Whether it's the departure of Keith Olbermann or the weakness of the new prime time lineup, the ratings at MSNBC are collapsing.Heh.
Take a look at how this so-called news network fared Thursday:
As you can see from the numbers published by TVNewser Friday, CNN beat MSNBC every hour throughout Thursday's extended prime time with the only exception being Lawrence O'Donnell at 8PM.
Yet even his numbers were nothing to brag about, for he has now slipped under Olbermann's typical average of roughly one million viewers. Rachel Maddow's numbers in the following hour are also well off her normal million, and Ed Shultz at 10PM is really stinking up the joint.
Another concern for MSNBC execs should be their network's loss to CNN all of those hours in the crucial demographic of folks aged 25 to 54. As that is a big determinant of advertising rates, Thursday's demo numbers were a disaster.
Most embarrassing for MSNBC has to be Cenk Uygur's performance at 6PM. Not only is he getting handily beaten by CNN's "Situation Room," but he's also almost getting quadrupled by Fox's "Special Report."
HBO's Bill Maher on Friday perfectly demonstrated liberal hypocrisy concerning how Democrat and Republican presidents should be treated by the media.Any wonder Elisabeth Hasselbeck questioned his manhood recently, talk about a small man with a serious Napoleon complex.
In a lengthy segment on HBO's "Real Time" about how "disrespectful" Bill O'Reilly was during his Super Bowl interview with Barack Obama, Maher castigated the Fox News host for his "unpatriotic" behavior moments before debasing former President George W. Bush for not being "aware of s--t".
If being patriotic means "not belittling your President," exactly what was that?
O'Reilly in Maher's view was "disrespectful" to Obama, but it was completely acceptable for the "Real Time" host to say Bush "wasn't aware of s--t." And nobody on Maher's production crew caught the glaring hypocrisy.
Boggles the mind, doesn't it?
In reality, this whole outrage of Maher's concerning O'Reilly's treatment of Obama is the height of hypocrisy.
Other than Keith Olbermann, likely no mainstream media member has shown more disrespect for George W. Bush than the "Real Time" host. For him to criticize anyone's treatment of an American President is the height of gall.
On Friday evening, Maher perfectly demonstrated that only Democrat presidents are deserving of respect.
A Republican?
He isn't "aware of s--t!"
Thanks for clearing that up, Bill
The idea of "gay conservative" is an oxymoron.Sad to watch so many in the GOP fall for this crap.
"Gay" is everything that "conservative" is not.
The foundation of the worldview that so-called "gay conservatives" embrace has far more in common with liberalism than with conservatism.
It's a worldview that is man-centered rather than God-centered. It is a worldview that rejects eternal truths passed on from the beginning of time. Although the worldview that "gay conservatives" choose to invent may diverge from the worldview of liberals, their common ground is they make it all up.
And it is here where "gay conservatives" and "liberals" fundamentally depart from conservatives.
Conservatives believe that there are objective and eternal truths, not of the product of any individual human mind, that are transmitted through the generations. Culture is not like HDTV or iPhones where the newest model is the best.
These eternal truths provide the light in the fog that keeps us from crashing on the rocky shores where our base instincts lead us.
"Gay" is liberal, not conservative, regardless of what their stand may be on government spending or taxes.
This year’s Super Bowl ads appear to have packed a particularly potent outrage punch. After the news cycle propagated the distaste against the website Groupon for making light of the political situation in Tibet, the response of Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee to a Pepsi commercial starring a black couple has put the ad in the spotlight. Tonight, Bill O’Reilly welcomed a panel to help him comprehend just what about the depiction of the jealous couple had allegedly nasty racial overtones.Honestly, I can see why black women in general would be p.o.'d about this ad, it certainly caters to Angry Black Woman stereotypes.
The ad, called out for its racism by both Rep. Jackson Lee and, in a far more convoluted argument potentially even more offensive than the ad itself, Rush Limbaugh, depicts a black couple fighting over the boyfriend’s wandering eyes, resulting in personal injury for the white woman he was caught admiring. Rep. Jackson Lee noted with outrage on the House floor in response to the ad that, especially in light of Black History Month, she found the crude stereotypes in the ad “demeaning,” “ridiculous,” and all-around repulsive.
O’Reilly initially conceded that something about the violence between the couple could certainly offend, but was out to find whether the race element merited being considered “valid beef.” To him, he told guests Deneen Borelli and Dr. Imani Perry, “the jealousy crosses all races,” and that the couple was black should not have had an impact on the reaction to the ad. Borelli agreed, noting that Super Bowl ads were “traditionally edgy” and that, more concerning than the ad was the fact that members of Congress were arguing over its content. “The voters did not elect [Rep. Jackson Lee] to be monitoring commercials,” she quipped.
Dr. Perry was far more skeptical of the impact of the ad, arguing that it “draws on old stereotypes of African American women as…battle-axes,” while displaying the man as “lecherous” towards the “white female jogger, who is a sex object.” O’Reilly continued to challenge Perry on this point, arguing, in essence, that the people in the ad were ultimately Americans, such that the race element should not have become an issue, though Perry refuses to concede on this argument.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has stepped down and handed control of the country to the military, Vice President Omar Suleiman said Friday in an address on state television.
The announcement touched off a wave of jubilation throughout Cairo's Tehrir Square, where tens of thousands of anti-government protesters had gathered demanding Mubarak's ouster hours after he failed to do so in an address on Thursday.
"In these difficult circumstances that the country is passing through, President Hosni Mubarak has decided to leave the position of the presidency," Suleiman said. He has commissioned the armed forces council to direct the issues of the state."
Mubarak had sought to cling to power, handing some of his authorities to Suleiman while keeping his title. But an explosion of protests Friday rejecting the move appeared to have pushed the military into forcing him out completely. Hundreds of thousands marched throughout the day in cities across the country as soldiers stood by, besieging his palace in Cairo and Alexandria and the state TV building.
Nobel Peace laureate and leading Egyptian democracy advocate Mohamed ElBaradei applauded Mubarak's resignation.
"This is the greatest day of my life," he told the Associated Press. "The country has been liberated after decades of repression."
Last December, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow visited David Letterman to discuss, among other things, Fox News – what would a pundit have to discuss, after all, if not a rival news network?
When asked by Letterman about network bias, Maddow responded that “I of course think [MSNBC] is much more true than Fox is true,” pointing out that Fox News had reported, multiple times, that “the New Black Panther Party decided the election for Barack Obama.”
A bold claim. So bold, in fact, that it prompted PolitiFact – “a project of the St. Petersburg Times to help you find the truth in politics” – to investigate her claim. After combing through transcripts from the network, it found that, rather than make the sweeping statement that the Party “elected” Obama, Fox News instead reported on “the legal side of the story and whether other media outlets were derelict in not giving it enough attention.”
Last night Rachel Maddow drew a stark comparison between the confident post-midterm rhetoric of a recently victorious GOP — who repeatedly averred “no compromise” to anyone that would listen — to the recent willingness to find common ground with the Obama administration. Maddow explained the many reasons behind the alleged 180 degree turn-around, namely that GOP House leadership “metaphorically punched themselves in the face so hard, they hurt no just their face, but also their hand,” before running down what she sees as numerous political missteps.
The missteps include the reading of the Constitution on the House floor (excepting the parts that they didn’t like or where pages where stuck together); the constitutional crisis of having to swear in to Republican members of the House who oddly took the oath in front of a television instead of the official swearing in; the dueling state of the union responses from Michele BachmannPaul Ryan; and the alleged proposal to raise taxes over Abortions. What follows in the pretty damning segment is Maddow surgically adding injury to insult, summing up by claiming that “the Republicans today don’t seem to be off message, they appear to be at war with themselves.” and
She then had on the former RNC Chair (and surprisingly new Maddow BFF) Michael Steele who seemed to claim that he predicted the challenges with governance that the MSNBC host had just laid out so reasonably, and yes some would say, lopsidedly. But interestingly, Steele didn’t seem to argue with the lopsided or biased presentation, rather he was quick to point out just how correct Maddow’s tough assessment was.
What do we really learn from this segment? As Steele points out, its very hard to play the role of leader in today’s political climate, and very easy to list all the missteps of leading political class by those in the opinion media game (see Jon Stewart during the Bush era and/or Fox News prime time programming in the last two years.) This is not what a harmonic convergence looks like.
Score one more for Sarah Palin in her fight against the “Lamestream Media”: Celebrity gossip source Us Weekly published a story about the former Alaska governor that included quotations originally fabricated for a satirical news piece.
According to Gossip Cop, SuperTuesdayNews.com came up with some Palin quotes for a post about her “reaction” to Christina Aguilera’s mangling of the national anthem during last weekend’s Super Bowl. In quoting the article, Us Weekly failed to note that these quotes were 1) not actually ever uttered by Palin and were 2) a joke. In fact, Us Weekly’s site attributes the quote to an interview Palin gave to Sean Hannity.
Gossip Cop reports:
Therefore, according to the outlet, Palin calls Aguilera a “demanding beauty queen who’s clearly in over her head.”
The fake “Palin” also talks about wanting to “deport” Aguilera, because “spicy Latin princesses” shouldn’t be allowed to sing at the Super Bowl.
“Unemployment is at nine percent, yet we have to suffer through a performance by a foreigner with a poor grasp of the English language,” the fake “Palin” supposedly tells “Hannity” in the phony interview.
So. How’s that Palin-free month going for y’all?
It usually takes a lot longer for the party in charge to start with the finger-pointing, the failed votes and the backpedaling on campaign promises.
But the House Republican majority has already had two failed floor votes, is experiencing a backlash on the right over spending cuts and has bypassed the committee process it once praised for taking up major bills.
And that’s all just this week.
These initial flubs in the first month of the GOP majority are mainly public relations embarrassments — but Republicans may face much more substantial problems quelling an uprising over the debt limit and corralling conservative votes on the budget bill known as the continuing resolution, measures that are essential to keeping the government operating. The miscues indicate that House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and other Republican leaders have a harder job than they bargained for managing an unwieldy, activist group of nearly 90 freshman lawmakers.
And the sudden resignation Wednesday of New York Rep. Christopher Lee, just hours after suggestive photos of him appeared on a gossip website, further demonstrated a GOP conference that continues to bumble its way through the opening chapter of the 112th Congress.
“The new majority has different leadership than the last time we actually were the majority. [They] have to make their own way, they have to make their own decisions, set their own policies,” said Florida Rep. Bill Young, a 38-year veteran of the House. “There’s a learning curve for leaders. There’s a learning curve for members.”
Boehner, who has tried to project an image of serenity throughout the opening weeks of this Congress, tried to downplay the challenges.
“We’ve been in the majority four weeks,” Boehner told reporters Wednesday morning. “We’re not going to be perfect every day.”
Democrats, however, are gleefully sending out press releases with the word “disarray” in the subject line, and Wednesday afternoon, the subcommittee chairmen of the House Appropriations Committee — traditionally known as “cardinals” — held an emergency meeting to seek ways to cut more than the approximately $40 billion being targeted so far. A senior GOP aide said “there are a lot of moving parts” as the leadership is working with the Republican Study Committee, freshmen and appropriators to find $100 billion in cuts.
“Governing is a bitch,” joked a top House Democrat, showing no sympathy for his GOP counterparts.
Less than a month after leaving MSNBC, liberal lightning rod Keith Olbermann said Tuesday he's headed to Current TV, the public affairs channel launched six years ago by former Vice President Al Gore.
Olbermann will start this spring with a prime-time talk show on Current. He was also named chief news officer at Current, which is available in 60 million homes in the U.S., a little more than half the nation's homes with television.
Financial terms were not divulged, although Current said Olbermann will get an equity stake in the company.
Olbermann's hiring was the biggest moment in the history of Current, which began as a network geared primarily toward young people featuring viewer-generated short videos and is now evolving into a more traditional network. Its showcase is the investigative documentary series "Vanguard."
"We now live in a world with fewer and fewer opportunities to hear truly unique, truly unfettered voices on television," Gore said. "Keith is one of those rare voices."
Olbermann's sudden departure from MSNBC, announced simultaneously by himself and the network on a Friday night, was never really explained. He'd been an occasional headache for his bosses, and was briefly suspended last year for making campaign contributions in violation of NBC News policy.
Egypt’s perilous standoff over democratic reforms has put the Obama administration on the defensive, with no clear end in sight to a stalemate that has exposed the White House to fire from all sides of the political spectrum.
Some analysts have given President Barack Obama credit for managing a complicated, volatile crisis as well as anyone could reasonably expect.
But many other foreign-policy experts, worried about the historic wave of unrest now spreading across the Middle East, are reconsidering George W. Bush’s pro-democracy “freedom agenda,” which the Obama foreign policy team largely rejected as too simplistic.
The policy questions continued to emerge Sunday even as representatives of the Egyptian government met with opposition leaders and offered major concessions in an effort to quell the uprising.
The regime of Egyptian strongman and staunch U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak promised to release imprisoned protesters, end restrictions on reporters covering the crisis, and institute constitutional reforms.
The early reaction from the tens of thousands of demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, however, suggested Egypt’s masses may not be satisfied until Mubarak is out of power, and possibly out of the country.
The Obama administration is drawing increasing fire for its apparent reluctance at times to bid Mubarak adieu:
* Nathan Brown, director of Middle East studies at George Washington University, said on CSPAN’s American Journal on Sunday that administration officials “have been shifting positions and calibrating constantly, and it certainly looks as if it’s an administration that’s kind of reeling with the punches. But to be fair to them, what they’re trying to do is react to realities on the ground.”
* Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, who has just returned from a trip to Saudi Arabia, tells Newsmax that Obama’s soft-peddling of criticism toward Middle East despots has been “shameful.” “[George W.] Bush was absolutely right on his freedom agenda,” Land said. “He said the only way you’re going to fix this [terrorism] problem is to drain the swamp. … I think Obama’s whole human-rights agenda has been sadly missing. I mean, I know a lot of Democrats who are shocked by how Kissinger-esque it has been.”
* Longtime Bush antagonist Maureen Dowd credited Bush in part, saying he “meant well when he tried to start a domino effect of democracy in the Middle East and end the awful hypocrisy of America coddling autocratic rulers. But the way he went about it was naive and wrong.” By contrast Dowd said Obama was “calling around this week to leaders in the region to stanch the uncontrolled surge of democracy in the Arab world.”
* The New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier said Obama’s policy of engagement and multicultural globalism has had “the effect of aligning America with regimes and against peoples.” He added, “This was the case with our response to the Iranian rebellion in 2009, and it was the case with our response to the Egyptian opposition until a few hours ago. The striking thing about Barack Obama’s ‘extended hand’ is how utterly irrelevant it is to the epochal events in Egypt, and Tunisia, and Iran, and elsewhere.”
* Stephen Carter, a Yale professor and left-leaning author, told The Daily Beast readers that the protests in Egypt prove Obama’s predecessor was right to push for democracy in the Arab world. The foreign-policy establishment largely derided Bush’s democracy push as naïve, but now some observers say it could have given the United States more credibility in the Arab world.
* Elliott Abrams, a Bush-era deputy secretary of state, conceded that Bush’s actual policies didn’t always live up to his “freedom agenda” rhetoric. “But the revolt in Tunisia, the gigantic wave of demonstrations in Egypt and the more recent marches in Yemen all make clear that Bush had it right -- and that the Obama administration's abandonment of this mind-set is nothing short of a tragedy,” Abrams wrote in a Washington Post op-ed.
* Conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe wrote that human rights and reform has clearly not been a priority of the Obama administration, adding: “It is unworthy of a nation as great and free as ours not to promote the values it most esteems. It shouldn't take an upheaval in the Arab street to remind us that it is always in America's interest to promote liberal democracy.”
* In a story titled “Was George Bush right?” The Economist stated that “Mr. Bush was indeed a far more active champion of democracy than Mr. Obama has been,” but said Bush still bears responsibility for invading Iraq.
In a 2003 speech Bush stated: ‘Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe - because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export."
The NAACP won’t directly address the racism displayed by progressive protesters outside a summit hosted by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch at the end of January in Palm Springs, Calif., but the organization did call for an end to all “vitriolic language.”
In response to The Daily Caller’s request for comment on a video showing progressive protesters calling for somebody to “string up” African American Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, or “send him back into the fields” or “cut off all his toes and feed them to him one-by-one,” NAACP spokesman Hilary Shelton pointed to the organization’s recent resolution calling for a “civil political discourse.”
“Last summer, the NAACP passed a resolution calling for a civil political discourse,” Shelton said in an e-mail to TheDC. “We continue to call on all Americans to abandon vitriolic language. It serves as a distraction from the real issues our society need to address and distorts the challenges we as Americans have to confront to make our nation greater still.”
Shelton would not, however, address the content of the video directly.
The much anticipated encounter between the leader of the free world, President Obama and the highest rated cable news host, Fox News Channel titan Bill O’Reilly took place and no subject was off limits. For the first half of the interview, the conversation between Obama and O’Reilly was slightly contentious on the topics of Egypt and healthcare reform, yet in the second half of the interview O’Reilly encouraged Obama to be introspective and analyze what was the worst part about being President and how the office has changed him personally.
Obama and O’Reilly seemed to enjoy themselves throughout the live discussion, even during moments of disagreement. Most surprising though was O’Reilly’s announcement that today’s fifteen minute interview is only the beginning, as O’Reilly announced that Obama agreed to answer additional questions that will be shown on tomorrow night’s The O’Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel. Given how loose and comfortable Obama looked here, even despite O’Reilly’s occasional interruption to keep the President’s answers more brief than usual, it seems likely that many viewers will eagerly anticipate the next part of this showdown.
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