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Chris Matthews Blasts Tea Party’s’ Russo for Having ‘Balloon-Head’ Bachmann as Spokesperson

Click here to view this media Somebody got on Tweety’s bad side tonight… the Tea Party Express’ Sal Russo. Joan Walsh didn’t get a chance to say much during the segment but she has more here at Salon — The skewering of Sal Russo : Live by the Tea Party, die by the Tea Party. The GOP flack falls apart defending Michele Bachmann’s slavery history Poor Sal Russo. The Tea Party Express leader had a rough day. Booked on MSNBC’s “Hardball” to discuss Michele Bachmann’s upcoming State of the Union rebuttal, instead he found himself confronted by Bachmann’s idiotic whitewash of American history in a speech in Iowa over the weekend. Go read the rest for more on Bachmann’s nonsense he was trying to defend, but I thought I’d share one more point she made during the interview and in her article about these astroturf teabaggers and who they really are. It was hard to feel sorry for Russo, though: He’s a mainstream Republican campaign consultant who’s worked for everyone from Ronald Reagan to Christine Todd Whitman. He saw a future in the Tea Party, so he hitched his wagon to its “Express.” His firm Russo Marsh and Associates paid itself millions for promoting the candidacies of Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle and Joe Miller — three seats Republicans should have won but lost because Russo’s candidates were crackpots. (Russo insists his firm does it for love, not money.) Now he’s hyping Bachmann; it’s the Tea Party Express that’s sponsoring her speech opposite official GOP rebutter, Rising Star™ Paul Ryan. Maybe Russo is secretly working for the Democrats? On “Hardball,” I tried to meet Russo on his own terms and talk about the deficit. His former boss, Ronald Reagan, built up the largest peacetime budget deficit in history back in the day, and also signed the largest peacetime tax increase. Republican George W. Bush took over a $200 billion annual budget surplus left by Democrat Bill Clinton, and handed President Obama a $1.2 trillion annual deficit. Where was Russo’s Tea Party movement when Republicans were looting the Treasury? Nowhere to be found. Russo and his buddy Dick Armey and the rest of them didn’t have a reason to be busing them to town halls when Republicans were busting the budget.

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All Three Networks Agree: Obama Sounded ‘Reaganesque’ in State of the Union

During coverage of President Obama's State of the Union address Tuesday night, all three broadcast networks, CBS, NBC and ABC, managed to compare the tone of the speech to that of Ronald Reagan. Reporters and pundits uniformly praised the supposed optimism of Obama. [ Audio available here ] On CBS, Evening News anchor Katie Couric touted how political analyst Jeff Greenfield thought it was “down right Reaganesque” and that “some” have argued “this could be his Reagan moment.” Greenfield himself declared: “He kept talking about winning the future and that was always a big theme about Reagan….the constant reiteration of optimism….he was clearly striking rhetorical notes that reminded me of Mr. Reagan.” View video below Meanwhile, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams noted how “The President [is] very sensitive lately, highly bothered by any kind of defeatism…that's part of what he went after tonight.” Correspondent Andrea Mitchell chimed in: “That's exactly what he was trying to get after and I think he was trying to invoke the optimism, the can-do spirit that brings to mind Ronald Reagan in these settings.” As Brent Baker earlier reported on NewsBusters, ABC This Week host Christiane Amanpour proclaimed that Obama's address was “full of sunny optimism, very Reaganesque, on and on about American exceptionalism in many, many instances and full of Kennedyesque encouragement to break a new frontier. That Sputnik moment was remarkable.” Later in the CBS coverage, Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer reiterated the Reagan comparison: “[Obama's] Reagan moment was when he made that speech in Tucson. But I think he kind of built on that tonight. I thought this speech was something of an extension of that speech.” Greenfield replied: “I think you're totally right.” It got to the point where even Couric wanted to move on to talk about the substance of the speech: “I don't mean to rain on your parade in terms of how eloquent this speech was, but really, realistically, [political analyst] John Dickerson, let me ask you, while these guys are kvelling over the President. I mean, how long will this last?” [According to Merriam-Webster.com , 'kvelling' is a Yiddish term meaning: "to be extraordinarily proud." In fact, this is the example of the word's usage that is provided: "Proud grandparents who kvell over every thing that their precious little darlings do."]

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Glenny and the Bunny

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I don’t even know what to say about this. It’s so bizarre, so utterly out in wingnut-land that I’m not sure how to describe it, other than to say it could possibly be the weirdest segment I’ve ever seen Glenn Beck do. I could only think of this when he was stroking that bunny while the chain saw was blasting. And this was on during the afternoon here when little kids might see it? What Anthony Weiner said of Michele Bachmann applies to Glenn Beck: he is clearly not in touch with the mother ship.

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I am not now nor have I ever been Glenn Beck. Please, please believe me! I am NOT Glenn Beck! Such was the tone of the unintentionally hilarious article in The New Republic by contributing editor John McWhorter . Apparently his “thought crime” in the eyes of Jim Sleeper writing in Talking Points Memo was agreeing with Glenn Beck on the social toxicity of Frances Fox Piven: One of Beck's targets is Professor Frances Fox Piven, as today's New York Times reports. When Beck started in on Piven last year, the clever, sad writer John McWhorter joined in , as did the right-wing provocateur David Horowitz. …In March The New Republic sounded one of these alarms about the curse supposedly cast on African-Americans by the Piven and her late husband Richard Cloward, who were said to have tried to bring down capitalism by flooding the welfare rolls in the 1960s. The purveyor of this long-exhausted half-truth at TNR was McWhorter, a young black linguist-turned-conservative racial bargainer. He cast Piven and Cloward among the crackpots he'd love to erase from public memory: “Rarely in American history have people with such a destructive agenda [as Piven and Cloward] had such power over the lives of the innocent….., helping to ruin the lives of, for example, some of my relatives.” EEK! Sleeper called McWhorter a (GASP!) conservative which caused the New Republic contributing editor to go into an absurdly funny defensive mode by establishing his liberal bona fides as well as to let us know that he is NOT Glenn Beck: Now: Of late, Glenn Beck, for reasons of his own, has mounted a crusade against Piven (Cloward is deceased) which has resulted in death threats against her as a Marxist threat to our nation. This chills and disgusts me. I have never advocated witch hunts of this kind against anyone whose views I disagree with, and have had no interest at all in painting even openly Marxist views like Piven’s as inherently “unAmerican.” I entirely respect Piven’s right to express her views. What chills and disgusts me even more, however, is Jim Sleeper’s claim that in criticizing Piven and Cloward I was taking a page from Beck. Sleeper has made a blithe, messy assumption on the basis of chronology: Beck started in on Piven a year ago this month, and my blurb in these pages on her and Cloward – in fact one of ten blurbs about assorted people, not a concentrated hit on Piven and Cloward alone – appeared in March. Sleeper has it that I “joined in” with Beck, then. What Beck did to cause alleged threats against Piven, McWhorter doesn't say but Mediaite sheds some light on the matter:

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Do I really have to treat this bozo as if he’s some intellectual giant ? In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king , I suppose. Here’s the Republican rebuttal , if you really want to torture yourself. Here’s my only-occasionally verbatim summation. But first, I want to point out that Rep. Ryan thinks the unemployed are lounging in a “hammock”, and billionaire Pete Peterson thinks giving people the Social Security they paid for is “paying people to be on vacation.” This is a family blog, so I can’t say what I’d like. But you’re probably right in whatever you’re imagining. Highlights: The country’s economic engine was seizing up, and the president insisted on pouring oil into the engine to get it going again. We only gave him enough oil to get the engine running, but not to fix it, and now we have to pay for all that oil! Damn him! Health care is an expensive entitlement. I know, because Ayn Rand told me so . The same party who put you behind the economic eight-ball is just the one you should double down on. GOP: Since our thirty-year campaign to convince you that government is incompetent, everyone now agrees with us. Which proves we were right! “We believe that the government has an important role to create the conditions that promote entrepreneurship, upward mobility and individual responsibility” — i.e. tax cuts and subsidies. “We believe, as our founders did, that “the pursuit of happiness” depends upon individual liberty, and individual liberty requires limited government.” Except when it comes to gay marriage, abortion rights and scientifically accurate depictions of evolution in your textbooks. Then, we know best. “This is a future in which we will transform our social safety net into a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency. ” Yeah – BY ELECTING THEM TO CONGRESS. Maybe we can do something about that! “Depending on bureaucracy to foster innovation, competitiveness and wise consumer choices has never worked — and it won’t work now.” Except for funding the creation of the internet and R&D for Big Pharma, just to name a few. “We need to reclaim our American system of limited government, low taxes, reasonable regulations and sound money, which has blessed us with unprecedented prosperity. And it has done more to help the poor than any other economic system ever designed. That’s the real secret to job creation — not borrowing and spending more money in Washington.” Except tax cuts and corporate subsidies. That’s not really spending, it’s more like tithing! Oh, go read it yourself. It’s making my head hurt.

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Amanpour Hails Obama as ‘Reaganesque’ But Contended Tea Party Too ‘Extreme’ for Reagan

ABC’s Christiane Amanpour hailed President Obama’s State of the Union address as “very Reaganesque,” but in October, holding herself up as some kind of protector of Reagan’s legacy, she discovered “a long and venerable tradition of conservatism in this country” exemplified by Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley and “all of that sort of intellectual conservatism,” yet now, she feigned distress, “people are looking at the Tea Party and saying this is not conservatism as we knew it but it's extreme.” Asked for her “take” on Obama’s address, Amanpour trumpeted his “Sputnik moment” as “remarkable,” heralding Wednesday night on ABC: Well, full of sunny optimism, very Reaganesque , on and on about American exceptionalism in many, many instances and full of Kennedyesque encouragement to break a new frontier. That Sputnik moment was remarkable, of course harking back to 1957 when the Soviet Union put the first un-manned satellite in space and started the space race and really launched a whole new era of technological, scientific and all sort of progress and the President calling for more of that here. (Two MRC colleagues tweeted Amanpour’s “Reaganesque” characterization here and here .) Back on the October 17 This Week , she argued: There's been a long and venerable tradition of conservatism in this country. You can go back at least to Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, all of that sort of intellectual conservatism that lasted about 30 years, and people are saying that right now, it's really gone to the extreme. People are looking at the Tea Party and saying this is not conservatism as we knew it but it's extreme. — Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center. Click here to follow him on Twitter.

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Click here to view this media I think Jeremy Scahill summed this up pretty well on Twitter tonight. He suggested that SNL could just run Bachmann’s “Tea Party” response to the State of the Union on its own, unedited. I couldn’t agree more. Our own Bluegal said someone else on Twitter thinks there are going to be a lot of GOP women using Sharpies as eyeliners now. And Susie Madrak thought she sounded like a librarian reading to her kids at story hour. I await the fact checking on her nonsense by others that have the time to do it, but for now, here she is in an appearance I hear was so rushed that they didn’t even get her set up properly to be looking into the right camera for the CNN viewers. And here she is preparing for her tea party response to the SOTU. Click here to view this media UPDATE: It appears our friends over at Media Matters Political Correction had some time to fact check Bachmann’s speech. Fact Checking Rep. Bachmann’s “Tea Party Response” To The State Of The Union Go read the whole thing since it looks like they put a lot of work into it including one of the first things that came to my mind when watching her which is The Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen’s bikini chart on jobs compared to Bachmann’s chart tonight. And here’s more from Salon’s Joan Walsh on both Ryan and Bachmann’s responses tonight — Why does the GOP hide its agenda? . CNN has the transcript . Good evening. My name is Congresswoman Michele Bachmann from Minnesota’s 6th District. I want to thank the Tea Party Express and Tea Party HD for inviting me to speak this evening. I’m here at their request and not to compete with the official Republican remarks. The Tea Party is a dynamic force for good in our national conversation, and it’s an honor for me to speak with you. Two years ago, when Barack Obama became our president, unemployment was 7.8%, and our national debt stood at what seemed like a staggering $10.6 trillion. We wondered whether the president would cut spending, reduce the deficit and implement real job-creating policies. Unfortunately, the president’s strategy for recovery was to spend a trillion dollars on a failed stimulus program, fueled by borrowed money. The White House promised us that all the spending would keep unemployment under 8%. Not only did that plan fail to deliver, but within three months, the national jobless rate spiked to 9.4%. It hasn’t been lower for 20 straight months. While the government grew, we lost more than 2 million jobs. Let me show you a chart. Here are unemployment rates over the past 10 years. In October of 2001, our national unemployment rate was at 5.3%. In 2008, it was at 6.6%. But just eight months after President Obama promised lower unemployment, that rate spiked to a staggering 10.1%. Today, unemployment is at 9.4% with about 400,000 new claims every week. After the $700 billion bailout, the trillion-dollar stimulus, and the massive budget bill with over 9,000 earmarks, many of you implored Washington to please stop spending money that we don’t have. But instead of cutting, we saw an unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt. It was unlike anything we’ve ever seen before in the history of the country. Well, deficits were unacceptably high under President Bush, but they exploded under President Obama’s direction, growing the national debt by an astounding $3.1 trillion. Well, what did we buy? Instead of a leaner, smarter government, we bought a bureaucracy that now tells us which lightbulbs to buy and which may put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama’s health care bill. Obamacare mandates and penalties may even force many job-creators to just stop offering health insurance altogether, unless, of course, yours is one of the more than 222 privileged companies, or unions, that’s already received a government waiver under Obamacare. In the end, unless we fully repeal Obamacare, a nation that currently enjoys the world’s finest health care might be forced to rely on government-run coverage. That could have a devastating impact on our national debt for even generations to come. For two years, President Obama made promises, just like the ones we heard him make this evening, yet still we have high unemployment, devalued housing prices, and the cost of gasoline is skyrocketing. Well, here’s a few suggestions for fixing our economy. The president could stop the EPA from imposing a job-destroying cap-and-trade system. The president could support a balanced budget amendment. The president could agree to an energy policy that increases American energy production and reduces our dependence on foreign oil. The president could also turn back some of the 132 regulations put in place in the last two years, many of which will cost our economy $100 million or more. And the president should repeal Obamacare and support free-market solutions, like medical malpractice reform and allowing all Americans to buy any health care policy they like anywhere in the United States. We need to start making things again in this country, and we can do that by reducing the tax and regulatory burden on job-creators. America will have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. Think about that. Look no further to see why jobs are moving overseas. But thanks to you, there’s reason for all of us to have hope that real spending cuts are coming, because last November, you went to the polls, and you voted out the big-spending politicians and you put in their place great men and women with a commitment to follow our Constitution and cut the size of government. I believe that we’re in the very early days of a history-making turn in America. Please know how important your calls, visits and letters are to the maintenance of our liberties. Because of you, Congress is responding, and we’re just beginning to start to undo the damage that’s been done the last few years, because we believe in lower taxes, we believe in a limited view of government and exceptionalism in America. And I believe that America is the indispensable nation of the world. Just the creation of this nation itself was a miracle. Who can say that we won’t see a miracle again? The perilous battle that was fought during World War II in the Pacific at Iwo Jima was a battle against all odds, and yet this picture immortalizes the victory of young GIs over the incursion against the Japanese. These six young men raising the flag came to symbolize all of America coming together to beat back a totalitarian aggressor. Our current debt crisis we face today is different, but we still need all of us to pull together. But we can do this. That’s our hope. We will push forward. We will proclaim liberty throughout the land. And we will do so because we, the people, will never give up on this great nation. So God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

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9 Out of 10 Viewers Approve of Obama’s Proposals

If these CBS News poll numbers are to be believed, the President had a very big night. According to the network, “91 percent of those who watched the speech approved of the proposals Mr. Obama put forth during his remarks. Only nine percent disapproved.” Those numbers are better than last year, when a mere 83 percent were on board. Of course the numbers could be skewed by any number of factors. For instance, people who can’t stand the president are less likely to watch and, therefore, be counted.

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I think the Giffords shooting and subsequent speech had a huge impact on the whole event tonight. President Obama’s SOTU speech was about as safe as it could be in a partisan sense. That’s the word that came to mind to me. He was big on examples of American ingenuity and made the case that we can overcome all the tough challenges we face. The Chamber had a weird vibe to it on TV with members of both parties sitting together like fifth graders with seating assignments as they made an effort not to over-clap the affair. The usual rousing ovations do inspire public speakers and performers as they progress and the audience in a way drained some of that energy. The President called for more bipartisanship again and praised our creative exceptionalism, defended his health care bill and made education, innovation and some infrastructure building the keynote topics, He also spent much of his time on right wing issues like the debt, fixing the tax code, tort reform and government spending. He said his Cat Food commission was a good thing but that he wasn’t going to use all their recommendations. I was happy that he didn’t give the impression that Social Security was going to be destroyed by the deficit and needed to be fixed now. I’m sure the Villagers won’t be happy with that. The speech seemed to be targeted at the mythical independent voters more than usual. It didn’t have the impact that a typical Obama speech has in my opinion, but CBS did a quick poll and 91% of Americans liked it.Oh, I was glad that he brought up the Dream Act again and said he was commited to immigration reform. FOX News had on Krathhammer, who said he thought it was a weaker Obama speech than usual and attacked many of the points he made, but Kristen Powers and Juan Williams liked it a lot because he laid out a vision for the country. Brit Hume was galled that Obama didn’t get into how we’re going to fix the deficit and was irked that entitlements were virtually left out. On the flip side Paul Ryan was just plain booooring and he looked kind of smarmy. His talking points focused on what you would expect, the deficit and government spending. He made no mention of his radical Roadmap plan to fix our economy, which would privatize Social Security and turn Medicare into a voucher program, which basically would destroy many people’s lives. That was odd, since it’s his true vision for America, but it wasn’t worthy to be brought to the American people on the biggest stage he ever had. On CNN David Gergen’s take on Ryan was that the speech was “lofty” . What the hell does that mean? ErickE brought back the painful memory of Bobby Jindal. Candy Crowley thought Ryan helped the Republican Party because he wasn’t Bush. If you have troubling sleeping, put the Ambien away and turn on Ryan’s speech. Hannity came on after the FOX All Star panel, which featured Frank Luntz and one of his dopey focus groups. It quickly turned into a shouting match with many of the participants calling the president a liar for much of the time. Michele Bachmann was reading her short soliloquy on a teleprompter — which she usually attacks Obama over — but made a very bad technical mistake. It looked like she was speaking into the Tea Party camera and not CNN’s, which gave it this freakishly creepy effect. Bad lighting and makeup didn’t help her appearance either. If you saw it on CNN you wondered who she was talking to. Are you talking to me? She used many debunked talking points — like those scary 16K IRS agents who are going to arrest you — and had a handy chart about unemployment. She actually told President Obama to repeal his own health care plan. Erick Erickson said that her performance actually backed up Paul Ryan’s speech. No, really. Ari Fleischer was there to back him up. Only in Red State world. They had got to try and mitigate the appearance of a split party and EE certainly had a plan in dealing with it. Remember, up is down and red is blue. Media Matters fact-checked her speech and found many distortions of the truth. Insisting that she was not upstaging the official GOP response to President Obama’s State of the Union, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) offered a combative and highly misleading speech of her own following the president’s address. In her “Tea Party Response,” Bachmann repeated a litany of false right-wing talking points about everything from the Recovery Act and job losses to the debt and “16,500 IRS agents.”.. .read on.

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Hogwash, Mr. President

By Robert Scheer What is the state of the union? You certainly couldn’t tell from that platitudinous hogwash that the president dished out. Related Entries January 26, 2011 Hogwash, Mr. President January 25, 2011 Watch the State of the Union Right Here

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