Tea Parties

The lead story in the New York Times Election Day, “At Election’s End, A Sunny Tone Meets Dark” was penned by reporter Michael Barbaro, last seen composing a loving vignette of a joyous Hillary Clinton dancing in the rain. Meanwhile, Matt Flegenheimer suggested Sarah Palin and the Tea Party were to blame for the campaign’s dark tone, and even blamed conservative critics of the news media…

Joe Biden appeared on MSNBC's Hardball on Tuesday, and claimed that "You never heard me criticize the tea party." Millions of people with decent memories and the ability to hear know that this is not true. Those with longer memories know that Biden's strident criticisms of the Tea Party movement, its members and its political candidates and officeholders go back over six years.

At a contentious impeachment hearing conducted by the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen admitted that his agency targeted Tea Party groups looking to obtain tax-exempt status. “They were totally improper criteria used to select organizations, applying for c-4 designation for further review,” testified Koskinen before the committee, “Those organizations…

Late Monday night, the group Eagle Forum released a statement that its founder, the Christian and conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, had passed away at the age 92 and immediately, The New York Times published a story to serve as cue cards for the major broadcast networks to blast Schlafly for stymying the Equal Rights Amendment and advocating for traditional family values for decades. At the…

Thursday’s New York Times got a kick out of conservative defeats in Kansas at the local and national level, when it wasn’t from relishing Donald Trump controversies and prematurely crowning Hillary Clinton the winner of the election. Reporter Carl Hulse, always on the look-out for signs of conservative weakness, found a pattern in a defeat of “hard-right” Kansas congressman and Tea Party “…

Lois Lerner’s confession at that conference did contain one small truth. The IRS targeting scandal did indeed start in “Cincy”—as D.C. headquarters refers to that outpost. On a cold late February day in 2010, a Cincinnati screener named Jack Koester found himself focused on an application from a local Tea Party group.  

Angry, embarrassed Republicans went looking for a scapegoat and settled on a man who’s more than a decade past the normal retirement age. That’s essentially the explanation The Week’s Paul Waldman gives for House GOPers’ move to impeach 76-year-old Internal Revenue Service commissioner John Koskinen. That effort, asserted Waldman in a Tuesday column, stems from Republicans’ “frustration over the…

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has contempt for both Donald Trump (“his appeal operates…at a sub-intellectual level”) and those who’ve voted for him (“the Republican Party turns out to be filled with idiots”). Still, suggested Chait in a Thursday post, Trump and his supporters have unwittingly clarified something important: the Tea Party movement is not and never was truly conservative,…

Closing out Wednesday’s edition of MSNBC’s Hardball, host Chris Matthews suggested that Hillary Clinton must pass “a test of leadership” to take the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination and become the next U.S. president that has nothing to do with any number of the scandals she’s involved in but simply whether she can corral Bernie Sanders supporters without capitulating to them.

On his Real Time show on Friday, HBO comedian Bill Maher referred to the U.S. military as a "mass murder machine" as he recalled that the reason he likes Bernie Sanders so much is because the Vermont socialist is the only presidential candidate who would argue against building a bigger military. Maher also made a crass reference to Tea Party conservatives by referring to Muslim extremists in…

Last night’s episode of ABC's drama Quantico, titled “Soon,” was like watching a liberal talking point world tour. Once again sought it to re-litigate George W. Bush’s presidential legacy while working in a host of left-wing special issues. 

A frequent guest on now-cancelled MSNBC program The Ed Show, The Nation’s national affairs correspondent John Nichols appeared on MSNBC Monday afternoon and proclaimed that Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz “is no more attractive to the Republican establishment” than Donald Trump and “maybe less” so since he’d do worse geographically.

In the first full weeknight since The National Enquirer tabloid published its unsubstantiated piece alleging that GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz has been engaging in extramarital affairs, late-night comedy hosts Conan O'Brien and Jimmy Kimmel spent portions of their Monday monologues promoting the smear as legitimate and wondering how any woman could be interested in Cruz.

In almost identical fashion to their hysteria concerning the defeat of transgender bathroom bill in Houston from November, Thursday’s CBS Evening News painted quite the doomsday scenario for Georgia and North Carolina over their respective religious freedom bills as the newscast argued they could lead to massive boycotts and the loss of billions of dollars in business.