MSNBC

I like Dan, but I am really glad to see Rachael get her own show. She will debut after the conventions in the 9pm slot on MSNBC.

UPDATE:

Keith Olbermann has also posted a diary about Rachael's new show over at DKos.

This would so rock:

“At some point, I don’t know when, she should have a show,” said Phil Griffin, hours before he was promoted on Wednesday to president of MSNBC. “She’s on the short list. It’s a very short list. She’s at the top.”

She is Rachael Maddow. Rachael would be awesome on her own show.

Three different times I turned on MSNBC and those three times the story they were covering was Hillary Clinton's new haircut. "Her hair is shorter and her part is on the right". This is news? I'm not the only one who has noticed it either.

The big F.U. that corporate media execs gave to the American people and, more importantly, U.S. soldiers. Jessica Yellin told Anderson Cooper last night the following:

Yellin: I think the press corps dropped the ball in the beginning when the lead up to war began, uh the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the President’s high approval ratings and my own experience at the White House was that the higher the President’s approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives, and I was not at this network at the time, but the more pressure I had from these executives to put on positive stories about the President. I think over time….

The video is available at Crooks and Liars.

As Glenn Greenwald puts it:

Yellin's admission is but the latest in a growing mountain of evidence demonstrating that corporate executives forced their news reporters to propagandize in favor of the Bush administration and the war, and censored stories that were critical of the Government. Katie Couric yesterday said that threats from the White House and accusations of being unpatriotic coerced the media into suppressing its questioning of the war. But last September, Couric revealed even more specifically the type of pressure that was put on her by NBC executives to refrain from criticizing the administration, after she conducted a "tough interview" with Condoleezza Rice:

We have been suffering a crisis in democracy here in the old U.S.A., and now the evidence is mounting against those who created this crisis. Congress needs to start acting on it, not for political gain, but because this nation deserves it.

Glenn Greenwald has

Pat Buchanan flipped out on Dan Abrams last night. He was trying to say that Obama only won states with heavy black populations. When another guest tried to correct him, Pat responds by telling the guest to shut-up. That was followed by Pat getting scolded by Rachel Maddow.

They took action right away on this one:

NBC News said Tuesday it has reprimanded the employee responsible for mistakenly flashing a picture of Osama bin Laden on MSNBC as Chris Matthews talked about Barack Obama.

"This mistake was inexcusable," MSNBC spokesman Jeremy Gaines said.

It happened during the opening of "Hardball" Monday evening. Matthews was previewing a story on the controversy over Obama's use of another politician's words, and a picture of bin Laden briefly flashed on the screen beside him with the headline "Words About Words."

Unlike FOX, where the employee would have been promoted or awarded in some way.

Februrary 22, David Shuster will return to MSNBC following his suspension, which we now find was two weeks. It will be interesting to see how Hillary responds to this.

The debate will be on Feb 26 in Ohio. She was going to boycott it, because of Shuster's statement, but now has decided to go forward with it.

Hillary tries to spin an answer on her letter about David Shuster. I still find it ironic that she was mum during Matthews much worse comments. I guess she would rather see the little people pay for the big dogs mistakes.

It started when Shuster said the Clinton's were "pimpin" out Chelsea to help with the election, which Shuster apologized for this morning. Then a conference call this afternoon with the Clinton campaign resulted in the campaign saying they would not appear on anymore MSNBC debates. Now MSNBC has suspended Shuster from any broadcasts, except to air his apology.

Yes it was wrong for Shuster to say that, but he apologized twelve hours later. When Matthews made his comment it took over a week before he apologized, and then he was heavily defended by Shuster and others, including Joe Scarborough, and the blogs were the ones blamed. It sounds like MSNBC has some serious problems going on there.

I want to clarify that I am in no way supporting Shuster for his comments. I have never heard anyone say "Bush is pimpin out Jenna" or "Cheney is pimpin out Mary" in the past, so there is a serious problem here and MSNBC did a good thing addressing it so quickly. Having said that, the same level of conduct and discipline need to be carried out throughout the entire organization - including Matthews.

That's what Pat Buchanan called him this morning on MSNBC:

This is a stunning indictment of McCain. Of course we can't forget that Buchanan has some problems with McCain over immigration, so that should be taken into account.

Just a reminder for those interested that there is a Republican debate on MSNBC tonight at 9:00pm est. I will be live blogging it if you can't stomach watching the fools. Also I will be testing out a new live blogging module I developed. How this works is if you are on the live blog post the data will refresh automatically every 30 seconds. It takes a lot of the work out of live blogging as I can easily add new items and it will be timestamped with my latest comments - almost like a one way chat system.

If this works out good, I will be looking for people to join in the live blogging sessions in the future. It will provide a new way to keep people up to date with opinions and analysis.

But who really cares? What I find the most interesting of the entire segment is how they keep saying Media Matters is now a front for the Clinton campaign.

Kind of. I wonder who pushed him into giving this little speech.

Keith O. just reported it on the air - Kucinich will not be allowed in the debate tonight. Way to pick our leaders NBC!