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With polls showing Donald Trump on track to score big in Super Tuesday primaries tonight, the GOP front-runner even considered being a no-show at the Fox News debate on Thursday that will be co-moderated by Megyn Kelly. According to a highly placed source familiar with the matter, Trump's thinking was that he could send a powerful signal that he no longer considers Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio credible rivals for the nomination. Bowing out of the Fox News debate would have the added bonus of sticking it to the channel's chief, Roger Ailes, and star anchor Kelly by depriving them...

For many months, Fox News and GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump have been at each other's throats. Trump has claimed that Fox News personality Megyn Kelly hasn't been fair to him, and Fox has said that Trump's accusations are baseless. New York Magazine reported that this little spat may be causing some further complications within the Fox News network. Reportedly Megyn Kelly and Bill O'Reilly are at each other's throats over Trump and Kelly's increasing popularity. Despite angering many people with her treatment of Trump, Kelly's popularity in Republican circles has actually grown, and she is now at the center...

Trump said he would host his own Iowa town hall to raise money for veterans and let other networks cover it. One clear sign of the gravity of tonight's development is the sense of confusion that is swirling throughout Fox. The network is split between Kelly's allies like Brit Hume and conservative anchors that are furious that Kelly - who graces the cover of Vanity Fair this month - has become the face of the network. An anchor fumed that Kelly hosted Michael Moore on her program tonight and the lefty filmmaker defended her against Trump. "That would be like...

From Gabriel Sherman writing for New York Magazine: When it comes to dealing with rogue states, Fox News has a firm editorial philosophy: You don’t negotiate. Roger Ailes is learning that the same logic applies to a rogue candidate. Last night, Donald Trump took to Twitter and blew up the uneasy truce Ailes had brokered with him two weeks ago following Trump’s attacks on Fox star Megyn Kelly after the first GOP debate.

More has changed in the past few years for women who allege rape than in all the decades since the women's movement began. Consider the evidence of October 2014, when a Philadelphia magazine reporter at a Hannibal Buress show uploaded a clip of the comedian talking about Bill Cosby: "He gets on TV, 'Pull your pants up, black people ... I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.' Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches ... I guess I want to just at least make it weird for...

In Saturday night's 3rd Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton sought to emphasize her line that Donald Trump has become "ISIS's best recruiter" by suggesting that the extremist group was using Trump in their recruiting videos, a claim which has now been widely discredited by fact-checkers and ISIS experts, and which prompted Trump to call Clinton a liar on the Sunday morning talk-show circuit. As a result, Sunday morning also saw Clinton campaign manager John Podesta and spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri work to walk Clinton's statement back. Appearing on ABC's This Week, Palmieri said that Clinton "didn't have a particular video in mind"

It's hard for a political party to self-diagnose its problems when its thinkers are at odds about the nature and extent of the current symptoms. That’s the condition of the Republican Party, which began this presidential cycle highly confident about consolidating power gained at the congressional and state levels during the last two midterms with the capture of that last Democratic redoubt, the White House.

Cycles in presidential campaigns begin with hopeful conjecture, outright lies, blind tabloid items that can’t ever be proved or disproved. This week the Marco Rubio cycle began. Marco Rubio is now the “front-runner” for the Koch brothers’ support and cash, the New York Daily News reported yesterday morning, citing a source “who ran into David Koch at a recent event in Manhattan.” That sourcing sounds pretty shaky — David Koch has never seemed like someone who blurts out his political plans to the restroom attendant, though, who knows, people always surprise you — but of course it’s hard to imagine...

hen Newsweek broke the story last week that the College Board had redone its controversial 2014 AP U.S. history (APUSH) framework, the headline blared: “Revised AP U.S. History Standards Will Emphasize American Exceptionalism.” That headline was quickly echoed across the web, with Slate promising an APUSH course “Juiced Up With More ‘American Exceptionalism,’” New York Magazine following suit, and Think Progress decrying the College Board’s supposed “cave” to conservative pressure. A more accurate headline would have been, “College Board Inserts Meaningless Mention of American Exceptionalism to Shut Conservatives Up: Liberals Go Nuts.” Early coverage of the renewed APUSH controversy has...

The Washington Post has a story today about 2016 presidential candidate Jeb Bush's unfortunate habit of getting involved in business deals destined to crumble and make him look bad. The problem is widespread enough that his career is littered with a graveyard of hilariously halfhearted explanations for his mistakes from friends, staffers, and Bush himself. In 1998 — shortly before he became governor of Florida, Bush told the St. Petersburg Times, according to the Post, “I’m 45 years old. I have to have better radar.” Bush's running mate in his failed gubernatorial bid in 1994, Tom Feeney, argued that the...

The Vanity Fair–Bloomberg cocktail reception that follows the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, held at the franco-swank residence of the French ambassador, is the kind of party where Katie Couric can kick off her shoes and spend much of the party in bare feet. It’s the kind of party where Charlie Rose and Ashley Judd stand by one of several bars and engage in a lot of intense close-talking. It’s the kind of party where one waits in line to use the loo, just as one has done at every normal, far less glitzy house party since the 1990s. But then...

Around 2 a.m. on December 12, four students approached the apartment of Omar Mahmood, a Muslim student at the University of Michigan, who had recently published a column in a school newspaper about his perspective as a minority on campus. The students, who were recorded on a building surveillance camera wearing baggy hooded sweatshirts to hide their identity, littered Mahmood’s doorway with copies of his column, scrawled with messages like “You scum embarrass us,” “Shut the **** up,” and “DO YOU EVEN GO HERE?! LEAVE!!” They posted a picture of a demon and splattered eggs. This might appear to be...

Jessica Pressler is no longer going to work at Bloomberg’s investigation unit after the disgraced New York magazine writer penned last week’s story about the Stuyvesant High School senior who allegedly made $72 million trading stocks, only to have it proved a hoax.

Old and busted, legacy media edition: Layers of fact checkers and editors. New hotness: “There was this one time, in band camp …” Yet another big, splashy mainstream media story has collapsed, although the damage from New York Magazine’s tall tale of a teen-genius stock traders and the New York Post’s follow-up is entirely limited to the two publications’ reputations. Jessica Pressler wrote this weekend that Mo Islam, a 17-year-old student, had amassed a $72 million fortune during his participation in a high-school trading club, apparently without asking some basic questions about how a minor could trade and how...

When the history of this presidency is written, it will record that bold, progressive reforms dramatically reshaped the face of government, thanks to the vision, creativity, and political will of one man. And that man is Mitt Romney. President Obama already has Gina McCarthy, who designed Romney’s cap-and-trade program in Massachusetts, running the Environmental Protection Agency for him. Coral Davenport reports today that the administration’s new regulations of power plants, due for release Monday, will be designed to expand the structure Romney built: As governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Romney was a key architect of a cap-and-trade program in nine northeastern...

As the late-night comedy landscapeI> reshuffles, are right-wing comics being unfairly ignored? An investigation.You would have thought that President Obama had nominated Eric Holder to succeed John Roberts as chief justice, not that Les Moonves had named a successor to David Letterman. When Stephen Colbert was promoted to the Late Show throne last month, Rush Limbaugh called in the dogs: “CBS has just declared war on the heartland of America,” he said, by hiring a partisan who would bring about “a redefinition of what is comedy.” The vitriol on the right became so thick that a couple of less excitable...

Lynn Cheney has a theory about why Monica Lewinsky wrote a long Vanity Fair essay about her experience with Bill Clinton: It’s because the Clintons wanted it. Cheney explains her suspicions. “I really wonder if this isn’t an effort on the Clintons’ part to get that story out of the way,” Cheney, announced on an interview on Fox News. “Would Vanity Fair publish anything about Monica Lewinsky that Hillary Clinton didn’t want in Vanity Fair?” There may be a couple of holes in this theory. The first is that, while it does account for the Clinton’s motivations, it fails to...

Demonstrating once again that Israel remains a favorite whipping boy of the liberal media, there was John Heilemann of New York magazine on today's Morning Joe defending John Kerry's grotesque claim that Israel risked becoming an "apartheid state." According to Heilemann, Kerry's ugly accusation was "not actually an unreasonable statement." To his credit, Joe Scarborough promptly riposted, saying "I couldn't disagree with you more." View the video here.

[This post contains spoilers from last night's GoT.] Game of Thrones has been a rape-heavy show from very early on. And it hasn't exactly been progressive in its take on sexual violence — Daenerys falls in love with her rapist, for example. But last night's rape scene, in which Jaime assaults his sister Cersei inches away from their dead son's body, is a new low for the deeply violent series, because the scene was rewritten from the book to recast the sex as not consensual, and yet the show's cast and crew aren't even sure whether it constitutes rape. "It...

U.S. President Barack Obama speaks during a visit to Bladensburg High School April 7, 2014 in Bladensburg, Maryland. Last weekend, I appeared on Melissa Harris-Perry’s weekend MSNBC show to discuss my cover story on racial politics. It was … not quite what I expected. The segment lasted 12 and a half minutes, and Harris-Perry spent almost half that time on an extended soliloquy about how I am wrong, only allowing me to join the discussion about my story for the second half. There was also a panel following that segment, consisting of four panelists who agree with Harris-Perry and none...