Arlen Specter

On Thursday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith talked to Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele about Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter switching to the Democratic Party: "Alright, so you see red states going to blue, though, in this last presidential election...You look at percentage-wise, lower numbers of people who declare themselves to be actual Republicans...Where does the…

Eleanor Clift is by no stretch a conservative apologist, but her reporting in Newsweek on the Specter switch exposes an angle that the broadcast networks are omitting: the Machiavellian maneuvers behind-the-scenes to coax Specter to jump the GOP ship.Of particular interest is Clift's revelation that Gov. Ed Rendell's motive for pushing Specter to become a Democrat was to shut down a potential…

On Wednesday's "Today" show, NBC's Chuck Todd called the decision of Arlen Specter – a Republican senator who has such a liberal voting record and has been such a constant-thorn-in-the-side of his party that he faced probable defeat in his own primary – to leave the GOP, "devastating." In a piece about Barack Obama's first 100 days that trumpeted his own network's new poll showing high ratings…

The evening newscasts on Tuesday night attributed Senator Arlen Specter's motivation for changing parties to how he realized he wouldn't win the Republican primary in Pennsylvania, but they also, just as they did with Senator Jim Jeffords in 2001, eagerly relayed -- without any challenge -- Specter's spin that, in the words of the TV journalists, he “had been driven out by the right-wing of the…

Ira who?The establishment media is saying almost nothing about the man who co-founded Earth Day, and who also happens to be in jail for life for murder. Arlen Specter's involvement with the Ira Einhorn case is an important event in the party-switching Senator's career that curious readers would want to know about -- if the establishment media cared to note it.You know they would be bringing out…

Leave it to CNN host Rick Sanchez to unintentionally give us a moment of comedy in an afternoon cable news broadcast. On "CNN Newsroom" on April 28, Sanchez interviewed Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., about the departure of Sen. Arlen Specter, Pa., from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party. He asked the senator from South Carolina if Specter was correct in his analysis that the conservative…

While the media are now painting turncoat Sen. Arlen Specter ( D-Pa.) as a Republican moderate who laments how the party has left him behind, a search through the Media Research Center's archives finds that the MSM have painted the Keystone State liberal anywhere from being a mere "conservative" to a traitorous Torquemada to pro-choicers.During the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in October…

Longtime Pennsylvania Republican Senator Arlen Specter has defected to the Democrat Party.Assuming Al Franken staves off recount lawsuits by Minnesota's Norm Coleman, this will give the Democrats and Barack Obama a filibuster-proof Senate. As reported by CNN.com moments ago:

One thing you can say about Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist and associate editor Dan Simpson (pictured at right) is that he is creative.In his April 22 column, Simpson created a meeting with a certain Senator Arlen Specter in 1974.Here's the relevant verbiage from Simpson's column ("Switch Sides, Sen. Specter"), the primary purpose of which is to lobby for the Keystone State Senator to become a…

Welcome to the Political Reporting 101 class, boys and girls. Please break out your notebooks because today we will be covering examples of poor political reporting. And the first such example is this report from CNN. It is about the Senator Arlen Specter campaign which is so worried about their prospects in next year's primary election that they are already running attack ads against someone who…

Although CNBC "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer has backed off his hyperbolic attacks on President Barack Obama ever since his "Daily Show" appearance, he's shown that he's not afraid to take on the Democratic-controlled Congress. So, to give credit where credit is due, the "Mad Money" host dedicated an entire segment to the Employee Free Choice Act, aka card check and how its passage by Congress…

On Thursday I interviewed Sen. John Cornyn, head of the National Republican Sentorial Committee. When I asked him about the NRSC running someone against Sen. Arlen Specter in 2010, given the anger many Republicans feel about Specter's vote on the stimulus bill, Cornyn's answer was basically that he would rather have someone voting with him 80% of the time, rather than a liberal Democrat who would…

If you haven't figured it out yet, the fact that lawmakers in Washington who voted for the mislabeled "stimulus" bill championed by Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid did so without reading it, let alone understanding it, means that in the coming weeks (or months?) we'll be learning about all manner of items in the legislation that "nobody" knew about. But that didn't stop House and…

It's a question we've all been waiting to hear answered. Unfortunately, it took a conservative talk radio host to ask it and didn't come from the mainstream media. In an interview with Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, Pa., on Feb. 9, talk show host Laura Ingraham asked why he and Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins are the only three out of 229 Republican members of Congress to support the…