For those who haven't seen Noel Sheppard outside his natural habitat on the Internet, we have pulled up some videos so you can see his zest in action.
This is exactly as I remember him from our many phone conversations, always a little amazed (and yet entertained) by the media circus.
While this will almost certainly remain unreported on the broadcast news networks, the Associated Press is reporting that the Democratic National Convention Committee accepted at least $5 million in corporate donations and borrowed another $8 million in order to reach its $36.7 million budgetary goal, according to the financial disclosure reports that were filed with the Federal Election Commission on Oct. 17.
In doing so however, the Democratic Party failed to uphold its pledge to run its convention solely from money raised by individual donors and not corporate cash. "This convention will be different," DNC chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Fla.) promised last year.
Appearing as regular panel member on Friday's Inside Washington on PBS, as he recounted former President Bill Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention, liberal Washington Post columnist Colby King claimed that "the amount of hate that the Republicans have for Barack Obama is just astounding," calling it "raw, visceral hate."
A bit later, after right-leaning panel member Charles Krauthammer offered criticism of Michelle Obama's speech, King lambasted him for not giving the First Lady a pass from substantive analysis and ended up gratuitously suggesting that dying was the only thing President Obama and wife Michelle could do to make the conservative Krauthammer happy. King:
On Friday's NBC Today, less than two hours before another poor jobs report, co-host Matt Lauer touted a bold economic prediction: "Some of the analysts I've been reading have said that no matter who is president over the next four years, the economy will add about 12 million jobs just because of the cycle it's in." CNBC Mad Money host Jim Cramer agreed with the rosy scenario: "...a lot of pent-up demand in autos and pent-up demand in exports. It's not such a bad moment."
Earlier in the discussion, Cramer predicted that the upcoming jobs numbers would be "a little better than expected" from the projection of 135,000 jobs created in August, with "Maybe 10,000 jobs more than that." At the top of the 9 a.m. hour, fill-in news anchor Tamron Hall delivered the much more disappointing reality: "[The unemployment rate] now stands at 8.1% for the month of August, down .2% from July, but only because more people gave up looking for work. The economy added 96,000 jobs last month."
Comparing the RNC and DNC conventions on Friday's NBC Today, MSNBC Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough declared a knockout for Democrats: "...if we're going pound for pound, round for round, this wasn't Ali versus Frasier, this was Muhammed Ali versus Chuck Wepner...It was ugly..." The liberal crowd assembled around Scarborough at a bar in Charlotte all cheered and applauded the statement. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Scarborough's boxing reference was to a 1975 fight when Wepner went 15 rounds with the heavyweight champion Ali before losing. On the conventions, he argued that Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden "all hit home runs...all hit it out of the park," while in Tampa, "you had a Republican convention that was trying to figure out how to love Mitt Romney."
During the midnight hour of MSNBC's Thursday night Democratic National Convention coverage, host Chris Matthews managed to squeeze in another charge of racism against a black President by "right wingers" as he brought up the birther movement and asserted:
During the midnight hour of MSNBC's Thursday night Democratic National Convention coverage, MSNBC analyst Howard Fineman -- formerly of Newsweek -- declared that it was "brilliant" for President Obama to suggest that Republicans are being "unpatriotic" in trying to make an issue of the economy's poor performance during his time in office.
Shortly past midnight, Fineman asserted:
The Democratic Convention produced a "home run derby of speeches," insisted CNN's John King early Friday morning on Piers Morgan Tonight. This came after CNN hailed Michelle Obama's DNC speech as "probably a grand slam" and Bill Clinton's DNC address as "one of the great modern political speeches I have ever heard."
"But over all, Democrats have to leave this town pretty happy. Still a close election, but Democrats have to leave happy. They had three very good nights, a home run derby of speeches," hyped King.
During early Friday morning’s coverage of the Democratic Convention, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews decided to play a clip of the previous evening's acceptance speech by Barack Obama to demonstrate that he was a “moderate” and “certainly not a socialist.” (video after jump)
During MSNBC’s Thursday night coverage of the Democratic Convention, Melissa Harris-Perry and Chris Matthews decided to further indulge in their unhealthy obsession with birtherism. You may recall that Matthews hijacked Andrea Mitchell’s interview of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to ask a question about birtherism during the Republican Convention on August 29. On September 5, Matthews concluded his interview with San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, an alleged rising Democratic star, why there are so many birthers in his state of Texas.
Perry’s birther interjection concerned Obama’s speech dealing with the theme of citizenship. In fact, she called it a “brilliant” moment. However, she made the patently false claim that mainstream Republicans are birther enthusiasts and “redefined” the term herself to convey an overt collectivist idea of citizenship. On the other hand, Matthews, who sat down with Rep. Joseph Crowley and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who declared that the "right wing" wants President Barack Obama's document because "he's black" and doesn't understand why people still don't "get it." Well, it's probably because conspiratorial drivel doesn't go mainstream all that often. (video after the jump)
Brian Williams, on NBC’s Thursday night coverage of the DNC, unleashed the biggest howler of the night when he told White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett: “You, I guess have to play mistake-free ball now for 60 days, hope for nothing but positive coverage. That's a tall order.”
Delivering positive coverage for Obama was certainly not a "tall order" for Williams and his fellow NBC News colleagues, as they spent most of the night praising Team Obama and dumping on Mitt Romney. (Video after the jump)
Not all members of the media offered a "tepid" reaction to President Obama's DNC address. ABC's Jonathan Karl hyped that Obama's crescendo to his speech that the audience loved was "vintage Obama."
"But that last part of the speech was vintage Obama, trying to get these people here, to get the people that drove his campaign, talking about we have providence on our side. They loved it," reported Karl, who added "Tears in the eyes of a lot of these delegates, a lot of tears."