progressive politics and regressive entertainment. like peanut and butter.
September 28, 2012 3 Comments
Have you seen how well President Obama is doing in the polls, historically speaking? Have you seen how Republican media outlets such as Fox News have argued that the polls are skewed? Yesterday, Stephen Colbert gave a comedic rundown of the conservative takes on polls.
September 10, 2012 1 Comment
It’s difficult for actual activist progressives to get a show on the teevee. MSNBC kind of backed into backing progressives when the sports guy they hired, Keith Olbermann, turned out to be critical of George Bush. Who knew? It was back when the traditional media was trying to cover for Bush, so Olbermann got a lot of attention for speaking out. I still think of him more as an outraged moderate than an activist progressive. Like Jon Stewart, Olbermann was prompted to start pillorying conservatives when they turned away from all common sense.
But Rachel Maddow is a bona fide progressive, for whom the cause has always come first, before sports or comedy…although humor is one of her strengths. You can see it in this short clip of Ed Schultz congratulating her on her show starting its fifth year. (It debuted on September 8, 2008.) Sure, Schultz’s Eastwood impression isn’t that great, but who cares, as Maddow makes it fun to talk about politics and fight for what’s right.
Thanks to Maddow and new pundits like Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris-Perry, there’s an actual liberal media out there.
SEE ALSO
ThinkWing Radio with Mike Honig: Rachel Maddow Masterpiece Theater: She schools the Koch Bros. [VIDEO]
Quai Franklin Radio: GOP Adds War on Voting to Party Platform – Rachel Maddow – Air Date 8-21-12
August 31, 2012 4 Comments
RACHEL MADDOW: That was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen at a political convention in my entire life.
And in case you missed the original, ThinkProgress compiled a highlight reel…
August 31, 2012 5 Comments
THE DAILY SHOW: A party too patriotic for facts. A candidate too successful for taxes. A city where flip-flops are evening wear. From Tampa, Florida, this is the Republican National Convention: the Road to Jeb Bush 2016.
August 17, 2012 2 Comments
Most of the traditional press likes to avoid strenuous activities such as research. After all, how could CNN be bothered to “look up” such trivial things as “facts” and “the historical record” when they’re busy figuring out to give their talking heads some substance by turning them into holograms?
August 15, 2012 1 Comment
From Up With Chris Hayes, here’s the lowdown on where Paul Ryan stands with deficit spending. Of course, the fact that Ryan wants to cut assistance to the poor is somehow a sign that he’s fiscally responsible, because baby angels smile when only the wealthy have health care.
August 14, 2012 5 Comments
Look, Ryan hasn’t “crunched the numbers”; he has just scribbled some stuff down, without checking at all to see if it makes sense. He asserts that he can cut taxes without net loss of revenue by closing unspecified loopholes; he asserts that he can cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge, without saying how; he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work. This is just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal.
- Paul Krugman on his blog (August 13, 2012)
August 7, 2012 10 Comments
The modern Republican Party is built on a bedrock of racism. Most political observers know about the Southern Strategy. In 1964, Barry Goldwater and the Republican Party began using “states’ rights” as a code word for their anti-black and anti-voting rights strategy to win the Southern states away from the Democratic Party. Nearly 50 years later, the Republican Party is still attacking voter rights in their attempts to suppress minority voting.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan kick-started his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, with a speech about states’ rights. Philadelphia is where Civil Rights activists Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were killed in 1964. Reagan also created imaginary Welfare Queens to infuriate white voters with this idea of black women somehow getting a free ride in this country. In 1988, the infamous Willie Horton ad made fear of black criminals a mainstay of George Herbert Walker Bush’s presidential campaign.
Now Mitt Romney is using “obvious dog whistle racism” to attack Barack Obama, lying that Obama is dismantling Welfare to Work, and we should not be surprised. Melissa Harris-Perry joins Rachel Maddow to discuss this and rightfully includes Bill Clinton in the history of this Republican-created racist strategy. For the Republicans, racism has been a mainstay of their presidential campaigns for the past half century. When might it ever stop?
SEE ALSO
Northup News: Romney’s racism isn’t even original
3ChicsPolitico: Mitt Romney’s False Welfare Attack Shows He Lacks The Principles We Need In A PRESIDENT
August 6, 2012 5 Comments
Ohio Republicans, like Fox News, are vocal opponents of democracy when it means actual democracy (enabling people to vote) rather than their version of democracy (allowing rich white males to vote). Hence the conservatives’ attempts to suppress the vote, including a move to restrict in-person early voting.
Ed Schultz is joined by former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland to discuss how Mitt Romney is attempting to spin the Democrats’ lawsuit to restore these rights as an attack on patriotism, soldiers, and patriotic soldiering apple pies. Schultz starts off his report on the situation by saying…
SCHULTZ: Once again, Mitt Romney doesn’t have the facts.
…but I disagree. Romney has all the facts. He just don’t care.
August 2, 2012 2 Comments
The Rachel Maddow Show addresses Ohio Republicans cutting down on access to voting in that state, including reducing early voting by three days. Maddow is joined by Michael Waldman from the Brennan Center for Justice. They discuss the conservative fight against democracy. My worry is that even if courts strike down these voter suppression tactics, Republicans win anyway by intimidating and confusing voters.
Funny that conservatives don’t seem to be bothered by lengthy lines to vote and other obstructions to democracy. One might even be tempted to think that their concern for spreading democracy abroad was a front for corporate acquisition of material wealth and that their concern for voting IDs at home was a front for making it harder for minorities and Democratic-leaning voters to get to the polls. Democracy not as a value, but as a means for the acquisition of power…
July 22, 2012 1 Comment
On the Melissa Harris-Perry Show yesterday, the panel discussed how we went from being a society in which assault weapons were banned into one where we can’t even have a discussion about where to draw the line in what sort of weaponry can be owned by the public. I very much agree with Dorian Warren of Columbia University.
WARREN: When you have military-level fire power in civilian hands, this is what happens. This is the inevitable outcome and it will happen again and again and again unless we want to make a distinction and say we have a value around certain kinds of guns in society that nobody needs.
July 16, 2012 Leave a comment
HARRY REID: If this flood of outside money continues, the day after the election, seventeen angry old white men will wake up and realize they just bought the country. That’s a sad commentary. About 60% or more of these outside dollars is coming from these seventeen people.
RACHEL MADDOW: Our nation is being sold to a few billionaires.
Indeed.
Despite all the shrill lip service they pay to the Constitution and its magical superpowers, the Republican Party just isn’t that into democracy. Witness A is all of the Republican voter suppression efforts. Witness B is the Republican efforts to prevent you from knowing just who is buying the election.
