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Acting as if he were trying out for a MSNBC gig, Piers Morgan used his half hour of CNN’s prime time, following President Barack Obama’s 9 PM EDT speech on the debt ceiling and House Speaker John Boehner’s response, to hit his guests from the left, presuming Obama holds the reasoned moral high ground while Boehner represents an obstinate and selfish position.  “A lot of people blame the…

MSNBC's Chris Matthews appears to have a serious case of Fox News envy. In a special installment of "The Last Word" following Barack Obama's debt ceiling address to the nation Monday, the "Hardball" host said, "I thought the President used a couple of words we’re familiar with: 'Fair and balanced.' It was like a Fox commercial" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In his White House speech tonight, President Obama renewed his call for a debt-ceiling impasse solution which requires "the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to give up some of their breaks in the tax code and special deductions." In other words, he wants tax increases, even though earlier in the day, he backed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's "plan" (using the term loosely, as…

Barack Obama might give Chris Matthews a thrill up his leg, but the bromance MSNBC's "Hardball" host has with former President Bill Clinton knows no bounds. On Monday's program, Matthews finished by nominating Clinton as Secretary of the Treasury, "Because in many ways it’s a life saver" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

After returning from asking Washington, D.C. tourists about the government-mandated phase out of incandescent light bulbs that begins in 2012, our friends at MRCTV got a first hand lesson in how the government expects Americans to handle the impending switch to mercury-laden compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs). [Video embedded below page break]  

On Sunday's Weekend Edition, NPR's Jeff Brady spotlighted the first same-sex "marriage" in New York State and how local political and business leaders in Niagara Falls, where this first ceremony took place, hope to cater to the homosexual community. Only one sound bite during Brady's report came from an opponent to such ceremonies, and the correspondent failed to mention the protests against…

Dodd-Frank, the 2,300-page financial "reform" monstrosity spearheaded by Capitol Hill corruptocrats, turned 1 this week. It made too-big banks bigger. It made too-risky incentives riskier. It made a lousy economy lousier. Billed as a "consumer protection" act, Dodd-Frank has succeeded phenomenally — in protecting and stimulating the business-stifling business of government. Dodd-Frank is a…

Former Newsweek editor Howard Fineman on Monday berated Tea Partiers for engineering a "slow motion succession" in relation to the budget impasse in Congress. Appearing with Hardball host Chris Matthews, Fineman summarized the conservative position this way: "This is an ending of the social compact. This is two, three generations worth of agreement about Social Security, about Medicare,…

In an interview, MSNBC president Phil Griffin made some rather strange characterizations of his network, insisting that it "come[s] from a progressive stance" while it is simultaneously "not ideologically driven." Those two concepts would seem contradictory in the minds of most people--but not to Griffin, who seems to believe that his staff of "smart people" who "do their research" is up to…

Quoting a British politician who claimed "right-wing nutters" pose the most serious threat to the international financial system, MSNBC's Martin Bashir asked his conservative guest on Monday: "He's right, isn't he?" The MSNBC anchor posed this question at the end of a contentious interview with Tea Party Nation Founder Judson Phillips, after asking Phillips four times whether he wanted the U.…

Frank Schaeffer -- the embittered liberal progeny of the late evangelical Christian scholar Francis Schaeffer -- appeared on MSNBC's "Martin Bashir" program this afternoon where he availed himself the opportunity to spew forth more venom against American evangelicals, who tend to vote for conservative Republicans. Schaeffer was ostensibly brought on to react to new polling data that show 56…

Once again, Tea Party-critic John Avlon took aim at "hyper-partisanship" in Congress but focused the blame squarely on House Republicans while saving a tiny bit of blame for Democrats. In a July 25 op-ed for CNN.com, he hit Republicans for walking away from a generous deal by President Obama to settle the debt ceiling debate. "We are learning that activists and ideologues pushing anti-tax…

You can already see the apologia coming on this one -- Rachel Maddow never actually said that seven towns in Wisconsin are named Union in homage to labor unions. Which is true, she didn't. Instead, it could not be more obvious that Maddow implied this, with trademark smarm, and more than once at that. Maddow did so for the first time on her MSNBC show back in February, during the battle…

Appearing on Saturday's NBC Today, CNBC's John Harwood solely blamed House Republicans for the ongoing debt ceiling gridlock: "Speaker Boehner and President Obama, were negotiating in good faith. They wanted a deal....the House Republican caucus...would not accept what President Obama needed to make a deal, and that is real and significant tax hikes as a component."   Harwood argued…