Rachel Maddow on the John McCain Agenda

November 29, 2012 by 4 Comments

On last night’s show, Rachel Maddow took a look at the war being waged by John McCain and a few allies against the potential nomination of United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice for the position of Secretary of State.

McCain, who appears to spend most of his time as a Fox News talking head, has questions, and as you would expect, Maddow does an excellent job providing answers.

MCCAIN: Who changed the talking points that was used by Ambassador Rice?

MADDOW: The intelligence agencies acknowledged last week that they were the ones who changed the talking points.

Here’s a link to where Maddow was getting some of this publicly available information.

MCCAIN: Why was references to Al Qaeda left out?

Here, Maddow quotes the Associated Press, reporting on the testimony by David Patraeus.

AP: “…a reason the references to al-Qaida were deleted was that the information came from classified sources and the links were, and still are, tenuous.”

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Friday Night Charts & Graphs – U.S. Budget Deficit By Year

November 23, 2012 by Leave a comment

On her Wednesday show, Rachel Maddow highlighted this chart by Steve Benen. As Democrats and Republicans look into cutting our social spending in order to reduce the deficit, it’s helpful to remember that the national deficit is not going up. It’s going down. So can someone remind me again why we are panicking about non-existent problems with Social Security? It doesn’t have anything to do with the private sector wanting all of that public money, does it?

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Wednesday Night Video – Rachel Maddow Visits David Letterman for Post-Debate Discussion

October 24, 2012 by 1 Comment

Rachel Maddow visited the self-described “sixty-five year old male voter” David Letterman last night. Topics included Maddow explaining how Romney’s plan for the auto industry was to rely upon non-existent private funding, how Ted Kennedy put together RomneyCare, and how Romney relied upon hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funding for the Salt Lake Olympics in 2002. Extras included a visual contradiction of Romney’s claim that Syria is Iran’s path to the sea, and Letterman going off on the lack of discussion of global warming and gun control.

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Quote of the Day: Howard Stern Praises Rachel Maddow

October 12, 2012 by 5 Comments

I was watching MSNBC. That Rachel Maddow is fabulous. I mean, what a wealth of information she has! I guess they have writers on that show. Could she possibly know everything in the world about politics and government? I’d like to see her debate, like, Bill O’Reilly. Bill O’Reilly’s all crowing about debating Jon Stewart, who’s a comedian, who happens to be pretty knowledgeable himself, but I don’t think Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly would debate Rachel Maddow. She knows too much. She knows too much.

- Howard Stern on his radio show (October 9, 2012)

SEE ALSO
Polentical: Rachel Maddow Visits Howard Stern

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Monday Night Video – Belated Happy Birthday, The Rachel Maddow Show!

September 10, 2012 by 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

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Friday Night Video – Rachel Maddow’s Reaction to Clint Eastwood’s Senior Moments

August 31, 2012 by 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…

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We Already Know That Mitt Romney Lied About His Tax Returns

August 17, 2012 by 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?

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Tuesday Night Video – Rachel Maddow on Republican Racism

August 7, 2012 by 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

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Thursday Night Video – The Rachel Maddow Show on Voting Rights

August 2, 2012 by 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…

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Monday Night Video – The Rachel Maddow Show Talks to Jon Tester About Open Democracy

July 16, 2012 by 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.

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Thursday Night Video – Rachel Maddow on Mitt Romney’s Bain Lies

July 12, 2012 by Leave a comment

Earlier tonight Rachel Maddow spoke with Boston Globe DC bureau chief Christopher Rowland about Mitt Romney’s attempt to claim he wasn’t working at Bain Capital when he was still their CEO and sole stockholder. The fact that Mitt Romney lies without qualm is no longer news, but this is an important issue because for years he has been trying to run away from Bain’s record of destroying jobs. I would like to point out that there actually is some consistency when it comes to Romney. He seems to have a spine when it comes to the moneyed elite. That’s his prime constituency, then and now. Romney is as insufferable as his “Is there a VIP entrance?” supporters, and I would bet that he doesn’t care about his lying as he simply doesn’t believe that people such as himself should follow the rules. Only I’m not a wealthy man, so my bet would have to be $10, not $10,000.

Note that many of Romney’s SEC filings contradicting his public statements were originally unearthed by David Corn at Mother Jones and Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.

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Wednesday Night Video – Mitt Likes Dick

July 11, 2012 by Leave a comment

On the Rachel Maddow Show tonight, Maddow highlighted the overlap between Mitt Romney’s policies and policy advisers with the Bush/Cheney administration. She introduced the segment with a list of economic facts that should be repeated frequently. Loudly. During the George W. Bush years…
…the unemployment rate went from just over 4% to just under 8%
…the budget surplus went from $236 billion to -$1.4 trillion
… poverty went up
…the uninsured rose

Conservative economics has been tried. It doesn’t work. The reason why the recovery has lagged is because many elements of the conservative economic plan has been retained, including massive deficit spending fueled by military spending and tax cuts for the elite. Mitt Romney’s planned fundraiser on Thursday with Dick Cheney is emblematic of Romney’s desire to repeat this recent past.

Maddow also gets extra points for her pointed takedown of the Washington Post transcribing Mitt Romney spin, rather than engaging in, you know, journalism. Your liberal media, not at work…

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