From The Daily Show March 4, 2010.

The Rapture is the ultimate Republican emergency backup plan that's guaranteed to derail Obama's health care reform.

From The Daily Show Feb. 25, 2010:

Something strange happens at the health care summit when Republicans and Democrats actually start having a conversation.

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These people can't stop lying. Peggy Noonan carries some water for the Republicans and pretends that President Obama and the Democrats in Congress haven't reached their hands out to Republicans again and again only to get them slapped, like accepting 160 Republican amendments on the health care bill without a single vote to show for it. She says that the President needs to piss off his base, as though she does not know how badly he's done that already. She also thinks we need more "seriousness" in Washington. Well maybe we'd get some of you and your fellow Villagers quit remaking reality for them Nooners.

MR. GREGORY: And--but here's--one of the big questions that came up this week is what is--do Americans listen to these two congressmen and say, "This is petty politics," or do they say, "This is sincere ideological division. What you really need is better leadership in Washington to cut through all of that."

MS. NOONAN: Well, I think it probably would have helped if the president, when he came in so strong having won by 9.5 million votes just more than a year ago, if he had come forward with more centrist ideas and very bravely reached out to Republicans, even to the point of alienating or frightening or putting off a little bit of his base. I think that didn't happen.

Overall, though, I think Washington is not broken. Bipartisanship is very possible, but we see too much bipartisanship in terms of passing bad things. There's always--the bastion of unity in Washington is the Appropriations Committee, also. They're always coming together to spend. Other issues that are not so easy spending have less unity.

And, look, overall we need more seriousness. Both parties have to remember they are here during a crisis, an ongoing crisis for serious reasons. They all get together, the Republican conference and the Democratic conference, once a week for lunch, and I know from people who are at those lunches that they spend 98 percent of the time talking about how to trip up the other guy and 2 percent of the time on policy.

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h/t to my friends at The Political Carnival with their cartoon of the day. So what do you think about Sister Sarah ever attempting to take a serious run for the presidency? I think the chance is somewhere between slim and none that she even lasts until the first debate. If she does throw her hat in there she'll quit just before that debate is scheduled and blame the media for demonizing her after she's raked in as many campaign contributions as possible from the suckers who don't know any better. Then she'll go back to ClusterFox and tell everyone how the "lamestream media" never gave her a chance so she just had to quit and John Ziegler can make another revisionist history excuse for a "documentary" and pretend he's relevant.

If not Palin, who might be the next GOP candidate for the presidency that would actually have a chance to win their nomination? I'm thinking someone who is on almost no one's radar screen right now, and that's David Petraeus. Your thoughts on that or anything else that has caught your attention today welcomed.

Open thread below...

Cenk does a great job of reflecting how I feel about the media's treatment of Evan Bayh and his retirement from the Senate. They never bring up all the money his wife has made working for WellPoint -- Evan Bayh's Wife Reaping The Benefits Of Health Care Reform. And they continually call these ConservaDems who are corporate Democrats "centrists" which drives me as crazy as it does Cenk.

Cenk also points out that unlike the main stream media the HuffPo was willing to ask Bayh if there's one job he won't rule out after leaving office and they got their answer here -- Evan Bayh Won't Rule Out Becoming A Lobbyist After His Term Ends.

And for more here's Cenk's post on the subject at hand -- The Media's Billion Dollar Ad for Evan Bayh:

The mainstream media has been giving Evan Bayh a big fat sloppy wet kiss for the last 24 hours. Every single story is about how moderate and centrist and independent he is. Golly gee willikers, Evan Bayh is such a pure and innocent person and he just couldn't take the corruption of Congress anymore. He was so fed up with the partisanship and like any great man decided he must strike out on his own and leave DC.

Come on, are these people this naïve or do they have a stake in this? Do you really think Evan Bayh only has pure motivations and was the last good man in Washington? This is absolutely absurd, and on many fronts it's the exact opposite of the truth. No one made a deal with corporate lobbyists faster than Evan Bayh. He wasn't sick of the problems of DC, he was the problem of DC. Read on...

As Cenk notes, like about half of the people who leave Congress, Bayh is just another name on a long list who might be looking for a big payday after their retirement from "public service". All of this might be just slightly easier to stomach if these assholes weren't lining their pockets while the rest of the country rots beneath them.

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Mike Barnicle apparently thinks that actual investigative journalists bear some sort of resemblance to Republican dirty trickster, Karl Rove wanna’ be and probably soon to be felon James O’Keefe. The cast of Morning Joe talks to author Gabriel Thompson, who “spent a year going undercover working alongside immigrants and citizens in jobs that most of us wouldn’t want to do,” in the words of Willie Geist in his intro. His book is Working in the Shadows. In what should have been just an interesting interview about what Thompson experienced while researching his book, Mike Barnicle throws this stink bomb out there.

Barnicle: You know it’s great for people to get more information about what kinds of jobs are being done by largely an immigrant population but you mentioned, you know, journalism, and it’s important also to note—you didn’t deceive any of your employers did you—in going to work?

Thompson: I totally deceived every employer because at the outset—it was more of a mission of when I told them my work experiences, did I say I’d spent years as a community organizer or years writing about Mexican immigrants—no. Because none of them would have allowed me access.

[…]

Barnicle: Do you view yourself in a similar fashion as, you know, the guy who got grabbed trying to wiretap the phones of Senator—or whatever they were trying to do at Sen. Landrieu’s office?

Thompson: Well… he was trying to commit a felony, right?

Barnicle: Yeah.

Thompson: I don’t think I was trying to commit a felony.

Barnicle: No.

Thompson: What I was trying to—what I wanted to experience and get access to is what it’s like to work in these jobs.

File this one under you’ve got to be friggin’ kidding me. And don’t tell me Barnicle didn’t know better than to even try to equate these two men. Someone going to work in these horrid conditions for a year and writing about what they experienced and not allowing the employers to know they are a journalist in no way, no shape and no how resembles what the mainstream media keeps trying to call journalism by the likes of O’Keefe.

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Chris Wallace and Fox News can sure pick 'em can't they? I've got to wonder if Fox will still be circling the wagons around this guy or throw him under the bus as more news comes out and possibly O'Keefe and the others involved start spilling the beans about what happened. Team member and web master for C&L Jamie had this prediction on how Fox will handle it.

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Boy, Digby had this one right:

In case you were wondering, the consensus on all the Sunday gasbag shows is that Obama is an abject failure because of his radical leftist ideology and that his only hope of even maintaining the presidency, much less winning a second term is to take a sharp turn to the right and enact the Republican agenda. Read on...

Case in point Matt Dowd and company on This Week.

DONALDSON: He has -- he's the president. He has to be the leader. Now, he may go down again, but he has got to say, "Here's my plan." And you're right: He has to herd the Democrats, first of all.

ROBERTS: But I don't think that they're so upset about the deficit.

DOWD: Well, actually -- actually...

ROBERTS: I think they're much more upset about jobs.

DOWD: Actually, I think the best thing to do -- for him to do is get in a fight with the Democrats right away, get in a fight with the Democrats, because the Democrats right now are as less liked as the Republicans are in Congress. And so if he demonstrates, "Listen, I got elected because I was going to be a post-partisan president. That's why I got elected. I was going to bring the country together. I was going to stop the dysfunction up the -- up the street. I was going to stop that. And the dysfunction belongs in both political parties, and I'm going to take on the Democrats on something big and get it done and work with the Republicans to do it." I think that's what the country wants.

MORAN: Triangulate?

(CROSSTALK)

DONALDSON: Clinton -- Clinton signed the welfare reform bill, and Mario Cuomo and all the good Democratic liberals said that's the end of the country almost, and, of course, it wasn't. He has to do something like that.

ROBERTS: A place he could do it is education, and he does have a very interesting education proposal that's running into problems with Democrats.

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I think I like the Bobblespeak translation of Peggy Noonan's hackery on Meet the Press better than the real thing. For a good laugh go read the whole post then compare it to the actual transcript.

Dionne: Obama needs to be like Reagan and speak in nonsensical parables

Gregory: he also needs have mindless optimism

Noonan: yes Reagan and Obama were both young Presidents

Gregory: um what?

Noonan: also Reagan had a clear plan - incite racial resentment, appear in front of a lot of flags and, build up the deficit and leave the problem for later

Gregory: people loved that

Actual hackery below the fold with Peggy Noonan still banging that we're a center-right country drum. Sorry Peggy, but we're not.

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From The Daily Show:

Senior Trendologist Jason Jones sees a big movement toward "experts" on the air making meaningless claims.

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Fox again proves itself to be little more than a propoganda arm for the Republican Party. Bill-O and Hume celebrate Sister Sarah joining their ranks at ClusterFox and hope the move helps advance her political career.

From Think Progress--O’Reilly excited that Palin will be able to use Fox News to help her political career.

O’REILLY: Right. Okay, now let’s get to Sarah Palin signing on with FNC. Smart move I think for the governor. Do you agree?

HUME: Well, she’ll certainly — is somebody that our audience will be interested in. The whole country is interested in her. The fascination with her, the preoccupation with her is something to behold. And it has endured, you know, long past the end of the campaign. Still endures to this day. So she will certainly be an asset to the FOX News Channel in the sense of attracting an audience. And that will give her a forum where she can say what she thinks. And it’ll give her a chance to perhaps polish her articulation of issues.

O’REILLY: There’s no doubt that she thinks she has a political future. Do you agree on the national level?

HUME: I think she does.

O’REILLY: Yes.

HUME: I think she does, Bill. She certainly has a tremendous future within the Republican party in the sense that she is a tremendous draw. She’s a great fundraiser. She wants to get beyond that, though, and appeal to a broader electorate. I think the electorate will need to be assured by her on a number of counts. I think that if — she will need because she’s from outside of Washington and proved occasionally to be out of touch with issues to some extent, she will need to establish herself as really conversant with a great many national and international issues.

O’REILLY: Right.

HUME: And to come across more knowledgeable on those issues.

O’REILLY: And she can do that here.

HUME: Well, I certainly — this will certainly give her a place where she can discuss those issues (INAUDIBLE).

Lawrence O'Donnell filling in for Keith Olbermann talks to Media Matters' Eric Burns about George Stephanopoulos' bit of stenography for Rudy Giuliani on Good Morning America. As Burns points out sadly what happened with Giuliani is more of a rule than the exception and thankfully we have organizations like Media Matters and the blogs holding the media accountable when they do these sort of things.

O`DONNELL: Let’s turn now to Eric Burns, president of Media Matters for America, which as you can imagine, has been all over this one today. Good evening, Eric.

ERIC BURNS: Good evening, Lawrence.

O`DONNELL: Now, we know that George Stephanopoulos knows that four teams of hijackers commandeered U.S. airliners on September 11th. He knows what happened. What is it that happened to a smart guy like George in a middle of an interview like that where Giuliani can just slip that by? Does it mean that Republicans like Giuliani are so accustomed to getting away with that move in these interviews like this that the media, in a sense, has internalized this notion that there were no domestic attacks during President Bush’s presidency?

BURNS: I think there’s no question that conservatives are used to getting away with this because we don’t have a culture of accountability in our media. And, you know, what happened today is a great example of accountability working the way it should. Our job at Media Matters is to hold journalists accountable.

When we documented this morning, other folks picked it up, PolitiFact picked it up. And by this afternoon, Mr. Stephanopoulos, to his credit, had accepted responsibility for not calling out Mr. Giuliani on his factually erroneous statement. And something we need to see more of in the media.

But, unfortunately, Lawrence, the media is lazy, you know? And it’s something we just see every day, but it’s bad for the county, it’s bad for America, it’s bad for our political discourse. Media’s got to do a better job. They can’t be carrying right-wing talking points, especially when they’re wrong.

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From The Colbert Report:

Stephen shows how easy it is to connect the dots to the underwear bomber on his T.G.I. Jihad's placemat.

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Rick Sanchez and David Gergen with more false left vs right equivalencies where of course it's somehow 'extreme' to think that dropping bombs on poor people's heads is alright in this phony 'war on terror' and military action is 'moderate'. And Gergen does his best to feed into the right wing meme that Democrats are somehow soft on terrorism because the President didn't come out beating his chest immediately while he was on vacation in Hawaii after the Underwear Bomber incident.

SANCHEZ: Meantime, if you have got it, Dan, give me the shot of the White House once again, because there is other developing story that we're following for you having to do with the president of the United States. He is meeting with the biggest of the bigs today. Everyone who has a position having to do even tangentially with national security is meeting right now behind closed doors with the president of the United States.

David Gergen, CNN senior political adviser, has been in meetings like this one.

The question continues to come back as to how broad this discussion will be. Will this be the beginning, David, of a discussion that the Obama administration is going to have over time as far as focusing our effort on terrorism, or will it just be a discussion to figure out how some guy got on a plane with a bomb in his underwear?

GERGEN: Well, Rick, listen, they have got a big political problem.

This guy got through. You know, hey, he had this loophole that he found in our system. He burst through it. He damn near brought down a plane, damn near killed a lot of Americans.

SANCHEZ: Yes.

GERGEN: And it looked like the administration was somewhat complacent about it. They said the system worked. And the president did not come out and respond for three days. So, they didn't quite look like they were quite on top of it.

Sometimes, when they go on vacation, they get a little too relaxed, if I may say so.

SANCHEZ: Yes.

GERGEN: And, so, first of all, they have to seem like and they have got put the period at the end of that sentence and start a new sentence, saying, we are being decisive and we're getting on top of this and we're going to fill these holes.

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Former Lt. General "Goes There": Calls for all Muslim men between 18-28 to be strip searched:

A recent FOX News Saturday guest, retired Lt. General Thomas McInerney offered a solution to terrorism on American airliners, religious profiling: "If you are an 18-28-year-old Muslim man then you should be strip searched. And if we don't do that there's a very high probability we're going to lose an airline." McInerney's solution is many things (swift and decisive, for instance), but is primarily ignorant of two portions of the US Constitution, The first and fourth amendments.

The FOX anchor implied that such violations would, and rightfully so, cause unrest: "That's just not going to go over, not in this country," she told McInerney, who simply declared that religious freedom and protection from such profiling through illegal searches were "part of the problem".

As Bob Cesca noted... what could possibly go wrong? Even the Fox newsmodel Julie Banderas was freaked out by the suggestion. I would like to know how the general would determine just who is a Muslim and who is not?