Of all the petty things Phil Griffin could do, this is on top of the list.

In case you were wondering why you haven't seen me on MSNBC recently, it seems that Joe Scarborough, he of the lowest rated morning show in cableland, has blackballed me. And Phil Griffin, the alleged president of MSNBC, is going along with it.

It all began May 29, with Joe Scarborough taking to Twitter to whine about the media coverage of the supposed Sestak scandal (remember that one?):...read on

I met Scarborough at a book party and he was very nice to me and actually praised C&L's coverage of him. He thought we were fair to him even though we do criticize him so I found this whole episode quite sad.

Digby explains the entire scenario:

So the most famous blogger in the world has been banned from MSNBC after Joe Scarborough pitched a fit about a passing comment on twitter nobody even paid attention to. It's hard to believe that anyone in politics or the media would be so incredibly stupid as to draw attention to the fact that he had a forgotten scandal in his past by forcing a public spectacle of it, but there you go. Of course, he is a Republican.

Those of you who don't know about Joe Scarborough's dead intern problem probably didn't start reading the internet regularly until after 2002. Certainly the mainstream press didn't cover it. You see at the time the entire village was hysterical over the disappearance of congressman Gary Condit's mistress, a woman who happened to work in his office and who seemed to remind everyone of Monica Lewinsky, which naturally made them come completely unglued. The media, with the help of the family, pretty much convicted Condit of murder in one of the most revolting displays of railroading ever seen in American politics. Even when the actual murderer was revealed years later, the worst of the perpetrators refused to back down.

Meanwhile, that same summer, star up-and-coming Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough, recently divorced under charges of infidelity, had unexpectedly decided to resign from office six months after being re-elected. Shortly thereafter an intern on his Florida staff was found dead -- in the office -- under mysterious circumstances with allegations of cover-ups by the local authorities and the quack medical examiner. And nobody in DC even raised an eyebrow.
...read on.

It was silly for Scarborough to have that type of reaction to a Twitter response. Lighten up, dude.

Greg Sargent reminds us of the double standard that applies to liberals when it comes to the media.

It's funny. I don't recall the chief of MSNBC publicly banning Liz Cheney from appearing on the network when she cut an entire Web video "publicly antagonizing" Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews for allegedly being too frightened to debate her about terrorism ...

See, conservatives are expected to demonize the media, and can always count on being granted a platform by the same major networks they hammer publicly on a regular basis. It's all part of the game, get it? But it seems Markos got publicly dressed down and banned by the president of the network, no less, all because he got under Scarborough's skin with a few nasty little Tweets.

Conservative pundits can say anything at all and are never held accountable for their actions. That's a sad fact that we see over and over again.

Booman Tribune: Your lousy congress

TBogg: The lovely couple and their guests

DownWithTyranny!: Tom Tomorrow's Invisible-Hand of-the-Free-Market-Man says: "We'll suggest that media coverage of the spill is the REAL catastrophe"

Badtux the Snarky Penguin: Let them eat dumpster scraps

Politics in the Zeros: Does an Afghanistan exit strategy hurt our allies

Norwegianity: Things I learned today

"Media Event". In campaign speak, that's an opportunity for a candidate to shake a few hands in front of the cameras, make a speech on some subject or the other and give the press a chance to see you. Unless you're Meg Whitman running for the governorship of California:

Press shy GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman found herself challenged by reporters today after she announced an "open press" stop in Oakland, then refused to take questions the press -- which was also barred from covering her tour of the port's Union Pacific facility.

Reporters from Bay Area media outlets -- TV, print and radio -- turned up for Whitman's advertised campaign stop in Oakland, where the former eBay CEO had announced a campaign stop and press event.

But once at the Union Pacific Railroad site, the assembled reporters were not allowed to view her tour -- and herded into a holding room instead.

Then came the news that Whitman also wouldn't take questions; reporters had been called in to "see" her make statements on "how she could be helpful as governor" on jobs and the economy, Whitman spokeswoman Sarah Pompei said.[..]

Pompei told reporters Whitman said the no press tour was a Union Pacific call -- that the company's officials did not want media coverage. (Union Pacific spokesman Aaron Hunt begs to differ. He just told us that "we planned, actually, to have press talk with Meg on the tour....we understood there would be media availability and we wanted to work with that.")

It's very possible that Whitman's handlers are nervous about her in front of the press, as her grasp on basic facts seem to be a little skewed, as this ad from California Accountability notes:

As yet, Whitman has still refused to release her taxes for public scrutiny as well, a growing concern as the election ads get progressively nastier.

Given the massive clusterf@#$ that is the state of the State of California (and the fact that not only is California the world's 8th largest economy, California taxes subsidize other states as well), having someone so clearly not-ready-for-prime-time in the Governor's office is a prescription for disaster.

Maybe David Broder should have waited until his own newspaper divulged their newest poll results before writing a slobbering column about Sarah Palin. Because wouldn't ya know, she's taken a huge dive in the polls.

I wrote a while ago that going off on her book tour would give her a nice bounce in the polls, but while the money was great, the hype would wear off long before 2012 came rolling along, and she's not going to be able to tour the country with as much positive media coverage as she did this time around.

Here's what the poll said:

Although Palin is a tea party favorite, her potential as a presidential hopeful takes a severe hit in the survey. Fifty-five percent of Americans have unfavorable views of her, while the percentage holding favorable views has dipped to 37, a new low in Post-ABC polling.

There is a growing sense that the former Alaska governor is not qualified to serve as president, with more than seven in 10 Americans now saying she is unqualified, up from 60 percent in a November survey. Even among Republicans, a majority now say Palin lacks the qualifications necessary for the White House.

Palin has lost ground among conservative Republicans, who would be crucial to her hopes if she seeks the party's presidential nomination in 2012. Forty-five percent of conservatives now consider her as qualified for the presidency, down sharply from 66 percent who said so last fall.

Among all Republicans polled, 37 percent now hold a "strongly favorable" opinion of Palin, about half the level recorded when she burst onto the national stage in 2008 as Sen. John McCain's running mate.

Among Democrats and independents, assessments of Palin also have eroded. Six percent of Democrats now consider her qualified for the presidency, a drop from 22 percent in November; the percentage of independents who think she is qualified fell to 29 percent from 37 percent.

And to all those who are enthralled with the mystical independent voters, she's dropped eight points. It's still very early, but these plummeting poll numbers shouldn't be ignored.

Since the book tour, she's become a Fox News analyst, appeared with on all the Fox shows, including with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, and was the highly paid main speaker at Tea Party National Convention. I guess it doesn't take a scandal or a major gaffe to sink this quickly after all. Or maybe Americans are getting saturated with Palin and she's losing her "populist edge."

I don't think she should be taken lightly myself, but I found these numbers quite surprising. I expected the bump she got from the book tour would last a bit longer. Joe Klein makes a good point when he says:

The speech was inspired drivel, a series of distortions and oversimplifications, totally bereft of nourishing policy proposals — the sort of thing calculated, carefully calculated, to drive lamestream media types like me frothing to their keyboards. Palin is a big fat target, eminently available for derision. But I will not deride. Because brilliance must be respected, especially when it involves marketing in an era when image almost always passes for substance. (See the top 10 unfortunate political one-liners.)

I don't agree with his use of the word "brilliance," but in the era of 24/7 cable TV, Fox News and Frank Luntz, marketing is a huge weapon. I have no doubt that she will improve as time goes by, but if America isn't buying her act at this point, I'm not sure they ever will.

The Moderate Voice has more.

Connecting.the.Dots: Bedtime for Bonzo Bankers

Sadly, No! Ruh Roh, Breitbart's boy reporter has race issues and Andy's having a twitter meltdown. It's Liberal Media Coverage!

Newsifact: Two propaganda outlets censor Obama

A plain blog about politics: Textbook

Economist's View: Inequality and "Guard Labor"

Calitics: Carlyfornia

Schoolhouse Rock - Three is a Magic Number

Okay, maybe not three, but would you believe that when it comes to Afghanistan, 30 is the magic number? As Moon of Alabama notes, each time a battle in Afghanistan is described, the losses are always around 30. Megan Carpentier of Air America suggests that it may be that the Pentagon's cold calculus is that 30 civilian deaths is the maximum we Americans will tolerate without questioning the wisdom of the battles:

In other words, the Pentagon determined that 30 casualties, even if they were civilian, were too few to matter politically or to attract the attention of the press for more than a few words. If commanders expected more civilian casualties than that, political leaders had to sign off on the attack in advance to make sure they were prepared for the PR fall-out.

That PR calculus of how many deaths matter to the average American has apparently carried over from the Bush Administration to the Obama Adminstration, at least insofar as ground commanders are concerned. But the American people deserve the truth about how many Afghans--civilian and otherwise--are being killed by our forces. Just because senior officials at the Pentagon think that killing 30 people doesn't warrant their attention doesn't mean they're right.

I know I'm a week late, but the NFL is finally under way and it looks like a pretty wide open year. I'm a NY Giants fan and they play the hated Cowboys on the road in the opening game of their new stadium on NBC's Sunday Night Football. The one where punters can hit the mega score board that Jerry Jones just had built.

Tom Brady was rusty, but in the end looked like Brady with the help of a fumble. JaMarcus Russell is very young and not ready to start in the NFL, but still hasn't been half as bad as Jake Delhomme. Adrian Peterson is awesome and even though I can't stand the media coverage surrounding Brett Favre, (He gets the Anna Nicole Smith treatment) I laugh at the way the media suddenly turned on their golden boy.

Injuries are hitting teams early and that's always a drag.

Anyway, who do you like and who are you rooting for?

Some big games for week 2:

New England at NY Jets

New Orleans at Philadelphia

Pittsburgh at Chicago

Baltimore at San Diego

NY Giants at Dallas

Indianapolis at Miami

Joe Sestak made a video to thank the netroots for our support during the Sestak/Specter Straw Poll.

Adam Green:

By creating one place where the public, political insiders, and the media could look to see the grassroots discontent with Specter and the level of support for Joe Sestak, progressives could alter the environment in which potential challengers made their decision about whether to run -- and alter the media dialogue to make the idea of a primary challenge less far-fetched.

Below are over 35 media stories and blog posts about the Straw Poll's launch and the final results -- personally, I'm most thrilled with all the local media coverage...read on

I want to thank all the C&L readers who participated in the Straw Poll. We had an enormous number of our readers weigh in. One of the main reasons for this campaign was to send a signal to the Beltway elite that christening Arlen Specter out of the gate as he actively voted against the party was not OK by us.

Maz Jobrani on the media coverage of Middle Easterners

Maybe because I've been following the Don Siegelman case closely, but when I heard about Elliot Spitzer's pending indictment, something just didn't past the smell test. While he's admitted to involvement with a prostitution ring and I'm by no means absolving him or trying to diminish the charges, there are more than a few unresolved aspects of this that keep me from calling for his resignation.

Jane Hamsher has summed up these little niggling questions very well:

1. Why would the bank tell the IRS and not Spitzer himself if there was a suspicious transfer? Spitzer is a longtime client, a rich guy and the governor. We're talking thousands of dollars here, not millions. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense that they spotted a "suspicious transfer" made by the governor, and that this is how things began. It's possible it was just ordinary paperwork the bank had to file with the government whenever some particular flag was raised, but if that's the case, why did the DoJ go to DefCon 3?

2. What is a USA doing prosecuting a prostitution case? This isn't normally what the feds spend their time with.

3. Mike Garcia is a Chertoff crony. Sources familiar with the investigation say that he sent a prosecution memo to DC two months ago asking for authority to indict a public figure (Spitzer). Which means they had their case made long before the wire tap of February 13. Why did they then include this line from that conversation in the complaint?

LEWIS continued that from what she had been told "he" (believed to be a reference to Client-9) "would ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe -- you know -- I mean that...very basic things...."Kristen" responded: "I have a way of dealing with that...I'd be like listen dude, you really want the sex?...You know what I mean."

This salacious detail does not seem like it's necessary to make their case, and appears to be added for no other purpose than to destroy Spitzer's career.

Scott Horton (who covers the Siegelman case extensively) and Digby have similar questions, while Glenn Greenwald notes the double standard between the breathless media coverage of Spitzer's scandal and David Vitter. And Will Bunch looks at the incredible history of the Mann act.