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MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell declared former Sen. Scott Brown's political career officially deceased during his Rewrite segment that Monday evening now that Brown had decided to give it the kiss of death and take a job as a lobbyist:

Scott Brown officially ended his political career on Monday. Instead of choosing to serve in public office, Scott Brown has decided to take a job at a Boston law firm, Nixon Peabody, according to The Boston Globe’s report. The law firms states that Brown “will focus his practice on business and governmental affairs.” But as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell states, “That is the lobbying world’s euphemism for lobbying ‘government affairs.’ So today, Scott Brown became a lobbyist. That is death for a politician every hoping to run for office again, and even Scott Brown is smart enough to know that.” [...]

Last month, Scott Brown signed on as a Fox News contributor. When Sarah Palin quit the Alaska governorship and left state affairs to Alaska Lieutenant Governor Parnell, she signed a contract with Fox News. So today, “[Brown] competed a full Palin by quitting politics completely and simply chasing the money that his political celebrity has earned him.”

O’Donnell continued to compare the two politicians’ trajectories. “Scott Brown is smart enough to know that he cannot go off and become a lobbyist and then take that dreaded occupation on to a debate stage as a candidate for anything ever again. This is Scott Brown’s full Palin—take FOX News’s money and then go for the money anywhere else he can. Like Sarah Palin, Scott Brown is all about the money, now.”

Here's more from Think Progress on Brown's new job: After Watering Down Financial Reform, Ex-Senator Scott Brown Joins Goldman Sachs’ Lobbying Firm:

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Bill Maher took a few shots at the religious right and Focus on the Family during his New Rules segment on Real Time this Friday evening and had this question for them: “If you’re doing God’s work and God is perfect, how come you’re always wrong? Is the problem that you can't follow instructions, or is Jesus just dicking you around?"

Maher went through a list of predictions that they got wrong if heaven forbid "we elected that evil Count Chocula as our President." And kudos to Maher for calling that group exactly what they are, which is nothing more than "an anti-gay lobbying group disguised as a church, basically the God-hates-fags guys crossed with Bain Capital."

Maher asked if we might ever expect to get an apology out of the group for having gotten so many of their predictions wrong, and as he noted, we haven't gotten one from them yet, or a host of others who have also been wrong with their predictions of doom and gloom if the Democrats were elected. He wrapped things up by telling his viewers, "as Joe Biden says, just use your common sense." Bill forgot that other rule when it comes to there being no punishment for Republicans constantly being wrong -- IOKIYAR.

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I assume MSNBC's Martin Bashir is on vacation this week since he hasn't been hosting his show, and I'm fairly sure that if he was there, guest and "Republican strategist" Juleanna Glover would not have been allowed to get away with this nonsense unchallenged.

LUI: But Juleanna, does Obama believe only that government builds things?

GLOVER: Look, I think that the problem with that speech was not just that phrase, that specific phrase that was referenced by the Romney campaign. It was the overall philosophy. I mean, for many people in this country the belief that, you know, it takes a village to do anything and that individual accomplishment shouldn't be lauded, it rings a little bit, a little bit like, sort of the Communist mantra of the 1950's and '60's.

And guest host Richard Lui and her other panel member, Julian Epstein, just let her get away with the red-baiting without a word of protest. Unbelievable.

Here's the way she was treated the last time I caught her on this show and Martin Bashir was there and she tried filibustering Bashir instead of answering his question.

And here's some background on this fearmonger for anyone not familiar with her. From her bio at The Ashcroft Group:

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Lawrence O'Donnell took NRA lobbyist Wayne LaPierre apart last year after the shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords. On this Monday evening's show, he did it again in the wake of the Aurora massacre.

O`DONNELL: In the Rewrite tonight, another huge win for the Grover Norquist of gun control, Wayne LaPierre. Wayne is the blood-drenched lobbyist who makes sure anyone in America, anyone can get 6,000 bullets, even people who want to use those bullets to shoot babies in movie theaters.

Wayne LaPierre is not a credit hog like Grover Norquist. Grover loves flexing his anti-tax lobbying muscles publicly. He loves calling senators idiots. He loves taking credit for preventing any consideration of sensible tax policy in this country.

Wayne is old school. Wayne LaPierre follows the old lobbyist playbook of never publicly taking credit for anything. Every time an American mass murderer uses the right that Wayne has preserved for any one in this country, including al Qaeda and homicidal maniacs, to buy insane amounts of ammunition, and then that mass murderer gets huge headlines, wall-to-wall cable news coverage, and comments from the president, Wayne LaPierre never takes credit for any of that. Never.

Wayne always does a kind of, aw shucks modesty thing and says, if I hadn`t made sure that that mass murderer could get thousands of bullets, he would have used something else to kill all those people. Talk about modesty, huh. Maybe some of our mass murderers would have found another way to kill a lot of people, but we`ll never know, will we? Because Wayne has just made it so easy, so very easy to kill babies with bullets, to kill fathers and mothers with bullets, to kill sons and daughters with bullets, to kill sisters and brothers with bullets.

Bullets are the American mass murderer`s first choice. And what we`ll never know is how many of them would be successful mass murderers today if Wayne LaPierre didn`t make sure they could easily get bullets, unlimited supplies of bullets. How many of our mass murderers would switch to making bombs if they couldn`t get bullets?

And how many of them would blow themselves up by mistake while making bombs and never hurt anyone else? Surely a few of them. Just how determined are American mass murderers? We`ll never know, because Wayne LaPierre makes it so, so easy for mass murderers.

Wayne has not said a word about our most recent mass murder. On Friday, he had his press secretary put out this statement: "our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families, and the community. NRA will not have any further comment until all the facts are known."

See how modest Wayne is? He`s the head of the National Rifle Association, and he wouldn`t even put his name on yet another high-profile NRA press release about a mass murder. Wayne presumably spent the weekend enjoying the summer with family and friends, none of whom were shot by a mass murderer this weekend.

Wayne`s unlimited ammo-for-all policy has never negatively affected Wayne`s life in any way. I invited Wayne to come on this program tonight, but you know Wayne. Even when he deserves 24-hour media attention, Wayne LaPierre is the perfect picture of modesty, blood-drenched modesty.

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More trouble for Uncle Rupert and his son James as the inquiry into the hacking scandal continues.

British Cabinet Minister Becomes Focus in Murdoch Inquiry:

The long-running tabloid newspaper scandal that has shaken Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire delivered a new jolt on Tuesday as its powerful and lucrative television operations moved to the center of a British judicial inquiry with disclosures that a senior cabinet minister, or at least an aide claiming to speak for him, worked covertly to help win approval for a $12 billion takeover of the BSkyB network.

A trove of newly released e-mails pointed to hand-in-glove collaboration between a lobbyist for Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation and the office of Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt, the official designated to pass judgment on the BSkyB bid. That deal, which would have crowned Mr. Murdoch’s 60-year media career, was scuttled last year as the scandal over illicit phone hacking exploded, and now appears out of his reach for years, if not permanently. Read on...

James Murdoch on the defensive over BSkyB bid:

James Murdoch came to the Leveson inquiry to defend his reputation, and ended up spending much of the remaining six and half hours on the stand in effect defending the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt.

But his robust defence of News Corporation's insider lobbying tactics was not matched by such a sure touch elsewhere, as his evidence revealed him to be incurious about phone hacking and uninterested in newspapers.

The media mogul said that his chief lobbyist, Frédéric Michel, was simply "doing his job" in his briefings again and again on titbits obtained from ministers and their special advisers with regard to the BSkyB bid. For all the information he received, Murdoch remained sceptical.

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I have to say, I could not agree more with Chris Hayes and what he said about Hilary Rosen during his show on Saturday and who CNN chooses to represent "the left" on their network. Sadly, I could say the same thing about a whole lot of their other pundits or which politicians they bring on as well. And it's not just CNN. The corporate media as a whole is terrible about giving those who actually represent the working class and their interests any time on the air.

I'll give Hayes credit for being one of the exceptions to that rule.

HAYES: If CNN is looking to represent the left in their crossfire style segments, they could do a lot better than a lobbyist messaging guru with a who's-who list of corporate clients – women who is head of the Recording Industry Association of America when it was crushing Napster and who was forced to severe ties with the Huffington Post in 2010 because she had BP as a client at a time when it was, well, in the news.” We know there are literally thousands, if not tens of thousands of people, who could better represent the left in our national conversation.

Indeed there are.

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Diane already posted Rick Santorum's bizarre rally in Tacoma here -- Protesters at Santorum Rally Tased, Taunted, and Dragged Away:

The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur decided to have a bit of fun with the creepy footage by combining it with some of the Blair Witch Project.

But first he reminded everyone that Rick Santorum is not just your average, everyday working class guy he's been trying to portray himself as. He ran the K Street Project for the Senate. Here's more from Salon Cenk quoted on that -- Santorum’s well-compensated love of fracking:

As the Center for Responsive Politics reports, Santorum is one of the top U.S. Senate recipients of campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry — and what makes those numbers so stunningly outsized is the fact that he remains one of the top Senate recipients even though the last time he ran for Senate was in 2006. Put another way, this is not a run-of-the-mill legislator who happened to get a few afterthought contributions from the industry; this is a guy who was such a sycophantic apostle of the industry that he received enough oil and gas money to keep him on the top-recipient list a full six years after he was voted out of office — that is, a full six years after he raised a single dollar for a Senate campaign. In baseball terms, it’s the equivalent of Hank Aaron racking up so many home runs that he was able to hold the record well after he retired — only with Santorum, it’s not home runs, it’s oil and gas cash.

He's another 99 percenter like the rest of them, bought and paid for by the oil and natural gas industries.

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From this Tuesday night's PBS Newshour, apparently the network decided their viewers just weren't getting enough of David Brooks' Villager conventional wisdom with his weekly appearance on Friday night and had him on to weigh in on the State of the Union Address as well. Par for the course with Brooks, he spent the better part of his time during this interview trying to whitewash whether Americans at at time when we've got record income disparity in the United States are going to care about Mitt Romney's finances and his time at Bain Capital.

Brooks doesn't think voters are going to care because hey... they just expect everyone who runs for president to be "super-rich." Maybe he's correct that the electorate is just looking for "he most assertive manly man" when it comes to some really angry Republican primary voters, especially given who they have to choose between right now, but in the general election, that's another story.

He's also enamored with the current crop of candidates for wanting to do something "big" like turn Medicare into a voucher program. As Ruth Marcus pointed out to Brooks, their proposals might be big things but they do nothing to address the concerns of everyday Americans and would primarily benefit the wealthy.

Brooks also came just short of repeating his spiel about the Republicans being the party of the working class again here. As I noted when he repeated that nonsense on Charlie Rose's show a few weeks ago, "Sadly, The New York Times, that supposed bastion of evil liberal ideology if you watch Fox or listen to right wing radio, is still paying this man way too much money to write a column there every week."

Transcript below the fold.

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After virtually ignoring the upcoming SOPA legislation and the upcoming online blackout to protest the pending legislation, now that the blackout is upon us, the corporate news channels that also support the bill finally decided to let their viewers know what was going on, because they had no choice. Were it not for the blackout, I'm sure they'd still be ignoring it for the most part.

MSNBC decided to bring on recently retired Senator and now lobbyist for the motion picture industry, Chris Dodd, for a nice "fair and balanced" discussion on the blackout. Dodd more or less accused the web sites participating in the blackout of acting like a bunch of spoiled children and offered little in the way of details to address the concerns of those who are against the legislation.

Glenn Greenwald wrote a pretty scathing piece on Dodd and the letter he issued via the L.A. Times. You can read the rest for his criticisms of Dodd's lobbying activity among other issues, but I thought I'd share some of his thoughts on Dodd and the MPAA's response to the protest -- Chris Dodd’s paid SOPA crusading:

The L.A. Times, yesterday – “MPAA’s Chris Dodd takes aim at SOPA strike”:

Hollywood’s chief lobbyist lashed out at tech companies for mounting Tuesday night’s planned online blackout to protest proposed anti-piracy legislation that has pitted Southern California movie and music distributors against Silicon Valley Internet corporations.

Motion Picture Assn. of America Chief Executive Chris Dodd, the former Senator from Connecticut, accused technology companies such as Google, Mozilla and Wikipedia of resorting to stunts. . . .

“It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and who use their services,” Dodd said in a statement. “It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today.”

[...]

It is in that capacity that Dodd has become the leading public spokesman and private lobbyist for the truly dangerous PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, bills craved by the industry that pays him. These bills, which vest the power in large corporations and the government to seize and shutdown websites with little or no due process in the name of stopping piracy, pose the greatest dangers to Internet freedom of any bill in the last decade, at least. So serious are these threats that they have prompted a rare — and inspiring — protest movement from numerous large Internet companies and blogs in the form of an Internet “blackout” today.

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Barney Frank didn't parse any words when asked by MSNBC's Martin Bashir what he thought of Newt Gingrich's prior statements that Congressman Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd should be jailed during last month's Republican debate, in light of the recent news that Gingrich took a reported $1.6 million in "consulting fees" from Freddie Mac.

Rep. Barney Frank: Gingrich ‘fundamentally intellectually dishonest’:

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) called Newt Gingrich “fundamentally intellectually dishonest” and decried the former House Speaker’s consulting contract with Freddie Mac as “ludicrous” during an interview Wednesday on MSNBC.

“It’s part of a pattern in which the Republicans, who were in charge during the bad times, try to blame us,” Frank said. [...]

But Gingrich has found himself in hot water since a Bloomberg report revealed that his consulting group earned between $1.6 million and $1.8 million from the mortgage giant. Gingrich has maintained that he did no lobbying, offering to turn over whatever records he legally could and saying he only provided “strategic advice.”

“I just want to emphasize this: I did no lobbying, I did not reach out to Capitol Hill,” Gingrich said Wednesday on the Laura Ingraham radio show. “I was not directly engaged in that way. I gave them advice on what they could do. But I’m not in the business of lobbying, period.”

Still, Gingrich acknowledged, Freddie Mac likely hired him based on his experience as Speaker of the House.

“I would assume they wanted the strategic advice of somebody who had been Speaker of the House and somebody who knew a fair amount about what was going on. And from that perspective I was very happy to offer them advice,” Gingrich said.

Frank rejected Gingrich’s claims, saying “there are two ‘L’ words that have to do with Newt — lobbyist and liar.”

“He was clearly there as a lobbyist and slipped and acknowledged that … you don’t enhance your academic credentials by serving as Speaker, you enhance your credentials as a lobbyist.”