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Bill asked everyone to at least "be nice to the poor and desperate people who change our Depends and cook our food, hopefully not in that order". Full rant at the HuffPo -- New Rule: This Mother's Day, Americans Must Extend a Special Thanks to Their Nannies:

New Rule: This Mother's Day, all Americans must pause and extend a special thanks to the women who maintain our homes, who take care of our kids, and who still make time for sex with Dad. I'm talking, of course, about our nannies. Lost in this whole immigration debate is why Americans want to be so harsh on the people who, in so many and varied ways, enable them to sit on their fat asses. Nannies, valet parkers, gardeners, all the people who do the things we're a little too busy or important to do. There are plenty of people to be mad at our there -- the jerks at Goldman Sachs, the idiots at BP, the guy who charged you fifty bucks for these tickets -- why set our crosshairs on the humble, servile people?

I'll tell you why. Because we're bullies. Instead of confronting real threats, like the debt or the environment or Utah, we pick out the poorest, most defenseless kid on the block -- illegal immigrants -- and say, "What are you looking at?" But I'll tell you something, you anti-immigrant hoopies -- as usual you're mad at the wrong people. It was corporate America that busted your unions and didn't keep your pay up to the cost of living, causing your wife to have to go to work and Esmeralda to have to come in to watch the kids. Your problem is low wages, not low riders. A middle class life can now only be maintained with the presence of an underpaid underclass. In the 1940s, fewer than one in five moms worked outside the home. Ironically, mostly in bomber factories, to beat Nazi Germany, a place, like Arizona, where you always had to show your papers. I kid, that's an unfair comparison. The Germans knew how to dress.

Read on...

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October 22, 2009 CBC The Hour

Bill Maher blast Bush and Obama on the economy and lots more

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It appears Chuck Todd didn't take too kindly to Jeremy Scahill's drubbing he received on Real Time the other night. From Glenn Greenwald:

According to Scahill (via email), Todd approached him after the Maher show and the following occurred:

Right as we walked off stage, he said to me "that was a cheap shot." I said "what are you talking about?" and he said "you know it." I then said that I monitor msm coverage very closely and asked him what was not true that I said on the show. He then replied: "that's not the point. You sullied my reputation on TV."

Media stars are so unaccustomed to being held accountable for the impact of their behavior -- especially when they're on television -- that they consider it a grievous assault on their entitlement when it happens.

Check out the entire post where Glenn's got much more on some similar events going on lately besides just his own dust up with Chuck Todd. Joe Klein got into it with Aimai of NoMoreMisterNiceBlog who happens to be I.F. Stone's granddaughter. Glenn and Marcy Wheeler had an ongoing feud with Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic. And now we've got Scahill and Todd's back and forth on Real Time.

Glenn summed all of this up much better than I could ever hope to:

Todd's condescending responses illustrate the same point as the above episodes with Klein and Ambinder: in the eyes of Beltway mavens, those who warned about and worked against the radicalism and lawbreaking of the Bush administration are the fringe, crazed, out-of-touch radicals. While Todd was fiddling around with pretty colored maps and fun polling games, Scahill was courageously investigating one of the most corrupt, dangerous and lethal private corporations in the world, yet it's Todd who understands and must solemnly explain the hardened realities of politics to Scahill, the confused and silly Leftist.

There's little question that when people look back at this period in American history, it will be difficult to comprehend what happened in the Bush era -- and especially how we blithely started a devastating war over complete fiction, while simultaneously instituting a criminal torture regime and breaking whatever laws we wanted. But far more remarkable still will be the fact that, other than a handful of low-level sacrificial lambs, those responsible -- both in politics and the establishment media -- not only suffered no consequences, but continued to wield exactly the same power, with exactly the same level of pompous self-regard, as they did before all of that happened. Looking back several decades or more from now, who will possibly be able to understand how that happened: the almost perfect inverse relationship between one's culpability and the price they paid for what they unleashed?

In fairness to Chuck Todd, he was not one of the ones out there cheerleading for the war and I really liked him when I'd see him on C-SPAN's Washington Journal about every morning when he was working for The Hotline. He's a numbers guy. He was one of the best in the business at reading and sorting through the numbers on how our elections were going to turn out. I don't think coming to MSNBC however, has been good for Chuck Todd.

And now he's on there with the rest of them repeating the narrative of how terrible for the Democrats it would be if any investigations are allowed to happen, and if anyone from the Bush administration is held accountable. It's all politics to Chuck.

Here are my thoughts on that. One of the reasons it would be turned into a game of politics is because Chuck Todd and the rest of the beltway media would report it as such, instead of a legal matter. What Chuck Todd is relaying is what the Republican Party would like to see happen if the Democrats or this Department of Justice goes after the law breaking. It would be the choice of those in the media to validate the Republicans' sniping, which would inevitably follow (and already has for that matter), or to dismiss them as playing partisan politics in order to cover up law breaking for political gain.

Of course since the media was part and parcel in allowing the atrocities of the last eight or nine years, that's never going to happen.