Bill Maher On Rachel Maddow

Bill talks about Mormonism and how it stacks up to the other fantasies called religions.

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A Pineapple Under the Sea

Rachel gets schooled by 6 year olds. I knew she was wrong because I have a granddaughter.

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Rachel Maddow

Rachel states it very clearly: most Americans are Democrats even if they don't know it. the problem is that the Democrats have no idea how to communicate to anybody what they are all about. They are FOR all of us, the bottom 99% of the US population, while the Republicans are for that very rich 1% of Americans and for corporations. But they have managed to trick large portions of the populations into voting Republican.

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What Obama Has Done

He's been busy, Rachel Maddow goes over the list and it's impressive. A lot of progressives are upset because of the things he didn't do and seem to forget what he has done. Even something as simple as removing the ban on stem cell research shows why we need a Democratic president over a Republican one. Obama didn't put the public option in the new health care bill, which is serious but no one has been able to do as much since Johnson passed Medicare back in 1964. Yes, there have been disappointments but I'm not sure any other president could have done more under the circumstances.

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Fake President

Tonight Rachel Maddow decided to give the speech she really wanted President Obama to give last night. All I can say is - too bad Rachel isn't our actual president.

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Howard Fineman

This video is from the Rachel Maddow Show. It's notable because of the emotion from Fineman when discussing Obama. He clearly is angry and disappointed at Obama's shortcomings as a politician.

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Yemen

Rachel Maddow and Richard Engel give a clear view of Yemen:

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Rachel re: Bob Graham

Nancy Pelosi says the CIA lied to her about waterboardeing and didn't tell her about it. Enter former Florida Senator Bob Graham, who also says he wasn't told about it at around the same time. And it turns out that 3 of the 4 meetings the CIA said they had with Graham didn't actually happen. How do we know this? Bob's got notebooks, lots and lots of little spiral notebooks. It's better to let Rachel take it from here because everything works better with pictures.

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The Paul Krugman Rock Song

Who else but Rachel Maddow would find the guy who wrote Paul Krugman his own theme song?

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Rachel Explains EFCA

Rachel Maddow keeps proving she can explain things with precision and simple clarity. Nor is she afraid to call anyone a liar when they are lying. She explains what EFCA is and what happens at a business when someone wants to start a union, and how the Republicans are lying through their teeth in their desperation to stop the bill.

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BULL PUCKEY!

Rachel Maddow's TV show is getting better all the time. She has now developed this commentary with her unique touch. Basically is what she is doing is showing what everyone - including the media - is saying about something then giving the REAL facts. You know, the way the news media USED to be. With this one she nails the Republicans for the lying sacks of bullshit they really are. They don't care about the country or Americans, all they care about is their own careers, their political party and the wealthy elite, in that order. Rachel gives some real facts on how they are trying to sabotage the presidents stimulous package because - like Rush Limbaugh - they want to see Obama fail. If he doesn't fail and improves the economy that means pretty much the end of the Republican party. So they put their own self interest above the nation, they WANT people to get fired and for the economy to continue downhill, even though real Americans will suffer because of it. But watch Rachel's video below, she puts in in such a way as to prove beyond any doubt that this is what's happening.

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The New RNC Chairman

Is Michael Steele. I don't know a lot about him but I've seen him a couple of times on Bill Maher and disliked him immensely. He is also black. Melissa Harris-Lacewell is a guest on the Rachel Maddow show often and is always intelligent and lively. Yesterday was her best night. She said that the Republicans see Obama as being from Krypton and they needed some Kryptonite. So they went to the planet Blackman and got the guy they thought would be his nemesis. What a great line. Here is a video of it.

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Sen. Whitehouse

...of Rhode Island gave a powerful speech on the floor of the senate the day after Obama was sworn in as our new president. The full speech can be read at Rachel Maddows Blog and there is a link to a video of it. I very much encourage everyone to read and watch it, I just hope our new president rteads it as well. Even just reading a section of it has me shedding tears of anger.

Image via WikipediaSo when an administration rigs the intelligence process and produces false evidence to send our country to war;

When an administration descends to interrogation techniques of the Inquisition, of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge - descends to techniques that we have prosecuted as crimes in military tribunals and federal courts;

When institutions as noble as the Department of Justice and as vital as the Environmental Protection Agency are systematically and deliberately twisted from their missions by odious means of institutional sabotage;

When the integrity of our markets and the fiscal security of our budget are opened wide to the frenzied greed of corporations, speculators and contractors;

When the integrity of public officials; the warnings of science; the honesty of government procedures; and the careful historic balance of our separated powers of government, are all seen as obstacles to be overcome and not attributes to be celebrated;

When taxpayers are cheated, and the forces of government ride to the rescue of the cheaters and punish the whistleblowers;

When a government turns the guns of official secrecy against its own people to mislead, confuse and propagandize them;

When government ceases to even try to understand the complex topography of the difficult problems it is our very purpose and duty to solve, and instead cares only for these points where it intersects with the party ideology, so that the purpose of government becomes no longer to solve problems, but only to work them for political advantage;

In short, when you have pervasive infiltration into all the halls of government - judicial, legislative, and executive - of the most ignoble forms of influence; when you see systematic dismantling of historic processes and traditions of government that are the safeguards of our democracy; and when you have a bodyguard of lies, jargon, and propaganda emitted to fool and beguile the American people...

Well, something very serious in the history of our republic has gone wrong, something that dims the light of progress for all humanity.

As we look forward, as we begin the task of rebuilding this nation, we have an abiding duty to determine how great the damage is. I say this in no spirit of vindictiveness or revenge. I say it because the thing that was sullied is so, so precious; and I say it because the past bears upon the future. If people have been planted in government in violation of our civil service laws to serve their party and their ideology instead of serving the public, the past will bear upon the future. If procedures and institutions of government have been corrupted and are not put right, that past will assuredly bear on the future. In an ongoing enterprise like government, the door cannot be so conveniently closed on the closets of the past. The past always bears on the future.

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War Crimes

Keith Olbermann does another special commentary, this one on why Bush and everyone in his administration has to invvestigated and prosecuted in the Obama administration. On Rachel Maddow she talks to Jonathan Turley who says that if we don't charge Bush that he could get arrested if he travels abroad and we would be looked on as a rogue state.

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Competence

By now everyone has heard the story of the courageous pilot who set his plane down on the Hudson River without crashing the plane and allowing all 150 passengers to get off with only one serious casualty, one woman broke both her legs. It struck me almost immediately that this is a clear sign of the changing of an era, the Bush Era of Incompetence. With Bush leaving office and Obama about to come in it's as if all America has suddenly found their inner competence once again. That suddenly we know once again that we are what we have always been, a courageous, resourceful and competent nation, a nation of heroes when it's been demanded of us. In the Bush Era we were reduced to sniveling cowards who couldn't do anything right but that day is gone.

Rachel Maddow has an interesting take on this, that it took training and preparation, time and tax dollars, for everything to be in place that morning on the Hudson. It was an investment in ourselves, in our ability to be resourceful, in our desire to have on hand what we need in an emergency. This is something the Republicans have never understood, that money and training must be spent if we are to be other than helpless victims of circumstances.

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More On The Economy

Paul Krugman is my favorite economist because he is one of the few who doesn't have his head stuck up the rightwing a-hole. And he really is a well known and highly respected economist. Check out his bio at the NY Times from which this is just a small piece:

Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the Op-Ed Page and continues as professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Mr. Krugman received his B.A. from Yale University in 1974 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1977. He has taught at Yale, MIT and Stanford. At MIT he became the Ford International Professor of Economics.

He's a heavyweight in the field. And he said something today on the Rachel Maddow show that scared me and made me realize what I forgot to mention yesterday in my post on the economy; namely, that we could be heading for another Great Depression just as bad, if not worse as in 1932. This is something I've worried about for years because anyone who knows even a little bit about the economy and what the idiot Republicans were doing to it were worried. Another Great Depression is, of course, the worst of all possible outcomes so I always thought it wasn't too likely (I hoped). But Krugman said today that if the Fed hadn't bailed out AIG we might have been only days away for a GD. Days. This from his blog 2 days ago:

And there’s a lesson there for those ready to hear it: government takeovers may be the only way to get the financial system working again.

Some people have been making that argument for some time. Most recently, Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, and two other veterans of past financial crises published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal declaring that the only way to avoid “the mother of all credit contractions” is to create a new government agency to “buy up the troubled paper” — that is, to have taxpayers take over the bad assets created by the bursting of the housing and credit bubbles. Coming from Mr. Volcker, that proposal has serious credibility.

If everyone loses faith in the ability of banks to borrow money then the whole system comes crashing down because all credit will end which will bring most business to a halt and put all of us out of work. In 1932 they had an unemployment rate of 24%, we could see that again.

So what do we have going on here? We can now proudly proclaim ourselves a socialist country in the style of Europe. That's what Republicanism has done for us. But we aren't out of the woods yet. Krugman says he wants to know the details of what the the Fed, SEC and Congress are cooking up to see if it will do what it needs to do, and hopefully without the CEO's and stockholders of failed companies walking away with millions.

What the Media Doesn't Show You

Think we are seeing the real convention? No, we are seeing what the corporate media wants to show us, and this is true even of my favorites, MSNBC with Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. But let me remind everyone what a great source YouTube is for things like this. I was thinking last night how much I'd like to hear Dennis Kucinich speak but thought they wouldn't let him because those in charge of the Democrats are scared of him. I was also pissed that Keith and Matthews went on and on while I could see Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer speaking in the background with no sound. Well, here are both speeches.

Jonathan Turley

Rachel Maddow was hosting Countdown yesterday, my second favorite after Keith himself. She had Jonathan Turley on, the Constitutional law professor. He had some very emotional things to say about the FISA bill that will be voted on today.

The Ed Schultz Show!

This is progressive radio that isn't Air America. It's nice to know there are others out there, after all, Air America has almost gone out of business a couple of times.

Big Eddie's show comes on at noon out here on the west coast, although I have to tune in to a Seattle radio station online to hear him because the LA station doesn't have him until 7 PM.

I didn't like Ed too much at first, he makes one really bad first impression because he sounds so much like Rush Limbaugh. I've talked to others who say they can't listen to him for that reason alone and I have to admit it was disconcerting for a long time. Also, he didn't seem like much of a liberal to me. He says; "I’m just a fat, red-headed, white guy from the mid-west." Also an ex-football player and even an ex-Republican. It took his wife, Wendy, to get him on the liberal track, so I doubted his commitment to being a liberal, or progressive if you prefer.

But there was nothing else at noon except Randi Rhodes, and I really can't stand her. Over time he won me over. He proved he's a real progressive by the way he's talked about the issues, even didn't like Hillary all that much because she isn't liberal enough. He never said that directly but I picked that up after listening long enough. I have to say he and I are in exact agreement on all things political, and I'm a REAL left-wing liberal. Only thing he's gotten wrong is in his support for biofuels and his refusal to see the problem with them, especially with corn. But hey, nobody is perfect.

But he's funny and boisterous and does his show with a lot of energy, humor and conviction. He is also making the rounds on the TV news talk shows, though usually not the same ones as Rachel Maddow. He is on Larry King a lot and sometimes even on Fox. Like I said, no one is perfect. But he and Rachel were on a show together recently which was fun. Can't remember which one it was, though, either Dan Abrams or Dick Greogory.

But he is worth tuning into, he's my third favorite radio guy after Rachel and Thom Hartmann in the number 2 position. He will sound less like Rush Limbaugh the more you listen to him, I promise. You can find him online at wegoted.com

Rachel Maddow

Anyone who hasn't heard Rachel Maddow on Air America is really missing something. I think she is the best progressive radio personality out there, in or out of Air America (no, Air America does not have a monopoly on progressive talk radio).

She is very intelligent and gives very concise and on target analysis of just about any political situation out there. She's actually a doctor, but not that kind of doctor.

She shows up on Countdown with Keith Olbermann often (almost nightly these days) and is the most energetic and coherent of all his guests and all of them are the best in the business. And the reason for this post is to announce that she will host Countdown tomorrow, Friday the 4th. It will be her first time but I'm sure she will be the best guest host they've ever had.

Here's the biography from her web site:

Rachel has a doctorate in political science (she was a Rhodes Scholar) and a background in HIV/AIDS activism, prison reform, and other lefty rabblerousing.

She shakes a mean cocktail, drives a bright red pickup, hates Coldplay, loves arguing with conservatives, spends a lot of money on AMTRAK tickets, and dresses like a first-grader.

Rachel is a political analyst for MSNBC, and makes irregular appearances elsewhere on the TV machine -- including "The Today Show", "Good Morning America", CNN, LOGO, and other TV outlets. She's been with Air America since its inception in Spring 2004 -- before AAR she worked for WRNX in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and WRSI in Northampton, Massachusetts. There was also a stint with a jungle-themed company called Expresso Bongo [sic], but she doesn't want to talk about it.

Rachel is 34 years old and lives in New York City and rural Western Massachusetts with her partner, artist Susan Mikula.