Tea Parties

The year-end issue of Time magazine includes an enormous article on “The Ebola Fighters,” their Persons of the Year, but there are also five pages on “The Ferguson Protesters: Their refusal to let a life be forgotten turned a local shooting into a national movement.” Four years ago, Time made “The Tea Party” a runner-up, but they were projected to fall apart. The headline was “The grass-roots…

Chris Matthews is no fan of retiring conservative Rep. Michele Bachmann (R), but it's rare that he attacks everyday rank-and-file Republican voters. Tonight was an exception as the MSNBC Hardball host excoriated the voters of Minnesota's Sixth Congressional District for repeatedly having elected her to the House of Representatives.

Yesterday, I received an email from the Democratic National Committee informing me that they had a "Cyber Monday surprise" just for me. How nice. All I had to do was click on the link to store.democrats.org. After the jump, readers will see the store's apparent "best sellers," raising a quite obvious question: Does anyone think the press would ignore analogous items on sale in a GOP store?

Amy Crawford of the Associated Press, who wrote the wire service's original Sunday story about a proposed first-in-the-nation ban on the sale of all tobacco products in the town of Westminster, Massachusetts, covered the town's Wednesday night public hearing. While it's nice that Crawford followed up on her original story, her opening paragraph, based on the facts as I understand them and…

A shame that Barney Frank retired from Congress.  We could really use him as the face of the Dem party.   On this evening's Hardball, Barney, AKA Mr. Congeniality, let it be known that he thought of Tea Party members as "dumb animals."  

The Esquire blogger contends that the GOP won the upper chamber because hard-right Tea Party candidates masqueraded as traditional conservatives.  "What the Republicans managed to do was to teach the Tea Party to wear shoes, mind its language, and use the proper knife while amputating the social safety net."

A number of center-right and New Media outlets have noted Politico Magazine's disingenuousness in the opening photograph in its "Race and the Modern GOP" article. At the item's top is the iconic "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door" photo showing onetime segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace "try(ing) to block the entry of two black students" into the University of Alabama. The aforementioned…

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton appeared on the Fox News Channel (FNC) Monday afternoon and informed viewers that a Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney admitted to his organization on Friday that the e-mails belonging to former IRS official Lois Lerner that were thought to be lost likely still exist. He declared to FNC’s Shannon Bream that the story of Lerner’s hard drive being damaged and…

It takes a special man to cram so much wrong into a mere 342 words.  Or an Old Grey Lady. The New York Times’ utterly ridiculous Editorial Board recently as one addressed Title II Internet regulatory Reclassification and Network Neutrality - and they did so in utterly ridiculous fashion.  They either have absolutely no idea what any of this is - or they are lying through their printing…

It would almost not be worth noting, because it's so predictable. On Fox News Sunday, Juan Williams, with strategic support at opportune times from National Journal's Ron Fournier, characterized the support within the Republican Party for impeachment as coming from "Tea Party opposition ... (with) no diversity, it's a white, older group of people." What makes it worthy of notice is the fact…

In a Friday-morning post, Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall likened the Tea Party to pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine who apparently are responsible for the shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Marshall wrote, “Here we have them break into nursing homes to photographs [sic] senator's comatose wives; there Putin gives them heavy armaments designed for full…

Both CBS This Morning and NBC’s Today chose to ignore the latest news in the IRS scandal Thursday morning that the Department of Justice (DOJ) will be investigating the disappearance and destruction of emails pertaining to former IRS official Lois Lerner.  Meanwhile, ABC’s Good Morning America did cover the news, but only devoted 22 seconds to the story in the form of a news brief during the…

There were three developments in the IRS-targets-the-Tea Party scandal in the past two days, all individually meriting coverage on their own right but, taken together as a package are most definitely newsworthy. Despite this, neither ABC's World News nor the CBS Evening News nor the NBC Nightly News spared even a second of coverage to them on their July 10 broadcasts. By contrast, time was…

Chris McDaniel, candidate for the U.S. Senate from Mississippi, lost the Republican runoff to incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran last month, and now he is being led down a primrose path to political oblivion. McDaniel's passionate supporters think that a moment of crisis for the country is a good time to treat control of the Senate as if it's a prom queen election. Hoping for yet a third primary…