John Nichols

The sour grapes were incredibly sour on the Thom Hartmann radio show on Thursday when they led off with the news that Anthony Weiner was resigning. Broadcasting live from the Netroots Nation hootenanny in Minneapolis, Hartmann went right from an admitted sex scandal to an unproven old story from last November in the National Enquirer:

Looks like Anthony Weiner’s about to step down. John Boehner’s involved in a major sex scandal. It’s all over the page of the National Enquirer. Two different women, they’re naming the women. So this is this is shades of the John Edwards revisit.

MSNBC's Ed Schultz on Thursday expressed a great deal of skepticism concerning Thursday's revelation that a significant number of ballots had not been included in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election held two days prior.

While he pointed fingers at the Waukesha County Clerk as being a Republican operative, he completely ignored the fact that a the very press conference he aired a clip from, the Vice Chair of that county's Democratic Party spoke and confirmed the results (videos follow with partial transcripts and commentary):

MSNBC's Ed Schultz on Wednesday claimed recent polls finding three newly-elected Republican governors wouldn't win if elections were held today represents a turning point in American history.

Not surprisingly, his far-left guests from the Nation magazine quite agreed with him (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Want to irk a liberal? I've got just the word for it -- "filibuster."

Hardly a waking hour passes these days without an indignant left-winger in the media condemning this arcane procedure requiring 60 votes to pass major legislation in the Senate.

In the process, dubious claims are being made. Here, for example, is John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation, on Ed Schultz's radio show this past Wednesday (click here for audio) --

NICHOLS: The fact of the matter is that the founders of this republic believed in an arcane, almost forgotten concept called majority rule. They thought that a majority got to decide things. And it is extremely important that these senators, and it's not just Feingold, it's also quite a few other Democratic senators, who think they are defending some sort of structural tradition, some sort of American way of doing things.

It's no secret the traditional journalistic business model doesn't work in an era where advances in technology have increased flow and velocity of information. Those changes have rendered many forms of communication obsolete and made journalism a difficult way to make a living. 

This has concerned some on the left who are convinced the ways of the past are vital to a democratic nation, including John Nichols, co-founder of Free Press and the co-author of "The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again," with Robert McChesney. Both authors appeared at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 16 to make the case for some sort of government policy to help this flailing trade and pointed to history as an example of how the media effected change. The amount of government funding they settled on was $30 billion annually.

"At some fundamental level the one thing we have to get back to is this notion that if we want an America that is fully democratic, really does confront the question of bankrupt government and a government that has other priorities, we're going to have to remember how we did in the past," Nichols said. "The greatest bankruptcy in this country was the founding on the original sin of human bondage. That was a horrible event and for the first 70 years of the American experiment, the Congress did not debate slavery."

Audio Embedded Below Fold

Want government to fund public media? Then PBS has a place for you. If you back giving news organizations tens of billions of dollars, that's good for nearly 25 minutes of air-time.

That's how the PBS weekly newsmagazine "NOW" addressed a left-wing solution to the decline of the news industry. On Jan. 15, "NOW," welcomed the founders of the left-wing media think tank Free Press - John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney - to tell how tax dollars can be the key component of "Saving American Journalism."

The duo recommended the United States pay $30 billion a year to fund media, what Nichols called a "pretty sane number." "This is sort of the number a free society pays to have credible journalism," he argued.

It's bad enough we have to bailout banks and auto manufacturers or spread around subsidies for wasteful, inefficient forms of energy like ethanol and morally reprehensible institutions like ACORN and Planned Parenthood. 

However, now a couple of the wizards of smart that have managed to land a spot in the editorial pages of The Washington Post are lobbying for journalism subsidies.

In the Oct. 30 Post, the co-founders of Free Press, John Nichols of the liberal publication, the Nation and Robert McChesney, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, suggested it's time for the government to prop-up beleaguered journalists to "spawn" so-called independent media. Nichols and McChesney make the case that newspapers are important for two reasons - one not-so important one and one arguably legitimate one. They maintain President Barack Obama believes newspapers are important and that they play an important part keeping government in check. But in order for them to sustain this vital role in our culture, they say it's time for the government to lend a hand.

Since the Iraq-Vietnam analogy they were so fond of citing no longer holds water, liberals have switched to applying the threadbare comparison to the war in Afghanistan.

In the process, an observer will occasionally hear things from left of center he's rarely heard before.

For example, on Ed Schultz's radio show Oct. 9, John Nichols of The Nation magazine had this to say about the dilemma facing Obama in Afghanistan (click here for audio) -- 

NICHOLS: So the real reason he should be drawing down in Afghanistan is because it's - a - bad - place - to - be. 

SCHULTZ: Have we ever escalated the 96th month into a conflict?