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"Hell hath no fury like a pundit ignored."NOW, the gloves are coming off. But it's not Obama-Clinton or McCain-Obama. It's Amalgamated Punditry vs. Hillary Clinton. The pundit-acracy is pissed that the former first lady ignored their advice to pack it in and just go home last night. A herd of commentators declared that Clinton would be announcing her exit from the race in her NYC speech--especially after many had proclaimed Barack Obama had clinched the Democrat nomination. Then, Clinton's speech chain-sawed the limb off. And after they all climbed out on it so confidently. The following video had some pundits...

HEY There, Sweetie by Nancy Morgan Obama called a reporter 'sweetie.' Gasp. The pundits are divided on whether he should attend sensitivity training to correct his thinking or whether his coerced apology will suffice. The debate swirls, the opinions proliferate. The lesser pundits anxiously await the position paper from the National Organization of Women before committing themselves to a firm stance on this vital issue. The rest of the world news takes a back seat. Welcome to another national conversation. Non-stop news coverage of experts, pundits and elites opining on someone else's opining. As in, "What he really meant to...

G. Will, Ann Coulter, P. Buchanan, Mark Steyn, et. al. On Jeremiah WrightRandom roundup of recent things Wright (Jeremiah) and Wrong (Wright’s sermons) on the web. If it takes Obama 20 years to notice that his pastor is a traitorous, racist nut-job, it will probably take him his full term of office to realize that the U.S. has been invaded and subdued by al-Qaida. Let’s just hope President Obama pays closer attention during national security briefings than he did during 20 years of the Rev. Wright’s church services. –Ann Coulter: Obama Campaign Gives Up On Finding ‘Mr. Wright’ For 20...

With just over six months before United States citizens choose their 44th president, the 2008 election is already proving to be the most fascinating and potentially one of the closest contests in living memory. Among those who will help Americans decide are the ubiquitous political pundits who help drive the national conversation and shape public opinion.

The 50 most influential US political pundits By Toby Harnden, US Editor Last Updated: 3:25pm BST 28/04/2008 With just over six months before United States citizens choose their 44th president, the 2008 election is already proving to be the most fascinating and potentially one of the closest contests in living memory. Have your say: Who do you think are the most influential US political pundits? The 50 most influential US political pundits: 50-41 All the latest news and analysis from the US presidential race Among those who will help Americans decide are the ubiquitous political pundits who help drive the...

John McCain heads into Tuesday's Florida primary facing resistance from not only his fellow candidates, but also from the leaders of conservative talk radio, who some suggest have put their reputations on the line, as well. Talk radio pioneer Rush Limbaugh said that if McCain or Mike Huckabee are nominated, "it's going to destroy the Republican Party." Mark Levin calls the senator "John McLame." On Monday, Laura Ingraham said she was "concerned about the mental stability of the McCain campaign" and had cuckoo-clock sound effects accompany his words. "Sen. McCain is a great American, a lousy senator and a terrible...

CONTEMPLATING the Clinton-Obama racial war, some Republicans were so excited you’d have thought Ronald Reagan had risen from the dead to slap around a welfare deadbeat. Never mind that the G.O.P. is running on empty, with no ideas beyond the incessant repetition of Reagan’s name. A battle over race-and-gender identity politics among the Democrats, with its acrid scent from the 1960s, might be just the spark for a Republican comeback. (As long as the G.O.P.’s own identity politics, over religion, don’t flare up.) Alas, these hopes faded on Tuesday night. First, the debating Democrats declared a truce, however fragile, in...

Mike Huckabee campaigns as religious Baptist. Yet how religious is Huck? Robert Novak, in the Washington Post, questions the depth of Huckabee’s Baptist support: More than personality explains why not all his Baptist brethren have signed on the dotted line for Huckabee. He did not join the “conservative resurgence” that successfully rebelled against liberals in the Southern Baptist Convention a generation ago. Ann Coulter goes farther, and questions both Huckabee’s intelligence and sincerity of his supposed religous convictions. Hat Tip: Allah Pundit: Hot Air, Huckabee is a liberal Arkansas politician, who would be a democrat, if the party was not...

Those who watched the Republican presidential "debate" in Iowa Wednesday now understand why The Des Moines Register is such a lousy newspaper. "That was not just the worst debate of 2007, that was the worst debate in Western history, and that includes the ancient Greeks," said columnist Charles Krauthammer. "There is no record in any major European record of a debate this transcendingly and crushingly dull." Mr. Krauthammer arguably wasn't engaging in hyperbole. Imagine a boxing match in which the boxers aren't allowed to lay a glove on each other, and you have an idea of what this "debate" was...

What ails the GOP? There are as many answers as there are pundits. But there’s always one narrative that news reporters and certain establishment GOP consultants love to give, again and again. Social conservatives, this story goes, have come to dominate the Republican party with their defense of the right to life and resistance to same-sex marriage. This sort of backward thinking has caused the party to lose support nationwide, and particularly among its traditional base of high-income earners. This narrative is now being repeated as social conservatives debate whom to support in the Republican primary —the debate is particularly...

Less than three months after he left his post as the White House’s deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove has agreed to become a Newsweek contributor and will pen opinion pieces for the magazine and its Web site. Rove will turn out several columns on the 2008 campaign up until inauguration day, according to the Washington Post. In a statement, Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham said: “Newsweek has a long tradition of asking practitioners and opinion-makers to offer our readers the benefits of their experience in occasional opinion essays. “Whether one agrees or disagrees with Karl, there is no arguing that...

FORT MILLS, S.C -- Campaigning in New Hampshire and South Carolina, Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson raised his voice and shook his fists as he described his vision of an America true to conservative values. The display of vigor last week was timely: Two months into his bid for the nomination, the former Tennessee senator is fighting to shake the image of a laid-back -- even lazy -- candidate who lacks the fervor of his rivals. Thompson not only has adopted a forceful speaking style, he has taken a more aggressive approach toward other Republican candidates. The push to put...

A look at the Sunday morning chat circuit ... Former Sen. Fred Thompson visits NBC's "Meet the Press." Of special note, the program is reaching its 60th anniversary. It debuted on Nov. 20, 1947, and is the world's longest-running TV program. It airs at 9 a.m. on WESH-Channel 2. Former President George H.W. Bush will talk to "Fox News Sunday." It airs at 9 a.m. on WOFL-Channel 35. Sen Joseph Biden will take questions on CBS' "Face the Nation." It airs at 10:30 a.m. on WKMG-Channel 6. Another guest will be Mark Penn, who is a strategist for Sen. Hillary...

So I come across this piece over at Real Clear Politics, which tries to sort out this whole "Thompson doesn't dazzle and therefore must go NOW" business, and I get to the money quote: "If you have the intelligence to see which rules are real and which are fake, the respectfulness to follow the real rules, and the guts to break the fake rules - you can get ahead in this world. In fact, people will love you for breaking the fake rules." I must admit up front that this follows a Bob Dylan reference about breaking fake rules in...

Used to be, you didn't need a scorecard to read a column written by a conservative pundit. But then along came Election 2008 two years early, and now you have to read 'em with a grain of salt. No, better make that a pound of salt. Take Jennifer Rubin (please). She's regularly thrashed Fred Thompson for months in the American Spectator's AmSpec blog. And in a recent post on Race 4 2008, she explains that it's not just the NY Times that is bashing Thompson, but points to pundits David Frum, Robert Novak and George Will as conservatives who have...

He was billed as the charisma-fueled Ronald Reagan-style conservative savior -- but screen star Fred Thompson is drawing mocking reviews for his latest role, as a Republican White House candidate. "Lazy," "subdued" and "rambling," blared recent media critiques of the ex-senator's first month in a fluid 2008 Republican field. Thompson's short-lived honeymoon might have been expected: he teased the media and surfed a wave of favorable coverage by hovering on the edge of the Republican field for months -- and so had huge expectations to meet. If pundits are to be believed, the "Law & Order" star's campaign is yet...

<p>So, should viewers of Tuesday's Republican presidential debate expect an exchange of views between the candidates - or between the candidates and one of the event's moderators?</p> <p>It's a fair question, given the jaw-dropping comments Thursday evening from MSNBC blowhard - and scheduled debate moderator - Chris Matthews.</p>

The reviews are in: Fred Thompson's plunge into the presidential campaign "was right up there with Britney Spears at the MTV awards." Well, that was liberal New York Times columnist Gail Collins. How about a committed conservative? "More belly-flop than swan dive . . . the strangest product launch since that of New Coke in 1985," writes columnist George Will. Okay, they're in the opinion business. But news accounts have described the fledgling Thompson venture as "a comedy of errors" (Politico.com); drawing "mediocre reviews" (Washington Post); and maintaining a "languid" schedule that on one swing "kept him on a jumbo...

Des Moines Register's David Yepsen: "Best Overall Debate Performance: Romney." (David Yepsen, "Best Overall Debate Performance: Romney," Des Moines Register Blog, http://blogs.dmregister.com, 5/15/07) - Yepsen: "Mitt Romney had the best overall performance. He was cool, concise, and showed an executive persona throughout the session." (David Yepsen, "Best Overall Debate Performance: Romney," Des Moines Register Blog, http://blogs.dmregister.com, 5/15/07) National Review Online's Mark Levin: "For what it's worth, Romney looks stronger and stronger to me. He's in his zone, he's nailed down his positions, he's confident and articulate, and he has charisma." (Mark Levin, "The Debate," Mark Levin Blog, http://levin.nationalreview.com, 5/15/07) The...

Back in the pre-Internet days of yore, political punditry was the best job in journalism and one of the best anywhere. You could spout off on anything you wanted, and almost nobody would call you on it, much less find a place to publish and prove you wrong. And once you had established yourself as "credible," it required little work, save coming up with a few semi-memorable phrases. (George Will's chef-d'oeuvre was opining that the Reagan Administration "loved commerce more than it loathed Communism.") With the advent of television talk shows, riches arrived in the form of corporate speaking gigs...

I have just finished reading a Ben Stein column about the recent SOTU adress. It started out very well, but then took what seemed to me an odd turn: Stein, along with several other conservative pundits, has come to the conclusion that the war in Iraq was just a big, huge mistake. I've been hearing this with increasing frequency, from people I did not expect to hear it from. Bill O'Reilly, Francis Fukuyama... even Charles Krauthammer sounds disenchanted. Here is my question: When did everyone decide to agree that the war in Iraq was a mistake? I still don't think...

When political leaders make drastic mistakes, accountability is delivered in the form of elections. That occurred in November when voters removed the party principally responsible for the war in Iraq. But the invasion would not have occurred had Americans not been persuaded of its wisdom and necessity, and leading that charge was a stable of pundits and media analysts who glorified President Bush’s policies and disseminated all sorts of false information and baseless assurances. Yet there seems to be no accountability for these pro-war pundits.

Preview and Analysis of the Weekend Talk Shows for December 9 and 10, 2006The Iraq Survey Group has delivered their tablets from the mountain and it is time for all of us to accept the fact that we have been defeated in Iraq and to stop worshipping the false god of democracy and freedom!  It's just too hard!  Instead we must accept Realpolitik and turn over all of the Middle East to the Islamists because we want to keep the oil flowing.  Those annoying Jews will just have to get over that whole Israel thing.  They should go back to...

Preview and Analysis of the Weekend Talk Shows for December 2 and 3, 2006 Having triumphed with a landslide win (hey, a 1 seat margin in the Senate and the smallest historical change in the House in a sixth year of a presidency is a mandate if they say it's a mandate!) the Democrats and DBM are now in full gloat mode.  They are trumpeting their plans to "fix" the country and undo all of the rotten things that the Republicans did since McChimpy Reagan defeated Holy Jimmy the C.  now the masks are off and they can finally reveal...

Preview and Analysis of the Weekend Talk Shows for November 25th and 26th, 2006 Very brief preview tonight.  I got the guests and links done on MTP and FTN, and the guests on  FNS Thursday night, before the surgery.  I was able to get the topics and guests for the other shows in tiny bits this afternoon, but that's all I'm going to do.  I got to the hospital a little after 6 this morning and the transplant was done and I was out of surgery, in recovery, before 10 AM and checked out before noon.  The surgery appears to...

Preview and Analysis of the Weekend Talk Shows for November 18 and 19, 2006The election is over.  So is the leadership fight.  The old media talking heads are now thrashing around trying to find a way to spin this new reality as a good thing and they're not having much luck.  And they're worried that a serious case of buyers remorse is setting in among the voters that they fooled in this election cycle. The few days since the election have seen the Dhimmicrats rhetorically confirm almost every warning the Republicans raised about what their agenda is.  You know, the...

Preview and Analysis of the Weekend Talk Shows for November 11 and 12, 2006This election is best described as the triumph of the inanities.? Let their gloating begin! The most cynical and dishonest campaign in the history of our country has triumphed, IMNSHO.? But what has it gained them? Rather than offering a positive set of ideas for their voters to vote for the Democrats spent their time and money convincing primarily conservative voters, particularly Christian conservatives, that they should stay home and not vote, or that those who think of themselves as "moderates" should vote for pseudo conservatives in...

Preview and Analysis of the Weekend Talk Shows for November 4 and 5, 2006 It's the last weekend shows before we change over from campaign mode to litigation mode in this election cycle and the Dhimmicrats and the DBM are in full on hysterics.  This is particularly true of the "experts" like Sabato and Cook, who both have been predicting huge wins for their political masters as part of the psyops campaign being waged by Soros and company.  Cook is now as much as 10 points off of polls like Rasmussen in some races where the trend is clearly for...

Preview and analysis for Weekend Talk Shows, October 28th and 29th, 2006 It's the last two weekends of campaign '06 and all pretense (and restraint) has been abandoned.  The reliable hard left old media is pulling out every stop and ignoring even the simplest of ethical consideration in their all out commitment to defeat Republicans and elect Democrats.  CNN is leading the pack with expensively produced specials attacking the Republicans (their Broken Government series, for example) as well as their usual cast of Dhimmicrat attack dogs, Cafferty being the bleeding edge of their moonbat pack.  Even Wolf Blitzer has taken...

I was curious as o how the elections will be covered here on FR. Will the threads be broken down by state or candidate or just one long continuous thread? I'm not a "threader", just a "reader". Have to work that day but at least I can get on FR from there. Your thoughts?

Preview and analysis for Weekend Talk Shows, 10-21-06 and 10-22-06 Just over two weeks left and the wheels appear to be coming off of the DBM/Dhimmicrat juggernaut.  Ford has imploded and probably provided the image of the election with his dismal stunt "confronting" Corker.  You can just see his world crumble as he stands there, and he knows it.  Lieberman is kicking MoveON butt in Connecticut and beginning to hint that he'll caucus with the Republicans if the Dhimmicrats don't give him his seniority.  Burns, who everyone counted out, is within striking distance in Montana and Steele is neck and...

However, Ms. Coulter‘s substance becomes secondary to her abrasive style. Debaters focus on the combative elements of her work and thus get sidetracked when attempting to disprove her talking points. As a consequence she becomes a caricature of the right-wing, never to be taken seriously and wholly ineffectual. Ms. Coulter is the girl your buddy denies seeing, even though you have caught them in bed together on more than one occasion. She lies underneath the Republican covers, and despite many possible suitors, no one in the Party stakes a claim in her unique brand of derogatory grandstanding.

See for example this thread first. Ann Coulter releases her book The cover photo had me hook'd <---- Assonance It's titled Godless (or should it be Goddess?) both the out- and in-side rate a look!

Stocks go up and down, but eventually, most go up. So if you invest and hold on, odds are you'll do quite well. As my former Princeton economics professor, Burton Malkiel, told me, "The stock market is like a gambling casino with the odds in your favor. Over the long pull, it beats inflation, and beats it by a great deal."If you want to beat other investors, too, it's logical to think that you should turn to the most visible specialists for advice. These men and women make their living studying stocks, and they sound so confident on CNBC. You'd...

Stealth sponsorship of talking heads and op-ed columnists is surprisingly common In the opinion industry, pundits who present themselves as independent voices sometimes turn out to be quietly financed by powerful interests. The latest example BusinessWeek has unearthed: The Hill, a Washington newspaper read closely in Congress, published an opinion piece last June extolling "payday loans." Readers weren't told that the author, Tom Lehman, a professor at Indiana Wesleyan University, had taken money from the industry that pushes these controversial high-interest loans. In other instances, BusinessWeek Online has recently identified Douglas Bandow and Michael Fumento, two prolific authors of newspaper...

Published: January 21, 2006 12:10 PM ET NEW YORK While much of the liberal blogosphere, and political figures such as Sen. John Kerry, remain inflamed over comments by MSNBC's Chris Matthews on "Hardball" on Thursday--in which he suggested that Osama bin Laden, in his latest video tape, sounded an awful lot like fillmmaker Michael Moore--The New York Times has also now been linked to Osama by another cable news pundit. On Friday night, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough weighed in on the subject, going beyond Moore to claim that bin Laden was also borrowing language or ideas from the likes of Howard...

EDITOR'S NOTE: We asked some family and friends to name their picks for best and worst political moments of 2005. Here's what they came up with. Michael G. Franc Best political moment: The confirmation of John Roberts to be the 17th chief justice of the Supreme Court. Roberts's opinionated writings during the Reagan administration and his decisions on the Court of Appeals assured us that he is a worthy successor to William Rehnquist. Worst political moment: The near instantaneous politicization of the response to Hurricane Katrina. The media's ready acceptance of the proposition that all responsibility for the flawed response...

Do you hold political views that reliably identify you as a Republican or a Democrat? Are you willing to interrupt your busy day or early evening at the drop of a hat to accept a limousine ride to a television studio? Do you enjoy having makeup spackled onto your face with a trowel? Then, do I have a job for you in this holiday season! It doesn't require independent thinking. In fact, independent thinkers need not apply. And it doesn't necessarily pay money. But it will give you the opportunity to bore millions of Americans (well, maybe a couple hundred...

I have always thought of historians as having a smidgen of a lazy streak, and I suspect that many future analysts of the Bush '43 administration will take the easy approach and draw many parallels between it and the Reagan administration. To wit: 1) The only Republicans to serve two full terms since Eisenhower. 2) Both were seen as intellectual lightweights. 3) Both campaigned on a promise to cut taxes, and did so. 4) Both had undistinguished, easily-mocked military careers during wartime. 5) Both had to deal with a highly-unconventional war against a monolithic opponent. 6) Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice,...

On Friday, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald indicted Scooter Libby on five counts of obstruction of justice, false statement, and perjury. The charges are serious but, as columnist David Brooks noted in the New York Times, Fitzgerald found no evidence of the broad conspiracy hinted at by journalists, bloggers, and partisan pundits. Nevertheless, opponents of the Iraq war have painted the indictment as evidence of original sin. The American Conservative, for example, accused the Bush administration of "forging the case for war." Liberal blogger Arianna Huffington argued that "the scandal has reignited a national debate about the White House lies...

People are willing to pay heavily for expert advice. Economists are consulted to tell us how the economy will change, stock analysts are paid large salaries to forecast the earnings of various companies, and political experts command large fees to tell our leaders what the future holds. The available evidence, however, implies that this money is poorly spent. But because few people pay attention to this evidence, I have come up with what I call the "seersucker theory": "No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers."One would expect experts...

Open Challenge to the "Conservative" Punditry. Stand and Deliver time boys and girls. OK. Let's forget about your inexcusable conduct towards Miers and deal. The LIBERALS are LAUGHING at you. They cannot believe you are all THIS stupid. They are watching, in stunned disbelief, as YOU do THEIR job in destroying the 1st Republican Majority in 50 years. All you "Conservatives" are all telling us "You can't trust Bush" and "We can win this fight". Well guess what. We have NO proof we can trust you. WHERE is YOUR paper trail? NONE of you were able to convince the Senate...

Here's John Hawkins' current faves for best opinion columnists, in descending order. Do you agree or disagree? 30) Fred Barnes 29) Bill O'Reilly 28) Ralph Reiland 27) Heather Mac Donald 26) Larry Kudlow 25) Linda Chavez 24) Robert Novak 23) Mona Charen 22) Ralph Peters 21) Larry Elder 20) Brendan Miniter 19) Tony Blankley 18) James Lileks 17) Kathleen Parker 16) Michael Barone 15) Rich Lowry 14) John Podhoretz 13) John Tierney 12) Jeff Jacoby 11) Jack Kelly 10) Michelle Malkin 9) Walter Williams 8) Jonah Goldberg 7) David Limbaugh 6) Charles Krauthammer 5) John Leo 4) Victor Davis Hanson...

GREG PALAST Eminence Grise or Eminently Greasy ? In the brave new world of Leftist journalism ,there is one “lead dog” : Greg Palast. How can one best describe “Greg’s World “? Picture, if you will, a pack of dogs , trotting nose to tail through life. The lead dog pauses, squats and strains . The dogs behind him stop, sniff appreciatively , and add their malodorous offerings ,one after another . All scratch their paws to spread their offal on the Internet , utter self-satisfied whines , and trot on. Out there – somewhere – there is Truth :...

The Huffington Post, an Internet blog that debuted May 9 after a campaign that would have delighted P.T. Barnum, makes me nostalgic for the good old days of journalism. It isn't that its founder, Arianna Huffington (who named it for herself in true Hollywood "enough about me, not what do YOU think about me" fashion) doesn't have every right to join the increasingly clogged blog superhighway. Rather, this blog has an agenda and speaks mostly to people who already believe what most of its writers say. In The Huffington Post, the musical genius Quincy Jones explains that Michael Jackson's problem...

America's military can win wars. We've done it in the past, and I have absolute confidence that we'll continue to do it in the future. We've won fights in which we possessed overwhelming technological superiority (Desert Storm), as well as conflicts in which we were the technical underdogs (the American Revolution). We've crossed swords with numerically superior foes, and with militaries a fraction of the size of our own. We've battled on our own soil, and on the soil of foreign lands -- on the sea, under the sea, and in the skies. We've even engaged in a bit of...

With Alger Hiss dead and Gloria Steinem married, liberals were in desperate need of an "intellectual." Woody Allen was a possibility, as were Carter and Clinton, but they were all too cliché. The Left needed someone relatively unknown to the masses -- public opinion isn't good for liberals -- and someone who knew lots and lots of words. (The definitions were essentially irrelevant, but pronunciation was key.) They settled, at long last, on someone just as good as any Soviet apparatchik they could have ever found: Susan Sontag. Recently deceased at the age of 71, Sontag was to liberal elitists...

<p>Last week, the powers-that-be installed a new stoplight in Highlands, NC. It’s on Carolina Way at the intersection with US 64, just east of Main Street. That makes four stoplights we have now. And it raises the question of why the 99.44% of my readers who live in a town larger than 1,000 people should care in the least bit about this major civic improvement.</p>

E-mail to John (Goose Hunter) Kerry #20 From: James (Cooter) Thompson re: Post-mortem Dear Senator Kerry: Jack Boudreau, Armen Yazoo, and me, the Designated Letter Writer down to Daryl's Bait Shop here in Lagniappe, Louisiana been watching news commentary on TV and we been reading tons of punditry on the Web concerning why you lost the election to George W. Bush. Truth be told, those pointy-heads would've done well to read my e-mails to you since last May for edification. Certain people lay the blame for your and your Party's defeat on folks like us. It's true, a substantial majority...

The MSM's Men (and women) In Black