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Results
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| The Stench |
Find out how Cooch took $55,000 from the disgraced "U.S. Navy Veterans Association," in apparent exchange for his promise to get the Virginia Office of Consumer Affairs (which had "notified Thompson's group that it no longer qualified for an exemption from state registration requirements") off the group's back. Can we say "pay-to-play?" Find out more.
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Rachel Maddow 
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Sat Nov 06, 2010 at 07:50:50 AM EDT
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"Fox News...Republican fundraiser...Fox News...Republican fundraiser." Oh, and "...no journalistic full disclosure" on any of this.
I understand the rule. I understand what it means to break it. I believe everyone should face the same treatment under that rule. I also personally believe that the point has been made and we should have Keith back hosting Countdown.
Here's the larger point, though, that's going mysteriously missing from the right-wing cackling and old media cluck-cluck-clucking: I know everyone likes to say, "Oh, cable news, it's all the same. Fox and MSNBC -- mirror images of each other. But if you look at the long history of Fox hosts not just giving money to candidates, but actively endorsing campaigns and raising millions of dollars for politicians and political parties -- whether it's Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck or Mike Huckabee -- and you'll see that we can lay that old false equivalency to rest forever. There are multiple people being paid by Fox News to essentially run for office as Republican candidates. If you count not just their hosts but their contributors, you're looking at a significant portion of the entire Republican lineup of potential contenders for 2012.
They can do that because there's no rule against that at Fox. Their network is run as a political operation. Ours isn't. Yeah, Keith's a liberal, and so am I. But we're not a political operation -- Fox is. We're a news operation. The rules around here are part of how you know that. In sum, Fox News is not a journalistic operation, is not ethical, is not "news." It's a Republican political operation, through and through, and should be treated as such by everyone - viewers, regulators, the rest of the media, the IRS, whoever. As for Rachel Maddow's network, they certainly have their flaws (big time), but as Maddow points out, there's absolutely not comparison to the breathtaking scale of Fox's utter lack of journalistic integrity, including having its on-air employees interviewing people without disclosing the fact that, days or weeks earlier, they gave them large sums of cash. If that's not unethical, I don't know what is.
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Thu Sep 09, 2010 at 05:30:00 AM EDT
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As Maddow says, what the NRCC did - revealing the home addresses of Tom Perriello staffers - is so over the line, it's not even politics anymore. All in a day's "work" (using the word extremely loosely) at the NRCC, I suppose!
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Wed Apr 14, 2010 at 06:28:53 AM EDT
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...Tonight we can report that Governor Bob McDonnell is stepping back from a third, radically right-wing policy position that he's taken as governor, in response to very negative public reaction. Governor McDonnell keeps trying this stuff, over and over and over again, then it gets national attention and he has to dial it back and pretend he didn't mean it in the first place.
It has happened again. Last night, we reported on Governor McDonnell's plans to require non-violent felons to write an essay about their contributions to society since their release if they wanted to have their voting rights restored. What had been a relatively perfunctory process would now include something like a test of a person's literacy about his or her merit as a citizen of Virginia. In another day that sort of thing might have been called a literacy test. And in another day, literacy tests were used to keep African Americans from voting in the south.
This policy change was greeted the way a lot of Governor McDonnell's governing ideas have been greeted so far. Much of the reaction could be described as horrified. And so today, Governor Bob McDonnell went on the radio in Norfolk, Virginia, acting as if his literacy-test-for-voting policy wasn't really wasn't what his administration said it would be. And, uh, maybe it's not really going to happen anyway.
[McDonnell speaking] "There's no essay, we've asked for just a simple, uh, statement of what the person has done in order to be reintegrated into society, a little bit about their crime, what they've done to get back into society, any community activities, and we're still in the draft stages...and I just ask people to give us a few months, we're gonna - we haven't even announced the final process." The only problem with McDonnell's "draft stages" excuse, as Rachel Maddow points out, is this letter was already sent out to "dozens of non-violent felons" seeking to have their voting rights restored. So much for the policy change being in the "draft stage."
As Maddow points out, this is the third time McDonnell has walked back a radical, right-wing policy after a public uproar. First, we had McDonnell's kinda sorta flip-flop on the issue of hiring protections for gays and lesbians in Virginia. Second, we had his kinda-sorta flip-flop on Confederate History Month. And now, we have his kinda-sorta flip-flop on a de facto literacy test for non-violent ex-felons. Should we all just start calling Bob McDonnell "Governor Flip-Flop," the "do-over" governor, or what?
P.S. Check out the discussion in the second half of this video. The question is, why is Bob McDonnell launching these culture wars? Is anyone in Virginia clamoring for them? Is this simply who McDonnell has been all along, does he think this makes sense politically for him, or what? Bizarre.
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Sat Apr 03, 2010 at 13:47:14 PM EDT
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As Rachel Maddow says, these supposed "scandals" are complete "bull-pucky", the "unmooring of politics from facts," "the triumph of fake politics -- outrage or advantage gleaned from stuff that's not real." Same thing with the Republicans' supposed "outrage" over recess appointments (Bush did it and Republicans were fine with it then), the individual mandate (it's a Republican idea), terrorism suspects being read their Miranda rights (again, they had no problem with this during the Bush administration), the stimulus (they admit it's working great when they go back to their districts), etc., etc. Watch the video and get the long list of Republican "bull-pucky"; it would all be entertaining if it weren't so damaging.
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Thu Mar 18, 2010 at 09:53:34 AM EDT
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Rachel Maddow calls out Bob McDonell and Ken Kookinelli for their homophobic bigotry, "birtherism" (in Cooch's case) and overall insanity. According to Maddow, McDonnell and Cooch are turning Virginia into "Jesse Helms-istan." Maddow also slams the national media for reporting McDonnell's and Cooch's bizarre explanations and behaviors without any critical analysis or journalistic skepticism. The more this continues, I'd argue we're looking as much like "Idiocracy" as "Jesse Helms-istan." But then again, I guess those are really flip sides of the same coin anyway.
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