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While discussing the news of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's recent weight loss surgery and whether it's an indication that he's going to run for president in 2016, Hardball's Chris Matthews once again let his mouth overrun his brain and called Krispy Kreme doughnuts "Christie Kremes."

Oops.

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Here's your quote of the day from Chris Matthews after Bob Shrum told him that the only reason Republicans got control of the House is because of gerrymandering:

MATTHEWS: I think the problem is the way the votes get counted. Democrats are just doing too damn well in the big cities. They're wasting votes. [...] They need a lot more than 51 percent of the population for them to carry it because they wasted the votes in the big cities.

Here's the problem with that. Even Republicans were bragging that gerrymandering is why they won the House. It was a strategy and they're proud of it.

And what's that word for when you lump as many of the other party's voters into the same district so that their votes won't count? I know it will come to me sooner or later.

From this Thursday's Hardball, former RNC Chairman and now unfortunately for anyone who watches the network, MSNBC contributor Michael Steele, decided to get into a spat with Chris Matthews over whether CPAC 2013 ought to be inviting the likes of birthers like Donald Trump to speak at the conference rather than those from the Republican party who might actually have a chance of winning a national election. Steele's response was basically to dismiss all of Trump's birther talk and attempt to paint it as ancient history.

That was so last month, don't you know. Al Cardenas, chairman of the American Conservative Union which runs the event defended their choice of speakers as well, but I'm with Matthews on what we're likely to hear from The Donald when he takes the stage:

Matthews surmised CPAC’s theory was, “invite the noisemakers and snub the people who might actually lead you out of the wilderness.”

If you look at the scheduled speaking times, CPAC’s priorities are clear. Sen. Ted Cruz is allotted 33 minutes of speaking time, Sarah Palin has 16 minutes, and Donald Trump gets 14 minutes. Down at the bottom are Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan with 11 minutes a piece.

Matthews asked former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele if Trump’s conservative message at CPAC could be overshadowed by all of his birther talk about President Obama.

“I think that characterization can be put behind Donald Trump…Let’s see what the man says tomorrow,” said Steele, telling Matthews that no one’s talking about the birther issue “but you. You’re the only person bringing it up.”

“You know why?” Matthews said. “Because people who think that the president is an illegal immigrant shouldn’t be talking out loud almost anywhere.”

Cardenas said Trump was invited because he’s a “successful businessman” who can reflect on the realities of today’s economy. “I think he’ll be a positive influence on the youngsters here.”

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It would be nice to see the Republicans called out like this more often for being willing to sabotage their own government if they don't get their way or like the results of the last election. Chris Matthews called them out for just that during his "let me finish" segment on this Tuesday's Hardball: Obama, not the GOP, wants to keep government working:

Let me finish tonight with this.

I think the difference between the Democrats and Republicans is getting as wide as the Grand Canyon.

Watch how they do it:

President Obama wants to keep the government running. Republicans threaten to stop it. It’s relentless. The fiscal “abyss,” the “debt ceiling,” the “sequester,” the end of the “continuing resolution.” Different words, different deadlines, all detonate the same explosion. Threaten to crash the government if you don’t like the way it’s doing something if you don’t like who the American voter has elected.

Isn’t this what the Republicans did back in the old days? If you don’t like government—Guatemala, Iran, the Dominican Republic, Chile—just bring it down.

Guess what? The Republicans are now using that tactic here at home. If they don’t like who’s been elected, they find some way to undermine it, discredit its leaders, whatever it takes to destroy it. We’re using the ways of the old Cold War CIA to destabilize our own country.

Look at the impact these constant threats to shutdown the government are having on public confidence. It’s undermining it, making people forever nervous about the basic ability of America to even have a government.

Is that patriotic? I don’t think so.

Now if we could just get his producers to spare us from the sort of "fair and balanced" discussion he had on the same topic earlier in the program with Michael Steele laughing at the notion that his party behaves this way even though it's obvious he knows full well it's true, and freaking "Fix the Debt" Ed Rendell supposedly representing the left -- maybe we'd be getting somewhere.

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After watching this segment on Hardball with Chris Matthews and former RNC Chairman Michael Steele (now one of MSNBC's regular contributors -- because heaven knows, Joe Scarborough isn't doing a good enough job polluting their the airways), all I can say is, shame on Steele for lying to their viewers about whether someone who was born in 1958 should still expect the government to be sending out their Social Security check -- and shame on Matthews for not calling him out on it.

Yes, there are some long term issues with the solvency of Social Security, but they could be solved pretty easily with measures liberals support, like raising the cap on the taxable income. Regardless of what anyone believes about how that issue should be resolved, it's just blatant fearmongering for someone who is Steele's age to pretend the program won't be there for him.

I still remember the days when Rachel Maddow was begging for an interview with this guy. That was back when he was head of the RNC and still had to be held accountable for the Republicans and their actions and policy positions. Now that he's one of their paid pundits, it seems he's free to spew as much unchallenged crap as he likes on the shows where he appears (and viewers are unfortunate enough to find him as a guest).

I'm not sure just which right wing political hack has taken "Uncle Pat" Buchanan's space (and the cot he was probably sleeping in so he could be ready for an interview at a moment's notice), but Steele certainly looks like he's in the running.

Transcript via MSNBC below the fold:

Continue reading »

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I was very glad to see that Salon's Joan Walsh is about as tired of those in the media playing the "both sides" false equivalency game, where they compare the craziness that's become the mainstream on the right to some either nonexistent, or out of the mainstream entity on the left, for the sake of so-called balance or fairness, as I am.

It was nice to see her call out The Daily Beast's Lauren Ashburn for doing just that on this Wednesday's edition of Hardball with guest host Michael Smerconish filling in for Chris Matthews. Here's more on that from Walsh herself in her column at Salon: The wingnut trifecta:

Right-wing claims that Hillary Clinton faked illness to avoid testifying about the Benghazi tragedy would be funny if they weren’t so ugly. It’s the wingnut trifecta, smearing our most popular past Democratic president, Bill Clinton, along with our current president, Barack Obama, and the current 2016 front-runner, all with one shot. Imagine birtherism crossed with the worst of the hateful anti-Clinton lies, like the “Vince Foster was murdered” claim. That’s Hillary-health trutherism.[...]

I talked about the crazy Benghazi allegations on “Hardball” today and I was surprised to find myself in strong disagreement with the Daily Beast’s Lauren Ashburn. Ashburn acted shocked at the Clinton slurs; I argued they’re just the latest outbreak of Clinton-Obama derangement syndrome. But even more significant, Ashburn tried to declare that both sides are somehow equally to blame for the “incivility” of our current political debate, claiming that someone (she didn’t say who or where) had wished death on former President George Bush when the news broke that he was in the intensive care unit.

I’m on record, often, saying that false equivalence about haters on the right and left is dangerous. To equate Democrats and Republicans on this front, you’d have to imagine, say, Susan Rice suggesting something that crazy, not to mention unethical, about Mitt Romney’s secretary of state, had the 2012 race ended differently. And you can’t equate some random commenter on the HuffPost with people like Krauthammer and Hannity who have regular perches atop Fox News. That would be like Chris Matthews wishing death on the former president; it would never happen.

I agree completely, except I wasn't surprised by what Ashburn said. She's one of Howard Kurtz's favorite guests on his Sunday show on CNN where what she did during the Hardball segment is the norm and not the exception.

h/t Captain Kangaroo

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I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed watching Joan Walsh get a chance to give Dick Armey his due after the way he treated her on Hardball back in early 2009. While discussing the mess over at FreedomWorks, which Karoli already wrote about here, Walsh called Armey and his fellow astroturfers exactly what they are -- a bunch of grifters.

Matthews took issue with the description, but I'd say Walsh is spot on. Armey and his ilk have lined their pockets, nicely extracting money from their rich backers and from those naive enough to actually believe that this so-called "tea party" is a grassroots movement, instead of what it actually is: a rebranding effort to get the Bush stink off of the label Republican.

Unlike Matthews and his producers, who seem more worried about trying to book Armey and Kibbe as guests on his show, his colleague at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow called out Armey among a host of others who are getting rich off of these con games earlier this month. Karoli wrote about that here: Rachel Maddow Slams Conservative Fox Commentators and Other Right Wing Scammers and MSNBC now has the transcript up for that show as well.

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If anyone thought the NRA's Wayne LaPierre's rambling, bizarre speech wasn't quite bad enough this Friday morning and needed just one more dose of right wing crazy to make it through their day, the producers at MSNBC's Hardball managed to find some nut to bring on the air to one up him. Guest host Michael Smerconish and guest David Corn seemed equally appalled when fellow guest, author Steve Siebold, came on and not only defended LaPierre's push to have more armed guards in our nation's schools, but he wants the teachers and students armed as well.

When Smerconish asked him what would happen if a teacher did not want to be armed, Siebold's response was that he wouldn't want his kid going to that school. And when he asked him why he didn't think we should arm all of the children as well if he actually believes that more guns make everyone safer, Siebold responded that they shouldn't be arming children. When Smerconish pointed out that seniors and college students are adults, Seibold was all in for arming them as well.

I don't know where MSNBC found this nut job, but shame on them for giving him an ounce of air time.

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As Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder was about to sign their union-busting right-to-work-for-less bills into law, Chris Matthews spoke to UAW President Bob King and the State Director of the Michigan chapter of Americans for Prosperity's Scott Hagerstrom. Matthews attempted to get Hagerstrom to come clean about who "signs his paycheck" and despite repeated badgering from Matthews, refused to acknowledge that AFP is just a front group for the Koch brothers.

He just works for a grass roots organization, like the Red Cross don't you know! And they have lots of donors. He didn't want to talk about their one big one though. Here's more on Hagerstrom and his remarks back in February of 2011 from Think Progress: Koch Front Group Americans For Prosperity: ‘Take The Unions Out At The Knees’:

In a speech earlier this month at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual conference, Americans For Prosperity-Michigan Executive Director Scott Hagerstrom revealed the true goal of his group and its allies like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) efforts. Speaking at CPAC’s “Panel for Labor Policy,” Hagerstrom said that AFP really wants to do is to “take the unions out at the knees”:

HAGERSTROM: It’s easy to go out there and fight taxes and increased regulation, you know we send out an action alert on taxes to AFP and we get thousands of people to respond. You send out one on a more complicated issue and it just doesn’t quite resonate…We fight these battles on taxes and regulation but really what we would like to see is to take the unions out at the knees so they don’t have the resources to fight these battles.

Taking “the unions out at the knees” has long been a goal of the Koch brothers and their many front groups. In the run-up to the 2010 elections, the Kochs worked with other anti-labor billionaires, corporations and activists to fund conservative candidates and groups across the country. Now after viciously opposing pro-middle class policies for years, Koch Industries is trying to eliminate the only organizations which serve as a counterweight to the well-oiled corporate machine.

Sadly they managed to succeed in that goal today in Michigan. Sourcewatch has more on Americans for Prosperity here and the fact that they are indeed just a front group for the Koch brothers here.

This interview has a bunch of right wing blogs worked up of course, the usual suspects that I'm not going to link to, calling Matthews "unhinged" and claiming he "berated" Hagerstrom because he asked him time and again who funds AFP. If they think this is Matthews coming "unhinged" they must not watch the show much, because this is pretty mild by his standards. There are times that stuff can be annoying out of him. This wasn't one of them.

The AFP chair was on there pretending he's got the interest of those workers in Michigan at heart and that they're just some grass roots organization instead of an AstroTurf front group who only care about a race to the bottom on wages so their rich donors can squeeze some more blood out of the working class.

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It seems this ongoing feud between former Sen. Alan Simpson and anti-tax lobbyist Grover Norquist isn't going to end any time soon. Simpson went after Norquist again on Hardball this Tuesday while doing his usual fearmongering over the "fiscal cliff."

Alan Simpson on fiscal cliff: ‘Go big or go home’:

Piecemeal measures won’t save us from the fiscal cliff, former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-WY), told Hardball’s Chris Matthews on Tuesday. His advice for his former colleagues: “Go big or go home.”

“On Dec. 31st there’s a mess floating around right now, about $7.2 trillion bucks worth of stuff…[we’ve] got to do something,” Simpson said. [...]

Simpson said some lawmakers “love their party more than they love their country,” and that they would wait until the last minute to strike a deal. “They’re going to react right down to the last point when there’s going to be blood and hair and eyeballs all over the floor and they’re going to come up with something, but let me tell you, if it’s just kicking the can down the road, the can is now a 55 gallon drum filled with explosives. You can’t play that game anymore,” said Simpson.

If there’s no real deal, he said, “the markets are going to chop us up and it will be an unknown day.”

The former lawmaker also took a hit at conservative activist Grover Norquist’s crusade to get members of Congress to vow never to raise taxes.

“So how do you deal with guys who came to stop government, or Grover wandering the Earth in his white robe saying you want to drown government in the bathtub. I hope he slips in there with it,” Simpson said.

Of course Matthews let him get away with the typical false equivalency game they've been playing, where they pretend that the likes of Norquist is the equivalent of those on the left who don't want to see our social safety nets destroyed and calls everyone "loons." There's nothing "looney" about wanting to protect the poor, the elderly and the middle class and allowing people to retire with dignity, instead of having to work until they drop dead.