. What those viewers heard, according to a just-…

Tea Party conservative Republicans like Sens. Mike Lee (Utah) and Ted Cruz (Texas) are nothing more than a racist "clavern of sociopaths" who are eager to saddle the country's first black president with a default on the nation's debt. That was the latest foaming-at-the-mouth bile from ultra-liberal Daily Beast's contributor Michael Tomasky this morning. "Clavern," of course, is not a real…

On Monday's All In show on MSNBC, after beginning a segment about a conservative rally in D.C. by displaying a Confederate Flag in the background, host Chris Hayes asked if connecting the Confederate Flag to the Tea Party was "fair" based on just one instance of its display. Just before a commercial break, Hayes posed:

Does Piers Morgan even try to show integrity anymore? The CNN host goaded the chair of the DNC into bashing Republicans on his Monday night show and plugged her new book without asking her one tough question about her own party. Morgan's first question to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) was this pathetic softball: "What is going on with the GOP right now?" Schultz laid into her…

Monday's CBS Evening News unsurprisingly ginned up the ideological struggle inside the Republican Party as it covered the ongoing partial government shutdown. Chip Reid spun the face-off inside the House Republican caucus as being between "staunch" Tea Party-aligned representatives inside the House and "mainstream" Republicans. Reid later played up how House Speaker John Boehner could "face…

At the top of her 1 p.m. ET hour MSNBC show on Monday, host Andrea Mitchell wrung her hands over "angry Tea Party protesters" who gathered in Washington over the weekend to denounce the Obama administration's politicization of the government shutdown being "whipped up" Sarah Palin and Texas Senator Ted Cruz. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump] Later on the program, she…