Peter Schiff

For conservatives, one of the bright spots of the Occupy Wall Street protests was when millionaire investor Peter Schiff went down to Zuccotti Park with video camera and a sign reading "I Am The 1% - Let's Talk."

On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of speaking with Schiff by telephone in a sweeping interview about his experience at OWS, how the financial media are doing, and ending with his rather frightening view of the economy and the future of our nation (video follows with transcript):

For the past several years, we’ve heard the doom-and-gloom prognostications coming from perma-bear Peter Schiff: The Federal Reserve is the root of all evil. Inflation will be the United States’ undoing. Invest in gold and overseas because the American stock market is toast.

Perhaps that’s a legitimate view, but Schiff argues a more libertarian approach to prevent these supposed calamities. He argues for a different way of handling monetary policy, less spending by the federal government and a rethinking of how regulation is handled. Yet, when a political campaign is waged in the halls of Congress by a partisan member against one of his competitors, he turns a blind-eye to the abuses of government power.

“You know, I have my own gold company and it bothers me what they're going to do,” Schiff said to CNBC’s “The Kudlow Report” fill-in host Michelle Caruso-Cabrera on the Sept. 24 broadcast. “I think that companies like, you know, like Goldline, you know that are basically marking up their gold coins 67 percent or whatever – it's outrageous. I mean, most companies mark-up 2 or 3 percent, which is what I do. These type of companies give the whole industry a bad name. What I’m afraid of is we're going to have a lot of regulation.”

Is it a requirement at MSNBC that program hosts interrupt conservative guests whenever possible thereby preventing anyone other than liberals to make a point?

Such certainly appeared to be the case Thursday evening when Lawrence O'Donnell filled in on "The Ed Show" and treated his guest, Peter Schiff, more poorly and unprofessionally than just about anything I've ever witnessed.

It was so bad that by the end of the segment, when O'Donnell said, "We're out of time. I gave you as much time as you wanted to tell me one thing," Schiff marvelously replied, "But you kept interrupting me."

Of course, since Schiff has just formed an exploratory committee to examine a possible run for Senate in 2010 against Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), the folks at MSNBC probably think O'Donnell did a good job (video embedded below the fold with full transcript, h/t Ed Morrissey):