Readers of this blog know that I've been a big booster of progressive talk radio ever since March 31, 2004, when an unemployed Mr. Brilliant sat in his man cave at noon-oh-six to hear the first words out of Al Franken's mouth on the very first O'Franken Factor on the new Air America Radio's New York affiliate, WLIB. The next day we discovered the great Morning Sedition, and for a few brief and wondrous months, there was nonstop progressive talk radio in New York City. We all know about the financing fiasco, with Evan Cohen turning out to be a crook, and general mismanagement by just about all involved.

Air America burned brightly on the airwaves for a very short time, and then crashed and burned with the help of some of the most astonishingly bad upper management not named "Carly Fiorina." From The Lionel Show to The Satellite Sisters to Springer on the Radio, the name Air America is now remembered only for schlocky programming and ineptitude. But in its heyday, when one could sit with the dial or button tuned to WLIB from 6 AM, when Morning Sedition came on with Marc Maron exhorting, "Good morning, geniuses...philosopher kings and queens...working class heroes...progressive utopians with no sense of humor..." until one went to sleep at night, there was something brilliant happening out there in the airwaves, something that promised to be a very real alternative to the bellowings of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Mark Levin and Michael Savage and the other hatemongers of right-wing talk. One of its rising stars was a young broadcaster from Massachusetts who had a show with Chuck D and Lizz Winstead. Her name was Rachel Maddow. You may have heard of her.

I was no stranger to prog-talk. I'd stumbled upon the IE America stream about a year or so earlier, when I'd listen to Mike Malloy and Randi Rhodes and the few other voices of progressive talk out there. But to have them right there for the taking on terrestrial radio was like finding an oasis in a desert. But in 2006, the contract with WLIB ended, the station went "praise and inspiration" and Air America moved from its 1190 spot on the AM dial, to the much weaker signal of WWRL at 1600, where after 5 PM you can't hear a thing out here in the hinterlands of New Jersey. And that was the beginning of the end for Air America. Today, WWRL has up until now been a home for the last vestiges of talk radio, with the intrepid Mark Riley, late of Morning Sedition fame, running a polyglot call-in show mixing local issues with national ones; syndication of Ed Schultz, Thom Hartmann, and Randi Rhodes in between African-American interest broadcasting and infomercials for nutritional supplements.

But as of the end of the year, these last traces of prog-talk will be gone, as WWRL is going Spanish. Aside from the final nail in the coffin of prog-talk on AM radio in New York, this now means that there are basically only three genres on terrestrial AM radio now: Spanish, sports talk, and news, plus the AM public radio affiliate, just to make you think you have a choice. It may be that the last generation of AM radio listeners is dying out, and future generations will be all about internet radio, which could give podcasters like Air America veteran Sam Seder a larger voice (at no pay other than donations). But there is a loss when the most accessible PUBLIC airwaves only feature one point of view, and it is one of nonstop hate shouted by people with no sense of obligation to reality.

Before Air America began, my afternoon drive time choice was an odd one, and it was on the home of wingnut talk in New York, WABC. At afternoon drive time, the soft-spoken, mainstream liberal, Richard Bey (known best for a trash-TV show in the 1980s) went head-to-head with hysterical right-winger Steve Malzberg. It was engaging programming which gave me the opportunity to yell at the radio and work off the frustrations of the day. Bey was fired in 2003 for opposing the Iraq War and hasn't worked steadily in radio since. Today is his last day subbing for Mark Riley from 6-9 AM. You might want to give him a listen.

Oh, there are those who will say that there's still liberal radio, after all there's NPR (largely corporate-funded, and increasingly showing it), and WBAI, the endlessly-struggling Pacifica station. But Pacifica has always seemed kind of stuck in 1968 and its impotent sloganeering has long since grown tiresome. The early Air America programming was lively, if uneven, and had the gonzo energy of pirate radio, a sense of fun, of "Hey, kids, let's put on a radio show!", of throwing shit up against the wall to see what sticks. It was exhilirating and infuriating and perfect for the Bush years. Maybe as the Bush years settled into the perennial disappointment of the Obama years, we all just grew tired of the whole thing, tired of fighting a battle in which our own side couldn't be bothered to join us, instead preferring to take the scraps from the Koch brothers' table after the Republicans got done gorging themselves. Or maybe because unlike the right, we just don't draw our life energy from rage and fear and loathing 24 hours a day. What I do know is that as of January 1, New York will have its most progressive mayor in a generation, and no real radio voice for those who want to support him. WBAI is still going to be focused on freeing Mumia, the sports talkers will be screeching about how awful the Knicks are, and you'll be able to hear all the salsa you want.

Elvis Costello was on to something back in 1977 when he defied Lorne Michaels and insisted on playing his scathing ode to corporate radio on Saturday Night Live:

Labels: Air America, Morning Sedition, Rachel Maddow, talk radio

I don't know what goes on in the rural South, in the areas that were represented by Jim DeMint and by people who think Ralph Reed should be the moral arbiter for anyone. But as far back as when I was a volunteer at Planned Parenthood back in 1976-77 in Easton, Pennsylvania, even the woman who came to the clinic, found she was six month pregnant, and had no idea because she wasn't showing and had continued to menstruate, knew what pregnancy meant. Most women know that pregnancy is something that if carried to term, results in a baby.

For me, the most revolting part of the white Republican male attempt to control the reproductive systems of every woman in the country is this idea that women are so stupid that they don't know what pregnancy means. These men seem to think that unless women are forced to carry a pregnancy to term, or be vaginally raped by the state with a foreign object and forced to hear a heartbeat, they won't know that pregnancy results in a baby. Maybe they think women believe a pregnancy is some kind of tumor that gets kissed with fairy dust and becomes a baby; I just don't know. But all this talk about women wanting the OPPORTUNITY to get a forced vaginal ultrasound by the state is less about the idea that the state can take over a woman's uterus, and more about what these men think of America's women.

Rachel Maddow pointed this out to Jim DeMint and Ralph Reed this morning on Press the Meat. I doubt she made them think at all, these men after all have no mind except the one that repeats over and over to them, "I HAVE A SMALL PENIS I HAVE A SMALL PENIS I HAVE A SMALL PENIS MUST OPPRESS WOMEN BECAUSE I HAVE A SMALL PENIS". But I just hope that women all across this country felt as patronized as I did watching this, and remember it in 2014, 2016, and beyond:



(h/t: Egberto Willies)

Labels: abortion, batshit crazies, condescending assholes, Rachel Maddow, reproductive rights, The Republican War on Women

I don't usually watch the troika of Sunday morning network gasbag shows. You know the ones I'm talking about -- the ones hosted by fossilized friends of the Bush family, craven ex-Clintonites trying to prove their moderatism, and Karl Rove's dancing partner. There is rarely anything substantive to these shows; they are an endless weekly repetition of the same old crap dished out by the same old (usually Republican) guest, followed by a discussion by Beltway hacks who stopped being relevant around the time George Herbert Walker Bush was astounded by a supermarket scanner.

It isn't that women aren't represented on these shows, it's that only a certain TYPE of woman is welcome. That woman is soft-spoken, tends to listen attentively and nod her head at what the menfolk are saying, and rarely has a contradictory opinion. She is well-coiffed, often with the Sally Quinn Pageboy Hairdo. She is Doris Kearns Goodwin and Peggy Noonan's Heart Will Go On For Ronald Reagan In Perpetuity. They are giddy fangirl Margaret Carlson and the plasticine face of what used to be Katty Kay. She is Donna Brazile only because with Donna you get a twofer token -- a black female who is one micrometer to the left of the semi-loony right that now passes as the center. Perennial girly-girl Arianna Huffington is welcome now that she's become a quasi-conservative again, and while some of these women are livelier than others, no woman is ever allowed on these shows who might tell these people that they are full of shit.

Except on the rare occasions when Rachel Maddow is on Meet the Press.

I deigned to watch the roundtable discussion on David Gregory's excreble weekly exercise in cocktail-weenie hackery yesterday, as I was doing some extremely repetitive work on The Project From Hell, because I wanted to see what Rachel Maddow had to say. And that is when it struck me just how smug and misogynistic the men on these shows are. Most people who read this blog probably either watch The Rachel Maddow Show or at least have a passing familiarity with her. Rachel is passionate without being mean, and she doesnt' just pull stuff out of her ass. But how she got through yesterday's show without going back to the green room and putting her fist through a wall, I have no idea.

If I had been in her shoes, and had this exchange with National Review's Rich Lowry, I would probably be in jail right now for throttling him:



Rich Lowry. Why is this man's opinion even regarded as something people should hear? After all, this is the man who wrote this after the 2008 Vice Presidential debate:

I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me.” And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.

I'm sorry, but a man who doesn't know that the person he sees on a TV screen isn't actually sitting behind the glass has no business being taken seriously in punditry.

But this is the typical way that men on these shows have of silencing women (and there really IS only one ) who dare to contradict them. Every time Rachel Maddow is on a show where there is a Republican, she is filibustered by them -- and the male hosts always, always let it happen. It doesn't even matter what the political leaning of the host is, if the host is male, they seem to think silencing a woman by filibustering is perfectly OK. Watch this clip from Real Time With Bill Maher to see what I mean:



Of course Maher, despite the fact that he's largely on our side, is, in fact, a sexist pig. So I guess we should expect this. But if a show is supposed to be about "discussion", it would be nice if they would allow women to actually participate in the discussion instead of sit quietly and look nice and only be allowed to speak when they agree with the Republican men.

Labels: hack journalism, misogyny, Rachel Maddow, sexism

And it was Peter Tork who reached out to the Rachel Maddow show, not the other way around:



Peter Tork is 70. How old do YOU feel now?

Labels: obituaries, pop culture, Rachel Maddow

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 Joe 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.

Labels: Chris Hayes, punditry, Rachel Maddow, smart people

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)

Labels: America Gone Mad, Big Blue Smurf Blogging, Cenk Uygur, Ed Schultz, Keith Olbermann, Lawrence O'Donnell, Rachel Maddow, Real Time with Bill Maher, Roger Ebert, Sam Seder

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)

Labels: pop culture, Rachel Maddow

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.

Labels: Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow

Labels: Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, sheer awesomeness

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.

Labels: Rachel Maddow, real journalism

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."

Labels: cowardice, President Barack Obama, Rachel Maddow, right-wing hatemongers, wussy-ass Democrats

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)

Labels: Rachel Maddow

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.

Labels: Greedy Republican Bastards, heartlessness, Rachel Maddow, right-wing hatemongers, scumbaggery, unemployment

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.

Labels: blind cheerleading, Daily Kos, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow

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:

Labels: Glenn Beck, hack journalism, Rachel Maddow, real journalism

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.

Labels: ACORN, Rachel Maddow, real journalism

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.

Labels: Rachel Maddow, Republican lies, Scott Brown

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.

Labels: humor, Rachel Maddow

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.

Labels: American Idiots, health care, House Republicans, Rachel Maddow

...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.

Labels: Rachel Maddow