Joan Walsh

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Hardball: Republican A.D.D.

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Chris Matthews and his panel of Joan Walsh and Jonathan Alter talk about the Republicans' bad case of A.D.D. where they're already carping that the Democrats had better not use Ted Kennedy's death to push through health care/insurance reform. Heaven forbid what's good for Ronnie Raygun might be good for Ted Kennedy as well.

Matthews: Let me ask you about this attempt at foot steps here on the part of the right to interrupt this in a way, I called them ghouls a few minutes ago..

Walsh: Yeah.

Matthews: ..ah, grave robbers. They're trying to get into this story by saying the Democrats are going to do a "win one for the Gipper"...well do me if Audie Murphy served this country and was fighting for us, we'd say, well let's try to do something as well. Let's try to be equally courageous.

If somebody dies in a battle you say, let's try to carry it on, carry the banner forward. That seems to be very, American. They're turning that on the right as some kind of "well, you'd better not try that".

Alter: We've seen this before. The year was 1964. John F. Kennedy has been assassinated and Lyndon Johnson said let's pass the Civil Rights Act as a memorial to the slain president.

Matthews: Let it continue.

Walsh: Right.

Alter: And the right wing at that time said that it was inproper. The bill was passed and Ted Kennedy told me once that it was one of the top three accomplishments of the United States Senate in you know, all the years that he was there in the Civil Rights Act of '64.

Walsh: Well of course it was and you know passing a great health reform bill would be another signature accomplishment and he deserves it. And no one's dictating what should be in the bill, but to accuse, to say that's playing politics is just ridiculous. That is what the man stood for.

Matthews: Isn't it funny that people have memories that are so slight. The A.D.D. that overcomes them? Not in a clinical or medical sense, but just in a political sense. How many times in our lives in the last twenty or so years have you heard the phrase "win one for the Gipper"?

Walsh: Right.

Matthews: It's hilarious. It's a hoot, and now they're saying "don't do what we do".



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Ron Reagan Jr. and Joan Walsh on Hardball reminding Chris Matthews that reality seems to have a liberal bias. As they both point out, once again, the Villagers were wrong, and the "loony left," as the media likes to dismiss any of us as, were right.

I disagree with both of them on one point, though. There is nothing "honorable" about what Tom Ridge is doing. He didn't quit and speak up when he was first asked to do this. And now that he's got a book to sell, suddenly he's feeding the public some half truths about what went on to gin up some interest in it.

Glenn Greenwald and Marcy Wheeler have had a bit of an interesting exchange with The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder over his reaction to Ridge's latest revelation that are well worth the read on the topic of how the Villagers treat the left.

Greenwald: Fringe leftist losers: wrong even when they're right:

Just as is still commonly said about opponents of the Iraq War (even though they were right, they were still wrong and unSerious because their motives were bad), Ambinder acknowledges that Bush critics were right that the terror alerts were being manipulated for political ends (he has no choice but to acknowledge that now that Ridge admits it), but still says journalists like himself were right to scorn such critics "because these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence." As always: even when the dirty leftist hippies are proven right, they're still Shrill, unSerious Losers who every decent person and "journalist" scorns.

Wheeler: Ambinder: Sorry I Was So Stupid, But I Was Right To Be Stupid:

Mark Ambinder takes the opportunity of Ridge's confirmation that the terror alerts were one big political game to claim he was justified in believing that we DFHers were wrong about the alerts--and in doing so, demonstrates what is so wrong with so much of Village journalism.

Be sure to check out the rest of both posts if you haven't already. Reagan and Walsh should read them as well if they haven't. By showing such deference to Ridge they're simply feeding into the narrative they're attempting to beat back here.


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This was another gem from Hardball yesterday besides Matthews' "deather" rant where bad Tweety was rearing his ugly head again. Was it a full moon yesterday or what? Joan Walsh attempted to give Chris Matthews a bit of a history lesson on the divisions in the United States which have been played upon by politicians and corporate interests to keep people voting against their own interests, and Matthews attacks it as being "Marxist".

Joan had something to say about this over at Salon, Is GOP using race to block Obama agenda? Ya think?:

There is one main reason the U.S. doesn't have the social democratic traditions and programs enjoyed by most Western democracies -- we are the only such nation without some kind of universal healthcare -- and that reason is our history of ethnic, racial and class strife. (The bounty of the eternal frontier and American exceptionalism fit in there too, but I'd pick our fractious and well-manipulated heterogeneity as the top reason.)

The history of the 19th century and early 20th century is the history of labor and political coalitions splintered by divisions between Northern Europeans and Southern Europeans, between middle-class Germans and less well off German Jews, between the Irish and everyone else, and, increasingly after blacks won something akin to freedom, between all white ethnic groups and African-Americans. Latinos and Asians came with their own demands and baggage and relations got more complicated still. Barriers of language, culture, class and skin color thwarted many efforts to grow labor unions and build a social-democratic majority.

Meanwhile, the one constant for at least 150 years has been a savvy cadre of political operatives who used those racial and ethnic divisions to advance their pro-business agenda. Go back to Karl Rove's idol Mark Hanna, who made turn-of-the-19th-century Republican politics safe for whites-only organizing in the South, to Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy, to Lee Atwater's Willie Horton strategy to Rove's own neo-Southern, pander-to-the-base strategy that has driven the GOP into its current ditch. Where in other Western nations, those years saw the fairly steady advance of basic conceptions of human rights, labor rights and an expanded social safety net, in the U.S. such social progress -- and especially such programs -- was more sporadic and limited.

Matthews didn't buy my analysis; in fact, he called it "Marxist" -- I challenged him, as it's not that simple, and he changed it to an "economic analysis" -- and he put former Rep. Kweisi Mfume on the hot seat asking if he agreed with me. Mfume started off by saying he's not a conspiracy theorist -- for the record, neither am I -- but then he added with a smile, "I don't believe Humpty Dumpty just fell; I believe he was pushed. And there are people who are pushing buttons to try to hold back the progress we are making in this country as one nation. And when you push those buttons, it causes the progress to slow down ... This is anti-American."

Digby weighed in on the interview as well.

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Chris Matthews asks Joan Walsh about her article at Salon where she weighed in on Liz Cheney's appearance on Larry King Live, and refused to put some distance between herself and the crazy birthers. Joan reiterated some of what she wrote in her post at Salon:

I wasn't planning to blog so I took notes in real-time, and I can't promise Cheney's quote is verbatim. But she said the same thing twice, so I'm confident I caught her drift. After King showed video of the crazy birther who disrupted a meeting with poor GOP Rep. Mike Castle, demanding he acknowledge Obama was born in Kenya (that's one birther claim); and after Carville denounced them as a "poor, pathetic" fringe group, King gave Cheney a chance to distance herself from them. But Cheney demurred, telling King the Birther movement exists because "People are uncomfortable with a president who is reluctant to defend the nation overseas."

The rarely shocked Carville seemed briefly speechless, and even King, not known to be the most combative interviewer, tried a second time to get an honest reaction from Cheney -- which I read as expecting her to separate herself from the crazies. But Cheney repeated her talking point about Obama inadequately defending the nation overseas. Unbelievable. Carville called her on it, accurately: "She refuses to say, 'This is ludicrous,' because she actually wants to encourage these people to believe this."

Now, I've debated Cheney, so I know she'll do anything from rudely interrupting to lying to make her point, but even I expected her to take King's opportunity to distinguish her brand of Republicanism from the hooligans who run with the Birthers. But she didn't. Wow. The GOP keeps coughing up younger, supposedly more compelling, "new" leadership, from Sarah Palin to Mark Sanford to, now, Liz Cheney -- and they keep making clear they're not ready for prime time. It's remarkable.


How about a Walsh-friendly edit of that Bill O'Reilly confrontation?

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If you happened to see Bill O'Reilly wanking ever onward Monday night in recapping his confrontation with Joan Walsh on Friday, you probably got the same low mordant chuckle out of his self-serving edit of the interview. After all, it gave him a chance to repeat three more times his leading "When did you stop beating your wife?" question.

But as we noted at the time, Walsh at critical junctures of the exchange handed O'Reilly his lunch -- especially when she zeroed in on his irresponsible, violent and often eliminationist rhetoric directed at the objects of his ire, and his refusal to man up to the predictable (and now manifest) consequences of that.

Indeed, O'Reilly (as usual) edited the video to make him look triumphant against the hapless liberal. But in reality, Walsh seriously called him out at key moments and kicked his butt -- especially at the end.

So we decided to offer our own Crooks and Liars Special Edition Video of the showdown. In which Walsh shines triumphant. It's not quite the whole story, but it's a lot closer to what actually happened than O'Reilly's pathetic whinefest.

Speaking of O'Reilly whinefests, I've also compiled a collage of his recent whining about left-wing meanies who have the audacity to call him out for nastiness -- denouncing in particular the "politics of ridicule" and the "demonization" of the opposition that those hateful far-left liberals employ. This includes some footage of one of his ambush crews attacking a woman at her car -- for having simply criticized O'Reilly.

And then it's capped off by a couple of his nastier "Pinhead" segments. Who's demonizing who?

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Bill O'Reilly Selectively Edits Joan Walsh Interview

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(h/t Dave)

How do you know that you've made Bill O'Reilly feel like a chump? When he decides that he's going to re-run his interview with you, without you there to defend yourself, and then selectively edit the footage and ignore large swaths of actual fact-based information (as opposed to the largely non-fact-based "reporting" so prevalent to Fox News). Such is the case with Salon.com's Joan Walsh, who so thoroughly humiliated Billo on Friday that I'm sure he stewed over it all weekend and decided that he had to reassert his lost manhood by bringing on sycophantic Mary Katherine Ham and Juan Williams to reassure him that Billo was still da man.

Note Bill's disingenuous framing of the whole interview: it's all about how the crazed liberals have no regard for the rights of the unborn from being murdered for callous reasons. Never mind that his producers sandbagged Walsh by telling her that she was on to talk about right wing violence. Never mind that the procedure that Dr. Tiller performed was not only legal, but highly regulated, and exceptionally rare. The 60,000 casual late term abortions that Billo cites is pulled from his rather constipated posterior region and doesn't pass even the most basic math logic test (That would mean that Tiller performed 16 late term, casual, abortions every day, 7 days a week, for TEN YEARS). Never mind that Dr. Tiller was acquitted by a Kansas grand jury for not violating the law (after only deliberating for an hour) and that the principal expert cited by O'Reilly, Dr. Paul R. McHugh, has his own controversies that call his agenda to question (McHugh, a former member of Bush43's Council on Bioethics, is a Vatican witness called to dismiss claims of DID in victims of priest molestation and has publicly scorned transsexuals and called for the end of gender reassignment surgery).

Yet for Bill, it's all about the babies. These poor, non-existent, viable fetuses that are being thrown out by their mothers (no doubt liberals) and enabled by the insidious Dr. Tiller. Doesn't Joan Walsh understand how wrong it is to blame Bill O'Reilly for his inflammatory rhetoric over completely fabricated and untrue circumstances that may have resonated so much with someone with only a tenuous grasp on ethics that he may have actually taken an innocent man's life? How dare Walsh be so intolerant?

By the way, Walsh herself had a little fun on Twitter over Billo's antics:

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God bless Joan Walsh. She finally did what I thought no one in the media was capable of doing: She shoved Bill O'Reilly's vicious words back in his face.

Or more correctly, she smacked him with the evil consequences of his reckless and irresponsible rhetoric, manifested in the case of Jim David Adkisson, the Knoxville shooter. And rather than respond, he simply shut up. If there had been more time, I expect he'd have cut her mike.

It was a thing of beauty.

Here are the lines Walsh, who was nastily attacked by O'Reilly the day before, delivered on-air last night on The O'Reilly Factor, to his face, that most of have wished someone would say someday:

Walsh: And you routinely attack, you routinely attack, people on the left, Janeane Garofalo, Michael Moore, who you think their rhetoric leads potentially to acts of violence. It never has led to one act of violence. But you've already driven that crazy guy in Knoxville last year who read your writings and then went and shot up a church and shot liberals, that's already happened once, and you don't feel any responsibility at all, now that it's happened a second time, Bill? Talk about blood on your hands.

The best O'Reilly could muster:

O'Reilly: Miss Walsh, I appreciate you coming on the program. I think everybody knows exactly where you're coming from.

If you watch the video -- I've included the entirety of his exchange with Walsh -- you can see that what led up to this was nine minutes of vintage O'Reilly: nasty, bullying, demanding quick answers to ridiculously leading questions. It started reaching quite a pitch near the end:

Walsh: And look, Bill, you crusaded against him, he had been shot twice already, his clinic had been exploded, his place had been attacked, bombed, vandalized --

O'Reilly: I'm sorry about that. I'm sorry about that. But my constitutional right says, I can say what I say, you can say what you say, as vile as you say it, you can say it, and I would never condemn you for saying it. You are misguided, you have blood on your hands because you portrayed this man as a hero, when he killed late-term babies for casual reasons.

Now, that's just bizarre: He calls someone's words "vile" and declares they have "blood on their hands" in the same breath in which he declares "I would never condemn you for saying it".

Bill O'Reilly "would never condemn" someone for saying what they think? That's perhaps the most outrageous lie, among a steady stream of them, that O'Reilly has ever uttered. O'Reilly regularly, steadily, and remorselessly condemns people for saying what they think. Garofalo and Moore are only the most frequent examples. Hell, that's what his entire show is predicated upon. The reason his ambush crews are so problematic is that they hunt down and harass private citizens merely for saying things Bill O'Reilly doesn't like.

I've known Joan Walsh for many years, and have always thought well of her, despite some philosophical differences -- including, I've thought, not showing enough toughness at times. But after last night, all I can say is:

God bless Joan Walsh.

BTW, below the fold you can see the clip of Falafel Bill setting up this segment in his "Talking Points Memo". It is almost as nastily delusional as what follows:





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Gee, surprise surprise. Bill O'Reilly took extreme umbrage at Salon's Joan Walsh speaking the truth about his role in inspiring acts of domestic terrorism.

Here's what she said:

WALSH: Exactly. I was watching MSNBC all day today, Chris. And there were a couple of experts on these right wing groups saying, this guy was known to authorities. He went to jail in the ‘80s for an assault on I think the Federal Reserve Bank. This is not a lone wolf who has never come into contact or expressed publicly expressed his hateful views. He published a book.

I think there is a certain amount of surveillance that would have been wise. How somebody like that gets a gun when he used a gun in his prior crime—all these things, I think, should be looked at. I support the Second Amendment, but I think guns are too easy to get. All these things will come into play.

And I will say, you know, I do hope that some conservatives stand up. I don‘t blame them. I don‘t blame mainstream Republicans, by any means, for this. I want to be clear. But they could help in ratcheting down some of the rhetoric. When Bill O‘Reilly goes on TV every night and calls Dr. Tiller a baby killer and a Nazi and a Mengele, and shows where he works, why do we put up with that? Why is that entertainment in our culture? It's demonizing a private citizen for doing a lawful job. Why are people doing that? Why is that acceptable? I would like to see a debate about that.

O'Reilly dismissed her point by saying: "Private citizen? Sounds like he sells insurance." Because, in O'Reilly's world, a person's occupation makes all the difference in whether or not he should violate basic precepts of journalistic ethics by holding him up for public demonization and suggesting that someone oughta take him out.

But then he and Laura Ingraham decided to embark on attacking Joan Walsh instead -- by bringing up Salon's coverage of the Jeff Gannon fiasco:

Ingraham: Look, Joan Walsh -- I did a little research for you, OK, tonight. Joan Walsh -- this was in 2005, in a Q&A with the Columbia Journalism Review, she justified what Salon had done to that reporter, Jeff Gannon, that White House reporter who Salon published accounts of as outing! Outing his sexuality, I guess, because of who he was or what he was doing, what he wasn't saying to the White House. And she said, look, it was justified because it was, the White House wasn't very forthcoming with information it was giving reporters, and it apparently didn't even know who this Jeff Gannon was, and he was a fraud, blah blah blah.

So let's be clear: The Left uses, quote, hateful rhetoric when the Left thinks it's justified. So the Left on MSNBC will call President Bush a war criminal, a liar, the most hateful comments about people like Karl Rove, et cetera, et cetera. But when these comments are directed by you -- about you, or people like Rush Limbaugh, as this Joan Walsh character did last night, that is -- well, they deserved it.

Um, Joan Walsh didn't accuse Jeff Gannon of being a mass murderer or a baby killer. She didn't suggest someone should do away with him. She and her reporters just pointed out that Jeff Gannon was a fraud of a reporter to whom the Bush White House gave unbelievable access -- which wasn't a controversial matter at all, but rather a simple fact. It certainly didn't constitute hateful speech.

The same, it must be added, can be said about the rest of Ingraham's examples. She's going to have to work hard to come up with an example of any anchor at MSNBC, let alone any guest, actually spewing hateful rhetoric. Calling Bush a war criminal isn't hateful speech; there in fact is a complete legal case to be made that Bush is indeed a war criminal. And whatever might be said about Rove or Limbaugh pales in comparison to their own daily foul emissions.

But when you're backed into a corner and exposed for the hatemongers you are, you grasp for whatever straws you can. Sorry, Laura. That was an Epic Fail.


Make no mistake. Muslims created this atmosphere where hatred of the Jews is okay and must be "tolerated" as a legitimate point of view. The shooting today is just yet another manifestation emanating from that viewpoint--another manifestation of the welcome mat that Muslims rolled out for fellow anti-Semites of all stripes to no longer be afraid to come out of the closet.
- Wingnut blogger Debbie Schlussel.

Aren't you tired of listening to crazy, hateful people treated as normal and even credible every time you turn on your teevee news? Yeah, me too. Joan Walsh talked about this delicate subject on Hardball last night: Yes, people themselves are responsible when they pull out a gun and shoot people - but do we really need television talking heads whipping them up into a frenzy?

And why is it that the right wing is so eager to blame music and movies "from liberal Hollywood" when kids who do crazy, violent things, yet people who are indoctrinated with year after year of Fair and Balanced Wingnut Poison are somehow invulnerable to its effects? Don't think this ended with von Brunn's capture yesterday. There were far too many people sitting at home watching the news and cheering him on.

More from Walsh:

If there's a through-line between any of these acts of terrorism and the right-wing rhetoric that abets it, of course, it's the one linking Bill O'Reilly to Scott Roeder, the man who murdered Tiller. O'Reilly more than demonized Tiller; night after night he called him a baby killer, compared him to the Nazis, and suggested that he must be stopped. Roeder stopped him, all right. If I were O'Reilly I'd feel terrible for putting a private figure in my public sights night after night, simply for doing his lawful job. But O'Reilly has no conscience, so he's proud of it.

And there's clearly been an uptick in rhetoric suggesting that white men are having their rights abridged by the Obama administration, especially since his pick of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. In a debate with Buchanan a couple of weeks ago, he told me that what was happening to white men was exactly what happened to black men — he didn't give me any examples of lynching — and that it was open season on white men. Wealthy Sen. Lindsay Graham suggested an average white guy like himself wouldn't get a fair shake from Sotomayor, and now even the new face of the GOP, Michael Steele, has said the same thing. If I were a marginal, unemployed, angry, racist white man right now, I'd be hearing a lot of mainstream conservative support for my point of view. Can that help create a climate for more violence? I don't know. I hope not, but I don't know.

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Joan Walsh and Liz Cheney in Campbell Brown's "Great Debate" segment. Good on Joan Walsh for not allowing Liz Cheney to talk over for the entire segment. More pundits who go up against her could take a few lessons from Joan. She hit back at Cheney for interrupting her right out of the box and never let up for the rest of the interview.

BROWN: Time for our time for our "Great Debate."

And tonight's premise: Bringing Guantanamo Bay detainees to America is a security risk.

Some Republicans say that is exactly what happened today, when Ahmed Ghailani was brought from Guantanamo to New York to face trial.

And joining us to debate tonight, Liz Cheney, the former vice president's daughter, who also served in President Bush's State Department. She thinks Gitmo prisoners do not belong on American soil. On the other side, Joan Walsh, who is editor in chief of Salon -- Salon.com.

And we want your opinion too. Vote by calling the number on the bottom of your screen.

First, we're going to have opening statements from each, 30 seconds on the clock.

Liz Cheney, the premise is: Bringing Guantanamo detainees to America is a security risk. Make your case.

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So which is it Chris Matthews? Are you for the rule of law or do you think it's okay to torture prisoners and violate our international treaties? You cannot call out a guest on your show one day for embracing Cheney's rhetoric and then turn around and embrace it yourself the next without rightfully being called either a complete hypocrite, or just psychotic. Matthews is a master of giving all of us a reason to never take him seriously when he does things like this. The man just has no filter.

He had on the ACLU's Anthony Romero in the previous segment and if anyone thinks him talking over Walsh in the clip I posted was bad he was worse with Romero. If Matthews just wants to hear himself talk I don't know why he bothers with guests at all.


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From CNN's Realiable Sources. Joan Walsh tries to get through to David Frum and Chris Cillizza that public opinion polls and whether anyone can claim that torturing prisoners "worked" or not do not matter.

WALSH: You know, I couldn't disagree more with my friend Chris. This is not a "he said/she said" situation. This is torture. Torture is illegal. We don't sit here, Howie, and say he said murder is illegal, but she said, well, sometimes murder's not so bad. These are clear matters of law.

Ronald Reagan signed the 1988 U.N. Convention Against Torture where we committed ourselves to prosecuting people who torture. It's the law. It's super clear. It's not a partisan witch hunt or a "she said/he said" situation.

KURTZ: David Frum.

FRUM: It's not super clear, because the key piece of information people need, most people need to make a decision, is missing. Look, there's a hard core of civil libertarians who will say, I don't care whether this contributed to the defense of the country. Forget it, we won't do it, even if it means Americans die. And then there are some people who say, I support the president no matter what.

But most people want to know, did this contribute to the nation's safety? If so, we'll come to one judgment. If it was wasteful, as it's sometimes alleged, and achieved nothing, then we all condemn it. That's the thing we need to know, and that's the thing we don't know. That's the missing piece in all the reportage.

(CROSSTALK)

WALSH: No, it's illegal, whether it works or not. It's illegal whether it works or not, David.

FRUM: Well, as I said, there's a small minority who would feel like Joan does.

WALSH: Oh, really?

FRUM: Most people want to know, did it -- and that is the missing or the contradicted piece. We don't have a clear answer to that question.

WALSH: It doesn't matter.

CILLIZZA: Howie, I just want to...

KURTZ: Chris.

CILLIZZA: Joan, just real quickly, I just want to point out, in our poll that came our this morning, 49 percent of people said no torture under any circumstances; 48 percent, in some special circumstances, depending on the information. That's not my opinion.

(CROSSTALK)

WALSH: But Chris, the point is it's illegal. In what instance does it matter that 80 percent of Americans would like to murder Dick Cheney? Does that -- would that make it legal? It's not a matter of opinion. It's law.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Joan Walsh and Peter Beinart do a pretty good job here of tag teaming Nancy Pfotenhauer on her punishing the rich talking point. It was nice to watch a panel where they didn't let her talk over everyone the entire time as she likes to do if they let her.

HUGHLEY: Nancy, what do you think? Is he a communist?

PFOTENHAUER: I heard communist and socialist thrown around, and they are two different things. If you want to talk about communism, that's more "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." So it would be more the redistribution of wealth aspect.

I do think his tax the rich thing is punishing prosperity, which is an antithetical to the American dream, and completely ignores the fact that the top five percent of the earners in this country, they do earn about 36 percent of the income. They pay about 60 percent of the income tax, and the bottom 40 percent pay zero. So I'm not sure that's the way he should be going. So that would speak to the redistribution act.

WALSH: But why is it --

PFOTENHAUER: Excuse me?

BEINART: Sorry, go ahead.

HUGHLEY: We just turned into Jerry Springer. Who is going to say -- Joan, what were you saying? You were about to say something.

WALSH: I think that we have had a situation. We are not punishing the rich. Let's be honest. In this country, we have a game that is rigged. If you're born wealthy, you stay wealthy. It's very hard to climb out of the middle class into wealth.

It's still possible. It's a great country. We provide a lot of opportunity. But the rich are finally about to pay their fair share, and Obama, finally a president did what he promised to do. He gave a tax cut to 95 percent of the country. And if you're lucky enough to be in the top five percent who will pay a little bit more, well, you're a lucky person to start with and you should be paying more.

(CROSSTALK)

BEINART: What happens is Republicans always play this game, Republicans always play this game when they start talking about taxes. They start talking about taxes, and then they add the word "income taxes."

PFOTENHAUER: I will talk about payroll.

BEINART: Payroll taxes are much more regressive. They fall much more aggressively on poor people. So do sales tax. So Republicans always talk about income taxes are so weighted against the rich. That is actually the most progressive part of our taxes.

PFOTENHAUER: Let me talk then, particularly, to payroll taxes. When you include payroll taxes with income taxes, the numbers do drop, but not demonstrably.

So you can look at it. You still see the top earners paying the lion's share of both the income and the payroll taxes, and you see the prime earners -- I'm not arguing for anybody to pay more taxes. In a recession, no one's taxes should be raised.

Since President Obama is not talking about raising anyone's taxes other than the upper earners I don't think Nancy is really too worried about everyone's taxes. Just the types she used to lobby for. Just a hunch.

Full transcript to follow.

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Following Dick Armey living up to his first name on Hardball with his sexist remarks to Joan Walsh, Bob Herbert says he owes Joan Walsh and the viewers of Hardball an apology. I agree and if you do as well you can contact the show at hardball@msnbc.com.


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During a debate about Rush Limbaugh's influence on the GOP and Phil Gingrey's boot licking apology for crossing the almighty Rushbo, Dick Armey, former GOP leader with Newt proved the point that Limbaugh's piggish views are the benchmark for conservatives when he insulted Joan Walsh as they debated the stimulus package. As she was making an informed argument, Armey started interrupting her as is typical with Republicans who never want to take any responsibility for their destructive policies that almost destroyed America, but really lost it with this exchange.

Walsh: Who are the income redistributionists?

Armey: Who, what..

Walsh: Who are the income redistributionists?

Armey: Well the biggest income redistributions was a Republican congresswoman, urr. Senator, but Charlie Rangel cracked me up, Charlie said you guys are giving her things that I wouldn't even ask for.

Armey: I don't want to get into that because then the controversy is that Dick Armey is assaulting somebody. There are income redistribitionsts that think they are going to curry favor with a voting blocks in both parties and it's wrong policy whether it comes Republicans or Democrats, it makes no sense. Armey's axiom. Don't let politics define your economics. Don't let politics define anything. Politics is silly, it's inane. Take what amusements you can from them but don't take them seriously.

Walsh: But this is serious business. The economy is a wreck, (Armey laughs) it's been wrecked by the Bush White House and by Republicans in Congress with a lot of help Democratic help, with ( Armey makes more noises and sighs)

Armey: Oh, give it a rest.

Walsh: President Obama, please stop saying 'give it a rest.' Do you have any anything else to say? President Obama has a mandate for change. (Armey laughs again) Your people have stood in his way. They are standing in his way in Capitol hill right now and Rush Limbaugh is making ridiculous statements and Republicans are crawling to him and groveling. That's the state of our economy and our world right now Rep. Armey and it's sad.

Armey: I'm so glad that you could never be my wife because I surely wouldn't have to listen to that prattle from you every day.

Walsh: Well, wow that makes two of us sir, that was really an outstanding comment...

Armey: Look ma'am, you're talking like a paid political hack making your political points.

Walsh: Am I sir?

Armey: Are we going to talk seriously...

Walsh" No, I actually care about social justice, I care about jobs, I care about the economy.

Not only does Armey whip out the sexist card, he then calls her a paid political hack which is what he was for the Republicans for many, many years. What a creep. He was part of Newt's take over so he sure knows about political hacks. Tweety should have made him stop and apologize right there, but he can't do that to one of the Old Boy's Republican club.

David writes:

In a later segment on the same show, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert called Armey's remark sexist. "Dick Armey was so far out of line in the last segment with his sexist comments and he owes Joan Walsh and your viewers an apology," said Herbert. Chris Matthews, host of Hardball, eventually remarked that Armey's comments were "overboard."