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Hardly anyone would dispute the validity of the term “small-government conservative,” but “big-government liberal” is a horse of a different color, believes Steve Benen, a producer for MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show. Benen claims that while right-wingers’ preference for small government is ideologically driven, “progressives” such as President Obama look at size-of-government issues in practical…

MSNBC's Chris Hayes is usually right less often than a stopped clock, i.e., fewer than two times a day. But he might get lucky if by some miracle he's right about something else today because of the matter discussed in this post. After the Obama administration announced that President Barack Obama will not attend Saturday's funeral for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a staunch Catholic,…

It would appear that the New York Times and MSNBC, in focusing on Hillary Clinton's speaking fees, are, after many months of serving as virtual Clinton campaign mouthpieces, beginning to hedge their bets in the race for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. This information has been available since last spring, but only now is it being seen as geuinely troubling. Why wasn't seen as a big…

President Obama considers the Republican party an international outlier, and so does MSNBC's Steve Benen. (That’s “outlier,” not “outlaw,” though, who knows, for them that may be a distinction without a difference.) After quoting Obama’s recent comment that the GOP is “the only major party that I can think of in the advanced world that effectively denies climate change,” Benen, who’s also the…

Though Steve Benen, who's also the primary blogger for the MSNBC program's website, is a true-blue liberal, he thinks highly of the foreign-policy chops of some recent Republicans. In a Thursday post, Benen wrote that GOPers such as Richard Lugar and Brent Scowcroft were “learned” and “approached international affairs with [a] degree of maturity.” That was then; this is now. Benen touched on,…

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Thursday that Joshua Williams "was sentenced ... to eight years in prison for starting a fire at a QuikTrip in Berkeley (a St. Louis suburb) after an officer-involved shooting there." The Dispatch apparently didn't think it important to tell readers that the crime spree which occurred after that shooting took place despite the fact that the suspect had pulled…

Robin Williams’s first album was called Reality…What a Concept. More than one lefty blogger implied that Unreality…What a Concept would have been a fitting title for Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate.

At the math-challenged mess known as MSNBC, the network's "all new video experience" known as "Shift by MSNBC" tweeted a dire warning: "Latest UN report says humanity will warm the planet by 2.7˚C or roughly 37˚F." Though not revealed in the tweet, this warming will allegedly occur by 2100. If MSNBC's conversion were true, it would of course mean that the earth as we know it is in dire straits.…

Leave it to MSNBC.com to dutifully act as Hillary Clinton campaign stenographers. That's precisely what weriter Nicole Brown did Tuesday afternoon with her story "Hillary Clinton receives letter from 'little feminist.'"

Michael Kinsley’s second-best-known contribution to political discourse, trailing only the “Kinsley gaffe,” is his observation that “the scandal isn't the illegal behavior -- the scandal is what's legal.” In a Thursday post, Steve Benen, a producer for MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and the primary writer for the TRMS blog, sought to apply Kinsley’s wisdom to the congressional inquiry into the…

MSNBC.com sure knows how to change the subject from baby-parts sales for their friends at Planned Parenthood. It’s somehow headline news that the abortion giant has made a set of YouTube videos about getting consent before sex. Because their brand isn’t supposed to be about committing more than 300,000 abortions annually. They’re a reproductive health group bettering society, apparently.  The…

To Steve Benen, Obamacare is a high-quality dress shirt that Republicans treat like a greasy rag. Benen, a producer for MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, wrote in a Friday post on the TRMS blog that even though “every GOP prediction about the Affordable Care Act has been discredited,” conservatives keep trying to use it to tarnish other measures they oppose, including the Iran nuclear deal. “If…

The Associated Press works very hard to ensure that its subscribing outlets and low-information voters who rely solely on its work — knowingly or unknowingly — never learn about Hillary Clinton's smart-aleck, sarcastic, condescending, reality-avoiding behavior. Tuesday night, four AP reporters (saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) — Jack Gillum and Stephen Braun in…

Cuban dissidents will not take part in Friday's formal ceremony opening the U.S. Embassy in Havana tomorrow, something that Secretary of State John Kerry is chalking up to a matter of respecting diplomatic protocol and a lack of space at the venue. But the controversy over the matter was omitted entirely from an NBC News article at MSNBC.com on Thursday evening.