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The liberal elite’s contempt for conservatives was on vivid display on Joy Reid’s MSNBC show this morning. In a long segment attacking Sean Hannity, guest Tiffany Cross said: “[Hannity] has a hotline to the White House. He also has a hotline to three million viewers every night . . . This is a scary thing because the people who watch him do not have the intellectual curiosity to get information other places, other than this echo chamber that is Fox News. So this group of people may be the people that drive us into a war.” Get the rest of...

The liberal media will seize any occasion—even the passing of a beloved former First Lady—as fodder for snipes at President Trump. And so it was on today’s Morning Joe, whereMike Barnicle suggested that the passing of Mrs. Bush is “accompanied by the passing of decency.” Jon Meacham echoed that theme. Describing the fine values by which Barbara Bush lived her life, Meacham said: Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

As NewsBuster Geoffrey Dickens has noted, Ben Affleck appeared on yesterday evening's edition of Hardball. And while it's true that the actor/director/Dem activist offered a generally innocuous analysis, he did manage to engage in a bit of religious bigotry. Affleck's foul foray arose in the course of his discussion of the way the various Republican candidates have dealt with the issue of evolution and creationism. Talk turned to the former governor of Arkansas. BEN AFFLECK: I think Huckabee actually framed his position in a much less dramatic way than had been made out. Which was he said it could...

Hillary Clinton: the patriotic choice for president? That seems the implication of Chuck Todd’s challenge to Paul Ryan in an interview aired on today’s Meet The Press. When Ryan told Todd that as Speaker of the House, he was supporting Trump, Todd retorted: “you just made a case though for party over country.” How absurd! As Ryan rightly went on to explain to Todd, “No I didn’t! I know Hillary Clinton won’t agree with anything we want to do. She’ll put a bad judge on the Supreme Court. She won’t agree with any of the conservative reforms we’re trying to...

If Bernie Sanders is a subsidiary of the NRA, they really should spin him off. . . On today's MTP Daily, Hillary surrogate Hakeem Jeffries, a NYC congressman and Hillary surrogate, claimed that "Senator Bernie Sanders has effectively functioned as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the National Rifle association for the entirety of his career." Really? Let's go to the scorecard. Sanders current NRA rating is a subterranean D-. Since 1992, he has racked up four Fs. His highest score was a C-. Kudos to Chuck Todd for reacting with incredulity: "can you really refer to him as a wholly-owned subsidiary...

Virtually every morning, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough vociferously reject the notion that they're in the tank for Donald Trump. And it's true that in word and print they can occasionally be critical of him. But on today's Morning Joe, Mika came up with an odd defense to the assertion that Trump often lies: "He's not just blurting out outright lies--he's kind of making people think in some ways." Um, okay. Mika's odd formulation came in response to the allegation by guest Evelyn Farkas, a former Obama Defense Department official with expertise on Russia, who has a current Politico piece...

Talk about your Hobson's Choice . . . on today's Morning Joe, Nicolle Wallace, citing GOP consultants, suggested that--other than social conservatives--Republicans concerned with foreign policy should consider supporting Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Hillary supporter Harold Ford, Jr. could be heard chiming in with a "well said." Wallace was echoing the argument laid out by Joe Scarborough: that on a range of issues from foreign intervention to Israel, taxing the rich to breaking up the banks, Clinton's positions are closer to those of the GOP establishment than Trump's. But Joe, Nicolle and those Republican consultants are forgetting one overriding...

MSNBC might have to build a deeper tank . . . so that Cokie Roberts can dive into it for Hillary. On today's Morning Joe, Roberts of NPR complained about the resources the FBI is devoting to the investigation of Hillary Clinton's misuse of email. Carped Cokie: "Don't they have other problems? There's no crime in the country they should be worrying about?" Roberts' timing could hardly have been worse. Just moments before, Joe Scarborough pointed out that last week it was revealed that 22 of the emails on Hillary's server "were so sensitive that the state department said releasing...

And we thought Joe Scarborough was the one who had it in for Marco Rubio . . . Turns out, Mika Brzezinski really doesn't dig Rubio. At all. On today's Morning Joe, Mika painted Rubio as an unprincipled pol "sucking up" to Donald Trump in order to be his VP pick. Mika: "he's the only one who will go against everything he believes in and say whatever Trump wants him to. He'll do whatever Trump tells him to do." Ouch. View the video here.

It was one of those stunning live-TV moments revealing the seamier side of TV news. Pat Brown is a criminal profiler who has taken a principled stand on media appearances about mass murderers. She will not discuss individual criminals, their motives, etc., believing that to do so pnly increases the number of mass murders. But when Brown appeared on CNN's New Day this morning, co-host Christi Paul immediately tried to engage her in a discussion of Colorado Springs shooter Robert Dear's possible "anti-government" views. Retorted Brown: "I'm a little disturbed because I made an agreement with CNN to appear this...

To quote the Church Lady: isn't that conv-e-e-e-e-nient? On Chris Hayes' MSNBC show tonight, Dem congressman Luis Gutierrez claimed that while he was "challenged" by the Catholic church's teachings on abortion and gay rights and found them "difficult" [but not difficult enough to change his standard liberal positions], no one can really argue the Pope's positions on illegal immigration and income inequality. View the video here.

Mika Brzezinski: fired up and ready to go . . . for Donald Trump? Not exactly. It isn't that Mika's jumping on the Make America Great Again express. It's just that she wants "intellectual honesty" from her peers when it comes to admitting that Trump has gone from amusing sideshow who's sure to eventually crash to true frontrunner who is now likely to be the Republican nominee. You might not think of Brzezinski as being particularly data-driven, but on today's Morning Joe she repeatedly argued that there is no data supporting a Trump meltdown scenario. Going around the table with...

How bad is it getting for Hillary when the best her defenders came come up with is Harold Ford Jr.'s formulation: okay, so the words most associated with her are "liar," "dishonest" and "untrustworthy" but, hey!—she's not "unpatriotic." On today's Morning Joe, after Ford resorted on Hillary's behalf to the last refuge of scoundrels, Joe Scarborough hit him with a killer question: does Ford think David Petraeus—who was convicted of a crime for improperly passing classified material--is a patriot? Ford had to acknowledge that he is, but when Harold tried to distinguish Hillary's actions from Petraeus', Scarborough swept in to...

Finally! Something from a New York Times reporter you can absolutely, positively believe: that no matter the mounting evidence, he will not condemn Hillary Clinton for her email malfeasance. On today's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough repeatedly tried to get Jeremy Peters to state whether he agreed with the federal judge who yesterday declared that Hillary had not "followed government policy" regarding her email. After haplessly trying to do anything but answer the question, an exasperated Peters finally sputtered: "you want, you want me to indict and damn Hillary? I'm not going to do that." View the video...

Did Rush Limbaugh force Fox News, in the wake of the Donald Trump/Megyn Kelly dust-up, to back down and welcome Trump back on its network? That's what New York Times reporter Nick Confessore suggested on today's Morning Joe. Asked by Mika Brzezinski who was the most powerful person in the media today, Confessore responded: "I think Fox or Rush Limbaugh [whose last name Confessore pronounced "Lim-bow], right? In this primary, right? There were two institutions that could have put a stop to Trump, talk radio and Fox. And talk radio likes him and Fox backed down." View the video here.

Yesterday, this NewsBuster was gobsmacked by the spectacle of senior Hillary aide Jennifer Palmieri suggesting that the FBI would be happy to discover that Hillary's infamous email server had been scrubbed clean. We wrote about it here. Today's Morning Joe picked through the smoldering ashes of that interview with the participation of John Heilemann, who conducted it. Joe Scarborough said that "everybody" he talked to called the interview a "disaster." Heilemann suggested that top Hillary staffers are "in the dark." The cruelest cut came from Mika Brzezinski, who said "there are no good answers." So where does Hillary go from...

Shades of 1968 and the Days of Rage? Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors has announced that "any opportunity we have to shut down a Republican convention, we will." Appearing on today's Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC, Cullors also blithely spoke of "the murder of Mike Brown" in Ferguson, MO. Neither of the co-guest hosts sitting in for Harris-Perry, Richard Liu and Janet Mock, challenged Cullors' characterization. This despite the fact that even Eric Holder's Justice Department found no wrongdoing on the part of the police officer who shot Brown. View the video here.

Not the endorsement someone heading into the Republican primaries would normally want, but it's the one Rand Paul got. On today's This Week [hosted by Jonathan Karl in the absence of Stephanopoulos], far-left Rep. Keith Ellison declared that on a variety of issues, including opposition to the Patriot Act, he is "proud to stand" with Rand Paul. Roll the video and watch Bill Kristol look on benignly as Ellison praises Paul. You can imagine he was thinking that every Ellison accolade was another chunk of GOP primary voters lost for Kristol's least-favorite Republican candidate. In the unkindest cut, Kristol claimed...

Was he serious? Some of his fellow panelists chuckled, but it wasn't obvious that conservative commentator Ben Domenech was kidding when on today's Up With Steve Kornacki he said that "the only person I think who could beat Hillary Clinton is Michelle Obama." Domenech's comment came during a segment on the subject of who might jump into the race should Hillary decide not to run. The mere fact that there was such a segment suggests that the controversy over Hillary's email might not be the much ado "about nothing" that some claim. View the video here.

It's official: Nicolle Wallace really doesn't like Sarah Palin. On today's Morning Joe, Wallace—who was Palin's chief handler during the 2008 campaign—took the occasion of Palin's speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit on Saturday to jab at the former veep candidate. Wallace had been asked to comment on conservative columnist Byron York's panning of Palin's speech as "long, rambling, and at times barely coherent." York's column also passed along criticism of the speech by a number of Iowa Republicans. Wallace said that it was interesting to see York come "full circle," since back in 2008 he had been a staunch...