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The rightwing has their shorts & panties in a knot over these two for what they say denigrates the Tea Party and what it stands for. The guys playing these characters beg to differ, even if they have to break character to do it.

via Mediaite

Pulling back to reveal the green-screen artifice of what they do, Wayne Keown (Colter) and Jake Hager (Swagger) explained to Beck that they are merely entertainers, with no larger political agenda.

“We aren’t in the political business, or the immigration business. We are in the entertainment business,” Keown said. He went on to attack Beck directly for failing to give his audience credit when it comes to the general understanding that pro-wrestling is fake. “Many of your followers are WWE fans and they understand the difference between reality and entertainment,” he added. “Are you out of touch with your audience Glenn? Or are you just a ‘stupid political commentator?’”

All of which is presumably done to hype a match between current WWE champion Alberto Del Rio and this guy, 'Jack Swagger'. Linda and Vince McMahon may have blown $100 mil on some quixotic dream of becoming a U.S. Senator but no one has ever accused them of not being savvy business people. If they're casting teabaggers as villains then even they can tell which way the wind is blowin'.

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From this Friday's Real Time With Bill Maher, Bill's annual election reel, "In Memoriam."

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Say what?

The Hartford Courant provided this summation of Sunday morning's debate between Republican Linda McMahon and Democrat Chris Murphy who are vying for the U.S. Senate seat from Connecticut being vacated by retiring Joe Lieberman.

As noted in the piece, the World Wrestling Entertainment mogul has based her entire campaign on personal attacks, resorting to the typical Republican boilerplate devoid of specifics when asked about policy. On Sunday morning that strategy met with a resounding thud.

[N]othing really explains her astonishing moment of blankness when asked about same-sex marriage. She stumbled through an answer in which she affirmed her support for “America’s same sex marriage law.” There is, of course, no such thing, unless she means DOMA, which is sort of the opposite. And then she just stopped, with probably more than a minute left on her clock. Nobody does that. If you’ve got a short answer, you pivot and talk about something loosely related with your remaining time. She seemed inexplicably rattled by this benign, predictable and routine question. (This is what happens when you spend your whole campaign dodging the press. You turn into the kind of candidate who can’t improvise.)

As the issue-based battles started slipping away from her, McMahon upped the ante on the personal attacks. If you’re a little tired of the way this campaign has been almost exclusively about attacks on character and very little about the issues, let the word go forth that McMahon was far more reliant on this strategy than was Murphy on Sunday. Paradoxically, late in the debate she unsheathed a new kind of negative rhetoric, claiming that Murphy had expected a coronation and instead found himself in a tough campaign with a serious woman. The paradox: never before in this campaign had she seemed less like a serious woman. She seemed like a silly woman who had attempted to substitute recent study sessions for the years of immersion one might expect an aspiring senator to have had.

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It seems one of the Republicans who is trying to distance themselves from Mitt Romney's statements about the lazy, mooching 47 percent who don't pay income taxes at that fundraiser is having a little trouble -- Linda McMahon hits Romney for 47% talking point she used:

In her second run for the Senate, Linda McMahon seems to have realized that she needs to temper her teabaggy leanings and sound Republican-lite. So she was first out of the gate to distance herself from the unraveling Mitt Romney.

“I disagree with Governor Romney’s insinuation that 47% of Americans believe they are victims who must depend on the government for their care. I know that the vast majority of those who rely on government are not in that situation because they want to be. People today are struggling because the government has failed to keep America competitive, failed to support job creators, and failed to get our economy back on track,” McMahon said.

Yeah, except here's McMahon's problem. The very day she launched her 2012 Senate campaign, this happened:

When News 8 questioned McMahon regarding President Obama's push for higher taxes on wealthy, she said she would like everyone to pay their fair share.
"I'd like to see everyone pay their fair share," said McMahon. "Forty-seven percent of the people today don't pay any taxes, so let's have a fair tax code where everybody pays their taxes."

And it's on tape. Read on...

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From The Last Word: Lawrence O'Donnell explains the right and wrong way to give a concession speech, with examples from this year's mid-term elections.

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Linda McMahon's new ad just screamed out for a mash-up, so I had to oblige.

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[YouTube]

The so-called race for Chris Dodd's Senate seat in Connecticut appears to be winding down to what most observers thought it would be months ago when Dodd decided to retire rather than lose against Linda McMahon of WWE fame and her millions poured into the race. It was assumed popular and longtime attorney-general Richard Blumenthal would have no trouble defeating her. But Blumenthal hasn't had to really campaign in years and early on it showed. That seems to have changed in the last few weeks, simply by Blumenthal seizing on what McMahon says and calling her on it. One such issue, of many, has been her business-friendly position on the minimum wage.

It's taken awhile but some in the media are finally asking McMahon about it, such as CNN's Jessica Yellin. But to really get to the heart of the matter, Rachel Maddow steps in, as usual. Maddow calls out McMahon's denials and outright lies of what she said about reducing the minimum wage. Again, it's hard to argue with videotape even if you can rely on (most of) the media not to check.

Interestingly, Maddow praises Richard Blumenthal for aggressively calling her out on that, going on the offense. For almost all of the campaign that has not been the case, and Blumenthal has been criticized for coasting. As soon as he did in this one instance pollsters decided to give him him back his double-digit lead. It'll be interesting what the new storyline will be for local pollster Quinnipiac in their next poll with these recent developments as they had been pushing a nail-biter.

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Well, it looks like Linda McMahon isn't the only one who doesn't know what the minimum wage is. RNC Chair Michael Steele doesn't know what it is either. While discussing Linda McMahon's statement that the minimum wage ought to be reviewed, MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell asks Steele if he knows what the minimum wage is, and he refuses to answer, accusing O'Donnell of playing a gotcha game with him.

Steele's defense every time O'Donnell made a good point, or asked him a question he didn't have an answer for, his response was to tell O'Donnell how "funny" he was. Sadly, it's no laughing matter for Steele or these other Republicans to be so out of touch that they aren't even aware of what the minimum wage is.

O'Donnell also asked Steele if it was now the Republican Party's position as Joe Miller has said that the minimum wage is un-Constitutional and Steele punted and wouldn't answer. O'Donnell followed by asking him if he'd be willing to "make a Republican Party commitment to minimum wage workers that you absolutely will not consider repealing or reducing the minimum wage?" Steele told him "nice try" and said he doesn't do policy. So in other words, "no."

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Apparently the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut thinks we should "review" the minimum wage. However, she has no idea what that wage even is or how many of her employees at the WWE are earning it. It's so nice to see these millionaires so in touch with the needs of average American voters that they might be representing should they get elected.

The Huffington Post has more on McMahon and her apparent lack of what the minimum wage is and what raising or lowering it actually means to the American economy.

Linda McMahon: 'We Ought To Review' The Minimum Wage

Her campaign apparently shot back at the article and said that they were not necessarily advocating for lowering it, but just for a "review". Well I'd welcome that review if she actually thought it was too low, but I'll be shocked if that's the case. If we wanted an honest "review" of whether the minimum wage is too high, I say let Linda McMahon try to live off of those wages for a year with no access to her other income and after that "review", we'll get her opinion on it.

And I just wanted to make one other point on the video which I've included here which is Ed Schultz, Ron Christie and Joe Madison debating McMahon's statement on Ed's show. I really was not sure which I wanted to make the headline, but decided criticism of McMahon was more worthy of notice than my criticism of the video I included.

That said, note to Ed Schultz. Please quit bringing Ron Christie, Heidi Harris and a host of other right wing back benchers on your show.

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I know it's his job as Chair of the NRSC to paint a happy face on this, but Sen. John Cornyn does his best to pretend that the right wing Tea Party candidates who are pushing the Republican Party even further to the right aren't going to do any damage to the chance of them regaining a majority in the Congress this mid-term election.

As Steve Benen pointed out after the hacks over at The Politico called some of the GOP right wing candidates "offbeat", the party's run to the right might not work out so well for them:

But there's one point I'd disagree with here. The crux of the piece is that the "offbeat" candidates are winning because they bring a non-traditional background to the table. This year, the argument goes, credible, relevant experience in public policy and/or government is a turnoff to voters seeking a wholesale break with the status quo.

That's not a bad argument, but I don't see the landscape this way. These bizarre candidates won major primary campaigns because of their far-right, often radical, ideologies. That they're coming from outside the world of government and politics is just gravy.

Did Linda McMahon win in Connecticut because she ran a wrestling company? No, she won because she spent a lot of money, and convinced Republicans her primary opponent was too moderate. Ken Buck won in Colorado for the same reason -- his party-preferred rival was deemed insufficiently right-wing. Dan Maes got a boost from McInnis' plagiarism scandal, but he capitalized because the party's base appreciated his extreme ideology.

And in Kentucky, Rand Paul didn't thrive because primary voters were impressed with his "outsider" ophthalmological background; they liked his radical worldview.

This isn't, in other words, a year for "offbeat" candidates to thrive; it's a year for right-wing candidates to win GOP primaries, without much regard for electability.

John Cornyn also claims that we need more Republicans in the Congress to move President Obama "toward the middle". I'm not sure what he's been smoking if he actually believes that himself, but sadly the propagandized viewers at Fox will believe his bull pucky.

Transcript below the fold.

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