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I've heard Lady-Mc-Cheney, Mary Matalin say a lot of ridiculous things in her defense of Mitt Romney, but this segment from Anderson Cooper's show on CNN this Thursday evening may have set a new low, even for Matalin's standards, which generally range from low to non-existent. Apparently labor unions, paying people minimum wage instead of slave wages and poverty programs that keep people from starving when times are tough are harming upward mobility in America.

And in this idiot's world, women being allowed to control their own reproductive health and having access to birth control is not one of the primary economic factors in most women's lives, but instead something that has no affect on whether they get "upward mobility opportunities" as well. Really astounding from someone who I assume was alive and cognizant during the last half a century or so and who has been around long enough to maybe remember the days when women were discriminated against because they might not be able to remain at a job, because heaven forbid they might end up pregnant.

Who needs misogynistic men around when you've got women like Matalin doing as much or more damage to her own gender as her male counterparts could ever hope to do.

As to the rest of the segment on CNN, I was glad to see The New York Times' Charles Blow call out Matalin for presuming to know what's best for African-American voters and the fact that you can't separate the issues she was discussing from the economic impact on the lives of average American workers, no matter what their race or gender.

Transcript via CNN below the fold.

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I've watched a lot of really pathetic coverage over at Fox "News" but Sean Hannity's interview with the father of George Zimmerman, Robert Zimmerman and the legal defense team now representing his son ranks right up there with some of the worst.

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell discussed the interview with The New York Times' Charles Blow and Natalie Jackson, an attorney representing Trayvon Martin's parents in the segment above and we got a whole lot more honest discussion about what anyone knows and doesn't know, or could reasonably assume from the information released so far to the public on the case than what we saw on Sean Hannity's show this Wednesday evening.

They did a good job of pointing out that we have no medical records or video evidence to substantiate the claims being made by Zimmerman's father and attorneys on his supposed injuries, but what we do have is enough evidence for there to be an arrest, since there is more than enough evidence for reasonable cause in the murder. And despite Sean Hannity and his guests' claims, no one is asking to have this case tried in the media. The members of Trayvon Martin's family and their attorneys are just asking that a jury has that opportunity.

As Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out, Hannity framed every one of his questions to make sure that his guests were allowed to lie and get their side of the story out there unchallenged. O'Donnell also played some footage from an interview with Zimmerman attorney Craig Sonner on Piers Morgan's show this week, where he didn't receive the same friendly treatment he did on Hannity's show.

Ellen at NewsHounds summed up Hannity's interview in her post here -- Sean Hannity Joins The George Zimmerman Defense Team And Ditches The Trayvon Martin Case Facts.

And Fox has the transcript of the interview posted at Hannity's site for anyone that doesn't want to subject themselves to watching the videos -- Exclusive: George Zimmerman's father defends son in Trayvon Martin shooting.

Video of the Hannity interview below the fold.

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Here we go again with the talking heads over at Fox complaining about "liberal media bias" at MSNBC and other outlets. This Saturday, it was Liz Trotta complaining about the coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting, the media daring to allow black journalists to give their opinions about the case, and for their outrage over a lack of an arrest of George Zimmerman.

Fox's Greg Jarrett opened up the segment above with a slip of his own, where he said Trayvon Martin was "allegedly" killed, before quickly correcting himself. Things went downhill from there with Trotta. Her first example of the coverage she didn't like was Lawrence O'Donnell and The New York Times' Charles M. Blow, grilling George Zimmerman's "friend" Joe Oliver. Trotta disregarded the fact that they had a right to be skeptical of him, given some of the ridiculous statements he was being allowed to get away with making in other interviews, such as the one we posted of Oliver on ABC, where he claimed Zimmerman used the word "goon" instead of "coon" and that we were supposed to believe that anyone would use a "term of endearment" just before fighting with and shooting someone.

Trotta was also terribly upset that Mr. Blow has written "glowing portraits" of Martin and his mother, even though he did not know either of them before the shooting. Her next gripe was that MSNBC's Tamron Hall and anchor Lester Holt were allowed to talk about how they've been racially profiled on NBC Nightly News. Because lord knows we can't have any "objectivity" if we allow black people to discuss the fact that this kind of thing goes on every day and that it had everything to do with why Zimmerman was suspicious of Martin in the first place. But that's not allowed at Fox.

And naturally Trotta doesn't like it that Al Sharpton is allowed to be anchoring a show at MSNBC and be an advocate for this cause as well. Because we all know Fox would never do something like that ... right? Unless of course you consider the "tea party" or Bill O'Reilly being allowed to come on the air and rail about an abortion doctor until someone killed him.

No one at Fox has a right to complain about another network's biases when they're operating as a political arm of the Republican Party on a daily basis and allowing their guests like Liz Trotta to do the same.

And one final thought on this. Liz Trotta was complaining that Zimmerman is being convicted by the media and how unfair that is. One, the media was late to this story. This didn't really garner any national attention until over a month had already gone by and there was no arrest. If Zimmerman is not arrested and charged within a certain amount of time, there's a statute of limitations where he's going to just walk free and never make it into a court of law, which is something one of the attorneys discussed on Al Sharpton's show this week. And Jarrett's remarks about black on black crime are ridiculous because if the police know who shot someone in those incidences, they're arrested and charged. That's not the case here which is what's sparking the outrage.

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MSNBC's Martin Bashir spoke to The New York Times' Charles M. Blow about his recent column where he discussed Rick Santorum's unhealthy obsession with sex and his "revulsion for the social-sexual liberation that began in the 1960s."

Santorum and the Sexual Revolution:

Rick Santorum wants to bring sexy back ... to the 1950s, when he was born.

That is because Santorum seems to have an unhealthy fixation with, and passionate disdain for, the 1960s and the sexual freedoms that followed.

To fully understand Santorum’s strident rejection of the 1960s, it’s instructive to recall a speech and question-and-answer session he gave in 2008 to a course on religion and politics at the Oxford Center for Religion and Public Life in Washington.

The speech was interesting, but the answers he gave to the questions that followed were truly illuminating.

In response to a question about the kinds of words he had heard “attached to religion and politics” during his years in the Senate, Santorum ventured off onto sex:

“It comes down to sex. That’s what it’s all about. It comes down to freedom, and it comes down to sex. If you have anything to do with any of the sexual issues, and if you are on the wrong side of being able to do all of the sexual freedoms you want, you are a bad guy. And you’re dangerous because you are going to limit my freedom in an area that’s the most central to me. And that’s the way it’s looked at.” Read on...

I don't know what's going on with these Republicans and their psyches, but it's not normal. Bill Maher poked some fun at Santorum back in January over his obsession with gay sex as well:

"He wears a sweater vest everywhere, which is proof that he does not have one gay friend," Maher noted. "This guy thinks about gay sex more than any gay man in America. There's a guy down in West Hollywood working at Dorothy's and Dildos who does not think about gay sex as much as Rick Santorum."

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Fox News has gone too far in hyping 2008 case of alleged voter intimidation, according to one New York Times columnist.

The conservative news network has recently produced a flurry of reports about a case where a member of the New Black Panther Party is accused of wielding a billy club outside of a polling place in Philadelphia. Appearing on MSNBC Monday, The New York Times' Charles Blow called out the network for exploiting the case.

"I think that the media, depending on what you call the media, some parts of the media, I think have exploited this to a degree that the president of the New Black Panther Party is on Fox on a regular basis now, it seems," Blow told MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski.

"You have a tough case here, because, to my understanding, we still don't have any person who has come forward to make an official complaint that they have been -- they were intimidated. You have a voter intimidation case with no intimidated voters," he said.

No on-air personality has promoted the story more than Fox News' Megyn Kelly.

Writing for The Atlantic, Dave Weigel accused Kelly's reports of inciting a crowd at a town hall event hosted by California Democrat:

Watch her broadcasts and you become convinced that the New Black Panthers are a powerful group that hate white people and operate under the protection of Eric Holder's DOJ. That "Megyn Kelly DESTROYS Kirsten Powers" video that I mentioned begins with her introducing a clip of a town hall meeting with Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Ca.) in which he gets an angry question about whether the DOJ has a policy of not prosecuting African-Americans.

"I am extremely sure that we do not have a policy at the Department of Justice of never prosecuting a black defendent."

The crowd rises up. "Yes you do!" shouts one voter. When Sherman says he doesn't know much about the Panther case, the crowd erupts in boos. They've been driven to fear and distrust of their DOJ by round-the-clock videos of one racist idiot brandishing a nightstick for a couple hours in 2008.

Congratulations, Megyn.

Also appearing on MSNBC Monday, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) suggested that the Obama administration may have a political motivation in ignoring the case.

"Congressman, what is your suspicion about why they are fearful to look into it?" asked MSNBC's Willie Geist. "What are you suggesting?"

"I don't know that I really ought to comment what it is," replied Wolf. "I think there is politics involved, but I think until we see, it's really hard -- very difficult to say."

But Blow disagreed. "The idea that the Obama administration, which is what is happening here which is people are trying to tie the Obama administration to black radicalism and that has been happening since the campaign and it continues to happen," said Blow.

"It strains logic to think that this tiny group, [Obama] somehow benefits politically from protecting them," Blow continued. "There's nothing to gain. In fact, there's everything to gain in prosecuting them."