This morning I thought I'd died and gone to smart heaven

Four walls can barely contain this much smart

If you think you've seen Chris Hayes all over the place the last few weeks, it's because you have. Over the last year, Hayes has been doing the Rachel Maddow Training Path gig of subbing for as many MSNBC hosts as possible. When he first started appearing on television, Hayes was a walking argument against drinking too much of the Official Coffee of Morning Schmoe, but as he's become more comfortable in front of the camera, his overcaffeinated bounciness has largely been tamed into a kind of youthful puppylike enthusiasm -- or at least it was until MSNBC gave him his own show, which premiered yesterday morning at the ungodly hour of 7 AM, and today at the almost as ungodly hour of 8 AM.

It's really kind of disingenuous for MSNBC to on the one hand recognize just how ferociously smart (and yeah, ok, cute) Hayes is, clearly want to flog the show enough to make even Joey "Dead Intern" Scarborough have a REAL progressive on as a guest instead of calling that unctuous tool Mark Halperin one; and on the other hand bury him at a time when almost no one in his target audience is awake yet. But if you are one of our younger readers, and you don't yet have a DVR, get one. Or watch online. But even if you are older than the target audience, which I am, it's really worth your while to get up early and see what a Sunday morning news talk show can be when it's NOT completely populated by Beltway dinosaurs who have been spouting the same relentlessly wrong and misguided conventional wisdom for decades. I mean seriously -- does anyone still actually care what George Will says, or Cokie Roberts, or Doris Kearns Goodwin? It would be one thing if these people were using a lifetime of observation of Washington to provide insight and perspective into what's going on today. But if you've watched what Driftglass so charmingly and accurately calls the Mouse Circus lately, you've no doubt wanted to stick an icepick in your own eye and lobotomize yourself just to make Teh Moronic Platitudes stop.

It's clear that unlike conventional Sunday gasbag shows, which parade out the same Republicans week after week, followed by a panel of irrelevances primly having the vapors over President Obama daring to question his Republican Overlords, Up with Chris Hayes (a title which both snarks at and embraces Hayes' chirpy, bouncy overcaffeinated chipmunk persona) is going to be light on guests, perhaps because there are few political figures who are going to be willing to put on full makeup and go into a studio for a 7 AM live interview with a guy who sounds like he's been up all night drinking Starbucks and fueled by the tray of pastries prominently displayed on the interview table, still has another six hours in him. Still, Hayes managed to score an interview with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for his debut show, which was followed on Sunday by an expression of frustration to his special guest and BFF Rachel Maddow (who was resplendently geeky in full Nerdy McNerdlington regalia) at how you can't get these people to say anything beyond their talking points.

The panel looks like it's going to consist of a few young think-tankers and high-end bloggers, one libertarian-leaning conservative, and a token Old Guy. Saturday's panel consisted of the ubiquitous MSNBC correspondent/HuffPo political blogger Alex Wagner, liberal comic John Fugelsang, former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, and American Conservative blogger Michael Dougherty. Sunday's panel included the equally overcaffeinated frequent Real Time with Bill Maher guest Reihan Salam, the aforementioned Rachel Maddow, New York Times correspondent and former Salon writer Rebecca Traister, and Pam Spaulding lookalike Heather McGhee of Demos. The Old Guy role was played today by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (NY-8) who surprisingly didn't seem at all out of place, perhaps because he is not among the gasbags to be invited to the Mouse Circus.

There's a ridiculous amount of content packed into these four hours of weekend television, which often seem paced as if they are running at 78rpm in a 33-1/3 rpm genre. But especially when you watch Chris Hayes banter with Rachel Maddow and his young panel, it makes you remember what intelligent political discourse used to look like, before Sally Quinn came along and conducted the unholy marriage between Washington politicians and the journalists who cover them. And as a special bonus? The show is executive-produced by original Morning Sedition producer Jonathan "Smartypants" Larsen.

Watch. Enjoy. You just might explode from an excess of smart:

Like butter spread on too much bread

If it seems like I haven't written much lately, it's not your imagination. Lately I just don't have it in me. There are a number of reasons for this. Part of it is the ridiculous hours I'm working, which has been seven days a week, 65-80 hours over those seven days. Some of it is outrage fatigue. After all, there's only so much internal resources that one has at the ripe old age of 55, and I have to keep my priorities straight in the age of American Diminishment. Since it looks like the guy we put into the White House is getting ready to fulfull the Republican dream of pulling the rug out from under the Social Security system into which I've been paying for thirty-eight years, if working seven days a week is what I have to do in order to have a roof over my head and some mac and cheese on the table in my old age, well, that's what I do. But some days I have to conserve my internal resources for work, and I don't have the luxury of expending it on the State of the World.

As Ian Holm says as Bilbo Baggins in the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring, "I feel thin, sort of stretched... like butter spread over too much bread." Well, I can't remember the last time I felt thin, but you get what I mean. The way it's manifested over the last couple of weeks is a kind of hair-trigger emotionality.

It really started with the Tucson shootings. For two weeks I simply could not look at a photograph of Christina Taylor-Green, or even THINK about her, without bursting into tears. Every step that Gabrielle Giffords, a Blue Dog Democrat who had I known more about her, might have been the focus of one of my anti-DINO rants, makes towards recovery, brings me a kind of joy that only comes from a small beacon of light shining on an otherwise dark, dark world.

Here in the New York area, it's Jets Fever, as the boisterous, goofy, brash, perhaps overachieving New York Jets prepare to take on Ben "Sexual Assault" Roethlisberger, Troy Polamalu, and the rest of the Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC Championship game tomorrow. For those who hate the Jets, Rex Ryan is an ass, Mark Sanchez is a pretty boy hype machine who doesn't have the goods, and the assortment of scrap heap cast-offs who have found new life with this team are a bunch of scrubs. But for those of us who have been captivated by this team, this asshole of a coach, for whom everyone in the NFL seems to want to play because he seems to galvanize a team the way no "gentleman coach" can, there's something endearing about this bunch of cast-offs like Santonio Holmes and LaDainian Tomlinson and Jason Taylor, this Byronesque quarterback who befriends dying children and loves musical theatre. I won't cry into my beer if the Jets lose tomorrow (or maybe I will, who knows?) because it's been a good long run for them. But a win would again send me off into a transcendent joy that far outweighs any degree of football fandom I might have.

Yesterday I was reading Roger Ebert describing his new chin prosthesis, which he will wear in his segment on a new At the Movies (which premiered last night on PBS). Ebert is such an American institution, and his very public journey with a disfiguring salivary gland cancer has been such a moving one, that simply having him back in the balcony (if in a limited capacity) is a cause for celebration. Again -- something far more significant to Ebert than to those who don't know him, but a small beam of light just the same. (Note: You'll be able to stream the show soon here.)

And then last night we lost Countdown, and it's all part of the same thing. I didn't know Christina-Taylor Green. I don't know Gabrielle Giffords, or Roger Ebert, or Keith Olbermann. And unlike people like, say, Rich Lowry, I do know the difference between actual people and images on a TV screen. But whatever happened to push Keith Olbermann off the air (and despite some rumblings that he just quit, whenever I hear "mutual agreement", you know it always means "asked him to resign"); whether it was outrage fatigue, grief over losing his father last year, an inability to conceive of how to keep the show sharp while "dialing it back a notch", the fact is that many of us invited this man into our living rooms every night for eight years. If it's eight o'clock, it's Olbermann. And now it isn't.

It isn't that we LIKED him, not in the way we LIKE, say, Rachel Maddow. Keith Olbermann never came across as someone you'd actually want to know. Those of us who watched every night knew that he was a bombastic, egotistical ass. But he was OUR bombastic, egotistical ass, and we loved him warts and all. When he was suspended for making the same kind of political contributions that everyone at Fox does (and even Joe Scarborough at MSNBC does), over 250,000 viewers signed a petition for reinstatement. We recognized his faults, but he wasn't our friend. He was the guy we turned to for a voice of sanity in a world full of climate change deniers and Christofascist zombies and ignoramuses who regard facts as just other opinions. At first it was just Keith Olbermann, but he's also the guy who gave us Rachel Maddow in prime time -- a gift for which we can never hope to repay him. And if you saw Rachel refuse to capitulate to the inevitable and ubiquitous filibustering of Club for Growth shill Stephen Moore on Real Time last night you too will be grateful to Olbermann for giving her a well-deserved break:

Olbermann was important to us, but despite his good work in setting up free health care clinics and making it possible for Americans to donate to help provide transplants to Arizona residents doomed by Jan Brewer's REAL death panel, he kept us at a distance. Rachel is more like the big sister of the narrator in a Carson McCullers story -- the happy, athletic, popular big sister who is always there for you when your parents don't understand you because you're nerdy, bookish, and anxious. Her success has allowed her to be filmed doing segments and promos without full makeup, in the blue nerd glasses and the Converse All-Stars. And the fact that she exudes passion and unabashed liberalism, and then puts on Kent Jones in a funny costume, may help insulate her somewhat from the kind of controversy that has always shadowed Olbermann.

But as much as we adore Rachel, it's Keith Olbermann who has been the pioneer, the voice cursing the darkness when no one else could have. Without Keith Olbermann, there's no Rachel Maddow. There's no Ed Show. There's no Sam Seder in front of the cameras in prime time. There's no Cenk Uygur forcing Republican former Congressman Bob McEwen to admit that there's no money in the Social Security trust fund because they stole it and we have to just suck it up. Without Keith Olbermann, Lawrence O'Donnell (who is still too "centrist" for my taste) is still an occasional third banana on Morning Schmoe. Without Keith Olbermann, the only voices of opinion journalism on the medium in which most people still get their news are the reality-challenged hatemeisters on Fox News.

Who knows...perhaps with the "friendlier faces of liberalism" that now constitute the MSNBC lineup (because Cenk Uygur's seat-warming at 6 PM is still only filler), the "both sides do it" claim will be mitigated. But for those of us who invited Keith Olbermann into our homes at 8 PM every weeknight for eight years, there's a big empty chair today. And just another weepy-trigger for an exhausted blogger.

More on Olbermann:

Greg Sargent
Steve Benen
Nicole Belle, focusing on the crowing of the right.
Brad Friedman
John Aravosis
Justin Rosario
Steve Kornacki
Some speculation about what's next (I'm not buying it.)
Adrastos
Richard Bey (with some inside dirt)

Rachel Maddow is a Trash Culture Mutant

Yes! She IS "one of us"! Puzzling evidence proving this was broadcast on October 28 and can be seen at 2:08:

Actually, it was the 1980's, and I have three copies of the ORIGINAL printing of the Book of the Subgenius to prove it.

By the way, any resemblance between "Bob" Dobbs and Stephen Colbert is, well, I don't know if it's intentional or not, but it's there.

(via)

First thoughts

Last night's discussion between Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart was something we haven't seen before -- a civil discussion between intelligent people of good will. I can't help but have the sense that Jon Stewart is telling liberals to take a knife to a gunfight -- for all that he's always bashing Barack Obama for doing exactly that.

Jon Stewart has been making the point for years that the nonstop cacophony of screeching on cable news over the last decade does nothing to address the problems we face -- and that's true. But what he seems to be asking Rachel Maddow and the other prime time hosts on MSNBC to do is unilaterally disarm and leave the screeching to Fox News, which he describes as "ideological" rather than "partisan", for all that the network pays almost all of the 2012 Republican presidential candidates as "correspondents" or show hosts and donates to groups like the Republican Governors Association.

Stewart's goal to turn the "You're a traitor!" "No, YOU'RE the traitor!" trading of accusations that takes the place of reasoned argument based on interpretation of evidence into the latter may be laudable. But there's a huge difference between calling George W. Bush a war criminal based on his now-admitted approval of torture (when torture is defined according to international law as a war crime) and Glenn Beck painting himself as an authoritative voice of fact and then doing a presentation which blames George Soros for everything Beck hates (George Soros being the favorite right-wing euphemism for "All-Powerful Jew"). And what Stewart seems to be saying is that since MSNBC still considers itself a news network, it should tone down the incendiary rhetoric and leave the screeching to Fox News. What he DOESN'T seem to realize is that not to answer the Fox News hosts' habit of pulling stuff out of their asses and then hammering it over and over again as fact (see also: the "Obama's trip to Asia is costing $200 million a day" lie) is to give it credence.

Is Stewart saying that we should just let accusations like that lie? Ask John Kerry how his assumption that the American people were too smart to believe the Swift Boaters lies worked out for him.

I understand why Jon Stewart, who has two young children and who devours cable news every day to obtain material for his show, has a vested interest in not seeing the outright evil of a president who takes a nation to war based on lies told to the citizenry. I understand him wanting to set Pol Pot as a benchmark, and create some arbitrary number of deaths that one has to cross to become truly "evil" or create distinctions between being a mass murderer of your own people vs. another country's. Because if you have children, and you believe that a president is capable of doing so, that a Congress that's supposed to provide checks and balances can blindly go along, and that the media will just regurgitate Defense Department talking points, then you will go insane projecting out the kind of country your children will inherit. It's much easier to believe that George W. Bush came from a position of goodwill and just made an itty bitty mistakey. The problem with that line of thinking is that you have to start believing that he made an awful lot of mistakeys for someone who cares about human life the way George Bush said he did.

I'm not sure what actually came out of last night's conversation, other than an increasing sense that for all his cynicism, Jon Stewart still retains the stubborn idea that the participants in the national shoutfest all come from a place of goodwill, that American politics is still a place where Orrin Hatch and Ted Kennedy can be great friends after disagreeing profoundly about politics. Fox News has made politics a blood sport, in which the opposition must not just be defeated, but pummelled to death and then having its corpse ass-raped repeatedly until it falls apart under the onslaught. Any media outlet worth its salt is going to combat Fox News' penchant for outright lies with demonstrable facts -- and even if you think Keith Olbermann is a self-iomportant bombastic jackass or that Rachel Maddow gets too passionate about the gay issues that affect her own life every day, the difference that Jon Stewart refuses to see between the MSNBC opinion show hosts and those at Fox is that at MSNBC, they don't just pull stuff out of their asses. Yes, it is opinion journalism over there at MSNBC, but at least they don't trot out a tagline like "fair and balanced" and expect people to believe it even in the face of a lineup that daily tells America that the president is a secret Muslim terrorist.

Set your DVR NOW

This is wonderful news...but can't we just call her "the host"?

I'm of course thrilled that Rachel Maddow will be the recipient of the Walter Cronkite Award...but why is her sexual orientation relevant to the amazing, smart, articulate, and most importantly, FACT-BASED reporting and commentary she does for us night after night?

The openly lesbian host of MSNBC’s "The Rachel Maddow Show" will receive the 2010 Walter Cronkite Faith & Freedom Award from the Interfaith Alliance in honor of her work covering religion and politics, The Huffington Post reported Tuesday, Aug. 17.

The award "recognizes individuals who courageously promote democratic values, defend religious freedom, and reinvigorate informed civic participation," according to an announcement from the Alliance. Cronkite served as Honorary Chairman of the organization until his death last year.

Maddow will receive the award at a gala dinner held in New York in October.

I have nothing to add to this

It's days like yesterday that make me glad I work for a giant multinational corporation instead of blogging full-time. Because if I'd had to cover this latest incident of the Obama Administration going into full-blown panic mood every time that racist scum Andrew Breitbrat says "Boo!", I think I would have to kill myself.

I don't know how Rachel held it together for this:

Even NPR this morning decided to cover the story from the standpoint of "Are we too sensitive about race", rather than "Andrew Breitbart is a libelous racist scumbag provacateur who should be shunned by all civilized people."

See? In high school even the smartest girls know that pretty is the only currency that matters

Now WHAT was I saying yesterday?


If this is a Photoshop job, it's a damn good one.

(via that thing Arianna Huffington runs that no one reads)

I missed this last week

Rachel Maddow on the demonization of the unemployed:

When you see it all in one place, it underscores just how horrific these people are. These are the people who are the architects of the policies that created this mess. The tragedy is that enough people are frightened and angry that they're going to put these heartless, greedy, evil people back in charge this November.

Keith Olbermann, the Kossack Cheerleaders, and Fake President Maddow

For eight years, progressives gnashed their teeth as the media and people on the right blindly applauded everything George W. Bush said or did. Chris Matthews would call a speech (yes, read from a teleprompter) "Churchillian." Wingnuts everywhere referred to him as "our president" and demanded that we all support "our president" -- blindly, utterly, completely -- as the heinousness escalated.

We've always felt we were different because we didn't always have to march in lockstep. I felt Obama's speech was lackluster, with more-of-the-same futile gestures towards "post-partisanship" with people who would like to see him dead, empty calls for commissions to talk the BP spill to death while the oil continues to gush into a dying Gulf of Mexico, and finally, because he seemed to not know what else to do, a call to prayer -- perhaps designed to try to get the Dominionist right to like him but instead sounding like a gesture of futility. Over at Balloon Juice, the sense is that the speech was sober, reasoned, and showed leadership. I respect John and Doug and the others for that opinion, even if I disagree with it, because where they're coming from is NOT some kind of blind faith in 11-dimensional chess, but a different interpretation of the speech.

No one was expecting Barack Obama to put on a wetsuit and fix the spill himself. What we were hoping for is the courage to use the spill as a launchpoint for a serious addressing of our dependence on fossil fuels. That doesn't make us Limbaugh dittoheads.

It's no secret that getting progressives to agree on much of anything is like herding cats -- except over at the Great Orange Satan, where any criticism of Barack Obama is met with scorn, troll ratings, and attempts at banning. For many Kossacks, the delusion that Obama is some kind of progressive visionary Superman dies hard -- so hard that trashing two of the most stalwart guardians of progressive values in the media became the order of the day, in diaries like Dear Rachel Maddow and Memo to Keith Olbermann: Go - - - - yourself.

Well, Mr. Olbermann has had quite enough of being trashed for refusing to participate in this kind of blind worship of even Democratic politicians as demigods:

If I can understand people's frustration with seeing a speech by a Democratic president criticized in a venue such as mine, why is it impossible for some people here to accept my frustration about the speech? You don't agree with me, fine. You don't want to watch because you don't agree with me, fine. But to accuse me, after five years of risking what I have to present the truth as I see it, of staging something for effect, is deeply offensive to me and is an indication of what has happened here.

You want Cheerleaders? Hire the Buffalo Jills. You want diaries with conspiracy theories, go nuts. If you want this site the way it was even a year ago, let me know and I'll be back.

Call Olbermann a crybaby if you want. But this is a guy who gets envelopes of white powder and death threats because of the things he says. When Ari Fleischer threatened all of America by ordering them to "Watch what they say, watch what they do", Olbermann was there. Night after night, as people who would turn this country into a right-wing Christian military theocracy that resembles Iran more than what we know of as America, Olbermann exposes them. This is the guy who brought Rachel Maddow out of the swamp of the dying Air America Radio and out where more people could hear the most ferociously smart commentator on American politics we've seen since Edward R. Murrow. For a guy whose ego is reputed to be bigger than Mt. Everest, that's no small thing. But let him criticize Barack Obama, and he's persona non grata among the Freepers of the Left.

If Olbermann had done nothing other than put Rachel Maddow on television, he'd deserve our enduring thanks...for segments like this:

Rachel can disclaim all she wants. I know there were people watching Fake President Maddow give that fake speech who found themselves wishing it was real. I know because I was one of them.

Maybe it's because not everyone wants media to spout wingnut talking points

Perhaps it happened the day Chris Matthews and G. Gordon Liddy had orgasms on the air over George W. Bush in a flight suit. Perhaps it happened even earlier, when the media decided taht George W. Bush won his debate with Al Gore. Perhaps it was eight years of regurgitating Dick Cheney's lies about Iraq. Perhaps it goes back to the media frenzy over a blue dress and a 20-year-old land deal. Perhaps it was the media presenting Sarah Palin as a credible figure to be a heartbeat away from, or in, the presidency. Perhaps it was the media giving a bunch of half-educated morons donning costumes and calling themselves Tea Party Patriots while spouting fractured history and rooting for tax cuts for rich people credibility as a viable third party and legitimate grassroots movement. Perhaps it hit the last straw with Bill Adair of Politifacts paraphrasing Stephen Colbert when opining that media outlets are afraid that facts are biased.

At any rate, thanks to the outright hackery of the last two decades, the journalism profession lies in ruins and its practitioners are pessimistic about its future:

Most newspaper and broadcast news editors think American journalism is in decline, and about half believe that their employers will go out of business if they do not find new sources of revenue, according to a survey to be released on Monday.

Among print editors, 18 percent said their papers were actively pursuing the idea of charging readers for access to their Web sites, while 58 percent said it was under consideration. Twenty-three percent said they believed that in three years, such subscription fees would be their primary source of online revenue, having overtaken advertising.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism polled members of two industry groups, the American Society of News Editors and the Radio Television Digital News Association. It received 353 sets of responses to the survey, conducted in December and January.

In addition, 48 percent of the editors who participated said that without a significant new income stream, their organizations could not remain solvent for more than 10 years; 31 percent gave them five years or less.

Despite that pessimism, about three-quarters of the editors who took part said they would have serious objections to accepting direct support from either the government or interest groups, and a similar number said their organizations had not seriously thought about taking donations from nonprofit groups.

In an era of shrinking newsrooms, 58 percent of the editors said journalism was headed in the wrong direction. Sixty-two percent said the Internet had changed the profession’s fundamental values, with most citing a loosening of standards.

Yes, blame the internet's "loosening of standards." Blame Brad Friedman, who has worked tirelessly over the last decade to expose the chicanery that lies behind our voting apparatus. Blame Greg Palast, who exposes so much treachery in public life that no one in the U.S. will hire him. For that matter, blame Rachel Maddow, who while part of the mainstream media, does cogent analysis night after night using DEMONSTRABLE FACTS while people who analyze media think this:

...is the same as this:

Here's why Rachel Maddow is not "just like Glenn Beck"

We live in a media culture in which pulling stuff out of your paranoid, crazy ass is regarded as just as valid in terms of truth as actual facts. It started, really, with Ronald Reagan's talk about the welfare queen in the Cadillac, and came to true, horrific fruition with Dick Cheney's One Percent Doctrine -- that if there is a one percent chance that something COULD be true, you assume it is 100% true. This is what allows the insane street-corner-equivalent ravings of Glenn Beck to be taken seriously by too large a segment of the American population.

Conservatives like to paint the two left-of-center hosts on MSNBC as meaning that all of MSNBC is just like Fox News. You could make an argument about Keith Olbermann if you like, though for all his eminently parody-able bombast, he doesn't pull stuff out of his ass like painting capitalist John D. Rockefeller as commissioning Communist art for the buildings that bear his name.

Perhaps part of the reason the Olbermann/Maddow axis is regarded with such fear and loathing by the right is BECAUSE facts are their stock in trade. And perhaps the reason that even leftish outfits like SALON draw parallels is because of things like Keith Olbermann's tireless crusade to speak truth to idiocy about health care reform, truth which led to hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations for free health care fairs in districts whose representatives were opposed to universal health care. And because Rachel Maddow dares to debunk horseshit that has bamboozled the mainstream press -- horseshit like the highly-edited "ACORN tapes" that brought ACORN down based on lies and selective editing:

We know from Brad Friedman's refusal to let the right-wing lie-based jihad against minority citizens go just HOW badly the mainstream media failed in its coverage of this story, and its all-too-eager willingness to believe the story of a couple of white punks based on highly edited video -- editing that can be done now by a middle-school kid with a PC.

But as you watch the above video, note how Rachel acknowledges that individuals in individual ACORN offices MAY have committed some misdeeds -- misdeeds that have absolutely nothing to do with James O'Keefe's videos. And that is the difference between Rachel Maddow and Fox News, and the difference between the left and the right. We do NOT march in lockstep. We do NOT worship our leaders and demand absolute fealty to them. We scream with outrage when our leaders decide that assassination of American citizens is OK. They decide that going to war based on lies is OK.

But what Rachel proves here, as she does every night in the meticulously-researched news stories she covers, is that it is possible to have opinion-based journalism that is based on FACTS, not just crap you pull out of your ass because it whips your frothing minions into a frenzy. You will never in a million years see a left-leaning newsmaker appear on a Fox news program without being somehow ambushed by doublespeak and lies. Rachel is unfailingly polite to her conservative guests, even the odious Richard Cohen, the so-called "ex-gay therapist" -- a guy who stands in opposition to her very being. Perhaps this politeness combined with a ferocious intellect and ability to decontstruct and demolish even the most carefully constructed fallacy is the reason for the fear and loathing of her from the right.

Whatever they call her, she practices real, legitimate journalism -- which is more than one can say for even the much-respected New York Times coverage of James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles.

The L Word

Rachel Maddow has had enough of Scott Brown trying to wrest money from potential donors based on lies about her nonexistent political aspirations, which seem to exist only in Scott Brown's mind:

This episode in Republican delusionality demonstrates clearly the Republican Doctrine: That something doesn't have to be true, you simply have to get it Out There, and if it could be true, it's the same as if it is. It's Dick Cheney's One Percent Doctrine, translated from actual war to political war. And it is now standard Republican boilerplate.

If we weren't living in an insane world, I'd almost think that Brown and Maddow were in cahoots, that both of them get good publicity from this. But we already know enough about Scott Brown, and about the Republican Party, to know that if they have to lie about the Threat of the Big Scary Lesbian in order to bring in the bucks, they'll do it. Yes, they're that cynical.

Cheer up, Rachel. It could be worse. You could be Raj Patel. Share International is now advertising on Countdown.

Yeah. Because Rachel Maddow is such a rubber stamp for the Democratic hackocracy

Wow. Health care reform is only a day old and already Scott Brown's brow is sweating:

Don't forget to read the crawl at the bottom of the screen. It's hilarious.

When frogs don't start falling from the sky, even the teabaggers will have to calm down

Well, not all of them. But when all the Medicare recipients who have been screaming "Keep the government out of my Medicare!" at rallies start getting $250 rebate checks as part of closing the prescription drug "doughnut hole", and see other immediate benefits as outlined by Rachel Maddow last night...

...the bellowing of John ManTan Boehner on the floor of the House the other night is going to look pretty damn ludicrous. Because this fall, the Republicans are going to have to run on the freedom of insurance companies to make absurd profits by refusing to cover your future pregnancies if you've ever been pregnant before, dropping you if you get sick, and raising your premiums by 40% a year.

Somehow that doesn't strike me as a winning platform. And as for John McCain, a clip of whom is shown in the segment above, is unlikely to be able to do anything to repeal it, because it looks increasingly likely that no matter how much he panders to the Ranks of the Stoopid in Arizona, he's going to get his clock cleaned by one of them in the primary.

I Do, However....

...care what Rachel Maddow has to say, and I love that she appeared in a segment on her own show getting her Dork on:

Because when you are as awesome as Rachel Maddow is, you can do that.

Rachel Maddow eviscerates Dick Cheney

THIS is why Rachel is the best in an industry where far too many so-called "journalists" do nothing but fellate Republicans:

If only Barack Obama had the balls to renege on his apparent deal to not prosecute the Bush/Cheney junta

With Dick Cheney emerging from his hidey-hold to call Barack Obama a pussy and a Threat to America, it would seem to be time to declare that all previous agreements to not look backwards are off, and that it's full speed ahead on investigation of the crimes of George W. Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney.

Especially now that it's pretty clear that the Bush Administration's torture tactics were NOT for the purpose of stopping a potential terrorist attack, but were instead used to further the aim of ginning up a phony Iraq/Al Qaeda link to justify their dick-waving war in Iraq.

As usual, only Rachel Maddow has the guts to report the truth:

I know that we have a great many problems to deal with in this country. But if you think that any of the potential Republican hopefuls for 2012 aren't looking at the Bushcheney tactics and thinking "I'd like to do that", guess again.

Of course, I'm not necessarily convinced that Barack Obama hasn't embraced them as well.

So if you want to know what makes a 23-year-old from a privileged background decide to sign up with jihadists, perhaps it's because the leaders of the country the jihadists want to attack decided it was perfectly OK to use torture to gin up a phony case for war against a country that did nothing to us.

Woman of the Year

I don't know how Rachel managed to retain any composure at all talking to this guy:

You see, MSNBC is NOT just like Fox News. At MSNBC, they confront the opposition with reality, not crap they pull out of their asses. Especially when the opposition DOES just pull crap out of their ass.

In case you're not familiar with Richard Cohen, check out this CNN segment from 2006:

(If you live in New Jersey, contact your legislators and let them know that you realize that gay marriage doesn't mean the apocalypse is nigh. Garden State Equality makes it easy.

Once again, when a Republican bashes the left, he's actually projecting

Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann discuss The Man Who Spawned the Worst President Ever's description of them as "sick puppies".

Keith Olbermann is exactly right: This is the man whose media operatives created Willie Horton. This is the man who hired Lee Atwater, without whom Karl Rove would not exist. And he's equating Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann stating FACTS in a snarky way with Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh pulling stuff out of their asses?